So maybe soon we'll have "100% Open Source" (as supported by Mr Stallman) vs the new "Open Source" with proprietary lock-ware in it.
As you point out, this was exactly Stallman's main beef with "open source": once you start talking about "openness" instead of "freedom", you open yourself up to all kinds of redefinitions and goalpost-moving. If I hold the standard at one that preserves "freedom", then all the Microsoft-style "open code" nonsense is quickly revealed as the trap that it is.
It would help if they would be more responsive when companies are *trying* to do the right thing.
So... the FSF wouldn't give your privately owned company free legal advice? I don't think that's something to get huffy about, AC. Most people pay their lawyers when they want a license or contract interpreted; why should you guys get that service for nothing?
This seems to be a common misunderstanding among companies making their first baby-steps toward using FOSS: they somehow think that FOSS developers and advocates owe them some kind of duty of free labor for being so kind and enlightened as to, you know, actually comply with their legal obligations.
The patent could be useful to you and other users of the FOSS protocol/software as a defensive patent, i.e. you could use it to countersue anyone (e.g. a troll) going after you or any other user of the software. Whether it's worth $10k to your company for this extra protection for you and the community of users is something you should talk to a lawyer, and your company/community's business strategists, about.
Settle down, tiger, and give that straw man a rest. I was responding to a post that made the absurd claim that a license that allowed covered code to be made less free ("closed" was, I think, the word used) was actually a more "free" license than one which required the code to remain free/open. This was so close to a restatement of Orwell's paradigmatic slogan of linguistic nihilism -- "Freedom is Slavery" -- that I thought it bore comment. The "freedom" to discard your own freedom -- or that of others -- is no freedom at all.
You've imputed to me a bunch of weird stuff about business models, equating software licenses with human slavery, and so on. I suggest that this is your baggage, not mine, being inappropriately drawn into the conversation.
Until AT&T and Comcast de-settlement-free-peer any large ISP that doesn't join the gang.
Or, even more likely, RIAA will sign on about 75% of the ISP market, then start a vindictive, focused litigation campaign against the customers of the last 25%. The relatively lighter treatment given to AT&T and Comcast customers will drive customers from the 25% stalwarts to the 75% sell-outs.
This divide-and-conquer strategy works pretty much all the time, as long as consumers keep buying with their short-term, rather than long-term, interests in mind. Just look at laid-off Wal-mart employees who continue to shop at Wal-mart.
Speaking as an American expat now living in Canada, crap like this is a big cause of the accelerating brain drain of educated, talented people (gay and otherwise) moving north to find civilization. In a few decades, you can expect the US to be even more dominated by the Sarah Palin crowd, with Canada having swiped a significant chunk of the US's triple-digit-IQ population.
And that is why Google is concerned. They're not sure how much innovation they'll be able to maintain when their head of R&D is Joe the Plumber.
In their licensing terms, the EULA people agree to, they would say "in addition, we get to install any other software we feel like putting on." Of course, nobody reads EULAs, so a lot of people agreed to that. If they had, say, 4 million machines, which was a pretty good sized adware network, they would just go up to every other adware distributor and say "Hey! I've got 4 million machines. Do you want to pay 20 cents a machine? I'll put you on all of them." At the time there was basically no law around this. EULAs were recognized as contracts and all, so that's pretty much how distribution happened.
Um, no. Unconscionability is a pretty ancient principle of contract law. People joke about signing away their first-born child in an unread EULA, but they understand that it's a joke: that term would never be enforced by a court, because allowing contracts of adhesion (like EULAs) signed by non-lawyers in casual circumstances to extract those kinds of concessions from the parties would result in the complete breakdown of society.
So when this guy (and his bosses) talk about how there was "no law around this", they're not fooling anyone, least of all themselves. If I buy a bus ticket and on the back there's some fine print stating that by riding the bus I've agreed to let the driver break into my house and take anything he wants, guess where the bus driver ends up if he tried to exercise his contractual "rights"? In prison. Which is where this guy belongs.
