"If someone were to say to you "I'll just write this little script, it won't take me long" I'd advise that you either (a) fire them or (b) run for the hills. They have no idea what they're doing. In the long run, all you get is grief. "
Clearly, you have way too much experience on your hands.
" You seem to asserting that something is "real" only if you can touch it. That's obviously absurd."
I made no such assertion.
I said that something is real only if it exists outside the boundaries of a legal framework. That's far different than ownership. You're confusing the existence of something with ownership of something.
If you write a treatise on the folly of Intellectual Property and come up with some very clever ideas, it very clearly exists, you are owner of the treatise, bu that doesn't mean you own the ideas expoused in the treatise. Its a subtle point, but one I'm sure you see.
And its where modern copyright and patent laws have gone wrong. People should own expressions of ideas, but not the idea itself. That was true in copyright and patent law until very very recently (less than 25 years ago). You seem to think the current legislative approach to copyright and patents is a natural one, when it really has only existed for a very short time, and will iikely disappear in less than 25 years.
"If I make something, I own it. That's the basis of property rights."
Not at all. You can own a piece of land, but you had no basis in "making" it. The same is true of ideas. Einstein figured out that E=mc^2, but he doesn't "own" that idea; the universe already knew that idea on its own. All Einstein did was write it down. Some people might claim Einstein "owned" E=mc^2, but clearly he didn't. Now, if Einsten made a space ship that made use of E=mc^2 (an expression of that idea), then he could claim ownership, but there is no ownership of fundamental ideas because you can only discover and document what you find.
"Intellectual property is as real as the chair I'm sitting on. "
By what measure?
If I take a chair, I can hold it in my hands. I can hide it in a closet. I can chop it up and use it for firewood. If I sell it, I don't have it, same as if someone steals it. I can describe its composition in terms of certain materials. It takes space. Most importantly, it exists regardless of what some senator or congressman wants to define it. That is, my chair will exist, even if Congress says "There are no chairs". Its a fact.
How can you compare "Clicking on this button lets you buy anything from Amazon with a single click". It only exists because you and I wink and say "Yes, that's intellectual property". If Congress decided tomorrow that it was a judgement in error to allow patents on business processes, then it would no longer exist. And anything that can be made to disappear by legislative process or judicial fiat is about as real as Mille Vanelli's singing career.
Does Santa Claus or the Easter bunny exist? They do to people who believe in them, but that doesn't mean they really exist.
You choose to claim "intellectual property" is real because it supports your arguments, but just saying it doesn't make it correct or true. Its simply a shorthand way to get the upper hand in a debate.
Let me get this straight... MS puts a hole in their operating system the size of Mack truck, and some point-haired professor's response is the ridiculous notion of "licensing" computer users?
Huh?
Aside from the fact that it would destroy any commercial uses of the internet, is politically infeasible, and is just a plain dumb idea, how can they ignore a more obvious (if equally dumb) idea:
Make the OS vendor responsible for flaws in
their product
Remember the Gauntlet firewall? One of the first firewalls commercial firewalls, and one that you got the source for (it was not open source in the sense that you couldn't distribute source).
Anyway, make a long story short. Gauntlet ran Solaris, HP-UX, and BSDI, because it actually modified the kernal and several peripheral systems to make it more secure.
Well, it was geared to a specific release of BSDI. I suspect this was one of the big sellers, and when Gauntlet essentially died of old age (and a company that had no interest in keeping its customers), BSDI lost a big chunk of the market.
Then you add the rise of the really "Free" BSD's and Linux, and that pretty much ended it.
But I'll say that BSDI was one of the most robust, forgiving, stable platforms I ran; a fortune 1000 company ran its entire email gateway systems on a pair of BSDI 4.x boxes running a customized FWTK proxy. They only reason it was retired was because the new guys were only Windows literate and BSDI scared them.
Anyway, I can't say enough good things about BSDI.
I went to the link you provided, and for a moment, I got a twin glimpse of the Saturn 5: the first was the view I had of a child of the magnificent machine that was going to take men to the moon; we build Estes Rocket versions of it, we wrote to NASA asking for pictures of it.
And then the adult in me realized the effort that went into that launch using 1960 technology. And the balls those astronauts had in strapping in.
Still, it felt good to think of the good old days for 2 minutes.
Since much of the adult world is comprised of parents, getting in front of a jury of parents is going to be a tough sell.
Combined with the idea that all she was doing was listening to music, I think at best its a long shot.
The name of "Briana"? Simply icing on the cake. Living in public housing, honor student... I'd like to be their lawyer, and I don't practice law. I could win that case.
The RIAA will probably back out of this by the end of the day.
