imagine if your workplace had a policy where if you saw someone downloading music, you had to approach them, then shout, "That is stealing!" Wow. Talk about demoralizing policy.
If it was a policy of a nongovernment workplace, it would seem to present a cause of action as defamation per se (either because it imputes criminal action to the target or because it impugns the professional character of the target.)
How would you have surgery if there weren't local surgeons? Small villages in Africa and India don't have surgeons. Nor does it make sense to have a specialist every couple of hundred miles for an area that may only have 50,000 people in case of emergencies.
Telesurgery isn't practical where there aren't local surgeons, in any case (and its probably less expensive to provide local surgeons than it would be to provide the infrastructure for telesurgery even if it were.) Telesurgery requires lots of infrastructure and expensive hardware, and all the local assistance of normal surgery; it might be useful for giving more major hospitals some access to some of the talent of the limited pool of the most expert surgeons (with on-site assisting surgeons, anaesthesiologists, nurses, techs, etc.), its not going to be a way to provide surgical capacity where minimal infrastructure exists.
Reducing us to "consumers" who "access content" (as opposed to co-equal users of a packet network, who consume or serve as we wish, within the constraints of the bandwidth we've paid for) is part of the problem.
The principles don't "reduce us" in the way that you claim. While they do refer to "consumers", they use that in the sense of the relationship to ISPs, not to content -- the role of the "consumer" is not merely to "access content". Note that while the entitlement to access content is in the first principle, the second principle entitles consumers to "run applications...of their choice", and does not exclude server applications from its scope.
The confusion is attributable to the FCC, not to the news report, because only that interpretation is consistent with the FCC's actual legal actions.
Wrong. The FCC's actual legal actions to enforce "network neutrality" principles, since they articulated in 2005, have not focussed on either extra user fees or slow downloads. The most notable cases have involved unconditional blocks on certain kinds of traffic (not slowing them, or charging extra for them); this includes the Madison River VoIP blocking case and the Comcast BitTorrent blocking case.
The confusion is attributable to the news report, since its characterization is inconsistent both with the FCC's actual statement (that it intends to enforce the published "network neutrality" principles) and the FCC's actual legal actions.
How do you choose which "unsupported" facts to call call into question and which to accept?
The only unsupported claim in the article is that the FCC's network neutrality principles are about "increased user fees and slow downloads".
The article claims (1) that the FCC has stated an intent to enforce network neutrality principles, and (2) that that statement of intent includes an intent to take action regarding increased user fees and slow downloads.
It supports the first claim with a quote from an FCC official stating an intent to enforce the FCC's network neutrality principles. It does not offer any support for the second claim, nor can the support it provides for the first claim be used to derive support for the second, since the actual network neutrality principles published by the FCC do not address "increased user fees and slow downloads", rather, they address the consumers entitlement to competition among various kinds of service providers, to access legal content of their choice, and to use legal devices, applications, and services of their choice on their internet connections.
Are only those inconsistent with your own ideology in doubt?
No; in fact, while I dislike violations of the FCC's actual published network neutrality principles, I also dislike increased user fees and slow downloads, so neither what the FCC has actually stated an intention to do nor what the article claims it has stated an intention to do is necessarily "inconsistent with my own ideology".
You could raise precisely the same doubt about this.
Certainly, any time a forward-looking intention is stated, one could question whether the intention will be carried out, but claims of intentions are a different kind of claim than fact claims about supposed past events.
You sound like: "maybe the news is wrong because it does not agree with my government-approved belief system".
No, what I am saying is that the news appears to be wrong because it says that a particular agency stated an intention to undertake a specific course of action when neither the quotes they have from the officials of the agency nor any other evidence presented states the intent that they claim the agency has stated.
The Obama administrationâ(TM)s Federal Communications Commission (FCC) plans to keep the Internet free of increased user fees based on heavy Web traffic and slow downloads.
Yes, it does claim that. It offers no support for this claim, and the only person they quote from the FCC states only that the FCC plans to enforce its network neutrality principles, which are published in an official policy statement and have nothing to do with "increased user fees based on heavy Web traffic and slow downloads".
TFA appears to be confusing a statement about the FCC's intention to enforce its publicly-articulate network neutrality principles with a common misconception of what "network neutrality" means that has little, if anything, to do with the principles articulated by the FCC.
That supports my claim that the government is out to control prices and demolishes your claim that it is not.
If one accepts it as a fact without any evidence, sure.
