I think it is impossible to incite someone to hatred of anything or anyone if that hatred is not already latent inside such a person. If I have firmly decided to love or at least tolerate rather than to hate, no hateful speech can make me hate the object of love or tolerance.
Problem is, hatred for just about anything is latent inside everyone. Just like love for about anything is latent inside everyone. Of course, not in you, but you are special.
That's all very well for those who use it occasionally, but recently when driving with my boss I realised that due to his over-reliance on sat-nav he was driving 10 miles out of his way to get home on a regular basis (on a journey of approx 50 miles).
He didn't even realise there was a shorter route.
You have to know _how_ to use a Satnav to get the best use out of it.
For example, TomTom can show you the "fastest" route and the "shortest" route. When showing the "fastest" route, it makes assumptions about the speed you can drive that are not always true; it often assumes a speed of 30 mph on major roads where you can go 50. Accordingly, it will prefer a route of twice the length on the motorway vs. a major road. On the other hand, "shortest" will get you on absolutely unsuitable roads. It will send you five miles down a single lane dirt track instead of 5.1 miles on a major road.
I tend to get good results by setting it to "speed limited to 45 mph" which will give it less preference for motorways. And if you think there is a better way (from home to work, for example), it is quite safe to experiment: Just go the other route. Sometimes two routes are actually very close; if one is two seconds shorter than TomTom will choose that one, but once you turned onto the other route, it changes its mind immediately. But if its own suggestion is a lot better, then it will for quite a while try to redirect you towards its initial suggestion.
The problem, as many have noted, is that once something is available on the internet, the cat's out of the bag. So the damages shouldn't be based on one infringement, the damages should be based on the value of the cat being kept in the bag.
Seriously, how do you come up with that nonsense? I have about one thousand CDs. All bought from regular stores, not downloaded. I could easily create a web site and put them on that website. Whether I have the music because I downloaded it illegally, or whether I have the music because I bought the CD in a store, that doesn't make the slightest difference to my ability to give illegal copies to others. Yes, the two people who downloaded the song from Jammie's computer can make further illegal copies (statistically, it is more likely that it is only one person). So can all the thousands and thousands of people who went to the store and bought a CD, or who downloaded DRM-free copies from Amazon or iTunes.
The penalty should be based on what it would cost me to gain the rights to distribute those 24 songs to anyone I wanted from my web site (and whatever penalty they court feel is warranted above that). So if I called the RIAA (at the time it happened) and said "I'm interested in putting these 24 songs on my web site for anyone who visits to download, what would that cost me?", whatever the answer would be would be a fair basis for the judgment. Obviously, the price they quote for the trial would have to backed up by facts (what have they actually charged for these or similar songs for instance) so they aren't able to just make up ridiculous amounts. Will it be a lot? Yes, it most likely will if they were popular songs (I'm sure 24 covers of Achy Breaky Heart wouldn't cost that much though), but it would be a fair way to estimate what the actual damage was.
British newspapers have repeatedly added free CDs full with decent music (Ok, tastes are different) that has sold better than the list of these 24 songs, to every single copy of their newspaper. That's about a million _real_ copies. So it can't cost much. But when you say "I want to put these 24 songs on my web site for anyone who visits to download", I think the price would be different depending on whether you are Apple, Amazon, some smaller well-known site, or some unknown music lover.
OJ simpson was found not guilty in a court of law but double jepoardy does not extend to "wrongful death" lawsuites even though its essentially a trial for the same thing -- only the penalty is different.
Three things: 1. By now we all know that OJ Simpson is beyond all doubt a serious criminal; he has been convicted to a long jail sentence for a serious violent crime. 2. In a criminal court, conviction needs "proof beyond reasonable doubt", in a civil court it is based on the "preponderance of evidence". Obviously that means there will be people that are between these two measures; it would be denying justice to the victim of the couldn't get damages from someone who most likely caused the damages, just because the proof is not enough to put them to jail as well. 3. After being convicted to pay about $10,000,000 dollars, OJ Simpson managed to lead a wealthy life without ever paying a penny of that fine.
A *minimum* of 18,000$ as statuary damages (as defined by the current stupid law) for sharing 24 songs, against an individual without an intent to make profits, is ludicrous and calls for judicial activism.
