He'll probably send another one, thus opening himself up to a lawsuit. And given how much attention he's getting now, he's bound to hit some lawyer out there (if nothing else I'm betting he'll accidentally double-DMCA some lawyer who posts a video trying to explain why what he's doing is illegal). After that... well, I hope he gets sued into oblivion, probably the only way he'll learn anything sadly.
If the wood was brought into the country illegally, whether it was by Gibson or someone else, the government's doing everyone a great disservice by not filing charges. Just seizing the wood won't stop the smuggling, but charging the smugglers and putting them in jail will. (It'll also send a strong message to other would-be smugglers that they should reconsider smuggling anything.)
No matter how you look at this the justice department is not handling it in the public's best interests.
Wouldn't work, they'd still blame the resulting drop in income on piracy. You simply can't convince those people that they're losing money due to anything but piracy.
Of course there's not any, the ones making all the accusations will be in the pay of the large media companies and they're special, they don't have to play by the same rules everyone else does.
The media companies pushing these laws think they are always right, IP addresses always identify a person (and the correct one at that) and you're guilty, period. They're just throwing us a bone giving us any possible defenses at all because they simply don't believe in our being innocent. Even if one proves they're innocent beyond a shadow of a doubt (like say, being dead at the time the infringement occurred) they're still guilty as far as the media companies are concerned.
Apparently it's not just the wood that's endangered, but common sense (at least within the government). We're in dire need of some of that when it comes to enforcing laws of all kinds. This is just more proof of it.
Taking two years of his life to try to get an answer isn't "suddenly car[ing] when it gets him some publicity". Your reading comprehension (and reality comprehension) is pretty bad.
Like that would help here? The contact says he's supposed to receive royalties once the band recouped the advance. But EMI
1. Won't actually provide an accounting (and never does through the entire process);
2. Then claims they paid royalties but to the wrong people;
3. Wait, maybe they didn't pay those other people after all and they don't have to pay anyone;
4. On second thought, we did pay them to the wrong people;
5. Since you won't drop the matter like we were hoping, how about we'll pay you royalties going forward if you keep your mouth shut and go away. Oh, and the only way you can fight this is a long drawn-out legal battle that we can afford and you can't. Your choice.
What part of reading the contract would have helped? EMI's not acting ethically at all. They're equivocating, possibly flat-out lying, and dragging things on forever and ever hoping he'll go away and they won't have to pay what they legally owe him. Once he backs them into a corner by refusing to just give up in disgust, they finally agree to pay him royalties from that point on, but he's just out of luck for the past ones they may or may not have paid to the wrong people. This is a recording company bullying its musicians simply because it can get away with it, not a contractual issue.
Yeah, so? Whatever the cause for it the reality is that people want to watch the shows when they want to watch them, and the majority aren't going to wait 8 days, they'll find them via any means possible, including pirating them.
Instead of bitching and moaning (and insulting people) about this occurring and demanding people change their desires, the solution is to provide them what they want in a way that continues to make you money. Driving them to piracy (which makes you no money) is a business failure. It's throwing away money.
Why is this so hard for the copyright boner coalition to understand? Your copyright is worthless if no one wants to see/read/listen to it. Instead of doing everything possible to not give people access to it in ways they want in a manner that allows you to make money, you're encouraging piracy. Maybe you should start suing yourself for doing so, isn't aiding and abetting piracy a crime?
That might help, the root problem is an education issue after all. Pretty much all water comes into contact with sewage at some point before treatment anyway. At the very least, there's plenty of runoff from farms that get into waterways, and who knows how much from wildlife. While it may not be a pleasant thought, it's the reality of the world and wastewater engineers are among those who know this reality so it doesn't bother them as much.
So you don't really have to make people participate in treatment to understand this, they just need to be educated about how it all works. This is probably part of the general apathy (or even downright hostility in some quarters) to science and science education that the US is dealing with.
I give him a 2/10 for his defense, to earn extra points he really should have suggested it was really planted by aliens from another planet being controlled by the secret mind control waves the government sends out, but which Ceglia's protected from due to his aluminum foil cap!
Sadly that would have sounded about as realistic as his current claims.
And given the guy moved away when they told him to, even though (legally) he didn't have to, there's no way at all to claim he was obstructing anything with a straight face. Unless you're one of the numerous cops who are jerks.
Carlos Miller that runs the Photography is not a Crime blog always refers to the charges in cases like this as "contempt of cop", which is (sadly) a much more accurate description for why they charged this guy.
It doesn't appear to be TechDirt's doing, it's Mercury News. Delete the ?nclick_check=1 off the link's end and it'll load fine. Apparently Mercury News is doing something funky when passed that parameter and it's redirecting to weird stuff (I also got a failed one that went to
Notice how it also starts with secure.*? I think it's some script on their side that's not checking parameters properly and just assuming the referral domain is the correct domain to tag secure.* on and try the rest of the stuff with.
