Is it that important to have your quote marks angled?
Sure, it greatly improves readability. Same thing with visual distinction between hyphens, various forms of dashes, and minus signs. There is a reason why professionally-published documents rarely restrict themselves to the subset of English punctuation supported by ASCII.
The Executive branch has no Constitutional authority to enforce it as any kind of treaty without ratification by Congress.
Ratification of treaties is by the Senate alone, not "by the Congress." If an international agreement is implemented by Congress through the normal legislative process, it is a normal statute law (these are also referred to as "Congressional-executive agreements"); the power to enter into these agreements is limited by Congress' existing enumerated powers, since this is simply an exercise of those powers in concert with foreign nations.
If an international agreement is implemented by the President alone, it is referred to as a "sole executive agreement", and it is constrained by the same bounds as the President's independent executive authority generally, as this is simple an exercise of that power in concert with foreign nations.
Only by treaty ratified by a 2/3 vote in the Senate can an international agreement extend beyond the other enumerated powers of Congress and/or the Executive, since only by treaty is a separate, independent Constitutional power of government exercised.
In international law as opposed to US Constitutional law, all three forms of agreements are "treaties".
In the particular case of ACTA, as a sole executive agreement it only has effect to the extent that it is within powers which are either inherent in the executive or which the executive has been given by law; looking through the text of ACTA that would seem to make most of provisions dead letters in US law.
It's the good old "jack of all trades" vs "master of one" all over again, and I call bullshit. The largest companies I've seen have had business liaisons and IT liaisons and the business divisions were trying to align their demands and the IT divisions (central + specialized) trying to align their deliveries and the idea that one person could do everything was ridiculous.
A "business analyst" isn't even remotely similar to a "business liaison" representing the "business division". In fact, the "business" in "business analyst" is a bad term, they are really systems analysts in the broad sense (that is, in the sense where system isn't limited to an IT system, though it may be an IT system or, more likely, a complex system with both human and IT components.)
I think that the ability to succeed in a hybridized programmer-businessanalyst role depends on how complex the business and its processes are, as well as how complex its IT platforms are.
I'm not convinced that's true.
If you're a more simpler company with simpler business processes and simpler platforms, then it's doable. But if you're in a complicated business environment with complex IT infrastructure, then creating these hybridized roles is asking for trouble.
This seems to assume that a "programmer" is supposed to have total knowledge of the IT infrastructure and that a "business analyst" is supposed to have similarly total knowledge of the business environment. If the former needs to be the case, then you probably have an environment where disparate systems are too-tightly coupled without a good information architecture, and fixing that is probably your most critical IT challenge, because trying to work around this by just hoping know-everything programmers will be able to keep it all in their heads as they add more to the mess is an ultimately doomed approach. If the latter is the case, you just don't understand the role of a "business analyst", whose role isn't to be a subject matter expert on all areas of the business, but to work with SMEs to establish system requirements (in this case, "system" often means the system of business processes into which one or more IT systems will be embedded, though in some cases the work is circumscribed just to an IT system serving an existing fixed set of business processes.)
Drop the accents, people will know what you mean...
I think you missed the first part of the sentence:
ASCII leaves off a lot of English punctuation, and accents that are, in fact, used in English
Standardizing on ASCII, even accents aside, would be insufficient for English. There's some punctuation used in English in the high end of Latin-1 (outside of the low-end which is ASCII), and even more in the Unicode general punctuation range (2000-206F).
Standardise the world on English. It'll be easier. It's already the second-most-spoken language, and Chinese is a real nightmare of character encoding in itsself. Then we can go back to good old ASCII.
ASCII leaves off a lot of English punctuation, and accents that are, in fact, used in English (sure, in words of foreign origin, but they are still used.)
Back to my original question: If not a floppy disk, what icon should be used for this action of committing an edited document to the part of the file system viewable by other users and applications?
The generic flowchart datastore symbol with an inbound arrow (retrieving something previously committed would use the same symbol with an outbound arrow.)
For products with less technical audiences, a stone tablet with an etching instrument, since committing results in the data being "carved in stone".
So, the weird thing about nation-states is that it's kind of more of a "as long as someone with a bigger bat doesn't come and hit me" situation. Just about everyone is only protected by their own ability and the willingness of others to prevent invasion...
