The best argument I've heard for changing the laws dealing with public domain in the USA is that in these days of federal budget cutting and decreasing spending, if these copyrights are so valuable then why are they being renewed for free automatically? It would seem logical to make a change where those who want their copyrights to be extended could pay a fee, perhaps fairly large, and fill out some paperwork to get the copyright renewed. If they forget to fill out the forms in time and pay the fee in time, too bad. That's how it was some years ago. If you forgot to renew your copyright in time, you lost it. Congress could enact a sliding scale where the renewal fee increases exponentially. For example, say that all works get an original copy right period of 50 years. Then if renewal is desired, the copyright holder could pay $500,000 for a renewal period of 10 years. If they want the works renewed at the end of that period for another 10 years, the fee goes up to $5 million. The next 10 year period is $50 million. The one after that is $500 million, then $5 billion and so on. Eventually the cost will get prohibitive that nobody will pay it any more and works will enter the public domain. I really do not get how if these works are so valuable that they must be renewed that Congress has to let it be done for free and virtually forever. Unfortunately to date the US Supreme Court has basically ruled "We're not saying that we think that extending copyright is a great idea, but the Constitution does permit it. As long as the termination date is less than 'never', any extension is probably legal." Why is Congress giving away money in renewal fees if these works are truly so valuable that they must remain in copyright longer?

Disclaimer: I am a Disney fan. However, I am willing to admit that Disney has hypocritically played both sides of the aisle here in milking public domain when it suited them (Snow White now practically belongs to them, for example) and crying loudly for copyright protection for their original material about to enter the public domain, but your examples are not 100% accurate.

Fantasia contains "Rite Of Spring" which was composed by Igor Stravinski and should have been under copyright at the time (the film came out in 1940 and "Rite" was composed in 1913.).
Bambi was based on a book and Disney purchased the film rights to the book, although they bought them from a producer who had previously purchased the rights and abandoned the project when he realized it would be too difficult for him to do.

You can get off your sanctimonious high horse. Are you really and truly arguing that laws have no national boundary? Suppose some foreign country passes a draconian law against watching internet pornography and they proscribe the death penalty to violators. Are you really going to argue that you should be subject to that law? The laws of other countries don't apply on US soil. Sometimes those countries try to extend their reach to other countries. For example, Ebay got in a bunch of trouble in France years ago for allowing the sale of Nazi memorabilia in the USA. Not France, but the USA. So Ebay had to put in a filter to attempt to block all information of such sales if the person was coming from a French IP address. Are you in favor of that kind of thing?

If you want to argue that the US should care about breaking the laws of other countries while in those countries, then that is a completely different argument to make, but I doubt that the NSA does its work outside of US soil for that very reason - foreign laws won't apply to actions done on US soil. Well, those countries may think that their laws apply, but good luck on an extradition request.

Most people who have responded seem to not understand the legal argument here. Yes, this is risky to his case and basically he can't explain how he got the coins without hurting his own case. However, that's not the point. My guess is that he and his attorneys know that he is going to lose in court and go to jail. They are trying a novel argument that likely won't work that the government doesn't have the right to seize the coins no matter how acquired specifically because of their electronic nature. This is basically a low percentage "hail Mary" type play (to use an American football reference - look it up in Wikipedia if you don't understand it) to try to at least get him some income (and get his lawyers paid now) for when he gets out of jail. It's trying to turn the best case scenario into "Yeah, you're going to jail, but you'll still be rich when you get out". The unpleasant alternative is to say nothing, let the government keep the coins, and proceed with his weak defense that probably won't work anyway, in which case he goes to jail for a long time penniless. He's going to jail - the only question is whether this highly unlikely argument to keep the coins actually works and he at least gets to leave prison as a rich man. Anything can happen in a US courtroom, but I don't think this is going to be successful.

I have learned from observance and being around people with various mental issues that those who regularly take their meds do a lot better than those who do not. One of the problems with mental illnesses is that the illness will convince the person who has it that they don't need to take their meds. If you are prone to this kind of thing where you don't take your meds when you feel good, you are going to have problems in a work place. I guarantee it. The most unpleasant work experience of my life was working with a guy my manager forced us to hire because we had left the job open for a long time and he told us that we had to hire someone or the job would be closed forever. So we hired the least objectionable of a very uninspiring group of candidates we interviewed for the job. On his first day at work, he told us all that he was bi-polar and he saw no need to take any medicine for this. The next 6 months or whatever it was that he worked with us were just very bad as we saw him both unrealistically happy and in the deepest depths of depression and neither state was very good for us as co-workers. He finally left us for another job and became somebody else's problem. I don't want to go into details as for all I know maybe he reads Slashdot and he could recognize himself, but he found an interesting way as he left the company to create problems for us for months to come and I wouldn't wish what he did to us on anybody.

