I'd debate the question of employment contracts. Most authors aren't, for instance, employees of the publisher. When I'm an actual employee of the company they're paying me for my time and effort in the subject they hired me for. I think it's entirely reasonable to say that what I do while I'm on the clock does belong to them, they paid me for it in my regular paycheck after all. Contractors are another matter, the company is paying them for a specific task, not their time in general, it'd be entirely reasonable to say that only the specific work product the contractor was paid to create belongs to the company and everything else belongs to the contractor. And even for employees, anything created off-the-clock and outside the area the employee's paid to work on belongs to the employee, not the company. That's already the law in many places, including Califormia and Washington, and I make sure to add a clause to any assignment-of-rights contract citing the statute and explicitly limiting the scope of the assignment to only those things not exempted by the law.
Current copyright law bears more resemblance to pre-Statute rules than post-. The Statute of Anne gave rights to the authors. Today the authors are mostly relegated back to their pre-Statute status as copyright vests primarily in the publishers (who won't publish unless the author hands over virtually all rights to them). As pre-Statute too, the targets of modern publishers are primarily other publishers with seeming disregard for whether the published works are actually ones the attacking publisher has any rights to.
I'd rather see a revamp of copyright law that gave copyright primarily to the authors again and prohibited any publisher from locking the author out when it comes to control over the copyrights on his works.
I wouldn't say his conduct merited a perjury and/or obstruction of justice investigation. I'd say it merited perjury and/or obstruction of justice investigation charges. The evidence is right there in the court records, clear as day. I'd bind him over for trial, and hand prosecution over to the public defender's office. I'd bet they'd love a chance to rip that officer apart.
Storman doesn't have very good arguments. For example, his "first sale doctrine" argument falls apart when you notice that "first sale" protects the sale of that copy, it doesn't grant any rights to make and sell additional copies. It'd be a defense if and only if the uploader destroyed their copy upon uploading it and Storman's service destroyed the uploaded copy after the buyer downloaded it, all of which is exactly what RomUniverse doesn't do.
As such, they literally can't see the best way to appeal to these users either, because to them...there's no problem that needs fixing.
No, to them there is a problem that needs fixing. It's just that they think the problem is that customers aren't buying their product. They refuse to accept that that's not the problem, it's just a symptom of the problem.
When faced with a patient who tells the doctor that they don't want to stop hitting their head with a hammer, they just want the doctor to make it stop hurting when they do, the doctor has two options:
Prescribe high-powered painkillers.
Prescribe a 5lb hammer with instructions to apply to the head repeatedly with as much force as possible until the pain subsides.
The second has the advantage of ending the patient's complaint quicker.
One thing Thomas leaves out is that the FCC could change the classification because the law gave them the authority to determine which classification those services fell into. Yes, that means the courts are going to have to discard old precedent when the classification is changed. That's no more a problem than it is that courts have to discard old precedent when the legislature changes the laws on them.
Yes you can, if you're the licensing agent of the copyright holder. That's pretty standard. But in this case Jukin media likely isn't a licensing agent because they've no idea who the copyright holder is. Whoever found the camera isn't the copyright holder, because you can't gain copyright on a work simply by finding a copy. Be an interesting business model for a lawyer there, finding the actual owners of those videos and seeing if they're interested in shaking down Jukin Media for license fees. :)
I'd have to see what they mean by "no longer works". If it still functions as an exercise bike and it's just the on-line service that's gone, I'd probably just keep the hardware. If it won't work as an exercise bike, though, then my response would be "Settlement? What settlement? I don't recall being involved in a lawsuit against you or agreeing to any settlement. You want to render your product inoperative, you refund 100% of my money. You balk, I'll send you the bill and file in small claims court and let the local judge sort you out.". After spending $2 grand on the bike, a couple hundred in filing fees and a few hours in court are worth it. Only caveat is that I want to make sure they're really rendering it unusable as a stand-alone exercise bike first before I ask a judge for a full refund plus costs and fees. If they're just disabling all the fancy features like adjustable resistance, then I'll make sure to ask for the difference between their price and the retail price of a basic bike with no more features than what's left on the Flywheel.
