Three items is the best size for menus when you have to go through them in sequential order from start to end (as in the example of an automated phone response system - press 1 for blah, 2 for foo, etc). That is just simple mathematics - i.e. if you have 81 options, you'll only have to sit through 12 total choices if organized into 3-size menus nested 4 levels deep, compared with 18 total choices if organized into 9-size menus nested 2 levels deep.
However, for a "random access" menu system, it would be quite a pain if I had to go through 4 levels of choices if I knew I wanted File->Save. In that case, it is better to organize them with basic usability in mind.
You've got it backwards - this does not raise revenue for private companies, it raises revenue for governments that sell it.
In fact, these rules prevent private companies from strong-arming their way into the market just because they have lots of money. Suppose that IBM coveted the same radio spectrum as your favorite community-hippie radio KHIP (yes, I'm guessing this will apply to you, Erris... don't ask me how I know). With the rules in place now, they can't simply start using it in a way that would interfere with your ability to enjoy the Arlo Guthrie marathon currently playing on KHIP.
Wireless bandwidth is a limited resource, and there needs to be a minimal set of rules to regulate its disposition (akin to the Land Title Registry for real estate for example). Without these rules, no one gets any productive use out of it, and you will find there is no "public good" for you to defend.
"I could go off and murder somone and receive less of a punishment than someone who defaced a website, resulting in a few hours of repairs by the administrator and the fixing of a securty hole. I'm sorry, but that's just not right."
Well, you're sort of correct here - but the part "that's just not right" is your assumption about what is considered a Federal Terrorism Offence. Defacing a website is not on the list.
Read the act. Notice that there is specific containment regarding what is covered:
As it pertains to "protection of computers", the following sections apply:
1030(a)(1): Basically covers national defense/espionage
1030(a)(4): Fraud via a "protected computer" - where a "protected computer" is one where the exclusive or primary use is for US government or interstate commerce use by a financial organization, in ways that directly affect their use by that government or institution. Note that even stealing credit card numbers from a financial institution (or CDNow, or Amazon, or anyone else) is NOT covered under this provision - it is covered under 1030(a)(2), and is not part of the terrorism definition.
1030(a)(5)(A): Intentional damage to a "protected computer". Reckless damage (as opposed to intentional damage) is not part of the terrorism definition. So, just releasing a random worm into the wild doesn't count, even if that worm tries to DDOS whitehouse.gov, since that is not a "protected computer" - it exists to provide PR for the president, not to support any essential US government actions.
1030(a)(7): Extortion, again involving a "protected computer".
Folks, the definition of "protected computer" makes it clear that simply defacing a website is not a "Federal Terrorism Offense", and stealing credit card numbers is not covered either.
What IS covered is this: espionage, and specific acts that intentionally disrupt the workings of the US government or financial institutions involved in interstate commerce. This is a completely reasonable definition.
For those of you who argue "hey, I just took down their system for a while, its no big deal"... ask yourself this: is a bomb threat against the government an act of terrorism? Even though you don't physically follow through on the threat, and even though there are no long-term effects the answer is clearly yes. An intentional, malicious strike against a government computer system should be treated the same way.
Before anyone reads the (predictably inflammatory) SecurityFocus article and decides that all hackers are criminals, you should track down what specifically is defined as being a Federal Terrorism Offense. Read the act, linked to in this article.
As it pertains to "protection of computers", the following sections apply:
1030(a)(1): Basically covers national defense/espionage
1030(a)(4): Fraud via a "protected computer" - where a "protected computer" is one where the exclusive or primary use is for US government or interstate commerce use by a financial organization, in ways that directly affect their use by that government or institution. Note that even stealing credit card numbers from a financial institution (or CDNow, or Amazon, or anyone else) is NOT covered under this provision - it is covered under 1030(a)(2), and is not part of the terrorism definition.
1030(a)(5)(A): Intentional damage to a "protected computer". Reckless damage (as opposed to intentional damage) is not part of the terrorism definition.
1030(a)(7): Extortion, again involving a "protected computer".
Folks, the definition of "protected computer" makes it clear that simply defacing a website is not a "Federal Terrorism Offense", and stealing credit card numbers is not covered either.
What IS covered is this: espionage, and specific acts that intentionally disrupt the workings of the US government or financial institutions involved in interstate commerce. This is a completely reasonable definition.
