Slashback: IP Protection, ReligiousDocument, LiPS Savings

Slashback tonight with updates and clarifications on recent Slashdot stories, including some more fuel for the Sony fire, a closer look at the Intellectual Property Protection Act, ministers jumping on the OpenDocument bandwagon, another spammer gets his due, founding members of the new LiPS board speak out and more - read on for details.

Sony leading a price-fixing cartel? Sheridan writes "Hot on the heels of the SonyBMG XCP rootkit fiasco The Times is reporting that Sony may have been charging online retailers up to 15% more for its products than high street outlets in an attempt to block online bargains from forcing prices down. Perhaps they're trying to recoup some of their losses on the rootkitted CDs, although somebody ought to let them know that most of their loss was to their reputation, which this certainly won't help."

Deconstructing the IP protection act. Brent writes "Ars Technica takes a more in-depth look at the Intellectual Property Protection Act of 2005 and shows that some of the original fears of the Act were overstated. The article states that the act is primarily concerned with criminal acts of infringement, namely infringement done for commercial gain or competitive advantage, and not with criminalizing the mere attempt at commonplace infringement. In short, the act is aimed at commercial piracy. The article also ends with an reasonable challenge to the US government, including the call for a referendum on consumer rights and the penalization of the use of any digital rights technology that impedes fair use."

Even the clergy are jumping into the OpenDocument fray. da6d writes "The LXer has an article about clergy joining the fray surrounding Microsoft's refusal to support OpenDocument. From the article: '[they] see Microsoft's stance as intentionally withholding support so that it can turn a technical business decision into a political fight. By refusing to support OpenDocument, Microsoft is ignoring the cross-platform document sharing needs of visually impaired users, not only in Massachusetts, but also in the other 49 states, not to mention the rest of the world. The economically disadvantaged will also suffer from the lack of Opendocument support in Microsoft Office.'"

UK spammer gets his due. delete writes "Notorious UK internet spammer Peter Francis-Macrae, who referred to himself as "weaselboy", has been convicted of fraud. The 23-year-old earned more than £1.5 million through his activities, primarily through spam mails offering the registration of unavailable domain names. Up to £425,000 of his earnings remain unrecovered."

Linux to make smartphones and high end communication devices cheaper. nitinah writes "In an interview with Phonemag, the founders of LiPS comment that mainstream adoption of Linux would make smartphone and high end communication devices more affordable than ever before. Founding members John Ostrem, lead scientist of PalmSource and Michel Gien, EVP of Jaluna also commented that Linux would also extend the economics to not just phones but applications and services."

Comments

Seems a bit unfair

[Otter]

Microsoft Office supports the needs of blind users. The OpenDocument alternatives do not. Massachusetts bars government use of Office until it complies with OpenDocument. Microsoft, at the moment, is going to concede the market to the alternatives.

So how exactly does this become "Microsoft mean to blind users!" Shouldn't blame belong to a) Open Office and other suites that don't have adequate accessibility, b) the Massachusetts government for locking out MS Office without considering this issue and c) the people who advocated b)?

And as a Massachusetts tax payer (and quite hefty taxes, at that) it's not obvious to me why this is any of the business of a bunch of ministers in North Carolina.

Re:Seems a bit unfair

[DaveCar]

Microsoft Office doesn't really support the needs of blind users. It is the screen reader companies that have spend lots of time writting custom code so Office works with their software. Who would have thought they would spend most time trying to get the monopoly office suite working?

If there were better (and I'm not a windows user/developer so I'm going on trust about such assertations) API hooks for accessibility (see the Peter Korn article) then they would be able to support _all_ suites adequately rather than having to spend all their time making MS Office work.

Sony, OpenDocument, and Linux Telco

[queenb**ch]

Sony BMG - Well, they don't think much about ripping off artists, so why should they be concerned about ripping off consumers?

OpenDocument - Why would Microsoft support anything that threatens their monopoly? DUH!

Linux and Communication Devices - Astersik anyone? Your own PBX http://www.asterisk.org/

2 cents,

Queen B

Huh?

[Mr2cents]

Sony denies penalising internet shopping sites, arguing that it is rewarding stores that can demonstrate its products.

Can someone explain me the difference?

The Terrible Secret of Space.

[hackwrench]

Microsoft is clearly the Pusher robot here.

http://www.kilna.com/music/terrible_stairs
http://www.kilna.com/music/terrible_protected

I mean, come on... what rock have you been hiding under? These aren't even illegal free downloads!

Hmm... Maybe that's the problem.

Re:OpenDocument

[Feneric]

There's a fair amount written locally about it in Saugus. You can read the public announcement, see it discussed on the Saugus forums (in regards to the Teaching American History Grant Project) or even see the blog entry I posted about it on the Saugus blog. If you go digging through Saugus.net's search facility I'm sure you'll find more info about it in Saugus, too.

Re:OpenDocument

[SandiConoverJones]

Sorry, my sister, an experienced professional editor, frequently spoke of newsroom personnel bragging about how bad their math skills were, and who understood science less than whom. I figured that someone from a newsroom might have an insight into what the journalism field is like more than the average /. reader. My other writing friends echo the same sentiments.

