To allow Microsoft to claim it grants indemnification whereas Linux does not, but it turns out instead of being a shield it's an umbrella with holes in it. More Public Relations shilling of empty promises.
MS had to try to say something to make it look like what they have to offer is better than Linux in view of the clear and obvious language in Microsoft's EULAs that explicitly deny any liability or indemnification for any form of infringement for your use of their software.
If someone who has a patent infringed by Windows 95/98/NT/ME/2000/XP and wanted to be nasty they could pull an RIAA style bulk lawsuit strategy against every retail and business user of the version or versions of Windows that carried some infringing technology that they could find. Most people would be unable to defend against such suits and might have to settle. And Microsoft wouldn't owe them a dime in compensation or be responsible at all for indeminfication.
However, such a lawsuit would be a public relations disaster for Microsoft that they would probably make some sort of settlement to provide relief for end users in such a case or might intervene to defend against it. Maybe just buy the company that has the patent.
The microsoft issue is between the Customer's Vendor, and the customer's vendor's competitor. The customer really should have nothing to do with IP claims over software they buy to use.
In most cases, this is true as the customer is often a retail user and is not someone with deep pockets from which to obtain money.
SCO has no business suing Linux end users over IP claims. SCO's beef is with the Linux authors, but customers are easier to go after because they have money.
Anyone who makes, uses, or sells anything containing patented technology who is not licensed by the patent owner is liable for damages as a result of infringement of the patent. Full stop. While typically the end-user is not targeted, there is no legal impediment to doing so.
Back in the 1980s, the Washington (D.C.) Metropolitan Area Transit Authority was sued by the owner of a patent on the fare collection system that they were using that was built by one of their vendors. It wasn't stated why the patent holder didn't sue the manufacturer but instead sued the transit authority. WMATA settled with the patent holder for an undisclosed sum, and presumably obtained restitution from the manufacturer for the costs involved.
While it is rare for the third party user to be sued, they are also infringing and thus they can be if the patent holder chooses to do so.
It's all a bunch of legal horse shit if you ask me. There's no way a customer should ever be held responsible for the content of stuff they buy from their vendors because they have little or no control over what goes into that stuff.
Write your congressman and tell him/her that. Not that they will listen, but...
In particular they want you to think that open source software does have a potential for liability. Don't get me wrong - simply using a peice of software does not infringe on any IP rights, regardless of whether it is open source or not
Incorrect. If a patent covers a particular concept then any manufacture, use, or sale of anything based on that patent is infringing, and anyone not licensed may be sued. When you purchase a product at retail containing a patent which is patented by the manufacturer - like, for example, dryer fabric softener sheets - they are giving you an implied license by selling it to you. This is why Procter & Gamble doesn't sue you when you put Bounce sheets in the dryer even though they are patented; you bought it from them and your purchase from them gives you a license to use the patents embodied in the product they sold you. Had you purchased an off-brand that did not pay P&G for the licensing fees, they can sue the manufacturer and technically could sue you for using a patented item without permission. Not that they would, of course, but the point is that it is theoretically possible for a patent holder to do so if they chose to do so.
If you purchased a mass-market product that infringes on a third-party's patents (like Kodak's instant camera a few years ago), the manufacturere that made the device (Kodak) is liable for infringement to the owner of the patent or patents (Polaroid) and technically so are you.
The patent owner can sue the manufacturer for infringement and they can sue any user of the item that incorporates an infringement of a patent. In theory they could sue you but as most end-users are simply innocent infringers (and have little or no assets) as well as it being bad public relations and too expensive to bother, they typically do not.
If this becomes standard practice, then these guarantees to indenify users will cost the individual and small software company developers much more than the big guys. Imagine that the only reason people can't start a development factory are the (non life altering insurance) legal costs rather than physical constraints. That's f'''ed up!
No, it means you start building your company first to make it as close to judgement proof as possible as opposed to mere limit of liability as was the prior practice. First thing is you use a corporate form. Each product is created and owned by a separate corporate entity; this costs maybe $50 a year or so per product. Thus suing one company over an alleged infringement doesn't get to the assets of another. Second you either lease all your equipment or you have a separate company own it. Third you never take a position as an officer in any of these companies, you're just an employee. No personal liability that way.
Once you get big enough to have any serious assets, you get legal advice on how to structure your company so as to limit its exposure, including options such as new incorporation each year, multiple forms (corporation vs. LLC vs LP vs something else), multiple states or countries, and other methods. Correct legally sound structuring can mean the difference between a thriving organization that is de jure judgement proof and some big fat juicy target of some lawsuit because it's not correctly structured for legal defense against lawsuits or other threats.
