Since Microsoft prefers to settle out of court for various levels of royalties and/or cross licencing no one knows for sure what the patents involved are or what the terms of the licence are. If they actually went to court over the matter the public would probably know, but Microsoft rarely does that as they're usually on the receiving end of patent lawsuits. The patents themselves are public, but the licencing agreement is not; this is very common in all industries as licencing agreements may reveal preferential pricing practices to the detriment of the licencor.
As for the $2 billion figure, that's just a number from a single analyst. It could be off by a factor of ten or more. In most cases though royalties typically amount to about a quarter of a device's retail cost. A $400 tablet may be encumbered by $100 in royalties and fees directly in addition to royalties and fees that were already paid by the manufacturer of parts that are part of the bill of materials. Believe it or not, that's dirt cheap compared to developing the whole thing from the ground up.
Microsoft rarely takes allegations of infringement to court, they almost always prefer to settle for royalties or cross-licencing. That being said, the FAT patents have survived many legal challenge and their validity has been upheld.
It's not trolling because Microsoft operates in the mobile market, designed the systems in question as a part of their market activities, and continues to use and license the systems in question as part of their market activities.
It's not simply a case of some unknown shell company purchasing broad and previously unknown patents in an attempt to squeeze settlements out major players. Everyone knows whom the FAT patents belong to, what the licencing terms are, and what will happen if they're not licensed.
The best selling smartphones in North America (the iPhone) do not have removable storage and do not use the FAT file system. Other phone manufactures are free to either implement FAT support as a matter of adding value and pay Microsoft the associated royalties, or leave it out.
Microsoft isn't patent trolling here. They would be patent trolling if they were simply holding onto broadly defined patents to use them offensively. The patents in question, which I believe relate to data storage and file systems, have been used by Microsoft for a very long time and have been challenged unsuccessfully before. Microsoft's own engineers did the work, not Google's. Google and various Android manufacturers are free to not implement them.
It's to stagger the load increase on the battlelog backend so that they can address loading issues hour by hour without the whole system crashing. There's still a few bugs to work out but by and large the launch has been quite smooth. None of the unusable battlelog features of the BF3 launch.
No, but it's a universal installer. One driver package for all supported operating systems, 32 and 64 bit variants, and all supported graphics cards. It's pretty impressive really.
They did not provide any sort of implicit permission. The copyright holders may have contracted with Nuke Piracy, and Nuke Piracy may very well have had express permission to use it to setup a honey pot, but the users who got caught in the trap had no way of knowing that.
Copyright law does not follow a "use it or lose it" doctrine like trademark law does and to some extent patent law as well. Many people confuse these three sections of law, but they are almost completely disjoint.
Copyright owners are under no obligation to pursue infringement of their work or follow any sort of consistent licencing policy. Setting up a honeypot such as this is a perfectly legal tactic provided that they are careful to avoid creating implied authorization. It seems to me like they were quite careful and that the users simply got too comfortable and trusting.
IANA's administration isn't limited to the USA. It handles IP assignment for all of the regional registries world wide. Granted its enforcement mechanism is limited to "we all agreed to play nice so lets do that" but if a deallocation by IANA/ARIN was picked up by enough networks it would make finding Antigua from any place in the world quite difficult especially if the networks carrying traffic [b]to[/b] Antigua drop it from their routing tables. Such a scenario is extremely unlikely though; Antigua has had this option on the table for years and haven't acted on it out of fear of reprisal.
Don't be stupid. Antigua is not a US state or territory. The anti-gambling law which sparked this row is a domestic law which displaces treaty obligations.
If Antigua decides to simply disregard IP obligations to the USA then the Department of Commerce could very well have IANA black hole the entire country by deallocating its' IP blocks. A work around may pop up eventually but doing so would certainly make it difficult to use as a piracy haven.
Supposedly they bundled the software in with the other JS but stripped out the licence. Understandable given the plaintext nature of JS but still a licence violation none the less.
healthcare.gov didn't fail because the designers didn't use open source software at every point in the chain - if the rumors are to be believed, an audit found open source code in there that had simply had its licence removed - it failed because it was designed by the lowest bidder and was not subject to the rigorous testing regime demanded by a national service.
FOSS is great for reigning in costs, but it is not a patch for unskilled developers or a crutch for incompetent project managers who are unable to keep the project on track and within scope.
