If the proposal is to force all porn sites into.xxx that's is a very bad idea.
But in fact, the proposal is simply to create a.xxx TLD that would be restricted to just porn sites.
And I'm assuming this wouldn't have the problems that the current namespace has since I doubt many companies want to register a lot of.xxx names (though obviously there will be lawsuits if there is a Metallica.xxx site).
Most of the comments seem to be along the lines of "sue the security company for the mistake," which is stupid, since it's probably not a mistake but rather a case of identity theft or an error made by a law enforcement agency. There have been a number of prominent cases where a person convicted of a felon has used a false ID and then gets tagged with that. A particularly incidious version of this is if somebody say steals your name and soc. security number and poses as you, but is found out -- your name and soc. number still go into a database as one of the aliases that this criminal uses. Have fun trying to sort your life out after that. Fundamentally, though, the problem is not with the end user of the information such as the security agency running a background check but the faulty information placed in databases in the first place by law enforcement.
Interesting nonsense about defacing billboard: "They can be easily used for the wrong reasons by the wrong people. Fortunately, Klein is quick to point this out and doesn't shy away from pointing out both good and bad aspects of each." Deface Nike billboard -- good Deface RedHat billboard -- bad F------ hypocrite
Actually this is boilerplate legal language for trademark use (and many such contracts are not easily understandable by lay persons without a legal background which is why companies hire lawyers).
Oh, I get it now. When Microsoft puts out a nonsensical press release about the horrors of Linux, that's FUD, but when the holy Linux saints at Slashdot push some bullshit nonsense about Apogee, it's because of their humanity. Give me a frigging break.
A pretty good summary of Taco-head's posts. Create a huge blowup over standard trademark legal disclaimers. You've got a company here that, unlike other media companies, wants to let people use their trademarks and then you have idiots like Slashdot come along and rake them over the coals for standard legal boilerplate that *any* company's going to require to use their trademarks (or perhaps Andover.Net won't mind it if somebody swipes the Slashdot log for a Nazi or pron site -- are those the terms of use for Slashdot?)
I'm ashamed to live in the same state as these morons at Slashdot who let this sort of nonsense through. Of course a company owning a trademark is going to sue if you use their trademarked logo, images, etc. in a derogatory manner, but this doesn't even come close to allowing them to sue to stop things like negative reviews. What a bunch of dumbasses (sheesh -- now that you're a wholly owned subsidiary of Andover couldn't you talk to *their* lawyers before posting such nonsense?)
Huh? We should be glad
on
Virtual War
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· Score: 2
The point of "virtual war" is precisely that American foreign policy is severely constrained by the American people's unwillingness to sustain serious casualties. This is a very good development as it will lower the risk of the U.S. becoming involved in a poorly thought out engagement.
In fact if you look at the "virtual wars" such as Kosovo and Desert Storm, both of them turned out to be pretty much impossible to win long term with a "virtual" approach and would have been ungodly expensive disasters with a conventional armed forces approach.
We should cheer this development -- now all we need to do is hope this century brings more highly developed democracies scared to death to go to war.
Have you really never heard of a small thing called ROBOTS.TXT which most search engines honor? If a site doesn't want to be indexed on a search engine, most will let them opt-out -- it's simply common courtesy.
This seems to be the judge's way of saying anything he rules is a) going to be litigated for years and b) more than likely overturned by appeals courts anyway, so c) why not do something completely outrageous like put IE in a separate company even though it generates very little revenue on its own.
Up next -- Aristotle was a great philosopher
on
Fahrenheit 451
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· Score: 1
Why is there a poorly written review of a classic scifi novel on Slashdot?
The whole "the 1950s was status quo conformism" is pure hogwash, apparently spouted by a reviewer with very little historical background of the era (not surprising from someone who actually lists as one of F451's goodpoints being that it is short.)
Finally, although the reviewer seems to extol "revolution" for its own sake even if it causes a little "instability" he should take a second from reading science fiction to doing a little historical research wherein he would find that revolutions which don't result in massive book burning are themselves in the minority. The American Revolution was the exception to the rule (and even those idiots immediately turned around and tired censoring each other with Sedition Acts, etc.)
That's a very good point. Racial and sexual harassment lawsuits generally require companies to show they took due diligence against reported behavior. If somebody complained about the site being translated to Jive, the lawyers would certainly recommend firing off a letter.
Still clearly the bank would have very little chance if they go to court.
What would be interesting would be if somebody gave a cease and desist to Babelfish which is a lot closer to a genuine copyright violation.