Well of course the copyright/patent maximalists are freaking out. When they said China needed to start respecting patents China apparently didn't hear the implicit and silent "our" in that sentence and that's now leaving those maximalists in the situation they wanted China to be in.
(appropriate tags are left as an exercise for the student)
One reason to modify buying a car in the future. I've already seen it with features like LoJack which combine on-car hardware with a service you need a subscription for, but with this it looks like the same care needs to be applied across the board. When you buy a car other than brand-new from a dealer, you need to get a copy of the original dealer invoice showing exactly what was part of the car when first purchased and possibly original invoices for anything that's been added since so that you have the paperwork to prove what features you own.
Perhaps a bunch of individual claims for refunds might send a message to companies that they can't just ignore the consequences of bricking/rendering-useless products they've sold. Class actions companies seem to just ignore, but individual legal claims add up to a lot more money and take a lot more work to deal with which might get executives' attention. The basic claim would be "UA sold me these items with these capabilities, they advertised those capabilities as reasons to buy their products, they've now actively removed those capabilities from the products (as opposed to just no longer supporting them), this situation is equivalent to a fitness equipment company selling me a set of weights and then coming around to my house and taking away all the weights above 10lbs and they shouldn't be allowed to take away what I bought without giving back the money I paid at the same time.".
Why does the MTA care? Probably because they want to change to the Vignelli style for their official map and if they do a) their lawyers told them Berman could sue them for infringement and b) everybody will believe (probably rightly) that the MTA's professionals couldn't come up with anything better than an amateur did.
I'd respond by pointing out that their contract is very clear on the subject: they disclaim any responsibility for anything on the home side of the connection pylon and declare it to be the responsibility of the subscriber. So, when I connect a cable modem to the wall outlet, I'm connecting it to my network. And the connection between that wiring and their network? Well, that was done by their technician, not me (and in fact I'm not allowed access to the pylon at all).
They can still of course refuse to connect your home if you don't use their equipment, but then they have to advertise the price of that equipment as part of the cost or face suits for false advertising (on the grounds that their own rules make it impossible to obtain the advertised service at the advertised price when that advertised price doesn't include the cost of equipment).
Video can be handled at the browser/client end. Most browsers now decline to autoplay video content, solving that problem. The Twitter client should be set the same by default, solving the problem in the app. GIFs should be handled the same way APNG is, the client simply only displays the first "frame" and not any subsequence updates unless and until the user clicks on the image and requests it to be animated. Ditto with audio, clients should by default mute audio unless and until the user enables it.
Basically anything serving up user-generated content should assume such content is hostile/malicious until told otherwise by the recipient.
Not quite. The model has certain interests in the photographs and the photographer needs to deal with that to obtain any right to disseminate the photographs. That's why all professional photographers insist on a model release being executed before they'll proceed with the shoot. What I proposed targets exactly the sorts of photographs that a subject would have the most expectation of privacy in and would suffer the most damage if they were publicly disseminated, making for the easiest case that the photographer was infringing on those rights. These are also the sorts of things it's easiest to make the case for that a reasonable person would know they were not to disseminate those images without permission, which is essential to meeting the negligence standard instead of having to prove intent.
Not a problem I think because most of those grounds aren't ones someone posting revenge porn would want to use. They mostly amount to fair-use defenses, and we've seen how hard fair use is to use as a defense in so many copyright-infringement cases. And if this law would run afoul of strict scrutiny, then all copyright law would as well because it puts the disseminator in the same position of having to use the fair-use defense against a criminal charge.
Yes, but it would become non-compliant if UL implements their proposal. AFAIK regulators can't stop them because UL is a private company not a government agency. Also AFAIK a lot of stores won't carry electronics if it isn't UL-listed, which is also something regulators can't do much about because of the same laws that make it almost impossible to control what companies do. That leaves IoT device makers with Hobson's choice.
