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

OpenDocument

[JoeShmoe950]

I'm in massachussets, and I'm glad massachussets is attempting to make the move. What I wonder is, with the major fight surrounding it, why is there just about 0 press? My history teacher, who knows about just about any current event in massachussets hasn't even heard of it. Why is no information getting to the unnerds?

Re:OpenDocument

[geekoid]

Becasue it's not interesting to most people? Seriously.

Yuo need to explain it to them, as well as your nerd bussies. When explaining what it is start with "It's a way to save the taxpayers a bunch of money"

Re:OpenDocument

[Stevyn]

Because the unnerds don't care. Paris Hilton's phone is stolen?? Now that's news. Face it, they don't care and the media doesn't want to waste the time trying when fantasy land entertainment figures are easy to track and report on every time they crap.

Re:OpenDocument

[Niten]

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. Until the people's knowledge of such technical issues improves (I have faith that it must, eventually), I'm afraid that issues like this, however important they really are, will never achieve much attention in the mainstream press.

Re:OpenDocument

[SandiConoverJones]

Really, how long do you expect it to take for technical news to hit non techies? Now, right on the news, with the weather report, is the mention of a new virus, worm, phishing scam, or whatever. Most of which a /. reader has known about the vulnerability far longer than reality TV watching morons.

The media is run by English majors who brag to each other who understands math/science less than the others! Don't expect an English major to understand tech stuff. You wouldn't, perhaps, remember proper gerund useage, would you?

Re:OpenDocument

[saskboy]

Just tell them:

"Remember how when you tried to move your assignment from my computer to your computer and it didn't work because I don't have Word?"

-"Yeah?"

"Well, OpenDocument means it would have worked."

-"Oh. Cool."

Re:OpenDocument

[SydShamino]

Massachussets has issued hundreds of press releases about their change.

Unfortunately, they were all in OpenDocument format and no one using Office can read them.

Re:OpenDocument

[RedNovember]

You wouldn't, perhaps, remember proper gerund useage, would you?

You wouldn't, perhaps, remember the proper spelling of usage, would you?

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

[pingveno]

I just accidently sent an .odt file to a friend instead of a Microsoft Word document. His reaction was "What the heck is an odt file?" Hardly "Oh. Cool."

Re:OpenDocument

[saskboy]

The point is, in 5 years, instead of the result you got by accident, more often than not a .odt will work either because everything will save to .odt by default, or the program will at least understand it.

As it is, even Word isn't compatible with Word. If you try to open a Word 97 file on Word 95, it won't work. If you save to .rtf in Word, it might not look the same when you open it and save it again in Open Office.

We need one standard, and it's going to be open. It's too bad that Microsoft will have to be burned over the same barrel their closed system has burned people on for over a decade now.

Re:OpenDocument

[saskboy]

"would recommend that you pirate MS Word instead."

Nearly all students have access to broadband now, and could download and take a copy of OpenOffice.org 2 home to their computers. No more piracy, and you can read the prof's power point shows, and send him Word files if they demand an assignment be emailed. No more MS piracy monkey on your back to worry about. Open Office 2 has improved a lot over Star Office from 4 years ago.

The ones who recommend piracy when a 99% compatible and legal alternative exists, probably don't realize that OpenOffice is free and almost the same as MS Office.

Re:OpenDocument

[cammoblammo]

MS Office has no useability issues

You might be right about this being an ego driven war, but let's face it, Winston Churchill was driven by ego as well as a desire to save Britain. Egotists can be right. And nobody wants to lose.

But there is one serious useability issue that seems to be at the heart of the whole debate--MS-Office doesn't support ODF. If they did, there would be no argument from anyone, and Massachusets would probably use MS quite happily.

So the question is, whose ego's causing the problem?

Re:OpenDocument

[LarsWestergren]

The media is run by English majors who brag to each other who understands math/science less than the others! Don't expect an English major to understand tech stuff.

I have met a LOT of bright English majors. Many of them, being intellectuals in general, are above the average citizen when it comes to knowledge of science and technology. Not once have I met any person boasting about being ignorant. Your comment is such a fucking troll, and this "us vs them" liberal arts bashing on Slashdot gets more and more tiring every day.

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:fp

[gg3po]

Well, at least you had the balls to not do it anonymously. You must have karma to burn :-)

Really?

[Trogre]

The economically disadvantaged will also suffer from the lack of Opendocument support in Microsoft Office.

How would the economically disadvantaged suffer? They'll just use OpenOffice instead. 100% OD support, and zero cost.

Unless they're already pirating MS Office and hopelessly locked in.

Re:Really?

[violent.ed]

The economically disadvantaged will suffer due to the fact that an OO document wont open in the MSWord processor that their boss/future employer uses to look at resume's. thats just one example.

