She didn't recognize the documents to be false; she recognized the behavior of the minors to be suspicious.
And therefore believed the documents to be false. "Reasonable reliance" means both actual reliance on the documents (that is, acting based on subjective belief in the accuracy of the documents) and that such reliance is reasonable.
(And, as another poster noted, the law actually requires completing an electronic scan and verification of the ID, not just visual inspection, for the liability shield to apply.)
She's going above and beyond the letter of the law, which is fine, but unnessecary -- certainly unnessecary for the issue of liability.
No, if she actually did not believe the person was over 21 despite the ID, she isn't, even ignoring the requirement of the electronic scan and verification. Now, admittedly, if reliance would have been reasonable (and if the suspicious behavior of the minor would have made a person of average intelligence and experience believe the person was under 21 despite the not-obviously-defective ID, it wasn't, anyway), it would be very difficult to establish liability (again, ignoring the electronic scan requirement) if she didn't let anyone know of her subjective belief that the person involved was a minor despite the ID, but that doesn't mean she would have been within the law, only that she could have, if she wanted to, concealed enough that she could probably lie and escape liability.
Being a criminal means infringing on someone's rights.
No, it means breaking a criminal law.
Rights are defined as to determine how scarce resources are to be controlled.
That's a rather unusual definition of rights. A more typical definition of a right would be "a just claim or title, whether legal, prescriptive, or moral." (the first noun definition.)
Information is not a scarce resource, by copying music from someone, I am not invading anyone's property, or if you prefer infringing on anyone's right.
You are violating a legal property right.
Really, your entire argument seems to be based on inventing unusual definitions of words ("criminal", "right", "property") as if they were the normal, uncontroversial, widely accepted definitions, and then just claiming that your preferred conclusion flows naturally from your definitions. That's rather silly.
If I run this locally on all 3.4e + 38 values, does that protect me from DMCA take-down notices when I post one of the values online?
Nope, because even in the best possible reading, you don't really own the number, you have just made the number a method of circumventing copyright that can be subject of a DMCA take-down. That doesn't insulate you from take-down notices from other people who may own content that it circumvents the protection on.
Of course, if distributing the number alone without explanation of its use is a DMCA violation, you then might have a cause of action against anyone who distributes any of your numbers for other purposes. Including, one might imagine, someone who incorporates it in a different decryption system.
Wouldn't the Unclean Hands Doctrine apply to this case?
Unclean hands is an equitable doctrine which deals with specific kinds of remedies, it does not deal with the underlying legality. Specifically, it does not address whether the material is subject to copyright.
Further, a link to an unsourced (though, from a quick skim, mostly accurate) Wikipedia page is probably not the kind of citation that was being asked for.
So I think you are, for those reasons, entitled to no cookie. But nice try.
DMCA questions aside - what gives the bartender the right to confiscate an ID she thinks is fake, then post it on the Internet?
IIRC, its not uncommon for state law to explicitly permit the seizure of false ID to people to whom they are presented for purposes of purchasing alcohol.
Not forgetting that now she's in possession of illegal property,
"Illegal property"? What do you mean?
If it was seized legally, its not stolen property.
If it is only illegal to make or present a false ID, but not to possess one, its not "illegal" for that reason, either.
she doesn't have the right to "play cop" with every young-looking kid who comes up there looking for a drink.
Actually, people who serve alcoholic beverages are often legally obligated to play cop to an extent. Its a condition of their licensure.
Whether this goes beyond what is allowed is another question, but certainly you provide no well-grounded reason to believe that it did.
If she asked for an ID, and reasonable documentation was provided, she's fulfilled her obligation under the law, and the liability now rests with the minor.
Wrong. Under the text of the law you quoted, if she actually relied on the document (that means she subjectively believed it was accurate) and that belief was reasonable, then she would not be liable. If she, in fact, recognized the document as false or merely believed it to be false, she would have been liable—even though it may be difficult to prove if she lied about it—because then she would not have relied upon the document, reasonably or otherwise.
I hope to never to have to program in Java. If it's so great, why am I not already using it?