Take a tip from the largest company in the world. Microsoft licenses its software through a Nevada subsidiary to legally avoid hundreds of millions of dollars - literally over half a billion dollars - of Washington State income tax. Using various corporate forms for tax avoidance has been an important strategy for corporations for decades, so prevention of liability for alleged patent violations requires the same due dilligence.
Does anyone here know why the movie industry ended up in Hollywood? Because the studios were often using infringing cameras and film not licensed from the Motion Picture Patents Company, and Los Angeles is fairly close to the Mexican border. The people running the studios could escape to Mexico in a hurry if they were sued or prosecuted for infringement.
However, how can you be sued for just using software that you believe to be under the GPL? If you did not modify that software such that it infringed someone else's IP rights, how can you be liable for it?
Because a patent provides a legal monopoly allowing the patent owner the exclusive right to make, use, and sell the patented article. When you purchase an article that is licensed you are granted permission to use as part of the license.
Since company2 will be indemnified, they'll care very little about winning, so will put up a poor defense. Company1 will win, but Microsoft will compensate company2; so its free money for you.
Nice try but it won't work.
When a company offers an indemnification clause, it will contractually require you to assign it total and complete authority to defend, compromise and settle any case regarding the matter to which it grants indemnification. That means Microsoft - not company 2 - decides how vigorously to defend the lawsuit and whether or not to settle.
With very limited exceptions that don't apply here, this is the standard rule, e.g. when you have automobile insurance. If you are involved in an auto accident and considered by anyone to be at fault, your insurance company provides you with a lawyer and defends you, and if you lose at trial or they decide to settle, they pay the amount of damages up to policy limits. But the insurer decides if it will settle or defend; you do not.
Having been both the party at fault in two accident and the injured party in two others, I am fully aware of how this works. In every case the injured party and the insured usually have no contact at all, the insured's insurance company - who is providing indemnification - does everything with the injured party, the insured doen't even get involved unless it proceeds to suit.
Pay cash and don't give personal information, thus they have no info to match against and as far as they are concerned they have no record.
If they decline the return, when the credit card company bills you, decline the charge as a problem with the merchant. Then they can either accept the return and get their merchandise back, or they can eat the charge.
It is one thing for a retailer to be having a problem with excessive returns where the customer may have used the merchandise they are returning, but to impose this on customers returning never used merchandise is untenable.
Doubleclick is the world's largest supplier of cookies? I am surprised; I always thought that Nabisco was the world's largest supplier of cookies. Keebler specifically states they are the second largest, so I'm guessing either Keebler is second to Doubleclick or second to Nabisco, I'm not sure which.
MSN, which is owned by Microsoft (a company which wants to encourage use of its proprietary, royalty collecting DRM format over others), has a story how people (supposedly) prefer a DRM-locked format over an open one. How amazing and unusual that such a story would come out. It couldn't be that they have biases, oh no! It's like that there clearly isn't any question that the issue of restricting reproduction of digital broadcasts through the FCC's mandating of digital TVs to honor the Broadcast Flag is unimportant by the fact that no television network or broadcast TV station has devoted even 30 seconds of TV news time to the issue all year. We all know the media isn't biased, right?
Despite this, I note that the original story indicates that MP3 is still more popular than any DRM-locked format, and that purchased (proprietary DRM-locked) songs are a tiny percentage of what people have around.
What's interesting is they are talking about people's habits in deleting files (which means nothing). Of course, people are less likely to delete files they have paid for over MP3s of files they may have ripped from their own CDs or have downloaded off a file-sharing service. If you didn't pay anything for the copy and you get tired of it or don't like the song, you might (or are more likely to) delete it. You're less likely to do that (even if you don't like it) with a song you paid hard cash for the copy. Witness the number of people who throw away / donate / give away used paperbacks they paid under $1 (and especially 50c and below), versus people who keep brand-new paperbacks and don't toss their new ones away as quickly.
I have an alternative solution for any environment that has server based or independent storage options to the internal harddrive -- [use an application to] write-protect the harddrive... If you want to make changes to the PC like installing new software, patches, etc. simply reboot and turn off the protection, make the changes and turn the protection back on.
Damn, I wish I had thought of that. I had forgotten that possibility. It brings back memories of decades ago when disk drives were washing machine sized, and there was a write-protect switch on the hard drive to allow drives to be run read only.
I will add two points to that.
You will have to have either an extra (local machine) writeable drive or a partition on the same drive because Windows requires writeable swap space. My rule of thumb is to use 4 times the amount of memory, so for a machine with, say, 1 GB of space, you want to set aside a 4GB swap partition if you're going to go this route. For example, when machines routinely had 64MB of memory, I would often make a machine perform better by creating a 256MB fixed swap file. No resizing and no potential for lack of swap space when the machine got full due to lack of disk space later.
