Sorry, but yes; self-plagiarism can be a copyright problem. Publishers usually have you sign away your copyright to them before they will publish your work. They can then legally prevent you from publishing your work with another publisher or yourself. Sure, the author usually retains a moral right to be identified as the author, but the right to profit from the work can be sold to others. If the author creates another work too similar to the first, i.e., they plagiarise themselves, then that can be just as much a problem as if anybody else plagiarised them.

The only entity that can't plagiarise a work (from a legal, copyright perspective), is the copyright owner, and that entity is often not the author.

Note that I don't believe this is a factor for Prince and Mooney since it seems that neither of them have sold their copyright.

If the beads are 0.2mm in diameter then, by my maths, that comes to about 1 (one) (US) gallon of them. Did someone leave off some zeros?

I don't think this is a good comparison to make. As I understand it, the restrictions of the 1990s did not require a back door to be inserted; they just limited the strength of the cryptography, presumably to a level breakable by the NSA even then. The old Clipper-chip back door fiasco was not responsible for logjam et al. and the new proposals are not intending to limit key length.

N.B.: I still definitely think that the current noises about mandating back doors is very worrying. My hope is that it won't happen due to the major privacy and security issues it presents. Perhaps our saviour will be the inability of different governments to trust each other.

I'm not sure you understand what "without limitation" means.

And by judges preventing improper inflaming of juries.

Never said anything like that. All I'm saying is that if I download a movie (or other IP) in violation of copyright laws then that is not theft. If you want a catchy, single-word term, use "piracy" (though, in my view, that devalues the original crime of that name which is still going on) but use of the word "theft" in this context by big content et al. is wrong.

Nobody is saying that there's no value in copyright violations. What they are saying is that it is not theft. I like the car analogy for this one:

• Theft: Somebody come and steals your car parked outside your house. Now they have a car and you don't.
• Copyright Violation: Somebody comes and makes a copy of your car parked outside your house. Now they have a car and so do you.

See the difference? And remember that it was you who said it makes no difference as to whether the things are tangible or not.

I think the early startups were going after the wedding topper market. Those are the decorations on the top of the cake that have often been in the form of little bride and groom dolls. Now those dolls can be actual replicas of the bride and groom.

Even if they're required by law to block the site, they're not required to do it in such a brainless way that they impact other sites. If HTTP, inspect the host name. If HTTPS then the IP will be enough by itself.

You haven't done much navigating have you? Nautical miles remain very much the standard for both aircraft and ships. It's because a minute of arc (a sixtieth of a degree) equals a nautical mile on the earth's surface ... and that's not going to change. 21600 (nautical miles around the equator) is a much nicer number than 40000 (kilometres around the earth via the poles) anyway.

For aircraft, altitude is still always reported in feet, presumably because changing would inevitably cost lives during the transition.

But you can't choose the distance units any more. It defaults to where you are or you can say you're in the US and it will show you miles or you can say you're in Australia and you'll get kilometres, &c. Too bad if you want nautical miles, which the old version allowed you to select, along with many other units.

Yes, data are data, but I don't see how a law making it illegal for you to obtain content that has been geo-blocked would break the Internet. The law wouldn't have to talk at all about technical details and they could catch people by following the money more easily than by following the bytes. More practically, it would make it hard for service providers in the jurisdiction to offer services to work around geo-blocking, making the case that started this thread open-and-shut.

As for the content providers grey-marketing their content, that's (currently) a contractual issue between them and their suppliers. New Zealand has historically been very pro-consumer-choice; explicitly allowing region-free DVD players so that people could grey-market the discs. If you're going to try stopping streaming suppliers, don't forget to also have Amazon stop shipping media (including books) internationally.

Maybe these things cannot be outlawed in the US, due to your strong constitutional rights to free speech, but they certainly could be in many other countries. Even in the US I believe there are limits on distributing ways to defeat copyright protection mechanisms. I'm not saying this is right, just that it's naïve to think this couldn't be legislated and upheld in many jurisdictions.

This is just what we need to wear to taser-proof ourselves. The conductive fibres should be able to short out the high voltage more effectively than our bodies. We might get a little burned---I'm not sure how much power (as opposed to voltage) tasers put out---but I suspect that's going to be preferable to the alternative electrocuting effects. I guess if it works the police will ban it the same as bullet-proof vests.