Keroberos 's Techdirt Comments

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  • On the post: Author Cries Trademark Infringment On Book Reviews Of A Different Book

    Keroberos ( profile ), 13 Sep, 2012 @ 01:52pm

    Re: Answer from Wild's attorney

    I think this letter defeats it's own case.

    The commenters who pointed out that one cannot trademark the title of a book are correct. However, the United States Patent and Trademark Office makes a distinction between the title of a single work (which may not be trademarked) and the name of a series of works (which can be trademarked). Mr. Wild?s CARNIVAL OF SOULS trademark is for a series of comic books, graphic novels and novels, not the title of a single book. There is simply no legal question that trademarks may properly be granted for series of books.
    Since the offending product in question is a single book, I don't see how a trademark on a series title can come into play.

  • On the post: Yet Another Court Says You're Not 'Negligent' If Someone Uses Your Open WiFi To Infringe

    Keroberos ( profile ), 13 Sep, 2012 @ 10:44am

    Re: Re:

    The accountability rests on the person performing the illegal activity, not at the service or open wifi provider levels.
    Of course it does. We just need to have an unappealable supreme court ruling that an IP address does not equal a person. I just don't see that happening (they seen to like to punt these kind of cases back to the lower courts).

  • On the post: Yet Another Court Says You're Not 'Negligent' If Someone Uses Your Open WiFi To Infringe

    Keroberos ( profile ), 13 Sep, 2012 @ 10:37am

    Re: Re: Re:

    Doesn't matter, just the accusation of child porn is enough to completely destroy your life. Most people will only hear about the accusation, and even the ones that learn that nothing was found will still have questions in the back of their minds.

  • On the post: Yet Another Court Says You're Not 'Negligent' If Someone Uses Your Open WiFi To Infringe

    Keroberos ( profile ), 13 Sep, 2012 @ 10:28am

    Re: Re: Re: Re:

    while most people are not correctly or fully securing their close ones
    While I do agree with this, some security is better than none.
    Some ones who knows enough to want to set up open wifi, for any of the number of reasons that lots of people do, knows enough how to correctly protect their privet part of the network.
    Don't use absolutes--part of my job is fixing the computers people broke while being absolutely convinced they knew what the hell they were doing.
    with relatively little time and investment you can in to privet networks who's owners think are secure.
    With relatively little time and investment you can get through any door lock--but I wouldn't be an advocate of not using them.
    Which I'd guess is by far more attractive to criminals for any number of reasons.
    Why would this be the case? I think it would be more likely for them to take the path of least resistance and move on to find a wifi access point that is not secure. The same is true for door locks, if it's locked they usually move on to find one that's not.

  • On the post: Yet Another Court Says You're Not 'Negligent' If Someone Uses Your Open WiFi To Infringe

    Keroberos ( profile ), 13 Sep, 2012 @ 09:43am

    Why go to all that trouble?

    Just to secure my network for public use? Why bother? In my small town of less than 20,000 people there are three public wifi access points within a 2 minute walk of my house (2 restaurants and the public library), and there are probably more that I don't know about. Plus, I can't think of any reason to open my wifi for public use even if there were some way to make it more secure (other than offering free internet to people who use their damn smartphone too much).

  • On the post: Yet Another Court Says You're Not 'Negligent' If Someone Uses Your Open WiFi To Infringe

    Keroberos ( profile ), 13 Sep, 2012 @ 09:19am

    Re:

    How will you know? The MAC address of the offending computer is not sent outside of your internal network. So you would have to check the timestamp of the alleged infringement against the routers logs (most consumer routers can't--or have very limited capability of--doing this-) to find the offending MAC address (which can be spoofed).

  • On the post: Yet Another Court Says You're Not 'Negligent' If Someone Uses Your Open WiFi To Infringe

    Keroberos ( profile ), 13 Sep, 2012 @ 09:10am

    Re:

    They'll just venue shop for judges that rule the way they want them to.

  • On the post: Yet Another Court Says You're Not 'Negligent' If Someone Uses Your Open WiFi To Infringe

    Keroberos ( profile ), 13 Sep, 2012 @ 09:09am

    Re: Re: Re: Re:

    That's my point. There's not a whole lot of trouble that can be caused with limited access to my water. I see my internet connection as being like unlimited access to my house, there's a whole lot that of things that could be done with it that I could be held liable for. And it's very difficult to make it so it they couldn't do those things.

  • On the post: Yet Another Court Says You're Not 'Negligent' If Someone Uses Your Open WiFi To Infringe

    Keroberos ( profile ), 13 Sep, 2012 @ 08:50am

    Re:

    Plus, the average layman probably got his router from his ISP. So does it even have any of the features that you would need to set up an open wifi network while keeping your own network secure?

  • On the post: Yet Another Court Says You're Not 'Negligent' If Someone Uses Your Open WiFi To Infringe

    Keroberos ( profile ), 13 Sep, 2012 @ 08:40am

    Re: Re:

    Because it's really stupid from a security point of view, plus it might even increase the chances of getting accused of infringing. I can almost guarantee that given enough time, someone will connect to your open wifi to infringe or do something else illegal (It's what some friends of mine used to do). You don't know who's connecting to your open wifi, and there are a whole lot of illegal things that can be done on the internet than just copyright infringement. I would much rather have accusations of copyright infringement than getting investigated for downloading child porn (which will ruin your life whether you did it or not). If you need protection because you are infringing, there are better, more secure, and undetectable methods available.

    Would you put a sign on your front lawn telling everyone they can use your house for whatever purpose they want "(a good thing in it's own right)"? Why would you do the same with your internet?

