I never said Apple was a monopoly, I just suggested that perhaps if this situation were to befall Apple, or Google to use another example, then people's opinion of the proceedings would be the exact opposite.
I'd also like to point out that not everyone agrees with the court decisions which determined Microsoft was a monopoly. The subsequent decisions by foreigh courts have yielded little action to curb Microsoft's behaviours, netting milliosn in fines instead, which leads me to believe they see a cash cow and an easy target to boot.
o you really need any more evidence that what's staring you right in the face? A legal system which allows the party responsible for determining justice is allowed to have confidential, closed door proceedings with the defenses primary competitors and not reveal the details of the meetings to the defense. If this were to occur in a U.S. court you people would be screaming bloody murder.
The judge didn't say they were irrelevant, she said they were confidential and the U.S. legal system was not going to be used as an end-run around the E.U. legal system. I find if frightenign that everyoen is willing to turn a blind eye to the E.U.'s corrupt legal system simpyl because it's Microsoft at the receiving end of the raw deal here. Would people be as casual if this were Apple?
When the hell are you fucking morons going to realize that intellectual property protects the EXPRESSION of an idea, not the idea itself? This is a very basic concept and withoutunderstanding it we get the mindless crap often repeated on Slashdot like that from the parent thread.
Why does each version of Firefox break plug-in and theme compatibility? I can maybe forgive SOME plug-ins but all of them? and THEMES!?!? WTF? There are plug-ins I used to use that ar still not compatible with 1.5. This is a MAJOR flaw with Firefox in my opinion. If you're going to tout the expandibility of Firefox as a major feature then youneed to make sure there's going to be at the very leat backwards compatibility for most plug-ins.
When are you gun nuts going to learn hwo to read? The Second Amendment states (emphasis mine): "A well regulated Militia, being neseccary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed." We no longer maintain militias in the form the framers originally conceived so the Second Amendment is pointless.
I was an avid fan of Outpost but the game had some serious bugs that were never fixed. Outpost 2 came out and killed the game concept, turnign it into an early Age of Empires like RTS. Maxis had, at the time, a new game under development called Sim Mars whichi looked like what Outpost was supposed to be only better. I was exicted and couldn't wait to play the game then it was quietly killed. Apparently Maxis was developing this new game, the Sims, and Sim Mars got the axe. The Sim franchise had some very fun alternatives that never really caught on (Sim Ant, Wim Earth ayone?) but with the recent interest in sending a manned mission to Mar, perhaps EA coudl revive this game.
We have a fable about a little boy who cried wolf as a prak one too many times. When there really was a wolf and he was in need, no one believed him. When your site is really taken down by the Chinese Government, don't be surprised when we don't believe you.
Most of the western world is a signatory of the Berne Convention (which, by the way, was what made copyright extension in the US what it is today, not Disney), meaning US Copyright does apply to a certain extent.
...is exactly why things like the DMCA get passed and we're stuck with DRM systems that overcomplicate playing a CD or DVD. You have no rights to distribute intellectual property in any way shape or form, period. To go beyond that and thumb your nose at the MPAA only exacerbates the problem. You want legal digital downloads and on demand content from the MPAA? Then the online community is going to have to prove that they are a responsible group and are willing to play by the rules. So far, the willingness of the community to replace P2P distribution servers which were know for illegally distributed intellectual property only serves to strengthen the argments the MPAA.
"I really don't see a thing, not one single thing, that will make the still undelivered Vista significantly better than the Linux or the Mac OS X desktops I have in front of me today."
He forgot one thing. Perhaps Vista will be significantly better than Windows XP adn this may be reason enough for some to upgrade. He never said it was worse than those OSes (other than his comments about a beta version of an OS). However, does it have to be significantly better than Linux or OS X? What if it's marginally better and someone has the option top buy OS X and Mac hardware or Windows Vista and a Dell box? Perhaps the lure of having access to a wide library of hardware and applications is enough to tip people towards Vista. Maybe, gasp, this fictional person everyone loves to talk about prefers the way Windows does things. I use OS X at work and Windows XP at home and I find Windows to be more comfortable to work in. OS X does what every Apple OS has done since the dawn of time, it works well until you stray from the Apple way of doing things. I don't dislike it but I don't like some of the limitations Apple puts in place.