I don't think the "intent to make profits" should matter at all. If she had burnt the 24 songs onto two CDs and sold them to me for $5 per CD, that would be clearly "intent to make profits", but the $18,000 as minimum and $3.6 million as maximum statutory damages would be just as ludicrous. What is ludicrous is the relation between statutory damages and the best estimate for actual damages.
True, though that's why this is unjust. It's unjust because there is a staggering difference between commercial for-profit infringement and what Thomas has done. Measures intended to deter the former should never be used against the latter. It is my belief that it would be better for the RIAA and all of its member companies to go bankrupt than for our legal system to be perverted and used as a tool of revenge in this way.
I personally disagree completely with the distinction between commercial or for-profit and non-commercial infringement. I think there should be fines that are based on the best possible estimate of actual damage. It seems obvious that a commercial infringer, who tries to make money from infringement, is much more likely to cause actual damage - if a commercial infringer makes money, it is very likely that there is actual damage at least equal to that amount and likely higher; Jammie Thomas on the other hand most likely didn't cause much damage at all. So in practice, commercial infringers tend to cause more actual damage and should be punished harder accordingly, but not because it is commercial, but because it is more damage.
I think that isn't going to happen in the USA for the simple reason that chatting with a policeman who you believe to be an eleven year old girl is not actually illegal. Even if you _believed_ to do something that is highly illegal (and rightfully so), you didn't actually do it.
Not when the issue is Not Your Fucking Business, it's not. A woman's weight, a man's impotency, a consensual blow job, and cancer firmly fall in that category.
In Germany, if an employer asks you questions during a job interview that are illegal to ask (like: Are you pregnant?) and telling them that it is illegal, or telling them that you don't want to answer would cost you the job, it is absolutely one hundred percent legal and moral to lie. If the employer finds out the truth later, that cannot be used against you in any way.
Same if you ask a question that is "Not Your Fucking Business"; if I am afraid that you will draw conclusions from my refusal to answer, it is obviously fine and moral to lie.
/. did add unicode support at one point, but it Caused Problems. Search around and you can prolly find some of the exploits.
When I read first about SQL injection (I have never done any SQL) programming, I thought it was interesting how you could subvert SQL and insert your own statements. Then I read what kind of code would be exploited, and I couldn't understand how anyone could even come up with the idea of writing code like that and not be slapped around the head by his colleagues. Same with Unicode: It can only be exploited if the programmer is bloody stupid. Read data that claims to be UTF-8, throw out anything that isn't valid UTF-8 (the Unicode standard includes an algorithm to do that, so that any sequence of bytes will always be cleaned to the exact same UTF-8 sequence), convert to either canonically precomposed or decomposed and you are fine. Result: UTF-8 that is as easy to handle as ASCII or any single-byte code.
I've started to wonder what the real value of "Jamie's playlist" really is.
Maybe some interested investigative journalist can find out how much money a British newspaper typically pays for the right to add a CD with say twenty similar songs to each single copy of their newspaper. Distribution of about one million. That is one million real copies, not one million imaginary copies.
Now I would say that if some newspaper made such a CD without permission, then we could take the customary rate, maybe double it, and that would be a fitting punishment for making a million copies. Now adjust that for the best estimate of the number of copies that were actually made of "Jamie's playlist".
But this definitely should be examined. These asinine penalties for a non-commercial copyright infringement is just insane. Hell, even for commercial copyright infringement... $1.9 million for someone selling essentially two copied CD's? Does that sound right to anyone other than someone who works for the RIAA directly or indirectly?
Here's what the problem is: This woman was one of millions sharing music. Since she was one of millions, and there is a limited number of downloads, there have most likely been very few downloads off her computer, and only a very small number of each song. But, statutory damages is statutory damages, no relation to the actual damage.
Now two or three years ago a CD with the final mix of U2's newest CD "disappeared". If somehow that CD had ended up at Sony, and Sony had, without any regard for copyright, started pressing and selling this CD, and had sold five million copies for loads of money, goes what statutory damages would be: Between $750 and $150,000 per protected work.
For a bit more madness: Just checked; I have one album with 37 Chopin Preludes & Etudes, about one hour of music. I have one album with a _single_ song of one hour. The first is 37 protected works, the other is 1 protected work. Mathematica sells for more than £1000 and is _one_ protected work. Nothing against Chopin, but would anyone reasonably claim that making a copy of a CD with Chopin music is 37 times worse than copying Mathematica?
For simple infingement (not intentional theft) I could see $100 a song, or $250 a song. But $18,000 is ludicrous.
