1. Discovery under law, is still tied to documents, not hardware.
No, it's not. Civil discovery applies to absolutely everything, starting with documents and continuing on to digging up every square inch of soil on your property.
2. All documents called must have relevance, and must relate to the case and the affected parties
All documents must pass the bar of admissibility to be admitted into evidence at trial. Discovery has a broader scope, and applies in particular to all things which can reasonably be expected to lead to admissible evidence. Guess what - a hard drive that allegedly contains pirated music can reasonably be expected to lead to admissible evidence; to wit, the pirated music.
3. indepedant parties are required to ensure that no documents not defined under the court order are accessed
The court order on its face requires an independent party analyze the drive, so this statement boils down to have no meaning whatsoever; but it's also mostly irrelevant to this side discussion.
4. You can not search other non afilliated parties documents, just because they happen to be there.
Sure, you can. You can search whatever is discoverable.
5. The constitution still applies to civil courts, in fact doubly so.
This is a fairly dubious claim. Do you have anything that backs up your belief that the Constitution applies "doubly" in civil matters? Furthermore, what part of the Constitution is implicated in the case of a hard drive being requested in civil discovery?
This is just discovery, not trial evidence. Discovery has a much broader scope than what is relevant and otherwise admissible. They don't know what's on the drive, and part of discovery is letting them discover what's on it. Also, the discovery form in use here is not "production of documents," it's "production of documents and things and entry upon land for inspection and other purposes." (FRCP 34.) The hard drive is a tangible thing ripe for inspection.
Yep. There's more to securely erasing a file than erasing its contents. You have to completely erase evidence of its existence, including the hole that was left by its removal. A good computer forensics expert (and you can rest assured that the RIAA is hiring the best of the best in the private sector for this kind of thing) will be able to tell what you did.
I checked the court's order here and it looks like Rule 26(c) was invoked, oddly by the plaintiff RIAA. Apparently the defendant refused to produce her hard drive and the RIAA claimed that a mirror image of it was necessary, and that any privacy concerns could be dealt with under a Rule 26(c) protective order. Normally, a plaintiff makes a motion under Rule 26(c), so this looks a tad unusual to me but it works. The judge did not explicitly rely on Rule 26(c) in making his order, but everything about the order says it's a Rule 26(c) order.
Rule 26(c) provides that, when certain prerequisites are met, "the court... may make any order which justice requires to protect a party or person from annoyance, embarrassment, oppression, or undue burden or expense, including... that the disclosure or discovery may be had only on specified terms and conditions...; that the discovery may be had only by a method of discovery other than that selected by the party seeking discovery; that certain matters not be inquired into, or that the scope of the disclosure or discovery be limited to certain matters; [or] that discovery be conducted with no one present except persons designated by the court[.]" See the text of Rule 26 for more.
Long story short - like I said, the court is just applying the rules and common sense. The RIAA is going to kick and scream about it, but there's nothing out of the ordinary about what just happened.:)
I thought that the idea was to lawfully have a copy of Mac OS X and install it on non-Apple hardware, as opposed to pirating the software and installing it on whatever hardware you have around. Maybe I was mistaken.
No, probable cause is not relevant in a civil case. However, this does strike the balance that the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure are supposed to provide between a plaintiff's ability to use discovery procedures to get access to the evidence he needs to prove his case and the defendant's interest in keeping his private information private. This is a very common-sense decision that probably has no real precedential value (because it's what most lawyers agree on anyhow), and it's good to see a judge using the rules and common sense to tell the RIAA that it is just like any other plaintiff in any other case, and just because it can bully Congress around doesn't mean that it can ignore the civil procedure rules and bully a court or civil defendant around.
If this were a criminal matter, then things would be different.
Like I said, I am no expert in the framebuffer hardware field. However, you talk about the hardware being unable to handle it at the time. Hardware is not something that one grabs out of the aether and it is not something that evolves on its own. Someone has to invent, develop, and implement the hardware. Was SGI doing something non-obvious with the hardware that made the claimed technology here possible? Why was SGI able to do it when nobody else did? (Note that the business decision not to invent something or not to develop it is likely financially motivated, and any relevance it has to obviousness of the innovation is probably limited to a suggestion that the invention is not obvious if only one person is capable of figuring out how to invent it without taking a long-term financial loss; I'm not willing to make that suggestion here.)
On a side note, the lawyers that you detest are able to articulate their arguments without using the word "shit." Why aren't you?
