>The Supreme Court has held that jury awards which are more than ten (10) times the actual damage are presumptively unconstitutional.
I'm still missing a step though...
If some guy in the swap meet is selling bootlegs of your work, and you can't prove how many he sold, how can there be any possibility of determining actual damages.
Lets say he sells 5,000 copies of your works at $1.00 a piece over the period of a few months Lets assume you would get yourself about $3.00 a piece normally from your authorized distributors. You could easily argue that you have taken damages in the amount of $15,000. However, you were only able to prove that he sold 3 copies, which works out to a provable $9.00 of damages, and using your 10x as a rough ceiling, you could only recover $90.00 from the guy. He actually pulled in $5,000.00, so even if he lost (excluding court costs), he's still ahead $4,910.00.
If that's the only worry he has, there is no reason not to sell bootlegs. There is next to no risk./Unless you can count court costs as damages... in which 10x of attorney's fees could get interesting
>-the unconstitutionality of a verdict for about 30,000 times the actual damage, and
Totally not a lawyer here... but those were statutory damages, weren't they? Which means the didn't have anything to do with actual damages.
And statutory damages, in my understanding, were setup because there are common situations where you just cannot prove how extensive the damages were. (when you nab the guy selling bootleg DVDs at the swapmeet... you might only be able to prove 3 sales, but he may have sold thousands of copies... not having statutory damages makes this a virtual no loss situation for the bootlegger)
That doesn't address its constitutionality directly, but it at least addresses where some of the "fair"ness comes in.
I'm way ot of my depth here, but aren't there also for cause rejections as well?
I don't know what limits there are on cause, but it seems to be a competent attorney could dig into the person with questions to try to elicit responses that would show a likely hood of deciding on factors that would not be relevant, that is, likely to render an unfair verdict.
Of course, if you get too picky you end up ticking off the judge and that may end up biasing things against you, but that's a whole different class of problem.
Right, but in the bootleg case, if you can prove one sale was made, you go for stautory damages which are much greater than a single sales worth, because there is just no way to prove how many were sold.
You've proven the guy did you damage of some sort, and its not remotely practical for the courts to work out how much that damage was, so statutory damages apply.
This gets to the whole "making available" argument... you could argue that "making available" is the same as "attempted distribution". (And in that case, "I didn't know I was distributing" seems like it should be an adequate defense.)
If you have a guy selling bootleg DVDs that you own the copyright to, do you have to actually prove that people purchased copies of the DVD in order to take action? The guy was at a swap meet, a place to sell stuff... and had copies of your material, which he didn't not have the right to distribute. If you do take him in, how do you prove how many people actually purchased copies? How do you show that they would have bought them from you? This is why there are statutory damages... to remove that whole problem, because they are impossible to show.
On the criminal side... it seems a little like saying "I didn't conspire to murder them", I was just "making the murder available by providing information about the socalled target, and providing the tools to do it.". It's not my fault someone took advantage of that situation.
>I suppose we should all be allowed to own slaves again? That, after all, was implicitly provided for in the original constitution and by the founders... but we've realized that's a terrible idea since then.
And using the processes within that document that was specifically weeded out.
> The fact that they choose to interpret it one way now as opposed to a different way then is not an expansion of their powers, nor is it a restriction of your rights; it is simply a re-interpretation thereof by an entity that has always been empowered to do so.
Yep, and this was provided for in that same document. We just need to make sure that we get/stay involved in the selection of judges in general, inasmuch as we can. If you don't vote your local judges, and don't use your opinion of judges when voting for those who would appoint them, you'r feeding into the system.
The system was designed to change slowly, and change slowly it has. Hopefully folks are starting to notice that the frog-boiler is getting a bit hot and we need to start shifting to "getting us out of the pot".
You (in this case a white man, pretend anyway if you're not) are sitting in the Jury to convict a white man of murdering a black man... he obviously did it, but you don't believe that should be a crime since the black man went out with his white daughter against his wishes.
Is nullification good then?
