An agreement or contract is only valid if both parties accept it. Yes. But acceptance is not the same as performance. The GPL is constructed in such a way that downloading the software is acceptance to be bound by its terms. No explicit grant of permission is needed from the copyright holder, since the authorization exists in making the software available in the first place. No specific notification is required by the licensee, as the GPL has neither requested nor required it.
Once a contract is accepted by both parties, a license exists and the power to revoke has left the offeror's hands. Breach of contract is the remedy for non-performance.
Saying "by copying this code you agree to the contract" is not valid, because there's nothing to stop you from disagreeing and yet copy it. Someone's been asleep for the past century. The offeror has the power to invite acceptance by any terms he sees fit. If the offeror determines that assent may be provided by the taking of the software, it is adequate acceptance, that is his right. Thus the GPL certainly MAY say "by using this software you agree to these terms".
In other words, it's pretty much up to the defendant whether this should be seen as a copyright violation or a breech of contract. First, you mean plaintiff; second, it's not true; third, if it were a copyright infringement suit, it wouldn't be a test of the GPL. It would be a test of copyright law.
The GPL says that one must agree to its terms to get permission, You keep saying "agree" but neglecting the fact that you actually mean "comply." These two are not the same.
You've got an offer and an acceptance, and thus a contract is formed and a license exists. Breach of contract from one party does not legitimate breach of contract from the other. Performance of the contract is separate from agreement to the contract. If you sue for copyright infringement because a party has not disclosed its source code (and you believe that they are obligated to), you're going to get countersued for breach of contract yourself.
You don't get to revoke your offer after it has been accepted. Specific performance of the terms is a contractual issue, not a copyright issue. You, as the copyright owner, extended an offer for a license (a promise not to sue) and performed by providing the code. The other party has accepted by using said code. The power to revoke is OVER. You, the copyright holder, are now bound not to sue; if you do so, you're breaching your contract. "But he broke the contract first!" is not a defense. This is why Slashdot is a poor source for legal information, because the masses just mod up your comments because they seem to make sense and support a popular viewpoint. It is sadly irrelevant to the community that what you're saying is completely bogus.
Because they don't have time for filibusters. There is no sort of regulation of what is said. The person continues to speak until he stops. He can say whatever he wants--read from cookbooks, go through the phonebook, just say "potato" over and over. He just has to keep standing and keep talking and it wastes everyone's time. There's no "actual speech" delivered in a filibuster--they're not debating the bill, they're just keeping it from coming to a straight vote because they know it will win and they don't want it to.
If the Senate can't get 60 people to vote in favor of cloture, they can't end the filibuster.
I'll pay less of it, because the sale price of the Mac will be lower without the 15% premium associated with the Apple Store's Canadian prices Uh, that 15% premium is mostly GST and PST, and the remaining 2% or so would be more than eaten by the cost of gas.
Easy. We don't have collective responsibility, so unlike the UK, the majority party doesn't get to do whatever it wants.
The minority party lets it leak (subtly or blatantly) that they intend to filibuster a certain bill, which causes the majority to revise the bill, pull it from a vote, or engage in some wild acrobatics to run it through anyway. This is because the majority party can't govern if they can't win, and if they can't get more than a handful of Republicans to vote for cloture, they can't defeat the filibuster.
It's an underhanded and sore-loser way of preventing the legitimately elected party from governing. It's an exercise dramatically tilted toward Republican abuse. The Democrats get their asses handed to them even when they're in the majority because they're the "nice guys" of Congress and won't step up to the plate. It's admirable in part and cowardly in part. The democrats could use some spine and arrogance, but they don't want to piss off the vocal Puritan Right, because no one can top their smear campaigns.
The ONLY reason you said he was an inventor was because you mistakenly thought he claimed patents on his own inventions. No, the only reason I said he was an inventor was because he, gosh, I don't know, invented things. He never wrote to say that inventors shouldn't have property rights in their inventions. All of his writings, not taken out of context as misapplied as you have done, have supported the property rights of inventors--copyright and patent in his day.
What he wrote against, and what no one except the mythological argument constructed by clueless twits like you, is the idea that information is property. It's not. Property is property, and copyrights and patents are property.
I've already shown you two quotes from him demonstrating that he felt strongly that property rights in ideas were dubious at best and there are lots more where those came from. You've demonstrated no such thing. You've given nothing that says copyright and patents are distasteful--again, he didn't believe they were. He believed them to be a valid tool in his utilitarian view of commerce and society. He disagreed with the conflicting rationale of "inherent value" of an idea itself, prompting his letter in 1813 regarding the concept of an idea as personalty--a concept rejected by Jefferson and the law. Curiously, you have solely quoted from it and not from the context of his discussions prior to or after with McPherson. Of course you wouldn't, because they don't support your conclusion.
You can keep writing until you turn blue, but you're railing against a point no one is making.
The only difference is that congress has interpreted "limited time" to approach infinity and I have interpreted it to be so short as to be negligible. Actually, the only difference is that the Supreme Court found one to be constitutional whereas you have no authority.
And yet he NEVER patented any of his own inventions - he gave them away freely Which is certainly his right, as it is the right of every other inventor. He never begrudged the rights of other inventors to choose an alternate path. He didn't rally against property rights, ever, for anyone else. He recognized the natural right to profit from one's own labour and to control interests in his works. That he personally chose to give his inventions away freely does not reflect any such expectation on others. That he specifically protected and voluntarily implemented the systems to establish it speaks to that. He had no obligation to take a role in establishing copyrights and patents in this country. He did so of his own accord and because of his belief in the plan for government that he had helped to shape.
