Have you ever even tried to do what you are claiming is so easy?
Not recently, but yeah I've added new logic to binaries. I added my new compiled code to the end and then inserted branches in the appropriate places -- an activity you deemed "not difficult," and I concur.
Large scale changes would probably be easier to do by disassembling portions of the binary, changing the assembly code and then reassembling it. For a popular program, folks would tend to disassemble and comment sections of it so that others could add functionality too. Not as easy as tweaking and recompiling C code, but not excessively difficult either.
One of the basic tenents of GPL is that you get access to source code.
That's primarily politics. Like Catholics at confession, providing the source code is the author's act of contrition that demonstrates he truly subscribes to the idea of improve-use-and-share. If improve-use-and-share was a right rather than a priviledge (as it would be in a world without copyright), the act of contrition would hold less importance.
Hasn't Microsoft's "shared source" pretty well proven this to you? The source code by itself means nothing.
So the entire open-source movement, and indeed the desire to tinker/hack/explore/create/whatever, is predicated on copyright?
The open-source movement is predicated on the mainstream general-purpose computer. The mainstream general-purpose computer is predicated on copyright allowing software to have commercial value independent of the hardware. A begets B begets C.
The desire to tinker, hack, etc. considerably predates open source and would surely have had an impact in any world we can imagine. But would an open-source-like movement have been able to achieve critical mass when faced with a chicken-and-egg problem where open source needs a general purpose computer but the already existing open source provides the only financial impetus to make a general purpose computer? Eventually. Maybe. But we'd only now be shifting from hobbyist kit computers to machines like the TRS-80.
Every "no-cd" game crack every made? What, are the l33t crackerz mad skillz too far beyond you? I doubt it.
Third-party level editors for the early FPS games like Doom? Technically I guess that modifies the reverse-engineered data rather than the code. Still, not too big a step to add code mods to handle new data types.
Its tough to name more significant mods. Why would anyone spend the time when they can't legally redistribute the changed code?
I think that the efficiency of having universal computing devices would be enough to (eventually) bring about convergence.
Maybe. But consider that even here it took 20 years for someone to write MAME, software for a general-purpose computer that could run the original Pac Man code instead of requiring a rewrite from scratch. That was with improvements in general-purpose computer hardware being driven primarily by the development of commercial copyright-protected software. Hobbyists contributed little to Moore's law.
The prospects for my ficticious non-copyright world are not good. It would probably make an interesting backdrop for a dystopian science fiction novel.
Following Microsoft's instructions, please explain how to configure the firewall there described to block all TCP traffic except connections on port 1434 from network 192.168.0.0/16. You can't do it. You can block a particular port from operating at all on a particular interface but that's about it. Its... pathetic.
The XP firewall does more, but it still doesn't do the very obvious task: allow connections to port 1434 from these three corporate netblocks and nowhere else.
Further, it wasn't really a requirement in Windows until fairly recently (2000-ish), at which point the functionality was added.
And that's the whole point, isn't it? Security and the devices which support security do not become requirements in Windows until late in the game... like locking the proverbial barn door after the animals have all fled. In Linux and most of the other Unixes, the security devices tend to make it into the software BEFORE the widespread security events that compel their use.
It was in Linux because (for reasons I have never been able to fathom) lots of people like to use Linux machines as firewalls and routers (why they don't use the orders-of-magnitude nicer FreeBSD+ipfw or ipfilter, or OpenBSD+ipfilter or pf, is beyond me).
Like perhaps "Internet Connection Sharing" in Windows? And hey, what do you know, Windows can work as a plain router too. It even supports RIP and OSPF natively. What it lacks is any of the tools necessary to make that work securely.
As for IPF on BSD, you're welcome to it. Its a very capable firewall. Astonishingly so compare to XP's junk. I prefer netfilter on Linux. It offers essentially the same capability and effeciency as ipfilter and I'm familiar with it. I don't know which one added groups or transparent proxies first but they both have it now. And Windows still doesn't.
