DVD CCA is a non-profit organization which by definition means they do not make money.
No. The definition of a nonprofit is that it does not pay out dividends to stockholders. (For tax exemption status, the nonprofit also has to meet conditions about its purpose of operation.)
A nonprofit can make huge amounts of money and still be nonprofit legally, so long as it doesn't pay out that money to stockholders. It can put it in the bank, use it to expand, etc. There's no conflict between DVD-CCA being a nonprofit and it hauling in big bucks via the sale of licenses. (NB: I don't know whether it does haul in big bucks, the references I've found to CSS licensing conflict concerning whether it's free or $$$. It is clear that DVD-CCA has a lock on the method and will not license anyone they don't approve of, however.)
"You Can Buy DVDs, But Playing Them is Illegal"
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DeCSS Author Arrested
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Who want to play their DVDs, you mean. The MPAA and DVD-CCA don't mind at all if Linux users want to buy DVDs and put money in their pockets... Actually using them is another matter.
Their explicit position is that Linux users have no right to view their legally-purchased DVDs unless the DVD-CCA allows them to. Read the words of John Hoy, president of DVD-CCA:
If a person or entity were prepared to take a license on the same terms as existing licensees, such a license would be granted. At that point, Linux users could lawfully view motion pictures on their non-Windows operating system. Until then, Linux users have no "right,"[...] to gain access to this proprietary technology.
Region coding has nothing to do with CSS. The "region code" is just a single byte on the disc, it's entirely up to the players to enforce it.
Sure it does. Look at your own words: it's up to the player to enforce regionalization. Therefore, if you want all consumer players to enforce regionalization, you need to control who can create a DVD player. You do that by keeping the CSS access-control system a closely held secret, and requiring implementation of region control - and any other access-control measure you want - as a precondition of receiving the CSS spec. Any player manufacturer who doesn't play along can't create a player capable of reading CSS-encoded DVDs, which means their player can't play most commercial movies, which means it's not going to be very useful to most people. which means all the player manufacturers have to play along.
At least, that's the way it works as long as you have to go to DVD-CCA in order to learn how to decode CSS-scrambled data. CSS has everything to do with regionalization - though the link is economic, not technical.
Is there a law that says that when you buy a dvd, or a video, or a tape, or a book, you should be able to play it, or see it, or... the way you choose?
Why, yes, there is. It's called the fair use doctrine and it means you can make fair use of a copy you own of copyrighted material.
And yes, it also applies to books. If you own a copy of a book, you can translate it into whatever language you like for your personal use.
It's not completely clear what US law will turn out to be on this issue. Under traditional interpretations of "fair use", the owner of a copy of a copyrighted work could access the information any way he or she pleased; the copyright holder could limit copying, but not personal use by an owner of the copy. This includes bypassing various access protections, if done in the course of "fair use" access of the work. (For example, you can strip off copy protection without getting into copyright trouble, as long as you don't then go and make extra infringing copies of the software.)
The Digital Millenium Copyright Act passed in 1998 makes it illegal to bypass access controls, even if done for purposes of access, not illegal copying. The copyright holder, under the DCMA, has the legal right to prevent access by the owner of a copy. The DCMA has not yet been tested in court, and there is a vague provision about how the new provisions aren't intended to gut fair use of copyrighted works. So basically we don't know yet whether, for example, playing a DVD on Linux when the copyright holder doesn't want to allow DVDs to be played on Linux is legal or not.
I know nothing about Norwegian law on this topic. Does anyone know whether Norwegian copyright law has any similar provisions?
That won't work when trade secret is at issue, as long as the original person describing what the code does has access to what's alleged to be a trade secret. (It wouldn't work for patent either.)
It does work for copyright, but only because copyright inheres in the exact representation of an idea, not the idea itself. So if you can write a piece of code that's compatible with something copyrighted, without reproducing the copyrighted code, you're free and clear of copyright concerns. (The clean-room technique basically is to make sure there's no legal question that the implementor used copyrighted code, because in the clean-room situation the implementor never *saw* copyrighted code.)
But this case isn't about copyright - no one alleges DeCSS is actually a copy of someone else's software - it's about trade secret. And a trade secret is still a trade secret, whether it's described in C or English. So doing a clean-room clone of CSS won't help here, there'll still be a trade secret problem.
