>>"If they can buy politicians then they can certainly buy a botnet for a few hours."
Well, with a watertight forensic argument like that, you've certainly got me convinced.
They could have done it, so they must have done it. Case closed.
But cui bono?
I honestly don't see that the RIAA/MPAA/whoever would have much to gain, and they could have a fair amount to lose, especially in the current atmosphere where (whatever might have happened in the past) DDoS attacks do seem fairly closely identified with the people they would see as enemies doing stuff that most people would tend to see as wrong.
Would seem a bit pointless for a serious industry organisation to to DDoS TPB since that's a pretty short term thing more like a teenage sulk than a practically worthwhile disabling, and it'd also cut away the moral high ground the RIAA, etc would seem likely to want to take.
Maybe there's some double or triple-bluffing (or more) going on?
>>"As another poster mentioned, one would imagine that that memory stick might have something on it that would lead to a charge other than negligence (which he would be convicted of just on the witness report)."
If he's responsible for doing the checking, I'm not sure witnesses would be needed to demonstrate negligence.
I suppose he had some time to think during the flight, and it's possible he realised he was screwed either way but ate the card for less selfish reasons, like trying to make sure it didn't end up as a clip for people to laugh at on YouTube.
Re: So there was an 'experienced glider' nearby...
>>"why didn't he bring it up PRIOR to takeoff?"
Well, a person could be looking at someone preparing to fly while partly occupied themselves, note that they haven't yet done a particular check but assume they're leaving it for later, and then realise that they're setting off without having done it when it's too late to safely stop them.
Especially if watching an instructor as a passive observer rather than someone actually involved in checking gear out, it might be easy for someone to have in their mind the idea that an instructor is very likely to do things right, and even if there was an expected time in a vaguely-standard checking sequence for a particular check to be done, the observer may just be interested if the instructor fails to do something when expected, consciously or subconsciously assuming that they must be leaving it until later for some reason, or maybe that they somehow did it out-of-sequence already, while the observer was distracted.
If he did, as has been reported, move to the USA for safety because his own country was thought too dangerous for him to live in, I'd hope he'd at least have shared some decent amount of his Facebook 'winnings' with the USA before going elsewhere for tax reasons.
>>"if someone downloads a film they have not agreed to any terms that say they shouldn't do it. so if T&C's are required your argument is nonsense."
If there are general laws saying 'It's against the law to help in the provision of copyright content' and someone breaks the law, the absence of any specific terms and conditions is.
Effectively, the 'standard legal terms and conditions' are already widely known, just as they are in the case of other illegal activity.
As for the website, there is no law saying people aren't allowed to use ad-blockers, and a website which wished to restrict access to only allow people who were not blocking ads could do so with relative technical ease, if they believed that doing so would actually profit them.
>>"But that does not mean I don't get bloody angry when I see copyright being used as nothing more than a tool to restrict freedom, make money and criminalise ordinary people."
Surely, the whole point of it is to allow people to exploit their own work by very narrowly restricting 'freedom' and giving them a tool to make some money, which they can use (or not) as they wish?
Though of course, the 'freedom' in question (the freedom to selfishly copy other people's work without giving anything in return) isn't one likely to figure on any Declaration of Fundamental Human Rights any time soon.
And it only criminalises 'ordinary people' who choose to break the criminal law by doing things like (in the UK) not merely taking copies of other people's stuff but effectively assisting in the publishing of other people's stuff.
'Ordinary people' is a weasel phrase designed to try and pretend from the outset that the people are by definition doing nothing wrong without actually making a sensible adult argument.
You might as well say that it's wrong to criminalise 'ordinary people' who choose to drive while ignoring the speed limit.
>>"The "freetards" are not against copyright, they are against the misuse of copyright."
'Misuse' typically seems to be something defined quite selfishly by people using their own desires as a yardstick of what is 'right', the way many children might be expected to do.
But then I guess someone with a problem seeing irony might not see the irony in their own posts complaining about 'factual flaws in every single thing someone writes' without giving a single effing example of that having happened.
That they then finish by calling the person whose arguments they don't like 'a child' when the epitome of 'childish' argument is to dismiss everything someone says as wrong without giving any grown-up reasons, or even any reasons is just more icing on the irony cake.
It's certainly debatable to what extent they are net job creators, as it is with a great many businesses.
Without Facebook, a great many people who turned out in this version of reality to be FB users would presumably be using other social networking sites, which would also be employing people.
>>"Since the "proof" is ontained by illegallyy monitoring computers (home invasion) "
It's not illegal if it's made legal, whatever opinion any barrack-room lawyer might have of it.
And looking at some level at communications (likely being automated and not involving people before the point where something shows up as fairly likely dodgy activity) is hardly 'home invasion'.
>>"So all the songs you bought back then and have since wanted to listen on your MP3 player, you just went ahead and bought again?"
No, since there was no meaningful threat that any individual doing that with things they'd already bought would face legal action, any more than there was previously any meaningful threat of legal action being taken against anyone taping their own CDs or LPs, placing doing such things in a distinctly different situation to people downloading copies of stuff they had never bought in *any* form, or sharing copies of stuff with an arbitrary number of other people.
Some people might want to pretend that there's no meaningful difference between people format-shifting stuff they have already paid for and people just copying and/or widely sharing stuff they haven't paid for, but that pretence simply isn't an honest one.
Morally speaking, there's a blindingly obvious difference, and legally speaking there's a clear practical difference resulting from the moral difference.
Whatever license terms drawn up long before MP3s were invented might say, it'd have seriously bad PR for someone to have been sued for format-shifting for personal use something they had already paid for, since the vast majority of observers would have looked at such a case from a moral standpoint rather than a strict legal one and whether people were doing it or not, they'd be likely to see little morally wrong with the activity.
On the other hand, people copying stuff they had never paid for are likely to be viewed massively less favourably by most people, and more so if they try and pretend they're somehow equivalent to a format-shifter.
That's one of the things with law - there's a huge difference between laws which are technically breached by a meaningful number of people in situations where there is a good moral defence ("I paid for it already"), and laws which are breached by a meaningful number of people where such a defence is lacking ("I have a right to get stuff for nothing").
>>"Don't you remember when they started mucking about with copy protection (car stereo killing in some cases, rootkit installing in others) on CDs?"
Not on any CDs I bought.
The fact that they gave up those attempts pretty quickly suggests a tacit acceptance that people demanded some freedom regarding things they had bought, freedom which the publishers decided it was necessary to provide.
Not really the actions of a huge powerful conspiracy.
>>"Although, here I think the point was that widespread piracy is at least partly due to the outdated business model of content providers. The refusal of the record companies to accept that we shouldn't have to re-buy all our music every time they bring out a new media format, for instance."
Since I started buying CDs >25 years ago, no one seems to have been forcing me to re-buy anything.
Or even meaningfully trying to claim that I should.
>>"It seems to me that the idea of copyrighting a language or any of its derivatives is also bonkers - what is the point of a language where the use of expressive techniques is controlled? "
Maybe there might be situations where it would make some sense, but at the very least, if there is going to be copyright or patent control exercised, it should be something that's made crystal clear from the start, not something that can bite someone years or decades later.
>>"As to the use of clouds to provide reliable backups, many old TV programmes which the official archivists thought were lost for ever, have been recovered for posterity due to their availability on Bittorrent - because some fan had the foresight to do some home recording and shared it with the world regardless of copyright law"
I'm not sure how much the BitTorrent adds to that situation, unless the fan in question would otherwise have decided to delete the digitised programme (and the original video tapes) after bothering to take the time to digitise it.
About all that it obviously seems to add is an increased chance of the recording being found over and above what appeals on fan sites for old recorded content might have resulted in.
