Nope, try again. Like a locked garage, you must surrender the keys once subpoenaed.
I know they're trying to enforce that as law in the UK, but as yet, that is still considered self-incrimination in the US and is protected by the 5th Amendment.
Now, I don't expect that to remain true much longer, but at least for now..
With all that, it's hard to see how the judge could have done anything other than what he did.
While I see where you're coming from...
How about, not knowing the extent of actual damages, invoking the MINIMUM penalty instead of the maximum. That would be more fair, particularly because it is incredibly hard for me to believe that some random woman would have the wherewithall to cause $3,000,000 of damage merely by downloading several dozen songs. Causing that much actual damage pretty much requires redistribution on a massive scale.
What would be even more fair would be only assigning damages according to what the woman could have bought the music for - the price of 200 songs or 15 albums, whichever is greater.
But then, nothing in this case had anything to do with being fair, or just, or any of those pretty, obsolete words.
Because the majority of The People do not beleive music theft to be a crime. We live in a democratic republic -- therefore if elected officials are not serving the people and allowing laws which directly contravene your wishes, you are under no moral obligation to obey them.
Thank you. What most people forget is that law, justice, these things are a consequence of the social contract.
One side breaks it (government - those in power) the other side is under no obligation to maintain their part of the bargain.
But don't take my word for it, read the works of Hobbes and Locke, who put in far better terms than I could.
Thank you for that information. I regularly Erase my harddrive after deleting financial documents, and once in awhile just to erase web surfing cached stuff. I ALSO erase stuff I have reason to believe is a copyright violation, so if someone were to do a forensic examination of my harddrive, they'd see lots of sectors that have obviously been erased (random HDD noise is just noise; erased sectors have very clean sets of 1's and 0's).
When I saw this article, I wondered what the burden of proof would be - is the mere existence of Erasure software proof of wrongdoing? Obviously not, but it would SEEM to be given the standard of judgement used by the judge in this case.
So your post is helpful. If I had mod points I'd mod you 'informative.'
It floors me that someone can expect a $3,000,000 maximum fine for downloading songs, while an oil company tends to get a $5000 fine for ruining a few acres of land.
This is one of the ways you know the world is moving towards fascism. Citizens are treated like criminals and punished 30,000 times over for it, and corporations that cause massive destruction are not even slapped on the wrist.
That's called government of the corporation, by the corporation, for the corporation - fascism.
True, we're not entirely there yet, and there's still some semblance of an attempt at fairness, but it seems those judges who actually want fair judgements are becoming more and more rare.
I'd rather file bankruptcy than spend time in a federal prison, imho.
Good luck ever filing for bankruptcy in the United States. After the finance industry's cout d'etat last year, forcing through the anti-bankruptcy law that makes it almost impossible to wipe away debts you'll never be able to pay, you're better off just spending a few years in jail, rather than the next 70 years of your life paying 30% of every paycheck to the RIAA.
Either way, you're completely screwed. This is not the situation we should be in. Seriously, how is this in the slightest bit fair?
Says you. And so long as anyone disagrees with you, you have no right to force your beliefs on others.
THAT is the antithesis of all this damn moral posturing about whether it's murder, whether the fetus is a baby, blah blah blah. You have no right to force me to accept your belief that a mother cannot choose to terminate her pregnancy because of arguments over when life begins.
Let the mother decide if it's ending a life or not - let the mother grapple with the moral and philosophical questions. That is her responsibility as a human being.
And let's not waste time with moral relativism by trying to claim I'm saying "Oh, so if I say I'm not murdering you when I stab you in the chest, it's ok?" because I am making no such point.
The problem is your opposition is ideological in nature. It is meant to provide balance, not to be adhered to literally. When I ask you a direct question, and you can't answer it because of ho-hum philosophical reason, it makes you look bad, like you're not even thinking. You're entrenched in this ideology. When you try and blend an argument about privacy in with an argument for freedom, with no clear distinction between the two, you are making some sort of fallacy, you tell me.
In another post on this topic, not one directed at you, I addressed that:
The question really is not one of an individual legal case. If the demand for information would be always and forever limited to this case I would say, more power to you, give up the information.
Unfortunately, actions like these establish that irritating little fellow called "precedent." Once authorities in Brazil and other countries realize they can strong arm a company into turning over personal information (whether based on the child porn pretext or otherwise, regardless of how solid that pretext is), you can kiss privacy goodbye.