You will need space for the TEMP= and TMP= settings (many applications need temp space for work or for recovery, such as Word Perfect's autosave, the ability to automatically checkpoint what you are doing in case Windows or WP crashes before you can save work). You could use the same partition (or drive) as the swap space for this purpose.
For these reasons creating, say, a ram drive would not be appropriate and you would need some local writeable storage of hard-drive size. Or, possibly having only a specific temporary directory be writeable and no other places, if it was possible to implement directory-level write protection, which I think can be done in Windows releases of NT 4 and above, e.g. 2000 and XP.
I think the parent poster for the message this is a response to gave an excellent idea and I commend him on his thinking of it.
Apple does not want anyone else making iTunes compatible hardware^W anything; anyone remember the threats Apple raised to invoke the DMCA because Real reverse-engineered apple's proprietary Digital Rights Management system? I don't remember if it was to allow Real's content to play on an iMac, or it was so that you could play Harmony-based content under Realplayer, or what it was, but Apple got very upset about this, despite the fact that the laws are not supposed to prevent developing compatible applications, but that's exactly what companies developing DRM schemes want to use the DMCA for, to lock up their content against anything that they don't deem appropriate under their terms.
If they wanted to call MP3 an open standard - even though it is subject to patent licensing - since there are plenty of software libre applications supporting it, I'd go along.
If they wanted to call OGG Vorbis an open standard I wouldn't raise a single reservation as it is clearly and obviously a fully-open and unencumbered standard.
But calling a closed proprietary system like Windows Media format an open standard is a double-plus ungood use of the word 'open'.
I have a DSL connection but a trailer still takes time to download. The stupid Quicktime trailer display for full-screen has 'play' and 'exit' for controls has no means to wait until it has loaded the clip but starts immediately - which means after 5 or 6 seconds it runs out of material - has no means to pause or rewind, and can't be minimized or closed except by whatever it decides is acceptable; even the Windows key is hijacked. Also it doesn't work right under the standard browser in Lindows - I get a puzzle piece icon indicating a plug in is missing - because it requires a plug in but neither the browser nor the website can tell me how to download it.
Also, to answer another comment about it only being available in quicktime, since the trailer is being downloaded from a site in the apple.com domain, this is a no-brainer. Would you expect a file from microsoft to use anything but Windows Media Player format, or from real to use anything but real media, or a site from macromedia...
If I worked for the state and used say a government car for personal use they wouldn't just fire me. They would arrest me for misuse of public funds and materials. This theft just the same.
In many places around here (Maryland and Virginia near DC), when a police officer is issued a patrol car, after they get off their shift, they don't have to return the car to the motor pool. they are permitted to take it home and use it. This provides additional protection to the public since the police officer is going someplace in his marked automobile.
I would presume if someone is assigned use of a vehicle for work - such as a road repair person - that they are allowed to drive someplace to eat during their lunch hour.
So not every private use of public government facilities is necessarily illegal or unauthorized.
Running SETI costs tax payers money if the form of the electric bill and ware and tear on the equipment.
That's "wear and tear," and running a computer for this purpose - since the operation of a background search is simply running the processor, not the disk drives - does not turn any moving parts and doesn't wear anything out. If the computer would otherwise hibernate into a lower power state it will use more electricity, but I would seriously doubt it would increase wear and tear on the processor or the computer.
Honeywell Files Lawsuit Against 34 Electronics Companies For Infringing Patented LCD Technology
MORRIS TOWNSHIP, New Jersey, October 6, 2004 -- Honeywell (NYSE: HON) today filed a lawsuit against 34 electronics companies claiming infringement of a Honeywell patent for technology that increases the brightness of images and that reduces the appearance of certain interference effects on a liquid crystal display (LCD).
Honeywell's lawsuit claims the company's patented technology is being used in a variety of consumer electronics products, including notebook computers, cell phones, personal digital assistants, portable DVD players, portable LCD TVs, video game systems, and digital still cameras.
"Honeywell invests millions of dollars in research and development every year, and we aggressively defend our intellectual property to protect that substantial investment," said John Donofrio, Vice President of Intellectual Property at Honeywell.
Honeywell's lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court for the district of Delaware, asks for monetary damages and an injunction to prohibit selling products that infringe its patent.
"The two largest LCD manufacturers, LG.Philips LCD and Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd., have previously taken licenses under this fundamental patent," said Donofrio. "Honeywell has a long history of successfully licensing proprietary technologies worldwide for non-competing uses as a core component of our strategic business model," Donofrio said. "We are pleased that LG.Philips and Samsung Electronics are benefiting through their licenses from our technology."
Defendants named in Honeywell's lawsuit are:
Apple Computer, Inc.
Argus a/k/a Hartford Computer Group, Inc.
