I'm a Ph.D. student (economics) and somewhere along here I'm hoping to publish papers. In order to keep my career options broad, I have to publish.
In many fields when you submit a paper for publication, you have to pay a fee to the journal. That's not as common in economics, but what I will have to do is sign over the copyright of my paper to the journal pubishing it. In order to participat in the intellectual life of my chosen field, I am required to give some business entity control over my work for the next 100 years or so.
Now, I'd be happy to open-source it. I'd even be happy to make it public domain. But, release the copyright to someone else? I may not even be able to put a copy on my website? Why is that good for either me, or the field of study?
There's a classic paper called "The Nature of the Firm" by R. H. Coase. Yesterday it took me a while to hunt it down. It was published in '37 and is considered pivitol. My university has one copy in a book, which I'm allwed to borrow, but undergrads aren't. The paper isn't online anywhere (at least not legally). If this paper was public doamin, it would be mirrored all over the place.
There's argument that copyright was required for the journal to recoup its costs. But, yes, most of those costs are associated with printing and distributing paper copies. Now since we can distribute the papers more efficiently online, the costs plummet.
The real problem now is not free-as-in-beer distribution, but free-as-in-speech academic research. How do we accomplish that, while maintaining the system of peer review?
The only solution I've been able to think of, and I may try, is to base things more on individual initiative. When someone has a paper, they find a person with a reputation in the field, and ask the expert to play "editor". The editor picks a few anonymous referees, who do their thing. Maybe the author submitting the paper would send along a (hopefully small) check for the editor and referees. If everything checks out, the editor gets cited as such on the paper, and the author self-publishes public domain (or some open-text license). Then any online database can mirro and index the paper.
8. What intellectual property policies will govern OCW materials?
The policies toward the intellectual property created for MIT OCW will be clear and consistent with other policies for scholarly material used in education. Faculty will retain ownership of most materials prepared for MIT OCW, following the MIT policy on textbook authorship
So, this course material isn't open-source, regardless of saying, "Faculty at colleges and universities around the world can use the OCW materials to develop new curricula and specific courses." I'm not sure how traditional copyright interacts with the ability to develop new curricula.
I've been thinking lately that elementary through high-school textbooks are long overdue for an open-source upgrade. Books remain a big expense at schools. More than at university level, it should be possible to determine what are the essential things which every high-school student should know about chemistry, or every 6th-grader should know about history.
I haven't noticed any such project. I have seen that there's folks aiming at open source Economics textbooks.
Sadly (IMO), scientific papers are not generally public domain, even when the sceince in them is. In my field (Economics, OK so the science part is arguable) the norm is that the journal owns the copyright on anything they publish. The author has to sign over the copyright when the article is accepted.
So, while I look forward to the day I succesfully publish, I dread giving ownership of my work to some journal as is basically required for anyone making a career in the field.
Antitrust law says that for a company to behave illegally, it must establish a monopoly (not in itself illegal), engage in anti-competitive practices, and perhaps most importantly, harm consumers.
Actually, nope. Antitrust law does not require demonstration that consumers have been harmed. The longstanding principle in antitrust is that it's extremely difficult and intrusive for a court to determine whether consumers have been hurt. As such, it's the actions to monopolize, conspire, etc. which are illegal, not the harming of consumers through those acions. This goes back to price-fixing agreeements such as
US v. Trenton Potteries, where the court said price-fixing agreements are illegal regardless of the prices they fix.
As to other issues, Jackson may have been biased an/or acted improperly, but I've still been impressed by his grasp of the case. Microsoft is trying to protect its OS monopoly by preventing an alternative application platform from "commoditizing" the OS, just as Windows has commoditized the hardware. The fear (reasonable or not) was that people would depend more and more on their browsers, and that a browser could run on any operating system.
This can be hard to see because it doesn't match what antitrust folks normally think about when they think "tying" or "predatory pricing" or any of that. But I think Jackson was right-on.
I don't know JBuilder, but Java with a nice IDE seems a very good choice. And have them do Applets Only at first. One of the great things which is possible now is quite serious programming while keeping the program isolated to its sandbox. That's a good thing while learning.
