I am one to agree that software patents should not exist (and non software ones should be only for exceptional inventions, not for tiny progress in a field) but I hate hypocrisy even more.
Google, go for revision requests the day you stop requesting patents left and right, and volunteer your own collection to be invalidated.
It won't be until some of the big patent holders themselves complain to the government about the horrible use of patents that things may change.
As long as they try to play the patent game, though, they should suck it up and play by the rules of the game they support when it's convenient for them.
This holds true for Apple too, won't bother bringing Microsoft since they are beyond hope.
If you have been reading SlashDot for long enough, you should know that's not how patent trolls work. They wait until the patent usage is nigh irreversible to jump in and demand compensation.
People really need to disconnect. It's sad to see people that simply can't put their phones down for a few minutes, because making that Twitter post is so important.
Some of us don't waste our time with trivial things like Twitter. We focus our phone resources to more valuable activities. Like getting that last golden egg in Angry Birds... elusive egg.... grrrr....
Honestly. Many people simply do not have the need, desire, temperament, or extra money required to purchase something other than a "dumbphone". Also, "dumbphones" make phone calls just as well as the so-called "smartphones".
It has nothing to do with being smart enough to realize you don't need one.
I agree with the price points (many people just cant be lured away from free retard-phones)
I also agree with the desire and temperament, mostly because these consumers don't realize how a smartphone can streamline their lives. Good readable email on the go can be priceless for anyone in most lines of work, and web access can save you a lot of money in the long run by double checking prices before you do sudden investments in a store.
The "makes calls just as well" though, i may partially disagree. Skype voice quality is highly superior to cell voice quality, extremely so. I have come to only use skype and not use my minutes whenever i have a good data signal. Yea, it's nitpicking, but it is a valid counterpoint to the "they can both make calls just as well" argument.
Price takes a role, but not necessarily because it being a roadblock. It's just hard for some people to justify paying for a phone when they can get a retard-phone that still can make calls for zero money down.
BTW... ATT is offering the 3Gs for $49.00. It's actually cheaper than the Go phone you noted (unless you trying to upgrade without renewing contract, that is.)
That's a nice idea but it doesn't often work that way. Many people (with a smart phone) don't seem to have the iron will to not be rude while talking face to face with someone. If someone can't control their actions at one level then they need to make their changes somewhere upstream in the decision making process. Either that, or enjoy the consequences of their rude behavior.
I'm sorry but I am not sure what prehistoric age you just time traveled from. In the present, people rudely point their noses to their phones without regard of these being smart phones or dumb phones. Text messaging is still a huge deal and virtually every single phone in the world can do this. Smartphones have nothing to do with that behavior. This has been true for the last 15 years.
I think it's more about people not realizing what they can do with a smartphone. It was not until early 2007 that I got my first smartphone, a Samsung Blackjack. Before that, all I wanted was a cheap, potentially free, flip phone, mainly to avoid accidental key presses while in the pocket (i hated the key pattern unlocks.)
When I got the Blackberry I started realizing how useful having the web everywhere I went was. Being able to check email often in the road, pulling up mapquest or looking for better prices when I find something cool in a store.
Recently my wife got a Blackberry, not because of it's greatness but because it gave her some wifi rerouting, something we needed at home due to the structure being too effective at blocking cellphone signal. Now she has gotten used to having readable email at her fingertips, 24 hours a day and I doubt she will ever go back to a dumbphone. She has lately be making notes of getting an iPhone, but for now she is still locked up with TMobile as the Blackberry was rather recent.
So my point is: people just don't realize what they can do with them, and it's not something they will ever realize at the store. They will realize once they have one for a month or so.
I have a $320 MSI netbook and a cheap data plan that does a lot more than I could with any smart phone. It only weighs maybe 2 pounds more and I can easily carry it in my satchel.
So, basically, I could buy a $200 more expensive phone and lose a lot of functionality to gain a small bit of convenience, or I could just keep using the netbook to do remote work when I need it.
Smartphones are toys, and at their current cost, they're not compelling toys for more people. They either need to increase their functionality to match netbooks and laptops or they need to drop in price to be more commensurate with their actual usefulness before they become widely accepted as the norm.
Opening up the netbook and using it as a GPS while driving has to be super fun! And I cant imagine the envy eyes in the subway when people see me take out a netbook to browse the web! And opening up the computer in the middle of a BestBuy to browse for potentially lower prices for stuff you just saw, all the tekkies there will drool at the sight of my super netbook!!! Man, I was such a fool getting myself a smartphone, I should had bought a netbook with a dataplan!!!
Plus American law is THE copyright law of the world, hence why we're forcing it on people with treaties and diplomatic agreements.
Wrong.