Your figures are a bit on the extreme end, I think, but I agree that MIT had (at least in the 90s) a drastically high dropout/delayed graduation rate compared to any peer institution (e.g. the Ivy League). Getting into MIT was just the beginning; actually making it through chewed up a lot of undergrads compared to places like Harvard and Yale.
That was not, as I recall, the stated intent of the MIT HASS (Humanities, Arts, and Social Science) requirement. But you're not the first MIT grad (or undergrad) I've heard make this bizarre conflation of "the humanities" with "social skills". Indeed, even the acronym HASS, encompassing as it does more or less every academic field outside of the physical sciences and engineering, is probably responsible for a large part of this misconception: it suggested to MIT students that there was the academic study of science/technology (category 1), which should necessarily be the core of one's existence, and then there was everything else in the universe human beings devote their time and energy to (category 2), which should be given a token glance every now and again. I have to admit that it resulted in some pretty impressive academics and engineers (see the./ article earlier today on my buddy Carl Dietrich and his flying car), but it also contributed to the exceptionally unhealthy atmosphere of the place that ruined more promising young lives than I like to remember due to their distorted values and priorities. (I'm not being hyperbolic; the suicide rate there in the late 90s and early 2000s was shameful.)
The article linked here is the only place on the web that makes the peculiar, and false, claim that Marlin is "open source". Marlin's own creators make no such claim; they only claim that it operates on "open standards", which is quite a different can of worms.
No story here, just one careless reporter and one careless./ submitter.
and also patent every number up to a few hundred billion.
You can't generally patent numbers. But you can secure copyright protection on them (e.g., the number encoded by the bits on a DVD of When Harry Met Sally).
And you probably thought you were being hyperbolic...
Refusing to send source to a valid owner is definitely a violation, of course, but if you sell a device that contains GPL code I don't think you are required to give the source to the public at large, just people who bought your product and then request said source.
You really ought to read the license. It's not that long.
If you do not distribute the source alongside the object code, you must include an offer to ship the source separately, and that offer must be redeemable by anyone, not just the person who got the object code from you. (See GPLv2, Section 3. BB is distributed under GPLv2.)
Yes, I'm being pedantic, but lawyers are worse.
Yes, we are. Of course, the odiousness of pedantry can be mitigated somewhat by being correct.
Well said. I'm always amazed when I talk to technically sophisticated software people who fundamentally misunderstand what it takes for a DRM system to work: DMR is not a module inside a device, it is an entire environment in which the device must operate in order to be effective. Rather than a little "DRM chip" inside a phone, DRM is more like a piece of saran wrap wrapped around the phone. Anything on the other side of the saran wrap is off-limits to anyone but the manufacturer; that's why DRM makes any device stupid and useless. Also, a single puncture in the saran wrap ruins the DRM scheme; that's what makes DRM ineffective.
Or is the summary just incoherent, and they really meant to say "either side".
You're being overly pedantic. The sentence parses just fine as:
"There are no less than six amici curiae who have filed briefs, arguing [among them] both sides of it."
And, as someone else pointed out, and to let you know that pedantry is pretty much de rigeur on./, the singular is amicus curiae, or "friend of the court".
(De rigeur is French. It translates roughly as "according to protocol".)
(Also, the initial sentence is incorrect in a different way: it should read "no fewer than six".)
What do you think the proper legal action would be for:
1. An adult telling an isolated and mentally unstable adult to kill himself, resulting in that friend's death?
2. A man telling a child that he is his father's friend from work, so that the child will spend time with him in his home? They proceed to watch disney movies.
3. A man telling another man the car he is selling was his commute vehicle, when really he is an unlicensed car dealer? Dropping of course, the charge of unlicensed car dealer.
