In the best case: they spin out the suit, cost the people in the class action a load of money, then put a dinky little label on the back of the CD case in one corner. Joe Average, who owns a regular CD player, doesn't care or even notice, so the money keeps coming in. Fair Use is still dead on the format.
A better one was the business that they were getting sued for Trade Descriptions for describing the product as an audio CD when it did not follow Audio CD formatting rules - anyone know what happened with that? (That could have some interesting consequences for PC CD games with mangled volume tables)
Heh. Don't play DDR, though... play Frickin' EZ2Dancer (Korean clone of DDR that drops one of the foot arrows but adds two handwave sensors).
I play that like mad now. I used to get the mick taken out of me because I was the only person who played that machine and regularly tried Ztar WarZ (the hardest song available) and died horribly. Now I can clear 60% of it and they can't even start. And best of all, when I started I'd be red and puffing wind afterwands; now I can go through it twice and only be breathing slightly hard (and I land more lightly on my feet than I did!).
Yes, these machines are workouts.
(Not as much as square dancing done well, though. I once went through four consecutive square dances and then collapsed in a heap. I'd been enjoying myself so much I just hadn't clocked the pain and exercise level. Which should really be a goal for all exercise IMHO.)
>MoCap Boxing [konami.com] has you put on a pair >of weighted gloves and actually punch and block >in a first person boxing match. This will tire >out more than just geeks. I've watched as macho >buffed guys with their girlfriends walk up to >the machine and brag about how easy it will be. >Within minutes they are barely able to keep >their arms up.
... I've also seen people get carried away and physically slam the screen hard enough to damage it.;)
> Yes, it was. I recently took a course on the > history of chemistry, and, apparently, some > alchemists discovered what they presumed to be > the elixir of life: the product resulting from > several distillations of wine.
Yes, that seemed popular. Whiskey was originally called 'the water of life'; in fact, the word 'whiskey' is a mangled version of an ancient word for that.
> you never have to ask for a raise (saves > engineers from having to learn the more > stressful of social graces),
Yes, this business about making sure you have to ask for a raise in a nice stressful way so that less social employees don't get them. Smacks of disability discrimination, really.
> PC's that come with windoze pre-installed by > the OEM present the EULA the first time you > boot, and won't let you go into windows without > clicking "accept".
So what operating system's services is the EULA-displaying program using?
> Oh, and the star athletes are usually the ones > with charisma
This has come up many times on this branch and it just seems irrelevant to me. The focus of the original post was scholars as opposed to sportspeople.
Not everybody who is smart and has knowledge of computers in high school is an asocial geek. CERTAINLY plenty of non-geeks seem to get on alright with a bit of Quake 3. Not all star athletes have charisma, and a fair bit of that is the 'mystique' of being a star athlete (especially in the case of cheerleader).
All that the school incidents have shown up is the pathetic teaching of social skills in schools. Yes, it's possible.
If you think it'd be cool to go to the Game On exhibition, how much exponentially cooler would it be to go to the Game On exhibition with a group including Jeff Minter!?
(Forgive me if I am the only person who thinks this would be rather good;) )
Thinking about it again, though, I think it comes out a bit unstable.
The problem is, that under this system, there's no motive for any lawyer to charge a high fee! After all, he can get just as much money if he actually charges a low fee but defeats a high-fee lawyer. That wipes out the main benefit for him of charging a high fee in the first place. And charging a high fee is a double whammy for his popularity with customers, because not only do they need to pay a lot for him, they take a bigger risk if they lose.
But if there are no high fee lawyers, then there are none for the others to defeat, and nobody gets the pay bonus, so they start increasing fees again, but so become a target for cheaper lawyers who can get the bonus by beating them.... it seems horribly like it'll descend into some twisted tragedy-of-the-commons (where no lawyer wants to charge a high fee because it costs them popularity, but every lawyer wants other lawyers to charge high fees to jack up the bonuses they'll get for beating them...)
Eugh. I'd ask a lawyer or an economist what would happen, but to be honest they'd probably laugh.