I don't know if anyone else mentioned it, but several months ago there was an AP story quoting officials who had been part of the USSR space program as saying that the USSR had made plans to nuke the moon. The gist there was that the military planners wanted an explosion on the moon that would be visible from the Earth, but after the scientists did all the calculations the military planners weren't impressed enough by the potential visible bang and decided not to pursue it.
Is anybody still selling CDs as loss leaders? Regardless the whole reason this policy was created was to protect small mom and pop music stores from large electronics chains such as Best Buy, etc. who were selling CDs at a loss in order to entice customers into the stores. Most of those retailers abandoned that practice after they grew their customer base sufficiently, and I doubt they'll be going back to it any time soon (i.e., this will probably have very little effect on the price of CDs, which are already very low anyway).
MP3.Com broadcasts to both users who have registered and those who haven't. There are any number of ways to get around the MP3.Com protections, as others here have pointed out.
What MP3.COm has done is no different than the following: I scan in all of Stephen King's novels and make them avaialble on a web site, but in order to read them I require you to fax me the inside cover to prove you own it. Both this and MP3.Com's scheme would be serious breaches of copyright law.
Again, I think the way we all win is if we say that a) devices or software methods that allow individuals who already own a piece of software or music or whatever to make personal copies is completely legal (even though it will obviously be used by some people to pirate copies), but also that b) those who do use such devices to pirate and distribute illicit materials are in fact breaking the law. Punish *them*, not the technology.
Radio stations pay *royalties* when they rebroadcast copyrighted music. The whole point of MP3.Com is that it claimed it didn't need to pay royalties for rebroadcasting copyrighted music.
MP3s aren't illegal at all. What is illegal is to distribute MP3s if you don't have permission from the copyright holder, which was what MP3.Com was doing.
Very reasonable ruling. MP3.Com was clearly stretching the principle of fair use way beyond the breaking point.
Same thing with Napster. Metallica should sue the users engaged in piracy rather than the service itself (their lawyers have it half right).
People who illegaly distribute MP3s should be punished but action shouldn't be taken against the hardware and software that (which, I believe, is largely the principle behind the denial of the preliminary injunction against Diamond/S3's Rio -- someone who downloads an illegal MP3 onto their Rio is breaking the law, but Diamond should not be held liable for that -- neither should Napster, but MP3.Com clearly should).
"One of the hallmarks of the unconscious civilization" off-line is our failure to grasp how pervasively we have slipped into conformity. Our media embrace "objectivity" -- a marketing ploy invented by publishers in the 1800's to make newspapers less offensive to large blocks of potential consumers. Corporatism is now so ubiquitous we can hardly even see it, even though it affects the food we buy, the restaurants we eat in, the books we can make and read, the movies we can see, the music we can listen to, the software most people buy."
Ah, now I see. Everybody but Jon is suffering from a false consciousness. Only our idol Jon has the intellectual temerity to see through the veil and bring to us the True NatureTM of things.
This is the classic Leftist attack on corporations. Corporations are successful in a free market because people *want* products and services they want. But Katz and others know that is a lie -- we only think we know what we want, but really we need a vanguard of individuals to deprogram us.
Give me a break.
Isn't it interesting, btw, that most of the things Katz writes about are about access to corporatist pablum? The Revolution *will* be televised and, apparently, it turns out to be "What Wants To Be A Millionare"?
Let me get this straight. I put a Metallica file on my HD, fire up Napster and tell everyone in the world, "come get free Metallica MP3s."
How is Metallica in any way invading privacy by identifying individuals who are publically making available Metallica MP3s? Do you even think through this nonsense before you post it, Katz?
Hmmm...how about if I scanned in your new book and put it up on my web page in PDF format and then emailed all my friends to come and download the piece of crap. A couple days later I get slapped with a copyright infringement lawsuit.
If I follow your logic, Jon, your publisher would be violating my privacy.
Personally, I think Metallica is on the right track -- don't get rid of something like Napster but instead go after those users who are violating copyright laws by illegally distributing copyright material.
Very shoddy journalism
on
Silicon Hell
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· Score: 2
Criminal records are usually public information. The obvious 21st century method will be to migrate such public information to the Internet. There is an obvious way to avoid having your criminal record revealed -- don't engage in criminal acts.
I live in a state where I can get a list of sex offenders on the web. Without that I never would have known the nice old man at the corner who is always trying to give my daughter candy is a convicted sex offender.
The news story here clearly falsifies the main premise of Slashdot's claim -- the Supreme Court hasn't "ruled" on anything here. All it has done is decided not to accept an appeal. That is a *vastly* different thing than the Supreme Court taking up a case and then making a ruling on some point of law.