I guess given a relatively slender tower, one advantage of this arrangement is that it *could* be combined with agriculture, since relatively little ground will be in shadow for long.
>>"We don't know but surely it would be better for his reputation to go to Sweden and defend the charge if he believes himself innocent than attempt to get of facing a judge by way of a legal technicality."
I'd have thought that even a win might only delay things, with some way round the situation being found, and the process re-started.
Would he be likely to have much luck in a second round?
Have there been many decisions against him so far that were borderline, and which had much chance of coming out differently even if the whole thing was re-run in its entirety?
Whether people think he didn't really have a case or think the UK courts were corrupt, would it be likely that things would be different in a repeat of the process?
Looking back, I can see how my first post could be read that way, even though I'm not identified as a Reg writer.
I started off writing and avoided saying 'think' rather than 'thought' since thoght would have seemed like I was contradicting your assertion about most people misunderstanding things
I apologise for any misunderstanding that might have caused, and see that maybe that was responsible for some of the approach you seemed to take towards what I actually wrote.
It's a pity it didn't get brought up earlier, since it could have been cleared up earlier, but that you didn't mention it earlier suggests it was maybe not central to your argument regarding what I actually did write..
Neither would it explain you claiming I had said there was something Terribly Wrong with writing things out the long-winded way when I simply hadn't said that (and nor had the author).
You could be read as claiming that anything other than the accuracy you seek is completely misstating/incorrect/misleading when it reality, while being incorrect it's not entitrely incorrect, and while being potentially misleading to some, it's not likely to mislead everyone.
To say 'completely mis-stating' necessarily assumes there is such a thing as partially mis-stating, which to be honest, I think would be a far better description of what had been written.
Well, given that the Treasury stepped in to give better terms in the Northern Rock case, and references frequently are to the system being government-backed, I think most people could be confident that, short of something which buggered the entire country, they'd be pretty safe.
Which, contrasted with MU. which at best looked a bit dubious, even a dodgy covered bank looks like a pretty safe bet.
Especially if there weren't any obvious better alternatives - if only one or two banks went tits-up, the government would step in.
If they all went tits-up and the government somehow ran away, you'd have lost out wherever you put your money, even if more in some places than others.
And the economy would be fucked anyway.
Choosing one of the dodgier websites on the internet (one of the ones that people might well have predicted was vastly more likely to attract trouble than many others both by its nature and its size) isn't necessarily comparable.
Even ignoring the flash issues, personally, if visiting a free museum, I'd happily pay not to have people even taking non-flash camera-phone pictures if I was trying to look at a piece properly.
Additionally, there could be various issues with exhibitions involving loan works, or (in some places) works which were still in copyright.
Though clearly they make money (income) from selling postcards, etc, even if they didn't, I think many museums would consider photography maybe more trouble than it was worth.
It would be interesting if it was possible to experiment with various museum websites, and see if having lots of stuff available in decent resolution had a positive or negative effect on visitor numbers.
>>5. All copyrights incorporate at least some stuff from the public domain, thus exclusive rights awarded to an individual is effectively stealing from the public domain. Even if this input is small it still must be counted.
That rather depends what position people choose to take on exactly what is being copyrighted.
If I paint a painting inspired by, and very similar to, the Mona Lisa, I might have shown little invention even if I'd shown good technique, but that's reflected in the fact that while I might have copyright in my picture (no-one has the right to sell unauthorised prints of it), anyone else could paint their version of the Mona Lisa without infringing my rights, as long as they didn't copy novel changes I'd made to a taking-the-piss extent..
So, I might be standing on the shoulders of all that past culture, but the less novel I'm being, the easier it would be for someone do do something similar to me.
Also, the less value I'm adding, presumably at least on average, the less people would be likely to value what I've done.
I wouldn't be 'stealing' from the public domain if I didn't take anything from it preventing someone else using it the way I had done.
At the very least, there's a kind of natural balancing going on there to some extent.
Surely in 1886, the users had few automated means of copying anything. Even if there had been steampunk internet for backlash-transmission, without photocopiers, printers, etc, there wouldn't have been much for 'users' to say even if they'd been asked. Most battles would likely have been between one or other commercial publisher
Re: 3)
Surely, there's a point where instructions in a manual can be rewritten without infringing copyright - if there really only is pretty much one way of saying things, there must be a limit to how much the instructions could be copyrighted?
Re: 4)
It'd be interesting to see what effect digital distribution might have.
Potentially it might mean that where previously a point would come where it was not thought worth doing reprints of a book even if there might be buyers out there, in future, slow sales might keep going rather longer.
The commercial life of a book might increase, and there'd also be more opportunity for someone dropping their royalties if they thought that might boost sales.
There could be an argument for saying that below some threshold, while the creator might still be getting something, the royalty was low enough that it wasn't a meaningful barrier for most people, and so letting copyright run for a long-ish period was not too objectionable.
If the royalty for a book that would take many hours to read was only the equivalent of a few minutes' work at minimum wage...
>>"You, by contrast, initially gave the wrong sentence, which plainly misled the OP as to the likely consequence of that sentence,"
I did no such thing.
The guy who got it wrong wasn't responding to me.
Please get your facts straight.
>>"refused to acknowledge the error, went off on a tangent about, of all the irrelevant nonsense, American sentences and parole systems, "
It wasn't my error to acknowledge.
And you were the one who started going on at length (and seemingly inaccurately) about differences between US and UK systems, in response to a single short sentence I wrote saying (partly for the benefit of any US readers) that differences between our countries seemed minimal in terms of parole.
Given I had suggested the 'N-to-life' usage was a potentially effective shorthand description of a UK sentence, I don''t see that one sentence as 'going off on a tangent' in any obvious way.
>>"asserted that substituting a sentence which doesn't even exist in the UK would be better than a concise statement of the *actual* sentence that was given."
I simply gave an opinion that a particular very compact form of words might be an improvement on what had actually been written in the article, an opinion which I still hold, especially as the compactness is of a strong kind that most journalists would find hard to break.
Where else those words may be used in only marginally relevant.
It was just an opinion, and stated as such, but one which you seem very keen on not merely disagreeing with, but declaring entirely wrong and completely misleading, whatever you had to do in the process.
You claimed I had said would be something 'terribly wrong' with reporting a sentence correctly.
I simply did not say that, or anything like that.
You failed to address that when I pointed it out.
Personally, I might well use the long-winded description myself much of the time, but that doesn't mean I'm going to throw condemnation at people who don't, especially if they're writing for an audience that is likely to be reasonably knowledgeable.
I merely acknowledged that many people will tend to compact things when writing, and even then, I suggested that if people were going to do that, there are possibly better ways of doing it, which is hardly giving it my total approval
>>"The sort of bellend who might want a convenient way to distribute an (open source) driver for hardware, a configuration file or script, patch or other entirely legitimate but large files they want to distribute quickly to a wide variety of users around the globe (who they may or may not know)."
Well, that's not really an answer to the question "What kind of bellend puts their only copy of..."
No, we're not, since you're obviously keen to blatantly misrepresent what I said, make incorrect assumptions and stupid exaggerations, and then fail to show the slightest bit of acknowledgement when that's pointed out.
At best you're now saying little more than asserting that a phrase couldn't be used here by anyone to describe something here irrespective of whether if it would be more accurate than many of the existing current brief or journalistically mangled attempts at description because it isn't officially used here, which does seem like pretty weak reasoning.
I really can't see any point wasting more time on someone like you.
>>"A kim dotcom film would be ace. I bet leonardo dicaprio is bulking up as we speak."
If there is a film, I do hope DiCaprio is in it
That way I could rely on the blanket warning words "starring Leonardo DiCaprio" to make sure I never end up starting to watch it by accident, rather than having to explicitly remember the name of the film on a list of experiences to avoid.
