Actually, if I own the property and the building the contractor is building that's what withholding is all about which is very standard in construction.
The last work I had done on my place I withheld 15% of the quoted price of the work despite the fact that they are a reputable company. They made no objection and once the work was completed and I signed off after doing some checking they were paid.
There are other ways to cancel or get out of a construction project for the homeowner to make use of as well. As for the contractor, go ahead and walk. You just lost the witholding, mate. At the very least.
Credit card companies do have the ability to unilaterally suspend or cancel cards if the entity holding the card is, say, chronically late in making payments.
From what I see here is that there was a claim that VISA had breached their contract with Wikileaks without contractual grounds to do so as outlined in the terms of service between Wikileaks and VISA.
Lurking in the background is the reality that the suspension of payment processing wasn't a contractual act but political pressure from the United States and United Kingdom, among others. That doesn't figure in the ruling that I can see except for this in the summary:
"WikiLeaks is persuing several actions against the blockade and a European Commission preliminary investigation into the blockade was started last July. A Commission decision on whether to pursue the financial services companies involved in the blockade is expected before the end of August." which passes that issue over to the EC.
If what you assert is true then those would have been defenses VISA could have used in the case. The main defense would have been breach of contract which is often as close to a bulletproof defense as you can get. If they did and the court rejected them they may have grounds for appeal depending on the court's reasons for rejecting them.
They can appeal if they want but for now in Iceland they're under a court order to resume processing payments. Period, full stop. If VISA doesn't resume processing payments and doesn't appeal they're in violation of the court order and there would come a time when VISA may be held in contempt of court.
VISA has the path of appeal and asking for a stay while the appeal proceeds. They'll act while within the law on this one. If it means opening the donation gateway for a few weeks so be it. You don't ignore court orders you don't like. VISA knows that even if you don't.
He wasn't thinking as much as reacting then using a single source document, Free Ride by Robert Levine, who he praises even though the Guardian's review of the book seems to recommend it for it's entertainment value as much as anything. http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/aug/18/free-ride-robert-levine-review
Not the world's best place to start.
He also seems, word for word, the rants found on trichordist whose blog we're all so familiar with.
Perhaps he also relies on Levine's misstatements and distortions for his rants. One musician, one author same source it seems.
No amount of pointing out that Homer, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Dante and countless others wrote classics of literature that speak to various natures of the human condition without copyright. The authors of the Old Testament wrote about the relationship between God and the Hebrews mixing in vast aspects of the human condition and behaviors. For example David's adultery and his murderous orders to his troops to let her husband, to then one of his best friends and advisers, be left to fend for himself on the battlefield where he died. More correctly was murdered on David's orders no matter who did the actual killing. All while slowly moving from the status of God, "I am", as a tribal god to a universal one, open to all which set the stage for an internet Rabbi, Jesus of Nazareth, to focus on the love commandment already stressed in Leviticus to the centre of the stage and stress the universality of God, "I am", open to all -- Jews and Gentiles (pagans) alike.
Biblical heros were humanly flawed not superhumans and frequently paid a very high price for their heroism and teachings. Rather as heros still do.
All without copyright.
Artists painted, sculptures were created, music was written and performed, all without benefit of copyright. It would seem, then, that the ancient world, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance and enlightenment were devoid of culture. After all, it was all free, right? And that's just taking a highly euro-centric view of the world by leaving out Egypt, Persia, Babylon and China to name but a few. All cultural wastelands because copyright didn't exist. They just HAD to be.
After all Levine and Morrison say so. They insist on it.
Too bad it didn't work out in the way that Morrison fantasies. Far, far from it. Unless, of course, the rest of us are suffering from some mass hallucination.
How nice to see you back again with your twisted reading of devices like safe harbours and, even better, fair use/fair dealing which is a concept that predated the internet by a couple of hundred years quite easily.
While the DCMA takedown process isn't perfect, nothing is, it strikes a reasonable balance between rights holders and user provided content policing of web sites.
I hate to burst your little bubble but it has always been up to the rights holder to enforce their copyright, police it in your words. No black hole has been created it's a continuation of what was there before.
The big complaint from (some) rights holders in the music biz and from the labels was that they had to police kids creating cassettes of their material and sharing or selling them. And that the penalties when they'd expended all the energy protecting their copyright were far, far too low.