Re:OpenDocument

[AKAImBatman]

I don't live in Massachusetts, but I'd guess the lack of press has a lot to do with the general public's tenuous grasp on the concept of file formats, let alone the idea of why any one format should be considered 'better' than another.

That's probably part of it. But part of it also is that this fight is happening mostly online. All the news sources carrying are online, and all the arguments are presented online. Heck, the story listed was RFCed on the Linux4Christians mailing list prior to publishing.

Journalists are getting better at watching the Internet for stories, but they've still got a long way to go. They're ignoring far too many major events that the Internet is buzzing with.

Re:OpenDocument

[werewolf1031]

Yeah, that works great in theory. In practice, most people -- yes, even college students (at least most of the ones I know personally) -- would much rather have a "fully functional" (and yeah, if necessary, pirated) copy of MS Office, a "mainstream" program suite, rather than go with "some unknown 3rd-party software", no matter how good it is. Most of them aren't nerds. A frightening proportion can't even be described realistically as "computer literate", except the ability to use Kazaa (whole other rant, I won't go there cuz it'd be even further off-topic).

Your arguments are sound IF you're talking to someone who knows what you're talking about. For the rest of society, it's a head-scratcher... and as such, they'll just go with the default (MS) instead of trying something new in the chance that "it might break compatability" (even though it most likely won't) and "I've never heard of it and neither have my friends so it can't be that great", etc. Insert whatever other arguments you can think of here, but the bottom line is most of the sheep won't go for it, simply because it's not from Big Huge Corporation(tm) which they think they can trust... for no other reason than because it's BHC(tm), a supposedly known quantity to them.

I'm not saying I'd recommend pirating MSW over OO, just sayin' that most "non-techies" won't go for an "unknown" alternative... unknown to THEM of course.

Re:OpenDocument

[cduffy]

They're being short changed by idiotic attempts to go away from [Microsoft]

Bullshit. Nobody in Massachusets wants to get away from Microsoft. Peter Quinn isn't against using Microsoft software. Much to the contrary, he's in faver of using ODF. Only thing is that Microsoft refuses to support ODF. If they do, and the Massachusets CIO's office still tells them to piss off, it makes Peter Quinn a hypocrite -- and he and his office are having enough trouble keeping power as it is.

So all Microsoft needs to do right now is support a sufficiently open document format (and ODF has already been selected as onesuch), and then they still have the business of the executive branch of the state of Massachusets. It's not all that hard, given the number of 3rd-party formats they'll already interoperate with. Heck, they could even open up the licensing on MSXML, and that would work too -- except that Microsoft refuses to do either of those things.

It's not about the users. If it was, the Linux and other OS os/app people would actually try to honestly grok why the end users consistantly choose Microsoft Windows over Linux and BSD and so forth. It's about sticking it to Microsoft, it's about FUD about Microsoft, and paranoia about Microsoft. I don't expect too many on /. to grasp any of this, but it's true. OPEN is not some magic word and those who wield it are frequently like the political correctness wonks on campus who whine about free speech but only as long as it is theirs: "the users" only matter as long as it is their hated enemy Microsoft that is getting the buys.

Perhaps that's the case with most of the OSS types you find on campus. It's a rather different matter with the folks who are doing OSS work commercially. You know, for pay? With managers?

I'm one of those people -- though it's not my full-time job anymore, I still do paid OSS work (primarily bugfixes, adding features we need, doing custom integration and the like) for my full-time employer very frequently (and no, we're not an "open source company", though my last employer -- still in business -- is).

You look at the usability work being done today, and it's mostly being funded by someone. Novell, IBM, Red Hat, Sun (they use GNOME for their desktop)... someone. But the point is that it does get funded, and once someone does it, everyone benefits.

Re:Really?

[Jasin Natael]

My wife, currently looking for work, was required to submit her resume in Word format to about half of the employers she's interviewed with. Monster.com won't accept PDF or any other resume types except for pasted text. There is a lot of very focused discrimination working in favor of MS Office. It was a pain, too.

Her resume was on a super-professional looking HTML/CSS template that I designed for my own resume, so we had HTML and PDF versions. It renders properly in every CSS-capable browser I've tried it with, and even on my cellphone's browser, but Word (surprise!) couldn't import the document without mangling it. We ended up re-doing the document from scratch on Word for OS X (which has decent stylesheet support, unlike the Windows versions) and battling with the tables.

Your point about Word not working with anything is more than valid. It can't import HTML, RTF, or just about any other format properly, so why are we surprised when it can't read its own file format just right? But at the end of the day, Word 2000 reads Word 2000 files pretty well -- not perfectly, but none of the corporate users know to expect better from an office document format. Word XP has 'issues' reading Word 2000 files, and so on, ad infinitum. This is by design, and the poor end-users who either can't afford Office or can't keep up with the upgrade cycle, are being looked over for certain jobs.

Luckily for us, the choice to put the document in another format was for convenience and interoperability, not because we didn't have or couldn't use Word. Like (I think) most people on Slashdot, I'm not calling for an end to the Microsoft Office Hegemony. I just think that unless they can find a way to work with at least one feature-rich document format besides their own, I will have to join the cry for revolution.

--Jasin Natael