"One could also quite convincingly argue that it is this girl's guardians' responsibility to find out what their charges are doing, and the illegality if any."
I want to see you argue that in front of a jury of parents.
"Alfred Hitchcock Present...The Three Investigators". We loved those books as kids.
I bought a few for my son, and it turns out that Alfred Hitchcock has been exorcised from these books (a license expired for the name perhaps?). He's been replaced by a generic famous film producer.
Not that it matters: my kids have no idea who Alfred Hitchcock is anyway.
My comment had nothing to do with fair business practices, it has to do with return on investment. MS is making billions. Great. Where is the *return* for the investor? The stock prices are bad, and they only recently paid a paultry dividend.
MS's doing well is great for Ballmer, Allen, and Gates, but is it good for anybody else?
If I were a large MS shareholder, I would have already demanded MS split itself into OS and App companies.
I suspect if they did that, the result would be worth far more than the company today, we'd probably have a revival in PC innovation, and there would be a general economic revival in the tech sector.
Instead, MS is sitting on billions in cash, the stock price is in the dumper, and every foreign government is trying to dump MS. I can't believe the shareholders don't quietly ask Ballmer and Gates to step down.
"and unless he had a very unusual contract, AT&T owned the code he wrote"
Yes, but when this code was written, there was no such thing as software patents; aside from copyright law, there was no protection for this code, except as a trade secret; and it seems difficult to believe that a trade secret can have the source code released with a BSD-style license and still remain a trade secret.
Honestly, I don't see where SCO is going with any of this. It doesn't make any sense.
They're opening up the market for small, inexpensive email clients. I mean, if the alternative is full-blown office (to get Outlook), or web email, then it seems there's a big hole between the $0, lousy Hotmail interface, and the $400 MS Office interface.
I'm pretty much aware that FM radio isn't nearly CD quality, but then neither is most of the stuff that people put in their MP3 players... I see a lot of people compressing music down to 64kb mp3, which sounds worse than most FM radio, and then seem to think its pretty good. Personally, I find any kind of compression below 192kb pretty dodgy.
But I guess I wasn't being very clear. The music at the quality broadcast is *good enough* for most people, and the record companies seem unconcernred about sharing this music. I think they ought to take the next leap and view P2P as a medium worth exploiting. They can't stomp it out...its impossible. I don't think they can even make a sizeable dent in it. So the smart thing to do would be to figure out how to make it profitable. But they're still stuck in 1967 from what I can tell.
Incidentally, I live in the DC area, and WPFW (A Pacifica affiliate) plays excellent jazz with less compression and artifacts than most. Not CD quality, but very good. And we have probably one of the few commercial classical stations left in the US... WGMS, besides the usual assortment of 4 NPR affiliated stations that play a lot of classical. The rest seems to be mostly clearchannel nonsense that has turned the "soft rock" and "progressive rock" stations into clones of each other with different DJ patter between each.
[I've read the file sharing pieces from Janet Ian. I think Courtney Love's view on record company practices enlightening as well, but I don't have a URL handy]
Good luck with the job... it looks like we'll get out of the recession by the end of the year at this rate, regardless of who's ruining the economy.
"They might also suspect that you have a conflict of interest"
I suppose you mean that in the generic sense. But I'd argue otherwise. The RIAA members already put relatively high quality music out there today on radio, I presume partially for the revenue that it producees but also to entice people to buy the remainder of the CD.
As for me specifically, I frankly don't care if file sharing goes away; based on what I've seen and read, it appears P2P networks tend to have top 40 stuff...that makes sense...people only download what's popular. My taste run more towards classical and "classic" Jazz CD's, which I suppose aren't a mainstay of Kazaa and the other P2P networks.
But I still maintain these networks could be a tremendous marketing opportunity that record execs seem unwilling to exploit. As to your reasons why it won't work: anybody can come up with those... the genius will be the guy who figures out how to make it work, and for the money these record company execs get, I think they need to act a lot smarter instead of trying to bully a significant portion of their customers.
Slashdot Mirror
AIM is the messenger of choice for anyone not associated with MSN; isn't this just a way of marketing their online service?
They're going for the "technically inept parent who is afraid fo the internet" market.
While there is a need for 64kbps bit rates, this is, *at best* FM radio quality.
This is not high fidelity and certainly not for critical listening.
"If someone were to say to you "I'll just write this little script, it won't take me long" I'd advise that you either (a) fire them or (b) run for the hills. They have no idea what they're doing. In the long run, all you get is grief. "
.
Clearly, you have way too much experience on your hands
" Remember Divx?"
Yes, and so does everyone else, including media, and MS.
They're not stupid; it will be far more subtle next next time around.
" You seem to asserting that something is "real" only if you can touch it. That's obviously absurd."