Well, it's $80,000, not $18,000. However, I cannot possibly see even $100 per song as justified. As far as I know, these file sharing programs require that you distribute about the same amount of songs that you download yourself. Or, turning the argument around, the amount that others download from you is about the same as what you download, so on average any song that is made available for downloading will be downloaded _once_. Damages are at most $0.70 per song (that's what the music company makes if I download a single song from iTunes). So even if we assume without justification that these songs were downloaded from her computer ten times each, that's only $7 per song.
I always though that statutory damages are not meant as a punishment, but as a means to give the copyright holder fair compensation in situations where the actual damage is impossible to establish. So I would agree that the RIAA deserves not the amount that they can actually prove, but a reasonable estimate of the actual damages. $80,000 in damages would be Ok if we could reasonably estimate that a song was downloaded about 115,000 times from her computer. Which is ridiculous.
There has been a time where in Britain it wouldn't be surprising if in a similar case the defendant would have been ordered to pay £2,000,000, payable at one pound a month for the rest of her life, and plaintiff pays all the cost.
What I would really like to know, was the jury made up of people who actually think that almost two million dollars for copying two CDs worth of music is correct, or did they intend to set a judgement that just _has_ to be overturned?
Yes because every road surface sinks 5mm as you drive over it... idiot.
You can try the effect by driving over a surface covered with sand. It sinks when you drive over it. It takes a lot more fuel to drive over sand than over an asphalt road. One reason why trains use relatively less fuel is that they drive on a steel surface on steel wheels that give less than your combination of asphalt + rubber tires.
It is very rare that I am braking in a parking lot. Usually the car is just rolling when possible, with the kinetic energy of the car eaten up as it rolls but also keeping the engine running with _no_ fuel consumption at all; from time to time I need fuel again to regain speed or keep the speed constant before I get too slow. These plates would eat up my cars kinetic energy and force me to use the engine and waste fuel more of the time. The effect is small, so I don't lose much fuel, and they don't gain much energy. This doesn't change the fact that their gain is my loss.
Where I work, we have code reviews before checking in non-trivial changes
The worst bug I ever had to search for happened because a trivial change wasn't code reviewed. A simple line "if (ptr != NULL)..." and one exceedingly "clever" developer decided that this was too many characters, so he changed it to "if (! ptr)..." and because the change was trivial, and because that developer was so clever, it was checked in without a code review.
I don't think defects are the only metric. Code reviews can result in a cleaner codebase that's easier to understand. Everyone occasionally writes bad code. A reviewer might say, "I see that it works, but I don't like it..." and mention an alternative solution. A reviewer might suggest that something is non-obvious and that a comment is warranted. Code reviews aren't just for bugs, they are to get better code.
Another important aspect is that code that is going to be reviewed will be better in the first place than code that isn't going to be reviewed. So it is quite possible that no bugs or code ugliness will be found in the code review, because the developer worked more carefully and removed the bugs _before_ the code review.
Why is it that no one is paying attention to the fact that he was breaking into the school computer system and changing grades? Should that not have been the police's main concern? Isn't that a significantly bigger crime than the others? Shouldn't the school have been interested in this? "Hello Police, I saw this guy loitering in front of the supermarket. Oh, and he was also killing dozens of people with a machine gun." "Thank you sir, we'll get right on that loitering thing."
You didn't actually read this properly weeks ago when it came up the first time. His roommate told the police "I saw him doing this stuff". That was it. No details whatsoever. He didn't even tell them _where_ he allegedly saw him breaking the the school computer. And now comes the judge with a sharp mind and says: Wait a second, you haven't even got an idea where this happened? So you haven't got any idea whether he used a computer in one of the school labs, or his own laptop? Well, in that case, you can't seize his laptop (or any of the computers at his home), because you don't have the foggiest idea whether there is the slightest bit of evidence on any of the computers at his home that could you help solving this crime - if it ever happened.
Wait a second, I just remember: The creator of a work can be copyright holder without there being any paperwork to prove it, and without witnesses. The company that I work for which pays me to write software owns the copyright without any paperwork proving it, but they could show my employment contract and call me as a witness if the matter came to court. But anyone else _must_ have some piece of paper that proves ownership. Copyright cannot change ownership without a written document that transfers ownership (at least that is what we learned from SCO vs. Novell).
So if a record company doesn't have the paper to show they are the owner, they cannot be the owner of the copyright.