Audiovox Corporation
Casio Computer Co., Ltd.
Casio, Inc.
Concord Cameras
Dell Inc.
Eastman Kodak Company
Fuji Photo Film Co., Ltd.
Fuji Photo Film U.S.A., Inc.
Fujitsu Limited
Fujitsu America, Inc.
Fujitsu Computer Products of America, Inc.
Kyocera Wireless Corp.
Matsushita Electrical Industrial Co.
Matsushita Electrical Corporation of America
Navman NZ Limited
Navman U.S.A. Inc.
Nikon Corporation
Nikon Inc.
Nokia Corporation
Nokia Americas
Olympus Corporation
Olympus America, Inc.
Pentax Corporation
Pentax U.S.A., Inc.
Sanyo Electric Co., Ltd.
Sanyo North America
Sony Corporation
Sony Corporation Of America
Sony Ericsson Mobile Communications AB
Sony Ericsson Mobile Communications (U.S.A.) Inc.
Toshiba Corporation
Toshiba America, Inc.
Honeywell International is a $23 billion diversified technology and manufacturing leader, serving customers worldwide with aerospace products and services; control technologies for buildings, homes and industry; automotive products; turbochargers; and specialty materials. Based in Morris Township, N.J., Honeywell's shares are traded on the New York, London, Chicago and Pacific Stock Exchanges. It is one of the 30 stocks that make up the Dow Jones Industrial Average and is also a component of the Standard & Poor's 500 Index. For additional information, please visit www.honeywell.com
This release contains forward-looking statements as defined in Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, including statements about future business operations, financial performance and market conditions. Such forward-looking statements involve risks and uncertainties inherent in business forecasts as further described in our filings under the Securities Exchange Act.
U.S. Federal law specifies penalties for false or fraudulent takedown notices. Since these are sworn under penalty of perjury that the person who did so had a good-faith belief, this was obviously false and perjurous in nature.
Since the MPAA thinks a $3,000 to $11,000 judgement is acceptable for someone accused of 'stealing' music, then I suppose a $3,000,000 to $11,000,000 judgement is acceptable for someone from MPAA accused of fraud and perjury. I figure MPAA is at least 1,000 times the size of the average file swapper.
It is a standard practice for companies to register their name followed by "sucks" in order to prevent someone else from registering it as a protest site. Or some will register many combinations of their name in case they think up a business use or to prevent someone from developing a domain name of something similar to theirs.
2600 Magazine reported in an issue last year that in addition to "verizon.com" and "verizonsucks.com" and the domains relating to Verizon Wireless, that Verizon has registered more than 700 domains in order to keep someone else from registering them.
At one time I registered all 4 important versions of my full name (.COM,.NET,.ORG and.US) even though at the time I wasn't sure what I would do with them, because it only costs $9 each per year (or less). Even for an individual to register all 4 variations it's a once a year cost equivalent to one dinner at a good restaurant For a single domain in one TLD it's less than the cost of a DVD.
To put it simply, if you're thinking of doing anything on the 'net with commercial potential, domain registration is a (very) cheap form of insurance.
The Democrats won't do it, neither will the Republicans, but I'd rather see a slightly stronger government that imposes some regulation and control over corporations, rather than a government that is so powerless that it cannot act in the public interest (which is what I believe would be the case under a Libertarian leadership.)
Let's not forget that corporations only exist because of government regulations that grant them existence with immunity to the stockholders from liability beyond their investment in the corporation. And a great deal of lack of responsibility by the managers and officers of corporations for their actions. Were those not present, a large degree of the so-called "power" of corporations is gone.
My fiancee worked hospice care for mentally disabled adults. One of them was a guy who got blindsided by an SUV while he was on his motorcycle. He went from being a well-paid metal worker to a grown man with the mental skills of a two-year old. Would the burden of his care be placed on his family, or the family of the person who hit him? Neither of them could support his care.
His insurance company is supposed to pay that up to policy limits. That's why you're supposed to pay for automobile insurance, because you cannot afford to cover the loss yourself, most people are not involved in accidents on a regular basis, and by spreading the risk around among a lot of people, it's possible to cover a loss that none of them alone could do.
But if the government wasn't so confiscatory we'd have charity hospitals that people would be willing to donate to. and to a limited degree, could do so as many people do now. Remember that the original purpose of government relief was so people wouldn't have to be "degraded" by going to a charity for help. So now what we have is the government usurping the functions of charities and almost bankrupting them in the process.
Is there some sort of math behind this I can get? Like, if I wanted to unseat the head of Enron because he commited theft (a crime of value X) against Y number of victims, what would (X*Y) have to equal before I'm morally free to bust a cap?