My concern is not ideological in nature, although that's the source - it's not that I'm afraid the door will be opened.. it's that I know it will. I want these people caught.. I just want the authorities to do it in a way that doesn't open the door for governments to lay claim to loads of personal data that was previously off limits to them.
On the other hand, it's only a matter of time before someone takes advantage of certain "freedoms" to trade child porn, or commit mass murder.
They already take advantage of those freedoms. And people always will.
When the government; the only people TO be trusted with all the information,
See, this is when I started to realize where you're really coming from: you trust the government way more than I do. How can they really be trusted with that information when in the past few months alone, the personal data of millions of Americans has been easily stolen from government computers not once, but several times?
But it's more than that - even if the government could find a way to perfectly protect the information they have (and I'm not convinced they can), you'd still have to trust those people way more than you trust anyone else. You're exactly right, they're people like you and me - fallible, like you and me, but worse, almost everyone can be corrupted by power of any sort, and you have to be especially wary of that because again, you're exactly right - anybody can be part of the government, like certain Homeland Security officers arrested for child pornography.
And let me make myself perfectly clear... Nobody can be trusted with all the information. And nobody should be. It should be spread out alot of different places, and no single entity or small group of entities should have all of it.
My wife works for the government, she adheres to privacy laws. My best friend does surveillance for the Air Force, NSA, he can't even tell me what his job entails, or he goes to jail!
I'm a government contractor, I work with government folk all the time and I also have a security clearance, so I know what having such a clearance entails. Unfortunately, enforcement of the secrecy pledge only goes so far as the government's willingness to do so, and we've seen plenty of instances where someone who should have been prosecuted, wasn't, because they're so well connected (i.e., STILL nobody has been charged for outing Valerie Plame [spelling?]).
I'm not so much worried about nameless workers in a government office, really; few people will ever have any interest in spilling secrets about people's personal lives or state secrets. Most state secrets are incredibly boring. I worry more about well-connected, corrupt politicians and thef
Are you trying to say people have a right to look at child porn? Or even that people have a right to allow minors access to porn?
That's what logicians call a "Loaded question." While not a direct logical fallacy, it is still intellectually dishonest.
Were I to answer "No", I'm removing the teeth from my argument. If I answer "Yes", you make me appear terribly immoral.
So let's throw away such questions, shall we, and get to the real issue:
There are a lot of you on Slashdot who think the internet is better as total anarchy, for ideological reasons, but you're not thinking of OTHER PEOPLE, let alone "the children".
No, that's exactly who we're thinking of: ALL of the people - not just the ones the police want to catch. What we're saying is, find a way to catch them that doesn't require (or lead to, by precedent) trampling the rights of everyone else. And yes, that's a hard job to do. And yes, sometimes that means guilty people go free. But freedom was never a guarantee that the police's job would be easy - in fact it's hard for a reason: it's rather difficult to have freedom of any sort in a police state.
What does privacy really get you, anyways?
I take it you subscribe to the logical fallacy that "If you have nothing to hide, you'll share everything you know"? Because your question is the exact same statement, just using different words. In fact, I have thought this through QUITE well - it seems to be you that hasn't wondered what kind of world you'll end up in if governments have free access to anything and everything they ever wanted to know about anyone.
Saying "I am over the age of 18" never worked when you were 14 and wanted a porno mag from 7-eleven, why should it work on the internet? These questions haven't been addressed yet.
You're right, they haven't, at least not fully. Alot of people ARE trying to address them though - for example, there are several dozen adult verification services on the internet that are used by the legitimate porn industry. That does highlight a marked difference between the internet and the real world, though - regulation (and recognition) of that kind of stuff is much easier in the real world. You don't drive down a neighborhood street and suddenly get attacked by pictures of naked women.
And that's going to be a problem on the internet, for a long time. I wouldn't say it's an unsolveable problem but it's certainly a difficult one.
Wouldn't you still consider yourself a free man if you had to jump through hoops in order to look at porn?
When you realize my post had nothing to do with porn (child or otherwise), you'll understand my argument.
The market is NOT sick at all - it's working precisely as markets should work. You said yourself "glut of DVDs". The DVDs are selling so cheap because there is massive oversupply. That's what's supposed to happen in a free market when there is massive oversupply of a good.