I disagree. Corsair products are almost always of high build quality and reliability. They use reputable OEMs to manufacture their high end products (Flextronics/Seasonic for their PSUs) and have some of the best cases around. I wouldn't trade my Obsidian 800D for anything except for a 900D.
Corporate personhood does not shield employers or employees from legal liability pertaining to their own actions. It simply shields investors from liability beyond their investment.
Point in case, Jeffrey Skilling is currently serving a 24 year prison sentence for actions that he took as the CEO of Enron.
Physically prevent it? They can't. However, releasing or transferring the software would be blatant and deliberate violation of a court order. That can carry jail time.
Both companies have done this for quite some time. They often introduce new products into emerging markets to sell off old silicon.
The Radeon 9100 (2003) was a rebadged Radeon 8500 (2001)
The HD 3410 (2009) was a rebadged HD 2400 (2007), and the HD 3610 (2009) is a rebadge and slightly retuned HD 2600 (2007). In fact, most of the HD 3000 series was a patch for the short lived HD 2000 series.
The HD 4580 (2011) is a rebadged HD 3750 (2008).
With the exception of the HD 6900 series GPUs, the entire HD 6000 family is just a fine tuning of the HD 5000 family. Only the HD 6930, HD 6950, and HD 6970 are based on an actual architectural revision.
It got really bad with the HD 7000 series though, with all of the 73xx through 76xx models being based on low end HD 6000 GPUs which were themselves refinements of the HD 5000 family.
Slashdot Mirror
Since Microsoft prefers to settle out of court for various levels of royalties and/or cross licencing no one knows for sure what the patents involved are or what the terms of the licence are. If they actually went to court over the matter the public would probably know, but Microsoft rarely does that as they're usually on the receiving end of patent lawsuits. The patents themselves are public, but the licencing agreement is not; this is very common in all industries as licencing agreements may reveal preferential pricing practices to the detriment of the licencor.
As for the $2 billion figure, that's just a number from a single analyst. It could be off by a factor of ten or more. In most cases though royalties typically amount to about a quarter of a device's retail cost. A $400 tablet may be encumbered by $100 in royalties and fees directly in addition to royalties and fees that were already paid by the manufacturer of parts that are part of the bill of materials. Believe it or not, that's dirt cheap compared to developing the whole thing from the ground up.
Microsoft rarely takes allegations of infringement to court, they almost always prefer to settle for royalties or cross-licencing. That being said, the FAT patents have survived many legal challenge and their validity has been upheld.
http://news.cnet.com/Microsofts-file-system-patent-upheld/2100-1012_3-6025447.html
It's not trolling because Microsoft operates in the mobile market, designed the systems in question as a part of their market activities, and continues to use and license the systems in question as part of their market activities.
It's not simply a case of some unknown shell company purchasing broad and previously unknown patents in an attempt to squeeze settlements out major players. Everyone knows whom the FAT patents belong to, what the licencing terms are, and what will happen if they're not licensed.
The best selling smartphones in North America (the iPhone) do not have removable storage and do not use the FAT file system. Other phone manufactures are free to either implement FAT support as a matter of adding value and pay Microsoft the associated royalties, or leave it out.
Microsoft isn't patent trolling here. They would be patent trolling if they were simply holding onto broadly defined patents to use them offensively. The patents in question, which I believe relate to data storage and file systems, have been used by Microsoft for a very long time and have been challenged unsuccessfully before. Microsoft's own engineers did the work, not Google's. Google and various Android manufacturers are free to not implement them.
Apple and Microsoft have a lot of long running cross-licencing agreements which almost certainly cover the patents in question.
A number can't be trademarked, that's why they lost it.
Fishing instructions are worthless to anyone who can't read or doesn't have a fishing boat.
Pharmaceutical information is worthless to anyone who is 1,000 kilometers away from the nearest pharmacy.
New farming techniques are worthless to anyone that is unable to farm because all the fertile land has been seized by the local warlord.
Knowledge is nice, but it isn't quite as powerful as you might think.
Oh yeah I'm sure that the pirates are enjoying the lovely single player campaign as we speak
It's to stagger the load increase on the battlelog backend so that they can address loading issues hour by hour without the whole system crashing. There's still a few bugs to work out but by and large the launch has been quite smooth. None of the unusable battlelog features of the BF3 launch.
No, but it's a universal installer. One driver package for all supported operating systems, 32 and 64 bit variants, and all supported graphics cards. It's pretty impressive really.