That's not weird, it applies to individual rights under internal laws as well. The difference is that usually, the nation-state with the laws is the person with the bigger bat (though you can sometimes find cases where this isn't true), whereas in the realm of international law there is no international government (particularly, there is not true standing international force policing nations, though there are institutions that serve some of the other functions of government to a certain extent), making all enforcement something that is done by the equivalent of an ad hoc posse.
Pretty much there with you... but as far as micronations go, Sealand has the best arguments.
Given that its far from established that a man-made object in the sea can be the sole territory of a sovereign state, I think the Gay and Lesbian Kingdom of the Coral Sea Islands has a better claim, having actual undisputed natural land over which it asserts a claim.
And really, the only thing that Sealand has going for it is possible inertia, in that it constructed its sovereignty before international law made it impossible.
It certainly asserted its sovereignty, but "constructed" sort of begs the question.
Using a cargo plane to drop really big bombs works if you have an enemy with little or no air defence such as the VC or al-Qaida but not if its a country like Iran which still has air defences.
I suspect that if the US decided it needed to attack Iranian nuclear facilities with manned bombers (whether B-2s, B-52s, or cargo planes rolling some kind of bomb out the back hatch), there would be an enormously large number of munitions expended immediately prior to the bomb run for the specific purposes of suppressing Iranian air defenses (both ground based and any intercept capacity), particularly (but probably not exclusively, especially when it comes to targetting aircraft) along the corridor the bomber was going to use.
Anyway if you are dealing with a nuclear weapon facility then why not use a small nuke to take it out.
Because all military actions serve political ends, and first use of nuclear weapons (while not something the US has renounced) has undesirable political consequences that outweigh the advantages in almost any conceivable scenario.
US law doesn't apply in Guantanamo, which is why they used it.
US law does, in fact, apply in Guantanamo (at least, according to the US it does.) However, Guantanamo nevertheless not part of the United States (it is foreign territory to which the United States has a perpetual lease [whose validity is disputed by the current government of Cuba, but that's another issue.].) As a result of that status of "outside of the US", US legal precedent (which is also US law) which holds that foreign combatants detained by the US military and held outside of the US do not have generally have recourse to US courts applies to Guantanamo, which is why it was used to handle certain detainees.
And yet, if both France and the UK asserted a 12 mile territorial water boundary, they would both claim the same chunk of land around the Strait of Dover...
The UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (which was a motivating factor in the UK extension, and to which both the UK and France are parties) addresses this.
The UK could of course just claim that this annexed the territories claimed by Sealand
Or, more likely, that it brought the abandoned structure that was formerly outside of UK territorial waters within it.
but then that claim has no more merit than Sealand's claims... except for that it has a larger military backing it up.
While otherwise considered a fallacy, appeal to force is a fairly traditional method of settling disputes over the the legality of claims of sovereignty (both whether it exists at all for an entity, and the exact territorial extent over which it does.)
After all, sovereignty is, stripped of all the decorative flourishes which distract from the ultimate reality, nothing more than the capacity to control action within a territory by force and to exclude others from doing so.
It also declared its sovereignty before international laws were put in place declaring that buildings and constructions at see don't give any territorial rights
Strictly speaking, the relevant treaty declares that such items constructed in certain places don't (the exclusive economic zone) don't have their own territorial waters, that the coastal state has the exclusive right to construct them, and that the coastal state has jurisdiction over those that are constructed. It's arguable about whether it has any effect on the status of pre-existing structures, even if they are within the relevant zone, and especially if they are pre-existing sovereign territory of another nation-state (note that I am not saying that HM Fort Roughs is sovereign territory of the Principality of Sealand or even that the Principality of Sealand exists as a state, merely stating that if it did before the current version of the UNCLOS was ratified, its a giant stretch to claim that the ratification fo the UNCLOS would change that.)
That the legislation doesn't make a named exception for Sealand means that, de jure, Sealand is not a country.
Sealand's sovereignty can'tbe determined by a treaty to which it is not a party. If it was a state before the UNCLOS, the UNCLOS couldn't have caused it to stop being one without its agreement.
Cool, what court case do you have to substantiate this position? Because there are already two UK court cases that explicitly disclaim Sealand as being under UK jurisdiction...
Both of which predate the UK extending its territorial claim from 3 miles to the 12 miles permitted on the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea. The retired HM Fort Roughs (the object claimed as the territory of the so-called "Principality of Sealand") is now entirely an artificial structure within the territorial waters of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.
I understand that no one has made any positive recognition of Sealand's sovereignty, but it has acted with de facto sovereignty for a number of years already now, and modern international law does not require anyone's recognition of your sovereignty.