Why does the second judge's ruling prevail? Why is it an AND boolean operation and not an OR?
What they asked for was a temporary restraining order (TRO). These are generally requested before there can be much if any evidence presented to the judge. The judge denied this request.
A preliminary injunction is a little different - it's a way of freezing the status quo until there can be a full trial. Normally, a preliminary injunction is granted only after there's been time to examine evidence and arguments. The New York judge granted the PI immediately, which surprised me (but maybe shouldn't have, in light of his remarks to the plaintiff's lawyers about wanting to give them "a runaway train"). The California judge (same one that denied the TRO before) granted the PI, but only after consideration of arguments offered by both sides.
The critical thing to remember is that this is two separate lawsuits, filed by different plaintiffs against different defendants under different laws in different jurisdictions. I'm sure both judges are watching the other case, but formally, they don't overlap.
Technically, both injunctions apply only to the parties named. Neither injunction forbids Joe Blow from posting DeCSS or any related code, as long as Joe is acting independently and not in concert with any of the people under injunction, at least this is my understanding. (Of course, DVD-CCA could still sue Joe, the same as they sued the original defendants.)
What's really annoying/alarming about this is that the arbitrator went ahead and issued a decision, even after the two parties had come to a mutally agreeable settlement. The arbitrator just rode roughshod over that.
Makes me suspect that the process in the future will be more about power than fairness. The results of that kind of thinking are rarely good ones, particularly not for individuals up against large organizations. What happens when the next "veronica.com" case comes up against this process? Will we see an increase in reverse domain piracy? I fear so.
But why the hell should they CARE about the home user making a copy or three?
It's been clear for some time that this isn't about piracy. As has been pointed out before:
Commercial, large-scale bootleggers don't need DeCSS to burn thousands of pirated copies of DVDs, and
For home users with a DVD drive, piracy is impractical given the media cost. (Not to mention that CDs can be copied in this same way, CDs have no equivalent of CSS, and the bottom hasn't exactly dropped out of the CD market.)
So what is the point of this? It's been suggested that they really want to control the market for drives...and that's possible, I guess, but according to the DVD FAQ, the license for CSS is free.
Could they be wanting to control the format in order to restrict use of it by independent artists? That would explain the MPAA's interest, I guess, but my understanding is that DVDs that aren't CSS-encrypted can still be played on any player.
Then there's maintaining the region control as a possible motivation...and while I'm sure studios prefer to be able to control which countries can see a movie, I somehow can't see it as being important enough for this level of attack.
I'm left with the Digital Millenium Copyright Act, and specifically the anti-consumer provisions that make it illegal to access content you own in a way that the copyright holder doesn't want to allow. This the potential to enormously increase the power of the MPAA and its members over the public, surely enough reason for the ferocity of the attack on DeCSS.
However - the actions and words of Judge Lewis Kaplan today notwithstanding - this is an awfully weak case for them to test the DMCA with. It straightforwardly pits the interests of the plaintiff against the right of consumers to create software for interoperability and to make fair use of content (in this case, to play legally purchased DVDs on a computer player they own).
I'm left with one of two conclusions: either there's some deep dark mystery here, or the movie industry is run by idiots. At this point I wouldn't rule out either possibility.
...that he's charged under the Fair Housing Act, which seems just a wee bit indirect. No one seems to have charged him with assault or making a threat.
For threats to be illegal they need to be pretty immediate, not just frightening. Saying that someone will be executed at some highly indeterminate time in the future "after the revolution" doesn't normally qualify as a criminal threat.
Having tried it sporadically during the period before the CDA was passed, and while it was being challenged in the courts, I've come to the surly conclusion that you can't educate 'em. Either they have a clue - in which case the story would have been better informed - or they're willing to get a clue before they write the story - in which case the story would have been better informed - or they are unable and unwilling to be clued.
In some cases, where the information was unavailable to them or difficult to find, journalists who write bad stories can be clued. But I don't think they have that excuse at this point. They have web access - this isn't 1995 any more - and they're able to use search engines and type in URLs. If they don't understand yet that this is about interoperability and not piracy, then they're not gonna.
