Microsoft is not unique in their success, only in the level of their success. There are many successful close source software companies out there. They just aren't raking in the monopoly profits like Microsoft is.
The existence of your "smart porn operator" is meaningless in the face of the existence of all the others; ".xxx" or ".sex" only has a use if all porn is there, and that ain't happening.
Porn sites will probably always exist in regular domains. But if they can avoid persecution by the government by switching to a different domain, I think that most would do so. The rest would be left to fend for themselves against whatever legislation Congress dreams up. While it may not be a perfect solution, it's a heck of a lot better than current filtering software. I'm still not completely decided about whether it's a good idea to have a porn TLD or not. It definitely worries me the same way that firearm registration worries me. Such things are usually just the first step in the process of banning them.
If you were a porn operator, you wouldn't want to be easily filtered.
If you were a smart porn operator, you would. One of the biggest problems the porn industry faces is legislation to "protect the children." If porn were easily filterable, then the protecting the children is easy, and no longer a good reason to persecute the purvayors of porn. There's already a huge amount of legitimate demand for porn, they don't need to try to sneak up on you with it.
Do they have to allow you to photocopy it, or do you have to copy it by hand? I'm thinking that before photocopiers existed, people must have done it some other way, so who decides when it's time to mandate that a newer technology be used to facilitate more convenient access to the law for the public?
Microsoft is free to do whatever they want, but third parties are free to do whatever they want.
Microsoft is NOT free to do whatever they want. Since they've been determined to be a monopoly, they are NOT free to leverage their OS monopoly to harm their competitors in other markets. Anti-trust laws exist to try to remedy a flaw in our market system. They are there for a reason and they should be enforced.
but he also sent threatening letters to those who were customers of this thief, informing them that they were committing contributory infringement.
This is a new one on me. I know what contributory infringement means in relation to copyright, but I've never heard it used in relation to patents. What law covers such a thing? Seems to me that if he believes someone is violating his patent, he should sue them. These other companies buying products from his competitor have no way of knowing whether the patent covers those products or not until it is decided by a court, at which point your friend either recovers damages from the competitor for the products it sold, or finds out his patent doesn't cover their products. I don't see how the other companies have anything to do with the dispute. Seems like legal scaremongering to me.
To me, there should be plenty of examples of prior art for something like this, possibly even an example lurking in a Computer Science textbook somewhere...
I'm thinking the same thing. Any CS student could come up with a hash like this. The matching algorithm might be slightly tougher, but it's still just a matter of determining criteria and boundaries for the matches. Might take a bit of trial and error to get it working well, but the solution itself seems obvious. I too have a very hard time believing this sort of thing hasn't been done many times in the past.
It's true, they do have a patent on that. I'm not sure if there is prior art for that or not (although i suspect there is). But even if it is a valid patent, it still doesn't explain why they're suing Roxio instead of freeDB. Any ideas on that one?
Actually, the movie studios don't "own" them either, they simply own the copyrights to them until the copyrights run out (yeah, I know, like that'll ever happen)
Slowly the patent office will get more CS people who are skilled in Internet "technologies." The boom is also slowing, which will allow examiners to spend more time with each patent.
You're not likely to find many CS grads working for peanuts at the PTO. Since the PTO has to support itself (and is used as a revenue source by the government), they have every incentive in the world to grant every patent that comes through there if it hasn't already been patented, regardless of how obvious or silly it is. They are not held accountable for their decisions. They get paid regardless of whether it gets overturned later or not. They also have every incentive to start granting patents in new areas where patents may not even promote innovation (business methods, software, genomics, etc.).
First of all, we need to take the money out of the equation. If we want patents to be screened well and objectively considered, we need to remove the financial incentive to sell patents like Big Macs. The PTO should be funded by our taxes and it should offer examiners wages commensurate with what they would make working for a commercial company in their chosen field. Otherwise, we will always end up with unqualified or underqualified examiners who won't know what is obvious to one of normal skill in the field of the patent they are examining. If we want the patent system to work properly, we had better be prepared to pay what it costs to make it work properly.