By nature's law, every man has a right to seize and retake by force his own property taken from him by another by force or fraud."--Jefferson again This doesn't get you anywhere. This simply says that property rights are the right to exclude. It's a tautology already embodied in and exhibited by the law.
You start disregarding the law in your day to day actions and you let me know how far you get before the lawfully delegated neutral third parties start applying force to your person. Done. Easy enough. Now what do I get?
Maybe the prize of you shutting up, since you have yet to provide a natural rights argument for why you have an inherent right to the work of others or to interfere with that which they can control. If I happen to see your credit card, I'll be especially glad to know that I'm free to use it and then to sell it to someone else to use.
Good luck with your laws of nature. They'll be especially helpful in signing your first employment contract when you grow up, and free from any guidance in nature, be immensely useful when you're terminated for breach of said contract.
It does not matter WHY he robbed you, the fact is that a law can't stop him. An intentional limitation. Would you prefer that the law be able to STOP people in an active sense? The law serves the people. The threat of "force" (by which you mean physical violence) is not what underscores the law in any modern case. It is irrational to arrive at that conclusion, but not surprising, given your clear lack of ability to consider your surroundings.
And I also know that he did so grudgingly A gross mischaracterization. That's the same as saying that they implemented government in general grudgingly--there was no superior option and still is none. Jefferson was never opposed to investing property interests in inventors--he was one!
Yes, they do prove the point I am arguing. Only given the premise that information is a controllable possession, a premise which neither I myself nor the law accept. Jefferson's writings do not support your position. I'd suggest you read them more carefully.
I think real property is just about anything that can be termed real estate, we were talking about owning land weren't we? No, you started talking about a mugging. Nothing about the discussion topic, the Slashdot summary, or my comments have anything to do with real property. Real estate is not the same as real property, either--real estate is land and improvements. Real property is a set of rights granted from a sovereign.
The problem with taking a legal term and trying to take the law out of it is that you're left with nothing, much like your argument. There is no enduring need to connect anything to what some crap-flinging primates would do. It's an academic basis for theory, not a binding limit on practice.
Maybe I'm missing something, but if you want an mp3 player "without a battery"--then why do you care what happens to the battery if you were to buy an iPod (or some other digital player)?
So what if the battery capacity gets blasted down to minutes (though I think that's easily avoidable--just unplug it from the wall one or two days a week and let it discharge; iPod batteries last well over 20 hours)? Obviously from the teardowns of these products, the battery has no significant impact on the end price.
Bingo was his name-o! Law takes a back seat to nature No, it doesn't. "Nature" didn't make some guy rob me with a gun. He did it himself. The consequence of a free society is that law can only respond to threats. There is absolutely nothing that can restrain the free will of a person.
Shot dead is shot dead, doesn't matter who does the shooting. The law doesn't shoot people for trivial violations or on whims. It doesn't, in fact, shoot anyone.
Your selective Jefferson quote always tickles those in the legal community, and I'm glad you took the bait. It proves your ignorance and clearly demonstrates that you're a fish out of water here--just like when you talk about "real property" (hint: it doesn't mean what you think it means). You do know that Jefferson was the person who first implemented patents and copyrights in this country, right? You also know that the letter you're quoting from doesn't refer to patents or to copyrights, but merely to knowledge, right? That he drew the distinction, which still stands in the law, that the property rights were the copyright and the patent, not the information? That the writings and actions of Jefferson prove the very point you're arguing?
Maybe you're not clear on the distinction that Jefferson made for you in the difference of those property rights from the law of obligations (i.e. personal rights). The letter counters the theory, somewhat in vogue at the time, that patents and copyrights extended beyond commercial and property interests to fundamental human rights--a view which is not part of the modern rationales.
Now you go ahead and tell me all about how the law will govern that mugger into resolving the dispute. Meanwhile, he's long gone and you're dead Law serves society, not the individual. The lack of law in your colorful situation wouldn't change the outcome, either, but the law allows the family of the victim some recourse, while managing the people generally.
You think the law is any different? Seriously, who enforces the law? A neutral third party. That's the difference of society over your wild-ass chaos island.
Real property is excludable, information is not excludable. Real property is not "excludable" without law, and property in law is not based in real property. Real property is a unique and strange beast in any modern legal system.
Thus exerting control of information is infeasible. I agree. Unfortunately for you, intellectual property isn't control of information. It's control of property rights. You have no natural rights argument for profiting from the work of others. Conversely, they have a natural rights argument for barring your action--it's the fruit of their labour, not yours. You're going up against Jefferson, Locke, Hume, Beard, the Framers, the common law, statutory law, the Constitution, and logic.
You really do think the law determines the world and not that the world determines the law. No. The law has subsumed nature for the governance of the actions of men. "Natural law" is a philosophical origin, not a justification for modern society, and not an objective theory of ANYTHING beyond survival, food, and reproduction. Again, when you do away with society and technology and we're talking about fruit and log cabins, you'll have a point.
There is no need to "shoot everyone in your city" just the ones who try to take your property No. There is no need to shoot anyone. There is no objective theory of property without a third party. What defines "your" property? You? How is anyone else supposed to have notice? To have opportunity to contest? Who resolves the dispute. Your system sucks. The first person to shoot wins? Come on.
Tell that to the tens of millions of pirates on the net Are you honestly trying to make a natural law argument about technology? Technology isn't natural. Information isn't the subject of laws. Control and profit are, neither of which are naturally occurring. The right to profit for your labour and to control your creations are natural rights. That's the root of the law. You're deluded if you think you have any natural right to the work of others. That's directly contrary to any natural basis.