I made no such assertion.
I said that something is real only if it exists outside the boundaries of a legal framework. That's far different than ownership. You're confusing the existence of something with ownership of something.
If you write a treatise on the folly of Intellectual Property and come up with some very clever ideas, it very clearly exists, you are owner of the treatise, bu that doesn't mean you own the ideas expoused in the treatise. Its a subtle point, but one I'm sure you see.
And its where modern copyright and patent laws have gone wrong. People should own expressions of ideas, but not the idea itself. That was true in copyright and patent law until very very recently (less than 25 years ago). You seem to think the current legislative approach to copyright and patents is a natural one, when it really has only existed for a very short time, and will iikely disappear in less than 25 years.
"If I make something, I own it. That's the basis of property rights."
Not at all. You can own a piece of land, but you had no basis in "making" it. The same is true of ideas. Einstein figured out that E=mc^2, but he doesn't "own" that idea; the universe already knew that idea on its own. All Einstein did was write it down. Some people might claim Einstein "owned" E=mc^2, but clearly he didn't. Now, if Einsten made a space ship that made use of E=mc^2 (an expression of that idea), then he could claim ownership, but there is no ownership of fundamental ideas because you can only discover and document what you find.
"Intellectual property is as real as the chair I'm sitting on. "
By what measure?
If I take a chair, I can hold it in my hands. I can hide it in a closet. I can chop it up and use it for firewood. If I sell it, I don't have it, same as if someone steals it. I can describe its composition in terms of certain materials. It takes space. Most importantly, it exists regardless of what some senator or congressman wants to define it. That is, my chair will exist, even if Congress says "There are no chairs". Its a fact.
How can you compare "Clicking on this button lets you buy anything from Amazon with a single click". It only exists because you and I wink and say "Yes, that's intellectual property". If Congress decided tomorrow that it was a judgement in error to allow patents on business processes, then it would no longer exist. And anything that can be made to disappear by legislative process or judicial fiat is about as real as Mille Vanelli's singing career.
Does Santa Claus or the Easter bunny exist? They do to people who believe in them, but that doesn't mean they really exist.
You choose to claim "intellectual property" is real because it supports your arguments, but just saying it doesn't make it correct or true. Its simply a shorthand way to get the upper hand in a debate.
Let me get this straight... MS puts a hole in their operating system the size of Mack truck, and some point-haired professor's response is the ridiculous notion of "licensing" computer users?
Huh?
Aside from the fact that it would destroy any commercial uses of the internet, is politically infeasible, and is just a plain dumb idea, how can they ignore a more obvious (if equally dumb) idea:
Make the OS vendor responsible for flaws in
their product
Oh sure, its dumb, but is a least *practical*.
The provided proxies were not well done, and from my viewpoint, the 5.0 release of Gauntlet was poor for proxying streams for video and audio.
The support from NA was at its best poor. At worst, it was a rip-off.
Remember the Gauntlet firewall? One of the first firewalls commercial firewalls, and one that you got the source for (it was not open source in the sense that you couldn't distribute source).
Anyway, make a long story short. Gauntlet ran Solaris, HP-UX, and BSDI, because it actually modified the kernal and several peripheral systems to make it more secure.
Well, it was geared to a specific release of BSDI. I suspect this was one of the big sellers, and when Gauntlet essentially died of old age (and a company that had no interest in keeping its customers), BSDI lost a big chunk of the market.
Then you add the rise of the really "Free" BSD's and Linux, and that pretty much ended it.
But I'll say that BSDI was one of the most robust, forgiving, stable platforms I ran; a fortune 1000 company ran its entire email gateway systems on a pair of BSDI 4.x boxes running a customized FWTK proxy. They only reason it was retired was because the new guys were only Windows literate and BSDI scared them.
Anyway, I can't say enough good things about BSDI.
I went to the link you provided, and for a moment, I got a twin glimpse of the Saturn 5: the first was the view I had of a child of the magnificent machine that was going to take men to the moon; we build Estes Rocket versions of it, we wrote to NASA asking for pictures of it.
And then the adult in me realized the effort that went into that launch using 1960 technology. And the balls those astronauts had in strapping in.
Still, it felt good to think of the good old days for 2 minutes.
That's the point, isn't it?
Since much of the adult world is comprised of parents, getting in front of a jury of parents is going to be a tough sell.
Combined with the idea that all she was doing was listening to music, I think at best its a long shot.
The name of "Briana"? Simply icing on the cake. Living in public housing, honor student... I'd like to be their lawyer, and I don't practice law. I could win that case.
The RIAA will probably back out of this by the end of the day.
"One could also quite convincingly argue that it is this girl's guardians' responsibility to find out what their charges are doing, and the illegality if any."
