Slashdot Mirror

SiteTruth rates SiteTruth itself as "Site ownership identified but not verified." (a yellow question mark), which is correct - there's a valid name and address on the web site, but no third party verification of business identity. That's a neutral rating by our standards. The red circle with a bar through it is a bad rating. To get a good rating, a green checkmark, some third party has to verify business identity. A valid BBBonline seal (and yes, we check) or an SSL cert with a name and address will do it. We're working on verification via credit card processors for sites using off-site payment systems. Click on any rating icon for the full explanation of a rating.

The standard we're enforcing is rather low. Insisting that a business have a valid, published, name and address isn't an obstacle to any legitimate business. Yes, the standards we're enforcing are slightly higher than those of California law. They're consistent with the Consumer's Union WebWatch guidelines ("Web sites should clearly disclose the physical location where they are produced, including an address, a telephone number or e-mail address") and the European Electronic Commerce Directive (Member States shall ensure that the service provider (defined as "any natural or legal person providing an information society service") shall render easily, directly and permanently accessible to the recipients of the service and competent authorities, at least the following information: (a) the name of the service provider; (b) the geographic address at which the service provider is established.) There's little support in law for anonymous businesses. If you're running a business without a published, valid name and address, there's something wrong.

All we ask for is a "Contact" or "About" page with a name and address in a format that would work on a mailed envelope. We can find that in HTML text; you don't have to do anything special for SiteTruth.

Name and address is just the first stage. Once we have a solid name and address, we can match it against business databases - state incorporation records, D/B/A names, criminal records, and credit ratings. We're doing some of that now, and will be doing more.

That's humorous (in a scary way) considering the following:

The commission communication "towards a general policy on the fight against cyber crime"

There is no agreed definition of "cyber crime". From a strictly legal point of view, it can be questioned whether there is any need for the term at all - it could be argued that "cyber space" is just a new specific instrument used to commit crimes which are not new at all. The term may thus be most interesting from an operational point of view, i.e. the operational instruments and procedures to fight against this type of crime must be developed.

With that said, as an American, I can almost indicate any connection to me as being an illegal one and cost the German taxpayers a bucketload of money with false claims. Let's consider the following scenario.. Ping. Simple administrative tool, can also be used for DoS attacks. Suppose I start a business ... eFishSkinSales.com that sells fish skins... I find a German counterpart GermanFishSkin.com... I take their IP addressing and spoof a pingflood to my routers and send German authorities the logfiles. Would they know what a spoof is for one. How about the following... A German websurfer visits my page and does not close his browser. For the next nMinutes where n equals the amount of time he has his browser on my page, he will make repeated GET's thus resulting in a DoS attack of the lamest kind. What then. Are browsers hacking tools?

Let's take it a step further into XSS (cross site scripting)... The browser IS THE TOOL. Should all browsers be banned now. Oh those Germans. I know... What about a German, with a shell on a server in America developing tools. Now those tools don't reside ANYWHERE in Germany then what. I would have laughed that law all the way to the bitbucket. But... You're likely dealing with e-Incompetent lawmakers driving Beamers and Benz' who care little about the advances in LIFE as a whole thanks to computing both good and bad (malicious hacking has forced companies to improve themselves).

Due to data retention Directive http://eur-lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do? uri=CELEX:32006L0024:EN:NOT, ISPs are gathering the resources required to fulfill its requirements -office, staff, hardware and software. But that's all at their cost! So, it looks like they decided to do something about it, like sell the user profiles they will soon have on every subscriber of their services. That's much closer to every user in a country, so don't be alarmed next time you see an ad from someone you never met but it looks like you did.

quantaman: I don't know the precise wording of the law

The text of the EUCD (AKA directive 2001/29/EC) is at http://eur-lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do? uri=CELEX:32001L0029:EN:HTML

The relevant part is article 6, sections (1) to (3), which reads as follows:

1. Member States shall provide adequate legal protection against the circumvention of any effective technological measures, which the person concerned carries out in the knowledge, or with reasonable grounds to know, that he or she is pursuing that objective.

