claiming this is just leeching risks appearing like a whiner to the few lusers who are actually pleased at some other (possibly illicit)functionality they received wth their viral browser plug in.
Putting up yet more terms and conditions on my web site doesn't sound like any fun or use. It's no news that reader's initial attention span and patience with a new site is short. So making them read a whole treatise, or - possibly worse because there's not lkely to be a back link to your referring page - diverting visitors to another site so they can read up on the plague, doesn't sound good either.
I presume these things work on a standard browser plug in architecture. You can detect Flash and other plug ins with javascript. Why not Top Text and all this crap, the politiely divert visitors with the offending code to a page that says actually does given them the info on what is going on, and that reminds them that in your eyes and in the eyes of many reasonable content producers, they are keeping very bad company indeed, and may not presently view your work.
I would feel just fine casting Top Text plug in vistors away from my site. For all the talk of legal remedies, involving parasitic behaviour or any more subtle arguments that have been put forth to me this the web equivalent of fly posting? If my web site were physical these people could be arrested for criminal damage.
I'm sure I could think of a few nicer arguments such as destruction of trade dress, contributory misrepresentation, alteration of registered trademarks (which is protected) and who knows what else. To someone who mentioned this elsewheer, this is likely _not_ a direct and clear copyright violation, as - on one point at least - the user is modifying your work only for their on use.
The basis on which the providors of such leechware could be sued for copyright infringment I am not clear. This is a grey area because of the free will aspects, free distribution of the offending leechware (though if this was directly sold you coudl claim copyright breach with intent to pander or profit therefrom which would be serious) and in essense the keyword advertisers are only paying for modifications to the code of a freely distributed "gift". Has anyone thought if these leechware things update themselves automatically? That might at least indicate the producers of this crap were _actively defacing_ website properties, and that they were n control and not the viewer / luser/
So until there's a legal remedy, is there a technological one : can I filter visitors by plug in or whether they have this crap installed?
He he, I guess you could quickly sell your defeater code to a bunch of upset content providors.
Isn't this rather like the guys who claimed they could sell a $50 box that's blank all the ads on tv, hyped it and sold the "defeaters" tosome channel for $x MLN?? I mean, are these people making a packet outta these keywords, does anyone know?
Must make this short (as there's a god long debate behind what follows) but this would make inadmissable any collected evidence in a UK court.
This would be because there is then no person or other body of evidence available to question regards veracity.
Evidence rules here very tough, and the case would be almost immediately thrown out.
This is tantamount to claiming the Ivisible Man as witness and the prosecutor or plaintiff claiming they cannot bring him for cross examination because they cannot find him.
The anaology is the same, if something cannot be shown to court, it may not bear witness.
This is the first basic rule of civilisation and law over hearsay, rumour and superstition.
I think you're missing the point if you think it's all about competition. Imagine Microsoft opened it's code... now let's say some medium size company that has been paying a few thousand dollars to license all of it's employees to use Windows and Office. Now this company only has to buy a CD for $30 and pass it around to everyone in the company. Microsoft's profit just decreased by several orders of magnitude. I would expect the NASDAQ to collapse shortly thereafter
.
Well, I ought to come clean here just a little - checking back on my user history might have given you a clue to my response to your comment.
In essence, companies can healthily expand their presentation of even crucial systems and knowledge to the public. There's good reason for this to become a worthwhile social and economic function of corporations, just like they file accounts with the SEC or whoever. Companies so often die, without a trace of heir experience being left or else enclose knowledge within themselves that no - one can ever learn from their mistakes, or their learning processes. I remember coming across the Autofile some time back and realising what a power of information it was to see how a small company started. Good coders can extrapolate the same experience within software.
I'm not going to tell you that everythng should be GPL'd - I didn't say that. Nor did I say that you could cookie cutter / rip / or compile any "freed" code for commercial advantage.
For that to happen you'd have to uproot nearly a century of copyright law development. And I refer you, in part, to some of my earlier posts by way of a quick but sparse advocates's explanation.
You can't simply take someone's ideas and work and re -use it.
The real reason why big corps are still scared of open - cource, even non - GPL open - source is because free distribution tends to imply a free license to use _for_personal_interests_ in copyright law.
That's the same basis of argument that you can keep a copy of a newspaper or CD you bought but not sell copies to other people. Which is a freedom which DMCA et.al - or rather the process of Case Law interpretations driven by ill advised commercial protagonism of a poorly written law, could manage to infringe.
There's nothing to say that by my "freeing" some code you have any right to circumvent my right to charge a fee for its use. Technicians in the audience might now comment how a corp has become equivalent to a person in law (it has rights, and can be sued for manslaughter and be held accountable) but I can only assure you that whilst corp = person for some analogies, corp != person in legal reality.
You might use my "freed" code and burn your own CD for your own use, non - profit. But could you explain to me how a company - as distinct from a non - profit organisation - could claim it was not using my code for gain?
Amusingly, - nay, importantly - most of copyright and asociated trademark and IP law is derived from the concept of Tort of Deception - that you gain something by being not what you purport to be, or that you get advantage by assuming the "makeup" of another person's work.
That, if you think about it, would be applicable to the code scenario you suggest. A user without an explicit license to derive benefit from my ("freed" code) work would be using their computer to pose as the results of my original effort. I hope that's some help. By way of disclaimer I manage and regularly defend IP property for a living, when not writing code or postng to/.
This may be a simple argument, and I know full well (now nearly entering my second decade in business for myself) that there are pitfalls and management snafus galore in what I am about to say
. . . _but_ . ..
[preamble] for all the years I fought to understand what it takes to make a living independantly in business, and damn, I tried and only when I'm getting old do I lear the implest of thinsg a child could understand by rote (repetition learning) there are forces afoot in business which are a simple function of wider systems - of capital, society and economics for sure, you've come across those before - but most of all in terms of indidual motivation to go out and set up a business.
[more preamble] I like to tell colleagues (who are cherished people for having put up with me for all these years - (we're a partnership not a corp)) how when Seymour Cray moved from Cray Computer to set up Cray Research (Cray 3 and 4, which though amazing never came to production) and even when he had _all_ that kudos, respect, and massive funding(well, 100mln usd is still big to me;), of all the 50,000 or so people who were directly or indirectly dependant on his old firm, only 6 or so - just a handfull - people went with him to the new venture. It's a story that makes me sober even after a long cold beer.
[now to the point] What I am saying is that even if IBM or SUN or Microsoft opened their crown jewels to the public and gave them away - and I'm presuming here for the sake of agument that Microsoft giving away it's source would not make them the laughing stock of the known universe - then who just who is going to set up and compete with them?
I'll qualify that statement a little bit. I guess if you are a small and needy company, you could get very hurt by doing this. But my perspective as the founder of such a company is that - short of someone else completely bs talking away your customers, which is always a real likelihood, and something to be managed in any event if you want to survive - maybe _then_ you don't want to throw your tech and IP into the hands of ruthless competitors.
My point stands, however (I think) that the amount of energy and resources required to set up and compete with any company, whatever the size, is huge.
I know you are saying that if I gave you the secrets to my business, then you'd be at some VC's door and getting funding in a second. But then, if your memory is good, or you have a penchant for studying financial markets, ask yourself why there are always industry or philosophy based booms and bust. - someone works out the internet is a good idea and everyone and their dog gets on the bandwagon, leaving no funding or attention for anything else. Remember a little further back to the conglomerate boom of the seventies. It was just the same. Or for railroads (the very reason why the NYSE exists today because all the burnt investors who'd bought worthless paper wanted a systematised environment to offload their bum purchases).
Community - financial techincal social or ad - hoc is a _movement_, it takes some motivating and working on. Individuals with good ideas, or sometimes even good observations on code (outside of open - source that is) so rarely make a difference. Politics and business is about propogation of relatively simple ideas. Therefore observations based on early knowledge about complex underlying systems are rarely capitalised or successful. The world is looking elsewhere.
I hope that some guys over in some companies who are large enough to not feel frightened by the downside to what I say listen up. You _can_ open source everything , especially if you are big and strong. In that spirit I just tried to convey to you some smple thoughts which - believe you me, or pity me as you will, took me a good deal of investment to come up with over the years.
Anyone wanting a more intelligent or expanded argument better reply and I'll come back with what I can later.
aplogies for replying to my own post and all, _but_ for the moderator who rated my post "+1 funny" - were you testing banjo tonight or my sense of perception? . .
I must be missing something here . ..I guess it's ironic : 1. breathe sigh that banjo has cool feature I craved for 2. make out with sincere gratitude for said feature 3. get modded "Score:5, Funny"
was that some/. admin commenting on the sustainability of the new code / db?
Or was some agency (with mod points) out there "stress testing"/.'s new server by calling all our old posts to hold against us in our future lives?
finally I can see my posting history from more than a week or so back.
I've never been a very frequent poster, but this is one reason why I've trailed off for months and months.
The search engine hasn't ever - in my recollection - thrown back at me my complete earlier posts, and user info has been extremely restricted to maybe the most recent couple of weeks. I once even resorted to a google search, but only came up with posts from literally ages ago.
This may sound like I'm being self obsessed. But here's why this annoyed me :
On/. I'm not holding a conversation in the way I am with someone in person. Sure I may hold a short - term memory of the poster's handle to whom I replied, or the topic of the story. But that's about it. Conversing on - line simply doesn't have the cues and triggers for recall like talking with someone in person. There's so little secondary information or impressions to rely on.
I'm not talking about staring back at how I managed to get some karma either (tho' it's nice:) but to try and understand the context of my thoughts at the time. By looking back I can see how stupid or even, maybe, informed I was. That helps me learn.
It brings me back, because I can better relate to my earlier experience of/. and what meant something enough for me to write, edit and post, hopefully in a grammatical fashion. Now all that I want is a _full_ record of my posts.
I guess some people might find some privacy concerns over this (given that even google doesn't seem to find everything I posted) but then I'll trade that for the learning experience, and the ability to find the souls (by handle at least) who provoked me to though in the first instance.
I would have posted a link to my user search on banjo.slashdot.org but then it's down;) Something for you guys to stress test I guess?
Please don't flame me, as a helpful AC ( in this post ) has already mentioned this machine's existence.
But it too me searching through 700 posts to fnd a reference and I don't have any mod points . .
I've been thinking hard about this one. Byte Reviewed the new Libretto L1 here and it sounds awesome. Not only Crusoe based, but has Bluetooth too. Which may not be to your liking, or cause grief on 2.4ghz, depending on your air interface preferences. But hey, I got a Bluetooth GPRS mobile and it's soooo tempting:)
The informed AC gave a very cool reference for Linux info : on Yahoo Groups to which I can only add this picture gallery froma company I found who sells the things properly localised, but, sadly, not with a distro.
Please forgive me if my post already redundant, but this little machine could rock.
If that ain't goodenough for you, tak a look at the reflective TFT models with NEC called Versa Daylight. I'm currently biased towards battery life, for reasons well posted in other arguments.
Oooh - oo I just saw NEC have some MIPS based things that look like rebadged HP Jornada 720s, only nicer looking. Wonder if anyone can get Linux support on these???
By induction, if they are offering a very one sided contract it is becasue they want to stay in business.
