No, but at least they could be caught and stopped for defying those regulations hopefully before they do too much damage. If you don't even have those regulations in place, then you can't really do anything but watch and wait for them to do something more serious.

Exactly right! What a lot of people don't understand is that the First Sale Doctrine is a defense not an offense. In other words, if you buy a copyrighted item, like a book, and resell it, the First Sale Doctrine protects you from getting successfully sued by the copyright holder for doing so. In other words, it is a defense. It does not however, put any obligations on the publisher to provide any support to ensure that these later customers can use the product. I'm not saying Ubisoft is doing the right thing here, but this really has nothing to do with the First Sale Doctrine.

Actually they can and have done so in the past, primarily in the field of cryptography, a field for which quantum computers might have important applications, so his fears are not unfounded.

Actually, it's the kids who are fucked. Sometimes literally, as children are much more likely to be sexually abused in a foster home than by real parents. (That's not to say MOST foster parents abuse kids; they don't. Most are very good people. But kids are statistically more likely to be abused in that way by non-parental guardians than by parents.)

True, unfortunately, it also reinforces the lesson that mistrusting authority can get your kids taken away, even if only temporarily. This can be very traumatic for many kids.

Can you please cite some examples of this harm? Thank you in advance.

That's absolute poppycock. I can't fathom how you were modded up to +5. According to your logic, in the US, if the Democrats are in power, no one is allowed to criticize Republicans and vice versa because they're not the governing party. Political debate, which is at the heart of free speech, would become impossible.

Or for that matter, the sound of a phone ringing. I mean literally ringing, with a real metal bell inside. Sure you can get that as a ringtone, and I've used it as one for a while, but a real authentic ringing phone seems to be a thing of the past.

But if the files are being shared on Bittorrent, they're being made available to every country in the world, and these could all be regarded as separate instances of infringement.

Well, if the files are shared on Bittorrent, then they are being made available to Americans, so most definitely yes! Certainly if the rights holder is American which most are.

No, the Canadian ISP is required to give the subscriber information to the rights holder, who may be American. With that information, the rights holder could then sue in a U.S. court.

While Canadian law does indeed cap infringement awards at $5000, there's no reason the rights holders can't sue in U.S. courts where there is no such limit. Once the ISP reveals the identity, which they are required to do under Canadian law, nothing limits what the rights holder can do with that information. Canadian courts may not comply with judgements of U.S. courts, but if the defendant has any assets in the U.S. or travels there, they could be at risk.

Interesting statement since my bank (which was then Wachovia and is now Wells Fargo) did.

I opened the account long before Netflix existed, so it wasn't for that purpose. Since I still don't have Netflix, I can't offer an A/B comparison of the difficulty levels.

That's a very good point. Floppy disks had write protect tabs, and the 3.5" ones had a little write protect slider switch. I don't know why thumb drive manufacturers don't include a similar feature on their drives. I think there'd be a real market for such a thing.