2. Member States shall provide adequate legal protection against the manufacture, import, distribution, sale, rental, advertisement for sale or rental, or possession for commercial purposes of devices, products or components or the provision of services which:

(a) are promoted, advertised or marketed for the purpose of circumvention of, or

(b) have only a limited commercially significant purpose or use other than to circumvent, or

(c) are primarily designed, produced, adapted or performed for the purpose of enabling or facilitating the circumvention of,

any effective technological measures.

3. For the purposes of this Directive, the expression "technological measures" means any technology, device or component that, in the normal course of its operation, is designed to prevent or restrict acts, in respect of works or other subject-matter, which are not authorised by the rightholder of any copyright or any right related to copyright as provided for by law or the sui generis right provided for in Chapter III of Directive 96/9/EC. Technological measures shall be deemed "effective" where the use of a protected work or other subject-matter is controlled by the rightholders through application of an access control or protection process, such as encryption, scrambling or other transformation of the work or other subject-matter or a copy control mechanism, which achieves the protection objective.

Unfortunately several studies declare that about half the drivers will have below average intelligence. :)
Seriously, drivers are actually pretty efficient self-optimizing machines. The only problem is they have little immediate incentives to play nicely with others. Traffic flow control is a rather complex (and chaotic) process to optimize, and it is an area where significant investments are being made today (for example under the FP7 in europe). It is a field which has potential for efficiency gains by bettering the perceived "group intelligence" of large numbers of drivers.

Actually Sun *is* the biggest contributor to Open Source by a long way, according to this report:

http://ec.europa.eu/enterprise/ict/policy/doc/2006 -11-20-flossimpact.pdf

Here in italy we currently have this law: if you bring criminal charges against someone and those charges are not proven then you're liable to be charged for "calunnia", and that's a felony. So private investigation by the oligopolists has been almost impossible. For example: If something like the RIAA suits was going to happen people could fight back and those proven innocent (or not proven guilty above any suspect) can claim a vast sum of money as compensation.

Unfortunately they (the oligopolist) recently lobbyed for fixing this at the european level. It has recently passed a awful legistlation that gives them investigative powers as those they enjoy in the USA. The only difference is that here (in Europe) the charges are only to be brought in by the police and not by "extorsion" agencies. The law in itself states that individuals acting without profits are extemped from the law, but it has to be seen how individual countries will accept and include this statement into the local criminal law. IPRED2 text here. http://europa.eu/rapid/pressReleasesAction.do?refe rence=IP/06/532&format=HTML&aged=1&language=EN&gui Language=en

There is, as far as I can tell, only one place in the world where GNOME is more popular than KDE, and that is, surprise surprise, on the Ubuntu Forums. Everywhere else, KDE appears to lead my a margin of roughly 2:1. In particular, it is a consistent winner of the LinuxQuestions Members Choice awards. It's also very popular on the desktops of European government, being used on 10.2% of desktops, compared to GNOME's 5.5% (see page 29).

It always saddens me to see the Big Distros rallying around GNOME and pouring funds into it as I've always viewed Open Source as a meritocracy, whereas the decision to back GNOME development is quite clearly not based on its merits (or at least, not its technical ones), nor even, clearly, on what the end users want. It also strikes me as a terrible waste of resources: GNOME's shaky technical base and general bureaucratic attitude means that even though money is thrown at it, nothing ever seems to get done, with GNOME's busiest days barely matching KDE's laziest, while the KDE team are completely shaking up the code and architecture of their massive code-base on a shoestring. A real shame, but - c'est la vie, I guess!

Amendment 1: (...), as defined by this Directive, other than patents.

European Parliament rules sharing isn't illegal

"Yesterday, 25/04/2007, the European Parliament voted in favour of a proposal to modify the EU Parliament and Congress directive regarding penal measures destined to enforce Intellectual Property rights. the directive finally establishes in Article 3 that the member states will be responsible of considering as a criminal infraction all intentional IP offences committed at a commercial scale, as well as complicity and/or incitement to these offences. According to Amendment 13, Article 2 of the directive excludes culpability of the acts performed by private users for personal non-profit usage. Read the "

There are some important parts there, that helps to clarify and protect private copying, while harmonizing the legislation among the members states to fight the real threat that this legislation aims: counterfeiting of real world trademarked and copyrighted goods. Here are some important parts of this amendments:

• Amendment 1: "Certain criminal provisions need to be harmonised so that counterfeiting and piracy in the internal market can be combated effectively."
• Ammendment 3: "The involvement of the holders of intellectual property rights concerned should constitute a supporting role that will not interfere with the neutrality of the state investigations.
• Amendment 13: ""infringements on a commercial scale" means any infringement of an intellectual property right committed to obtain a commercial advantage; this would exclude acts carried out by private users for personal and not for profit purposes;
• Amendment 16: "Member States shall ensure that the fair use of a protected work, including such use by reproduction in copies or audio or by any other means, for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship or research, does not constitute a criminal offence."
• Amendment 24: "Member States shall ensure that, through criminal, civil and procedural measures, the misuse of threats of criminal sanctions is prohibited and made subject to penalties. Member States shall prohibit procedural misuse, especially where criminal measures are employed for the enforcement of the requirements of civil law.
• Amendment 25: "Member States shall ensure that the rights of defendants are duly protected and guaranteed.
• Amendment 27: "The Member States shall put in place adequate safeguards to ensure that such assistance [by the IP holders] does not compromise the rights of the accused person, for example by affecting the accuracy, integrity or impartiality of evidence.

Now, again, let's comment on that. How is that bad for fair use, private copying, etc? It is exactly THE OPPOSITE of what is being stated in the summary of this article, it defines explicitly fair use, right to private copying and creates a legal framework for the IP holders to be able to assert their rights, while protecting the citizens against baseless suits.

And, as a side effect of that, it legalizes the legal parallel importing of goods, making the ones like Lik Sung (sic) to be able to operate on E.U. territory. See below:

• Amendment 15: Criminal sanctions shall not be applied in cases of parallel importation of original goods which have been marketed with the agreement of the right-holder in a

(b) "infringements on a commercial scale" means any infringement of an intellectual property right committed to obtain a commercial advantage; this would exclude acts carried out by private users for personal and not for profit purposes;

andyteleco writes "Yesterday, 25/04/2007, the European Parliament voted in favour of a proposal to modify the EU Parliament and Congress directive regarding penal measures destined to enforce Intellectual Property rights. the directive finally establishes in Article 3 that the member states will be responsible of considering as a criminal infraction all intentional IP offences committed at a commercial scale, as well as complicity and/or incitement to these offences. According to Amendment 13, Article 2 of the directive excludes culpability of the acts performed by private users for personal non-profit usage. Read the entire text"

Yeah, really well put, but...

Quote: "But to be fair, and to avoid attributing to EU regulators a moral high ground they don't in fact possess, I have my doubts that the EU would have gone as far as it has if Microsoft was a European company"

Please take a look at http://ec.europa.eu/comm/competition/antitrust/cas es/ which contains a huge list of antitrust cases (with damages > 500 million euro/650 million US$ per company (!)) initiated by the EU mainly against european companies.

Not monopolies, but closely releated are cartels. The EU fines these with fairly hefty sums regularly (over 2 billion in 2007 so far) See http://ec.europa.eu/comm/competition/cartels/overv iew/index_en.html and http://ec.europa.eu/comm/competition/cartels/stati stics/statistics.pdf

Not monopolies, but closely releated are cartels. The EU fines these with fairly hefty sums regularly (over 2 billion in 2007 so far) See http://ec.europa.eu/comm/competition/cartels/overv iew/index_en.html and http://ec.europa.eu/comm/competition/cartels/stati stics/statistics.pdf

For the Lazy.

first:
http://ec.europa.eu/dgs/energy_transport/galileo/i ndex_en.htm
second:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GALILEO_positioning_s ystem

Oh come now, You must be referring to Galileo system that is being buid for the EU and ESA (European Space Agency) by European Satellite Navigation Industries. So it's basicly european system not French. Get your facts straight.

The industry got slammed for using sat fats and then got blamed for the transfats when it was the well-intentioned food nannies that lead to the change?

Next thing you know, someone is going to suggest that we shouldn't drive faster than 70mph, and you'll start driving 1mph just to show them. Maybe, just maybe, the appropriate response to "Don't put unhealthy stuff in food" is to find healthy stuff to put into food. But that would require that corporations not resort to childish petulance whenever they don't get their way.

Did the furniture industry start putting PBDEs in the materials or were they compelled by some well-intentioned safety group or legislation?