Don't kid yourself. While it may not have been global it was happening on an enormous scale. The burden then was where it is now. On the rights holder. That's where it's always been since copyright came into effect.
Your imaginary black hole doesn't exist.
The take down notice is a way of enforcement.
For all your whining about the effort as you've discovered if your song is posted somewhere Google will tell you where almost the same afternoon. Cost is minimal.
The judge in this case makes no comment that would lead anyone to the conclusion that the takedown notice system has negated copyright in any way. He's explained the system and why it has come to be, in Reader's Digest compressed form.
To restate myself on fair dealing/fair use those concepts have always been there. They haven't just appeared with the DMCA.
Incidentally, according to physics, if this is a black hole then almost 20 years on the entire music industry, not just the labels, would have been pulled into the vortex by now and in either the spahgettification stage or well inside the black hole and getting completely squashed.
The music industry as a whole is doing quite well thank you. Even if that's something else you don't want to believe.
You have an odd view of this history and development of the Web and the Internet it runs on to say that safe harbours make the freebie Web possible. I'm assuming you mean freebie content which isn't entirely true but as for the Internet and the Web they were both intended to be as free as possible. Both are based on open source protocols, neither are encoumbered by patents. In fact acceptance of a new protcol by either forbids them to be patented.
Like it or not they're a tool. Not a hostile life form that wants to eat your music. Perhaps that will come with quantum computing and the quantum Internet and Web which some argue will take on the signs of intelligent life. They could then choose to eat you and your music or just ignore you in order to piss you off.
They'd also know how easy it is to piss you off. You have so many buttons to push. Most of which lead to irrationality even when you do have a good argument to make you do it so irrationally that you're ignored or someone points out that you're a few thousand bricks short of a load.
If the defendant didn't show up and, as a result, it was an automatic judgement giving the plaintiff all the plaintiff wanted then it's about the weakest sort of precedent you can have. To have some binding strength on future similar cases it usually requires that both/all parties were present to present evidence and have a ruling based on that.
If you sell the jacket as Columbia then that moves into the area of fraud as you're clearly not Columbia which isn't a trade mark issue. You may also invoke counterfeit here.
If you make an exact copy of a movie including title and cast then I'd think that would clearly be a copyright issue. If you marketed it as Hellaciously Good Movies, who made the original then trade mark would kick in as you're not them.
If you bittorrent a copy of the original movie then we get back to IP copyright silliness which we disuss so much around here.
The expense of making a true repoduction, not the original, in the case of a movie or video trumps that as being an option.
As a thought problem/experiment both questions are interesting but each, in their own way are too expensive to do in the real world and would probably not repay whoever did it. An interesting question as you frame it though.
Even if there is only one Property Quantum Hard Drive is that by Quantum Physics it can exists in two places simultaneously and possibly in two time lines simultaneously. They're all the the original one just in a different state, time and location.
So which one is the non infringing one in the world of quantum IP?
I am from Canada and you're right in that a Committee headed by a respected jurist who is selected from a list submitted to the Speaker of the House Federally and in each province.
Actually it's rubber stamped as the short list is selected by other judges.
The rules are fairly simple. The riding boundaries are drawn up strictly on the basis of representation by population. The idea is that each MP represents the the same number of people plus or minus a certain percentage. Municipal boundaries may be taken into account, natural boundaries such as rivers, straits, mountain ranges may vary the number of constituents. Remote area ridings may be adjusted in terms of size so the MP can properly service the constituents.
There was an idea of taking minority populations into account in the 1970s which was dropped when it was discovered that election by election the result of riding distribution based on overall rep-by-pop resulted in equal representation of such groups. As a result the system is colour blind.
Since the current system was adopted there have been no allegations of gerrymandering where before it was there were more than a few. It doesn't mean people are always happy with the results of the changes though by and large most Canadians like it.
Parties may complain every now and then but they like it too as it's predictable even if the riding boundaries are not and everyone knows how the system works. Parties move their supporters list from the old riding to the new one and just carry on. The result is that each MP has a similar workload.
A lovely side effect of this system is that when their constituents in neighbouring ridings are sharing the same issue it forces the MPs to work together even if they're from other parties.
They're recruiting the worst of the terrorists. Copyright and Patent Troll attorneys-at-law. Bring America to her knees faster than any bomb ever could.
