No, if Americans bought the ads, they broke the law. If the ad agency broke the law or not depends on what they knew. Same as anybody else you sweep in with "participated."
If you're acting on behalf of a foreign entity, you might be a foreign agent. Seems kinda obvious just from the words "foreign" and "agent."
It's a well thought out legal opinion with no malice, designed to educate. I can't decide if the poster is correct or not because it's complex and has more depth than any other post here. It may very well be written by a legal expert. Or it may be written by a sophist posing as one.
Disclaimer: No legal opinions were presented, only personal opinions and general observations about what I believe to be the current state of formal civics in the Unites States.
I'm definitely not a legal expert. I do read scotusblog and popehat, though.
The difference between me and a sophist is that a sophist gets paid. I'm on the Socrates Plan instead; I'm just telling people they're wrong to give them a chance to say something wise, that I might hear it and learn something. Rarely happens.
The thing is, when you're introducing a word like "assembled" then it is no longer clear that it is a used device, or a new device made from recycled parts.
Rossmann's position is very hair-splitting, and when there are always these words that reduce clarity, instead of presenting the actual facts, then it makes me suspicious.
You've got lots of apples and oranges there; when I buy a new-old-stock phone display to use with my microcontroller projects, it is literally as good as new; an old battery is not as good as new. It might even explode when you try to charge it. So getting hand-wavy about parts in general doesn't even fit the circumstances, and it doesn't even purport to be actual facts about the situation.
You use the words "were certainly" where the truth seems to be, "I'm guessing". Those are not at all equivalent.
For the billion and 1st time, if the business you do is in the US, you did business in the US.
When you order a pizza over the telephone, you're doing business wherever you're calling from, you're also doing business wherever the pizza place is located. Very very simple.
If you're paying somebody who is in the US, for them to do activities in the US, and those activities are also illegal in the US, then you broke the law in the US.
For the billionth time, if you conduct business in the US, you are conducting business in the US. It is really that simple.
Yes, if you are a foreigner and spend money in the US to influence American politics or to represent a foreign entity, then you have to be registered. No, there isn't an international quota of one registration, so no, you can't just say, "Golly, somebody else might have been registered, why me?"
Nobody cares if you're working on behalf of a foreign company. If it isn't registered in the US, you certainly can't hide behind it. You're responsible for your own actions when you do business in a foreign country, you can't just point at a piece of paper in your home country and expect it to somehow shield you.
If you engage in illegal conduct in the United States, even if you do it remotely, you can expect to be arrested when you travel to any modern country, not just the US.
Clean the inside of the nozzle with a metal brush after each print. The micro-scratches it creates should throw it off enough that you can't ID it.
OK, now what about the scratches and differences on the gear that shoves the filament into the nozzle? Also, if you're scratching it up enough to change the imprint, you're going through a lot of nozzles! You could also just change nozzles more often.
It might not help as much as you think, because this is a "fingerprint" in the sense that anything else that is 1-in-10 is a "fingerprint." As in, nothing at all like the uniqueness of an actual fingerprint! Or for example, most ink printers print a difficult-to-see fingerprint in the margin with the printers serial number. This is nothing like that. They just want it to sound the same.
Rifling a barrel is hard, if you're a terrorist and you care more about covering the money trail than surviving the attack.
Milling is fairly easy, and yet the machines are big, make a lot of noise, and can be difficult to purchase in person using cash without looking suspicious.
Also, what makes you think they even care if it is rifled?
Buying stuff online creates a paper trail; that's fine for people who are just interested in their Freeze Peach, but it is a bigger issue for terrorists.
Too many assumptions combined to make any sort of picture that has value.
It does if it made it out of the factory overseas and was never sold by the company whose trademark is on it!
For example, if the factory accidentally made an extra one, and accidentally sold it to you, and then you imported it, it went from "unsold trademarked goods" to "counterfeit" as soon as you crossed the border.
OTOH, if the mark holder sold it to a distributor, and then they sold it to you, then it is all legit and importing it can't make it counterfeit.
That there is a growing market in China of refurbished old hardware does not actually tell us if in this case the batteries confiscated were used batteries, making them real and legal, new counterfeit batteries, or legal new old stock. However, Apple's supply contracts probably regulate any unsold items, and when it comes to this stuff a foreign contract is basically law from the perspective of the US courts; so new old stock would probably have never had a legit "sale" that would let it onto the US market now.
Do we know if the batteries he had purchased were refurbs taken from old Macbooks, or do we only know that somebody wrote that on the product listing or import paperwork?