You don't. There is still a functioning system of courts and an operating government where Enron operated, i.e. in Texas, USA. Unless and until you and whatever group you have are willing to declare that government has gone nonexistent and/or is a criminal organization and declare war against it (or declare a civil war exists because it your government and has in effect declared war on its citizens) then you don't have any right to do so.
I looked up the most serious and well known obscenity in English, the 4-letter one beginning with "f", and it was not present, but that might be a choice they made. However, the most-defined word in the English language, run is not present. Two major and significant words and neither are found. So that means the system is garbage as far as I'm concerned.
If you or I want to unseat or kill a thug like Saddam Hussein, we're morally free to do so. He's a tyrant and a murderer. We'd only be acting on behalf of his victims.
Does this mean that he'd repeal the (not so carefully followed) US policy of not assassinating foreign leaders?
No, he's saying that any private party - such as you or I, or any group of people who choose to do so - has just as much of a right - but not the responsibility - to go into an area to stop the violation of human rights that offends us as any other group when there is no government or the government has gone criminal. It would have been legitimate for any group or person to attack Iraq for the purpose of stopping its acts of aggresion and war against its people, same as if some person or group had done the same thing to the Nazi government that had declared war on Jews and other "undesirables."
No government has a right to claim legitimacy when it has begun an unjustified war of agression upon its own people or upon others. Such is the talk of a hypocrite who claims the right to disregard and violate the rights of others but expects its own rights to be respected.
Now, of course, those who speak on behalf of governments will claim that only a government has the "right" to act against other governments. This is neither accurate nor valid. All rights of any kind eminate from human beings; government as such is merely the agent of such human beings residing within its jurisdiction. If a government has any "right" to engage in war, it only does so as a direct extention of the rights of the people involved. And a governmnent cannot have any "rights" that do not exist in and of the individuals who form the residents of that jurisdiction; to claim otherwise is to claim that a group of people can somehow grant themselves the authority to do something that they as individuals have no authority to do. That is the claim of "might makes right" or mob rule on a nation-state scale.
This means, in simple terms, that any individual or group or government has just as much "right" to stop a government that has declared war on its citizens, but is under no responsibility to do so.
A computer programmer can do this sort of work in which they bid on a job because if you have a specification and a target to aim for then you can determine what you have to do to solve the problem. But you had better be good at estimating or you could lose your shirt (end up working for coolie wages).
It's no good where you don't have a rigid, fixed target to aim for. That's pure research and you had better be on a time-based contract rather than a fixed-price one. Doing R&D for a fixed price will lead to disaster if you have to do that for a living. But if you can correctly estimate how much time you need and price the job accordingly you could do this and possibly even make a decent living although it would be difficult. (Working for yourself is always difficult.) But for picking up extra cash for working spare time it's easy to do. In fact, people already are doing this.
I did one myself, made a few hundred dollars for a job I worked part-time on as I felt like it and as I got the inspiration on how to solve the problem over a three month period. I had a lot of fun solving the problem and learned a hell of a lot. It also improved my ability to better estimate how much a job is worth. Had it been something I had to make a living at I couldn't, but for something that was extra money for doing a work-for-hire job on my spare time, it wasn't too bad.
I replied to the previous article without a full understanding of the issues, but now that I know a whole lot more I have to comment again. If this housing is owned by the university, then the students are subject to the university because first of all, they are students, and second, the university is their landlord.
The Denver Airport as well as Massport in Boston wanted to require tenants to use its (for pay) wifi network and prohibited them from setting up their own, claiming that since they own the airport they have the right to restrict tenant use over the wireless space. The FCC stated in a ruling that it alone has exclusive jurisdiction over radio frequency space regulation and a legitimate tenant has the same right to use unlicensed radio-frequency space as any other user, and that no one else, state or local government, nor any private party including a landlord, has authority to regulate or control use of unlicensed radio-frequency space.
The site has been so throughly slashdotted it has exceeded not only its daily bandwidth cap but perhaps its monthly or even yearly cap. Maybe even the entire bandwidth cap of the company supplying it with connectivity, or
Infinium got the site shut down somehow.
Considering that when I tried it several hours ago and it timed out, the reason why becomes painfully obvious. Before pointing Slashdot at a site to be turned loose to be strip mined of bandwidth, perhaps we need to to find some way to protect its environment. (I don't know, the above phrase seemed funnier when I wrote it.)
Slashdot Mirror
MS had to try to say something to make it look like what they have to offer is better than Linux in view of the clear and obvious language in Microsoft's EULAs that explicitly deny any liability or indemnification for any form of infringement for your use of their software.
