In neither case does the law benefit the consumer.
You obviously didn't understand, WHY Nintendo did get fined. Not about setting different prices in different countries in the EU (that's perfectly legal). It was about having contracts with local distributors and retailers forbidding them a) to take advantage of price differences and selling Nintendo stuff in countries other than the home country of the retailer and b) selling to people known to ship the stuff out of the country to resell it elsewhere. In return Nintendo awarded the distributors with exclusive rights to sell Nintendo stuff, thus creating a local monopoly in each country unchallenged by Nintendo retailers from other countries.
One of the results of those politics were the high price differences between different countries in the EU, which triggered an investigation by the EU competition commissioner. But they only where the trigger, not the issue.
Inside a EU country, you're also not allowed to ask different prices in different regions. For instance, telcos can't ask less for a telephone connection in a city (where mass coverage is cheaper) than they do in rural areas. They're forced to spread out their costs evenly.
You are messing things up.
It is allowed for a company to charge whatever they want to charge for a product and wherever they want to charge that price. So lets say BP may offer gasoil at a station in London for a different price than at a station in St Helens.
There were exceptions from this rule, especially for the former state owned, state founded or by the state warranted monopolies like the railways and the telephone companies. To encourage competition in this business, the old monopolies got a strict ruleset for pricing and service standards, so they weren't able to subsidize attractive markets like big towns by charging higher fees in the more rural regions, which would have been impossible for a newly formed company without a country wide network which was payed for by tax money.
There is still another exception, especially in the german langue region (Austria, Germany and Switzerland). This is the price fixing for print media. It still exists for historical reasons, but the EU competition commissioner is already targetting the issue.
On the contrary, multinationals are only operating within the framework provided by national governments. When governments dismantle their trade barriers, such as import tarriffs and quotas, then price differences will simply be arbitraged away by brokers (i.e. you see something selling for $10 in country A and $5 in country B, export/import it and sell it in country A for $6 - eventually the margin will tend to zero). But that can only happen if there are no obstacles to freely moving goods and capital around.
[ ] You understood the issue at stake.
There were no laws, taxes or duties imposed by the different countries causing the price differences. There were contracts between Nintendo and the different distributors and retailers in each country of the EU explicitely forbidding reimport of cheaper Nintendo products from other countries.
So your brokers wouldn't be able to get the stuff in the cheap country and sell them in the other country, because Nintendo would stop delivering the stuff to the distributor because of breaching the contract and selling stuff to people known as reimporters. And the distributors would play nice because of the margin they got from selling Nintendo stuff (even though the price was lower than elsewhere, but also was Nintendos grosselling price). It is amazing what having a local monopoly can do to the moral of a company;)
Nintendo got fined for unlawfully signing such contracts, and the distributors also got fined for signing those. Because the contracts are against common EU law that explicitely forbits artificial barriers. It was the EU who played the Free Market Defender [tm].
Your actually wrong here. If you sell your computer to Jo Bob down the street the copy of Windows is actually illegal. Microsoft was sending out fliers to schools and other non-profits recently that explained how they had to be careful with licenses on computers.
Interesting thing, this US law. In Germany the Federal Constitutional Court ruled otherwise. According to this rules you can perfectly legally buy a computer with an OEM licence and sell only the licence or only the computer and keep the other part of the bundle (or sell it to someone else).
The reasoning was, that Copyright (or the german equivalent Urheberrecht, roughly translated to Author's Right) can't provide any means to control distribution channels. First sale doctrin rules higher than Copyright. By the way: Click-tru-licences are no valid contracts in Germany anyway, because you have a contract with your dealer when you buy software, not a contract with the author of the software. So the only way for the author to control your usage of the software is the Author's Right, and this is a law and not a contract.
1) Strictly speaking, no. A PC is any descendant of the original IBM PC or of one of the many reverse-engineered BIOSen thereof.
Strictly speaking the first computers marketed as "Personal Computers" were the Apple ][ Series using the 6502 Processor. There was also the Personal Electronic Transactor from Commodore, also using the 6502 CPU.
After all, HDD manufacturers have unilaterally (as of today) shortened warranties from 3 years to 1.
Big problem for distributors in Europe... Here the law requires every seller to warrant the usability of technical equipment (at least) for two years. If the manufacturer doesn't give those two years of warranty on the sold equipment, the seller has to keep a stock of the equipment just to replace the failed ones. So either the manufacturer gives two years of warranty to the distributor, or the distributor walks over to a manufacturer who does. Or he stops selling harddrives. Either way the manufacturer looses.