If they cannot _ unless you sign, then they have problems you can make painful for them, see my other post.
So if they are planning to be able to stay in business, they can in due course pay you. Just - apparently (though I don't trust this without further information) - not now.
You may personally feel it is not their fault. But the law offers people who start a business a limitation of personal liability, privided you follow the rules (also see my post above) in return for the responsibility those rules and other aspects of the law convey upon them.
I have studied many systems in collapse, from social, psychological and quanitive persectives. What we *need* in this world of capitalism is a sense of pay - back for those who enter into business frivolously or without honour. You may disagree with my ancient point of view, but to "blame the system" is a cop - out, and more people, good bad, indifferent as well as intentionally fraudulent will just be encouraged to try their hand without any conscience about the matter if we all exonerate every failure that tries to screw upon their *customers* the minute they encounter a little trouble. Damn it, I have to go home now, but I _really_ wished I had the time here to rant from the perspective my several very painful (financially, emotionally and every which way) experiences with sharp operators in business. - John.
p.s. my company trades advertising contracts in Europe, if your site is interested in non - exclusive agreements for wholesale onward sales, contact me intially via my spam account above. We have a good legal team, too.
Six months to a central London hearing during which time assets stripped.
Unless, that is you can file in the High Court, apply for an Interlocutory (preliminary) Injunction for freeze of assets bason on previous form.
Any amount >750 GBP does the job here, but you _have_ to avoid the small claims process.
Also, take note, if these guys are skulduggerous (man, I like that word and haven't used it much;-) they'll find a counterclaim, apply to court to have the cases combined (which in one case I've worked with so confused the Plaintiff that she - and I say here I say this only after the fact - allowed a settlement to be made citing the *wrong* counterparty, making enforcement very difficult) and then, under Fast Track rules, you'll be forced to do twice the work to attack the core issues, as it complicates the issue before the Magistrates or Judges or whoever on account the opportunity offered under the counterclaim to besmirch you as well.
Also, there is the overriding concept in UK law of "Balance Convenience" whereunder you will have to prove that a bankruptcy order is *the only* way to recover your monies. Otherwise a simple order will be made for payment. Then you have to wait six months before you can get a Sherrifs Order to send out Bailiffs.
Believe you me, find other ways if you can to get your dues. See my other post. - John
IANAL, but I handle all our company's contracts in the UK and USA.
Look carefully at the pattern of earnings and balance sheet reporting that UGO has made during recent fiscal periods.
This may not be formally reported or up to date. In the UK there is Comapnies House, to which Directors (but, interestingly, not the companies) are obliged to file annual accounts and shareholder information).
In the USA you will have to look at individual State Registrars, unless UGO is under SEC rules to file federally because of number of shareholders, public offers or listings.
Get *every* piece of detail you can about the INDIVIDUALS who run the business.
Companies in common law, USA and UK are Legal Persons, intentionally separated from their officers, in both countries (in the UK Companies Act, and once again your local state law) there is the concept of PERSONAL LIABILITY of officers and directors in the event they operate the company KNOWING IT CANNOT FINANCIALLY SURVIVE.
This *is* a complex affair.
But you may be in a position to apply pressure to obtain needed severances from contracts, so that you can do business elsewhere.
Or you may want to try to negotiate a settlement from any cash reserves still remaining.
You may yet be a creditor in the event UGO becomes insolvent or files Chapter 11.
I know you said a lawsuit may be futile. I am not advising on that (though these steps would be prepared by a good forensic accountant's legal team) but I *am* suggesting you get what info you can to apply LEVERAGE upon the officers, directors or whoever is responsible.
If you feel you can follow these steps and also read your local legal codes, _and_ provided you treat this in a resonably detached manner (I learned many skills years ago when such an investigation became a personally charged affair because my business was very hurt, but I still don't recommend the vendetta, you're smart enough to see the reasons for that) then you can at the very least feel as if your own intelligence can apply to the awful and unpleasant situation you are in. This aspect alone, for anyone bright enough to have managed their own business, gives a certain amount of better sleep and can reduce personal bitterness and sense of hopelessness. In fact many fraudsters OPERATEON THE BASIS that it is a common perception that legal recourse is hopeless. Legal recourse does not mean you have to go to court. The vast majority of serious cases are settled between big companies.
If you find a basis for argument that the directors or officers of the company have operated and ENCOURAGED NEW BUSINESS in the knowledge that their financial models are unsustainable, and / or they are broke, they may fall foul of insolvency rules, and in the UK I can say for certain I would immediately file suit for fraud against the INDIVIDUALS THEMSELVES. In the UK companies law makes it a CRIMINAL offence to operate a company when you know it can't meet its bills. Check your local State Codes for the equivalents WHERE THE COMPANY IS DOMICILED AND OR LOCATED...
Finally, for this post at least, WRITE UP what you find, quoting law and precendence wherever you can, and copy it to officers _home_ addresses, circulate to investors and advisors (who may also legally be culpable in some circumstances) and think seriously about putting a release across PRWire or another news service which gets picked up by the mainstream press. If the likelihood of fraud is widespread, and key officers of UGO have personal assets, you may find a specialist attorney calling you offering a deal to pursue in return for a reasonable commission. In other words, get in position to have your pound of flesh back, _as well as_ what is already legally due to you, and you may suddenly find yourself treated *much* more fairly.
I could comment further on contract law, too. But if you want to ask me anything write my spam account above with a very clear header, and I'll write back from my main a/c with some further pointers when I'm in less of a hurry. (only pointers, mind).
Forgive for answering directly to the story but I think your question "invert the price / performance ratio which has led people to scoff at the P4 in favor of AMD chips" is badly qualified.
It seems from these price cuts that Intel is more concerned with instruction set deployment / share than direct competition.
If AMD - and they rightly deserve this - gain a stronghold in volume machines, they will continue to have the upper hand in the extension to x86-64, whereas Intel actually have a fight on their hand to get developers actively retargeting code at new ISAs (IA64/ Itanium).
If I also understand correctly, games - that omnipresent cunsumer "killer app" are historically, and may remain, heavily optimised. You can't just unroll loops in IA64, no way. You have to use modulus voodoo and preferably live higher in the compiler algorithms to eek out performance.
I was reading yesterday an interview with an AMD honcho (I think on Toms') and when asked about SSE/2 support for Palomino there was a decidely vague / no comment response.
If I understand correctly, SSE is far closer to VLIW in form aka Altivec than usual x86 "core" ISA.
P4 is a big developent for SSE instructions and maintaining developers' optimisation attentions is a key issue for them. AMD x86-64 could otherwise become too attractive.
I cannot think how Intel could consider price cuts unless they had volume. They've enjoyed enormous gross margins for years, and AMD seems to still be volume constrained, German and M'sia plants notwithstanding.
If AMD is forced to cut margins - further - as well as compete on fab capacity, they will have difficulty *notwithstanding* actual processor performance.
For my part, I just cannot understand P4 in a budget context otherwise. My main machine is a PIII w/ i840 (a nice server targetted mo'bo and Rambus and dual capable for upgrade). As it goes, I do feel proc constrained, but for even simpler graphics apps I use I wouldn't even be feeding the processor with less IO - and I don't believe regular consumers will be any different given the growth in MPEG4 and DVD sware processing.
So, as a result, I don't believe this will invert price / performance perceptions at all.
Oh, and believe me, consumer word will travel fast in response to the ridiculously demanding (compared with Word, anyhow) media apps already mentioned.
[pray that I'm right at least for consumers' sake in the awful event such a scenario goes ahead, but curse me that it might kill off some cpu dev and make slashdot a place where posting about SCSI chipsets becomes *the* thing]
However, if AMD shipped *all* its CPUs with chip speed, not bus speed, decent sized caches aka the worthy PPro, then they might KILL Intel across all these cheapo IO constrained systems.
Ah, but then they'd be not so such cheap CPUs. Darn Pity.
=====================
Took me long enough to write I'm probably just repeating what you already thought, already said.
It's been noted the squillions lost by the original investors, and how maybe Mot should have poured in more. But thankfully, even after all that carnage, there's a chance a product will come out at a price the market can afford and which will sustain the company. After all, unlike Teledesic and all, Iridium is at least _up there_.
My guess is that the markets burned the original investors who had hoped for first - mover monopolies, and that in a way is sweet.
also sweet is a real chance for me not to be stuck with out terrestrial GSM monopolies (UK has four, One2One, Vodaphone, Cellnet, Orange) which stupid, or self serving governments don't realise a monopoly div by n is just one encumbant with best capital picking cherries and several followers too scared not to take the cosy fruits of symbiosis back to the shareholders. With only 4 choices, these companies just "[brand] value associate" themselves with different sets of customers and screw on any chance of working technology like GPRS or 3G. The smaller outfits can always claim to be competitive, because the big guys always price for pain.
I'm still arguing with Cellnet why they doubled my c. $1000/yr standing charge for flat roaming across Europe (Europe One Rate), without giving me the option to exit. (was signed for 12 mth rolling to get the rates). Anyone remember being compensated for suddenly expensive flights by British Airways when the Supreme Court ruled Freddie Laker got fsked by them? I digress.
Both the Sun E 10000 (no doubt the attraction of the piece) and the E 4500 have been around a while now, as these slightly longer reviews from 1999 remind me. I expect there will have been numerous updates to shipping variations since launch, nonetheless, which I won't check with Sun's docs right now.
Neither yet support the Ultra Sparc 3, which is the chip and associated ( potentially) massively (1024) SMP platform probably of most interest to anyone evaluating entreprise scale systems right now. Whether Sun have yet fixed the memory / cache problems which apparently still persist, despite numerous fixes, for the USII I can't tell. But if anyone can post a quick summary comparison of cache design between the two chips, and whether there might be a replay of the well publicised memory problems, that'd be darn nifty. US3 has yet to ship in volume with servers, so there may not be any occasional user reports out there for a while.
Personally, I would rather see a story on Ask/. trying to find someone who could write even a short review (particularly of the E 10000) from production environment experience. The story links did not do much for me. I would not be surpised however if Sun has NDAs preventing real world reviews as part of mandatory support contracts for their big iron.
Oh, and for those of you interested in clusters, here's a related snippet:)
Could you post a link to some examples or previous commissions?
If your friends are looking for helpful suggestions for pro bono projects, I am sure that it would help people come forward if they could better understand the direction your authors wish to take.
What are your / their personal interests? (I can glean nothing from your/. UID which helps me guess).
For example, when you suggest something "some documentation that non-geeks could understand " I feel uneasy because there is considerable room for confusion in writing from a non - technical background.
A good example of this might be the subject of Linux Human Interfaces - imagine writing about Linux GUIs for a very broad novice audience - do you explain the underpinnings of GNOME vs KDE and how they behave as a result, or how apps may want to find certain libraries installed such as QT, or do you write something like "if KDE, expect this, click here . . "?
To say that writing docs from CVS is not possible does not massively narrow the field of your interest either, without further clarification. However it does seem clear you don't want proposals to write programmers references:)
Also, if the aim is "getting them hired at some computer company some day", then in what department? Pure technical authoring for engineers, with present work as a stepping stone? Marketing copy writing? OEM channel / sales documentation like the "white papers" which Sun used (ages ago)to actually post hardcopy to me by the hundred - weight? All of these could come under the umbrella of "I want to get them into technical documentation".