And if your shit flops because you entered the market at the wrong time, too bad; lots of businesses tried shit that didn't work, and 20 years later another company "came out with it" and it's a big thing now. Virtualization is a good example. Portable MP3 players too (the iPod wasn't the first, just the popular one). MP3 itself was from ages past, but unuseful. It's A Wonderful Life was just something cheap to show on TV, so the networks broadcast it a lot.
It seems you are confusing copyright with patents. Patents expire, they must expire, and in that segment the current 20 years I would say are too many, they can easily get in the way of future inventions. That has nothing to do with works of art, literature, paintings, plays, movies, stories, etc, though. No one would had come with the same work of art in the future, some one could had come with something similar but never the same. Works of art are extensions of your own persona and as a person you should never loose ownership of them, unless you willingly give these rights away. As an company things can be a bit sketchier, but companies tend to just be the front of a group of people. Existing art also does not block the way for new art to be created, and it's not a crime to copy small elements of other pieces as long as the bulk of your work is your own. Other than wanting to profit from another's creation, there is no reason to oppose copyright.
As for A Wonderful Life, "cheap" art does not become popular just because it was cheap. It becomes popular because it was good and it's creator deserved a success he never got. It baffles me that you would dare call that movie "something cheap to show on TV", who can advocate that art be free yet undermine the value of any given work of art?
I hope you are right but fear you are wrong. Afaict the music industry only relented on DRM because they were fed up with apple having a two product lockin (you couldn't use your ipod with DRM music purchased from anywhere other than itunes and you couldn't easilly use your itunes music on a non-apple portable player).
The movie industry OTOH seems to be all for tightening up on protection. Afaict movies have never been sold in the west in any significant numbers (there was videocd but I have never seen a legit videocd for sale) in an unprotected digital format. Yes the DVD protection is thoughrougly cracked but they are still using it to bring the legal hammer on anyone who sells DVD copying software commercially and they really stepped up the protection for blu-ray.
It was Apple that was sick of the DRM, every time some one came up with any kind of workaround the DRM they were contractually forced to patch the DRM to prevent that DRM, a lot of money wasted in something that added no real security and in the end it added nothing to their sales (people WANTED iPods, they didn't need a lock-in to sell the things.) It was the music industry that refused to let go of the DRM. Heck, even at the end they told Apple they would only accept DRM free music IF Apple allowed them to increase the prices for new music and best-sellers.
There are two reasons I think it will take digital purchases to be at the same level of digital music before this happens. First, digital distributors need to have more power before they can voice their annoyance with keeping DRMs up to date. Second, content owners must feel the world has accepted digital purchases and that the masses truly think digital sales are easier to get than piracy.
My DVDs can burn in a fire, they can grow fungus, get scratched. DVDs may eventually go the way of the Dodo and manufacturing may cease, eventually my dvd player breaks down and there is no way to play that back.
Yes, all extreme cases, just as extreme as the ones you list.
For one, there are rentals (yay netflix streaming, die dvd rentals!)
But in the long run, it just takes looking at the digital music market to predict what will happen in the long term. These DRMs will eventually be depreciated, stores like iTunes will continue to support old DRMs but only sell DRM free content. It will take a few years, though, because it wont happen until movie digital sales are as commonplace as digital music sales were a couple years ago.
Only reason that comes to my mind is secrecy, but still does not sound realistic to me. Parts have been showing in some places so manufacturing, to some level, is already going on. Final assembly may be what finally got kick-started.
I wish people would stop calling it the iPad 2. Does Apple make a MacBook 2? An iMac 2? iPod touch 2? No, Apple generally doesn't number its products. It will probably be known as the 2011 iPad or informally as the iPad 2G (if you follow the iPod touch examples).
Hmm, you realize they call the iPod Touch line "iPod Touch (Xth Generation)" with the X replaced by the version number?
Sure they don't put it in THEIR website, but every website and every keynote and every communication calls it Xth Generation. I hope they do give it a descriptive name, I recall one ALMOST accidentally buying a 2nd Gen iPod Touch because it was listed as the cheapest option among the 3rd Gen in their store. I luckily noticed the extremely weaker specs before I went for it.
I sort of wish they changed the numbering, though, for iPhones too, and started calling them with years. iPhone '11, iPod '11, iPad '11, etc. Would be much easier to tie up hardware specs across the lines (and they tend to be almost the same.)
On that note, I am going to predict the future:
Soon Apple will announce the iPad 2nd Gen, and announce it's specs. They will likely lower the price of the cheapest 1st Gen iPads and sell them as budget units (and humiliating Motorola's Xoom with it's $799 price tag.)
This summer Apple will release the iPhone 5, and announce very similar specs to those in the iPad 2nd Gen.
This October Apple will release the iPod Touch 5th Generation, it will be an iPhone 5 without cell coverage, earpiece and perhaps not camera flash either.