Except when you say "The work belongs to the creator until he sells it." It does belong to the creator in every meaningful way. If I don't publish my book or license reprinting of my painting, it will never become public domain so long as I own it. It is only when I sell it in some way that the SoL begins to run or that someone else has the authority to alter that privacy.
The actual, physical work--the original painting, the paper manuscript, the guitar tabs with scribbled notes, etc.--is subject to the laws of personalty or chattels, depending. The intellectual property rights are likewise mine to control. There is no requirement that I share copies of it with the public at all (if I do elect to do so, then I become subject to these limitations). Hence copyright--it offers a compromise to authors and artists to compel them to share without giving up the farm; it does not require that they enter into that bargain, however. My private diary doesn't enter the public domain if I've elected never to share any of my rights to it with anyone else. The physical book remains my property, as do all intellectual property rights. Things get quite a bit more complicated upon my death, but generally, all of those rights pass onto my estate and continue to remain private.
If I decline to license copies of my work at all, that is my right and no reproduction of any kind permissible--there's no 70 year limit, no fair use, nada. You must gain some sort of equitable right to my work by my authorization before I'm bound to honor any terms. 70 years later, you still can't just take my diary and publish it. In that sense, no one in the general public has any legal right to my work at all. Thus, if I never surrender any of my inherent rights to a work, you (and society) never gain them. An owner has exclusive rights in perpetuity so long as he never transfers any of those rights to anyone else.
In short, it's not a contradictory statement. As long as you keep your work entirely private, you're the sole owner of every aspect. There has to be a copy before the whole copyright bargain sets in.
I refer you to your own words: If you're going to do that, refer to ALL of them. Earlier in the discussion you jumped into the middle of, it was already established that we were talking about property in a legal context. The legal concept of property is the subject of the discussion, not the lay meaning of the word, which was also not at issue.
I don't see anything there about an idea, or an array of pixels on a monitor, or a pattern of dots on a canvas, or a sequence of words being classified as property That's because it's not. The right is the property, as I've said no fewer than three times previously in this thread. Nowhere is anything different suggested.
That's not a proof. That's your opinion. No, it's the presumption of the law. If you can own something, you can litigate over it. Ownership of the ephemeral work never passes from the author--that is the right of attribution. Ownership of particular rights transfers away from the creator upon sale, licensing, or lapse of copyright, inter alia. The physical painting might change hands many times, and the exclusive copyrights will lapse, but at no point do you become the owner, or a shareholder in the ownership. If that is your contention, it is you who must establish it in point of fact, because there is zero case law to support it.
You as a member of the public never attain any legal ownership rights to works after lapse of copyright. When a work enters the public domain, that means that it is open to all, not that it is owned by all--it is owned by none. There's a difference between no one owning a work and everyone owning a work, and it is not merely a semantic one. If you require an elaboration of that framework, take a 1L property course.
Their functional similarity is not the basis of their association. Either the FSF is being disingenuous or they're painfully ignorant in making that claim. Rather, it is their concurrence in a legal dispute that makes them form a convenient grouping. Copyrights, patents, trademarks, and trade secrets are very closely interrelated (along with stocks and bonds, certain aspects of contract law, and a number of other components of business and commercial law) in legal proceedings.
The term's convenience or transparency to the general public could not be less relevant. The fact that people think there is a unifying theory that makes them functionally similar is completely beside the point.
You can replace "intellectual property" with "real property" and make the same rant (substituting other elements for copyright, patent, and so on). Not surprisingly, words have different meanings in legal contexts. The FSF is preaching to the choir--legalese is confusing to lay people! What a shocking revelation!
Prove it. Please demonstrate that the word property exclusively denotes a legal construct, and nothing else. Straw man. The word property is not at issue here. The word's legal meaning is at issue, since the term intellectual property is a legal term of art (a vacuous one at that, since it has no legal significance on its own--it refers merely to a group of other legal instruments which are closely interrelated). In the aforementioned legal sense, property:
"includes all a person's legal rights, of whatever description. A man's property is all that is his in law. This usage, however, is obsolete at the present day, though it is common enough in the older books.... In a second and narrower sense, property includes not all a person's rights, but only his proprietary as opposed to his personal rights. The former constitute his estate or property, while the latter constitute his status or personal condition. In this sense a man's land, chattels, shares, and the debts due to him are his property; but not his life or liberty or reputation.... In a third application, which is that adopted [here], the term includes not even all proprietary rights, but only those which are both proprietary and in rem. The law of property is the law of proprietary rights in rem, the law of proprietary rights in personam being distinguished from it as the law of obligations. According to this usage a freehold or leasehold estate in land, or a patent or copyright, is property; but a debt or the benefit of a contract is not.... Finally, in the narrowest use of the term, it includes nothing more than corporeal property -- that is to say, the right of ownership in a material object, or that object itself." --John Salmand (legal scholar, as cited in Black's Law 7th edition).
Once again, prove it. The work belongs to everyone. That is the arrangement. It most certainly does not. The work belongs to the creator until he sells it. My paintings don't belong to everyone. They belong to me. If I choose to license copies, that physical piece of canvas still belongs to me. The likeness of that painting within the copies still belongs to me. It continues to belong to me forever, though I lose the ability to enforce that ownership after the copyright ends. Society does not subsume ownership of anything--once something is protected by copyright, the likeness of that work becomes freely accessible to all, with NO ONE able to assert ownership when the copyright lapses. This is distinctly different from "everyone owning it"--if that were the case, you would open the door to disputes between individuals over its use. Once something is in the public domain, it is excluded from anyone asserting ownership, individually OR collectively.