For those of you who argue "hey, I just took down their system for a while, its no big deal"... ask yourself this: is a bomb threat against the government an act of terrorism? Even though you don't physically follow through on the threat, and even though there are no long-term effects the answer is clearly yes. An intentional, malicious strike against a government computer system should be treated the same way.
"It is only human convention that keeps copyright around, not some law of nature."
Huh? It is also only a human convention that keeps me from kicking your ass, taking your property, savaging your wife, or doing countless other things that non-human living creatures do to each other.
What differentiates humans from pretty much every other living thing on the planet is an ability to reason. As a result, "human conventions" - that is, the laws of the land - are enacted to define rights that you seem to think are granted by nature. If you think that the right to life and liberty is a law of nature rather than a human convention, then why do you even need a Constitution?
Not only do humans have the ability to reason, it is fundamentally our primary means of survival. It is a good thing for us to enact laws to protect that. I won't argue the specific details of copyright law, patent law, etc., because there are undoubtedly some details that are ill-conceived (i.e. it may be too easy to pass off some obvious idea as "non-obvious" in order to get a patent for it). However, your general assertion that IP does not or should not exist in our "human conventions" is just plain wrong.
Microsoft is certainly extending the reach of their technology with this announcement... but remember, it is _their_ technology. So, only half of your mantra applies here.
That's the second time you've posted this in this thread, so I really have to ask... can you be more specific on links to information that indicates that IP agreements are completely null and void in some states?
I suspect you may be confusing this with the "non compete" issue - non compete clauses may be unenforceable in some jurisdictions if the employee involved does not possess any trade secrets. I've never heard this applied to IP disclosure agreements though.
"There is no 'Value Add' to what Yahoo provides... Yahoo the index is still not worth paying for".
Second part first: you're not paying for it, so what's your point? At the current price of "free", millions of people think it is worth its price each day.
First part second: look beyond "Yahoo the index", and there's plenty of value added. If they didn't give it away, I'd pay a yearly subscription fee for their easy-to-use, fast, comprehensive finance tools. BTW, if you can spend an hour programming up anything like that, post the link to it tomorrow morning and I'll promptly eat my cat.
"Hence, culture, and by extension music [since it is a piece of culture] becomes necessary in some sense. Whole albums? no. A song here or there, just to keep current? Yup"
Talk about making excuses. Even if someone accepts your highly debatable point that music is necessary for your survival, there is no "need" for you to actually steal a copy. Listen to the radio. Hang out with a friend who has the song. Go to a concert.
"As for M$ software, yeah, I really like not being able to communicate with most of the sheeple in the world"
So, you're unable to communicate without embedding an Excel shreadsheet in your Word document? You need that for your survival? A simple.rtf or.txt is not sufficient to satisfy your need for communication?
Come on and admit it - you're stealing the software or music, and making big excuses to try to soothe your guilty soul.
While you're at it, why not do a comparison of the cost of electricity for two groups of people: those who live in the 21st century, and the Flintstones.
What's that? The cost of electricity is in the billions of dollars for the 21st century folks, but the cost for the Flintstones is zero!
Based on your brilliant logic, we should all live in the stone age, so our costs for this particular line item could be reduced to zero.
For the vast majority of computer users, their productivity using non-Windows tools would be reduced as surely as if they simply pulled the plug on their computer. Either way, their "cost" could be nothing - but that's only half the equation.
"I reverse engineered quite a few MS file formats (see my out-of-print book Undocumented Windows File Formats)"
This seems highly unlikely, as I long ago proved that quite a few MS file formats cannot be reverse engineered (see my out-of-print book Reversed Engineering Undocumented Windows File Formats - It Can't Be Done!)"
"Imagine someone wanting to format a document without printing it?!? Gasp"
I tripped over the same PageSetup problem a few years ago, but I soon realized it made perfect sense.
You can format the document (i.e. fonts, colors, cell properties, etc) - but, you can't format it for a specific printer, without knowing the properties of the printer (i.e. properties controlled by PageSetup). Without knowing what paper sizes and formats your printer/plotter supports, you can't sensibly set page breaks, margins, orientation, etc.
I think you're off-base on the assumption that file formats are going to be more stable from version-to-version, compared with the COM interface, because the COM interface is the public one. There may be a small handful of COM interfaces that worked for, say, Office 95 that don't work for Office 2000 (although, I can't identify any specific ones - can you?). However, the file formats have changed substantially.
what the living hell are those freaky guys over at intel thinking anyways? this leaves no upgrade path for existing intel customers, unless they can make more "overdrive" processors for slot-1 and -2 mobos. which means that anyone who wants a p4 is going to need a new case & power supply, mobo, and cpu. oh, and probably some rambus rdram
Or...
what the living hell are those freaky guys over at Ford thinking anyways? this leaves no upgrade path for existing horse and buggy customers, unless they can make more "overdrive" bags of steroid-laden oats. which means that anyone who wants a car is going to need a new chassis. oh, and probably some wheels.