It is very unlikely that Apple would do anything to make it easy to put a DVD on the iPad. They want you to obtain content like that through the iTunes store. Anything they can do to help kill physical media is good for Apple.
Anything they can do to help kill physical media is good for everyone.
Also, will it have video-out capability yet? Or possibly video-in so I can use it to pretend I have a portable DVD player?
Get yourself Air Video, better than a video-in cable. It's one of those apps I can't live without.
Hopefully they will add AirPlay support once iOS 4.3 is out and allow for over the air video out, too. In the meantime, you can get video out cables that plug in the one port. Why get more ports when one port can do it all?:P
The original term was 14 years, then 28 years, now 99 years after the death of the author.
I find it disturbing that an eternal business can get eternal copyright until it dies. Effectively copyright lasts until there's no one to bitch about it anymore anyway. Nobody owns it because they're all dead, not because of some legal statute; the law codifies this.
The original term by who's standard? Copyright was not invented in America, the concept has been around for over 5 centuries and it has been defined in many spans over the years by multiple countries. The best you can say is "at one point it was only 14 years", but that does not even gets close to covering most of the copyright history.
Also, it seems you have the impression copyright expiration dates are there to benefit the community, to somehow bring all creations eventually into the public domain. That is not the reason for the expiration date. The reason is simply to make sure the author can profit from his creation without any one entity or group (even if it's just the collective community) hindering his ability to profit from it. 99 years after the death of the author makes sure that an author that creates a work and dies soon after can have his heirs profit from his work for their own lifetime even if he happens to be born the day before the creator died.
At one point it was believed 14 years would be enough for a creator to profit, but many sleeping creations that don't become successful until many decades later should prove that this is not true. Look at "It's a Wonderful Life", the movie did not become popular and profitable until the 80s, despite being released in 1946. 30 years would not had allowed anyone to make money from it (and they didn't, back then copyrights did expire as you mention.)
As long as the work's creator or inheritors are still around, they should be able to profit from the creator's work and have the legal means to protect that right.
Trade dress is a legal term of art that generally refers to characteristics of the visual appearance of a product or its packaging (or even the design of a building) that signify the source of the product to consumers.Trade dress is a form of intellectual property.
Follow the link for more in depth information. I'd say, in short words: show a screen shot or video clip without name to a group of people. If too many quickly identify it as "Tetris", you are very likely violating trade dress.
Tetris simplicity is a double edge sword, for one it's to simplistic to patent or copyright, but on the other hand that simplicity has made it extremely iconic and any falling block game gets quickly called Tetris.
Forget Tetris, when is somebody gonna either release, or clone Lemmings?
Some one has to release a 20 minute programming tutorial on how to make a simple Lemmings game first. Then you will see app stores everywhere having Lemming clones submitted.
Disney extended the copyright term because they wanted to not lose copyright on their characters. It was originally something like 14 years. This is stupid; and doubly so since Disney still puts out cool shit. It's time Beauty and the Beast goes into the public domain, while people still pay every 10 years for a Disney official collector's edition from the vault. People still pay for 1984 when you can read it for free.
Making stuff available for free is not equal to making it copyright free. 1984 makes money, true, but you cant go out grab a copy of the book and upload it to Amazon and sell it because it still belongs to the original author, it's not public domain even if the author allows you to read it for free.
As for the game above, it's plain plagiarism. Sure, plagiarism itself is not really legal, but its widely hated and it's the reason why most slashdot readers automatically default to bash the clone maker.
We're allowed to perform Shakespeare and The Crucible and other old plays freely; we're not allowed to perform Beauty and the Beast (yes, this is a play, Disney owns it) without paying a lot of money. Pink Floyd's songs should be folk songs by now, covered by lots of cover bands.
You are in your full right to adapt the original Beauty and The Beast into a play, if you so wish. You can adapt that one word by word, or you can do like Disney and twist it in an original way, but you can't plagiarize theirs. I find it also interesting how you keep insisting on 14 year old works be set on public domain while claiming that Shakespeare and other classics are free for you to play with. France, for instance, in the 18th and 19th century, gave copyrights to the author for his entire lifetime, with works (at one point in that period, at least) becoming public domain only 5 years after the death of the author. Another window was 10 years from the works creation or for the duration of the author's life, whatever was longer.
Many of the classics you enjoy today were inherited by the world only after it's creator died, and citing them in a copyright conversation will very likely end in very unproductive results (unless your goals are to have Disney works be their property until the company itself dies.)
14 years is nothing, and so are 30 years as far as copyright works is concerned.
Because much of the court's ruling was based on the original licensing agreement between Apple and Microsoft for Windows 1.0, it made the case more of a contractual matter than of copyright law, to the chagrin of Apple. This also meant that the court avoided a more far-reaching "look and feel copyright" precedent ruling. However, the case did establish that the analytic dissection (rather than the general "look and feel") of a user interface is vital to any copyright decision on such matters.