The FCC stated that they will go after violations. This is not the same as them actually doing it!
Let's first wait and see how this agency, that is stuffed with people from companies that are net-neutrality opponents, actually will perform.
They've actually already been acting against violations of the principles; two notable cases being the Madison River Communications case centering on VoIP blocking, and the Comcast case centering on BitTorrent blocking.
I personally don't believe a word of what a government agency says.
Perhaps, then, you should pay some attention to what they do.
As for wired vs airwaves, I think I could make my point a little more clear. It's not that they have no mandate to control wired communications, however, it seems to me that their ability to control CONTENT and what's actually sent (rather than the more basic control over HOW it's sent) only extends to those things that are broadcast over the airwaves.
Net neutrality principles don't address the content of what can be sent, so I don't see where this complaint comes from.
The FCC, making a decision on its own and without direction from Congress
The FCC is acting under general policy direction from Congress. The specifics aren't dictated by Congress, but then, if Congress wanted to dictate the specifics, they probably wouldn't create regulatory agencies in the first place.
going after companies based on its own whims
Continuing to follow through on a policy statement made in 2005 that it has pursued by various means in the intervening time period is hardly a "whim".
basically completely ignoring the rule of law
Acting under legal authority articulated by the US Supreme Court (in Brand X in 2005) isn't "ignoring the rule of law."
I like net neutrality as a concept, e.g. i don't want Comcast blocking my port 25, but on the other hand there will eventually have to be some use-based pricing because transfer does cost money.
Use-based pricing (by maximum bandwidth or total transfer) doesn't even come close to violating any of the FCC's network neutrality principles. There is nothing non-neutral about paying for what you use.
At some point, don't the ISPs risk their common carrier status?
No, because ISPs, as such, explicitly do not have common carrier status the way telephone companies do (even when the ISP is a telephone company.) They have similar immunities to those given to common carriers under various laws, but they don't have (explicitly in law) most of the obligations of common carriers. OTOH, the net neutrality principles echo, in many respects, the obligations of common carriers.
The FCC should NOT have authority over broadband companies, because their purpose is to control the airwaves.
Wrong. The FCC's original 1934 mandate included both the regulatory authority over the airwaves that had previously belonged to the Federal Radio Commission and that over wire communication that previously belonged to the Interstate Commerce Commission, so even if we're looking at their original jurisdiction and ignoring newer laws like the 1996 Telecommunications Act, the FCC has always had a broader mandate than the airwaves, and its always included communication over wires.
If anything, taking care of net neutrality should be something the SEC has domain over, because right now it's more of an antitrust problem than anything else.
Assuming, for the sake of argument, that "net neutrality" was mostly an antitrust issue, and, further, assuming, again for the sake of argument, that this particular area of commerce isn't explicitly within the FCC's regulatory purview, that would make it a matter for the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), not the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).
To encourage broadband deployment and preserve and promote the open and interconnected nature of the public Internet, consumers are entitled to access the lawful Internet content of their choice.
To encourage broadband deployment and preserve and promote the open and interconnected nature of the public Internet, consumers are entitled to run applications and use services of their choice, subject to the needs of law enforcement.
To encourage broadband deployment and preserve and promote the open and interconnected nature of the public Internet, consumers are entitled to connect their choice of legal devices that do not harm the network.
To encourage broadband deployment and preserve and promote the open and interconnected nature of the public Internet, consumers are entitled to competition among network providers, application and service providers, and content providers.
The proposed mandate is a pricing scheme biased in favor of those who consume more.
"Network neutrality" is not a pricing scheme.
If everyone is required to pay the same price regardless of usage, then those who consume little bandwitdth pay a relatively high rate (in dollars/bit) while those who consume much bandwidth pay a relatively low rate.
The FCC's Network Neutrality principles do not require that "everyone is required to pay the same price regardless of usage."
...but aren't we talking about private property owned by private private companies?
Most ISPs wouldn't be able to deliver service at all if it wasn't for public appropriation of property rights, via eminent domain, to put in their connecting infrastructure (often, established to support their operation as common-carrier telephone companies, which were often regulated monopolies), and many of them are protected from having much competition by the fact that governments aren't going to keep doing that to support multiple redundant sets of infrastructure.
If the government wanted the internet to be free of these kind of controls, doesn't it make sense for them to OWN the infrastructure so they can make the rules?
Government can make the rules whether or not in owns the infrastructure; being able to make the rules is pretty much the definition of "government".