Bulmash misses the point that without copyright, I can find the appropriate place in your machine code to insert my functions and then distribute the modified versions to my friends. That's 90% of the GPL right there... And the right redistribute everything is probably more valuable than being able to see your sloppy undocumented source code anyway.
Kfogel misses the point that without copyright the computer industry would have grown an entirely different direction from way back in the '70s. Without specific protection for the software component, companies would have tied software to the hardware. Think: dedicated Pac Man machines in the arcades. You can copy the Microsoft Office ROMS all you want, but it uses the registers and I/O devices only present on the patented Microsoft Office machine. No *general purpose* computers... Copyright is what made the general purpose computer sociologically possible. That world, by the way, would suck.
For example, firewalls are pretty ubiquitous now. Linux and the other unixes have very sophisticated firewalling built in to the stock kernel. Microsoft has the Windows XP firewall.
Ipfwadm, Linux's first basic packet filter, was added to the mainline kernel in 1996. Microsoft didn't add their first simple packet filter until 5 years later in Windows XP... and it was less capable that the ipfwadm Linux had long since left behind in favor of netfilter (iptables).
Ipfwadm allowed you to, say, block inbound connection requests to TCP port 1434 from networks other than 127.0.0.0/8. Even after the service packs, the Windows XP firewall still does not offer that level of specificity.
Where do people get this illusion that Unix systems were secure in the past? As an undergrad we would drive our friends crazy hacking into computers. Just about every Unix program they ran, from mail to finger to rn had security holes you could drive a car through.
In 1995, most of the US military facilities on the Internet had no firewall. I still remember logging on to the MS Lan Manager servers at work from home using Samba over a 28.8 modem and exporting X-Windows to Sun workstations 600 miles away. That was the normal level of information security and both Windows and Unix met it.
In 2007 the expected level of information security is rather different. In 2007, Unix and Linux have adapted to the new requirements and excelled at meeting them while Windows works only moderately better than it did in 1995.
So you're right, but you're wrong. Unix and Linux consistently met or exceeded the appropriate level of security at the time. That the target moves doesn't change the fact that they keep on hitting it. Windows, on the other hand, hasn't hit the target for the better part of a decade now.
IMHO, folks who produce open source do so from four major backgrounds:
1. Paid to do so. A number of folks are paid by various companies to make sure that companies' products operate properly with open source software. This is a relatively new phenomenon which did not contribute to open sources' original growth.
2. Side-effect of career. When I worked for for an ISP, I produced software to improve our business. The software wasn't the product; the services were. So I was able to release some of the software as open source. A colleague down the hall recently released a perl module that he built to manipulate one of our databases where I work now. There is some real generosity here, but make no mistake: the software would not have been developed without the business need.
3. Education/research byproduct. Think NCSA httpd, NCSA Mosaic, BSD Unix. Universities exist to spread knowledge. Students learn by doing. For a sufficiently creative professor, open source is a natural extension.
4. Boredom. I wrote a tremendous amount of software when I was in high school. I like writing software and high school classes bored me spitless so I spent all day with a paper and pencil figuring out the code I would write when I got home. A couple years ago I spent 8 months working as a government contractor in the branch managing the agency's email. Nice people but they had enough work for me to fill about 2 hours each day. So I spent most of the other six writing my own anti-spam software.
Even Stallman fits above. He's currently in category 1 but he got his start in categories 2 and 3. He probably also had a healthy dose of category 4. Given his personality, I'd bet that before emacs his services were not in high demand.
The point of the NDA is to inform the recipient that they are about to receive trade secrets that they're expected to keep secret, and to get a written acknowledgement that they have been so informed. You lose the trade secret when its no longer a secret, so you have a duty to make sure that everyone you tell keeps it a secret.
No, they're unlicensed implementations of AACS. It's only circumventing a copyright if you decrypt movies with your implementation.
As previously mentioned, I misspoke. An unlicensed implementation of AACS violates the various patents AACS uses, not a copyright.