I admit this isn't a very useful attitude. People who feel up to it should still write reporters who file obviously-misleading stories; it's probably most effective if you include a lot of pointers to source material, and take a rather-shocked-to-find-you-so-misinformed tone (rather than flaming). If enough people write in, the reporter may be more careful next time, if only out of embarrassment. But don't expect instant or impressive results.
You notice, though, that they don't say they're *not* going to regulate political speech on the net - only that the regulatory process will be slow and they probably won't do anything until after the election.
Notice also that "campaign finance reform" is a hot issue in this upcoming Presidential election, and the form it usually takes is either forbidding campaign contributions or severely limiting them. If political advocacy is taken as a "contribution" when it takes place on the net - and the FEC doesn't seem to have ruled out this possibility, just said it won't decide that now - then presumably it would be illegal to advocate for or post in support of a candidate or issue, or be legal only if your expenditures were calculated at below the limit.
There are some obvious first amendment problems with limiting campaign contributions by private parties, and this really brings them into sharp focus. "Post 'Vote for So-and-So', go to jail". A close eye still needs to be kept on this, and hopefully brought up during discussion of the broader issue of campaign finance reform.
Does this mean that @home should not still be punished?
The point of a UDP is to stop the denial-of-service attack on Usenet, not to punish an ISP that's been lax. Once the spam has stopped - by whatever means, accompanied by whatever weasel words - there's no reason to continue the cancels.
A universal cancel on a site's posts would have a lot less moral justification if it were done to "send a message" or "punish" or "show 'em who's boss". At least I think so.
The point, which you seem to have missed, is that a man who "isn't familiar with the issue" of censorware filters has no business introducing a bill to require them, at least not until he's familiarized himself with the issue.
It doesn't matter where the article came from, and your discussion of the AFA is a red herring.
The story goes that Apple tried to license the GUI from Xerox in 1980 or 1981 - when the Lisa design was in progress - and was told it wasn't considered a licensable property. (Back then, copyright on user interface design was unheard of.) Apple settled for licensing SmallTalk from Xerox.
Xerox did sue Apple over the design of the Lisa and Mac, but not until 1989. The court asked pointedly where Xerox had been for the last six years, and the suit was eventually dismissed.
All that is needed to stop this censorware craze is for a library to install the software (as it seems one has already done), and a kid (I'm sure there would be pleanty of volenteers) to try to research something, say breast cancer (maybe one of her friend's mothers has it). She gets blocked
This happens already, with fair frequency. These incidents are the source of a lot of the anecdotes about censorware programs blocking the ACLU or the LPF (under "militant", I am not kidding) or gay-rights sites, not to mention sites with non-entertainment sexual content such as medical info. Some of these are on the Censorware Project and Peacefire.
However, no one seems to much care. It's not as though there aren't plenty of examples of people being blocked - there are lists on the above sites, neatly categorized for the benefit of any Crusading Journalist - but they're mostly ignored, spun by the censorware companies as "minor imperfections". My guess is that if a student did manage to get an egregious problem looked at by the official media, it would be presented as "Teen sues software manufacturer over porno access on Internet".
At least one of the filters blocks peacefire.org because of its politics (it's a children's-rights site) and because it has a page with instructions on how to disable filters.
And if they were not happy with the situation, why did they not change it... But not in the form of sueing, which is a bit easy.
The feds didn't really give them the option. If this is the case I'm thinking of, these people started out as independent 1099 contractors to Microsoft. This was the business arrangement they agreed to and the one they wanted.
However: The IRS really, really doesn't like independent contractors. (Some state tax authorities like them even less.) They don't get taxes withheld, they're harder to control generally...and so the IRS will sometimes audit a company, declare its 1099 contractors are "really" employees, and bill the company for the back taxes (that the contractor has already paid in quarterlies), plus fines and interest.
Fear of this outcome led MS, as it led many other companies, to tell their contractors that they'd have to switch to being leased employees of an agency. Instead of 1099 contractors, they are now W2 employees of the agency, which withholds their taxes. The IRS is happy, MS is happy, the agencies now getting a percentage are happy.