The only constitutional reason for any kind of extraordinary control granted over ideas to an individual or company are to promote progress. No, it's to promote progress by granting an exclusive right. It's not some willy-nilly ambiguous statement. The mechanism by which an exclusive right has any value whatsoever is in protection of commercial interests. This corresponds precisely to the Lockean theories of profiting from labour. This should be eminently obvious to anyone who has ever studied the Constitution--Hobbes and Locke, anyone? Clearly we can't count yourself among them.
the current system has been shown again and again to retard progress It does not. Progress for society does not correspond to instant gratification for every cheap bastard who doesn't want to pay for something. It doesn't mean progress in the life of a man, it means progress by encouraging ongoing participation in the system. It has been a colossal success. See Beard, for starters. You don't even need an academic source to know this, because you can just look at the machine in front of you and the home you live in.
is therefore unconstitutional SCOTUS disagrees, and since they are the final arbiter of the Constitution, as provided for in the Constitution, that is check and mate for you, my friend.
I would be willing to bet that the concept of property predated law. And for the fourth time, I'm going to remind you to stop conflating lay property with legal property. Property cannot predate law, because property is a legal construct.
The idea of ownership predates law.
The creative work is not the property of the creator, the copyright is. The creative work is the exclusive possession of the creator and has a number of property rights associated with it; the copyright is a property right not strictly associated with the physical work itself. I'm not sure what your aim is in attempting to establish a contradiction here--the work itself is a thing held by the owner of said thing. No one can claim superior rights than those of the creator if s/he has not sold the original--s/he will still hold the majority of property rights to that work.
Licensing the production of copies transfers a limited set of rights to the customers. They do not become owners of the work--the author still owns the work. They become owners of a copy, with which there is a small number of rights, most of which are dead-end rights, with the most notable exception of the right to resale.
Ownership of real property does not require a government. It most certainly does. How do you stake a record of ownership? How do you 'defend possession' without law? By shooting people? Unless you can shoot everyone in your city before they shoot you, that's a losing prospect.
If you want to go back a few thousand years and stop society from forming, fine. But that ship has sailed, and it's a flight of pure fantasy to speak of nature as guiding or controlling any action of humanity. It is nothing more than a theoretical foundation, long since abstracted away from.
You seem to think that everything begins and ends with the law, completely ignorant of nature. Nature doesn't govern society. Primal instincts gave way thousands of years ago. Nothing in your life today would exist without a departure from "natural" "law." There's no dispute resolution mechanism, no possible rationalization of shared and interconnected interests, and no possible reconciliation of technological advances without a government guaranteeing rights and managing the citizenry.
You'll have a point when everyone lives in log cabins they built themselves with no roads, no utilities, and no technology. Society is not possible without a civilized and binding method of dispute resolution.
I have a right as a parent to control my children There is no such thing as a right to control another human being. That said, you do have certain property interests in your children. Particularly, the parental rights termination proceedings are often evaluated (depending on jursidiction) using litmus tests from property law.
You must, simply must, stop thinking of 'property' in a legal context the same way you think of the word "property" in discourse.
May I dispose of them as I see fit? That is one property right. Property rights are usually expressed as a "bundle"--you don't have to have every right in the bundle of possible property rights, and in fact I can think of no case in which you ever do have EVERY SINGLE property right to anything.
Consequently, it will be difficult for them to obey laws regarding property when they don't understand the terminology. You don't know what property is. It doesn't have any material impact on your life. People aren't expected to think about legal theory--they're expected to obey statutory laws.
For example, copyright infringement equating to theft How does this materially impact the average person? People in general can't handle the murder/manslaughter distinction, either. Does it mean we have to do away with it? Of course not. The charges are not important--the rule is: don't do it. Copyright infringement is against the law; only lawyers, courts, and legal scholars have any concern about how. There is further a distinction between theft and stealing. Copyright infringement most certainly is stealing, a lay term. It is not theft, a legal term. Do you follow the finer points of the burglary/robbery distinction? No. It's academic unless you've been charged, in which case your lawyer takes care of it.
Or the conflation of a creative work with exclusive rights to its reproduction. What conflation? Authors of a work do have exclusive rights to its reproduction.
"Exclusive right" pretty much covers that. The right to control something is a property interest.
In a society where rights are evaluated on economic issues, particularly given that the issues that concern IP are business-based, they all function as property rights.
Property is not "things you can own." Property in the law is ALL artificial. Property is the right to exclude, in the simplest of terms. There is no legal relevance to or association with any tangible object in ANY kind of property law. To say otherwise is an extralegal fiction perpetuated by an anti-IP crowd.
Intellectual Property doesn't refer to a "fiction that it's something to be owned." The fiction is the unstated premise that "property" actually refers to a "thing" at all. It doesn't and never has. Real property isn't a thing. You can't own land. You can only own rights to that land guaranteed by the government. There is no difference. The only reason the name "Intellectual Property" exists is for convenience--it flags people as to what specific fields are involved. Real property law is a special pursuit, separate from plain-old vanilla property law, separate from personalty.
People in general don't know what property means, and they don't know what "real" means either, and instead they decide that somehow "Intellectual Property" causes people to think in false terms, as though it has any consequence whatsoever on the legal community. This is why Slashdot's arguments about legal terms of art are spurious at best. Property isn't a thing, and Intellectual Property doesn't imply a thing to own. The thing is the right itself. It's not even a little misleading, contrary to what RMS spoon feeds you.
