dominicmauro

I am a lawyer, and "circumvention of access control" means defeating DRM measures, like when you rip a CD or DVD to make a copy on your computer. Someone would have to really torture their reading of the law to come up with "writing down a domain from which ads are served is prohibited by the DMCA."

Author here. I agree entirely. Apple's pricing and discovery issues created this perverse incentive structure, and Marco's just responding to it. Competition under this system gets ugly.

The punitive damages were also roughly the amount of money McDonald's makes selling coffee in one or two days, according to a contemporaneous WSJ report: http://www.business.txstate.edu/users/ds26/Business%20Law%20...

Why do you think the Fair Use section is so poorly written? I'm inclined to agree with you that it doesn't provide as much protection as some people might think, but I don't know about "zero" protection.

> What happens if I put a blanket ban in the TOS on use of the site by anyone acting as an agent of any law enforcement agency? Certainly with a warrant, it would hold up , but without one, it may not.

Actually, I'm not so sure you don't have that backwards. If a police officer shows up at your door without a warrant, you can tell him "hey, no cops allowed in my house!" and make him leave. But he or she has a warrant, you can deny them all you want, but they're legally entitled to come in and look for stuff.

With a login page, it would work roughly the same way. "No cops allowed" might work, but not once a judge gives the police a right to be where you don't particularly want them.

Yeah, it seems like the judge is making an effort to let you have friends and friends-of-friends, just not customers. It's worth noting that this is an opinion from Administrative Law Judge, which is about a half-dozen appeals from the State's highest court, the Court of Appeals. So there are plenty of judges who could overrule this in the next few years.

Last year, this fellow named Warren tried that logic in NYC. It didn't work too well. The Verge ran a piece about it back in May 2013.

> The law seems to include an exemption for hosts who rent out an extra room or couch to a "lawful boarder" for less than 30 days, but remain in the dwelling while the guest is there. Because Warren's roommate was home while his Russian boarder was there, he argued that the exemption should apply. However, the judge interpreted the terms "boarders and lodgers" in the law to mean "occupants who share the life of the dwelling with its permanent occupants" and not to "complete strangers who have no, and are not intended to have any, relationship with the permanent occupant." Because the Russian visitor did not interact with Warren or his roommate, the judge said, the exemption should not apply.

That last sentence is an interesting interpretation of the judge's decision, but the rest of it is pretty spot on. The opinion in question is here: http://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/702734/decision-and-or... [PDF]

I wasn't using "scared" literally, and I assume the person I was replying to wasn't, either. Web sites aren't generally actually frightening. [Insert your own punchline here]

The guy you're replying to just gave you a reason to limit the supply of taxis: regulating them is expensive.

With a ratio of nearly 20:1, I don't even know that you can say "it seems" that women are scared away anymore.

Valve was giving away a promotional item in Team Fortress 2 for users who logged into the game from a Linux machine. The last time they did this, for users who logged in from a Mac, the promotional item became a kind of in-game de facto currency.

There were lots of users logging in once from an Ubuntu VM instance for the item; it'll be interesting to see if this growth continues now that the item giveaway is over.

For reference: http://wiki.teamfortress.com/wiki/Tux

Absolutely perfect.

Oh, agreed entirely that it's apples and oranges. Reality Bites was a Universal movie, the soundtrack was on RCA, and they put five tracks on MTV. It was very much top-down.

Now these guys, on the other hand...

Lisa Loeb also did it. http://www.merrimackhall.com/lisaloeb.html

I winced when the guy hedged by saying "in modern history" — remembering this doesn't make me that old.

I don't know, but I hope they post a graph of the traffic spike.

Yeah. People seem to mistake "Auction House exists" with "Must cash out kids' college savings to buy new sword."

It's not illegal to fantasize. It is illegal to attempt to blow up a bridge. Federal law is remarkably consistent on this, whether you vote Democrat, Republican, or Ron Paul.

Presumably zero. Patents are only permitted for "useful" subject matter. Useful is a term of art: you can still patent silly things like Slinkies: http://www.google.com/patents/US2415012?printsec=drawing – but whatever you patent has to actually function as advertised. So while the Slinky is objectively useless, it does what the patent says it does. A warp drive would be objectively useful, but when you build it, it won't do what the patent says it does; therefore, it's not patentable.