I want to see you argue that in front of a jury of parents.
I double-dare you, in fact.
The only dose you'll get from Denmark is a dose of the clap.
I don't understand what this is a license for.
I'm not trolling, I'm not trying to be cute, I just don't understand what the license gives me the right to do, or not to do.
Can someone (obviously smarter than me), let me know what this does?
"Alfred Hitchcock Present...The Three Investigators". We loved those books as kids.
I bought a few for my son, and it turns out that Alfred Hitchcock has been exorcised from these books (a license expired for the name perhaps?). He's been replaced by a generic famous film producer.
Not that it matters: my kids have no idea who Alfred Hitchcock is anyway.
Ah well.
You're not thinking it through.
My comment had nothing to do with fair business practices, it has to do with return on investment. MS is making billions. Great. Where is the *return* for the investor? The stock prices are bad, and they only recently paid a paultry dividend.
MS's doing well is great for Ballmer, Allen, and Gates, but is it good for anybody else?
If I were a large MS shareholder, I would have already demanded MS split itself into OS and App companies.
I suspect if they did that, the result would be worth far more than the company today, we'd probably have a revival in PC innovation, and there would be a general economic revival in the tech sector.
Instead, MS is sitting on billions in cash, the stock price is in the dumper, and every foreign government is trying to dump MS. I can't believe the shareholders don't quietly ask Ballmer and Gates to step down.
And no, I am not trolling.
...once you have it, that is...
They sell you a service based on T1-like speeds, but then complain if you actually use it as advertised.
Go figure.
Although it says it is available on Amazon, and Amazon lists the player, it is not available for sale.
Plus, its $600 a lot to pay for a gadget that is mostly "gee-whiz".
"and unless he had a very unusual contract, AT&T owned the code he wrote"
Yes, but when this code was written, there was no such thing as software patents; aside from copyright law, there was no protection for this code, except as a trade secret; and it seems difficult to believe that a trade secret can have the source code released with a BSD-style license and still remain a trade secret.
Honestly, I don't see where SCO is going with any of this. It doesn't make any sense.
I invite you to google for "medical equipment malfunction"
You'll get interesting stuff like this:
Oops, I did it again!
They're opening up the market for small, inexpensive email clients. I mean, if the alternative is full-blown office (to get Outlook), or web email, then it seems there's a big hole between the $0, lousy Hotmail interface, and the $400 MS Office interface.
Actually no. The idea of software patents is a relatively one; it did not exist in the 70's.
I'm pretty much aware that FM radio isn't nearly CD quality, but then neither is most of the stuff that people put in their MP3 players... I see a lot of people compressing music down to 64kb mp3, which sounds worse than most FM radio, and then seem to think its pretty good. Personally, I find any kind of compression below 192kb pretty dodgy.
... WGMS, besides the usual assortment of 4 NPR affiliated stations that play a lot of classical. The rest seems to be mostly clearchannel nonsense that has turned the "soft rock" and "progressive rock" stations into clones of each other with different DJ patter between each.
But I guess I wasn't being very clear. The music at the quality broadcast is *good enough* for most people, and the record companies seem unconcernred about sharing this music. I think they ought to take the next leap and view P2P as a medium worth exploiting. They can't stomp it out...its impossible. I don't think they can even make a sizeable dent in it. So the smart thing to do would be to figure out how to make it profitable. But they're still stuck in 1967 from what I can tell.
Incidentally, I live in the DC area, and WPFW (A Pacifica affiliate) plays excellent jazz with less compression and artifacts than most. Not CD quality, but very good. And we have probably one of the few commercial classical stations left in the US
[I've read the file sharing pieces from Janet Ian. I think Courtney Love's view on record company practices enlightening as well, but I don't have a URL handy]
Good luck with the job... it looks like we'll get out of the recession by the end of the year at this rate, regardless of who's ruining the economy.
"They might also suspect that you have a conflict of interest"
I suppose you mean that in the generic sense. But I'd argue otherwise. The RIAA members already put relatively high quality music out there today on radio, I presume partially for the revenue that it producees but also to entice people to buy the remainder of the CD.
As for me specifically, I frankly don't care if file sharing goes away; based on what I've seen and read, it appears P2P networks tend to have top 40 stuff...that makes sense...people only download what's popular. My taste run more towards classical and "classic" Jazz CD's, which I suppose aren't a mainstay of Kazaa and the other P2P networks.
But I still maintain these networks could be a tremendous marketing opportunity that record execs seem unwilling to exploit. As to your reasons why it won't work: anybody can come up with those... the genius will be the guy who figures out how to make it work, and for the money these record company execs get, I think they need to act a lot smarter instead of trying to bully a significant portion of their customers.