I should have been more specific - glut of sellers trying to sell DVDs for 50 cents. I wouldn't say there's a glut of DVDs in the general market, although I'm no economist. On ebay, there IS - which is why ebay is a horrible place to sell otherwise valuable items.
For the record, I don't buy into the argument that immigrants take jobs away from Americans, so I apologize if I offended any sensibilities. The joke part had more to do with the current topic and the 'think of the children' part.
Why are so many/. readers depressed? I know we've been/.ing for years and Linux still isn't dominant, but I've read this whole thread and it seems every other person here is discussing their experience with anti-depressants.
I'm too lazy to find the reference at the moment (it's about 3 years old so it would take some doing) but there is a high correlation between intelligence and depression - specifically, the areas of the brain that make one intelligent and insightful are the same areas that make one susceptible to depression.
I'm not convinced the link is purely neurological though; I think there's got to be a strong cultural influence, too. Depression doesn't (usually) come out of nowhere - it has a trigger, and in our culture, that trigger is almost always very high stress, anxiety, or worry about a particular topic (finances), event (death in the family, etc.), or circumstance (unhappy with job, can't afford higher education, etc.).
Depression is almost unheard of in indigenous cultures however, as is the high level of stress we experience. That itself is enough to make me think there's some seriously wrong in our culture.
Hmm.. your ideas intrigue me and I would like to subscribe to your newsletter. [/Homer Simpson]
Well, I AM adding you to my friends list.
Seriously though, this is a topic that is very close to my heart.. so much of what we accept, and so much of what we don't do, are a consequence of exactly what you're saying:
Be silent. Accept your life. Don't make waves. Don't try to change the world. Who are you to believe your ideas more important, or your philosophy more correct, than someone else?
And the most heinous part of it all is exactly what you said: Everybody is baited with the promise that, if they work hard they can someday be the ones on top. And that's all it is.. an empty promise. Those on top know that... but those on the bottom would never accept their place in life if they knew it.
When I read the article and the Slashdot headline, my first thought was "Great - but is that really a world we want, where everyone is happy with exactly the way things are?" Talk about stagnation.
I seriously can't see why people are so much against releasing any kind of info, when the cops are going after child porn abusers.. Anyone care to elaborate?
The question really is not one of an individual legal case. If the demand for information would be always and forever limited to this case I would say, more power to you, give up the information.
Unfortunately, actions like these establish that irritating little fellow called "precedent." Once authorities in Brazil and other countries realize they can strong arm a company into turning over personal information (whether based on the child porn pretext or otherwise, regardless of how solid that pretext is), you can kiss privacy goodbye.
But more than that, you can kiss justice and government oversight goodbye. When the government can have more information on you than YOU have on you, you know the balance of power has shifted way too far in the government's favor. That's the kind of world in which you fear your own government more than any terrorist.
I am not willing to open those kinds of doors. If that means some guilty people are harder to prosecute, that's what that means - that is the price of freedom. It makes sure that the vast majority remain free. Arguing otherwise requires arguing that the vast majority of free people are in fact criminals, which is a simply ridiculous claim to make - and if one were to rely on the claim that the law makes most people criminals (even for minor infractions like jay-walking or littering), one really should consider the idea that there's something wrong with the law.
Forgive my ignorance of the US/Brazillian legal systems but why not just get a warrant from a US court? If this is a legitimate investigation and the request is narrow enough (eg: not a fishing exp), where's the problem?
Eh. The only court in the United States empowered to handle international legal disputes is the US Supreme Court.
But it takes alot to bring a case before them, so it'd probably be awhile before we saw any US legal action.
[If anyone knows differently let me know. My recollection of the US Constitution says this is so but I don't know the 200 years of intervening history that may have delegated that power to other US courts]
...why they would have a problem releasing that information even from the US. I'd hate to be the American company protecting child pornography. Could be very bad for the image. Not to mention the stock price.
What you've just done is invoke the "think of the children" free pass to the US Constitution (and every other political system in the world based on individual freedom, of which there are several dozen).
This is exactly the tactic used by so many in power to get their foot in the door of eliminating privacy: Choose an issue that causes anyone who disagrees to look like a criminal, and get people to voluntarily give up their freedoms and privacy. Now that you have a precedent set for getting access to that information, you can do it for basically any reason - and abuse of power is just a step away.
I don't trust anyone enough to give them that kind of power in the first place.
There's a saying, and I will paraphrase because I don't remember the exact words..
