Intellectual property claims aren't necessarily always evil, but frivolous, overly-broad claims seem to be a growing problem (e.g., sightsound.com's patenting of internet delivered audio/video, or OpenMarket's patent on shopping carts).
We can whine, posit, and conjecture all the day long on Slashdot about greed of various media and software companies and their lawyers, but what can we really start to DO about it?
It seems to me that Be's decision to move away from the Apple/PPC HW was just as politcal as Apple's decision not to help them out. From an engineering standpoint, Be almost certainly could have done it (other OS's have... BSD, LinuxPPC, Darwin..) From a legal standpoint, it's not clear what Apple could have done about it -- other than burn up Be's resources in a frivolous lawsuit, which isn't trivial, but it's not certain that such a lawsuit would even have enough merit to do any serious burning.
Nope, I think that Apple was just unfriendly enough at just the time that people in the Intel world were getting friendly with Be. And part of Be's deal with the Intel world was to move out of PPC. I keep thinking this because it seems like Be would have had nothing to lose (and some customers to gain) by, if nothing else, unofficially supporting the new Apple/PPC HW (saying: "it might work, it might not, don't call us if it doesn't: this is unsupported HW, though some folks have had success"). But they chose to forgo that free benefit. And they're smart folks. They probably would have only done that for a good reason...
Not to say that this wasn't a rational decision for Be. Just want to say I think it wasn't all Apple's fault Be isn't producing stuff for their HW anymore -- even if Be's PR department decided to make it look that way in the FAQ.
I had their policy for a year. I was pretty happy at $70 per month. I didn't know that I could do a bit better, but I did know I could have done a lot worse.
But it got worse. I never found it necessary to make a claim in that year. However, inside 6 months, the rates were hiked to $100 per month. Hmmm, I thought. Time to shop around. By the time they hiked to $135 per month, I decided it was definitely time to bail. I was back in school by that point, and used BYU's health plan (fairly nice to single students).
MEGA (the insurer of the NASE plan) said the cost increase was due to rising medical costs. %100 in 1 year? I think not.
The thing I hate most about old machines isn't their slowness. It's the clunky cases. I often feel old machines could be great single purpose devices (not just network stuff), but I just can't like the clunky cases.
So what I need is a crash course in how you go about repackaging old machines so they still work, but they're smaller. Can anyone point me to something?
A special part of repackaging is interfacing. A honkin' huge monitor just doesn't seem right for a single purpose device. How about a tinier CRT, or LED display... know about that?
* Fair-minded Intellectual Property Laws and fair minded administration of those laws.
* Freer Radio and communications -- citizen access to a broader spectrum of media (though the net already has improved the situation...)
* Microcredit -- no, not Micropayment, though that'd be nice. But Microcredit loans, like the Grameen Bank does. I'd like to see that idea wider spread; I guess it already exists.
A while back, I heard that Symantec had also released some of their old development stuff free as well (Think C 5? Think Pascal?). I poked around their website, but couldn't find much. Anybody know anything?
Also, anybody wanna help me petition to get Turbo Prolog released? It was actually sold to a company called PDC a ways back; now that they're several years into "Visual Prolog" maybe they'd release the old DOS version?
Ahh, Turbo Prolog. I worked for 5 years teaching high school kids how to use it at a BYU summer camp. We switched to Prolog from Pascal because half of everyone interested in CS already knew Pascal, and Prolog really teaches a different way of thinking that can somewhat transfer over to functional languages, too. Lots of fun, and the libraries it had (characteristic of the Borland Turbos) added made it actually useful. There's still some things I would rather code in Prolog than anything else. I haven't found a Prolog I like as much yet (or even, really, a useable one).
However, unless the folks that Borland sold Turbo Prolog to (PDC - Prolog Development Corp) open up and let Prolog for DOS go free (they've got "Visual Prolog" now, for Win9x, NT, and supposedly Linux), we probably won't see a free usable version of Prolog. Especially for DOS.
First of all, Copyright -- as in the idea (and laws that say) you have some control over the destiny over your creative works -- is not dead. Enforceability might be dying, or at least weakened. Control at all times of fixed form of the creative work and how that form is distributed is somewhat problematic, and becoming more so. Since profits are generally made by distributing and charging for various fixed forms, a business model is the challenge. But the basic idea of copyright still has merit (as is frequently pointed out, it makes the GPL possible). And the authors of the SPP article give a nod to this idea, when they talk about funding through "Advertising on the Download Site." The SPP is an idea for a business model, and not too bad at that (some flaws, to be sure, but not bad).