I really like the whole jury of peers thing, but when the peers themselves are corrupt, justice just doesn't get done. I'm really torn on this whole thing.
I'm in a similar position, and I'm constatntle having to chose which option "a,b,c,d" is best. When we're trying to come up with a solution to new problems, we have multiple approaches... we evaluate them, and then choose.
Yes, school was boring, and there were a lot of confirmity inducing activities, but they were helpful in their own right.
On one hand, companies tend to like most folks to conform, with a few folks standing out in order to have some sort of consistent and predictable direction. On the other hand, those that do stand out, have learned to get along with everyone else, and still stand out and maintain their own individuality.
Have to rejuvenate the kid on the weekend? Good. That's your job. Keep individuality alive, and instill your own values. The school is a machine, and not able to that level of need consistently for everyone.
I still have yet to hear an education "solution" that gets folks out of the 18th century using the people that are currently teaching, and able to allow each and every student to do their own thing and be measurable in some way or another.
As long as we keep alot of the social/moral messages out of school, I'm happy enough with the system. Let them do the boring teaching work, let me do the interesting stuff.
>They are watermarked, and you have to install their software.
Watermarking is not DRM. Watermarking does not restrict what you can do with the music in any way. You are still free to share it all over the place, just now, in theory they can trace it back to you.
You only have to use their software for "whole albums", which is still weird, but still doesn's constitute DRM. Once you have the album, you can do what you want with it without their software.
> 4 additionals bytes (B) dont seem that much of a price.
Sorry, had to say it... but are you really sure that "ytes" is beings represented on my machine in bytes? My browser might actually be translating into a unicode representation (or some other storage) that uses at least 2 Bytes per character. =-)
Even if you got those sorts of speeds, what effect would that have on your overall system speed? If you were managing a group of devices via RAID, and able to feed them all over the bus, since USB is dependent on the main processor, how much overhead will that 10x cost you.
>DHCP doesn't give a network admin any more control over a network, either.
Sure it does. I can set certain classes of my clients to use a certain set of DNS servers; I can black list specific MAC addresses from getting an address, or I can grant them addresses on a VLAN that has no corporate access but has Internet access; I can have a central location that records the addresses of my clients and who they're linked with, etc...
At least these are services I'm used to right now with DHCPv4. I'm going to be pissed when we make the move to IPv6 and I don't have these same features.
To your specific argument about why it doesn't give any more control... Yes, there are trivially simple ways to get around the need for DHCP, but that doesn't mean it doesn't provide a benefit when it's there. And actually, since I have a list of folks who properly negotiated their addresses, it's not difficult to scan the network for functioning addresses and if I don't have a registration... route them to NULL. How would I accomplish that in autoconfig?
Even without that, just being able to look at a console and say "hmm, I'm running about 80% utilization of addresses, I need to think about adjusting something here...". How would I get that sort of proactive info in autoconfig? Or is the answer the same as so much else in IPv6? (Make the individual subnets so large that it'd be impossible to fill them up)
Why would I want to step away from my remote control?
I have my Mac Mini setup on my TV, and I drop movie files on it from my real desktop. I don't want to have to browse to their site on a screen too small to fit everything, have it not use the full screen, have depend on my network connection working, etc...
I want to sit my ass down, hit the remote, select my show, and get fat.
The easiest one I can think of off top of my head is a to have IE6 become a required update. Upgrading from IE 5.5 to 6 can be disastrous for some apps. As I recall, that was the primary reason we still had thousands of machines running Windows 2000.
Other patches like the ones that changed the way ActiveX controls are enabled can ruin automation and user interaction. (What do you mean I have to go to the web page and click teh 7 graphs in order to get my dashboard to show up?)
Those are two obvious ones off the top of my head.
Anytime you futz with the OS, you run the risk of side effects having more subtle affects though.
> But in the absence of a professional code of ethics, companies struggle to keep corporate policies up to date."
How hard is that? Every large company I've seen policies for has blanket statements saying something like "don't access stuff you're not authorized to access". What is not being kept up to date? How much more complicated does it need to get?
