If you find a competent, reputable IP attorney, it shouldn't cost more than $500 to sit down with them for a 1 hour consultation. I got a 1.5 hour consultation with an outstanding, very in-demand real estate attorney on the outskirts of metropolitan DC for $400. You don't need to retain his services, just get him to go over your plan and tell you what he thinks is your risk.
That means that the only way to effect change is to subvert one of the political parties. The Sarah Palin/Glenn Beck/tea party people have been eating through the Republicans like a chestburster from Aliens. We need to do the same to the Democratic party to make it more progressive, and various people have been trying.
The Palin/Beck supporters and tea partiers are the ones most likely to be in agreement with the "progressive left" on regulating the shit (pun intended?) out of Chinese goods like this.
I think they're going to have a hard time making that case since so few people will make the connection. Dick is not one of those authors whose works are so familiar to the general public that there is likely to be any mental connection between the average person visiting a T-Mobile store and thinking about buying an Android phone and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep.
Seriously, you have to be a moron to take him seriously at this point. Anyone who is motivated to protect something like he claims to be in protecting MySQL does not sell off the rights to a multinational corporation, especially not one in constant turmoil like Sun has been for several years.
If he wanted to protect MySQL, what he would have done is tried to turn the company into a non-profit like Mozilla.
Because the Italian legal system said so. Different political and legal system, different powers to impose burdens on you, me and corporations.
But why the ISP? Why not the electric company for supplying electricity 'knowing' full well that someone somewhere will be using the electricity for illicit puposes?
Well, for one, the ISP is the direct conduit for the illegal activity as it is what connects the user to The Pirate Bay. No sane legal system brings in tertiary parties like utilities and computer manufacturers when there is a clear party that is in a relationship with the defendant who can be coerced into effectively stopping the activity. It doesn't help your argument that the ISP also can intelligently block certain activities whereas all a utility or manufacturer can choose to do is stop selling. The courts single out the parties who have the greatest role in enabling the activity and who can most effectively prevent it in cases like this (hence why the Italian courts don't target the utilities...)
No, extraordinary claims require simple proof like anything else. The burden of proof does not scale with the grandiosity of the claims. Rather, each aspect of the extraordinary claim should be subjected to falsification.
Here are some falsification tests for Christianity, for example, which directly map to specific, "extraordinary claims" made by it.
If I were to claim to have a device that could solve any problem in linear time, or that produced more energy than it consumed, or that nullified gravity, any engineer worth the title would be highly skeptical and would demand to see hard data before believing such a claim.
That is because those claims have been demonstrated to be impossible or at least improbable beyond a reasonable doubt at this point. Spiritual claims are primarily testimonial. I suppose you could argue that testimonial evidence is crap, but then you'd also have to argue that the entire foundation of the legal system is crap too, since "forensic science" (at least as practiced by the government) is closer to phrenology than physics as far as being science.
So let me explain it to you. A company that sells to the general market products that can be used for crimes is not liable for their use. A company that happens to unknowingly sell to a lot of criminals is not liable for their use of the goods it sells. A company that knowingly sells goods to criminals is fully liable for their use insofar as it has knowingly facilitated a crime.
From that description, you should be able to grasp why The Pirate Bay and search engines are treated quite differently.
which suggests that Microsoft's new-found eagerness to 'engage' with open source has nothing to do with a real desire to reach a pacific accommodation with free software, but is simply a way for Microsoft to fight against it from close up, and armed with inside knowledge.
Would it be any different if WHOEVER_MAKES_WORDPERFECT_RIGHT_NOW did this too? Microsoft is not going to reach an "accommodation" with anyone trying to directly steal their business from them anymore than Apple is going to reach an accord with clone vendors, Japanese car companies are going to wink and nod at Chinese manufacturers trying to import cheap cars that use their designs into the US and Japan or any other scenario where an incumbent would "just welcome" competitors.