>>"Reg readers were meant to be IT professionals, it's pretty obvious from most of the conspiracy/anti "the man" type of comments which crop up again and again that this is no longer the case. "
I think a lot of the readers of tech articles are still IT professionals.
In some ways unfortunately, Reg comment threads do seem to get seriously high up Google rankings.
It's not uncommon for me to be searching for more information on a very recent comment only to find that chucking a few relevant words into a search brings up the Reg thread with that post in on the first results page.
People particularly into a single issue can find these threads maybe a bit too easily.
>>"Also the lack of comments on any actual hard IT stories:New disk array out?3 Comments all saying imagine how much porn it could hold."
Well, for a lot of hardware, there's not a huge amount to comment on, once given the facts.
>>"You're completely missing the point. I'm talking about dodgy not from a legal standpoint, but from you giving your business to them standpoint. RBS are not legally dodgy, but if the government hadn't rescued them, you could have lost thousands or more because of their business model."
I'm not sure he (assuming the AC is a 'he') is missing the point.
Assuming he'd checked up before paying his money in, he would have effectively seen a legitimate guarantee insuring his deposits against loss, at least up to a certain level, and might even had some expectation the government might help even beyond that level.
Which means he doesn't actually have to /care/ about their business model, or how well the FSA might be supervising them, or anything like that.
>>"Looking back on it, doing business with RBS was at least as hazardous to your financial wellbeing as storing files on MU and therefore your point applies to both."
Not for someone who had actually checked them out to see they were covered and who was only storing reasonable amounts of their own money there.
>>"The light is encoded with an electronic signature."
So I guess that involves some co-ordination, even if automated to the point where a code is automatically read from each round and transmitted to a linked designator to change the signature (or a round is automatically programmed to a particular designator's signature).
I agree that copyright does seem to be excessive in length, maybe particularly in the case of a company-made work involving lots of people, rather than some individual personal creation.
That said, there is at least a good argument for copyright being longer than patents, since patents can often involve someone finding out something now which would have been entirely found out very soon by other people, even if the first person had fallen under a bus.
With copyright, particularly where a work is made by only one or two people, if one person hadn't done what they did, the chances of what they would have done being done basically the same by someone else might be pretty minimal.
>>"Unfortunately, laws give totally exclusive rights to the inventor/creator, and in the case of copyright, it's for the life of the creator plus 70 years. Clearly, this isn't fair as most of the knowledge that went into the creation originally came from the public domain."
In the case of copyright, it's not obvious that potential Creator 2 is prevented from doing a different set of 'last steps' to Creator 1 to make a different product.
Someone produces a film of Sondheim's Sweeny Todd musical, which was itself based on the old story.
Are they stopping anyone else writing their own musical version of the old story?
Someone patents an electronic device which is made from existing components by well-known construction techniques, and designed using principles of Electrical Engineering.
Are they stopping anyone else making a different product using those components and techniques and principles?
Are they even necessarily stopping someone making a competing device using a different design? (and even if sometimes they do, that's just an argument for better operation of the patent system).
As long as they're not crapping in the public domain well that they drank from, using 'similarity' claims to fence off areas other people might well have gone into in future, or claiming the rights to stuff someone did before them, they're not necessarily doing anything wrong.
>>"In the UK, anyone with money in RBS or HBOS (LLoyds only got dodgy when it was forced to take HBOS over) would have lost the lot. However, the government stepped in and if not, the banking compensation scheme would have covered at least some of the money."
Well, deposits up to a decent level were automatically covered, so no individual would have lost the lot, and most people would have been fully covered.
Someone with an account below the compensation limit could have invested their money quite safely, as long as the bank was a UK one, covered by the scheme.
>>"The point here, is that it's unnecessary. They could easily shut the service down for a week, take full backups etc. for the court case and then make it available again for people to download anything they need. They could even monitor what people are downloading and if they are breaking copyright, prosecute them."
Is downloading a criminal offence in the USA or is it the uploading (including making stuff available P2P) that is potentially criminal, similar to what (I think) is the UK situation?
>>"But no......they take the nuclear option and hit the innocent as well as the guilty"
>>"I totally agree that sufficient assets should be unfrozen to pay to keep the data available for a period of time to give people a chance to remove their files."
Well, they might understandably not want to open it up for anyone to download anything in any quantity and with minimal records kept.
How easy it would be to have a system that allowed legitimate copying back of data, but blocked business as usual, I wouldn't like to say.
>>"And on top of all that, the authorities would be regarded as acting reasonably and hopefully would get a much better image out of it."
I guess if they reckon legitimate use was limited, they might think that, if technically feasible, and someone else footing the bill, having a system where they asked people to apply for access to get one copy of their data back could give them useful ammunition in the case of having relatively few applications for access, even if such applications would naturally only reflect a fraction of total legitimate usage, excluding both use for legitimate distribution, and use for legitimate storage of stuff not kept elsewhere.
Certainly, there'd be a good PR angle for giving some kind of access, especially since in the absence of doing anything, there'd be little to stop any number of invented/exaggerated tales of lost valuable or personal data flying around alongside any genuine ones, whereas giving reasonable access would largely knock that kind of thing on the head.
On the other hand, maybe they'd reckon that encouraging people to keep legitimate data away from 'borderline legal' sites in future might be handy as well, making it easier to portray such places as not merely being unlawful in some of their activity, but not even having much legitimate use going on.
>>"I'm not sure how it is in America, but in the UK, the police would pay."
>>"Let's say someone tells the police they think you have some illegal substances in your house. The police decided to do a midnight raid and arrest you while they search. They have to a) make sure the house is secure, and b) pay for any thing they break, including broken doors and ripped up floorboards. That's regardless of if they find anything or not. If they find nothing then they have to compensate you for the time they've held you for. Certainly that's according to the UK guides on this subject."
Though if a crime is committed in a squat or rented property, would the police have to pay to store all the contents of the building just in case someone might want to use something in their defence?
Would they have to rent the building indefinitely to prevent the owners using it for something else?
Would they even have a right to keep hold of anything which they couldn't claim was relevant evidence for the investigation?
It's certainly complicated here by the fact money has been frozen, but in a similar case where it hadn't been frozen, it would seem that the business would probably have to pay for keeping any data the authorities weren't interested in.
That would suggest that maybe sufficient assets should be unfrozen to pay for its upkeep, if the defendants want that.
If they don't want that, they might find it hard to successfully claim unfairness later.
After all they wouldn't be benefiting from the money in any sense other than getting a better chance at a trial, while a presumably/supposedly legitimate US company would be, so that should be relatively easy for the US authorities to stomach.
>>"As for the US Supreme Court saying that "VCR's were NOT to be banned if they had 'significant non-infringing uses" you have clearly misunderstood it: it does NOT mean "some uses, or possible uses which do not require infringement". A more exact - although still inexact - meaning would be "many of its uses do not necessarily require infringement". It does not mean "someone somewhere is using it for non-infringing uses". And it *certainly* does not mean "YOU are using it to store versions of something you're writing"."
I'd guess a relevant factor is also that the decision was about banning VCRs in general, not about taking action against one particular VCR or its owner.
With regard to websites, if they're going to be looked at as individual things on their own merits, then it's not like banning all websites in advance because some could be used for dodgy ends, but looking at a particular website to see what is going on there.
>>""John Doe was sentenced to life and will serve a minimum of 15 years" is a long phrase in your book?"
Well, the relevant point seems to be whether it's long enough in many people's books to result in a briefer description being used much of the time, or to the phrase being broken up in news articles to the point where it frequently takes some reading well beyond the mention of 'life' to find out what the tariff actually was even when you're explicitly looking for it.