It's called "High Usage Saver". You might call and ask. Absolutely. You can move around in classifications to achieve the best deal for you personally, but in each category you have a usage baseline, and within any single rate schedule, the rates will ratchet upwards incrementally based on your baseline usage. For example, your use of midday power will be a certain number. If you dramatically spike upward one month (and you don't have a YOY/balancing plan), you'll pay the same rate as always for the baseline usage, and pay a higher rate for your "excess" usage in that same schedule.
You might have, as part of your plan to get the best possible rates for your home, a rate schedule which uses an artificially sustained rate to minimize major swings in bills.
But it is ironic about more usage costing less. My dad used to manage a smelting operation, and the electricity costs were a fraction of residential rates simply because they used so much. Absolutely. Residential rates are substantially higher than commercial rates. Same goes with business costs--their price per byte is rock-bottom. But that's offset by the fact that their bills are several orders of magnitude higher. If you could supply that much business, you too could have those low rates. But that confuses vertical rates (what we're talking about here) and horizontal schedules (different classes of service).
So they seem to be okay with most people using a lot more. Sure. Their concerns about bandwidth vary from location to location based on a huge number of factors, which is why they resist setting any concrete figure. They'll be more tolerant of "overuse" in places with low demand and when it occurs during off-peak hours than if you were consistently saturating a connection during peak hours on an oversold pipe with a large number of customers. That's why they decline to state when they start to "care" about how much you're using--because it's a complex matter sensitive to time, geography, and local market conditions.
Your 600GB isn't a problem in your area. In my area, my 200GB could be a problem. It's fundamentally unfair and also inevitable, so it's a lose-lose situation for Comcast to say anything about it. Laying new cable is the obvious solution, but also a poor business decision--copper coax isn't very futureproof. The cable companies have the misfortunate of undertaking a massive infrastructure rollout that missed the PC/Internet bandwagon by just a few years. They had no idea how critical bandwidth to the home would be, and they're running into the same wall that the phone companies did--an expensive and limited infrastructure. Cable smashed dialup/ISDN/DSL--and they're about to be smashed by FiOS and others. Until those technologies are widespread and cheap, we have to work around the limits of cable.
They lady said I shouldn't bother unless there is an issue. An issue like being told you're going to be disconnected:). Seriously, there's a separate calculus for business use that involves a greater bandwidth expectation, so it helps with the load balancing for you to be considered a "small business" in that instance, and it means you won't get a shutdown notice as quickly. The lady on the phone was probably trying to save you money, since, as you say, your usage is not problematic.
Equivalent of 30,000 songs, 250,000 pictures or 13 million emails in a month" is not a defined limit. It's like saying the speed limit is 55 wargs per hour. By "the same approach" I was referring to the enforcement, not the limit. Enforcement is arbitrary. The users who would be approached about violating the limits are not unsuspecting grandmothers, which is all Comcast needed to clarify. No typical family is anywhere near this volume of usage. It's the same effect as the wife saying you can only golf 25 days a month--unless you're seriously committed to golf and have no job, you're not going to get in much trouble. The people who feel that 25 days a month is a restriction at all already know who they are.
So? Each franchise is able to set their limits This discussion is about a corporate line, which they are declining to create. To my knowledge, the franchises all use the corporate terms, which can't state a limit because of that local variability. If you're suggesting that there should be an addendum, that's an option, but I think an unnecessary one.
The limit isn't only geographic, but time-based. Not setting a limit is the most generous to customers, since personal "overuse" in a relatively low-demand period is much more tolerable than consistently high usage at peak hours. It's a judgment call and requires a certain amount of trust in Comcast (ha! I know) but I doubt anyone being shut down wouldn't reasonably know that they're using a tremendous amount of bandwidth.
My interests start and finish with the service I'm paying for. It's not a community service, it's simply a private transaction between me and the ISP. It isn't your business how I choose to use my computer or bandwidth. Stop and listen. Cable is a communal resource. It is laid to a community, with particular characteristics in each community. It is a finite pool. As for it being "my" business how you use your computer, you're building up an absurd straw man. It's COMCAST's business, and they're managing that based on the interests of EVERYONE in the community. If they determine that your use is causing a strain on the access of others in the community, you get cut off. That's their right.
You cannot buy double the bandwidth from Comcast. Try it. Call them up and say "Oh, I'm getting around 120G per month. I'd like twice that" Again, a pointless remark. If you're overusing your share of the residential connection, you can easily switch to a small business connection with greater bandwidth which can be used in the local load balancing. It's a simple call to make.
And incidentally, comcast cable service is $40-45 per month, not including local taxes. My bill is $34.26, including all taxes, for a 5Mbit connection.
they do not switch you to a higher cost if you use more, they switch you to a lower cost plan because you are using more. What are you smoking? Usage beyond the baseline gets boosted into gradually higher categories. If you dramatically overuse electricity beyond baseline, the kWh charge increases for each bracket. Your use through 120% baseline is at one rate schedule, 120-140% at another schedule, and so on. This is specifically to discourage overconsumption--being charged less for using more is a completely asinine argument to take.
Seriously, you are a busy body worrying about how other people use their service that they pay for. If I download a terrabyte and comcast doesn't care, then it's not your business I don't care how people use their service. COMCAST does. As long as Comcast is managing the bandwidth effectively, it doesn't matter to me personally how much you personally download. COMCAST is MANAGING the COMMUNITY of its INDIVIDUAL USERS by DISCONNECTING those users who OVERCONSUME. That's their right and their responsibility to their customers.