You don't have to program in Java to use JavaFX Script. Of course, if you want to code logic behind the UI in Java, you can, since it runs on the JVM, but I'd imagine that using it in an applet providing the front end to a web app often wouldn't involve anything other than JavaFX Script on the front end, and whatever you wanted to program your web app in on the backend, whether that's Java or a RESTful RoR webapp serving XML, or whatever else you want.
We are moving from using an open language (Javascript) that can be a real pain (thanks to all the different browsers ways of interpreting and using things) to an open language (JavaFX will be open sourced according to the FAQ) that will have a good reference implementation and should alleviate many of these annoying little things about JS, without having to use something as heavy or overkill as Flash.
Is the JVM really less "heavy or overkill" than Flash?
If, as you say, the GPL can't cover linking, what stops an entity from writing a closed-source app that links to Readline, but distributes only the Readline source with the otherwise-closed binaries?
Quite possibly nothing in law; the open-source-but-not-GPL examples along the same lines I've heard of involved lengthy exchanges between RMS and the person running the open source project involved (with people from the community diving in on both sides), which eventually culminated in the OS project leader abandoning whatever other license they were using and agreeing to use the GPL to end the conflict, not so much because they were convinced that they were legally obligated to do so.
IIRC (and I'm too lazy to go reread the GPL at the moment) the "linking" provision isn't in the text of the GPL explicitly, its an explanation in the FSF GPL FAQ.
This may be slightly redundant but I'm expanding. At best, the forger's work could be considered a derivative work. It was mentioned that the forger, however, while claiming copyright, is making his work from a goverment designed document. There can be no copyright protection on a government work.
This is true, in US copyright law, only federal government works. State government works (example) are subject to copyright. Derivative works, to the extent they are original (whether the source is subject to copyright are not, due to authorship) are still subject to copyright to the extent that they are original, though they may also infringe on the source and make the creator liable for that.
A fake ID, besides being illegal to create in the United States, is a derivative work of the United States Government, and is not an original creative work of authorship.
There are two errors here:
First, most real (government-issued) IDs are not works of the US government but of state goverments. This is a minor point, but perhaps very tangentially significant since US government works are not subject to copyright on creation but state government works are.
Second, an original work that is derivative of another work is still, insofar as it contains original work, subject to copyright. Now, it may itself be a violation of the copyright of the work on which it is based, but that's an issue between the creator of the original and the creator of the derivative, not something which grants a license to third parties.
Umm, last I checked every American citizen that legally has a job in the U.S. already has a "federalized ID card". It's called your Social Security Card.
A social security card is not an ID card.
Also, if you travel outside the U.S. at all you have *two* federalized IDs in the Social Security Card and your passport (which has RFID).
True, foreign travel requires you to get a passport. Very few Americans, proportionately, have passports, because Americans don't tend to leave America.
One wonder what things like ratings would mean in a truly post-advertising world. Why spend millions more on a show just because it gets better ratings, if ad revenues don't exist? Would all cable become like the Discovery channel?
Discovery is a regular, advertising-supported commercial cable channel. Eliminating advertising will not make things more like the Discovery channel.
Or will pay-per-view become universal?
Pay per view isn't the only alternative to ads. Premium channels have long existed without ads (except for their interstitials for their own programming), and would presumably continue to exist even without advertising.
OTOH, the model of advertising embedded in programs (more prominent product placement, etc.) has been gaining and presumably would replace traditional advertising if it became trivial for most viewers to avoid "interruption" style ads, already techniques to simplify "dynamic" in-program ads so that they could change for different viewings have been discussed. As long as your eyeballs are on programming, someone is going to be willing to pay to get access to your eyeballs, and people providing the programming are going to like the opportunity for extra cash.
Aside from HBO's interstitials, which are "commercials" for HBO's own programming, and the "First Looks", which are, in a sense, "infomercials" for movies (but scheduled programs and thus easy to avoid), neither of which interrupt other programmings but instead occur between programs, HBO still doesn't have commercials.
What real harm a national ID can do. I'm not trying to troll, I've just never really "gotten" why a single centralized ID is more dangerous than a large number of different IDs.
You know the privacy problem with SSNs? Now imagine if there were one single identifier that was even more frequently used than SSNs.
