My bet is this fuck up will cost her the real case.

Unlikely. I doubt any of this screw-up will be admissible in the real case, as it is irrelevant to the matters under trial there.

What interests me is the results of the "oops" case. A lot of that depends on whether service was properly carried out. If so, then the $11m judgment will probably all go away, but it'll be difficult to get much in the way of sanctions or a successful countersuit. When served for a trial, you need to answer it! Absent a defendant, the judge acted properly. There are no disputed facts, so the plaintiff's assertions are more or less taken as gospel.

If service was improperly carried out, then sanctions are probable, and the judgment goes away instantly.

I remember what Prof. Alan Meltzer (Physics, RPI) said on the matter of using his own textbook. He made a personal point of never using a book he'd written. Either the book should cover everything he wanted the class to cover, and then his lecture is superfluous; or the lecture is necessary to supplement the book, and he wrote a poor book.

I'm not really sure I agree with him, since there's plenty of value in classroom examples which don't belong in a textbook. Nevertheless, the thought bears consideration.

1 April, 2040:

Three-digit Slashdot ID sells at auction for $240,000!

The entire point of IP is to encourage social and cultural development through the protection of initial investment. The fashion industry demonstrates what happens when IP is weakened or non-existant - a disincentive to create and develop and a thriving copy-culture.

Now that's an interesting point. Let me ask you, what's the downside in software development? A good software developer should copy as much as possible — yes, legally, from good sources, etc. The whole point to code reuse is that one guy does it right and everyone can use that "best" solution instead of reinventing a slightly less round wheel.

I believe that a good programmer should feel a disincentive to create. That's something which took me years to learn as a young programmer. I've lost track of the number of times I wrote quick-n-dirty linked lists because that was less work than learning the interfaces to existing solutions. I was wrong, and eventually I figured it out. What's wrong with encouraging programmers to figure it out earlier?

I'm not advocating zero copyright for source code, but a greatly reduced term seems perfectly fine with me. Although there are some strong economics ideas that we don't even need copyright to have a thriving open source community. See, E.g., Michele Boldrin and David Levine's paper on Market Structure and Property Rights in Open Source Industries (PDF).

Are you thinking of the Nellie Bly case? Or did someone decide to try the experiment again?

Ayn Rand was right about one thing--that governments make needless laws to create criminals of its citizens in hopes they'll pay them to not be criminals any more

I've never subscribed to that view. I see the situation as an unfortunate interaction of incentives. I believe that my (USA) legislators make laws to justify their positions. They have to be seen to be doing something, or we might vote for someone else next term. (Active looks better than passive to us voters, you'll never get elected on a platform of "I won't pass new laws.") The accumulation — nay, sedimentation! — of laws just stems from that. Meanwhile, law enforcement has learned that the best way to go after criminals is to stretch those laws to the fullest, and to use the latest and greatest ones which haven't been suitably narrowed by the courts. Since law enforcement is more familiar with the latest mess than the general population, that tends to work.

And, of course, a lot of law enforcement officers know a criminal when they see him. They're also usually right, but heaven help you if one decides that you're it.

If anybody knows a way to break that series of incentives that doesn't involve warm, fuzzy "just don't do that!" notions, I'd love to hear it. My persistent gripe with people who want to change the world is that they never seem to account for the fact that people will always tend to follow these sorts of incentives, or they will be replaced by those who will.

Fortunately, there's more incentive for computer standards to be comprehensible and implementable. Over time, I think that'll work itself out.

There's plenty of precedent for it. Consider Max Euwe, who was the 5th World Champion of chess, and the amateur heavyweight boxing championship of Europe. (Although I don't think it was at the same time.) It may have contributed to his reputation as being one of the most sportsmanlike world champions — Max was always willing to wager his championship, while many other champions found plenty of excuses not to stake it.

It appears you don't understand his concern. Whatever YOUR goal is, it seems to enable what he's worried about - once you enable the ISPs & content owners (which are rapidly merging into being the same entities) control over what KIND of connection you can have - anonymous or not - they will always default to non-anonymous so they can control what you can access.

Perhaps I'm a little slow here, but I thought I'd addressed his concern: today's existing Internet doesn't go away. It exists in parallel with other (private) networks. You cannot make the situation inherently less anonymous by adding more options, as one can always eschew all other options to stick with the existing Internet. If the existing Internet doesn't change, then mathematically, anonymity is non-decreasing.

Is the concern that ISPs will stop providing access to the base Internet? Economically, that doesn't pass the laugh test. Any ISP that doesn't let you connect to the base Internet will be ridiculously uncompetitive. The only way this could happen is if a legislative solution is enforced. Picture the headline: "Congress votes to disconnect the USA from the Internet!"