If this is a question with a person's career in mind, surely the direction, as well as what you can learn are all important. Then, if that is right, I can understand the _right_ pro bono work could be of enormous assistance, and the engagement of benefit to everyone.
It seems to be a commonplace cry from projects of all kinds - "We need someone to write the docs! Help!" As such you make a appealing offer on behalf of your friends, but more detail would certainly help keep they and hopeful project managers from being unnecessarily distracted or disappointed.
Since you also mention your friends are already professional writers, I hope it's not off topic to mention I am professionally engaging a literary / editorial (as opposed to documentation per se) project this year which will be dealing with possibly relevant commercial / technical subjects, with a strong emphasis on underlying systems. (a recent spell of narrowly focussed comments which in part relate to this can be found by looking at my user history on this forum). Feel free to mail me if you have any questions.
Ashleigh Brilliant is a "professional epigrammatist." He creates and copyrights thousands of short sayings, such as "Fundamentally, there may be no basis for anything." When he finds someone who has "used" one of his epigrams, he contacts them demanding a payment for breach of copyright. Television journalist David Brinkley wrote a book, Everyone is Entitled to My Opinion, the title of which he attributed to a friend of his daughter. Brilliant contacted Brinkley about copyright violation. Random House, Brinkley's publisher, paid Brilliant $1000 without contesting the issue, perhaps because it would have cost more than this to contest it.
A full text of this article, from Wall Street Journal, 27 January 1997, is available here
From it, you will note that "Random House, which published Mr.
Brinkley's book, paid him $1,000 for the rights without agreeing to or
contesting Mr. Brilliant's claims.
Copyright subsists - exists within, and does not have to be claimed by any author, of an original artistic or literary work. In UK and US code, titles, epithets and bon mots do *not* gain protection as they are not of themselves considered artistic works.
You cannot copyright things as simple as this. But you can, apparently get the occasional (stupid)publisher to pay up to stop you wasting their time.
Personally, I would have contested in court if necessary this man's claims over ownership of title to a book with which he had no connection. (his this sort of claim which might easily be thown out, or at least loose quickly on case law)
Moreover, in the UK there is the concept of a "vexatious claim" in which it can in certain cases become a criminal offence to attempt in bad faith to extract payment not due by means of coercion, including by means of jumped up legal threat. Also in the UK I could apply to the court that any claimant post bond for costs (including mine) in the event he looses and this application usually scares the harassers away:-)
The author of "Information liberation" uses this example as supposedly one of the more egregious happenings in copyright abuse. Awww, come on Mr Brian Martin, it was a simple thing for the publisher to work out that their lawyer's time even in typing a proper response could cost more than the thousand bucks they paid. But I find, from experience, that people who make claims such as Mr Brilliant did do not usually press these in court, as they _know_ how weak they are. I would have acted differently from Random House, especially how you see now how these decisions become grist to the misinformed mill of people working against fair rights in works (Mr Martin)
"Starting with Acton's dictum that power corrupts, Information Liberation explores the corruptions and abuses of information power . .."
Lord Acton's quote was : "power tends to corrupt, absolute power corrupts absolutely"
This is precisely the same difference (from the mis quotation, in meaning and effect) between those I see who take copyright and trademark laws and use them for tactical gain (please note, all you trendy IP lawyers, I see no bill or statute headed "Intellectual Property", which are words I think created to make this sound the birth right of anyone who merely posesses a brain and uses it), and those who, on the other side say that rights such as copyright should be abandoned because bully boy tactics hurt a number of the innocent.
I ended up arguing this point at length last night in this post (which is very long so I'll excerpt the relevant bit here) :
Now, if you are a lawyer employed by a company with a tenuous claim, it may be thought expediant to put out a little propoganda, the sort of which might give rise to the formation of opinions such as yours. However, that alone does not a case make (nor a rebuttal by logical reverse of the said lawyers' corporate polemic). Preposterous claims aside (which are common in times of rapid gain or exchange of wealth (think back to Vanderbilt's day)), the best response is to learn, know and practise the known law. If that doesn't work, you can _base _ on _ that a political response.
Having just read Chapter 3, "Against intellectual property". I'm fear that Slashdotters who read this book hoping to arm themselves with a credible arsenal against abusers of "IP concepts" (ugh, sorry but that jargonism just slipped in there and covers the relevant sins:), may be disappointed.
Trademarks, service marks, and trade names have one particular reason for existing: to help to avoid customer confusion
I think that you will find that your perspective is a byproduct of the development in law, not such perspectives the cause of it.
In fact, if you think about it, your statement / opinion is tortological. You have to think of the sequence causal actions involved in creating a product : It is rather the vendor who decides a name for a product than a consumer who asks for a product of a certain type to be named such and such.
As I already mentioned, the legal form of trademark, derived in case law from the tort of deceipt.
US civil code, Title 15, Section 1125 cites, and its wording echoes this:
False designations of origin, false descriptions, and dilution forbidden.
(a) Civil Action
(1)Any person who Any person who, on or in connection with any goods or services, or any container for goods, uses in commerce any word, term, name, symbol, or device, or any combination thereof, or any false designation of origin, false or misleading description of fact, or false or misleading representation of fact, which -
(A) is likely to cause confusion, or to cause mistake, or to
deceive as to the affiliation, connection, or association of such
person with another person, or as to the origin, sponsorship, or
approval of his or her goods, services, or commercial activities
by another person, or
(B) in commercial advertising or promotion, misrepresents the
nature, characteristics, qualities, or geographic origin of his
or her or another person's goods, services, or commercial
activities, shall be liable in a civil action by any person who believes that he or she is or is likely to be damaged by such act.
. .
When you say "When you suggest that International Business Machines, the current holder of the ibm.com domain name, has the right to sue for trademark infringement anyone who registers ibm.com, despite the availability caused by, say, a lapse in the domain registration by International Business Machines, you are falling for a line. I most assure you I am not.
The Federal Trademarks Act of 1995
cited the likelihood of consumer confusion as a means to protect _famous_ marques, in particular it introduced the effect of a larger legal footprint for such marques, such as IBM. Because the collateral value of being able to trade as IBM (and the cost of attaining such wide recognition) is so high , they have been afforded, along with, say Apple Computer, additional protection, against similar or confusing marques _in _any _line of business, and against anyone who seeks to represent a famous marque for their own benefit. Yes, you _could_ try to start a non - profit organisation called, shall we say Imbecilic Burocratic Morons, but obtaining someone else's means to their business would be an infringement and would create a liability for damages. By your argument you could imply that Gary Kremen, the original owner of sex.com should not have it returned. (see Wired's coverage.)
In the next section of your argument, you propose some things which are easily answered : "Why exactly does that IBM have this right? If there's a company in France with the registered French trademark Immeuble Baisemain that puts on a show about selling real-estate, and it's convenient for their customers to call them by a three letter acronym, why shouldn't they have as much right to the domain name as, say, International Business Machines? Can you seriously imagine that their website will confuse people into thinking that they provide computer hardware, software, and consulting services from International Business Machines? And if it somehow does, can't IBM U.S. just sue them?"
First up, IBM has that right because they used a marque to designate products which they maintained in the marketplace. With a high degree of certainty they began using the name when _no-one _else _ did. So we have a designator for a company. By using the marque, they made it distinct _of_their_own actions. To suggest that they should not benefit from this strikes me as unfair on any business.
Now for Immeuble Baisemain (ugh), as a registered marque, you have to ask the question : who has superior rights? For this you would look at the First Use in Commerce rules, and these would, in fact apply internationally, under, originally Treaty of Paris 1846, and - more up to date, US Code Title 15, Chapter 22, SubCh III, Sec 1126, (a).
Because you have not established precedence, or first use in commerce for your example, it is moot.
In so far as you imply that no confusion would exist if I tapped in www.ibm.com and got a French realtor and could not easily find IBM's site or any of my bookmarks to that (or neither could any of IBM's customers or intranet users), I suggest that that would in fact cause a *lot* of confusion. The effect would be tantamount to a stranger taking over your shop-front on main street. Customers would still come, but for all that advertising and promotion, money and goodwill you spent over the years saying "come to 1055 Main and Second for the best firkins in town", you'd have to redo, and *still* you'd loose some business, whatever you did.
"And if it somehow does, can't IBM U.S. just sue them?" - That's the whole point, I was merely showing the basis under which they rightly could.
"Now, modern "intellectual property" lawyers are trying to convince everyone that we should suddenly change everything and ignore the above. Of course, they aren't presenting it that way publicly. What they say is that they are protecting the "intellectual property" and trademark rights of their clients in the new electronic sphere. However, in their actions they are making preposterous claims, and unfortunately many people seem to be accepting their position uncritically
I've taken your paragraph out of sequence, because you were making unsupported and unrelated assertions in aid of your surrounding argument. There is no way that current lawers could easily overturn a history of case law and precedent. That does not preclude the possibility of political lobbying for interpretations, which is a separate and contentious topic. Now, if you are a lawyer employed by a company with a tenuous claim, it may be thought expediant to put out a little propoganda, the sort of which might give rise to the formation of opinions such as yours. However, that alone does not a case make (nor a rebuttal by logical reverse of the said lawyers' corporate polemic). Preposterous claims aside (which are common in times of rapid gain or exchange of wealth (think back to Vanderbilt's day)), the best response is to learn, know and practise the known law. If that doesn't work, you can _base _ on _ that a political response. That may appear to be the course of action you want to take, and whilst I may not endorse the specifics of what you say, debate is *sorely* needed and is one major reason for my long response.
Isn't it much more likely that the lawyers of the world are just stretching the law in this novel area as far as they think they can take it, simply because it is in their interest to provide their clients with the best possible outcome, justified or not?
I'm not so sure there is any "novel idea" involved, except money making. And, dammit, if I employ someone to work for me I sure as heck want them to support my interests. (although I should hope that my interests are properly justifiable before promulgating them).
Finally, I am pleased you agree that SnapNames may not be the best thing under the sun. But I am concerned that you baldly claim I have made such elementary and potentially damaging mistakes in my previous post. Your aside "(and there are plenty who do, you do not need to feel any shame)" is a very smart rhetorical device to imply I should admit (or imply I should admit this, to readers) that I am in fact elementarily mistaken. I don't think so.
I've not heard of this organisation before, but right at the end of the Content Protection for Recordable Media Proposal PDF is the statement : "CRPM documents maybe obtained at www.lmicp.com" which turns out to be a LLC company that is looking to license the systems and technologies.
now from an unposted thought from earlier, I wonder if there's a connection with the following :
. .
The International Herald Tribune has a piece which suggests that new software may be used to monitor for stolen music on your PC.
The company in question, EMusic, proposes to use the DMCA to shoehorn its software into a policing role for Napster users, as well as, no doubt, any other user of digital media, on behalf of the rights of copyright owners. Their chief, Gene Hoffman, baldly states, "Privacy is not the issue, Piracy is."
His statement implies that the trade for using the technologies which have themselves created an era of stunning growth for media companies, is a blunt, painful, surgical implant into our private equipment and facilities.
