You can be ticketed for going too slow for the flow of traffic, even if you're driving within the speed limit and everyone else is not.

It should be legal to make new music from old music and audio that wouldn't cut into the old music's sales, but the courts have not backed that up. Remember back when there was a nascent movement, mostly among hip hop, that used a ton of samples from different sources? Paul's Boutique and Fear Of A Black Planet were two of the biggest hits in that style, but then Biz Markie lost his shirt in a court case and that whole genre of music was pretty much killed overnight. Now sampling is much more rare and usually much more conspicuous with each particular sample -- e.g., when Puff Daddy used Led Zeppelin's Kashmir.

Side note: Bittersweet Symphony is a song where a band actually got permission to sample a song, but when it became a huge hit they were successfully sued and even lost songwriting credits.

Isn't freedom of speech a basic human right? We're at the point where a media company can claim your personal expression violates their IP without any proof, and your video or audio is removed from websites. Now it looks like they want to expand this abuse to cover all internet traffic, with the obvious side-effect of lots of legal and legitimate speech effectively being censored. It seems to me that allowing the government and media companies to filter or remove personal expressions from the internet under the pretense of possible IP violations is very much a matter of human rights.

If you think journalists today don't understand the precariousness of their employment, you are dead wrong. Every single journalist I know is under severe stress at the least, and most are under-employed or unemployed.

I laud these reporters for standing up for the news business and trying as best they can to keep the subject matter and material from becoming a race to the bottom. People complain about the papers these days - and in many cases rightfully so - but we're going to be in a woeful place if journalists become extinct and TV reporters, comedians, and bloggers are the only sources of news.

And in a terrific coincidence with one of today's other articles, the audio's been disabled because it hasn't been authorized by Warner Music Group. The word egregious comes to mind, and that's putting it nicely.

I'd think the octopus would have a natural advantage in a snowball fight.

Could someone explain why I was modded to -1, Overrated, while this post, which says much the same thing and came after mine, is modded +3, Insightful? I know my posts aren't exactly the wisdom of the ages, but I'd at least like a chance to get out of the karma pit I'm in.

The biggest difference is that we're not professionals - i.e., there's no set of academic, ethical, and skills requirements to work in IT. If the only requirement for working in a trade is that you convince someone to hire you for it, then the salaries are going to suffer right alongside the quality of the workforce.

My only experience with getting gas in Oregon was soon followed by my only experience having another driver on a highway hail me to roll down my window, and that soon was followed by my only experience pulling over in order to put my car's gas cap back on the tank.