I haven't heard anything good about Verizon Wireless that made me want to do business with them in a very long time. They seem to be competing with themselves to see how much bad press they can drum up in the shortest possible time. What a sharp contrast to my personal experience with their DSL service, which has been amazingly hassle-free (no bandwidth caps, no ports filtered, no restrictions on running servers, etc). It's a shame because this one division seems hell-bent on giving a bad name to the entire company. This deal with Microsoft may be for $500 million, but I wonder what that figure would be if you adjusted for ill will and lost sales from potential customers who see this kind of thing and decide to go elsewhere.
My initial reaction is just pure anger. I have settings, I like those settings. To have them just overwritten, and to take away my choice of a search provider just reeks to me. BTW - Way to go pushing that Google Android based phone, and then piss off your BB users with a Bing deal.
The law should allow you to cancel your contract with no early termination penalty of any sort anytime the telco unilaterally and irreversibly reduces the phone's configuration like this. This behavior should legally negate any "terms subject to change without notice" clauses. It's a form of bait-and-switch, because when you bought the phone you were able to decide which search service to use and now that decision has been removed without your consent after you signed the contract.
If it only applied to new phones with new contracts, or to existing customers whose contracts are renewing (and thus can be terminated with no penalty) I'd feel differently about it. It's waiting until you are locked into a contract with specific expectations and then reducing (instead of improving) the functionality of the device mid-term that I have a problem with.
How the heck would you black out wi-fi for the driver? Cone of silence, engage! Besides, when I use my laptop while driving, I sit it on the passenger seat anyway.:P Also, the same people who would be guilty of "distracted driving" with wi-fi are the ones who do it with their phone. Take away their phone, they'll read a book (I've seen this). Take away the book, they'll get so engrossed in talking with their passenger, they don't pay attention. The best method of protecting other drivers is to get people to pay more attention to driving than anything else, not take away everything else. There'll always be some distraction you can't take away.
Proposed solution: don't try to stop them. Just pass a law stating that if you cause an accident (i.e. it is your fault) and there is evidence that willful/preventable driver distraction was a factor, you lose your license for ten years with no exceptions and no possibility to obtain it sooner than those ten years, no matter how minor or major that accident was. Now if we can also get something like this for tailgaters who rear-end the guy in front of them (easily the most preventable and most stupid accident you could ever have), we'd have a good thing going.
As far as I know, there are no particular laws for complex versus simple products.
I didn't mean that to sound like I'd expect the law to care about this. I meant it more in the sense that if a product is so simple that it is extremely unlikely to fail, then what happens if it is defective in some way is much less of a concern. Just the general idea that the more complex something is, the more likely it is to break.
Not only that, but it's documentation - something else the FOSS community is decidedly unfond of doing.
I must disagree there. Usually a man page is all I need just to look up the syntax and available options to a program. However, for more complex operations there are volumes of HOWTOs and other detailed, step-by-step guides available to anyone who can use Google. Maybe during my 10+ years of using Linux I have encountered a situation where I really needed documentation and could find nothing of the sort, and I won't positively say this has never happened, but honestly I cannot recall a single instance.
I'll add that the documentation is much more useful than what often comes with i.e. Windows programs, in one particular way. This way may not appeal to everyone, but I appreciate it. The documentation tends to get straight to the point and it tends not to assume that I'm incompetent or otherwise don't know what I am doing. Much of the documentation that comes with Windows programs (particularly boxed software) seems designed for users who have never seen a computer before in their lives and are semi-literate or functionally illiterate and totally unwilling to learn something new. It's actually rather patronising, but having worked a technical support line I must concede that I understand why they do it that way. I don't mean to pick on Windows exclusively, for much of the industry operates this way (including embedded devices), but I wanted to limit my commentary to that with which I am familiar.
Still, I just don't believe in the merits of that prevalent tendency to dumb everything down. I suspect that if it weren't treated like the only possible approach and otherwise weren't so thoroughly catered to, the demand for "just mindlessly follow these steps with no understanding" type of instructions wouldn't be so high. To put that a slightly different way, I don't think it's morally wrong to have a reasonable learning curve.
The fact the Legalzoom exists as a corporation tends to promote the idea that these form providers are not handing out legal advice, at least not under the definition of the states where they provide there forms. Of course, they may be "risking" it and might be in violation of some state's law, but I didn't take the time to go check any individual state's law on the unauthorized practice of law with reference to "legal" forms.
Whether it constitutes legal advice or not is a moot point to me. I wouldn't expect that to be the basis of the lawsuit anyway. I'd expect such a (hypothetical) lawsuit to be more like a product liability issue. In this case, the legal forms as a type of intellectual property are the product. In my opinion, the law in general is written by lawyers for lawyers, and they have little or no interest in making it as simple and easy to understand as possible, especially for laymen. Therefore, this is an unusually complex product for which there might be product liability. Or maybe not. That's the part I have no clue about, as I'm definitely not a lawyer so I can only speculate in an uninformed fashion.