Whilst, In a update yesterday, Wired reports that the DMCA is said not to impact the rights of customers under first sale doctrine, an aggressive, "policing" stance such as the one proposed by EMusic, appears it would infringe that.
At a blunt guess, EMusic would effectively be placing a toll gate on the legitimate transfer of a legally purchased work. Under its plans to hoop up ISPs into blocking "infringing" accounts, it creates a lopsided penalty for alleged infirngement.
It is not stated how EMusic's system is or could be audited. If a legitimate owner of a work wished to sell or trade, in an error, trust could be reduced, impeding a sale. If the vendor's ISP account were incorrectly blocked, it is conceivable that the action might be a restraint of trade.
Either way EMusic wants to introduce a burden of proof on your ownerwhip of digital media. The company may be bandwagon jumping, or monkeying on the back of the "great fear" promulgated around Napster, but EMusic looks hawkish, and copyright lawers are becoming increasingly aggressive.
. .
Dear Slashdotters, I think the corporate wagons are circling. Are you up to the argument? Or have we left things too late?
Now how much of this (reported) exodus is because of pay schemes way heavy on stock options which are now not going to vest?
Yeah, some companies have reset the option strike prices, but ther's big debate that this must, even though it sometimes isn't, hit the bottom line as a charge to profits.
I've talked with too many people this last few years, each well pleased with their options, many of whom I soon discovered did not really understand what an option was, or that they may have traded some hard cash salary for their paper.
Just another example of bad money driving out the good (engineers from dot-coms)?
an after thought - it may be also that, in order to keep accounting liabilities low, dot-coms have only signed short contracts, even with their most valuable staff. That would leave many freer to leave than might otherwise be the case.
In a sense you are, and you are not. What makes this confusing is you are buying an exclusive use of a domain on renewable terms with a period of contract defined therein. Actual ownership of a domain is subject to interpretaion of what a domain constitutes. IMO, absolute ownership would not be clear until you have rights such that neither a registrar nor any root server owner nor anyone else may alter or interfere with the domain name you registered and corresponding DNS entries, in perpetuity.
If you would like to register a domain wherein the contract with the registrar confers you explicit title in ownership (albeit, once again the derivative rights from that are unclear and subject to interpretation) take a look at Gandi.net who have Terms and conditions in contract which appear very favourable to the registrant.
A more philosophical way to look at this is ask yourself, if you are a home owner, whether you own that house outright, or if, as is usual, the deeds are owned by your mortgage lender and you will be paying them interest on a loan for any number of years to come. Many aspects of control derive from lend or lease variations, see Marx for some good rants.
Its going to be interesting to guess where the bulk of SnapNames' busines is going to come from.
Now if you think that they are going to have lots of lucrative business from big corporations, I ask you this : just how many large outfits with a big web presence (yeah, Hotmail aside) are *not* on the ball wrt their domain properties and the intellectual property and trademark rights which may apply to them?
Now whilst there have been a number of instances of _registered_ trademark owners expanding their name spaces over innocent registrants of similar names, for _registered_ trademarks which are _famous_ , action against confusingly similar names by those with an established presence is an intelligable component of the law.
Registered, Federal or national trademark or not, if you have a business name or domain through which you conduct trade, you will likely have acquired common law trademark rights thru use.
Now both the Federal type registrations as well as the common law aspects of trademark have basis in "passing off" (imitating to obtain a competitor's business) and these laws themselves derive from the tort of deceit.
If a party willingly and knowingly assists another party in infringing actions, the infringed party is able to bring suit against the body or agency who made this "assist" on the basis they have made a contributory infringement.
This works in much the same way as if you send me a warez copy of Office2000 and I publish it on my website, I am also responsible by my actions to infringe the copyright of the owner. (this is a very blunt analogy, but the specific differences are a very long post).
I see some difficulties with SnapNames' modus operandi :
Firstly, the "Snap-shot" monitoring service, for which the first 20 monitored names are free (therafter $20 per 100). Now, if I am Big Corp A and I have say a few important domains, exactly how does this benefit me? This many is easy to monitor, and in any case it is no hardship to ensure renewals happen well in advance of expiry, and for long periods. SnapNames makes no money here. In fact SnapNames makes nothing out of this monitoring service until someone wants 120 names watched for status. How many people have legitimate rights over 120 names? I know some porn redirector operators own thousands, but seriously, is that really SnapNames target market? And for anyone else, is a random sample of 120 names not going to have residual rights in trademark, common law or registered, remaining with previous owners. It may be that SnapNames are making a statistical play, and I have not the data to see their justifications.
Now to their "SnapBack" service, for which I'll quote their FAQ :
7. How do I use Snap-Back to "back order" a domain name?
You can use the Snap-Back service to give yourself a second chance to acquire a domain name that you would like to own but is currently registered to someone else. Please note that our service does not and never will take a domain name away from a current registrant. However, you can still sign up for Snap-Back on that name and if it ever becomes available, it gives you the best available assurance of being the first one to acquire it. In effect, you have back ordered the name in case it ever becomes available
I am not too sure the disclaimer : ". Please note that our service does not and never will take a domain name away from a current registrant. " is really adequate.
The idea is that a desirable domain falls off a registry and becomes available (other posters have already covered whether this will actually happen or not), and then SnapNames will run an automatic registration of that domain for you.
What this does not take into account, where say there are trademark rights applicable to the "fallen" domain, is that abandonment of a domain registration does not constitute abandonment of a marque. It *is* possible for large companies to slip up, but that by no means suggests that IBM would have given up any associated rights to www.IBM.com because the trademark laws say that you abandon a marque only when you stop using it, or when you stop policing it, if it is a Federal registered trademark. Now for IBM to somehow simultaneously stop using its marque on all products as it "drops" its domain, _as well_ as to choose not to file suit for return of its domain citing trademark law, isto be far fetched.
Essentially I think, even without recourse to the inner workings of trademarks, domains and related law, that SnapNames is an incitement to infringe, and the company may find itself embroiled in the middle of some nasty disputes in the future. Obviously I hope otherwise, just as I would hope that people would look and think before claiming rights on trademarks (interestingly there is very onerous code requiring possible trademark registrants to look under every stone for possible superior rights, but that is another story altogether). Having thought of that, would not making a standing application to buy a trademarked domain actually be a form of claim in itself?
It's nice that SnapNames makes a thing of being useful to lawers. If I were entrusted with maintaining a client's domain, I'd be pretty sure to make it so I *don't* need SnapNames' services. The very lack of legal actual substance on their site, together with promised "ongoing education" (like it doesn't take a few years to learn the subject, and any professional will have an eye the case law databases almost continuously) leads me to think that angle is just a smokescreen.
Iridigm's technology, which sounds to me too much like a satellite business, call their tech "I-mod"
I'd post a link to the Trademarks Office if the server was not down (business UK hours only) but British Telecom just tried all the related names to annoy NTT DoCoMO with their 'phone kit :
Once you have a trademark registration, btw, you have a good claim against "confusingly similar" marques.
and once you've filed you have a superior claim in Madrid Treaty countries (US recognises this) from date of application of registered trademarkNot the actual first use of a name.
you have to see an excerpt of the class descriptions for the application to believe this :
I had to cut the actual text because of Lameness Filter. But you can search for yourself tomorrow:-)
an excerpt from class 9 of the application: transmission, reception, processing, retrieval, reproduction,
manipulation, analysis, display and print-out of sound, images and/or data;
computer hardware and firmware; computer software; digital communications
apparatus and instruments
the names :
Status: Pending
Mark Text:
I-MODE
Mark Text:
i-mode
Mark Text:
i-MODE
Mark Text:
I-mode
Mark Text:
I.MODE
Mark Text:
i.mode
Mark Text:
I.mode
Mark Text:
i.MODE
Mark Text:
I MODE
Mark Text:
i mode
Mark Text:
i MODE
Mark Text:
I mode
M
Okay, I'll bite. I've not had enough coffee to wake me yet, so apologies if I am brief and even a little rambling.
It may help you - a lot, even, depending on circumstances - to remove the word "sponsorship" from your pitch language. From my own experience, the most overriding reason for this is the number of (extra) hurdles you may face in approaching any company of size for what is - more often than not - an exchange of money for tied exposure, which in my book is advertising.
From your question, it seems as if you are effectively thinking about creating publicity products for the Expo - and desirable ones at that. Pencil in the positions on the media you plan to produce, group this list with the demographics from the Expo exhibitors blurb, a bullish pro points list for Windowmaker (home environment, work environment, productivity increases whatever) and a few juicy quotes from the mainstream media about Linux.
Voila - Media Pack.
Now pricing is a different matter, but a very very rough ballpark would be to start with the price for a full page full colour advert in any programem or visitors guide to the expo, and work on a multiple of that. Even if you look to be expensive, once you've worked on the cost of your media and screen prinitng logos or whatever else you plan, you can argue value add from e.g. value of your media vehicle over time (user reloads windowmaker on several systems), possibilitty for reuse or archive, novelty, heightening public interest in anything GUI related. Make up the list as you go along.
Get this all together in your head and call a likely target company. Do not call and ask for a sponsorship manager unless you want to be involved in a long drawn out set of meetings tryign to show how your organisation's values, history et.c. fit so beautifully with your prospects. Take it from me this is an agonising waste of time if you can actually write down a convincing product argument inside say 6 main letter pages + appendices and send this to someone by fax. Also, try to pitch someone who is not mainline advertising or marketing. Most of the ad market works on schedules to assist bulk buys of established regular products (magazines, whatever) and there is burocrasy there to make you weep. Try to find a sales director or product manager rather than those who probably just place the ads to spec. This is especially important if your time is valuable to you.
You say you would have a problem paying for media and packaging. Now most major publications charge a hefty cancellation fee for any advertising, even to their best accounts. This is because it is practically impossible to caluculate the price fo an unsold page of advertising (there be lots of nasty option math in there, but i'm not sure the publishers even think about that). The bulk of advertising costs exist within the selection, placement process and people recognise that. So when you make a sale it is expected to be firm, and you are not expected to swallow the costs is the buyer runs. If you have never dealt with a customer before it is quite normal to demand advance payment, mayeb in full, possibly at least half inside 14 days of the order beign signed. If your customer complains, think this through and reput the arguments. If you ar eoperating through a limited liability vehicle with fresh incorporation or a low Dunn and Bradstreet rating, have these arguments at the ready and practised, since even if the person who signs the paperwork with you is cool, it is normal for credit control and payment to get their look in, sometimes even try to renegotiate prices, when they get the work flow for payment. Be calm, be firm, reel in the deal.
Maybe this is my last thought for now (unless you have something specific you want to know else, in which case post below) but : Pitching for the business is fun or can be made so. Getting it home every time makes for early baldness. Trust me, I know. Hope this bald guy was useful to you today.
Slashdot Mirror
. .
claiming this is just leeching risks appearing like a whiner to the few lusers who are actually pleased at some other (possibly illicit)functionality they received wth their viral browser plug in.
Putting up yet more terms and conditions on my web site doesn't sound like any fun or use. It's no news that reader's initial attention span and patience with a new site is short. So making them read a whole treatise, or - possibly worse because there's not lkely to be a back link to your referring page - diverting visitors to another site so they can read up on the plague, doesn't sound good either.
