First off, not everyone has broadband in the US. It is something like 60%. And, not everyone with broadband has music-consuming teens. I'd guess that level is more like 50%. I have to believe this is where CD sales are coming from.
So you buy CDs and such. Why? Because you think the artist needs to be supported? BS - *everyone* knows that the artist gets nothing for CD sales. So why buy? Or, are you just trying to say "I'm not a nasty copyright-breaking pirate because I still buy some CDs?" Don't you understand that it is all free now? When 50% of the population refuses to pay for music and the record companies are relying on the remaining 50% to keep them and the rest of the music business going all you can call those that still pay is "suckers".
The music "business" is pretty much over. When broadband reaches 85 or 90% there won't be any CD sales left to talk about. Sure, there will still be music on radio stations, but it won't be a promotion anymore - it will be there to get people to listen to commercials and radio stations will pay groups for their music.
If you "remove" the copyright, then there are no rights for the artist, and no damages. Maybe revoking the contract with the artist and having the copyright revert to the artist. Who will then just sign up with some other promotional company who will continue to pay the radio stations for airplay.
This works the same way with retail stores. You want your product in the store? Expect to pay a "slotting fee" (bribe) of $50,000 or $100,000 for a large retailer. Just starting out and don't have that much? Sorry, there is no shelf space for your product. I'm sure this works the same way in Europe and Japan as well. Air time, shelf space, whatever - they are valuable commodities which can be sold. And they are.
Actually, DVD region codes are for censorship. UK has a different policy vs. the US for what they will rate as what level and so on. Australia is different again. The only way they can keep US DVDs out of UK and so forth is region coding.
There are places in the world with distinctly different ideas about what is acceptable in a movie - region coding allows countries to decide for themselves.
Yes, region coding is "broken" so this isn't absolute protection. But it is how some kind of world-wide movie standard got accepted. It is much better than the VHS system - import restrictions.
is fine, as long as everyone is playing by mostly the same rule book. Having a nice disagreement about pre-marital sex is all fine and dandy for Western, Judeo-Christian folks.
Just remember that there is a substantial group of people that think stoning is a moral punishment. Or that if you do not believe as they do, you must pay a tax.
A flexible morality stops being so nice when you have to tolerate that much "diversity".
Nobody cares. I've tried that approach and it is a waste of my time and the person's on the other end.
We use sshd_sentry which puts the IP address into the hosts.deny list for 24 hours after five failed attempts. This eliminates the problem completely and it doesn't fill up our logs with useless trash.
I am thinking of doing the same thing for relay attempts because that seems to have become the new sport. One reject you would think would be quite sufficient, but no, we're getting a hundred or more requests from the same IP address.
We use a script called sshd_sentry. It is set up so that after five failed attempts the IP address is blocked for 24 hours.
This has essentially ended the problem for us. It allows SSH to be wide open so out-of-the-office employees can log in from a hotel or Treo in case something bad happens and it absolutely blocks dictionary attacks.
I would offer that it is much closer to the picture of the billboard showing an offer to sell or buy something. The picture is taken and 20 years later someone comes along and wants to take advantage of the offer. It is refused or doesn't exist any longer and the wronged party sues the picture taker and the company that put up the billboard in the first place.
If you are going to preserve information, someone is going to be responsible for that preservation.
I would say also that you post a web page that insults someone. They take you to court and get a judgement in their favor for libel or defamation. As part of the ruling, you are required to remove the offending text from your web page. OK, now what happens to third parties that copied the page and are preserving it in the form the court ordered removed?
Sorry, it doesn't work that way. It will never be a "dialog". It can be either 1,000 voices crying out that something is unfair and one lonly voice saying you have the facts wrong - or - one lawyer crushing the oppressed masses. See, no dialog needed at all.
Employers are restricted from commenting on past and present employees - they get sued over disclosing things that employees did while employed if it makes them look bad. So, unless your previous employer can tell your new employer all about the whining, late arrivals and other stuff this turns into a one-sided "bash the employer" fest. Fair? I don't see any possibility of that.
Problem is when you get the lower price product - ordered via the Internet - you find it is a cheap piece of crap made in China and completely unsuitable for what you wanted it for. How do "lower prices" help anyone in this kind of context? Sure, as a race to the bottom where the price is the only consideration it might help. But what about customer service, quality and a raft of other things? Don't they count? Or is the Internet just about low, low, low prices and everything else counts for nothing?