The copyright registration documents are merely the paperwork that indicates that the copyright owners registered their works... which is a necessary precondition to suing for damages. The documents themselves also establish a prima facie presumption that the plaintiffs actually own the copyrights to the works that are allegedly infringed. In other words: Even if this motion to suppress objections fails, the defense is going to have to prove that the plaintiffs do not have rights to the copyrights in question... good luck trying to prove that. Frankly, the motion is not as evil as people here will make it out to be, since the issue of ownership of the copyrights isn't really in dispute anyway, and it will save both sides time & money to get to the important parts of the case.
I would assume that when a record company owns the copyright to a work then they would have some paperwork proving it. Either the copyright registration, or some document where the previous copyright owner assigns the copyright to them. Record companies are big companies with excellent lawyers who would never lose that kind of paperwork. The conclusion is that if a record company doesn't have any paperwork demonstrating the ownership of a copyright, then it is most likely that they don't own the copyright.
So who says that ownership of copyrights is not in dispute? Of course, we don't have any evidence that the RIAA lawyers are lying, but in a case where they already tried to get $200,000 off Mrs. Thomas, I think the defendant shouldn't have to take their word for it when they claim copyright ownership.
Seriously? Their product is pretending to be an iPod so that it can force a connection with Apple's Intellectual Property (iTunes). I'm pretty sure there's something in the iTunes EULA that prevents non-Apple devices from connecting.
1) This is impossible for Apple to block. If according to USB it's an iPod, how can Apple distinguish? They can try to see if any little details are missing, but in the end any probing they do can easily be met by Palm.
If I was Apple, and I intended to be nasty: I would find exactly what iPod model the Pre pretends to be (should be trivial). Next, iTunes checks all the time whether your iPod needs any new software. So Apple fixes a few bugs in that iPod model. Next time you connect your iPod to iTunes, its firmware gets updated. Next time you connect your Pre to iTunes, well, iTunes attempts to install iPod software on a Pre and I have no idea how happy the Pre will be with that:-(
Obviously I wouldn't do this right now, I wait until the first million Pres are sold. If Palm doesn't sell a million of them, I wouldn't bother.
I, for one, tend to believe that the law-abiding have nothing to hide, so there are times when I abhor our system for letting people off on technicalities. At the same time, I've known people who were falsely accused, and I'm glad they were able to use the legal system to their benefit.
I tend to believe that the number of people who abide all the laws all the time is very, very low. And I believe that law-abiding people very often have a lot to hide. A slashdotter wouldn't want the RIAA to know that he downloaded the latest Britney Spears record, but he would even less want his fellow slashdotters to know that he _purchased_ it.
I wasn't aware that anything MediaSentry has brought into court was anywhere near something we'd call evidence. Vague screenshots, unverifyable logs?
It was enough to get Mrs. Thomas convicted the first time round. Or lets say to convince the jury that she did what she was accused of doing; the other part was convincing the jury that what she was accused of doing was actually illegal; the judge figured out later that he instructed the jury incorrectly on that part. So their "evidence" is still accepted as evidence.
Am I the only one who find the whole issue about illegally obtained evidence not being admissible in court preposterous?
Yes. You are the only one who finds it preposterous.
There are laws in place that try to discourage illegal behavior. One way to discourage illegal behavior is to make sure that you cannot gain advantage by illegal behavior. It would do no good if bank robbery was punished with a $100 fine. In this case, trying to find evidence by illegal means is discouraged by making any evidence found that way inadmissible.
There are more reasons. Evidence has to be trusted. If evidence has been "found" by illegal means, how can you possibly trust that evidence? If MediaSentry did some illegal wiretapping, how can you trust them that they didn't do some even more illegal to "improve" the evidence they found? Like faking a few screen shots and so on.
Next reason: There are things like client-attorney privilege, rights of no self incrimination, privacy rights. These rights basically guarantee that to some degree you can "get away" with things. The RIAA bosses and their lawyers rely on this to a huge degree themselves (or how many of them would be put away for drug abuse otherwise? ). Destroying this right would destroy the fabric of human social life. Do you want to live as a monk (and they probably do things in the night that they shouldn't)?
Next reason: Wiretapping wasn't only done against the guilty, it was done against everybody. Making illegally obtained evidence inadmissible makes sure that nobody breaks the law in an attempt to find evidence, especially when the victim of the illegal activity hasn't done anything wrong.