I'm not an expert in this field, but it would surprise me greatly if there were Free templates of the sort you seek. For starters, most business law is governed by state law rather than federal law, so the requirements will depend in large part on where you are incorporated.
Second, the sources for those templates would generally be the experts who derive their living from selling that sort of information (i.e. lawyers, accountants, tax firms, etc.) It is in their own financial best interests not to give away that which they need to make their own ends meet. Business law and tax law are very convoluted and generally require quite a bit of specialization.
I can see the possibility of Free tools for W2s and meeting minutes, but I'm skeptical as to the availability of legal and taxation materials. Also, even if they were available, I would go in with both eyes open because as a business owner, you're on the hook for making sure you're using correct and current information, and taxes in particular change with alarming regularity.
Another thing occurred to me when I read your comment. You can buy a good book, use online tutorials, examine source code produced by others, etc., and teach yourself how to be a competent programmer. There is no professional organization that you must join in order to be considered qualified. You're qualified if your programs compile and function and are decently well-written and that's about it for software development. By contrast, it's not nearly so easy to jump into practicing law, not even on a minor scale like the boilerplate forms this discussion mentions.
Incidentally, I view this as something of a grey area. Forms like this are something a layman can probably do on his own (that's a guess, not a claim), though it is of course much better to have a lawyer take care of it. What I am getting at is it's nothing like being in a courtroom (other than small-claims) where you're quite foolish and don't really have a prayer if you don't have a lawyer. If the challenges can be overcome, comparatively minor issues like business forms probably would lend itself to an open-source approach, but like you explained, even that is questionable.
I'd say the same but there are sites like Legalzoom.com and such that offer it for a price. I wonder if they have the same issue ? I honestly don't know but I wonder if they have a disclaimer us OSS people could use as well to protect us from this sort of thing.
True, though Legalzoom might be a special case. The people behind it are lawyers, so they are much less likely to make such a mistake on the forms. They would also be well-equipped to defend themselves in a lawsuit. Legalzoom is a (presumably) profitable company so a lawsuit, even a successful one, is unlikely to be a showstopper for them. The corporation would be sued but not its individual members. I'd imagine this wouldn't be nearly the showstopper that the same thing happening to a regular non-lawyer citizen who gets personally sued could be.
I've scoured the web for free/open source legal templates for hiring contractors, issuing W-2s, keeping shareholder minute meetings, etc, but haven't been able to find any decent sources. It seems like this should be a priority of the open source community since reducing the cost of entry into small business could drive open source development.
I agree that this could only be a good thing. However, most of the Open Source community consists of developers, sysadmins, and other technically-minded folks. By contrast, this is more of a legal issue.
I also wonder if anyone who provides such open-source legal templates might be exposing himself to liability. Suppose someone uses such a template and it turns out to be incorrect, even by some minor technicality, and as a result that person has additional legal expenses or other damages. They just might try to sue the person who produced the template. Unlike software, where disclaiming liability is a standard practice, legal advice or legal documents might be much more problematic. I am definitely not a lawyer but I hope a lawyer might take a moment to explain whether this is a legitimate concern.
Actual equalization would be if the state paid all legal expences (as that would remove the main advantage organizations have over individuals), but that would quickly lead to a deluge of lawsuits from greedy assholes suing for every reason imaginable, and would be socialism besides.
I don't really know if that'd be socialism (and I'm no fan of central control). The court system is a legitimate function of government. If the tax dollars pay legal bills so that citizens are better able to utilize this function of government, is that really socialism?
I have one idea of a simple mechanism to help prevent the deluge of lawsuits that you mention. If the judge dismisses the suit for any reason, you get stuck with your own legal bill and maybe also your opponent's. If the suit is worthy enough to proceed to its conclusion (a judgment or a settlement), then you don't.
Also, you're unlikely to return a bat at i.e. 3am. Additionally, in many (most?) hoseholds you have more than one person on premises, like family members. Now you have multiple witnesses who would all have to lie in order to paint your scenario.
As one of the replies to a sibling post states, the perjury penalty is only for falsely saying that you're the copyright owner or a representative of the copyright owner. In this case, the company sending the DMCA notices was a representative of the copyright owner.
I wish we had a good legal definition of "fair use". Right now, fair use is a defense if you are sued. That's all it is. There is no law that says "if your use meets these criteria, then no one can successfully sue you." If we had such a good definition, we could then extend that perjury penalty to also apply to any takedown notices issued against people who were engaged in legally recognized fair use. That would greatly cut down on the abuses, assuming the "fair use" definition were not bought and paid for. Perhaps that's a big "if".
while there may be little legal recourse to issuing invalid DMCA notices...
You can't sue the organization issuing a bogus take-down notice? Tortious interference? Shouldn't be too tough to show actual damages, tripled in this state if it's deliberate. Or is there some incredibly high bar for damages?
If you want that to be effective, we need a loser-pays system for civil lawsuits. That is, whoever loses the lawsuit is liable for both their own legal expenses and those of the victor of the suit, in addition to any damages awarded. If you don't have this, then you have average individual Americans up against a well-funded army of corporate lawyers with nothing to equalize the odds.