The rich ppl might not care to try to use a "free" software for compatibility, they pay for their own MS Office, and dont care. if the poor bastard that cant afford mS office cant write a resume that i can open in my native word processing program, i will skip over that application for someone else who's mommy can afford (or at least whos brother knows how to pirate) MS Office.

Re:Really?

[pla]

You forget these people may need to send or receive documents from the well-to-do people that are using Microsoft Office already. Communication is supposed to be a two-way street, after all.

The "economically disadvantaged" don't blow $300 to $600 on buying Office, Acrobat, Photoshop, and whatever other crap they need to view "standard" formats.

They either run Free Software, or they pirate the real thing.

When you can choose between food for the next two months, and Excel - Well, one of those wins without even a second though. And that winner doesn't start with "M" and end with "T".

Or, just in case you have no frame of reference for this - Think back to college, to eating nothing but ramen (or worse, the school's "Food" Services chow) between visits to the family. If you came across a $10 bill - Would you put it away towards your student copy of MathCad... Or buy a pizza?

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

UK spammer gets his due

[oliverthered]

Well, it just goes to show we don't need many if any new laws with the word computer in them.

Re:UK spammer gets his due

[1u3hr]

He didn't "get his due" for spamming. he wasn't even charged with any offences related to how he sent his messages, as far as I can see.

Francis-Macrae was found guilty of two counts of fraudulent trading, one of concealing criminal property, two of making threats to kill, one charge of threatening to destroy or damage property and one count of blackmail.

Strange...

[TedTschopp]

As a Christian, I see more need to have an opinion on Intelligent Design than on a document standard from a company. One is a discussion on the reality of the world, the other is a stance on the choice of a company to provide a service. Christians should be more concerned about reality and than on the document standard stance of a company.

Then again I belive the above statements should also hold ture if you replace company with government or political party and document standard with morality.

Re:Strange...

[hunterx11]

One is a discussion on the reality of the world

I'm pretty sure that's not Intelligent Design you're thinking of there, bud.

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

What losses?

[eepok]

Can we seriously STOP calling non-materialized projected profits "LOSSES"? Sony hasn't lost a single dollar on their "rootkit fiasco." At the worst, they could be making less than they expected, but they're not losing any money that was already in their pockets. Their "lost profits" are based on their predictions of how their products would sell given certain predicted factors.

Yes, this "LOSSES" arguement easily fits into the piracy problem and how the MPAA has "LOST" so much money.

Stop! Just stop falling for their vocabulary changes.

Re:What losses?

[Red Flayer]

Well, lost potential revenues are one thing, LOSSES are another. And actually, it looks like the federal government redefined "loss" in re: fraud cases, here's the proposal (1998), see Appendix A: http://www.ussc.gov/publicat/Lossdefn.pdf (pdf)

The fact of the matter is, though, that the MPAA can use LOSS when discussing these 'ghost' revenues, unless they are on their financial statements and disclosures.

They can claim they "LOST" sales. They can claim they "LOST" revenues. They can even claim that they "LOST $XXX,XXX,XXX in revenues according totheir calculations. They cannot claim they realized a financial LOSS though, unless they did.

The problem is not how they use loss -- the problem is that many people don't understand the difference between financial loss and whatever mumbo-jumbo the **AA are spewing.

Although, semantically, it would be nice if those of us in the know fdid not refer to their phantom revenues as "LOSS" though, since it is a matter of public perception.

Sony

[vodkamattvt]

Sony has been racking up the karma lately, all bad it seems. Unfortunately, with the way the content "industry" is these days, Im not sure it will get better before it gets worse. Im sure the lesson here that all the other big media monopolists learned is to be more ... discreet ... when trying to screw Joe Public. Or worse, screw Joe Public by going through Big Brother.

Oh great...

[Spy der Mann]

the last thing we need is Britney Spears saying Open Source is cool. *shudder* :-S

Counterargument on price fixing

[Michael Woodhams]

The summary on Sony price-fixing portrays it as a Bad Thing. Here's a counter-argument.

If Acme sells the Acme Wizmaster 5000 cheaper to high-street stores than to "e-tailers", it could be because Acme believes that the stores are providing Acme with additional benefits. A potential buyer can go into Gadgets-R-Us and see the Acme Wizmaster, see how big it really is (much more useful than text saying "15 cm diameter"), how solid it feels, what the UI is like etc. There is a shop attendent who can answer questions on the spot. These services make it more likely the shopper will buy the Acme Wizmaster. If Acme doesn't sell at discount to the brick-and-mortar stores, they will go out of business because they can't compete with the web stores, and potential customers won't have anywhere they can go to see an actual Wizmaster. (Or Acme has to set up "demonstration stores", where they demonstrate but don't necessarily sell stuff. The high-street stores save them this expense.)

