"at will" employment has very few good points for the employee. The causal link between you getting canned in the way you did, and getting the better job is very tenuous - you could just as easily have applied for the job anyway, and resigned from your old job in the normal way. Or the company across the street might not have been there.
In the mean time, the ability to just walk out will be advantageous to an employee only in the rare situation that a better job offer comes up, and their potential new employer can't hold it open for 2 weeks while they work their notice. And if that's the case, they're probably not going to be a valued employee and at high risk of getting canned anyway.
Also, might be a good idea to require people to bring lockable (and locked) cases. That'll keep most of the valuable stuff safe (and while someone could conceivably get around the sign in/out requirements by pilfering a graphics card and hiding it in some baggy clothes, that'll be much harder if all they can nick is the whole case.)
Dependent on how rustic you want to go, you could sling some chain down the sides of the room attached to something fairly secure (like heating pipes) for people to attach stuff to. How many people own system locks these days? (or lockable cases?)
The judge may not have a personal vested interest in the case, but as a judge; it is always in everyone's interests to grab themselves as much power as they can. (Or, at least, that's how it always ends up. It's just how people (and organisations run by people) are.) He may not have an interest in having jurisdiction over X case of dubious jurisdiction now, but if another case with similar jurisdictional issues comes up that he wants to use to victimise someone, he can now point to this case and say "look, I got jurisdiction in these similar circumstances before".
Why does the fact that the supreme court has found wrongly in the past make them not wrong? The case you cite is not nearly so clear-cut as you make out. There are 4 dissents, 3 of which were signed by 4 justices (all 4 dissents were signed by the chief justice) - it was 5:4 on three points and 6:3 on one. What you quote is the opinion of a very slim majority of the supreme court, the slim minority directly attack the language of the majority. "I dissent because I do not believe that the fundamental protections of the Constitution were meant to be so easily evaded, or that "the civilizing hand of law" would be hampered in the slightest by enforcing the First Amendment in this case."
"I do not believe that giving this Court's seal of approval to such a gross misuse of the judicial process is likely to lead to greater respect for the law any more than it is likely to lead to greater protection for First Amendment freedoms. The ex parte temporary injunction has a long and odious history in this country, and its susceptibility to misuse is all too apparent from the facts of the case. As a weapon against strikes, it proved so effective in the hands of judges friendly to employers that Congress was forced to take the drastic step of removing from federal district courts the jurisdiction to issue injunctions in labor disputes. The labor injunction fell into disrepute largely because it was abused in precisely the same way that the injunctive power was abused in this case. Judges who were not sympathetic to the union cause commonly issued, without notice or hearing, broad restraining orders addressed to large numbers of persons and forbidding them to engage in acts that were either legally permissible or, if illegal, that could better have been left to the regular course of criminal prosecution. The injunctions might later be dissolved, but in the meantime strikes would be crippled because the occasion on which concerted activity might have been effective had passed. Such injunctions, so long discredited as weapons against concerted labor activities, have now been given new life by this Court as weapons against the exercise of First Amendment freedoms. Respect for the courts and for judicial process was not increased by the history of the labor injunction."
"The right to defy an unconstitutional statute is basic in our scheme. Even when an ordinance requires a permit to make a speech, to deliver a sermon, to picket, to parade, or to assemble, it need not be honored when it is invalid on its face. Lovell v. Griffin, 303 U.S. 444, 452-453; Thornhill v. Alabama, 310 U.S. 88, 97; Jones v. Opelika, 316 U.S. 584, 602, adopted per curiam on rehearing, 319 U.S. 103, 104; Cantwell v. Connecticut, 310 U.S. 296, 305-306; Thomas v. Collins, 323 U.S. 516; Staub v. City of Baxley, 355 U.S. 313, 319.
"By like reason, where a permit has been arbitrarily denied, one need not pursue the long and expensive route to this Court to obtain a remedy. The reason is the same in both cases. For if a person must pursue his judicial remedy before he may speak, parade, or assemble, the occasion when protest is desired or needed will have become history and any later speech, parade, or assembly will be futile or pointless."