What I'd like to know is on what grounds do they think they can mandate how traffic is managed on ISP networks.
Presumably because Congress, by law, has given the FCC authority to regulate interstate and foreign communication to acheive policy aims set by Congress, including, for instance, direction "to preserve the vibrant and competitive free market that presently exists for the Internet" and "to promote the continued development of the Internet" and to "encourage the deployment on a reasonable and timely basis of advanced telecommunications capability to all Americans", and also because of the US Supreme Court ruling in Brand X, 545 U.S. 967 (2005) that "the Commission remains free to impose special regulatory duties on facilities-based ISPs under its Title I ancillary jurisdiction."
No, there are net neutrality principles that the FCC has articulated that it believes are appropriate and necessary to acheive the mandates the FCC has been given by Congress with regard to the internet, and which it intends to use to guide its policymaking in that area.
"Principle" means jack squat legally.
True, principles, as such, have no binding force. The FCC Net Neutrality principles, one should note, are essentially a statement of how the Commission intends to acheive the objectives set for it in law, using its existing statutory authority; they aren't asserted to be independent legal authority.
This leaves a huge hole for ISP's to take the FCC to court for what is essentially a privately delivered service.
Anyone can take the FCC to court for anything they want; whether they can win or not is another matter.
Consumers are entitled to access the lawful Internet content of their choice;
Consumers are entitled to run applications and services of their choice, subject to the needs of law enforcement;
Consumers are entitled to connect their choice of legal devices that do not harm the network;
Consumers are entitled to competition among network providers, application and service providers, and content providers.
Neither of the principles you state are, as such, strictly necessary to meet those principles.
That being said, discrimination by source or destination could in some cases violated the principles (e.g., if an ISP that is also a content provider outright blocks access to traffic trying to reach competing content providers over its network, or blocks all port 80 requests, or all requessts that appear to use the HTTP protocol, going to their non-business subscribers IPs.) Likewise, discrimination by protocol might in some cases violate the protocol (indeed, the last example of discrimination by source or destination is also a discrimination by protocol.) Whether deprioritizing rather than outright blocking traffic using certain ports or protocols would violate the principles depends on the circumstances; presumably, deprioritization that made it impractical to use the protocol for its principal purpose would be problematic.
So maybe it's time for both kernel developers and distribution packagers to focus a little bit more on which hardware users are buying. Which is not multi (4+) core servers, but rather cheap laptops and netbooks.
Actually, I expect that more of the people that are paying for Linux support and Linux related services are buying multicore servers than cheap laptops and netbooks.
And I expect that the people paying for Linux support and services are much more important to the people for whom Linux is a business than the people who aren't paying for it. Just because software doesn't have a license fee doesn't mean that it writes and maintains itself for free. People are, in fact, paid to work on Linux, and the money that pays them comes from somewhere, and where that money comes from has an effect on priorities.
And, anyway, lower power consumption and better efficiency will probably also benefit the "big iron".
Sure, but the approaches that produce lower power consumption and better efficiency with the kind of hardware, applications, and loads that are typical of "big iron" use and the approaches that do so with typical desktop, notebook, or netbook hardware and usage patterns are quite likely very different.
The author recounts his own personal experience with poor battery life on a linux laptop, and then asks: "Why is battery life on notebooks so poor when using Linux?"
Well, who says it is? The old notebook on which I replaced XP with Ubuntu 8.10 (and then 9.04) has much better battery life under Linux that it had under Windows (plus it periodically would heat up and crash under Windows, but doesn't do that with Ubuntu.) Unlike the author of the story here, I won't generalize from that and say that Ubuntu is better for notebook performance in general than Windows; I personally think at least part of my experience is likely due to an age-related hardware quirk interacting with something Windows--or something else that was installed on Windows--did which was causing atypically poor performance under Windows. What I will say is that comparing Windows and Linux performance on one hardware setup is not a good basis for generalizing about their relative perforamnce for notebook computers in general.
Is protecting your right to not receive spam abusing the law? Is there something illegal about being a professional litigant? I thought we called them lawyers.
No. A litigant is (in the context used here) a party to a lawsuit, not the attorney representing them.
Sure, but how many crimes did it prevent? I always considered cameras more of a prevention, i.e. only idiots commit crimes in front of cameras.
That would perhaps make cameras somewhat useful for prevention, if criminals were usually acting on a rationa cost-benefit analysis considering the likelihood of being caught vs. the probable profit or enjoyment resulting from their actions. And even that, only if cameras were actually effective at making it easier criminals, which gets back to the report which is discussed in TFA.
