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.

Don't I wish.

A cynic might argue that the key difference in this case was that, for a change, the ISP's, and not merely defendants, were challenging the subpoenas; but of course we all know that justice is 'blind'.

An ingrate might bemoan the Court's failure to address the key underlying fallacy in the "John Doe" cases, that because someone pays the bill for an internet account that automatically makes them a copyright infringer; but who's complaining over that slight omission?

A malcontent like myself might be a little unhappy that it took the courts ten (10) years to finally come to grips with the personal jurisdiction issue, which would have been obvious to 9 out of 10 second year law students from the get go, and I personally have been pointing it out and writing about it since 2005; but at least they finally did get there.

And a philosopher might wonder how much suffering might have been spared had the courts followed the law back in 2004 when the John Doe madness started; but of course I'm a lawyer, not a philosopher. :)

Bottom line, though: this is a good thing, a very good thing. Ten (10) years late in coming, but good nonetheless. - R.B. )

Next time there's a Slashdot story where the consensus among the wise, assembled community (who always have mysterious insight above and beyond the people behind the technology in question) is It'll-Never-Work, just remember this article.

We're talking about a technology that is 20 years old, deployed globally and (based on the complete absence of negative comments from current users) a universally accepted improvement upon the system it replaced.

And the running theme from the (let's face it : primarily American) contingent in the comments is It-Can-Never-Work, It's-Hopelessly-Flawed and What-Idiot-Invented-This.

Slashdot is a special place.

For this to be a new system you need to travel back to 1992 when France adopted it.

Anyway, it can't ever be purely proximity based (like the contactless payments systems that you are presumably worried about) because it requires your PIN to authorise the transaction. Since its challenge/response there is presumably little benefit to eavesdropping on one transaction - you're not going to capture anything that will allow you to perform additional transactions in future.

The first proper credit card in the US was 1958, the first outside the US was 1966 (according to Wikipedia). I'm not sure that an 8 year head start investment of infrastructure from 50 years ago is a plausible explanation.

It's easy to make excuses to save national face, but given the massive fraud reduction that chip and pin brings the likely result is that you have spent the last 10 years or so paying for the increased credit fraud in the US through charges or through increased interest rates on credit card debt.

Someone has dragged the process out for their own gain and they'll do it again next time round if you accept it.

Chip and pin is not proximity based. You put your card in a handset and enter your pin to authorise the transaction like at a cashpoint. The handset never gets access to the PIN in the card, only the one you enter on the pad. It's genuinely surprising that there is still somewhere where this is not the standard. I can't remember the last time I had to sign for a card transaction.

I once got asked a question which I found hurtful and offensive, and felt tempted to 'blow up' the interview at that point. Fortunately, I resisted the temptation. As it turns out, the question was his way of introducing the next thing, which was telling me that he was offering me the job.

Here's my report on the actual ruling which is being reviewed: 2nd Circuit affirms denial of plaintiffs' preliminary injunction motion in WNET v Aereo

I guess it would take a litigator to notice this, but it's quite unusual that a preliminary injunction denial would be getting this kind of appellate attention.

In the first place, it was unusual for an interlocutory appeal to be granted from the denial of the preliminary injunction motion. In federal court usually you can only appeal from a final judgment.

Similarly, apart from the fact that it's always rare for a certiorari petition to be granted, it's especially tough where the appeal is not from a final judgment, but just from a preliminary injunction denial which does not dispose of the whole case.

Funny, I had the same reaction when I read it. He seemed like a salesman for Google or something.

Dear Prince Bernard, If you're talking about my bank account, you're barking up the wrong tree :)

Fair use cases are very fact specific. If you start monkeying with the facts, Judge Chin might not feel the same way about it.