They're contributions, to be sure. But we could also be hopeful that all the IP industry money he's taking is that he's getting ready to retire and augmenting his pathetic congressional pension plan.
As for Issa, well, you can easily play both sides against the middle when it suits you.
I suspect that the diplomatic US IP cop will be about as welcome as the CIA types who are in embassies around the world. Maybe less.
Please try your spell check, make some citatitons about all this money being siphoned off by a perfectly legal activity and remember to take your meds.
Google are criminals? Oh yes, the devil called Big Search from someone who doesn't seem to understand what search engines do except that they don't do what trichordist wants them to do which is rig the returns.
Still, when Big IP is blowing the bank of several small nations lobbying the US Congress and you want to be heard above the cash register rings then you gotta join them as does the rest of the tech industry.
If they're criminals file a criminal complaint. You can do that you know. You'd be laughed out of court but there's the teenie tiny chance they might get convicted in a private prosecution. Why not try it?
The key question is will this wake up the USTR to the extent that they take the US Congress, other legislatures like the Australian Parliament AND the public have a right to know what's going on. And then there's the joke that has Canada and Mexico as 5th rate participants in the TPP negotiations.
What's so amusing to me about this is that I'll wager that the major non-participant, China, has cleaved the veil of "transparency" around TPP and knows every word, sentence, dot, comment and observation and who said or proposed it all.
Not that I'm saying this as if China is doing something nasty here. If an agreement of this scope were being negotiated with the United States on the sideline I'd be sure they'd be doing exactly what China is doing now.
The other reason for saying this is that between the petition and China's "national interest" is to let the USTR know that they're being watched. Closely. Being so opaque about this while claiming transparency just raises suspicions and cynicism about what's going on behind the veil.
I wouldn't be. Your court and judge at the extradition hearing are doing exactly what they ought to be doing. As for the contempt of the FBI, that outfit is as corrupt as all get out and more. It's a game they play or try to. They're rotten to the core as an organization which is not saying their agents are all like that but the organization has always thought it was above the law, all the way back to J Edgar Hoover.
On the post: Iceland Court Orders Visa To Start Processing Wikileaks Payments Again Within Two Weeks
Re:
The last work I had done on my place I withheld 15% of the quoted price of the work despite the fact that they are a reputable company. They made no objection and once the work was completed and I signed off after doing some checking they were paid.
There are other ways to cancel or get out of a construction project for the homeowner to make use of as well. As for the contractor, go ahead and walk. You just lost the witholding, mate. At the very least.
On the post: Iceland Court Orders Visa To Start Processing Wikileaks Payments Again Within Two Weeks
Re: Re:
From what I see here is that there was a claim that VISA had breached their contract with Wikileaks without contractual grounds to do so as outlined in the terms of service between Wikileaks and VISA.
Lurking in the background is the reality that the suspension of payment processing wasn't a contractual act but political pressure from the United States and United Kingdom, among others. That doesn't figure in the ruling that I can see except for this in the summary:
"WikiLeaks is persuing several actions against the blockade and a European Commission preliminary investigation into the blockade was started last July. A Commission decision on whether to pursue the financial services companies involved in the blockade is expected before the end of August." which passes that issue over to the EC.
On the post: Iceland Court Orders Visa To Start Processing Wikileaks Payments Again Within Two Weeks
Re: Re: Re:
They can appeal if they want but for now in Iceland they're under a court order to resume processing payments. Period, full stop. If VISA doesn't resume processing payments and doesn't appeal they're in violation of the court order and there would come a time when VISA may be held in contempt of court.
VISA has the path of appeal and asking for a stay while the appeal proceeds. They'll act while within the law on this one. If it means opening the donation gateway for a few weeks so be it. You don't ignore court orders you don't like. VISA knows that even if you don't.
On the post: You Can't Introduce Any Decently Cool Product These Days Without Some Sore Loser Claiming Patent Infringement
Re: Re: Re: Re:
/s (?)
On the post: ACTA Failure Inspires The Most Clueless Column Ever
Re: Re:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/aug/18/free-ride-robert-levine-review
Not the world's best place to start.
He also seems, word for word, the rants found on trichordist whose blog we're all so familiar with.
Perhaps he also relies on Levine's misstatements and distortions for his rants. One musician, one author same source it seems.
