There's an inverse relationship between the level of authority you posted with and the level of accuracy of your statements. Defensive patents are extremely commonplace in the industry, and Google has never used a patent non-defensively to date. That is to say, they've only ever counter-sued when sued. You think a few thousand dollars is a big deal to a company like Google? Hell, for Google it's just the cost of the filing fee. Google has their own in-house legal department. They pay their lawyers regardless of whether they sit on their ass twiddling their thumbs or if they're in court fighting over patents. That means, the opportunity cost of filing a patent is minimal--just whatever the filing fees themselves are ($750 I think?).

I've used JSTOR and I never agreed to any TOS. More than likely, the University in question did that as they are the actual "customer".

I frankly find it hard to believe that spoofing a MAC address to keep from being banned from a network rises to the level of "hacking". The guy already has trespassing charges for being in the building, and that seems like the most appropriate crime to charge him with. Everything else is just piling on bullshit because "We didn't have a law that fit this guy, so we're gonna throw everything we can think of at him because we think he should go to jail."

For the record, all the articles he "stole" are public domain. JSTOR asserts copyright because it was their scan, even though the articles themselves belong to the public now. The problem is, that there's currently no way to access a lot of this older public domain stuff except by going through JSTOR.

This is almost the least stupid software patent I've ever seen. I mean, all great ideas look obvious in retrospect, but I can't tell you how many times I've been embarrassed that I forgot to silence my phone and had to fumble with it to try to silence it without removing it from my pocket. If could just give my thigh a light slap and silence it mid-ring, that'd be awesome.

Still, I'm not sure I like the idea of a patent protecting something like this, even if it hasn't' been done before and would be useful. I think there's enough benefit in simply being first to do something like this to justify the minimal R&D required to come up with something like this (which is to say, none, just a neat idea that popped into some engineers head). We don't need to nurture this level of innovation along with the promise of a monopoly on the idea. It simply doesn't rise to that level nor does it require such incentive to happen.

"But here it is anyways"

Well you *can* air the I Have A Dream speech if you want, you'll just probably be sued. You might win. As I understand it, it's sort of a dubious claim.

My potatoes never last that long before rotting. What am I doing wrong?

The thing is, this is like the 19th time we've rehashed this issue on Slashdot. Periodically there will be a new article about it, and it will inevitably get posted on Slashdot and I'm pretty sure at least a certain percentage of readers assume its a new thing, and not just a discussion about something we've already discussed a dozen times or more.

It wasn't a big deal then, it's not a big deal. This article is just more shrilly alarmist in its language choice than others. I can't tell if that's a product of not truly understanding the issues or just a lack of integrity on the part of the writer.

It should be proven at least once. This article is terrible. It refers to a non-issue as a "major privacy scandal" and talks about google "secretly" doing something that was such a good secret that Google didn't even know about it. The writer just doesn't have a good understanding of the issues, or he/she is intentionally misstating them to be alarmist. Either way, though, there was nothing evil about what Google did in either "scandal". Google was indeed subverting Safari's privacy settings to set a Cookie, but it was an OPT-IN cookie. Apple was blocking Google from doing something that Google's users wanted done, and Google used a work-around and then apologized for it and stopped when people freaked out even though it was totally a non-issue.

What is it doing here?

So because the old method, which relies on random chance can be dangerous, we should not use a more targeted technique? How do you imagine that would be *more* dangerous instead of less?

I don't quite understand your logic. "You want a job? You're not entitled to a job. Go get a job, you hippy."

Showing a picture of a hamburger (as an example), then reviewing the food is not what is meant by "criticism, comment, news reporting"--if you didn't take the picture, that's just plain old infringement. It means commenting on or criticizing the *actual* photograph in question as a work of art--not the subject of the photograph.

So if I run newspaper, I can't just use whatever graphic for any story I want and claim fair use because "news reporting"--I only get to invoke fair use if the news story is about the photograph in question.

She might be able to make a fair use claim somewhere, but I doubt she can make a fair use case for the vast majority of the infringements. I don't see how some guy's campaign for Sheriff qualifies as an entitlement to free use of any stock photography he wants.

That's just my 2 cents. But, like yourself, IANAL.

Well you know Schizophrenia can sometimes have a late onset. I'm not a doctor, but her writing definitely has a certain rambling, imbalanced quality to it. That whole, huge thing was one long paragraph on the theme of "everyone is out to get me". It's possible that she is genuinely mentally ill, and yet she might have been a competent attorney once. All I can say is that, as a layman, I was somewhat concerned for her mental health after reading that blog entry. It doesn't strike me as the writings of a sane person, but I'm not an expert.

That's where I keep all my stuff!

Samsung "gets a free pass" because they used their patents the "right" way and used it as a defensive deterrent against other lawsuits. When Apple sued them, they sued back as a means of increasing their leverage in a legal battle. Samsung wasn't out simply trolling with the patent, as this company seems to be.