How about we ask the 10-legged 8-eyed blue/green alien that got obliterated because his planet was circling that supernova?
Since the time for information from the alien about the supernova to reach us is at least as long information from the supernova itself, that doesn't really change the problem, even ignoring the problem of asking.
Sony still hasn't demonstrated a good reason for me to buy a PS3 when the only console games I want to play are Guitar Hero and Guitar Hero 2, both of which I can play on a significantly cheaper PS2.
I suspect that "people who only want to play Guitar Hero and Guitar Hero 2" aren't really the center of the target market for the PS3.
You'll note that those downloads include all the core libraries that Sun promised to release. Why don't they redirect users looking at http://openjdk.dev.java.net/ [java.net] to that page?
Its very easy to end up in various dead-end parts of Sun's web presence: I've run into lots of old links to zombie Sun webpages that were still up even though outdated and replaced by updated pages at different addresses.
It's not that the OSS model is "unsustainable," but that business managers just don't understand the mindsent behind, say, Debian. They don't understand how it can be that someone would write an app or maintain a distro because they find it enjoyable or gratifying, and so they don't find that model predictable, much less harnessable.
Most business managers I've known have hobbies, and many of them have rather intricate ones. I doubt very much that they, as a broad class, have any trouble understand why people would create out of non-pecuniary motives. OTOH, you are quite right that they find, from experience, difficulty in harnessing it, which is there principal concern in relating to it as business managers.
One way they've gotten around it is sponsoring their own FOSS projects managed by paid staff, or paying staff developers to work on FOSS projects so that the business-important features get implemented. But going beyond that and finding a way to provide incentives to the community seems that it could be win/win for business and the OS community. One barrier many FOSS applications face is that the elements that are important to users that aren't ideologically committed to FOSS are often time-consuming drudgery to implement.
I really think that a considerable part of the resistance to OSS, whether it be GNU/Linux or OpenOffice or whatever, is on principle, not merit.
I think a lot of it is on merit, and relates directly to the fact that FOSS is often driven by what is interesting to developers, not what users are willing to pay for. While money may be an indirect and imperfect method of assessing the importance of features to the audience, it seems to work in many cases better, along with other feedback mechanisms available, than those mechanisms work without money.
IME, compared to closed-source competitors, many FOSS projects are more developer-friendly and less end-user-friendly. And its not surprising, given the incentives. There are exceptions (Firefox, at least from my perspective, is at least as end-user-friendly as IE, for instance), but it seems to be a broad trend.
The first problem they need to get over is that "intellectual property" is not property, and is anti free market.
But "intellectual property" is exactly as much property (and exactly as compatible with the "free market") as any other kind of property, so why should they get over something that is manifestly the truth?
The fact is, children require sacrifice, and when given the option many people will just avoid sacrificing. This is why in Europe and Japan population is declining, and why, unless a new pro-family and pro-child secular ethos is created, religious people will be the ones keeping society going.
No, the reason European and Japanese population is experiencing negative natural growth is that advanced modern societies with strong social safety networks don't make having children important as a source of personal support later in life (which is also, on the flip side, why developing nations tend to have high birthrates.)
Whereas even wealthy societies with weaker social support structure and greater wealth inequality continue to create pressures on individuals to produce many children not as a "sacrifice" for some "pro-family ethos", but simply out of simpler economic motives.
Now, I'm not saying that birth control is all a bad thing. My parents used birth control (but they still had 3 kids), my sister and her husband are using "natural" birth control (because she's allergic to something, I think). But it has had bad unintended consequences. A society with no children is a society with no future.
A society experiencing a short-term negative natural population growth because the economic pressures that lead to unbounded and dangerous population increases have been curbed and therefore the population is returning to a more comfortable equilibrium is not a society with no children, and probably has a much brighter future than a society with aggregate wealth that has failed to deal with the pressures that lead to unending population growth (given that all kinds of misery positively correlate with population density.)
But most consumer routers have to do NAT for reasons other than security, but because of the limited externally-exposed IP address range most consumers have.