Same is of course valid for ready built computers, not only single parts. Assemblers have either give a warranty for at least two years or the distributor looks for someone who does. In the tight market with sliding sales I doubt the assemblers or the manufacturers will be able to close shoulders and stand the urge from distribution channels to give two years of warranty. The distribution channels have no choice. They are required by law to do so.
So I'm wondering if some of the information in your posting are entirely accurate.
In fact there is a glitch. After region free players were beginning to become common things at least in the Region 2 countries, the DVD consortium did something called Advanced Regio Coding. This is in fact some piece of software on the DVD itself, which causes the DVD to not play if the Regio code is zero.
Embedded in the DVD standard is the possibility to execute small programs. This feature is used to check the actual regio setting while running the DVD and thus the ARC can block the "execution" of the DVD program.
One common aspect of contract law is that a contract must be mutually agreed on by both parties: it must be signed, by two people (sometimes more).
I don't know about U.S. law, but at least german law doesn't require the signing of a contract. It doesn't even require the written form of a contract.
The only thing german law requires is that both parties are agreeing on the contract. There are special contracts that require written form and signing, but they are especially named in the different bylaws.
In fact most contracts never ever get signed. You don't sign a contract when you buy milk. You don't sign a contract when you buy a bus ticket. In this case the contract terms are part of something that is called "general business conditions" in Germany, which are set by the shop or the transport company and published to the customers.
But you can also have individual contracts between two parties in Germany, to which both parties are bound, and which don't need written form or any type of signment. Lets say I am driving along the road, and you are hitchhiking, and I'll take you to the next town, then we have agreed on a contract. You are keeping me awake with some smalltalk, and I get you closer to your destination in exchange.
Not written down contracts aren't limited to such simple things. In fact every contract can be agreed on just by verbal communication, with the exception of those the law requires the written form. But often the parties want the written form for proof of the conditions. It is difficult for everyone to prove contract breaches to a court without being able to prove the actual conditions were set in different way than the actual fulfillments and to prove both parties have agreed upon them.
So don't think just because you didn't sign anything nobody could force you to fulfill your part in a contract.
Re:Too late. The cat is out of the bag.
on
"Squishy" DRM?
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· Score: 1
Mozart died nearly penniless, without even the money for a private grave. (He was buried in a mass grave, so we don't know exactly where to go to pay respects.) Yeah, that's a great incentive.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was one of the best paid musicians of his time. He was for instance giving music lessons to aristocratic people, getting a fee of about three gold ducates per hour. The girl, who cleaned his house, got 12 gold ducates per year. So if he was giving one hour of lessons a working day he had the yearly income of his house maiden after two and a half week.
W.A.Mozard and his wife were spending his money with both hands. Buying expensive things, having expensive parties, travelling to the best spas around. W.A.Mozart died not in poverty. It is true that he got buried in a mass grave, but this was because his wife hadn't any will to pay too much on a decent funeral. His body (or whatever one thought was his body) later got a second funeral, paid for by his "fans" and admirers.
W.A.Mozart died of bad health. But this was not because he wasn't able to pay a medican. It was because his lifestyle was exhausting him. Having parties all night and drinking too much and being a workaholic with his music destroyed his health. So W.A.Mozart is one of the worst examples anyone defending copyright can use.
I believe CBR is not the best way to encode music. For instance, why would you encode a 2-second silence gap with 192kbps if you don't have actually any discernible sound on it ?
Constant bit rates are interesting for streaming media. If your transfer process can assume, that the amount of data sent per fixed time frame is constant, it can use a simpler and more robust encoding scheme. Also warranting bandwith is more easily to handle.
Consumers used to vote with their dollars, no "balancing" was necessary. MS is betting on using monopoly power, and ignorant consumers to pull this one over on the public. Educated consumers are a necessary part of the free market, with technology becoming so complex, and specialization at an all time high, this may point to a larger problem, a complete breakdown of the free market, due to the lack of educated consumers.
Consumers still vote with their dollars (or whatever currency they are using...). And that's what I plan to do about DRM. I'll act as a consumer.
I buy "content" (whatever that is) because I expect something from it. I expect for instance information about something that matters to me. That's why I buy newspapers and endure advertisements on TV to watch the News. I expect something that helps me to get into a mood I like. Thar's why I listen to music or watch a melodramatic movie. I expect to hear someone else's opinion about a fact I can't really sort out myself. That's why I read commentaries and theatre critics. I am interested how a thought would work out if you think them further to the end. That's why I buy books of fiction. Or I just need some inspiration for myself. That's why I zap around on TV until I get to something that takes my attention. That's why I tune the radio until I get something that suits me. That's why I read some pages in a book and then put it back into the shelf.