The principle is "first sale." Once Apple has sold it, then the buyer owns it and can resell it.
If they're being produced on contract, and the contract ended and they have surplus units that have never been sold, those are "counterfeits" if they make their way to the market "somehow." What matters is when the rights holder sells the item.
The trademark doesn't tell you what factory it came from, it tells you which company placed it on the market.
Worrying about if it is functionally the same, that is a concern for fungible goods, not branded goods that trade on their mark.
The real problem with the story is the lack of clear facts about what the items really were; new or used.
Even "new old stock" is only legit if it was sold to a distributor who then warehoused it. It has to have been sold legitimately at some point to still be legit now. But once it was sold, they can warehouse it as long as they want.
If they're "refurbished" then they are "used" and were merely repaired, and they're allowed to have their original labels. I don't know what country the things you said are true in, but it isn't the USA. Here, once somebody buys it, they own it and can resell it without restriction.
If you don't like it, don't put your trademark on the item, just sell it is a white-box generic.
If apple no longer makes those replacement batteries, then how can they be legitimate apple branded batteries? Presumably these were just manufactured and not 'new old stock'.
It all depends on if they were new or used. If they were used, they're probably legit. If they were actually new, then it explains why Mr Rossman uses sarcastic language instead of direct language. He complains that DHS doesn't consider that maybe the batteries were removed from used devices, but that's not the same as saying "the batteries were in fact removed from used devices."
I can't say I'm liking or trusting either side on this one. Two assholes having a fart competition.
Americans don't have to register to sow discord, we get to shout "freeze peach!" whenever anybody complains. As long as we do it in America.
If we go to Russia and make statements to sow discord, we should definitely be registered with the local authorities and be following their rules for foreign lobbying.
But still, regardless of who paid her, she would have to register because she is herself a foreigner. If she was an American and receiving foreign money for it, she would also have to register. So it is a double-failure-to-register; she needed to be registered to do it at all because of who she is, and she also would need to be registered to do it with the money she used because of who the money was from.
If she wants a freeze peach, she'll need to figure out how to get one of those in Russia. It seems unlikely though.
Well, most threats are in fact protected speech, as are most slanders. Most lawsuits accusing slander find that the accusation it true, but still protected. Slander(verb) is the act of making a false and damaging statement, not the act of a court agreeing that you can collect damages because of it. Slander(noun) is the law, so as long as you're using the noun not the verb then it makes sense to say it is only slander if you win the case. But the act of slander is still almost always protected speech.
False advertising is also protected, just less protected than political speech. That's why they let them say things that are somewhat misleading, even when the statute actually says it is supposed to not be misleading at all. Same for inciting violence; if I say words and people hear them and become violent, most of the time my words will still have been protected. It takes a narrower construction to be true.
Obscenity is almost always protected speech. Even in a limited forum like public broadcasting where the government is allowed to regulate some things that are obscene, they've still failed to regulate lots of other things that they consider obscene.
Free speech not being an absolute right means that the court has to balance between the speech protections and other considerations, it doesn't stop the speech from being protected.
Money is peaches, money is cold, therefor all peaches are freeze! Freeze Peach! Freeze Peach!
News flash: *) Foreigners aren't supposed to participate in our elections. *) Money spent on an election is only considered speech if you're on the of people allowed to participate in the election. For foreigners, it is just money that they spent on a type of fraud. *) Spending money does not insulate a crime from prosecution. Generally, it instead is evidence of both participation and motive.
Sorry, Ivan. Words have meaning.
It is kinda funny, I remember 20+ years ago the righties would shout in the faces of Democrats, "YOU COMMIE PINKO!" and stuff like that. Now look at you! Do you remember your red faced rage? Doesn't it make your face red again now, to think of what you were angry over, and which side you're on now?
The problem with your comment is that you make it clear you don't understand what a CPU is, from a technology/manufacturing perspective.
Saying "CPU in the CPU" has as much meaning as "a play within a play." It is 100% subjective, and the outermost "play" is still the only play involved; the other play is actually part of the first play! There is only physically one play, but subjectively it can be seen as two.
Some of the chips I work with are made from numerous processors; multiple "cores," plus embedded smaller ARM processors, plus an FPGA. That's all in one IC package. And then, the peripherals have their own processors that you can't even interact with directly; all they do is run really fast and emulate a different process for the main processor; typically they emulate a set of registers.
Check out the CPU in a Beaglebone! They take an ARM processor from TI, connect a bunch of external components like capacitors and diodes, solder it onto a little circuit board with pads on the bottom, encase it in the same plastic as other ICs, and then attach solder balls to the pads on the bottom. They sell it as a "SystemOnChip" but the technology is really "System on Package." It looks like a regular processor IC with a ball gate array, but it is actually a module.