The key was a trade secret. Under state law in all 50 states its illegal to reveal a trade secret without the owners' authorization. Ordinarily you can legally reverse-engineer something in order to discover any trade secrets it embeds, but under the DMCA anti-circumvention provisions it was illegal reverse-engineer the player software in order to fetch the key.
Whoever did it first is in a world of hurt if he's ever caught.
On the other hand, open publication of a trade secret ends the trade secret. Unlicensed implementations of AACS are still copyright infringement and such implementations combined with the key are still violations of the DMCA, but the key by itself is probably beyond protection... Not that it would stop the movie folks from suing and making your life more interesting than you'd like for a couple years.
I'm pretty sure iconized copies of the boxes for links and scans of the title text heading the respective pages would have fallen under fair use for a fan page with walkthroughs and the like. Probably the only place I crossed the legal line was with the scans of the official game maps. Wander on over to http://www.owo.com/archive/ and tell me where you think I breached their copyright, why don't you? That first page is all them but the subsequent pages are pretty close to what they were way back when.
You are not issued a MySpace profile upon birth in this country.
I'm pretty sure Barrack Obama's identity was issued to him at birth. However unintentionally, Joe skirted the line with identity theft. I don't care how much work you put in to usurping someone's identity, its still not yours.
You miss the point. We're not talking talking about the Joseph Anthony Barrack Obama fan page here. We're talking about the Barrack Obama home page. Joe took the initiative and created it. For that he deserves kudos. Joe volunteered to run it and for that he deserves kudos too. But it was Barrack's page, Barrack's identity. The moment Barrack decided it was over, it was over.
What Joe [innocently] stumbled in to -- requesting payment before handing over control of the Barrack Obama page -- skirts the line with identity theft. That seems to be the way Obama's staffers saw it, and clearly that's how MySpace saw it too.
How do you convince a board that they need to start budgeting for this?
You don't. You watch the tapes of the old board meetings, figure out which board member is most likely to have a clue what you're talking about and then you convince her directly. Bringing along the rest of the board is then her game in which you're just a player.
Way back in the day, I built a web site around the Ultima series of computer games. Much of it was scanned copies of Origin Systems' artwork though it also contained walkthroughs, hints and similar fan-supplied stuff from various authors. I'm a big fan of the games, so I built the web site in that vein. It became the central source of information about the Ultima games on the web.
After a while, Origin came along and asked how much I'd be willing to sell it to them for. My answer? Tell me what you think is fair. After all, its their game not mine. They picked a number, I agreed and that was that.
I could have picked a number that was representative of the manpower I put in to making the site. I could have gotten in to a big fight where they accuse me of copyright infringement and I accuse them of bullying, etc. etc.
I could have, but I didn't. I didn't build the site to make money and at the end of the day it was their game, not mine. So I smiled and said, "thank you," sent them a zip file of the content and put a redirect on my web site that pointed to the site's new home.
Joseph Anthony is nobody. Its Obama's myspace profile; Anthony is just a fan. He should have turned it over along with a list of expenses and said, "pay me what you think is fair."
No one blames the Bible for David Koresh. Why is that do you think? It seems pretty obvious to me: Koresh was a crazy loser and if he hadn't picked the bible as his poison, he'd have just picked something else. That's what crazy losers do: they latch on to something and turn it destructive.
The Bible is not causitive to insanity. And regardless of how you may massage the numbers, its not correlative either. Neither are slasher flicks, ghost stories, football, rock and roll, cops and robbers, or, yes, video games. Got it?
While I agree with your post, it doesn't answer the deeper question of where Windows is "manufactured." I'd argue it's manufactured in Redmond.
That's an easy one: Windows ISN'T manufactured. PC's running Windows are manufactured. For patent purposes, Windows is just an unpatentable set of instructions telling those PC's how to implement a patent.
Patents are a little different than copyright. You infringe a copyright by copying the work. You infringe a patent using the patent -- in the sense that you use a physical device which implements the patent. Accordingly, manufacture of the device occurs when the components are combined into a physical form capable of using the patent.