Many of those things are very dependend on my mood. Sometimes I am too tired to watch the News. Sometimes I am to nervous to concentrate on a movie. Sometimes I just need someone with me to get into the mood for music. Sometimes I can't stand hypothetical or fictional situations because I am too occupied with my own situation.
There are just three ways for me to deal with "content". Either I can just take it whenever or wherever I want. That's why I buy books and CDs and videos. That's why there are News channels which constantly repeat the news over and over, so you can get many information within every 30min. Or it is something I have to be mentally prepared for. That's when I plan do go to a concert or a theatre. That's when I make a date with friends to have a private video night. And then there is the experimental way. Getting a bit from here, listening to a part from that, fiddling around with another thing, mixing two things together.
So for me there are three different kinds of "content". The one that's a commodity. Available wherever and whenever I want. The second one that's an event. With preparations and fixed timelines, unique and not to be repeated in the same way again. And the last one is like the big heap of stuff, where I walk around and turn some pages here, or just look at the covers there, take some random parts and make my own work from it.
So how fits DRM into this? It doesn't. It tells you that "content" is not a commodity. It is licensed per single consumption on a single place at a single time. It tells you that "content" isn't something that's unique. It can be repeated again and again, if you paid for it again and again. It is no single performance in a special environment. And it definitely isn't the big heap of stuff where you can walk around and get just some small parts here and fiddling arund with. It presents you with finished blocks that are unalterable. There are no ways to combine these things to new works. There is no way just to take that one sentence from here and the single tune from there. You always have to get the whole block, making experimental handling of the "content" virtually impossible or at least very, very expensive.
So my reaction is this: I don't buy DRM protected "content". It doesn't fit into my way to handle "content". DRM protected "content" is no offer to me that convinces me to pay money for. There is a whole world of unprotected "content" I have to explore before I feel the urge to look for the protected one. Whenever I see a "Top 100 books you should have read" list I see that I know no more than 30% of them. Whenever I stroll through a flea market I see music I never listened to. There are concerts and theatres everywhere I can go to to have a unique and nonrepeatable experience.
So I am just a consumer. I have a limited amount of money to spend. I plan to spend it on stuff that suits me. I can easily ignore offers. "Content" is nothing I need for life like food and water and housing an clothing. But if there is a "content provider", who wants to fiddle with my life and with my freedom and with my way to do things even though I really don't want his offerings, then I just get angry and tell him to piss off. I don't have any relation to him. So he should keep out of my way.
There is still one issue left: Make yourself invisible for a specified range of the spectrum, and you will be also blind in the same spectrum. There is no way to measure in a given spectrum without having a measurable effect in the same spectrum. Experimental physics is full of ways to figure out the influence of your own measurement on the "real" values of the things you are measuring.
As far as I know erasing the regio code in a DVD player is pretty common here in Germany. It's even a service your electronic store offers to you for a small fee, if you are not able to do that on your own.
On the other hand a person had to give up the business to buy large quantities of Regio 1 DVDs (namely U.S. american ones) and sell them in Germany, after he got a cease-and-desist-letter.
So the situation in Germany is somewhat paradox. It seems as if a shop is allowed to offer the service to unlock the regiocode for a fee, but importing DVDs from the U.S. and selling them in Germany is not.
No, it means that a jetliner has to be operating for a year with just 3 mins in the hangar. But about half its lifetime a jetliner is in maintenance, giving it an uptime of about 50%.
Sorry this should read 50% availability.
Yes I know there may be arguments that scheduled maintenance won't count. But even without counting this jetliner availability never reaches 99.999%.
About two years ago I had to fly a longer distance . I sat in the plane, but the plane didn't leave the gate for about an hour. Then the pilot spoke to us asking our patience for another hour, there would be a problem with the oil pressure and the mechanics were looking at it. After this hour he told us that the oilfilter was defective and had to be changed. And after another hour he asked us to leave the plane, there weren't any new oilfilter available at the airport and they had to get another one from another airport. After five hours we finally got clearance and started.
That's five hours unavailability. If this was the only unplanned outage for the plane at all, and it was on average available 99,999% this means a lifetime of 500000 hours or about 60 years for this plane without any further problem with the plane (included outer conditions like weather, grounding due to Sep 11 et. al.)