I read that pile of crap that somone claims to be an article about Why Vista Will Suck and all I got out of it is this guy is a $%@^$@# idiot. Great, he's got a copy of Vista and a fast machine. Most of his complaints can either be dismissed because Vusta is still a BETA or not attributed to Microsoft at all. Is it really Microsoft's fault if you're not careful around your USB drive? And who cares if Linux and Mac OS X have had feature X for years? Isn't Vista going to benefit from using feature X if everyone else has? How can this be a reason why Vista will suck? Isn't this more of a reason why Microsoft's marketing managers suck? What about his anecdotal argument concering security? There was a patch for the WMF swcurity hole. Let's analyze the argument. First of all, the patch was released in January. The CTP was released in February. You do the math. Not to mention that perhaps there was an old portion of XP in the January release of Vista that's since been removed from the February CTP. Did Stephen check? Probably not. If security patches being released for an OS are all the proof he needs that it's insecure than he'd better add OS X and Linux to the list. All in all, this was a poorly written and researched article with little evidence to back up his claims.
Ummm, but can't one argue that Bothers in Arms is vastly diffrerent than Call of Duty despite both being FPS shooters? Brothers in Arms adds squad based elements to the game which changes the dynamics of the playing field and the way you progress through the levels. One could also argue that Nintendo is whoring the Mario et al characters, disguisng mundane games with their well known characters in hopes of selling more copies simply because it's got Mario on the cover. Nintendo's one trick pony isn't going to last much longer with the new consoles and Link isn't going to do much to save them either.
We have this thing in the US called States Rights. Voting systems are picked by each district, not on a Federal level and you'd have a very hard time forcing thousand of districts to replce their current systems. Some out of spite and stubborness, others out of financial hardship, and probably a mix of the two with the rest. The US Constitution was written to appease the States and as such the Federal Government could not appear to take too much power over their little feifdoms. Things like this are the result of this decision our forefathers made, for better or worse. Perhaps you should try to understand this concept and why it came about before you bash the US.
...now where was that? Oh, yeah, Microsoft Word for Mac. Except they did it right. Despite what they claim in the article, floating palettes most certainly have been used in office apps.
Ah, but you're talking about the expression of the idea itself. Even your poorly written wiki article discuses this basic fact (perhaps you should RTFW again, no?) Let's put it this way, if I were to write a story about a boy who discovers he's a wizard when an agent from the local wizarding school comes to collect him, I'm in the clear. If I name my school Hogwarts and call the boy Harry Potter I'm so deep in trouble there's no way I'm getting out. The character's name and school are integral to the expression of the idea and thus protected by copyright. The idea of a boy going to wizarding school is not integral to the expression and thus not protected. It is merely an idea in and of itself and cannot be protected no matter how unique it is. Fan fiction writers cross this boundry because they reuse characters. Regardless of how original their story may be, it is still a violation of copyright because the characters they are using are not thir own expressions of what may otherwise be an original idea.
100% of an idea may be used, it's the expression of the idea which bears copyright protection. Why is this such a diccifult concept to understand? Most of the arguments against copyright from the slashbots would go away if you simply understood this simple point (the rest would go away if they understood that copying is distribution and while it may or may nto deprive the author of anything, it this violation which is being contested, not whether they lost any money).
You're missing the point. I don't think we'd be anywhere near the empass we're at with copyright protection on the internet if people simply realized they have no explicit or implicit rights to all the free intellectual property they want. This is the nuclear arms race all over again and unfortunately htere appears to be no end in sight. Therefore, I don't give a rat's ass about your rights if you're not willing to give a rat's ass about my rights. It has nothing to do with me wishing for your rights to not exist at all.
Then perhaps the online community needs to learn how to respect intellectual property holder's rights. I don;t give a rat's ass about your rights if you're going to violate mine, it's really as simple as that. You can rot in prison for al lI care, I have no sympathy for you.
You DO have to get permission for every use of copyrighted material UNLESS it falls under the protection of fair use, which has a very limited scope ad doesn't cover what many slashbots think it covers.