"Under cover of exhortation that the Negro exercise "respect for judicial process," the Court empties the Supremacy Clause of its primacy by elevating a state rule of judicial administration above the right of free expression guaranteed b
Well who else is going to do it? That's the first question a judge asks, "do I have subject matter jurisdiction here?"
I don't have an answer to the first question, but it's plain common sense that a person who has a vested interest in a decision going one particular direction should not be allowed to make that decision. A judge may ask that question first, but there have been numerous examples where any objective observer will quickly conclude 'no', but the judge has decided 'yes' instead.
And if people are free to disregard orders because they believe the judges were wrong in issuing them, then there is no rule of law.
I never said that they should be free to disregard them because they think they're unlawful, I say they should be free to disregardthem because they are unlawful. I agree that to allow someone to stand up and say "I didn't obey the order because I didn't think it was lawful" and have the appeal judge reply "oh, well, if you thought it was unlawful that's ok then" would be a nonsense. But for someone to be able to stand up and say "I didn't obey the order because it was unlawul, here's why..." and have the appeal judge reply "you're right, that was unlawful, no charge to answer" is plain common sense.
Order -> ignore -> appeal -> lose -> prison The rule of law is fine.
Order -> ignore -> appeal -> win -> *nothing* The rule of law is fine
Order -> ignore -> appeal -> win -> prison Rule of law is broken, and the system entirely ass-backwards.
Order -> obey -> appeal -> lose -> *nothing* The rule of law is fine
Order -> obey -> appeal -> win -> restitution The rule of law is fine
Order -> obey -> appeal -> win -> *nothing* Rule of law is broken
Law ought to be as robust as physics - if your theory can't handle any input parameters between the boundaries of reality then it isn't very good. If you have a theory which applies at high temperatures only (say), you don't waltz in and try to apply it to a low temperature system anyway so that you can make a complete hash of it and blame the input data.
My example is extreme, it's not silly. There's nothing to stop a judge putting pen to paper and writing "the defendant, Smith, is enjoined not the breathe. It is so ordered. Signed, Judge Bloggs". In the model that that defendants must obey all orders until they are overturned, Smith will be dead before he can even lodge an appeal. That is either not an accurate depiction of the model at hand, or it is and the model is broken. When you get an implausible situation, does the person applying the law accept that the law as written isn't meant for this situation? or just blithely go in an apply it badly anyway?
I wasn't trying to argue that was in any sense a lawful order. Constitutional issues could get it overturned, but if defendant Smith is still bound to follow it until it's overturned, he's still going to prison or the morgue.
Of course, if it's a general premise, not a law (oh, the irony), then the whole discussion is largely moot.
But you're not going to get too much sympathy from the appellate court by saying "I didn't obey the order because the judge was wrong," even if the appellate court agrees that the judge was wrong.
An appeal judge that hypocritical (or that incapable of cognitive reasoning) should not be in charge of watching the rock which keeps tigers away, let alone a court of law. And that is why (returning to my point at the top), the validity of idea that the courts should be assumed to be right until proved wrong (and should be allowed to punish people for not obeying them when they were wrong, but hadn't been proved to be so at the time) is not a decision which should be left up the courts.
This is why the courts should never be allowed to hear aspects of cases which hinge around the extents of the court's authority.
What's the objective difference between an unlawful order and one which is based upon shakey facts which are later found to be untrue? To put it another way: There must be 'facts', and there must be a law which allows an injunction given those 'facts'. What's the difference between an order which is issued without any basis in law, and one which is issued wrongly because the 'facts' were wrong. If judges are free to issue orders which are in defiance of the law, and have higher courts uphold contempt judgements against people for disobeying those orders, there is no rule of law. Just petty tyrants with essentially unlimited power.