Those are great questions. I really think that the first is the most problematic, from a criminal perspective. The second would be enough to get you a restraining order, but with no actual harm and no evidence of attempted assault/molestation etc, I'm not sure anything more than that is appropriate. The third sounds like straightforward commercial fraud, which is usually dealt with through civil law unless it's particularly egregious.
Again, though, the first still doesn't seem to meet the sniff test. I can't imagine how you'd draw a bright enough line between constitutionally protected speech and criminal speech here. If I tell someone to "take a long walk off a short pier", do I get thrown in prison if the person looks depressed? If the person tells me they're depressed? If I know they're on Prozac? If I know they used to be on Prozac? If it's a 17-year-old kid walking past me on the street who looks 18? Really, I invite you to word the statute in such a way that it's clear what kind of speech and what kind of knowledge is required to land you in prison.
The government can't protect everyone from having mean things said to them. It can't even protect them from being lied to, unless they rely on that lie to their detriment (which was not the case here in any concrete sense). It's true that children and other mental incompetents are a special case, but that's why they have guardians whose job is to protect them from harmful influences. I have no reason to think that the parents here were negligent, but teenagers sometimes commit suicide, and it's not always somebody's fault. If I play some depressing music on my stereo and the kid upstairs ends up offing himself, I don't get put in prison for it. Am I an asshole? Maybe, if I knew about the kid's condition and thought about that as I put on the music. But I'm not a criminal, even then. This case is obviously more extreme, but I'm still having a hard time seeing how it rises to the level of criminality.
The main problem I have with this prosecution is that it's being brought under a statute clearly not intended to cover this sort of behavior. It's an anti-hacking statute: it imposes criminal penalties on people who crack other people's machines in order to snatch information that is then used in civil offenses (invasion of privacy, fraud, etc). Here, they're claiming that the woman gained "unauthorized acccess" to MySpace because she violated their terms of service.
This is nonsense. The dispute between MySpace and the woman is entirely unrelated to the dispute between the woman and the girl's family. Allowing private entities to define the contours of criminal law (by rewriting the Terms of Use for a website) erases the entire distinction between public and private law, and no judge with even a passing familiarity with constitutional principles would let such a prosecution go forward.
I hope the parents bring a wrongful death suit. But that probably won't happen until a judge puts an end to the current federal prosecutorial gong show.
I've got pirate in my blood and ninja in my soul. Don't abuse my children, and we're cool.:)
Okay, okay, I'll stop.;)
Sounds like we're more or less on the same page in our moral intuitions. I think it might be possible to pass a consitutionally valid statute outlawing this kind of intentional fraud for the purpose of causing severe emotional harm to minors (or adults, for that matter). It would have to be carefully crafted, though: it's very difficult to draw the line between this woman's behavior and, say, misrepresenting your waist size in an online dating profile, initiating a flirtation with someone through that site, leading them on a bit and then dumping them. This is an area where the state needs to tread very lightly to avoid undue intereference with people's private lives and relationships.
I'm curious about your intuitions about this case: how important is it to you that the girl was a minor? That the woman misrepresented her identity? That the woman knew that the girl was emotionally unstable? Would you still advocate criminal punishment if any one of these three factors weren't true?
I think answering that question is key to crafting a criminal statute for this kind of thing that is narrowly tailored enough that it doesn't improperly invade people's private lives.
People go to prison for 20 years for carrying around a hit of acid, and the rationale is that it could end up in the hands of a child.
Putting people in prison for 20 years for non-violent drug offenses is ridiculous and inhumane. You're not doing a good job of supporting your position here.
If it were my daughter, I would kill the woman. No questions asked. And I would not get caught.
You sound like quite the ninja. I'll make sure not to get on your bad side.
Injustices abound in the world. People are mean. Sometimes there is a legal remedy for this cruelty; sometimes not. In this case, there is; it just happens not to be a criminal remedy, but a civil one. Given the dangers inherent in criminalizing various forms of speech (which is all this woman engaged in), I think that's probably for the best.