If someone who has a patent infringed by Windows 95/98/NT/ME/2000/XP and wanted to be nasty they could pull an RIAA style bulk lawsuit strategy against every retail and business user of the version or versions of Windows that carried some infringing technology that they could find. Most people would be unable to defend against such suits and might have to settle. And Microsoft wouldn't owe them a dime in compensation or be responsible at all for indeminfication.
However, such a lawsuit would be a public relations disaster for Microsoft that they would probably make some sort of settlement to provide relief for end users in such a case or might intervene to defend against it. Maybe just buy the company that has the patent.
Back in the 1980s, the Washington (D.C.) Metropolitan Area Transit Authority was sued by the owner of a patent on the fare collection system that they were using that was built by one of their vendors. It wasn't stated why the patent holder didn't sue the manufacturer but instead sued the transit authority. WMATA settled with the patent holder for an undisclosed sum, and presumably obtained restitution from the manufacturer for the costs involved.
While it is rare for the third party user to be sued, they are also infringing and thus they can be if the patent holder chooses to do so.
Write your congressman and tell him/her that. Not that they will listen, but...If you purchased a mass-market product that infringes on a third-party's patents (like Kodak's instant camera a few years ago), the manufacturere that made the device (Kodak) is liable for infringement to the owner of the patent or patents (Polaroid) and technically so are you.
The patent owner can sue the manufacturer for infringement and they can sue any user of the item that incorporates an infringement of a patent. In theory they could sue you but as most end-users are simply innocent infringers (and have little or no assets) as well as it being bad public relations and too expensive to bother, they typically do not.
Once you get big enough to have any serious assets, you get legal advice on how to structure your company so as to limit its exposure, including options such as new incorporation each year, multiple forms (corporation vs. LLC vs LP vs something else), multiple states or countries, and other methods. Correct legally sound structuring can mean the difference between a thriving organization that is de jure judgement proof and some big fat juicy target of some lawsuit because it's not correctly structured for legal defense against lawsuits or other threats.
Take a tip from the largest company in the world. Microsoft licenses its software through a Nevada subsidiary to legally avoid hundreds of millions of dollars - literally over half a billion dollars - of Washington State income tax. Using various corporate forms for tax avoidance has been an important strategy for corporations for decades, so prevention of liability for alleged patent violations requires the same due dilligence.
Does anyone here know why the movie industry ended up in Hollywood? Because the studios were often using infringing cameras and film not licensed from the Motion Picture Patents Company, and Los Angeles is fairly close to the Mexican border. The people running the studios could escape to Mexico in a hurry if they were sued or prosecuted for infringement.
When a company offers an indemnification clause, it will contractually require you to assign it total and complete authority to defend, compromise and settle any case regarding the matter to which it grants indemnification. That means Microsoft - not company 2 - decides how vigorously to defend the lawsuit and whether or not to settle.
With very limited exceptions that don't apply here, this is the standard rule, e.g. when you have automobile insurance. If you are involved in an auto accident and considered by anyone to be at fault, your insurance company provides you with a lawyer and defends you, and if you lose at trial or they decide to settle, they pay the amount of damages up to policy limits. But the insurer decides if it will settle or defend; you do not.
Having been both the party at fault in two accident and the injured party in two others, I am fully aware of how this works. In every case the injured party and the insured usually have no contact at all, the insured's insurance company - who is providing indemnification - does everything with the injured party, the insured doen't even get involved unless it proceeds to suit.
- Pay cash and don't give personal information, thus they have no info to match against and as far as they are concerned they have no record.
- If they decline the return, when the credit card company bills you, decline the charge as a problem with the merchant. Then they can either accept the return and get their merchandise back, or they can eat the charge.
It is one thing for a retailer to be having a problem with excessive returns where the customer may have used the merchandise they are returning, but to impose this on customers returning never used merchandise is untenable.Doubleclick is the world's largest supplier of cookies? I am surprised; I always thought that Nabisco was the world's largest supplier of cookies. Keebler specifically states they are the second largest, so I'm guessing either Keebler is second to Doubleclick or second to Nabisco, I'm not sure which.
Despite this, I note that the original story indicates that MP3 is still more popular than any DRM-locked format, and that purchased (proprietary DRM-locked) songs are a tiny percentage of what people have around.
What's interesting is they are talking about people's habits in deleting files (which means nothing). Of course, people are less likely to delete files they have paid for over MP3s of files they may have ripped from their own CDs or have downloaded off a file-sharing service. If you didn't pay anything for the copy and you get tired of it or don't like the song, you might (or are more likely to) delete it. You're less likely to do that (even if you don't like it) with a song you paid hard cash for the copy. Witness the number of people who throw away / donate / give away used paperbacks they paid under $1 (and especially 50c and below), versus people who keep brand-new paperbacks and don't toss their new ones away as quickly.
I will add two points to that.
