Opening the box and installing it on a piece of hardware and selling the hardware makes things different.
No, it doesn't!
Actually, it does (kind of). You should at some time have a look at what the first sale doctrine allows you to do and what not. If you buy a used Mac G4, buy Leopard, install it on the G4, and sell the combination for a profit, including the opened box and DVD obviously, that is fine by the first sale doctrine. If you buy a used Mac G3, buy Leopard, modify it so you can install it on the G3 (which is perfectly legal), and sell the combination for a profit, then first sale doctrine does _not_ give you permission to do that because the software has been modified. Fortunately for you, the MacOS X license actually allows it. In case of any computer that is not Apple-labeled, Apples license doesn't allow you installation on that computer, so that computer now has an illegal copy of MacOS X. First sale doctrine doesn't allow you to sell any illegal copies of the software.
No one is forcing Apple to do anything. If they don't want to sell it for $130, they don't have to. They just can't control what I do with it once they sell it to me.
And that is exactly where you are wrong. They can. They sell a box with a DVD, and a license that allows you to make certain kinds of copies and no others. Without that license you own the DVD, but you are not allowed to make any copies of it.
How is Psystar buying copies of OSX that Apple is (voluntarily) selling "forcing a company to operate in areas they deem unprofitable"?
Psystar buys boxes of MacOS X that come with a license that allows installation on a Macintosh computers, and nowhere else. That is absolutely fine, they can buy as many boxes as they like, and Apple doesn't mind and can't prevent it anyway (anybody buying a MacOS X box has the right to resell it, unopened, unmodified). As soon as Psystar installs the software on a non-Macintosh computer, they have made an illegal copy of the software (because the license didn't allow it), and the license becomes invalid (because that is what the license says, similar to the GPL license which becomes invalid automatically when you make illegal copies of GPL'd software).
When Apple sells that box, the price comes from the combination of software + license that you get. If Apple were to sell boxes with a different license, they would have different prices. The family pack is identical software, with a different license that allows a higher price. If Apple wanted to sell boxes with a license to sell anywhere, they would have different prices. Apple doesn't want to sell such a combination, and nobody can force them to.
Isn't that what got lexmark bitchslapped in the end? They DRM'd their crtridges so the printers would only use genuine ones, sued a competitor under the DMCA and lost.
This case is often quoted, but it is completely different.
The first difference is the alleged "copyrighted material". In Lexmark, they claimed to have copyright on a 15 byte long program, that was specifically designed so that no other 15 byte program could be substituted. Apple claims to have copyright on MacOS X, which is a few Gigabyte in size. So the first problem that Lexmark ran into was trying to explain the judge that such a tiny program with artificial restrictions could actually be protected by copyright. It couldn't. Apple won't have that problem.
The second problem was that Lexmark used a bizarre misinterpretation of the DMCA. They didn't actually try to protect their copyrighted software, all fifteen bytes of it. Instead they tried to make it impossible to create printer cartridges without infringing on their copyright. They didn't actually care about the software itself; they just made it impossible to create printer cartridges without a copy of that software. Apple's case is quite different: They actually have some hardware in their Macs that is required to run MacOS X. You need to duplicate that hardware to access to the MacOS X software (these guys writing the DMCA act were actually not stupid; it is trivial to _copy_ MacOS X, but you have to take special measures to actually make it run, and that is disallowed by the DMCA).
With the approch from the article, the same calculation may return different results. That a nightmare in terms of error estimation and propagation, except in some very limit cases....
Actually, reproducible results may create the wrong impression that the results are actually meaningful. If a processor did random rounding, then you could run an algorithm twice and compare the results; if random rounding creates different results, then you know that reproducible rounding won't produce meaningful results.
Actually, it IS because they have no legal recourse against DIY use of patented inventions. Patents only grant monopolies over commercial exploitation of an invention. You are explicitly allowed to employ the disclosed inventions for your personal use, or for educational purposes. You're just not allowed to sell or give it to others.
And you are encouraged to do this, improve the patented method, and get a patent on your improvement.
How someone knowing where I am is particularly dangerous for me if I'm not in the witness protection program?
If you lived alone in a house with valuables, and I was a burglar, I wouldn't be very interested in knowing exactly where you are, but I would be quite interested in knowing you're not at home.