In 1997, five years after the lawsuit was decided, all lingering infringement questions against Microsoft regarding the Lisa and Macintosh GUI as well as Apple's "QuickTime piracy" lawsuit against Microsoft were settled in direct negotiations.
That being told, I don't think the analytical dissection of the user interface applies here, the interface in question is not similar to the one used in any Tetris game I have seen.
The game in question, is obviously a blatant copy and I personally have no sympathy for the author. I even would take charges further and request full source code, then look up tutorials from books and other websites to see if the developer is guilty of stealing sample code (assuming such code was not openly licensed, noting that providing code as sample does not make it public domain nor BSD or GPL open source.)
There have been many falling block games out there that have never been target from Tetris take down notices, games like Sega's Columns, Pop Cap's Bejeweled and Capcom's Puzzle Fighters. If you want to make such a puzzle game, be original, don't just go out copying some one else and come crying when you are legally called out on it.
Who's all in favor of modifying the constitutions of every Western country to read:
"Any attempt by government to in any way censor or limit or shut down the Internet will lead to immediate execution of said members of the Executive and Legislature by having their heads repeatedly smashed in by a circa-1995 Cisco router."
There isn't a good way to compare the amount of games in each app store, but I haven't yet found a popular game that wasn't also Android.
Come on, lets be honest here!!! Most Android users that have touched gaming on this very article have agreed it's a lacking category. I'ts extremely easy to find popular games that are not available for Android (home-made copycats that attempt to imitate and risk lawsuits are not valid examples and only apply for the simplest of games)
Here is a list of games that, for all I know, are not available for Android:
Broken Sword
Broken Sword 2
Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3
Square Enix's Chaos Rings
Final Fantasy I (no illegal emulated roms)
Final Fantasy II (no illegal emulated roms)
Dead Space
Infinity Blade
World of Goo
SimCity Delux (this one may be there or make it someday since EA tosses a few bones the Android's way)
Plants Vz Zombies
Infinity Blade
Maple Story
John Carmak's Rage
Call of Duty: Zombies
Civilization Revolution
Adult Swim's Robot Unicorn Attack
The list goes on and on.
Anyways, on the Amex app, I was wrong on that one because i was not able to find any note on it on their website.
I have not tried VLC Stream and Convert but I have used the plain VLC player (Windows and Mac) and Air Video server supports file formats that VLC did not support (usually the audio track being the issue.) There are other solutions like this for iPhone, so I'm sure there must be other solutions for the Android too (and some of the ones for iPhone are in the works to support Android) My affection to this specific one is the support to play a bunch of formats I can't even play on the desktop because I must go codec hunting (even after getting the popular codec collections.)
At least for me, the two main uses (outside of web browsing and, well... calling) for my iPhone and iPad are video games and netflix. From that perspective the Android Market disappoints and Google hiring hundreds or thousands of developers wont change that (unless they make their own game development studio and start pushing amazing games for the device and keeping them Android Exclusive.)
Maybe the web is full of Apple Fanboi propaganda, but I just cant find any success stories in the Android Market that rival the iOS equivalents.
You mean other than Angry Birds who is making $1,000,000/month on Android (yes via advertising)? Or how about Fring who is making $10,000/day?
My problem with the Angry Birds example is that it's an extreme exception. I think it's the app most people spend most of their day playing, during hours long play seasons, on almost daily basis, it's impossible not to accidentally click the ad banners, and the game is too addictive to let that bother you much, you just close whatever opened and go back to the game.
But there is another issue with the sample, as of the day the 1million a month was announced (Dec 3), they had sold 12 million copies to iOS users, that was in the course of about a year. It may sound we are talking about the same amount per month, but the iPad version of the game is 4.99 and has been in the top spot since the iPad release. If we guess that only 15% of the copies sold were for the iPad, we are already talking about 1.6 million a month vs 1 million a month. That still ignores that Angry Birds for the iPhone has one DLC for sale at an additional 99c (The Mighty Eagle). The percentage of users that paid for this has not been mentioned (that I know.)
To attempt to pull that level of success again means competition, players will have to stop Angry Birds to play your game long enough to make money. With a sale, they can just stop playing Angry Birds for a while, finish your game, then go back to Angry Birds. Eventually, ad based revenue becomes a zero-sum users must split time between apps for you to pull any level of success.
I am only making about $3000/month with my apps. But, considering I am just doing app development as a hobby, that is not bad. And yes, nearly all of my revenue is from advertising. Almost none of my apps are on the Android Market. Most of them are on Mikandi.