IANAL, but I suspect the ruling has been misrepresented.
Generally, a company operating abroad is responsible for complying with local law, not US law. You can't sue a company in a US court for its behavior overseas. That's the the general rule; there are exceptions.
The law makes an exception for building devices in the US which would infringe a patent if sold in the US but are instead exported -- the patent holder can sue in the US where the device is made. Microsoft argued that the general principle (local law) applies here, not the exception, because the would-be infringing device was actually manufacturered abroad.
The Supreme Court agreed and applied the general rule: if AT&T wants to collect, they'll have to sue in the countries where the infringement occurred.
Historically, broadcast radio stations get to play your music for free. Back before home recording was common, some radio stations got sued but won: through some really foul reasoning not supportable by existing statute, the judge held the broadcasts to be fair use. That has since been enshrined in precedent and tradition.
So, when Internet radio was on the horizon, RIAA conspired with a couple members of congress to cut it off at the pass. Internet radio is explicitly not fair use under the statutes. Instead, Internet radio stations are entitled to play you song under a compulsory license. The statute requires the Librarian of Congress to set and periodically revise the specific terms of the compulsory license.
Its compulsory in the sense that the copyright owner doesn't get any choice about whether to offer the license and he doesn't get any choice about the terms. Think of it as a form of fair use that you get paid for. You may, however, offer any other licenses you choose. And anyone wishing to broadcast the signal may accept one of those other licenses instead; the compulsion lies only on the copyright owners' side.
SoundExchange fits in to the picture as the only entity presently designated to collect the fees for recordings played under said compulsory license.
Slashdot Mirror
Have you ever even tried to do what you are claiming is so easy?
Not recently, but yeah I've added new logic to binaries. I added my new compiled code to the end and then inserted branches in the appropriate places -- an activity you deemed "not difficult," and I concur.
Large scale changes would probably be easier to do by disassembling portions of the binary, changing the assembly code and then reassembling it. For a popular program, folks would tend to disassemble and comment sections of it so that others could add functionality too. Not as easy as tweaking and recompiling C code, but not excessively difficult either.
One of the basic tenents of GPL is that you get access to source code.
That's primarily politics. Like Catholics at confession, providing the source code is the author's act of contrition that demonstrates he truly subscribes to the idea of improve-use-and-share. If improve-use-and-share was a right rather than a priviledge (as it would be in a world without copyright), the act of contrition would hold less importance.
Hasn't Microsoft's "shared source" pretty well proven this to you? The source code by itself means nothing.
So the entire open-source movement, and indeed the desire to tinker/hack/explore/create/whatever, is predicated on copyright?
The open-source movement is predicated on the mainstream general-purpose computer. The mainstream general-purpose computer is predicated on copyright allowing software to have commercial value independent of the hardware. A begets B begets C.
The desire to tinker, hack, etc. considerably predates open source and would surely have had an impact in any world we can imagine. But would an open-source-like movement have been able to achieve critical mass when faced with a chicken-and-egg problem where open source needs a general purpose computer but the already existing open source provides the only financial impetus to make a general purpose computer? Eventually. Maybe. But we'd only now be shifting from hobbyist kit computers to machines like the TRS-80.
Every "no-cd" game crack every made? What, are the l33t crackerz mad skillz too far beyond you? I doubt it.
Third-party level editors for the early FPS games like Doom? Technically I guess that modifies the reverse-engineered data rather than the code. Still, not too big a step to add code mods to handle new data types.
Its tough to name more significant mods. Why would anyone spend the time when they can't legally redistribute the changed code?
I think that the efficiency of having universal computing devices would be enough to (eventually) bring about convergence.
Maybe. But consider that even here it took 20 years for someone to write MAME, software for a general-purpose computer that could run the original Pac Man code instead of requiring a rewrite from scratch. That was with improvements in general-purpose computer hardware being driven primarily by the development of commercial copyright-protected software. Hobbyists contributed little to Moore's law.
The prospects for my ficticious non-copyright world are not good. It would probably make an interesting backdrop for a dystopian science fiction novel.