"I would rather one guilty man remain free than compromise the freedoms of a thousand."
See, that's what so few people understand - the price of freedom is eternal vigilance (Thomas Jefferson). What this means is that freedom is actually an incredibly difficult social system to maintain, and still retain justice and order. But it is that struggle, that effort, that makes the ends so worthwhile - it is the very definition of honor and integrity.
And that is why so many people find freedom so frustrating [read: people we elect to leadership]... they know they don't deserve it.
Ebay is a very sick marketplace today, prices too low to sustain any sort of valid business. Selling things for 95% off- you would have to be working on your kitchen table! 60 or 80% off, fine.
To sell as low as some categories are on ebay you would have to get everything for free. Not that it doesn't happen, I work for a company that gets lots of our ebay items for free. But I have a policy against selling things so cheap they foul up the market- If I can't get anything reasonable for it I just scrap it. I wish some of the other ebay sellers would think about that. Selling a $3000 item for $10 hardly contributes to business success. You can't even get lunch after your ebay and paypal fees.
Thank you. Exactly.
Part of the problem as I have seen eBay evolve is an influx of sellers who are willing to sell a $40 item for $0.50, just to get the sale and the feedback, have 97% of their auctions end without bidders, simply in the hope that the other 3% will make up the difference. eBay IS a very sick market place and I've stopped selling there for that reason.
One has to wonder why you can't get even market value on the vast majority of items on ebay - except, of course, for things sold by major corporations like Windows, where someone trying to undersell the market will find themselves sued every whichway from Sunday. But a DVD set that sells at, say, $30 on Amazon, you can barely get $3 for on eBay, because the glut of DVDs makes it seem like DVDs are worthless.
At this point, I prefer to stick something on Craigs list for 6 months where at least listing is free so that if it doesn't sell, I didn't pay up the ass for the honor of not selling my item.
That said, there are a few niche areas left on eBay where someone can get a decent price for items. I do see them once in awhile, but not often.
I've tried listing items that are legit and they'll cancel the auction because someone files a bogus report.
I had someone do this to me 4 times - for the same item. He claimed our auctions were substantially similar because I, god forbid, actually included a table of conversion values that are freely available anywhere, and he included such a listing also (which I didn't know until I went hunting for auctions similar to mine).
Ebay actually let him get away with his "don't you dare compete with me for the same items" until I posted, in size 24 font, the reference for the values I was using, so that he couldn't claim I was copying him (it was a list of gold weight conversions, by the way).
At that point he really had no grounds to complain but seriously, I should not have had to relist the damn item 4 times because some seller gets upset that someone is competing with him.
And yet other serious, genuine complaints get completely ignored with a polite "Thanks for telling us, now go away!" email, for example, sellers who post a DVD at 1 cent and charge $75 shipping (actually happened; I reported the auction to ebay and it stayed up until it completed).
If these bands are so worried about their 'artistic vision' being chopped, why do they not force the radio stations to play every track in order? They don't; the hit songs get played, some other songs may never be played.
Exactly. The other part of that question is, if they're so concerned about their artistic vision, why do they sign with media conglomerates that they KNOW are going to bastardize that vision into its most marketable form?
The way I see it, if control of the experience is what they want [and that honestly is what defines true artists], they should be doing that at the concert level, not at the individual-album-sale level.
(I realize you're quoting so my responses aren't directed at you so much as to the concepts themselves).
While all of that sounds really nice, and is definitely based in legal precedent.. the program is still wrong. When did ethics become less important than the rule of law?
The article is also peppered with unfounded statements that the program has "undoubtedly saved lives." And then to state that the program helped to prevent the "9/11 Part 2" British airline bombings just makes it sound like the government knew the ruling was coming and needed a reason to demonstrate how the program 'saves lives.' It just doesn't fly with me.
And it really doesn't matter to me if it saves lives. It's still wrong. I would charge the government, then, with finding another way to save lives - stop being lazy, and stop treating every American like a criminal. That's a good start.
I hearby invoke Godwin's Law [wikipedia.org] and ask that the editors close this article from further comments.
Give me a break. From the very article itself:
The government argued that the program is well within the president's authority, but said proving that would require revealing state secrets.
Proving that something is within the President's power is revealing a state secret? I thought all of the President's powers were enumerated in the Constitution. He now has secret powers that nobody can know about? That is EXACTLY the kind of "President's Prerogative" that the Furher's Princip is all about.