Second of all, I think we can count on some (not complete) public adherence to copyright law. In many cases, people (ummm... me) pirate things just because they can't afford to buy it. They'd (I'd) pirate less if either the works they wanted were less money or they had more. Are there some people who would try to get everything free? Yep. But for the most part, I don't think the public is a mass of rabid duplicators waiting to redistribute anything that falls into their hands to everyone they know, nor are they going to go to the effort to find a covert source for everything they want. I'm a pirate sometimes, and a legitimate purchaser sometimes. Probably most people are pretty much the same way. Copyright control & adherence, in my view, will never be complete, but neither will it be totally disregarded.
So mix up the business models. Give away some stuff as a loss leader, and don't try to control the distribution. Sell some other stuff, either by download or in print or on a CD or something. Use the SPP, or put up a website and ask for contributions and promise all those who donate a special release of a creative work. Be creative. Success of one model doesn't preclude use of the others.
One of the coolest promos I ever took advantage of was Toad the Wet Sprocket's listener appreciation tour. If you bought a CD at a participating store, you got a free concert ticket. Buying the CD was a no brainer -- buying 6 CDs was a no brainer. Even if it sucked, I got concert tickets. The value for $13.50 was suffecient to make me buy. Now, concerts are different thing than IP (fixed creative works), and I'm not sure what my point is there, but it was a cool promo and it worked like a charm on me. Maybe the moral of the story is that if you provide value for the price, people will pay.
There are, of course, probably some legitimate cases where you wouldn't want others linking to your content. The right to control (or at least influence) the destiny of your content is a debatable issue, but many folks on/. would probably agree there is a case for it.
Still, sticking something out in the open on a web server is invitation to have it indiscriminately linked to and copied. Your first effort should be to make some technological effort to keep from linking. (Not hard. You read/., you probably know there's a number of ways you could do this.) Your second effort should be a friendly reminder on your site _not_ to link whatever you want linked, and friendly contact with anyone you know has overlooked that (deliberately or non). Legal action, with all its financial requirements and precedent setting potential, should be last.
Much of the complaint I have (and other posters seem to share) is that it doesn't seem like ASCAP is looking out for anyone but themselves. The Wired article notes that they showed up to collect fees from TravelFinder.com, but it doesn't say they were representing anyone -- not even the radio stations. Not the artists. It doesn't even say whether ASCAP knew artists that were part of ASCAP were part of the content of TravelFinder.com. And from the account, it sounds like the links told viewers where the content was coming from. This doesn't sound like the case of some poor content producer/provider getting robbed blind by deceiving links.
But nobody does anything about it. I fully expect to see an article on Slashdot one day with a picture of Einstein by it on how someone IS doing something about the weather. But I've been following slashdot for a while now, and I don't see a whole lot about people doing anything about IP issues.
This is interesting, considering the fact that I see the Open Source community as very self-reliant. Cooperative, yes, but also, self-reliant.
I have seen some insightful posts now and again. And some folks have pointed out that there are, in existence, several organizations that exist to work with these issues.
I'm going to list some of these at the end of my post. If you know of others, I'd be interested to hear about them. I'd also be interested in knowing what you folks think of their efforts & effectiveness. And I'm also interested hearing other ideas about what we could DO about this problem. The law system seems to have been designed to be adversarial, with each side of an issue to be represented by an advocate. We've got to have some good advocates, or the law system will fail us.
Organizations:
FSF, of course (http://www.fsf.org) The Electronic Frontier Foundation (http://www.eff.org) Digital Future Coalition (http://www.dfc.org/) Web Media Advisory Council (http://www.com-prod.com/wmac.org/) Home Recording Rights Coalition (http://www.hrrc.org/)
Maybe that Ralph Nader guy is even doing something.
Other Online Resources:
Cyberspace Law Center (http://www.cybersquirrel.com/clc/index.html) Nolo (DYI law stuff, mostly) (http://www.nolo.com) FindLaw (http://www.findlaw.com)
All these links are listed simply on this page:
http://sun.he.net/~uvm/links/ip.html
And feel free to email me (weston@byu.edu) if you're interested in working on this problem, have insights onto who really is, or if you have other comments.
