That's an interesting question. I suspect that a clevel plaintiffs' attorney would suggest that this action suggests that the manufacturer in conceeding that it has a duty to the of care to the end-user. The company would argue back that it isn't appropriate to use proactive safety measures against them.

(For your reference, there are four elements of a classic tort case:
1. Demonstrating that the defendant had a duty to observe or protect the safety of the plaintiff
2. The defendant breached that duty and endangered the health and safety of the plaintiff
3. The plaintiff suffered injury in some form
4. The plaintiff's injuries were caused by the negligence of the defendant.)

I suspect the manufacturer would contest the idea that it had a duty of care, but I think the courts would infer some duties (perhaps, for example, the duty to warn) anyway. Note: I am by no means a products liability lawyer, so take my analysis with several shakers of salt.

To me, though, the really interesting question will arise when a 3D manufacturer develops internal software that physically disables the printer from being able to print potentially lethal items. I understand certain copiers already detect currency and refuse to copy it. The fun case will be when one printer company demonstrates that those controls are physically possible, but another company does not implement similar controls, and someone injures themselves.

Reading these comments makes me dispair about basic understanding of the law and government's role in preventing "censorship" by a private corporation.

Question: Is a company engaging in censorship somehow violating the constitution or the law?

Answer: No. The Constituton limits the governments' actions. It is designed to protect the people from government infringement of certain delineated rights. There is nothing in the Constitution or federal law that prevents private corporations from expressing an opinion about the desirable use of their own products. Government may regulate certain behaviors (i.e., discrimination in hiring or health and safety), but is prohibited from picking winners and losers based on political belief. Corporations are subject to no such restrictions.

Question: Is it "illegal" for a company to revoke a lease because the lessee is using the lessor's product in a manner that the lessor thinks is disagreeable?

Answer: No. The lessor is a private company with rights to its own personal political positions and beliefs. There is nothing "illegal" about the company enforcing its contractual rights because it dislikes the use its product is being put to by this particular lessee. (Again, leaving aside certain lawful restrictions on a company's conduct). Instead, it is the terms of the lease that will govern the relationship between the parties.

Question: Is it legal for a lease to differentiate between political views?

Answer: It's very much up to the individual parties to craft a contract that governs the lessee's and lessor's rights. The point is that the parties have complete freedom to arrange the lease as they see fit. In fact, it is common for a lessor to include very broad re-take rights into the contract. If the lessee believes that the lessor has repossessed the equipment in violation of the contract, then he or she has rights under contract law, and the appropriate remedy is to sue (or not agree to the lease to begin with).

Question: Even if we assume it is legal to print a gun under federal law, the law of all fifty states and every local jurisdiction, does the legality/non-legality affect the rights of the lessor to repossess the printer under the lease?

Answer: No. The legality of the finished product has no bearing on the contractual rights of the parties to enforce the conditions of the lease.

Question: Does the 3-D printer manufacturer have legitimate legal concerns, even if the printed guns were unambiguously legal?

Answer: Absolutely. The manufacturer could easily be the target of a law suit for negligence on the part of a victim of the printed gun. The civil liability claims could be enormous. Even the potential threat of such litigation could raise his insurance premiums or cause existing insurers to rescind their coverage. Remember -- in America, each party typical pays its own legal costs. A law suit does not have much merit to bankrupt a small business. And here, the manufacturer was on actual notice that the lessee wanted to make a gun, which would help any plaintiff in establishing that the manufacturer knew or should have known that his product could be used to harm people.

The manufacturer could also be subject to some far-fetched legal theory advanced by a prosecutor in some random jurisdiction. Or he could find his product subject to import/export restrictions in the US or other jurisdictions.

PS - It's not clear to me what the law says on whether printing guns is legal. I'm a lawyer, and spent maybe 10 minutes reading a couple of the various rules. It was enough to determine that it's a complicated patchwork of federal and state rules. In anyone has a lawyer willing to say that such behavior is unambiguously legal under all federal, state and local laws, without any thought or research, should find themselves a new lawyer.

Summary: I'm trying to keep this post a-political and just about general legal concepts. We as educated Americans (or interested foreigners) really need to appreciate when Constitutional rights are at stake and when the Constitution has nothing to do with the underlying issue. This is one of the latter situations imho.

And yes - I am a lawyer - I am not your lawyer. So please don't rely on this posting for legal advise; merely commen sense.