So planes on average are much more often unavailable than 0.001% of their operation time. The average delay for the Frankfurt Airport (FRA) is currently 15mins, if we assume that every plane lands on FRA about once per day this would be an average outage of 1%, 1000 times that of 5-9.
No, it means that a jetliner has to be operating for a year with just 3 mins in the hangar. But about half its lifetime a jetliner is in maintenance, giving it an uptime of about 50%.
And if you look back... There was a guy called Paul Nipkow who 1890 already filed a patent for the mechanical-optical picture disassemblation, even though at his time there was no means to convert the light impulses into electrical ones to transmit them. Reconversation was possible already with the light bow lamp though. Wonder why Farnsworth and Baird demonstrated their invention about 25 years after Nipkow's patent was filed. It surely has nothing to do with Nipkow's patent expiring just at this moment.
So, while the invention was already done 1890. the practical version using the Braun's tube (cathode ray tube) was demonstrated by Manfred von Ardenne in 1935 in Berlin.
And you have also to take into account, that SUVs are an U.S.-only phenomenon, not really catching on outside the U.S. for completely unknown reasons (can you spell fuel cost?).
How many of us can say our parents are actively downloading MP3's and burning them onto CD's? Answer: Very few. How many people do you know who have never burned an audio CD? Answer: Plenty.
For some reason I never downloaded anyMP3, and my parents not even own a computer... the CD player they own was a gift from my wife, my mother and me to my father's birthday about three or four years ago. Ah yes... My father used to be an engineer in the audio industry, develloping all those cool gadgets like tape recorders and stuff. So he is tech-savvy and knows how to operate a computer and understands even the algorithms that went into the MP3 encoders.
And me? Working in IT as a information security specialist I don't even have a sound card in my computer. It was more easily tax deductible that way, when I bought it, and even though I stuffed in more harddrives, memory and ethernet cards later, I never bothered to add a soundcard. For some reason I don't like sound with the computer games.
Why does this man persist in flogging the poor horse? At the risk of being flamed to a crisp... Software patents are a good idea. There, I said it. If it weren't for these patents, none of those big, bad companies like Microsoft would make any money, and computing technology wouldn't be art the point it is.
Here comes your fault... Microsoft makes money not from patents on software, but on closed source. Patents force the patent holder to open the source to the public.
Did you ever read something about Microsoft battling someone else infringing Microsoft's patents? No. They are bitching about copyright and reinventing ideas. And no patent ever hindered Microsoft to do so.
I think this would be flawed from the beginning. Take my IP I am often using. If you look up the netblock, it is assigned to a California based company, but the actual box, a Sun workstation, is in Germany on my desk and has an uplink there to the world. If I am using the windows box on a private network, it gets NATted on a firewall in California. If I am using the local proxy, it is back to Germany (but I am not using the local proxy, because the sites I almost use the windows box for are in the U:S., so there is no point in using public lines to cross the ocean.
So by browsing I would have to adjust the geo-headers all the time;)
If I am travelling around, I almost log in into my Sun box first, because all my bookmarks and history files are there, so I am technically browsing from Germany even though I may be in a hotel in Aruba Beach.
Local advertising only works with local ISPs. And that excludes for instance most AOLers, and most Germans too (largest provider is T-Online there, and it has not locatable IPs for the whole country.)
But copyright IS a right to control distribution channels!
Not quite right. Copyright is what it states: The right to copy a work of art. This is restricted to a certain juristical entity, which can license it to other people. But it is not about distribution of those copies. That means: If someone buys a truckload of MS-CDs to plaster his walls, then this may be against an EULA, but it is not a violation of the copyright, even it is kind of a distribution.
In Germany there is the Urheberrecht (Author's right), which does basicly the same. The Urheber (better translation is "The final cause";) ) has all rights to his work and can license them to other people. But he can never sell or donate the Urheberrecht itself to anyone else. There is no such thing as "work for hire" in the German law. There are other rights (Verwertungsrechte, translated to "Rights to Use"), which can be bought by other persons or entities.
The Federal Court ruled, that the ownership of even the Urheberrecht doesn't entitle Microsoft to control, how other people handle the licenses, they bought from other sources than Microsoft, as long as they don't violate the Urheberrecht.
Can you or somebody give a reference to more info about the legal situation in Germany? Is it completely legal to sell OEM licenses separately? Does Microsoft agree on that, or do they still hunt people who do so?