Don't think that the "loser pays" system helps too much.
All that happens in the UK is that the big firms pump up the cost of the lawsuit as far as they can (hiring the most expensive lawyers, transporting them around, etc). If they are suing a small firm, or especially a private individual, they know that if they have to pay his costs it's barely a blip on a balance sheet, but if he has to pay theirs it could gut his business or bankrupt his family in a single fell swoop. The result is the same: they settle to avoid the risk.
The proposed system is interested, but I'd make a change: you have to pay, to BOTH lawyers, whatever you paid yours. So if yours cost $3000 and the other guy's cost $500000 and you lose, you pay only $6000... but if you WIN, the other guy has to pay $1000000, and your lawyer gets an extra $497000! (Hey, he deserves it for beating a higher-paid lawyer, right?) This ensures that the big firms still have to worry about paying costs if they lose, as opposed to being able to say '$3000? Pah.' It also, of course, means that small guys won't have much of a problem finding a lawyer in these cases...
> You are not providing a counter argument to the > very idea of patenting itself. In this case, > that claim would be "if no one was allowed to > patent the gene, then no one would fund the > work to identify it, because they couldn't > profit from it."
What they do is to make money by selling the CURE. If they don't have the cure yet, then, sorry Johnny, you don't get your prize until after you've won the race.
I would say that patenting a disease gene is broken as a) the disease has no useful or advancing application, and b) they didn't invent it. Also, if they are claiming rights to breast cancer, can anyone who has it sue them?
> The future is this: if you can think of a > thing, you can see it, read it, listen to it, > watch it, within seconds
This is, so sadly, not true.
One of the big changes in digital and modern technology is that the hardware required to play things, to copy them, and to create them has become disparate. Once, if you wanted to play a song, you played it on your own instruments.. which you could use to create just as well. Once, if you wanted to copy a song, you copied the sheet music, and you could write new music on the same thing.
Now if you want to play a song you need a CD Player or Winamp. If you want to copy a song you need a CD Burner or an internet connection. But if you want to create a song that can compare to others you need thousands of pounds of hardware.
The future, it seems, is: if you can think of a thing, you can see it, read it, listen to it, watch it, within seconds, PROVIDED SOMEBODY ELSE REALIZED IT. And that somebody else isn't necessarily talented or anything like that; they're just rich enough to afford the creation hardware.
> Obviously, Intel must think it's financially in > their best interest to side with the content > guys. Why they feel this way hasn't been > answered.
They probably hope to snag an exclusive license from the content providers.
> The public will never have anything of their > own and all property will be at the disposal of > the very select few at the heads of business. > Maybe if we can present this to polititions, of > any party, we can create a new "Red Scare".
I doubt it - this argument for socialism has been around for ages. In fact, it appear in some form in the books by Lenin and Marx. The argument is basically: (restated but NOT supported by me)
"Pointing out capitalism's advantages over socialism is futile because capitalism turns *into* socialism once the market winners dominate so strongly that they become impossible to compete with (which must happen eventually - competitions are always eventually won). So, since you wind up with socialism either way, better have it controlled by a government that is involved with the people than by a random corporation that happened to do well in the markets in the transition period. Although the goverment might be corrupt, the corruption will consist of nothing more that people trying to get benefit for themselves; but that is what corporations will do, meaning that even a 90%+ corrupted goverment will do less looking out for itself than a corporate winner would."
My response to you point is that you have yet to show that any solution that is 'logical and realistic' by your definition would NOT be ignored.
Suppose we did work out a way of doing DRM that allows fair use. Why should anyone take any notice? As long as the law allows them to use a version that blocks fair use - and supports them in doing so - they have no reason to care about our technology.
Can you suggest anything that would NOT be ignored unless backed up by legal change to give it teeth?
Money is needed for progress, both to buy the stuff you need for progress AND to encourage people to make progress instead of doing something else that makes money.