THAT sounds interesting, that's the kind of feedback I was looking for when I started this thread here. May I ask what apps we talking about, or at least app types? What kinds of ad you run in your app (ad service and/or form factor)?
Slashdot Mirror
I am one to agree that software patents should not exist (and non software ones should be only for exceptional inventions, not for tiny progress in a field) but I hate hypocrisy even more.
Google, go for revision requests the day you stop requesting patents left and right, and volunteer your own collection to be invalidated.
It won't be until some of the big patent holders themselves complain to the government about the horrible use of patents that things may change.
As long as they try to play the patent game, though, they should suck it up and play by the rules of the game they support when it's convenient for them.
This holds true for Apple too, won't bother bringing Microsoft since they are beyond hope.
If you have been reading SlashDot for long enough, you should know that's not how patent trolls work. They wait until the patent usage is nigh irreversible to jump in and demand compensation.
Don't be so sure, WebM may become just another patent trap soon.
People really need to disconnect. It's sad to see people that simply can't put their phones down for a few minutes, because making that Twitter post is so important.
Some of us don't waste our time with trivial things like Twitter. We focus our phone resources to more valuable activities. Like getting that last golden egg in Angry Birds... elusive egg.... grrrr....
Honestly. Many people simply do not have the need, desire, temperament, or extra money required to purchase something other than a "dumbphone". Also, "dumbphones" make phone calls just as well as the so-called "smartphones". It has nothing to do with being smart enough to realize you don't need one.
I agree with the price points (many people just cant be lured away from free retard-phones)
I also agree with the desire and temperament, mostly because these consumers don't realize how a smartphone can streamline their lives. Good readable email on the go can be priceless for anyone in most lines of work, and web access can save you a lot of money in the long run by double checking prices before you do sudden investments in a store.
The "makes calls just as well" though, i may partially disagree. Skype voice quality is highly superior to cell voice quality, extremely so. I have come to only use skype and not use my minutes whenever i have a good data signal. Yea, it's nitpicking, but it is a valid counterpoint to the "they can both make calls just as well" argument.
Price takes a role, but not necessarily because it being a roadblock. It's just hard for some people to justify paying for a phone when they can get a retard-phone that still can make calls for zero money down.
BTW... ATT is offering the 3Gs for $49.00. It's actually cheaper than the Go phone you noted (unless you trying to upgrade without renewing contract, that is.)
That's a nice idea but it doesn't often work that way. Many people (with a smart phone) don't seem to have the iron will to not be rude while talking face to face with someone. If someone can't control their actions at one level then they need to make their changes somewhere upstream in the decision making process. Either that, or enjoy the consequences of their rude behavior.
I'm sorry but I am not sure what prehistoric age you just time traveled from. In the present, people rudely point their noses to their phones without regard of these being smart phones or dumb phones. Text messaging is still a huge deal and virtually every single phone in the world can do this. Smartphones have nothing to do with that behavior. This has been true for the last 15 years.
I think it's more about people not realizing what they can do with a smartphone. It was not until early 2007 that I got my first smartphone, a Samsung Blackjack. Before that, all I wanted was a cheap, potentially free, flip phone, mainly to avoid accidental key presses while in the pocket (i hated the key pattern unlocks.)
When I got the Blackberry I started realizing how useful having the web everywhere I went was. Being able to check email often in the road, pulling up mapquest or looking for better prices when I find something cool in a store.
Recently my wife got a Blackberry, not because of it's greatness but because it gave her some wifi rerouting, something we needed at home due to the structure being too effective at blocking cellphone signal. Now she has gotten used to having readable email at her fingertips, 24 hours a day and I doubt she will ever go back to a dumbphone. She has lately be making notes of getting an iPhone, but for now she is still locked up with TMobile as the Blackberry was rather recent.
So my point is: people just don't realize what they can do with them, and it's not something they will ever realize at the store. They will realize once they have one for a month or so.
I have a $320 MSI netbook and a cheap data plan that does a lot more than I could with any smart phone. It only weighs maybe 2 pounds more and I can easily carry it in my satchel.
So, basically, I could buy a $200 more expensive phone and lose a lot of functionality to gain a small bit of convenience, or I could just keep using the netbook to do remote work when I need it.
Smartphones are toys, and at their current cost, they're not compelling toys for more people. They either need to increase their functionality to match netbooks and laptops or they need to drop in price to be more commensurate with their actual usefulness before they become widely accepted as the norm.
Opening up the netbook and using it as a GPS while driving has to be super fun! And I cant imagine the envy eyes in the subway when people see me take out a netbook to browse the web! And opening up the computer in the middle of a BestBuy to browse for potentially lower prices for stuff you just saw, all the tekkies there will drool at the sight of my super netbook!!! Man, I was such a fool getting myself a smartphone, I should had bought a netbook with a dataplan!!!