Interpretations of modern international law include a pretty fundamental conflict between adherents of the declaratory theory which does not require recognition and the constitutive theory which does; the constitutive theory which does. Both have considerable currency in modern international law and see direct support in the rulings of modern international tribunals.
Sealand has fallen through a weird legal crack, that the UK could easily pave over at any moment, but until that time, Sealand is best described as an unrecognized sovereign territory.
In practical terms, an "unrecognized sovereign territory" is nothing more than an entity that asserts sovereignty over a territory where no one has bothered to take official notice of the claim. That's not much of a substantive shield for someone seeking to take up residence there as a means of protection against action by nation-states that are already targetting them.
Can you show me any decision in domestic courts or international tribunals that recognizes man-made structures as extensions of territory?
Probably, but it would take more work than I can be bothered with. Explicit treaty text would be easier. Consider UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, art. 47, para. 4; art. 60, para. 3 (but note that per the same treaty such structures, while they are within the jurisdiction of the coastal state even when outside of the territorial waters but within the exclusive economic zone, do not have territorial waters of their own; art. 60, para. 8.)
you think some fucking derrick well within UK territorial waters that has no recognition from anyone other than a few crackpots who printed up some faux passports somehow constitutes a legitimate claim of sovereignty?
I don't think I've ever claimed that the sovereignty claims of the so-called Principality of Sea Land over the ex-H.M. Fort Roughs were legitimate. Perhaps when responding to posts you would do better to respond to claims actually made in them rather than ones that you have fabricated.
They can't even decide on the ultimate fate of Western Sahara, and you think there's some reasonable interpretation of International Law that allows a completely man-made structure to be seen as territory?
These two things have pretty much nothing to do with each other. It's like saying "the sky is red, and you think tomorrow is Friday".
A nation, in practice, needs nothing more than no one with sufficient force to apply objecting to its exercise of sovereign authority.
In theory, the key thing is the recognition of soveriegnty by other nations.
No interpretation of International Law I've ever seen allows a steel man-made structure to be considered territory.
Every reasonable interpretation of international law allows plenty of man-made structures (independently of their construction material) to be considered soveriegn territory of nations.
More likely than not, he's registered with BMI or ASCAP. You can purchase global rights through those agencies. I'm fairly certain Gingrinch's campaign has dotted that 'i' and crossed that 't'.
More than likely, the composer was -- and the composer's lawyers were -- aware of whether the composer is registered with such an agency and whether the Gingrich campaign had purchased the appropriate rights, whether through such an agency or otherwise, before filing a lawsuit. I suspect the existence of such agencies and the fact that some campaigns do purchase rights through them is why most of the times that artists have publicly protested their works by campaigns haven't involved formal cease-and-desist notices or lawsuits, just public statements of disapproval, with the more formal actions being a fairly rare exception.
But his is likely a case of a composer wanting to distance themselves from the politician who likes their music. That's not exactly a new phenomena by any stretch of the imagination.
The distancing is not unusual, the lawsuit is., and you don't seem to have any basis for your claim that the case is likely baseless except the fact that, historically, other campaigns have had artists distance themselves from the campaigns use of songs, which is a pretty thin reed to hang your claim on.
We go through this every election cycle. Stop using music. Just shuffle off the stage. Maybe when you're awkwardly doing so, think about changing music copyright laws if you get elected?
Or, do what Mitt Romney did with Kid Rock, and ask permission from the creator before using their work.
Its fairly easy to avoid the situation that Gingrich is in where he got a C&D from one artist one day and a lawsuit from another the next without changing copyright laws or avoiding music altogether.
Wouldn't his use of the song clip...be considered fair use?
Probably not.
He's not generating profit from this. He's not playing the entire performance of the song...
While those both relate to factors that are relevant to fair use determinations, the two of them together don't automatically mean that something is "fair use".
SOPA/PIPA were US legislation and would have had only been able to be used to prosecute inside the United States.
SOPA/PIPA were US legislation that were sold largely on their utility in fighting foreign-origin piracy by (among other things) requiring ISPs in the US to block access to foreign sites that were (accused of) providing pirated materials.
I know someone who continues to argue that the takedown of MegaUpload shows that the existing laws are not adequate and that we *need* SOPA/PIPA to protect the movie/music industries from offshore (non-US) piracy.