The contractors have no reason to be happy, though. The agency is now chowing down for a quarter to a third of their rate, and their income drops accordingly. Their tax situation changes since they're no longer independent business people, but employees: a lot of expenses become suddenly un-deductible. Some of their intangible freedom is gone. In many ways, it's the worst of both worlds: they have the drawbacks of being an employee, without the benefits of being a Microsoft employee,
They got screwed, so they sued. They can't sue the IRS or the agencies, and that leaves Microsoft. But they didn't get screwed because they weren't hired as employees; they got screwed because they weren't allowed to stay as contractors, but were forced into a leased-employement arrangement they didn't want to avoid tax liability for their clients.
Meanwhile, the rest of us get screwed too, as it's been getting harder and harder for the last ten years or so to get 1099 work. Most companies demand you go through an agency and give up a percentage of your income, because they don't want the potential tax liability if you're arbitrarily declared an "employee". At some companies, this fear extends even to agency leased employees - they're terrified to treat you "like an employee" and that sometimes translates to "decently". (Trivial example: I've been officially disinvited from release parties for a product I'd been lead on because "HR rules are that contractors can't attend".)
There was a Salon article about this a couple of years ago that gives a bit of background.
Color is backward-compatible with black-and-white. As stations converted to color, the old/cheap b/w sets could still pick them up - they didn't get the color information but they could watch the programs.
My understanding is this is not true of HDTV: old sets can't receive HDTV broadcasts at all, not even at NTSC resolution.
Breaking compatibility requires a lot more justification than making an improvement that's backward-compatible. I'm not sure myself that greater resolution and a sharper picture is worth it.
Umm, current anti-virus software does not detect suspected but unknown viruses
Some packages will monitor for writes to files (such as system files) that the package feels a binary has no business writing to, and put up a "permit or deny" dialog. This isn't exactly an attempt to detect viruses, but it is an attempt to detect and stop viral reproduction, even for unknown viruses. [No, I am not going to get into the Plural Wars.]
"iCEO" started out as a semi-joke, because Jobs insisted he was merely the interim CEO - hence the "i".
He's finally apparently admitted that he is the non-interim CEO, but is keeping the "i" to show that Apple is committed to the Internet or some such marketing-babble thing.
You don't need to patent it. All you have to do is publish the technology somewhere.
That assumes prior art considerations count. However, in the real world of current patent practice, it's not going to stop a competitor from obtaining a patent on your technique.
When they sue you for using the technique you originated, you might win...after being drained by attorney's fees and the other costs of a trial. Not a very good gamble.
The problem isn't going to be solved by the actions of a single company, or even a majority of companies, because the need for self-defense against bogus patents is still there if there's just one person willing to exploit the ability to obtain them. This has to be fixed in the patent office. Complaining about the companies doing it may feel good, but it will not fix the problem. If the ultimate goal of this boycott is satisfied and Amazon relinquishes its patent, the problem will still exist (and B&N will probably go out the next day and patent one-click for itself).
This article (PDF format) takes an interesting tack on the question of whether stores should want Internet purchases taxed. It might come back to bite them.
Internet merchants have made the point that it's extremely burdensome to be able to compute the sales tax rates for every one of the thousands of tax jurisdictions in the US, and provide the funds to each of those jurisdictions. (It's especially bad for small vendors - say, people who sell a few things on eBay.)
The above-referenced paper argues that for reasons of basic legal equity, it won't be constitutionally possible to impose an obligation to collect use taxes of this kind on Internet merchants without imposing the same obligation on stores.
Imagine walking into your local store and having them require proof of address so they could compute the proper tax. (Imagine the store owner - particularly small local stores - having to set up or buy a system to compute those different tax rates.) It might not be so bad in practice in areas where there's a single sales-tax rate for a large area...but in, say, the Bay Area, you can barely drive two miles without hitting a change in the sales tax rate
It's an interesting question. Do physical stores really want to open this particular can of worms? Killing small Internet merchants and slowing down the big ones is of economic benefit to store owners, but it might come back around to bite them.
A sales tax is a "regressive" tax because it taxes the poor more than the rich.
This argument assumes that wealthy people and poor people purchase relatively the same number of items. [...] In reality, the wealthy spend rediculously more than the poor.
