So while having the offended party (Marriott in this case) pay for his ticket to fly over might be considered entrapment in a number of jurisdictions, it's perfectly legal in the US.
Entrapment in the US law sense happens when someone persuades you to commit a crime that otherwise you wouldn't have committed. US authorities are not allowed to do that, and it is a decent defense if you can show that some US authoritiy did this. It's not a defense if a private company does it.
But that didn't happen here. The crime was already in progress (the hacking had happened, and the extortion was in progress), so even if the US police had concocted this plan, it would have been absolutely fair game to find and catch a criminal.
well it seems the problem was that they bought copyrights to a story that has no market besides them
No, that's not what happened. Righthaven bought the _right to sue for copyright infringement_. And several judges told them, completely logical, that if you don't own the copyright, then you have no standing to sue, and it doesn't matter if the copyright holder sells you the right to sue.
Let's say you go to Avis and pay them money to rent a car for two weeks. So for two weeks you have the right to drive their car. Except if you lose your driving license. In that case you don't have the right to drive the car, even though Avis sold you the right to drive it.
I wonder if people truly believe that comparing theft of physical objects that someone owns to the potential loss of potential profit (in this case, there is no loss of potential profit to begin with). One causes a loss of property to a person, the other causes a loss of... nothing (not even potential profit in this case).
If you get fired for no reason, you loose... nothing. If a restaurant refuses to serve you, you loose... nothing.
Why does the destruction of one plant cause this much harm? -> Because it accounted for 25% of the market. That's actually fairly large; however, most techs would argue that 25% of the market going under does not justify a 400% price increase. It is possible, but something seems kind of...off about the situation.
As long as you sell all the drives you have, you can increase profit by increasing the price. So the question is: Do they have any unsold drives?
As has been mentioned, there are probably contracts in place where they have to deliver drives to HP, Dell, Apple, and so on at a fixed price. So the 25% loss of total capacity may be 80% of the drives that were available after all the contracts are fulfilled.
And why do you think HD manufacturers are "shortsighted idiots" for having no spare capacity? How would spare capacity have been of any benefit to _them_? HD manufacturers are not suffering.
he other problem is that many customers don't even know they are being had. Modern stuff especially electronics are so complicated that the average person just doesn't have the time to figure it all out and buy rationally. They usually become dependent on store recommendations or someone they know, if they know someone.
That has nothing to do with complicated. When I got my hands on a friend's MacBook to upgrade the hard drive, I noticed that the display looked really awful. Turned out he had somehow switched it to a non-native resolution but not taken any further notice.
Remember when Toyota was in the news for the unintended acceleration thing? Funny, because up until that point, all brands had similar numbers of sporadic cases of UA, but none of them made the news. Then suddenly Toyota makes the news, and out of nowhere, nearly all models of Toyota's began exhibiting the problem at the same time. And it didn't matter if it was a new car just off the lot or a vehicle that had been driven for several years. Suddenly they all started failing at once. Then just as quickly the problem disappeared. But surprisingly, none of the other non-Toyota brands made headlines for similar problems, even though they all experienced it.
At the time a Mercedes engineer said that on every Mercedes, and in his opinion on every car sold, the brakes are about four times stronger than the engine. In other words, you can bring _any_ car with working brakes easily to a standstill by hitting the brakes hard until the car stands still, no matter what the engine tries. The essential bit is hitting the _brake pedal_ and not any other pedal. And actually stopping the car; if you drive at 70mph with your engine revving and hitting the brake pedal to stay at that speed, then eventually the brakes will overheat and fail.
I'm not sure why you think this, if they were looking for power consumption, wouldn't they go with the Atom?
Only an imbecile would put an Atom processor into a laptop. Performance is about a factor five less than what is in the slowest current MacBook Air. Atom is only for toy netbooks.
The number of Mac users is growing. Therefore the number of Mac users doing X is growing, whatever X is. For example, the number of Mac users downloading open source software can be expected to grow since there are more Mac users. Now the _percentage_ of Mac users downloading open source software, that would be interesting to know.