Darn, I wont be able to do business with you, I only carry Facebook Credits on me.
Plus American law is THE copyright law of the world, hence why we're forcing it on people with treaties and diplomatic agreements.
Wrong.
And if your shit flops because you entered the market at the wrong time, too bad; lots of businesses tried shit that didn't work, and 20 years later another company "came out with it" and it's a big thing now. Virtualization is a good example. Portable MP3 players too (the iPod wasn't the first, just the popular one). MP3 itself was from ages past, but unuseful. It's A Wonderful Life was just something cheap to show on TV, so the networks broadcast it a lot.
It seems you are confusing copyright with patents. Patents expire, they must expire, and in that segment the current 20 years I would say are too many, they can easily get in the way of future inventions. That has nothing to do with works of art, literature, paintings, plays, movies, stories, etc, though. No one would had come with the same work of art in the future, some one could had come with something similar but never the same. Works of art are extensions of your own persona and as a person you should never loose ownership of them, unless you willingly give these rights away. As an company things can be a bit sketchier, but companies tend to just be the front of a group of people. Existing art also does not block the way for new art to be created, and it's not a crime to copy small elements of other pieces as long as the bulk of your work is your own. Other than wanting to profit from another's creation, there is no reason to oppose copyright.
As for A Wonderful Life, "cheap" art does not become popular just because it was cheap. It becomes popular because it was good and it's creator deserved a success he never got. It baffles me that you would dare call that movie "something cheap to show on TV", who can advocate that art be free yet undermine the value of any given work of art?
I hope you are right but fear you are wrong. Afaict the music industry only relented on DRM because they were fed up with apple having a two product lockin (you couldn't use your ipod with DRM music purchased from anywhere other than itunes and you couldn't easilly use your itunes music on a non-apple portable player).
The movie industry OTOH seems to be all for tightening up on protection. Afaict movies have never been sold in the west in any significant numbers (there was videocd but I have never seen a legit videocd for sale) in an unprotected digital format. Yes the DVD protection is thoughrougly cracked but they are still using it to bring the legal hammer on anyone who sells DVD copying software commercially and they really stepped up the protection for blu-ray.
It was Apple that was sick of the DRM, every time some one came up with any kind of workaround the DRM they were contractually forced to patch the DRM to prevent that DRM, a lot of money wasted in something that added no real security and in the end it added nothing to their sales (people WANTED iPods, they didn't need a lock-in to sell the things.) It was the music industry that refused to let go of the DRM. Heck, even at the end they told Apple they would only accept DRM free music IF Apple allowed them to increase the prices for new music and best-sellers.
There are two reasons I think it will take digital purchases to be at the same level of digital music before this happens. First, digital distributors need to have more power before they can voice their annoyance with keeping DRMs up to date. Second, content owners must feel the world has accepted digital purchases and that the masses truly think digital sales are easier to get than piracy.
My DVDs can burn in a fire, they can grow fungus, get scratched. DVDs may eventually go the way of the Dodo and manufacturing may cease, eventually my dvd player breaks down and there is no way to play that back.
Yes, all extreme cases, just as extreme as the ones you list.
For one, there are rentals (yay netflix streaming, die dvd rentals!)
But in the long run, it just takes looking at the digital music market to predict what will happen in the long term. These DRMs will eventually be depreciated, stores like iTunes will continue to support old DRMs but only sell DRM free content. It will take a few years, though, because it wont happen until movie digital sales are as commonplace as digital music sales were a couple years ago.
Only reason that comes to my mind is secrecy, but still does not sound realistic to me. Parts have been showing in some places so manufacturing, to some level, is already going on. Final assembly may be what finally got kick-started.
I wish people would stop calling it the iPad 2. Does Apple make a MacBook 2? An iMac 2? iPod touch 2? No, Apple generally doesn't number its products. It will probably be known as the 2011 iPad or informally as the iPad 2G (if you follow the iPod touch examples).
Hmm, you realize they call the iPod Touch line "iPod Touch (Xth Generation)" with the X replaced by the version number?
Sure they don't put it in THEIR website, but every website and every keynote and every communication calls it Xth Generation. I hope they do give it a descriptive name, I recall one ALMOST accidentally buying a 2nd Gen iPod Touch because it was listed as the cheapest option among the 3rd Gen in their store. I luckily noticed the extremely weaker specs before I went for it.
I sort of wish they changed the numbering, though, for iPhones too, and started calling them with years. iPhone '11, iPod '11, iPad '11, etc. Would be much easier to tie up hardware specs across the lines (and they tend to be almost the same.)
On that note, I am going to predict the future:
Soon Apple will announce the iPad 2nd Gen, and announce it's specs. They will likely lower the price of the cheapest 1st Gen iPads and sell them as budget units (and humiliating Motorola's Xoom with it's $799 price tag.)