According to your philosophy, any corporate entity is obviously evil. Heck, anyone not out there digging weeds in their field is a lazy good-for-nothing being supported by the work of others.
Apparently beheading people on TV isn't against "international law". About the only thing that can be said for "international law" is that it has to be a concensus of all nations. Just like the UN - one veto and that clause is struck out. So, torturing a mass murderer or capital punishment is "against international law", beheading infidels can't be.
The model you are describing works for those that have high-speed broadband Internet access. What about the other people on the planet? Tell them to go stuff themselves because media has "evolved" beyond the point where they can be served?
Sorry, but I don't think the majority of people have broadband access yet. That is at least a long time off, if ever. Come back when that happens and we can talk about it again.
Ha. It is perfectly legal for third party companies to combine this information and it is being done today. Why do you think it is illegal? Do you understand what the credit reporting agencies are doing?
Absolutely. RBL's make email unreliable for confirming purchases. RBL's make email unreliable for sending any sort of mail which is required as part of a commercial transaction. RBL's make it impossible to rely on a email address getting an email.
This is exactly the environment that many anti-spam, pro-BL folks want. No commerce on the Internet, period.
You do realize that DDT has saved something like 500 million people in third-world countries, right? It hasn't had much of an effect like that in the US, because we could use less effective pesticides and still not get insect-borne diseases.
Preventing third-world countries from getting access to DDT was one of the most selfish, racist, elitest decisions that was ever made. It sentanced millions to death by disease. Disease that was easily preventable.
Sounds great... except you are forgetting something. All players are not equal. What I mean by that is once something becomes "public domain" there are a number of players that can exploit it effectively. The rest of the world can't really. Why is that? Because you have to "make" something and "distribute" it. However that is done, there is a limited number of people/organizations/groups/clubs/etc. that can do this effectively. Some non-effective folks can try, but it isn't going anywhere. Example: you might have a great idea about selling Chinese-made toys in your home town, but my guess is that WalMart beat you do it and will consistently be able to out-perform you.
So, what you propose is if nobody bids on a patent, it becomes public domain. And free for these "effective exploiters" to make money off of without compensating anyone. Sure, there might be some competition - like KMart and WalMart - but those folks are used to that. How worried is Sony about BMG, really?
All that happens is everything ends up being given over free to the most capable distributors and nobody else gets a dime. In the last 20 years or so we have gotten into a system where about the only thing that matters is distribution, not innovation and certainly not manufacturing. People will buy old (not innovative) junk (manufactured poorly) if it is on their doorstep.
What you don't understand about this is,..., well, a lot.
Plextor doesn't make the chipset for the drive - they buy them from Sanyo. The "trade secret" commands that are being sent to the drive are quite likely described in a document that is restricted to Sanyo licensees. So, Plextor quite likely doesn't have the right to disclose this information in the first place.
The commands are way outside of the MMC3 specification, or any other specification that exists. They are "vendor specific" and are not in any way disclosed outside of said licensed materials from Sanyo.
The commands were "discovered" by apparently reverse-engineering the application supplied with the drive. If this was done by disassembling the application, it violates the EULA under which the application is distributed. It could have been done by monitoring the drive bus and recording the activity and guessing at what the commands were doing. That is clearly not a violation of the application's EULA and may not be a violation of anything at all. The developers admit to "reverse engineering", so if they disassembled the application they are likely to get slapped around a bit by some lawyers. If they can prove they didn't violate the EULA, well, it is likely nothing will happen.
As far as Sanyo is concerned, the cat is pretty much out of the bag. It is unknown how this will affect their competitors and what this will do to the drive market in general. Certainly, it is the last time I would trust Plextor with a trade secret without a lot better assurances about how they would protect a valuable property. Sort of like how Xing let the CSS cat out of the bag. Where is Xing these days, anyway? Maybe Plextor will end up there too as a result of this.
Let's see here - assuming the information is restricted to the parties to the case, how much would it take for someone to be paid by a competitor (or potential competitor, if only they knew the secrets...) to get the information? Of course, they would have to be convicted of drunk driving,... but for a million dollars it might be worth it.
See, businesses are like that. If you can get the edge on your competitors and you know what that edge is worth, you do it. If you can save yourself a year of research and staffing the R&D effort by acquiring the information, you do it. Everyone gets better, cheaper products that way.