Of course laws against murder infringe upon ones right to kill. It's just that by general agreement we've decided we're better off giving up that right so as to greatly reduce the likelihood of being murdered by somebody that's pissed off by us.
More specifically the law against murder makes the proposition of using lethal force in self defense much dicier than it would otherwise be because you then have to worry about what people are going to think in retrospect. You also lose the ability to deter others by putting the person's head on a pike.
Not that it isn't an overall worthwhile trade off, but you are having your rights infringed by the arrangement.
I've always felt that it should be understood that anyone who does certain activities is so unconcerned for their own safety that they give up their legal right to be protected by the law. This includes breaking into someone's house, mugging them, etc. If those activities became more dangerous by being more likely to result in the perpetrator being legally shot and killed, it could only be a good thing. There is no good, morally/ethically correct reason why a homeowner who is faced with an (armed or potentially armed) intruder should ever have to worry about prosecution for any amount of force used against said intruder. If the intruder doesn't like that, he can always decide not to break into someone's home.
No, the only reason why such a legitimate case of self-defense would ever be prosecuted has nothing to do with ethics or morality or good legal precedent. It's because the government wishes to have a monopoly on the use of force.
That fits with my idea that the standard politician idea of going after bankers' salaries and bonuses [ft.com] is moronic. The crux of the problem is how fat the BANKS get, not how they pay bigwigs.
It's not really moronic; it's deliberate. It's actually quite clever, though in an evil sort of way. The point of that is to satisfy the visceral outrage of their constituents without having to actually address the real problem.
If the politicians did otherwise, they'd be backstabbing the people who got them into office in the first place. Their reward for that would be replacement by another politician who's more willing to play ball.
When FDR said: "In politics, nothing happens by accident. If it happened, you can bet it was planned that way," I wonder what people think he was talking about.
I agree, the public is just going to crucify the company. We need to move forward, fix the problems, and make sure they don't happen again.
On the other hand, this might be a great learning exercise for academia. It might be nice if accredited institutions could review a portion of the details in the interests of study cases; particularly a business ethics class (no that's not an oxymoron).
Business ethics: if it's legal, do it for short-term profit with no regard for side-effects, long-term losses, or harm that it might cause to other people. If it's not legal, grease the right palms until it becomes legal.
I think the insurance industry needs the same sort of backing that the FDIC gives our banking system.
At a minimum I think it would be prudent to require an insurance company to carry a government backed surety bond to ensure that clients get paid their settlements even if the company goes tits up.
I say government backed because asking the insurance industry to insure itself is a circular nightmare.
The only difference between the bailouts and an FDIC-like system is that the FDIC-like system is negotiated and its terms are spelled out before something goes wrong. Otherwise they are the same.
The only way you would ever have a free market is if the average person always fully understood both the product/service that is being sold AND any contract that goes along with it. Even that wouldn't be enough. You would then need for all people, as individuals, to be willing to boycott a company (even in the absence of a competitor) and bring it to its financial knees and to be willing to do this over even minor abuses. They must do this individually and not as the result of some organization's decision, and nearly all of them must do so. Then if a corporation even remotely looks like maybe it is screwing someone over, it gets faced with its own bankruptcy and made an example of. This will put other corporations on notice, proving to them that anything resembling bad-faith or malfeasance absolutely will not be tolerated and will be punished at all costs.
Under your idea of doing things, no corporations would exist, because they would not be able to get the working capital from prospective shareholders to accomplish anything meaningful; they'd be too worried about losing their investments to the next lawsuit-de-jour, whether justified or not.
I'm not saying corporations don't do bad things - there's a mountain of evidence to show they do. When they do, they should be held accountable. But there is such a things as going to far, over reacting or creating an environment so stifling that no innovation can take place.
Let's take a deep breath and see how this plays out, shall we?
It was no accident that I never once mentioned the word "lawsuit." That was not what I had in mind. What I had in mind was for people to do without i.e. a cellphone rather than accept a cellphone deal with which they are unsatisfied. My idea was that any industry which has customer satisfaction rates as low as this one would either shape up or go out of business and be replaced by someone else.
Give companies a choice of either bankruptcy or actually treating their customers with respect (which includes full disclosure and not finding clever ways to screw them over or nickle-and-dime them) and the companies will choose the latter every time. But the threat of bankruptcy from a widespread boycott cannot be an empty threat; it must be one that people are willing to back up at any cost if it should become necessary. To put it bluntly, all this requires is a spine and the realization that cellphones are very convenient and useful but are not essential to life. You talk about holding corporations accountable and I agree that we should do this. Since the only thing corporations care about is money, not giving money to them is how you go about it.
Everywhere I go people claim we need some great authority to keep a smaller "authority" in check. We need a city government to rule over people, because people might do bad things. We need county governments to rule over the cities, in case the city does something wrong. We need a state government to watch over the county governments. We need a federal government to make sure the states don't pass terrible laws. So on and so forth; some people go even further and claim we need a world government, but that doesn't even solve the problem, and I'd say the further up the chain you go the more removed from the actual effects of your policies and the more apt and able a leader is to engage in corrupt activities.