This summer Apple will release the iPhone 5, and announce very similar specs to those in the iPad 2nd Gen.
This October Apple will release the iPod Touch 5th Generation, it will be an iPhone 5 without cell coverage, earpiece and perhaps not camera flash either.
It is very unlikely that Apple would do anything to make it easy to put a DVD on the iPad. They want you to obtain content like that through the iTunes store. Anything they can do to help kill physical media is good for Apple.
Anything they can do to help kill physical media is good for everyone.
Also, will it have video-out capability yet? Or possibly video-in so I can use it to pretend I have a portable DVD player?
Get yourself Air Video, better than a video-in cable. It's one of those apps I can't live without.
Hopefully they will add AirPlay support once iOS 4.3 is out and allow for over the air video out, too. In the meantime, you can get video out cables that plug in the one port. Why get more ports when one port can do it all? :P
The original term was 14 years, then 28 years, now 99 years after the death of the author.
I find it disturbing that an eternal business can get eternal copyright until it dies. Effectively copyright lasts until there's no one to bitch about it anymore anyway. Nobody owns it because they're all dead, not because of some legal statute; the law codifies this.
The original term by who's standard? Copyright was not invented in America, the concept has been around for over 5 centuries and it has been defined in many spans over the years by multiple countries. The best you can say is "at one point it was only 14 years", but that does not even gets close to covering most of the copyright history.
Also, it seems you have the impression copyright expiration dates are there to benefit the community, to somehow bring all creations eventually into the public domain. That is not the reason for the expiration date. The reason is simply to make sure the author can profit from his creation without any one entity or group (even if it's just the collective community) hindering his ability to profit from it. 99 years after the death of the author makes sure that an author that creates a work and dies soon after can have his heirs profit from his work for their own lifetime even if he happens to be born the day before the creator died.
At one point it was believed 14 years would be enough for a creator to profit, but many sleeping creations that don't become successful until many decades later should prove that this is not true. Look at "It's a Wonderful Life", the movie did not become popular and profitable until the 80s, despite being released in 1946. 30 years would not had allowed anyone to make money from it (and they didn't, back then copyrights did expire as you mention.)
As long as the work's creator or inheritors are still around, they should be able to profit from the creator's work and have the legal means to protect that right.
The term Tradedress should answer your question.
Trade dress is a legal term of art that generally refers to characteristics of the visual appearance of a product or its packaging (or even the design of a building) that signify the source of the product to consumers.Trade dress is a form of intellectual property.
Follow the link for more in depth information. I'd say, in short words: show a screen shot or video clip without name to a group of people. If too many quickly identify it as "Tetris", you are very likely violating trade dress.
Tetris simplicity is a double edge sword, for one it's to simplistic to patent or copyright, but on the other hand that simplicity has made it extremely iconic and any falling block game gets quickly called Tetris.
Forget Tetris, when is somebody gonna either release, or clone Lemmings?
Some one has to release a 20 minute programming tutorial on how to make a simple Lemmings game first. Then you will see app stores everywhere having Lemming clones submitted.
Disney extended the copyright term because they wanted to not lose copyright on their characters. It was originally something like 14 years. This is stupid; and doubly so since Disney still puts out cool shit. It's time Beauty and the Beast goes into the public domain, while people still pay every 10 years for a Disney official collector's edition from the vault. People still pay for 1984 when you can read it for free.
Making stuff available for free is not equal to making it copyright free. 1984 makes money, true, but you cant go out grab a copy of the book and upload it to Amazon and sell it because it still belongs to the original author, it's not public domain even if the author allows you to read it for free.
As for the game above, it's plain plagiarism. Sure, plagiarism itself is not really legal, but its widely hated and it's the reason why most slashdot readers automatically default to bash the clone maker.
We're allowed to perform Shakespeare and The Crucible and other old plays freely; we're not allowed to perform Beauty and the Beast (yes, this is a play, Disney owns it) without paying a lot of money. Pink Floyd's songs should be folk songs by now, covered by lots of cover bands.
You are in your full right to adapt the original Beauty and The Beast into a play, if you so wish. You can adapt that one word by word, or you can do like Disney and twist it in an original way, but you can't plagiarize theirs. I find it also interesting how you keep insisting on 14 year old works be set on public domain while claiming that Shakespeare and other classics are free for you to play with. France, for instance, in the 18th and 19th century, gave copyrights to the author for his entire lifetime, with works (at one point in that period, at least) becoming public domain only 5 years after the death of the author. Another window was 10 years from the works creation or for the duration of the author's life, whatever was longer.
Many of the classics you enjoy today were inherited by the world only after it's creator died, and citing them in a copyright conversation will very likely end in very unproductive results (unless your goals are to have Disney works be their property until the company itself dies.)