I think it's also good to start with a "real" language, rather than a language confined to some special learning tasks. It depends on the personality of the kids, but the real power of programming is that it lets you do whatever you want. Sacrificing a big chunk of that freedom for special kid-friendly programming goals (Logo, etc.) seems a shame to me.
Mindstorms are pretty cool, with a lot of big buts. But there's not enough RAM to do the kind of things lots of folks want to do. But it's very special purpose. Mostly: But robotics isn't (just) programming, it's a very physical thing. Not that kids playing with Mindstorms won't learn a lot, but I would imagine a purer programming environment would be better to learn programming.
Sure, they could all work together--but simple game theory predicts they won't.
I'd be interested to see that "simple game theory" elaborated a bit. It's true that it's remarkably hard for companies selling competing products to collude to get monopoly prices. Even this can still happen when there's no legal force to prevent it: Sometimes OPEC works, for instance.
But it's not nearly as clear that firms selling complementary products--each the dominant one in its market--are unlikely to collude. It should make it somewhat easier to observe when collusion does happen, howerver, so legal steps can be taken. For instance, if proprietary API info gets from the OS company to the Apps firm, it'll look funny.
Even then, how funny will it look, though? The Apps firm will clearly be the most profitable company in it's market, it should be able to negotiate a deal with the OS firm over API info. And the Apps company can keep VBA, which helps tie it to Windows, because after all, the potential Linux Office users are really too small a market to worry about much.
It still comes down to legal options. Unfortunately, with this kind of breakup, collusion won't even be guarranteed to be recognizable.
This is one reason that I don't like the suggested form of breakup. I'd rather see rules imposed which make sure the OS a black box, and that the inputs and outputs of that black box are published. Maybe second to that would be the suggestion of breaking it up into separate OS companies, which woould hopefully compete with each other. The problem with the latter is that one would likely wind up with a period of a few years of chaos until a new monopolist wins the competition. Then we'd be back where we started.
What almost everyone agrees should be avoided in this case is government regulation of software development, for several reasons. First, it smacks of big, slow government in our cool, making-everybody-rich fast-moving sector. Looks bad, probably is. Second, it's already been tried. The previous "remedies" were content control remedies which MS slipped around, under, and through. Further such remedies would likely cause similar response. So, what folks mostly want is a structural remedy, which would hopefully eliminate the need for government regulation. This isn't what MS is proposing, of course. They're proposing a combination of what you suggest (limiting the sorts of deals they're allowed to make with OEMs), and content control. The essence of what you're arguing is the same as Gates argued in a Wall Street Journal editorial some time ago--the MS Windows monopoly is good for us, we should enjoy knowing that there's a single standard. I'd be willing to accept this on either of two conditions, pick the one which suits best: 1) Make the standard open. If Windows is going to be the standard, then treat it like other standards that anyone can make use of. Anyone should be allowed to produce a product which acts like Windows and runs Windows software, and should be given the necessary information and stability of specification to do so. OR 2) Make the standard regulated. If we all agree that MS Windows is going to be to one everyone uses, and that it's a good thing everyone uses it, then hold them accountable to the public (not the shareholders, the public) as you would any other pseudo-governmental organization. Most agree that the first is the better option. But as it stands, Windows is the standard, determines the way an enormous number of people in the country work, play, and communicate. In spite of this, the producers of it, due to monopoly power, aren't very responsible to either the public via regulation or the marketplace via competition. And as someone else mentioned, they're very good at using this monopoly power to extend to other realms... Visual Basic and it's inbred cousin VBA are becoming more and more of a standard for development, supporting and supported by MS Office. Wanna see what happens in the computer gaming field when MS releases an ActiveX-based game console? Of course the game console will have a 8G hard drive and internet connectivity, maybe they'll decide to bundle a browser and a free month of MSN with it?
1) Wasn't the Supreme Court decision about a design being trademarked, rather than patented? These are two very different areas of IP law, intended to protect different sorts of stuff in different ways.
Patents and copyrights (rightly or wrongly) are meant to give monopoly rights to innovations, so as to motivate innovation. (And in the case of patents, to motivate publicising the innovation.
Trademark protection is intended to keep one business from pretending to be another business, and hurting reputation. For the design trademark protection, that means if a design is so distinctive as to be automatically identified as from a particular company, when in fact it's not, then that could be considered a trademark violation. Normally design trademarks are applied to product packaging rather than the product itself.