Also their definition of progress is wide open. After all, CDs and DVDs and similar are entertainment products, so it is not clear how they constitute or promote progress; in fact it could be argued that they impede it (because when someone is watching a film they're not progressing something else). However, a similar argument did get tried in court (somebody was charged with copying some porn, and they appealed under the grounds that porn should have no copyright protection because, being frowned on by society, it didn't constitute progress) and was rejected by the judge.
Better than any of those, libraries have the most amazing reputation with the public possible.
Do something that hurts pirates (or can be framed as hurting pirates)? Folks cheer. Do something that hurts fair use? Folks go, "'Wha?". Do something that hurts computer wizards? Folks ignore it. But do something that hurts LIBRARIES? Pitchforks at dawn.
There have been articles I've seen before that stated that copyright mavens feared a confrontation with libraries because of their reputation...
> How are they supposed to allow copies for > legitimate uses but not for piracy? Today's DRM > technology cannot make this distinction. > Telling them to remove all protection is > equivalent to saying "ignore me, please, > because I don't have constructive input."
No, absolutely not. The companies need to be told that if THEY want the benefits of the technology, THEY have to develop it first. Breaking people's rights to get one without the other is wrong.
Suppose I want to be able to defend my house against burglars. I have the right to do that and to use reasonable force in doing so. I would like to build a machine that would club burglars on the head. By your logic, it is ok for me to set up a machine which attacks EVERYONE who comes within range of my house. After all, I have the right to protection, and I cannot help the fact that innocents get attacked because the technology to distinguish them from burglars doesn't exist.
Furthermore, unless legislation that forces companies to adopt technologies that will permit fair use is created, then a) no money will go into developing it, and b) even if it is developed nobody will use it. Why should they? They would far prefer that there was no fair use.
The DMCA is NOT really a copyright law. You are right, digital content is protected in the same way as everything else by regular copyright law.
What the DMCA does is to ban the distribution of devices that circumvent copy protection mechanisms. Thus, for example: Copyright law says it's illegal to use a decrypter to copy a DVD. The DMCA says it's illegal to get the decrypter in the first place (unless you invented it yourself).
Unfortunately, the killer is that it (apparantly) bars devices that circumvent copy protection mechanims, NO MATTER WHAT ELSE THOSE DEVICES DO, and NO MATTER WHAT ELSE THE COPY PROTECTION MECHANISMS DO.
Fair use is the classic example. Preventing fair use isn't copyright protection, because copyright cannot legally prevent fair use. Technically it would be completely legal for you to decrypt a DVD for fair use reasons, and neither copyright nor the DMCA stops you directly. But the DMCA will stop you getting the decryptor you need to do it. So unless you want to engineer one yourself, you effectively lose your fair use ability. The holders have defended this under the grounds that 'they are under no obligation to make fair use easy'.
The real question is how Boucher is going to get fair use into the DMCA without repealing the whole thing. An extra law, which said that they WERE obliged to make fair use easy, would help..
> What about Microsoft? Can you name ONE > competitor to ANY of Microsoft's products that > works decently enough, that is compatible > across the board with the hardware that the > average user has,
But this is an unfair comparison. MS software ISN'T compatible with very much at all. It only appears to be because people make their hardware compatible with MS. But others, not MS, do the work.
> that is easy to teach to the > laymen, and that looks and feels good?
The WIMPs used today are hideously illogical. They're considered user friendly for the same reason that the qwerty keyboard is considered efficient.
> It's not because of Microsoft's monopoly, its > because of BAD competition
The competition is only bad because no firm can obtain the amount of money needed to compete and those that can obtain it can't afford to risk it. Note that the majority of this money would probably not need to be spent on development, it would need to be spend on advertising and prising open bundles.
Consider this in light of the argument that 'you must have an EULA to use software because you have to make a copy in RAM which would break copyright otherwise'. Ergo if you don't sign an EULA for the installer, you break copyright by running it (if this argument is upheld). The company can't just say 'well, you have permission to run the installer' because that giving of permission is what an EULA is for.
