arstechnica.com — The US Court of Federal Claims has ruled that, when crafting the DMCA, Congress left the US government immune to any claims of infringement under the statute. So when the Air Force cracked some code to avoid an expiration date, it apparently acted legally.
Aug 4, 2008 View in Crawl 4
dennisparrottAug 4, 2008
@zadadka et. al. about suing the US Gov't.Prior to the Civil War, it was actually quite common for the US Gov't. to get sued by the populace. If you go back and look at history many cases went to trial and worked their way through the courts. Some of these cases are very famous and changed the Republic.After the Civil War, it became much less common for the US Gov't. to get sued. The reason is that our basic governmental underpinnings changed. Prior to the Civil War, the US Constitution was a trust indenture; it created a legal trust. The officers named in the Constitution were trustees of that trust. A primary feature of a trust is that the beneficiaries of a trust can sue trustees for conduct that violates that trust. In the aftermath of the Civil War, Congress was so afraid of getting the hell sued out it by people in the South for the abuses of the "carpetbaggers" that they passed a law that changed the basic form into a corporation and then defined many potential lawsuits out of existence.This had the effect of creating two US Constitutions; a "Constitution OF the United States" and a "Constitution FOR the United States". One is a trust indenture, the other a corporate document. This protected the rotten Congress-critters of the late 1860's from being sued to hell and back by Southerners who were rightfully ticked off at how "the North" was mismanaging the aftermath and how the "carpetbaggers" were basically stealing people's property. Ever since that time we've seen nothing but a steady growth in government and steady erosion of the rights and liberties that our Constitution enumerated. In the 1860's the manipulation was about protecting people who were raping the South in the aftermath of the war. Today it is about protecting corporate business models and criminal politicians.So many people don't understand why this stuff is occurring. Nor do they understand how something so basic as the form of government (trust vs. corporation) is being misused to enrich a few and enslave the rest.If you want to properly address the issues that face us, we really need to put things back on their original footing. Only then can the elected class properly address the needs of those who benefit from that trust...
jethrisAug 4, 2008
Assuming it was a MS programming language, the only thing they'd find are the .exe's, not the .vb, .bas, .cs, etc.
coinspinnerAug 5, 2008
Dugg for the hilarious title.
cjacks9Aug 5, 2008
Dude that's gotta be a Digg submission somewhere. There's a similar law in Chicago, or at least there was.
nod32userAug 7, 2008
OK - Common Law, but I don't see how that gets us to where you say - care to expand?
moulin1Aug 10, 2008
Point is, no one has ever been able to sue the federal or state government unless that entity specifically allows it. It's not justice but that's the way it is and always has been.