I presume these things work on a standard browser plug in architecture. You can detect Flash and other plug ins with javascript. Why not Top Text and all this crap, the politiely divert visitors with the offending code to a page that says actually does given them the info on what is going on, and that reminds them that in your eyes and in the eyes of many reasonable content producers, they are keeping very bad company indeed, and may not presently view your work.
I would feel just fine casting Top Text plug in vistors away from my site. For all the talk of legal remedies, involving parasitic behaviour or any more subtle arguments that have been put forth to me this the web equivalent of fly posting? If my web site were physical these people could be arrested for criminal damage.
I'm sure I could think of a few nicer arguments such as destruction of trade dress, contributory misrepresentation, alteration of registered trademarks (which is protected) and who knows what else. To someone who mentioned this elsewheer, this is likely _not_ a direct and clear copyright violation, as - on one point at least - the user is modifying your work only for their on use.
The basis on which the providors of such leechware could be sued for copyright infringment I am not clear. This is a grey area because of the free will aspects, free distribution of the offending leechware (though if this was directly sold you coudl claim copyright breach with intent to pander or profit therefrom which would be serious) and in essense the keyword advertisers are only paying for modifications to the code of a freely distributed "gift". Has anyone thought if these leechware things update themselves automatically? That might at least indicate the producers of this crap were _actively defacing_ website properties, and that they were n control and not the viewer / luser/
So until there's a legal remedy, is there a technological one : can I filter visitors by plug in or whether they have this crap installed?
He he, I guess you could quickly sell your defeater code to a bunch of upset content providors.
Isn't this rather like the guys who claimed they could sell a $50 box that's blank all the ads on tv, hyped it and sold the "defeaters" tosome channel for $x MLN?? I mean, are these people making a packet outta these keywords, does anyone know?
. . .
Must make this short (as there's a god long debate behind what follows) but this would make inadmissable any collected evidence in a UK court.
This would be because there is then no person or other body of evidence available to question regards veracity.
Evidence rules here very tough, and the case would be almost immediately thrown out.
This is tantamount to claiming the Ivisible Man as witness and the prosecutor or plaintiff claiming they cannot bring him for cross examination because they cannot find him.
The anaology is the same, if something cannot be shown to court, it may not bear witness.
This is the first basic rule of civilisation and law over hearsay, rumour and superstition.
.
I think you're missing the point if you think it's all about competition. Imagine Microsoft opened it's code... now let's say some medium size company that has been paying a few thousand dollars to license all of it's employees to use Windows and Office. Now this company only has to buy a CD for $30 and pass it around to everyone in the company. Microsoft's profit just decreased by several orders of magnitude. I would expect the NASDAQ to collapse shortly thereafter
.
Well, I ought to come clean here just a little - checking back on my user history might have given you a clue to my response to your comment.
In essence, companies can healthily expand their presentation of even crucial systems and knowledge to the public. There's good reason for this to become a worthwhile social and economic function of corporations, just like they file accounts with the SEC or whoever. Companies so often die, without a trace of heir experience being left or else enclose knowledge within themselves that no - one can ever learn from their mistakes, or their learning processes. I remember coming across the Autofile some time back and realising what a power of information it was to see how a small company started. Good coders can extrapolate the same experience within software.
I'm not going to tell you that everythng should be GPL'd - I didn't say that. Nor did I say that you could cookie cutter / rip / or compile any "freed" code for commercial advantage.
For that to happen you'd have to uproot nearly a century of copyright law development. And I refer you, in part, to some of my earlier posts by way of a quick but sparse advocates's explanation.
You can't simply take someone's ideas and work and re -use it.
The real reason why big corps are still scared of open - cource, even non - GPL open - source is because free distribution tends to imply a free license to use _for_personal_interests_ in copyright law.
That's the same basis of argument that you can keep a copy of a newspaper or CD you bought but not sell copies to other people. Which is a freedom which DMCA et.al - or rather the process of Case Law interpretations driven by ill advised commercial protagonism of a poorly written law, could manage to infringe.
There's nothing to say that by my "freeing" some code you have any right to circumvent my right to charge a fee for its use. Technicians in the audience might now comment how a corp has become equivalent to a person in law (it has rights, and can be sued for manslaughter and be held accountable) but I can only assure you that whilst corp = person for some analogies, corp != person in legal reality.
You might use my "freed" code and burn your own CD for your own use, non - profit. But could you explain to me how a company - as distinct from a non - profit organisation - could claim it was not using my code for gain?
Amusingly, - nay, importantly - most of copyright and asociated trademark and IP law is derived from the concept of Tort of Deception - that you gain something by being not what you purport to be, or that you get advantage by assuming the "makeup" of another person's work.
That, if you think about it, would be applicable to the code scenario you suggest. A user without an explicit license to derive benefit from my ("freed" code) work would be using their computer to pose as the results of my original effort. I hope that's some help. By way of disclaimer I manage and regularly defend IP property for a living, when not writing code or postng to /.
. . .
Why anyone can open source virtually anything.
This may be a simple argument, and I know full well (now nearly entering my second decade in business for myself) that there are pitfalls and management snafus galore in what I am about to say
. . . _but_ . . .
[preamble] for all the years I fought to understand what it takes to make a living independantly in business, and damn, I tried and only when I'm getting old do I lear the implest of thinsg a child could understand by rote (repetition learning) there are forces afoot in business which are a simple function of wider systems - of capital, society and economics for sure, you've come across those before - but most of all in terms of indidual motivation to go out and set up a business.
[more preamble] I like to tell colleagues (who are cherished people for having put up with me for all these years - (we're a partnership not a corp)) how when Seymour Cray moved from Cray Computer to set up Cray Research (Cray 3 and 4, which though amazing never came to production) and even when he had _all_ that kudos, respect, and massive funding(well, 100mln usd is still big to me;), of all the 50,000 or so people who were directly or indirectly dependant on his old firm, only 6 or so - just a handfull - people went with him to the new venture. It's a story that makes me sober even after a long cold beer.
[now to the point] What I am saying is that even if IBM or SUN or Microsoft opened their crown jewels to the public and gave them away - and I'm presuming here for the sake of agument that Microsoft giving away it's source would not make them the laughing stock of the known universe - then who just who is going to set up and compete with them?
I'll qualify that statement a little bit. I guess if you are a small and needy company, you could get very hurt by doing this. But my perspective as the founder of such a company is that - short of someone else completely bs talking away your customers, which is always a real likelihood, and something to be managed in any event if you want to survive - maybe _then_ you don't want to throw your tech and IP into the hands of ruthless competitors.
My point stands, however (I think) that the amount of energy and resources required to set up and compete with any company, whatever the size, is huge.
I know you are saying that if I gave you the secrets to my business, then you'd be at some VC's door and getting funding in a second. But then, if your memory is good, or you have a penchant for studying financial markets, ask yourself why there are always industry or philosophy based booms and bust. - someone works out the internet is a good idea and everyone and their dog gets on the bandwagon, leaving no funding or attention for anything else. Remember a little further back to the conglomerate boom of the seventies. It was just the same. Or for railroads (the very reason why the NYSE exists today because all the burnt investors who'd bought worthless paper wanted a systematised environment to offload their bum purchases).
Community - financial techincal social or ad - hoc is a _movement_, it takes some motivating and working on. Individuals with good ideas, or sometimes even good observations on code (outside of open - source that is) so rarely make a difference. Politics and business is about propogation of relatively simple ideas. Therefore observations based on early knowledge about complex underlying systems are rarely capitalised or successful. The world is looking elsewhere.
I hope that some guys over in some companies who are large enough to not feel frightened by the downside to what I say listen up. You _can_ open source everything , especially if you are big and strong. In that spirit I just tried to convey to you some smple thoughts which - believe you me, or pity me as you will, took me a good deal of investment to come up with over the years.
Anyone wanting a more intelligent or expanded argument better reply and I'll come back with what I can later.
. .
aplogies for replying to my own post and all, _but_ for the moderator who rated my post "+1 funny" - were you testing banjo tonight or my sense of perception? . .
I must be missing something here . . .I guess it's ironic : 1. breathe sigh that banjo has cool feature I craved for 2. make out with sincere gratitude for said feature 3. get modded "Score:5, Funny"
was that some /. admin commenting on the sustainability of the new code / db?
Or was some agency (with mod points) out there "stress testing" /.'s new server by calling all our old posts to hold against us in our future lives?
only time will tell
= = = Idle Random Thoughts - usual disclaimers apply = = =
. . .
finally I can see my posting history from more than a week or so back.
I've never been a very frequent poster, but this is one reason why I've trailed off for months and months.
The search engine hasn't ever - in my recollection - thrown back at me my complete earlier posts, and user info has been extremely restricted to maybe the most recent couple of weeks. I once even resorted to a google search, but only came up with posts from literally ages ago.
This may sound like I'm being self obsessed. But here's why this annoyed me :
On /. I'm not holding a conversation in the way I am with someone in person. Sure I may hold a short - term memory of the poster's handle to whom I replied, or the topic of the story. But that's about it. Conversing on - line simply doesn't have the cues and triggers for recall like talking with someone in person. There's so little secondary information or impressions to rely on.
I'm not talking about staring back at how I managed to get some karma either (tho' it's nice:) but to try and understand the context of my thoughts at the time. By looking back I can see how stupid or even, maybe, informed I was. That helps me learn.
It brings me back, because I can better relate to my earlier experience of /. and what meant something enough for me to write, edit and post, hopefully in a grammatical fashion. Now all that I want is a _full_ record of my posts.
I guess some people might find some privacy concerns over this (given that even google doesn't seem to find everything I posted) but then I'll trade that for the learning experience, and the ability to find the souls (by handle at least) who provoked me to though in the first instance.
I would have posted a link to my user search on banjo.slashdot.org but then it's down;) Something for you guys to stress test I guess?
. . .
Please don't flame me, as a helpful AC ( in this post ) has already mentioned this machine's existence.
But it too me searching through 700 posts to fnd a reference and I don't have any mod points . .I've been thinking hard about this one. Byte Reviewed the new Libretto L1 here and it sounds awesome. Not only Crusoe based, but has Bluetooth too. Which may not be to your liking, or cause grief on 2.4ghz, depending on your air interface preferences. But hey, I got a Bluetooth GPRS mobile and it's soooo tempting :)
The informed AC gave a very cool reference for Linux info : on Yahoo Groups to which I can only add this picture gallery froma company I found who sells the things properly localised, but, sadly, not with a distro.
Please forgive me if my post already redundant, but this little machine could rock.
If that ain't goodenough for you, tak a look at the reflective TFT models with NEC called Versa Daylight. I'm currently biased towards battery life, for reasons well posted in other arguments.Oooh - oo I just saw NEC have some MIPS based things that look like rebadged HP Jornada 720s, only nicer looking. Wonder if anyone can get Linux support on these???
. . .
But I don't get this. . .
From Slide 13 :
"Participant Profiles Next generation GNOME users - Business, Scientific, and Creative Professionals Computer Literate and Savvy
Is how they describe their testers.
