Insisting that Apple's separately sold software has to be run on Apple's hardware is an unenforceable and illegal tying arrangement under US antitrust law. This exact issue has come up before in 734 F.2d 1336 DIGIDYNE CORP. v. DATA GENERAL. [precydent.com]. The Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ruled: The issue presented for review is whether Data General's refusal to license its NOVA operating system software except to purchasers of its NOVA central processing units (CPUs) is an unlawful tying arrangement under section 1 of the Sherman Act, 15 U.S.C. Sec. 1 (1976) and section 3 of the Clayton Act, 15 U.S.C. Sec. 14 (1976). We conclude that it is.
You are comparing oranges and apples. In that lawsuit, Digidyne could build Nova compatible computers, but Nova was _the only_ operating system running on these machines. So by refusing to license Nova, Data General effectively prevented Digidyne from selling any computers at all, because without OS they were useless. In the case of Psystar, there are several alternatives, like this company in Seattle selling an operating system called "Windows", and various outlets distributing another OS called "Linux". That is the difference: Apple doesn't prevent Psystar from selling computers. Dell, HP and many others make lots of money selling computers that cannot run MacOS X, so Apple is free to license it to who they want and nobody else.
The GPL gives you rights that copyright would not normally allow. EULAs take away rights that the doctrine of first sale would normally permit. That's the difference.
The first sale doctrine allows you to sell the software to someone else. A clause in a EULA that doesn't allow you to sell the software on is not valid. However, the first sale doctrine doesn't affect anything else in the EULA. If you bought MacOS X with the intention to install it on a Dell, then read the EULA and find out it doesn't allow it, then you have the right to return the software, or you can make use of the first sale doctrine and sell it to me. But I will be bound by the EULA in exactly the same way, and I can't install the software on my HP computer either.
Wouldn't this be like buying a music CD from sony that says on the package "you are only allowed to play this on a sony CD player" Then having sony sue the manufacturer of another cd player that is able to play sony cd's out of the box? Where is/should the line be drawn on what a Eula can dictate? Software on a CD is not too much different from music or video on a CD.
Sony would have the right to do that.
Now there is a difference between music sales and operating system sales: Most people are quite happy owning only one operating system. Most people are not happy with owning only one CD. So if I were a very strange person who only wanted to buy one CD in their whole life, and I liked that Sony CD best, then I would likely buy it together with the Sony CD player and not complain. But since I want many CDs, and using many CD players would be a major inconvenience, I would be angry if _all_ record companies used that strategy and use LPs, music cassettes, piracy but not CDs; if Sony was the only one, then I wouldn't buy Sony CDs.
That explains why Apple can do it and still sell both operating systems and computers with success, while the same strategy wouldn't work for Sony. But legally, there is no difference. I think you gave this as an example to show that such a EULA would be absurd and shouldn't be allowed; I say it is perfectly legal but doesn't make business sense in the music industry.
First sale, etc. So them buying OS X and sending it to me, alnogn with the hardware, etc. is oK. As some other poster(s) mentioned, they are redistributing OS X updates,e tc.
Apple's complaint is about 30 pages, and there are lots of things that (according to Apple) Psystar shouldn't do. For example, using the goodwill in MacOS X to sell their own products. If they shipped a computer + an unopened box containing MacOS X, that would be enticing you to install MacOS X without a valid license. Now it may be possible that _you_ could legally get away with doing that as an end user, but Psystar as a company cannot entice you to do this.
So what are they going to do with that cash? Expanding the product line significantly would mean diluting the brand. Even buying / Starting a low end brand would have the same effect.
One CEO of a slightly smaller company (only a few hundred million in the bank) told me that if you have money in the bank, that's a very good place for it to be. He said that because he made the mistake of taking the money and buying companies, and it was pure luck that complete disasters and one excellent purchase evened themselves out. But he could have achieved the same results with much less work, and much less risk, and without losing any sleep, by keeping the money in the bank.
In the past, Apple has used their cash to buy very specialised things that they wanted. Like (I think) Raycer which was important for 3D graphics know-how, now PA Semi, strategic investments into ARM, Akamai and I think a $100mil investment into Samsung? for developing LCD monitors a few years ago (I think that was repaid, but it served its purpose).
