There are already efforts block some of the easy work around methods. VISA was making threatening noise about not making payments to services like VPN's use usenet.
You highlighted some real problems, but my concern is mission creep. What comes after they have the filters in place under the guise of "Protect the Children!" Terrorism is probably up next, and that part of the filter won't be optional because "only terrorist sympathizers could be against blocking terrorism sites." After the mandatory filters are in place the next public enemy will almost certainly be PIRACY. I suspect this is the actual driving force behind the current movement since simply blocking torrent sites has not worked. After that they have some wonky defamation laws in England, so sites that make celebrities look bad are a likely candidate, especially if they can be extended just a bit to cover politicians. And that opens the door to blocking any type of "subversive" sites, especially those that criticize the filtering system itself.
Technically she is famous for being related to someone who is famous for being married to someone who is famous. And that person is only famous because of birth.
Perhaps it is an attempt to boost sales of her original book. Ironically, it probably will help her original book because the lawsuit will draw attention to both the parody and the original. Maybe there is a new #PippinTip in here somewhere:
"If you are famous mainly because of your association with someone else who is famous, sue other people to keep your name in the papers."
But I am sure the site blocking resulted in a huge surge in profits for the recording and movie industry. No? Well maybe a tiny blip in profits. No? Well at least there was a moral victory because they made those horrible dirty pirates mad. Oh, those horrible dirty pirates are also some of our best customers and now they are mad at the industry? Well at least they have the satisfaction of knowing that they are providing a healthy living for the anti-piracy contractors. Their share holders aren't going to catch on to how much all this anti-piracy stuff is costing the industry. Right?
Unfortunately once they allow lawyers into the board room rational business thinking usually goes out the window in favor lawyerthink "We have a right to control this, therefore we should control it."
These situations demonstrate the high cost of the the war on drugs. Just start calculating the hourly cost of manpower and other assets like aircraft and SUV's. And they would have been satisfied with a few grams of pot? It is insanity beyond anything that happened during prohibition.
There was a "Pop-Up Killer" application in 1999, which suggests that the popups predated the patent application.
You can read the original patent at http://www.google.com/patents/US7353229 . To my untrained eye it looks like this is a patent for the idea of using mechanisms already in JavaScript and Java applets to present advertising. Reading the article as a programmer I didn't see much in the way of how to do popups other than "Use the tools that are already provided."
JavaScript and the ability to do pupups and popunders was released by Netscape in 1997. I am sure that by the time the '229 patent was filed there were a lot of tutorials that explained how to do pupup and popnder ads and did it better than this paptent.
It seems like they could just block torrent traffic for 15 days. Of course, that probably isn't the Draconian measure the backers of Hadopi had hoped to get.
I have lost 80 pounds since November 1. I more or less ignore every bit of nutritional advice issued by the US government for the last 40 years. My diet is 60% fat, 35% protein and less than 5% carbohydrates. Take the food pyramid and turn it upside down. I just had a complete blood panel and every single test came back in the normal or better than normal category. I was high in almost everything before the diet. I feel great and I am not hungry on 1200 -1500 calories a day.
What is making us fat is the food industry's regulatory capture of the FDA. Low fat/high carb diets are great for food industry profits but they lead to all sorts of health problems.
If you are in a 6 strikes plan it costs 35 for the innocent to protest. Maybe the additional 40 was tacked on when it occurred to someone that it was cheaper to be guilty than to be innocent.
You echo my feelings about Sony. Sony has demonstrated that they don't respect the customers first sale rights and feel that it is acceptable to remove product features after a customer makes a purchase. Ultimately they are an MPAA company and are likely to implement ill conceived anti-piracy measures in the future.
My personal policy still stands: Don't buy any Sony product that connects to the Internet and has rewritable firmware.
It's more likely to be something subtle that ruins his career or puts him in prison. Accidents draw too much public scrutiny because they are easy pickings for the press. The other options make the victim look unsympathetic so the media takes press conferences by the DA at face value and doesn't dig deeper.
This whole NSA thing is really about the failure of the media and its unwillingness to cover hard news. Bloggers have been on top of it for at least a decade. No doubt that is why there are efforts to deny first amendment press benefits to bloggers.
One big problem with fee-shifting remedies is that the only apply if the case goes to court and if you win the judge lottery and get one who will grant fees. Last time I checked the American Bar Association generally opposes loser-pay concepts and judges are ABA members. So even though judges can award fees they are usually reluctant to do so.
Fee shifting solutions are at best a bandaid on a fundamentally broken patent system.