Also, some programs only show their licenses after they're installed, meaning that the entire program has already passed through RAM as part of the installation/decompression process. Also, that proposition squashes use of the DMCA to protest at removing the license statement because a copy of the software can be made in RAM by arbitarily reading sectors off the CD without running any of the software on the disk.
It's annoying especially. I read a bunch of EULAs and the vast majority actually make it impossible for you to install the software. (Eg, many say you may maintain one copy on one machine, and say that it is on a machine if it is stored on media including hard disk **and CDROM**. Problem.. during installation, it is on both the hard disk and the CDROM of the machine, and therefore by their definition you have two copies on that machine and broke the EULA.)
I think all of these arguments are pretty ridiculous. What it comes down to is saying: "It's bad to give stuff away for free, because it denies people the right to make money from making that stuff". This makes no sense in any interpretation of capitalism. Let's also not forget that this is exactly the same tactic Microsoft used to kill the web browser market. So using Office is an example isn't a great move.
The suggestion that studying greed would be a good thing is a truly sad statement about society.
Loss of jobs for programmers? Not really. Even if free software somehow dominated, if IT firms failed to support programmers its quality would drop over time by comparison with hardware and firms would either hire staff to improve it or produce commercial equivalents.
(I wonder if this could be a new software model? Download your software. It's free, but you can send money to the firm that makes it anytime you like. However it continuously checks with the firm who made it every time it starts up - not to send spy data but to see how the firm's doing financially. If it isn't making a profit, the software won't start. You can complain about subsidising other users and Tragedy of the Commons if you like, but your software still won't start.)
The problem is that there would be no money. Anything like current money could be duplicated. So original material would have to BE the currency. But that means that artists could only sell to other artists, which would be a pretty small market.
Slashdot Mirror
In the best case: they spin out the suit, cost the people in the class action a load of money, then put a dinky little label on the back of the CD case in one corner. Joe Average, who owns a regular CD player, doesn't care or even notice, so the money keeps coming in. Fair Use is still dead on the format.
A better one was the business that they were getting sued for Trade Descriptions for describing the product as an audio CD when it did not follow Audio CD formatting rules - anyone know what happened with that? (That could have some interesting consequences for PC CD games with mangled volume tables)
Heh. Don't play DDR, though... play Frickin' EZ2Dancer (Korean clone of DDR that drops one of the foot arrows but adds two handwave sensors).
I play that like mad now. I used to get the mick taken out of me because I was the only person who played that machine and regularly tried Ztar WarZ (the hardest song available) and died horribly. Now I can clear 60% of it and they can't even start. And best of all, when I started I'd be red and puffing wind afterwands; now I can go through it twice and only be breathing slightly hard (and I land more lightly on my feet than I did!).
Yes, these machines are workouts.
(Not as much as square dancing done well, though. I once went through four consecutive square dances and then collapsed in a heap. I'd been enjoying myself so much I just hadn't clocked the pain and exercise level. Which should really be a goal for all exercise IMHO.)
>MoCap Boxing [konami.com] has you put on a pair
... I've also seen people get carried away and physically slam the screen hard enough to damage it. ;)
>of weighted gloves and actually punch and block
>in a first person boxing match. This will tire
>out more than just geeks. I've watched as macho
>buffed guys with their girlfriends walk up to
>the machine and brag about how easy it will be.
>Within minutes they are barely able to keep
>their arms up.
> Yes, it was. I recently took a course on the
> history of chemistry, and, apparently, some
> alchemists discovered what they presumed to be
> the elixir of life: the product resulting from
> several distillations of wine.
Yes, that seemed popular. Whiskey was originally called 'the water of life'; in fact, the word 'whiskey' is a mangled version of an ancient word for that.
I *think* this logo is already used on some videos and DVDs in the UK.
Basically, it looks like:
COPY PROTECTED
(big triangle with a stylised 'cp' written in it)
MACROVISION
That's it. Not terribly obfuscatory.
> you never have to ask for a raise (saves
> engineers from having to learn the more
> stressful of social graces),
Yes, this business about making sure you have to ask for a raise in a nice stressful way so that less social employees don't get them. Smacks of disability discrimination, really.