In absolute terms, yes, but that's not the point of "regressive" versus "progressive"; the point is the relative percentage of income spent. A poor person is likely to spend close to 100% of income on necessities of life, hence to be sales-taxed on close to 100% of income (so an 8% sales tax would represent close to 8% of the poor person's income). A rich person might spend 50% of income on necessities and luxuries, hence be sales-taxed only on 50% of income (so the sales tax on the rich person is 4% of their income).
What makes a tax "progressive" or "regressive" is the percentage of income taken as the tax, not the total amount.
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DVD CCA is a non-profit organization which by definition means they do not make money.
No. The definition of a nonprofit is that it does not pay out dividends to stockholders. (For tax exemption status, the nonprofit also has to meet conditions about its purpose of operation.)
A nonprofit can make huge amounts of money and still be nonprofit legally, so long as it doesn't pay out that money to stockholders. It can put it in the bank, use it to expand, etc. There's no conflict between DVD-CCA being a nonprofit and it hauling in big bucks via the sale of licenses. (NB: I don't know whether it does haul in big bucks, the references I've found to CSS licensing conflict concerning whether it's free or $$$. It is clear that DVD-CCA has a lock on the method and will not license anyone they don't approve of, however.)
Who want to play their DVDs, you mean. The MPAA and DVD-CCA don't mind at all if Linux users want to buy DVDs and put money in their pockets... Actually using them is another matter.
Their explicit position is that Linux users have no right to view their legally-purchased DVDs unless the DVD-CCA allows them to. Read the words of John Hoy, president of DVD-CCA:
Region coding has nothing to do with CSS. The "region code" is just a single byte on the disc, it's entirely up to the players to enforce it.
Sure it does. Look at your own words: it's up to the player to enforce regionalization. Therefore, if you want all consumer players to enforce regionalization, you need to control who can create a DVD player. You do that by keeping the CSS access-control system a closely held secret, and requiring implementation of region control - and any other access-control measure you want - as a precondition of receiving the CSS spec. Any player manufacturer who doesn't play along can't create a player capable of reading CSS-encoded DVDs, which means their player can't play most commercial movies, which means it's not going to be very useful to most people. which means all the player manufacturers have to play along.
At least, that's the way it works as long as you have to go to DVD-CCA in order to learn how to decode CSS-scrambled data. CSS has everything to do with regionalization - though the link is economic, not technical.
Is there a law that says that when you buy a dvd, or a video, or a tape, or a book, you should be able to play it, or see it, or... the way you choose?
Why, yes, there is. It's called the fair use doctrine and it means you can make fair use of a copy you own of copyrighted material.
And yes, it also applies to books. If you own a copy of a book, you can translate it into whatever language you like for your personal use.
is it illegal to do so for personal purposes
It's not completely clear what US law will turn out to be on this issue. Under traditional interpretations of "fair use", the owner of a copy of a copyrighted work could access the information any way he or she pleased; the copyright holder could limit copying, but not personal use by an owner of the copy. This includes bypassing various access protections, if done in the course of "fair use" access of the work. (For example, you can strip off copy protection without getting into copyright trouble, as long as you don't then go and make extra infringing copies of the software.)
The Digital Millenium Copyright Act passed in 1998 makes it illegal to bypass access controls, even if done for purposes of access, not illegal copying. The copyright holder, under the DCMA, has the legal right to prevent access by the owner of a copy. The DCMA has not yet been tested in court, and there is a vague provision about how the new provisions aren't intended to gut fair use of copyrighted works. So basically we don't know yet whether, for example, playing a DVD on Linux when the copyright holder doesn't want to allow DVDs to be played on Linux is legal or not.
I know nothing about Norwegian law on this topic. Does anyone know whether Norwegian copyright law has any similar provisions?
That won't work when trade secret is at issue, as long as the original person describing what the code does has access to what's alleged to be a trade secret. (It wouldn't work for patent either.)
It does work for copyright, but only because copyright inheres in the exact representation of an idea, not the idea itself. So if you can write a piece of code that's compatible with something copyrighted, without reproducing the copyrighted code, you're free and clear of copyright concerns. (The clean-room technique basically is to make sure there's no legal question that the implementor used copyrighted code, because in the clean-room situation the implementor never *saw* copyrighted code.)