If you like Sunnyvale CPU's better, then use 'em. If you prefer a horse and buggy to a car, then go for it. Just quit whining, OK?
I'll assume that the cuckoo-guy is just doing this to copyrighted materials that shouldn't legally be available for free on Napster (it's tough to defend his actions otherwise).
That said... Your point is correct - sending out an endless stream of cuckoos rather than an expected Metallica song would be harmful to Napster's userbase. So, they could use their right-to-terminate clause to off this user.
However, by doing so, they implicitly are TAKING AN INTEREST in the content of what is being transmitted. That interest is certainly not clear-cut, but it does weigh in substantially on the overall scales of justice.
Their legal argument for avoiding trouble with the RIAA is that they are simply a conduit for information, with no interest or responsibility for what specifically is being exchanged. By invoking their right-to-terminate clause in this case, they would jeopardize that position.
I didn't say that/. doesn't provide original content - there's plenty of that (including our exchange here). I did say that it doesn't provide any OBJECTIVE original content - i.e. "Just the facts, ma'am". Sure there are all sorts of interesting aspects to stories to be found here, and everyone who is reading this enjoys the "cherry on the top" aspect of these little journalistic treats, but that doesn't mean we should be going on a diet of 100% cherries. The important stuff is the meat and potatoes that objective journalism provides.
The same is true for the specific case of financial research - there are all sorts of interesting tidbits out there, and there are plenty of places like/. for financial matters (fool.com message boards, for example). However, there is NO WAY I'm going to make fundamental decisions on information obtained from 100 anonymous (or pseudonymous) sources, each with their own unrevealed agenda. If I want to figure out the P/E ratio of a company, or its earnings growth over the past 5 years (i.e. FACTS), I want a reliable source for those facts. I don't want to take a poll of 100 financially oriented Signal 11's so they can tell me what they think the P/E ought to be.
I think your view on objectivity is 180 degrees out of phase. Good journalism should be based on objective facts, and I as the reader should put those facts in a proper context and draw my own conclusions and value judgements. You appear to think it is the other way around - that journalism should provide an opinion, and the reader should try to see through a smoke-screen to figure out what the facts are. Opinion pieces may be interesting, but they are no replacement for facts.
Katz's definition of "Open Media" isn't fact-based news, it's Op-Ed. Sites that thrive on the contribution of readers "foraging for information" (like Slashdot) might be an entertaining read, and once in a while they provide something to think about. However, they don't provide any original-content objective reporting on anything.
If I want to learn about stuff that REALLY matters - for example, how should I invest my retirement fund so I'm not eating dog food in 30 years - I'm not going to sit back and wait for Signal 11 to enlighten me. I'm going to get factual, clearly written information from a reliable, (relatively) impartial new source such as CNN, FP, my local newspaper, etc.
For those of you who would argue that CNN isn't completely impartial and fact-based - well, you're right, but it's nothing compared to "Open Media". This article from Katz is a perfect example.
Jon simply has a monstrously inflated sense of self-worth if he thinks the entertainment value of Op-ed sites is going to replace the newsworthy content provided by sources such as CNN or NYT. In this case, my sig says it all.
"Personally I wish they would all just give up and go home, and stop treating a non-scarce resource like a precious, scarce one"
Are there an infinite number of actors in the world? Do they all have an infinite amount of time on their hands? Is there an infinite number of sound sets to shoot these movies on? Until the answers to the above questions (and many others) are "yes", you will find that the resource that is the digitally-encoded movie is indeed scarce, even if the resulting stream of 0's and 1's isnt. Simple supply-and-demand dictates that it should cost some finite value to supply the resource that you demand.
I don't know what that finite value should be. However, any system that treats the IP as being without value is wrong, and destined to fail.
You don't sue for punitive damages; you just sue, and the court ultimately decides the compensatory/punitive damages.
In this case, a lot more would have to be proven before punitive damages were considered. Punitive damages are used to punish a defendant for extremely inappropriate actions.
