This is wonderful. If the Green Party candidate got elected President of the United States, and the first thing she did was turn around and lob a hydrogen bomb at Ottawa, you'd all be here coming up with rationales as to why it was a good thing. All of a sudden, the collective wisdom-holders of Slashdot have had the scales fall from their eyes: the sense and justice of ad-supported content models is unquestionable, copyright law must be strictly observed, and terms of service should _always_ be not only respected, but followed to the letter.

Um, no. The $150,000 is the maximum award for willful infringement — and as noted, Alan isn't out any actual income in this situation which would make a maximum judgment unlikely —but that assumes a court's finding that infringement actually occurred. In spite of the FSF's and Alan Cox's saber-rattling, I don't believe they've actually got a case. The FSF regularly conflates a "derivative work" with a "combined work", and they're not at all the same thing.

I suspect it must the Free Software Foundation's "Imaginary Court of Making Stuff Up" that "decided" this.

Intelligently, Samsung's lawyers didn't try to pull that one.

He wasn't "granted diplomatic asylum", he was simply allowed to live in the US Embassy. If he'd been "granted diplomatic asylum", that would imply that China was obliged to give him safe conduct to leave the country, and that's clearly not the case.

No, the US does not recognize the notion of diplomatic asylum, nor does Britain.

The US has granted political asylum to people, but only when they were on US soil.

Julian didn't run.

You two are on a first-name basis...?

In fact, Assange did run: he had an interview with the police and prosecutors scheduled in Sweden for September 28th. He left the country on September 27th. When the authorities informed his lawyer that they planned to file a warrant for his arrest, they were told Assange would be back in Sweden by October 8th, and he'd be willing to meet with them then. He never showed up, at which point Sweden ordered him "arrested in absentia" and began the extradition process.

In fact, Assange's lawyer Hurtig was accused by the British High Court of deliberately trying to mislead the court over this sequence of events.

Second is that all available evidence points to him not having committed sexual assault (as any anglo-saxon would understand it).

Funny that every court in Britain, up to and including the High Court, found that the acts of which he'd been accused would constitute "rape" in the UK, huh...?

Thanks for having the patience to provide so much sense here. It's like King Canute ordering back the tide, though, I'm afraid. People believe what they want to believe, and facts don't seem to be enough to persuade 'em...

Doesn't matter, rape is a criminal charge, not a civil complaint. Once the police have established that the circumstances of rape have occurred, the victim doesn't have the latitude to "not press charges".

He's charged with a variety of crimes, the most serious of which are sexual assault — he allegedly pinned one woman down and tried to force her legs apart so that he wouldn't have to wear the condom she insisted he wear — and rape — he allegedly initiated sex, without a condom, with a sleeping woman who had insisted that he not have unprotected sex with him.

The British High Court agreed that these accusation would certainly constitute crimes in the UK.

That's actually the rape charge.

The sexual assault charge relates to him allegedly pinning a second woman down on her bed, holding her hands down, and attempting to force her legs apart in an effort to keep her from getting the condom she insisted he wear as a condition of having sex.

The Swedish phrase which gets translated as "surprise sex" is apparently a euphemism for rape. Interestingly, they have the same euphemism in Japanese.

"What is "normal," though not in Sweden obviously, is that any interview prior to charges being laid be voluntary."

Except that he's already been ordered arrested in Sweden. His interview is no longer voluntary at this point, and his attendance is required. It's required on Swedish soil, since this formal questioning is — as the British High Court noted — the equivalent of an arraignment, and the next step is that he'd be charged and arrested if the prosecutors agree that the charge is warranted. The court explicitly said that a) the acts he's accused of would indeed be crimes in the UK, and b) that were this case being tried in the UK, he'd be charged if it had progressed to the point the Swedish case has.

So, let's say they (in this one very special case) allow an accused criminal to dictate the terms of his own questioning, and question him by telephone in his hidey-hole in the Ecuadorian Embassy. Based on that, they indeed decide to charge him.

What then? They can't arrest him if he's outside of Swedish jurisdiction (like Britain; or Ecuador). Are they supposed to extradite him a second time?