Wrong on all accounts.
>IANAL
Good, because you're wrong about pretty much everything that you wrote.
They did not provide any sort of implicit permission. The copyright holders may have contracted with Nuke Piracy, and Nuke Piracy may very well have had express permission to use it to setup a honey pot, but the users who got caught in the trap had no way of knowing that.
Copyright law does not follow a "use it or lose it" doctrine like trademark law does and to some extent patent law as well. Many people confuse these three sections of law, but they are almost completely disjoint.
Copyright owners are under no obligation to pursue infringement of their work or follow any sort of consistent licencing policy. Setting up a honeypot such as this is a perfectly legal tactic provided that they are careful to avoid creating implied authorization. It seems to me like they were quite careful and that the users simply got too comfortable and trusting.
IANA's administration isn't limited to the USA. It handles IP assignment for all of the regional registries world wide. Granted its enforcement mechanism is limited to "we all agreed to play nice so lets do that" but if a deallocation by IANA/ARIN was picked up by enough networks it would make finding Antigua from any place in the world quite difficult especially if the networks carrying traffic [b]to[/b] Antigua drop it from their routing tables. Such a scenario is extremely unlikely though; Antigua has had this option on the table for years and haven't acted on it out of fear of reprisal.
Don't be stupid. Antigua is not a US state or territory. The anti-gambling law which sparked this row is a domestic law which displaces treaty obligations.
Reading comprehension...
If Antigua decides to simply disregard IP obligations to the USA then the Department of Commerce could very well have IANA black hole the entire country by deallocating its' IP blocks. A work around may pop up eventually but doing so would certainly make it difficult to use as a piracy haven.
The party negotiating or signing a treaty rarely has the authority to create the domestic legal framework necessary to enforce that treaty.
Diplomats sign treaties, legislatures write them into law. This process is called ratification.
Multiple supreme court cases have further entrenched this by declaring that domestic law always trumps international obligations.
The core components of OSX are completely open source in the form of the Darwin operating system.
This is not HFT and as such a small delay would not have changed anything. It went on for 45 minutes, not 45 microseconds.
supposedly it was a golf course contract of sorts. I don't know all the details, but I do know that it was not handled in a professional manner.
It was on /. a few days ago if I recall. Here's at least one news source
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20131018/13291924928/healthcaregov-violates-open-source-license.shtml
Supposedly they bundled the software in with the other JS but stripped out the licence. Understandable given the plaintext nature of JS but still a licence violation none the less.
healthcare.gov didn't fail because the designers didn't use open source software at every point in the chain - if the rumors are to be believed, an audit found open source code in there that had simply had its licence removed - it failed because it was designed by the lowest bidder and was not subject to the rigorous testing regime demanded by a national service.
FOSS is great for reigning in costs, but it is not a patch for unskilled developers or a crutch for incompetent project managers who are unable to keep the project on track and within scope.
I disagree. Corsair products are almost always of high build quality and reliability. They use reputable OEMs to manufacture their high end products (Flextronics/Seasonic for their PSUs) and have some of the best cases around. I wouldn't trade my Obsidian 800D for anything except for a 900D.
Corporate personhood does not shield employers or employees from legal liability pertaining to their own actions. It simply shields investors from liability beyond their investment.
Point in case, Jeffrey Skilling is currently serving a 24 year prison sentence for actions that he took as the CEO of Enron.
Physically prevent it? They can't. However, releasing or transferring the software would be blatant and deliberate violation of a court order. That can carry jail time.
Both companies have done this for quite some time. They often introduce new products into emerging markets to sell off old silicon.
The Radeon 9100 (2003) was a rebadged Radeon 8500 (2001)
The HD 3410 (2009) was a rebadged HD 2400 (2007), and the HD 3610 (2009) is a rebadge and slightly retuned HD 2600 (2007). In fact, most of the HD 3000 series was a patch for the short lived HD 2000 series.
The HD 4580 (2011) is a rebadged HD 3750 (2008).
With the exception of the HD 6900 series GPUs, the entire HD 6000 family is just a fine tuning of the HD 5000 family. Only the HD 6930, HD 6950, and HD 6970 are based on an actual architectural revision.
It got really bad with the HD 7000 series though, with all of the 73xx through 76xx models being based on low end HD 6000 GPUs which were themselves refinements of the HD 5000 family.