They offered to settle for what worked out to around $2 or so per song shared (note: she was sharing around a couple thousand songs--the trial only concerned 24 for technical and practical reasons). That's a lot less than someone would normally pay for a license to redistribute songs to an arbitrary number of untracked people for a flat rate. Note also that even though they only sued over a small fraction of the songs she was sharing, the minimum possible statutory damages would be quite a bit larger than the settlement offer. She knew she was guilty, and should have known they could prove it, so should have jumped at such a reasonable offer.

Then, after she stupidly decided to fight, and lost, and got caught tampering with evidence and perjuring herself (things that do not endear one to a jury--the same jury that will be deciding the damages), and got hit with damages much larger than the settlement offer, the RIAA again offered to settle, again for a reasonable amount. Again she refused, got another trial, lost again, and that jury went for an even bigger amount of damages.

I believe there was a third settlement offer after that.

I question the ethics of her lawyer. I think he's putting satisfying his legal fantasy of winning a stunning case at the Supreme Court ahead of his client's best interests.

That's ridiculous. If the punishment for an illegal act is simply what it would have cost to do the act in the first place, then there is no reason to ever do the act legally. Doing it illegally always has a better expected outcome than doing it legally.

Furthermore, you didn't even calculate the costs correctly under your flawed model. $24 would be the cost to legally download 24 songs for personal listening. The cost for a license to legally download 24 songs and redistribute them to an arbitrary number of strangers for no addition fees and with no tracking or reporting requirements would be a lot more than $1/song.

It was designed to find potential infringement on consumer-oriented sharing services where people can sign up and post or stream video without any screening beforehand. On such services, the fast majority of videos that get caught will in fact be blatant infringement, not fair use.

There are two ways to stream on UStream and avoid the risk of a false positive. First, you can use the paid service, instead of the ad-supported service. They assume that people who are actually paying are probably not pirates, and disable the automated copyright checking. Second, if you are using the ad-supported service you can notify them in advance of broadcasts of this kind and they will disable the checking. The organizers of the Hugo ceremony did not do this.

The fact that the songs normally retail for $0.99 is completely irrelevant. It would perhaps be relevant if he were merely downloading songs for his own personal enjoyment. That's not, however, what he was doing. He was downloading and then redistributing.

The relevant price comparison should be to the cost of a fixed price license that allows the licensee to make unlimited copies and redistribute them without restriction to anyone in the world, with no requirement to track or report on any of this to the licensor.

That license is going to cost a lot more than $0.99 per song.

There is some disagreement in legal circles as to whether or not it is possible to put a work into the public domain in some countries (including the United States). In US copyright law, a work that otherwise would be copyrighted can be in the public domain because the law explicitly says it is not copyrighted (e.g., works authored by the US government) or it can be in the public domain because its copyright expired. There's nothing in there that says you can actually put a work into the public domain.

Better to go with a permissive license like BSD and be on firm ground rather than trying for public domain and having to live with uncertainty.

No, a one time pad with a true random key is truly unbreakable.

What you've overlooked is that when your hypothetical Godlike being sees all possible computed plain texts, that consists of every possible message of the length of the cipher text.

Note that what the Godlike being sees when he tries all possible decryptions does not depend on what the message is (other than the length). Thus, he gets absolutely no information from the cipher text (other than the length).

Try thinking about it with a small example and that should help you see it. For instance, do a 3 bit message. We've got 8 possible messages: 000, 001, 010, 011, 100, 101, 110, and 111. Let's say you know that only 001, 010, and 100 make any sense. Alice sends to Bob the encrypted message 110.

When your Godlike being considers all possible decryptions, he gets 000, 001, 010, 011, 100, 101, 110, and 111, depending on whether the key was 110, 111, 100, 101, 010, 011, 000, or 001.

So he looks at these, and picks out 001, 010, and 100 as the only meaningful messages. Now what? He has no idea which is the right message.

Now perhaps he knows that some of the meaningful messages are more likely than others. Maybe he knows that 99% of the time, Alice sends 010. So he will probably be right if he guesses that this message was 010.

However, he'd have had exactly the same chance of being right if he had guessed 010 without even looking at Alice's message!

The link somehow got lost in my above post. Here it is.

Standing desks are not good for you. Unfortunately neither are sitting desks if you sit too long. There's a good short look at the benefits and risks by the Cornell Ergonomics group.

Here is the bottom line from the aforementioned article:

Atomic clocks based on hyperfine transitions of electrons in rubidium-87 are readily available commercially for a couple thousand dollars.

It's done this way because there are two possibilities. First, the judge could decide the APIs can be copyrighted. In this case, we need the jury to decide on the factual issue of whether or not Google infringed.

Second, the judge could decide that APIs cannot be copyrighted. Since this is a decision on a matter of law, it can be appealed. If the appeals court decides the judge was wrong, the case is remanded back, and then we again need the jury to decide on the factual issues of whether or not Google infringed.

Since this remanding back could happen months, or even years (especially if the appeals court decision is appealed and the Supreme Court takes the case), getting a jury decision then would require getting a brand new jury, getting all the witnesses back, and doing the damn trial over again. Ugh.

It's much more efficient to have the current jury take a look at the infringement issue now, even if it turns out ultimately that APIs are not copyrightable and so they are just considering a hypothetical.

Correct. This is done in the interest of judicial economy. Suppose the judge decided the API issue first, and suppose he decided that APIs are not subject to copyright, and thus the issue of infringement never reaches the jury. Then Oracle appeals. Eventually, the appeals court (and possibly the Supreme Court) weigh in. Suppose that the higher courts decide the judge was wrong, and subject to copyright.

The case would then come back to the district court--and they'd have to bring in a new jury and bring all the witnesses back and do a whole new trial to decide the infringement issue.

By having the jury decide infringement now, if the judge decides APIs cannot be copyrighted and turns out to be wrong, then when the case comes back to him he will have all he needs to render a final decision. There will be no need to run a whole new trial.

The GPLv3 anti-Tivoization clause only applies to software distributed with the device, as part of a transaction in which the right of possession and use of the the device is transferred to the recipient in perpetuity or for a fixed term. In other words, it would apply to any GPLv3 that Apple ships with the phone or iPad. It does not apply to any software that Apple distributes separately, which includes all software Apple distributes via the app store. The anti-Tivoization clause was very narrowly tailored to take out Tivoization and nothing else.

The GPL (both v2 and v3) are incompatibility with the Apple app store is due to the app store terms and condition. As a condition of using the app store, the end user must agree to not redistribute downloaded apps or to reverse engineer them. This counts as additional terms under GPL, and GPL forbids that.

Patent infringement cases are civil cases, not criminal cases.

RMS made a similar argument.