How can a company with $24B in sales, $3B in profit, and $40B in cash and assets (2007 figures) have a market cap of $160B?
You used the 2007 figures of $3bn profit. The last figures are $4.6bn profit for the last year. That would be 50 percent growth, which is the key factor. Someone posted that you'd need 53 years to make $160bn if you make $3bn profit a year. Obviously we would need to subtract the $40B in cash and assets firsts, leaving $120bn. And divide by $4.6bn per year, making it 26 years which is about equivalent to 3.9% interest per year. But now we have to factor in the growth: If Apple managed the same growth for the next three years, then profit could triple and the 3.9% interest goes up to 12%.
That is why Microsoft is valued so low: Because the market doesn't expect any growth anymore.
I'm not sure what the court's exact definition of 'charging for a license' is there (and I don't have that Wallace v. IBM reference handy), but the GPL isn't actually supposed to prohibit distributors from charging, it just makes charging impractical because they have to provide the whole code as well.
Let's say I have the source code and executable code for the gcc compilers on my hard drive at home. I can sell you the executable code for a million dollars if you are stupid enough to pay that amount; that is perfectly legal under the GPL. You can then ask me for the source code; I can charge you my cost for providing the source code (lets be generous, 20 dollars for burning a CD and mailing it to you). You decide that you want to give copies to your friends, so you need a license to do this. I have to give you the license to make copies under the terms of the GPL, and I am not allowed to charge a penny for it.
It's not stronger copyright law, the way copyright works has not changed at all, it's just an already existing copyright being honoured by the federal court, after for some reason a lesser court refused to honour it. I could probably explain better if I RTFA but we all know that's not going to happen.
The judge in this case corrected a blatant error by the District Court.
Like the GPL, the Artistic License basically says "You can copy this software provided you do X, Y and Z". The correct interpretation of this license is: If I do X, Y and Z then I have the right to copy the software. If I don't do X, Y and Z, then I have no right to copy the software, and copying is copyright infringement, and courts will stop me from doing it if the copyright holder asks them. The wrong interpretation, used by the District Court, was: I have the right to copy the software. I am also obliged to X, Y and Z, and if I don't do them, then the copyright holder can sue me to do X, Y and Z or pay damages. However, the copyright holder cannot stop me from copying. As I said, this has now been declared the wrong interpretation.
If it doesn't, the logic behind the notion that the way to protect sensitive data like "core location" is to blacklist, should suffice. If you're dealing with signed apps, why would you need to blacklist? The code should be reviewed for proper use of resources, no?
What makes you think that anybody looks at the source code for any application that gets submitted? What do you think would be the outcry on Slashdot if Apple asked to see everyone's source code before allowing them to sell applications?
Ok, you have the capability to decide for yourself, but what it you don't have the technical ability? Like, what if it turns out that Super Monkey Ball is tracking you throughout your day, and relaying that information back to someone? In that case, even if you knew that, how would you disable Super Monkey Ball from having access to your location?
Since we are all paranoid here...
I write a nice little game and sell it through the iPhone store. One day when you get the high score, it lets you enter your name (as games do) and town and offers to look it up through GPS. When you allow the lookup, an error comes "sorry, this town is not in my database".
Three months later, a gang of robbers starts stealing iPhones. The strange thing is, they know exactly where people with iPhones are. Even stranger, all these people who got robbed have been using my little iPhone game. That is where a core location blacklist would be handy.
In other news, the iPhone developer agreement apparently must include the "we can pull any of your apps from the store for an arbitrary reason aside from the ones mentioned explicitly in the agreement" clause, since removal of _I Am Rich_ was, Apple claims, a "judgment call".
I haven't read that agreement carefully, but there might be for example a clause that you can't create applications that are bad for Apple's reputation. Whether this application is bad for Apple's reputation is surely a "judgement call".
If there were no patent law, no new drugs would be made. It costs many millions of dollars to find a new drug, prove it is safe and effective, find the proper dose, and get it approved. Without patent protection, a drug company would have no way to earn their money back. The argument is a strawman.
