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Jobs' Next Fight — Dealing With iPhone Hackers
An anonymous reader writes "With Steve Jobs' recent announcement of his intention to fight off the independent iPhone developers, the question worth asking is: How will Apple try to defeat the hackers: Software updates, or lawsuits? Will Apple risk losing its most frequently (ab)used legal tool, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, in order to try and punish the developers of the iPhone unlocking tools? This CNET article explores the legal issues involved in this, which make it perfectly legal to reverse engineer your own iPhone, but illegal to share your circumventing source code with others."
Jobs better start caring about its best customers first. The iPod game fiasco could cause a lot of customers to have a bad taste in their mouth. Espcially parants that will need to re-purchase the very same games they already bought for the same iPod platform. This is a bad precedent. See here: http://www.reelsmart.com/2007/09/18/apple-screws-customers-that-bought-games-for-ipod/
already have a bad taste in their mouths. their butt hurts too.
Was this a call for the government to become an impartial monitor of the marketplace and an increased government control of the rules of the game to prevent abuse by large businesses and priviledged individuals? Somehow I do not think so....
Libertarians repeat this like a prayer, and like a prayer they hope it somehow, magically, becomes true.
But it is not, and it won't.
The truth is that monopolies and oligopolies are created via barriers to entry to the marketplace, and abuse of governmental regulation is only one of many method of creating such barriers, others being technological, geographical, social, cultural etc and so on.
For example, no one mandated the (for all the practical purposes) duopoly of Coca-cola and Pepsi. Neither was Intel and AMD somehow made the only major players in the PC CPU arena via making their competitors illegal. Etc and so on. I could go on like this through the thousands of persistent (as in lasting through generations) global, national and local monopolies which have nothing whatsoever to do with government or regulation and yet are devastating to consumer choice and highly parasitic in nature.
In short, blaming the government for all inherent flaws of the real-life (as opposed to inane "theoretical" oversimplifications used by propagandists) marketplace serves only one purpose: to free some very unscrupulous and ill-meaning individuals from any last remaining vestiges of anything resembling oversight. And that marginal oversight is the very last thing standing between them and their dream of becoming the new Kings, Lords and Nobles and the rest of us their indentured slaves and outright owned peons.
That is why Libertarians frighten me to no end, they are like the goofuses who honestly thought that the new "Worker's and Peasant's Party" will, in a few more red-flag-waving rallies, bring them freedom, justice and prosperity, just as that fellow Lenin promised! Different phillosophy but the same naivette and a very similar species of wool-clad wolves leading their "rugged indvidualist" sheep to slaughter at the altar of greed and power.