Start with a negligence standard and work up. Copyright law says that every image has a copyright owner and that no person has any right to disseminate that image without permission from that copyright owner. If you don't know who the copyright owner is, or you don't know if they've given permission, then the law says you can't legally disseminate the image because you can't have gotten permission. So write the law to avoid the whole obscenity issue and simply make it a crime to disseminate images where you don't have a clear right to do so under copyright law and a reasonable person would find that the images displayed the subject in a sexual act or displayed their intimate parts (those parts that would cause the subject to be charged with indecent exposure if displayed in public). Intent would be irrelevant for the first part because the way copyright law is written the person disseminating the images would've been negligent in not getting permission first. Then add a second class of offense with a greater punishment if the prosecution can show intent, not mere negligence.
On the post: Happy Birthday, Statute of Anne
Re: Re:
I'd debate the question of employment contracts. Most authors aren't, for instance, employees of the publisher. When I'm an actual employee of the company they're paying me for my time and effort in the subject they hired me for. I think it's entirely reasonable to say that what I do while I'm on the clock does belong to them, they paid me for it in my regular paycheck after all. Contractors are another matter, the company is paying them for a specific task, not their time in general, it'd be entirely reasonable to say that only the specific work product the contractor was paid to create belongs to the company and everything else belongs to the contractor. And even for employees, anything created off-the-clock and outside the area the employee's paid to work on belongs to the employee, not the company. That's already the law in many places, including Califormia and Washington, and I make sure to add a clause to any assignment-of-rights contract citing the statute and explicitly limiting the scope of the assignment to only those things not exempted by the law.
On the post: Happy Birthday, Statute of Anne
Current copyright law bears more resemblance to pre-Statute rules than post-. The Statute of Anne gave rights to the authors. Today the authors are mostly relegated back to their pre-Statute status as copyright vests primarily in the publishers (who won't publish unless the author hands over virtually all rights to them). As pre-Statute too, the targets of modern publishers are primarily other publishers with seeming disregard for whether the published works are actually ones the attacking publisher has any rights to.
I'd rather see a revamp of copyright law that gave copyright primarily to the authors again and prohibited any publisher from locking the author out when it comes to control over the copyrights on his works.
On the post: Federal Court Blasts Lying Cop Using His Warrantless Search Of A Room To Fraudulently Obtain A Search Warrant
I wouldn't say his conduct merited a perjury and/or obstruction of justice investigation. I'd say it merited perjury and/or obstruction of justice investigation charges. The evidence is right there in the court records, clear as day. I'd bind him over for trial, and hand prosecution over to the public defender's office. I'd bet they'd love a chance to rip that officer apart.
On the post: Cybersecurity Firm Hired By Voatz To Audit Its System Finds Voatz Is Full Of Vulnerabilities
When Sawheny says they don't have to worry because they haven't been hacked yet, I'm minded of:
On the post: Bold: Matthew Storman, Sans Lawyer, Counter Sues Nintendo For False Allegation Of Copyright Infringement
Re:
Storman doesn't have very good arguments. For example, his "first sale doctrine" argument falls apart when you notice that "first sale" protects the sale of that copy, it doesn't grant any rights to make and sell additional copies. It'd be a defense if and only if the uploader destroyed their copy upon uploading it and Storman's service destroyed the uploaded copy after the buyer downloaded it, all of which is exactly what RomUniverse doesn't do.
On the post: AT&T Can't Get Out Of Its Own Way As It Tries To 'Disrupt' Traditional TV
No, to them there is a problem that needs fixing. It's just that they think the problem is that customers aren't buying their product. They refuse to accept that that's not the problem, it's just a symptom of the problem.
When faced with a patient who tells the doctor that they don't want to stop hitting their head with a hammer, they just want the doctor to make it stop hurting when they do, the doctor has two options:
The second has the advantage of ending the patient's complaint quicker.