I wasn't saying it was morally justified. But content providers would probably be better off if they understood the problem of piracy in this light. This casts piracy in the light of service issues with economic solutions. Content providers would be better off if they address the economic issues that drive piracy rather than wasting huge amounts of money and political capital trying to get legal solutions.
The fact that we haven't seen big Pharma beating the war drums in the past few days suggests to me that they are finally realizing that the only way they are going to preserve their patent playground is to get some of the non-pharma bad actors out of the business.
If you look at the proposals that are currently under active consideration you will notice that almost none of them would crimp patents on pharmaceutical companies. In fact it might help them with their efforts to evergreen their patents. A lot of the evergreened drugs use things like implementing slightly different compounding methods, and this is something that the PAE's could easily start going after.
Big pharma has always lobbied to not make any patent reforms in the fear that something might be done to harm their current monopoly system. Perhaps they now feel that the need for reform is so urgent that they need to get out in front of it to protect their own interests.
On the post: UK Prime Minister More Interested In Regulating The Internet Than Regulating Porn
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On the post: UK Prime Minister More Interested In Regulating The Internet Than Regulating Porn
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On the post: Jimmy Carter Says NSA Scandal Shows America Has No Functioning Democracy
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On the post: Pippa Middleton Sends Legal Threats Over Parody Twitter Account
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On the post: Pippa Middleton Sends Legal Threats Over Parody Twitter Account
"If you are famous mainly because of your association with someone else who is famous, sue other people to keep your name in the papers."
On the post: Anti-Piracy Agent Says Full Site Blocking Only Makes His Job Harder
On the post: Universal Music's Latest Bet On The Future: People Will Buy Music On Plastic Discs, Right?
On the post: How Important Are YouTube Game Videos To Game Companies?
On the post: Pilots Want To Know Why The DHS/CBP Are Searching Their Planes Without Warrants
On the post: NSA Boss Pretends He Doesn't Know Anything About Wikileaks
1) He was lying.
2) He is incompetent.
A person in his position should have been following Wikileaks closely. If he was, then he is lying. If he wasn't, he should have been.
On the post: Company Claims Patent On Pop-Up Ads, Sues Porn & Travel Companies
You can read the original patent at http://www.google.com/patents/US7353229 . To my untrained eye it looks like this is a patent for the idea of using mechanisms already in JavaScript and Java applets to present advertising. Reading the article as a programmer I didn't see much in the way of how to do popups other than "Use the tools that are already provided."
JavaScript and the ability to do pupups and popunders was released by Netscape in 1997. I am sure that by the time the '229 patent was filed there were a lot of tutorials that explained how to do pupup and popnder ads and did it better than this paptent.
On the post: First French File-Sharer Sentenced To Disconnection Under Hadopi; But Judgment May Be Unenforceable
On the post: DailyDirt: Diets That Work...?
What is making us fat is the food industry's regulatory capture of the FDA. Low fat/high carb diets are great for food industry profits but they lead to all sorts of health problems.
On the post: Warner Bros. Copyright Trolling Customers Of Non-Six Strikes ISPs
On the post: Sony At E3: Look How Unlike Microsoft We Are!
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My personal policy still stands: Don't buy any Sony product that connects to the Internet and has rewritable firmware.
On the post: Senator Wyden Calls For Hearings Over Intelligence Officials Lying To Congress
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This whole NSA thing is really about the failure of the media and its unwillingness to cover hard news. Bloggers have been on top of it for at least a decade. No doubt that is why there are efforts to deny first amendment press benefits to bloggers.
On the post: Chief Patent Judge Speaks Out Against Patent Trolls
Fee shifting solutions are at best a bandaid on a fundamentally broken patent system.
On the post: Russian 'Pirate' Unofficially Ports Xbox Live Arcade Game To The PC; Moral Conundrums And Fractured English Ensue
Re: Dumb to use morality
On the post: Russian 'Pirate' Unofficially Ports Xbox Live Arcade Game To The PC; Moral Conundrums And Fractured English Ensue
An interesting quote, although it isn't a foreign concept to regular readers here.
On the post: White House Also Releases Report On Patent Problems
If you look at the proposals that are currently under active consideration you will notice that almost none of them would crimp patents on pharmaceutical companies. In fact it might help them with their efforts to evergreen their patents. A lot of the evergreened drugs use things like implementing slightly different compounding methods, and this is something that the PAE's could easily start going after.
Big pharma has always lobbied to not make any patent reforms in the fear that something might be done to harm their current monopoly system. Perhaps they now feel that the need for reform is so urgent that they need to get out in front of it to protect their own interests.
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