Right now I have a co-worker who battles depression and a few other issues and while it sometimes makes him difficult to deal with, he does regularly take his meds and we've learned to just accept his occasional bad moods as they don't last and he is a valuable contributor. But if you are going to go through periods where you don't take your meds, you'll do nobody any favors by working in an office.

Nonsense. Regimes that hate or hated freedom like the Soviet Union and the PRC have plenty of allies. The US will still have its friends. The major ones who really matter aren't leaving.

Brazil's president is a quite a bit more anti-US anyway than her predecessor who despite coming from a supposedly anti-US background was actually pretty friendly towards the US while president. Let's just say that the whole spying affair has provided her with a convenient excuse to pile on the anti-Americanism when she was already leaning that way since she took office. There are a lot of internal problems within Brazil right now and being able to thumb her nose in Uncle Sam's face helps to distract the population from real problems that her government has been completely unable to make any progress on solving. This is an old strategy used by more countries than I can even mention. Whenever there are big problems at home, just blame the US for something. I'm not sure that Cuba and Venezuela's government could even exist if the ability to blame all of their problems on the US boogeyman got taken away from them.

I don't know anything that could possibly make you appear more of a nut job than to actually think Cindy Sheehan is a hero. Almost nobody knew what the NSA was up to. It was only nut jobs like you who always suspect the worst of government who just got lucky this time with your wild guess.

You cannot possibly be American if you think that. As someone born and raised in the USA, I can assure you that my countrymen have a memory span of about 5 minutes and whatever the 2016 election's main story is, concern about NSA issues will not be it. The economy will likely be the biggest issue of 2016 with both major party candidates arguing that they've got the best plan to create new jobs.

I love (not really) how on Slashdot anything related to the airline industry brings out posts from people who never travel by plane. I had a friend who last traveled on a plane around 1999. He's not likely to ever travel anywhere by plane again in his life and this is by choice. He never flew after the TSA existed, yet listening to hm talk about the TSA you would think TSA had singled him out for unfair treatment on some flight years ago and he bore a grudge he never got over. Slashdot is the same way where people post here about how great it is to be able to talk on planes and they never fly anywhere.

I think letting people talk on planes on their cell phones is a horrible idea, but the airlines will allow if it given a choice. This is why the only way to stop it is for the government to forbid it. Now if I hold a minority opinion on this and it's clear that the majority of flyers want to talk on their cell phones on planes, I will accept that. I won't like it, but I'll accept it. The US airlines will allow this if given a choice for 2 reasons. The first is that they've already proven themselves unwilling to restrict alcohol sales to obviously inebriated passengers, some of whom in their drunken state cause problems serious enough to get them arrested when the plane lands, perhaps even having to make an emergency landing. Alcohol sales bring in money. They won't be stopped. The second reason is that this obviously creates a money making situation where they can, as mentioned earlier, sell "quiet zone" spaces at a premium. I travel by plane sometimes for personal reasons and I am not happy at all at the thought of having to pay an extra $200 or more just so I don't have to listen to someone else's phone conversation for the whole flight.

I am a US citizen and I've dealt with US customs before, but not New Zealand customs. In my experience, customs generally has no interest in your phone and laptop if you are truly a Joe Backpacker kind of guy. They are very interested in you if they think you are trying to smuggle drugs or something else. A couple of years ago I got back from a trip to China to visit my girlfriend and the guy I talked to at Customs at the US airport became convinced that I was smuggling Chinese herbs, so he made me go to a special line so my luggage could get examined. I was a bit amused as I knew they would find nothing as I brought no herbs of any kind with me and very few souvenirs of the trip. The guy who examined my luggage actually got annoyed because he found nothing. I was immediately allowed to leave with my luggage. I am sure that there is much more to this story than the backpacker is telling because he knows that Customs probably had a very good reason to be interested in him. For example, he may have worked with Wikileaks, been in contact with Snowden, or have some other non-Snowden issue that caused Customs to be very interested in him. In fact, don't be surprised if we get more information and it actually has nothing to do with Snowden because he transited through San Francisco and apparently US Customs had no interest in him. If US Customs felt that he was a source of useful information about Snowden, they'd have confiscated his electronics there. I'm pretty sure that New Zealand customs does not randomly target backpackers for confiscation of electronics and this is not an example of a police state gone mad. I'm sure he knows the real reason they took his stuff and he doesn't want to mention it because he wants to play the "I'm being singled out for nothing!" angle to the press right now.