On the post: Clarence Thomas Regrets Brand X Decision That Paved Way For The Net Neutrality Wars
One thing Thomas leaves out is that the FCC could change the classification because the law gave them the authority to determine which classification those services fell into. Yes, that means the courts are going to have to discard old precedent when the classification is changed. That's no more a problem than it is that courts have to discard old precedent when the legislature changes the laws on them.
On the post: Can You License A Video You Don't Hold The Copyright Over?
Yes you can, if you're the licensing agent of the copyright holder. That's pretty standard. But in this case Jukin media likely isn't a licensing agent because they've no idea who the copyright holder is. Whoever found the camera isn't the copyright holder, because you can't gain copyright on a work simply by finding a copy. Be an interesting business model for a lawyer there, finding the actual owners of those videos and seeing if they're interested in shaking down Jukin Media for license fees. :)
On the post: The Next Risk In Buying An IOT Product Is Having It Bricked By A Patent Dispute
I'd have to see what they mean by "no longer works". If it still functions as an exercise bike and it's just the on-line service that's gone, I'd probably just keep the hardware. If it won't work as an exercise bike, though, then my response would be "Settlement? What settlement? I don't recall being involved in a lawsuit against you or agreeing to any settlement. You want to render your product inoperative, you refund 100% of my money. You balk, I'll send you the bill and file in small claims court and let the local judge sort you out.". After spending $2 grand on the bike, a couple hundred in filing fees and a few hours in court are worth it. Only caveat is that I want to make sure they're really rendering it unusable as a stand-alone exercise bike first before I ask a judge for a full refund plus costs and fees. If they're just disabling all the fancy features like adjustable resistance, then I'll make sure to ask for the difference between their price and the retail price of a basic bike with no more features than what's left on the Flywheel.
On the post: The US Spent Years Telling China To Take Patents Seriously; Now It's Freaking Out That China Is Doing So
Well of course the copyright/patent maximalists are freaking out. When they said China needed to start respecting patents China apparently didn't hear the implicit and silent "our" in that sentence and that's now leaving those maximalists in the situation they wanted China to be in.
(appropriate tags are left as an exercise for the student)
On the post: The End Of Ownership: Tesla Software Updates Giveth... And Tesla Software Updates Taketh Away...
One reason to modify buying a car in the future. I've already seen it with features like LoJack which combine on-car hardware with a service you need a subscription for, but with this it looks like the same care needs to be applied across the board. When you buy a car other than brand-new from a dealer, you need to get a copy of the original dealer invoice showing exactly what was part of the car when first purchased and possibly original invoices for anything that's been added since so that you have the paperwork to prove what features you own.
On the post: You Don't Own What You've Bought: Under Armour Smart Hardware Gets Lobotomized
Perhaps a bunch of individual claims for refunds might send a message to companies that they can't just ignore the consequences of bricking/rendering-useless products they've sold. Class actions companies seem to just ignore, but individual legal claims add up to a lot more money and take a lot more work to deal with which might get executives' attention. The basic claim would be "UA sold me these items with these capabilities, they advertised those capabilities as reasons to buy their products, they've now actively removed those capabilities from the products (as opposed to just no longer supporting them), this situation is equivalent to a fitness equipment company selling me a set of weights and then coming around to my house and taking away all the weights above 10lbs and they shouldn't be allowed to take away what I bought without giving back the money I paid at the same time.".
On the post: Why Is The NYC MTA Going After A Random Artist Who Created A Different Subway Map For Infringement?
Why does the MTA care? Probably because they want to change to the Vignelli style for their official map and if they do a) their lawyers told them Berman could sue them for infringement and b) everybody will believe (probably rightly) that the MTA's professionals couldn't come up with anything better than an amateur did.