How does hardware floating point for what borders on a realtime application in 1997 become obvious if nobody else was doing it? There's no need to throw flamebait out there - but if you must, then at least make sure that your point is linked to the discussion in a rational way. How can you say that something is obvious when only the world's leader in graphics hardware manages to think of doing it? If SGI wasn't the only company doing it, that's different, but that's the question I posed. If truly nobody else came up with it, then you have a pretty steep hill to climb on convincing anyone that the idea was really so obvious as to be unpatentable.
SGI still has viable products. This is actual protection of its intellectual property in the one area that it has always (rightly) prided itself in leading. SCO is different because it is litigating something it didn't invent and has no continuing interest in protecting. SGI might be dying, but it is not yet at the point that its business model gives priority to litigation.
Where would you draw the line? When is it okay to litigate to protect your intellectual property without being accused of having a business model of litigation?
The abstract, which you quoted, is not the patent. Read each of the "claims" in the patent for what is actually claimed as being covered by the patent.
That said, I don't know what the state of the art was in 1998, but how obvious was a floating-point frame buffer back then? To me, that seems to be the real question here, at least in terms of obviousness of the patent. When did ATI start using similar technology? How far behind does ATI have to be before the idea is no longer obvious?
For the past couple of months, Apple has said that the new Xserve (with Xeon processors) will be available in October. October's almost gone. Does anyone know the scoop on this?
I honestly have no idea. Forgetting to set your clocks ahead for daylight saving time is one thing, but missing an entire leap day two times in a row is kind of funny.
What the hell? This looks like a teenager taking the interview in a busy airport concourse. Can someone help me pull the fork out of my ear? I had to put it there to survive long enough to find the "stop" button on the interview video.
No. Most of the hard work in writing something like this is dealing with server errors, which Myspace serves up in lieu of content based on a sinusoidal pattern where you have between 10 and 100 percent probability of getting an error depending on the time of day on Mars.
Are you saying that, given the choice between 100 people (who are presumably not political clones of each other), the only way to find one you agree with is if there is only one issue at stake? Can you provide evidence to support this statement?
I think that you have trends that are later less popular and totalitarianism confused. Ireland is a republic, and as such there is political accountability for the.ie TLD not allowing pornography-related domain names. If you don't like the rule, elect a new government that will reverse it. In a totalitarian state, one man would have made this decision and there would be no way short of military coup to change his mind about it.
Totalitarianism is orthogonal to all of the things you listed as examples of bad public policy, and moreover is entirely incompatible with the concept of public policy itself. The term public policy infers that it's a policy of the people. If you have a one-man government, the policies are no longer public in ownership but only in application.
The really interesting part of the switch, to me, is the Swedish debacle. Essentially, in 1700 they set a 40-year no-leap-days plan to get on track, but ended up with leap days in both of the following leap years, so they ended up one day ahead of the Julian calendar (and still nowhere near the Gregorian calendar). They held a February 30 double leap day in 1712 to get back on Julian and then finally managed to convert to Gregorian by 1753.
The statement is accurate, but imprecise. The lawsuit referred to in the article you linked to appears to be not for defamation but rather for wrongful termination when reporters refused to lie. In fact, Fox claimed that it was trying to avoid a defamation suit by taking the actions it did.
Bzzt. Wrong answer. The correct answer, in the American legal system, is that the jury decides issues of fact and the judge decides issues of fact. (The exception is that the judge can decide issues of fact as a matter of law when there is no issue of material fact, such as when there is absolutely no evidence on a given point or when there is absolutely no evidence disputing a given point.)
In most civil cases, the issue of liability and the issue of damages are both issues of material fact which are subject to legitimate dispute.
I haven't RTFA, and IANAL, but generally you don't get to the jury without a defendant present. A plaintiff's lawyer files the complaint and serves the defendant; if the defendant does not respond by filing an answer, a motion to dismiss, or some other appearance in the case, the plaintiff's lawyer files a motion for default judgment and gets a court order saying the plaintiff won because the defendant failed to show up. (If the defendant was not properly served with the suit papers, then he can later file a motion to dismiss for failure to serve process. Plaintiffs' lawyers are paranoid about this, since the suit could be dismissed after the statute of limitations runs and be lost forever.)
At any rate, I somehow suspect that the defendant here managed to make an appearance of some sort.
UANAL, indeed. Most wrongful death suits are the result of unintentional torts, such as negligence (and its popular subcategory, medical malpractice). The torts of assault, battery, intentional infliction of emotional distress, slander, libel, conversion, and trespass are examples of intentional torts.
