>Let's assume we agree that the defendant was, as this juror said, an obvious liar, and guilty on all counts. >Should she really lose her house or retirement savings over this?
Sure. Lie in court to the extent that even the judge and jury understand you are blatantly lying, and you should probably go to prison. If we accept people being dishonest in court, we have no justice system, and no rule of law.
I don't believe the penalty corresponds to the damage of the original claim, but I don't think any punishment is too severe for a person who lies in court.
You have a lease contract form that was purchased at a office supply store. That contract form is copyrighted by its publisher.
You and your tenant fill it out.
Now, are you not allowed to copy the filled out, executed contract so that you and your tenant each has a copy?
If you and the tenant enter a legal dispute, are you both forbidden from copying this document (which is a derivative work, your writing on a copyrighted form) and giving the copies to your lawyers or the court?
I do not think you will ever see a judgment that declares legal correspondence to be constrained by copyright to the degree that it actually forbids a party to the correspondence from sharing that correspondence. To assert this is to abridge a party's rights, which could have fatal consequences in a lawsuit situation.
The last thing you want to do as plaintiff in a lawsuit, is give a judge a reason to believe you have been unfair to the defendant with respect to his right to mount a defense to your claims. The reason you shouldn't pull a stunt like this "copyrighted letter" is simply that you don't want to give the defendant any place to stand where he can suggest you acted in bad faith. Even in a solid position, bad faith actions can cost your case.
Why can't this be copyrighted? Because it fails to license the defendant to do procedural things that would be required (providing copies for the court, distributing copies to his attorneys and among all persons who would be affected by a suit, etc.)
It would probably be judged to be (harmless and reversible) error on the part of the plaintiff. It's a claim that has a null effect on anything. You can write a perfectly legitimate demand letter, and in it, claim the earth is flat. The person receiving the demand letter, cannot choose not to comply with the legitimate demand, just because the earth is known to not be flat. The problem with the C&D in the article is on the order of this. On one hand, a C&D letter is just a letter. It is not a legal instrument, it's simply a letter. It may become evidence in a lawsuit that repeats its demands at some point, and that is its only value, that it establishes evidence that a party was notified of a grievance.
If a substantive claim of the letter was in error, (e.g., the defendant could show that he is not responsible for whatever damage is claimed), that's significant. If something unrelated is in error (e.g., the letter writer signed "Sincerely yours" when he wasn't sincere), that's not going to lead to any judicial action...
So the letter writer might enjoy reserving copyright on the letter, but it gains him nothing, and even if this letter is accepted as civil evidence, it establishes nothing about copyright. If the letter writer tried to act on the violation of the copyright, he would have a very hard time convincing a judge that this is reasonable. I would especially like to see the part where he explains that it should be entered into evidence but the court has no right to distribute it.
>All it proves is you mailed yourself an envelope on that date.
It doesn't even prove that!
A much better idea is to provide a copy to someone whose *testimony* will be *persuasive*. One such option is to register your copyright with the US Copyright Office. Then, presumably, an official representing the federal government will issue an affadavit on your behalf, which is, generally speaking, one very good piece of evidence to have.
Personally, I think it would also be wise to make sure your agent and producer and attorney all have really clear and detailed evidence in their files. Chances are very good that they, having a vested interest in the protection of your rights, will not hesitate to testify on your behalf. Are you absolutely certain that somebody from the *government* is going to come to your trial? I wouldn't want that to be my only option!
Of course they can "really sue." Anyone in the UK can bring any grievance to court for resolution. The question you should be asking is, "can they really prevail?"
The answer is "no" and the judge in the article is saying as much, going no further than a judge may go in such a public statement. He's merely ruling that the claims in the case (whatever they are -- we don't know all the details) are *possible*. That means very little.
Say, it's "possible" that the radio is a is a private FM transceiver hooked up to a P2P sharing hub...
>can the guy with music blaring out of his headphones next to me on the subway be sued also?