The situation was this: A german computer distibutor got problems with Microsoft where Microsoft claimed, the distributor was selling not licensed preinstalled Windows. Microsoft claimed, that the distributor was selling CD-ROM and Book with different computers and thus selling every license twice.
So Microsoft stopped the contract with this distributor, and the distributor was not getting OEM licenses anymore.
Then the distributor was starting to bid for not used OEM licenses on eBay and resold them with his computers instead of directly licensed software from Microsoft. Microsoft brought the distributor to court for violating license agreements in the OEM EULA, which included a non reselling clause.
The federal court ruled, that those clauses are only valid for the original licensee, that is the computer dealer, who sold the first computer with this license. But it is not legally binding for anyone else, including even the buyer of the first computer. And as long as there is no technological difference between the software, that comes with the different licenses, there is no right for Microsoft, to controle the distribution ways for the different licenses.
The federal court stated, that there is "no way to deduce from Copyright a right to control distribution channels."
Luckily the Bundesgerichtshof (Federal Court) in Germany ruled recently, that selling no longer used MS licenses is perfectly legal in Germany as long as you don't keep a copy with your computers and files. And even reselling them with new computers is legal too.
So for everyone who wants to sell his old license: Look for your german mates and let them do the ebay.
Slashdot Mirror
In neither case does the law benefit the consumer.
You obviously didn't understand, WHY Nintendo did get fined. Not about setting different prices in different countries in the EU (that's perfectly legal). It was about having contracts with local distributors and retailers forbidding them a) to take advantage of price differences and selling Nintendo stuff in countries other than the home country of the retailer and b) selling to people known to ship the stuff out of the country to resell it elsewhere. In return Nintendo awarded the distributors with exclusive rights to sell Nintendo stuff, thus creating a local monopoly in each country unchallenged by Nintendo retailers from other countries.
One of the results of those politics were the high price differences between different countries in the EU, which triggered an investigation by the EU competition commissioner. But they only where the trigger, not the issue.
Inside a EU country, you're also not allowed to ask different prices in different regions. For instance, telcos can't ask less for a telephone connection in a city (where mass coverage is cheaper) than they do in rural areas. They're forced to spread out their costs evenly.
You are messing things up.
It is allowed for a company to charge whatever they want to charge for a product and wherever they want to charge that price. So lets say BP may offer gasoil at a station in London for a different price than at a station in St Helens.
There were exceptions from this rule, especially for the former state owned, state founded or by the state warranted monopolies like the railways and the telephone companies. To encourage competition in this business, the old monopolies got a strict ruleset for pricing and service standards, so they weren't able to subsidize attractive markets like big towns by charging higher fees in the more rural regions, which would have been impossible for a newly formed company without a country wide network which was payed for by tax money.
There is still another exception, especially in the german langue region (Austria, Germany and Switzerland). This is the price fixing for print media. It still exists for historical reasons, but the EU competition commissioner is already targetting the issue.
On the contrary, multinationals are only operating within the framework provided by national governments. When governments dismantle their trade barriers, such as import tarriffs and quotas, then price differences will simply be arbitraged away by brokers (i.e. you see something selling for $10 in country A and $5 in country B, export/import it and sell it in country A for $6 - eventually the margin will tend to zero). But that can only happen if there are no obstacles to freely moving goods and capital around.
;)
[ ] You understood the issue at stake.
There were no laws, taxes or duties imposed by the different countries causing the price differences. There were contracts between Nintendo and the different distributors and retailers in each country of the EU explicitely forbidding reimport of cheaper Nintendo products from other countries.
So your brokers wouldn't be able to get the stuff in the cheap country and sell them in the other country, because Nintendo would stop delivering the stuff to the distributor because of breaching the contract and selling stuff to people known as reimporters. And the distributors would play nice because of the margin they got from selling Nintendo stuff (even though the price was lower than elsewhere, but also was Nintendos grosselling price). It is amazing what having a local monopoly can do to the moral of a company
Nintendo got fined for unlawfully signing such contracts, and the distributors also got fined for signing those. Because the contracts are against common EU law that explicitely forbits artificial barriers. It was the EU who played the Free Market Defender [tm].
Your actually wrong here. If you sell your computer to Jo Bob down the street the copy of Windows is actually illegal. Microsoft was sending out fliers to schools and other non-profits recently that explained how they had to be careful with licenses on computers.