Just inadvertently mixing up background information on someone isn't "extremely inapproprate" - there would have to be more to it than that. Suppose 99.99% of things sent over US mail make it to their destination - does that mean I can expect to sue 'em and get punitive damages if I my bill payment happens to fall in the other 0.01%? Probably not.
Slashdot Mirror
Three items is the best size for menus when you have to go through them in sequential order from start to end (as in the example of an automated phone response system - press 1 for blah, 2 for foo, etc). That is just simple mathematics - i.e. if you have 81 options, you'll only have to sit through 12 total choices if organized into 3-size menus nested 4 levels deep, compared with 18 total choices if organized into 9-size menus nested 2 levels deep.
However, for a "random access" menu system, it would be quite a pain if I had to go through 4 levels of choices if I knew I wanted File->Save. In that case, it is better to organize them with basic usability in mind.
You've got it backwards - this does not raise revenue for private companies, it raises revenue for governments that sell it.
In fact, these rules prevent private companies from strong-arming their way into the market just because they have lots of money. Suppose that IBM coveted the same radio spectrum as your favorite community-hippie radio KHIP (yes, I'm guessing this will apply to you, Erris... don't ask me how I know). With the rules in place now, they can't simply start using it in a way that would interfere with your ability to enjoy the Arlo Guthrie marathon currently playing on KHIP.
Wireless bandwidth is a limited resource, and there needs to be a minimal set of rules to regulate its disposition (akin to the Land Title Registry for real estate for example). Without these rules, no one gets any productive use out of it, and you will find there is no "public good" for you to defend.
Well, you're sort of correct here - but the part "that's just not right" is your assumption about what is considered a Federal Terrorism Offence. Defacing a website is not on the list.
See the specific provisions that are covered here
1030(a)(1): Basically covers national defense/espionage
1030(a)(4): Fraud via a "protected computer" - where a "protected computer" is one where the exclusive or primary use is for US government or interstate commerce use by a financial organization, in ways that directly affect their use by that government or institution. Note that even stealing credit card numbers from a financial institution (or CDNow, or Amazon, or anyone else) is NOT covered under this provision - it is covered under 1030(a)(2), and is not part of the terrorism definition.
1030(a)(5)(A): Intentional damage to a "protected computer". Reckless damage (as opposed to intentional damage) is not part of the terrorism definition. So, just releasing a random worm into the wild doesn't count, even if that worm tries to DDOS whitehouse.gov, since that is not a "protected computer" - it exists to provide PR for the president, not to support any essential US government actions.
1030(a)(7): Extortion, again involving a "protected computer".
Folks, the definition of "protected computer" makes it clear that simply defacing a website is not a "Federal Terrorism Offense", and stealing credit card numbers is not covered either.
What IS covered is this: espionage, and specific acts that intentionally disrupt the workings of the US government or financial institutions involved in interstate commerce. This is a completely reasonable definition.
For those of you who argue "hey, I just took down their system for a while, its no big deal"... ask yourself this: is a bomb threat against the government an act of terrorism? Even though you don't physically follow through on the threat, and even though there are no long-term effects the answer is clearly yes. An intentional, malicious strike against a government computer system should be treated the same way.
As it pertains to "protection of computers", the following sections apply:
1030(a)(1): Basically covers national defense/espionage
1030(a)(4): Fraud via a "protected computer" - where a "protected computer" is one where the exclusive or primary use is for US government or interstate commerce use by a financial organization, in ways that directly affect their use by that government or institution. Note that even stealing credit card numbers from a financial institution (or CDNow, or Amazon, or anyone else) is NOT covered under this provision - it is covered under 1030(a)(2), and is not part of the terrorism definition.
1030(a)(5)(A): Intentional damage to a "protected computer". Reckless damage (as opposed to intentional damage) is not part of the terrorism definition.
1030(a)(7): Extortion, again involving a "protected computer".
Folks, the definition of "protected computer" makes it clear that simply defacing a website is not a "Federal Terrorism Offense", and stealing credit card numbers is not covered either.
What IS covered is this: espionage, and specific acts that intentionally disrupt the workings of the US government or financial institutions involved in interstate commerce. This is a completely reasonable definition.
For those of you who argue "hey, I just took down their system for a while, its no big deal"... ask yourself this: is a bomb threat against the government an act of terrorism? Even though you don't physically follow through on the threat, and even though there are no long-term effects the answer is clearly yes. An intentional, malicious strike against a government computer system should be treated the same way.