An example. A judge orders you to stop breathing. This is clearly not a lawful order. You appeal to a higher court, and 24 hours later sucessfully overturn it. In the mean time (let's assume that you don't choose to asphyxiate yourself), you've breathed many hundreds of times. The first judge finds you in contempt. The higher court supports the contempt ruling because you must obey an injunction until it's overturned and you go to prison. Either you're wrong, or the system is very broken. I hope it's the former (nothing personal).
no, Asda were dumb enough to advertise themselves as "part of the Wal*Mart family", so those of us with a bit of sense refuse to shop there - pumping Tesco up may not be clever, but it's preferable if it means they can squeeze Asda out of the market. Clash of the Titans indeed.
pracie: Asda is not top dog because we're not all flocking there because we know that it's really Wal*Mart because they told us it was.
No, they're well within their rights to require you to leave if you do professional photography. Being the landowner only gives you the right to exclude people from your property - every other 'power' derives from that. Example: You own a shop. You display a sign saying 'no photography'. I take photos anyway. You tell me to leave. I leave.
I've not done anything criminally or civilly actionable. There's no law against not obeying your policies, only that I must leave when told to do so (which you may, of course, do if I break your rules, or, indeed, entirely on a whim).
or having access to most of the resources of Nintendo and a free hand to turn whatever his interest of the moment is into a game to force onto the rest of us as the next 'in thing'.
yeah, I have a £9 pair of shoes that began to show signs of wear within 3 uses, and a £25 pair of shoes that lasted 3 1/2 years of near daily use before the soles had finally worn down too much under the heals. The sweet spot is never at the bottom of the market.
Ok, the Mike Rowe Soft thing; he, a student, fought an enormous corporation and didn't lose. They settled out of court, and MR got several hundred dollars worth of stuff in exchange for the domain name. M$ did not win anything w.r.t protecting their trademark. MR was also hampered by broken ICANN regulations which labelled him as having acted in bad faith by asking to be paid hansomely for handing over a domain name that M$ was not entitled to.
I was giving an example of why a name used by one organisation which starts with a string of slightly over half of another trademark is not automatically infringing. MICROsoft - MICROstar; eh? eh? Not buying it? So why are you buying SCRABble - SCRABulous?
From the wiki: "The test is always whether a consumer of the goods or services will be confused as to the identity of the source or origin." Maybe I wrongfully inserted the word 'reasonable', but I doubt it means 'absolutely any consumer, anywhere, no matter how stupid' either. Will a consumer think "ah, 'scrabulous', must be an official scrabble product", or "ah, 'scrabulous', that looks like someone is trying to advertise a scrabble-like game without portraying themselves as the owners of scrabble"? Not even google knows about 'prefix haunting', I will therefore say that you are talking out of your ass, unless you can provide some references. Would you care to explain how knowlege of the present state of the law would in any way be beneficial in constructing an argument as to why a decision based (presumably) soundly upon the law as it stand is wrong?
Finally, hammer it home. Nearness only applies broadly once you've been ruled against before. Scrabble is by now a genericized trademark - if I offer to play a game with you using a 15x15 board and some tiles with letters on them, you're going to say "ah! scrabble", not "ah, a tile-turning word game". To then use only part of that mark to identify what your product actually is; is (or ought to be) protected.
And to put the cherry on the top; some ad-hominem: You're letting your opinion be guided by the law - this makes you a feable-minded moron. Here's a clue; the law is not right because it's the law. In this case, as a result of 'the law', a wrong decision has been made. Therefore the law is wrong.
If you take it away from being in my immediate possession (or from where I could immediately regain possession), and refuse to return it on demand, you've seized it. Seizure is not the same thing as forfeiture - if I still technically own something, but you won't actually return it to me, you've seized it.
look, a thorough search of a laptop is invasive, but it's just a search - if the thing is siezed for 6 months it will depreciate by about 25% of its value, and you may lose the primary tool that you use to do your job. If you worked as a wood-carver and customs took away your chisels for 6 months to inspect them, you'd be pretty pissed off, and rightly so. Now imagine that they stored them badly so that when you get them back they'd rusted and were 25% less effective. You can't compare on-the-spot inspection (however thorough) with long-term seizure.
search, maybe, indefinite seizure of property for no particular reason though? AFAICT from your link, the border search exception applies to searches, not seizures. Got anything on that?