I work in Enterprise IT, and we love work. Our problem is that we're kept so busy because they've laid everyone off that we don't have time to get fluent in the specifics of every technology we'd like to implement. And if we put something out there, since we're "Enteprise", it has to basically be perfect the first time out or whoever is in charge of us this week will end up torching the moving the project to another group to mis-run.
It's not "IT" that's your problem... its the executives and management.
Just do away with DUI entirely... enforce the laws on the books, and maybe add a "you did something intentionally that made you more likely to be a dumbass" multiplier.
Weave into the next lane without signalling? That's a paddling. Doing it while drunk? That's a triple paddling. Doing it while on your phone? That's a triple paddling. Doing it while eating? That's a triple paddling. Doing it while catching your house plant? That's a triple paddling.
Punish the behavior enough (driving like a dumbass), and people will focus on avoiding that behavior. The serious drunks? they were never going to follow anything anyway, so it doesn't make a real difference.
Why do alot of people not use their turn signals, even when there is time? Because "it's not a big deal".
Some places are set with their external servers as dumb as possible... they know nothing about whose accounts are valid or not, so if they ever do get hacked, you don't have all legal addresses available for mailings lists, sales, etc...
Granted, you can pick up alot from logs, but not all
I can't find the reference, but didn't Apple say that if they ever shutdown the Apple Store they'd release keys to permanently unlock the purchased content?
Exactly... people forcible sent from their homes, and having their weapons forcibly removed from then in area where there was high crime and police control had broken down. The people who needed their basic rights the most had them forcibyly remove by the government.
Slashdot Mirror
>The Supreme Court has held that jury awards which are more than ten (10) times the actual damage are presumptively unconstitutional.
/Unless you can count court costs as damages... in which 10x of attorney's fees could get interesting
I'm still missing a step though...
If some guy in the swap meet is selling bootlegs of your work, and you can't prove how many he sold, how can there be any possibility of determining actual damages.
Lets say he sells 5,000 copies of your works at $1.00 a piece over the period of a few months
Lets assume you would get yourself about $3.00 a piece normally from your authorized distributors.
You could easily argue that you have taken damages in the amount of $15,000.
However, you were only able to prove that he sold 3 copies, which works out to a provable $9.00 of damages, and using your 10x as a rough ceiling, you could only recover $90.00 from the guy.
He actually pulled in $5,000.00, so even if he lost (excluding court costs), he's still ahead $4,910.00.
If that's the only worry he has, there is no reason not to sell bootlegs. There is next to no risk.
Guess that's why the pay y'all teh big bucks. Thanks for clearing that up!
>-the unconstitutionality of a verdict for about 30,000 times the actual damage, and
Totally not a lawyer here... but those were statutory damages, weren't they? Which means the didn't have anything to do with actual damages.
And statutory damages, in my understanding, were setup because there are common situations where you just cannot prove how extensive the damages were. (when you nab the guy selling bootleg DVDs at the swapmeet... you might only be able to prove 3 sales, but he may have sold thousands of copies... not having statutory damages makes this a virtual no loss situation for the bootlegger)
That doesn't address its constitutionality directly, but it at least addresses where some of the "fair"ness comes in.
Am I missing something?
I'm way ot of my depth here, but aren't there also for cause rejections as well?
I don't know what limits there are on cause, but it seems to be a competent attorney could dig into the person with questions to try to elicit responses that would show a likely hood of deciding on factors that would not be relevant, that is, likely to render an unfair verdict.
Of course, if you get too picky you end up ticking off the judge and that may end up biasing things against you, but that's a whole different class of problem.
Right, but in the bootleg case, if you can prove one sale was made, you go for stautory damages which are much greater than a single sales worth, because there is just no way to prove how many were sold.
You've proven the guy did you damage of some sort, and its not remotely practical for the courts to work out how much that damage was, so statutory damages apply.
Funny, That really sounded like 3 standard sequels to me... just minor variations on the theme.