Bottom line is that cameras are more than anything security theater (or, in the jurisdiction at immediate issue in TFA, security theatre), which are pursued because they (as noted by the Home Office spokesman quoted in TFA) "help communities feel safer".
Can you really "waive your rights against self-incrimination"?
Yes.
Like, now that he's waived his rights, he's required to incriminate himself?
No, it means that once he made the waiver, the statements he made to law enforcement can be used against him in a court of law and he cannot assert his Constitutional right against self-incrimination to have those statements excluded from evidence at trial (or, at least, provided that evidence shows that he did in fact waive those rights, an attempt to do so would fail.)
How about changing Linux to use a less restrictive license?
Since neither pre-acquisition Sun nor Oracle owns the Linux kernel, that's not something that's going to come out of this merger. (AS I understand it, since Linus doesn't require copyright assignment, the Linux kernel isn't all owned by any one entity, which means that relicensing the kernel would be extraordinarily difficult, so it'll probably take something more compelling than ZFS to motivate such a change.)
Oracle might have more reason to want ZFS to be available on Linux than Sun did, and so might plausible license ZFS in a way to make that happen.
Well, I suspect that Oracle will attempt to position MySQL as their "free Oracle-compatible" database offering
Oracle already has a "free Oracle-compatible" database offering, Oracle XE. I doubt they'll replace it with something with less commonality with the main Oracle DB products, since that would make it harder for people to step up from the free product to the expensive one, a transition that Oracle has some strong reasons to make as easy as possible.
Should such anonymity-busting court rulings include a provision for penalties if the plaintiff does not follow through with legal action after outing their target?
Since its possible that the identity and circumstances of the anonymous poster could affect the legal viability and utility of the lawsuit, and since the plaintiff cannot know those effects until the anonymity is pierced, probably not.
It serves neither the public interest, the interests of the potential defendants, nor the interests of the plaintiffs if plaintiffs in such cases were compelled to sue the people outed.
Slashdot Mirror
Sure, cross the nearest international border and do not return.
Governments are monopolies, sure, but for the most part only regional ones.
If it was a policy of a nongovernment workplace, it would seem to present a cause of action as defamation per se (either because it imputes criminal action to the target or because it impugns the professional character of the target.)
Telesurgery isn't practical where there aren't local surgeons, in any case (and its probably less expensive to provide local surgeons than it would be to provide the infrastructure for telesurgery even if it were.) Telesurgery requires lots of infrastructure and expensive hardware, and all the local assistance of normal surgery; it might be useful for giving more major hospitals some access to some of the talent of the limited pool of the most expert surgeons (with on-site assisting surgeons, anaesthesiologists, nurses, techs, etc.), its not going to be a way to provide surgical capacity where minimal infrastructure exists.
The principles don't "reduce us" in the way that you claim. While they do refer to "consumers", they use that in the sense of the relationship to ISPs, not to content -- the role of the "consumer" is not merely to "access content". Note that while the entitlement to access content is in the first principle, the second principle entitles consumers to "run applications...of their choice", and does not exclude server applications from its scope.
Wrong. The FCC's actual legal actions to enforce "network neutrality" principles, since they articulated in 2005, have not focussed on either extra user fees or slow downloads. The most notable cases have involved unconditional blocks on certain kinds of traffic (not slowing them, or charging extra for them); this includes the Madison River VoIP blocking case and the Comcast BitTorrent blocking case.
The confusion is attributable to the news report, since its characterization is inconsistent both with the FCC's actual statement (that it intends to enforce the published "network neutrality" principles) and the FCC's actual legal actions.
The only unsupported claim in the article is that the FCC's network neutrality principles are about "increased user fees and slow downloads".
The article claims (1) that the FCC has stated an intent to enforce network neutrality principles, and (2) that that statement of intent includes an intent to take action regarding increased user fees and slow downloads.
It supports the first claim with a quote from an FCC official stating an intent to enforce the FCC's network neutrality principles. It does not offer any support for the second claim, nor can the support it provides for the first claim be used to derive support for the second, since the actual network neutrality principles published by the FCC do not address "increased user fees and slow downloads", rather, they address the consumers entitlement to competition among various kinds of service providers, to access legal content of their choice, and to use legal devices, applications, and services of their choice on their internet connections.