Slashdot Mirror
No, it's not. Civil discovery applies to absolutely everything, starting with documents and continuing on to digging up every square inch of soil on your property.
All documents must pass the bar of admissibility to be admitted into evidence at trial. Discovery has a broader scope, and applies in particular to all things which can reasonably be expected to lead to admissible evidence. Guess what - a hard drive that allegedly contains pirated music can reasonably be expected to lead to admissible evidence; to wit, the pirated music.
The court order on its face requires an independent party analyze the drive, so this statement boils down to have no meaning whatsoever; but it's also mostly irrelevant to this side discussion.
Sure, you can. You can search whatever is discoverable.
This is a fairly dubious claim. Do you have anything that backs up your belief that the Constitution applies "doubly" in civil matters? Furthermore, what part of the Constitution is implicated in the case of a hard drive being requested in civil discovery?
This is just discovery, not trial evidence. Discovery has a much broader scope than what is relevant and otherwise admissible. They don't know what's on the drive, and part of discovery is letting them discover what's on it. Also, the discovery form in use here is not "production of documents," it's "production of documents and things and entry upon land for inspection and other purposes." (FRCP 34.) The hard drive is a tangible thing ripe for inspection.
Yep. There's more to securely erasing a file than erasing its contents. You have to completely erase evidence of its existence, including the hole that was left by its removal. A good computer forensics expert (and you can rest assured that the RIAA is hiring the best of the best in the private sector for this kind of thing) will be able to tell what you did.
I checked the court's order here and it looks like Rule 26(c) was invoked, oddly by the plaintiff RIAA. Apparently the defendant refused to produce her hard drive and the RIAA claimed that a mirror image of it was necessary, and that any privacy concerns could be dealt with under a Rule 26(c) protective order. Normally, a plaintiff makes a motion under Rule 26(c), so this looks a tad unusual to me but it works. The judge did not explicitly rely on Rule 26(c) in making his order, but everything about the order says it's a Rule 26(c) order.
... may make any order which justice requires to protect a party or person from annoyance, embarrassment, oppression, or undue burden or expense, including ... that the disclosure or discovery may be had only on specified terms and conditions ...; that the discovery may be had only by a method of discovery other than that selected by the party seeking discovery; that certain matters not be inquired into, or that the scope of the disclosure or discovery be limited to certain matters; [or] that discovery be conducted with no one present except persons designated by the court[.]" See the text of Rule 26 for more.
:)
Rule 26(c) provides that, when certain prerequisites are met, "the court
Long story short - like I said, the court is just applying the rules and common sense. The RIAA is going to kick and scream about it, but there's nothing out of the ordinary about what just happened.
I thought that the idea was to lawfully have a copy of Mac OS X and install it on non-Apple hardware, as opposed to pirating the software and installing it on whatever hardware you have around. Maybe I was mistaken.
No, probable cause is not relevant in a civil case. However, this does strike the balance that the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure are supposed to provide between a plaintiff's ability to use discovery procedures to get access to the evidence he needs to prove his case and the defendant's interest in keeping his private information private. This is a very common-sense decision that probably has no real precedential value (because it's what most lawyers agree on anyhow), and it's good to see a judge using the rules and common sense to tell the RIAA that it is just like any other plaintiff in any other case, and just because it can bully Congress around doesn't mean that it can ignore the civil procedure rules and bully a court or civil defendant around.
If this were a criminal matter, then things would be different.
Like I said, I am no expert in the framebuffer hardware field. However, you talk about the hardware being unable to handle it at the time. Hardware is not something that one grabs out of the aether and it is not something that evolves on its own. Someone has to invent, develop, and implement the hardware. Was SGI doing something non-obvious with the hardware that made the claimed technology here possible? Why was SGI able to do it when nobody else did? (Note that the business decision not to invent something or not to develop it is likely financially motivated, and any relevance it has to obviousness of the innovation is probably limited to a suggestion that the invention is not obvious if only one person is capable of figuring out how to invent it without taking a long-term financial loss; I'm not willing to make that suggestion here.)
On a side note, the lawyers that you detest are able to articulate their arguments without using the word "shit." Why aren't you?
How does hardware floating point for what borders on a realtime application in 1997 become obvious if nobody else was doing it? There's no need to throw flamebait out there - but if you must, then at least make sure that your point is linked to the discussion in a rational way. How can you say that something is obvious when only the world's leader in graphics hardware manages to think of doing it? If SGI wasn't the only company doing it, that's different, but that's the question I posed. If truly nobody else came up with it, then you have a pretty steep hill to climb on convincing anyone that the idea was really so obvious as to be unpatentable.