I don't think you need to appeal to any particular technical expertise to explain that the takedown of MegaUpload shows that existing laws are more than adequate, since MegaUpload was offshore (non-US) piracy and it was taken down under existing laws.
Flaw #2 - Not suing UMG in Small Claims Court for damages. You want Small Claims since Universal would expressly be prohibited from using any lawyers.
Small claims limits the damages available, and venue issues would often require an inconvenient venue for the claimant. Plus, small claims rules don't prevent parties from consulting with lawyers to prepare for the trial, nor do they even prevent them from being represented by a lawyer at the trial (typically, IIRC, the small claims rule is that a lawyer may only represent a corporation at trial if the lawyer is an officer of the corporation.)
Plus, UMG would likely have the ability to remove many cases from small claims court to another state court or even to federal court even if the cases were initially filed against them in small claims.
If enough people who've had their videos taken down erroneously sue UMG in small claims court you'll literally bankrupt them.
Probably not; there probably aren't enough people with a credible claim to that to even make noticeable dent in UMG's profits if UMG was found liable for the maximum small claims award available in each and every case.
With one problem: Our society believes that everyone has to work for their supper.
No, it doesn't. This is evidenced by the fact that it gives plenty of "suppers" to the people who don't work for them (those whose income comes from capital rather than labor.)
The problem is that as production gets more efficient you don't need as many people. We're going to have some serious problems if we can't get it through our heads that we're going to make a world so efficient that eventually very few people will need to be employed.
To accommodate a society where production is increasingly capital-heavy and labor-light, you need to adopt policies that promote broader distribution of personal ownership of capital.
In theory, you are right. In practice, it hasn't been able for any person to keep up with all the purported science in any but the narrowest of fields for centuries, and that problem is just getting worse. The peer review process used by journals is intended to serve as a first-cut proxy for review by the larger community, and individual readers review of the work that actually appears in particular journals drives the order and attention they provide to journals.
I don't care if they're respected. That isn't science. There should be nothing between the scientist and his/her peers. If their peers WANT to filter out bad science then it won't be hard to set up such filters in a way that can't be easily gamed.
Which is why journals that don't take a restrictive approach some do are good. They provide a first cut filter for people who want to prioritize reading for staying informed, but they don't prevent distribution of the same papers through other means, which facilitates the direct peer-to-peer (and peer-to-world, really) access that you are referring to.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, you get one of the biggies on your own:
Sure, it greatly improves readability. Same thing with visual distinction between hyphens, various forms of dashes, and minus signs. There is a reason why professionally-published documents rarely restrict themselves to the subset of English punctuation supported by ASCII.
Ratification of treaties is by the Senate alone, not "by the Congress." If an international agreement is implemented by Congress through the normal legislative process, it is a normal statute law (these are also referred to as "Congressional-executive agreements"); the power to enter into these agreements is limited by Congress' existing enumerated powers, since this is simply an exercise of those powers in concert with foreign nations.
If an international agreement is implemented by the President alone, it is referred to as a "sole executive agreement", and it is constrained by the same bounds as the President's independent executive authority generally, as this is simple an exercise of that power in concert with foreign nations.
Only by treaty ratified by a 2/3 vote in the Senate can an international agreement extend beyond the other enumerated powers of Congress and/or the Executive, since only by treaty is a separate, independent Constitutional power of government exercised.
In international law as opposed to US Constitutional law, all three forms of agreements are "treaties".
In the particular case of ACTA, as a sole executive agreement it only has effect to the extent that it is within powers which are either inherent in the executive or which the executive has been given by law; looking through the text of ACTA that would seem to make most of provisions dead letters in US law.
A "business analyst" isn't even remotely similar to a "business liaison" representing the "business division". In fact, the "business" in "business analyst" is a bad term, they are really systems analysts in the broad sense (that is, in the sense where system isn't limited to an IT system, though it may be an IT system or, more likely, a complex system with both human and IT components.)
I'm not convinced that's true.
This seems to assume that a "programmer" is supposed to have total knowledge of the IT infrastructure and that a "business analyst" is supposed to have similarly total knowledge of the business environment. If the former needs to be the case, then you probably have an environment where disparate systems are too-tightly coupled without a good information architecture, and fixing that is probably your most critical IT challenge, because trying to work around this by just hoping know-everything programmers will be able to keep it all in their heads as they add more to the mess is an ultimately doomed approach. If the latter is the case, you just don't understand the role of a "business analyst", whose role isn't to be a subject matter expert on all areas of the business, but to work with SMEs to establish system requirements (in this case, "system" often means the system of business processes into which one or more IT systems will be embedded, though in some cases the work is circumscribed just to an IT system serving an existing fixed set of business processes.)