But this is what happens. . .
From Slide 16 :
'Icon Design and Tooltips 11 out of 12 users misundersood the logout icon, thinking it was for:
Am I missing something here? Have I not been using a GUI for long enough?
You may then strike out under Statutory Provisions any clause which is "unfair" without varying any other right.
Allowed our company to tell any number of a%%hole cell / isp companies to go ram when they "fixed" the terms suddenly.
For more reading, go look up Law of Equity in the library, I'm not saying Google will have much, even allowing my audience :) - John
By induction, if they are offering a very one sided contract it is becasue they want to stay in business.
If they cannot _ unless you sign, then they have problems you can make painful for them, see my other post.
So if they are planning to be able to stay in business, they can in due course pay you. Just - apparently (though I don't trust this without further information) - not now.
You may personally feel it is not their fault. But the law offers people who start a business a limitation of personal liability, privided you follow the rules (also see my post above) in return for the responsibility those rules and other aspects of the law convey upon them.
I have studied many systems in collapse, from social, psychological and quanitive persectives. What we *need* in this world of capitalism is a sense of pay - back for those who enter into business frivolously or without honour. You may disagree with my ancient point of view, but to "blame the system" is a cop - out, and more people, good bad, indifferent as well as intentionally fraudulent will just be encouraged to try their hand without any conscience about the matter if we all exonerate every failure that tries to screw upon their *customers* the minute they encounter a little trouble. Damn it, I have to go home now, but I _really_ wished I had the time here to rant from the perspective my several very painful (financially, emotionally and every which way) experiences with sharp operators in business. - John.
p.s. my company trades advertising contracts in Europe, if your site is interested in non - exclusive agreements for wholesale onward sales, contact me intially via my spam account above. We have a good legal team, too.
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I live in the UK.
Been there, done that.
Six months to a central London hearing during which time assets stripped.
Unless, that is you can file in the High Court, apply for an Interlocutory (preliminary) Injunction for freeze of assets bason on previous form.
Any amount >750 GBP does the job here, but you _have_ to avoid the small claims process.
Also, take note, if these guys are skulduggerous (man, I like that word and haven't used it much ;-) they'll find a counterclaim, apply to court to have the cases combined (which in one case I've worked with so confused the Plaintiff that she - and I say here I say this only after the fact - allowed a settlement to be made citing the *wrong* counterparty, making enforcement very difficult) and then, under Fast Track rules, you'll be forced to do twice the work to attack the core issues, as it complicates the issue before the Magistrates or Judges or whoever on account the opportunity offered under the counterclaim to besmirch you as well.
Also, there is the overriding concept in UK law of "Balance Convenience" whereunder you will have to prove that a bankruptcy order is *the only* way to recover your monies. Otherwise a simple order will be made for payment. Then you have to wait six months before you can get a Sherrifs Order to send out Bailiffs.
Believe you me, find other ways if you can to get your dues. See my other post. - John
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IANAL, but I handle all our company's contracts in the UK and USA.
Look carefully at the pattern of earnings and balance sheet reporting that UGO has made during recent fiscal periods.
This may not be formally reported or up to date. In the UK there is Comapnies House, to which Directors (but, interestingly, not the companies) are obliged to file annual accounts and shareholder information).
In the USA you will have to look at individual State Registrars, unless UGO is under SEC rules to file federally because of number of shareholders, public offers or listings.
Get *every* piece of detail you can about the INDIVIDUALS who run the business.
Companies in common law, USA and UK are Legal Persons, intentionally separated from their officers, in both countries (in the UK Companies Act, and once again your local state law) there is the concept of PERSONAL LIABILITY of officers and directors in the event they operate the company KNOWING IT CANNOT FINANCIALLY SURVIVE.
This *is* a complex affair.
But you may be in a position to apply pressure to obtain needed severances from contracts, so that you can do business elsewhere.
Or you may want to try to negotiate a settlement from any cash reserves still remaining.
You may yet be a creditor in the event UGO becomes insolvent or files Chapter 11.
I know you said a lawsuit may be futile. I am not advising on that (though these steps would be prepared by a good forensic accountant's legal team) but I *am* suggesting you get what info you can to apply LEVERAGE upon the officers, directors or whoever is responsible.
If you feel you can follow these steps and also read your local legal codes, _and_ provided you treat this in a resonably detached manner (I learned many skills years ago when such an investigation became a personally charged affair because my business was very hurt, but I still don't recommend the vendetta, you're smart enough to see the reasons for that) then you can at the very least feel as if your own intelligence can apply to the awful and unpleasant situation you are in. This aspect alone, for anyone bright enough to have managed their own business, gives a certain amount of better sleep and can reduce personal bitterness and sense of hopelessness. In fact many fraudsters OPERATEON THE BASIS that it is a common perception that legal recourse is hopeless. Legal recourse does not mean you have to go to court. The vast majority of serious cases are settled between big companies.
If you find a basis for argument that the directors or officers of the company have operated and ENCOURAGED NEW BUSINESS in the knowledge that their financial models are unsustainable, and / or they are broke, they may fall foul of insolvency rules, and in the UK I can say for certain I would immediately file suit for fraud against the INDIVIDUALS THEMSELVES. In the UK companies law makes it a CRIMINAL offence to operate a company when you know it can't meet its bills. Check your local State Codes for the equivalents WHERE THE COMPANY IS DOMICILED AND OR LOCATED...
Finally, for this post at least, WRITE UP what you find, quoting law and precendence wherever you can, and copy it to officers _home_ addresses, circulate to investors and advisors (who may also legally be culpable in some circumstances) and think seriously about putting a release across PRWire or another news service which gets picked up by the mainstream press. If the likelihood of fraud is widespread, and key officers of UGO have personal assets, you may find a specialist attorney calling you offering a deal to pursue in return for a reasonable commission. In other words, get in position to have your pound of flesh back, _as well as_ what is already legally due to you, and you may suddenly find yourself treated *much* more fairly.
I could comment further on contract law, too. But if you want to ask me anything write my spam account above with a very clear header, and I'll write back from my main a/c with some further pointers when I'm in less of a hurry. (only pointers, mind).
Whatever you do, my very best luck to you. - John
. . .
Forgive for answering directly to the story but I think your question "invert the price / performance ratio which has led people to scoff at the P4 in favor of AMD chips" is badly qualified.
It seems from these price cuts that Intel is more concerned with instruction set deployment / share than direct competition.
If AMD - and they rightly deserve this - gain a stronghold in volume machines, they will continue to have the upper hand in the extension to x86-64, whereas Intel actually have a fight on their hand to get developers actively retargeting code at new ISAs (IA64/ Itanium).
If I also understand correctly, games - that omnipresent cunsumer "killer app" are historically, and may remain, heavily optimised. You can't just unroll loops in IA64, no way. You have to use modulus voodoo and preferably live higher in the compiler algorithms to eek out performance.
I was reading yesterday an interview with an AMD honcho (I think on Toms') and when asked about SSE/2 support for Palomino there was a decidely vague / no comment response.
If I understand correctly, SSE is far closer to VLIW in form aka Altivec than usual x86 "core" ISA.
P4 is a big developent for SSE instructions and maintaining developers' optimisation attentions is a key issue for them. AMD x86-64 could otherwise become too attractive.
I cannot think how Intel could consider price cuts unless they had volume. They've enjoyed enormous gross margins for years, and AMD seems to still be volume constrained, German and M'sia plants notwithstanding.
If AMD is forced to cut margins - further - as well as compete on fab capacity, they will have difficulty *notwithstanding* actual processor performance.
For my part, I just cannot understand P4 in a budget context otherwise. My main machine is a PIII w/ i840 (a nice server targetted mo'bo and Rambus and dual capable for upgrade). As it goes, I do feel proc constrained, but for even simpler graphics apps I use I wouldn't even be feeding the processor with less IO - and I don't believe regular consumers will be any different given the growth in MPEG4 and DVD sware processing.
So, as a result, I don't believe this will invert price / performance perceptions at all.
Oh, and believe me, consumer word will travel fast in response to the ridiculously demanding (compared with Word, anyhow) media apps already mentioned.
[pray that I'm right at least for consumers' sake in the awful event such a scenario goes ahead, but curse me that it might kill off some cpu dev and make slashdot a place where posting about SCSI chipsets becomes *the* thing]
However, if AMD shipped *all* its CPUs with chip speed, not bus speed, decent sized caches aka the worthy PPro, then they might KILL Intel across all these cheapo IO constrained systems.
Ah, but then they'd be not so such cheap CPUs. Darn Pity.
=====================
Took me long enough to write I'm probably just repeating what you already thought, already said.
====================
. .
It's been noted the squillions lost by the original investors, and how maybe Mot should have poured in more. But thankfully, even after all that carnage, there's a chance a product will come out at a price the market can afford and which will sustain the company. After all, unlike Teledesic and all, Iridium is at least _up there_.
My guess is that the markets burned the original investors who had hoped for first - mover monopolies, and that in a way is sweet.
also sweet is a real chance for me not to be stuck with out terrestrial GSM monopolies (UK has four, One2One, Vodaphone, Cellnet, Orange) which stupid, or self serving governments don't realise a monopoly div by n is just one encumbant with best capital picking cherries and several followers too scared not to take the cosy fruits of symbiosis back to the shareholders. With only 4 choices, these companies just "[brand] value associate" themselves with different sets of customers and screw on any chance of working technology like GPRS or 3G. The smaller outfits can always claim to be competitive, because the big guys always price for pain.
I'm still arguing with Cellnet why they doubled my c. $1000/yr standing charge for flat roaming across Europe (Europe One Rate), without giving me the option to exit. (was signed for 12 mth rolling to get the rates). Anyone remember being compensated for suddenly expensive flights by British Airways when the Supreme Court ruled Freddie Laker got fsked by them? I digress.
Gimme Iridium, but gimme pocket sized 'phones.
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Both the Sun E 10000 (no doubt the attraction of the piece) and the E 4500 have been around a while now, as these slightly longer reviews from 1999 remind me. I expect there will have been numerous updates to shipping variations since launch, nonetheless, which I won't check with Sun's docs right now.
Neither yet support the Ultra Sparc 3, which is the chip and associated ( potentially) massively (1024) SMP platform probably of most interest to anyone evaluating entreprise scale systems right now. Whether Sun have yet fixed the memory / cache problems which apparently still persist, despite numerous fixes, for the USII I can't tell. But if anyone can post a quick summary comparison of cache design between the two chips, and whether there might be a replay of the well publicised memory problems, that'd be darn nifty. US3 has yet to ship in volume with servers, so there may not be any occasional user reports out there for a while.
Personally, I would rather see a story on Ask /. trying to find someone who could write even a short review (particularly of the E 10000) from production environment experience. The story links did not do much for me. I would not be surpised however if Sun has NDAs preventing real world reviews as part of mandatory support contracts for their big iron.
Oh, and for those of you interested in clusters, here's a related snippet :)
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Could you post a link to some examples or previous commissions?
If your friends are looking for helpful suggestions for pro bono projects, I am sure that it would help people come forward if they could better understand the direction your authors wish to take.
What are your / their personal interests? (I can glean nothing from your /. UID which helps me guess).