But this case isn't about copyright - no one alleges DeCSS is actually a copy of someone else's software - it's about trade secret. And a trade secret is still a trade secret, whether it's described in C or English. So doing a clean-room clone of CSS won't help here, there'll still be a trade secret problem.
Why does the second judge's ruling prevail? Why is it an AND boolean operation and not an OR?
What they asked for was a temporary restraining order (TRO). These are generally requested before there can be much if any evidence presented to the judge. The judge denied this request.
A preliminary injunction is a little different - it's a way of freezing the status quo until there can be a full trial. Normally, a preliminary injunction is granted only after there's been time to examine evidence and arguments. The New York judge granted the PI immediately, which surprised me (but maybe shouldn't have, in light of his remarks to the plaintiff's lawyers about wanting to give them "a runaway train"). The California judge (same one that denied the TRO before) granted the PI, but only after consideration of arguments offered by both sides.
The critical thing to remember is that this is two separate lawsuits, filed by different plaintiffs against different defendants under different laws in different jurisdictions. I'm sure both judges are watching the other case, but formally, they don't overlap.
Technically, both injunctions apply only to the parties named. Neither injunction forbids Joe Blow from posting DeCSS or any related code, as long as Joe is acting independently and not in concert with any of the people under injunction, at least this is my understanding. (Of course, DVD-CCA could still sue Joe, the same as they sued the original defendants.)
What's really annoying/alarming about this is that the arbitrator went ahead and issued a decision, even after the two parties had come to a mutally agreeable settlement. The arbitrator just rode roughshod over that.
Makes me suspect that the process in the future will be more about power than fairness. The results of that kind of thinking are rarely good ones, particularly not for individuals up against large organizations. What happens when the next "veronica.com" case comes up against this process? Will we see an increase in reverse domain piracy? I fear so.
But why the hell should they CARE about the home user making a copy or three?
It's been clear for some time that this isn't about piracy. As has been pointed out before:
So what is the point of this? It's been suggested that they really want to control the market for drives...and that's possible, I guess, but according to the DVD FAQ, the license for CSS is free.
Could they be wanting to control the format in order to restrict use of it by independent artists? That would explain the MPAA's interest, I guess, but my understanding is that DVDs that aren't CSS-encrypted can still be played on any player.
Then there's maintaining the region control as a possible motivation...and while I'm sure studios prefer to be able to control which countries can see a movie, I somehow can't see it as being important enough for this level of attack.
I'm left with the Digital Millenium Copyright Act, and specifically the anti-consumer provisions that make it illegal to access content you own in a way that the copyright holder doesn't want to allow. This the potential to enormously increase the power of the MPAA and its members over the public, surely enough reason for the ferocity of the attack on DeCSS.
However - the actions and words of Judge Lewis Kaplan today notwithstanding - this is an awfully weak case for them to test the DMCA with. It straightforwardly pits the interests of the plaintiff against the right of consumers to create software for interoperability and to make fair use of content (in this case, to play legally purchased DVDs on a computer player they own).
I'm left with one of two conclusions: either there's some deep dark mystery here, or the movie industry is run by idiots. At this point I wouldn't rule out either possibility.
...that he's charged under the Fair Housing Act, which seems just a wee bit indirect. No one seems to have charged him with assault or making a threat.
For threats to be illegal they need to be pretty immediate, not just frightening. Saying that someone will be executed at some highly indeterminate time in the future "after the revolution" doesn't normally qualify as a criminal threat.
Only in a criminal case. If you're sued, there's no requirement for an attorney to be provided: you're responsible for your own defense.
What does it take to educate these journalists?
Having tried it sporadically during the period before the CDA was passed, and while it was being challenged in the courts, I've come to the surly conclusion that you can't educate 'em. Either they have a clue - in which case the story would have been better informed - or they're willing to get a clue before they write the story - in which case the story would have been better informed - or they are unable and unwilling to be clued.
In some cases, where the information was unavailable to them or difficult to find, journalists who write bad stories can be clued. But I don't think they have that excuse at this point. They have web access - this isn't 1995 any more - and they're able to use search engines and type in URLs. If they don't understand yet that this is about interoperability and not piracy, then they're not gonna.