The weird question this case brings up is: Does the test of distinctiveness automatically put smaller businesses at a disadvantage? How many people have to be able to recognize a design as being distinctively of some company, before that design is allowed as a trademark?
But I can't see this having any effect on patent law.
Your taxes do not pay for a patent examiners income, it is payed through the patent application fees and patent maintenance fees.
This is troubling; it definitely makes one wonder about the incentives for the patent office. As near as I can tell it means there is money in accepting almost any patent application, and no money in rejection.
Self-supporting works for the US Post Office largely because the payments are based on serving those it's supposed to serve anyway. The payment scheme for the USPTO seems to imply its goal is to exclusively serve holders (or desired holders) of intellectual property, rather than serving society at large.
If the USPTO is going to have to completely pay its own bills, then it needs to be financially accountable to non-patent holders as well. Perhaps require them to pay the legal fees for a successful patent challenge?
Perhaps it's time to question the person responsible for the current state of the USPTO, and the preposterous patents we see granted. People are quite willing to hold Janet Reno personally accountable for the failings of the Justice Dept., why not this guy?
Q. Todd Dickinson is the Assistant Secretary of Commerce and Commissioner of Patents and Trademarks. He's only been on the job for 4 months, so we can't blame him personally for many past failings, but he's the one to address about making it stop. According to his biography, "Under Dickinson's leadership, the PTO is implementing the most sweeping reform in patent law in a half-century and its restructuring into a performance-based organization."
Since IANAL, I can't make much sense of Dickinson v. Zurko, but it might give some insight on Disckinson's attitudes. It vaguely makes it look like he tried pretty vigorously to strenghten the legal force of PTO decisions that something was prior art and couldn't be patented. It may or may not also strengthen decisions that something is patentable. He says he's trying to hire many more people familiar with software, and make more resources available for recognizing prior art.
There's several of his speeches available at the PTO site.
I read the Wall Street Journal almost every day, over breakfast. It highlights the important stories well, and presents me with news which is outside my normal range of web-scanning. The paper format is still more comfortable for me than a monitor, although this is something I really hope will change with smart paper.
I'm pretty left-leaning, but I still get a lot out of the rabid right-ring pro-corporate editorial page. For instance, that's where Bill Gates published a piece which essentially said, "We aren't a monopoly, but everyone uses us, and if you hurt Microsoft, we're taking the economy down with us!" More recently, Bruce Sterling had a bit in there about the DDoS attacks.
To reference a few points:
Slow to grasp the implications of emerging information technologies like radio, TV, cable, then the Net and Web, papers have been asking themselves more or less the same questions for half a century now: what should we be?
Primarily, the role of the newspaper hasn't changed. TV news uniformly sucks, news on the Web has so far completely failed to impress me.
In recent years, newspapers have remained graphically impaired. They seem oblivious to the graphic revolution that has swept magazines and is spreading through the Web.
And thank goodness for that! I don't want my news source to be flashy like WiReD, I want news. While I love the WSJ, they recently added a lame, color-and-glitz filled Friday entertainment section which just wastes my time. Look at the web news source we go to--Slashdot is low on graphics, high on prose. This is how most news sources should be.
As the Net and Web spawn ferocious and idiosyncratic commentary, democratizing opinion all over the country, newspapers cling to stuffy and elitist op-ed pages...
This is the other place where newspapers, without changing their mission are doing a good job. Anyone else remember how in The Diamond Age, Hackworth got his morning paper? As he rose in the rank of his society, his customized paper got more and more uniformly like the paper of others. It's important that one can't just seek out that news which satisfies one's idiosyncratic interests, but also has a common point of reference with others. A good paper fulfills this role, helping to inform the reader about what the mainstream is thinking about.
I can think of one way newspapers should change to account for new technology. Any article which is in the hard copy should also be online, and easily located. As a subscriber to the hard-copy I should get free access to the online version. While I prefer the paper for browsing, clipping and saving articles isn't as good as printing out, saving, or bookmarking online versions.
This isn't that kind of lawsuit. Presuming that MS is finally found to be violating antitrust rules (very likely, but still not certain, especially cuz they can appeal), the next phase isn't a damages phase, but a remedy phase.