I haven't played any of them since I was so ticket when MS took Halo from the Mac for so long.
This gets to the whole "making available" argument... you could argue that "making available" is the same as "attempted distribution". (And in that case, "I didn't know I was distributing" seems like it should be an adequate defense.)
If you have a guy selling bootleg DVDs that you own the copyright to, do you have to actually prove that people purchased copies of the DVD in order to take action? The guy was at a swap meet, a place to sell stuff... and had copies of your material, which he didn't not have the right to distribute.
If you do take him in, how do you prove how many people actually purchased copies? How do you show that they would have bought them from you?
This is why there are statutory damages... to remove that whole problem, because they are impossible to show.
On the criminal side... it seems a little like saying "I didn't conspire to murder them", I was just "making the murder available by providing information about the socalled target, and providing the tools to do it.". It's not my fault someone took advantage of that situation.
>I suppose we should all be allowed to own slaves again? That, after all, was implicitly provided for in the original constitution and by the founders... but we've realized that's a terrible idea since then.
And using the processes within that document that was specifically weeded out.
> The fact that they choose to interpret it one way now as opposed to a different way then is not an expansion of their powers, nor is it a restriction of your rights; it is simply a re-interpretation thereof by an entity that has always been empowered to do so.
Yep, and this was provided for in that same document. We just need to make sure that we get/stay involved in the selection of judges in general, inasmuch as we can. If you don't vote your local judges, and don't use your opinion of judges when voting for those who would appoint them, you'r feeding into the system.
The system was designed to change slowly, and change slowly it has. Hopefully folks are starting to notice that the frog-boiler is getting a bit hot and we need to start shifting to "getting us out of the pot".
>Hardly. I can find you a dozen people to say anything at all.
And it's the opposing attorney's job to try to weed that sort of thing out.
That's part of why we have an adversarial system
You (in this case a white man, pretend anyway if you're not) are sitting in the Jury to convict a white man of murdering a black man... he obviously did it, but you don't believe that should be a crime since the black man went out with his white daughter against his wishes.
Is nullification good then?
I really like the whole jury of peers thing, but when the peers themselves are corrupt, justice just doesn't get done.
I'm really torn on this whole thing.
I'm in a similar position, and I'm constatntle having to chose which option "a,b,c,d" is best. When we're trying to come up with a solution to new problems, we have multiple approaches... we evaluate them, and then choose.
Yes, school was boring, and there were a lot of confirmity inducing activities, but they were helpful in their own right.
On one hand, companies tend to like most folks to conform, with a few folks standing out in order to have some sort of consistent and predictable direction.
On the other hand, those that do stand out, have learned to get along with everyone else, and still stand out and maintain their own individuality.
Have to rejuvenate the kid on the weekend? Good. That's your job. Keep individuality alive, and instill your own values. The school is a machine, and not able to that level of need consistently for everyone.
I still have yet to hear an education "solution" that gets folks out of the 18th century using the people that are currently teaching, and able to allow each and every student to do their own thing and be measurable in some way or another.
As long as we keep alot of the social/moral messages out of school, I'm happy enough with the system. Let them do the boring teaching work, let me do the interesting stuff.
>They are watermarked, and you have to install their software.
Watermarking is not DRM. Watermarking does not restrict what you can do with the music in any way.
You are still free to share it all over the place, just now, in theory they can trace it back to you.
You only have to use their software for "whole albums", which is still weird, but still doesn's constitute DRM.
Once you have the album, you can do what you want with it without their software.
>Mostly, I made it through HS by not caring what anyone thought of me.
Why post AC?
> 4 additionals bytes (B) dont seem that much of a price.
Sorry, had to say it... but are you really sure that "ytes" is beings represented on my machine in bytes? My browser might actually be translating into a unicode representation (or some other storage) that uses at least 2 Bytes per character. =-)
Even if you got those sorts of speeds, what effect would that have on your overall system speed?
If you were managing a group of devices via RAID, and able to feed them all over the bus, since USB is dependent on the main processor, how much overhead will that 10x cost you.
big deal? doubt it
>DHCP doesn't give a network admin any more control over a network, either.
