There are situations where one could sue anonymously ( http://www.legalmatch.com/law-... ), and they should still have copyright protections ( http://commons.wikimedia.org/w... ) but proving themselves to be the actual authors and have standing to sue might be difficult?

1. How do you find out about the band in the first place? Fact is, YouTube is the place for a lot of indies to make it big.

2. You haven't visited YouTube in a while, have you? Everybody has their official content there. You can even rent movies there.

"Don't be evil" is the Nobel Peace Prize of corporate slogans: It started out as a sincere, non-ironic effort, and then gradually morphed into the world's best parody of itself.

Bicycle?

Agreed that it's not in the summary, but as you correctly note, it's just a "summary". Anyone who reads the underlying blog post will read this among the facts on which the court based its opinion: "The public was allowed to search by keyword. The search results showed only the page numbers for the search term and the number of times it appeared; none of the text was visible."

So those readers who RTFA will be in the know.

Competition. Invisible Hand. Selective pressure from consumers who don't want a site with 80% screen real-estate devoted to ads, and subconsciously choose to spend their time on sites with (for whatever reason) fewer, better ads.
There are obviously limits and pressures already at play, or every site would be nothing but a wall of ads, because "more profit."

I'd like to opt out of the untargeted ads. I don't so much mind relevant, possibly-useful advertising -- I don't feel like it wastes my time so much, or even, in a way, creepily insinuates I would be interested in things I'm totally not. As long as the targeted advertising is done right, I'd rather have it. The more accurate such advertising gets, the more value-per-print it can generate, and therefore the less overall advertising will be required to sustain the "free" services we use. One well-chosen ad is worth dozens of spammy ones.

Or ... could we get the big advertising systems to allow us to pay them, centrally, to remove ads across all the sites they print on? And have them just forward a portion of the money to the sites themselves, just as they would have paid them to print an equivalent number of ads, while serving me nothing but 1px placeholders?

You forgot step 1.5 : Login with your username and password that can be easily traced to the traffic, regardless of which physical device you were connected to.

How does it make any sense for Comcast to charge your for extra bandwidth that somebody used on their public WiFi network, not logged in as you? This may be a terrible idea, but not for that reason. Comcast is just using existing equipment to do something other than sit idle. This doesn't seem that nefarious to me. (I'm sure they'll try to prove me wrong later, but for now anyway).

Comcast will be just as liable as they are now. This is not Comcast giving people access to your private network. For this to be even technologically feasible, it's going to have to be configured so that every router broadcasts the same SSID. That means it's going to be a separate virtual network from your home network. So some random guy is not going to be able to log onto your shared folders and print to your printer. If somebody downloads porn, it's going to show that it was some user (with a username and login) that logged into the public Comcast network, and happened to do it from your router. (But more than usual, see my .sig)

That's not true at all, and is a bad analogy. You own your house. If the bank has a mortgage, then they have a lien on the house. If they want to take possession of it, they have to go through a foreclosure proceeding. They can't just walk into your living room and start watching TV. Your house is real property, which has lots of strong protections. Comcast, on the other hand, does own the router that they lease to you, which is a chattel and therefore subject to a different set of rights. No, they can't walk in and just take it (that would violate your real property rights). But they do own the network, and if their contract with you is written in a way that permits them to reconfigure a leased router to grant somebody else access to their network over wireless signals that you're leaking out into the air anyway, then yeah, they can do that.

You act like it's some crazy notion that people in government would covertly collect information on private citizens for purposes of blackmail to "keep them in line"---not because those citizens are breaking any law, but because certain officials deem them to be dangerous to their own personal agendas and power structure. Have you ever heard of a guy named J. Edgar Hoover? Perhaps you should look into that.

No, that's not true. The duty of preservation in a civil lawsuit is entirely different from a search warrant in a criminal investigation. And no, they didn't design the system to comply with the law. If they'd done that, they wouldn't allegedly have so much information that it can't be stored. They should be performing targeted searches related to actual criminal cases and threats to national security, not wholesale data mining on every man, woman, and child in the United States, regardless of how soon they delete it.

Precisely. If they were doing what a legitimate government agency should be doing---targeted investigation of crimes and threats to national security---there wouldn't be a problem.