One can argue that successful deployment of this sort of solution will change the existing Internet. For example, there is the potential to reduce the traffic load. E.g., if everybody migrates to a spam-free email network (which doesn't actually need an isolated network), the ROI on spam email will finally drop to the point where it largely ceases. With no SMTP traffic (legitimate or spam), it becomes a bit harder to hide your traffic in the background noise. It's even possible that eventually, years and years down the road, the existing Internet could become so undesirable to the typical consumer that people cease to subscribe. Then you might have a real concern, since oppressive regimes could assume that anyone still using it has something to hide. Personally, I doubt the existing Internet would ever come to that point without an equivalent replacement, although there's certainly a hint of "Laslo, I respect you but I graduated" to the discussion.

A larger concern is something you mentioned as a side point: ISPs and content providers are beginning to merge. A lot of the technical design is in place to provide incentives to entrepreneurs. But if an ISP decides to enter the market with a private network offering, they have an unfair competitive edge: they can use their own infrastructure at cost while charging outsiders a hefty fee. Fixing that detail probably takes a legislative solution. That's the sort of thing which really worries me, because it's hard to force a legislative solution against that sort of lobby.

Who is the receiver? Me, or my ISP?

You are the receiver. Your ISP is a carrier. You elect to connect to private networks, who may charge subscription fees of you. For use of the ISP's network, those same private network owners may pay for their provisioned capacity.

...what happens if my ISP decides - of its own free will or because Disney/Government forced it to - to deny anonymous inbound traffic? I don't have any choice of ISPs where I live, and of course they too would be forced to obey such laws.

This is possible, sure. Just as, today, the same lobbying group could attempt to force the government to mandate that your ISP sniff your every packet to detect that you're pirating Steamboat Willie. However, bear in mind that the goal is to add an economic incentive to the ISP to fight restrictions. The ISP wants to sell services to as many private network providers as possible because they are being paid for the reserved capacity. When the copyright cartel meets the ISP lobby in Congress, there's at least a chance that things could improve. As it stands, the only ISP incentive to fight it is the cost of the monitoring equipment, and I'm sure the copyright cartel would be thrilled to provide it to them, along with their own custom software....

...the rest of us are not allowed to keep our own anonymous network, because anonymity is a threat to those in power by making monitoring people harder. Please cease researching growth hormones for Big Brother, it's huge enough already.

Either I have not explained things adequately or you have misunderstood. The goal is to enable disruptive, innovative network technologies which cannot currently be deployed because they might conflict with the existing technologies. (For a particularly disruptive example, look at Decongestion Control [PDF].) There's no desire to block existing technologies, and I'd fully expect the existing Internet to continue alongside the new networks. Retaining the existing Internet is a primary goal of the research thrust, and I'd reject as unworkable any new architecture that didn't enable it.

Really, the most undesirable thing about the model is that it enables a lot more nickel-and-diming from the ISPs and the network providers. You might pay a base fee for ISP connectivity, followed by an additional fee for access to the base Internet, then you pay a fee to connect to the SpamFreeEmailNetwork, and so forth ad nauseum. But at least you only need to pay for the services you use, and I could see package deals (analogous to cable channel bundles) becoming a selling point, too.

This isn't pure rhetoric and sarcasm, whether the author meant it that way or not.

Credential Grab: I'm a doctoral candidate, and this is in my area of research.

The right solution, without considering feasibility, is that traffic may be anonymous, but that receivers should be able to refuse to receive anonymous traffic, and should also be able to refuse to grant resources (such as incoming network capacity) to that traffic. The current Internet architecture doesn't make this technically feasible, as the sender is generally in control of your inbound network capacity. There's a research push toward architectures that remove this limitation, such as the Internet Indirection Infrastructure (i3). (Not one of my favorites, but it illustrates the point.)

My personal goal is that we develop an internet architecture which allows for provisioned virtual network links on shared physical infrastructure. Then Kaspersky (and anyone who agrees with him) really can have an isolated network, carried on the same physical infrastructure, while those who think anonymity is an important goal can have their own isolated network, sharing hardware but with neither able to impact the other. Network overlays can do all of this right now except for the provisioned links, and MPLS and similar technologies could already enable provisioning if they were widely adopted and deployed.

(My own research is into high-speed overlay hosting platforms.)

*cough* Actually, the girl's a cute young red-head who happens to like sharp, shiny objects. I make knives; she thinks bladesmiths are sexy. I'm definitely not going to argue.

Wait, what racist overtone? Just about anyone who's actually on the lookout for older manuscripts knows that there's not a lot of middle eastern content available. It's just a fact. An unfortunate one, to be sure, for historians, but there's no racism. You're being oversensitive.

Europe, on the other hand, has a great deal of published archaeological research. For example, if I want to research medieval knives, I can find a wealth of information on English artifacts. When I tried to find references on Armenian specimens, the only thing I could find was a 3-volume Russian dig report. The situation is endlessly frustrating.

You're leaving out the common law tort, slander of title. Presuming the OP can prove he owns the copyrights, that's a slam dunk, since they did contact his clients.

Good idea. I was beginning to think I was the only one here who'd actually buy the book if it actually existed, just to have it on the shelf.