The idea is that, unlike a regular lawsuit, where the guilty party is forced to compensate the damaged party in some way, in antitrust cases like this, the goal is to reorganize something so that the guilty part can't continue to exploit monopoly power.
So, if the DOJ liked thought that making Windows opensource would remove chances for future monopoly power, and could convince the right judges of that idea (damned unlikely), issues of who's been damaged in the past are moot.
Picture this: MS allows source to be downloaded, but still requires a binary license to run it. So you're free to look at the sources, free to compile them, but you can't legally run that version - and you certainly can't sell it.
The most worthwhile (from an antitrust point of view) part of opensourcing Windows is that other developers could develop fully compatible OSs pretty easily.
If there was any practical way to allow freely-distributable, modifiable, and resellable source code, while still retaining for the developer of any flavor of Windows the right to charge for executable... [ugh, what a horrible clause that was]...that could provide a wonderful incentive, both for MS, and other developers.
I don't see how it could happen, though. What's to stop someone changing how the "Start" button looks on some version, and then distributing their "version" for almost free?
It sounds bogus, like someone getting overexcited and hyper-interpreting a quip by Gates. BUT, if it is true it would be a big improvement over the breakup plans suggested.
As I understand it, there are two basic breakup plans:
1) Break MS into an applications company and an OS company. This would require constant policing as MS-OS continued to assert that this or that was really part of the OS. This is the nightmare scenario for those who think government can do no good, because it involves bureaucrats in software development. 2) Break MS into parallel competing firms, each with ownership of the code. In this case, the urge for the firms to collude would be incredible. But assuming they could overcome it and compete, the expectation would be that one firm would overtake the others for the new dominant force. All you'd really expect is a period of chaos and then a new monopolistic equilibrium.
If MS seriously put current and future versions of Windows into Open Source (as we understand it), then there could be ongoing competition for quality and speed-of-release. MS would certainly have the upper hand in that competition. So long as it could keep winning that competition, it would continue to have a head start in application development.
But, let them have Office if they lose a grip on the OS. As another poster pointed out, Office is one thng they've done very well, but it doesn't have as strong network-effects monopoly as the OS.
Visual Basic and VBA, on the other hand, are a threat. Can't wait to see how those work out.
First, if one is willing to go to the trouble and expense of patenting something, then an alternative would be making it unpatentable. If an (algorithm / business model / idea) was adequately publicized and clearly granted to the public domain before anyone applied for a patent on it, this should nullify patent attempts without using the patent system to do it.
The above might be worthwhile, creating a good, searchable, central database of otherwise patentable ideas committed to the public domain. The trouble would be keeping it useful without making the submission process as painful as the patent application process.
Second, a major issue with "defensive" patents is cross-licensing. The idea is that if IBM is going to patent the substance of every third memo, then GE is going to want some patents of its own so they can negotiate the use of IBM's stuff. The "defensive" part isn't simply a matter of, "Let's patent this, so we don't have to pay someone else for it later." Rather it's "Let's patent this as leverage when they patent that."
To the extent that the patenters themselves don't like this dynamic, it might be possible to create some institution to fight it, but I don't think yours will do it.
Slashdot Mirror
So the money they'll take in isn't just targeted to pay the hard-working folks checking security holes, it seems.
In many fields when you submit a paper for publication, you have to pay a fee to the journal. That's not as common in economics, but what I will have to do is sign over the copyright of my paper to the journal pubishing it. In order to participat in the intellectual life of my chosen field, I am required to give some business entity control over my work for the next 100 years or so.
Now, I'd be happy to open-source it. I'd even be happy to make it public domain. But, release the copyright to someone else? I may not even be able to put a copy on my website? Why is that good for either me, or the field of study?
There's a classic paper called "The Nature of the Firm" by R. H. Coase. Yesterday it took me a while to hunt it down. It was published in '37 and is considered pivitol. My university has one copy in a book, which I'm allwed to borrow, but undergrads aren't. The paper isn't online anywhere (at least not legally). If this paper was public doamin, it would be mirrored all over the place.
There's argument that copyright was required for the journal to recoup its costs. But, yes, most of those costs are associated with printing and distributing paper copies. Now since we can distribute the papers more efficiently online, the costs plummet.
The real problem now is not free-as-in-beer distribution, but free-as-in-speech academic research. How do we accomplish that, while maintaining the system of peer review?