As I found out by dialing 911 because I needed an ambulance where I was (long story, not a happy ending), even though GPS was enabled for emergency services in the configuration, they had absolutely no idea where I was.
I needed the RAC (British autombile club) a few days ago; I knew where I was, but they also told me that they could have found my location anyway since I called by mobile phone (and mine is ancient), all they needed (for legal reasons) was my permission.
I would think the safer thing to do would be to at least be consistent with yellow light length.
While red and green lights vary wildly around town, and of course are unpredictable due to traffic-tripped intersections, I take it for granted that all the lights in MY town have the same length for a yellow light
They shouldn't actually have exactly the same length; the length should depend on the speed limit (shorter if the limit is 20mph, much longer if it is 70mph), and an additional factor if the road goes uphill or downhill. However, as an experienced driver, you automatically translate distance + speed into how hard you have to brake (gentle, hard, emergency brake) and _that_ should be the same everywhere.
In that case, the fault lies on the one tailgating. In case of collision, the tailgater is considered guilty, his/her insurance will have to pay everything and he/she will get monetary malus.
You are missing an important point. It is the job of police, government agencies and so on to help making traffic safe and avoiding situations that cause accidents. If there are more accidents through tailgating when the yellow phase is short, then the yellow phase should be made longer. Of course this doesn't happen, because you get fined or punished financially for hitting a car when you were driving too close, but you don't get fined for setting up traffic lights in a dangerous way.
From a theoretical point of view, it shouldn't make the intersection more dangerous, it should just increase the ticket revenue.
The factor that reduces or increases the danger of collisions on the crossing is the time between my traffic light turning yellow, and the time of the traffic lights on the left and right turning green. The factor that increases the number of collisions when one car brakes hard to avoid a ticket and another runs into him is the length of the yellow phase.
So if short yellow phases increase the number of accidents, then a major effect will be more cars braking hard to avoid tickets. Another factor may or may not be whether they just shortened the yellow phase, without increasing the phase where all four lights are red.
In German you are subject to the laws of Germany. However in many cases it seems that being an "American Citizen" means that if you are in Germany but do something that's illegal in the US (maybe not in Germany), they may still come after you when you come home...
That would be unusual. Most countries will prosecute crimes committed in their own country, and not crimes committed elsewhere. There are rare cases where it may be unclear where a crime is "committed", like sending a letter bomb from one country to another, or shooting a border guard on the other side of the border. And there may be some very special exceptions, like sexual abuse of children in foreign countries. For most things, even murder, the USA might extradite you, but they couldn't prosecute you.
If you've filed a patent, and you're about to sue someone I'm guessing generally actually you wouldn't seek employment at a company that is part of it. You know, what with it firstly being a completely transparent move, and secondly because you wouldn't be able to defend your patent when you're in jail for corporate espionage.
But it wouldn't be corporate espionage. So he downloaded documents at work that he had access to as an employee, but that he wasn't supposed to download. As long as he doesn't pass them on or act on them, he can probably be fired, but not charged with anything. However, if the documents contain evidence of wrongdoing on Microsoft's side, that kind of information is not in any way protected by the law. It's not protected by copyright law (the Unabomber tried to pull a stunt like that, claiming that letters he sent to victims shouldn't have been used to track him down because he was the copyright holder), and not protected as a trade secret (because getting away with a crime is not a competitive advantage protected by the law).
Considering that most people would quite guiltlessly keep any extra change that a cashier might give them without saying anything...
Are you sure about that? If that is your attitude, then you should consider that at the end of the day where will be money missing and the cashier will be personally held responsible for that.
Sony, for example, has been noted to be rather schizophrenic, also; its content producing divisions dreams of ever more secure/draconian DRM, while its consumer electronics division would prefer no DRM whatsoever (or at least, no new DRM systems which only make consumer devices more costly and complicated to produce and less user-friendly).
I bet Apple makes more money selling iPods than Sony makes selling music. And if you go back a few years in time, the music player market was there for Sony to take, or at least to have a good go at trying to take it. I have no doubt Sony could have created a really good player that would have given the iPod a run for its money, and because of their music division they threw it away.