Being mean to people shouldn't be a criminal offense, but creating a false identity specifically to cause emotional or mental harm SHOULD be.
Yes, perhaps it should. But it's not. Creating ex post facto criminal laws is a big no-no under any modern constitutional scheme. People have a right to know what the law is before they get punished under it.
The fact that she tried to destroy the evidence is proof that she knew she was doing something very wrong.
Aha! She had something to hide from the government! A sure sign of a guilty conscience! Burn the witch!
Seriously, people need to calm down about this. Of course what she did was wrong. That doesn't mean it was a criminal offense.
Perhaps it should be a criminal offense (although I have a hard time figuring out how you'd word a statute outlawing "being mean to people" in a way that didn't violate the First Amendment). But the fact is that there is no criminal law under which this woman can be prosecuted. This prosecution is relying on a completely unrelated statute, and they'll get slapped down by the judge.
Cases like this is what civil law is for. There are causes of action in tort to cover tihs kind of behavior. Bring a wrongful death suit. Teasing someone is not a proper justification for the state to deprive you of life or liberty, but it can be grounds for the parents to collect damages from you.
The next logical extension if this case is allowed to stand is that you can be prosecuted for putting down a book you are reading in a public place and not taking adequate care to secure it.
Right. I don't see how such an act fails to meet the criteria for "making available".
William Patry (copyright expert and Google general copyright counsel) has a very nice post about the "making available" precedent here.
Everything you said is right, but that being said, there are certainly grounds on which a court could find a given statutory damages scheme to be unconstitutional. In fact, elsewhere on./ is a story about just such an incident involving UMG and an unconstitutionally high award of damages for infringement.
One can imagine other grounds for finding a statutory damages scheme unconsitutional as well; a brave judge could even entertain the notion that any law that puts constitutionally protected speech in danger of multi-billion dollar penalties if it steps over a vaguely-defined line (no lawyer in America knows what constitute "fair use") is inherently violative of the First Amendment.
Slashdot Mirror
So maybe soon we'll have "100% Open Source" (as supported by Mr Stallman) vs the new "Open Source" with proprietary lock-ware in it.
As you point out, this was exactly Stallman's main beef with "open source": once you start talking about "openness" instead of "freedom", you open yourself up to all kinds of redefinitions and goalpost-moving. If I hold the standard at one that preserves "freedom", then all the Microsoft-style "open code" nonsense is quickly revealed as the trap that it is.
It would help if they would be more responsive when companies are *trying* to do the right thing.
So... the FSF wouldn't give your privately owned company free legal advice? I don't think that's something to get huffy about, AC. Most people pay their lawyers when they want a license or contract interpreted; why should you guys get that service for nothing?
This seems to be a common misunderstanding among companies making their first baby-steps toward using FOSS: they somehow think that FOSS developers and advocates owe them some kind of duty of free labor for being so kind and enlightened as to, you know, actually comply with their legal obligations.
The patent could be useful to you and other users of the FOSS protocol/software as a defensive patent, i.e. you could use it to countersue anyone (e.g. a troll) going after you or any other user of the software. Whether it's worth $10k to your company for this extra protection for you and the community of users is something you should talk to a lawyer, and your company/community's business strategists, about.
"Attention, citizen! I am Robocop(rophage). Step away from the doggie doo and nobody gets eaten."
"Thank you for your copro-peration."
(Sorry, I just can't stop.)
Paging John Waters... we have just the robot to star in your next movie.
Really, the thought of a poop-eating robot roaming the streets is just... what's that you say? They already have these deployed in Japan?
Settle down, tiger, and give that straw man a rest. I was responding to a post that made the absurd claim that a license that allowed covered code to be made less free ("closed" was, I think, the word used) was actually a more "free" license than one which required the code to remain free/open. This was so close to a restatement of Orwell's paradigmatic slogan of linguistic nihilism -- "Freedom is Slavery" -- that I thought it bore comment. The "freedom" to discard your own freedom -- or that of others -- is no freedom at all.