I never played it, so I can't comment on what the artwork looked like, but on the trademark issue, it was a similar name which looked like it had been deliberately contrived to be similar whilst not being exactly the same. I've not seen monopoly knockoffs which end in 'opoly' being victimised (at least not sucessfully) by whoever owns the rights to 'monopoly'. That sort of name says "hey, look, we deliberately contrived our name so that it isn't the same as the trademark, but is similar to give you an indication of what the game is actually like". I don't think it requires a great deal of intelligence to figure out that something name 'scrabulous' is probably not an official scrabble (or hasbro) product, maybe I'm wrong.
they didn't claim to be 'scrabble'. They claimed to be 'scrabulous'. Is this the 5 8ths rule? if you use more than the larger half (in the case of odd numbers) or one more than half (in the case of even numbers) of the letters of someone else's trademark in consecutive order then you're in breach of it? Because I see all sorts of problems for microstar and anyone who sells a generic microwave. If scrabulous were a Hasbro product it would have been called 'Scrabble' or 'Scrabble online', it would not have been a deliberate portmanteau of 'scrabble' and 'fabulous'. Any reasonable person should come to the conclusion that they're not related except that the scrab- prefix indicates that it's a scrabble-like game. Thus; not a trademark infringement.
I'd rather the final decision was not down to 12 random people from the street who don't in any way understand the law, probably don't understand the facts, were too stupid to get out of it, are royally pissed at having to spend their time settling my dispute while being paid 1/4 of their normal wage and want to get out of here early so they can beat the traffic home.
Admittedly, it's more pertinent in crimnal trials, where the judge should have the power to overrule the jury if they find a clearly innocent person guilty anyway (but not the other way). People are fallible - incompetent (in the 'not qualified for the job they're doing' sense) people doubly so.
In this case; the jury made a decision based on an interpretation of the law given to them by the judge (or an interpretation of their own), the judge has now decided that that interpretation was wrong. Are you saying that because they're a somehow omniscient, mystical, and perfect group of 12 people their original decision should stand anyway? You set yourself up for a massive fall by declaring one link of the chain to be unquestionable - everything must be up for review.
I'd be more disturbed if the judge didn't have the power to overule a jury when they're wrong.
The argument is that the jury made a decision that the contract was breached, given that the fees clause was valid.
The judge has now ruled, as a matter of law, that the fees clause was not valid, which makes the jury's judgement of the facts at best irrelevant. Presumably there is now no fact to be tried by a jury - the part of the contract that the customers have supposedly breached is invalid, therefore no breach could have occured, therefore no fees.
He can film what he likes. It can't be transmitted on TV without a release or as 'factual' footage after subsequent conviction for a crime. (You'll notice that people who are subsequently not convicted are shown with faces blurred). A suicidal man who was shown, identifiable, on a 'clips from CCTV' show carrying a knife sucessfully sued when he argued that he wasn't breaking the law because he had a legitimate reason for having a knife in public (i.e. killing himself)
It's pretty slimy though. I normally can't bear to watch those shows, but when I've seen bits of them, the police always come off looking like high-handed, arrogant, self-important thugs. I do wonder why they agree to assist in making them.
How widely read is the ABA quarterly in the judging profession, and if it's not that high, how much would it cost to (and would it be worth doing to) send a dead-tree copy of the article to every judge in the country?
for a given tooltip (or whatever) you must have a piece of text, this is probably not written (in its final version) by the programmers, which means that someone else does it. The distinction between the person who writes the tooltip for en-us, en-gb, de & fr is completely arbitrary. Also, if the localisation argument is valid, when can I expect to be able to buy en-us versions for the cheaper price?