Can someone explain for non US residents what the problem is? In the UK, I can buy a digital receiver for £20 in my local supermarket, which plugs into any TV with a SCART socket (any newer TV with HDMI really ought to have a digital receiver built-int). For a bit more, you get a digital receiver with harddisk recorder. Quality is close to DVD, five times more programs available, so there is no need for subsidies. The only problem is when your reception is bad, because the digital TV quality in that case is either perfect or rubbish, nothing in between.
The main issue here is what was the intention of the police. Obviously it can't be to trace the original poster (why seize a mirror, or anything at all since Indymedia does not log ips), nor can it be to remove the comment (this had already happened). Would it just be a form of punishment for a "critical" organization? Indymedia is entirely volunteer-run and depends on donations. Taking a server offline and a potential court case will seriously increase the workload and will have financial consequences too.
Who says they can't find anything? So some Indymedia guy says they keep no logs. Well, some admins are not the brightest, and it is entirely possible that while Indymedia _believes_ they don't keep logfiles, they might actually have logs. Or "not keeping logs" might mean "delete the logs every seven days". Or their servers might keep some other information that is not obviously usable but can find IP addresses after some forensic examination. Or that Indymedia guy might be lying. They might have a policy to tell all their users that no logs are kept, but they still keep them, just in case some user does something _really_ shitty. If that judge, his family and twenty neighbours were murdered, would you be very surprised if log files suddenly turned up?
Unfortunately it's not SHAC who are getting shafted, it's indymedia, who as far as I can tell have no association with SHAC except SHAC were posting there as ACs.
Well, that's just tough luck. They lost a mirror server (temporarily, I hope. Maybe we should note that you should always have a physically separate mirror server so that the police can take it away without touching your main server; a RAID mirror in a closed box together with the "real" server would have been a bad idea); they'll probably have to spend money to get a replacement which will then be a spare.
However, they are lucky in so far as nobody has attacked or threatened any of their staff members, nobody has found out where their dead relatives are living and dug them out and hidden the bodies away, nobody has got a list of all Indymedia employees and warned all their neighbours that they are pedophiles, nobody has called their suppliers and told them to stop selling hardware to them.
I can understand that the well-being of american workers is more important than that of visa-holders to an elected politician. However, the impact of losing the job is much higher for H1Bs, as they usually have to leave the country (within 1 week I think). Considering the fact that these are humans, too, maybe it would be acceptable to lessen these restrictions somewhat, i. e. allow these people to stay in the country for a year if they have the financial means.
The entire H-1B process is reliant on the fact that there are people who have more rights (in this case, American citizens) and people with fewer rights (in this case, non-citizens of the USA). The American citizens have for whatever reasons the right to get jobs ahead of the others. Microsoft is allowed to hire non-citizens if they can prove that American citizens can't fill all the needed positions. Microsoft _wants_ to hire non-citizens because they have fewer rights, so they are willing to work for less money. If these people coming into the USA through H-1B didn't have fewer rights, they wouldn't be willing to work for less money, and Microsoft wouldn't want to hire them.
Whether the situation is fair or unfair is surely worth a discussion, but with H-1B you are only allowed into the USA because Microsoft couldn't find Americans to fill the job. Clearly if Microsoft fires American citizens, then that argument would be moot.
My state law specifically states that I have the right to defend myself, other people, and my property with a "reasonable" amount of force. And by damned, I would do exactly that. A punch in the nose is more than reasonable for a semester's worth of lecture notes.
Reasonable force depends on the situation. In this case, the teacher is a person well known to you. It would be very easy to get your property back by calling your parents, the school headmaster, or the police. Therefore "a punch in the nose" wouldn't be reasonable. On the other hand, if a person unknown to you assaulted you on the way to school and tried to take away your notes, you would have very little chance of getting your property back once they have it and run away, so "a punch in the nose" would be very reasonable to prevent the theft.
If you say that: A=student, B=teacher, then, the moment the student puts the teacher's name in the notebook, that teacher's gains a right to inspect the student's notebook, and to request deletion of these contents.
I very much doubt that. I recommend that you check the appropriate French laws carefully. First, the teacher wouldn't have a right to check the student's notebook. The teacher would at best have the right to ask the student which information he or she holds about the teacher (if students are indeed covered by this law, it most likely only applies to businesses and state agencies), and the student would have to give the information after payment of an appropriate fee. Then the teacher might have the right to ask for information about them to be destroyed. However, the teachers name would most definitely not be considered "personal information" (address, age, phone number, salary etc. would).