As I understand it, in the UK, anybody can be sued for anything. Successfully persuading a court to award damages after judging your suit on its merits, is a separate matter. Wake me up when this sees the inside of a courtroom.
>You may look at that stuff but the average customer could care less about the POS in a store.
Retail stores that care about perception disagree with you and actually invest accordingly. It's about everything that's visible or perceived, and the Point of Sale is particularly important. Customers can go from "eager to part with their money" to "out the door" in a hurry, for a really large number of reasons. And then there's the whole study of why they do, or do not, return; which turns out to be THE most important thing in some parts of the retail sector.
There might be things you can cheap out on, but I don't think cash registers or accounting systems are on that list.
>Buying snake oil just to use a visual indication present at the product is STILL laughable. Just tag >your cables, no need to buy $400 snake oil just because of small printed arrows.
Uh, you still totally misunderstood me. I *make* some of my patch cables with directional indicators.
Who said anything about snake oil or "$400"? Stop trying to attack me with a strawman please.
I explained how a perfectly reasonable thing can influence someone, through a combination of ignorance and greed, to take a good idea and exploit it in a very stupid way.
I should have used a different example. How about the tire shops that push Nitrogen? Sure, aircraft and the space shuttle and Formula 1 cars have nitrogen filled tires, so it must be a great thing, right? It's a similar phenomenon. Something that makes sense, say, on a piece of mining equipment, does not necessarily translate to a good idea for a consumer automobile.
Anyway, if you realized the *number* of cables involved in my (production studio) example, you *would not* volunteer to label them.
I think we're in violent agreement on the original subject. The Amazing Randi's money is safe.
Your customers aren't stupid. They recognize a POS that's in widespread use, and they will recognize that you cheaped out. It might be petty, but customers know cheap, unreliable, POS systems from experience, and this can definitely impact the confidence game that is sales.
My advice is to buy the same HP RP5K system Starbucks uses, if for no other reason, the positive (or at least neutral) impact it will have on customer perception. If they've seen it, especially if they've seen it a *lot*, it won't get in the way of them being comfortable giving you money. If your customer's perceived experience isn't pretty much the number one thing on your list of priorities, it behooves you to put it there. I guess, if you're setting up the checkout system for a bail bond office or the DMV, maybe not so much.
>It IS laughable: sound signals are AC. Even if "directional cables" made any sense for DC-biased signals, they would not affect sound AC signals.
You did not read or understand my point.
I'm not saying the signals are directional. I'm saying there are situations where it is extremely useful, if not critical, to have visual indicators of roting direction. Don't think in terms of two channel home audio wiring. Think in terms of a production studio that has dozens of channels and many thousands of routing possibilities. Believe me, the last thing you want in this situation is wiring failures, either because of a quality control issue, or because of human error plugging a source instead of a destination.
So you see, in a situation where it makes sense to have "directional" cables, some clueless person must have seen the cables and thought "a-ha! The PROS use directional cables so they MUST be good." Or maybe somebody saw an opportunity to sell things to clueless people.
Ask a modular synthesizer owner if it is useful to have the signal path direction labeled on patch cords.
The ability to charge $7000 as one single component of a very expensive system, with an overhead cost of $5 is where it's *at*.
The best customer here is someone who has a "use it or lose it budget", and where the system you sell them *needs* to be more expensive than the competition or they won't buy yours.
Once, someone who was in my studio laughed at my directional cables. (3.5mm TRS patch cables with arrows indicating the signal direction.)
However, when I showed him the patchbay with, on the order of 250 cables, the reason sunk in. When you are dealing with something like this, and when a single lost signal can represent thousands of dollars of financial loss, it makes sense to really test every cable and to make them with care and consistency.
Ideas like this that make sense in a production environment are often taken straight out of context and put into the "audiophile" world. And then you get things like directional cables where someone tries to claim that the electrical signal itself is directional. Or you get extreme amounts of quality control. Or you get people who *claim* they apply extreme amounts of quality control when all they are really doing is rebranding some industrial product.