For example, when you suggest something "some documentation that non-geeks could understand " I feel uneasy because there is considerable room for confusion in writing from a non - technical background.
A good example of this might be the subject of Linux Human Interfaces - imagine writing about Linux GUIs for a very broad novice audience - do you explain the underpinnings of GNOME vs KDE and how they behave as a result, or how apps may want to find certain libraries installed such as QT, or do you write something like "if KDE, expect this, click here . . "?
To say that writing docs from CVS is not possible does not massively narrow the field of your interest either, without further clarification. However it does seem clear you don't want proposals to write programmers references:)
Also, if the aim is "getting them hired at some computer company some day", then in what department? Pure technical authoring for engineers, with present work as a stepping stone? Marketing copy writing? OEM channel / sales documentation like the "white papers" which Sun used (ages ago)to actually post hardcopy to me by the hundred - weight? All of these could come under the umbrella of "I want to get them into technical documentation".
If this is a question with a person's career in mind, surely the direction, as well as what you can learn are all important. Then, if that is right, I can understand the _right_ pro bono work could be of enormous assistance, and the engagement of benefit to everyone.
It seems to be a commonplace cry from projects of all kinds - "We need someone to write the docs! Help!" As such you make a appealing offer on behalf of your friends, but more detail would certainly help keep they and hopeful project managers from being unnecessarily distracted or disappointed.
Since you also mention your friends are already professional writers, I hope it's not off topic to mention I am professionally engaging a literary / editorial (as opposed to documentation per se) project this year which will be dealing with possibly relevant commercial / technical subjects, with a strong emphasis on underlying systems. (a recent spell of narrowly focussed comments which in part relate to this can be found by looking at my user history on this forum). Feel free to mail me if you have any questions.
Best of luck with it all, whatever you do!
Oh, and Happy New Year!
Ashleigh Brilliant is a "professional epigrammatist." He creates and copyrights thousands of short sayings, such as "Fundamentally, there may be no basis for anything." When he finds someone who has "used" one of his epigrams, he contacts them demanding a payment for breach of copyright. Television journalist David Brinkley wrote a book, Everyone is Entitled to My Opinion, the title of which he attributed to a friend of his daughter. Brilliant contacted Brinkley about copyright violation. Random House, Brinkley's publisher, paid Brilliant $1000 without contesting the issue, perhaps because it would have cost more than this to contest it.
A full text of this article, from Wall Street Journal, 27 January 1997, is available here
From it, you will note that "Random House, which published Mr. Brinkley's book, paid him $1,000 for the rights without agreeing to or contesting Mr. Brilliant's claims.
Copyright subsists - exists within, and does not have to be claimed by any author, of an original artistic or literary work. In UK and US code, titles, epithets and bon mots do *not* gain protection as they are not of themselves considered artistic works.
You cannot copyright things as simple as this. But you can, apparently get the occasional (stupid)publisher to pay up to stop you wasting their time.
Personally, I would have contested in court if necessary this man's claims over ownership of title to a book with which he had no connection. (his this sort of claim which might easily be thown out, or at least loose quickly on case law)
Moreover, in the UK there is the concept of a "vexatious claim" in which it can in certain cases become a criminal offence to attempt in bad faith to extract payment not due by means of coercion, including by means of jumped up legal threat. Also in the UK I could apply to the court that any claimant post bond for costs (including mine) in the event he looses and this application usually scares the harassers away :-)
The author of "Information liberation" uses this example as supposedly one of the more egregious happenings in copyright abuse. Awww, come on Mr Brian Martin, it was a simple thing for the publisher to work out that their lawyer's time even in typing a proper response could cost more than the thousand bucks they paid. But I find, from experience, that people who make claims such as Mr Brilliant did do not usually press these in court, as they _know_ how weak they are. I would have acted differently from Random House, especially how you see now how these decisions become grist to the misinformed mill of people working against fair rights in works (Mr Martin)
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The review at Danny Yee's beings with a famous misquotation.
"Starting with Acton's dictum that power corrupts, Information Liberation explores the corruptions and abuses of information power . . ."
Lord Acton's quote was : "power tends to corrupt, absolute power corrupts absolutely"
This is precisely the same difference (from the mis quotation, in meaning and effect) between those I see who take copyright and trademark laws and use them for tactical gain (please note, all you trendy IP lawyers, I see no bill or statute headed "Intellectual Property", which are words I think created to make this sound the birth right of anyone who merely posesses a brain and uses it), and those who, on the other side say that rights such as copyright should be abandoned because bully boy tactics hurt a number of the innocent.
I ended up arguing this point at length last night in this post (which is very long so I'll excerpt the relevant bit here) :
Now, if you are a lawyer employed by a company with a tenuous claim, it may be thought expediant to put out a little propoganda, the sort of which might give rise to the formation of opinions such as yours. However, that alone does not a case make (nor a rebuttal by logical reverse of the said lawyers' corporate polemic). Preposterous claims aside (which are common in times of rapid gain or exchange of wealth (think back to Vanderbilt's day)), the best response is to learn, know and practise the known law. If that doesn't work, you can _base _ on _ that a political response.
Having just read Chapter 3, "Against intellectual property". I'm fear that Slashdotters who read this book hoping to arm themselves with a credible arsenal against abusers of "IP concepts" (ugh, sorry but that jargonism just slipped in there and covers the relevant sins :), may be disappointed.
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Trademarks, service marks, and trade names have one particular reason for existing: to help to avoid customer confusion
I think that you will find that your perspective is a byproduct of the development in law, not such perspectives the cause of it.
In fact, if you think about it, your statement / opinion is tortological. You have to think of the sequence causal actions involved in creating a product : It is rather the vendor who decides a name for a product than a consumer who asks for a product of a certain type to be named such and such.
As I already mentioned, the legal form of trademark, derived in case law from the tort of deceipt.
US civil code, Title 15, Section 1125 cites, and its wording echoes this:
False designations of origin, false descriptions, and dilution forbidden.
(a) Civil Action
(1)Any person who Any person who, on or in connection with any goods or services, or any container for goods, uses in commerce any word, term, name, symbol, or device, or any combination thereof, or any false designation of origin, false or misleading description of fact, or false or misleading representation of fact, which -
(A) is likely to cause confusion, or to cause mistake, or to deceive as to the affiliation, connection, or association of such person with another person, or as to the origin, sponsorship, or approval of his or her goods, services, or commercial activities by another person, or
(B) in commercial advertising or promotion, misrepresents the nature, characteristics, qualities, or geographic origin of his or her or another person's goods, services, or commercial activities, shall be liable in a civil action by any person who believes that he or she is or is likely to be damaged by such act.
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When you say "When you suggest that International Business Machines, the current holder of the ibm.com domain name, has the right to sue for trademark infringement anyone who registers ibm.com, despite the availability caused by, say, a lapse in the domain registration by International Business Machines, you are falling for a line. I most assure you I am not.
The Federal Trademarks Act of 1995 cited the likelihood of consumer confusion as a means to protect _famous_ marques, in particular it introduced the effect of a larger legal footprint for such marques, such as IBM. Because the collateral value of being able to trade as IBM (and the cost of attaining such wide recognition) is so high , they have been afforded, along with, say Apple Computer, additional protection, against similar or confusing marques _in _any _line of business, and against anyone who seeks to represent a famous marque for their own benefit. Yes, you _could_ try to start a non - profit organisation called, shall we say Imbecilic Burocratic Morons, but obtaining someone else's means to their business would be an infringement and would create a liability for damages. By your argument you could imply that Gary Kremen, the original owner of sex.com should not have it returned. (see Wired's coverage.)
In the next section of your argument, you propose some things which are easily answered : "Why exactly does that IBM have this right? If there's a company in France with the registered French trademark Immeuble Baisemain that puts on a show about selling real-estate, and it's convenient for their customers to call them by a three letter acronym, why shouldn't they have as much right to the domain name as, say, International Business Machines? Can you seriously imagine that their website will confuse people into thinking that they provide computer hardware, software, and consulting services from International Business Machines? And if it somehow does, can't IBM U.S. just sue them?"
First up, IBM has that right because they used a marque to designate products which they maintained in the marketplace. With a high degree of certainty they began using the name when _no-one _else _ did. So we have a designator for a company. By using the marque, they made it distinct _of_their_own actions. To suggest that they should not benefit from this strikes me as unfair on any business.
Now for Immeuble Baisemain (ugh), as a registered marque, you have to ask the question : who has superior rights? For this you would look at the First Use in Commerce rules, and these would, in fact apply internationally, under, originally Treaty of Paris 1846, and - more up to date, US Code Title 15, Chapter 22, SubCh III, Sec 1126, (a).
Because you have not established precedence, or first use in commerce for your example, it is moot.
In so far as you imply that no confusion would exist if I tapped in www.ibm.com and got a French realtor and could not easily find IBM's site or any of my bookmarks to that (or neither could any of IBM's customers or intranet users), I suggest that that would in fact cause a *lot* of confusion. The effect would be tantamount to a stranger taking over your shop-front on main street. Customers would still come, but for all that advertising and promotion, money and goodwill you spent over the years saying "come to 1055 Main and Second for the best firkins in town", you'd have to redo, and *still* you'd loose some business, whatever you did.
"And if it somehow does, can't IBM U.S. just sue them?" - That's the whole point, I was merely showing the basis under which they rightly could.
"Now, modern "intellectual property" lawyers are trying to convince everyone that we should suddenly change everything and ignore the above. Of course, they aren't presenting it that way publicly. What they say is that they are protecting the "intellectual property" and trademark rights of their clients in the new electronic sphere. However, in their actions they are making preposterous claims, and unfortunately many people seem to be accepting their position uncritically
I've taken your paragraph out of sequence, because you were making unsupported and unrelated assertions in aid of your surrounding argument. There is no way that current lawers could easily overturn a history of case law and precedent. That does not preclude the possibility of political lobbying for interpretations, which is a separate and contentious topic. Now, if you are a lawyer employed by a company with a tenuous claim, it may be thought expediant to put out a little propoganda, the sort of which might give rise to the formation of opinions such as yours. However, that alone does not a case make (nor a rebuttal by logical reverse of the said lawyers' corporate polemic). Preposterous claims aside (which are common in times of rapid gain or exchange of wealth (think back to Vanderbilt's day)), the best response is to learn, know and practise the known law. If that doesn't work, you can _base _ on _ that a political response. That may appear to be the course of action you want to take, and whilst I may not endorse the specifics of what you say, debate is *sorely* needed and is one major reason for my long response.
Isn't it much more likely that the lawyers of the world are just stretching the law in this novel area as far as they think they can take it, simply because it is in their interest to provide their clients with the best possible outcome, justified or not?
I'm not so sure there is any "novel idea" involved, except money making. And, dammit, if I employ someone to work for me I sure as heck want them to support my interests. (although I should hope that my interests are properly justifiable before promulgating them).
Finally, I am pleased you agree that SnapNames may not be the best thing under the sun. But I am concerned that you baldly claim I have made such elementary and potentially damaging mistakes in my previous post. Your aside "(and there are plenty who do, you do not need to feel any shame)" is a very smart rhetorical device to imply I should admit (or imply I should admit this, to readers) that I am in fact elementarily mistaken. I don't think so.
now from an unposted thought from earlier, I wonder if there's a connection with the following :
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The International Herald Tribune has a piece which suggests that new software may be used to monitor for stolen music on your PC.