Which would seem to be the case.
When it comes to an article on the law, it's a two-way thing - on the one hand, you could argue precision is vital, on the other that brevity (even inaccurate brevity) is acceptable as long as most expected readers won't be confused.
>>"Not only ["John Doe was sentenced to life and will serve a minimum of 15 years"] completely accurate, but it clearly states the minimum time that John Doe will serve (which handily answers your last two paragraphs).
Well, as a sentence is given as something like '"Life imprisonment with a minimum term of 15 years", someone who actually was a stickler for language could argue that that was a bit like saying 'life imprisonment, except it probably won't be'.
'15-years-to-life' would arguably be technically more accurate since it's not saying something and then immediately contradicting it.
>>"see incorrectly. And you are still stating the sentence wrongly, and a sentence that you're importing from a completely different and irrelevant legal system at that."
I guess you have a rather different interpretation of 'completely different' to me - to you, it seems to mean 'not identical down to the last detail of every word used to describe it'.
And what's wrong with using a short phrase which other people use elsewhere to mean pretty much the same thing, especially if the longer phrase you like is going to be prone to one or other person truncating it in a way which makes it much less accurate than the short phrase would be?
It's simply your opinion that a "N-to-life' description would be mis-stating, seemingly based on what is partly a misunderstanding of what it actually means elsewhere.
But maybe they're 'simply wrong' elsewhere as well, if they're not putting the same interpretation on the phrase that you have determined that it should have.
Still, it seems evident you've made your mind up once and for all on the matter, so whether 'N-to-life' people elsewhere do actually end up on lifelong parole when you reckon they don't is probably not important.
And despite being a stickler for semantics when it suits you, it's apparently OK for you to put words in my mouth and wildly exaggerate what I said, and then fail to correct yourself when it's pointed out..
To be fair, Apple would probably let someone get away with a rectangular screen if they put a huge unnecessary border around it, or sold it smeared in excrement, or had razor-sharp corners that maimed anyone who tried to pick it up, or did something other than the blindingly obvious things most people would do to make something look nice.
Jobs/Ives/etc did (collectively, and in whatever order decisions were made) decide to make tech stuff which looked nice to many and was aspirational, rather than just functional.
That decision paid off, and they reaped the rewards, but it's not as if they invented the concept of 'nice'.
Once other people start making nice tech stuff as well, it's not at all obvious that there should be much that should be restricted, beyond actual passing-off.
If stuff is white or black or some version of silver, it's going to end up looking a fair bit like something else of a similar shape which is, the way a lot of silver/grey modern cars aren't always too easy to distinguish from a glance - there are practical limits on how different they could look, and it's only really things which are actively different from the general shape (like a lot higher window-line) tat tend to be distinctive.
If people are going to go for unobtrusive and subtle designs, they're likely to look fairly similar.
>>"So the CSIs will have the joy of trying to work out the firing position of a guided bullet, just think of the freedom that will give to bump off your next door neighbour without detection."
I imagine in reality, it's a bit harder than the TV would suggest to find a corpse or two with a bullet hole in, guess their exact position and attitude at the time they were shot, break out the lasers, and have them pinpoint the precise window in a 50-storey building that the shot came from.
It would seem best if they could use some seized assets to pay for the data to be kept, but presumably that's one of the things they're negotiating about.
Justice would suggest that at the very least, giving the defence access to it for a reasonable time to look for defence evidence would be necessary.
If it came to storing it all, potentially for years before trials and possible appeals, just in case some of it was useful to the defence, it might be a bit much to expect the US to pay for all that.
Otherwise, what would happen if there was a similar situation which was being run more hand-to-mouth, with huge monthly storage bills and only enough money around to pay for the next couple of months?
>>"You seem determined to argue that it's OK to completely misreport a sentence, that it would be OK to completely misreport it in another way and that there would something terribly wrong with reporting it correctly."
Please don't try to put words in my mouth.
Where did I say it would be 'terribly wrong' to report it in a long phrase, (or anything remotely like 'terribly wrong')?
In practice, there's a limit to how long a phrase can be before it is likely to be abbreviated, especially in places where people assume others know what is intended.
Given that, a way of abbreviating it in a way which seems fairly unlikely to meaningfully confuse many people who do know the situation or meaningfully mislead many people who don't seems at least worth trying, especially if it's rather better than the likeliest alternative abbreviation.
It seems to me that to call describing a sentence as 'N years to life' 'completely misreporting' is also at best an exaggeration, since it requires a particular set of assumptions to be made regarding post-release conditions which are certainly not inherent in the phrase, as suggested by the fact that the phrase is used elsewhere to describe a sentence which *does* require lifelong conditions.
On a more general note, given that one of the complaints I seem to remember hearing about UK sentencing seems to be of the form "X was given a sentence of 'life', but they could be out in 15 years", maybe it'd actually also be rather more honest if the sentence actually was described right from the beginning in the form of "15-to-life" rather than "I sentence you to Life *Imprisonment* (but you could be out in 15)"
It might be a life *sentence*, but it rarely is life *imprisonment* in reality.
>>"The US sentence of <determinate period>-to-life means that you may serve a period from <determinate period> years to life, BUT once released and your parole completed you are done. With a life licence, you are NEVER done. Clear? "
Well, as far as I can see, in the US, someone released on parole from a life-with-parole or N-years-to-life sentence typically is on parole for life.
Which is what I said before.
>>"How difficult would it be to say "<murderer> received a life sentence and will be imprisoned for at least fifteen years"? What is wrong with that?"
Well, the longer something is, the more likely it will be abbreviated by people tired of writing it in full, especially if they expect the bulk of the people reading don't need to be explained to over and over.
If many people were as ignorant as you say, which may well be the case, I'm assuming you don't expect *them* to have much of a clue about the life licence system either.
>>"This looks to me like an excellent example of the damage to the internet that over-zealous piracy-busting can do, just as its detractors claim. It directly undermines confidence in letting your data out of your sight. If that isn't impacting the direction that progress is taking us, I don't know what is."
It does at least suggest that if people are going to let important data out of their sight (let alone *sole copies of important data*) that they use a little bit of sense and check out who's going to be in charge of it to a degree commensurate with the data's value.
If 'progress is taking us' in the direction of blindly trusting 'the internet', then even if nothing else good comes out of it, with a bit of luck this case *will* directly undermine the confidence of many people.
>>"Which site is next and will your data be on it?"
If any other sites, then likely ones sailing a bit close to (or beyond) the limits of the legal, none of which I seem to use for anything, let alone backup, so I guess my data is fairly safe for now.
Register
1202 posts • joined Monday 16th April 2007 14:31 GMT
Page:
Re: Look at the Wookie!
>>"Of course it's the Media MAFIAA®."
>>"If they can buy politicians then they can certainly buy a botnet for a few hours."
Well, with a watertight forensic argument like that, you've certainly got me convinced.
They could have done it, so they must have done it. Case closed.
But cui bono?
I honestly don't see that the RIAA/MPAA/whoever would have much to gain, and they could have a fair amount to lose, especially in the current atmosphere where (whatever might have happened in the past) DDoS attacks do seem fairly closely identified with the people they would see as enemies doing stuff that most people would tend to see as wrong.
Would seem a bit pointless for a serious industry organisation to to DDoS TPB since that's a pretty short term thing more like a teenage sulk than a practically worthwhile disabling, and it'd also cut away the moral high ground the RIAA, etc would seem likely to want to take.
Maybe there's some double or triple-bluffing (or more) going on?
Re: One would imagine
>>"As another poster mentioned, one would imagine that that memory stick might have something on it that would lead to a charge other than negligence (which he would be convicted of just on the witness report)."