Of course new drugs would be made. Without new drugs, everyone would be selling the same old drugs all the time. That would give you an excellent opportunity to bust the market wide open by introducing something new. You develop it, keep it secret, get the approval and sell. Anyone else needs to do the same approval process, which will take them the same time, so the market is yours for years. It stops being yours when someone else figures out the same things as you did - but then what makes you think you should have any right on other peoples inventions?
If anything, patent law prevents improvement of existing drugs. The patent holder has no need for improvement, because they have a monopoly on the drug anyway. Their competitors have no incentive for improving it, because the original is patented and you can't turn your improvements into money.
Of course it's possible that if someone doesn't have a decent understanding of how the software works, it's plausible that a person could honestly be ignorant, but for anyone who frequents slashdot or has any small amount of knowledge about computers probably knows better.
I have seen advertisements for software that really did sound as if you could download millions of songs legally (that's what it advertised: Download millions of songs legally). Maybe a lawyer with a very suspicious mind would have figured it out just by reading the advert, I figured it out because I _know_ there are no millions of songs that you can get legally and for free and therefore knew what words to look for in the advert, but to anyone who doesn't know about that subject it looked totally genuine. I thought it was disgusting.
If you download music illegally, and you know what you're doing, that's fine with me; you know the risk, you take your chances. But that kind of advert could get someone into deepest trouble who doesn't have the slightest idea they are doing anything wrong.
Well the girl wasn't authorised to distribute the songs, so surely it doesn't matter who she distributed them to?
Well, if the copyright holder himself asks you for a copy, or an authorised agent of the copyright holder, then it surely is authorised.
If Bill Gates' laptop crashes and he needs a new copy of the OS, you can give him your copy to install it. That is as long as he uses Linux or Windows, not if its MacOS X:-)
A fun and practical way to demonstrate how NOT to set up a network with nodes that shouldn't have to trust each other!
At every place, there are rules and consequences if you break the rules.
Where I work, if you hack into the wireless network and we find out, you get thrown out, and get prosecuted if we can find proof. Same if you hack into the wired network. That's our rules. At Black Hat, if you hack into the wireless network and they find out, your are fine (except for egg on your face if they catch you, and egg on your face if you are hacked). If you hack into the wired network reserved for reporters and they find out, you are thrown out.
Why is this even an issue? Apple could yank it and wanted to. So they did.
Some people seem to argue that there should be a free market, so Apple shouldn't be allowed to yank it. And others think that there should be a free market, so Apple _should_ be allowed to remove it.
I took a COBOL course at university in the very late 70s, passed, never touched it again. Then bought a book a few years ago from the bargain book, read through it, and the language is just absurd. Ok, it would have been hard to design something better in the 50s when it was created, but it is just horrible. If we really want a cheap, simple language to do bog standard things without all that newfangled stuff, then the dBase language would be ten times better. And dBase on todays hardware would just _fly_.
If you think YOU'RE a slave, try working in a iPod factory in China [msn.com] for a while.
That story came out in about 2006. When it was published, the newspaper wrote "lots of complaints were made about the amount of overtime". The actual report said "lots of complaints because sometimes there wasn't enough overtime available for everyone".
As for the person committing suicide, she should have reported the harassment to the police, rather than choose such an idiotic solution. The mother is guilty of harassment/disorderly conduct, but only the person who killed herself is guilty of her own death.
The whole point is that the girl didn't realise this was harassment. She believed that a genuine 17 year old boy who she had fallen in love with and who loved her genuinely believed that the world was better off without her, and that he was right about it. Had she known that it was her neighbour, she wouldn't have gone to the police or to a lawyer, she would have said "f*** you" to the woman and that would have been it.
I don't see how not filling in your profile correctly can so easily lead to a criminal offence... There's a lot of circumstances where the most you could be truly guilty of is 'not bothering to read the terms' (hardly intrinsically criminal), or of being a 13 year old saying you are 14 to use the service (again not truly a criminal action?), or someone in industry might make a test profile to do competititve analysis (again not criminal intent.. etc
Many things depend on circumstances. I think it can be reasonably argued that _any_ false information is against the terms of service, and how severely this is treated should depend on what damage was done based on this false information.