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I think it is impossible to incite someone to hatred of anything or anyone if that hatred is not already latent inside such a person. If I have firmly decided to love or at least tolerate rather than to hate, no hateful speech can make me hate the object of love or tolerance.
Problem is, hatred for just about anything is latent inside everyone. Just like love for about anything is latent inside everyone. Of course, not in you, but you are special.
That's all very well for those who use it occasionally, but recently when driving with my boss I realised that due to his over-reliance on sat-nav he was driving 10 miles out of his way to get home on a regular basis (on a journey of approx 50 miles).
He didn't even realise there was a shorter route.
You have to know _how_ to use a Satnav to get the best use out of it.
For example, TomTom can show you the "fastest" route and the "shortest" route. When showing the "fastest" route, it makes assumptions about the speed you can drive that are not always true; it often assumes a speed of 30 mph on major roads where you can go 50. Accordingly, it will prefer a route of twice the length on the motorway vs. a major road. On the other hand, "shortest" will get you on absolutely unsuitable roads. It will send you five miles down a single lane dirt track instead of 5.1 miles on a major road.
I tend to get good results by setting it to "speed limited to 45 mph" which will give it less preference for motorways. And if you think there is a better way (from home to work, for example), it is quite safe to experiment: Just go the other route. Sometimes two routes are actually very close; if one is two seconds shorter than TomTom will choose that one, but once you turned onto the other route, it changes its mind immediately. But if its own suggestion is a lot better, then it will for quite a while try to redirect you towards its initial suggestion.
The problem, as many have noted, is that once something is available on the internet, the cat's out of the bag. So the damages shouldn't be based on one infringement, the damages should be based on the value of the cat being kept in the bag.
Seriously, how do you come up with that nonsense? I have about one thousand CDs. All bought from regular stores, not downloaded. I could easily create a web site and put them on that website. Whether I have the music because I downloaded it illegally, or whether I have the music because I bought the CD in a store, that doesn't make the slightest difference to my ability to give illegal copies to others. Yes, the two people who downloaded the song from Jammie's computer can make further illegal copies (statistically, it is more likely that it is only one person). So can all the thousands and thousands of people who went to the store and bought a CD, or who downloaded DRM-free copies from Amazon or iTunes.
The penalty should be based on what it would cost me to gain the rights to distribute those 24 songs to anyone I wanted from my web site (and whatever penalty they court feel is warranted above that). So if I called the RIAA (at the time it happened) and said "I'm interested in putting these 24 songs on my web site for anyone who visits to download, what would that cost me?", whatever the answer would be would be a fair basis for the judgment. Obviously, the price they quote for the trial would have to backed up by facts (what have they actually charged for these or similar songs for instance) so they aren't able to just make up ridiculous amounts. Will it be a lot? Yes, it most likely will if they were popular songs (I'm sure 24 covers of Achy Breaky Heart wouldn't cost that much though), but it would be a fair way to estimate what the actual damage was.
British newspapers have repeatedly added free CDs full with decent music (Ok, tastes are different) that has sold better than the list of these 24 songs, to every single copy of their newspaper. That's about a million _real_ copies. So it can't cost much. But when you say "I want to put these 24 songs on my web site for anyone who visits to download", I think the price would be different depending on whether you are Apple, Amazon, some smaller well-known site, or some unknown music lover.
OJ simpson was found not guilty in a court of law but double jepoardy does not extend to "wrongful death" lawsuites even though its essentially a trial for the same thing -- only the penalty is different.
Three things: 1. By now we all know that OJ Simpson is beyond all doubt a serious criminal; he has been convicted to a long jail sentence for a serious violent crime. 2. In a criminal court, conviction needs "proof beyond reasonable doubt", in a civil court it is based on the "preponderance of evidence". Obviously that means there will be people that are between these two measures; it would be denying justice to the victim of the couldn't get damages from someone who most likely caused the damages, just because the proof is not enough to put them to jail as well. 3. After being convicted to pay about $10,000,000 dollars, OJ Simpson managed to lead a wealthy life without ever paying a penny of that fine.
A *minimum* of 18,000$ as statuary damages (as defined by the current stupid law) for sharing 24 songs, against an individual without an intent to make profits, is ludicrous and calls for judicial activism.