The US led private industry design and build the Apollo project. I don't know how detailed the specs were that private companies like Lockheed and Boeing were given for their parts of the program, for example. I did have a chance some years ago to talk to a guy who worked on the Apollo project for NASA and he was working there during the first moon landing. He told me an interesting story about the onboard computer that the LEM (lunar lander) used and mentioned that MIT was responsible for the programming on it.

I'm betting that they knew exactly what the code did and this is a legal excuse to try to get them off the hook because they know they can't pay the fine. I know nothing about the German legal system, so I can't comment on how likely this ruling is to stand, but I am sure that they are just trying to get out from under the ruling by claiming ignorance. That excuse wouldn't work in the USA, but again, I don't know how the German legal system works. By the way, we have a rather infamous court here in the USA in Texas where patent infringement cases like to be filed because they have a very high degree of success.

Is this another name for .Net? I've never heard of "MS Stack". Maybe it's too arcane to have much demand for it. Keep in mind that LA is the 2nd biggest metro area in the USA so finding work there using some little in demand technology is a lot different than going to a smaller area and trying to find a job using it. If it's .Net, well, that does have its users, but if anything it seems to me that .Net is dying not thriving.

I've been to the Pacific Northwest in the lengthy rainy season, several times in fact, and all I can say is it's not for everybody. If you've never really experienced it for a week or more at a time, you can't just assume that you'll be OK with it. Having said that, if you can actually put up with it, I do understand why this part of the country appeals to some people.

You are right that this is a deterrence. I posted yesterday a much longer comment about this in the thread about the guy who got a huge fine and 2 years probation for participating for a very short time in the DOS. Basically US law allows for punitive damages in some cases and the system allows them to be exorbitant and perhaps even illogical. Sometimes these get reduced on appeal, but not always. The point is indeed to provide a deterrent against others doing the same thing in the future. It's not at all about fairness. If you are American and don't like it, work to change the system (probably not possible though) or complain all you want, but it's not going away. If you're not American, you can complain all you want about it but you can't change it.

I mentioned this in my post yesterday too, but some of it is that jury members in general know little about technology and some are almost Luddites. Judges and lawyers in general also know little about technology. This leads to prosecutors and judges overreacting against things they don't understand very well and juries overreacting to punish people due to not really understanding what they did.

Wow. You sure are full of yourself. So you really believe that there is not one person here in all of Slashdot who makes more in an hour than your customized servers do? Anyway, congratulations I guess on finding the only way possible to use NT and make it work, but I bet you have to reboot everything every couple of months or earlier anyway because NT sucks. And anyway, the fact that your one specialized set of circumstances make you or your company company a lot of money (assuming you are telling the truth) does not prove that XP is not dying.

I'm American, so I speak from experience. The US legal system allows punitive damages. Eric Rosol didn't have to actually go to jail - that was the fair part of the sentence. But US verdicts with insane monetary awards are not unusual. There's the infamous "McDonald's coffee" case which eventually got settled out of court for a never disclosed amount after a jury awarded what almost everybody in the US considered an unreasonable and probably insane amount of money in punitive damages. Jammie Thomas, the last person you'd ever want to fight the RIAA, has gotten a series of shocking judgements against her, far in excess of any real damage that was done by her. I served on a jury once that awarded punitive damages and they're meant to send a lesson to the guilty party and others (this part is key) that there are very real financial costs to certain actions. In this case, the message is clear that people should not do DOS activities or they too may be facing ruinous financial penalties. I haven't followed this case at all, so for all I know like Jammie Thomas, Rosol may be his own worst enemy and perhaps his demeanor in court led to this outcome. Juries really don't like arrogant defendants who insist that they did nothing wrong when the jury feels otherwise. I can tell you from experience that the vast majority of jurors are non-techies and some are actually tech hostile. These kinds of people also get easily swayed by prosecutor arguments that some great evil just happened that must be prevented in the future because they don't really understand what happened. Juries also sometimes get this subgroup of people (roughly 10% of the population by my estimation) who see the entire world in black and white and are obsessed with punishing rule breakers as they see them. These are the people who want draconian punishments for trivial offenses (ie. they'd support the death penalty for people who let a parking meter expire as "That will teach them not do that again!"). Sometimes on juries they are adamant that the "evil doer" has to get a very harsh sentence and if the other jurors really don't care, want to go home, and agree at least that the defendant really is guilty, the other jurors will just agree to large punitive damages so they can get on with their lives. It's difficult to get punitive damages reduced and there's no incentive in the US system for juries to really find a fair verdict. The system just wants them to all agree on the verdict and if 11 people give in to 1 stubborn crazy person, the US system accepts this as the cost for how the system works. The prevailing dogma that gets drilled into all law students and the American public in general is that the US jury system is the greatest of all possible systems and is the cornerstone of our democracy, so nobody on the legal side dares to question whether it really works as it is supposed to or not.