Slashdot Mirror
If the proposal is to force all porn sites into .xxx that's is a very bad idea.
.xxx TLD that would be restricted to just porn sites.
.xxx names (though obviously there will be lawsuits if there is a Metallica.xxx site).
But in fact, the proposal is simply to create a
And I'm assuming this wouldn't have the problems that the current namespace has since I doubt many companies want to register a lot of
Most of the comments seem to be along the lines of "sue the security company for the mistake," which is stupid, since it's probably not a mistake but rather a case of identity theft or an error made by a law enforcement agency. There have been a number of prominent cases where a person convicted of a felon has used a false ID and then gets tagged with that. A particularly incidious version of this is if somebody say steals your name and soc. security number and poses as you, but is found out -- your name and soc. number still go into a database as one of the aliases that this criminal uses. Have fun trying to sort your life out after that. Fundamentally, though, the problem is not with the end user of the information such as the security agency running a background check but the faulty information placed in databases in the first place by law enforcement.
Interesting nonsense about defacing billboard: "They can be easily used for the wrong reasons by the wrong people. Fortunately, Klein is quick to point this out and doesn't shy away from pointing out both good and bad aspects of each." Deface Nike billboard -- good Deface RedHat billboard -- bad F------ hypocrite
Actually this is boilerplate legal language for trademark use (and many such contracts are not easily understandable by lay persons without a legal background which is why companies hire lawyers).
Oh, I get it now. When Microsoft puts out a nonsensical press release about the horrors of Linux, that's FUD, but when the holy Linux saints at Slashdot push some bullshit nonsense about Apogee, it's because of their humanity. Give me a frigging break.
When has Taco ever seemed intelligent? This seems pretty consistent with his general cluelessness.
A pretty good summary of Taco-head's posts. Create a huge blowup over standard trademark legal disclaimers. You've got a company here that, unlike other media companies, wants to let people use their trademarks and then you have idiots like Slashdot come along and rake them over the coals for standard legal boilerplate that *any* company's going to require to use their trademarks (or perhaps Andover.Net won't mind it if somebody swipes the Slashdot log for a Nazi or pron site -- are those the terms of use for Slashdot?)
I'm ashamed to live in the same state as these morons at Slashdot who let this sort of nonsense through. Of course a company owning a trademark is going to sue if you use their trademarked logo, images, etc. in a derogatory manner, but this doesn't even come close to allowing them to sue to stop things like negative reviews. What a bunch of dumbasses (sheesh -- now that you're a wholly owned subsidiary of Andover couldn't you talk to *their* lawyers before posting such nonsense?)
The point of "virtual war" is precisely that American foreign policy is severely constrained by the American people's unwillingness to sustain serious casualties. This is a very good development as it will lower the risk of the U.S. becoming involved in a poorly thought out engagement.
In fact if you look at the "virtual wars" such as Kosovo and Desert Storm, both of them turned out to be pretty much impossible to win long term with a "virtual" approach and would have been ungodly expensive disasters with a conventional armed forces approach.
We should cheer this development -- now all we need to do is hope this century brings more highly developed democracies scared to death to go to war.
Have you really never heard of a small thing called ROBOTS.TXT which most search engines honor? If a site doesn't want to be indexed on a search engine, most will let them opt-out -- it's simply common courtesy.
This seems to be the judge's way of saying anything he rules is a) going to be litigated for years and b) more than likely overturned by appeals courts anyway, so c) why not do something completely outrageous like put IE in a separate company even though it generates very little revenue on its own.
Why is there a poorly written review of a classic scifi novel on Slashdot?
The whole "the 1950s was status quo conformism" is pure hogwash, apparently spouted by a reviewer with very little historical background of the era (not surprising from someone who actually lists as one of F451's goodpoints being that it is short.)
Finally, although the reviewer seems to extol "revolution" for its own sake even if it causes a little "instability" he should take a second from reading science fiction to doing a little historical research wherein he would find that revolutions which don't result in massive book burning are themselves in the minority. The American Revolution was the exception to the rule (and even those idiots immediately turned around and tired censoring each other with Sedition Acts, etc.)
That's a very good point. Racial and sexual harassment lawsuits generally require companies to show they took due diligence against reported behavior. If somebody complained about the site being translated to Jive, the lawyers would certainly recommend firing off a letter.
Still clearly the bank would have very little chance if they go to court.
What would be interesting would be if somebody gave a cease and desist to Babelfish which is a lot closer to a genuine copyright violation.