Well you can't do anything now since you consented to her taking them by letting her in your backpack. Sounds like you just got a lesson in 4th amendment rights. Never let anyone, including authority figures cop teachers, have your personal property ever. Even if you have nothing to hide.
Of course you can do something. He didn't consent to hand it over, he was tricked into falsely believing that she had the right to it. So making him hand it over fully fits the definition of fraud: Fraud happens when you hand over your property yourself because you were made to believe something which is not true, whereas theft happens when something is just taken away from you illegally. If he believed she had the right to take his notes and handed them over, she committed fraud. If he refused to hand them over and she just took them, then it is theft.
Besides being anal about exactly how students take notes, she was notorious for making all students turn in their notebooks at the end of the year. She would make sure they were complete (you'd fail the entire class if not) and then make you shove it through an industrial shredder she had brought in just for this task.
In the UK, this would be blackmail under section 21 of the 1968 Theft Act.
Neither cheating or plagiarism will be impacted because only the honest students will turn in their only copy of the notes
What do you mean there? Not "honest students", but "stupid students". The teacher has no right whatsoever to these notes. A good student will keep his notes and refer to them in the future when necessary, for example when he or she needs the information later in their professional life. That's what school is for, to teach you knowledge that you can use throughout your life. If you return or destroy those notes, that is completely defeating the purpose of education.
And if you borrow these notes to someone else to learn from them? Well, that is the purpose of education, isn't it? To make people learn. So if in the next year, some student goes to that teachers class and doesn't understand something, isn't it the best thing that student can do to get someone's notes and learn on their own accord what they missed in class?
Besides that, anyone turning in their notes to an _economy_ teacher proves that they didn't understand the basics of copyright law and property law. Instant fail of the course, if you ask me.
Besides that, does that article give you a clue why Europeans are either laughing their heads off or throwing up when Americans claim they live in the "freeest of all countries"?
Slashdot Mirror
Opening the box and installing it on a piece of hardware and selling the hardware makes things different.
No, it doesn't!
Actually, it does (kind of). You should at some time have a look at what the first sale doctrine allows you to do and what not. If you buy a used Mac G4, buy Leopard, install it on the G4, and sell the combination for a profit, including the opened box and DVD obviously, that is fine by the first sale doctrine. If you buy a used Mac G3, buy Leopard, modify it so you can install it on the G3 (which is perfectly legal), and sell the combination for a profit, then first sale doctrine does _not_ give you permission to do that because the software has been modified. Fortunately for you, the MacOS X license actually allows it. In case of any computer that is not Apple-labeled, Apples license doesn't allow you installation on that computer, so that computer now has an illegal copy of MacOS X. First sale doctrine doesn't allow you to sell any illegal copies of the software.
No one is forcing Apple to do anything. If they don't want to sell it for $130, they don't have to. They just can't control what I do with it once they sell it to me.
And that is exactly where you are wrong. They can. They sell a box with a DVD, and a license that allows you to make certain kinds of copies and no others. Without that license you own the DVD, but you are not allowed to make any copies of it.
How is Psystar buying copies of OSX that Apple is (voluntarily) selling "forcing a company to operate in areas they deem unprofitable"?
Psystar buys boxes of MacOS X that come with a license that allows installation on a Macintosh computers, and nowhere else. That is absolutely fine, they can buy as many boxes as they like, and Apple doesn't mind and can't prevent it anyway (anybody buying a MacOS X box has the right to resell it, unopened, unmodified). As soon as Psystar installs the software on a non-Macintosh computer, they have made an illegal copy of the software (because the license didn't allow it), and the license becomes invalid (because that is what the license says, similar to the GPL license which becomes invalid automatically when you make illegal copies of GPL'd software).
When Apple sells that box, the price comes from the combination of software + license that you get. If Apple were to sell boxes with a different license, they would have different prices. The family pack is identical software, with a different license that allows a higher price. If Apple wanted to sell boxes with a license to sell anywhere, they would have different prices. Apple doesn't want to sell such a combination, and nobody can force them to.
Isn't that what got lexmark bitchslapped in the end? They DRM'd their crtridges so the printers would only use genuine ones, sued a competitor under the DMCA and lost.