Be glad that Microsoft wants to fight in the marketplace first and foremost. 10-15 years ago, if you suggested that Microsoft would fight more or less above board rather than letting slip the dogs of war and running a scorched Earth campaign, you'd have been called a fanboi.
It seems someone should enlighten Italian jurists about technology.
Facilitating a crime has, to my knowledge, never been legal in any Western country. That is precisely what sites like The Pirate Bay do for users in certain countries.
The headline of the article is "NY Times, LA Times..." and we've seen a number of articles on here about New York and California bitching 5x more than the rest of the states. Their political systems also tend to be two of the worst examples of the "waaaaaahhhh why can't we just tax, tax, tax and make it everyone else's responsibility" mentality in American politics.
If humans can travel efficiently through space, make avatars, etc., they have the technology to genetically engineer plant life that could help to quickly rebuild's Earth ecosystems. I would imagine that that would be less involved than creating an avatar...
All it would take is for California and New York to each pass a law creating a standardized tax rate for their entire state. No local sales taxes, etc. Just a single state sales tax which is redistributed by the state tax authority to municipal governments. It would then be as easy for Amazon as "cut a check every month and mail it to Sacramento or Albany."
Each federal department behaves differently. Agencies like the various DoD support and intelligence agencies, not to mention the CIA which is its own separate agency unto itself from any department, are not going to let the yahoos from Homeland Security or Justice tell them what to do or even be in on the conversation about how they organize and communicate, especially with regard to classified information.
A cyber-security czar who cannot command the CIA and DoD agencies is quite literally one with no practical authority since those groups are the majority of what matters with real, important IT security in the federal government.
Disconnect those users. The iPhone zealots have nowhere else to go. Telling them to go for the Droid is like telling a crack addict to drop their habit by smoking pot and slurping vodka. Take down a few thousand users, and the majority will quickly stop complaining.
the right of conquest? Every powerful country, even self-proclaimed anti-imperialists like the Communist countries, have recognized it. Their only complaints have been when it didn't serve them. If Mexico had won the Mexican-American War, you damn well better believe that they'd be saying that they have a right to Mississippi, Alabama and Georgia right now.
Making its copyright laws more cut and dry. The problem with a loser pays system is that corporations like Microsoft can pay for $500/hour attorneys. Even if it were statutorally limited to "reasonable expenses," a loser pays system can destroy someone pretty quickly which can create real hardship for people who lose or forfeit, but aren't objectively guilty.
What I found interesting about reading the law books of the Old Testament is how many criminal offenses they cover (basically the same as most U.S. states), and how cut and dry (and protective) the standards of evidence are. No witnesses? No conviction in a "felony case." Witness is caught lying against the accused? Judge can summarily sentence the witness on the spot and drop the charges against the accused.
By contrast, modern legal systems are so highly convoluted that ordinary people often have no idea if what they're doing is legal; they just assume it is. I'm not saying that the Mosaic Law is a system we (and India) should adopt, but merely pointing out that the advantages outweigh the disadvantages of a much simpler, more cut and dry legal system. Even if the penalties are harsher, a system that has built in 0 tolerance for lawyerly bullshit, that has exacting standards of evidence is a lot easier to defend oneself in.
That, people, is the true objective of intellectual property. You people think they care about you making pirate copies of CDs and DVDs? How pathetically self-centered! The truth is much bigger than your hard drive contents.
As a matter of fact, I think they do because there is no other reason why the RIAA and MPAA would go after so many students if they were really just secret imperialistic stooges hoping to maintain our global hegemony. The truth is that the developing world would benefit from greater IP protection, as IP currently has functionally **no** protection in most of it. India in particular would greatly benefit from the sale of a lot more legitimate copies versus illegitimate copies of IP goods.
Furthermore, your argument falls apart in that if we were really so paranoid about them, we wouldn't be training their students in our universities to the level we are.
Interestingly, the hysteria is driven by tabloid newspapers who, on other pages, will be moaning about the "Nanny State
That's the way they work. The entire mainstream media operates on this model. Some just do it with more class than others, such as bigger publications manufacturing controversies about things like the "digital divide" or "gender wage gaps" based on faulty assumptions like not adjusting for the career choices of men and women.