As for the metamax comment you made, well, I'm not even sure why you made it. Betamax is technology and the courts ruled that the technology itself wasn't enough to prove infringement or even contributory infringement. The MPAA could still sue people who used betamax tapes to infrige copyrights, or not if they felt the pirating of their intelelctual property wasn't that big a deal.
In short I'm disagreeing with you because your arguments fail any basic understanding of copyright and intellectual property law.
* It fails the 'is this contract fair' test too, since the courts have repeatedly rules that you can reproduce portions of the books and it's fair use.
Google isn't reproducing portions of the book, they are merely presenting portions of the book at any given time during a search. It is highly likely that the search engine itself could be considered a violation of copyright on this point alone.
* Yet that clause was put in those books prior to Google Book search existing, so it couldn't have been written with Google in mind"
Doesn't matter, and I can't belive anybody would even make this argument.
* Finally, some publishers are not complaining about Google Book Search, and their books have that clause, which suggests the first point is true (that that clause was not intended to block benefitial use).
Again, it doesn't matter. Copyright awners are welcome to enforce their copyrights as they see fit. If a publisher is ok with Google indexing their books then perhaps Google should have asked in the first place.
So it's perfectly reasonable for Google to ask the publishers which books they don't want indexed by Google Book Search and a judge will find in their favour I reckon.
This was the argument the publisher's guild made when Google first presented this idea. Google didn't want to build their index this way and they went ahead without first securing permission.
No, they're not. 'Content consumers turned content creators' is nothing new, they just have a platform to distribute their work more easily now. This in no way suggests quality of work , it merely increases the signal to noise ratio.
That's funny, I was able to get Outlook 2003 on its own and I have it running side by side with Office 2000. What breed of moron is making the claim that Outlook is bundled with Office? Sure, there are Office bundles but you can purchase every app on its own as well. You get a break by buying the bundle but what's anti-competitive about that?
Slashdot Mirror
I never said Apple was a monopoly, I just suggested that perhaps if this situation were to befall Apple, or Google to use another example, then people's opinion of the proceedings would be the exact opposite.
I'd also like to point out that not everyone agrees with the court decisions which determined Microsoft was a monopoly. The subsequent decisions by foreigh courts have yielded little action to curb Microsoft's behaviours, netting milliosn in fines instead, which leads me to believe they see a cash cow and an easy target to boot.
o you really need any more evidence that what's staring you right in the face? A legal system which allows the party responsible for determining justice is allowed to have confidential, closed door proceedings with the defenses primary competitors and not reveal the details of the meetings to the defense. If this were to occur in a U.S. court you people would be screaming bloody murder.
The judge didn't say they were irrelevant, she said they were confidential and the U.S. legal system was not going to be used as an end-run around the E.U. legal system. I find if frightenign that everyoen is willing to turn a blind eye to the E.U.'s corrupt legal system simpyl because it's Microsoft at the receiving end of the raw deal here. Would people be as casual if this were Apple?
When the hell are you fucking morons going to realize that intellectual property protects the EXPRESSION of an idea, not the idea itself? This is a very basic concept and withoutunderstanding it we get the mindless crap often repeated on Slashdot like that from the parent thread.
Why does each version of Firefox break plug-in and theme compatibility? I can maybe forgive SOME plug-ins but all of them? and THEMES!?!? WTF? There are plug-ins I used to use that ar still not compatible with 1.5. This is a MAJOR flaw with Firefox in my opinion. If you're going to tout the expandibility of Firefox as a major feature then youneed to make sure there's going to be at the very leat backwards compatibility for most plug-ins.
When are you gun nuts going to learn hwo to read? The Second Amendment states (emphasis mine): "A well regulated Militia, being neseccary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed." We no longer maintain militias in the form the framers originally conceived so the Second Amendment is pointless.
The US is not a democracy, it never has been. The US is a democratic republic. We use the democratic process to elect officials to act on our behalf.