The only solution I've been able to think of, and I may try, is to base things more on individual initiative. When someone has a paper, they find a person with a reputation in the field, and ask the expert to play "editor". The editor picks a few anonymous referees, who do their thing. Maybe the author submitting the paper would send along a (hopefully small) check for the editor and referees. If everything checks out, the editor gets cited as such on the paper, and the author self-publishes public domain (or some open-text license). Then any online database can mirro and index the paper.
I can dream.
I've been thinking lately that elementary through high-school textbooks are long overdue for an open-source upgrade. Books remain a big expense at schools. More than at university level, it should be possible to determine what are the essential things which every high-school student should know about chemistry, or every 6th-grader should know about history.
I haven't noticed any such project. I have seen that there's folks aiming at open source Economics textbooks.
So, while I look forward to the day I succesfully publish, I dread giving ownership of my work to some journal as is basically required for anyone making a career in the field.
Actually, nope. Antitrust law does not require demonstration that consumers have been harmed. The longstanding principle in antitrust is that it's extremely difficult and intrusive for a court to determine whether consumers have been hurt. As such, it's the actions to monopolize, conspire, etc. which are illegal, not the harming of consumers through those acions. This goes back to price-fixing agreeements such as US v. Trenton Potteries, where the court said price-fixing agreements are illegal regardless of the prices they fix.
As to other issues, Jackson may have been biased an/or acted improperly, but I've still been impressed by his grasp of the case. Microsoft is trying to protect its OS monopoly by preventing an alternative application platform from "commoditizing" the OS, just as Windows has commoditized the hardware. The fear (reasonable or not) was that people would depend more and more on their browsers, and that a browser could run on any operating system.
This can be hard to see because it doesn't match what antitrust folks normally think about when they think "tying" or "predatory pricing" or any of that. But I think Jackson was right-on.
I think it's also good to start with a "real" language, rather than a language confined to some special learning tasks. It depends on the personality of the kids, but the real power of programming is that it lets you do whatever you want. Sacrificing a big chunk of that freedom for special kid-friendly programming goals (Logo, etc.) seems a shame to me.
Mindstorms are pretty cool, with a lot of big buts. But there's not enough RAM to do the kind of things lots of folks want to do. But it's very special purpose. Mostly: But robotics isn't (just) programming, it's a very physical thing. Not that kids playing with Mindstorms won't learn a lot, but I would imagine a purer programming environment would be better to learn programming.
I'd be interested to see that "simple game theory" elaborated a bit. It's true that it's remarkably hard for companies selling competing products to collude to get monopoly prices. Even this can still happen when there's no legal force to prevent it: Sometimes OPEC works, for instance.
But it's not nearly as clear that firms selling complementary products--each the dominant one in its market--are unlikely to collude. It should make it somewhat easier to observe when collusion does happen, howerver, so legal steps can be taken. For instance, if proprietary API info gets from the OS company to the Apps firm, it'll look funny.
Even then, how funny will it look, though? The Apps firm will clearly be the most profitable company in it's market, it should be able to negotiate a deal with the OS firm over API info. And the Apps company can keep VBA, which helps tie it to Windows, because after all, the potential Linux Office users are really too small a market to worry about much.
It still comes down to legal options. Unfortunately, with this kind of breakup, collusion won't even be guarranteed to be recognizable.
This is one reason that I don't like the suggested form of breakup. I'd rather see rules imposed which make sure the OS a black box, and that the inputs and outputs of that black box are published. Maybe second to that would be the suggestion of breaking it up into separate OS companies, which woould hopefully compete with each other. The problem with the latter is that one would likely wind up with a period of a few years of chaos until a new monopolist wins the competition. Then we'd be back where we started.
