Though Microsoft has been accused of this before, previous accusations were based more on hyperventilation than true legal theory. But charging different customers a different price for the same good is a clear violation of antitrust principles. This is a far more serious violation that simply bundling your browser and media player with your OS: that just makes it slightly more inconvenient to switch. Imposing an actual cost raises all sorts of red flags.

Laugh if you like, but I can actually see this being of some use. Though it seems to be marketed to paranoid American suburban-types who aren't in any real danger, I can imagine residents of what passes for posh neighborhoods in Mexico City or Bogata getting good use out of something like this. If you regularly sleep in a neighborhood that regularly experiences gunfire--such places do exist, even in American cities--it might well be worth the investment.

I can even imagine a good use for the internal air-supply. I live in close proximity to both a coal-fired power plant and an ethanol refinery. Both stink to high heaven, and when the wind blows just so, closing the windows isn't sufficient to keep it out. It doesn't actually hurt to breathe, but it's really hard on the eyes. I can't count the number of times this made it hard to sleep, and I know people around here who would be willing to pay a not-insignificant amount of money to be able to sleep in a sealed environment.

I'm currently doing research into the origin and development of copyright for two of my law and graduate classes. Read L. Ray Patterson's Copyright in Historical Perspective. If you've got access--damn the monopolists!--check out his article, The DMCA: A Modern Version of the Licensing Act of 1662 in The Journal of Intellectual Property Law (10 J. Intell. Prop. L. 33).

The trends Cory discusses in his article (which I'm going to cite in my paper), in my view, are an unavoidable return to the purposes for which copyright was originally conceived: an anti-competition trade regulation. For two hundred years, copyright existed to keep the English printing cartel in business, protected from both "unlicensed" (read "non-member") presses and foreign imports. The Stationers' Company invented copyright as a publisher's right, not an author's right, to protect themselves. Parliament eventually got sick of the Stationers' monopoly--they were preventing the printing of works of Shakespeare and Milton--and tried to shift copyright to authors, but it never really worked. Now, after another two hundred years of jurisprudence which tried to conceive of copyright as something designed to foster creativity, we're finding out that that isn't really what it was for in the first place. It's always been about monopoly. It's only a matter of time before this point once again becomes too obvious for the copyright cartels to deny.

Though distasteful in the extreme, neither the site as I saw it at 11:43PM EST nor the Google cache of that page (Wayback Machine is down for maintenance) appears to contain any speech which could be considered a true threat. No violence is suggested. Though the author does suggest that blacks and Jews are responsible for unpleasant and antisocial actions, he does not actually suggest a course of action clearly enough to constitute a cognizable threat or incitement.

On the other hand, the allegations about some of the Jena defendants and their families would certainly be defamatory, assuming they're false. Defamation is an entirely different category, as false statements of fact are generally afforded little First Amendment protection, particularly when about private individuals.