The company in question, EMusic, proposes to use the DMCA to shoehorn its software into a policing role for Napster users, as well as, no doubt, any other user of digital media, on behalf of the rights of copyright owners. Their chief, Gene Hoffman, baldly states, "Privacy is not the issue, Piracy is."
His statement implies that the trade for using the technologies which have themselves created an era of stunning growth for media companies, is a blunt, painful, surgical implant into our private equipment and facilities.
Whilst, In a update yesterday, Wired reports that the DMCA is said not to impact the rights of customers under first sale doctrine, an aggressive, "policing" stance such as the one proposed by EMusic, appears it would infringe that.
At a blunt guess, EMusic would effectively be placing a toll gate on the legitimate transfer of a legally purchased work. Under its plans to hoop up ISPs into blocking "infringing" accounts, it creates a lopsided penalty for alleged infirngement.
It is not stated how EMusic's system is or could be audited. If a legitimate owner of a work wished to sell or trade, in an error, trust could be reduced, impeding a sale. If the vendor's ISP account were incorrectly blocked, it is conceivable that the action might be a restraint of trade.
Either way EMusic wants to introduce a burden of proof on your ownerwhip of digital media. The company may be bandwagon jumping, or monkeying on the back of the "great fear" promulgated around Napster, but EMusic looks hawkish, and copyright lawers are becoming increasingly aggressive.
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Dear Slashdotters, I think the corporate wagons are circling. Are you up to the argument? Or have we left things too late?
Yeah, some companies have reset the option strike prices, but ther's big debate that this must, even though it sometimes isn't, hit the bottom line as a charge to profits.
I've talked with too many people this last few years, each well pleased with their options, many of whom I soon discovered did not really understand what an option was, or that they may have traded some hard cash salary for their paper.
Just another example of bad money driving out the good (engineers from dot-coms)?
an after thought - it may be also that, in order to keep accounting liabilities low, dot-coms have only signed short contracts, even with their most valuable staff. That would leave many freer to leave than might otherwise be the case.
In a sense you are, and you are not. What makes this confusing is you are buying an exclusive use of a domain on renewable terms with a period of contract defined therein. Actual ownership of a domain is subject to interpretaion of what a domain constitutes. IMO, absolute ownership would not be clear until you have rights such that neither a registrar nor any root server owner nor anyone else may alter or interfere with the domain name you registered and corresponding DNS entries, in perpetuity.
If you would like to register a domain wherein the contract with the registrar confers you explicit title in ownership (albeit, once again the derivative rights from that are unclear and subject to interpretation) take a look at Gandi.net who have Terms and conditions in contract which appear very favourable to the registrant.
A more philosophical way to look at this is ask yourself, if you are a home owner, whether you own that house outright, or if, as is usual, the deeds are owned by your mortgage lender and you will be paying them interest on a loan for any number of years to come. Many aspects of control derive from lend or lease variations, see Marx for some good rants.
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Its going to be interesting to guess where the bulk of SnapNames' busines is going to come from.
Now if you think that they are going to have lots of lucrative business from big corporations, I ask you this : just how many large outfits with a big web presence (yeah, Hotmail aside) are *not* on the ball wrt their domain properties and the intellectual property and trademark rights which may apply to them?
Now whilst there have been a number of instances of _registered_ trademark owners expanding their name spaces over innocent registrants of similar names, for _registered_ trademarks which are _famous_ , action against confusingly similar names by those with an established presence is an intelligable component of the law.
Registered, Federal or national trademark or not, if you have a business name or domain through which you conduct trade, you will likely have acquired common law trademark rights thru use.
Now both the Federal type registrations as well as the common law aspects of trademark have basis in "passing off" (imitating to obtain a competitor's business) and these laws themselves derive from the tort of deceit.
If a party willingly and knowingly assists another party in infringing actions, the infringed party is able to bring suit against the body or agency who made this "assist" on the basis they have made a contributory infringement.
This works in much the same way as if you send me a warez copy of Office2000 and I publish it on my website, I am also responsible by my actions to infringe the copyright of the owner. (this is a very blunt analogy, but the specific differences are a very long post).
I see some difficulties with SnapNames' modus operandi :
Firstly, the "Snap-shot" monitoring service, for which the first 20 monitored names are free (therafter $20 per 100). Now, if I am Big Corp A and I have say a few important domains, exactly how does this benefit me? This many is easy to monitor, and in any case it is no hardship to ensure renewals happen well in advance of expiry, and for long periods. SnapNames makes no money here. In fact SnapNames makes nothing out of this monitoring service until someone wants 120 names watched for status. How many people have legitimate rights over 120 names? I know some porn redirector operators own thousands, but seriously, is that really SnapNames target market? And for anyone else, is a random sample of 120 names not going to have residual rights in trademark, common law or registered, remaining with previous owners. It may be that SnapNames are making a statistical play, and I have not the data to see their justifications.
Now to their "SnapBack" service, for which I'll quote their FAQ :
7. How do I use Snap-Back to "back order" a domain name? You can use the Snap-Back service to give yourself a second chance to acquire a domain name that you would like to own but is currently registered to someone else. Please note that our service does not and never will take a domain name away from a current registrant. However, you can still sign up for Snap-Back on that name and if it ever becomes available, it gives you the best available assurance of being the first one to acquire it. In effect, you have back ordered the name in case it ever becomes available
I am not too sure the disclaimer : ". Please note that our service does not and never will take a domain name away from a current registrant. " is really adequate.
The idea is that a desirable domain falls off a registry and becomes available (other posters have already covered whether this will actually happen or not), and then SnapNames will run an automatic registration of that domain for you.
What this does not take into account, where say there are trademark rights applicable to the "fallen" domain, is that abandonment of a domain registration does not constitute abandonment of a marque. It *is* possible for large companies to slip up, but that by no means suggests that IBM would have given up any associated rights to www.IBM.com because the trademark laws say that you abandon a marque only when you stop using it, or when you stop policing it, if it is a Federal registered trademark. Now for IBM to somehow simultaneously stop using its marque on all products as it "drops" its domain, _as well_ as to choose not to file suit for return of its domain citing trademark law, isto be far fetched.
Essentially I think, even without recourse to the inner workings of trademarks, domains and related law, that SnapNames is an incitement to infringe, and the company may find itself embroiled in the middle of some nasty disputes in the future. Obviously I hope otherwise, just as I would hope that people would look and think before claiming rights on trademarks (interestingly there is very onerous code requiring possible trademark registrants to look under every stone for possible superior rights, but that is another story altogether). Having thought of that, would not making a standing application to buy a trademarked domain actually be a form of claim in itself?
It's nice that SnapNames makes a thing of being useful to lawers. If I were entrusted with maintaining a client's domain, I'd be pretty sure to make it so I *don't* need SnapNames' services. The very lack of legal actual substance on their site, together with promised "ongoing education" (like it doesn't take a few years to learn the subject, and any professional will have an eye the case law databases almost continuously) leads me to think that angle is just a smokescreen.
(see The Register and Silicon.com)
Iridigm's technology, which sounds to me too much like a satellite business, call their tech "I-mod"
I'd post a link to the Trademarks Office if the server was not down (business UK hours only) but British Telecom just tried all the related names to annoy NTT DoCoMO with their 'phone kit :
Once you have a trademark registration, btw, you have a good claim against "confusingly similar" marques.
and once you've filed you have a superior claim in Madrid Treaty countries (US recognises this) from date of application of registered trademark Not the actual first use of a name.
you have to see an excerpt of the class descriptions for the application to believe this :
I had to cut the actual text because of Lameness Filter. But you can search for yourself tomorrow :-)
an excerpt from class 9 of the application: transmission, reception, processing, retrieval, reproduction, manipulation, analysis, display and print-out of sound, images and/or data; computer hardware and firmware; computer software; digital communications apparatus and instruments
the names : Status: Pending Mark Text: I-MODE Mark Text: i-mode Mark Text: i-MODE Mark Text: I-mode Mark Text: I.MODE Mark Text: i.mode Mark Text: I.mode Mark Text: i.MODE Mark Text: I MODE Mark Text: i mode Mark Text: i MODE Mark Text: I mode M
It may help you - a lot, even, depending on circumstances - to remove the word "sponsorship" from your pitch language. From my own experience, the most overriding reason for this is the number of (extra) hurdles you may face in approaching any company of size for what is - more often than not - an exchange of money for tied exposure, which in my book is advertising.
From your question, it seems as if you are effectively thinking about creating publicity products for the Expo - and desirable ones at that. Pencil in the positions on the media you plan to produce, group this list with the demographics from the Expo exhibitors blurb, a bullish pro points list for Windowmaker (home environment, work environment, productivity increases whatever) and a few juicy quotes from the mainstream media about Linux.
Voila - Media Pack.
Now pricing is a different matter, but a very very rough ballpark would be to start with the price for a full page full colour advert in any programem or visitors guide to the expo, and work on a multiple of that. Even if you look to be expensive, once you've worked on the cost of your media and screen prinitng logos or whatever else you plan, you can argue value add from e.g. value of your media vehicle over time (user reloads windowmaker on several systems), possibilitty for reuse or archive, novelty, heightening public interest in anything GUI related. Make up the list as you go along.
Get this all together in your head and call a likely target company. Do not call and ask for a sponsorship manager unless you want to be involved in a long drawn out set of meetings tryign to show how your organisation's values, history et.c. fit so beautifully with your prospects. Take it from me this is an agonising waste of time if you can actually write down a convincing product argument inside say 6 main letter pages + appendices and send this to someone by fax. Also, try to pitch someone who is not mainline advertising or marketing. Most of the ad market works on schedules to assist bulk buys of established regular products (magazines, whatever) and there is burocrasy there to make you weep. Try to find a sales director or product manager rather than those who probably just place the ads to spec. This is especially important if your time is valuable to you.
You say you would have a problem paying for media and packaging. Now most major publications charge a hefty cancellation fee for any advertising, even to their best accounts. This is because it is practically impossible to caluculate the price fo an unsold page of advertising (there be lots of nasty option math in there, but i'm not sure the publishers even think about that). The bulk of advertising costs exist within the selection, placement process and people recognise that. So when you make a sale it is expected to be firm, and you are not expected to swallow the costs is the buyer runs. If you have never dealt with a customer before it is quite normal to demand advance payment, mayeb in full, possibly at least half inside 14 days of the order beign signed. If your customer complains, think this through and reput the arguments. If you ar eoperating through a limited liability vehicle with fresh incorporation or a low Dunn and Bradstreet rating, have these arguments at the ready and practised, since even if the person who signs the paperwork with you is cool, it is normal for credit control and payment to get their look in, sometimes even try to renegotiate prices, when they get the work flow for payment. Be calm, be firm, reel in the deal.
Maybe this is my last thought for now (unless you have something specific you want to know else, in which case post below) but : Pitching for the business is fun or can be made so. Getting it home every time makes for early baldness. Trust me, I know. Hope this bald guy was useful to you today.