It makes no difference other than to the engineer designing the circuit board it is going on, though.
Even something that appears to be analog like an op-amp is actually going to have a processor inside, and low pass filtered I/O. The quality of the filter will determine much of the device performance.
Even with time, if he doesn't have the clearance, then the answer he gets from within is that it didn't happen.
And yet, when it comes time for him to gather some evidence of that, it won't be available to him. His colleagues will have to apologize to him for telling him things that they know have to tell him were only rumors, or that the database holding the logs got accidentally deleted. Reports will go missing.
But still, you'd never have evidence of what didn't happen anyways, you'd only have documentation of the steps you took to check.
They're still insisting that it was a firmware-only bug, and that Bloomberg is confused. Bloomberg's reply is that they're not confused, there were a whole stack of security problems that they've uncovered evidence of.
Between the two, one side (Apple) claiming knowledge of one exploint, and the other side (Bloomberg) claiming knowledge of multiple exploits, it seems obvious to me that if Bloomberg was wrong, Apple wouldn't know. You know what you do know, you don't know the things you never learned. You prove positives, not negatives.
If Apple truly doesn't know about the exploit... why would they be asking for a retraction? They would be ignorant about if it happened or not, they wouldn't know. The only way to know is if it did happen, and they know that!
Plus, it isn't like Apple had given people details in the past. They only came up with supposed details from years ago this year when the new accusations came out.
Apple demanding a retraction basically proves all of Bloomberg's story, because Apple would only know if it is true if it is true! If it was false, they don't know, they can only say, "we never heard any of this." The nature of the story is such that if you didn't know while it was happening, you still wouldn't know after it happened. Especially if it was only a small number of devices that got the extra hardware.
Slashdot Mirror
No, if Americans bought the ads, they broke the law. If the ad agency broke the law or not depends on what they knew. Same as anybody else you sweep in with "participated."
If you're acting on behalf of a foreign entity, you might be a foreign agent. Seems kinda obvious just from the words "foreign" and "agent."
The previous post should be modded up, not down.
It's a well thought out legal opinion with no malice, designed to educate. I can't decide if the poster is correct or not because it's complex and has more depth than any other post here. It may very well be written by a legal expert. Or it may be written by a sophist posing as one.
Disclaimer: No legal opinions were presented, only personal opinions and general observations about what I believe to be the current state of formal civics in the Unites States.
I'm definitely not a legal expert. I do read scotusblog and popehat, though.
The difference between me and a sophist is that a sophist gets paid. I'm on the Socrates Plan instead; I'm just telling people they're wrong to give them a chance to say something wise, that I might hear it and learn something. Rarely happens.
The thing is, when you're introducing a word like "assembled" then it is no longer clear that it is a used device, or a new device made from recycled parts.
Rossmann's position is very hair-splitting, and when there are always these words that reduce clarity, instead of presenting the actual facts, then it makes me suspicious.
You've got lots of apples and oranges there; when I buy a new-old-stock phone display to use with my microcontroller projects, it is literally as good as new; an old battery is not as good as new. It might even explode when you try to charge it. So getting hand-wavy about parts in general doesn't even fit the circumstances, and it doesn't even purport to be actual facts about the situation.
You use the words "were certainly" where the truth seems to be, "I'm guessing". Those are not at all equivalent.
For the billion and 1st time, if the business you do is in the US, you did business in the US.
When you order a pizza over the telephone, you're doing business wherever you're calling from, you're also doing business wherever the pizza place is located. Very very simple.
If you're paying somebody who is in the US, for them to do activities in the US, and those activities are also illegal in the US, then you broke the law in the US.
There is nothing hard about this.
Who cares if you care, though? How does that impact the situation, or the analysis?
If the story was, "DHS encourages people to avoid local swap meet" then it would matter. But the story is about something else.
For the billionth time, if you conduct business in the US, you are conducting business in the US. It is really that simple.
Yes, if you are a foreigner and spend money in the US to influence American politics or to represent a foreign entity, then you have to be registered. No, there isn't an international quota of one registration, so no, you can't just say, "Golly, somebody else might have been registered, why me?"
Nobody cares if you're working on behalf of a foreign company. If it isn't registered in the US, you certainly can't hide behind it. You're responsible for your own actions when you do business in a foreign country, you can't just point at a piece of paper in your home country and expect it to somehow shield you.