So it is one thing if a thirteen year old claims to be fourteen to get access to a site. Another matter if a forty year old man claims to be an eight year old girl to get access to a site aimed at children. Another matter for a forty year old woman to pretend to be a 17 year old boy, building a pretend romantic relationship to a 14 year old girl, then telling her that the world would be better off without her. If the fourteen year old had known that the person is her neighbour and the mother of another teenage girl she has fallen out with, anything that woman said would have had no effect at all.
The marriage was broken up because the guy wanted to cheat on his wife but got caught instead. The prank actually did a wife a favor.
That is very, very questionable. It is quite possible that she would have preferred not to know about it. It is quite possible that she would have ignored an attempt to cheat except the information was made public and couldn't easily be ignored. Maybe she would have preferred to raise her children together with their father and this "prankster" prevented it.
Even if he did do some of the work while on duty, that wouldn't make it government property. It would only be government property if it was the product of his job. Suppose that a soldier while on duty works on his novel or that a sailor carves scrimshaw. Do you think that the resulting novel or carving cease to be his property? No, they don't, because they weren't made in the course of his job.
He received and accepted a promotion for his good work.
Exactly! That's the worrying part about this. Had the court ruled that the USAF was (at least partially) owner of the software and therefore allowed to modify it, then there'd be no problem at all. It's the unlimited license to pirate, copy and steal that's wrong here.
Courts do their rulings in the most efficient way possible. The USAF was sued for a DMCA violation. The usual defences against this are: (1) The plaintiff doesn't own the copyright. (2) The defendant didn't breach the DMCA. In this unusual case, there was a third defence: DMCA doesn't apply to the USAF. Once that was found to be the case, there was no point in even looking at the other defences. Even looking at whether the USAF had rights to the software would have been a waste of tax payers money.
The plaintiff is still free to sue the USAF for copyright infringement.
Slashdot Mirror
I predict in 2012, we'll see the OSX BSOD projected on the ceiling at the Olympics.
Except, knowing Apple, it will be fuchsia instead blue.
Except, this being London, it will be delayed to 2013.
Insisting that Apple's separately sold software has to be run on Apple's hardware is an unenforceable and illegal tying arrangement under US antitrust law. This exact issue has come up before in 734 F.2d 1336 DIGIDYNE CORP. v. DATA GENERAL. [precydent.com]. The Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ruled: The issue presented for review is whether Data General's refusal to license its NOVA operating system software except to purchasers of its NOVA central processing units (CPUs) is an unlawful tying arrangement under section 1 of the Sherman Act, 15 U.S.C. Sec. 1 (1976) and section 3 of the Clayton Act, 15 U.S.C. Sec. 14 (1976). We conclude that it is.
You are comparing oranges and apples. In that lawsuit, Digidyne could build Nova compatible computers, but Nova was _the only_ operating system running on these machines. So by refusing to license Nova, Data General effectively prevented Digidyne from selling any computers at all, because without OS they were useless. In the case of Psystar, there are several alternatives, like this company in Seattle selling an operating system called "Windows", and various outlets distributing another OS called "Linux". That is the difference: Apple doesn't prevent Psystar from selling computers. Dell, HP and many others make lots of money selling computers that cannot run MacOS X, so Apple is free to license it to who they want and nobody else.
The GPL gives you rights that copyright would not normally allow. EULAs take away rights that the doctrine of first sale would normally permit. That's the difference.
The first sale doctrine allows you to sell the software to someone else. A clause in a EULA that doesn't allow you to sell the software on is not valid. However, the first sale doctrine doesn't affect anything else in the EULA. If you bought MacOS X with the intention to install it on a Dell, then read the EULA and find out it doesn't allow it, then you have the right to return the software, or you can make use of the first sale doctrine and sell it to me. But I will be bound by the EULA in exactly the same way, and I can't install the software on my HP computer either.
Wouldn't this be like buying a music CD from sony that says on the package "you are only allowed to play this on a sony CD player" Then having sony sue the manufacturer of another cd player that is able to play sony cd's out of the box? Where is/should the line be drawn on what a Eula can dictate? Software on a CD is not too much different from music or video on a CD.