Speak for yourself, and please stop worrying about what is the correct amount for me to download each month. It is not for you to say. I didn't--Comcast did. Get that through your thick skull. They've set a limit, which amounts to somewhere in the neighborhood of 150GB per month. My only comment on the matter is that that is a perfectly reasonable limit for residential service and a volume of data not reached by 90% of customers. If you're using so much that it strains the service for others, your bandwidth should be curtailed, just as they're doing, so that everyone else's access is preserved.
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You can provide assent by performance, but you can't skip assent.
Once a contract is accepted by both parties, a license exists and the power to revoke has left the offeror's hands. Breach of contract is the remedy for non-performance. Saying "by copying this code you agree to the contract" is not valid, because there's nothing to stop you from disagreeing and yet copy it. Someone's been asleep for the past century. The offeror has the power to invite acceptance by any terms he sees fit. If the offeror determines that assent may be provided by the taking of the software, it is adequate acceptance, that is his right. Thus the GPL certainly MAY say "by using this software you agree to these terms". In other words, it's pretty much up to the defendant whether this should be seen as a copyright violation or a breech of contract. First, you mean plaintiff; second, it's not true; third, if it were a copyright infringement suit, it wouldn't be a test of the GPL. It would be a test of copyright law.
You've got an offer and an acceptance, and thus a contract is formed and a license exists. Breach of contract from one party does not legitimate breach of contract from the other. Performance of the contract is separate from agreement to the contract. If you sue for copyright infringement because a party has not disclosed its source code (and you believe that they are obligated to), you're going to get countersued for breach of contract yourself.
You don't get to revoke your offer after it has been accepted. Specific performance of the terms is a contractual issue, not a copyright issue. You, as the copyright owner, extended an offer for a license (a promise not to sue) and performed by providing the code. The other party has accepted by using said code. The power to revoke is OVER. You, the copyright holder, are now bound not to sue; if you do so, you're breaching your contract. "But he broke the contract first!" is not a defense. This is why Slashdot is a poor source for legal information, because the masses just mod up your comments because they seem to make sense and support a popular viewpoint. It is sadly irrelevant to the community that what you're saying is completely bogus.
Because they don't have time for filibusters. There is no sort of regulation of what is said. The person continues to speak until he stops. He can say whatever he wants--read from cookbooks, go through the phonebook, just say "potato" over and over. He just has to keep standing and keep talking and it wastes everyone's time. There's no "actual speech" delivered in a filibuster--they're not debating the bill, they're just keeping it from coming to a straight vote because they know it will win and they don't want it to.
If the Senate can't get 60 people to vote in favor of cloture, they can't end the filibuster.
Easy. We don't have collective responsibility, so unlike the UK, the majority party doesn't get to do whatever it wants.
The minority party lets it leak (subtly or blatantly) that they intend to filibuster a certain bill, which causes the majority to revise the bill, pull it from a vote, or engage in some wild acrobatics to run it through anyway. This is because the majority party can't govern if they can't win, and if they can't get more than a handful of Republicans to vote for cloture, they can't defeat the filibuster.
It's an underhanded and sore-loser way of preventing the legitimately elected party from governing. It's an exercise dramatically tilted toward Republican abuse. The Democrats get their asses handed to them even when they're in the majority because they're the "nice guys" of Congress and won't step up to the plate. It's admirable in part and cowardly in part. The democrats could use some spine and arrogance, but they don't want to piss off the vocal Puritan Right, because no one can top their smear campaigns.
What he wrote against, and what no one except the mythological argument constructed by clueless twits like you, is the idea that information is property. It's not. Property is property, and copyrights and patents are property. I've already shown you two quotes from him demonstrating that he felt strongly that property rights in ideas were dubious at best and there are lots more where those came from. You've demonstrated no such thing. You've given nothing that says copyright and patents are distasteful--again, he didn't believe they were. He believed them to be a valid tool in his utilitarian view of commerce and society. He disagreed with the conflicting rationale of "inherent value" of an idea itself, prompting his letter in 1813 regarding the concept of an idea as personalty--a concept rejected by Jefferson and the law. Curiously, you have solely quoted from it and not from the context of his discussions prior to or after with McPherson. Of course you wouldn't, because they don't support your conclusion.
You can keep writing until you turn blue, but you're railing against a point no one is making. The only difference is that congress has interpreted "limited time" to approach infinity and I have interpreted it to be so short as to be negligible. Actually, the only difference is that the Supreme Court found one to be constitutional whereas you have no authority.
Maybe the prize of you shutting up, since you have yet to provide a natural rights argument for why you have an inherent right to the work of others or to interfere with that which they can control. If I happen to see your credit card, I'll be especially glad to know that I'm free to use it and then to sell it to someone else to use.
Good luck with your laws of nature. They'll be especially helpful in signing your first employment contract when you grow up, and free from any guidance in nature, be immensely useful when you're terminated for breach of said contract.
The problem with taking a legal term and trying to take the law out of it is that you're left with nothing, much like your argument. There is no enduring need to connect anything to what some crap-flinging primates would do. It's an academic basis for theory, not a binding limit on practice.
Maybe I'm missing something, but if you want an mp3 player "without a battery"--then why do you care what happens to the battery if you were to buy an iPod (or some other digital player)?