Re:Counterargument on price fixing

[BrynM]

If Acme doesn't sell at discount to the brick-and-mortar stores, they will go out of business because they can't compete with the web stores, and potential customers won't have anywhere they can go to see an actual Wizmaster. (Or Acme has to set up "demonstration stores", where they demonstrate but don't necessarily sell stuff. The high-street stores save them this expense.)

Your analogy is good except for the advertising involved with music. Consider if Acme had MTV, VH1, BET, E!, Entertainment Tonight and all of the other tv outlets in addition to the godawful amount of people playing the Wiz5K on the radio plus magazines interviewing the makers of the 5K at every opportunity plus the Wiz5K 2005 North American Tour. Hell, you'd have to nearly enter a sensory dep environment to avoid the newest Wizmaster... the public is most likely already dreaming of the 6K and it hasn't even been made yet. The interviewers keep asking about it.

Gladly, nothing is quite like the modern music intdustry. The amount the big players are saturating us is quite insane already. The only reason to have hard product in the stores for the likes of Sony is to villify anything that isn't a hard product including the sales mechanism. It's their soapbox and they'll be damned if they let you insult it. The only way they'll let that soapbox be ruined is by bashing it over your head, which we are now watching them do. I hope that thing falls apart soon. The headache is killing me.

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: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.

Re:Seems a bit unfair

[Anonymous Coward]

You seem to be misinformed about exactly what this policy entails and when it is to take place. MS office will not be banned, but it cannot be used to generate new documents after January 2007 - That's more than a year from now. There are several projects already tackling the accessability issues for ODF. There are also several programs that will allow you to convert ODF to a MS compatible format should that be necessary. For more information, try reading these articles on groklaw for starters (the first one should address your issues quite adequately):

http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=200510292 12458555
http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=200511141 03034350
http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=200510150 42041410

As a concerned citizen of Massachusetts myself, I find the position of locking all Mass citizens into the use of MS office to be quite unfair.

Re:Seems a bit unfair

[aukset]

It is my understanding that the majority of accessibility tools available are third party applications that only work with Microsoft Office. The limitations do not necessarily rest with the OpenDocument format or the available implementations of it.

One might conclude that the limitations are a symptom of Microsoft's stranglehold on office applications where accessibility tool developers have little incentive to develop their tools to interoperate. Given that OpenDocument is completely open and unencumbered, having the market-leader support ODF would create a huge incentive for those third party developers to build interoperable tools that work on any application that supports ODF. In other words, if Microsoft Office joins the rest of the industry in implementing ODF, all add-on tools and applications, including accessibility software, will have a single, standard avenue to co-operate with any office application. That would be the biggest win for accessibility issues.

Does no one find this comic from last year ironic?

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.ctrlaltdel-online.com/comic.php?d=2005- 11-04

.doc may suffice between nobility and commoners

[tepples]

[Poor] people may need to send or receive documents from the well-to-do people that are using Microsoft Office already.

I would imagine that documents exchanged between the nobility and the commoners aren't likely to use macros, heavy dependence on pagination quirks, or other features of .doc or .rtf that OOo 2.0 RC3 doesn't emulate properly.

Re:Does no one find this comic from last year iron

[shawb]

You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

Those clerks are fanatical stallmanians

[rekrutacja]

Don Parris is one-man christian think tank supporting free software philosophy. His book "Penguin in a pew" makes very interesting reading.

Re:Does no one find this comic from last year iron

[nonother]

I think you mean two weeks ago, not last year.

Re:Seems a bit unfair

[cduffy]

Massachusetts adopts a regulation designed to exclude current versions of Microsoft Office

More accurately: Massachusets adopts a regulation designed to ensure that the state's documents will be accessible in perpetuity and permit competition amongst multiple vendors for their office-suite-related business.

Microsoft had two options to avoid being excluded by this policy: Either permit their own XML-based document format to be freely enough licensed to meet the state's requirements, or support a document format that is freely enough licensed to meet the state's requirements.

Let me say that again: Microsoft needed to do no development work whatsoever to meet the state's requirements; they simply needed to make the MSXML license sublicensable (or do development work and support ODF). They have declined to do either.

leaving blind users without a working alternative

First, the Massachusets policy permits disabled users to use whatever software they need, even if this would otherwise be in conflict with their policy.

Second, there will be freely available 3rd-party filters to allow Office to read and write ODF documents before 2005 is out, so the policy doesn't really prohibit use of MS Office -- so long as it's used in conjunction with onesuch filter.

Third, there are multiple companies on crash courses to finish accessibility work on competing ODF-aware tools long before the policy goes into effect.