No amount of pointing out that Homer, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Dante and countless others wrote classics of literature that speak to various natures of the human condition without copyright. The authors of the Old Testament wrote about the relationship between God and the Hebrews mixing in vast aspects of the human condition and behaviors. For example David's adultery and his murderous orders to his troops to let her husband, to then one of his best friends and advisers, be left to fend for himself on the battlefield where he died. More correctly was murdered on David's orders no matter who did the actual killing. All while slowly moving from the status of God, "I am", as a tribal god to a universal one, open to all which set the stage for an internet Rabbi, Jesus of Nazareth, to focus on the love commandment already stressed in Leviticus to the centre of the stage and stress the universality of God, "I am", open to all -- Jews and Gentiles (pagans) alike.
Biblical heros were humanly flawed not superhumans and frequently paid a very high price for their heroism and teachings. Rather as heros still do.
All without copyright.
Artists painted, sculptures were created, music was written and performed, all without benefit of copyright. It would seem, then, that the ancient world, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance and enlightenment were devoid of culture. After all, it was all free, right? And that's just taking a highly euro-centric view of the world by leaving out Egypt, Persia, Babylon and China to name but a few. All cultural wastelands because copyright didn't exist. They just HAD to be.
After all Levine and Morrison say so. They insist on it.
Too bad it didn't work out in the way that Morrison fantasies. Far, far from it. Unless, of course, the rest of us are suffering from some mass hallucination.
On the post: ACTA Failure Inspires The Most Clueless Column Ever
Re: Re: Cultural Disaster?
On the post: How Not To Build A 21st Century Trade Agreement: In Secret
Of course everyone in every country affected by TPP will fall into line to support it, just like they did ACTA. See? It still works!
On the post: Judge Rejects Key Universal Music Argument In Legal Fight With Grooveshark
Re:
While the DCMA takedown process isn't perfect, nothing is, it strikes a reasonable balance between rights holders and user provided content policing of web sites.
I hate to burst your little bubble but it has always been up to the rights holder to enforce their copyright, police it in your words. No black hole has been created it's a continuation of what was there before.
The big complaint from (some) rights holders in the music biz and from the labels was that they had to police kids creating cassettes of their material and sharing or selling them. And that the penalties when they'd expended all the energy protecting their copyright were far, far too low.
Don't kid yourself. While it may not have been global it was happening on an enormous scale. The burden then was where it is now. On the rights holder. That's where it's always been since copyright came into effect.
Your imaginary black hole doesn't exist.
The take down notice is a way of enforcement.
For all your whining about the effort as you've discovered if your song is posted somewhere Google will tell you where almost the same afternoon. Cost is minimal.
The judge in this case makes no comment that would lead anyone to the conclusion that the takedown notice system has negated copyright in any way. He's explained the system and why it has come to be, in Reader's Digest compressed form.
To restate myself on fair dealing/fair use those concepts have always been there. They haven't just appeared with the DMCA.
Incidentally, according to physics, if this is a black hole then almost 20 years on the entire music industry, not just the labels, would have been pulled into the vortex by now and in either the spahgettification stage or well inside the black hole and getting completely squashed.
The music industry as a whole is doing quite well thank you. Even if that's something else you don't want to believe.
You have an odd view of this history and development of the Web and the Internet it runs on to say that safe harbours make the freebie Web possible. I'm assuming you mean freebie content which isn't entirely true but as for the Internet and the Web they were both intended to be as free as possible. Both are based on open source protocols, neither are encoumbered by patents. In fact acceptance of a new protcol by either forbids them to be patented.
Like it or not they're a tool. Not a hostile life form that wants to eat your music. Perhaps that will come with quantum computing and the quantum Internet and Web which some argue will take on the signs of intelligent life. They could then choose to eat you and your music or just ignore you in order to piss you off.
They'd also know how easy it is to piss you off. You have so many buttons to push. Most of which lead to irrationality even when you do have a good argument to make you do it so irrationally that you're ignored or someone points out that you're a few thousand bricks short of a load.
On the post: What Happens If File Sharing Can Also Be Prosecuted As Trademark Infringement?
Re: Re: Re:
On the post: What Happens If File Sharing Can Also Be Prosecuted As Trademark Infringement?
Re: Re:
If you make an exact copy of a movie including title and cast then I'd think that would clearly be a copyright issue. If you marketed it as Hellaciously Good Movies, who made the original then trade mark would kick in as you're not them.