So what if the battery capacity gets blasted down to minutes (though I think that's easily avoidable--just unplug it from the wall one or two days a week and let it discharge; iPod batteries last well over 20 hours)? Obviously from the teardowns of these products, the battery has no significant impact on the end price.
Your selective Jefferson quote always tickles those in the legal community, and I'm glad you took the bait. It proves your ignorance and clearly demonstrates that you're a fish out of water here--just like when you talk about "real property" (hint: it doesn't mean what you think it means). You do know that Jefferson was the person who first implemented patents and copyrights in this country, right? You also know that the letter you're quoting from doesn't refer to patents or to copyrights, but merely to knowledge, right? That he drew the distinction, which still stands in the law, that the property rights were the copyright and the patent, not the information? That the writings and actions of Jefferson prove the very point you're arguing?
Maybe you're not clear on the distinction that Jefferson made for you in the difference of those property rights from the law of obligations (i.e. personal rights). The letter counters the theory, somewhat in vogue at the time, that patents and copyrights extended beyond commercial and property interests to fundamental human rights--a view which is not part of the modern rationales.
The actual, physical work--the original painting, the paper manuscript, the guitar tabs with scribbled notes, etc.--is subject to the laws of personalty or chattels, depending. The intellectual property rights are likewise mine to control. There is no requirement that I share copies of it with the public at all (if I do elect to do so, then I become subject to these limitations). Hence copyright--it offers a compromise to authors and artists to compel them to share without giving up the farm; it does not require that they enter into that bargain, however. My private diary doesn't enter the public domain if I've elected never to share any of my rights to it with anyone else. The physical book remains my property, as do all intellectual property rights. Things get quite a bit more complicated upon my death, but generally, all of those rights pass onto my estate and continue to remain private.
If I decline to license copies of my work at all, that is my right and no reproduction of any kind permissible--there's no 70 year limit, no fair use, nada. You must gain some sort of equitable right to my work by my authorization before I'm bound to honor any terms. 70 years later, you still can't just take my diary and publish it. In that sense, no one in the general public has any legal right to my work at all. Thus, if I never surrender any of my inherent rights to a work, you (and society) never gain them. An owner has exclusive rights in perpetuity so long as he never transfers any of those rights to anyone else.
In short, it's not a contradictory statement. As long as you keep your work entirely private, you're the sole owner of every aspect. There has to be a copy before the whole copyright bargain sets in.
You as a member of the public never attain any legal ownership rights to works after lapse of copyright. When a work enters the public domain, that means that it is open to all, not that it is owned by all--it is owned by none. There's a difference between no one owning a work and everyone owning a work, and it is not merely a semantic one. If you require an elaboration of that framework, take a 1L property course.
Their functional similarity is not the basis of their association. Either the FSF is being disingenuous or they're painfully ignorant in making that claim. Rather, it is their concurrence in a legal dispute that makes them form a convenient grouping. Copyrights, patents, trademarks, and trade secrets are very closely interrelated (along with stocks and bonds, certain aspects of contract law, and a number of other components of business and commercial law) in legal proceedings.
The term's convenience or transparency to the general public could not be less relevant. The fact that people think there is a unifying theory that makes them functionally similar is completely beside the point.
You can replace "intellectual property" with "real property" and make the same rant (substituting other elements for copyright, patent, and so on). Not surprisingly, words have different meanings in legal contexts. The FSF is preaching to the choir--legalese is confusing to lay people! What a shocking revelation!
"includes all a person's legal rights, of whatever description. A man's property is all that is his in law. This usage, however, is obsolete at the present day, though it is common enough in the older books.... In a second and narrower sense, property includes not all a person's rights, but only his proprietary as opposed to his personal rights. The former constitute his estate or property, while the latter constitute his status or personal condition. In this sense a man's land, chattels, shares, and the debts due to him are his property; but not his life or liberty or reputation.... In a third application, which is that adopted [here], the term includes not even all proprietary rights, but only those which are both proprietary and in rem. The law of property is the law of proprietary rights in rem, the law of proprietary rights in personam being distinguished from it as the law of obligations. According to this usage a freehold or leasehold estate in land, or a patent or copyright, is property; but a debt or the benefit of a contract is not.... Finally, in the narrowest use of the term, it includes nothing more than corporeal property -- that is to say, the right of ownership in a material object, or that object itself."
--John Salmand (legal scholar, as cited in Black's Law 7th edition). Once again, prove it. The work belongs to everyone. That is the arrangement. It most certainly does not. The work belongs to the creator until he sells it. My paintings don't belong to everyone. They belong to me. If I choose to license copies, that physical piece of canvas still belongs to me. The likeness of that painting within the copies still belongs to me. It continues to belong to me forever, though I lose the ability to enforce that ownership after the copyright ends. Society does not subsume ownership of anything--once something is protected by copyright, the likeness of that work becomes freely accessible to all, with NO ONE able to assert ownership when the copyright lapses. This is distinctly different from "everyone owning it"--if that were the case, you would open the door to disputes between individuals over its use. Once something is in the public domain, it is excluded from anyone asserting ownership, individually OR collectively.
The idea of ownership predates law. The creative work is not the property of the creator, the copyright is. The creative work is the exclusive possession of the creator and has a number of property rights associated with it; the copyright is a property right not strictly associated with the physical work itself. I'm not sure what your aim is in attempting to establish a contradiction here--the work itself is a thing held by the owner of said thing. No one can claim superior rights than those of the creator if s/he has not sold the original--s/he will still hold the majority of property rights to that work.