If he's responsible for doing the checking, I'm not sure witnesses would be needed to demonstrate negligence.
I suppose he had some time to think during the flight, and it's possible he realised he was screwed either way but ate the card for less selfish reasons, like trying to make sure it didn't end up as a clip for people to laugh at on YouTube.
Re: So there was an 'experienced glider' nearby...
>>"why didn't he bring it up PRIOR to takeoff?"
Well, a person could be looking at someone preparing to fly while partly occupied themselves, note that they haven't yet done a particular check but assume they're leaving it for later, and then realise that they're setting off without having done it when it's too late to safely stop them.
Especially if watching an instructor as a passive observer rather than someone actually involved in checking gear out, it might be easy for someone to have in their mind the idea that an instructor is very likely to do things right, and even if there was an expected time in a vaguely-standard checking sequence for a particular check to be done, the observer may just be interested if the instructor fails to do something when expected, consciously or subconsciously assuming that they must be leaving it until later for some reason, or maybe that they somehow did it out-of-sequence already, while the observer was distracted.
If he did, as has been reported, move to the USA for safety because his own country was thought too dangerous for him to live in, I'd hope he'd at least have shared some decent amount of his Facebook 'winnings' with the USA before going elsewhere for tax reasons.
Re: out of interest
>>"if someone downloads a film they have not agreed to any terms that say they shouldn't do it. so if T&C's are required your argument is nonsense."
If there are general laws saying 'It's against the law to help in the provision of copyright content' and someone breaks the law, the absence of any specific terms and conditions is.
Effectively, the 'standard legal terms and conditions' are already widely known, just as they are in the case of other illegal activity.
As for the website, there is no law saying people aren't allowed to use ad-blockers, and a website which wished to restrict access to only allow people who were not blocking ads could do so with relative technical ease, if they believed that doing so would actually profit them.
Re: Drivel - As Usual
>>"But that does not mean I don't get bloody angry when I see copyright being used as nothing more than a tool to restrict freedom, make money and criminalise ordinary people."
Surely, the whole point of it is to allow people to exploit their own work by very narrowly restricting 'freedom' and giving them a tool to make some money, which they can use (or not) as they wish?
Though of course, the 'freedom' in question (the freedom to selfishly copy other people's work without giving anything in return) isn't one likely to figure on any Declaration of Fundamental Human Rights any time soon.
And it only criminalises 'ordinary people' who choose to break the criminal law by doing things like (in the UK) not merely taking copies of other people's stuff but effectively assisting in the publishing of other people's stuff.
'Ordinary people' is a weasel phrase designed to try and pretend from the outset that the people are by definition doing nothing wrong without actually making a sensible adult argument.
You might as well say that it's wrong to criminalise 'ordinary people' who choose to drive while ignoring the speed limit.
>>"The "freetards" are not against copyright, they are against the misuse of copyright."
'Misuse' typically seems to be something defined quite selfishly by people using their own desires as a yardstick of what is 'right', the way many children might be expected to do.
@The Indomitable Gall
Quite.
But then I guess someone with a problem seeing irony might not see the irony in their own posts complaining about 'factual flaws in every single thing someone writes' without giving a single effing example of that having happened.
That they then finish by calling the person whose arguments they don't like 'a child' when the epitome of 'childish' argument is to dismiss everything someone says as wrong without giving any grown-up reasons, or even any reasons is just more icing on the irony cake.
Re: job creators?
It's certainly debatable to what extent they are net job creators, as it is with a great many businesses.
Without Facebook, a great many people who turned out in this version of reality to be FB users would presumably be using other social networking sites, which would also be employing people.
Re: no legal ground
>>"Since the "proof" is ontained by illegallyy monitoring computers (home invasion) "
It's not illegal if it's made legal, whatever opinion any barrack-room lawyer might have of it.
And looking at some level at communications (likely being automated and not involving people before the point where something shows up as fairly likely dodgy activity) is hardly 'home invasion'.
Re: If its so widespread AND illegal
>>"too much text"
For the short-attention-spanners, maybe.
But I'm not particularly bothered what they think.
Re: If its so widespread AND illegal
>>"So all the songs you bought back then and have since wanted to listen on your MP3 player, you just went ahead and bought again?"
No, since there was no meaningful threat that any individual doing that with things they'd already bought would face legal action, any more than there was previously any meaningful threat of legal action being taken against anyone taping their own CDs or LPs, placing doing such things in a distinctly different situation to people downloading copies of stuff they had never bought in *any* form, or sharing copies of stuff with an arbitrary number of other people.
Some people might want to pretend that there's no meaningful difference between people format-shifting stuff they have already paid for and people just copying and/or widely sharing stuff they haven't paid for, but that pretence simply isn't an honest one.
Morally speaking, there's a blindingly obvious difference, and legally speaking there's a clear practical difference resulting from the moral difference.
Whatever license terms drawn up long before MP3s were invented might say, it'd have seriously bad PR for someone to have been sued for format-shifting for personal use something they had already paid for, since the vast majority of observers would have looked at such a case from a moral standpoint rather than a strict legal one and whether people were doing it or not, they'd be likely to see little morally wrong with the activity.
On the other hand, people copying stuff they had never paid for are likely to be viewed massively less favourably by most people, and more so if they try and pretend they're somehow equivalent to a format-shifter.
That's one of the things with law - there's a huge difference between laws which are technically breached by a meaningful number of people in situations where there is a good moral defence ("I paid for it already"), and laws which are breached by a meaningful number of people where such a defence is lacking ("I have a right to get stuff for nothing").
>>"Don't you remember when they started mucking about with copy protection (car stereo killing in some cases, rootkit installing in others) on CDs?"
Not on any CDs I bought.
The fact that they gave up those attempts pretty quickly suggests a tacit acceptance that people demanded some freedom regarding things they had bought, freedom which the publishers decided it was necessary to provide.
Not really the actions of a huge powerful conspiracy.
Re: If its so widespread AND illegal
>>"Although, here I think the point was that widespread piracy is at least partly due to the outdated business model of content providers. The refusal of the record companies to accept that we shouldn't have to re-buy all our music every time they bring out a new media format, for instance."
Since I started buying CDs >25 years ago, no one seems to have been forcing me to re-buy anything.
Or even meaningfully trying to claim that I should.
Re: Oh the irony...
>>"The original research was supported by a Microsoft Research Fellowship, and now the resulting product's only available for Mac."
Maybe they realised that it was a cool idea, but not much actual use just yet, and chose their audience accordingly.
Re: The great land grab of the 21st century
>>"It seems to me that the idea of copyrighting a language or any of its derivatives is also bonkers - what is the point of a language where the use of expressive techniques is controlled? "
Maybe there might be situations where it would make some sense, but at the very least, if there is going to be copyright or patent control exercised, it should be something that's made crystal clear from the start, not something that can bite someone years or decades later.
This post has been deleted by its author
Re: good and bad clouds
>>"As to the use of clouds to provide reliable backups, many old TV programmes which the official archivists thought were lost for ever, have been recovered for posterity due to their availability on Bittorrent - because some fan had the foresight to do some home recording and shared it with the world regardless of copyright law"
I'm not sure how much the BitTorrent adds to that situation, unless the fan in question would otherwise have decided to delete the digitised programme (and the original video tapes) after bothering to take the time to digitise it.
About all that it obviously seems to add is an increased chance of the recording being found over and above what appeals on fan sites for old recorded content might have resulted in.
Re: Breakthrough?
I guess given a relatively slender tower, one advantage of this arrangement is that it *could* be combined with agriculture, since relatively little ground will be in shadow for long.