Just to be clear - are you suggesting that private hospitals (a) should be forced to bear the costs of treating uninsured persons in extremis and pass through those costs to shareholders; or (b) should turn away a bleeding child because he or she doesn't have insurance? If (b), I admire your adherence to the free market, but question your humanity. If (b), then I question why individual shareholders should be required to finance a public policy mandate. Passing through these public good costs to society makes good sense to me, but I'm curious what exactly you are advocating.

This I do not understand: you are not required to purchase anything. You can elect not to purchase health care. However, there is a tax consequence.

Moreover, I don't understand why otherwise pro-market folks are opposed to this. The more you contribute to governmental healthcare costs, the higher your taxes go. It's a pretty straightforward cause/effect analysis.

Just FYI, Takoma Park's liberalness (which includes a bead store, vegan restaurants and the rest) has little to do with the Adventists, who aren't really a force in town. Instead, Takoma Park has a long hippy tradition and is filled with aging boomers who moved to the community because of its reputation as a liberal enclave. It's often referred to as the "Berkely of the East" and other such monickers.

My favorite nuclear free story growing up was that the police department looked for a while like it was going to have to buy Volvo squad cars, because every other major manufacturer had some toe hold in nuclear weapons. Not sure how they managed to avoid that, but they did. Similarly, when the transit authority wanted to build a major highway right through the middle of Takoma Park (which at that point was a sleepy middle class suburb full of WWII bungallos), the local community rallied together and killed the massive highway plan on the Maryland side of Washington, DC. Those techies in Northern Virginia who enjoy the Mixed Bowl during their morning commute see what could have happened to Maryland. Of course, nothing's that simple -- but it's refreshing that there's still a place that combates global warming by banning gasoline-powered lawn mowers.....

Takoma Park was a great place to grow up. Crazy as they are, it's refreshing to have such a community of idealists. Even though it seems like the whole community has gentrified over the last few years, I still love it, even as I've transitioned to the Dark Side (business! Eeek!)

Garak was a traitor?? Oh, I'm sorry to hear that. Stopped watchign after a few seasons, always knew he was a double/triple agent, but it never occurred to me he would have real allegiance to one side or the other. *sigh*

But probably not for the reasons you think.... I have been a subscriber to the Sunday dead-tree edition of the paper for several years now. This, in theory, gives me free access to all online content. But the login system never remembers me. Not on my work computer, not on my iPad, not on my home computer. And the login is often squirrely too.

So I typically use my "20 free articles a month" rather than login each and every freak'n time. I know, this doesn't exactly rise to the level of suffering that really warrants a post - but it's pretty damn annoying. Going to 10 just makes the site even less user-friendly than it already is. Is it really that hard to develop a login system that works???

The summary of this article is just wrong. The Supreme Court has not said that the issue is unclear - it has merely agreed to hear a case about whether a specific decision made by the U.S. Circuit Court for the District of Columbia conflicts with existing Supreme Court precedent.

To the extent that you can infer anything from the Supreme Court's grant of certiorari, it is equally likely to conclude that they took the case in order to slap down the D.C. Circuit's novel approach to the 4th Amendment.

The existing precedent, by the way, is that we have no reasonable expectation of privacy in our cars. As a result, it is not an "unreasonable" search or seizure to attach beepers or other devices to our cars in order to monitor our movements.

In fact, the judge in this case does an excellent job summarizing and applying the relevant case law. He points to a case from the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals (which is the relevant circuit for St. Louis) clearly stating that putting a tracker on a car and then later retreiving it is not a constitutionally prohibited search or seizure.

Agree or disagree on whether we have a reasonable expectation of privacy in our cars - the judge in this case acted properly. It would have violated another constitutional right - the one to a speedy trial - if he had simply delayed the issuance of his opinion until after the Supreme Court issues its (entirely discretionary) opinion.

What a silly article.

Blackberry 10 is so much a better name than BBX. I mean, really - what the ****! That's a terrible name! Why would you engage in litigation over it? Maybe if they start losing more cases, they'll start doing better....

I can't tell whether you are serious or not.... Just as one example, building those wind farms is very expensive. Averaged over the expected life time of the turbines, it probably costs around 10 cents per watt - which, depending on where in the country you live - is probably more than you are paying now.

I won't even talk about the cost of transmission lines, distribution lines, or the price of backup power when the wind doesn't blow. They said nuclear would be too cheap to meter too... They were wrong. Nothing in this life is free, my friend.....

We are also paid to have a sense of humor about when we read /.....