Interesting thing, this US law. In Germany the Federal Constitutional Court ruled otherwise. According to this rules you can perfectly legally buy a computer with an OEM licence and sell only the licence or only the computer and keep the other part of the bundle (or sell it to someone else).
The reasoning was, that Copyright (or the german equivalent Urheberrecht, roughly translated to Author's Right) can't provide any means to control distribution channels. First sale doctrin rules higher than Copyright. By the way: Click-tru-licences are no valid contracts in Germany anyway, because you have a contract with your dealer when you buy software, not a contract with the author of the software. So the only way for the author to control your usage of the software is the Author's Right, and this is a law and not a contract.
Strictly speaking the first computers marketed as "Personal Computers" were the Apple ][ Series using the 6502 Processor. There was also the Personal Electronic Transactor from Commodore, also using the 6502 CPU.
Big problem for distributors in Europe... Here the law requires every seller to warrant the usability of technical equipment (at least) for two years. If the manufacturer doesn't give those two years of warranty on the sold equipment, the seller has to keep a stock of the equipment just to replace the failed ones. So either the manufacturer gives two years of warranty to the distributor, or the distributor walks over to a manufacturer who does. Or he stops selling harddrives. Either way the manufacturer looses.
Same is of course valid for ready built computers, not only single parts. Assemblers have either give a warranty for at least two years or the distributor looks for someone who does. In the tight market with sliding sales I doubt the assemblers or the manufacturers will be able to close shoulders and stand the urge from distribution channels to give two years of warranty. The distribution channels have no choice. They are required by law to do so.
In fact there is a glitch. After region free players were beginning to become common things at least in the Region 2 countries, the DVD consortium did something called Advanced Regio Coding. This is in fact some piece of software on the DVD itself, which causes the DVD to not play if the Regio code is zero.
Embedded in the DVD standard is the possibility to execute small programs. This feature is used to check the actual regio setting while running the DVD and thus the ARC can block the "execution" of the DVD program.
I don't know about U.S. law, but at least german law doesn't require the signing of a contract. It doesn't even require the written form of a contract.
The only thing german law requires is that both parties are agreeing on the contract. There are special contracts that require written form and signing, but they are especially named in the different bylaws.
In fact most contracts never ever get signed. You don't sign a contract when you buy milk. You don't sign a contract when you buy a bus ticket. In this case the contract terms are part of something that is called "general business conditions" in Germany, which are set by the shop or the transport company and published to the customers.
But you can also have individual contracts between two parties in Germany, to which both parties are bound, and which don't need written form or any type of signment. Lets say I am driving along the road, and you are hitchhiking, and I'll take you to the next town, then we have agreed on a contract. You are keeping me awake with some smalltalk, and I get you closer to your destination in exchange.
Not written down contracts aren't limited to such simple things. In fact every contract can be agreed on just by verbal communication, with the exception of those the law requires the written form. But often the parties want the written form for proof of the conditions. It is difficult for everyone to prove contract breaches to a court without being able to prove the actual conditions were set in different way than the actual fulfillments and to prove both parties have agreed upon them.
So don't think just because you didn't sign anything nobody could force you to fulfill your part in a contract.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was one of the best paid musicians of his time. He was for instance giving music lessons to aristocratic people, getting a fee of about three gold ducates per hour. The girl, who cleaned his house, got 12 gold ducates per year. So if he was giving one hour of lessons a working day he had the yearly income of his house maiden after two and a half week.
W.A.Mozard and his wife were spending his money with both hands. Buying expensive things, having expensive parties, travelling to the best spas around. W.A.Mozart died not in poverty. It is true that he got buried in a mass grave, but this was because his wife hadn't any will to pay too much on a decent funeral. His body (or whatever one thought was his body) later got a second funeral, paid for by his "fans" and admirers.
W.A.Mozart died of bad health. But this was not because he wasn't able to pay a medican. It was because his lifestyle was exhausting him. Having parties all night and drinking too much and being a workaholic with his music destroyed his health. So W.A.Mozart is one of the worst examples anyone defending copyright can use.
Constant bit rates are interesting for streaming media. If your transfer process can assume, that the amount of data sent per fixed time frame is constant, it can use a simpler and more robust encoding scheme. Also warranting bandwith is more easily to handle.
Consumers still vote with their dollars (or whatever currency they are using...). And that's what I plan to do about DRM. I'll act as a consumer.