@AC
>>"We don't know but surely it would be better for his reputation to go to Sweden and defend the charge if he believes himself innocent than attempt to get of facing a judge by way of a legal technicality."
I'd have thought that even a win might only delay things, with some way round the situation being found, and the process re-started.
Would he be likely to have much luck in a second round?
Have there been many decisions against him so far that were borderline, and which had much chance of coming out differently even if the whole thing was re-run in its entirety?
Whether people think he didn't really have a case or think the UK courts were corrupt, would it be likely that things would be different in a repeat of the process?
Looking back, I can see how my first post could be read that way, even though I'm not identified as a Reg writer.
I started off writing and avoided saying 'think' rather than 'thought' since thoght would have seemed like I was contradicting your assertion about most people misunderstanding things
I apologise for any misunderstanding that might have caused, and see that maybe that was responsible for some of the approach you seemed to take towards what I actually wrote.
It's a pity it didn't get brought up earlier, since it could have been cleared up earlier, but that you didn't mention it earlier suggests it was maybe not central to your argument regarding what I actually did write..
Neither would it explain you claiming I had said there was something Terribly Wrong with writing things out the long-winded way when I simply hadn't said that (and nor had the author).
You could be read as claiming that anything other than the accuracy you seek is completely misstating/incorrect/misleading when it reality, while being incorrect it's not entitrely incorrect, and while being potentially misleading to some, it's not likely to mislead everyone.
To say 'completely mis-stating' necessarily assumes there is such a thing as partially mis-stating, which to be honest, I think would be a far better description of what had been written.
>>""15 years for murder is shite. Be out in half that probably! Should be 60 years if u ask me" was not a comment on your article?
No it wasn't,because it wasn't my fucking article.
>>"As regards the US stuff, since YOU raised the comparison between US parole and UK life licence,"
I wrote one short sentence, to which you responded with a long post telling me how terribly wrong I was.
Apparently, that's me going off at a tangent.
@RTS
I think it's fairly unimportant for music (to most people, at least), but can be pretty relevant to things like games and movies.
Well, given that the Treasury stepped in to give better terms in the Northern Rock case, and references frequently are to the system being government-backed, I think most people could be confident that, short of something which buggered the entire country, they'd be pretty safe.
Which, contrasted with MU. which at best looked a bit dubious, even a dodgy covered bank looks like a pretty safe bet.
Especially if there weren't any obvious better alternatives - if only one or two banks went tits-up, the government would step in.
If they all went tits-up and the government somehow ran away, you'd have lost out wherever you put your money, even if more in some places than others.
And the economy would be fucked anyway.
Choosing one of the dodgier websites on the internet (one of the ones that people might well have predicted was vastly more likely to attract trouble than many others both by its nature and its size) isn't necessarily comparable.
@Graham
Re: Museums.
I think this got doe elsewhere recently.
Even ignoring the flash issues, personally, if visiting a free museum, I'd happily pay not to have people even taking non-flash camera-phone pictures if I was trying to look at a piece properly.
Additionally, there could be various issues with exhibitions involving loan works, or (in some places) works which were still in copyright.
Though clearly they make money (income) from selling postcards, etc, even if they didn't, I think many museums would consider photography maybe more trouble than it was worth.
It would be interesting if it was possible to experiment with various museum websites, and see if having lots of stuff available in decent resolution had a positive or negative effect on visitor numbers.
@Graham
>>5. All copyrights incorporate at least some stuff from the public domain, thus exclusive rights awarded to an individual is effectively stealing from the public domain. Even if this input is small it still must be counted.
That rather depends what position people choose to take on exactly what is being copyrighted.
If I paint a painting inspired by, and very similar to, the Mona Lisa, I might have shown little invention even if I'd shown good technique, but that's reflected in the fact that while I might have copyright in my picture (no-one has the right to sell unauthorised prints of it), anyone else could paint their version of the Mona Lisa without infringing my rights, as long as they didn't copy novel changes I'd made to a taking-the-piss extent..
So, I might be standing on the shoulders of all that past culture, but the less novel I'm being, the easier it would be for someone do do something similar to me.
Also, the less value I'm adding, presumably at least on average, the less people would be likely to value what I've done.
I wouldn't be 'stealing' from the public domain if I didn't take anything from it preventing someone else using it the way I had done.
At the very least, there's a kind of natural balancing going on there to some extent.
@Graham
Re: 2)
Surely in 1886, the users had few automated means of copying anything. Even if there had been steampunk internet for backlash-transmission, without photocopiers, printers, etc, there wouldn't have been much for 'users' to say even if they'd been asked. Most battles would likely have been between one or other commercial publisher
Re: 3)
Surely, there's a point where instructions in a manual can be rewritten without infringing copyright - if there really only is pretty much one way of saying things, there must be a limit to how much the instructions could be copyrighted?
Re: 4)
It'd be interesting to see what effect digital distribution might have.
Potentially it might mean that where previously a point would come where it was not thought worth doing reprints of a book even if there might be buyers out there, in future, slow sales might keep going rather longer.
The commercial life of a book might increase, and there'd also be more opportunity for someone dropping their royalties if they thought that might boost sales.
There could be an argument for saying that below some threshold, while the creator might still be getting something, the royalty was low enough that it wasn't a meaningful barrier for most people, and so letting copyright run for a long-ish period was not too objectionable.
If the royalty for a book that would take many hours to read was only the equivalent of a few minutes' work at minimum wage...
>>"You, by contrast, initially gave the wrong sentence, which plainly misled the OP as to the likely consequence of that sentence,"
I did no such thing.
The guy who got it wrong wasn't responding to me.
Please get your facts straight.
>>"refused to acknowledge the error, went off on a tangent about, of all the irrelevant nonsense, American sentences and parole systems, "
It wasn't my error to acknowledge.
And you were the one who started going on at length (and seemingly inaccurately) about differences between US and UK systems, in response to a single short sentence I wrote saying (partly for the benefit of any US readers) that differences between our countries seemed minimal in terms of parole.
Given I had suggested the 'N-to-life' usage was a potentially effective shorthand description of a UK sentence, I don''t see that one sentence as 'going off on a tangent' in any obvious way.
>>"asserted that substituting a sentence which doesn't even exist in the UK would be better than a concise statement of the *actual* sentence that was given."
I simply gave an opinion that a particular very compact form of words might be an improvement on what had actually been written in the article, an opinion which I still hold, especially as the compactness is of a strong kind that most journalists would find hard to break.
Where else those words may be used in only marginally relevant.
It was just an opinion, and stated as such, but one which you seem very keen on not merely disagreeing with, but declaring entirely wrong and completely misleading, whatever you had to do in the process.
You did misrepresent what I said.
You claimed I had said would be something 'terribly wrong' with reporting a sentence correctly.
I simply did not say that, or anything like that.
You failed to address that when I pointed it out.
Personally, I might well use the long-winded description myself much of the time, but that doesn't mean I'm going to throw condemnation at people who don't, especially if they're writing for an audience that is likely to be reasonably knowledgeable.
I merely acknowledged that many people will tend to compact things when writing, and even then, I suggested that if people were going to do that, there are possibly better ways of doing it, which is hardly giving it my total approval
>>"The sort of bellend who might want a convenient way to distribute an (open source) driver for hardware, a configuration file or script, patch or other entirely legitimate but large files they want to distribute quickly to a wide variety of users around the globe (who they may or may not know)."
Well, that's not really an answer to the question "What kind of bellend puts their only copy of..."
>>"We're not going to see eye-to-eye on this."
No, we're not, since you're obviously keen to blatantly misrepresent what I said, make incorrect assumptions and stupid exaggerations, and then fail to show the slightest bit of acknowledgement when that's pointed out.