From the Wikipedia article:
It is precisely because such a reference or comparison may sometimes be appropriate, Godwin argues in his book, Cyber Rights: Defending Free Speech in the Digital Age, that hyperbolic overuse of the Hitler/Nazi comparison should be avoided, as it robs the valid comparisons of their impact.
This is a time when it IS appropriate and no hyperbole of any kind was introduced.
What does it take to shake us out of our passivity?
Usually.. a real war with a quantifiable enemy and a well defined end-point.
In this case though, what it will take is descent into dicatatorship. It's unfortunate, but people will not wake up until they no longer have easy access to bread and circuses, and they realize that they can no longer afford to ignore their government. That, unfortunately, doesn't seem to happen until their day to day life becomes so odious that they are FORCED to take action.
Slashdot Mirror
Now, I don't expect that to remain true much longer, but at least for now..
How about, not knowing the extent of actual damages, invoking the MINIMUM penalty instead of the maximum. That would be more fair, particularly because it is incredibly hard for me to believe that some random woman would have the wherewithall to cause $3,000,000 of damage merely by downloading several dozen songs. Causing that much actual damage pretty much requires redistribution on a massive scale.
What would be even more fair would be only assigning damages according to what the woman could have bought the music for - the price of 200 songs or 15 albums, whichever is greater.
But then, nothing in this case had anything to do with being fair, or just, or any of those pretty, obsolete words.
One side breaks it (government - those in power) the other side is under no obligation to maintain their part of the bargain.
But don't take my word for it, read the works of Hobbes and Locke, who put in far better terms than I could.
Thank you for that information. I regularly Erase my harddrive after deleting financial documents, and once in awhile just to erase web surfing cached stuff. I ALSO erase stuff I have reason to believe is a copyright violation, so if someone were to do a forensic examination of my harddrive, they'd see lots of sectors that have obviously been erased (random HDD noise is just noise; erased sectors have very clean sets of 1's and 0's).
When I saw this article, I wondered what the burden of proof would be - is the mere existence of Erasure software proof of wrongdoing? Obviously not, but it would SEEM to be given the standard of judgement used by the judge in this case.
So your post is helpful. If I had mod points I'd mod you 'informative.'
That's called government of the corporation, by the corporation, for the corporation - fascism.
True, we're not entirely there yet, and there's still some semblance of an attempt at fairness, but it seems those judges who actually want fair judgements are becoming more and more rare.
Either way, you're completely screwed. This is not the situation we should be in. Seriously, how is this in the slightest bit fair?
THAT is the antithesis of all this damn moral posturing about whether it's murder, whether the fetus is a baby, blah blah blah. You have no right to force me to accept your belief that a mother cannot choose to terminate her pregnancy because of arguments over when life begins.
Let the mother decide if it's ending a life or not - let the mother grapple with the moral and philosophical questions. That is her responsibility as a human being.
And let's not waste time with moral relativism by trying to claim I'm saying "Oh, so if I say I'm not murdering you when I stab you in the chest, it's ok?" because I am making no such point.
In another post on this topic, not one directed at you, I addressed that:
My concern is not ideological in nature, although that's the source - it's not that I'm afraid the door will be opened.. it's that I know it will. I want these people caught.. I just want the authorities to do it in a way that doesn't open the door for governments to lay claim to loads of personal data that was previously off limits to them.
They already take advantage of those freedoms. And people always will.
See, this is when I started to realize where you're really coming from: you trust the government way more than I do. How can they really be trusted with that information when in the past few months alone, the personal data of millions of Americans has been easily stolen from government computers not once, but several times?
But it's more than that - even if the government could find a way to perfectly protect the information they have (and I'm not convinced they can), you'd still have to trust those people way more than you trust anyone else. You're exactly right, they're people like you and me - fallible, like you and me, but worse, almost everyone can be corrupted by power of any sort, and you have to be especially wary of that because again, you're exactly right - anybody can be part of the government, like certain Homeland Security officers arrested for child pornography.
And let me make myself perfectly clear... Nobody can be trusted with all the information. And nobody should be. It should be spread out alot of different places, and no single entity or small group of entities should have all of it.
I'm a government contractor, I work with government folk all the time and I also have a security clearance, so I know what having such a clearance entails. Unfortunately, enforcement of the secrecy pledge only goes so far as the government's willingness to do so, and we've seen plenty of instances where someone who should have been prosecuted, wasn't, because they're so well connected (i.e., STILL nobody has been charged for outing Valerie Plame [spelling?]).