Second, we should seriously reevaluate the effects that patents really have on innovation in various industries. I can pretty much guarantee that a 20 year software patent does not have the same benefit to that industry that a 20 year pharmaceutical patent or biotech patent might have in those industries. We should rethink term lengths for the various types of patents as well as whether certain types should be granted at all.
Until these things happen, the patent system will continue to be a mess that siphons resources off to the lawyers that could be better spent hiring more people in the various industries as well as doing more R&D in order to produce real innovations rather than just patenting every silly incremental improvement that someone thinks up.
In the long run, I hope that the Patent system "smartens up" in the patents that they actually grant...
Hope all you want, but our government has seen to it that the PTO has ABSOLUTELY NO REASON to stop granting silly and frivolous patents. They get paid for them, and the courts get stuck sorting it all out. There is no accountability on their end. If you want them to shape up, you have to work to change the system.
Remember, the copyright laws allow the GPL to exist just as much as they allow proprietary software to exist.
I'm well aware of this. I'm not against Copyright per se. I'm against the seemingly endless term extensions and further restrictions of our fair use rights. Roll the law back to something more reasonable (such as a term that is shorter thna a human lifespan, preferably much shorter), then get rid of the more onerous portions of the DMCA, and I'd be willing to support copyright. As it exists today, it does nothing but screw people.
Copying software that is not licensed that way is theft.
Nope. It's still just copyright infringement. It's an artificial legal construct to try to give some incentive for creators to continue to create stuff. Not to give them absolute ownership over what they create. They don't actually own the work that they create, they simply own a copyright over that work.
If you want to argue that infringing on a copyright is immoral, I would agree. However, I would also insist that the copyright term extensions that have been bought by the copyright industry are also immoral (especially retroactive extensions as there is no possible way they could provide incentive to create works that have already been created). They don't have any compunctions about using their power to screw the public out of works that should have become public domain by now. I think that the public is starting to lose its compunctions about infringing on copyrights. What goes around comes around I guess.
IE5.5 on Win98 seems to let me read kuro5hin just fine. I can moderate and metamoderate on/. just fine too. You sure you're using the latest version?
I just downloaded moz 0.9. I wanna see how much it's improved. I can't wait to have a standards compliant browser. Hopefully it will force MS to get theirs up to snuff too.
Yep, some of my best friends today are people I met on BBSes years ago. It was exactly as you describe. Most of us got to know each other, went to gatherings and all that. It was great. But the boards I frequented back then are gone now, except for one. It's still around, but nothing like it used to be. And I don't have 6 or 8 hours a night to kill on it anymore anyway:)
Just because they were the ones that were dominating and profiting the most from the mainstreaming doesn't mean that that's a good thing or that what they did was really good for consumers or the industry in general.
They dont make the best products, they dont make them first, and they dont make them cheapest or free-est. But despite that, they are the dominant software company. And despite everything, the mainstreamed computers.
True, they managed to make enormous profits despite the fact that they did nothing better than someone else, and they made very few innovations themselves, instead buying out the companies that were innovating. I think their success is attributable to a few things. Number one, IBM didn't realize what it was creating when it began distributing DOS on all it's PCs. Number two, customers didn't really have expectations when it came to computer software. Bugs, crashes? They were considered normal. Number three, Microsoft had absolutely no compunctions about using any method they could, legal or illegal, to destroy their competitors. This is evident from the internal email and documents that were revealed during their anti-trust trials.
Is this a good thing? I don't think so. Had they not used those sort of practices and beat down their competitors, the innovations would still have been made (since MS wasn't the one innovating really) and consumers probably would have gotten more for their money. Without one monolithic corporation controlling 90%+ of the desktop OS market, there would have been more choices and more focus by individual companies to make sure that they adhere to standards so that their software interoperates with others. Instead, we have MS, which gives us the minimum amount of interoperability that they can get away with. All in all, I think that the mainstreaming of computing was inevitable, and it would be better for all of us if Microsoft didn't dominate it.