Unfortunately, the guy that paid for the R&D that got released ends up bankrupt because everyone buys the cheaper model where there is no R&D to pay off.
The problem with paper ballots in the US today is they are not auditable by disinterested parties. People are required to do anything with the ballots. This leads to non-reproducible results. People do not like non-reproducible results in elections.
When you count the ballots one way, Fred wins. Count them again and Mary wins. Count them some more times and you continue to get random results between Fred and Mary being the winner. This is not what people are interested in - any people. The people being voted for deserve a "fair" and reproducible result. The people voting should have the assurance that their votes are being counted the same way every time. This is evidently impossible in the current climate. It is true that when the election results are more than 5% apart the margin of error built into the system disappears. But we are now seeing elections where the results are less than 5% and involving humans in the counting process seems to put the margin of error up above the difference between the two candidates. This is a huge problem.
And, any involvement of third-party candidates reduces the margins between the candidates and makes the whole situation worse. Let's not forget Truman vs. Dewey where the Chicago Tribune announced the wrong winner. This is famous because it was the first time it happened - I believe it was the first time the election was close enough that the results were not finally known until hours after the newspaper was printed. Close elections were a rarity, so this didn't come up.
This is probably the only real justification for electronic voting machines, and it will be the reason they are used. We can't afford to have elections where the outcome is indeterminate.
Do you understand what the broadband penetration is into the "Joe Average" community? Do you understand how user-unfriendly BitTorrent is to actually find something and download it to the "Joe Average" community?
As soon as this becomes more accessible - WinMX for movies, let's say - and there is greater broadband penetration, you will start to see the "Joe Average" folks start downloading en mass. As soon as that happens, it is a whole new ballgame.
With the release of a easy-to-use, easy-to-search system for "Joe Average" the lines at Blockbuster and WalMart will dry up.
Plenty of evidence abounds for what you are talking about. Unfortunately, the Earth as a closed system can't handle the current load, much less the future.
We passed the point of fully "sustainable" around 1850 or so - every year after that we produced more waste products that can be broken down by natural processes in a year. I'm not talking about CO2 or iPods here - I'm talking about vegetable matter and human waste. Heat is another consideration as well - our current use of energy produces significant amounts of heat and not all of it is radiated into space.
To consider a "sustainable" environment and a closed system you are going to have to look at how things are going to be in several hundred years. Recycling is going to be a big deal, because the energy required to smelt ore into "new" metal isn't going to be around. Nor would any right-thinking individual let someone produce the waste products and heat from lighting up a forge. Why would you anyway, when you can just go over to the dump and pick up something ready to be "reclaimed"? Remember, that if we really want "sustainable" we better start thinking about some significant population reductions. Quickly, too.
Pollution and waste management are but one side of the equation - the other is input resources. We can spend money today on the future and building our ability to obtain resources from elsewere, or we can spend money today on reducing the population so we don't have to later. There is a third alternative - let everyone keep knocking up their Significant Other and having 14 children. Especially popular in third-world countries. We will, of course, drown in our own waste products if we don't bake from our own waste heat.
The population in 1850 was less than 100 million people. At that level we can be 100% fully "sustainable" and the natural processes on the planet will recycle all of the waste products. Waste heat won't be a problem either. We just need to decide between "open" or "closed" system and plan for the future. Should we decide on "closed", we better start reducing the population, drastically, and soon.
Embedding ads is a joke - they would just be removed. Nobody is going to go out of their way to get advertising. Instead, they are going to go out of their way to avoid it.
The "new business model" is pretty clear - there are no customers, just viewers. Viewers don't buy anything and don't want ads. The idea of a "new business model" is that the money will come from somewhere else - tip jars, voluntary contributions, taxes, something - just not pay-per-view or pay-per-use. Unfortunately, nobody has ever figured out how to actually make that work in a large scale. We do have "tip jar" models today, like shareware, and it doesn't work. Maybe if artists and filmmakers were tax-supported (like they are in Canada) we wouldn't have this discussion. Except in Canada the government tells you what your subject matter is going to be. Do we want that? Just think about government-supported boy bands...
If it is "free" (tax supported) or not is pretty much immaterial. Has anyone thought that the service would be actually provided by the city? Hardly - they are going to contract it out. Just like in Tempe, AZ.
Let's say they maintain administration of it, because it is "theirs". Do you really like the idea of the same ISP that you are using also paying the Chief of Police? Wouldn't that lead to a terrific conflict of interest sometimes?