The public needs to realize that the "free press" is not the "mainstream media," but the freedom of ordinary people to print their speech. In the U.S., the first amendment was never intended to protect journalists as a profession, but to broadly protect the common man's access and property rights in means to publish protected speech.
If Iranian expatriates or Americans of Iranian descent can prove that they are the victims of physical violence against themselves or their property while on American soil, that would be a legitimate reason for the United States to invade Iran. If a foreign state sends its agents to a country to kill that country's citizens, that has traditionally been recognized as an act of aggression and legitimate casus belli for the offended nation.
The Mullahs better be careful, lest they become the first, straight up legitimate victim of "American regime change" in the last few decades...
I won't regurgitate most of what Radley Balko said, as his post is probably one of the most insightful I've ever read on this subject, but there are two functions that the papers do or are supposed to do, not one:
-Aggregate news -Investigative journalism
Very few do investigative journalism anymore. Most of it is just aggregating and writing up some additional filter around press releases and such. The average crime story is no more nuanced and investigative than regurgitating what the police, prosecutor and defense attorney have to say. Most newspapers do so little investigative journalism that they are, quite frankly, as useless and vestigial to our society's continued liberties as tits on a bull.
What most newspapers are upset about is the fact that new media is more efficient at cheaply aggregating raw information and sprucing it up with some additional verbage. It's not like they're losing money because others are stealing the hard work of their investigators.
Does it weaken Goetz's argument that his description of the software lifecycle harks back to the waterfall days and bears little resemblance to current development practice in open source and/or Internet contexts?
It's not the design practices per se, but rather the software market that does. It is significantly easier to build an independent, popular product today than it was 40 years ago. The main argument for patents is to protect a company's investment in the risk of doing R&D to get a product to market. Pharmaceuticals are one of the last industries where that is probably still a valid concern. For software it is at best, rent-seeking, and at worst a cudgel with which they can beat smaller players or extort big, lumbering giants.
Even a geek with full-blown asperger's syndrome could predict how Arrington and his crew would react to this approach to renegotiating the IP rights. If they had been at least moderately smart about it, they would have come forward with some sort of half-serious offer like buying out some of TechCrunch's equity in the IP or agreeing to assume TechCruch's liability for the business side of getting it out there, warranting it, etc. in exchange for a greater cut of the pie.
This... just comes off as a blatant attempt to stab a partner in the back if this story can be believed.
Slashdot Mirror
Make it painfully clear to IE6 users what they're doing.
My version, which is more educational for them.
If you find a competent, reputable IP attorney, it shouldn't cost more than $500 to sit down with them for a 1 hour consultation. I got a 1.5 hour consultation with an outstanding, very in-demand real estate attorney on the outskirts of metropolitan DC for $400. You don't need to retain his services, just get him to go over your plan and tell you what he thinks is your risk.
The Palin/Beck supporters and tea partiers are the ones most likely to be in agreement with the "progressive left" on regulating the shit (pun intended?) out of Chinese goods like this.
I think they're going to have a hard time making that case since so few people will make the connection. Dick is not one of those authors whose works are so familiar to the general public that there is likely to be any mental connection between the average person visiting a T-Mobile store and thinking about buying an Android phone and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep.
Seriously, you have to be a moron to take him seriously at this point. Anyone who is motivated to protect something like he claims to be in protecting MySQL does not sell off the rights to a multinational corporation, especially not one in constant turmoil like Sun has been for several years. If he wanted to protect MySQL, what he would have done is tried to turn the company into a non-profit like Mozilla.
Well, for one, the ISP is the direct conduit for the illegal activity as it is what connects the user to The Pirate Bay. No sane legal system brings in tertiary parties like utilities and computer manufacturers when there is a clear party that is in a relationship with the defendant who can be coerced into effectively stopping the activity. It doesn't help your argument that the ISP also can intelligently block certain activities whereas all a utility or manufacturer can choose to do is stop selling. The courts single out the parties who have the greatest role in enabling the activity and who can most effectively prevent it in cases like this (hence why the Italian courts don't target the utilities...)