Here's Microsoft's support note for packet filtering in Windows 2000: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/309798
Following Microsoft's instructions, please explain how to configure the firewall there described to block all TCP traffic except connections on port 1434 from network 192.168.0.0/16. You can't do it. You can block a particular port from operating at all on a particular interface but that's about it. Its... pathetic.
The XP firewall does more, but it still doesn't do the very obvious task: allow connections to port 1434 from these three corporate netblocks and nowhere else.
Further, it wasn't really a requirement in Windows until fairly recently (2000-ish), at which point the functionality was added.
And that's the whole point, isn't it? Security and the devices which support security do not become requirements in Windows until late in the game... like locking the proverbial barn door after the animals have all fled. In Linux and most of the other Unixes, the security devices tend to make it into the software BEFORE the widespread security events that compel their use.
It was in Linux because (for reasons I have never been able to fathom) lots of people like to use Linux machines as firewalls and routers (why they don't use the orders-of-magnitude nicer FreeBSD+ipfw or ipfilter, or OpenBSD+ipfilter or pf, is beyond me).
Like perhaps "Internet Connection Sharing" in Windows? And hey, what do you know, Windows can work as a plain router too. It even supports RIP and OSPF natively. What it lacks is any of the tools necessary to make that work securely.
As for IPF on BSD, you're welcome to it. Its a very capable firewall. Astonishingly so compare to XP's junk. I prefer netfilter on Linux. It offers essentially the same capability and effeciency as ipfilter and I'm familiar with it. I don't know which one added groups or transparent proxies first but they both have it now. And Windows still doesn't.
Both of you miss the obvious.
Bulmash misses the point that without copyright, I can find the appropriate place in your machine code to insert my functions and then distribute the modified versions to my friends. That's 90% of the GPL right there... And the right redistribute everything is probably more valuable than being able to see your sloppy undocumented source code anyway.
Kfogel misses the point that without copyright the computer industry would have grown an entirely different direction from way back in the '70s. Without specific protection for the software component, companies would have tied software to the hardware. Think: dedicated Pac Man machines in the arcades. You can copy the Microsoft Office ROMS all you want, but it uses the registers and I/O devices only present on the patented Microsoft Office machine. No *general purpose* computers... Copyright is what made the general purpose computer sociologically possible. That world, by the way, would suck.
For example, firewalls are pretty ubiquitous now. Linux and the other unixes have very sophisticated firewalling built in to the stock kernel. Microsoft has the Windows XP firewall.
Ipfwadm, Linux's first basic packet filter, was added to the mainline kernel in 1996. Microsoft didn't add their first simple packet filter until 5 years later in Windows XP... and it was less capable that the ipfwadm Linux had long since left behind in favor of netfilter (iptables).
Ipfwadm allowed you to, say, block inbound connection requests to TCP port 1434 from networks other than 127.0.0.0/8. Even after the service packs, the Windows XP firewall still does not offer that level of specificity.
http :// www.my.bank@127.0.0.1/steal/my/info.html
'nuff said.
Where do people get this illusion that Unix systems were secure in the past? As an undergrad we would drive our friends crazy hacking into computers. Just about every Unix program they ran, from mail to finger to rn had security holes you could drive a car through.
In 1995, most of the US military facilities on the Internet had no firewall. I still remember logging on to the MS Lan Manager servers at work from home using Samba over a 28.8 modem and exporting X-Windows to Sun workstations 600 miles away. That was the normal level of information security and both Windows and Unix met it.
In 2007 the expected level of information security is rather different. In 2007, Unix and Linux have adapted to the new requirements and excelled at meeting them while Windows works only moderately better than it did in 1995.
So you're right, but you're wrong. Unix and Linux consistently met or exceeded the appropriate level of security at the time. That the target moves doesn't change the fact that they keep on hitting it. Windows, on the other hand, hasn't hit the target for the better part of a decade now.