I don't think the "intent to make profits" should matter at all. If she had burnt the 24 songs onto two CDs and sold them to me for $5 per CD, that would be clearly "intent to make profits", but the $18,000 as minimum and $3.6 million as maximum statutory damages would be just as ludicrous. What is ludicrous is the relation between statutory damages and the best estimate for actual damages.
True, though that's why this is unjust. It's unjust because there is a staggering difference between commercial for-profit infringement and what Thomas has done. Measures intended to deter the former should never be used against the latter. It is my belief that it would be better for the RIAA and all of its member companies to go bankrupt than for our legal system to be perverted and used as a tool of revenge in this way.
I personally disagree completely with the distinction between commercial or for-profit and non-commercial infringement. I think there should be fines that are based on the best possible estimate of actual damage. It seems obvious that a commercial infringer, who tries to make money from infringement, is much more likely to cause actual damage - if a commercial infringer makes money, it is very likely that there is actual damage at least equal to that amount and likely higher; Jammie Thomas on the other hand most likely didn't cause much damage at all. So in practice, commercial infringers tend to cause more actual damage and should be punished harder accordingly, but not because it is commercial, but because it is more damage.
I think that isn't going to happen in the USA for the simple reason that chatting with a policeman who you believe to be an eleven year old girl is not actually illegal. Even if you _believed_ to do something that is highly illegal (and rightfully so), you didn't actually do it.
Not when the issue is Not Your Fucking Business, it's not. A woman's weight, a man's impotency, a consensual blow job, and cancer firmly fall in that category.
In Germany, if an employer asks you questions during a job interview that are illegal to ask (like: Are you pregnant?) and telling them that it is illegal, or telling them that you don't want to answer would cost you the job, it is absolutely one hundred percent legal and moral to lie. If the employer finds out the truth later, that cannot be used against you in any way. Same if you ask a question that is "Not Your Fucking Business"; if I am afraid that you will draw conclusions from my refusal to answer, it is obviously fine and moral to lie.
/. did add unicode support at one point, but it Caused Problems. Search around and you can prolly find some of the exploits.
When I read first about SQL injection (I have never done any SQL) programming, I thought it was interesting how you could subvert SQL and insert your own statements. Then I read what kind of code would be exploited, and I couldn't understand how anyone could even come up with the idea of writing code like that and not be slapped around the head by his colleagues. Same with Unicode: It can only be exploited if the programmer is bloody stupid. Read data that claims to be UTF-8, throw out anything that isn't valid UTF-8 (the Unicode standard includes an algorithm to do that, so that any sequence of bytes will always be cleaned to the exact same UTF-8 sequence), convert to either canonically precomposed or decomposed and you are fine. Result: UTF-8 that is as easy to handle as ASCII or any single-byte code.
I've started to wonder what the real value of "Jamie's playlist" really is.
Maybe some interested investigative journalist can find out how much money a British newspaper typically pays for the right to add a CD with say twenty similar songs to each single copy of their newspaper. Distribution of about one million. That is one million real copies, not one million imaginary copies.
Now I would say that if some newspaper made such a CD without permission, then we could take the customary rate, maybe double it, and that would be a fitting punishment for making a million copies. Now adjust that for the best estimate of the number of copies that were actually made of "Jamie's playlist".
But this definitely should be examined. These asinine penalties for a non-commercial copyright infringement is just insane. Hell, even for commercial copyright infringement... $1.9 million for someone selling essentially two copied CD's? Does that sound right to anyone other than someone who works for the RIAA directly or indirectly?
Here's what the problem is: This woman was one of millions sharing music. Since she was one of millions, and there is a limited number of downloads, there have most likely been very few downloads off her computer, and only a very small number of each song. But, statutory damages is statutory damages, no relation to the actual damage.
Now two or three years ago a CD with the final mix of U2's newest CD "disappeared". If somehow that CD had ended up at Sony, and Sony had, without any regard for copyright, started pressing and selling this CD, and had sold five million copies for loads of money, goes what statutory damages would be: Between $750 and $150,000 per protected work.
For a bit more madness: Just checked; I have one album with 37 Chopin Preludes & Etudes, about one hour of music. I have one album with a _single_ song of one hour. The first is 37 protected works, the other is 1 protected work. Mathematica sells for more than £1000 and is _one_ protected work. Nothing against Chopin, but would anyone reasonably claim that making a copy of a CD with Chopin music is 37 times worse than copying Mathematica?
For simple infingement (not intentional theft) I could see $100 a song, or $250 a song. But $18,000 is ludicrous.