At best you're now saying little more than asserting that a phrase couldn't be used here by anyone to describe something here irrespective of whether if it would be more accurate than many of the existing current brief or journalistically mangled attempts at description because it isn't officially used here, which does seem like pretty weak reasoning.
I really can't see any point wasting more time on someone like you.
You're only likely to misrepresent me again.
>>"A kim dotcom film would be ace. I bet leonardo dicaprio is bulking up as we speak."
If there is a film, I do hope DiCaprio is in it
That way I could rely on the blanket warning words "starring Leonardo DiCaprio" to make sure I never end up starting to watch it by accident, rather than having to explicitly remember the name of the film on a list of experiences to avoid.
@AC
>>"Reg readers were meant to be IT professionals, it's pretty obvious from most of the conspiracy/anti "the man" type of comments which crop up again and again that this is no longer the case. "
I think a lot of the readers of tech articles are still IT professionals.
In some ways unfortunately, Reg comment threads do seem to get seriously high up Google rankings.
It's not uncommon for me to be searching for more information on a very recent comment only to find that chucking a few relevant words into a search brings up the Reg thread with that post in on the first results page.
People particularly into a single issue can find these threads maybe a bit too easily.
>>"Also the lack of comments on any actual hard IT stories:New disk array out?3 Comments all saying imagine how much porn it could hold."
Well, for a lot of hardware, there's not a huge amount to comment on, once given the facts.
@Mad Mike
>>"You're completely missing the point. I'm talking about dodgy not from a legal standpoint, but from you giving your business to them standpoint. RBS are not legally dodgy, but if the government hadn't rescued them, you could have lost thousands or more because of their business model."
I'm not sure he (assuming the AC is a 'he') is missing the point.
Assuming he'd checked up before paying his money in, he would have effectively seen a legitimate guarantee insuring his deposits against loss, at least up to a certain level, and might even had some expectation the government might help even beyond that level.
Which means he doesn't actually have to /care/ about their business model, or how well the FSA might be supervising them, or anything like that.
>>"Looking back on it, doing business with RBS was at least as hazardous to your financial wellbeing as storing files on MU and therefore your point applies to both."
Not for someone who had actually checked them out to see they were covered and who was only storing reasonable amounts of their own money there.
@Tom13
Any chance you could reference the post you're replying to - sometimes active threads can get hard to read if people don't.
@Gareth 7
>>"The light is encoded with an electronic signature."
So I guess that involves some co-ordination, even if automated to the point where a code is automatically read from each round and transmitted to a linked designator to change the signature (or a round is automatically programmed to a particular designator's signature).
@Graham Wilson
I agree that copyright does seem to be excessive in length, maybe particularly in the case of a company-made work involving lots of people, rather than some individual personal creation.
That said, there is at least a good argument for copyright being longer than patents, since patents can often involve someone finding out something now which would have been entirely found out very soon by other people, even if the first person had fallen under a bus.
With copyright, particularly where a work is made by only one or two people, if one person hadn't done what they did, the chances of what they would have done being done basically the same by someone else might be pretty minimal.
>>"Unfortunately, laws give totally exclusive rights to the inventor/creator, and in the case of copyright, it's for the life of the creator plus 70 years. Clearly, this isn't fair as most of the knowledge that went into the creation originally came from the public domain."
In the case of copyright, it's not obvious that potential Creator 2 is prevented from doing a different set of 'last steps' to Creator 1 to make a different product.
Someone produces a film of Sondheim's Sweeny Todd musical, which was itself based on the old story.
Are they stopping anyone else writing their own musical version of the old story?
Someone patents an electronic device which is made from existing components by well-known construction techniques, and designed using principles of Electrical Engineering.
Are they stopping anyone else making a different product using those components and techniques and principles?
Are they even necessarily stopping someone making a competing device using a different design? (and even if sometimes they do, that's just an argument for better operation of the patent system).
As long as they're not crapping in the public domain well that they drank from, using 'similarity' claims to fence off areas other people might well have gone into in future, or claiming the rights to stuff someone did before them, they're not necessarily doing anything wrong.
@Mad Mike
>>"In the UK, anyone with money in RBS or HBOS (LLoyds only got dodgy when it was forced to take HBOS over) would have lost the lot. However, the government stepped in and if not, the banking compensation scheme would have covered at least some of the money."
Well, deposits up to a decent level were automatically covered, so no individual would have lost the lot, and most people would have been fully covered.
Someone with an account below the compensation limit could have invested their money quite safely, as long as the bank was a UK one, covered by the scheme.
>>"The point here, is that it's unnecessary. They could easily shut the service down for a week, take full backups etc. for the court case and then make it available again for people to download anything they need. They could even monitor what people are downloading and if they are breaking copyright, prosecute them."
Is downloading a criminal offence in the USA or is it the uploading (including making stuff available P2P) that is potentially criminal, similar to what (I think) is the UK situation?
>>"But no......they take the nuclear option and hit the innocent as well as the guilty"
Have they actually taken an option yet?
@Mad Mike
>>"I totally agree that sufficient assets should be unfrozen to pay to keep the data available for a period of time to give people a chance to remove their files."
Well, they might understandably not want to open it up for anyone to download anything in any quantity and with minimal records kept.
How easy it would be to have a system that allowed legitimate copying back of data, but blocked business as usual, I wouldn't like to say.
>>"And on top of all that, the authorities would be regarded as acting reasonably and hopefully would get a much better image out of it."
I guess if they reckon legitimate use was limited, they might think that, if technically feasible, and someone else footing the bill, having a system where they asked people to apply for access to get one copy of their data back could give them useful ammunition in the case of having relatively few applications for access, even if such applications would naturally only reflect a fraction of total legitimate usage, excluding both use for legitimate distribution, and use for legitimate storage of stuff not kept elsewhere.
Certainly, there'd be a good PR angle for giving some kind of access, especially since in the absence of doing anything, there'd be little to stop any number of invented/exaggerated tales of lost valuable or personal data flying around alongside any genuine ones, whereas giving reasonable access would largely knock that kind of thing on the head.
On the other hand, maybe they'd reckon that encouraging people to keep legitimate data away from 'borderline legal' sites in future might be handy as well, making it easier to portray such places as not merely being unlawful in some of their activity, but not even having much legitimate use going on.
@AC
>>"I'm not sure how it is in America, but in the UK, the police would pay."
>>"Let's say someone tells the police they think you have some illegal substances in your house. The police decided to do a midnight raid and arrest you while they search. They have to a) make sure the house is secure, and b) pay for any thing they break, including broken doors and ripped up floorboards. That's regardless of if they find anything or not. If they find nothing then they have to compensate you for the time they've held you for. Certainly that's according to the UK guides on this subject."
Though if a crime is committed in a squat or rented property, would the police have to pay to store all the contents of the building just in case someone might want to use something in their defence?
Would they have to rent the building indefinitely to prevent the owners using it for something else?
Would they even have a right to keep hold of anything which they couldn't claim was relevant evidence for the investigation?
It's certainly complicated here by the fact money has been frozen, but in a similar case where it hadn't been frozen, it would seem that the business would probably have to pay for keeping any data the authorities weren't interested in.
That would suggest that maybe sufficient assets should be unfrozen to pay for its upkeep, if the defendants want that.
If they don't want that, they might find it hard to successfully claim unfairness later.
After all they wouldn't be benefiting from the money in any sense other than getting a better chance at a trial, while a presumably/supposedly legitimate US company would be, so that should be relatively easy for the US authorities to stomach.