Should your own employer use similar methods, then you can take revenge by ratting them out to Microsoft, who can then either sue your employer for patent infringement, or forbid them altogether to use methods infringing on this patent.
The "site specific object" sounds to me like a shop having a transmitter that sends out a signal "you are at shop xyz at location abc". For example, very Apple Store could have a transmitter sending which store you are at, and some software can then get you to a website specifically for that store.
I don't think even a phone tower would count as "site specific".
Because the patent isn't about finding your location, and it doesn't cover using any information stored with the device. It is about getting information that has been specifically adapted to your location.
If a patent says "we know how to do X, Y and Z. We patent doing A, B and C once you've got X, Y and Z", then X, Y and Z are not prior art. They are also not covered by the patent.
It seems to me the problem is not that I drive 900 miles everyday, just that I drive 900 miles maybe 2 or 3 times a year. If I can't afford multiple cars, how do we solve this so my road trip stays on track?
Renting a car. I need a truck maybe once a year, so when I need one, I rent it. If I needed a car other than my own once or twice a year, of course I would rent it.
Universal's insurer agreed to indemnify against copyright cases, and this was a copyright case. I suppose Universal should perhaps have checked that they would have been covered before agreeing to settle the case, but other than that the only out clause I can see for the insurer is that they didn't technically "lose" the case - they agreed to a settlement without admission of guilt.
I wonder if this settlement is actually something that should be covered at all. I think the case was not about illegal copying per se, but about copying and then not paying fees that were due, and the settlement is just a late payment of those fees.
Let's say you do $50,000 worth of work on my house. I don't pay, you take me to court, and we have a settlement where I agree to pay the $50,000. What reason would there be for an insurance to pay at all? I should have paid the $50,000 in the first place, and Universal should have paid the rightfully owned fees in the first place.
Or lets say Universal makes 1000 copies of Microsoft Office instead of paying 1000 x $500. And then Microsoft takes them to court, there is a settlement that Universal pays $500,000. That is just what they should have paid anyway; I can see why an insurance would refuse to pay.
To use a car analogy, it's like renting a car that is supposed to have a 150 hp engine (that's horsepower, not health/hit points) and then being told if you actually get up to 150 at any time your engine will automatically throttle back down to 50 hp.
Your car's engine doesn't actually produce 150 hp most of the time. Not even near 50 hp most of the time. To drive at 70 mph constant speed on a straight road in a resonably efficient car only uses maybe 15 hp. Even when accellerating you don't get anywhere near the 150 hp until the rpm of the engine is excessively high.
I think the best thing about a.com is the fact that you generally have the biggest companies where they are easy to find (apart from a few amusing examples - I'm looking at you Mr Nissan and your cheeky computer store that you have run forever and ever!) which is under a.com.
That story is a frightening example how lawyers can mess things up completely, with the worst possible outcome for both sides.
See, you're not swearing that the file in question belongs to the copyright holder that you represent. You're only swearing that you allege that the file in question belongs to a copyright holder that you represent. BIG difference.
Subtly incorrect or not expressed clearly enough. In a DMCA notice you say "we found file X, and file X belongs to the copyright holder, and I am authorized to act in their behalf". If you are not authorized to act, then it is perjury. If file X doesn't belong to the copyright holder, it is perjury. But if the file in question is not file X, but a different file Y, then it is not perjury.
The first part, "a statement that the information in the notification is accurate", would of course be false, but that doesn't fall under perjury.
That said, I would be _very_ careful with my choice of words if I wrote a DMCA takedown notice.
Most headers are non-copyrightable. There may be some headers that have logic in them that might qualify for copyright. From what I know, the ones in question are mainly #include statements with a few #ifdef. As such they fall under scÃnes à faire exclusion outlined by Gates v Bando and Computer Associates v Altai.
I'd say comments are much more likely to be copyrightable. I can put a little poem into each header file that I create as a comment, and if you copy the header file including my poem, it's very clearly copyright infringement.