The intention of our federal system was that most government a citizen experiences would come from the state and local levels. At those levels the average politically active citizen is much better represented and better able to influence the legislature. The intention was that the federal government would be quite weak compared to the one we now know, and would only concern itself with matters that truly require a national response, such as warfare or interstate trade.
Rather than going further up an endless chain, this system allows you to vote with your feet. Don't like the policies of the state you're in? Move to another state and stop supporting the errant state with your tax dollars. States that piss off too many people end up reducing their taxbase, and unlike the federal government, the states cannot just print money whenever convenient. It's like a competitive market for government.
That goes out the window the moment the federal government becomes the gigantic beast that is involved in the daily lives of citizens like the system we know today. It goes out the window when the federal government can take our money via taxation, and then selectively give that money away to states on the condition that they behave the way the feds want them to. I could go on but you get the point. That never-ending chain of ever-higher authorities to purportedly keep lower authorities in line only seems inevitable because we, collectively, have failed to appreciate and correctly use the system that we have inherited.
People rationalize. "Not enough people will do it, so it won't have any effect, so it's pointless for me boycott ACME Paper Co." The only thing in our culture that needs to change is for most of us to decide to patronize or boycott a company for the sake of claiming integrity, and not because we think our one dollar will make a difference.
I've heard the essential difference explained this way. You can act because you wish to engineer a particular outcome, in which case all of your thoughts and actions are subordinate to expediency. You can also act according to your standards of integrity, honor, and honesty, in which case your concern is that your conscience is clear, you are not contributing to the problem, and you are not concerned about whether a particular goal is achieved, for the only goal is to have no conflict with yourself.
The people who worry about whether enough people will participate in a legitimate boycott are trying to engineer an outcome. Those who don't subscribe to this kind of self-inhibition do what they know to be right and accept that others must have the free choice to do likewise or not. They might try to persuade others, but they could not support any attempt to coerce others (legally or otherwise) to make particular market decisions without making hypocrites of themselves.
The funny thing is that the outcome is much more likely when the individuals involved aren't worried about what others are doing. It totally eliminates the concern of "my boycott alone won't have any noticable effect." If more people felt that way, boycotts would be both more likely and more effective.
To put it crudely, if the majority of customers (they are not consumers) sent a clear and unambiguous message of "don't fuck with us, because at all costs we will not tolerate it", much regulation would become redundant and unnecessary.
But the world doesn't run on wishes. You can't escape the necessity for people to be responsible and informed, first and foremost, and when they are that makes the need for regulation unnecessary.
That just about made me do a double-take.
The world doesn't run on wishes. You can't escape the reality that people won't be responsible and informed. Informed is important here, too, and is part of the job of regulation -- for example, we have laws about food safety, so I can walk into any restaurant with some confidence that the food there is safe to eat. You could have a totally free market, in which independent organizations certify particular restaurants as "safe", but then the customers would have to constantly be checking those certifications.
That's one area where the argument for regulation is unusually strong. If you get screwed over when you buy a car, you can always decide not to do business with that company again. If you go to a restaurant, eat the food, and die of food poisoning, it's going to be pretty hard to vote with your feet and take your business to a competitor when you're dead.
I'm not a fan of regulation, but this is one of its more benign forms. There's not a lot of political power to be had by verifying food safety. It's not an area that is so open to abuse, nothing like when the government wants to take over a bank or an automobile manufacturer.
I admit that regulation is not 100% evil or 100% useless in all cases, so cue the people who think that makes me a socialist/communist/leftist. Perhaps they do that because they've never met a real one and seen their wholehearted allegience to authority regardless of whether it has any amount of legitimacy or necessity.
Until and unless people come to see it this way, we will indeed need government regulation.
Who will regulate the government and prevent its corruption? You state,
The only way you would ever have a free market is if the average person always fully understood both the product/service that is being sold AND any contract that goes along with it.
How is that not similar to the politicians people vote for? You're just treating the government as a benevolent, righteous deity because "IT'S SUPPOSED TO" carry out justice. But the world doesn't run on wishes. You can't escape the necessity for people to be responsible and informed, first and foremost, and when they are that makes the need for regulation unnecessary.
I don't know how you managed to do it, but you somehow interpreted my words in the exact opposite way in which they were intended. I straight up said that what you need are people who are responsible and informed -- you quoted the very line in which I said it ("The only way you would ever have a free market...").
To me, government regulation is a sorry substitute for a fully informed, savvy public who makes good rational decisions in the marketplace. I said as much, when I stated that government regulation merely relocates the problem. That is, it relocates it as opposed to solving it.
I even went so far as to talk about how individuals need to stand up to these corporations when they misbehave, and they need to do it without being prompted ("not as the result of some organization's decision", because lobbyists have proven that an organization can be compromised). Government intervention would not be individual action; it would be collective (or organizational) action. Does my call for individual action really sound to you like I regard the government as "a benevolent, righteous deity"? When I say that laws can be bought RIAA-style, does that sound to you like I am a great admirer of government? Does it sound like I believe our government has any integrity?