I'm not so much worried about nameless workers in a government office, really; few people will ever have any interest in spilling secrets about people's personal lives or state secrets. Most state secrets are incredibly boring. I worry more about well-connected, corrupt politicians and thef
Were I to answer "No", I'm removing the teeth from my argument. If I answer "Yes", you make me appear terribly immoral.
So let's throw away such questions, shall we, and get to the real issue:
No, that's exactly who we're thinking of: ALL of the people - not just the ones the police want to catch. What we're saying is, find a way to catch them that doesn't require (or lead to, by precedent) trampling the rights of everyone else. And yes, that's a hard job to do. And yes, sometimes that means guilty people go free. But freedom was never a guarantee that the police's job would be easy - in fact it's hard for a reason: it's rather difficult to have freedom of any sort in a police state.
I take it you subscribe to the logical fallacy that "If you have nothing to hide, you'll share everything you know"? Because your question is the exact same statement, just using different words. In fact, I have thought this through QUITE well - it seems to be you that hasn't wondered what kind of world you'll end up in if governments have free access to anything and everything they ever wanted to know about anyone.
You're right, they haven't, at least not fully. Alot of people ARE trying to address them though - for example, there are several dozen adult verification services on the internet that are used by the legitimate porn industry. That does highlight a marked difference between the internet and the real world, though - regulation (and recognition) of that kind of stuff is much easier in the real world. You don't drive down a neighborhood street and suddenly get attacked by pictures of naked women.
And that's going to be a problem on the internet, for a long time. I wouldn't say it's an unsolveable problem but it's certainly a difficult one.
When you realize my post had nothing to do with porn (child or otherwise), you'll understand my argument.
For the record, I don't buy into the argument that immigrants take jobs away from Americans, so I apologize if I offended any sensibilities. The joke part had more to do with the current topic and the 'think of the children' part.
I'm not convinced the link is purely neurological though; I think there's got to be a strong cultural influence, too. Depression doesn't (usually) come out of nowhere - it has a trigger, and in our culture, that trigger is almost always very high stress, anxiety, or worry about a particular topic (finances), event (death in the family, etc.), or circumstance (unhappy with job, can't afford higher education, etc.).
Depression is almost unheard of in indigenous cultures however, as is the high level of stress we experience. That itself is enough to make me think there's some seriously wrong in our culture.
Hmm.. your ideas intrigue me and I would like to subscribe to your newsletter.
[/Homer Simpson]
Well, I AM adding you to my friends list.
Seriously though, this is a topic that is very close to my heart.. so much of what we accept, and so much of what we don't do, are a consequence of exactly what you're saying:
Be silent. Accept your life. Don't make waves. Don't try to change the world. Who are you to believe your ideas more important, or your philosophy more correct, than someone else?
And the most heinous part of it all is exactly what you said:
Everybody is baited with the promise that, if they work hard they can someday be the ones on top.
And that's all it is.. an empty promise. Those on top know that... but those on the bottom would never accept their place in life if they knew it.
When I read the article and the Slashdot headline, my first thought was "Great - but is that really a world we want, where everyone is happy with exactly the way things are?" Talk about stagnation.
Unfortunately, actions like these establish that irritating little fellow called "precedent." Once authorities in Brazil and other countries realize they can strong arm a company into turning over personal information (whether based on the child porn pretext or otherwise, regardless of how solid that pretext is), you can kiss privacy goodbye.
But more than that, you can kiss justice and government oversight goodbye. When the government can have more information on you than YOU have on you, you know the balance of power has shifted way too far in the government's favor. That's the kind of world in which you fear your own government more than any terrorist.
I am not willing to open those kinds of doors. If that means some guilty people are harder to prosecute, that's what that means - that is the price of freedom. It makes sure that the vast majority remain free. Arguing otherwise requires arguing that the vast majority of free people are in fact criminals, which is a simply ridiculous claim to make - and if one were to rely on the claim that the law makes most people criminals (even for minor infractions like jay-walking or littering), one really should consider the idea that there's something wrong with the law.
But it takes alot to bring a case before them, so it'd probably be awhile before we saw any US legal action.
[If anyone knows differently let me know. My recollection of the US Constitution says this is so but I don't know the 200 years of intervening history that may have delegated that power to other US courts]
When will you think of the children?!?!