What almost everyone agrees should be avoided in this case is government regulation of software development, for several reasons. First, it smacks of big, slow government in our cool, making-everybody-rich fast-moving sector. Looks bad, probably is. Second, it's already been tried. The previous "remedies" were content control remedies which MS slipped around, under, and through. Further such remedies would likely cause similar response. So, what folks mostly want is a structural remedy, which would hopefully eliminate the need for government regulation. This isn't what MS is proposing, of course. They're proposing a combination of what you suggest (limiting the sorts of deals they're allowed to make with OEMs), and content control. The essence of what you're arguing is the same as Gates argued in a Wall Street Journal editorial some time ago--the MS Windows monopoly is good for us, we should enjoy knowing that there's a single standard. I'd be willing to accept this on either of two conditions, pick the one which suits best: 1) Make the standard open. If Windows is going to be the standard, then treat it like other standards that anyone can make use of. Anyone should be allowed to produce a product which acts like Windows and runs Windows software, and should be given the necessary information and stability of specification to do so. OR 2) Make the standard regulated. If we all agree that MS Windows is going to be to one everyone uses, and that it's a good thing everyone uses it, then hold them accountable to the public (not the shareholders, the public) as you would any other pseudo-governmental organization. Most agree that the first is the better option. But as it stands, Windows is the standard, determines the way an enormous number of people in the country work, play, and communicate. In spite of this, the producers of it, due to monopoly power, aren't very responsible to either the public via regulation or the marketplace via competition. And as someone else mentioned, they're very good at using this monopoly power to extend to other realms... Visual Basic and it's inbred cousin VBA are becoming more and more of a standard for development, supporting and supported by MS Office. Wanna see what happens in the computer gaming field when MS releases an ActiveX-based game console? Of course the game console will have a 8G hard drive and internet connectivity, maybe they'll decide to bundle a browser and a free month of MSN with it?
1) Wasn't the Supreme Court decision about a design being trademarked, rather than patented? These are two very different areas of IP law, intended to protect different sorts of stuff in different ways.
Patents and copyrights (rightly or wrongly) are meant to give monopoly rights to innovations, so as to motivate innovation. (And in the case of patents, to motivate publicising the innovation.
Trademark protection is intended to keep one business from pretending to be another business, and hurting reputation. For the design trademark protection, that means if a design is so distinctive as to be automatically identified as from a particular company, when in fact it's not, then that could be considered a trademark violation. Normally design trademarks are applied to product packaging rather than the product itself.
The weird question this case brings up is: Does the test of distinctiveness automatically put smaller businesses at a disadvantage? How many people have to be able to recognize a design as being distinctively of some company, before that design is allowed as a trademark?
But I can't see this having any effect on patent law.
This is troubling; it definitely makes one wonder about the incentives for the patent office. As near as I can tell it means there is money in accepting almost any patent application, and no money in rejection.
Self-supporting works for the US Post Office largely because the payments are based on serving those it's supposed to serve anyway. The payment scheme for the USPTO seems to imply its goal is to exclusively serve holders (or desired holders) of intellectual property, rather than serving society at large.
If the USPTO is going to have to completely pay its own bills, then it needs to be financially accountable to non-patent holders as well. Perhaps require them to pay the legal fees for a successful patent challenge?
Q. Todd Dickinson is the Assistant Secretary of Commerce and Commissioner of Patents and Trademarks. He's only been on the job for 4 months, so we can't blame him personally for many past failings, but he's the one to address about making it stop. According to his biography, "Under Dickinson's leadership, the PTO is implementing the most sweeping reform in patent law in a half-century and its restructuring into a performance-based organization."
Since IANAL, I can't make much sense of Dickinson v. Zurko, but it might give some insight on Disckinson's attitudes. It vaguely makes it look like he tried pretty vigorously to strenghten the legal force of PTO decisions that something was prior art and couldn't be patented. It may or may not also strengthen decisions that something is patentable. He says he's trying to hire many more people familiar with software, and make more resources available for recognizing prior art.
There's several of his speeches available at the PTO site.
Dickinson did praise the late Judge Giles Sutherland Rich, who wrote the opinion in the State Street Bank & Trust Co. v. Signature Financial Group Inc. case that explicitly made it acceptable to patent mathematical algorithms and business models.
It would be great if the slashdot masters could arrange an Ask Slashdot with this guy.
I'm pretty left-leaning, but I still get a lot out of the rabid right-ring pro-corporate editorial page. For instance, that's where Bill Gates published a piece which essentially said, "We aren't a monopoly, but everyone uses us, and if you hurt Microsoft, we're taking the economy down with us!" More recently, Bruce Sterling had a bit in there about the DDoS attacks.
To reference a few points:
Slow to grasp the implications of emerging information technologies like radio, TV, cable, then the Net and Web, papers have been asking themselves more or less the same questions for half a century now: what should we be?