I was an avid fan of Outpost but the game had some serious bugs that were never fixed. Outpost 2 came out and killed the game concept, turnign it into an early Age of Empires like RTS. Maxis had, at the time, a new game under development called Sim Mars whichi looked like what Outpost was supposed to be only better. I was exicted and couldn't wait to play the game then it was quietly killed. Apparently Maxis was developing this new game, the Sims, and Sim Mars got the axe. The Sim franchise had some very fun alternatives that never really caught on (Sim Ant, Wim Earth ayone?) but with the recent interest in sending a manned mission to Mar, perhaps EA coudl revive this game.
We have a fable about a little boy who cried wolf as a prak one too many times. When there really was a wolf and he was in need, no one believed him. When your site is really taken down by the Chinese Government, don't be surprised when we don't believe you.
Most of the western world is a signatory of the Berne Convention (which, by the way, was what made copyright extension in the US what it is today, not Disney), meaning US Copyright does apply to a certain extent.
...is exactly why things like the DMCA get passed and we're stuck with DRM systems that overcomplicate playing a CD or DVD. You have no rights to distribute intellectual property in any way shape or form, period. To go beyond that and thumb your nose at the MPAA only exacerbates the problem. You want legal digital downloads and on demand content from the MPAA? Then the online community is going to have to prove that they are a responsible group and are willing to play by the rules. So far, the willingness of the community to replace P2P distribution servers which were know for illegally distributed intellectual property only serves to strengthen the argments the MPAA.
"I really don't see a thing, not one single thing, that will make the still undelivered Vista significantly better than the Linux or the Mac OS X desktops I have in front of me today."
He forgot one thing. Perhaps Vista will be significantly better than Windows XP adn this may be reason enough for some to upgrade. He never said it was worse than those OSes (other than his comments about a beta version of an OS). However, does it have to be significantly better than Linux or OS X? What if it's marginally better and someone has the option top buy OS X and Mac hardware or Windows Vista and a Dell box? Perhaps the lure of having access to a wide library of hardware and applications is enough to tip people towards Vista. Maybe, gasp, this fictional person everyone loves to talk about prefers the way Windows does things. I use OS X at work and Windows XP at home and I find Windows to be more comfortable to work in. OS X does what every Apple OS has done since the dawn of time, it works well until you stray from the Apple way of doing things. I don't dislike it but I don't like some of the limitations Apple puts in place.
I read that pile of crap that somone claims to be an article about Why Vista Will Suck and all I got out of it is this guy is a $%@^$@# idiot. Great, he's got a copy of Vista and a fast machine. Most of his complaints can either be dismissed because Vusta is still a BETA or not attributed to Microsoft at all. Is it really Microsoft's fault if you're not careful around your USB drive? And who cares if Linux and Mac OS X have had feature X for years? Isn't Vista going to benefit from using feature X if everyone else has? How can this be a reason why Vista will suck? Isn't this more of a reason why Microsoft's marketing managers suck? What about his anecdotal argument concering security? There was a patch for the WMF swcurity hole. Let's analyze the argument. First of all, the patch was released in January. The CTP was released in February. You do the math. Not to mention that perhaps there was an old portion of XP in the January release of Vista that's since been removed from the February CTP. Did Stephen check? Probably not. If security patches being released for an OS are all the proof he needs that it's insecure than he'd better add OS X and Linux to the list. All in all, this was a poorly written and researched article with little evidence to back up his claims.
Ummm, but can't one argue that Bothers in Arms is vastly diffrerent than Call of Duty despite both being FPS shooters? Brothers in Arms adds squad based elements to the game which changes the dynamics of the playing field and the way you progress through the levels. One could also argue that Nintendo is whoring the Mario et al characters, disguisng mundane games with their well known characters in hopes of selling more copies simply because it's got Mario on the cover. Nintendo's one trick pony isn't going to last much longer with the new consoles and Link isn't going to do much to save them either.
We have this thing in the US called States Rights. Voting systems are picked by each district, not on a Federal level and you'd have a very hard time forcing thousand of districts to replce their current systems. Some out of spite and stubborness, others out of financial hardship, and probably a mix of the two with the rest. The US Constitution was written to appease the States and as such the Federal Government could not appear to take too much power over their little feifdoms. Things like this are the result of this decision our forefathers made, for better or worse. Perhaps you should try to understand this concept and why it came about before you bash the US.