I think that with very small works, the problem is magnified all out of proportion. But for most small works, you probably can't even find the person who did it first. Nor are small works usually worth enough to warrant any real vigilance on the part of the creator to protect them. Infringement cases will also take intent into consideration. If it is determined that you willfully infringed on someone's copyright, you will likely be in trouble (i.e. trading Metallica MP3s), but if it's determined that the infringement was coincidental and/or caused no real harm, you'll probably get off very light or completely free.
Re: Follow this thought all the way out...
on
MS VP Speech Online
·
· Score: 2
Hmm.. this is tricky. I believe that the GPL does not require that it be the only license that you release your code under. So the NSA could release just their modifications as public domain software (even tho it wouldn't be terribly useful by itself, at least it would be there) and still include them in the GPL'd Linux distribution. You still wouldn't be able to co-opt the distro, but the public would have complete and unfettered access to the NSA's work.
Of course no-one has to download in order to copy - you could just rent a DVD from Blockbuster or NetFlix and rip yourself a copy... Hell, you don't even have to burn it to CD - I see Seagate is now selling 180G drives - enough for a pretty impressive collection of movies (around 200 or so)!
And the number of people who do this would probably be comparable to the number of people who do it with VCRs today. Which is to say a pretty insignificant number, and not one that will harm the MPAA enough to warrant the kind of restrictions they want.
I personally think they've brought any such disregard for copyright laws by the masses on themselves. People only tolerate corruption for so long before they decide to purge it.
What ripping and recompressing to DivX achieve is to get the file size down to 1 or 2 CD's where you can burn it on a CD (and more easily download it), which is widespread technology, unlike DVD copiers.
I find it hard to believe that this is any sort of real threat to the MPAA. How many people are going to be willing to tie up their broadband connection for a whole day just to download a movie to watch on their PC when they can usually go rent the movie for 4 bucks or less whenever they want? I just don't see it causing any real harm, certainly not enough harm to justify the kinds of restrictions the MPAA wants.
Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft is not unique in their success, only in the level of their success. There are many successful close source software companies out there. They just aren't raking in the monopoly profits like Microsoft is.
The existence of your "smart porn operator" is meaningless in the face of the existence of all the others; ".xxx" or ".sex" only has a use if all porn is there, and that ain't happening.
Porn sites will probably always exist in regular domains. But if they can avoid persecution by the government by switching to a different domain, I think that most would do so. The rest would be left to fend for themselves against whatever legislation Congress dreams up. While it may not be a perfect solution, it's a heck of a lot better than current filtering software. I'm still not completely decided about whether it's a good idea to have a porn TLD or not. It definitely worries me the same way that firearm registration worries me. Such things are usually just the first step in the process of banning them.
If you were a porn operator, you wouldn't want to be easily filtered.
If you were a smart porn operator, you would. One of the biggest problems the porn industry faces is legislation to "protect the children." If porn were easily filterable, then the protecting the children is easy, and no longer a good reason to persecute the purvayors of porn. There's already a huge amount of legitimate demand for porn, they don't need to try to sneak up on you with it.
The patent office is self-supporting. Look it up.
Which happens to be one of the biggest flaws in the US patent system.
Do they have to allow you to photocopy it, or do you have to copy it by hand? I'm thinking that before photocopiers existed, people must have done it some other way, so who decides when it's time to mandate that a newer technology be used to facilitate more convenient access to the law for the public?
You consider that site to be some sort of authority? You must be joking.
Microsoft is free to do whatever they want, but third parties are free to do whatever they want.
Microsoft is NOT free to do whatever they want. Since they've been determined to be a monopoly, they are NOT free to leverage their OS monopoly to harm their competitors in other markets. Anti-trust laws exist to try to remedy a flaw in our market system. They are there for a reason and they should be enforced.
IE is *already* at over 90% market share
Where did you come across this bit of info?
but he also sent threatening letters to those who were customers of this thief, informing them that they were committing contributory infringement.