Wasn't one of the whole points of IPv6 to expand the address space to alleviate this problem? Doesn't it do it quite effectively? My understanding was that the answer to both is yes, which suggests that consumer routers in an IPv6 world ought to be able to act as firewalls for security, without doing NAT.
Siracusa ultimately believes that the ability to achieve such a break is more likely to emerge within an authoritative, top-down organization than from a grass-roots, fractious community such as Linux.
Nothing stops an "authoritative, top-down organization" from taking all the open-source work done on Linux, and applying its own methodology to driving it forward; if that's more effective than what everyone else in the Linux community is doing, users will be more interested in adopting what they do with it (and, heck, once the transition occurs, the less-centralized portions of the community will probably follow along and start working on the "Neo-Linux" thus produced.)
Its true that revolutionary, rather than evolutionary, change is probably best driven by a narrow committed group with a shared vision and the skills to realize than a disorganized community. But there is no barrier to that within Linux; and between the occasional revolutionary changes, the evolutionary changes that the community is very good at will still remain important. With open source, you don't have to choose: you can have a top-down narrow group working on revolutionary changes (you can have many of them working on different competing visions of revolutionary changes, which, given the risk involved in revolutionary change, is a good thing), all while the community at large continues plugging away on evolutionary changes to the base system—and if once one of the revolutionary variants attracts attention, begins working on evolutionary improvements to that, too.
Why is inequality the issue in the discussion? Because someone made a post about the disparities in wealth they perceived in India, someone else made a comment about disparities in wealth in Brazil, someone else made a comment about disparities in wealth in the US, and then someone else made a dismissive comment that the claim about the US was misplaced and things were pretty good in the US.
If you want to know why it was originally raised, well, it'd make more sense to do so in response to the post in which it was raised; at least, you'd have a better chance of having someone who might know the answer notice that you asked, given the way Slashdot's notifications work.
Slashdot Mirror
And therefore believed the documents to be false. "Reasonable reliance" means both actual reliance on the documents (that is, acting based on subjective belief in the accuracy of the documents) and that such reliance is reasonable.
(And, as another poster noted, the law actually requires completing an electronic scan and verification of the ID, not just visual inspection, for the liability shield to apply.)
No, if she actually did not believe the person was over 21 despite the ID, she isn't, even ignoring the requirement of the electronic scan and verification. Now, admittedly, if reliance would have been reasonable (and if the suspicious behavior of the minor would have made a person of average intelligence and experience believe the person was under 21 despite the not-obviously-defective ID, it wasn't, anyway), it would be very difficult to establish liability (again, ignoring the electronic scan requirement) if she didn't let anyone know of her subjective belief that the person involved was a minor despite the ID, but that doesn't mean she would have been within the law, only that she could have, if she wanted to, concealed enough that she could probably lie and escape liability.
No, it means breaking a criminal law.
That's a rather unusual definition of rights. A more typical definition of a right would be "a just claim or title, whether legal, prescriptive, or moral." (the first noun definition.)
You are violating a legal property right.
Really, your entire argument seems to be based on inventing unusual definitions of words ("criminal", "right", "property") as if they were the normal, uncontroversial, widely accepted definitions, and then just claiming that your preferred conclusion flows naturally from your definitions. That's rather silly.
Nope, because even in the best possible reading, you don't really own the number, you have just made the number a method of circumventing copyright that can be subject of a DMCA take-down. That doesn't insulate you from take-down notices from other people who may own content that it circumvents the protection on.
Of course, if distributing the number alone without explanation of its use is a DMCA violation, you then might have a cause of action against anyone who distributes any of your numbers for other purposes. Including, one might imagine, someone who incorporates it in a different decryption system.
Unclean hands is an equitable doctrine which deals with specific kinds of remedies, it does not deal with the underlying legality. Specifically, it does not address whether the material is subject to copyright.
Further, a link to an unsourced (though, from a quick skim, mostly accurate) Wikipedia page is probably not the kind of citation that was being asked for.
So I think you are, for those reasons, entitled to no cookie. But nice try.
IIRC, its not uncommon for state law to explicitly permit the seizure of false ID to people to whom they are presented for purposes of purchasing alcohol.
"Illegal property"? What do you mean?