14 years is nothing, and so are 30 years as far as copyright works is concerned.
Because much of the court's ruling was based on the original licensing agreement between Apple and Microsoft for Windows 1.0, it made the case more of a contractual matter than of copyright law, to the chagrin of Apple. This also meant that the court avoided a more far-reaching "look and feel copyright" precedent ruling. However, the case did establish that the analytic dissection (rather than the general "look and feel") of a user interface is vital to any copyright decision on such matters.
In 1997, five years after the lawsuit was decided, all lingering infringement questions against Microsoft regarding the Lisa and Macintosh GUI as well as Apple's "QuickTime piracy" lawsuit against Microsoft were settled in direct negotiations.
That being told, I don't think the analytical dissection of the user interface applies here, the interface in question is not similar to the one used in any Tetris game I have seen.
The game in question, is obviously a blatant copy and I personally have no sympathy for the author. I even would take charges further and request full source code, then look up tutorials from books and other websites to see if the developer is guilty of stealing sample code (assuming such code was not openly licensed, noting that providing code as sample does not make it public domain nor BSD or GPL open source.)
There have been many falling block games out there that have never been target from Tetris take down notices, games like Sega's Columns, Pop Cap's Bejeweled and Capcom's Puzzle Fighters. If you want to make such a puzzle game, be original, don't just go out copying some one else and come crying when you are legally called out on it.
Who's all in favor of modifying the constitutions of every Western country to read:
"Any attempt by government to in any way censor or limit or shut down the Internet will lead to immediate execution of said members of the Executive and Legislature by having their heads repeatedly smashed in by a circa-1995 Cisco router."
Sir, if you run for president, I'll vote for you.
There isn't a good way to compare the amount of games in each app store, but I haven't yet found a popular game that wasn't also Android.
Come on, lets be honest here!!! Most Android users that have touched gaming on this very article have agreed it's a lacking category. I'ts extremely easy to find popular games that are not available for Android (home-made copycats that attempt to imitate and risk lawsuits are not valid examples and only apply for the simplest of games)
Here is a list of games that, for all I know, are not available for Android:
The list goes on and on.
Anyways, on the Amex app, I was wrong on that one because i was not able to find any note on it on their website.
I have not tried VLC Stream and Convert but I have used the plain VLC player (Windows and Mac) and Air Video server supports file formats that VLC did not support (usually the audio track being the issue.) There are other solutions like this for iPhone, so I'm sure there must be other solutions for the Android too (and some of the ones for iPhone are in the works to support Android) My affection to this specific one is the support to play a bunch of formats I can't even play on the desktop because I must go codec hunting (even after getting the popular codec collections.)
At least for me, the two main uses (outside of web browsing and, well... calling) for my iPhone and iPad are video games and netflix. From that perspective the Android Market disappoints and Google hiring hundreds or thousands of developers wont change that (unless they make their own game development studio and start pushing amazing games for the device and keeping them Android Exclusive.)
Maybe the web is full of Apple Fanboi propaganda, but I just cant find any success stories in the Android Market that rival the iOS equivalents.
You mean other than Angry Birds who is making $1,000,000/month on Android (yes via advertising)? Or how about Fring who is making $10,000/day?
My problem with the Angry Birds example is that it's an extreme exception. I think it's the app most people spend most of their day playing, during hours long play seasons, on almost daily basis, it's impossible not to accidentally click the ad banners, and the game is too addictive to let that bother you much, you just close whatever opened and go back to the game.
But there is another issue with the sample, as of the day the 1million a month was announced (Dec 3), they had sold 12 million copies to iOS users, that was in the course of about a year. It may sound we are talking about the same amount per month, but the iPad version of the game is 4.99 and has been in the top spot since the iPad release. If we guess that only 15% of the copies sold were for the iPad, we are already talking about 1.6 million a month vs 1 million a month. That still ignores that Angry Birds for the iPhone has one DLC for sale at an additional 99c (The Mighty Eagle). The percentage of users that paid for this has not been mentioned (that I know.)
To attempt to pull that level of success again means competition, players will have to stop Angry Birds to play your game long enough to make money. With a sale, they can just stop playing Angry Birds for a while, finish your game, then go back to Angry Birds. Eventually, ad based revenue becomes a zero-sum users must split time between apps for you to pull any level of success.
I am only making about $3000/month with my apps. But, considering I am just doing app development as a hobby, that is not bad. And yes, nearly all of my revenue is from advertising. Almost none of my apps are on the Android Market. Most of them are on Mikandi.
THAT sounds interesting, that's the kind of feedback I was looking for when I started this thread here. May I ask what apps we talking about, or at least app types? What kinds of ad you run in your app (ad service and/or form factor)?