> PC's that come with windoze pre-installed by
> the OEM present the EULA the first time you
> boot, and won't let you go into windows without
> clicking "accept".
So what operating system's services is the EULA-displaying program using?
> Oh, and the star athletes are usually the ones
> with charisma
This has come up many times on this branch and it just seems irrelevant to me. The focus of the original post was scholars as opposed to sportspeople.
Not everybody who is smart and has knowledge of computers in high school is an asocial geek. CERTAINLY plenty of non-geeks seem to get on alright with a bit of Quake 3. Not all star athletes have charisma, and a fair bit of that is the 'mystique' of being a star athlete (especially in the case of cheerleader).
All that the school incidents have shown up is the pathetic teaching of social skills in schools. Yes, it's possible.
http://www.llamasoft.co.uk/forum/viewtopic.php?
If you think it'd be cool to go to the Game On exhibition, how much exponentially cooler would it be to go to the Game On exhibition with a group including Jeff Minter!?
(Forgive me if I am the only person who thinks this would be rather good
Thinking about it again, though, I think it comes out a bit unstable.
The problem is, that under this system, there's no motive for any lawyer to charge a high fee! After all, he can get just as much money if he actually charges a low fee but defeats a high-fee lawyer. That wipes out the main benefit for him of charging a high fee in the first place. And charging a high fee is a double whammy for his popularity with customers, because not only do they need to pay a lot for him, they take a bigger risk if they lose.
But if there are no high fee lawyers, then there are none for the others to defeat, and nobody gets the pay bonus, so they start increasing fees again, but so become a target for cheaper lawyers who can get the bonus by beating them.... it seems horribly like it'll descend into some twisted tragedy-of-the-commons (where no lawyer wants to charge a high fee because it costs them popularity, but every lawyer wants other lawyers to charge high fees to jack up the bonuses they'll get for beating them...)
Eugh. I'd ask a lawyer or an economist what would happen, but to be honest they'd probably laugh.
Don't think that the "loser pays" system helps too much.
All that happens in the UK is that the big firms pump up the cost of the lawsuit as far as they can (hiring the most expensive lawyers, transporting them around, etc). If they are suing a small firm, or especially a private individual, they know that if they have to pay his costs it's barely a blip on a balance sheet, but if he has to pay theirs it could gut his business or bankrupt his family in a single fell swoop. The result is the same: they settle to avoid the risk.
The proposed system is interested, but I'd make a change: you have to pay, to BOTH lawyers, whatever you paid yours. So if yours cost $3000 and the other guy's cost $500000 and you lose, you pay only $6000... but if you WIN, the other guy has to pay $1000000, and your lawyer gets an extra $497000! (Hey, he deserves it for beating a higher-paid lawyer, right?) This ensures that the big firms still have to worry about paying costs if they lose, as opposed to being able to say '$3000? Pah.' It also, of course, means that small guys won't have much of a problem finding a lawyer in these cases...
> You are not providing a counter argument to the
> very idea of patenting itself. In this case,
> that claim would be "if no one was allowed to
> patent the gene, then no one would fund the
> work to identify it, because they couldn't
> profit from it."
What they do is to make money by selling the CURE. If they don't have the cure yet, then, sorry Johnny, you don't get your prize until after you've won the race.
I would say that patenting a disease gene is broken as a) the disease has no useful or advancing application, and b) they didn't invent it. Also, if they are claiming rights to breast cancer, can anyone who has it sue them?
> The future is this: if you can think of a
> thing, you can see it, read it, listen to it,
> watch it, within seconds
This is, so sadly, not true.
One of the big changes in digital and modern technology is that the hardware required to play things, to copy them, and to create them has become disparate. Once, if you wanted to play a song, you played it on your own instruments.. which you could use to create just as well. Once, if you wanted to copy a song, you copied the sheet music, and you could write new music on the same thing.