No, extraordinary claims require simple proof like anything else. The burden of proof does not scale with the grandiosity of the claims. Rather, each aspect of the extraordinary claim should be subjected to falsification.
Here are some falsification tests for Christianity, for example, which directly map to specific, "extraordinary claims" made by it.
That is because those claims have been demonstrated to be impossible or at least improbable beyond a reasonable doubt at this point. Spiritual claims are primarily testimonial. I suppose you could argue that testimonial evidence is crap, but then you'd also have to argue that the entire foundation of the legal system is crap too, since "forensic science" (at least as practiced by the government) is closer to phrenology than physics as far as being science.
So let me explain it to you. A company that sells to the general market products that can be used for crimes is not liable for their use. A company that happens to unknowingly sell to a lot of criminals is not liable for their use of the goods it sells. A company that knowingly sells goods to criminals is fully liable for their use insofar as it has knowingly facilitated a crime.
From that description, you should be able to grasp why The Pirate Bay and search engines are treated quite differently.
Would it be any different if WHOEVER_MAKES_WORDPERFECT_RIGHT_NOW did this too? Microsoft is not going to reach an "accommodation" with anyone trying to directly steal their business from them anymore than Apple is going to reach an accord with clone vendors, Japanese car companies are going to wink and nod at Chinese manufacturers trying to import cheap cars that use their designs into the US and Japan or any other scenario where an incumbent would "just welcome" competitors.
Be glad that Microsoft wants to fight in the marketplace first and foremost. 10-15 years ago, if you suggested that Microsoft would fight more or less above board rather than letting slip the dogs of war and running a scorched Earth campaign, you'd have been called a fanboi.
Facilitating a crime has, to my knowledge, never been legal in any Western country. That is precisely what sites like The Pirate Bay do for users in certain countries.
The headline of the article is "NY Times, LA Times..." and we've seen a number of articles on here about New York and California bitching 5x more than the rest of the states. Their political systems also tend to be two of the worst examples of the "waaaaaahhhh why can't we just tax, tax, tax and make it everyone else's responsibility" mentality in American politics.
If humans can travel efficiently through space, make avatars, etc., they have the technology to genetically engineer plant life that could help to quickly rebuild's Earth ecosystems. I would imagine that that would be less involved than creating an avatar...
All it would take is for California and New York to each pass a law creating a standardized tax rate for their entire state. No local sales taxes, etc. Just a single state sales tax which is redistributed by the state tax authority to municipal governments. It would then be as easy for Amazon as "cut a check every month and mail it to Sacramento or Albany."
Each federal department behaves differently. Agencies like the various DoD support and intelligence agencies, not to mention the CIA which is its own separate agency unto itself from any department, are not going to let the yahoos from Homeland Security or Justice tell them what to do or even be in on the conversation about how they organize and communicate, especially with regard to classified information.
A cyber-security czar who cannot command the CIA and DoD agencies is quite literally one with no practical authority since those groups are the majority of what matters with real, important IT security in the federal government.
Disconnect those users. The iPhone zealots have nowhere else to go. Telling them to go for the Droid is like telling a crack addict to drop their habit by smoking pot and slurping vodka. Take down a few thousand users, and the majority will quickly stop complaining.
the right of conquest? Every powerful country, even self-proclaimed anti-imperialists like the Communist countries, have recognized it. Their only complaints have been when it didn't serve them. If Mexico had won the Mexican-American War, you damn well better believe that they'd be saying that they have a right to Mississippi, Alabama and Georgia right now.
Making its copyright laws more cut and dry. The problem with a loser pays system is that corporations like Microsoft can pay for $500/hour attorneys. Even if it were statutorally limited to "reasonable expenses," a loser pays system can destroy someone pretty quickly which can create real hardship for people who lose or forfeit, but aren't objectively guilty.