I don't know about you suckers, but I finally found a girl who likes the joke about getting her a charcoal ring for the truly long-term investment. :P
I always thought the Crimson was the coolest. Here is a picture of a few SGI systems for your amusement.
SGI still has viable products. This is actual protection of its intellectual property in the one area that it has always (rightly) prided itself in leading. SCO is different because it is litigating something it didn't invent and has no continuing interest in protecting. SGI might be dying, but it is not yet at the point that its business model gives priority to litigation.
Where would you draw the line? When is it okay to litigate to protect your intellectual property without being accused of having a business model of litigation?
The abstract, which you quoted, is not the patent. Read each of the "claims" in the patent for what is actually claimed as being covered by the patent.
That said, I don't know what the state of the art was in 1998, but how obvious was a floating-point frame buffer back then? To me, that seems to be the real question here, at least in terms of obviousness of the patent. When did ATI start using similar technology? How far behind does ATI have to be before the idea is no longer obvious?
Given your signature, I will take you seriously. I have mod points right now but sadly there isn't an option for "+1 Gracious." :)
For the past couple of months, Apple has said that the new Xserve (with Xeon processors) will be available in October. October's almost gone. Does anyone know the scoop on this?
I honestly have no idea. Forgetting to set your clocks ahead for daylight saving time is one thing, but missing an entire leap day two times in a row is kind of funny.
What the hell? This looks like a teenager taking the interview in a busy airport concourse. Can someone help me pull the fork out of my ear? I had to put it there to survive long enough to find the "stop" button on the interview video.
No. Most of the hard work in writing something like this is dealing with server errors, which Myspace serves up in lieu of content based on a sinusoidal pattern where you have between 10 and 100 percent probability of getting an error depending on the time of day on Mars.
Are you saying that, given the choice between 100 people (who are presumably not political clones of each other), the only way to find one you agree with is if there is only one issue at stake? Can you provide evidence to support this statement?
That's only the case if you only have two choices in any election.
I think that you have trends that are later less popular and totalitarianism confused. Ireland is a republic, and as such there is political accountability for the .ie TLD not allowing pornography-related domain names. If you don't like the rule, elect a new government that will reverse it. In a totalitarian state, one man would have made this decision and there would be no way short of military coup to change his mind about it.
Totalitarianism is orthogonal to all of the things you listed as examples of bad public policy, and moreover is entirely incompatible with the concept of public policy itself. The term public policy infers that it's a policy of the people. If you have a one-man government, the policies are no longer public in ownership but only in application.
The really interesting part of the switch, to me, is the Swedish debacle. Essentially, in 1700 they set a 40-year no-leap-days plan to get on track, but ended up with leap days in both of the following leap years, so they ended up one day ahead of the Julian calendar (and still nowhere near the Gregorian calendar). They held a February 30 double leap day in 1712 to get back on Julian and then finally managed to convert to Gregorian by 1753.
The statement is accurate, but imprecise. The lawsuit referred to in the article you linked to appears to be not for defamation but rather for wrongful termination when reporters refused to lie. In fact, Fox claimed that it was trying to avoid a defamation suit by taking the actions it did.
Bzzt. Wrong answer. The correct answer, in the American legal system, is that the jury decides issues of fact and the judge decides issues of fact. (The exception is that the judge can decide issues of fact as a matter of law when there is no issue of material fact, such as when there is absolutely no evidence on a given point or when there is absolutely no evidence disputing a given point.)
In most civil cases, the issue of liability and the issue of damages are both issues of material fact which are subject to legitimate dispute.
I haven't RTFA, and IANAL, but generally you don't get to the jury without a defendant present. A plaintiff's lawyer files the complaint and serves the defendant; if the defendant does not respond by filing an answer, a motion to dismiss, or some other appearance in the case, the plaintiff's lawyer files a motion for default judgment and gets a court order saying the plaintiff won because the defendant failed to show up. (If the defendant was not properly served with the suit papers, then he can later file a motion to dismiss for failure to serve process. Plaintiffs' lawyers are paranoid about this, since the suit could be dismissed after the statute of limitations runs and be lost forever.)
At any rate, I somehow suspect that the defendant here managed to make an appearance of some sort.
UANAL, indeed. Most wrongful death suits are the result of unintentional torts, such as negligence (and its popular subcategory, medical malpractice). The torts of assault, battery, intentional infliction of emotional distress, slander, libel, conversion, and trespass are examples of intentional torts.