Well, it's a quandary. Publishers want to sell books. Academics and students want to use those books for free, and with a volume of use that would make ever purchasing the book unnecessary for all but a handful of them. I'm sure this will seem a reasonable position to some folks here, but I think it's clear which side is asking for the moon. Incidentally, if you RTFA it's clear Georgia State was operating well beyond what might be considered "fair use" (which Georgia State more or less admitted by tightening its policies after the lawsuit was filed).

Erm, Cambridge University Press has one of the largest academic publishing operations in the world and it's detached from Cambridge itself. This has nothing to do with competition between Cambridge and Harvard and everything to do with academics who don't know anything about copyright law.

That document has no binding legal force in the US and so is irrelevant for this discussion.

Ohh, it's got cel shading!!!

I seem to remember getting all of mine by "borrowing" them from work. I've still got a box with several hundred of these in it. I've been meaning to return them any day, but a) I haven't worked there in over 10 years, b) I'd probably have to delete all the viruses and porn from them first, and c) I don't believe anybody really wants these anymore -- even if they are free.

Is that 'have' as in possess, or consume?

Justice should be blind. Thank you for your service.

Funny, I always figured it would be Wonkette which got Gawker dragged into court. Shows what I know. Anyway, IANAL, but Eugene Volokh and Orin Kerr are, and have some useful analysis on Gawker/Gizmodo's exposure.

All too well, all too well. I had a home-built gateway/firewall running Slackware which I kept under my desk. As far as Charter was concerned *that* was the computer connected to the Internet. What a joke.

Lots of colleges and universities are switching over to Google. The reasons are pretty straightforward: Google offers more storage space than most higher ed IT departments could reasonably afford and the move relieves them of the need to administer an email server. See this article for an overview. Even Hope, in Taco's home town, switched over a couple years back and I know they've been pretty happy with it.

According to Eugene Volokh, the law was actually passed in 1951, is something of a dead letter, and they're currently trying to repeal it. Sorry to spoil all the hand-wringing.

Perhaps someone with better knowledge of the case could comment on the substance of the judge's order, which concerns the apparently incorrect testimony given by the defendant. I'm not a lawyer, but I don't think you can recover fees when your own client makes material misrepresentations. I'm surprised that the RIAA's own request for sanctions was denied under the circumstances.

The summary, however, oversimplifies things. In the opinion, the Court notes that the sergeant signed an acceptable use policy in 2000, and was informed at a general meeting in 2002 that pagers (and their messages) were considered email as far as the policy was concerned. The city had a policy/practice (not entirely clear how official) that employees who went over the 25,000 character limit would pay the overage. The lieutenant who acted as the bill collector apparently told members of the force that if they paid the overages there would be no questions asked. In 2003, the chief asked for an evaluation of whether these repeated overages were work-related, apparently (and a jury agreed) to determine whether the 25,000 character limit was still reasonable or whether it needed to be increased. The primary point of contention, I think, is over whether the provider violated the Stored Communications Act by turning over the transcripts to the city in the first place. There's an interesting write-up over at Volokh from Orin Kerr, whose work on the SCA is cited in the Court's opinion.

In other words, if this law passes, a bunch of lawyers and constitutional law professors are going to make some serious money ;).

Whereas I'd ask where you live that you somehow have cable but not DSL + dish.