Now if you want to play a song you need a CD Player or Winamp. If you want to copy a song you need a CD Burner or an internet connection. But if you want to create a song that can compare to others you need thousands of pounds of hardware.
The future, it seems, is: if you can think of a thing, you can see it, read it, listen to it, watch it, within seconds, PROVIDED SOMEBODY ELSE REALIZED IT. And that somebody else isn't necessarily talented or anything like that; they're just rich enough to afford the creation hardware.
> Obviously, Intel must think it's financially in
> their best interest to side with the content
> guys. Why they feel this way hasn't been
> answered.
They probably hope to snag an exclusive license from the content providers.
> The public will never have anything of their
> own and all property will be at the disposal of
> the very select few at the heads of business.
> Maybe if we can present this to polititions, of
> any party, we can create a new "Red Scare".
I doubt it - this argument for socialism has been around for ages. In fact, it appear in some form in the books by Lenin and Marx. The argument is basically: (restated but NOT supported by me)
"Pointing out capitalism's advantages over socialism is futile because capitalism turns *into* socialism once the market winners dominate so strongly that they become impossible to compete with (which must happen eventually - competitions are always eventually won). So, since you wind up with socialism either way, better have it controlled by a government that is involved with the people than by a random corporation that happened to do well in the markets in the transition period. Although the goverment might be corrupt, the corruption will consist of nothing more that people trying to get benefit for themselves; but that is what corporations will do, meaning that even a 90%+ corrupted goverment will do less looking out for itself than a corporate winner would."
My response to you point is that you have yet to show that any solution that is 'logical and realistic' by your definition would NOT be ignored.
Suppose we did work out a way of doing DRM that allows fair use. Why should anyone take any notice? As long as the law allows them to use a version that blocks fair use - and supports them in doing so - they have no reason to care about our technology.
Can you suggest anything that would NOT be ignored unless backed up by legal change to give it teeth?
> Only to promote progress. Not for money.
Money is needed for progress, both to buy the stuff you need for progress AND to encourage people to make progress instead of doing something else that makes money.
Also their definition of progress is wide open. After all, CDs and DVDs and similar are entertainment products, so it is not clear how they constitute or promote progress; in fact it could be argued that they impede it (because when someone is watching a film they're not progressing something else). However, a similar argument did get tried in court (somebody was charged with copying some porn, and they appealed under the grounds that porn should have no copyright protection because, being frowned on by society, it didn't constitute progress) and was rejected by the judge.
Better than any of those, libraries have the most amazing reputation with the public possible.
Do something that hurts pirates (or can be framed as hurting pirates)? Folks cheer. Do something that hurts fair use? Folks go, "'Wha?". Do something that hurts computer wizards? Folks ignore it. But do something that hurts LIBRARIES? Pitchforks at dawn.
There have been articles I've seen before that stated that copyright mavens feared a confrontation with libraries because of their reputation...
> How are they supposed to allow copies for
> legitimate uses but not for piracy? Today's DRM
> technology cannot make this distinction.
> Telling them to remove all protection is
> equivalent to saying "ignore me, please,
> because I don't have constructive input."
No, absolutely not. The companies need to be told that if THEY want the benefits of the technology, THEY have to develop it first. Breaking people's rights to get one without the other is wrong.
Suppose I want to be able to defend my house against burglars. I have the right to do that and to use reasonable force in doing so. I would like to build a machine that would club burglars on the head. By your logic, it is ok for me to set up a machine which attacks EVERYONE who comes within range of my house. After all, I have the right to protection, and I cannot help the fact that innocents get attacked because the technology to distinguish them from burglars doesn't exist.
Furthermore, unless legislation that forces companies to adopt technologies that will permit fair use is created, then a) no money will go into developing it, and b) even if it is developed nobody will use it. Why should they? They would far prefer that there was no fair use.
The DMCA is NOT really a copyright law. You are right, digital content is protected in the same way as everything else by regular copyright law.