This case is often quoted, but it is completely different.
The first difference is the alleged "copyrighted material". In Lexmark, they claimed to have copyright on a 15 byte long program, that was specifically designed so that no other 15 byte program could be substituted. Apple claims to have copyright on MacOS X, which is a few Gigabyte in size. So the first problem that Lexmark ran into was trying to explain the judge that such a tiny program with artificial restrictions could actually be protected by copyright. It couldn't. Apple won't have that problem.
The second problem was that Lexmark used a bizarre misinterpretation of the DMCA. They didn't actually try to protect their copyrighted software, all fifteen bytes of it. Instead they tried to make it impossible to create printer cartridges without infringing on their copyright. They didn't actually care about the software itself; they just made it impossible to create printer cartridges without a copy of that software. Apple's case is quite different: They actually have some hardware in their Macs that is required to run MacOS X. You need to duplicate that hardware to access to the MacOS X software (these guys writing the DMCA act were actually not stupid; it is trivial to _copy_ MacOS X, but you have to take special measures to actually make it run, and that is disallowed by the DMCA).
With the approch from the article, the same calculation may return different results. That a nightmare in terms of error estimation and propagation, except in some very limit cases....
Actually, reproducible results may create the wrong impression that the results are actually meaningful. If a processor did random rounding, then you could run an algorithm twice and compare the results; if random rounding creates different results, then you know that reproducible rounding won't produce meaningful results.
Actually, it IS because they have no legal recourse against DIY use of patented inventions. Patents only grant monopolies over commercial exploitation of an invention. You are explicitly allowed to employ the disclosed inventions for your personal use, or for educational purposes. You're just not allowed to sell or give it to others.
And you are encouraged to do this, improve the patented method, and get a patent on your improvement.
How someone knowing where I am is particularly dangerous for me if I'm not in the witness protection program?
If you lived alone in a house with valuables, and I was a burglar, I wouldn't be very interested in knowing exactly where you are, but I would be quite interested in knowing you're not at home.
As I found out by dialing 911 because I needed an ambulance where I was (long story, not a happy ending), even though GPS was enabled for emergency services in the configuration, they had absolutely no idea where I was.
I needed the RAC (British autombile club) a few days ago; I knew where I was, but they also told me that they could have found my location anyway since I called by mobile phone (and mine is ancient), all they needed (for legal reasons) was my permission.
I would think the safer thing to do would be to at least be consistent with yellow light length. While red and green lights vary wildly around town, and of course are unpredictable due to traffic-tripped intersections, I take it for granted that all the lights in MY town have the same length for a yellow light
They shouldn't actually have exactly the same length; the length should depend on the speed limit (shorter if the limit is 20mph, much longer if it is 70mph), and an additional factor if the road goes uphill or downhill. However, as an experienced driver, you automatically translate distance + speed into how hard you have to brake (gentle, hard, emergency brake) and _that_ should be the same everywhere.
In that case, the fault lies on the one tailgating. In case of collision, the tailgater is considered guilty, his/her insurance will have to pay everything and he/she will get monetary malus.
You are missing an important point. It is the job of police, government agencies and so on to help making traffic safe and avoiding situations that cause accidents. If there are more accidents through tailgating when the yellow phase is short, then the yellow phase should be made longer. Of course this doesn't happen, because you get fined or punished financially for hitting a car when you were driving too close, but you don't get fined for setting up traffic lights in a dangerous way.
From a theoretical point of view, it shouldn't make the intersection more dangerous, it should just increase the ticket revenue.
The factor that reduces or increases the danger of collisions on the crossing is the time between my traffic light turning yellow, and the time of the traffic lights on the left and right turning green. The factor that increases the number of collisions when one car brakes hard to avoid a ticket and another runs into him is the length of the yellow phase.
So if short yellow phases increase the number of accidents, then a major effect will be more cars braking hard to avoid tickets. Another factor may or may not be whether they just shortened the yellow phase, without increasing the phase where all four lights are red.
In German you are subject to the laws of Germany. However in many cases it seems that being an "American Citizen" means that if you are in Germany but do something that's illegal in the US (maybe not in Germany), they may still come after you when you come home...