I buy "content" (whatever that is) because I expect something from it. I expect for instance information about something that matters to me. That's why I buy newspapers and endure advertisements on TV to watch the News. I expect something that helps me to get into a mood I like. Thar's why I listen to music or watch a melodramatic movie. I expect to hear someone else's opinion about a fact I can't really sort out myself. That's why I read commentaries and theatre critics. I am interested how a thought would work out if you think them further to the end. That's why I buy books of fiction. Or I just need some inspiration for myself. That's why I zap around on TV until I get to something that takes my attention. That's why I tune the radio until I get something that suits me. That's why I read some pages in a book and then put it back into the shelf.
Many of those things are very dependend on my mood. Sometimes I am too tired to watch the News. Sometimes I am to nervous to concentrate on a movie. Sometimes I just need someone with me to get into the mood for music. Sometimes I can't stand hypothetical or fictional situations because I am too occupied with my own situation.
There are just three ways for me to deal with "content". Either I can just take it whenever or wherever I want. That's why I buy books and CDs and videos. That's why there are News channels which constantly repeat the news over and over, so you can get many information within every 30min. Or it is something I have to be mentally prepared for. That's when I plan do go to a concert or a theatre. That's when I make a date with friends to have a private video night. And then there is the experimental way. Getting a bit from here, listening to a part from that, fiddling around with another thing, mixing two things together.
So for me there are three different kinds of "content". The one that's a commodity. Available wherever and whenever I want. The second one that's an event. With preparations and fixed timelines, unique and not to be repeated in the same way again. And the last one is like the big heap of stuff, where I walk around and turn some pages here, or just look at the covers there, take some random parts and make my own work from it.
So how fits DRM into this? It doesn't. It tells you that "content" is not a commodity. It is licensed per single consumption on a single place at a single time. It tells you that "content" isn't something that's unique. It can be repeated again and again, if you paid for it again and again. It is no single performance in a special environment. And it definitely isn't the big heap of stuff where you can walk around and get just some small parts here and fiddling arund with. It presents you with finished blocks that are unalterable. There are no ways to combine these things to new works. There is no way just to take that one sentence from here and the single tune from there. You always have to get the whole block, making experimental handling of the "content" virtually impossible or at least very, very expensive.
So my reaction is this: I don't buy DRM protected "content". It doesn't fit into my way to handle "content". DRM protected "content" is no offer to me that convinces me to pay money for. There is a whole world of unprotected "content" I have to explore before I feel the urge to look for the protected one. Whenever I see a "Top 100 books you should have read" list I see that I know no more than 30% of them. Whenever I stroll through a flea market I see music I never listened to. There are concerts and theatres everywhere I can go to to have a unique and nonrepeatable experience.
So I am just a consumer. I have a limited amount of money to spend. I plan to spend it on stuff that suits me. I can easily ignore offers. "Content" is nothing I need for life like food and water and housing an clothing. But if there is a "content provider", who wants to fiddle with my life and with my freedom and with my way to do things even though I really don't want his offerings, then I just get angry and tell him to piss off. I don't have any relation to him. So he should keep out of my way.
There is still one issue left: Make yourself invisible for a specified range of the spectrum, and you will be also blind in the same spectrum. There is no way to measure in a given spectrum without having a measurable effect in the same spectrum. Experimental physics is full of ways to figure out the influence of your own measurement on the "real" values of the things you are measuring.
On the other hand a person had to give up the business to buy large quantities of Regio 1 DVDs (namely U.S. american ones) and sell them in Germany, after he got a cease-and-desist-letter.
So the situation in Germany is somewhat paradox. It seems as if a shop is allowed to offer the service to unlock the regiocode for a fee, but importing DVDs from the U.S. and selling them in Germany is not.
Sorry this should read 50% availability.
Yes I know there may be arguments that scheduled maintenance won't count. But even without counting this jetliner availability never reaches 99.999%.
About two years ago I had to fly a longer distance . I sat in the plane, but the plane didn't leave the gate for about an hour. Then the pilot spoke to us asking our patience for another hour, there would be a problem with the oil pressure and the mechanics were looking at it. After this hour he told us that the oilfilter was defective and had to be changed. And after another hour he asked us to leave the plane, there weren't any new oilfilter available at the airport and they had to get another one from another airport. After five hours we finally got clearance and started.
That's five hours unavailability. If this was the only unplanned outage for the plane at all, and it was on average available 99,999% this means a lifetime of 500000 hours or about 60 years for this plane without any further problem with the plane (included outer conditions like weather, grounding due to Sep 11 et. al.)
