On the one hand, I recognize the importance of the per-market limitation on trademarks, and under that standard this dismissal appears to be correctly decided. I recognize also that in terms of avoiding undesirable results in future cases, this is almost certainly the right thing to do.
However, speaking as a consumer who does not live in (or anywhere near) that region of the world: if I ran across "Land O Lakes"-branded fishing gear, my first reaction would be "Are they the same people who make the butter?" or "What is a butter brand doing on fishing gear??". (Although I am aware of the presence of the apostrophe in "Land O' Lakes", I doubt that I would have considered its absence significant in this instance, prior to reading this article.)
As such, there does seem to be some chance of consumer confusion - not between products, but in terms of implied association and thus potential endorsement.
In the mobile-device game Bitcoin Billionaire, one of the fake news-ticker articles refers to an upcoming Stark Trek movie, where the "Stark" appears to be a reference to Game of Thrones...
At risk of spoiling the joke, this looks like - of all things - a text-to-speech flub. He almost certainly meant "without my receiving a single sou", and that final word - which refers to an old French copper coin of tiny value - happens to be pronounced more-or-less identically to "Sioux".
In short: there's only one thing that might redress the increasing imbalance between what the government knows about us and what we know about the government: ubiquitous strong encryption. Laws are what the government shall not do. Encryption is what the government cannot do.
This seems interestingly parallel to a thought I've had for some time in a different context:
Copyright law is about restricting what you're allowed to do.
Either I'm misunderstanding what would happen here, or you are.
According to my understanding, in order to get this phone to install the modified code, it would have to be provided as an updated iOS image.
According to my understanding, when you replace or upgrade a smartphone OS version, you do so essentially wholesale; you drop in the entire OS image, replacing everything which was there before, not just the pieces which were changed.
If that's correct, then there would be no way to replace just the login-screen code; you would have to replace everything. It's possible (even likely) that the replacements for everything else would not be (significantly) different from what was there before, but there would be no way to verify that without looking at the source code.
Even if that's not true, I'm not certain that your apparent assumption that there would be logs of the OS-update process which would show enough detail to determine whether anything other than the login-screen code had been modified is accurate. Certainly I've seen no sign of such logs on the Android side of the fence.
Beyond that, even if we assume that it can be proved that only the program(s) involved with handling the login screen were modified, there's no reason why the login-screen program(s) could not (be modified to) include code capable of modifying other parts of the system - and I would be extremely surprised if there were enough logging to be able to catch it if they did.
Really, if you're paranoid about every possible angle of attack and you don't trust the people who are in charge of the operation to do the right thing and be honest about their actions and motives, there is no way to be certain that the modified code has not tampered with the data on the phone other than to see - and possibly to experiment with - the code itself.
Minor nit: it's not "Id Software", or (as some in the comments have had it) "ID Software", but - as the quoted article correctly uses it - "id Software". The correct spelling of the name is with the first word in all lowercase.
To presume abandonment of server email after 180 days is like presuming abandonment of the contents of your safety deposit box (or your savings account) after 180 days.
That's surprisingly close to what was almost certainly the original analogy.
I strongly suspect that the original comparison was to, not a safety-deposit box, but a post-office box. The mechanics are much the same; mail comes in, it's put in the box, and from time to time the recipient comes and takes it out, to read and process as desired. If the mail is left in the box without being taken out for long enough, it's considered abandoned, and can be examined under the right circumstances. As long as the analogy holds, this treatment seems reasonable.
By contrast, in a modern E-mail system, you often no longer take mail out of the box; instead, you read it, sort it, and leave it there in case you want it later. The original analogy to a post-office box has broken down, and it is no longer reasonable to apply the same rules.
Unfortunately, since the entrenched interests benefit from applying the same old rules in this new situation where they no longer make sense, getting the rules updated to reflect the changes since the days of the original analogy has proved to be fairly difficult.
If I'm reading the thing correctly, what you've missed is that what is being sued over is not the photos, but the front pages.
The photos appeared on the front pages, and the photos were licensed for use in the book. If they had also put the photos all on one page, that would almost certainly have been OK, depending on the terms of the license - but that's not what they did.
What they did put all on one page (or more like two, if I have this right) is the actual front pages on which those photos appeared - not just the photos, but the surrounding context as well. That context is covered by its own copyright, and is not covered under the license.
No, I think it's far more likely to be a matter of spellcheck in this case.