Re: Civil suit? No, this should be a federal criminal case
A lifetime sentence might be a bit much, but if the feds would pursue the actual company owners/CEOs/etc. with wiretapping charges, then convict some of them on those charges and put the actual people in jail, it might have a deterrent effect. Right now all that generally happens is there's lots of bad publicity and the company providing the technology either goes under, or renames/sells its assets off and repeats the procedure again in the future.
But if you have the actual masterminds going to jail, well now, the number of people actually willing to take the risk to run such a company will quickly dwindle. Those stupid enough to continue to risk it will end up in jail, and the others will find something else to do. (Probably also unethical and immoral, but maybe not illegal.)
Honestly, the article doesn't break it down, but it sounds like he's facing at least as much time, if not more, for his contempt of court charges as he is for the actual hacking charges. And it's hard to see even the hacking charges as too severe when he was charged with breaking into 500,000+ accounts. That's a LOT of accounts to break into, it's not just a one-off thing. Then he violated the court's temporary restraining order and preliminary injunction and continued to access Facebook. And let's not forget his long history of ignoring lawsuits and court orders prior to this.
Judges don't like it when you ignore court orders. Whatever sentence he gets will be much more influenced by his total lack of respect for the courts than for how many computers he broke into. Society sure as hell will be better off with him not loose to do whatever he wants.
Several sites I go to have changed their methods of commenting. Many I guess going to Discus to prevent spammers. It has resulted in I read the articles but not the comments being as you have to sign up to Discus to read them. Needless to say, I make no contribution to those articles since the change.
There's a couple of webcomics I read that use Disqus and the comments are visible without logging in. I don't know if it's a setting a site owner can pick or not, but it is apparently optional. I know one of them even allows you to post pseudonymously as a guest, just having to fill in an E-mail address (which most blogs require, but don't use, so you can always use a fake one). I've actually posted to the comments there occasionally as a guest with no problems, and never created a Disqus account or logged in via any other method.
There's nothing stopping people from trolling from an account that has an apparently real name. And there's tons and tons of people with real names that look insanely generic. Like John Smith, James Brown, Jane Brown, etc. Instead of trying to play the magic "is this the person's real name" guessing game (that you're always going to lose a non-insignificant percentage of the time) how about focusing on behavior, not names?
For example I use a psueduonym, but I don't troll, I don't post hateful comments, etc. I have very good reasons for not using my real name, but I don't use my pseudonomity to misbehave. I just use it to contribute to conversations online in a way that protects my real self. There's no reason to exclude me from a conversation. Trying to lump me in with trolls is disingenuous at best. And there are a LOT of people like me out there.
As a side note, my psuedonym is a legitimate Japanese name. So trying to guess if it's real or not becomes problematic anyway. This could be a person's real name. Would you want to be the one making the choice to delete or not delete an account based on it without any proof of misbehavior? Google/Facebook/etc. are wanting to place themselves in that position, and it's stupid. Every mistake will cause lots of bad press, and the benefits are mostly non-existent.
Much better to just delete accounts for misbehavior. Who gets upset when they hear a company kicked a troll or spammer off their network?
Not to mention they apparently didn't learn anything from the supreme court slapping them down there for a few years. They don't seem interested in learning.
On the post: Double Bogus DMCA Takedown All The Way!
Re:
On the post: Gibson CEO: US Government Won't Even Tell Us What Law They Think We've Violated
Re: Re: Another example...
No matter how you look at this the justice department is not handling it in the public's best interests.
On the post: UK Government Tried To Make It Harder To Appeal Three Strikes Accusations
Re:
On the post: UK Government Tried To Make It Harder To Appeal Three Strikes Accusations
Re: Is there punishment for false accusations?
The media companies pushing these laws think they are always right, IP addresses always identify a person (and the correct one at that) and you're guilty, period. They're just throwing us a bone giving us any possible defenses at all because they simply don't believe in our being innocent. Even if one proves they're innocent beyond a shadow of a doubt (like say, being dead at the time the infringement occurred) they're still guilty as far as the media companies are concerned.
On the post: Feds Raid Gibson; Musicians Now Worried The Gov't Will Take Their Guitars Away
The wood isn't the only thing endangered
On the post: EMI Doesn't Pay Royalties, Or It Does, But To The Wrong People, Or It Doesn't, Or Maybe It Does...
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
On the post: EMI Doesn't Pay Royalties, Or It Does, But To The Wrong People, Or It Doesn't, Or Maybe It Does...
Re: Really?