This is a new one on me. I know what contributory infringement means in relation to copyright, but I've never heard it used in relation to patents. What law covers such a thing? Seems to me that if he believes someone is violating his patent, he should sue them. These other companies buying products from his competitor have no way of knowing whether the patent covers those products or not until it is decided by a court, at which point your friend either recovers damages from the competitor for the products it sold, or finds out his patent doesn't cover their products. I don't see how the other companies have anything to do with the dispute. Seems like legal scaremongering to me.
To me, there should be plenty of examples of prior art for something like this, possibly even an example lurking in a Computer Science textbook somewhere...
I'm thinking the same thing. Any CS student could come up with a hash like this. The matching algorithm might be slightly tougher, but it's still just a matter of determining criteria and boundaries for the matches. Might take a bit of trial and error to get it working well, but the solution itself seems obvious. I too have a very hard time believing this sort of thing hasn't been done many times in the past.
It's true, they do have a patent on that. I'm not sure if there is prior art for that or not (although i suspect there is). But even if it is a valid patent, it still doesn't explain why they're suing Roxio instead of freeDB. Any ideas on that one?
Actually, the movie studios don't "own" them either, they simply own the copyrights to them until the copyrights run out (yeah, I know, like that'll ever happen)
Slowly the patent office will get more CS people who are skilled in Internet "technologies." The boom is also slowing, which will allow examiners to spend more time with each patent.
You're not likely to find many CS grads working for peanuts at the PTO. Since the PTO has to support itself (and is used as a revenue source by the government), they have every incentive in the world to grant every patent that comes through there if it hasn't already been patented, regardless of how obvious or silly it is. They are not held accountable for their decisions. They get paid regardless of whether it gets overturned later or not. They also have every incentive to start granting patents in new areas where patents may not even promote innovation (business methods, software, genomics, etc.).
First of all, we need to take the money out of the equation. If we want patents to be screened well and objectively considered, we need to remove the financial incentive to sell patents like Big Macs. The PTO should be funded by our taxes and it should offer examiners wages commensurate with what they would make working for a commercial company in their chosen field. Otherwise, we will always end up with unqualified or underqualified examiners who won't know what is obvious to one of normal skill in the field of the patent they are examining. If we want the patent system to work properly, we had better be prepared to pay what it costs to make it work properly.
Second, we should seriously reevaluate the effects that patents really have on innovation in various industries. I can pretty much guarantee that a 20 year software patent does not have the same benefit to that industry that a 20 year pharmaceutical patent or biotech patent might have in those industries. We should rethink term lengths for the various types of patents as well as whether certain types should be granted at all.
Until these things happen, the patent system will continue to be a mess that siphons resources off to the lawyers that could be better spent hiring more people in the various industries as well as doing more R&D in order to produce real innovations rather than just patenting every silly incremental improvement that someone thinks up.
In the long run, I hope that the Patent system "smartens up" in the patents that they actually grant...
Hope all you want, but our government has seen to it that the PTO has ABSOLUTELY NO REASON to stop granting silly and frivolous patents. They get paid for them, and the courts get stuck sorting it all out. There is no accountability on their end. If you want them to shape up, you have to work to change the system.
Remember, the copyright laws allow the GPL to exist just as much as they allow proprietary software to exist.
I'm well aware of this. I'm not against Copyright per se. I'm against the seemingly endless term extensions and further restrictions of our fair use rights. Roll the law back to something more reasonable (such as a term that is shorter thna a human lifespan, preferably much shorter), then get rid of the more onerous portions of the DMCA, and I'd be willing to support copyright. As it exists today, it does nothing but screw people.
Copying software that is not licensed that way is theft.
Nope. It's still just copyright infringement. It's an artificial legal construct to try to give some incentive for creators to continue to create stuff. Not to give them absolute ownership over what they create. They don't actually own the work that they create, they simply own a copyright over that work.
If you want to argue that infringing on a copyright is immoral, I would agree. However, I would also insist that the copyright term extensions that have been bought by the copyright industry are also immoral (especially retroactive extensions as there is no possible way they could provide incentive to create works that have already been created). They don't have any compunctions about using their power to screw the public out of works that should have become public domain by now. I think that the public is starting to lose its compunctions about infringing on copyrights. What goes around comes around I guess.