I think he probably wrote "terraced" by ear as "terrist", and took the spellchecker's suggestion of "terrorist" without thinking about it or knowing any better.
If that's correct, then it [i]is[/i] a matter of misspelling, just not in the way which may seem obvious.
Well, what he _means_ is clear enough; "because people can get (the same) video for free, there is less demand in the for-pay video market". I.e., by "demand", he is referring only to demand for the legitimate, for-pay offerings - which is an incomplete and shortsighted view of the overall supply-and-demand market, but is not incorrect or invalid as far as it goes.
Re: Re: Re: Re: 'Competition' means more than one viable choice
Do you have a citation on that? I have not previously seen it reported that the FCC was using lower figures for reports, etc., carried out after the higher figures were announced.
I'm still catching up from months and months behind, but I want to say: I think this may be the most useful and insightful comment I've seen here yet. (And considering some of the competition, that's saying a fair bit.)
If we had a lot of individual courts, but all on the same level, then if one court (or group thereof) came to a different set of decisions from the others, there would be no way to resolve that split. You would wind up with "justice" and the law being defined differently depending on where you live. (We have that anyway, due to circuit splits and various other factors, but it would be much worse.)
If we had only one court, then there would be essentially no way for most people to get a hearing; there are far too many court cases for one court to have the time to hear them all.
On a structural level (leaving aside state vs. federal sovereignty concerns, among others), the existence of multiple levels of court can be seen as a matter of delegation. The top-level court has final authority as to what the court system judges the law to be, but it delegates authority to lower courts so as to have more people available to hear cases, and those courts in turn delegate authority to courts below them for the same reason.
That's not the way it's written in the law, but as far as I can see, it's more or less the practical reason for doing it that way.
The "corrupting influence of the profit motive" in this case manifests in the arbitration industry. The arbitrator might have the following line of reasoning:
* In the case before me, there are two parties: the company and the customer.
* The company will be involved in many arbitration cases in the future.
* If I decide in favor of the company, the company will be more likely to hire me again for those future arbitration cases.
* If I decide against the company, the company will be less likely to hire me again for those future arbitration cases.
* The customer will very likely never be involved in another arbitration case, no matter how I decide this case. Therefore, the customer is unlikely to hire me again, no matter how I decide this case.
* Therefore, if I decide against the company, I am likely to make less money in the future.
* Therefore, in order to make the most profit, I should decide in favor of the company - regardless of what the actual merits of the case may be.
This is an example of what is known as a "perverse incentive", where what is in the best interest of one of the parties to a transaction is in conflict with the design goals of the system which the transaction is a part.
At a glance, what you label as "claim rights" vs. "liberty rights" sounds like the same distinction as what Ken White (of Popehat) refers to with the terms "positive rights" (the right to have someone else do something) and "negative rights" (the right to have someone else not do something).
Imprimis, which is publicly traded, is not allowed to make a direct copy of Daraprim.
Why not?
Given that (per the article) it's 62 years old, it must be long since out of patent. What is there which would forbid anyone who wants to do so from making a direct copy of it, using the information filed in the patent?
I was under the impression that the reason there isn't / hasn't been off-brand competition for Daraprim is that getting FDA approval for a generic alternative would require expensive studies, even if the generic is chemically identical to the brand-name drug. That's ridiculous enough as it is, but if Imprimis is making a non-identical alternative, that should certainly have to go through at least as many studies to get approval - so how could the hoops to jump through for producing the identical generic be any more prohibitive?
Re: Re: Re: People are obviously becoming a lot more stupid this century. Who's poisoning the water supply?!?
(Second post attempt; the first one led to a blank page for some reason. Sometimes that means "it posted, but we didn't load the confirmation page properly", but this time reloading doesn't show the comment.)
My favorite name in this vein is "Richard Bissell"; if you don't get it, you probably don't remember the Bissell brand of vacuum cleaners. (For context, he wrote some of the best - and most good-literature - erotica the Internet has ever seen.)
"Bauer Decl., Ex. D." is a citation to a source which purportedly confirms the previously stated information.
"Bauer Decl." is almost certainly short for "the Bauer declaration", which is presumably referenced / defined elsewhere in the document.
I don't parse "Ex. D." clearly just offhand, but it's going to either further describe the Bauer declaration (e.g. explaining where it comes from, maybe), or help explain where in that Declaration to find the cited information.