Slashdot Mirror
"at will" employment has very few good points for the employee. The causal link between you getting canned in the way you did, and getting the better job is very tenuous - you could just as easily have applied for the job anyway, and resigned from your old job in the normal way. Or the company across the street might not have been there.
In the mean time, the ability to just walk out will be advantageous to an employee only in the rare situation that a better job offer comes up, and their potential new employer can't hold it open for 2 weeks while they work their notice. And if that's the case, they're probably not going to be a valued employee and at high risk of getting canned anyway.
Also, might be a good idea to require people to bring lockable (and locked) cases. That'll keep most of the valuable stuff safe (and while someone could conceivably get around the sign in/out requirements by pilfering a graphics card and hiding it in some baggy clothes, that'll be much harder if all they can nick is the whole case.)
Dependent on how rustic you want to go, you could sling some chain down the sides of the room attached to something fairly secure (like heating pipes) for people to attach stuff to. How many people own system locks these days? (or lockable cases?)
The judge may not have a personal vested interest in the case, but as a judge; it is always in everyone's interests to grab themselves as much power as they can. (Or, at least, that's how it always ends up. It's just how people (and organisations run by people) are.) He may not have an interest in having jurisdiction over X case of dubious jurisdiction now, but if another case with similar jurisdictional issues comes up that he wants to use to victimise someone, he can now point to this case and say "look, I got jurisdiction in these similar circumstances before".
Why does the fact that the supreme court has found wrongly in the past make them not wrong?
The case you cite is not nearly so clear-cut as you make out. There are 4 dissents, 3 of which were signed by 4 justices (all 4 dissents were signed by the chief justice) - it was 5:4 on three points and 6:3 on one.
What you quote is the opinion of a very slim majority of the supreme court, the slim minority directly attack the language of the majority.
"I dissent because I do not believe that the fundamental protections of the Constitution were meant to be so easily evaded, or that "the civilizing hand of law" would be hampered in the slightest by enforcing the First Amendment in this case."
"I do not believe that giving this Court's seal of approval to such a gross misuse of the judicial process is likely to lead to greater respect for the law any more than it is likely to lead to greater protection for First Amendment freedoms. The ex parte temporary injunction has a long and odious history in this country, and its susceptibility to misuse is all too apparent from the facts of the case. As a weapon against strikes, it proved so effective in the hands of judges friendly to employers that Congress was forced to take the drastic step of removing from federal district courts the jurisdiction to issue injunctions in labor disputes. The labor injunction fell into disrepute largely because it was abused in precisely the same way that the injunctive power was abused in this case. Judges who were not sympathetic to the union cause commonly issued, without notice or hearing, broad restraining orders addressed to large numbers of persons and forbidding them to engage in acts that were either legally permissible or, if illegal, that could better have been left to the regular course of criminal prosecution. The injunctions might later be dissolved, but in the meantime strikes would be crippled because the occasion on which concerted activity might have been effective had passed. Such injunctions, so long discredited as weapons against concerted labor activities, have now been given new life by this Court as weapons against the exercise of First Amendment freedoms. Respect for the courts and for judicial process was not increased by the history of the labor injunction."
"The right to defy an unconstitutional statute is basic in our scheme. Even when an ordinance requires a permit to make a speech, to deliver a sermon, to picket, to parade, or to assemble, it need not be honored when it is invalid on its face. Lovell v. Griffin, 303 U.S. 444, 452-453; Thornhill v. Alabama, 310 U.S. 88, 97; Jones v. Opelika, 316 U.S. 584, 602, adopted per curiam on rehearing, 319 U.S. 103, 104; Cantwell v. Connecticut, 310 U.S. 296, 305-306; Thomas v. Collins, 323 U.S. 516; Staub v. City of Baxley, 355 U.S. 313, 319.
"By like reason, where a permit has been arbitrarily denied, one need not pursue the long and expensive route to this Court to obtain a remedy. The reason is the same in both cases. For if a person must pursue his judicial remedy before he may speak, parade, or assemble, the occasion when protest is desired or needed will have become history and any later speech, parade, or assembly will be futile or pointless."