How could there be multiple providers? There really isn't much room for effective sharing of physical space by competing 802.11 transceivers. While it probably wouldn't push Starbucks off the air, you certainly would not have Verizon buying pole space to have their transceiver next to the municpal one - this would be an enforced monopoly because the frequencies are a finite resource. So much for "competition." As for keeping the major providers out of it, whom exactly do you think is going to get the contract to provide the service, anyway?
All of this is just a fun way to take your money for a service that you probably won't get to use - because it will service the downtown area. So unless you live and/or work there, you just get to pay for it in your taxes. Think they are going to tax the downtown people extra to pay for it and not everyone else? Come on, you did think that, didn't you?
This implies two things - the author believes there is value in just his name being familiar and that there are other forms where sales occur.
That is fine for an established author who may receive significant compensation based on things other than raw book sales. It doesn't mean much for an author being judged on book sales. Specifically, "Well, your last book sold really well so we would like to give you a contract for another." Compare and contrast to "Too bad your last book didn't sell all that well."
As to the last part, can anyone doubt we are moving to an environment where more media will be produced, stored and used digitally? If you can download a book and either use it with an electronic reader or print it on a fast printer (with recycled and recyclable paper), why would you go to a bookstore? A place where they simply have lots of "analog" media on display? So it would seem that discounting the value of digital media and assuming it will lead to more "analog" media sales is not very forward thinking at all.
Yes, the problem is absolutely the lack of a clear, enforced policy. You can have a 1-week policy if you want. You get sued and have this policy in writing that says everything older than 1 week is deleted and you turn over everything for the past week. No problems.
Alternatively, you turn over stuff from the last three months and they say, well, we don't think we have any more. Then, turn over stuff from four months ago. You're cooked - this is clearly a violation and you're going to get nailed on it.
Absolutely, in this case the judge is making an example out of them.
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So you buy CDs and such. Why? Because you think the artist needs to be supported? BS - *everyone* knows that the artist gets nothing for CD sales. So why buy? Or, are you just trying to say "I'm not a nasty copyright-breaking pirate because I still buy some CDs?" Don't you understand that it is all free now? When 50% of the population refuses to pay for music and the record companies are relying on the remaining 50% to keep them and the rest of the music business going all you can call those that still pay is "suckers".
The music "business" is pretty much over. When broadband reaches 85 or 90% there won't be any CD sales left to talk about. Sure, there will still be music on radio stations, but it won't be a promotion anymore - it will be there to get people to listen to commercials and radio stations will pay groups for their music.
This works the same way with retail stores. You want your product in the store? Expect to pay a "slotting fee" (bribe) of $50,000 or $100,000 for a large retailer. Just starting out and don't have that much? Sorry, there is no shelf space for your product. I'm sure this works the same way in Europe and Japan as well. Air time, shelf space, whatever - they are valuable commodities which can be sold. And they are.
Actually, DVD region codes are for censorship. UK has a different policy vs. the US for what they will rate as what level and so on. Australia is different again. The only way they can keep US DVDs out of UK and so forth is region coding.
There are places in the world with distinctly different ideas about what is acceptable in a movie - region coding allows countries to decide for themselves.
Yes, region coding is "broken" so this isn't absolute protection. But it is how some kind of world-wide movie standard got accepted. It is much better than the VHS system - import restrictions.
Just remember that there is a substantial group of people that think stoning is a moral punishment. Or that if you do not believe as they do, you must pay a tax.
A flexible morality stops being so nice when you have to tolerate that much "diversity".
We use sshd_sentry which puts the IP address into the hosts.deny list for 24 hours after five failed attempts. This eliminates the problem completely and it doesn't fill up our logs with useless trash.
I am thinking of doing the same thing for relay attempts because that seems to have become the new sport. One reject you would think would be quite sufficient, but no, we're getting a hundred or more requests from the same IP address.
We use a script called sshd_sentry. It is set up so that after five failed attempts the IP address is blocked for 24 hours.
This has essentially ended the problem for us. It allows SSH to be wide open so out-of-the-office employees can log in from a hotel or Treo in case something bad happens and it absolutely blocks dictionary attacks.
No longer a problem.
If you are going to preserve information, someone is going to be responsible for that preservation.
I would say also that you post a web page that insults someone. They take you to court and get a judgement in their favor for libel or defamation. As part of the ruling, you are required to remove the offending text from your web page. OK, now what happens to third parties that copied the page and are preserving it in the form the court ordered removed?