Huh? It is also only a human convention that keeps me from kicking your ass, taking your property, savaging your wife, or doing countless other things that non-human living creatures do to each other.
What differentiates humans from pretty much every other living thing on the planet is an ability to reason. As a result, "human conventions" - that is, the laws of the land - are enacted to define rights that you seem to think are granted by nature. If you think that the right to life and liberty is a law of nature rather than a human convention, then why do you even need a Constitution?
Not only do humans have the ability to reason, it is fundamentally our primary means of survival. It is a good thing for us to enact laws to protect that. I won't argue the specific details of copyright law, patent law, etc., because there are undoubtedly some details that are ill-conceived (i.e. it may be too easy to pass off some obvious idea as "non-obvious" in order to get a patent for it). However, your general assertion that IP does not or should not exist in our "human conventions" is just plain wrong.
"While the article does make some interesting points (you *did* read it, didn't you?)"
We'll, I tried, but my eyes glazed over after "One of my favorite scenes in the movie Ghostbusters II..."
"I saw Nadia when I was about 7 - 8 years old. It was a remarkably well made movie..."
Except that it was a TV series in 39 episodes:
http://us.imdb.com/Title?0096591
Microsoft is certainly extending the reach of their technology with this announcement... but remember, it is _their_ technology. So, only half of your mantra applies here.
That's the second time you've posted this in this thread, so I really have to ask... can you be more specific on links to information that indicates that IP agreements are completely null and void in some states?
I suspect you may be confusing this with the "non compete" issue - non compete clauses may be unenforceable in some jurisdictions if the employee involved does not possess any trade secrets. I've never heard this applied to IP disclosure agreements though.
"There is no 'Value Add' to what Yahoo provides ... Yahoo the index is still not worth paying for".
Second part first: you're not paying for it, so what's your point? At the current price of "free", millions of people think it is worth its price each day.
First part second: look beyond "Yahoo the index", and there's plenty of value added. If they didn't give it away, I'd pay a yearly subscription fee for their easy-to-use, fast, comprehensive finance tools. BTW, if you can spend an hour programming up anything like that, post the link to it tomorrow morning and I'll promptly eat my cat.
Send me a nickel and I'll post it for you.
Talk about making excuses. Even if someone accepts your highly debatable point that music is necessary for your survival, there is no "need" for you to actually steal a copy. Listen to the radio. Hang out with a friend who has the song. Go to a concert.
"As for M$ software, yeah, I really like not being able to communicate with most of the sheeple in the world"
So, you're unable to communicate without embedding an Excel shreadsheet in your Word document? You need that for your survival? A simple .rtf or .txt is not sufficient to satisfy your need for communication?
Come on and admit it - you're stealing the software or music, and making big excuses to try to soothe your guilty soul.
While you're at it, why not do a comparison of the cost of electricity for two groups of people: those who live in the 21st century, and the Flintstones.
What's that? The cost of electricity is in the billions of dollars for the 21st century folks, but the cost for the Flintstones is zero!
Based on your brilliant logic, we should all live in the stone age, so our costs for this particular line item could be reduced to zero.
For the vast majority of computer users, their productivity using non-Windows tools would be reduced as surely as if they simply pulled the plug on their computer. Either way, their "cost" could be nothing - but that's only half the equation.
Top line numbers (total revenue) are up 9%. The growth rate is slowing; sales are still up.
This seems highly unlikely, as I long ago proved that quite a few MS file formats cannot be reverse engineered (see my out-of-print book Reversed Engineering Undocumented Windows File Formats - It Can't Be Done!)"
"Imagine someone wanting to format a document without printing it?!? Gasp"
I tripped over the same PageSetup problem a few years ago, but I soon realized it made perfect sense.
You can format the document (i.e. fonts, colors, cell properties, etc) - but, you can't format it for a specific printer, without knowing the properties of the printer (i.e. properties controlled by PageSetup). Without knowing what paper sizes and formats your printer/plotter supports, you can't sensibly set page breaks, margins, orientation, etc.
I think you're off-base on the assumption that file formats are going to be more stable from version-to-version, compared with the COM interface, because the COM interface is the public one. There may be a small handful of COM interfaces that worked for, say, Office 95 that don't work for Office 2000 (although, I can't identify any specific ones - can you?). However, the file formats have changed substantially.
Or...
what the living hell are those freaky guys over at Ford thinking anyways? this leaves no upgrade path for existing horse and buggy customers, unless they can make more "overdrive" bags of steroid-laden oats. which means that anyone who wants a car is going to need a new chassis. oh, and probably some wheels.