I don't know if anyone else mentioned it, but several months ago there was an AP story quoting officials who had been part of the USSR space program as saying that the USSR had made plans to nuke the moon. The gist there was that the military planners wanted an explosion on the moon that would be visible from the Earth, but after the scientists did all the calculations the military planners weren't impressed enough by the potential visible bang and decided not to pursue it.
MS is right about the copyrighted stuff -- it should be removed. But the links and other stuff -- no way.
Is anybody still selling CDs as loss leaders? Regardless the whole reason this policy was created was to protect small mom and pop music stores from large electronics chains such as Best Buy, etc. who were selling CDs at a loss in order to entice customers into the stores. Most of those retailers abandoned that practice after they grew their customer base sufficiently, and I doubt they'll be going back to it any time soon (i.e., this will probably have very little effect on the price of CDs, which are already very low anyway).
MP3.Com broadcasts to both users who have registered and those who haven't. There are any number of ways to get around the MP3.Com protections, as others here have pointed out.
What MP3.COm has done is no different than the following: I scan in all of Stephen King's novels and make them avaialble on a web site, but in order to read them I require you to fax me the inside cover to prove you own it. Both this and MP3.Com's scheme would be serious breaches of copyright law.
Again, I think the way we all win is if we say that a) devices or software methods that allow individuals who already own a piece of software or music or whatever to make personal copies is completely legal (even though it will obviously be used by some people to pirate copies), but also that b) those who do use such devices to pirate and distribute illicit materials are in fact breaking the law. Punish *them*, not the technology.
Radio stations pay *royalties* when they rebroadcast copyrighted music. The whole point of MP3.Com is that it claimed it didn't need to pay royalties for rebroadcasting copyrighted music.
MP3s aren't illegal at all. What is illegal is to distribute MP3s if you don't have permission from the copyright holder, which was what MP3.Com was doing.
Very reasonable ruling. MP3.Com was clearly stretching the principle of fair use way beyond the breaking point.
Same thing with Napster. Metallica should sue the users engaged in piracy rather than the service itself (their lawyers have it half right).
People who illegaly distribute MP3s should be punished but action shouldn't be taken against the hardware and software that (which, I believe, is largely the principle behind the denial of the preliminary injunction against Diamond/S3's Rio -- someone who downloads an illegal MP3 onto their Rio is breaking the law, but Diamond should not be held liable for that -- neither should Napster, but MP3.Com clearly should).
"One of the hallmarks of the unconscious civilization" off-line is our failure to grasp how pervasively we have slipped into conformity. Our media embrace "objectivity" -- a marketing ploy invented by publishers in the 1800's to make newspapers less offensive to large blocks of potential consumers. Corporatism is now so ubiquitous we can hardly even see it, even though it affects the food we buy, the restaurants we eat in, the books we can make and read, the movies we can see, the music we can listen to, the software most people buy."
Ah, now I see. Everybody but Jon is suffering from a false consciousness. Only our idol Jon has the intellectual temerity to see through the veil and bring to us the True NatureTM of things.
This is the classic Leftist attack on corporations. Corporations are successful in a free market because people *want* products and services they want. But Katz and others know that is a lie -- we only think we know what we want, but really we need a vanguard of individuals to deprogram us.
Give me a break.
Isn't it interesting, btw, that most of the things Katz writes about are about access to corporatist pablum? The Revolution *will* be televised and, apparently, it turns out to be "What Wants To Be A Millionare"?
Let me get this straight. I put a Metallica file on my HD, fire up Napster and tell everyone in the world, "come get free Metallica MP3s."
How is Metallica in any way invading privacy by identifying individuals who are publically making available Metallica MP3s? Do you even think through this nonsense before you post it, Katz?
Hmmm...how about if I scanned in your new book and put it up on my web page in PDF format and then emailed all my friends to come and download the piece of crap. A couple days later I get slapped with a copyright infringement lawsuit.
If I follow your logic, Jon, your publisher would be violating my privacy.
Personally, I think Metallica is on the right track -- don't get rid of something like Napster but instead go after those users who are violating copyright laws by illegally distributing copyright material.
'Nuff said. Typical journalistic FUD.
Criminal records are usually public information. The obvious 21st century method will be to migrate such public information to the Internet. There is an obvious way to avoid having your criminal record revealed -- don't engage in criminal acts.
I live in a state where I can get a list of sex offenders on the web. Without that I never would have known the nice old man at the corner who is always trying to give my daughter candy is a convicted sex offender.
The news story here clearly falsifies the main premise of Slashdot's claim -- the Supreme Court hasn't "ruled" on anything here. All it has done is decided not to accept an appeal. That is a *vastly* different thing than the Supreme Court taking up a case and then making a ruling on some point of law.