What part of reading the contract would have helped? EMI's not acting ethically at all. They're equivocating, possibly flat-out lying, and dragging things on forever and ever hoping he'll go away and they won't have to pay what they legally owe him. Once he backs them into a corner by refusing to just give up in disgust, they finally agree to pay him royalties from that point on, but he's just out of luck for the past ones they may or may not have paid to the wrong people. This is a recording company bullying its musicians simply because it can get away with it, not a contractual issue.
On the post: Of Course: New Fox Delay Means More Unauthorized Downloads Of Fox Shows
Re:
Instead of bitching and moaning (and insulting people) about this occurring and demanding people change their desires, the solution is to provide them what they want in a way that continues to make you money. Driving them to piracy (which makes you no money) is a business failure. It's throwing away money.
Why is this so hard for the copyright boner coalition to understand? Your copyright is worthless if no one wants to see/read/listen to it. Instead of doing everything possible to not give people access to it in ways they want in a manner that allows you to make money, you're encouraging piracy. Maybe you should start suing yourself for doing so, isn't aiding and abetting piracy a crime?
On the post: Of Course: New Fox Delay Means More Unauthorized Downloads Of Fox Shows
Re: Jeez, Mike
On the post: DailyDirt: Don't Drink The Water
Re:
So you don't really have to make people participate in treatment to understand this, they just need to be educated about how it all works. This is probably part of the general apathy (or even downright hostility in some quarters) to science and science education that the US is dealing with.
On the post: Paul Ceglia To Facebook: I Didn't Forge A Contract, You Did!
Re: He's reaching
Sadly that would have sounded about as realistic as his current claims.
On the post: Spoiler Alert: People Enjoy Books More When They Know The Spoilers
Re: DON'T SPOiL iT FOR OTHERS
On the post: After Widespread Cheating, FBI Will Retest Agents On Surveillance Guidelines... With Much Easier Test
Re: Re: Re:
On the post: Police, Yet Again, Arrest Someone For Filming Them, Saying It's Obstruction Of Justice
Re: Obstruction?
Carlos Miller that runs the Photography is not a Crime blog always refers to the charges in cases like this as "contempt of cop", which is (sadly) a much more accurate description for why they charged this guy.
On the post: Justice Department Refuses To Give Up; Still Going After Peter Adekeye In Vindictive Lawsuit
Re:
https://secure.passport.mnginteractive.com/mngi/servletDispatch/ErightsPassportServlet.dyn?url=h ttp://www.mercurynews.com/crime-courts/ci_18618018?nclick_check=1&forced=true
Notice how it also starts with secure.*? I think it's some script on their side that's not checking parameters properly and just assuming the referral domain is the correct domain to tag secure.* on and try the rest of the stuff with.
Correct URL sans screwed-up server parameter:
http://www.mercurynews.com/crime-courts/ci_18618018
On the post: ISPs Accused Of Hijacking Search Terms, Redirecting Browser Results To Marketer's Websites
Re: Civil suit? No, this should be a federal criminal case
But if you have the actual masterminds going to jail, well now, the number of people actually willing to take the risk to run such a company will quickly dwindle. Those stupid enough to continue to risk it will end up in jail, and the others will find something else to do. (Probably also unethical and immoral, but maybe not illegal.)
On the post: Spamford Wallace Surrenders To The FBI; May Finally Go To Jail
Re: I hate spam...
Judges don't like it when you ignore court orders. Whatever sentence he gets will be much more influenced by his total lack of respect for the courts than for how many computers he broke into. Society sure as hell will be better off with him not loose to do whatever he wants.
On the post: What's In A Name: The Importance Of Pseudonymity & The Dangers Of Requiring 'Real Names'
Re:
On the post: What's In A Name: The Importance Of Pseudonymity & The Dangers Of Requiring 'Real Names'
Re:
For example I use a psueduonym, but I don't troll, I don't post hateful comments, etc. I have very good reasons for not using my real name, but I don't use my pseudonomity to misbehave. I just use it to contribute to conversations online in a way that protects my real self. There's no reason to exclude me from a conversation. Trying to lump me in with trolls is disingenuous at best. And there are a LOT of people like me out there.
As a side note, my psuedonym is a legitimate Japanese name. So trying to guess if it's real or not becomes problematic anyway. This could be a person's real name. Would you want to be the one making the choice to delete or not delete an account based on it without any proof of misbehavior? Google/Facebook/etc. are wanting to place themselves in that position, and it's stupid. Every mistake will cause lots of bad press, and the benefits are mostly non-existent.
Much better to just delete accounts for misbehavior. Who gets upset when they hear a company kicked a troll or spammer off their network?
On the post: Patent Loving Court Strikes Again: CAFC Orders USPTO To Reconsider NTP Patents It Had Rejected
Re: Patent Loving Court
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