"Id." is legal shorthand for "the same", or suchlike, as someone else already explained. In this sort of context, it means "the same source as the previous citation" - in other words, in this case it means "the thing I just said is also confirmed by statements in (the same part of) the Bauer Declaration". It's used purely as an abbreviation, to avoid having to retype citations, which can be lengthy and easily gotten wrong.
On the post: Court Dismisses Dumb Trademark Suit Between Dairy And Fishing Tackle Companies
However, speaking as a consumer who does not live in (or anywhere near) that region of the world: if I ran across "Land O Lakes"-branded fishing gear, my first reaction would be "Are they the same people who make the butter?" or "What is a butter brand doing on fishing gear??". (Although I am aware of the presence of the apostrophe in "Land O' Lakes", I doubt that I would have considered its absence significant in this instance, prior to reading this article.)
As such, there does seem to be some chance of consumer confusion - not between products, but in terms of implied association and thus potential endorsement.
On the post: CBS CEO Forced To Admit Cheaper 'Skinny' TV Bundles 'Inevitable'
Re: Stark Trek?
On the post: Author Sues Half The Internet For Defamation, Copyright Infringement, Cyberbullying, Use Of Section 230
Re: Re:
On the post: Author Sues Half The Internet For Defamation, Copyright Infringement, Cyberbullying, Use Of Section 230
Re:
On the post: Author And Former Covert CIA Operative Barry Eisler On Why You Should Support Techdirt
This seems interestingly parallel to a thought I've had for some time in a different context:
Copyright law is about restricting what you're allowed to do.
DRM is about restricting what you're able to do.
On the post: Apple Might Be Forced To Reveal & Share iPhone Unlocking Code Widely
Re:
According to my understanding, in order to get this phone to install the modified code, it would have to be provided as an updated iOS image.
According to my understanding, when you replace or upgrade a smartphone OS version, you do so essentially wholesale; you drop in the entire OS image, replacing everything which was there before, not just the pieces which were changed.
If that's correct, then there would be no way to replace just the login-screen code; you would have to replace everything. It's possible (even likely) that the replacements for everything else would not be (significantly) different from what was there before, but there would be no way to verify that without looking at the source code.
Even if that's not true, I'm not certain that your apparent assumption that there would be logs of the OS-update process which would show enough detail to determine whether anything other than the login-screen code had been modified is accurate. Certainly I've seen no sign of such logs on the Android side of the fence.
Beyond that, even if we assume that it can be proved that only the program(s) involved with handling the login screen were modified, there's no reason why the login-screen program(s) could not (be modified to) include code capable of modifying other parts of the system - and I would be extremely surprised if there were enough logging to be able to catch it if they did.
Really, if you're paranoid about every possible angle of attack and you don't trust the people who are in charge of the operation to do the right thing and be honest about their actions and motives, there is no way to be certain that the modified code has not tampered with the data on the phone other than to see - and possibly to experiment with - the code itself.
On the post: Rage Against The Convoluted 'Rage' Trademark Dispute
On the post: Congress Might Actually Be Moving Forward On Fixing Outdated Email Privacy Law!
Re: It's all about "effects"
I strongly suspect that the original comparison was to, not a safety-deposit box, but a post-office box. The mechanics are much the same; mail comes in, it's put in the box, and from time to time the recipient comes and takes it out, to read and process as desired. If the mail is left in the box without being taken out for long enough, it's considered abandoned, and can be examined under the right circumstances. As long as the analogy holds, this treatment seems reasonable.
By contrast, in a modern E-mail system, you often no longer take mail out of the box; instead, you read it, sort it, and leave it there in case you want it later. The original analogy to a post-office box has broken down, and it is no longer reasonable to apply the same rules.
Unfortunately, since the entrenched interests benefit from applying the same old rules in this new situation where they no longer make sense, getting the rules updated to reflect the changes since the days of the original analogy has proved to be fairly difficult.
On the post: NY Times Files Ridiculous Copyright Lawsuit Over Book That Mocks NYT For Glamorizing War
Re:
The photos appeared on the front pages, and the photos were licensed for use in the book. If they had also put the photos all on one page, that would almost certainly have been OK, depending on the terms of the license - but that's not what they did.
What they did put all on one page (or more like two, if I have this right) is the actual front pages on which those photos appeared - not just the photos, but the surrounding context as well. That context is covered by its own copyright, and is not covered under the license.