Sorry man but you couldn't be farther off the mark. Had you not quoted my text, I would have asked if you were even responding to me or someone else.
It's called nationalization, and it's a shame that Americans shy away from such a pro-consumer action because it stinks of "socialism".
No, nationalization is when the government assumes control of something. The GP was not talking about that. He was talking about private citizens purchasing shares of an existing corporation on the open market in order to own a controlling interest. That controlling interest can then be used to determine how that corporation runs. His idea is to use that to set up a truly customer-friendly cell-phone company. In a way it's a good idea. The barriers to entry in this market are rather high; better to legally take over an existing company with an existing customer base than to try to start from scratch.
Either you were itching for an excuse to discuss socialism or you really misunderstood the GP.
Slashdot Mirror
Not gonna do it.
I haven't heard anything good about Verizon Wireless that made me want to do business with them in a very long time. They seem to be competing with themselves to see how much bad press they can drum up in the shortest possible time. What a sharp contrast to my personal experience with their DSL service, which has been amazingly hassle-free (no bandwidth caps, no ports filtered, no restrictions on running servers, etc). It's a shame because this one division seems hell-bent on giving a bad name to the entire company. This deal with Microsoft may be for $500 million, but I wonder what that figure would be if you adjusted for ill will and lost sales from potential customers who see this kind of thing and decide to go elsewhere.
Go download the Google app in the meantime.
My initial reaction is just pure anger. I have settings, I like those settings. To have them just overwritten, and to take away my choice of a search provider just reeks to me. BTW - Way to go pushing that Google Android based phone, and then piss off your BB users with a Bing deal.
The law should allow you to cancel your contract with no early termination penalty of any sort anytime the telco unilaterally and irreversibly reduces the phone's configuration like this. This behavior should legally negate any "terms subject to change without notice" clauses. It's a form of bait-and-switch, because when you bought the phone you were able to decide which search service to use and now that decision has been removed without your consent after you signed the contract.
If it only applied to new phones with new contracts, or to existing customers whose contracts are renewing (and thus can be terminated with no penalty) I'd feel differently about it. It's waiting until you are locked into a contract with specific expectations and then reducing (instead of improving) the functionality of the device mid-term that I have a problem with.
How the heck would you black out wi-fi for the driver? Cone of silence, engage! Besides, when I use my laptop while driving, I sit it on the passenger seat anyway. :P Also, the same people who would be guilty of "distracted driving" with wi-fi are the ones who do it with their phone. Take away their phone, they'll read a book (I've seen this). Take away the book, they'll get so engrossed in talking with their passenger, they don't pay attention. The best method of protecting other drivers is to get people to pay more attention to driving than anything else, not take away everything else. There'll always be some distraction you can't take away.
Proposed solution: don't try to stop them. Just pass a law stating that if you cause an accident (i.e. it is your fault) and there is evidence that willful/preventable driver distraction was a factor, you lose your license for ten years with no exceptions and no possibility to obtain it sooner than those ten years, no matter how minor or major that accident was. Now if we can also get something like this for tailgaters who rear-end the guy in front of them (easily the most preventable and most stupid accident you could ever have), we'd have a good thing going.
I didn't mean that to sound like I'd expect the law to care about this. I meant it more in the sense that if a product is so simple that it is extremely unlikely to fail, then what happens if it is defective in some way is much less of a concern. Just the general idea that the more complex something is, the more likely it is to break.
I must disagree there. Usually a man page is all I need just to look up the syntax and available options to a program. However, for more complex operations there are volumes of HOWTOs and other detailed, step-by-step guides available to anyone who can use Google. Maybe during my 10+ years of using Linux I have encountered a situation where I really needed documentation and could find nothing of the sort, and I won't positively say this has never happened, but honestly I cannot recall a single instance.
I'll add that the documentation is much more useful than what often comes with i.e. Windows programs, in one particular way. This way may not appeal to everyone, but I appreciate it. The documentation tends to get straight to the point and it tends not to assume that I'm incompetent or otherwise don't know what I am doing. Much of the documentation that comes with Windows programs (particularly boxed software) seems designed for users who have never seen a computer before in their lives and are semi-literate or functionally illiterate and totally unwilling to learn something new. It's actually rather patronising, but having worked a technical support line I must concede that I understand why they do it that way. I don't mean to pick on Windows exclusively, for much of the industry operates this way (including embedded devices), but I wanted to limit my commentary to that with which I am familiar.
Still, I just don't believe in the merits of that prevalent tendency to dumb everything down. I suspect that if it weren't treated like the only possible approach and otherwise weren't so thoroughly catered to, the demand for "just mindlessly follow these steps with no understanding" type of instructions wouldn't be so high. To put that a slightly different way, I don't think it's morally wrong to have a reasonable learning curve.