"Under cover of exhortation that the Negro exercise "respect for judicial process," the Court empties the Supremacy Clause of its primacy by elevating a state rule of judicial administration above the right of free expression guaranteed b
I don't have an answer to the first question, but it's plain common sense that a person who has a vested interest in a decision going one particular direction should not be allowed to make that decision.
A judge may ask that question first, but there have been numerous examples where any objective observer will quickly conclude 'no', but the judge has decided 'yes' instead.
I never said that they should be free to disregard them because they think they're unlawful, I say they should be free to disregardthem because they are unlawful. I agree that to allow someone to stand up and say "I didn't obey the order because I didn't think it was lawful" and have the appeal judge reply "oh, well, if you thought it was unlawful that's ok then" would be a nonsense. But for someone to be able to stand up and say "I didn't obey the order because it was unlawul, here's why..." and have the appeal judge reply "you're right, that was unlawful, no charge to answer" is plain common sense.
Order -> ignore -> appeal -> lose -> prison
The rule of law is fine.
Order -> ignore -> appeal -> win -> *nothing*
The rule of law is fine
Order -> ignore -> appeal -> win -> prison
Rule of law is broken, and the system entirely ass-backwards.
Order -> obey -> appeal -> lose -> *nothing*
The rule of law is fine
Order -> obey -> appeal -> win -> restitution
The rule of law is fine
Order -> obey -> appeal -> win -> *nothing*
Rule of law is broken
Law ought to be as robust as physics - if your theory can't handle any input parameters between the boundaries of reality then it isn't very good. If you have a theory which applies at high temperatures only (say), you don't waltz in and try to apply it to a low temperature system anyway so that you can make a complete hash of it and blame the input data.
My example is extreme, it's not silly. There's nothing to stop a judge putting pen to paper and writing "the defendant, Smith, is enjoined not the breathe. It is so ordered. Signed, Judge Bloggs". In the model that that defendants must obey all orders until they are overturned, Smith will be dead before he can even lodge an appeal.
That is either not an accurate depiction of the model at hand, or it is and the model is broken.
When you get an implausible situation, does the person applying the law accept that the law as written isn't meant for this situation? or just blithely go in an apply it badly anyway?
I wasn't trying to argue that was in any sense a lawful order. Constitutional issues could get it overturned, but if defendant Smith is still bound to follow it until it's overturned, he's still going to prison or the morgue.
Of course, if it's a general premise, not a law (oh, the irony), then the whole discussion is largely moot.
An appeal judge that hypocritical (or that incapable of cognitive reasoning) should not be in charge of watching the rock which keeps tigers away, let alone a court of law. And that is why (returning to my point at the top), the validity of idea that the courts should be assumed to be right until proved wrong (and should be allowed to punish people for not obeying them when they were wrong, but hadn't been proved to be so at the time) is not a decision which should be left up the courts.
So you essentially have no freedom at all. Great.
This is why the courts should never be allowed to hear aspects of cases which hinge around the extents of the court's authority.
What's the objective difference between an unlawful order and one which is based upon shakey facts which are later found to be untrue?
To put it another way:
There must be 'facts', and there must be a law which allows an injunction given those 'facts'. What's the difference between an order which is issued without any basis in law, and one which is issued wrongly because the 'facts' were wrong.
If judges are free to issue orders which are in defiance of the law, and have higher courts uphold contempt judgements against people for disobeying those orders, there is no rule of law. Just petty tyrants with essentially unlimited power.
An example. A judge orders you to stop breathing. This is clearly not a lawful order. You appeal to a higher court, and 24 hours later sucessfully overturn it. In the mean time (let's assume that you don't choose to asphyxiate yourself), you've breathed many hundreds of times. The first judge finds you in contempt. The higher court supports the contempt ruling because you must obey an injunction until it's overturned and you go to prison. Either you're wrong, or the system is very broken. I hope it's the former (nothing personal).
i USE CAPSLOCK, YOU INSENSITIVE CLOD!