No; in fact, while I dislike violations of the FCC's actual published network neutrality principles, I also dislike increased user fees and slow downloads, so neither what the FCC has actually stated an intention to do nor what the article claims it has stated an intention to do is necessarily "inconsistent with my own ideology".
Certainly, any time a forward-looking intention is stated, one could question whether the intention will be carried out, but claims of intentions are a different kind of claim than fact claims about supposed past events.
No, what I am saying is that the news appears to be wrong because it says that a particular agency stated an intention to undertake a specific course of action when neither the quotes they have from the officials of the agency nor any other evidence presented states the intent that they claim the agency has stated.
Yes, it does claim that. It offers no support for this claim, and the only person they quote from the FCC states only that the FCC plans to enforce its network neutrality principles, which are published in an official policy statement and have nothing to do with "increased user fees based on heavy Web traffic and slow downloads".
TFA appears to be confusing a statement about the FCC's intention to enforce its publicly-articulate network neutrality principles with a common misconception of what "network neutrality" means that has little, if anything, to do with the principles articulated by the FCC.
If one accepts it as a fact without any evidence, sure.
They've actually already been acting against violations of the principles; two notable cases being the Madison River Communications case centering on VoIP blocking, and the Comcast case centering on BitTorrent blocking.
Perhaps, then, you should pay some attention to what they do.
Net neutrality principles don't address the content of what can be sent, so I don't see where this complaint comes from.
The FCC is acting under general policy direction from Congress. The specifics aren't dictated by Congress, but then, if Congress wanted to dictate the specifics, they probably wouldn't create regulatory agencies in the first place.
Continuing to follow through on a policy statement made in 2005 that it has pursued by various means in the intervening time period is hardly a "whim".
Acting under legal authority articulated by the US Supreme Court (in Brand X in 2005) isn't "ignoring the rule of law."
Use-based pricing (by maximum bandwidth or total transfer) doesn't even come close to violating any of the FCC's network neutrality principles. There is nothing non-neutral about paying for what you use.
No, because ISPs, as such, explicitly do not have common carrier status the way telephone companies do (even when the ISP is a telephone company.) They have similar immunities to those given to common carriers under various laws, but they don't have (explicitly in law) most of the obligations of common carriers. OTOH, the net neutrality principles echo, in many respects, the obligations of common carriers.
Wrong. The FCC's original 1934 mandate included both the regulatory authority over the airwaves that had previously belonged to the Federal Radio Commission and that over wire communication that previously belonged to the Interstate Commerce Commission, so even if we're looking at their original jurisdiction and ignoring newer laws like the 1996 Telecommunications Act, the FCC has always had a broader mandate than the airwaves, and its always included communication over wires.
Assuming, for the sake of argument, that "net neutrality" was mostly an antitrust issue, and, further, assuming, again for the sake of argument, that this particular area of commerce isn't explicitly within the FCC's regulatory purview, that would make it a matter for the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), not the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).
What is meant by the FCC with network neutrality is four things:
"Network neutrality" is not a pricing scheme.
The FCC's Network Neutrality principles do not require that "everyone is required to pay the same price regardless of usage."
Most ISPs wouldn't be able to deliver service at all if it wasn't for public appropriation of property rights, via eminent domain, to put in their connecting infrastructure (often, established to support their operation as common-carrier telephone companies, which were often regulated monopolies), and many of them are protected from having much competition by the fact that governments aren't going to keep doing that to support multiple redundant sets of infrastructure.
Government can make the rules whether or not in owns the infrastructure; being able to make the rules is pretty much the definition of "government".
Presumably because Congress, by law, has given the FCC authority to regulate interstate and foreign communication to acheive policy aims set by Congress, including, for instance, direction "to preserve the vibrant and competitive free market that presently exists for the Internet" and "to promote the continued development of the Internet" and to "encourage the deployment on a reasonable and timely basis of advanced telecommunications capability to all Americans", and also because of the US Supreme Court ruling in Brand X, 545 U.S. 967 (2005) that "the Commission remains free to impose special regulatory duties on facilities-based ISPs under its Title I ancillary jurisdiction."
(Additional authority is cited in the FCC's Memorandum Opinion and Order in the Comcast case.)
No, there are net neutrality principles that the FCC has articulated that it believes are appropriate and necessary to acheive the mandates the FCC has been given by Congress with regard to the internet, and which it intends to use to guide its policymaking in that area.