Whether it constitutes legal advice or not is a moot point to me. I wouldn't expect that to be the basis of the lawsuit anyway. I'd expect such a (hypothetical) lawsuit to be more like a product liability issue. In this case, the legal forms as a type of intellectual property are the product. In my opinion, the law in general is written by lawyers for lawyers, and they have little or no interest in making it as simple and easy to understand as possible, especially for laymen. Therefore, this is an unusually complex product for which there might be product liability. Or maybe not. That's the part I have no clue about, as I'm definitely not a lawyer so I can only speculate in an uninformed fashion.
I'm not an expert in this field, but it would surprise me greatly if there were Free templates of the sort you seek. For starters, most business law is governed by state law rather than federal law, so the requirements will depend in large part on where you are incorporated. Second, the sources for those templates would generally be the experts who derive their living from selling that sort of information (i.e. lawyers, accountants, tax firms, etc.) It is in their own financial best interests not to give away that which they need to make their own ends meet. Business law and tax law are very convoluted and generally require quite a bit of specialization.
I can see the possibility of Free tools for W2s and meeting minutes, but I'm skeptical as to the availability of legal and taxation materials. Also, even if they were available, I would go in with both eyes open because as a business owner, you're on the hook for making sure you're using correct and current information, and taxes in particular change with alarming regularity.
Another thing occurred to me when I read your comment. You can buy a good book, use online tutorials, examine source code produced by others, etc., and teach yourself how to be a competent programmer. There is no professional organization that you must join in order to be considered qualified. You're qualified if your programs compile and function and are decently well-written and that's about it for software development. By contrast, it's not nearly so easy to jump into practicing law, not even on a minor scale like the boilerplate forms this discussion mentions.
Incidentally, I view this as something of a grey area. Forms like this are something a layman can probably do on his own (that's a guess, not a claim), though it is of course much better to have a lawyer take care of it. What I am getting at is it's nothing like being in a courtroom (other than small-claims) where you're quite foolish and don't really have a prayer if you don't have a lawyer. If the challenges can be overcome, comparatively minor issues like business forms probably would lend itself to an open-source approach, but like you explained, even that is questionable.
I'd say the same but there are sites like Legalzoom.com and such that offer it for a price. I wonder if they have the same issue ? I honestly don't know but I wonder if they have a disclaimer us OSS people could use as well to protect us from this sort of thing.
True, though Legalzoom might be a special case. The people behind it are lawyers, so they are much less likely to make such a mistake on the forms. They would also be well-equipped to defend themselves in a lawsuit. Legalzoom is a (presumably) profitable company so a lawsuit, even a successful one, is unlikely to be a showstopper for them. The corporation would be sued but not its individual members. I'd imagine this wouldn't be nearly the showstopper that the same thing happening to a regular non-lawyer citizen who gets personally sued could be.
I agree that this could only be a good thing. However, most of the Open Source community consists of developers, sysadmins, and other technically-minded folks. By contrast, this is more of a legal issue.
I also wonder if anyone who provides such open-source legal templates might be exposing himself to liability. Suppose someone uses such a template and it turns out to be incorrect, even by some minor technicality, and as a result that person has additional legal expenses or other damages. They just might try to sue the person who produced the template. Unlike software, where disclaiming liability is a standard practice, legal advice or legal documents might be much more problematic. I am definitely not a lawyer but I hope a lawyer might take a moment to explain whether this is a legitimate concern.
I don't really know if that'd be socialism (and I'm no fan of central control). The court system is a legitimate function of government. If the tax dollars pay legal bills so that citizens are better able to utilize this function of government, is that really socialism?
I have one idea of a simple mechanism to help prevent the deluge of lawsuits that you mention. If the judge dismisses the suit for any reason, you get stuck with your own legal bill and maybe also your opponent's. If the suit is worthy enough to proceed to its conclusion (a judgment or a settlement), then you don't.
Four words: signs of forced entry.
Also, you're unlikely to return a bat at i.e. 3am. Additionally, in many (most?) hoseholds you have more than one person on premises, like family members. Now you have multiple witnesses who would all have to lie in order to paint your scenario.
You, sir, rain supreme.
If that where the case then they might one day loose they're supremacy.
As one of the replies to a sibling post states, the perjury penalty is only for falsely saying that you're the copyright owner or a representative of the copyright owner. In this case, the company sending the DMCA notices was a representative of the copyright owner.
I wish we had a good legal definition of "fair use". Right now, fair use is a defense if you are sued. That's all it is. There is no law that says "if your use meets these criteria, then no one can successfully sue you." If we had such a good definition, we could then extend that perjury penalty to also apply to any takedown notices issued against people who were engaged in legally recognized fair use. That would greatly cut down on the abuses, assuming the "fair use" definition were not bought and paid for. Perhaps that's a big "if".
while there may be little legal recourse to issuing invalid DMCA notices...
You can't sue the organization issuing a bogus take-down notice? Tortious interference? Shouldn't be too tough to show actual damages, tripled in this state if it's deliberate. Or is there some incredibly high bar for damages?
If you want that to be effective, we need a loser-pays system for civil lawsuits. That is, whoever loses the lawsuit is liable for both their own legal expenses and those of the victor of the suit, in addition to any damages awarded. If you don't have this, then you have average individual Americans up against a well-funded army of corporate lawyers with nothing to equalize the odds.