You've imputed to me a bunch of weird stuff about business models, equating software licenses with human slavery, and so on. I suggest that this is your baggage, not mine, being inappropriately drawn into the conversation.
Yeah, just like America was a much freer place in 1750 because you were free to own slaves or to sell yourself into indentured servitude.
Or, even more likely, RIAA will sign on about 75% of the ISP market, then start a vindictive, focused litigation campaign against the customers of the last 25%. The relatively lighter treatment given to AT&T and Comcast customers will drive customers from the 25% stalwarts to the 75% sell-outs. This divide-and-conquer strategy works pretty much all the time, as long as consumers keep buying with their short-term, rather than long-term, interests in mind. Just look at laid-off Wal-mart employees who continue to shop at Wal-mart.
Speaking as an American expat now living in Canada, crap like this is a big cause of the accelerating brain drain of educated, talented people (gay and otherwise) moving north to find civilization. In a few decades, you can expect the US to be even more dominated by the Sarah Palin crowd, with Canada having swiped a significant chunk of the US's triple-digit-IQ population.
And that is why Google is concerned. They're not sure how much innovation they'll be able to maintain when their head of R&D is Joe the Plumber.
From the article:
Um, no. Unconscionability is a pretty ancient principle of contract law. People joke about signing away their first-born child in an unread EULA, but they understand that it's a joke: that term would never be enforced by a court, because allowing contracts of adhesion (like EULAs) signed by non-lawyers in casual circumstances to extract those kinds of concessions from the parties would result in the complete breakdown of society.
So when this guy (and his bosses) talk about how there was "no law around this", they're not fooling anyone, least of all themselves. If I buy a bus ticket and on the back there's some fine print stating that by riding the bus I've agreed to let the driver break into my house and take anything he wants, guess where the bus driver ends up if he tried to exercise his contractual "rights"? In prison. Which is where this guy belongs.
Your figures are a bit on the extreme end, I think, but I agree that MIT had (at least in the 90s) a drastically high dropout/delayed graduation rate compared to any peer institution (e.g. the Ivy League). Getting into MIT was just the beginning; actually making it through chewed up a lot of undergrads compared to places like Harvard and Yale.
That was not, as I recall, the stated intent of the MIT HASS (Humanities, Arts, and Social Science) requirement. But you're not the first MIT grad (or undergrad) I've heard make this bizarre conflation of "the humanities" with "social skills". Indeed, even the acronym HASS, encompassing as it does more or less every academic field outside of the physical sciences and engineering, is probably responsible for a large part of this misconception: it suggested to MIT students that there was the academic study of science/technology (category 1), which should necessarily be the core of one's existence, and then there was everything else in the universe human beings devote their time and energy to (category 2), which should be given a token glance every now and again. I have to admit that it resulted in some pretty impressive academics and engineers (see the./ article earlier today on my buddy Carl Dietrich and his flying car), but it also contributed to the exceptionally unhealthy atmosphere of the place that ruined more promising young lives than I like to remember due to their distorted values and priorities. (I'm not being hyperbolic; the suicide rate there in the late 90s and early 2000s was shameful.)
The article linked here is the only place on the web that makes the peculiar, and false, claim that Marlin is "open source". Marlin's own creators make no such claim; they only claim that it operates on "open standards", which is quite a different can of worms.
No story here, just one careless reporter and one careless ./ submitter.
and also patent every number up to a few hundred billion.
You can't generally patent numbers. But you can secure copyright protection on them (e.g., the number encoded by the bits on a DVD of When Harry Met Sally).
And you probably thought you were being hyperbolic...
Refusing to send source to a valid owner is definitely a violation, of course, but if you sell a device that contains GPL code I don't think you are required to give the source to the public at large, just people who bought your product and then request said source.
You really ought to read the license. It's not that long.