Employers are restricted from commenting on past and present employees - they get sued over disclosing things that employees did while employed if it makes them look bad. So, unless your previous employer can tell your new employer all about the whining, late arrivals and other stuff this turns into a one-sided "bash the employer" fest. Fair? I don't see any possibility of that.
Problem is when you get the lower price product - ordered via the Internet - you find it is a cheap piece of crap made in China and completely unsuitable for what you wanted it for. How do "lower prices" help anyone in this kind of context? Sure, as a race to the bottom where the price is the only consideration it might help. But what about customer service, quality and a raft of other things? Don't they count? Or is the Internet just about low, low, low prices and everything else counts for nothing?
Good 13th century view of the world, there.
Apparently beheading people on TV isn't against "international law". About the only thing that can be said for "international law" is that it has to be a concensus of all nations. Just like the UN - one veto and that clause is struck out. So, torturing a mass murderer or capital punishment is "against international law", beheading infidels can't be.
Sorry, but I don't think the majority of people have broadband access yet. That is at least a long time off, if ever. Come back when that happens and we can talk about it again.
Ha. It is perfectly legal for third party companies to combine this information and it is being done today. Why do you think it is illegal? Do you understand what the credit reporting agencies are doing?
This is exactly the environment that many anti-spam, pro-BL folks want. No commerce on the Internet, period.
Preventing third-world countries from getting access to DDT was one of the most selfish, racist, elitest decisions that was ever made. It sentanced millions to death by disease. Disease that was easily preventable.
So, what you propose is if nobody bids on a patent, it becomes public domain. And free for these "effective exploiters" to make money off of without compensating anyone. Sure, there might be some competition - like KMart and WalMart - but those folks are used to that. How worried is Sony about BMG, really?
All that happens is everything ends up being given over free to the most capable distributors and nobody else gets a dime. In the last 20 years or so we have gotten into a system where about the only thing that matters is distribution, not innovation and certainly not manufacturing. People will buy old (not innovative) junk (manufactured poorly) if it is on their doorstep.
Plextor doesn't make the chipset for the drive - they buy them from Sanyo. The "trade secret" commands that are being sent to the drive are quite likely described in a document that is restricted to Sanyo licensees. So, Plextor quite likely doesn't have the right to disclose this information in the first place.
The commands are way outside of the MMC3 specification, or any other specification that exists. They are "vendor specific" and are not in any way disclosed outside of said licensed materials from Sanyo.
The commands were "discovered" by apparently reverse-engineering the application supplied with the drive. If this was done by disassembling the application, it violates the EULA under which the application is distributed. It could have been done by monitoring the drive bus and recording the activity and guessing at what the commands were doing. That is clearly not a violation of the application's EULA and may not be a violation of anything at all. The developers admit to "reverse engineering", so if they disassembled the application they are likely to get slapped around a bit by some lawyers. If they can prove they didn't violate the EULA, well, it is likely nothing will happen.
As far as Sanyo is concerned, the cat is pretty much out of the bag. It is unknown how this will affect their competitors and what this will do to the drive market in general. Certainly, it is the last time I would trust Plextor with a trade secret without a lot better assurances about how they would protect a valuable property. Sort of like how Xing let the CSS cat out of the bag. Where is Xing these days, anyway? Maybe Plextor will end up there too as a result of this.
See, businesses are like that. If you can get the edge on your competitors and you know what that edge is worth, you do it. If you can save yourself a year of research and staffing the R&D effort by acquiring the information, you do it. Everyone gets better, cheaper products that way.
Unfortunately, the guy that paid for the R&D that got released ends up bankrupt because everyone buys the cheaper model where there is no R&D to pay off.
When you count the ballots one way, Fred wins. Count them again and Mary wins. Count them some more times and you continue to get random results between Fred and Mary being the winner. This is not what people are interested in - any people. The people being voted for deserve a "fair" and reproducible result. The people voting should have the assurance that their votes are being counted the same way every time. This is evidently impossible in the current climate. It is true that when the election results are more than 5% apart the margin of error built into the system disappears. But we are now seeing elections where the results are less than 5% and involving humans in the counting process seems to put the margin of error up above the difference between the two candidates. This is a huge problem.
