IAAL but TINLA, but you should see an intellectual property lawyer and ask for their advice on the following matters. These things do vary by jurisdiction, although some of it is based on the TRIPS treaty (required for WTO membership), so it is getting to be less different between the jurisdictions. Firstly, if you did this as a contractor, you quite likely still own the copyright, unless you signed an agreement saying you don't. In that case he client has a licence, the scope of which may vary, but not so far as to allow them to apply their own copyright claim to the exclusion of you. Secondly, what they have done is quite likely a breach of your moral right of attribution, especially if you were a contractor rather than an employee. There may well be scope for a nice scary letter from a lawyer to get them to behave.

Sometims their "geek" is the problem. I got copies of emails from ASIC (an Australian government agency) under FOI, in which their supposed Internet geek insisted an email address was invalid because it didn't end with one of the big 5 TLDs or a CCTLD. When you're dealing with that kind of rank incompetence, you have no hope of getting a reasonable outcome.

I think, but am not certain, that you are being sarcastic. But just in case, spammers do not go to that kind of effort. They do not have time to go to that kind of effort.

This is not correct. Spammers and scammers always take the easy approach. It is simply too hard for them to compromise addresses at these intermediate points for it to be worth the effort to these people. It is much, much easier for them to compromise the holder of a large list of addresses, either directly, or via social engineering. To say there is another way that it could have happened is not to disprove the most likely case. A person who fell backwards into a volcano could have just lost their balance, but the person with the smoking gun standing 10 feet away is still going to prison. I have seen one case in Australia where one federal agency (the Australian Securities and Investments Commission - which is fairly universally known within the legal profession as the single most incompetent government agency by far in the country) compromised its entire database. A spammer was spamming for his fraudulent "university" and "charity", which was subsequently shut down by, it seems, Victorian education authorities. The spammer got hold of one of ASIC's databases of contact details, including email addresses. There were several complaints from users who did what the submitter did - had unique addresses for each organisation they deal with - and all received the spams at only the ASIC address and at none of their other (sometimes hundreds of) addresses. ASIC continue to deny that to this day and run the same bogus excuse you are attempting here. Some of the addresses were even obscure. ASIC actually likes to think it's qualified to advise on security too - it's a joke.

Teaching children religion at all is child abuse. Why, I hear you ask. There are many religions, and with the exception of omnitheistic religions, they all believe all the others are wrong. At the absolute best, only one can be right. But statistically speaking, a person taught a particular religion as a child is much more likely to adhere to that religion throughout life, to the exclusion of any other. That means the choice was made for them by their parents, rather than by rational and reasoned thought. And in most if not all cases that choice is wrong. That makes the teaching of religion to a child a form of indoctrination or brainwashing, done before the person has a chance to rationally form their own view, with the result that they may never be able to do so. No person ever has the right to do that to another, not even a parent. Especially not a parent. They are in a position of trust and responsibility, and grossly misuse that when they teach their children a particular religion.

What happens when they have IP data or licensed data that is being hosted by a cloud provider, or company to company lawsuit. Court case starts

IP in the cloud is worse to deal with than you can possibly imagine. For starters, when somebody grants you a license to use IP, as often as not (and especially in the case of IP licensed to big companies) the licence is restricted to a particular country. This is in part because your IP is a different thing in each country, governed by different rules. If you go storing licensed IP in the cloud, you don't know where it is going to end up - you have a very good chance of breaching your licence. If you think "that's OK, I'm not storing somebody's licensed IP", think again - unless you are wrote it (or are simply using somebody else's IP without a licence, in which case you have the problem anyway), then you are.

Then you have the problem that you likely haven't got the first inkling as to how intellectual property works in the, most likely third world country (if not now, then eventually), where the data is going to be stored.

If you're dealing with confidential information, can you be sure some minimum wage flunky you have never even met is not going to be prepared to sell it for enough money to keep them and their family in comfort for years to come? Can you be sure the law in the country where it happened even cares? The criminal element that wants to sell your private data isn't so much sitting behind a keyboard in their mother's basement writing viruses or using skripts to break into your systems - they're getting jobs at places like Google in their data centres, possibly with a fake resume with their buddies giving fake references.

Then you have the "cloud provider goes out of business or discontinues the service" issues (which are worse if the data is in a proprietary format).

The biggest problems with the cloud are not technical issues (although there are technical issues any time you keep your data "there" rather than "here"). The big problems are the law and people issues. From that perspective, the cloud is a huge risk. If you are capable of safely storing your data and maintaining your systems without the cloud, then you should do so. Leave the cloud for people who cannot look after themselves.

For years we have assumed the forbidden fruit was apples. Now we find it it was magic mushrooms.

I am a lawyer. Where most people talk about lying, we lawyers tend to use the terms "fraud" and "deception". Intentionally leaving something out to give a false impression is just as much fraud and deception as saying something that is flat-out false. Lawyers that are party to such conduct can lose their right to practice law.

The only exception to that is giving an answer to a direct question that does not seek the additional information - if the question has a "yes" or "no" answer, you can give that answer without further clarification. Of course you cannot normally ask such direct ("leading") questions of your own witness.

Good to see another lawyer here. Of course we normally use the term "fraud".

Come on, I can't be the only one that has a problem with a reference to vaporising an atmosphere.

This article is a mess, so I doubt this will be heard above the noise, but I'll try anyway.

1. There is nothing new or surprising in this. Copyright covers the instructions in the code, not the functionality. While it shouldn't have needed to be stated explicitly, it does go back to the Apple look and feel suits in the late 80s.
2. As others have pointed out, copyrights and patents are not the same thing.
3. While this is a non-binding Advocate-General opinion, most of the time the ECJ adopts the Advocate-General opinion.
4. This opinion is in the "duh" category. Nothing interesting or newsworthy here whatsoever.

IAAL, but probably not your lawyer.

Then you're probably not an "inventor" of the thing, let alone "the original inventor", and are probably signing a false declaration (punishable by imprisonment) if you sign the patent as an inventor, and you have a positive obligation (even if you don't sign) to tell the PTO everything you know that might invalidate the patent. See 37 FCR 1.57 and 1.63.

Any contrary direction by your employer is unlawful and of no effect.

Given the piss-poor quality of American software patent applications, these obligations are blatantly ignored in the vast majority of applications.

At least then the software industry would be getting screwed by professionals.

Not true. Most people with a complete lack of empathy constrain their behaviour for rational reasons. In fact high-empathy people without that rational self-control can be far more dangerous to people who are not close to them, than somebody who lacks empathy.

Technically we never stop accelerating. The consequences of ceasing to accelerate, given our velocity (with respect to the point at around the centre of the earth) of around 230 metres per second at the equator, would be rather unfortunate. Even if you were standing precisely on one of the poles, bits of you would be accelerating in different directions. Then there's the roughly 15,000 metres per second with respect to the centre of the Sun. Then there's the roughly 220,000 metres per second with respect to the centre of the galaxy. Which is just one of the reasons a certain automobile manufacturer had to concede that gravity is rather important.