Make cinema affordable for families again and piracy will go down very quickly.
Don't compare to the cost of taking a family of four to the movies, compare to the cost of renting a movie on iTunes. It's not the spending of £60 that is the problem, it is the unwillingness to pay any money at all.
The potential USP of this is the keyboard dock. However, methinks they need to get the price of the original Transformer plus the dock down to the iPad price of $499 rather than trying to sell on specs.
Tough sell. The biggest advantage of the iPad compared to a laptop is that it is easier to carry, and easier to use in a casual situation, because it is just one flat square compared to two flat squares connected with a hinge as a laptop. A tablet with keyboard dock loses that advantage, so you'd rather take a laptop with you, or leave the keyboard dock behind.
Why does everyone think that HTML5 is the answer when even desktop browsers can't get it uniformly implemented? Mobile browsers are still mostly shit from a compliance and capability perspective compared to the desktop browsers that still can't get it right.
Most browsers installed on mobile devices are based on Webkit, and there is not much reason to change the code from the code for a Webkit-based desktop browser like Safari.
Totally sensational headline. The Injunction was against Apple Inc. and Apple Inc. can appeal and introduce new evidence. Apple Germany sells iStuff in Germany, not Apple inc. There has been no ruling against Apple Germany. how about/. deals with some facts instead of troll feeding?
So that is similar to Samsung Germany which isn't allowed to sell certain products in Europe (which Samsung France, Samsung Italy, Samsung UK and so on can happily continue to sell).
Now I'm assuming... they really thought the best way to do that was send hired goons to the dude's house.
That is an assumption, and it may be true or not true, we don't know. However, it is a _fact_ that you now make this assumption, which isn't favorable for Apple. And as the chief of Apple's security, you have to try to act in a way so that people don't make that kind of assumption.
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So while having the offended party (Marriott in this case) pay for his ticket to fly over might be considered entrapment in a number of jurisdictions, it's perfectly legal in the US.
Entrapment in the US law sense happens when someone persuades you to commit a crime that otherwise you wouldn't have committed. US authorities are not allowed to do that, and it is a decent defense if you can show that some US authoritiy did this. It's not a defense if a private company does it.
But that didn't happen here. The crime was already in progress (the hacking had happened, and the extortion was in progress), so even if the US police had concocted this plan, it would have been absolutely fair game to find and catch a criminal.
well it seems the problem was that they bought copyrights to a story that has no market besides them
No, that's not what happened. Righthaven bought the _right to sue for copyright infringement_. And several judges told them, completely logical, that if you don't own the copyright, then you have no standing to sue, and it doesn't matter if the copyright holder sells you the right to sue.
Let's say you go to Avis and pay them money to rent a car for two weeks. So for two weeks you have the right to drive their car. Except if you lose your driving license. In that case you don't have the right to drive the car, even though Avis sold you the right to drive it.
I wonder if people truly believe that comparing theft of physical objects that someone owns to the potential loss of potential profit (in this case, there is no loss of potential profit to begin with). One causes a loss of property to a person, the other causes a loss of... nothing (not even potential profit in this case).
If you get fired for no reason, you loose ... nothing. If a restaurant refuses to serve you, you loose ... nothing.
Why does the destruction of one plant cause this much harm? -> Because it accounted for 25% of the market. That's actually fairly large; however, most techs would argue that 25% of the market going under does not justify a 400% price increase. It is possible, but something seems kind of...off about the situation.
As long as you sell all the drives you have, you can increase profit by increasing the price. So the question is: Do they have any unsold drives?
As has been mentioned, there are probably contracts in place where they have to deliver drives to HP, Dell, Apple, and so on at a fixed price. So the 25% loss of total capacity may be 80% of the drives that were available after all the contracts are fulfilled.
And why do you think HD manufacturers are "shortsighted idiots" for having no spare capacity? How would spare capacity have been of any benefit to _them_? HD manufacturers are not suffering.
he other problem is that many customers don't even know they are being had. Modern stuff especially electronics are so complicated that the average person just doesn't have the time to figure it all out and buy rationally. They usually become dependent on store recommendations or someone they know, if they know someone.