(Notice for the humor impaired: This post was also a joke.)
This is exactly the tactic used by so many in power to get their foot in the door of eliminating privacy: Choose an issue that causes anyone who disagrees to look like a criminal, and get people to voluntarily give up their freedoms and privacy. Now that you have a precedent set for getting access to that information, you can do it for basically any reason - and abuse of power is just a step away.
I don't trust anyone enough to give them that kind of power in the first place.
There's a saying, and I will paraphrase because I don't remember the exact words..
"I would rather one guilty man remain free than compromise the freedoms of a thousand."
See, that's what so few people understand - the price of freedom is eternal vigilance (Thomas Jefferson). What this means is that freedom is actually an incredibly difficult social system to maintain, and still retain justice and order. But it is that struggle, that effort, that makes the ends so worthwhile - it is the very definition of honor and integrity.
And that is why so many people find freedom so frustrating [read: people we elect to leadership]... they know they don't deserve it.
Exactly. And if that doesn't make the case for abuse of monopoly and the role DRM plays in that kind of abuse, I don't know what will.
And all Apple would have to do to avoid those kind of accusations is to license FairPlay. But no, too tempting, all that power.
Goddammit, thank you.
I simply cannot believe people are trying this crap.. and I can fathom even less that they're getting away with it.
What next, every word we speak will be trademarked or copyrighted in some fashion so that merely communicating will cost an arm and a leg?
Where the hell does it end?
Thank you. Exactly.
Part of the problem as I have seen eBay evolve is an influx of sellers who are willing to sell a $40 item for $0.50, just to get the sale and the feedback, have 97% of their auctions end without bidders, simply in the hope that the other 3% will make up the difference. eBay IS a very sick market place and I've stopped selling there for that reason.
One has to wonder why you can't get even market value on the vast majority of items on ebay - except, of course, for things sold by major corporations like Windows, where someone trying to undersell the market will find themselves sued every whichway from Sunday. But a DVD set that sells at, say, $30 on Amazon, you can barely get $3 for on eBay, because the glut of DVDs makes it seem like DVDs are worthless.
At this point, I prefer to stick something on Craigs list for 6 months where at least listing is free so that if it doesn't sell, I didn't pay up the ass for the honor of not selling my item.
That said, there are a few niche areas left on eBay where someone can get a decent price for items. I do see them once in awhile, but not often.
Ebay actually let him get away with his "don't you dare compete with me for the same items" until I posted, in size 24 font, the reference for the values I was using, so that he couldn't claim I was copying him (it was a list of gold weight conversions, by the way).
At that point he really had no grounds to complain but seriously, I should not have had to relist the damn item 4 times because some seller gets upset that someone is competing with him.
And yet other serious, genuine complaints get completely ignored with a polite "Thanks for telling us, now go away!" email, for example, sellers who post a DVD at 1 cent and charge $75 shipping (actually happened; I reported the auction to ebay and it stayed up until it completed).
The way I see it, if control of the experience is what they want [and that honestly is what defines true artists], they should be doing that at the concert level, not at the individual-album-sale level.
(I realize you're quoting so my responses aren't directed at you so much as to the concepts themselves).
While all of that sounds really nice, and is definitely based in legal precedent.. the program is still wrong. When did ethics become less important than the rule of law?
The article is also peppered with unfounded statements that the program has "undoubtedly saved lives." And then to state that the program helped to prevent the "9/11 Part 2" British airline bombings just makes it sound like the government knew the ruling was coming and needed a reason to demonstrate how the program 'saves lives.' It just doesn't fly with me.
And it really doesn't matter to me if it saves lives. It's still wrong. I would charge the government, then, with finding another way to save lives - stop being lazy, and stop treating every American like a criminal. That's a good start.
Proving that something is within the President's power is revealing a state secret? I thought all of the President's powers were enumerated in the Constitution. He now has secret powers that nobody can know about? That is EXACTLY the kind of "President's Prerogative" that the Furher's Princip is all about.
From the Wikipedia article:
This is a time when it IS appropriate and no hyperbole of any kind was introduced.
In this case though, what it will take is descent into dicatatorship. It's unfortunate, but people will not wake up until they no longer have easy access to bread and circuses, and they realize that they can no longer afford to ignore their government. That, unfortunately, doesn't seem to happen until their day to day life becomes so odious that they are FORCED to take action.