(Here is some non-caps waffle to get past the shout-filter)
no, Asda were dumb enough to advertise themselves as "part of the Wal*Mart family", so those of us with a bit of sense refuse to shop there - pumping Tesco up may not be clever, but it's preferable if it means they can squeeze Asda out of the market. Clash of the Titans indeed.
pracie:
Asda is not top dog because we're not all flocking there because we know that it's really Wal*Mart because they told us it was.
No, they're well within their rights to require you to leave if you do professional photography. Being the landowner only gives you the right to exclude people from your property - every other 'power' derives from that.
Example:
You own a shop. You display a sign saying 'no photography'. I take photos anyway. You tell me to leave. I leave.
I've not done anything criminally or civilly actionable. There's no law against not obeying your policies, only that I must leave when told to do so (which you may, of course, do if I break your rules, or, indeed, entirely on a whim).
or having access to most of the resources of Nintendo and a free hand to turn whatever his interest of the moment is into a game to force onto the rest of us as the next 'in thing'.
yeah, I have a £9 pair of shoes that began to show signs of wear within 3 uses, and a £25 pair of shoes that lasted 3 1/2 years of near daily use before the soles had finally worn down too much under the heals. The sweet spot is never at the bottom of the market.
Ok, the Mike Rowe Soft thing; he, a student, fought an enormous corporation and didn't lose. They settled out of court, and MR got several hundred dollars worth of stuff in exchange for the domain name. M$ did not win anything w.r.t protecting their trademark. MR was also hampered by broken ICANN regulations which labelled him as having acted in bad faith by asking to be paid hansomely for handing over a domain name that M$ was not entitled to.
I was giving an example of why a name used by one organisation which starts with a string of slightly over half of another trademark is not automatically infringing. MICROsoft - MICROstar; eh? eh? Not buying it? So why are you buying SCRABble - SCRABulous?
From the wiki: "The test is always whether a consumer of the goods or services will be confused as to the identity of the source or origin."
Maybe I wrongfully inserted the word 'reasonable', but I doubt it means 'absolutely any consumer, anywhere, no matter how stupid' either. Will a consumer think "ah, 'scrabulous', must be an official scrabble product", or "ah, 'scrabulous', that looks like someone is trying to advertise a scrabble-like game without portraying themselves as the owners of scrabble"?
Not even google knows about 'prefix haunting', I will therefore say that you are talking out of your ass, unless you can provide some references.
Would you care to explain how knowlege of the present state of the law would in any way be beneficial in constructing an argument as to why a decision based (presumably) soundly upon the law as it stand is wrong?
Finally, hammer it home.
Nearness only applies broadly once you've been ruled against before.
Scrabble is by now a genericized trademark - if I offer to play a game with you using a 15x15 board and some tiles with letters on them, you're going to say "ah! scrabble", not "ah, a tile-turning word game". To then use only part of that mark to identify what your product actually is; is (or ought to be) protected.
And to put the cherry on the top; some ad-hominem:
You're letting your opinion be guided by the law - this makes you a feable-minded moron.
Here's a clue; the law is not right because it's the law. In this case, as a result of 'the law', a wrong decision has been made. Therefore the law is wrong.
If you take it away from being in my immediate possession (or from where I could immediately regain possession), and refuse to return it on demand, you've seized it.
Seizure is not the same thing as forfeiture - if I still technically own something, but you won't actually return it to me, you've seized it.
look, a thorough search of a laptop is invasive, but it's just a search - if the thing is siezed for 6 months it will depreciate by about 25% of its value, and you may lose the primary tool that you use to do your job. If you worked as a wood-carver and customs took away your chisels for 6 months to inspect them, you'd be pretty pissed off, and rightly so. Now imagine that they stored them badly so that when you get them back they'd rusted and were 25% less effective.
You can't compare on-the-spot inspection (however thorough) with long-term seizure.
or, just, "you don't own anything, but you get to keep what we deign to not take away"
search, maybe, indefinite seizure of property for no particular reason though? AFAICT from your link, the border search exception applies to searches, not seizures. Got anything on that?