If it was seized legally, its not stolen property.
If it is only illegal to make or present a false ID, but not to possess one, its not "illegal" for that reason, either.
Actually, people who serve alcoholic beverages are often legally obligated to play cop to an extent. Its a condition of their licensure.
Whether this goes beyond what is allowed is another question, but certainly you provide no well-grounded reason to believe that it did.
Wrong. Under the text of the law you quoted, if she actually relied on the document (that means she subjectively believed it was accurate) and that belief was reasonable, then she would not be liable. If she, in fact, recognized the document as false or merely believed it to be false, she would have been liable—even though it may be difficult to prove if she lied about it—because then she would not have relied upon the document, reasonably or otherwise.
The government has always been able to enter civil suits.
Yes, they are outside of the criminal justice system. That means, for one thing, no one is going to be sent to jail, executed, etc.
Government engages in civil lawsuits all the time.
Government has been able to take civil action forever. So there is no real precedent in it being able to do so now.
Not only can they, but they have been for quite some time.
You don't have to program in Java to use JavaFX Script. Of course, if you want to code logic behind the UI in Java, you can, since it runs on the JVM, but I'd imagine that using it in an applet providing the front end to a web app often wouldn't involve anything other than JavaFX Script on the front end, and whatever you wanted to program your web app in on the backend, whether that's Java or a RESTful RoR webapp serving XML, or whatever else you want.
Is the JVM really less "heavy or overkill" than Flash?
Quite possibly nothing in law; the open-source-but-not-GPL examples along the same lines I've heard of involved lengthy exchanges between RMS and the person running the open source project involved (with people from the community diving in on both sides), which eventually culminated in the OS project leader abandoning whatever other license they were using and agreeing to use the GPL to end the conflict, not so much because they were convinced that they were legally obligated to do so.
IIRC (and I'm too lazy to go reread the GPL at the moment) the "linking" provision isn't in the text of the GPL explicitly, its an explanation in the FSF GPL FAQ.
This is true, in US copyright law, only federal government works. State government works (example) are subject to copyright. Derivative works, to the extent they are original (whether the source is subject to copyright are not, due to authorship) are still subject to copyright to the extent that they are original, though they may also infringe on the source and make the creator liable for that.
There are two errors here:
First, most real (government-issued) IDs are not works of the US government but of state goverments. This is a minor point, but perhaps very tangentially significant since US government works are not subject to copyright on creation but state government works are.
Second, an original work that is derivative of another work is still, insofar as it contains original work, subject to copyright. Now, it may itself be a violation of the copyright of the work on which it is based, but that's an issue between the creator of the original and the creator of the derivative, not something which grants a license to third parties.
A social security card is not an ID card.
True, foreign travel requires you to get a passport. Very few Americans, proportionately, have passports, because Americans don't tend to leave America.
Discovery is a regular, advertising-supported commercial cable channel. Eliminating advertising will not make things more like the Discovery channel.
Pay per view isn't the only alternative to ads. Premium channels have long existed without ads (except for their interstitials for their own programming), and would presumably continue to exist even without advertising.
OTOH, the model of advertising embedded in programs (more prominent product placement, etc.) has been gaining and presumably would replace traditional advertising if it became trivial for most viewers to avoid "interruption" style ads, already techniques to simplify "dynamic" in-program ads so that they could change for different viewings have been discussed. As long as your eyeballs are on programming, someone is going to be willing to pay to get access to your eyeballs, and people providing the programming are going to like the opportunity for extra cash.
Aside from HBO's interstitials, which are "commercials" for HBO's own programming, and the "First Looks", which are, in a sense, "infomercials" for movies (but scheduled programs and thus easy to avoid), neither of which interrupt other programmings but instead occur between programs, HBO still doesn't have commercials.
You know the privacy problem with SSNs? Now imagine if there were one single identifier that was even more frequently used than SSNs.
Now you see one of the problems?
Since the time for information from the alien about the supernova to reach us is at least as long information from the supernova itself, that doesn't really change the problem, even ignoring the problem of asking.
I suspect that "people who only want to play Guitar Hero and Guitar Hero 2" aren't really the center of the target market for the PS3.