Licensing the production of copies transfers a limited set of rights to the customers. They do not become owners of the work--the author still owns the work. They become owners of a copy, with which there is a small number of rights, most of which are dead-end rights, with the most notable exception of the right to resale.
If you want to go back a few thousand years and stop society from forming, fine. But that ship has sailed, and it's a flight of pure fantasy to speak of nature as guiding or controlling any action of humanity. It is nothing more than a theoretical foundation, long since abstracted away from. You seem to think that everything begins and ends with the law, completely ignorant of nature. Nature doesn't govern society. Primal instincts gave way thousands of years ago. Nothing in your life today would exist without a departure from "natural" "law." There's no dispute resolution mechanism, no possible rationalization of shared and interconnected interests, and no possible reconciliation of technological advances without a government guaranteeing rights and managing the citizenry.
You'll have a point when everyone lives in log cabins they built themselves with no roads, no utilities, and no technology. Society is not possible without a civilized and binding method of dispute resolution.
You must, simply must, stop thinking of 'property' in a legal context the same way you think of the word "property" in discourse. May I dispose of them as I see fit? That is one property right. Property rights are usually expressed as a "bundle"--you don't have to have every right in the bundle of possible property rights, and in fact I can think of no case in which you ever do have EVERY SINGLE property right to anything. Consequently, it will be difficult for them to obey laws regarding property when they don't understand the terminology. You don't know what property is. It doesn't have any material impact on your life. People aren't expected to think about legal theory--they're expected to obey statutory laws. For example, copyright infringement equating to theft How does this materially impact the average person? People in general can't handle the murder/manslaughter distinction, either. Does it mean we have to do away with it? Of course not. The charges are not important--the rule is: don't do it. Copyright infringement is against the law; only lawyers, courts, and legal scholars have any concern about how. There is further a distinction between theft and stealing. Copyright infringement most certainly is stealing, a lay term. It is not theft, a legal term. Do you follow the finer points of the burglary/robbery distinction? No. It's academic unless you've been charged, in which case your lawyer takes care of it. Or the conflation of a creative work with exclusive rights to its reproduction. What conflation? Authors of a work do have exclusive rights to its reproduction.
"Exclusive right" pretty much covers that. The right to control something is a property interest.
In a society where rights are evaluated on economic issues, particularly given that the issues that concern IP are business-based, they all function as property rights.
Property is not "things you can own." Property in the law is ALL artificial. Property is the right to exclude, in the simplest of terms. There is no legal relevance to or association with any tangible object in ANY kind of property law. To say otherwise is an extralegal fiction perpetuated by an anti-IP crowd.
Intellectual Property doesn't refer to a "fiction that it's something to be owned." The fiction is the unstated premise that "property" actually refers to a "thing" at all. It doesn't and never has. Real property isn't a thing. You can't own land. You can only own rights to that land guaranteed by the government. There is no difference. The only reason the name "Intellectual Property" exists is for convenience--it flags people as to what specific fields are involved. Real property law is a special pursuit, separate from plain-old vanilla property law, separate from personalty.
People in general don't know what property means, and they don't know what "real" means either, and instead they decide that somehow "Intellectual Property" causes people to think in false terms, as though it has any consequence whatsoever on the legal community. This is why Slashdot's arguments about legal terms of art are spurious at best. Property isn't a thing, and Intellectual Property doesn't imply a thing to own. The thing is the right itself. It's not even a little misleading, contrary to what RMS spoon feeds you.
You might have, as part of your plan to get the best possible rates for your home, a rate schedule which uses an artificially sustained rate to minimize major swings in bills. But it is ironic about more usage costing less. My dad used to manage a smelting operation, and the electricity costs were a fraction of residential rates simply because they used so much. Absolutely. Residential rates are substantially higher than commercial rates. Same goes with business costs--their price per byte is rock-bottom. But that's offset by the fact that their bills are several orders of magnitude higher. If you could supply that much business, you too could have those low rates. But that confuses vertical rates (what we're talking about here) and horizontal schedules (different classes of service). So they seem to be okay with most people using a lot more. Sure. Their concerns about bandwidth vary from location to location based on a huge number of factors, which is why they resist setting any concrete figure. They'll be more tolerant of "overuse" in places with low demand and when it occurs during off-peak hours than if you were consistently saturating a connection during peak hours on an oversold pipe with a large number of customers. That's why they decline to state when they start to "care" about how much you're using--because it's a complex matter sensitive to time, geography, and local market conditions.
Your 600GB isn't a problem in your area. In my area, my 200GB could be a problem. It's fundamentally unfair and also inevitable, so it's a lose-lose situation for Comcast to say anything about it. Laying new cable is the obvious solution, but also a poor business decision--copper coax isn't very futureproof. The cable companies have the misfortunate of undertaking a massive infrastructure rollout that missed the PC/Internet bandwagon by just a few years. They had no idea how critical bandwidth to the home would be, and they're running into the same wall that the phone companies did--an expensive and limited infrastructure. Cable smashed dialup/ISDN/DSL--and they're about to be smashed by FiOS and others. Until those technologies are widespread and cheap, we have to work around the limits of cable. They lady said I shouldn't bother unless there is an issue. An issue like being told you're going to be disconnected
The limit isn't only geographic, but time-based. Not setting a limit is the most generous to customers, since personal "overuse" in a relatively low-demand period is much more tolerable than consistently high usage at peak hours. It's a judgment call and requires a certain amount of trust in Comcast (ha! I know) but I doubt anyone being shut down wouldn't reasonably know that they're using a tremendous amount of bandwidth.