That would be unusual. Most countries will prosecute crimes committed in their own country, and not crimes committed elsewhere. There are rare cases where it may be unclear where a crime is "committed", like sending a letter bomb from one country to another, or shooting a border guard on the other side of the border. And there may be some very special exceptions, like sexual abuse of children in foreign countries. For most things, even murder, the USA might extradite you, but they couldn't prosecute you.
If you've filed a patent, and you're about to sue someone I'm guessing generally actually you wouldn't seek employment at a company that is part of it. You know, what with it firstly being a completely transparent move, and secondly because you wouldn't be able to defend your patent when you're in jail for corporate espionage.
But it wouldn't be corporate espionage. So he downloaded documents at work that he had access to as an employee, but that he wasn't supposed to download. As long as he doesn't pass them on or act on them, he can probably be fired, but not charged with anything. However, if the documents contain evidence of wrongdoing on Microsoft's side, that kind of information is not in any way protected by the law. It's not protected by copyright law (the Unabomber tried to pull a stunt like that, claiming that letters he sent to victims shouldn't have been used to track him down because he was the copyright holder), and not protected as a trade secret (because getting away with a crime is not a competitive advantage protected by the law).
Considering that most people would quite guiltlessly keep any extra change that a cashier might give them without saying anything...
Are you sure about that? If that is your attitude, then you should consider that at the end of the day where will be money missing and the cashier will be personally held responsible for that.
Sony, for example, has been noted to be rather schizophrenic, also; its content producing divisions dreams of ever more secure/draconian DRM, while its consumer electronics division would prefer no DRM whatsoever (or at least, no new DRM systems which only make consumer devices more costly and complicated to produce and less user-friendly).
I bet Apple makes more money selling iPods than Sony makes selling music. And if you go back a few years in time, the music player market was there for Sony to take, or at least to have a good go at trying to take it. I have no doubt Sony could have created a really good player that would have given the iPod a run for its money, and because of their music division they threw it away.
Can someone explain for non US residents what the problem is? In the UK, I can buy a digital receiver for £20 in my local supermarket, which plugs into any TV with a SCART socket (any newer TV with HDMI really ought to have a digital receiver built-int). For a bit more, you get a digital receiver with harddisk recorder. Quality is close to DVD, five times more programs available, so there is no need for subsidies. The only problem is when your reception is bad, because the digital TV quality in that case is either perfect or rubbish, nothing in between.
This will just be appealed, this was just a judge not understanding the difference between breaking a contract (EULA) and breaking a copyright.
What makes you think you would understand this better than this judge? Especially as you start by confusing contracts and licenses?
The main issue here is what was the intention of the police. Obviously it can't be to trace the original poster (why seize a mirror, or anything at all since Indymedia does not log ips), nor can it be to remove the comment (this had already happened). Would it just be a form of punishment for a "critical" organization? Indymedia is entirely volunteer-run and depends on donations. Taking a server offline and a potential court case will seriously increase the workload and will have financial consequences too.
Who says they can't find anything? So some Indymedia guy says they keep no logs. Well, some admins are not the brightest, and it is entirely possible that while Indymedia _believes_ they don't keep logfiles, they might actually have logs. Or "not keeping logs" might mean "delete the logs every seven days". Or their servers might keep some other information that is not obviously usable but can find IP addresses after some forensic examination. Or that Indymedia guy might be lying. They might have a policy to tell all their users that no logs are kept, but they still keep them, just in case some user does something _really_ shitty. If that judge, his family and twenty neighbours were murdered, would you be very surprised if log files suddenly turned up?
Unfortunately it's not SHAC who are getting shafted, it's indymedia, who as far as I can tell have no association with SHAC except SHAC were posting there as ACs.
Well, that's just tough luck. They lost a mirror server (temporarily, I hope. Maybe we should note that you should always have a physically separate mirror server so that the police can take it away without touching your main server; a RAID mirror in a closed box together with the "real" server would have been a bad idea); they'll probably have to spend money to get a replacement which will then be a spare.
However, they are lucky in so far as nobody has attacked or threatened any of their staff members, nobody has found out where their dead relatives are living and dug them out and hidden the bodies away, nobody has got a list of all Indymedia employees and warned all their neighbours that they are pedophiles, nobody has called their suppliers and told them to stop selling hardware to them.