On the post: How The UK's Counter-Terrorism And Security Act Has Made Law Enforcement Into The Literal Grammar Police
Re: Re:
I think he probably wrote "terraced" by ear as "terrist", and took the spellchecker's suggestion of "terrorist" without thinking about it or knowing any better.
If that's correct, then it [i]is[/i] a matter of misspelling, just not in the way which may seem obvious.
On the post: Netflix CEO 'Loves' Netflix Password Sharing
Re:
On the post: AT&T Whines That FCC Report Highlights Broadband Coverage Gaps Company Helped Create
Re: Re: Re: Re: 'Competition' means more than one viable choice
On the post: US Copyright Office Asks For Public Comments On DMCA's Notice And Takedown
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
On the post: And Of Course: Authors Guild Asks Supreme Court To Overturn Fair Use Ruling On Google Books
Re:
If we had only one court, then there would be essentially no way for most people to get a hearing; there are far too many court cases for one court to have the time to hear them all.
On a structural level (leaving aside state vs. federal sovereignty concerns, among others), the existence of multiple levels of court can be seen as a matter of delegation. The top-level court has final authority as to what the court system judges the law to be, but it delegates authority to lower courts so as to have more people available to hear cases, and those courts in turn delegate authority to courts below them for the same reason.
That's not the way it's written in the law, but as far as I can see, it's more or less the practical reason for doing it that way.
On the post: Supreme Court Again Makes It Clear: Companies Can Erode Your Legal Rights Via Mouse Print
Re: Re: Re: gov't regulated arbitration
* In the case before me, there are two parties: the company and the customer.
* The company will be involved in many arbitration cases in the future.
* If I decide in favor of the company, the company will be more likely to hire me again for those future arbitration cases.
* If I decide against the company, the company will be less likely to hire me again for those future arbitration cases.
* The customer will very likely never be involved in another arbitration case, no matter how I decide this case. Therefore, the customer is unlikely to hire me again, no matter how I decide this case.
* Therefore, if I decide against the company, I am likely to make less money in the future.
* Therefore, in order to make the most profit, I should decide in favor of the company - regardless of what the actual merits of the case may be.
This is an example of what is known as a "perverse incentive", where what is in the best interest of one of the parties to a transaction is in conflict with the design goals of the system which the transaction is a part.
On the post: Dave Chappelle Thinks A Sock And A Dream Will Keep People From Using Phones At Shows
Re: Re: This sucks!
On the post: The Selfie Monkey Strikes Back: Lawyers Claim Of Course Monkeys Can Sue For Copyright
Re: Re: Re: Ownership
On the post: Express Scripts Pushing $1 alternative To Turing's $750 Daraprim Pills
Why no "direct copy"?
Why not?
Given that (per the article) it's 62 years old, it must be long since out of patent. What is there which would forbid anyone who wants to do so from making a direct copy of it, using the information filed in the patent?
I was under the impression that the reason there isn't / hasn't been off-brand competition for Daraprim is that getting FDA approval for a generic alternative would require expensive studies, even if the generic is chemically identical to the brand-name drug. That's ridiculous enough as it is, but if Imprimis is making a non-identical alternative, that should certainly have to go through at least as many studies to get approval - so how could the hoops to jump through for producing the identical generic be any more prohibitive?
On the post: Montana Newspaper Announces Plans To Reveal The Names Of All Previous Commenters, Despite Promises To Keep Them Secret
Re: Re: Re: People are obviously becoming a lot more stupid this century. Who's poisoning the water supply?!?
My favorite name in this vein is "Richard Bissell"; if you don't get it, you probably don't remember the Bissell brand of vacuum cleaners. (For context, he wrote some of the best - and most good-literature - erotica the Internet has ever seen.)
On the post: Defense Lawyers Claim FBI Illegally Bugged Outside Steps Of County Courthouse
Re:
"Bauer Decl." is almost certainly short for "the Bauer declaration", which is presumably referenced / defined elsewhere in the document.
I don't parse "Ex. D." clearly just offhand, but it's going to either further describe the Bauer declaration (e.g. explaining where it comes from, maybe), or help explain where in that Declaration to find the cited information.
"Id." is legal shorthand for "the same", or suchlike, as someone else already explained. In this sort of context, it means "the same source as the previous citation" - in other words, in this case it means "the thing I just said is also confirmed by statements in (the same part of) the Bauer Declaration". It's used purely as an abbreviation, to avoid having to retype citations, which can be lengthy and easily gotten wrong.
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