Scotfree @ 71:

That's about as intelligent as claiming that books are for deaf people with no memories.

Humans have more senses than vision, and there's no good reason to insist that we should get information--including information about what other people know--only through one of them. Books, much as I love the written word, cannot detect when the reader doesn't understand something; a skilled lecturer can, and can explain it in a different way, or stop to answer questions.

I also would challenge you to have provided, in anything like as timely a fashion, a book containing the material in (for example, from memory) the lecture that one of my history professors gave in November 1982. The course was "History of the Soviet Union, 1917-present." The topic was the death of Leonid Brezhnev, and what effects it was likely to have. The professor had learned of this event when he was awakened by a telephone call from a German radio station, asking him to comment on the event. Many of us learned about it when the lecture started.

Brilliant. Just brilliant. Sue the guys who keep lots of lawyers on staff, with a suit that they have to defend because it strikes at the core of their business.

I wonder if they've already had a suit against the Web site that actually has the relevant articles thrown out of court.

This claim isn't just that someone who commits a kidnapping in London has to be tried under British rather than U.S. law, which would be reasonable. It's claiming that if the kidnappers bring the victim into a U.S. court, the U.S. court does not have the authority to free the kidnap victim. Think about that: they're not just claiming that government officials can violate foreign law with impunity, but that other government officials cannot intervene to help the victims.

If another nation made the equivalent claim--if, say, Saudi Arabia claimed that it had the right to snatch people off the streets of Washington and take them to Riyadh to punish them for blasphemy or bank robbery--Americans would be outraged.

Svein @ 19: That DG is a large company doesn't guarantee they won't go out of business. (Every time I look up Park Avenue, there's the Pan Am Building, with an insurance company's logo displayed at the top.) It certainly doesn't guarantee that they'll offer this particular form of music sales forever.

If a company decides that a line of business isn't [adequately] profitable for them, they're also likely to decide that it's not worth continuing to maintain servers that supported that line of business. That's especially likely if the customers aren't paying anything for continued use of the servers. But a DRM call-home system leaves the customer without a product if the servers vanish. I'd be astonished if there were, anywhere, a contract under which such a vendor agreed to reimburse customers even a portion of their purchase price if the removal of support made the product worthless. (Such a promise would, in any case, only relevant if the company stays in business; you can't enforce a contract against a nonexistent entity.)