On the post: New Law Bans ISPs From Charging You A 'Rental' Fee For Hardware You Already Own
Re:
I'd respond by pointing out that their contract is very clear on the subject: they disclaim any responsibility for anything on the home side of the connection pylon and declare it to be the responsibility of the subscriber. So, when I connect a cable modem to the wall outlet, I'm connecting it to my network. And the connection between that wiring and their network? Well, that was done by their technician, not me (and in fact I'm not allowed access to the pylon at all).
They can still of course refuse to connect your home if you don't use their equipment, but then they have to advertise the price of that equipment as part of the cost or face suits for false advertising (on the grounds that their own rules make it impossible to obtain the advertised service at the advertised price when that advertised price doesn't include the cost of equipment).
On the post: Shocking Absolutely No One, Ring Admits Employees Improperly Accessed Customers' Data
Re:
The employees are being customer-centric. What, you thought the people who buy Ring devices are the customers? No, they're the product.
On the post: Twitter Blocks Animated PNGs After A Bunch Of Shitbirds Spend National Epilepsy Month Harassing Epileptics
Video can be handled at the browser/client end. Most browsers now decline to autoplay video content, solving that problem. The Twitter client should be set the same by default, solving the problem in the app. GIFs should be handled the same way APNG is, the client simply only displays the first "frame" and not any subsequence updates unless and until the user clicks on the image and requests it to be animated. Ditto with audio, clients should by default mute audio unless and until the user enables it.
Basically anything serving up user-generated content should assume such content is hostile/malicious until told otherwise by the recipient.
On the post: Minnesota Appeals Court Nukes State's Broadly-Written Revenge Porn Law
Re: Re: Start with negligence and work up
Not quite. The model has certain interests in the photographs and the photographer needs to deal with that to obtain any right to disseminate the photographs. That's why all professional photographers insist on a model release being executed before they'll proceed with the shoot. What I proposed targets exactly the sorts of photographs that a subject would have the most expectation of privacy in and would suffer the most damage if they were publicly disseminated, making for the easiest case that the photographer was infringing on those rights. These are also the sorts of things it's easiest to make the case for that a reasonable person would know they were not to disseminate those images without permission, which is essential to meeting the negligence standard instead of having to prove intent.
On the post: Minnesota Appeals Court Nukes State's Broadly-Written Revenge Porn Law
Re: Re: Start with negligence and work up
Not a problem I think because most of those grounds aren't ones someone posting revenge porn would want to use. They mostly amount to fair-use defenses, and we've seen how hard fair use is to use as a defense in so many copyright-infringement cases. And if this law would run afoul of strict scrutiny, then all copyright law would as well because it puts the disseminator in the same position of having to use the fair-use defense against a criminal charge.
On the post: UL Pushes Security Standards For The Internet Of Broken Things
Re:
Yes, but it would become non-compliant if UL implements their proposal. AFAIK regulators can't stop them because UL is a private company not a government agency. Also AFAIK a lot of stores won't carry electronics if it isn't UL-listed, which is also something regulators can't do much about because of the same laws that make it almost impossible to control what companies do. That leaves IoT device makers with Hobson's choice.
On the post: Minnesota Appeals Court Nukes State's Broadly-Written Revenge Porn Law
Start with negligence and work up
Start with a negligence standard and work up. Copyright law says that every image has a copyright owner and that no person has any right to disseminate that image without permission from that copyright owner. If you don't know who the copyright owner is, or you don't know if they've given permission, then the law says you can't legally disseminate the image because you can't have gotten permission. So write the law to avoid the whole obscenity issue and simply make it a crime to disseminate images where you don't have a clear right to do so under copyright law and a reasonable person would find that the images displayed the subject in a sexual act or displayed their intimate parts (those parts that would cause the subject to be charged with indecent exposure if displayed in public). Intent would be irrelevant for the first part because the way copyright law is written the person disseminating the images would've been negligent in not getting permission first. Then add a second class of offense with a greater punishment if the prosecution can show intent, not mere negligence.
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