I can understand that the well-being of american workers is more important than that of visa-holders to an elected politician. However, the impact of losing the job is much higher for H1Bs, as they usually have to leave the country (within 1 week I think). Considering the fact that these are humans, too, maybe it would be acceptable to lessen these restrictions somewhat, i. e. allow these people to stay in the country for a year if they have the financial means.
The entire H-1B process is reliant on the fact that there are people who have more rights (in this case, American citizens) and people with fewer rights (in this case, non-citizens of the USA). The American citizens have for whatever reasons the right to get jobs ahead of the others. Microsoft is allowed to hire non-citizens if they can prove that American citizens can't fill all the needed positions. Microsoft _wants_ to hire non-citizens because they have fewer rights, so they are willing to work for less money. If these people coming into the USA through H-1B didn't have fewer rights, they wouldn't be willing to work for less money, and Microsoft wouldn't want to hire them.
Whether the situation is fair or unfair is surely worth a discussion, but with H-1B you are only allowed into the USA because Microsoft couldn't find Americans to fill the job. Clearly if Microsoft fires American citizens, then that argument would be moot.
My state law specifically states that I have the right to defend myself, other people, and my property with a "reasonable" amount of force. And by damned, I would do exactly that. A punch in the nose is more than reasonable for a semester's worth of lecture notes.
Reasonable force depends on the situation. In this case, the teacher is a person well known to you. It would be very easy to get your property back by calling your parents, the school headmaster, or the police. Therefore "a punch in the nose" wouldn't be reasonable. On the other hand, if a person unknown to you assaulted you on the way to school and tried to take away your notes, you would have very little chance of getting your property back once they have it and run away, so "a punch in the nose" would be very reasonable to prevent the theft.
If you say that: A=student, B=teacher, then, the moment the student puts the teacher's name in the notebook, that teacher's gains a right to inspect the student's notebook, and to request deletion of these contents.
I very much doubt that. I recommend that you check the appropriate French laws carefully. First, the teacher wouldn't have a right to check the student's notebook. The teacher would at best have the right to ask the student which information he or she holds about the teacher (if students are indeed covered by this law, it most likely only applies to businesses and state agencies), and the student would have to give the information after payment of an appropriate fee. Then the teacher might have the right to ask for information about them to be destroyed. However, the teachers name would most definitely not be considered "personal information" (address, age, phone number, salary etc. would).
Well you can't do anything now since you consented to her taking them by letting her in your backpack. Sounds like you just got a lesson in 4th amendment rights. Never let anyone, including authority figures cop teachers, have your personal property ever. Even if you have nothing to hide.
Of course you can do something. He didn't consent to hand it over, he was tricked into falsely believing that she had the right to it. So making him hand it over fully fits the definition of fraud: Fraud happens when you hand over your property yourself because you were made to believe something which is not true, whereas theft happens when something is just taken away from you illegally. If he believed she had the right to take his notes and handed them over, she committed fraud. If he refused to hand them over and she just took them, then it is theft.
Besides being anal about exactly how students take notes, she was notorious for making all students turn in their notebooks at the end of the year. She would make sure they were complete (you'd fail the entire class if not) and then make you shove it through an industrial shredder she had brought in just for this task.
In the UK, this would be blackmail under section 21 of the 1968 Theft Act.
Neither cheating or plagiarism will be impacted because only the honest students will turn in their only copy of the notes
What do you mean there? Not "honest students", but "stupid students". The teacher has no right whatsoever to these notes. A good student will keep his notes and refer to them in the future when necessary, for example when he or she needs the information later in their professional life. That's what school is for, to teach you knowledge that you can use throughout your life. If you return or destroy those notes, that is completely defeating the purpose of education.
And if you borrow these notes to someone else to learn from them? Well, that is the purpose of education, isn't it? To make people learn. So if in the next year, some student goes to that teachers class and doesn't understand something, isn't it the best thing that student can do to get someone's notes and learn on their own accord what they missed in class?
Besides that, anyone turning in their notes to an _economy_ teacher proves that they didn't understand the basics of copyright law and property law. Instant fail of the course, if you ask me.
Besides that, does that article give you a clue why Europeans are either laughing their heads off or throwing up when Americans claim they live in the "freeest of all countries"?