For these reasons creating, say, a ram drive would not be appropriate and you would need some local writeable storage of hard-drive size. Or, possibly having only a specific temporary directory be writeable and no other places, if it was possible to implement directory-level write protection, which I think can be done in Windows releases of NT 4 and above, e.g. 2000 and XP.
I think the parent poster for the message this is a response to gave an excellent idea and I commend him on his thinking of it.
Paul Robinson
Apple does not want anyone else making iTunes compatible hardware^W anything; anyone remember the threats Apple raised to invoke the DMCA because Real reverse-engineered apple's proprietary Digital Rights Management system? I don't remember if it was to allow Real's content to play on an iMac, or it was so that you could play Harmony-based content under Realplayer, or what it was, but Apple got very upset about this, despite the fact that the laws are not supposed to prevent developing compatible applications, but that's exactly what companies developing DRM schemes want to use the DMCA for, to lock up their content against anything that they don't deem appropriate under their terms.
If they wanted to call OGG Vorbis an open standard I wouldn't raise a single reservation as it is clearly and obviously a fully-open and unencumbered standard.
But calling a closed proprietary system like Windows Media format an open standard is a double-plus ungood use of the word 'open'.
Also, to answer another comment about it only being available in quicktime, since the trailer is being downloaded from a site in the apple.com domain, this is a no-brainer. Would you expect a file from microsoft to use anything but Windows Media Player format, or from real to use anything but real media, or a site from macromedia ...
I would presume if someone is assigned use of a vehicle for work - such as a road repair person - that they are allowed to drive someplace to eat during their lunch hour.
So not every private use of public government facilities is necessarily illegal or unauthorized.
That's "wear and tear," and running a computer for this purpose - since the operation of a background search is simply running the processor, not the disk drives - does not turn any moving parts and doesn't wear anything out. If the computer would otherwise hibernate into a lower power state it will use more electricity, but I would seriously doubt it would increase wear and tear on the processor or the computer.Press Releases
Honeywell Files Lawsuit Against 34 Electronics Companies For Infringing Patented LCD Technology
MORRIS TOWNSHIP, New Jersey, October 6, 2004 -- Honeywell (NYSE: HON) today filed a lawsuit against 34 electronics companies claiming infringement of a Honeywell patent for technology that increases the brightness of images and that reduces the appearance of certain interference effects on a liquid crystal display (LCD).
Honeywell's lawsuit claims the company's patented technology is being used in a variety of consumer electronics products, including notebook computers, cell phones, personal digital assistants, portable DVD players, portable LCD TVs, video game systems, and digital still cameras.
"Honeywell invests millions of dollars in research and development every year, and we aggressively defend our intellectual property to protect that substantial investment," said John Donofrio, Vice President of Intellectual Property at Honeywell.
Honeywell's lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court for the district of Delaware, asks for monetary damages and an injunction to prohibit selling products that infringe its patent.
"The two largest LCD manufacturers, LG.Philips LCD and Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd., have previously taken licenses under this fundamental patent," said Donofrio. "Honeywell has a long history of successfully licensing proprietary technologies worldwide for non-competing uses as a core component of our strategic business model," Donofrio said. "We are pleased that LG.Philips and Samsung Electronics are benefiting through their licenses from our technology."
Defendants named in Honeywell's lawsuit are:
- Apple Computer, Inc.
- Argus a/k/a Hartford Computer Group, Inc.
- Audiovox Corporation
- Casio Computer Co., Ltd.
- Casio, Inc.
- Concord Cameras
- Dell Inc.
- Eastman Kodak Company
- Fuji Photo Film Co., Ltd.
- Fuji Photo Film U.S.A., Inc.
- Fujitsu Limited
- Fujitsu America, Inc.
- Fujitsu Computer Products of America, Inc.
- Kyocera Wireless Corp.
- Matsushita Electrical Industrial Co.
- Matsushita Electrical Corporation of America
- Navman NZ Limited
- Navman U.S.A. Inc.
- Nikon Corporation
- Nikon Inc.
- Nokia Corporation
- Nokia Americas
- Olympus Corporation
- Olympus America, Inc.
- Pentax Corporation
- Pentax U.S.A., Inc.
- Sanyo Electric Co., Ltd.
- Sanyo North America
- Sony Corporation
- Sony Corporation Of America
- Sony Ericsson Mobile Communications AB
- Sony Ericsson Mobile Communications (U.S.A.) Inc.
- Toshiba Corporation
- Toshiba America, Inc.