Sony would have the right to do that.
Now there is a difference between music sales and operating system sales: Most people are quite happy owning only one operating system. Most people are not happy with owning only one CD. So if I were a very strange person who only wanted to buy one CD in their whole life, and I liked that Sony CD best, then I would likely buy it together with the Sony CD player and not complain. But since I want many CDs, and using many CD players would be a major inconvenience, I would be angry if _all_ record companies used that strategy and use LPs, music cassettes, piracy but not CDs; if Sony was the only one, then I wouldn't buy Sony CDs.
That explains why Apple can do it and still sell both operating systems and computers with success, while the same strategy wouldn't work for Sony. But legally, there is no difference. I think you gave this as an example to show that such a EULA would be absurd and shouldn't be allowed; I say it is perfectly legal but doesn't make business sense in the music industry.
First sale, etc. So them buying OS X and sending it to me, alnogn with the hardware, etc. is oK. As some other poster(s) mentioned, they are redistributing OS X updates,e tc.
Apple's complaint is about 30 pages, and there are lots of things that (according to Apple) Psystar shouldn't do. For example, using the goodwill in MacOS X to sell their own products. If they shipped a computer + an unopened box containing MacOS X, that would be enticing you to install MacOS X without a valid license. Now it may be possible that _you_ could legally get away with doing that as an end user, but Psystar as a company cannot entice you to do this.
So what are they going to do with that cash? Expanding the product line significantly would mean diluting the brand. Even buying / Starting a low end brand would have the same effect.
One CEO of a slightly smaller company (only a few hundred million in the bank) told me that if you have money in the bank, that's a very good place for it to be. He said that because he made the mistake of taking the money and buying companies, and it was pure luck that complete disasters and one excellent purchase evened themselves out. But he could have achieved the same results with much less work, and much less risk, and without losing any sleep, by keeping the money in the bank.
In the past, Apple has used their cash to buy very specialised things that they wanted. Like (I think) Raycer which was important for 3D graphics know-how, now PA Semi, strategic investments into ARM, Akamai and I think a $100mil investment into Samsung? for developing LCD monitors a few years ago (I think that was repaid, but it served its purpose).
How can a company with $24B in sales, $3B in profit, and $40B in cash and assets (2007 figures) have a market cap of $160B?
You used the 2007 figures of $3bn profit. The last figures are $4.6bn profit for the last year. That would be 50 percent growth, which is the key factor. Someone posted that you'd need 53 years to make $160bn if you make $3bn profit a year. Obviously we would need to subtract the $40B in cash and assets firsts, leaving $120bn. And divide by $4.6bn per year, making it 26 years which is about equivalent to 3.9% interest per year. But now we have to factor in the growth: If Apple managed the same growth for the next three years, then profit could triple and the 3.9% interest goes up to 12%. That is why Microsoft is valued so low: Because the market doesn't expect any growth anymore.
I'm not sure what the court's exact definition of 'charging for a license' is there (and I don't have that Wallace v. IBM reference handy), but the GPL isn't actually supposed to prohibit distributors from charging, it just makes charging impractical because they have to provide the whole code as well.
Let's say I have the source code and executable code for the gcc compilers on my hard drive at home. I can sell you the executable code for a million dollars if you are stupid enough to pay that amount; that is perfectly legal under the GPL. You can then ask me for the source code; I can charge you my cost for providing the source code (lets be generous, 20 dollars for burning a CD and mailing it to you). You decide that you want to give copies to your friends, so you need a license to do this. I have to give you the license to make copies under the terms of the GPL, and I am not allowed to charge a penny for it.
It's not stronger copyright law, the way copyright works has not changed at all, it's just an already existing copyright being honoured by the federal court, after for some reason a lesser court refused to honour it. I could probably explain better if I RTFA but we all know that's not going to happen.
The judge in this case corrected a blatant error by the District Court.