If you do not distribute the source alongside the object code, you must include an offer to ship the source separately, and that offer must be redeemable by anyone, not just the person who got the object code from you. (See GPLv2, Section 3. BB is distributed under GPLv2.)
Yes, I'm being pedantic, but lawyers are worse.
Yes, we are. Of course, the odiousness of pedantry can be mitigated somewhat by being correct.
Well said. I'm always amazed when I talk to technically sophisticated software people who fundamentally misunderstand what it takes for a DRM system to work: DMR is not a module inside a device, it is an entire environment in which the device must operate in order to be effective. Rather than a little "DRM chip" inside a phone, DRM is more like a piece of saran wrap wrapped around the phone. Anything on the other side of the saran wrap is off-limits to anyone but the manufacturer; that's why DRM makes any device stupid and useless. Also, a single puncture in the saran wrap ruins the DRM scheme; that's what makes DRM ineffective.
Or is the summary just incoherent, and they really meant to say "either side".
You're being overly pedantic. The sentence parses just fine as:
"There are no less than six amici curiae who have filed briefs, arguing [among them] both sides of it."
And, as someone else pointed out, and to let you know that pedantry is pretty much de rigeur on ./, the singular is amicus curiae, or "friend of the court".
(De rigeur is French. It translates roughly as "according to protocol".)
(Also, the initial sentence is incorrect in a different way: it should read "no fewer than six".)
(Yes, I'm being a jackass on purpose.)
What do you think the proper legal action would be for:
1. An adult telling an isolated and mentally unstable adult to kill himself, resulting in that friend's death?
2. A man telling a child that he is his father's friend from work, so that the child will spend time with him in his home? They proceed to watch disney movies.
3. A man telling another man the car he is selling was his commute vehicle, when really he is an unlicensed car dealer? Dropping of course, the charge of unlicensed car dealer.
Those are great questions. I really think that the first is the most problematic, from a criminal perspective. The second would be enough to get you a restraining order, but with no actual harm and no evidence of attempted assault/molestation etc, I'm not sure anything more than that is appropriate. The third sounds like straightforward commercial fraud, which is usually dealt with through civil law unless it's particularly egregious.
Again, though, the first still doesn't seem to meet the sniff test. I can't imagine how you'd draw a bright enough line between constitutionally protected speech and criminal speech here. If I tell someone to "take a long walk off a short pier", do I get thrown in prison if the person looks depressed? If the person tells me they're depressed? If I know they're on Prozac? If I know they used to be on Prozac? If it's a 17-year-old kid walking past me on the street who looks 18? Really, I invite you to word the statute in such a way that it's clear what kind of speech and what kind of knowledge is required to land you in prison.
The government can't protect everyone from having mean things said to them. It can't even protect them from being lied to, unless they rely on that lie to their detriment (which was not the case here in any concrete sense). It's true that children and other mental incompetents are a special case, but that's why they have guardians whose job is to protect them from harmful influences. I have no reason to think that the parents here were negligent, but teenagers sometimes commit suicide, and it's not always somebody's fault. If I play some depressing music on my stereo and the kid upstairs ends up offing himself, I don't get put in prison for it. Am I an asshole? Maybe, if I knew about the kid's condition and thought about that as I put on the music. But I'm not a criminal, even then. This case is obviously more extreme, but I'm still having a hard time seeing how it rises to the level of criminality.
The main problem I have with this prosecution is that it's being brought under a statute clearly not intended to cover this sort of behavior. It's an anti-hacking statute: it imposes criminal penalties on people who crack other people's machines in order to snatch information that is then used in civil offenses (invasion of privacy, fraud, etc). Here, they're claiming that the woman gained "unauthorized acccess" to MySpace because she violated their terms of service.
This is nonsense. The dispute between MySpace and the woman is entirely unrelated to the dispute between the woman and the girl's family. Allowing private entities to define the contours of criminal law (by rewriting the Terms of Use for a website) erases the entire distinction between public and private law, and no judge with even a passing familiarity with constitutional principles would let such a prosecution go forward.