Honeywell International is a $23 billion diversified technology and manufacturing leader, serving customers worldwide with aerospace products and services; control technologies for buildings, homes and industry; automotive products; turbochargers; and specialty materials. Based in Morris Township, N.J., Honeywell's shares are traded on the New York, London, Chicago and Pacific Stock Exchanges. It is one of the 30 stocks that make up the Dow Jones Industrial Average and is also a component of the Standard & Poor's 500 Index. For additional information, please visit www.honeywell.comThis release contains forward-looking statements as defined in Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, including statements about future business operations, financial performance and market conditions. Such forward-looking statements involve risks and uncertainties inherent in business forecasts as further described in our filings under the Securities Exchange Act.
Contact:
Ron Crotty
602-436-6823
Since the MPAA thinks a $3,000 to $11,000 judgement is acceptable for someone accused of 'stealing' music, then I suppose a $3,000,000 to $11,000,000 judgement is acceptable for someone from MPAA accused of fraud and perjury. I figure MPAA is at least 1,000 times the size of the average file swapper.
2600 Magazine reported in an issue last year that in addition to "verizon.com" and "verizonsucks.com" and the domains relating to Verizon Wireless, that Verizon has registered more than 700 domains in order to keep someone else from registering them.
At one time I registered all 4 important versions of my full name (.COM, .NET, .ORG and .US) even though at the time I wasn't sure what I would do with them, because it only costs $9 each per year (or less). Even for an individual to register all 4 variations it's a once a year cost equivalent to one dinner at a good restaurant For a single domain in one TLD it's less than the cost of a DVD.
To put it simply, if you're thinking of doing anything on the 'net with commercial potential, domain registration is a (very) cheap form of insurance.
But if the government wasn't so confiscatory we'd have charity hospitals that people would be willing to donate to. and to a limited degree, could do so as many people do now. Remember that the original purpose of government relief was so people wouldn't have to be "degraded" by going to a charity for help. So now what we have is the government usurping the functions of charities and almost bankrupting them in the process.
I looked up the most serious and well known obscenity in English, the 4-letter one beginning with "f", and it was not present, but that might be a choice they made. However, the most-defined word in the English language, run is not present. Two major and significant words and neither are found. So that means the system is garbage as far as I'm concerned.
No government has a right to claim legitimacy when it has begun an unjustified war of agression upon its own people or upon others. Such is the talk of a hypocrite who claims the right to disregard and violate the rights of others but expects its own rights to be respected.
Now, of course, those who speak on behalf of governments will claim that only a government has the "right" to act against other governments. This is neither accurate nor valid. All rights of any kind eminate from human beings; government as such is merely the agent of such human beings residing within its jurisdiction. If a government has any "right" to engage in war, it only does so as a direct extention of the rights of the people involved. And a governmnent cannot have any "rights" that do not exist in and of the individuals who form the residents of that jurisdiction; to claim otherwise is to claim that a group of people can somehow grant themselves the authority to do something that they as individuals have no authority to do. That is the claim of "might makes right" or mob rule on a nation-state scale.
This means, in simple terms, that any individual or group or government has just as much "right" to stop a government that has declared war on its citizens, but is under no responsibility to do so.
It's no good where you don't have a rigid, fixed target to aim for. That's pure research and you had better be on a time-based contract rather than a fixed-price one. Doing R&D for a fixed price will lead to disaster if you have to do that for a living. But if you can correctly estimate how much time you need and price the job accordingly you could do this and possibly even make a decent living although it would be difficult. (Working for yourself is always difficult.) But for picking up extra cash for working spare time it's easy to do. In fact, people already are doing this.
I did one myself, made a few hundred dollars for a job I worked part-time on as I felt like it and as I got the inspiration on how to solve the problem over a three month period. I had a lot of fun solving the problem and learned a hell of a lot. It also improved my ability to better estimate how much a job is worth. Had it been something I had to make a living at I couldn't, but for something that was extra money for doing a work-for-hire job on my spare time, it wasn't too bad.
The Denver Airport as well as Massport in Boston wanted to require tenants to use its (for pay) wifi network and prohibited them from setting up their own, claiming that since they own the airport they have the right to restrict tenant use over the wireless space. The FCC stated in a ruling that it alone has exclusive jurisdiction over radio frequency space regulation and a legitimate tenant has the same right to use unlicensed radio-frequency space as any other user, and that no one else, state or local government, nor any private party including a landlord, has authority to regulate or control use of unlicensed radio-frequency space.
- The site has been so throughly slashdotted it has exceeded not only its daily bandwidth cap but perhaps its monthly or even yearly cap. Maybe even the entire bandwidth cap of the company supplying it with connectivity, or
- Infinium got the site shut down somehow.
Considering that when I tried it several hours ago and it timed out, the reason why becomes painfully obvious. Before pointing Slashdot at a site to be turned loose to be strip mined of bandwidth, perhaps we need to to find some way to protect its environment. (I don't know, the above phrase seemed funnier when I wrote it.)