Well, it's $80,000, not $18,000. However, I cannot possibly see even $100 per song as justified. As far as I know, these file sharing programs require that you distribute about the same amount of songs that you download yourself. Or, turning the argument around, the amount that others download from you is about the same as what you download, so on average any song that is made available for downloading will be downloaded _once_. Damages are at most $0.70 per song (that's what the music company makes if I download a single song from iTunes). So even if we assume without justification that these songs were downloaded from her computer ten times each, that's only $7 per song.
I always though that statutory damages are not meant as a punishment, but as a means to give the copyright holder fair compensation in situations where the actual damage is impossible to establish. So I would agree that the RIAA deserves not the amount that they can actually prove, but a reasonable estimate of the actual damages. $80,000 in damages would be Ok if we could reasonably estimate that a song was downloaded about 115,000 times from her computer. Which is ridiculous.
There has been a time where in Britain it wouldn't be surprising if in a similar case the defendant would have been ordered to pay £2,000,000, payable at one pound a month for the rest of her life, and plaintiff pays all the cost.
What I would really like to know, was the jury made up of people who actually think that almost two million dollars for copying two CDs worth of music is correct, or did they intend to set a judgement that just _has_ to be overturned?
Yes because every road surface sinks 5mm as you drive over it ... idiot.
You can try the effect by driving over a surface covered with sand. It sinks when you drive over it. It takes a lot more fuel to drive over sand than over an asphalt road. One reason why trains use relatively less fuel is that they drive on a steel surface on steel wheels that give less than your combination of asphalt + rubber tires.
It is very rare that I am braking in a parking lot. Usually the car is just rolling when possible, with the kinetic energy of the car eaten up as it rolls but also keeping the engine running with _no_ fuel consumption at all; from time to time I need fuel again to regain speed or keep the speed constant before I get too slow. These plates would eat up my cars kinetic energy and force me to use the engine and waste fuel more of the time. The effect is small, so I don't lose much fuel, and they don't gain much energy. This doesn't change the fact that their gain is my loss.
Where I work, we have code reviews before checking in non-trivial changes
The worst bug I ever had to search for happened because a trivial change wasn't code reviewed. A simple line "if (ptr != NULL)..." and one exceedingly "clever" developer decided that this was too many characters, so he changed it to "if (! ptr)..." and because the change was trivial, and because that developer was so clever, it was checked in without a code review.
I don't think defects are the only metric. Code reviews can result in a cleaner codebase that's easier to understand. Everyone occasionally writes bad code. A reviewer might say, "I see that it works, but I don't like it..." and mention an alternative solution. A reviewer might suggest that something is non-obvious and that a comment is warranted. Code reviews aren't just for bugs, they are to get better code.
Another important aspect is that code that is going to be reviewed will be better in the first place than code that isn't going to be reviewed. So it is quite possible that no bugs or code ugliness will be found in the code review, because the developer worked more carefully and removed the bugs _before_ the code review.
Why is it that no one is paying attention to the fact that he was breaking into the school computer system and changing grades? Should that not have been the police's main concern? Isn't that a significantly bigger crime than the others? Shouldn't the school have been interested in this? "Hello Police, I saw this guy loitering in front of the supermarket. Oh, and he was also killing dozens of people with a machine gun." "Thank you sir, we'll get right on that loitering thing."
You didn't actually read this properly weeks ago when it came up the first time. His roommate told the police "I saw him doing this stuff". That was it. No details whatsoever. He didn't even tell them _where_ he allegedly saw him breaking the the school computer. And now comes the judge with a sharp mind and says: Wait a second, you haven't even got an idea where this happened? So you haven't got any idea whether he used a computer in one of the school labs, or his own laptop? Well, in that case, you can't seize his laptop (or any of the computers at his home), because you don't have the foggiest idea whether there is the slightest bit of evidence on any of the computers at his home that could you help solving this crime - if it ever happened.
Wait a second, I just remember: The creator of a work can be copyright holder without there being any paperwork to prove it, and without witnesses. The company that I work for which pays me to write software owns the copyright without any paperwork proving it, but they could show my employment contract and call me as a witness if the matter came to court. But anyone else _must_ have some piece of paper that proves ownership. Copyright cannot change ownership without a written document that transfers ownership (at least that is what we learned from SCO vs. Novell).
So if a record company doesn't have the paper to show they are the owner, they cannot be the owner of the copyright.