And, any involvement of third-party candidates reduces the margins between the candidates and makes the whole situation worse. Let's not forget Truman vs. Dewey where the Chicago Tribune announced the wrong winner. This is famous because it was the first time it happened - I believe it was the first time the election was close enough that the results were not finally known until hours after the newspaper was printed. Close elections were a rarity, so this didn't come up.
This is probably the only real justification for electronic voting machines, and it will be the reason they are used. We can't afford to have elections where the outcome is indeterminate.
As soon as this becomes more accessible - WinMX for movies, let's say - and there is greater broadband penetration, you will start to see the "Joe Average" folks start downloading en mass. As soon as that happens, it is a whole new ballgame.
With the release of a easy-to-use, easy-to-search system for "Joe Average" the lines at Blockbuster and WalMart will dry up.
We passed the point of fully "sustainable" around 1850 or so - every year after that we produced more waste products that can be broken down by natural processes in a year. I'm not talking about CO2 or iPods here - I'm talking about vegetable matter and human waste. Heat is another consideration as well - our current use of energy produces significant amounts of heat and not all of it is radiated into space.
To consider a "sustainable" environment and a closed system you are going to have to look at how things are going to be in several hundred years. Recycling is going to be a big deal, because the energy required to smelt ore into "new" metal isn't going to be around. Nor would any right-thinking individual let someone produce the waste products and heat from lighting up a forge. Why would you anyway, when you can just go over to the dump and pick up something ready to be "reclaimed"? Remember, that if we really want "sustainable" we better start thinking about some significant population reductions. Quickly, too.
Pollution and waste management are but one side of the equation - the other is input resources. We can spend money today on the future and building our ability to obtain resources from elsewere, or we can spend money today on reducing the population so we don't have to later. There is a third alternative - let everyone keep knocking up their Significant Other and having 14 children. Especially popular in third-world countries. We will, of course, drown in our own waste products if we don't bake from our own waste heat.
The population in 1850 was less than 100 million people. At that level we can be 100% fully "sustainable" and the natural processes on the planet will recycle all of the waste products. Waste heat won't be a problem either. We just need to decide between "open" or "closed" system and plan for the future. Should we decide on "closed", we better start reducing the population, drastically, and soon.
The "new business model" is pretty clear - there are no customers, just viewers. Viewers don't buy anything and don't want ads. The idea of a "new business model" is that the money will come from somewhere else - tip jars, voluntary contributions, taxes, something - just not pay-per-view or pay-per-use. Unfortunately, nobody has ever figured out how to actually make that work in a large scale. We do have "tip jar" models today, like shareware, and it doesn't work. Maybe if artists and filmmakers were tax-supported (like they are in Canada) we wouldn't have this discussion. Except in Canada the government tells you what your subject matter is going to be. Do we want that? Just think about government-supported boy bands...
Let's say they maintain administration of it, because it is "theirs". Do you really like the idea of the same ISP that you are using also paying the Chief of Police? Wouldn't that lead to a terrific conflict of interest sometimes?
How could there be multiple providers? There really isn't much room for effective sharing of physical space by competing 802.11 transceivers. While it probably wouldn't push Starbucks off the air, you certainly would not have Verizon buying pole space to have their transceiver next to the municpal one - this would be an enforced monopoly because the frequencies are a finite resource. So much for "competition." As for keeping the major providers out of it, whom exactly do you think is going to get the contract to provide the service, anyway?
All of this is just a fun way to take your money for a service that you probably won't get to use - because it will service the downtown area. So unless you live and/or work there, you just get to pay for it in your taxes. Think they are going to tax the downtown people extra to pay for it and not everyone else? Come on, you did think that, didn't you?
That is fine for an established author who may receive significant compensation based on things other than raw book sales. It doesn't mean much for an author being judged on book sales. Specifically, "Well, your last book sold really well so we would like to give you a contract for another." Compare and contrast to "Too bad your last book didn't sell all that well."
As to the last part, can anyone doubt we are moving to an environment where more media will be produced, stored and used digitally? If you can download a book and either use it with an electronic reader or print it on a fast printer (with recycled and recyclable paper), why would you go to a bookstore? A place where they simply have lots of "analog" media on display? So it would seem that discounting the value of digital media and assuming it will lead to more "analog" media sales is not very forward thinking at all.
Alternatively, you turn over stuff from the last three months and they say, well, we don't think we have any more. Then, turn over stuff from four months ago. You're cooked - this is clearly a violation and you're going to get nailed on it.
Absolutely, in this case the judge is making an example out of them.