True, principles, as such, have no binding force. The FCC Net Neutrality principles, one should note, are essentially a statement of how the Commission intends to acheive the objectives set for it in law, using its existing statutory authority; they aren't asserted to be independent legal authority.
Anyone can take the FCC to court for anything they want; whether they can win or not is another matter.
The FCC's Network Neutrality Principles are:
Neither of the principles you state are, as such, strictly necessary to meet those principles.
That being said, discrimination by source or destination could in some cases violated the principles (e.g., if an ISP that is also a content provider outright blocks access to traffic trying to reach competing content providers over its network, or blocks all port 80 requests, or all requessts that appear to use the HTTP protocol, going to their non-business subscribers IPs.) Likewise, discrimination by protocol might in some cases violate the protocol (indeed, the last example of discrimination by source or destination is also a discrimination by protocol.) Whether deprioritizing rather than outright blocking traffic using certain ports or protocols would violate the principles depends on the circumstances; presumably, deprioritization that made it impractical to use the protocol for its principal purpose would be problematic.
Actually, I expect that more of the people that are paying for Linux support and Linux related services are buying multicore servers than cheap laptops and netbooks.
And I expect that the people paying for Linux support and services are much more important to the people for whom Linux is a business than the people who aren't paying for it. Just because software doesn't have a license fee doesn't mean that it writes and maintains itself for free. People are, in fact, paid to work on Linux, and the money that pays them comes from somewhere, and where that money comes from has an effect on priorities.
Sure, but the approaches that produce lower power consumption and better efficiency with the kind of hardware, applications, and loads that are typical of "big iron" use and the approaches that do so with typical desktop, notebook, or netbook hardware and usage patterns are quite likely very different.
The author recounts his own personal experience with poor battery life on a linux laptop, and then asks: "Why is battery life on notebooks so poor when using Linux?"
Well, who says it is? The old notebook on which I replaced XP with Ubuntu 8.10 (and then 9.04) has much better battery life under Linux that it had under Windows (plus it periodically would heat up and crash under Windows, but doesn't do that with Ubuntu.) Unlike the author of the story here, I won't generalize from that and say that Ubuntu is better for notebook performance in general than Windows; I personally think at least part of my experience is likely due to an age-related hardware quirk interacting with something Windows--or something else that was installed on Windows--did which was causing atypically poor performance under Windows. What I will say is that comparing Windows and Linux performance on one hardware setup is not a good basis for generalizing about their relative perforamnce for notebook computers in general.
No. A litigant is (in the context used here) a party to a lawsuit, not the attorney representing them.
That would perhaps make cameras somewhat useful for prevention, if criminals were usually acting on a rationa cost-benefit analysis considering the likelihood of being caught vs. the probable profit or enjoyment resulting from their actions. And even that, only if cameras were actually effective at making it easier criminals, which gets back to the report which is discussed in TFA.
Bottom line is that cameras are more than anything security theater (or, in the jurisdiction at immediate issue in TFA, security theatre), which are pursued because they (as noted by the Home Office spokesman quoted in TFA) "help communities feel safer".
Yes.
No, it means that once he made the waiver, the statements he made to law enforcement can be used against him in a court of law and he cannot assert his Constitutional right against self-incrimination to have those statements excluded from evidence at trial (or, at least, provided that evidence shows that he did in fact waive those rights, an attempt to do so would fail.)
Since neither pre-acquisition Sun nor Oracle owns the Linux kernel, that's not something that's going to come out of this merger. (AS I understand it, since Linus doesn't require copyright assignment, the Linux kernel isn't all owned by any one entity, which means that relicensing the kernel would be extraordinarily difficult, so it'll probably take something more compelling than ZFS to motivate such a change.)
Oracle might have more reason to want ZFS to be available on Linux than Sun did, and so might plausible license ZFS in a way to make that happen.
Oracle already has a "free Oracle-compatible" database offering, Oracle XE. I doubt they'll replace it with something with less commonality with the main Oracle DB products, since that would make it harder for people to step up from the free product to the expensive one, a transition that Oracle has some strong reasons to make as easy as possible.
"Legal defense" is not among the free-of-charge services Google offers.
Since its possible that the identity and circumstances of the anonymous poster could affect the legal viability and utility of the lawsuit, and since the plaintiff cannot know those effects until the anonymity is pierced, probably not.
It serves neither the public interest, the interests of the potential defendants, nor the interests of the plaintiffs if plaintiffs in such cases were compelled to sue the people outed.