Sure, they were required to not have their furniture burst into flames, so naturally they went out, did some research and found the safest flame-retardant they could find... right? Right? Well, after Penta-BDEs were found in breast milk in the '90s, that research was done, resulting in the banning of Penta- and Octa- BDEs in Europe. Further research into DecaBDEs "revealed a number of uncertainties concerning possible effects on the environment".

Funny, in most arguments, the person making the assertion is the one that has to provide the burden of proof, but when corporate interests are on the line, suddenly the laws of logic fly out the windows, and by default many people blindly accept whatever the corporation says as truth by assertion: "The company asserts that their flame retardant is safe, therefore it must be so." Demands for the company to prove their claim are unacceptable to these people.

You obviously don't work with anyone working in EU institutions (European Commission, European Parliement, European Counsil, European Central Bank, Committee of Regions just to name some of the big ones all accessible via http://www.europa.eu/) that all have a url with ".europea.eu" same goes for all their staff that has an email addrees with "@someinst.europa.eu".

I, for one, see ".eu" addresses every business day.

These guys use it extensively: http://www.europa.eu/ (links to the joined websites of all the European institutions)

Despite the image based on what US-based news outlets report to you, the reality of things might be somewhat different. EU based companies aren't getting away scot free, it just happens that sales restrictions across member state borders and blatant disregard for the law are a few of those things that the union doesn't look upon very kindly.

http://eur-lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do? uri=CELEX:32006L0024:EN:NOT

The data retention directive only applies to ISPs, and only deals with who you "communicate" with. It does not explicitly say that a record of which websites you visit should be retained, and it explicitly says that the content of the communication must not be retained.

However, as for all EU directives, it only contains the baseline of regulation. Directives are never law themselves, but have to be implemented in each respective member state by each respective legislative body. These, in turn, are free to implement whatever they want ABOVE the baseline, so some member states may have longer retention periods for this data, some member states may require ISPs to retain additional data.

The deadline for this directive is September this year, but if you read it, a few member states have reserved the option to postpone parts of the directive, typically of the internet-related traffic. This basically means that they recognize the difficulties in implementing it, and want more time to think about on how to do it, or possibly obstruct it.

What all of this boils down to is that maybe, sometime in the future, if you have an European ISP, they may be required to store all the URLs that you access. Google search data is transmitted as querystring parameters that are part of the URL, which means that your search data may be stored by your ISP, in a non-anonymized way. There's nothing in this possible future that Google has to comply with, as long as they are not an European ISP.

Section: 'eIdentification' at:

http://ec.europa.eu/idabc/en/document/6614/386

(I do not think it is a good idea)

Well, Phill Zimmerman not only gave a heads up in 1991, he gave to the tools to use to do something about it. According to even a slow beast as the European Parliament, you should already be encrypting your e-mail. It's warning is from 2001, read and weep:

Well, Phill Zimmerman not only gave a heads up in 1991, he gave to the tools to use to do something about it. According to even a slow beast as the European Parliament, you should already be encrypting your e-mail. It's warning is from 2001, read and weep:

"And the European constitution actually gives the right to freedom of expression, though of course it isn't anywhere near as long established as the US' right to free speech."

And that's the problem with it. The US document merely recognizes that and other freedoms.

You shouldn't be so snarky about something you are ignorant of. I quote:

1. The Union shall recognise the rights, freedoms and principles set out in the Charter of Fundamental Rights which constitutes Part II.

Even if true (which I very much doubt) coal and oil is only a minor source of air pollution. Things like pesticides are far more significant. Here in CA, the San Joaquin Valley is one of the most polluted areas in the state, partly because of the large amount of agriculture.

Maybe agriculture is locally significant in terms of air pollution, but, globally, there's no contest.

This EU press release is not a scientific study, but it accurately interprets this massive EU research study. And, yes, it does say 300,000 premature deaths from air pollution per year across the EU, and overwhelmingly that is from the burning of fossil fuels. And not all of those deaths are old people (a fair and often neglected point). A US study on the topic suggested the average loss of life from a premature death from air pollution is roughly 10-15 years. On top of that, there's also the massive problem of air pollution contributing to kiddies getting asthma.

As for your points about California's local geography and the potential effects of wind turbines and the like, that's a reasonable point about the local situation in one of the more densely populated and most car-saturated places on earth. But that's why you do environmental impact statements before any development, including wind turbines.