@Turtle
(To Mike)
>>"As for the US Supreme Court saying that "VCR's were NOT to be banned if they had 'significant non-infringing uses" you have clearly misunderstood it: it does NOT mean "some uses, or possible uses which do not require infringement". A more exact - although still inexact - meaning would be "many of its uses do not necessarily require infringement". It does not mean "someone somewhere is using it for non-infringing uses". And it *certainly* does not mean "YOU are using it to store versions of something you're writing"."
I'd guess a relevant factor is also that the decision was about banning VCRs in general, not about taking action against one particular VCR or its owner.
With regard to websites, if they're going to be looked at as individual things on their own merits, then it's not like banning all websites in advance because some could be used for dodgy ends, but looking at a particular website to see what is going on there.
>>""John Doe was sentenced to life and will serve a minimum of 15 years" is a long phrase in your book?"
Well, the relevant point seems to be whether it's long enough in many people's books to result in a briefer description being used much of the time, or to the phrase being broken up in news articles to the point where it frequently takes some reading well beyond the mention of 'life' to find out what the tariff actually was even when you're explicitly looking for it.
Which would seem to be the case.
When it comes to an article on the law, it's a two-way thing - on the one hand, you could argue precision is vital, on the other that brevity (even inaccurate brevity) is acceptable as long as most expected readers won't be confused.
>>"Not only ["John Doe was sentenced to life and will serve a minimum of 15 years"] completely accurate, but it clearly states the minimum time that John Doe will serve (which handily answers your last two paragraphs).
Well, as a sentence is given as something like '"Life imprisonment with a minimum term of 15 years", someone who actually was a stickler for language could argue that that was a bit like saying 'life imprisonment, except it probably won't be'.
'15-years-to-life' would arguably be technically more accurate since it's not saying something and then immediately contradicting it.
>>"see incorrectly. And you are still stating the sentence wrongly, and a sentence that you're importing from a completely different and irrelevant legal system at that."
I guess you have a rather different interpretation of 'completely different' to me - to you, it seems to mean 'not identical down to the last detail of every word used to describe it'.
And what's wrong with using a short phrase which other people use elsewhere to mean pretty much the same thing, especially if the longer phrase you like is going to be prone to one or other person truncating it in a way which makes it much less accurate than the short phrase would be?
It's simply your opinion that a "N-to-life' description would be mis-stating, seemingly based on what is partly a misunderstanding of what it actually means elsewhere.
But maybe they're 'simply wrong' elsewhere as well, if they're not putting the same interpretation on the phrase that you have determined that it should have.
Still, it seems evident you've made your mind up once and for all on the matter, so whether 'N-to-life' people elsewhere do actually end up on lifelong parole when you reckon they don't is probably not important.
And despite being a stickler for semantics when it suits you, it's apparently OK for you to put words in my mouth and wildly exaggerate what I said, and then fail to correct yourself when it's pointed out..
To be fair, Apple would probably let someone get away with a rectangular screen if they put a huge unnecessary border around it, or sold it smeared in excrement, or had razor-sharp corners that maimed anyone who tried to pick it up, or did something other than the blindingly obvious things most people would do to make something look nice.
Jobs/Ives/etc did (collectively, and in whatever order decisions were made) decide to make tech stuff which looked nice to many and was aspirational, rather than just functional.
That decision paid off, and they reaped the rewards, but it's not as if they invented the concept of 'nice'.
Once other people start making nice tech stuff as well, it's not at all obvious that there should be much that should be restricted, beyond actual passing-off.
If stuff is white or black or some version of silver, it's going to end up looking a fair bit like something else of a similar shape which is, the way a lot of silver/grey modern cars aren't always too easy to distinguish from a glance - there are practical limits on how different they could look, and it's only really things which are actively different from the general shape (like a lot higher window-line) tat tend to be distinctive.
If people are going to go for unobtrusive and subtle designs, they're likely to look fairly similar.
>>"So the CSIs will have the joy of trying to work out the firing position of a guided bullet, just think of the freedom that will give to bump off your next door neighbour without detection."
I imagine in reality, it's a bit harder than the TV would suggest to find a corpse or two with a bullet hole in, guess their exact position and attitude at the time they were shot, break out the lasers, and have them pinpoint the precise window in a 50-storey building that the shot came from.
>>""...a barrister cross-examining himself....."
>>"Ah, opportunity for a new euphamism there methinks.
Well, as euphemisms go, it's a less disturbing mental image than one barrister cross-examining another one, or a pair cross-examining each other.
It would seem best if they could use some seized assets to pay for the data to be kept, but presumably that's one of the things they're negotiating about.
Justice would suggest that at the very least, giving the defence access to it for a reasonable time to look for defence evidence would be necessary.
If it came to storing it all, potentially for years before trials and possible appeals, just in case some of it was useful to the defence, it might be a bit much to expect the US to pay for all that.
Otherwise, what would happen if there was a similar situation which was being run more hand-to-mouth, with huge monthly storage bills and only enough money around to pay for the next couple of months?
>>"You seem determined to argue that it's OK to completely misreport a sentence, that it would be OK to completely misreport it in another way and that there would something terribly wrong with reporting it correctly."
Please don't try to put words in my mouth.
Where did I say it would be 'terribly wrong' to report it in a long phrase, (or anything remotely like 'terribly wrong')?
In practice, there's a limit to how long a phrase can be before it is likely to be abbreviated, especially in places where people assume others know what is intended.
Given that, a way of abbreviating it in a way which seems fairly unlikely to meaningfully confuse many people who do know the situation or meaningfully mislead many people who don't seems at least worth trying, especially if it's rather better than the likeliest alternative abbreviation.
It seems to me that to call describing a sentence as 'N years to life' 'completely misreporting' is also at best an exaggeration, since it requires a particular set of assumptions to be made regarding post-release conditions which are certainly not inherent in the phrase, as suggested by the fact that the phrase is used elsewhere to describe a sentence which *does* require lifelong conditions.
On a more general note, given that one of the complaints I seem to remember hearing about UK sentencing seems to be of the form "X was given a sentence of 'life', but they could be out in 15 years", maybe it'd actually also be rather more honest if the sentence actually was described right from the beginning in the form of "15-to-life" rather than "I sentence you to Life *Imprisonment* (but you could be out in 15)"
It might be a life *sentence*, but it rarely is life *imprisonment* in reality.
>>"The US sentence of <determinate period>-to-life means that you may serve a period from <determinate period> years to life, BUT once released and your parole completed you are done. With a life licence, you are NEVER done. Clear? "
Well, as far as I can see, in the US, someone released on parole from a life-with-parole or N-years-to-life sentence typically is on parole for life.
Which is what I said before.
>>"How difficult would it be to say "<murderer> received a life sentence and will be imprisoned for at least fifteen years"? What is wrong with that?"
Well, the longer something is, the more likely it will be abbreviated by people tired of writing it in full, especially if they expect the bulk of the people reading don't need to be explained to over and over.
If many people were as ignorant as you say, which may well be the case, I'm assuming you don't expect *them* to have much of a clue about the life licence system either.
@AC
>>"This looks to me like an excellent example of the damage to the internet that over-zealous piracy-busting can do, just as its detractors claim. It directly undermines confidence in letting your data out of your sight. If that isn't impacting the direction that progress is taking us, I don't know what is."
It does at least suggest that if people are going to let important data out of their sight (let alone *sole copies of important data*) that they use a little bit of sense and check out who's going to be in charge of it to a degree commensurate with the data's value.
If 'progress is taking us' in the direction of blindly trusting 'the internet', then even if nothing else good comes out of it, with a bit of luck this case *will* directly undermine the confidence of many people.
>>"Which site is next and will your data be on it?"
If any other sites, then likely ones sailing a bit close to (or beyond) the limits of the legal, none of which I seem to use for anything, let alone backup, so I guess my data is fairly safe for now.
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