Of course laws against murder infringe upon ones right to kill. It's just that by general agreement we've decided we're better off giving up that right so as to greatly reduce the likelihood of being murdered by somebody that's pissed off by us. More specifically the law against murder makes the proposition of using lethal force in self defense much dicier than it would otherwise be because you then have to worry about what people are going to think in retrospect. You also lose the ability to deter others by putting the person's head on a pike. Not that it isn't an overall worthwhile trade off, but you are having your rights infringed by the arrangement.
I've always felt that it should be understood that anyone who does certain activities is so unconcerned for their own safety that they give up their legal right to be protected by the law. This includes breaking into someone's house, mugging them, etc. If those activities became more dangerous by being more likely to result in the perpetrator being legally shot and killed, it could only be a good thing. There is no good, morally/ethically correct reason why a homeowner who is faced with an (armed or potentially armed) intruder should ever have to worry about prosecution for any amount of force used against said intruder. If the intruder doesn't like that, he can always decide not to break into someone's home.
No, the only reason why such a legitimate case of self-defense would ever be prosecuted has nothing to do with ethics or morality or good legal precedent. It's because the government wishes to have a monopoly on the use of force.
Do you know where I can buy DMCA repellant? Hell, a more generic shoddy-law repellant would do the job too.
... with apologies to the late Bill Hicks.
*sprays can* PFSSSSSSSHHHHT... "What's that?" "Oh that? That's DMCA repellant!"
It's not really moronic; it's deliberate. It's actually quite clever, though in an evil sort of way. The point of that is to satisfy the visceral outrage of their constituents without having to actually address the real problem.
If the politicians did otherwise, they'd be backstabbing the people who got them into office in the first place. Their reward for that would be replacement by another politician who's more willing to play ball.
When FDR said: "In politics, nothing happens by accident. If it happened, you can bet it was planned that way," I wonder what people think he was talking about.
I agree, the public is just going to crucify the company. We need to move forward, fix the problems, and make sure they don't happen again.
On the other hand, this might be a great learning exercise for academia. It might be nice if accredited institutions could review a portion of the details in the interests of study cases; particularly a business ethics class (no that's not an oxymoron).
Business ethics: if it's legal, do it for short-term profit with no regard for side-effects, long-term losses, or harm that it might cause to other people. If it's not legal, grease the right palms until it becomes legal.
I think the insurance industry needs the same sort of backing that the FDIC gives our banking system.
At a minimum I think it would be prudent to require an insurance company to carry a government backed surety bond to ensure that clients get paid their settlements even if the company goes tits up.
I say government backed because asking the insurance industry to insure itself is a circular nightmare.
The only difference between the bailouts and an FDIC-like system is that the FDIC-like system is negotiated and its terms are spelled out before something goes wrong. Otherwise they are the same.
The only way you would ever have a free market is if the average person always fully understood both the product/service that is being sold AND any contract that goes along with it. Even that wouldn't be enough. You would then need for all people, as individuals, to be willing to boycott a company (even in the absence of a competitor) and bring it to its financial knees and to be willing to do this over even minor abuses. They must do this individually and not as the result of some organization's decision, and nearly all of them must do so. Then if a corporation even remotely looks like maybe it is screwing someone over, it gets faced with its own bankruptcy and made an example of. This will put other corporations on notice, proving to them that anything resembling bad-faith or malfeasance absolutely will not be tolerated and will be punished at all costs.
Under your idea of doing things, no corporations would exist, because they would not be able to get the working capital from prospective shareholders to accomplish anything meaningful; they'd be too worried about losing their investments to the next lawsuit-de-jour, whether justified or not.
I'm not saying corporations don't do bad things - there's a mountain of evidence to show they do. When they do, they should be held accountable. But there is such a things as going to far, over reacting or creating an environment so stifling that no innovation can take place.
Let's take a deep breath and see how this plays out, shall we?
It was no accident that I never once mentioned the word "lawsuit." That was not what I had in mind. What I had in mind was for people to do without i.e. a cellphone rather than accept a cellphone deal with which they are unsatisfied. My idea was that any industry which has customer satisfaction rates as low as this one would either shape up or go out of business and be replaced by someone else.
Give companies a choice of either bankruptcy or actually treating their customers with respect (which includes full disclosure and not finding clever ways to screw them over or nickle-and-dime them) and the companies will choose the latter every time. But the threat of bankruptcy from a widespread boycott cannot be an empty threat; it must be one that people are willing to back up at any cost if it should become necessary. To put it bluntly, all this requires is a spine and the realization that cellphones are very convenient and useful but are not essential to life. You talk about holding corporations accountable and I agree that we should do this. Since the only thing corporations care about is money, not giving money to them is how you go about it.
The intention of our federal system was that most government a citizen experiences would come from the state and local levels. At those levels the average politically active citizen is much better represented and better able to influence the legislature. The intention was that the federal government would be quite weak compared to the one we now know, and would only concern itself with matters that truly require a national response, such as warfare or interstate trade.