You Sir, need to acquire the very useful skill of comprehension.

The actual press release would be a very useful start to find out what all this is really about.

Among other things, it explains very early on what the fines are for:
The European Commission has sent a Statement of Objections (SO) to Microsoft for failing to comply with certain of its obligations under the March 2004 Commission decision (see IP/04/382)

Now if you could remove your head from that orifice of yours so that you can put your eyes on the article, you'll soon find your point entirely demolished.

Supply complete and accurate information: This is very vague and how would they even test whether the documentation is complete and accurate

If I was appointed to the evaluation, I would try to figure out if I am able to create a software able to communicate with windows's SMB (and friends) protocols from their spec. I don't see this as an impossible task really as long as I am given enough time, and it looks like they took some time for that since the issue with EU began. The formulation of the news report may sound vague to you, but the objective it represents does not need much more details I think.

Make that information available on resonable terms: Then specify the terms rather than going back and forth on telling MS, your royalty rates are high. If comission finds that the royalty rates are high, then specify the maximum that MS can charge on these kind of things. If comission determines it should be free and specify that

I've the feeling that it's more or less what they have done:

here reads:
For both licences, Microsoft divided the protocols into Gold, Silver and Bronze price categories based on the claimed degree of innovation. Microsoft has already agreed that there is a fourth category of protocols, not necessarily innovative, for which there will be no royalty.

According to the trustee, there is no innovation in most of their protocols, which means there should be no royalty for them if I read that correctly. You may argue that the appointed trustee might not be in conditions to drive educated enough conclusions, but this is someone both EU and microsoft have agreed upon:

In accordance with the terms of the Decision, Microsoft submitted several candidates for the position of Monitoring Trustee

Hence, I see some substance in the today's development of the microsoft issue, and hope it's gonna go a lot further for once. This is a stupid games, and microsoft is wasting both EU's time and tax money on that one; I'll be glad if some of that cash come back as a fine they truly deserve.

How does the ec know what is innovative or not?

Well, according to the actual article released by the EC, the documentation Microsoft provided was reviewed by the Monitoring Trustee (Professor Neil Barrett, a tech expert chosen from a list of people provided by Microsoft) as well as TAEUS, the EC's technical advisors.

See the FAQ for more information.

How does the ec know what is innovative or not?

Well, according to the actual article released by the EC, the documentation Microsoft provided was reviewed by the Monitoring Trustee (Professor Neil Barrett, a tech expert chosen from a list of people provided by Microsoft) as well as TAEUS, the EC's technical advisors.

See the FAQ for more information.

How does the ec know what is innovative or not?

Well, according to the actual article released by the EC, the documentation Microsoft provided was reviewed by the Monitoring Trustee (Professor Neil Barrett, a tech expert chosen from a list of people provided by Microsoft) as well as TAEUS, the EC's technical advisors.

See the FAQ for more information.

The EU institutions have exclusive competence over regulating competition within the EU (it is one of the very few areas where almost all of the Member State powers have been given up). The European Commission in particular has been pushing the liberalisation of formerly state-owned monopolistic services. Read more... http://ec.europa.eu/comm/competition/liberalisatio n/overview_en.html

This idea dates back to begin 2000. At that time the UK national criminal inteligence service argued for it. In a plan that I dont think was intended for publication it concluded: "There is a convergence of issues. Communications data is of crucial importance to Law Enforcement, and the Intelligence and Security Agencies but our needs are in conflict with existing legislation arising from data protection provisions and ECHR. In addition, there is significant commercial pressure to delete data. There are also significant public policy issues to address. It is an area requiring prompt attention."

Thats "European Convention on Human Rights". It has an article on how invasions upon someones privacy should be proportional. Keeping traffic data on everyone in Europe could be considdered disproportional.

Somehow the proponents forgot to mention that bit when they lobbied for this idea. First at the G8, then at the EU commision. The procedure the commision used for this legislation would have kept the decision out of the EU parlaiment. This is where the accusation of "policy laundering" comes from. The pressure to pass legislation increased after the Madrid train bombings, leading some people to mistake this law for a reaction to terrorism or something. I dont know why the text always had to mention it was directed at "terrorism and serious crime", isn`t terrorism a serious crime? Proponents were fearmongering using very scary crimes that were solved using traffic data. (So why the new legislation if you can solve crimes...?) And everyone was saying that the bill, which would go to the telco`s as NCIS had first suggested, would be that high.

