Stipulations are not illegal though. You can loan me money and i can agree that all disputes to the contract or repayment be settled in your home town. Likewise, you can agree to not take legal actions if repayment isn't made according to the contract. We both can be held to those terms if we violate them. That in and of itself is not illegal even if local laws provide the means to act contrary to the agreed contract.

The issue here may be that by agreeing to terms that specify jurisdiction, they may have waived the rights to sue outside that jurisdiction. But that doesn't mean the government is prevented from prosecuting or fining. I don't think google will get out of the suit should the case be moved, but they may gain an advantage. But iirc, most courts will ignore jurisdiction clauses if it disproportionatly creates a hardship for one of the psrties.

This is a civil case over supposed criminal activities that google has not been charged on in Europe (yet). There will not be any arrests or extradiction because of the lawsuit. But any assests including bank accounts within control/reach of the legal system could be confiscated and converted into payments if Brittish law allows it to happen. If the trial was properly defended, other countries could honor yhe judgement but not likely if it was held in absentia (google doesn't show).

If you didn't want to limit your legal remedies to those available in a certain area, then why did you agree to doing so in the first place? Was it an intentional act of fraud in order to benefit from what you otherwise couldn't?

This isn't something that just got made up. Its part of the license agreement people agree to in order to install the software. I don't see google winning but i find the outrage being shown to be very uninteligent and lacking.

Not really. They could but only to the extent other countries recognized them as a country and even then, only to the extent their transactions are viewed to be within that country.

The problem is if you buy something online, did you buy it in your country or the sellers. That even gets muddled when you send it to my country and i use it. Am i using it in my country or yours. This is where a strong military and economic advantage comes into play. If you have the military might, you can enforce it being in your country. Absent that, economics come into play. Would it benefit you forcing jurisdiction if it meant you could no longer import or export to the other country. How about if it makes doing so more expensive through taxing. But back to the earlier theme, what do i care if another country is mad at me if it possesses neither might or economic leverage and i do. I could just impose jurisdiction on them or ignore them altogether.

Being added to iTunes was a very small part of the discussion about DRM, I think. The importance is that the MP3s don't have DRM.

Now, a relevant question is whether the Amazon cloud player or mp3 downloader can make use of an "Automatically Remove from iTunes" API, or a "remove from Winamp playlist" or other API, to take back the mp3 content at will. I think the answer to that is 'no'.

Next time you want to say "you can't" don't talk about how it is done. Talk about how it can't be done.

No, I think the point of the question was that you cannot prove that something is absolutely safe, only that it doesn't immediately kill the test subjects. Whether it is ultimately "safe" is a question that can only be answered after decades of use by millions of people, and even then you may get the wrong answer. Your "controlled study" has given us things like Thalidomide and Celebrex and "vaginal mesh implants" (a current target of online lawyers seeking class action suit participants).

Perhaps you missed the point that it is the rest of the world whose FDA equivalents are working under the "prove it is safe" paradigm. Are you truly aiming your snark at non-US governments and claiming that those non-US agencies are victims of "regulatory capture" and "biased media" and that's how they're proving that things are safe? And then, by extension, that since the FDA does not try to prove chemicals are safe they are not subject to regulatory capture and biased media? If so, what an unexpected turn in the /. environment.

The correct, non-snarky, non-political answer to the question is, of course, that one cannot prove the lack of any possible negative consequences to any chemical under FDA review. I.e., you can't prove something is safe, only that it doesn't immediately kill a large percentage of the test subjects.

Just a lot of conjecture and theory posturing as fact.

And they've admitted the mistake and fixed it. It was even reported as fixed BEFORE it wound up in the Guardian.

I already know why. Because they face a legal liability from the true copyright holder if they sell something that they shouldn't have and need a means of mitigating the damage. Example? '1984'. The vendor who put '1984' on Amazon didn't have rights to do so so there could be no legal sales. When that mistake was discovered Amazon pulled the material that they didn't have the right to sell and refunded the money. I know you'd rather see Amazon sued by the heirs to Orwell's estate, but they weren't willing to break copyright law to make a point on your behalf.

If you are doing so only because you fear they will pull the music from your warm, living hands, then yes, you should be mocked.

A year or so ago I bought my first 99 cent MP3 from the Amazon monster. They wanted me to download and install an MP3 downloader to get it. I figured I would have to jump through some hoops, maybe find some DRM stripper to use the music where I wanted it, but I went ahead and bought it as an experiment.

I was amazed to find that the song downloaded and was imported into iTunes almost automatically. I copied the file from the My Amazon MP3 directory onto my phone and it played with no problem at all. Not only that, but many of the CDs I had bought through the years from Amazon showed up in the "download me" list, and I could download DRM-free copies of that music even though I had purchased only the physical CD version.

So, if you're unhappy that Amazon has too much DRM on the music it sells, well, "none" is a pretty small amount, but I'll happily sell you a program that will strip it off of the music. It's called "cp" or "copy", and it's only $3.99 in the Google Play store for Android.

What difference does that make? They fixed the problem after admitting it happened. Who cares if they found the problem all by themselves (unlikely) or someone had to tell them about it?

I've written lots of code that I don't find the bugs in myself, it takes someone complaining before I know they exist. Am I now an unethical slob because I didn't discover every bug myself and fix them before anyone said anything?

And the "random customer care person" didn't actually say that the problem would be fixed in July, that was the "in other words" of an angry user who was posting on a site intended to rake big corporations over the coals for DRM policies they don't like. It would be unthinkable that an angry user might use hyperbole to make a tenuous claim into a mountain, yes?

Well, yes, the '1984' incident should have told you that. But "can" is not "will be", and in this case Amazon has already stated that it was a mistake that has been rectified.

The '1984' problem was that the vendor who was selling through Amazon couldn't legally sell the book, so Amazon couldn't legally sell the book. They retracted the content and then refunded the money. The current kerfluffle is about a sale that was legal and Amazon made a mistake in not allowing access to something they've already sold. They've admitted that and claim to have fixed it.

If you think the issue is that Disney has pulled the content from the Amazon shelves, well, the copyright holder has that right, and you really don't have a right to demand that they keep selling it.

Yeah, it's only in the headline of the only reference for the summary, after all.

You quoted what they told "a single angry customer." I'll repeat it: 'at this time they've pulled that show for exclusivity on their own channel.' That's the end of the quote. The rest of the comment from "customer" is "in other words", which means "not a quote""

Of course Disney can "pull" a product from the Amazon shelves at any time they want. They've done this before with DVD content. They release certain movies for a limited time to help drive up demand, and then stop selling them. But that doesn't mean they can pull it from your shelf once you've bought it, and Amazon has already said that. And, according to the Guardian article, has already fixed that problem.

Yes, 1984 was a precedent that woke people up. The difference is that the copies of 1984 that Amazon sold were done so without the copyright owner's permission and thus Amazon could not legally sell them in the first place. They refunded the money. In this case, Disney is the copyright holder, Disney approved the original sale, and Amazon is not taking back the content.

What happens when every time a new invention is announced Slashdotters continually come up with edge cases, apparently assuming that the inventors are fucking idiots who didn't think of that instead of that the article just didn't mention it! What happens when they're always modded to +5! What happens then OMG!