Know what works really well for speaker wire in permanent installations? Romex 12 gauge copper house wiring. Incredibly durable, solid wire, lays flat, tends to be very pure copper (costs more to make alloys), easy to fish, and it's hard to pay more than $.50 a meter.
Line signal cables have different issues from speaker cables of course, but the $7500 wires in the article are speaker wires.
In the blind test, one control I'd want to do is to have the subject hook up the system with the really expensive wires (play up the whole packaging angle, use really fancy connectors, etc.) but the signal they actually listen to is going through $0.29/meter lamp cord.
If these were signal routing lines for a mastering studio, the cost per foot would still be extreme, but the idea that quality matters this much would be a little more reasonable. You typical studio probably has a kilometer of cables, mostly on the hard to reach side of patch panels. You want to get these right the first time. This can be expensive. For an IT analogy think "fiber interconnects where a downtime incident costs millions and you get fired." There are plenty of situations like that in audio production and broadcast. Other examples of really high cost items, lamps for stage lighting where it would be a real nightmare if one lamp failed without warning.
Anyway I rant. I realize there are thousands of audio and broadcast engineers on slashdot, pro musicians, people with home studios, people who work in pro studios, lighting and camera folks, etc. I think they know where I'm coming from on this. I just hate seeing these things, because if one thing is insanely overpriced and has ridiculous claims, the response tends to be applied to all kinds of other things. (You *can* have a preference among $3000 microphones; minute individual variations in signal impedance or shielding *can* mean a ruined production; tube circuits and solid state circuits *do* have different coloration effects on a signal, etc.)
But will there be a double blind test on the speaker wires in the article? Don't hold your breath.
>Y'know that law that makes yelling "FIRE" in a theatre illegal?
There's no such law. That is a justification by which the government could, in the past, establish time place and manner restrictions on what would otherwise be "free speech", when there is a compelling public interest in such a restriction.
It's probably important to understand the historical context of "Yell Fire" is in response to protests against the military draft... not in the Vietnam era, but during World War I.
"The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man falsely shouting fire in a theater and causing a panic. [...] The question in every case is whether the words used are used in such circumstances and are of such a nature as to create a clear and present danger that they will bring about the substantive evils that Congress has a right to prevent." -- Oliver Wendell Holmes, 1919
The government's argument at that time, was that printing fliers in opposition to the military draft, constituted a "danger" to the government. Holmes *agreed*, and the decision stood for a while.
Today, the government would have to show that a person intends to "incite imminent lawless action", that is, to directly act in such a way as to deliberately start a riot, in order for it to be a crime.
But there's no law that makes it illegal for a crowd to sing along to REM's "One I Love", or illegal for Michael Franti to sing his song "Yell Fire!", crowded theatre or empty.
>That differs somewhat from this patent. In this patent if you click a checkbox to mute, then drag it across a checkbox that is already in mute state, it >would have to unmute it. The key word appears to be "toggle".
I'm thinking that anything that "works" this way, is into "UI hall of shame" territory anyway.
>I mean, really, are programmers expected to patent every single frickin' thing they do out of fear that someone else might?
NO! They are supposed to patent everything so that TWENTY YEARS from now, there will be a sudden boost to development when all the patents from the big rush of the early 21st century expire all together.
Slashdot Mirror
>Let's assume we agree that the defendant was, as this juror said, an obvious liar, and guilty on all counts.
>Should she really lose her house or retirement savings over this?
Sure. Lie in court to the extent that even the judge and jury understand you are blatantly lying, and you should probably go to prison.
If we accept people being dishonest in court, we have no justice system, and no rule of law.
I don't believe the penalty corresponds to the damage of the original claim, but I don't think any punishment is too severe for a person who lies in court.
>In which way does he qualify for a Darwin Award?
The appropriate punishment for this crime is castration?