The problem is that the audience might not be big enough... ie, people who are able to read intelligent comparison without getting angry that it didn't take their side. Let alone people who could actually produce it.
I've been thinking about this. I'm beginning to notice that in many ways, some of Microsoft's products are satisfactory for most of my "everyday" end-user type needs. They're even satisfactory for my net access needs. So, I wonder, why do I have lingering (OK, sometimes consuming) hostility toward them? Largely because of their behavior. I worry that someday they really might win and I'll have no choice. Though Open Source largely seems to have fixed the no choice problem for now.
I think I also hate them because I got my broadest exposure to their products from 1993-1995. I'd always thought DOS was emasculated UNIX, but when I encountered FoxPro 2.5 for DOS (and was expected to write a real application in it; this while Delphi actually existed)and Win 3.1 and its ilk up close, I really hated Microsoft. But Windows 95 and NT really are better (than previous MS products). Although I will never touch FoxPro again, maybe not even for large sums of money.
Hmmm. I'm just meandering. I guess my main point is that it's snuck up on me that MS's products, by and large, have become tolerable for me. In some cases, even adequate. Anybody else feeling this?
OK, Cliff Stoll's Silicon Snake Oil was a big, rambling book, but the point should be well taken. The internet is cool, technology is cool, they're both a barrel of fun, useful, and many other positive things. But they are _not_ a panacea or the solution to all problems. Go outside once in a while. You do better general thinking, and sometimes you even hack better.
Slashdot Mirror
Intellectual property claims aren't necessarily always evil,
but frivolous, overly-broad claims seem to be a growing problem
(e.g., sightsound.com's patenting of internet delivered audio/video,
or OpenMarket's patent on shopping carts).
We can whine, posit, and conjecture all the day long
on Slashdot about greed of various media and software
companies and their lawyers, but what can we really start
to DO about it?
Just want to split a certain hair, here.
It seems to me that Be's decision to move away
from the Apple/PPC HW was just as politcal as Apple's decision not to help them out. From an engineering standpoint, Be almost certainly could have done it (other OS's have... BSD, LinuxPPC, Darwin..) From a legal standpoint, it's not clear what Apple could have done about it -- other than burn up Be's resources in a frivolous lawsuit, which isn't trivial, but it's not certain that such a lawsuit would even have enough merit to do any serious burning.
Nope, I think that Apple was just unfriendly enough at just the time that people in the Intel world were getting friendly with Be. And part of Be's deal with the Intel world was to move out of PPC. I keep thinking this because it seems like Be would have had nothing to lose (and some customers to gain) by, if nothing else, unofficially supporting the new Apple/PPC HW (saying: "it might work, it might not, don't call us if it doesn't: this is unsupported HW, though some folks have had success"). But they chose to forgo that free benefit. And they're smart folks. They probably would have only done that for a good reason...
Not to say that this wasn't a rational decision for Be. Just want to say I think it wasn't all Apple's fault Be isn't producing stuff for their HW anymore -- even if Be's PR department decided to make it look that way in the FAQ.
I had their policy for a year. I was pretty happy at $70 per month. I didn't know that I could do a bit better, but I did know I could have done a lot worse.
But it got worse. I never found it necessary to make a claim in that year. However, inside 6 months, the rates were hiked to $100 per month. Hmmm, I thought. Time to shop around. By the time they hiked to $135 per month, I decided it was definitely time to bail. I was back in school by that point, and used BYU's health plan (fairly nice to single students).
MEGA (the insurer of the NASE plan) said the cost increase was due to rising medical costs. %100 in 1 year? I think not.
The thing I hate most about old machines isn't
their slowness. It's the clunky cases. I often
feel old machines could be great single purpose
devices (not just network stuff), but I just can't
like the clunky cases.
So what I need is a crash course in how you go
about repackaging old machines so they still work,
but they're smaller. Can anyone point me to something?
A special part of repackaging is interfacing. A honkin' huge monitor just doesn't seem right for a
single purpose device. How about a tinier CRT,
or LED display... know about that?
Things I'm interested in seeing come to pass:
* Fair-minded Intellectual Property Laws and fair minded administration of those laws.