Rather than going further up an endless chain, this system allows you to vote with your feet. Don't like the policies of the state you're in? Move to another state and stop supporting the errant state with your tax dollars. States that piss off too many people end up reducing their taxbase, and unlike the federal government, the states cannot just print money whenever convenient. It's like a competitive market for government.
That goes out the window the moment the federal government becomes the gigantic beast that is involved in the daily lives of citizens like the system we know today. It goes out the window when the federal government can take our money via taxation, and then selectively give that money away to states on the condition that they behave the way the feds want them to. I could go on but you get the point. That never-ending chain of ever-higher authorities to purportedly keep lower authorities in line only seems inevitable because we, collectively, have failed to appreciate and correctly use the system that we have inherited.
I've heard the essential difference explained this way. You can act because you wish to engineer a particular outcome, in which case all of your thoughts and actions are subordinate to expediency. You can also act according to your standards of integrity, honor, and honesty, in which case your concern is that your conscience is clear, you are not contributing to the problem, and you are not concerned about whether a particular goal is achieved, for the only goal is to have no conflict with yourself.
The people who worry about whether enough people will participate in a legitimate boycott are trying to engineer an outcome. Those who don't subscribe to this kind of self-inhibition do what they know to be right and accept that others must have the free choice to do likewise or not. They might try to persuade others, but they could not support any attempt to coerce others (legally or otherwise) to make particular market decisions without making hypocrites of themselves.
The funny thing is that the outcome is much more likely when the individuals involved aren't worried about what others are doing. It totally eliminates the concern of "my boycott alone won't have any noticable effect." If more people felt that way, boycotts would be both more likely and more effective.
To put it crudely, if the majority of customers (they are not consumers) sent a clear and unambiguous message of "don't fuck with us, because at all costs we will not tolerate it", much regulation would become redundant and unnecessary.
But the world doesn't run on wishes. You can't escape the necessity for people to be responsible and informed, first and foremost, and when they are that makes the need for regulation unnecessary.
That just about made me do a double-take.
The world doesn't run on wishes. You can't escape the reality that people won't be responsible and informed. Informed is important here, too, and is part of the job of regulation -- for example, we have laws about food safety, so I can walk into any restaurant with some confidence that the food there is safe to eat. You could have a totally free market, in which independent organizations certify particular restaurants as "safe", but then the customers would have to constantly be checking those certifications.
That's one area where the argument for regulation is unusually strong. If you get screwed over when you buy a car, you can always decide not to do business with that company again. If you go to a restaurant, eat the food, and die of food poisoning, it's going to be pretty hard to vote with your feet and take your business to a competitor when you're dead.
I'm not a fan of regulation, but this is one of its more benign forms. There's not a lot of political power to be had by verifying food safety. It's not an area that is so open to abuse, nothing like when the government wants to take over a bank or an automobile manufacturer.
I admit that regulation is not 100% evil or 100% useless in all cases, so cue the people who think that makes me a socialist/communist/leftist. Perhaps they do that because they've never met a real one and seen their wholehearted allegience to authority regardless of whether it has any amount of legitimacy or necessity.
Who will regulate the government and prevent its corruption? You state,
How is that not similar to the politicians people vote for? You're just treating the government as a benevolent, righteous deity because "IT'S SUPPOSED TO" carry out justice. But the world doesn't run on wishes. You can't escape the necessity for people to be responsible and informed, first and foremost, and when they are that makes the need for regulation unnecessary.
I don't know how you managed to do it, but you somehow interpreted my words in the exact opposite way in which they were intended. I straight up said that what you need are people who are responsible and informed -- you quoted the very line in which I said it ("The only way you would ever have a free market...").
To me, government regulation is a sorry substitute for a fully informed, savvy public who makes good rational decisions in the marketplace. I said as much, when I stated that government regulation merely relocates the problem. That is, it relocates it as opposed to solving it.
I even went so far as to talk about how individuals need to stand up to these corporations when they misbehave, and they need to do it without being prompted ("not as the result of some organization's decision", because lobbyists have proven that an organization can be compromised). Government intervention would not be individual action; it would be collective (or organizational) action. Does my call for individual action really sound to you like I regard the government as "a benevolent, righteous deity"? When I say that laws can be bought RIAA-style, does that sound to you like I am a great admirer of government? Does it sound like I believe our government has any integrity?
Sorry man but you couldn't be farther off the mark. Had you not quoted my text, I would have asked if you were even responding to me or someone else.
It's called nationalization, and it's a shame that Americans shy away from such a pro-consumer action because it stinks of "socialism".
No, nationalization is when the government assumes control of something. The GP was not talking about that. He was talking about private citizens purchasing shares of an existing corporation on the open market in order to own a controlling interest. That controlling interest can then be used to determine how that corporation runs. His idea is to use that to set up a truly customer-friendly cell-phone company. In a way it's a good idea. The barriers to entry in this market are rather high; better to legally take over an existing company with an existing customer base than to try to start from scratch.
Either you were itching for an excuse to discuss socialism or you really misunderstood the GP.