Ok, here's an example:
You have a lease contract form that was purchased at a office supply store. That contract form is copyrighted by its publisher.
You and your tenant fill it out.
Now, are you not allowed to copy the filled out, executed contract so that you and your tenant each has a copy?
If you and the tenant enter a legal dispute, are you both forbidden from copying this document (which is a derivative work, your writing on a copyrighted form) and giving the copies to your lawyers or the court?
I do not think you will ever see a judgment that declares legal correspondence to be constrained by copyright to the degree that it actually forbids a party to the correspondence from sharing that correspondence. To assert this is to abridge a party's rights, which could have fatal consequences in a lawsuit situation.
The last thing you want to do as plaintiff in a lawsuit, is give a judge a reason to believe you have been unfair to the defendant with respect to his right to mount a defense to your claims. The reason you shouldn't pull a stunt like this "copyrighted letter" is simply that you don't want to give the defendant any place to stand where he can suggest you acted in bad faith. Even in a solid position, bad faith actions can cost your case.
Why can't this be copyrighted? Because it fails to license the defendant to do procedural things that would be required (providing copies for the court, distributing copies to his attorneys and among all persons who would be affected by a suit, etc.)
It would probably be judged to be (harmless and reversible) error on the part of the plaintiff. It's a claim that has a null effect on anything. You can write a perfectly legitimate demand letter, and in it, claim the earth is flat. The person receiving the demand letter, cannot choose not to comply with the legitimate demand, just because the earth is known to not be flat. The problem with the C&D in the article is on the order of this. On one hand, a C&D letter is just a letter. It is not a legal instrument, it's simply a letter. It may become evidence in a lawsuit that repeats its demands at some point, and that is its only value, that it establishes evidence that a party was notified of a grievance.
If a substantive claim of the letter was in error, (e.g., the defendant could show that he is not responsible for whatever damage is claimed), that's significant. If something unrelated is in error (e.g., the letter writer signed "Sincerely yours" when he wasn't sincere), that's not going to lead to any judicial action...
So the letter writer might enjoy reserving copyright on the letter, but it gains him nothing, and even if this letter is accepted as civil evidence, it establishes nothing about copyright. If the letter writer tried to act on the violation of the copyright, he would have a very hard time convincing a judge that this is reasonable. I would especially like to see the part where he explains that it should be entered into evidence but the court has no right to distribute it.
>All it proves is you mailed yourself an envelope on that date.
It doesn't even prove that!
A much better idea is to provide a copy to someone whose *testimony* will be *persuasive*. One such option is to
register your copyright with the US Copyright Office. Then, presumably, an official representing the federal government
will issue an affadavit on your behalf, which is, generally speaking, one very good piece of evidence to have.
Personally, I think it would also be wise to make sure your agent and producer and attorney all have really clear and detailed evidence in their files. Chances are very good that they, having a vested interest in the protection of your rights, will not hesitate to testify on your behalf. Are you absolutely certain that somebody from the *government* is going to come to your trial? I wouldn't want that to be my only option!
>Just a though really:
>Can they really Sue?
Of course they can "really sue." Anyone in the UK can bring any grievance to court for resolution.
The question you should be asking is, "can they really prevail?"
The answer is "no" and the judge in the article is saying as much, going no further than a judge may go in such a public statement.
He's merely ruling that the claims in the case (whatever they are -- we don't know all the details) are *possible*. That means very little.
Say, it's "possible" that the radio is a is a private FM transceiver hooked up to a P2P sharing hub...
>can the guy with music blaring out of his headphones next to me on the subway be sued also?
As I understand it, in the UK, anybody can be sued for anything. Successfully persuading a court to award damages after judging your suit on its merits, is a separate matter. Wake me up when this sees the inside of a courtroom.
...[T]hinking that you actually said "those audiophile directional cables are great because the arrows help me organizing a complex installation".
I was explaining how a good idea can be observed by an idiot who turns it into a bad idea.