IMHO, folks who produce open source do so from four major backgrounds:
1. Paid to do so. A number of folks are paid by various companies to make sure that companies' products operate properly with open source software. This is a relatively new phenomenon which did not contribute to open sources' original growth.
2. Side-effect of career. When I worked for for an ISP, I produced software to improve our business. The software wasn't the product; the services were. So I was able to release some of the software as open source. A colleague down the hall recently released a perl module that he built to manipulate one of our databases where I work now. There is some real generosity here, but make no mistake: the software would not have been developed without the business need.
3. Education/research byproduct. Think NCSA httpd, NCSA Mosaic, BSD Unix. Universities exist to spread knowledge. Students learn by doing. For a sufficiently creative professor, open source is a natural extension.
4. Boredom. I wrote a tremendous amount of software when I was in high school. I like writing software and high school classes bored me spitless so I spent all day with a paper and pencil figuring out the code I would write when I got home. A couple years ago I spent 8 months working as a government contractor in the branch managing the agency's email. Nice people but they had enough work for me to fill about 2 hours each day. So I spent most of the other six writing my own anti-spam software.
Even Stallman fits above. He's currently in category 1 but he got his start in categories 2 and 3. He probably also had a healthy dose of category 4. Given his personality, I'd bet that before emacs his services were not in high demand.
Siracusa states that this attitude of refusing to think holistically ("across layers") is responsible for all of the current failings of Linux
In related news, a lack of synergy was responsible for all of the bankruptcies at the end of the bubble.
What? that has never been a law. If that were a law then there would be no point to NDA contracts.
s _Act
18 U.S.C. 1831(a). Do your homework. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trade_secret http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniform_Trade_Secret
The point of the NDA is to inform the recipient that they are about to receive trade secrets that they're expected to keep secret, and to get a written acknowledgement that they have been so informed. You lose the trade secret when its no longer a secret, so you have a duty to make sure that everyone you tell keeps it a secret.
No, they're unlicensed implementations of AACS. It's only circumventing a copyright if you decrypt movies with your implementation.
As previously mentioned, I misspoke. An unlicensed implementation of AACS violates the various patents AACS uses, not a copyright.
I misspoke. You're correct of course; it would infringe the patents.
The key was a trade secret. Under state law in all 50 states its illegal to reveal a trade secret without the owners' authorization. Ordinarily you can legally reverse-engineer something in order to discover any trade secrets it embeds, but under the DMCA anti-circumvention provisions it was illegal reverse-engineer the player software in order to fetch the key.
Whoever did it first is in a world of hurt if he's ever caught.
On the other hand, open publication of a trade secret ends the trade secret. Unlicensed implementations of AACS are still copyright infringement and such implementations combined with the key are still violations of the DMCA, but the key by itself is probably beyond protection... Not that it would stop the movie folks from suing and making your life more interesting than you'd like for a couple years.
IANAL, but it is a hobby of mine.
So you're a legal genius and a nice guy to boot. How fortunate I am to have your sage advice.
you're goddamn lucky
I'm pretty sure iconized copies of the boxes for links and scans of the title text heading the respective pages would have fallen under fair use for a fan page with walkthroughs and the like. Probably the only place I crossed the legal line was with the scans of the official game maps. Wander on over to http://www.owo.com/archive/ and tell me where you think I breached their copyright, why don't you? That first page is all them but the subsequent pages are pretty close to what they were way back when.
You are not issued a MySpace profile upon birth in this country.
I'm pretty sure Barrack Obama's identity was issued to him at birth. However unintentionally, Joe skirted the line with identity theft. I don't care how much work you put in to usurping someone's identity, its still not yours.
You miss the point. We're not talking talking about the Joseph Anthony Barrack Obama fan page here. We're talking about the Barrack Obama home page. Joe took the initiative and created it. For that he deserves kudos. Joe volunteered to run it and for that he deserves kudos too. But it was Barrack's page, Barrack's identity. The moment Barrack decided it was over, it was over.
What Joe [innocently] stumbled in to -- requesting payment before handing over control of the Barrack Obama page -- skirts the line with identity theft. That seems to be the way Obama's staffers saw it, and clearly that's how MySpace saw it too.