So planes on average are much more often unavailable than 0.001% of their operation time. The average delay for the Frankfurt Airport (FRA) is currently 15mins, if we assume that every plane lands on FRA about once per day this would be an average outage of 1%, 1000 times that of 5-9.
No, it means that a jetliner has to be operating for a year with just 3 mins in the hangar. But about half its lifetime a jetliner is in maintenance, giving it an uptime of about 50%.
And if you look back... There was a guy called Paul Nipkow who 1890 already filed a patent for the mechanical-optical picture disassemblation, even though at his time there was no means to convert the light impulses into electrical ones to transmit them. Reconversation was possible already with the light bow lamp though.
Wonder why Farnsworth and Baird demonstrated their invention about 25 years after Nipkow's patent was filed. It surely has nothing to do with Nipkow's patent expiring just at this moment.
So, while the invention was already done 1890. the practical version using the Braun's tube (cathode ray tube) was demonstrated by Manfred von Ardenne in 1935 in Berlin.
Sique
And you have also to take into account, that SUVs are an U.S.-only phenomenon, not really catching on outside the U.S. for completely unknown reasons (can you spell fuel cost?).
For some reason I never downloaded anyMP3, and my parents not even own a computer... the CD player they own was a gift from my wife, my mother and me to my father's birthday about three or four years ago. Ah yes... My father used to be an engineer in the audio industry, develloping all those cool gadgets like tape recorders and stuff. So he is tech-savvy and knows how to operate a computer and understands even the algorithms that went into the MP3 encoders.
And me? Working in IT as a information security specialist I don't even have a sound card in my computer. It was more easily tax deductible that way, when I bought it, and even though I stuffed in more harddrives, memory and ethernet cards later, I never bothered to add a soundcard. For some reason I don't like sound with the computer games.
Software patents are a good idea. There, I said it. If it weren't for these patents, none of those big, bad companies like Microsoft would make any money, and computing technology wouldn't be art the point it is.
Here comes your fault... Microsoft makes money not from patents on software, but on closed source. Patents force the patent holder to open the source to the public.
Did you ever read something about Microsoft battling someone else infringing Microsoft's patents? No. They are bitching about copyright and reinventing ideas. And no patent ever hindered Microsoft to do so.
So by browsing I would have to adjust the geo-headers all the time
If I am travelling around, I almost log in into my Sun box first, because all my bookmarks and history files are there, so I am technically browsing from Germany even though I may be in a hotel in Aruba Beach.
Local advertising only works with local ISPs. And that excludes for instance most AOLers, and most Germans too (largest provider is T-Online there, and it has not locatable IPs for the whole country.)
UMTS is not a company. It is the 3G phone services standard itself. And it will be mainly implemented by a tyre and rubberboot factory and a 125 year old mechanics company.
Just install Cygwin and compile it for your Windows NT/2000/XP.
Not quite right. Copyright is what it states: The right to copy a work of art. This is restricted to a certain juristical entity, which can license it to other people. But it is not about distribution of those copies. That means: If someone buys a truckload of MS-CDs to plaster his walls, then this may be against an EULA, but it is not a violation of the copyright, even it is kind of a distribution.
In Germany there is the Urheberrecht (Author's right), which does basicly the same. The Urheber (better translation is "The final cause"
The Federal Court ruled, that the ownership of even the Urheberrecht doesn't entitle Microsoft to control, how other people handle the licenses, they bought from other sources than Microsoft, as long as they don't violate the Urheberrecht.
The situation was this: A german computer distibutor got problems with Microsoft where Microsoft claimed, the distributor was selling not licensed preinstalled Windows. Microsoft claimed, that the distributor was selling CD-ROM and Book with different computers and thus selling every license twice.
So Microsoft stopped the contract with this distributor, and the distributor was not getting OEM licenses anymore.
Then the distributor was starting to bid for not used OEM licenses on eBay and resold them with his computers instead of directly licensed software from Microsoft. Microsoft brought the distributor to court for violating license agreements in the OEM EULA, which included a non reselling clause.
The federal court ruled, that those clauses are only valid for the original licensee, that is the computer dealer, who sold the first computer with this license. But it is not legally binding for anyone else, including even the buyer of the first computer. And as long as there is no technological difference between the software, that comes with the different licenses, there is no right for Microsoft, to controle the distribution ways for the different licenses.
The federal court stated, that there is "no way to deduce from Copyright a right to control distribution channels."
So for everyone who wants to sell his old license: Look for your german mates and let them do the ebay.