Even if you could, you might want to look at the by-laws, and see if the board itself gets to approve such things :-)
You think they didn't anticipate that kind of a coup?
*ALL* mistakes are "human mistakes."
>You may look at that stuff but the average customer could care less about the POS in a store.
Retail stores that care about perception disagree with you and actually invest accordingly.
It's about everything that's visible or perceived, and the Point of Sale is particularly important.
Customers can go from "eager to part with their money" to "out the door" in a hurry, for a really large number of reasons. And then there's the whole study of why they do, or do not, return; which turns out to be THE most important thing in some parts of the retail sector.
There might be things you can cheap out on, but I don't think cash registers or accounting systems are on that list.
>Buying snake oil just to use a visual indication present at the product is STILL laughable. Just tag >your cables, no need to buy $400 snake oil just because of small printed arrows.
Uh, you still totally misunderstood me. I *make* some of my patch cables with directional indicators.
Who said anything about snake oil or "$400"? Stop trying to attack me with a strawman please.
I explained how a perfectly reasonable thing can influence someone, through a combination of ignorance and greed, to take a good idea and exploit it in a very stupid way.
I should have used a different example. How about the tire shops that push Nitrogen? Sure, aircraft and the space shuttle and Formula 1 cars have nitrogen filled tires, so it must be a great thing, right? It's a similar phenomenon. Something that makes sense, say, on a piece of mining equipment, does not necessarily translate to a good idea for a consumer automobile.
Anyway, if you realized the *number* of cables involved in my (production studio) example, you *would not* volunteer to label them.
I think we're in violent agreement on the original subject. The Amazing Randi's money is safe.
Your customers aren't stupid. They recognize a POS that's in widespread use, and they will recognize that you cheaped out.
It might be petty, but customers know cheap, unreliable, POS systems from experience, and this can definitely impact the
confidence game that is sales.
My advice is to buy the same HP RP5K system Starbucks uses, if for no other reason, the positive (or at least neutral) impact it will have on customer perception. If they've seen it, especially if they've seen it a *lot*, it won't get in the way of them being comfortable giving you money. If your customer's perceived experience isn't pretty much the number one thing on your list of priorities, it behooves you to put it there. I guess, if you're setting up the checkout system for a bail bond office or the DMV, maybe not so much.
>It IS laughable: sound signals are AC. Even if "directional cables" made any sense for DC-biased signals, they would not affect sound AC signals.
You did not read or understand my point.
I'm not saying the signals are directional. I'm saying there are situations where it is extremely useful, if not critical, to have visual indicators of roting direction. Don't think in terms of two channel home audio wiring. Think in terms of a production studio that has dozens of channels and many thousands of routing possibilities. Believe me, the last thing you want in this situation is wiring failures, either because of a quality control issue, or because of human error plugging a source instead of a destination.
So you see, in a situation where it makes sense to have "directional" cables, some clueless person must have seen the cables and thought "a-ha! The PROS use directional cables so they MUST be good." Or maybe somebody saw an opportunity to sell things to clueless people.
Ask a modular synthesizer owner if it is useful to have the signal path direction labeled on patch cords.
>Another had a custom listening room built as an annex to his house.
I'm going to have a separate annex built with a room just for my piano.
The ability to charge $7000 as one single component of a very expensive system, with an overhead cost of $5 is where it's *at*.
The best customer here is someone who has a "use it or lose it budget", and where the system you sell them *needs* to be more expensive than the competition or they won't buy yours.
Once, someone who was in my studio laughed at my directional cables. (3.5mm TRS patch cables with arrows indicating the signal direction.)
However, when I showed him the patchbay with, on the order of 250 cables, the reason sunk in. When you are dealing with something like this,
and when a single lost signal can represent thousands of dollars of financial loss, it makes sense to really test every cable and to make them with care and consistency.
Ideas like this that make sense in a production environment are often taken straight out of context and put into the "audiophile" world. And then you get things like directional cables where someone tries to claim that the electrical signal itself is directional. Or you get extreme amounts of quality control. Or you get people who *claim* they apply extreme amounts of quality control when all they are really doing is rebranding some industrial product.
