DMCA takedown notices have rather specific requirements. If they don't meet those requirements then they are, in fact, illegal.

This is starting to sound like the witch test from Monty Python and The Holy Grail.

Unless he stole Adobe code, the DMCA takedown notice was probably illegal. Giving people the right to read what they bought is not a violation of copyright that DMCA takedowns are meant to refer to..

copyright gives you the right to control other people's ability to make and distribute further copies of your work, not the right to control how they use the copies tha they have -- or even the right to give the copy that you sold them to someone else (aka 'the right of first purchase').

DRM is being used to control the end-user far beyond what copyright is supposed to be about.

The GPL, on the other hand, only kicks in if/when you go beyond what copyright would allow a normal user to do (i.e. when you try to make/distribute further (possibly modified) copies). Until that point, the GPL claims no ability to control what you do.

That doesn't matter, as long as you're not paying for the download.

Counterfeits can often be convincingly realistic, and since counterfeiting benefits terrorism, you don't want to buy them. The only way to make sure that you never buy a counterfeit DVD is .... to never buy a physical DVD.

This means that downloading movies (whether legitimately or not) rather than buying DVDs (whether legitimate or not -- since we really can't always tell the difference) is a counter-terrorism effort.

Long Live Counter-Terrorism!

"Those who take me seriously, Deserve to."

Shane Conolley

George Bush Jr. is the best thing to have happened to Al Quaeda since their inception.

QED.

Throw the bastards in jail.

In any event, enemies of democracy are enemies of the state.

No. Diebold marketed their machines as being capable of producing secure and accurate results, and delivered something mind-numbingly incompetent (at best).

'criminal negligence causing ....' All that is required is to prove a willingness to accept an unconscionable level of risk. All that it is necessary to prove is that diebold knew tha their code was broken and was capable of being used to produce a subverted election,and that they promoted this product as something entirely different.

Code has been found in the diebold system that has no reasonable explanation for its existence other than the rigging of elections.

In any event, this stuff is not a case of the system messing up randomly or just working badly. Diebold has marketed their system as being capable of producing secure, accurate election results, and is nowhere near that level of competence.

Given the brutal simplicity of what is required, I see no reason why they shouldn't be held to the same level of responsibility as someone who is making a heart monitor, or even an electronic slot machine.

An, yes, you're right. You're not an apologist for anybody, you're an apologist for someone very, very specific -- Diebold.

Yeah, better to give them Linux and show them how to install CSS to view the DVDs that they paid good money for.

Hey, these companies were secure in the knowledge that a critical piece of software was supported by a massive company like Microsoft -- and Microsoft is not going away (just their support).

This compares to companies that trust in open source... You never know when the company that's at the centre of open source development is going to go belly up, leaving customers with nothing more than the source code and the ability to support the product themselves for as long as it's important enough to them.

/me removes tongue from cheek.

Nice analogy, but -- in this case, childs didn't steal or vandalize anything. The system ran just fine without his passwords.

The fact that the city hired some consultants that broke the system while trying to fix it isn't his problem.

Well, that's better than taking responsibility for a roll out of Vista/Win7 to all 120,000 desktops.

sometimes you just have to recognize the difference between pointing a pea-shooter at your foot, and a shotgun.

Because Apple's OSs are designed by their engineers, while Microsoft's OSs seem to be designed by their marketing department.

I go a completely different path:

Microsoft's mantra to keep people from trying Linux has been "

• It's not compatible with windows XP,
• there are so many devices that don't work with it,
• people are going to have to learn a new system, and
• your current software may not work with it.
• .....

Now that all of these issues apply to people 'upgrading' to Vsta/Win7, why not actually upgrade their system by going to an OS that really works for it's users, like Gnu/Linux?