I think you missed the first part of the sentence:
Standardizing on ASCII, even accents aside, would be insufficient for English. There's some punctuation used in English in the high end of Latin-1 (outside of the low-end which is ASCII), and even more in the Unicode general punctuation range (2000-206F).
ASCII leaves off a lot of English punctuation, and accents that are, in fact, used in English (sure, in words of foreign origin, but they are still used.)
The generic flowchart datastore symbol with an inbound arrow (retrieving something previously committed would use the same symbol with an outbound arrow.)
For products with less technical audiences, a stone tablet with an etching instrument, since committing results in the data being "carved in stone".
That's not weird, it applies to individual rights under internal laws as well. The difference is that usually, the nation-state with the laws is the person with the bigger bat (though you can sometimes find cases where this isn't true), whereas in the realm of international law there is no international government (particularly, there is not true standing international force policing nations, though there are institutions that serve some of the other functions of government to a certain extent), making all enforcement something that is done by the equivalent of an ad hoc posse.
Given that its far from established that a man-made object in the sea can be the sole territory of a sovereign state, I think the Gay and Lesbian Kingdom of the Coral Sea Islands has a better claim, having actual undisputed natural land over which it asserts a claim.
It certainly asserted its sovereignty, but "constructed" sort of begs the question.
Right now, the West (along with the Arab League) is working out a list of demands for Syria, with a short timetable for Syria to accede.
Syria isn't being attacked now, just like Iran isn't, but its hardly much further from it.
I suspect that if the US decided it needed to attack Iranian nuclear facilities with manned bombers (whether B-2s, B-52s, or cargo planes rolling some kind of bomb out the back hatch), there would be an enormously large number of munitions expended immediately prior to the bomb run for the specific purposes of suppressing Iranian air defenses (both ground based and any intercept capacity), particularly (but probably not exclusively, especially when it comes to targetting aircraft) along the corridor the bomber was going to use.
Because all military actions serve political ends, and first use of nuclear weapons (while not something the US has renounced) has undesirable political consequences that outweigh the advantages in almost any conceivable scenario.
US law does, in fact, apply in Guantanamo (at least, according to the US it does.) However, Guantanamo nevertheless not part of the United States (it is foreign territory to which the United States has a perpetual lease [whose validity is disputed by the current government of Cuba, but that's another issue.].) As a result of that status of "outside of the US", US legal precedent (which is also US law) which holds that foreign combatants detained by the US military and held outside of the US do not have generally have recourse to US courts applies to Guantanamo, which is why it was used to handle certain detainees.
The UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (which was a motivating factor in the UK extension, and to which both the UK and France are parties) addresses this.
Or, more likely, that it brought the abandoned structure that was formerly outside of UK territorial waters within it.
While otherwise considered a fallacy, appeal to force is a fairly traditional method of settling disputes over the the legality of claims of sovereignty (both whether it exists at all for an entity, and the exact territorial extent over which it does.)
After all, sovereignty is, stripped of all the decorative flourishes which distract from the ultimate reality, nothing more than the capacity to control action within a territory by force and to exclude others from doing so.
Strictly speaking, the relevant treaty declares that such items constructed in certain places don't (the exclusive economic zone) don't have their own territorial waters, that the coastal state has the exclusive right to construct them, and that the coastal state has jurisdiction over those that are constructed. It's arguable about whether it has any effect on the status of pre-existing structures, even if they are within the relevant zone, and especially if they are pre-existing sovereign territory of another nation-state (note that I am not saying that HM Fort Roughs is sovereign territory of the Principality of Sealand or even that the Principality of Sealand exists as a state, merely stating that if it did before the current version of the UNCLOS was ratified, its a giant stretch to claim that the ratification fo the UNCLOS would change that.)
Sealand's sovereignty can'tbe determined by a treaty to which it is not a party. If it was a state before the UNCLOS, the UNCLOS couldn't have caused it to stop being one without its agreement.
Both of which predate the UK extending its territorial claim from 3 miles to the 12 miles permitted on the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea. The retired HM Fort Roughs (the object claimed as the territory of the so-called "Principality of Sealand") is now entirely an artificial structure within the territorial waters of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.