Primarily, the role of the newspaper hasn't changed. TV news uniformly sucks, news on the Web has so far completely failed to impress me.
In recent years, newspapers have remained graphically impaired. They seem oblivious to the graphic revolution that has swept magazines and is spreading through the Web.
And thank goodness for that! I don't want my news source to be flashy like WiReD, I want news. While I love the WSJ, they recently added a lame, color-and-glitz filled Friday entertainment section which just wastes my time. Look at the web news source we go to--Slashdot is low on graphics, high on prose. This is how most news sources should be.
As the Net and Web spawn ferocious and idiosyncratic commentary, democratizing opinion all over the country, newspapers cling to stuffy and elitist op-ed pages...
This is the other place where newspapers, without changing their mission are doing a good job. Anyone else remember how in The Diamond Age, Hackworth got his morning paper? As he rose in the rank of his society, his customized paper got more and more uniformly like the paper of others. It's important that one can't just seek out that news which satisfies one's idiosyncratic interests, but also has a common point of reference with others. A good paper fulfills this role, helping to inform the reader about what the mainstream is thinking about.
I can think of one way newspapers should change to account for new technology. Any article which is in the hard copy should also be online, and easily located. As a subscriber to the hard-copy I should get free access to the online version. While I prefer the paper for browsing, clipping and saving articles isn't as good as printing out, saving, or bookmarking online versions.
The idea is that, unlike a regular lawsuit, where the guilty party is forced to compensate the damaged party in some way, in antitrust cases like this, the goal is to reorganize something so that the guilty part can't continue to exploit monopoly power.
So, if the DOJ liked thought that making Windows opensource would remove chances for future monopoly power, and could convince the right judges of that idea (damned unlikely), issues of who's been damaged in the past are moot.
The most worthwhile (from an antitrust point of view) part of opensourcing Windows is that other developers could develop fully compatible OSs pretty easily.
If there was any practical way to allow freely-distributable, modifiable, and resellable source code, while still retaining for the developer of any flavor of Windows the right to charge for executable... [ugh, what a horrible clause that was] ...that could provide a wonderful incentive, both for MS, and other developers.
I don't see how it could happen, though. What's to stop someone changing how the "Start" button looks on some version, and then distributing their "version" for almost free?
As I understand it, there are two basic breakup plans:
1) Break MS into an applications company and an OS company. This would require constant policing as MS-OS continued to assert that this or that was really part of the OS. This is the nightmare scenario for those who think government can do no good, because it involves bureaucrats in software development.
2) Break MS into parallel competing firms, each with ownership of the code. In this case, the urge for the firms to collude would be incredible. But assuming they could overcome it and compete, the expectation would be that one firm would overtake the others for the new dominant force. All you'd really expect is a period of chaos and then a new monopolistic equilibrium.
If MS seriously put current and future versions of Windows into Open Source (as we understand it), then there could be ongoing competition for quality and speed-of-release. MS would certainly have the upper hand in that competition. So long as it could keep winning that competition, it would continue to have a head start in application development.
But, let them have Office if they lose a grip on the OS. As another poster pointed out, Office is one thng they've done very well, but it doesn't have as strong network-effects monopoly as the OS.
Visual Basic and VBA, on the other hand, are a threat. Can't wait to see how those work out.
First, if one is willing to go to the trouble and expense of patenting something, then an alternative would be making it unpatentable. If an (algorithm / business model / idea) was adequately publicized and clearly granted to the public domain before anyone applied for a patent on it, this should nullify patent attempts without using the patent system to do it.
The above might be worthwhile, creating a good, searchable, central database of otherwise patentable ideas committed to the public domain. The trouble would be keeping it useful without making the submission process as painful as the patent application process.
Second, a major issue with "defensive" patents is cross-licensing. The idea is that if IBM is going to patent the substance of every third memo, then GE is going to want some patents of its own so they can negotiate the use of IBM's stuff. The "defensive" part isn't simply a matter of, "Let's patent this, so we don't have to pay someone else for it later." Rather it's "Let's patent this as leverage when they patent that."
To the extent that the patenters themselves don't like this dynamic, it might be possible to create some institution to fight it, but I don't think yours will do it.