If you like Sunnyvale CPU's better, then use 'em. If you prefer a horse and buggy to a car, then go for it. Just quit whining, OK?
It's actually quite concise and accurate. Being a consumer of this information, I appreciated the time-preference characteristic it exhibited.
Perhaps you have a more concise wording to share with us?
I'll assume that the cuckoo-guy is just doing this to copyrighted materials that shouldn't legally be available for free on Napster (it's tough to defend his actions otherwise).
That said... Your point is correct - sending out an endless stream of cuckoos rather than an expected Metallica song would be harmful to Napster's userbase. So, they could use their right-to-terminate clause to off this user.
However, by doing so, they implicitly are TAKING AN INTEREST in the content of what is being transmitted. That interest is certainly not clear-cut, but it does weigh in substantially on the overall scales of justice.
Their legal argument for avoiding trouble with the RIAA is that they are simply a conduit for information, with no interest or responsibility for what specifically is being exchanged. By invoking their right-to-terminate clause in this case, they would jeopardize that position.
I didn't say that /. doesn't provide original content - there's plenty of that (including our exchange here). I did say that it doesn't provide any OBJECTIVE original content - i.e. "Just the facts, ma'am". Sure there are all sorts of interesting aspects to stories to be found here, and everyone who is reading this enjoys the "cherry on the top" aspect of these little journalistic treats, but that doesn't mean we should be going on a diet of 100% cherries. The important stuff is the meat and potatoes that objective journalism provides.
/. for financial matters (fool.com message boards, for example). However, there is NO WAY I'm going to make fundamental decisions on information obtained from 100 anonymous (or pseudonymous) sources, each with their own unrevealed agenda. If I want to figure out the P/E ratio of a company, or its earnings growth over the past 5 years (i.e. FACTS), I want a reliable source for those facts. I don't want to take a poll of 100 financially oriented Signal 11's so they can tell me what they think the P/E ought to be.
The same is true for the specific case of financial research - there are all sorts of interesting tidbits out there, and there are plenty of places like
I think your view on objectivity is 180 degrees out of phase. Good journalism should be based on objective facts, and I as the reader should put those facts in a proper context and draw my own conclusions and value judgements. You appear to think it is the other way around - that journalism should provide an opinion, and the reader should try to see through a smoke-screen to figure out what the facts are. Opinion pieces may be interesting, but they are no replacement for facts.
Katz's definition of "Open Media" isn't fact-based news, it's Op-Ed. Sites that thrive on the contribution of readers "foraging for information" (like Slashdot) might be an entertaining read, and once in a while they provide something to think about. However, they don't provide any original-content objective reporting on anything.
If I want to learn about stuff that REALLY matters - for example, how should I invest my retirement fund so I'm not eating dog food in 30 years - I'm not going to sit back and wait for Signal 11 to enlighten me. I'm going to get factual, clearly written information from a reliable, (relatively) impartial new source such as CNN, FP, my local newspaper, etc.
For those of you who would argue that CNN isn't completely impartial and fact-based - well, you're right, but it's nothing compared to "Open Media". This article from Katz is a perfect example.
Jon simply has a monstrously inflated sense of self-worth if he thinks the entertainment value of Op-ed sites is going to replace the newsworthy content provided by sources such as CNN or NYT. In this case, my sig says it all.
"Personally I wish they would all just give up and go home, and stop treating a non-scarce resource like a precious, scarce one"
Are there an infinite number of actors in the world? Do they all have an infinite amount of time on their hands? Is there an infinite number of sound sets to shoot these movies on? Until the answers to the above questions (and many others) are "yes", you will find that the resource that is the digitally-encoded movie is indeed scarce, even if the resulting stream of 0's and 1's isnt. Simple supply-and-demand dictates that it should cost some finite value to supply the resource that you demand.
I don't know what that finite value should be. However, any system that treats the IP as being without value is wrong, and destined to fail.
You don't sue for punitive damages; you just sue, and the court ultimately decides the compensatory/punitive damages.
In this case, a lot more would have to be proven before punitive damages were considered. Punitive damages are used to punish a defendant for extremely inappropriate actions.
Just inadvertently mixing up background information on someone isn't "extremely inapproprate" - there would have to be more to it than that. Suppose 99.99% of things sent over US mail make it to their destination - does that mean I can expect to sue 'em and get punitive damages if I my bill payment happens to fall in the other 0.01%? Probably not.