  • On the post: Two Copywrongs Don't Make A Right, But We Still Need A Way To Combat False Takedown Notices

    Keroberos ( profile ), 11 Sep, 2012 @ 01:00pm

    It would be nice to see some form of punishment for false DMCA takedowns, but it would take a complete rewrite of the law to do it. There are so many weasel worded parts to the DMCA that it's basically a carte blanche for the copyright holders to take down whatever they want.

    Also, the biggest problem with abuse is becoming ContentID systems which have nothing to do with the DMCA (or any other law), so changing the DMCA would do nothing to mitigate the abuse there.

  • On the post: Judge In Ebook Price Fixing Case Takes Briefing Filed As A Comic (Somewhat) Seriously

    Keroberos ( profile ), 07 Sep, 2012 @ 02:12pm

    Royalties would be part of Amazon's wholesale cost, and as long as Amazon is paying the distributors for the products they sell it doesn't matter what they sell it for.

    Marginal cost is on the production side. It doesn't enter into the retail side of the equation. So even my example is somewhat incorrect--it adds the cost of transfer from retail to end user--so would be even lower (millipenies? nanopenies?).

    It's can very difficult to calculate the various costs (fixed/variable/marginal) of digital goods, because many of the things involved in production could fit into any one of the three--or just don't exist for digital goods as they do for physical ones. For example; the publisher/distributer only ever produces/sells/ships one copy of an e-book to Amazon--Amazon then takes care of making the copies when they sell it. So the marginal cost of an e-book can almost be said to be zero--because once you've made one (the original), you can make another copy (or millions--or billions) for so low a cost it might as well be zero.

  • On the post: Judge In Ebook Price Fixing Case Takes Briefing Filed As A Comic (Somewhat) Seriously

    Keroberos ( profile ), 07 Sep, 2012 @ 12:50pm

    He also fails in his understanding of marginal cost.

    In economics and finance, marginal cost is the change in total cost that arises when the quantity produced changes by one unit. That is, it is the cost of producing one more unit of a good.
    What is the marginal cost of a single e-book? It's the cost of copying it from the publisher's server, to the store's server, then to my PC/e-reader. So fractions of a penny for bandwidth and electricity.

    Yes, Amazon did price some e-books below wholesale cost, but that in and of itself is not illegal (many stores do the same). If Amazon was guilty of predatory pricing, that would have been grounds for a complaint to be filed against them, not creating a price fixing agreement.

    Obviously, the publishers saw that a complaint against Amazon would have been dismissed for having no basis in fact, so they entered into the price fixing agreement.

  • On the post: EA: Withholding The Next Great Videogame Franchise For The Next Console Is Good Business

    Keroberos ( profile ), 07 Sep, 2012 @ 06:14am

    Of course; what he doesn't mention, those 3 to 5 new IPs are just iterative, copycat crap that can only do well early in a console's life cycle so they don't have too much competition from better product.

    "Gen 4 hardware is a huge opportunity, and it's going to lead to a huge growth spurt for the industry."
    How is this gonna help. Having better hardware didn't help Sony out too much with the PS3. So unless the next gen hardware is significantly cheaper, I don't see much changing.

  • On the post: Murder Case Upended After Police Read Phone Texts Without A Warrant

    Keroberos ( profile ), 06 Sep, 2012 @ 04:20pm

    Re: confused

    1: It violates the 4th amendment because they did not have a warrant to search the phone (not certain it was needed in this case due to the fact that the evidence on the phone could have been easily destroyed and the probable cause of there being a questionable injury on the premises).

    2: That would be the case if the evidence was in plain sight, the argument in this case would be that the data on the phone was not in plain sight and is separate from the phone (that was).

  • On the post: Murder Case Upended After Police Read Phone Texts Without A Warrant

    Keroberos ( profile ), 06 Sep, 2012 @ 04:06pm

    And they really dropped the ball, because in most places the courts will usually allow the police to confiscate the phones, and then apply for the warrant. This can be allowed if there is the possibility of evidence destruction--which would be a valid concern in this case (healthy six year old boys don't usually just drop dead for no reason).

  • On the post: Copyright Killbots Strike Again: Official DNC Livestream Taken Down By Just About Every Copyright Holder

    Keroberos ( profile ), 05 Sep, 2012 @ 04:44am

    It will be interesting to see what the official spin will be to this. The current administration absolutely needs the support of the internet savvy to be reelected (and this kind of BS certainly won't help with that), but I don't think they can afford to piss off their masters in Hollywood by being too harsh with their response to this. I wonder if these occurrences will become a last minute political issue in this election (not that I think much will truly change if it does)?

  • On the post: Piracy Is A Cultural Opportunity; Embrace It

    Keroberos ( profile ), 01 Sep, 2012 @ 01:16am

    Re: Re: Re:

    Yeah, Gives all the mod makers somthing to do.

  • On the post: Piracy Is A Cultural Opportunity; Embrace It

    Keroberos ( profile ), 01 Sep, 2012 @ 01:10am

    Re: Re: Re:

    The amount of movies being made has gone up also (record number every year).

  • On the post: Piracy Is A Cultural Opportunity; Embrace It

    Keroberos ( profile ), 01 Sep, 2012 @ 01:08am

    Re:

    I'm already liking the results we're getting now. Lots of cool, fun games are getting crowd-funded--bypassing the big publishers who would never have funded them. I think the world could do with fewer Call of Honor, Medal of Duty, Gears of Halo, and Madden: Same Damn Game as You Bought Last Year, Sucker titles that seem to be all the big publishers are funding.

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