Know what works really well for speaker wire in permanent installations? Romex 12 gauge copper house wiring. Incredibly durable, solid wire, lays flat, tends to be very pure copper (costs more to make alloys), easy to fish, and it's hard to pay more than $.50 a meter.
Line signal cables have different issues from speaker cables of course, but the $7500 wires in the article are speaker wires.
In the blind test, one control I'd want to do is to have the subject hook up the system with the really expensive wires (play up the whole packaging angle, use really fancy connectors, etc.) but the signal they actually listen to is going through $0.29/meter lamp cord.
If these were signal routing lines for a mastering studio, the cost per foot would still be extreme, but the idea that quality matters this much would be a little more reasonable. You typical studio probably has a kilometer of cables, mostly on the hard to reach side of patch panels. You want to get these right the first time. This can be expensive. For an IT analogy think "fiber interconnects where a downtime incident costs millions and you get fired." There are plenty of situations like that in audio production and broadcast. Other examples of really high cost items, lamps for stage lighting where it would be a real nightmare if one lamp failed without warning.
Anyway I rant. I realize there are thousands of audio and broadcast engineers on slashdot, pro musicians, people with home studios, people who work in pro studios, lighting and camera folks, etc. I think they know where I'm coming from on this. I just hate seeing these things, because if one thing is insanely overpriced and has ridiculous claims, the response tends to be applied to all kinds of other things. (You *can* have a preference among $3000 microphones; minute individual variations in signal impedance or shielding *can* mean a ruined production; tube circuits and solid state circuits *do* have different coloration effects on a signal, etc.)
But will there be a double blind test on the speaker wires in the article? Don't hold your breath.
>Y'know that law that makes yelling "FIRE" in a theatre illegal?
There's no such law. That is a justification by which the government could, in the past, establish time place and manner restrictions on what would otherwise be "free speech", when there is a compelling public interest in such a restriction.
It's probably important to understand the historical context of "Yell Fire" is in response to protests against the military draft... not in the Vietnam era, but during World War I.
"The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man falsely shouting fire in a theater and causing a panic. [...] The question in every case is whether the words used are used in such circumstances and are of such a nature as to create a clear and present danger that they will bring about the substantive evils that Congress has a right to prevent."
-- Oliver Wendell Holmes, 1919
The government's argument at that time, was that printing fliers in opposition to the military draft, constituted a "danger" to the government. Holmes *agreed*, and the decision stood for a while.
Today, the government would have to show that a person intends to "incite imminent lawless action", that is, to directly act in such a way as to deliberately start a riot, in order for it to be a crime.
But there's no law that makes it illegal for a crowd to sing along to REM's "One I Love", or illegal for Michael Franti to sing his song "Yell Fire!", crowded theatre or empty.
>That differs somewhat from this patent. In this patent if you click a checkbox to mute, then drag it across a checkbox that is already in mute state, it
>would have to unmute it. The key word appears to be "toggle".
I'm thinking that anything that "works" this way, is into "UI hall of shame" territory anyway.
>I mean, really, are programmers expected to patent every single frickin' thing they do out of fear that someone else might?
NO! They are supposed to patent everything so that TWENTY YEARS from now, there will be a sudden boost to development when all the patents from the big rush of the early 21st century expire all together.
>>"for the sheer vituousness of it."
>>
>The WHAT?
The WHAT-ness?
The average snowboarder probably has more words for "snow" than anyone.
>It'd really suck if someone decided to bring a bomb and set it off *there*, particularly if it was organized across a number of airports at once.
It actually surprises me a whole lot that it hasn't happened.
I'm still expecting one of the bins where everyone has to dump their liquids, to catch fire.
>Send ten and you're virtually guaranteed to initiate a complete lockdown of all air traffic in the country.
What if that's your goal?