The EU parlaiment argued is should get a say, so its civil liverties commisions got to work and... then the two big party blocks reached a deal behind closed doors. This was done under the threat from the commision to pass legislation without any input from parlainment. They can do that, the procedure is explained in this map of the codecision procedure. I am not kidding, thats the real thing. And the threat was to stay outside of that map... anyway. The version that was passed allowed national governments some freedom in setting their legislation so some countries will be less bad.

Usually you can only return an opened product if it is faulty.

I suggest you read up on EU law before making statements like that. TFA states "consumers in some European countries have the right to return items with no questions asked for a specified time period after purchase." This is incorrect. This applies to all EU countries, although there are exceptions for various types of product.

The Distance Selling Regulations allow a consumer to return goods they have bought from a vendor via mail/Internet order for any reason as long as they make arrangements to do so within 7 days of delivery. The only current exemption regarding "opened" products is "(d) for the supply of audio or video recordings or computer software if they are unsealed by the consumer". They are also considering removing this exemption, putting all digital media on a par with other products where the consumer is allowed to open the packaging to examine what they have purchased before deciding whether or not to keep it.

See the green paper mentioned in TFA for more information.

The Economic Impact of Open Source Software and the competitiveness of the Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) sector in the EU, pages 48-53. The best counter argument to the standard closed source development model that I've ever read.

It is no excuse for Microsoft. Applications as important on the market place have to work. Microsoft has a tradition of insane binary compatibility. If they don't guarantee it for widespread Apple products than its intentional incompatibility.

Haha, oh we didn't know our users want to use Apple products...

Apple should approach the antitrust authorities which keep an eye on VISTA.

Article 7 Joint investigation teams
The Member States must ensure that the holders of intellectual property rights
concerned, or their representatives, and experts, are allowed to assist the investigations carried out by joint investigation teams into the offences referred to in Article 3.

Article 8
Initiation of criminal proceedings
Member States shall ensure that the possibility of initiating investigations into, or prosecution of, offences covered by Article 3 are not dependent on a report or accusation made by a person subjected to the offence, at least if the acts were committed in the territory of the Member State.

Article 7 Joint investigation teams
The Member States must ensure that the holders of intellectual property rights
concerned, or their representatives, and experts, are allowed to assist the investigations carried out by joint investigation teams into the offences referred to in Article 3.

Article 8
Initiation of criminal proceedings
Member States shall ensure that the possibility of initiating investigations into, or prosecution of, offences covered by Article 3 are not dependent on a report or accusation made by a person subjected to the offence, at least if the acts were committed in the territory of the Member State.

• Who is a convicted monopolist ?
  (see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Micr osoft
  and: http://europa.eu/rapid/pressReleasesAction.do?refe rence=IP/04/382&format=HTML&aged=0&language=&guiLa nguage=en )
  
• Who is still under investigation in at least U.S. and Europe markets ?
  (see: http://ww.iowaconsumercase.org/ )
• Whose mint new operating system is in direct competition with Apple's Mac OS X ? (see: http://www.winsupersite.com/showcase/macosx_leopar d_preview.asp )
• Who is trying hard to enter the mp3 player market with an iPod-killer ?
  (see: http://www.technewsworld.com/story/54786.html )

So the situation is not that different from the US.

Subsidies have been cut by 36%, but they are still there.

Ethanol from Corn or sugar beets doesn't make sense for the US or Europe. This may be different for e.g. Brazil. Diesel from rape or soybeans makes much more sense (or even algae in the long run).

Bye egghat

The domain appears to have been extent prior to 25 Feb 2004.

http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://gmail.de

However, the first two archived pages are error messages so it's not clear if this was being used for an email service. If this was a registered trade mark then it wouldn't matter as the Nice Classification for marks is Telecoms (which surely encompasses websites) - I'm not sure how it works with unregistered marks though.

http://oami.europa.eu/CTMOnline from OHIM (the European TM registry) shows the earliest registration of "gmail" to be by Google Inc. 14/Apr/2004.