What I found interesting about reading the law books of the Old Testament is how many criminal offenses they cover (basically the same as most U.S. states), and how cut and dry (and protective) the standards of evidence are. No witnesses? No conviction in a "felony case." Witness is caught lying against the accused? Judge can summarily sentence the witness on the spot and drop the charges against the accused.
By contrast, modern legal systems are so highly convoluted that ordinary people often have no idea if what they're doing is legal; they just assume it is. I'm not saying that the Mosaic Law is a system we (and India) should adopt, but merely pointing out that the advantages outweigh the disadvantages of a much simpler, more cut and dry legal system. Even if the penalties are harsher, a system that has built in 0 tolerance for lawyerly bullshit, that has exacting standards of evidence is a lot easier to defend oneself in.
As a matter of fact, I think they do because there is no other reason why the RIAA and MPAA would go after so many students if they were really just secret imperialistic stooges hoping to maintain our global hegemony. The truth is that the developing world would benefit from greater IP protection, as IP currently has functionally **no** protection in most of it. India in particular would greatly benefit from the sale of a lot more legitimate copies versus illegitimate copies of IP goods.
Furthermore, your argument falls apart in that if we were really so paranoid about them, we wouldn't be training their students in our universities to the level we are.
and slap ChromeOS 1.0 on that. The CrunchPad sounds like it would be the perfect device to use as a proof of concept for later Chrome devices.
If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear!
That's the way they work. The entire mainstream media operates on this model. Some just do it with more class than others, such as bigger publications manufacturing controversies about things like the "digital divide" or "gender wage gaps" based on faulty assumptions like not adjusting for the career choices of men and women.
The public needs to realize that the "free press" is not the "mainstream media," but the freedom of ordinary people to print their speech. In the U.S., the first amendment was never intended to protect journalists as a profession, but to broadly protect the common man's access and property rights in means to publish protected speech.
If Iranian expatriates or Americans of Iranian descent can prove that they are the victims of physical violence against themselves or their property while on American soil, that would be a legitimate reason for the United States to invade Iran. If a foreign state sends its agents to a country to kill that country's citizens, that has traditionally been recognized as an act of aggression and legitimate casus belli for the offended nation.
The Mullahs better be careful, lest they become the first, straight up legitimate victim of "American regime change" in the last few decades...
I won't regurgitate most of what Radley Balko said, as his post is probably one of the most insightful I've ever read on this subject, but there are two functions that the papers do or are supposed to do, not one:
-Aggregate news
-Investigative journalism
Very few do investigative journalism anymore. Most of it is just aggregating and writing up some additional filter around press releases and such. The average crime story is no more nuanced and investigative than regurgitating what the police, prosecutor and defense attorney have to say. Most newspapers do so little investigative journalism that they are, quite frankly, as useless and vestigial to our society's continued liberties as tits on a bull.
What most newspapers are upset about is the fact that new media is more efficient at cheaply aggregating raw information and sprucing it up with some additional verbage. It's not like they're losing money because others are stealing the hard work of their investigators.
It's not the design practices per se, but rather the software market that does. It is significantly easier to build an independent, popular product today than it was 40 years ago. The main argument for patents is to protect a company's investment in the risk of doing R&D to get a product to market. Pharmaceuticals are one of the last industries where that is probably still a valid concern. For software it is at best, rent-seeking, and at worst a cudgel with which they can beat smaller players or extort big, lumbering giants.
Even a geek with full-blown asperger's syndrome could predict how Arrington and his crew would react to this approach to renegotiating the IP rights. If they had been at least moderately smart about it, they would have come forward with some sort of half-serious offer like buying out some of TechCrunch's equity in the IP or agreeing to assume TechCruch's liability for the business side of getting it out there, warranting it, etc. in exchange for a greater cut of the pie.
This... just comes off as a blatant attempt to stab a partner in the back if this story can be believed.