Interpretations of modern international law include a pretty fundamental conflict between adherents of the declaratory theory which does not require recognition and the constitutive theory which does; the constitutive theory which does. Both have considerable currency in modern international law and see direct support in the rulings of modern international tribunals.
In practical terms, an "unrecognized sovereign territory" is nothing more than an entity that asserts sovereignty over a territory where no one has bothered to take official notice of the claim. That's not much of a substantive shield for someone seeking to take up residence there as a means of protection against action by nation-states that are already targetting them.
Probably, but it would take more work than I can be bothered with. Explicit treaty text would be easier. Consider UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, art. 47, para. 4; art. 60, para. 3 (but note that per the same treaty such structures, while they are within the jurisdiction of the coastal state even when outside of the territorial waters but within the exclusive economic zone, do not have territorial waters of their own; art. 60, para. 8.)
I don't think I've ever claimed that the sovereignty claims of the so-called Principality of Sea Land over the ex-H.M. Fort Roughs were legitimate. Perhaps when responding to posts you would do better to respond to claims actually made in them rather than ones that you have fabricated.
These two things have pretty much nothing to do with each other. It's like saying "the sky is red, and you think tomorrow is Friday".
A nation, in practice, needs nothing more than no one with sufficient force to apply objecting to its exercise of sovereign authority.
In theory, the key thing is the recognition of soveriegnty by other nations.
Every reasonable interpretation of international law allows plenty of man-made structures (independently of their construction material) to be considered soveriegn territory of nations.
More than likely, the composer was -- and the composer's lawyers were -- aware of whether the composer is registered with such an agency and whether the Gingrich campaign had purchased the appropriate rights, whether through such an agency or otherwise, before filing a lawsuit. I suspect the existence of such agencies and the fact that some campaigns do purchase rights through them is why most of the times that artists have publicly protested their works by campaigns haven't involved formal cease-and-desist notices or lawsuits, just public statements of disapproval, with the more formal actions being a fairly rare exception.
The distancing is not unusual, the lawsuit is., and you don't seem to have any basis for your claim that the case is likely baseless except the fact that, historically, other campaigns have had artists distance themselves from the campaigns use of songs, which is a pretty thin reed to hang your claim on.
Or, do what Mitt Romney did with Kid Rock, and ask permission from the creator before using their work.
Its fairly easy to avoid the situation that Gingrich is in where he got a C&D from one artist one day and a lawsuit from another the next without changing copyright laws or avoiding music altogether.
Probably not.
While those both relate to factors that are relevant to fair use determinations, the two of them together don't automatically mean that something is "fair use".
SOPA/PIPA were US legislation that were sold largely on their utility in fighting foreign-origin piracy by (among other things) requiring ISPs in the US to block access to foreign sites that were (accused of) providing pirated materials.
I don't think you need to appeal to any particular technical expertise to explain that the takedown of MegaUpload shows that existing laws are more than adequate, since MegaUpload was offshore (non-US) piracy and it was taken down under existing laws.
Small claims limits the damages available, and venue issues would often require an inconvenient venue for the claimant. Plus, small claims rules don't prevent parties from consulting with lawyers to prepare for the trial, nor do they even prevent them from being represented by a lawyer at the trial (typically, IIRC, the small claims rule is that a lawyer may only represent a corporation at trial if the lawyer is an officer of the corporation.)
Plus, UMG would likely have the ability to remove many cases from small claims court to another state court or even to federal court even if the cases were initially filed against them in small claims.
Probably not; there probably aren't enough people with a credible claim to that to even make noticeable dent in UMG's profits if UMG was found liable for the maximum small claims award available in each and every case.
No, it doesn't. This is evidenced by the fact that it gives plenty of "suppers" to the people who don't work for them (those whose income comes from capital rather than labor.)
To accommodate a society where production is increasingly capital-heavy and labor-light, you need to adopt policies that promote broader distribution of personal ownership of capital.
Its not.
In theory, you are right. In practice, it hasn't been able for any person to keep up with all the purported science in any but the narrowest of fields for centuries, and that problem is just getting worse. The peer review process used by journals is intended to serve as a first-cut proxy for review by the larger community, and individual readers review of the work that actually appears in particular journals drives the order and attention they provide to journals.
Which is why journals that don't take a restrictive approach some do are good. They provide a first cut filter for people who want to prioritize reading for staying informed, but they don't prevent distribution of the same papers through other means, which facilitates the direct peer-to-peer (and peer-to-world, really) access that you are referring to.