As I understand it though, at least in Europe, you have to protect a mark (to maintain it as an designation of origin of goods or service) otherwise you lose your rights to it.

In summary ... a bit more info please.

The problem is that recycling a computer is EXPENSIVE. Shipping an old computer, specially with CRT monitors costs a lot of money. Also, people don't want to take these old clunkers off you, so you end up collecting more and more pentium II 200mhz toasters which you then have to find some way to get rid off. It's not a profitable business. Now of course people will chime in, why doesn't the gov recycle them for plastics etc? Well recycling printers/monitors is really hard to do. It's very expensive and not worth a computer charities time on the whole, if they don't want to go under from the associated cost.

Simple solution: require all hardware vendors to take back and recycle or properly dispose the products they sell. They will automatically start designing for ease of recycling instead of low cost. The cost of disposal will end up part of the original sale price, and the problem will solve itself.

In almost every question of pollution the simplest and most appropriate solution is "the polluter pays for the cleanup". It's just common sense.

Incidentally, this is the path the EU and Japan are following, with the Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment directive in the EU, and the Law for Promotion of Effective Utilization of Resources in Japan.

Based also on Large FLOSS Study Gets the Real Facts (more specificaly Economic impact of FLOSS on innovation and competitivness of EU ICT sector, page 102:
Q: Can you be as productive in OpenOffice as MS Office?
A: YES - more than 20%, YES but some problems - almost 60%, NO - under 10%)
I can say YES.

Sun is the leading opensource contributer - page 51 according to the EU.

So this shouldn't come as a surprise.

Alex

That has to be ignoring half a kazillion markets where the leading product is a commercial product which is vastly superior to any OSS equivalent

Ah! I've been waiting for a chance to find the equivalent value of 1 kazillion in any of the known number systems, and lo! Here it is! A chance at Mathematical Fame! Right on Slashdot!

So let me work this out for you all. You can be my jury.

Markets without a significant FOSS presence:

1. CAD. AutoCAD still rulz
2. CAM. Well, maybe that's the same market, but we'll count it anyway. An off-by-one won't matter in the final analysis.
3. Accounting. GnuCash is coming along, but not there yet
   Space exploration— oh wait. NASA is using a lot of linux now
4. Point of sales processing? Except web-based POS is mostly done with Perl or PHP on Apache. Uh, Lets count this anyway, for all the mom&pop stores and farmers co-ops and such.
   That's it? I think so.

So count those up, and the total is 0.5 kazillion, 'cuz parent post said so. Therefore 1 kazillion is equal to 8.

Funny, I expected it to be more. Maybe 1 kazillion is a very large value of 8...

So, my jury, have I satisfactorily established the equivalence of 1 kazillion in known numeric systems? Will my name now be known for all time as a Major Contributor to Mathematics, like whatzhisname with the triangle thingy?

You be the judge...

BTW,
...OSS thrives in markets that have stagnated and have little or no competition.

I think not. Here's a timely and relevant quote:

The existing base of quality FLOSS applications with reasonable quality control and distribution would cost firms almost Euro 12 billion to reproduce internally. This code base has been doubling every 18-24 months over the past eight years, and this growth is projected to continue for several more years.

From Economic impact of open source software on innovation and the competitiveness of the Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) sector in the EU (Nov 2006)

It is interesting that your list fails to include any of my real arguments. Since you have forgotten (or failed to understand but instead talked about what you thought I implied), I'll do a quick recap:

• Information that has no costs and no barriers to use, gets used more.
• Open information models have the potential to be more accurate that traditional proprietary ones.
• Restrictions on information negatively impacts decision making capabilities in business.

I don't think any of these are particularly controversial. I then went on to say this was analogous to software and that your arguments were weak - specifically, I questioned that free-software has been out-competed, your metrics and your assertion of the proprietary software model is better by pointing out that proprietary software benefits from the ideas of the free-software community - if not from the code base.

You are obviously unaccustomed to having civil discourse with people that disagree with your point of view. A suggestion: start with the supposition that you might not have understood something correctly rather than pursuing a path of intellectual arrogance and focus a lot less on what was implied and more on what was actually said. Who knows, you might actually learn something (read the executive summary).

The trademark information on the European Trademark Office

Maybe the fact that Apple owns the TM in half the world, was the reason to use the iPhone name.