If you engage in illegal conduct in the United States, even if you do it remotely, you can expect to be arrested when you travel to any modern country, not just the US.
You're also having some encoding problems, Ivan.
"Melted," sortof, but maybe really only softened.
Clean the inside of the nozzle with a metal brush after each print. The micro-scratches it creates should throw it off enough that you can't ID it.
OK, now what about the scratches and differences on the gear that shoves the filament into the nozzle? Also, if you're scratching it up enough to change the imprint, you're going through a lot of nozzles! You could also just change nozzles more often.
It might not help as much as you think, because this is a "fingerprint" in the sense that anything else that is 1-in-10 is a "fingerprint." As in, nothing at all like the uniqueness of an actual fingerprint! Or for example, most ink printers print a difficult-to-see fingerprint in the margin with the printers serial number. This is nothing like that. They just want it to sound the same.
Rifling a barrel is hard, if you're a terrorist and you care more about covering the money trail than surviving the attack.
Milling is fairly easy, and yet the machines are big, make a lot of noise, and can be difficult to purchase in person using cash without looking suspicious.
Also, what makes you think they even care if it is rifled?
Buying stuff online creates a paper trail; that's fine for people who are just interested in their Freeze Peach, but it is a bigger issue for terrorists.
Too many assumptions combined to make any sort of picture that has value.
It does if it made it out of the factory overseas and was never sold by the company whose trademark is on it!
For example, if the factory accidentally made an extra one, and accidentally sold it to you, and then you imported it, it went from "unsold trademarked goods" to "counterfeit" as soon as you crossed the border.
OTOH, if the mark holder sold it to a distributor, and then they sold it to you, then it is all legit and importing it can't make it counterfeit.
For items manufactured in the US, the manufacturer is open to liability if they hurt somebody.
For imported items, the importer is the one who is open to liability if they hurt somebody. That's Mr Rossmann in this case, not Apple.
Thanks for throwing shit at the wall declaratively, though.
That there is a growing market in China of refurbished old hardware does not actually tell us if in this case the batteries confiscated were used batteries, making them real and legal, new counterfeit batteries, or legal new old stock. However, Apple's supply contracts probably regulate any unsold items, and when it comes to this stuff a foreign contract is basically law from the perspective of the US courts; so new old stock would probably have never had a legit "sale" that would let it onto the US market now.
Do we know if the batteries he had purchased were refurbs taken from old Macbooks, or do we only know that somebody wrote that on the product listing or import paperwork?
The principle is "first sale." Once Apple has sold it, then the buyer owns it and can resell it.
If they're being produced on contract, and the contract ended and they have surplus units that have never been sold, those are "counterfeits" if they make their way to the market "somehow." What matters is when the rights holder sells the item.
The trademark doesn't tell you what factory it came from, it tells you which company placed it on the market.
Worrying about if it is functionally the same, that is a concern for fungible goods, not branded goods that trade on their mark.
The real problem with the story is the lack of clear facts about what the items really were; new or used.
Even "new old stock" is only legit if it was sold to a distributor who then warehoused it. It has to have been sold legitimately at some point to still be legit now. But once it was sold, they can warehouse it as long as they want.
If they're "refurbished" then they are "used" and were merely repaired, and they're allowed to have their original labels. I don't know what country the things you said are true in, but it isn't the USA. Here, once somebody buys it, they own it and can resell it without restriction.
If you don't like it, don't put your trademark on the item, just sell it is a white-box generic.
If apple no longer makes those replacement batteries, then how can they be legitimate apple branded batteries? Presumably these were just manufactured and not 'new old stock'.
If they were used, or new old stock.
It all depends on if they were new or used. If they were used, they're probably legit. If they were actually new, then it explains why Mr Rossman uses sarcastic language instead of direct language. He complains that DHS doesn't consider that maybe the batteries were removed from used devices, but that's not the same as saying "the batteries were in fact removed from used devices."
I can't say I'm liking or trusting either side on this one. Two assholes having a fart competition.
Even Paris Hilton had to disclose her approval of her political message!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Americans don't have to register to sow discord, we get to shout "freeze peach!" whenever anybody complains. As long as we do it in America.
If we go to Russia and make statements to sow discord, we should definitely be registered with the local authorities and be following their rules for foreign lobbying.
But still, regardless of who paid her, she would have to register because she is herself a foreigner. If she was an American and receiving foreign money for it, she would also have to register. So it is a double-failure-to-register; she needed to be registered to do it at all because of who she is, and she also would need to be registered to do it with the money she used because of who the money was from.