I admit this isn't a very useful attitude. People who feel up to it should still write reporters who file obviously-misleading stories; it's probably most effective if you include a lot of pointers to source material, and take a rather-shocked-to-find-you-so-misinformed tone (rather than flaming). If enough people write in, the reporter may be more careful next time, if only out of embarrassment. But don't expect instant or impressive results.
You notice, though, that they don't say they're *not* going to regulate political speech on the net - only that the regulatory process will be slow and they probably won't do anything until after the election.
Notice also that "campaign finance reform" is a hot issue in this upcoming Presidential election, and the form it usually takes is either forbidding campaign contributions or severely limiting them. If political advocacy is taken as a "contribution" when it takes place on the net - and the FEC doesn't seem to have ruled out this possibility, just said it won't decide that now - then presumably it would be illegal to advocate for or post in support of a candidate or issue, or be legal only if your expenditures were calculated at below the limit.
There are some obvious first amendment problems with limiting campaign contributions by private parties, and this really brings them into sharp focus. "Post 'Vote for So-and-So', go to jail". A close eye still needs to be kept on this, and hopefully brought up during discussion of the broader issue of campaign finance reform.
Does this mean that @home should not still be punished?
The point of a UDP is to stop the denial-of-service attack on Usenet, not to punish an ISP that's been lax. Once the spam has stopped - by whatever means, accompanied by whatever weasel words - there's no reason to continue the cancels.
A universal cancel on a site's posts would have a lot less moral justification if it were done to "send a message" or "punish" or "show 'em who's boss". At least I think so.
The point, which you seem to have missed, is that a man who "isn't familiar with the issue" of censorware filters has no business introducing a bill to require them, at least not until he's familiarized himself with the issue.
It doesn't matter where the article came from, and your discussion of the AFA is a red herring.
The story goes that Apple tried to license the GUI from Xerox in 1980 or 1981 - when the Lisa design was in progress - and was told it wasn't considered a licensable property. (Back then, copyright on user interface design was unheard of.) Apple settled for licensing SmallTalk from Xerox.
Xerox did sue Apple over the design of the Lisa and Mac, but not until 1989. The court asked pointedly where Xerox had been for the last six years, and the suit was eventually dismissed.
All that is needed to stop this censorware craze is for a library to install the software (as it seems one has already done), and a kid (I'm sure there would be pleanty of volenteers) to try to research something, say breast cancer (maybe one of her friend's mothers has it). She gets blocked
This happens already, with fair frequency. These incidents are the source of a lot of the anecdotes about censorware programs blocking the ACLU or the LPF (under "militant", I am not kidding) or gay-rights sites, not to mention sites with non-entertainment sexual content such as medical info. Some of these are on the Censorware Project and Peacefire.
However, no one seems to much care. It's not as though there aren't plenty of examples of people being blocked - there are lists on the above sites, neatly categorized for the benefit of any Crusading Journalist - but they're mostly ignored, spun by the censorware companies as "minor imperfections". My guess is that if a student did manage to get an egregious problem looked at by the official media, it would be presented as "Teen sues software manufacturer over porno access on Internet".
At least one of the filters blocks peacefire.org because of its politics (it's a children's-rights site) and because it has a page with instructions on how to disable filters.
And if they were not happy with the situation, why did they not change it... But not in the form of sueing, which is a bit easy.
The feds didn't really give them the option. If this is the case I'm thinking of, these people started out as independent 1099 contractors to Microsoft. This was the business arrangement they agreed to and the one they wanted.
However: The IRS really, really doesn't like independent contractors. (Some state tax authorities like them even less.) They don't get taxes withheld, they're harder to control generally...and so the IRS will sometimes audit a company, declare its 1099 contractors are "really" employees, and bill the company for the back taxes (that the contractor has already paid in quarterlies), plus fines and interest.
Fear of this outcome led MS, as it led many other companies, to tell their contractors that they'd have to switch to being leased employees of an agency. Instead of 1099 contractors, they are now W2 employees of the agency, which withholds their taxes. The IRS is happy, MS is happy, the agencies now getting a percentage are happy.