* Freer Radio and communications -- citizen access to a broader spectrum of media (though the net already has improved the situation...)
* Microcredit -- no, not Micropayment, though that'd be nice. But Microcredit loans, like the Grameen Bank does. I'd like to see that idea wider spread; I guess it already exists.
* Better traffic flow!
Weston
Anyone know of any good books on this subject?
I've culled all the URLs I can from the posts above, but I'm looking for some good texts, too.
Please, suggest a few!
A while back, I heard that Symantec had also
released some of their old development stuff
free as well (Think C 5? Think Pascal?). I
poked around their website, but couldn't find
much. Anybody know anything?
Also, anybody wanna help me petition to get
Turbo Prolog released? It was actually sold
to a company called PDC a ways back; now that
they're several years into "Visual Prolog" maybe
they'd release the old DOS version?
-Weston
iowa_so8ng@hot8mail.com (Remove eights)
Ahh, Turbo Prolog. I worked for 5 years teaching high school kids how to use it at a BYU summer camp. We switched to Prolog from Pascal because half of everyone interested in CS already knew Pascal, and Prolog really teaches a different way of thinking that can somewhat transfer over to functional languages, too. Lots of fun, and the libraries it had (characteristic of the Borland Turbos) added made it actually useful. There's still some things I would rather code in Prolog than anything else. I haven't found a Prolog I like as much yet (or even, really, a useable one).
However, unless the folks that Borland sold Turbo Prolog to (PDC - Prolog Development Corp) open up and let Prolog for DOS go free (they've got "Visual Prolog" now, for Win9x, NT, and supposedly Linux), we probably won't see a free usable version of Prolog. Especially for DOS.
Anybody want to start a petition? Email me.
(iowa_so8ng@hot8mail.com -- Remove eights).
First of all, Copyright -- as in the idea (and laws that say) you have some control over the destiny over your creative works -- is not dead. Enforceability might be dying, or at least weakened. Control at all times of fixed form of the creative work and how that form is distributed is somewhat problematic, and becoming more so. Since profits are generally made by distributing and charging for various fixed forms, a business model is the challenge. But the basic idea of copyright still has merit (as is frequently pointed out, it makes the GPL possible). And the authors of the SPP article give a nod to this idea, when they talk about funding through "Advertising on the Download Site." The SPP
is an idea for a business model, and not too bad at that (some flaws, to be sure, but not bad).
Second of all, I think we can count on some (not complete) public adherence to copyright law. In many cases, people (ummm... me) pirate things just because they can't afford to buy it. They'd (I'd) pirate less if either the works they wanted were less money or they had more. Are there some people who would try to get everything free? Yep. But for the most part, I don't think the public is a mass of rabid duplicators waiting to redistribute anything that falls into their hands to everyone they know, nor are they going to go to the effort to find a covert source for everything they want. I'm a pirate sometimes, and a legitimate purchaser
sometimes. Probably most people are pretty much the same way. Copyright control & adherence, in my view, will never be complete, but neither will it be totally disregarded.
So mix up the business models. Give away some stuff as a loss leader, and don't try to control the distribution. Sell some other stuff, either by download or in print or on a CD or something. Use the SPP, or put up a website and ask for contributions and promise all those who donate a special release of a creative work. Be creative.
Success of one model doesn't preclude use of the others.
One of the coolest promos I ever took advantage of
was Toad the Wet Sprocket's listener appreciation tour. If you bought a CD at a participating store, you got a free concert ticket. Buying the CD was a no brainer -- buying 6 CDs was a no brainer. Even if it sucked, I got concert tickets. The value for
$13.50 was suffecient to make me buy. Now, concerts are different thing than IP (fixed creative works), and I'm not sure what my point is
there, but it was a cool promo and it worked like a charm on me. Maybe the moral of the story is that if you provide value for the price, people will pay.
There are, of course, probably some legitimate cases where you wouldn't want others linking to your content. The right to control (or at least influence) the destiny of your content is a debatable issue, but many folks on /. would probably agree there is a case for it.
/., you probably know there's a number of ways you could do this.) Your second effort should be a friendly reminder on your site _not_ to link whatever you want linked, and friendly contact with anyone you know has overlooked that (deliberately or non). Legal action, with all its financial requirements and precedent setting potential, should be last.