Like the GPL, the Artistic License basically says "You can copy this software provided you do X, Y and Z". The correct interpretation of this license is: If I do X, Y and Z then I have the right to copy the software. If I don't do X, Y and Z, then I have no right to copy the software, and copying is copyright infringement, and courts will stop me from doing it if the copyright holder asks them. The wrong interpretation, used by the District Court, was: I have the right to copy the software. I am also obliged to X, Y and Z, and if I don't do them, then the copyright holder can sue me to do X, Y and Z or pay damages. However, the copyright holder cannot stop me from copying. As I said, this has now been declared the wrong interpretation.
If it doesn't, the logic behind the notion that the way to protect sensitive data like "core location" is to blacklist, should suffice. If you're dealing with signed apps, why would you need to blacklist? The code should be reviewed for proper use of resources, no?
What makes you think that anybody looks at the source code for any application that gets submitted? What do you think would be the outcry on Slashdot if Apple asked to see everyone's source code before allowing them to sell applications?
Ok, you have the capability to decide for yourself, but what it you don't have the technical ability? Like, what if it turns out that Super Monkey Ball is tracking you throughout your day, and relaying that information back to someone? In that case, even if you knew that, how would you disable Super Monkey Ball from having access to your location?
Since we are all paranoid here...
I write a nice little game and sell it through the iPhone store. One day when you get the high score, it lets you enter your name (as games do) and town and offers to look it up through GPS. When you allow the lookup, an error comes "sorry, this town is not in my database".
Three months later, a gang of robbers starts stealing iPhones. The strange thing is, they know exactly where people with iPhones are. Even stranger, all these people who got robbed have been using my little iPhone game. That is where a core location blacklist would be handy.
In other news, the iPhone developer agreement apparently must include the "we can pull any of your apps from the store for an arbitrary reason aside from the ones mentioned explicitly in the agreement" clause, since removal of _I Am Rich_ was, Apple claims, a "judgment call".
I haven't read that agreement carefully, but there might be for example a clause that you can't create applications that are bad for Apple's reputation. Whether this application is bad for Apple's reputation is surely a "judgement call".
If there were no patent law, no new drugs would be made. It costs many millions of dollars to find a new drug, prove it is safe and effective, find the proper dose, and get it approved. Without patent protection, a drug company would have no way to earn their money back. The argument is a strawman.
Of course new drugs would be made. Without new drugs, everyone would be selling the same old drugs all the time. That would give you an excellent opportunity to bust the market wide open by introducing something new. You develop it, keep it secret, get the approval and sell. Anyone else needs to do the same approval process, which will take them the same time, so the market is yours for years. It stops being yours when someone else figures out the same things as you did - but then what makes you think you should have any right on other peoples inventions?
If anything, patent law prevents improvement of existing drugs. The patent holder has no need for improvement, because they have a monopoly on the drug anyway. Their competitors have no incentive for improving it, because the original is patented and you can't turn your improvements into money.
Of course it's possible that if someone doesn't have a decent understanding of how the software works, it's plausible that a person could honestly be ignorant, but for anyone who frequents slashdot or has any small amount of knowledge about computers probably knows better.
I have seen advertisements for software that really did sound as if you could download millions of songs legally (that's what it advertised: Download millions of songs legally). Maybe a lawyer with a very suspicious mind would have figured it out just by reading the advert, I figured it out because I _know_ there are no millions of songs that you can get legally and for free and therefore knew what words to look for in the advert, but to anyone who doesn't know about that subject it looked totally genuine. I thought it was disgusting.
If you download music illegally, and you know what you're doing, that's fine with me; you know the risk, you take your chances. But that kind of advert could get someone into deepest trouble who doesn't have the slightest idea they are doing anything wrong.
Well the girl wasn't authorised to distribute the songs, so surely it doesn't matter who she distributed them to?
Well, if the copyright holder himself asks you for a copy, or an authorised agent of the copyright holder, then it surely is authorised.
:-)
If Bill Gates' laptop crashes and he needs a new copy of the OS, you can give him your copy to install it. That is as long as he uses Linux or Windows, not if its MacOS X
A fun and practical way to demonstrate how NOT to set up a network with nodes that shouldn't have to trust each other!
At every place, there are rules and consequences if you break the rules.