Its very easy to end up in various dead-end parts of Sun's web presence: I've run into lots of old links to zombie Sun webpages that were still up even though outdated and replaced by updated pages at different addresses.
Most business managers I've known have hobbies, and many of them have rather intricate ones. I doubt very much that they, as a broad class, have any trouble understand why people would create out of non-pecuniary motives. OTOH, you are quite right that they find, from experience, difficulty in harnessing it, which is there principal concern in relating to it as business managers.
One way they've gotten around it is sponsoring their own FOSS projects managed by paid staff, or paying staff developers to work on FOSS projects so that the business-important features get implemented. But going beyond that and finding a way to provide incentives to the community seems that it could be win/win for business and the OS community. One barrier many FOSS applications face is that the elements that are important to users that aren't ideologically committed to FOSS are often time-consuming drudgery to implement.
I think a lot of it is on merit, and relates directly to the fact that FOSS is often driven by what is interesting to developers, not what users are willing to pay for. While money may be an indirect and imperfect method of assessing the importance of features to the audience, it seems to work in many cases better, along with other feedback mechanisms available, than those mechanisms work without money.
IME, compared to closed-source competitors, many FOSS projects are more developer-friendly and less end-user-friendly. And its not surprising, given the incentives. There are exceptions (Firefox, at least from my perspective, is at least as end-user-friendly as IE, for instance), but it seems to be a broad trend.
But "intellectual property" is exactly as much property (and exactly as compatible with the "free market") as any other kind of property, so why should they get over something that is manifestly the truth?
No, the reason European and Japanese population is experiencing negative natural growth is that advanced modern societies with strong social safety networks don't make having children important as a source of personal support later in life (which is also, on the flip side, why developing nations tend to have high birthrates.)
Whereas even wealthy societies with weaker social support structure and greater wealth inequality continue to create pressures on individuals to produce many children not as a "sacrifice" for some "pro-family ethos", but simply out of simpler economic motives.
A society experiencing a short-term negative natural population growth because the economic pressures that lead to unbounded and dangerous population increases have been curbed and therefore the population is returning to a more comfortable equilibrium is not a society with no children, and probably has a much brighter future than a society with aggregate wealth that has failed to deal with the pressures that lead to unending population growth (given that all kinds of misery positively correlate with population density.)
But most consumer routers have to do NAT for reasons other than security, but because of the limited externally-exposed IP address range most consumers have.
Wasn't one of the whole points of IPv6 to expand the address space to alleviate this problem? Doesn't it do it quite effectively? My understanding was that the answer to both is yes, which suggests that consumer routers in an IPv6 world ought to be able to act as firewalls for security, without doing NAT.
Nothing stops an "authoritative, top-down organization" from taking all the open-source work done on Linux, and applying its own methodology to driving it forward; if that's more effective than what everyone else in the Linux community is doing, users will be more interested in adopting what they do with it (and, heck, once the transition occurs, the less-centralized portions of the community will probably follow along and start working on the "Neo-Linux" thus produced.)
Its true that revolutionary, rather than evolutionary, change is probably best driven by a narrow committed group with a shared vision and the skills to realize than a disorganized community. But there is no barrier to that within Linux; and between the occasional revolutionary changes, the evolutionary changes that the community is very good at will still remain important. With open source, you don't have to choose: you can have a top-down narrow group working on revolutionary changes (you can have many of them working on different competing visions of revolutionary changes, which, given the risk involved in revolutionary change, is a good thing), all while the community at large continues plugging away on evolutionary changes to the base system—and if once one of the revolutionary variants attracts attention, begins working on evolutionary improvements to that, too.
Why is inequality the issue in the discussion? Because someone made a post about the disparities in wealth they perceived in India, someone else made a comment about disparities in wealth in Brazil, someone else made a comment about disparities in wealth in the US, and then someone else made a dismissive comment that the claim about the US was misplaced and things were pretty good in the US.
If you want to know why it was originally raised, well, it'd make more sense to do so in response to the post in which it was raised; at least, you'd have a better chance of having someone who might know the answer notice that you asked, given the way Slashdot's notifications work.