I never played it, so I can't comment on what the artwork looked like, but on the trademark issue, it was a similar name which looked like it had been deliberately contrived to be similar whilst not being exactly the same. I've not seen monopoly knockoffs which end in 'opoly' being victimised (at least not sucessfully) by whoever owns the rights to 'monopoly'. That sort of name says "hey, look, we deliberately contrived our name so that it isn't the same as the trademark, but is similar to give you an indication of what the game is actually like". I don't think it requires a great deal of intelligence to figure out that something name 'scrabulous' is probably not an official scrabble (or hasbro) product, maybe I'm wrong.
they didn't claim to be 'scrabble'. They claimed to be 'scrabulous'. Is this the 5 8ths rule? if you use more than the larger half (in the case of odd numbers) or one more than half (in the case of even numbers) of the letters of someone else's trademark in consecutive order then you're in breach of it? Because I see all sorts of problems for microstar and anyone who sells a generic microwave.
If scrabulous were a Hasbro product it would have been called 'Scrabble' or 'Scrabble online', it would not have been a deliberate portmanteau of 'scrabble' and 'fabulous'. Any reasonable person should come to the conclusion that they're not related except that the scrab- prefix indicates that it's a scrabble-like game. Thus; not a trademark infringement.
ooh. that's an idea & a half. You get the buckyball, I'll get the tiles.
I'd rather the final decision was not down to 12 random people from the street who don't in any way understand the law, probably don't understand the facts, were too stupid to get out of it, are royally pissed at having to spend their time settling my dispute while being paid 1/4 of their normal wage and want to get out of here early so they can beat the traffic home.
Admittedly, it's more pertinent in crimnal trials, where the judge should have the power to overrule the jury if they find a clearly innocent person guilty anyway (but not the other way). People are fallible - incompetent (in the 'not qualified for the job they're doing' sense) people doubly so.
In this case; the jury made a decision based on an interpretation of the law given to them by the judge (or an interpretation of their own), the judge has now decided that that interpretation was wrong. Are you saying that because they're a somehow omniscient, mystical, and perfect group of 12 people their original decision should stand anyway?
You set yourself up for a massive fall by declaring one link of the chain to be unquestionable - everything must be up for review.
I'd be more disturbed if the judge didn't have the power to overule a jury when they're wrong.
The argument is that the jury made a decision that the contract was breached, given that the fees clause was valid.
The judge has now ruled, as a matter of law, that the fees clause was not valid, which makes the jury's judgement of the facts at best irrelevant. Presumably there is now no fact to be tried by a jury - the part of the contract that the customers have supposedly breached is invalid, therefore no breach could have occured, therefore no fees.
He can film what he likes. It can't be transmitted on TV without a release or as 'factual' footage after subsequent conviction for a crime. (You'll notice that people who are subsequently not convicted are shown with faces blurred). A suicidal man who was shown, identifiable, on a 'clips from CCTV' show carrying a knife sucessfully sued when he argued that he wasn't breaking the law because he had a legitimate reason for having a knife in public (i.e. killing himself)
It's pretty slimy though. I normally can't bear to watch those shows, but when I've seen bits of them, the police always come off looking like high-handed, arrogant, self-important thugs. I do wonder why they agree to assist in making them.
We'll have bigger problems to worry about, because physics will be broken.
How widely read is the ABA quarterly in the judging profession, and if it's not that high, how much would it cost to (and would it be worth doing to) send a dead-tree copy of the article to every judge in the country?
shut up, shut up, shut up.
The Treasury might get ideas if they read that!
for a given tooltip (or whatever) you must have a piece of text, this is probably not written (in its final version) by the programmers, which means that someone else does it. The distinction between the person who writes the tooltip for en-us, en-gb, de & fr is completely arbitrary.
Also, if the localisation argument is valid, when can I expect to be able to buy en-us versions for the cheaper price?