That has nothing to do with complicated. When I got my hands on a friend's MacBook to upgrade the hard drive, I noticed that the display looked really awful. Turned out he had somehow switched it to a non-native resolution but not taken any further notice.
Sandboxing on MacOS X 10.7 solves this quite reasonably. A sandboxed application can request access to all files _that the user opens_.
Remember when Toyota was in the news for the unintended acceleration thing? Funny, because up until that point, all brands had similar numbers of sporadic cases of UA, but none of them made the news. Then suddenly Toyota makes the news, and out of nowhere, nearly all models of Toyota's began exhibiting the problem at the same time. And it didn't matter if it was a new car just off the lot or a vehicle that had been driven for several years. Suddenly they all started failing at once. Then just as quickly the problem disappeared. But surprisingly, none of the other non-Toyota brands made headlines for similar problems, even though they all experienced it.
At the time a Mercedes engineer said that on every Mercedes, and in his opinion on every car sold, the brakes are about four times stronger than the engine. In other words, you can bring _any_ car with working brakes easily to a standstill by hitting the brakes hard until the car stands still, no matter what the engine tries. The essential bit is hitting the _brake pedal_ and not any other pedal. And actually stopping the car; if you drive at 70mph with your engine revving and hitting the brake pedal to stay at that speed, then eventually the brakes will overheat and fail.
I'm not sure why you think this, if they were looking for power consumption, wouldn't they go with the Atom?
Only an imbecile would put an Atom processor into a laptop. Performance is about a factor five less than what is in the slowest current MacBook Air. Atom is only for toy netbooks.
If you travel with a high resolution camera you are going to want an optical drive to back up you photos.
A little 500 GB 2.5" USB hard drive is ten times faster, ten times more reliable, and cheaper.
The number of Mac users is growing. Therefore the number of Mac users doing X is growing, whatever X is. For example, the number of Mac users downloading open source software can be expected to grow since there are more Mac users. Now the _percentage_ of Mac users downloading open source software, that would be interesting to know.
Should your own employer use similar methods, then you can take revenge by ratting them out to Microsoft, who can then either sue your employer for patent infringement, or forbid them altogether to use methods infringing on this patent.
The "site specific object" sounds to me like a shop having a transmitter that sends out a signal "you are at shop xyz at location abc". For example, very Apple Store could have a transmitter sending which store you are at, and some software can then get you to a website specifically for that store.
I don't think even a phone tower would count as "site specific".
How would a GPS not qualify as prior art?
Because the patent isn't about finding your location, and it doesn't cover using any information stored with the device. It is about getting information that has been specifically adapted to your location.
If a patent says "we know how to do X, Y and Z. We patent doing A, B and C once you've got X, Y and Z", then X, Y and Z are not prior art. They are also not covered by the patent.
It seems to me the problem is not that I drive 900 miles everyday, just that I drive 900 miles maybe 2 or 3 times a year. If I can't afford multiple cars, how do we solve this so my road trip stays on track?
Renting a car. I need a truck maybe once a year, so when I need one, I rent it. If I needed a car other than my own once or twice a year, of course I would rent it.
Non-obviousness, you know one of the patent criteria.
Surely Carmack discovering it independently doesn't make it obvious.
Universal's insurer agreed to indemnify against copyright cases, and this was a copyright case. I suppose Universal should perhaps have checked that they would have been covered before agreeing to settle the case, but other than that the only out clause I can see for the insurer is that they didn't technically "lose" the case - they agreed to a settlement without admission of guilt.
I wonder if this settlement is actually something that should be covered at all. I think the case was not about illegal copying per se, but about copying and then not paying fees that were due, and the settlement is just a late payment of those fees.
Let's say you do $50,000 worth of work on my house. I don't pay, you take me to court, and we have a settlement where I agree to pay the $50,000. What reason would there be for an insurance to pay at all? I should have paid the $50,000 in the first place, and Universal should have paid the rightfully owned fees in the first place.