IE5.5 on Win98 seems to let me read kuro5hin just fine. I can moderate and metamoderate on /. just fine too. You sure you're using the latest version?
I just downloaded moz 0.9. I wanna see how much it's improved. I can't wait to have a standards compliant browser. Hopefully it will force MS to get theirs up to snuff too.
Yep, some of my best friends today are people I met on BBSes years ago. It was exactly as you describe. Most of us got to know each other, went to gatherings and all that. It was great. But the boards I frequented back then are gone now, except for one. It's still around, but nothing like it used to be. And I don't have 6 or 8 hours a night to kill on it anymore anyway :)
Just so long as we understand:
significant != positive
Just because they were the ones that were dominating and profiting the most from the mainstreaming doesn't mean that that's a good thing or that what they did was really good for consumers or the industry in general.
They dont make the best products, they dont make them first, and they dont make them cheapest or free-est. But despite that, they are the dominant software company. And despite everything, the mainstreamed computers.
True, they managed to make enormous profits despite the fact that they did nothing better than someone else, and they made very few innovations themselves, instead buying out the companies that were innovating. I think their success is attributable to a few things. Number one, IBM didn't realize what it was creating when it began distributing DOS on all it's PCs. Number two, customers didn't really have expectations when it came to computer software. Bugs, crashes? They were considered normal. Number three, Microsoft had absolutely no compunctions about using any method they could, legal or illegal, to destroy their competitors. This is evident from the internal email and documents that were revealed during their anti-trust trials.
Is this a good thing? I don't think so. Had they not used those sort of practices and beat down their competitors, the innovations would still have been made (since MS wasn't the one innovating really) and consumers probably would have gotten more for their money. Without one monolithic corporation controlling 90%+ of the desktop OS market, there would have been more choices and more focus by individual companies to make sure that they adhere to standards so that their software interoperates with others. Instead, we have MS, which gives us the minimum amount of interoperability that they can get away with. All in all, I think that the mainstreaming of computing was inevitable, and it would be better for all of us if Microsoft didn't dominate it.
I'd tack "lobby" onto that list as well.
I think that with very small works, the problem is magnified all out of proportion. But for most small works, you probably can't even find the person who did it first. Nor are small works usually worth enough to warrant any real vigilance on the part of the creator to protect them. Infringement cases will also take intent into consideration. If it is determined that you willfully infringed on someone's copyright, you will likely be in trouble (i.e. trading Metallica MP3s), but if it's determined that the infringement was coincidental and/or caused no real harm, you'll probably get off very light or completely free.
Hmm.. this is tricky. I believe that the GPL does not require that it be the only license that you release your code under. So the NSA could release just their modifications as public domain software (even tho it wouldn't be terribly useful by itself, at least it would be there) and still include them in the GPL'd Linux distribution. You still wouldn't be able to co-opt the distro, but the public would have complete and unfettered access to the NSA's work.
Of course no-one has to download in order to copy - you could just rent a DVD from Blockbuster or NetFlix and rip yourself a copy... Hell, you don't even have to burn it to CD - I see Seagate is now selling 180G drives - enough for a pretty impressive collection of movies (around 200 or so)!
And the number of people who do this would probably be comparable to the number of people who do it with VCRs today. Which is to say a pretty insignificant number, and not one that will harm the MPAA enough to warrant the kind of restrictions they want.
I personally think they've brought any such disregard for copyright laws by the masses on themselves. People only tolerate corruption for so long before they decide to purge it.
What ripping and recompressing to DivX achieve is to get the file size down to 1 or 2 CD's where you can burn it on a CD (and more easily download it), which is widespread technology, unlike DVD copiers.
I find it hard to believe that this is any sort of real threat to the MPAA. How many people are going to be willing to tie up their broadband connection for a whole day just to download a movie to watch on their PC when they can usually go rent the movie for 4 bucks or less whenever they want? I just don't see it causing any real harm, certainly not enough harm to justify the kinds of restrictions the MPAA wants.
He listened over and over to a Susan Vega song (Tom's Diner IIRC)
This alone shows that he must have been truly dedicated to his work.