Where I work, if you hack into the wireless network and we find out, you get thrown out, and get prosecuted if we can find proof. Same if you hack into the wired network. That's our rules. At Black Hat, if you hack into the wireless network and they find out, your are fine (except for egg on your face if they catch you, and egg on your face if you are hacked). If you hack into the wired network reserved for reporters and they find out, you are thrown out.
Why is this even an issue? Apple could yank it and wanted to. So they did.
Some people seem to argue that there should be a free market, so Apple shouldn't be allowed to yank it. And others think that there should be a free market, so Apple _should_ be allowed to remove it.
I took a COBOL course at university in the very late 70s, passed, never touched it again. Then bought a book a few years ago from the bargain book, read through it, and the language is just absurd. Ok, it would have been hard to design something better in the 50s when it was created, but it is just horrible. If we really want a cheap, simple language to do bog standard things without all that newfangled stuff, then the dBase language would be ten times better. And dBase on todays hardware would just _fly_.
If you think YOU'RE a slave, try working in a iPod factory in China [msn.com] for a while.
That story came out in about 2006. When it was published, the newspaper wrote "lots of complaints were made about the amount of overtime". The actual report said "lots of complaints because sometimes there wasn't enough overtime available for everyone".
As for the person committing suicide, she should have reported the harassment to the police, rather than choose such an idiotic solution. The mother is guilty of harassment/disorderly conduct, but only the person who killed herself is guilty of her own death.
The whole point is that the girl didn't realise this was harassment. She believed that a genuine 17 year old boy who she had fallen in love with and who loved her genuinely believed that the world was better off without her, and that he was right about it. Had she known that it was her neighbour, she wouldn't have gone to the police or to a lawyer, she would have said "f*** you" to the woman and that would have been it.
I don't see how not filling in your profile correctly can so easily lead to a criminal offence... There's a lot of circumstances where the most you could be truly guilty of is 'not bothering to read the terms' (hardly intrinsically criminal), or of being a 13 year old saying you are 14 to use the service (again not truly a criminal action?), or someone in industry might make a test profile to do competititve analysis (again not criminal intent.. etc
Many things depend on circumstances. I think it can be reasonably argued that _any_ false information is against the terms of service, and how severely this is treated should depend on what damage was done based on this false information.
So it is one thing if a thirteen year old claims to be fourteen to get access to a site. Another matter if a forty year old man claims to be an eight year old girl to get access to a site aimed at children. Another matter for a forty year old woman to pretend to be a 17 year old boy, building a pretend romantic relationship to a 14 year old girl, then telling her that the world would be better off without her. If the fourteen year old had known that the person is her neighbour and the mother of another teenage girl she has fallen out with, anything that woman said would have had no effect at all.
The marriage was broken up because the guy wanted to cheat on his wife but got caught instead. The prank actually did a wife a favor.
That is very, very questionable. It is quite possible that she would have preferred not to know about it. It is quite possible that she would have ignored an attempt to cheat except the information was made public and couldn't easily be ignored. Maybe she would have preferred to raise her children together with their father and this "prankster" prevented it.
'bringing legal action against me may punish me, but it won't change or even impact online culture.'
I guess the punishment is what his victims want.
Even if he did do some of the work while on duty, that wouldn't make it government property. It would only be government property if it was the product of his job. Suppose that a soldier while on duty works on his novel or that a sailor carves scrimshaw. Do you think that the resulting novel or carving cease to be his property? No, they don't, because they weren't made in the course of his job.
He received and accepted a promotion for his good work.
Exactly! That's the worrying part about this. Had the court ruled that the USAF was (at least partially) owner of the software and therefore allowed to modify it, then there'd be no problem at all. It's the unlimited license to pirate, copy and steal that's wrong here.
Courts do their rulings in the most efficient way possible. The USAF was sued for a DMCA violation. The usual defences against this are: (1) The plaintiff doesn't own the copyright. (2) The defendant didn't breach the DMCA. In this unusual case, there was a third defence: DMCA doesn't apply to the USAF. Once that was found to be the case, there was no point in even looking at the other defences. Even looking at whether the USAF had rights to the software would have been a waste of tax payers money.
The plaintiff is still free to sue the USAF for copyright infringement.