But more to the point - do you really think burger flippers, on their feet 24/7, have more downtime than lawyers?!? Now that's funny.

I filled out the survey, but I will share my major concerns here as well. I use IE 7. My company mandates its use and locks things down fairly well. I am a lawyer interested in science and tech policy, but with no actual computer skills (i.e., I programmed a few lines of HTML in my youth, but that's about it).

Over the past few years, my user experience has gone into the gutter, with very few corresponding benefits. Boxes often overlap, and the whole site freezes on a regular basis. Most other sites are fine.

As a result, I show up less. Sure, I could read it on my home computer, but eh. What's the point if you can't sit on a conference call while reading?

Wait a second - people are faulting HP from diagnosing a problem and then (god forbid) taking time to put together a business plan and roll out the anouncement of said business plan?!? God forfend! No, instead they should continue on their pre-annointed course, never deviating, regardless of market conditions. (Iceberg dead-ahead? Pshaw. That's not what we decided three weeks ago!) Any major company-shaping (or company-shaking) decision + short-term loss in stock value = Law suit. My reasonably large company takes many bold positions/reinventions as the industry changes. Companies like mine get sued all the time. They are all frivolous (just like this one). They all allege massive insider conspiracies (just like this one). They allege you-made-a-decision-a-certified-moron-wouldn't-make (just like this one). The only news here is who is doing publicity for the law firm - they are apparently good at their job and maybe should be hired in the future. Otherwise, what a joke - carry on.

The entry/non-entry of Dr. King's speech into the public domain is a famous case in copyright circles - and in fact, was one reason the copyright laws were changed. It's a fascinating story.

First you need to realize that prior to 1976, unless you put a copyright mark on a document and properly registed it, it was presumed to be in the public domain as soon as it was made public. This led to a number of problems and disputes, and today is widely viewed as being overly punative to people who simply forget to put the mark on a document before releasing it. Today's copyright laws eliminate the "all or nothing" nature of the 1909 Act, and sensibly declare that copyright rests with the author, regardless of whether they properly marked it.

Second, there's an interesting history behind the I Have a Dream speech. While the factual accounts of exactly what happened differ, Dr. King and his associates apparently distributed advance copies of the speech without the copyright mark on them to a group of journalists. Recognizing that this was a serious error, others within Dr. King's circle reportedly re-collected each of the advance copies, and then redistributed them with the copyright mark hand written on the document. So there was a factual question as to whether the textual copy of the speech was put into the public domain or not registered with the copyright office correctly.

There was less dispute over the video and audio. As others have noted, Dr. King improvised/departed from the prepared text a number of times. So there was an argument that, even if Dr. King had lost the copyright on the original text (which is itself debatable), he maintained the copyright on the "performance" of the speach, and was thus entitled to a separate copyright (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estate_of_Martin_Luther_King,_Jr.,_Inc._v._CBS,_Inc.).

I also believe that the speech is freely licensed to anyone engaging in educational activities - so it's not quite as eggregious on the part of the family as many have suggested.

Let's stop conflating the whether an emissions market is mechanically sound from the politically-charged question of whether it is wise to have established an emissions market for carbon. Emissions markets are common and typically function well. There are established markets in the United States for SOx, NOx, Particulate Matter and other various pollutants emitted from large stationary sources (i.e., power plants, cement factories, etc).

These markets are an excellent way of determining the marginal cost of complying with a particular regulatory regime. I emphasize that last statement because that is what we are really asking is what is the marginal cost of complying with a particular set of rules? Emissions markets are very effective at determining that marginal price.

Of course, the function of the market says nothing about (i) the social utility of complying with the particular rules or (ii) whether the market will actually limit the non-desirable behavior regulators are attempting to stiffle. Whether the market is going to increase that social good depends on on your base-case assumptions. Is global climate change real? Is it exascerbated by CO2 emissions? What is your assumption of CO2 emissions today? What type of compliance regime is utilized to police participation in the market? How strong is the evidence that purchasing and retiring a ton of CO2 from the market actually leads to a ton of CO2 not being put ito the atmosphere?

Personally, I think the evidence suggests that global climate change is happening, and that it is highly likely that man-made emissions are driving the process. But regardless of whether you share my opinion of the science -- you should agree that an emissions exchange is an excellent way of setting the marginal price of complying with a specific set of rules. In short -- just because you are a climate change skeptic doesn't mean you should ignore the rules of economics as well as chemisty.