How do you convince a board that they need to start budgeting for this?
You don't. You watch the tapes of the old board meetings, figure out which board member is most likely to have a clue what you're talking about and then you convince her directly. Bringing along the rest of the board is then her game in which you're just a player.
Way back in the day, I built a web site around the Ultima series of computer games. Much of it was scanned copies of Origin Systems' artwork though it also contained walkthroughs, hints and similar fan-supplied stuff from various authors. I'm a big fan of the games, so I built the web site in that vein. It became the central source of information about the Ultima games on the web.
After a while, Origin came along and asked how much I'd be willing to sell it to them for. My answer? Tell me what you think is fair. After all, its their game not mine. They picked a number, I agreed and that was that.
I could have picked a number that was representative of the manpower I put in to making the site. I could have gotten in to a big fight where they accuse me of copyright infringement and I accuse them of bullying, etc. etc.
I could have, but I didn't. I didn't build the site to make money and at the end of the day it was their game, not mine. So I smiled and said, "thank you," sent them a zip file of the content and put a redirect on my web site that pointed to the site's new home.
Joseph Anthony is nobody. Its Obama's myspace profile; Anthony is just a fan. He should have turned it over along with a list of expenses and said, "pay me what you think is fair."
No one blames the Bible for David Koresh. Why is that do you think? It seems pretty obvious to me: Koresh was a crazy loser and if he hadn't picked the bible as his poison, he'd have just picked something else. That's what crazy losers do: they latch on to something and turn it destructive.
The Bible is not causitive to insanity. And regardless of how you may massage the numbers, its not correlative either. Neither are slasher flicks, ghost stories, football, rock and roll, cops and robbers, or, yes, video games. Got it?
While I agree with your post, it doesn't answer the deeper question of where Windows is "manufactured." I'd argue it's manufactured in Redmond.
9 33137
That's an easy one: Windows ISN'T manufactured. PC's running Windows are manufactured. For patent purposes, Windows is just an unpatentable set of instructions telling those PC's how to implement a patent.
Here, this post explains it far better than I can: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=232849&cid=18
Patents are a little different than copyright. You infringe a copyright by copying the work. You infringe a patent using the patent -- in the sense that you use a physical device which implements the patent. Accordingly, manufacture of the device occurs when the components are combined into a physical form capable of using the patent.
IANAL, but I suspect the ruling has been misrepresented.
Generally, a company operating abroad is responsible for complying with local law, not US law. You can't sue a company in a US court for its behavior overseas. That's the the general rule; there are exceptions.
The law makes an exception for building devices in the US which would infringe a patent if sold in the US but are instead exported -- the patent holder can sue in the US where the device is made. Microsoft argued that the general principle (local law) applies here, not the exception, because the would-be infringing device was actually manufacturered abroad.
The Supreme Court agreed and applied the general rule: if AT&T wants to collect, they'll have to sue in the countries where the infringement occurred.
Its a rather funky area of law.
Historically, broadcast radio stations get to play your music for free. Back before home recording was common, some radio stations got sued but won: through some really foul reasoning not supportable by existing statute, the judge held the broadcasts to be fair use. That has since been enshrined in precedent and tradition.
So, when Internet radio was on the horizon, RIAA conspired with a couple members of congress to cut it off at the pass. Internet radio is explicitly not fair use under the statutes. Instead, Internet radio stations are entitled to play you song under a compulsory license. The statute requires the Librarian of Congress to set and periodically revise the specific terms of the compulsory license.
Its compulsory in the sense that the copyright owner doesn't get any choice about whether to offer the license and he doesn't get any choice about the terms. Think of it as a form of fair use that you get paid for. You may, however, offer any other licenses you choose. And anyone wishing to broadcast the signal may accept one of those other licenses instead; the compulsion lies only on the copyright owners' side.
SoundExchange fits in to the picture as the only entity presently designated to collect the fees for recordings played under said compulsory license.