Or lets say Universal makes 1000 copies of Microsoft Office instead of paying 1000 x $500. And then Microsoft takes them to court, there is a settlement that Universal pays $500,000. That is just what they should have paid anyway; I can see why an insurance would refuse to pay.
To use a car analogy, it's like renting a car that is supposed to have a 150 hp engine (that's horsepower, not health/hit points) and then being told if you actually get up to 150 at any time your engine will automatically throttle back down to 50 hp.
Your car's engine doesn't actually produce 150 hp most of the time. Not even near 50 hp most of the time. To drive at 70 mph constant speed on a straight road in a resonably efficient car only uses maybe 15 hp. Even when accellerating you don't get anywhere near the 150 hp until the rpm of the engine is excessively high.
I think the best thing about a .com is the fact that you generally have the biggest companies where they are easy to find (apart from a few amusing examples - I'm looking at you Mr Nissan and your cheeky computer store that you have run forever and ever!) which is under a .com.
That story is a frightening example how lawyers can mess things up completely, with the worst possible outcome for both sides.
See, you're not swearing that the file in question belongs to the copyright holder that you represent. You're only swearing that you allege that the file in question belongs to a copyright holder that you represent. BIG difference.
Subtly incorrect or not expressed clearly enough. In a DMCA notice you say "we found file X, and file X belongs to the copyright holder, and I am authorized to act in their behalf". If you are not authorized to act, then it is perjury. If file X doesn't belong to the copyright holder, it is perjury. But if the file in question is not file X, but a different file Y, then it is not perjury.
The first part, "a statement that the information in the notification is accurate", would of course be false, but that doesn't fall under perjury.
That said, I would be _very_ careful with my choice of words if I wrote a DMCA takedown notice.
Most headers are non-copyrightable. There may be some headers that have logic in them that might qualify for copyright. From what I know, the ones in question are mainly #include statements with a few #ifdef. As such they fall under scÃnes à faire exclusion outlined by Gates v Bando and Computer Associates v Altai.
I'd say comments are much more likely to be copyrightable. I can put a little poem into each header file that I create as a comment, and if you copy the header file including my poem, it's very clearly copyright infringement.
Make cinema affordable for families again and piracy will go down very quickly.
Don't compare to the cost of taking a family of four to the movies, compare to the cost of renting a movie on iTunes. It's not the spending of £60 that is the problem, it is the unwillingness to pay any money at all.
The potential USP of this is the keyboard dock. However, methinks they need to get the price of the original Transformer plus the dock down to the iPad price of $499 rather than trying to sell on specs.
Tough sell. The biggest advantage of the iPad compared to a laptop is that it is easier to carry, and easier to use in a casual situation, because it is just one flat square compared to two flat squares connected with a hinge as a laptop. A tablet with keyboard dock loses that advantage, so you'd rather take a laptop with you, or leave the keyboard dock behind.
Why does everyone think that HTML5 is the answer when even desktop browsers can't get it uniformly implemented? Mobile browsers are still mostly shit from a compliance and capability perspective compared to the desktop browsers that still can't get it right.
Most browsers installed on mobile devices are based on Webkit, and there is not much reason to change the code from the code for a Webkit-based desktop browser like Safari.
Totally sensational headline. The Injunction was against Apple Inc. and Apple Inc. can appeal and introduce new evidence. Apple Germany sells iStuff in Germany, not Apple inc. There has been no ruling against Apple Germany. how about /. deals with some facts instead of troll feeding?
So that is similar to Samsung Germany which isn't allowed to sell certain products in Europe (which Samsung France, Samsung Italy, Samsung UK and so on can happily continue to sell).
Now I'm assuming ... they really thought the best way to do that was send hired goons to the dude's house.
That is an assumption, and it may be true or not true, we don't know. However, it is a _fact_ that you now make this assumption, which isn't favorable for Apple. And as the chief of Apple's security, you have to try to act in a way so that people don't make that kind of assumption.