You might disagree with the way the business world works--as I know many of the ignoramuses on slashdot do--but Apple is the only company in this whole new-age-of-computing fracas that has been playing by the rules.
Like not paying license fees for patents of other companies?
Yeah, Apple is soooo innocent...
E.U. Charter of Fundamental Rights, 'nuf said
There are different restrictions.
In Germany you can say what you want in your own home as well. Speech is limited in public (where public order could be disturbed).
So the differences are in detail, not in principle.
At which point they would have a hell of a time complying with the court order to turn over the information they didn't have on file.
Bullshit. In such cases companies are expected to produce the informationen THEY HAVE.
If they don't have the information they will not be help in contempt.
Otherwise they would be in trouble every time a user creates an account with fake data. (And you can be sure that such accounts exist in abundance.)
We provide you with a service, you agree to certain rules, or we kick you out. That's basic property rights.
That's how it works in the US.
In Germany (and Europe in general) contracts have to comply with the law. Certain things are mandatory and can not be waived by contract.
The idea here is that the relationship between a company and a consumer often isn't as equal as one may hope.
That's why certain parts of TOCs and EULAs are not valid in Europe, and some EULAs are invalid in general. (Like the EULA of Windows: Since the EULA is only shown after the consumer has already bought the product, the EULA is not part of the contract and can not be enforced by Microsoft.)
Feasability: The use of nicknames can only mandated if it is just and reasonable, so even the law here is not absolute. No one would require the use of pseudonyms from ebay or amazon.
Strangely enough, I have been using pseudonyms on eBay for like, ever.
Also, it is not about a requirement of Facebook users using pseudonyls, but about allowing the use of pseudonyms.
And it would be no problem for FB to allow that and support that technology-wise. So feasability is absolutely NOT a problem.
They basically only need to find a single feature that wouldn't work with pseudonyms and anything but real names isn't justified anymore.
Or they just block this one feature for people using pseudonyms.
Plus, since FB can hardly make sure that a name that I enter when creating an account is my real name, they can not really claim that their service wouldn't work with pseudonyms. I'm pretty sure that 10+% of the current accounts don't comply with the real name rule.
So this isn't about technical issues, this is only about Facebook changing their TOC (for German users, at least).
The only thing that is amazing about these cases is the degree of nationalism that Europeans display. Apparently you think that the entire rest of the world should obey European laws, while European companies can operate overseas free from the restraints of local laws.
When a US company does business in a European country they have to comply with the laws in that country, yes.
Facebook provides services directly aimed a German people via facebook.de.
You can now pretty much say whatever you want (but there may be restrictions on where you can say it).
And not being allowed to say whatever you want everywhere is not a limit, how, exactly?
When the streaming service Kino.to was taken down, there was talk about going after the users. How, if downloading is legal?
The current law (Â53 UrhG) contains the clause 'unless from obviously illegal sources', and that's broad and unclear enough to catch most downloaders, if needed.
I discovered this the hard way when I just got battlefield 2 for the 10th anniversary of 1942.
The 10th anniversary of 1942 was some 60 years ago.
I didn't know that you had computers back then and that GamSpy is that old...
Which mostly shows that you don't know much about names: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kim_(given_name)
I didn't have a problem with him until I read his wikipedia page. Now I have a big problem with him. I suggest you do the same. If you're basing your opinion of him on the fact that you liked downloading things from megaupload and hate the MPAA, you're missing a lot of real info.
I don't like what I heard about his personality, but it doesn't matter: If somebody is a douche or not has no bearing on whether the actions taken against him and his company are legal and befitting the alledged crime or not.
This is the point where the charges get dropped.
I doubt this would safe them.
When they illegaly spied on a NZ resident they broke the law.
If I where Dotcom I would still drag them to court even if all charges would be dropped.
In other words, many US companies are excluded by default from providing cloud services to many European agencies.
The DPD should apply not only to European agencies but also citizen of a EU country.
So companioes like Dropbox should in theory not provide any service in the EU at all.
I personally am using German hosting providers that state that they only use server located in Germany/Europe.
True, GOG doesn't force it on you, but the others do. And GOG would obviously *like* you to use it, which is why I count it in the same list.
You wrote about services that *require* a running client.
That is not true for GoG, so it's inclusion is outright wrong. No matter what they would like you to do.
Also, I thought they only have a download manager and not a full fledged client? (I might be wrong here.)
"Protozoa are small, and bacteria are small, but viruses are smaller than the both put together."