Sure it does.
I can set certain classes of my clients to use a certain set of DNS servers; I can black list specific MAC addresses from getting an address, or I can grant them addresses on a VLAN that has no corporate access but has Internet access; I can have a central location that records the addresses of my clients and who they're linked with, etc...
At least these are services I'm used to right now with DHCPv4. I'm going to be pissed when we make the move to IPv6 and I don't have these same features.
To your specific argument about why it doesn't give any more control... Yes, there are trivially simple ways to get around the need for DHCP, but that doesn't mean it doesn't provide a benefit when it's there. And actually, since I have a list of folks who properly negotiated their addresses, it's not difficult to scan the network for functioning addresses and if I don't have a registration... route them to NULL. How would I accomplish that in autoconfig?
Even without that, just being able to look at a console and say "hmm, I'm running about 80% utilization of addresses, I need to think about adjusting something here...". How would I get that sort of proactive info in autoconfig? Or is the answer the same as so much else in IPv6? (Make the individual subnets so large that it'd be impossible to fill them up)
Why would I want to step away from my remote control?
I have my Mac Mini setup on my TV, and I drop movie files on it from my real desktop.
I don't want to have to browse to their site on a screen too small to fit everything, have it not use the full screen, have depend on my network connection working, etc...
I want to sit my ass down, hit the remote, select my show, and get fat.
The easiest one I can think of off top of my head is a to have IE6 become a required update. Upgrading from IE 5.5 to 6 can be disastrous for some apps. As I recall, that was the primary reason we still had thousands of machines running Windows 2000.
Other patches like the ones that changed the way ActiveX controls are enabled can ruin automation and user interaction. (What do you mean I have to go to the web page and click teh 7 graphs in order to get my dashboard to show up?)
Those are two obvious ones off the top of my head.
Anytime you futz with the OS, you run the risk of side effects having more subtle affects though.
> But in the absence of a professional code of ethics, companies struggle to keep corporate policies up to date."
How hard is that? Every large company I've seen policies for has blanket statements saying something like "don't access stuff you're not authorized to access".
What is not being kept up to date? How much more complicated does it need to get?
I work in Enterprise IT, and we love work.
Our problem is that we're kept so busy because they've laid everyone off that we don't have time to get fluent in the specifics of every technology we'd like to implement.
And if we put something out there, since we're "Enteprise", it has to basically be perfect the first time out or whoever is in charge of us this week will end up torching the moving the project to another group to mis-run.
It's not "IT" that's your problem... its the executives and management.
Just do away with DUI entirely... enforce the laws on the books, and maybe add a "you did something intentionally that made you more likely to be a dumbass" multiplier.
Weave into the next lane without signalling? That's a paddling.
Doing it while drunk? That's a triple paddling.
Doing it while on your phone? That's a triple paddling.
Doing it while eating? That's a triple paddling.
Doing it while catching your house plant? That's a triple paddling.
Punish the behavior enough (driving like a dumbass), and people will focus on avoiding that behavior.
The serious drunks? they were never going to follow anything anyway, so it doesn't make a real difference.
Why do alot of people not use their turn signals, even when there is time? Because "it's not a big deal".
>OP is a bit naive thinking he won't be able to buy Universal content any more!!
I don't run Windows at home (get enough of it at work)... How much do you want to bet whatever site pops up to sell the show will be WMP10 or similar?
Some places are set with their external servers as dumb as possible... they know nothing about whose accounts are valid or not, so if they ever do get hacked, you don't have all legal addresses available for mailings lists, sales, etc...
Granted, you can pick up alot from logs, but not all
I can't find the reference, but didn't Apple say that if they ever shutdown the Apple Store they'd release keys to permanently unlock the purchased content?
Exactly... people forcible sent from their homes, and having their weapons forcibly removed from then in area where there was high crime and police control had broken down.
The people who needed their basic rights the most had them forcibyly remove by the government.