What the DMCA does is to ban the distribution of devices that circumvent copy protection mechanisms. Thus, for example: Copyright law says it's illegal to use a decrypter to copy a DVD. The DMCA says it's illegal to get the decrypter in the first place (unless you invented it yourself).
Unfortunately, the killer is that it (apparantly) bars devices that circumvent copy protection mechanims, NO MATTER WHAT ELSE THOSE DEVICES DO, and NO MATTER WHAT ELSE THE COPY PROTECTION MECHANISMS DO.
Fair use is the classic example. Preventing fair use isn't copyright protection, because copyright cannot legally prevent fair use. Technically it would be completely legal for you to decrypt a DVD for fair use reasons, and neither copyright nor the DMCA stops you directly. But the DMCA will stop you getting the decryptor you need to do it. So unless you want to engineer one yourself, you effectively lose your fair use ability. The holders have defended this under the grounds that 'they are under no obligation to make fair use easy'.
The real question is how Boucher is going to get fair use into the DMCA without repealing the whole thing. An extra law, which said that they WERE obliged to make fair use easy, would help..
> What about Microsoft? Can you name ONE
> competitor to ANY of Microsoft's products that
> works decently enough, that is compatible
> across the board with the hardware that the
> average user has,
But this is an unfair comparison. MS software ISN'T compatible with very much at all. It only appears to be because people make their hardware compatible with MS. But others, not MS, do the work.
> that is easy to teach to the
> laymen, and that looks and feels good?
The WIMPs used today are hideously illogical. They're considered user friendly for the same reason that the qwerty keyboard is considered efficient.
> It's not because of Microsoft's monopoly, its
> because of BAD competition
The competition is only bad because no firm can obtain the amount of money needed to compete and those that can obtain it can't afford to risk it. Note that the majority of this money would probably not need to be spent on development, it would need to be spend on advertising and prising open bundles.
You missed his point.
Consider this in light of the argument that 'you must have an EULA to use software because you have to make a copy in RAM which would break copyright otherwise'. Ergo if you don't sign an EULA for the installer, you break copyright by running it (if this argument is upheld). The company can't just say 'well, you have permission to run the installer' because that giving of permission is what an EULA is for.
Also, some programs only show their licenses after they're installed, meaning that the entire program has already passed through RAM as part of the installation/decompression process. Also, that proposition squashes use of the DMCA to protest at removing the license statement because a copy of the software can be made in RAM by arbitarily reading sectors off the CD without running any of the software on the disk.
It's annoying especially. I read a bunch of EULAs and the vast majority actually make it impossible for you to install the software. (Eg, many say you may maintain one copy on one machine, and say that it is on a machine if it is stored on media including hard disk **and CDROM**. Problem.. during installation, it is on both the hard disk and the CDROM of the machine, and therefore by their definition you have two copies on that machine and broke the EULA.)
I think all of these arguments are pretty ridiculous. What it comes down to is saying: "It's bad to give stuff away for free, because it denies people the right to make money from making that stuff". This makes no sense in any interpretation of capitalism. Let's also not forget that this is exactly the same tactic Microsoft used to kill the web browser market. So using Office is an example isn't a great move.
The suggestion that studying greed would be a good thing is a truly sad statement about society.
Loss of jobs for programmers? Not really. Even if free software somehow dominated, if IT firms failed to support programmers its quality would drop over time by comparison with hardware and firms would either hire staff to improve it or produce commercial equivalents.
(I wonder if this could be a new software model? Download your software. It's free, but you can send money to the firm that makes it anytime you like. However it continuously checks with the firm who made it every time it starts up - not to send spy data but to see how the firm's doing financially. If it isn't making a profit, the software won't start. You can complain about subsidising other users and Tragedy of the Commons if you like, but your software still won't start.)
The problem is that there would be no money. Anything like current money could be duplicated. So original material would have to BE the currency. But that means that artists could only sell to other artists, which would be a pretty small market.
> All it would mean would be a shift from TV, car,
> whatever manufacturers to energy providers.
Nope. You can duplicate yourself a generator and an unlimited amount of petrol. Or an unlimited number of charged batteries.