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I've had several discussions with Adobe on how to put copying and printing limits on my line of 40 e-books (do to with learning and customizing AutoCAD, Visio, IntelliCAD, and so on).

All they can offer is a centralized server that hands out permissions. But for isolated customers -- the kind I have -- who buy and read my ebooks, this obviously isn't going to work.

Mass copying? It happens. One customer asked if it was alright for them to have made 16 copies. I replied, "Sure, just pay for them." They never did.

For classrooms, I recommend that the instructor have the college bookstore print copies for students.

But the problem of limited-DRM on ebooks isn't solved. I would love to have code inside a PDF file that limits it to being printed once and copied twice -- from the original PDF file only.

http://www.upfrontezine.com/ebooks

Was that one of the blackjack teams? I only remember the documentary because one of the guys "went on to found a major CAD company" (according to the documentary - sorry, I'm relying on possibly faulty memory).

"At least one CAD company ceo I know of was interviewed on-camera about his role in the MIT blackjack team of the early 1990s during a Discovery Channel program. Some of the team members spoke in the shadows with their identities hidden, but he did not."

Reminds me of the VisuaLABS scandal. This guy fooled investors and squandered millions of dollars on his revolutionary 3D television which was nothing but an off-the-shelf large screen TV with a couple of lines etched into it and some camera tricks to give the illusion of depth. The founder (Sheldon Zelitt) was a bit of a wacko - spent his time in his inventor's studio playing with "optics" - which usually meant doing bizarre and childish things like gluing magnifying glasses to pennies with superglue (I made up that example, but you get the idea). I think he also once wooed investors with a parabolic mirror magic trick which I guess none of them had ever seen. More info here.

It's kind of ironic that the poster got his information from upFront.eZine issue #379 without giving any credit (except as "a CAD-related mailing list"). I guess he didn't read the article "When CAD News is Plagiarized" in issue #378.

It's kind of ironic that the poster got his information from upFront.eZine issue #379 without giving any credit (except as "a CAD-related mailing list"). I guess he didn't read the article "When CAD News is Plagiarized" in issue #378.

Is a courtesy citation so hard? The poster is referring to the article "Does Better Analysis Make Products Worse?" in Ralph Grabowski's upFront.eZine newsletter. The URL for the current issue still points to #378, but should be updated shortly.

(Here I get to plug my own site, sort of)

Does CAD Degrade Drawing Quality? compiles a few weeks' worth of reader comments about computers, engineering and current events. The original source of the comments (reprinted with permission) are from Ralph Grabowski's upFront.eZine, which is a weekly newsletter all about the CAD industry.

While your asking programmers you may actually run into a business savvy person.
Can you ask if the contract process between in-country versus international is percieved as a potential problem or benefit of Indian based shops.

Currently the ability for corporations/persons inside Europe and North America to effectively sue under both tort , contract breach, and ethics breach is breaking down. Internationalizing commercial software exacerbates the prosecution situation.

Do the programmers/managers/entrepreneurs you meet feel that India has an effective legislative and justice body to protect their personal and corporate rights? Does India has an effective system to adequately respond to international requests for justice?

Given the fact that International lawsuits are very expensive and hard to enforce judgements across boarders for big crimes (humanity, slavery, trafficing, fraud, etc) how are small companies everywhere going to CYA [cover your arse] their hard cash currancy investments in India development shops?

What is the India's stance on Copywrite enforcment?
It it foreseeable that a SCO like travisty would happen cross boarders. It is also foreseeable that a "legitamate" accusation as in the Racecad/alibre situation.

I also would like to see what would happen in cases like the IBM S.K. bribery case. How effectively are Indian companies and government actually enforcing fraud laws?

Have Indian shops ever been stiffed for non-payment, late payment, under payment by a non regional company [Europe, US]? What was the costs and outcome of legal recourse?

Anti-Piracy Raid Backfires

According to CNET, Autodesk and three other companies are being sued by a company in Mexico City for being wrongfully targeted in a 1998 raid aimed at finding pirated software. The raid produced no evidence that led to criminal charges and caused sales at Consultores en Computacion y Contabilidad to drop.

Consultores' suit seeks unspecified damages for slander and invasion of privacy from Autodesk, Microsoft, Adobe Systems, Symantec and the Business Software Alliance trade group. Consultores said it appeared on the evening news as a "busted counterfeiting operation" -- even though none of its employees were arrested and no counterfeiting machines were found. It also claims the BSA had alerted Mexican news organizations of the raid in advance. BSA organizes 75 to 100 raids a year in Mexico.

Visio is a founding member of an effort to have AutoCAD open its DWG standard (see Open DWG). I wonder what will happen now.

As has been noted by several /.ers, it was reported that Visio was going to release its code for IntelliCAD 2000. See this article from upfront.eZine. The IntelliCAD Technology Consortium (ITC) supposedly will have a website up and running (www.intellicad.org) soon, but now, who knows?

Finally, there is an OpenCAD effort that can be found here.