Still, sticking something out in the open on a web server is invitation to have it indiscriminately linked to and copied. Your first effort should be to make some technological effort to keep from linking. (Not hard. You read
Much of the complaint I have (and other posters seem to share) is that it doesn't seem like ASCAP is looking out for anyone but themselves. The Wired article notes that they showed up to collect fees from TravelFinder.com, but it doesn't say they were representing anyone -- not even the radio stations. Not the artists. It doesn't even say whether ASCAP knew artists that were part of ASCAP were part of the content of
TravelFinder.com. And from the account, it sounds like the links told viewers where the content was coming from. This doesn't sound like the case of some poor content producer/provider getting robbed blind by deceiving links.
But nobody does anything about it. I fully expect to see an article on Slashdot one day with a picture of Einstein by it on how someone IS doing something about the weather. But I've been following slashdot for a while now, and I don't see a whole lot about people doing anything about IP issues.
This is interesting, considering the fact that I see the Open Source community as very self-reliant. Cooperative, yes, but also, self-reliant.
I have seen some insightful posts now and again. And some folks have pointed out that there are, in existence, several organizations that exist to work with these issues.
I'm going to list some of these at the end of my post. If you know of others, I'd be interested to hear about them. I'd also be interested in knowing what you folks think of their efforts & effectiveness. And I'm also interested hearing other ideas about what we could DO about this problem. The law system seems to have been designed to be adversarial, with each side of an issue to be represented by an advocate. We've got to have some good advocates, or the law system will fail us.
Organizations:
FSF, of course (http://www.fsf.org)
The Electronic Frontier Foundation
(http://www.eff.org)
Digital Future Coalition
(http://www.dfc.org/)
Web Media Advisory Council
(http://www.com-prod.com/wmac.org/)
Home Recording Rights Coalition
(http://www.hrrc.org/)
Maybe that Ralph Nader guy is even doing something.
Other Online Resources:
Cyberspace Law Center
(http://www.cybersquirrel.com/clc/index.html)
Nolo (DYI law stuff, mostly)
(http://www.nolo.com)
FindLaw
(http://www.findlaw.com)
All these links are listed simply on this page:
http://sun.he.net/~uvm/links/ip.html
And feel free to email me (weston@byu.edu) if you're interested in working on this problem, have insights onto who really is, or if you have other comments.
The problem is that the audience might not be big enough... ie, people who are able to read intelligent comparison without getting angry that it didn't take their side. Let alone people who could actually produce it.
I've been thinking about this. I'm beginning to notice that in many ways, some of Microsoft's products are satisfactory for most of my "everyday" end-user type needs. They're even satisfactory for my net access needs. So, I wonder, why do I have lingering (OK, sometimes consuming) hostility toward them? Largely because of their behavior. I worry that someday they really might win and I'll have no choice. Though Open Source largely seems to have fixed the no choice problem for now.
I think I also hate them because I got my broadest exposure to their products from 1993-1995. I'd always thought DOS was emasculated
UNIX, but when I encountered FoxPro 2.5 for DOS
(and was expected to write a real application
in it; this while Delphi actually existed)and Win 3.1 and its ilk up close, I really hated Microsoft. But Windows 95 and NT really are better (than previous MS products). Although I will never touch FoxPro again, maybe not even for large sums of money.
Hmmm. I'm just meandering. I guess my main point is that it's snuck up on me that MS's products, by and large, have become tolerable for me. In some cases, even adequate. Anybody else feeling
this?
OK, Cliff Stoll's Silicon Snake Oil was a big,
rambling book, but the point should be well taken.
The internet is cool, technology is cool, they're
both a barrel of fun, useful, and many other
positive things. But they are _not_ a panacea or
the solution to all problems. Go outside once in
a while. You do better general thinking, and
sometimes you even hack better.
1) Get contact info for judge, especially email
:|
2) Attempt contact, try to obtain a statement. Maybe he has good reasons (hope springs eternal).
Maybe he could be influenced by reason...
3) Find out if he's elected or appointed.
4) If he's elected, find some way to make sure
this event stands out in public memory come
the next election.
I'll work on it. Anyone else is welcome to
do the same. Are there any good ideas that
I missed?
Is there a group that takes action against
such things? This whole patent thing is out
of control, as most posters seem to agree.
If there's not a group, anybody wanna start
one?