If she wants a freeze peach, she'll need to figure out how to get one of those in Russia. It seems unlikely though.
Well, most threats are in fact protected speech, as are most slanders. Most lawsuits accusing slander find that the accusation it true, but still protected. Slander(verb) is the act of making a false and damaging statement, not the act of a court agreeing that you can collect damages because of it. Slander(noun) is the law, so as long as you're using the noun not the verb then it makes sense to say it is only slander if you win the case. But the act of slander is still almost always protected speech.
False advertising is also protected, just less protected than political speech. That's why they let them say things that are somewhat misleading, even when the statute actually says it is supposed to not be misleading at all. Same for inciting violence; if I say words and people hear them and become violent, most of the time my words will still have been protected. It takes a narrower construction to be true.
Obscenity is almost always protected speech. Even in a limited forum like public broadcasting where the government is allowed to regulate some things that are obscene, they've still failed to regulate lots of other things that they consider obscene.
Free speech not being an absolute right means that the court has to balance between the speech protections and other considerations, it doesn't stop the speech from being protected.
Freeze Peach! Freeze Peach!
Money is peaches, money is cold, therefor all peaches are freeze! Freeze Peach! Freeze Peach!
News flash:
*) Foreigners aren't supposed to participate in our elections.
*) Money spent on an election is only considered speech if you're on the of people allowed to participate in the election. For foreigners, it is just money that they spent on a type of fraud.
*) Spending money does not insulate a crime from prosecution. Generally, it instead is evidence of both participation and motive.
Sorry, Ivan. Words have meaning.
It is kinda funny, I remember 20+ years ago the righties would shout in the faces of Democrats, "YOU COMMIE PINKO!" and stuff like that. Now look at you! Do you remember your red faced rage? Doesn't it make your face red again now, to think of what you were angry over, and which side you're on now?
The problem with your comment is that you make it clear you don't understand what a CPU is, from a technology/manufacturing perspective.
Saying "CPU in the CPU" has as much meaning as "a play within a play." It is 100% subjective, and the outermost "play" is still the only play involved; the other play is actually part of the first play! There is only physically one play, but subjectively it can be seen as two.
Some of the chips I work with are made from numerous processors; multiple "cores," plus embedded smaller ARM processors, plus an FPGA. That's all in one IC package. And then, the peripherals have their own processors that you can't even interact with directly; all they do is run really fast and emulate a different process for the main processor; typically they emulate a set of registers.
Check out the CPU in a Beaglebone! They take an ARM processor from TI, connect a bunch of external components like capacitors and diodes, solder it onto a little circuit board with pads on the bottom, encase it in the same plastic as other ICs, and then attach solder balls to the pads on the bottom. They sell it as a "SystemOnChip" but the technology is really "System on Package." It looks like a regular processor IC with a ball gate array, but it is actually a module.
It makes no difference other than to the engineer designing the circuit board it is going on, though.
Even something that appears to be analog like an op-amp is actually going to have a processor inside, and low pass filtered I/O. The quality of the filter will determine much of the device performance.
Even with time, if he doesn't have the clearance, then the answer he gets from within is that it didn't happen.
And yet, when it comes time for him to gather some evidence of that, it won't be available to him. His colleagues will have to apologize to him for telling him things that they know have to tell him were only rumors, or that the database holding the logs got accidentally deleted. Reports will go missing.
But still, you'd never have evidence of what didn't happen anyways, you'd only have documentation of the steps you took to check.
They're still insisting that it was a firmware-only bug, and that Bloomberg is confused. Bloomberg's reply is that they're not confused, there were a whole stack of security problems that they've uncovered evidence of.
Between the two, one side (Apple) claiming knowledge of one exploint, and the other side (Bloomberg) claiming knowledge of multiple exploits, it seems obvious to me that if Bloomberg was wrong, Apple wouldn't know. You know what you do know, you don't know the things you never learned. You prove positives, not negatives.
If Apple truly doesn't know about the exploit... why would they be asking for a retraction? They would be ignorant about if it happened or not, they wouldn't know. The only way to know is if it did happen, and they know that!
Plus, it isn't like Apple had given people details in the past. They only came up with supposed details from years ago this year when the new accusations came out.
Apple demanding a retraction basically proves all of Bloomberg's story, because Apple would only know if it is true if it is true! If it was false, they don't know, they can only say, "we never heard any of this." The nature of the story is such that if you didn't know while it was happening, you still wouldn't know after it happened. Especially if it was only a small number of devices that got the extra hardware.
Worse than "credence" is discovery; if Apple sues they'll have to turn over their own evidence!