The contractors have no reason to be happy, though. The agency is now chowing down for a quarter to a third of their rate, and their income drops accordingly. Their tax situation changes since they're no longer independent business people, but employees: a lot of expenses become suddenly un-deductible. Some of their intangible freedom is gone. In many ways, it's the worst of both worlds: they have the drawbacks of being an employee, without the benefits of being a Microsoft employee,
They got screwed, so they sued. They can't sue the IRS or the agencies, and that leaves Microsoft. But they didn't get screwed because they weren't hired as employees; they got screwed because they weren't allowed to stay as contractors, but were forced into a leased-employement arrangement they didn't want to avoid tax liability for their clients.
Meanwhile, the rest of us get screwed too, as it's been getting harder and harder for the last ten years or so to get 1099 work. Most companies demand you go through an agency and give up a percentage of your income, because they don't want the potential tax liability if you're arbitrarily declared an "employee". At some companies, this fear extends even to agency leased employees - they're terrified to treat you "like an employee" and that sometimes translates to "decently". (Trivial example: I've been officially disinvited from release parties for a product I'd been lead on because "HR rules are that contractors can't attend".)
There was a Salon article about this a couple of years ago that gives a bit of background.
Color is backward-compatible with black-and-white. As stations converted to color, the old/cheap b/w sets could still pick them up - they didn't get the color information but they could watch the programs.
My understanding is this is not true of HDTV: old sets can't receive HDTV broadcasts at all, not even at NTSC resolution.
Breaking compatibility requires a lot more justification than making an improvement that's backward-compatible. I'm not sure myself that greater resolution and a sharper picture is worth it.
Some packages will monitor for writes to files (such as system files) that the package feels a binary has no business writing to, and put up a "permit or deny" dialog. This isn't exactly an attempt to detect viruses, but it is an attempt to detect and stop viral reproduction, even for unknown viruses. [No, I am not going to get into the Plural Wars.]
"iCEO" started out as a semi-joke, because Jobs insisted he was merely the interim CEO - hence the "i".
He's finally apparently admitted that he is the non-interim CEO, but is keeping the "i" to show that Apple is committed to the Internet or some such marketing-babble thing.
That assumes prior art considerations count. However, in the real world of current patent practice, it's not going to stop a competitor from obtaining a patent on your technique.
When they sue you for using the technique you originated, you might win...after being drained by attorney's fees and the other costs of a trial. Not a very good gamble.
The problem isn't going to be solved by the actions of a single company, or even a majority of companies, because the need for self-defense against bogus patents is still there if there's just one person willing to exploit the ability to obtain them. This has to be fixed in the patent office. Complaining about the companies doing it may feel good, but it will not fix the problem. If the ultimate goal of this boycott is satisfied and Amazon relinquishes its patent, the problem will still exist (and B&N will probably go out the next day and patent one-click for itself).
This article (PDF format) takes an interesting tack on the question of whether stores should want Internet purchases taxed. It might come back to bite them.
Internet merchants have made the point that it's extremely burdensome to be able to compute the sales tax rates for every one of the thousands of tax jurisdictions in the US, and provide the funds to each of those jurisdictions. (It's especially bad for small vendors - say, people who sell a few things on eBay.)
The above-referenced paper argues that for reasons of basic legal equity, it won't be constitutionally possible to impose an obligation to collect use taxes of this kind on Internet merchants without imposing the same obligation on stores.
Imagine walking into your local store and having them require proof of address so they could compute the proper tax. (Imagine the store owner - particularly small local stores - having to set up or buy a system to compute those different tax rates.) It might not be so bad in practice in areas where there's a single sales-tax rate for a large area...but in, say, the Bay Area, you can barely drive two miles without hitting a change in the sales tax rate
It's an interesting question. Do physical stores really want to open this particular can of worms? Killing small Internet merchants and slowing down the big ones is of economic benefit to store owners, but it might come back around to bite them.
In absolute terms, yes, but that's not the point of "regressive" versus "progressive"; the point is the relative percentage of income spent. A poor person is likely to spend close to 100% of income on necessities of life, hence to be sales-taxed on close to 100% of income (so an 8% sales tax would represent close to 8% of the poor person's income). A rich person might spend 50% of income on necessities and luxuries, hence be sales-taxed only on 50% of income (so the sales tax on the rich person is 4% of their income).
What makes a tax "progressive" or "regressive" is the percentage of income taken as the tax, not the total amount.