...now where was that? Oh, yeah, Microsoft Word for Mac. Except they did it right. Despite what they claim in the article, floating palettes most certainly have been used in office apps.
Ah, but you're talking about the expression of the idea itself. Even your poorly written wiki article discuses this basic fact (perhaps you should RTFW again, no?) Let's put it this way, if I were to write a story about a boy who discovers he's a wizard when an agent from the local wizarding school comes to collect him, I'm in the clear. If I name my school Hogwarts and call the boy Harry Potter I'm so deep in trouble there's no way I'm getting out. The character's name and school are integral to the expression of the idea and thus protected by copyright. The idea of a boy going to wizarding school is not integral to the expression and thus not protected. It is merely an idea in and of itself and cannot be protected no matter how unique it is. Fan fiction writers cross this boundry because they reuse characters. Regardless of how original their story may be, it is still a violation of copyright because the characters they are using are not thir own expressions of what may otherwise be an original idea.
100% of an idea may be used, it's the expression of the idea which bears copyright protection. Why is this such a diccifult concept to understand? Most of the arguments against copyright from the slashbots would go away if you simply understood this simple point (the rest would go away if they understood that copying is distribution and while it may or may nto deprive the author of anything, it this violation which is being contested, not whether they lost any money).
You're missing the point. I don't think we'd be anywhere near the empass we're at with copyright protection on the internet if people simply realized they have no explicit or implicit rights to all the free intellectual property they want. This is the nuclear arms race all over again and unfortunately htere appears to be no end in sight. Therefore, I don't give a rat's ass about your rights if you're not willing to give a rat's ass about my rights. It has nothing to do with me wishing for your rights to not exist at all.
Then perhaps the online community needs to learn how to respect intellectual property holder's rights. I don;t give a rat's ass about your rights if you're going to violate mine, it's really as simple as that. You can rot in prison for al lI care, I have no sympathy for you.
You DO have to get permission for every use of copyrighted material UNLESS it falls under the protection of fair use, which has a very limited scope ad doesn't cover what many slashbots think it covers.
As for the metamax comment you made, well, I'm not even sure why you made it. Betamax is technology and the courts ruled that the technology itself wasn't enough to prove infringement or even contributory infringement. The MPAA could still sue people who used betamax tapes to infrige copyrights, or not if they felt the pirating of their intelelctual property wasn't that big a deal.
In short I'm disagreeing with you because your arguments fail any basic understanding of copyright and intellectual property law.
* It fails the 'is this contract fair' test too, since the courts have repeatedly rules that you can reproduce portions of the books and it's fair use.
Google isn't reproducing portions of the book, they are merely presenting portions of the book at any given time during a search. It is highly likely that the search engine itself could be considered a violation of copyright on this point alone.
* Yet that clause was put in those books prior to Google Book search existing, so it couldn't have been written with Google in mind"
Doesn't matter, and I can't belive anybody would even make this argument.
* Finally, some publishers are not complaining about Google Book Search, and their books have that clause, which suggests the first point is true (that that clause was not intended to block benefitial use).
Again, it doesn't matter. Copyright awners are welcome to enforce their copyrights as they see fit. If a publisher is ok with Google indexing their books then perhaps Google should have asked in the first place.
So it's perfectly reasonable for Google to ask the publishers which books they don't want indexed by Google Book Search and a judge will find in their favour I reckon.
This was the argument the publisher's guild made when Google first presented this idea. Google didn't want to build their index this way and they went ahead without first securing permission.
No, they're not. 'Content consumers turned content creators' is nothing new, they just have a platform to distribute their work more easily now. This in no way suggests quality of work , it merely increases the signal to noise ratio.
That's funny, I was able to get Outlook 2003 on its own and I have it running side by side with Office 2000. What breed of moron is making the claim that Outlook is bundled with Office? Sure, there are Office bundles but you can purchase every app on its own as well. You get a break by buying the bundle but what's anti-competitive about that?
Balthaser's own website is built using Flash, one of the technologies for which it claims a patent.