The copyright registration documents are merely the paperwork that indicates that the copyright owners registered their works... which is a necessary precondition to suing for damages. The documents themselves also establish a prima facie presumption that the plaintiffs actually own the copyrights to the works that are allegedly infringed. In other words: Even if this motion to suppress objections fails, the defense is going to have to prove that the plaintiffs do not have rights to the copyrights in question... good luck trying to prove that. Frankly, the motion is not as evil as people here will make it out to be, since the issue of ownership of the copyrights isn't really in dispute anyway, and it will save both sides time & money to get to the important parts of the case.
I would assume that when a record company owns the copyright to a work then they would have some paperwork proving it. Either the copyright registration, or some document where the previous copyright owner assigns the copyright to them. Record companies are big companies with excellent lawyers who would never lose that kind of paperwork. The conclusion is that if a record company doesn't have any paperwork demonstrating the ownership of a copyright, then it is most likely that they don't own the copyright.
So who says that ownership of copyrights is not in dispute? Of course, we don't have any evidence that the RIAA lawyers are lying, but in a case where they already tried to get $200,000 off Mrs. Thomas, I think the defendant shouldn't have to take their word for it when they claim copyright ownership.
Seriously? Their product is pretending to be an iPod so that it can force a connection with Apple's Intellectual Property (iTunes). I'm pretty sure there's something in the iTunes EULA that prevents non-Apple devices from connecting.
Nope.
1) This is impossible for Apple to block. If according to USB it's an iPod, how can Apple distinguish? They can try to see if any little details are missing, but in the end any probing they do can easily be met by Palm.
If I was Apple, and I intended to be nasty: I would find exactly what iPod model the Pre pretends to be (should be trivial). Next, iTunes checks all the time whether your iPod needs any new software. So Apple fixes a few bugs in that iPod model. Next time you connect your iPod to iTunes, its firmware gets updated. Next time you connect your Pre to iTunes, well, iTunes attempts to install iPod software on a Pre and I have no idea how happy the Pre will be with that :-(
Obviously I wouldn't do this right now, I wait until the first million Pres are sold. If Palm doesn't sell a million of them, I wouldn't bother.
I, for one, tend to believe that the law-abiding have nothing to hide, so there are times when I abhor our system for letting people off on technicalities. At the same time, I've known people who were falsely accused, and I'm glad they were able to use the legal system to their benefit.
I tend to believe that the number of people who abide all the laws all the time is very, very low. And I believe that law-abiding people very often have a lot to hide. A slashdotter wouldn't want the RIAA to know that he downloaded the latest Britney Spears record, but he would even less want his fellow slashdotters to know that he _purchased_ it.
I wasn't aware that anything MediaSentry has brought into court was anywhere near something we'd call evidence. Vague screenshots, unverifyable logs?
It was enough to get Mrs. Thomas convicted the first time round. Or lets say to convince the jury that she did what she was accused of doing; the other part was convincing the jury that what she was accused of doing was actually illegal; the judge figured out later that he instructed the jury incorrectly on that part. So their "evidence" is still accepted as evidence.
Am I the only one who find the whole issue about illegally obtained evidence not being admissible in court preposterous?
Yes. You are the only one who finds it preposterous.
There are laws in place that try to discourage illegal behavior. One way to discourage illegal behavior is to make sure that you cannot gain advantage by illegal behavior. It would do no good if bank robbery was punished with a $100 fine. In this case, trying to find evidence by illegal means is discouraged by making any evidence found that way inadmissible.
There are more reasons. Evidence has to be trusted. If evidence has been "found" by illegal means, how can you possibly trust that evidence? If MediaSentry did some illegal wiretapping, how can you trust them that they didn't do some even more illegal to "improve" the evidence they found? Like faking a few screen shots and so on.
Next reason: There are things like client-attorney privilege, rights of no self incrimination, privacy rights. These rights basically guarantee that to some degree you can "get away" with things. The RIAA bosses and their lawyers rely on this to a huge degree themselves (or how many of them would be put away for drug abuse otherwise? ). Destroying this right would destroy the fabric of human social life. Do you want to live as a monk (and they probably do things in the night that they shouldn't)?
Next reason: Wiretapping wasn't only done against the guilty, it was done against everybody. Making illegally obtained evidence inadmissible makes sure that nobody breaks the law in an attempt to find evidence, especially when the victim of the illegal activity hasn't done anything wrong.