I hope the parents bring a wrongful death suit. But that probably won't happen until a judge puts an end to the current federal prosecutorial gong show.
I've got pirate in my blood and ninja in my soul. Don't abuse my children, and we're cool. :)
Okay, okay, I'll stop. ;)
Sounds like we're more or less on the same page in our moral intuitions. I think it might be possible to pass a consitutionally valid statute outlawing this kind of intentional fraud for the purpose of causing severe emotional harm to minors (or adults, for that matter). It would have to be carefully crafted, though: it's very difficult to draw the line between this woman's behavior and, say, misrepresenting your waist size in an online dating profile, initiating a flirtation with someone through that site, leading them on a bit and then dumping them. This is an area where the state needs to tread very lightly to avoid undue intereference with people's private lives and relationships.
I'm curious about your intuitions about this case: how important is it to you that the girl was a minor? That the woman misrepresented her identity? That the woman knew that the girl was emotionally unstable? Would you still advocate criminal punishment if any one of these three factors weren't true?
I think answering that question is key to crafting a criminal statute for this kind of thing that is narrowly tailored enough that it doesn't improperly invade people's private lives.
People go to prison for 20 years for carrying around a hit of acid, and the rationale is that it could end up in the hands of a child.
Putting people in prison for 20 years for non-violent drug offenses is ridiculous and inhumane. You're not doing a good job of supporting your position here.
If it were my daughter, I would kill the woman. No questions asked. And I would not get caught.
You sound like quite the ninja. I'll make sure not to get on your bad side.
Injustices abound in the world. People are mean. Sometimes there is a legal remedy for this cruelty; sometimes not. In this case, there is; it just happens not to be a criminal remedy, but a civil one. Given the dangers inherent in criminalizing various forms of speech (which is all this woman engaged in), I think that's probably for the best.
Being mean to people shouldn't be a criminal offense, but creating a false identity specifically to cause emotional or mental harm SHOULD be.
Yes, perhaps it should. But it's not. Creating ex post facto criminal laws is a big no-no under any modern constitutional scheme. People have a right to know what the law is before they get punished under it.
The fact that she tried to destroy the evidence is proof that she knew she was doing something very wrong.
Aha! She had something to hide from the government! A sure sign of a guilty conscience! Burn the witch!
Seriously, people need to calm down about this. Of course what she did was wrong. That doesn't mean it was a criminal offense.
Perhaps it should be a criminal offense (although I have a hard time figuring out how you'd word a statute outlawing "being mean to people" in a way that didn't violate the First Amendment). But the fact is that there is no criminal law under which this woman can be prosecuted. This prosecution is relying on a completely unrelated statute, and they'll get slapped down by the judge.
Cases like this is what civil law is for. There are causes of action in tort to cover tihs kind of behavior. Bring a wrongful death suit. Teasing someone is not a proper justification for the state to deprive you of life or liberty, but it can be grounds for the parents to collect damages from you.
She could've become a doctor, a pilot, or even a Slashdotter.
When you put it that way, perhaps it was all for the best.
The next logical extension if this case is allowed to stand is that you can be prosecuted for putting down a book you are reading in a public place and not taking adequate care to secure it.
Right. I don't see how such an act fails to meet the criteria for "making available".
William Patry (copyright expert and Google general copyright counsel) has a very nice post about the "making available" precedent here.
Everything you said is right, but that being said, there are certainly grounds on which a court could find a given statutory damages scheme to be unconstitutional. In fact, elsewhere on ./ is a story about just such an incident involving UMG and an unconstitutionally high award of damages for infringement.
One can imagine other grounds for finding a statutory damages scheme unconsitutional as well; a brave judge could even entertain the notion that any law that puts constitutionally protected speech in danger of multi-billion dollar penalties if it steps over a vaguely-defined line (no lawyer in America knows what constitute "fair use") is inherently violative of the First Amendment.