If you bittorrent a copy of the original movie then we get back to IP copyright silliness which we disuss so much around here.
The expense of making a true repoduction, not the original, in the case of a movie or video trumps that as being an option.
As a thought problem/experiment both questions are interesting but each, in their own way are too expensive to do in the real world and would probably not repay whoever did it. An interesting question as you frame it though.
On the post: What Happens If File Sharing Can Also Be Prosecuted As Trademark Infringement?
Re: Re:
So which one is the non infringing one in the world of quantum IP?
On the post: Lamar Smith Looking To Sneak Through SOPA In Bits & Pieces, Starting With Expanding Hollywood's Global Police Force
How Canada does it.
Actually it's rubber stamped as the short list is selected by other judges.
The rules are fairly simple. The riding boundaries are drawn up strictly on the basis of representation by population. The idea is that each MP represents the the same number of people plus or minus a certain percentage. Municipal boundaries may be taken into account, natural boundaries such as rivers, straits, mountain ranges may vary the number of constituents. Remote area ridings may be adjusted in terms of size so the MP can properly service the constituents.
There was an idea of taking minority populations into account in the 1970s which was dropped when it was discovered that election by election the result of riding distribution based on overall rep-by-pop resulted in equal representation of such groups. As a result the system is colour blind.
Since the current system was adopted there have been no allegations of gerrymandering where before it was there were more than a few. It doesn't mean people are always happy with the results of the changes though by and large most Canadians like it.
Parties may complain every now and then but they like it too as it's predictable even if the riding boundaries are not and everyone knows how the system works. Parties move their supporters list from the old riding to the new one and just carry on. The result is that each MP has a similar workload.
A lovely side effect of this system is that when their constituents in neighbouring ridings are sharing the same issue it forces the MPs to work together even if they're from other parties.
It's a good system.
On the post: Lamar Smith Looking To Sneak Through SOPA In Bits & Pieces, Starting With Expanding Hollywood's Global Police Force
Re: Re: Words...
On the post: Lamar Smith Looking To Sneak Through SOPA In Bits & Pieces, Starting With Expanding Hollywood's Global Police Force
Re: Re: Lamar Smith - on the take
As for Issa, well, you can easily play both sides against the middle when it suits you.
I suspect that the diplomatic US IP cop will be about as welcome as the CIA types who are in embassies around the world. Maybe less.
America The Beautiful -- Marked Down at WalMart!
On the post: Lamar Smith Looking To Sneak Through SOPA In Bits & Pieces, Starting With Expanding Hollywood's Global Police Force
Re: Re: Lamar Smith - on the take
Thanks.
On the post: Lamar Smith Looking To Sneak Through SOPA In Bits & Pieces, Starting With Expanding Hollywood's Global Police Force
Re: Re: Re:
On the post: Lamar Smith Looking To Sneak Through SOPA In Bits & Pieces, Starting With Expanding Hollywood's Global Police Force
Re: Re: Re: Re:
Still, when Big IP is blowing the bank of several small nations lobbying the US Congress and you want to be heard above the cash register rings then you gotta join them as does the rest of the tech industry.
If they're criminals file a criminal complaint. You can do that you know. You'd be laughed out of court but there's the teenie tiny chance they might get convicted in a private prosecution. Why not try it?
On the post: NYPD Put Couple On 'Wanted' Poster For Videotaping Police
Re:
Ahhh, the desperation.
Nice to meet you and the NYPD.
Too bad you don't have the backbone Mike has or 1/90th the courage of the average beat cop.
On the post: Petition With 90,000 Signatures Of People Worried About TPP Hand Delivered To USTR Negotiators
What's so amusing to me about this is that I'll wager that the major non-participant, China, has cleaved the veil of "transparency" around TPP and knows every word, sentence, dot, comment and observation and who said or proposed it all.
Not that I'm saying this as if China is doing something nasty here. If an agreement of this scope were being negotiated with the United States on the sideline I'd be sure they'd be doing exactly what China is doing now.
The other reason for saying this is that between the petition and China's "national interest" is to let the USTR know that they're being watched. Closely. Being so opaque about this while claiming transparency just raises suspicions and cynicism about what's going on behind the veil.
On the post: FBI Continues To Insist There's No Reason For Kim Dotcom To Be Able To See The Evidence Against Him
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