Your argument works exactly the other way. Bandwidth is a privilege, not a right, so there's nothing giving cable users the right to use more than anyone else.
Remember, by having cable as a private customer, you are not providing anything to the net. In fact, you are potentially consuming a great deal.
The example shows only that max user limits are a flawed model, because a 56k user takes up far less bandwidth than a cable user. Not only does a cable user take up masses of bandwidth, they also submit requests faster.
Also, bear in mind that cable isn't available in some countries. Since country of origin is intimately linked to race, requiring cable is racism.
I've seen a TV program on "the sound". It didn't sound much like chussssh, though. It sounded like a loud burst of low-frequency tones.
The idea of it there was to place a sound generator under a surveillance camera. When you cross a certain point, "the sound" plays, and the subject (yes, this has been tested) tends to localise it. In doing so, they look at the camera. This prevents people from hiding their faces from surveillance cameras.
This worked only when they were not told about it. The scientist himself, who knew, could stop himself localising but only by consciously thinking that he knew what it was.
Unfortunately, it seems very unlikely that this is going to work. Why?
First, although cross-platform apps make it easier to migrate, they provide no incentive to do so. After all, if your apps will run as well on Windows as on Linux, why switch? Windows's reputation will ensure people continue to choose it; they'll stick with what they know; and not all apps will be cross-platform (Office, anyone?)
Also, being cross-platform is a lousy tradeoff. Generally, cross-platforms apps are slow, have awkward user interfaces, are locked to the lowest common denominator of platform features, and similar. And the tradeoff - being able to run the same binary on multiple platforms - is worthless to the majority of users, since most of them only use one platform anyway, and those that don't would be perfectly capable of handling two binaries that apply to different platforms.
The only possible benefits are for programmers who can't be bothered to maintain their code for different platforms. In a commercial environment, users will not be prepared to trade away so many of their features to make things easy for the programmers. After all, they are trading away a fair amount of money in exchange for the programmer doing something hard. Sorry.
The belief that programmers will somehow be "forced" to write cross-platform software and so a Linux-available set of applications will become available by the "back door" is pretty ridiculous, too.
The first is a danger in letting official distributions spring up for a profit. What I think is one of the big benefits of the viral GPL is that it prevents a company from getting GNU software, selling it commercially, and then suing THE ORIGINAL AUTHOR for illegally copying the software. Of course, they didn't do so.. but they still have to prove it in court, and they still have to have a lawyer to say so. In evidence, the company has a boxed product and the original author has a bunch of files on an FTP server - which looks more like the pirated copy? The author also has the old problems of being sued by a monied company, such as the company pumping up their own legal costs so that the defendant is ruined if costs go against them, or (in one case which actually happened, although it was about patented hardware rather than copyrighted software) suing for multiple violations all at once so the author can't afford to be represented in all the suits. The GPL at the moment blocks that, not least because in many GPLed works the firm could not identify an author to sue (Do. Do. Do. Do. and Do., anyone?), and also because a boxed copy of a distribution would have to be GPLed and therefore the concept of illegally copying it doesn't exist.
The other problem is the one you point out clearly. Most individuals cannot afford to be solely responsible for distributing a piece of software. Whereas WRITING software for free still gets them a benefit (they can still use the software themselves), making effort to distribute it for free costs money (copies, bandwidth, etc) and if they ask money for the distribution those costs go up even more because the firms they get them from all start demanding a piece of the pie.
Furthermore, allowing the person "who last modified that generation of the software" exclusive rights to distribution of that generation is guaranteed to cause problems with the scope required to create a "modification". You write your neato latest distribution and put it up on a few free ftp sites, then your local company buys one copy, adds a few zeroes to the end of the main binary and adds their name to the author field to constitute a "modification", and throws the result into a $5m marketing and distribution machine. Where's your reward for work now? (If we believe the ridiculous argument I saw earlier, that the CD layout of an image of GPL'd files is not derivative of those files, then all they need to do to get modification rights is to reburn the disc with the files in a different order!)
There is a reward for commercial development. That reward is money. There is also a reward for GPLed development. That reward is that others will also develop under the GPL, and more and better software will be available for free. Hence, indirectly GPL developers gain money too - because they can get software without needing to pay, and thus save the money they would otherwise have paid for the software. (If I write some stuff for Linux, then Linux gets better, so Linux sticks around, so other people write stuff for Linux, so I don't have to buy Windows.) Even those who don't develop help, because they create communities which effectively provide customer support for GPLed products.
Allowing GPLed code to be used for commercial purposes would deny that reward to GPL developers in the same way that allowing commercial code to be given away for free denies the reward to commercial developers.
*Somebody* is going to have to sue Sony for this. I am not a lawyer, so this is only a thought, but I seem to recall there's a section in copyright law which says that a copyright can lapse if it isn't defended. If no legal action is taken, then POSE's copyright could fall off, which will render its license irrelevant.
The problem is, this could be easily used as a way of wiping off GPLs. All it takes is for three or four big companies to break GPL on a single product at once. Somebody's then got to fight them all, or lose the copyright for nondefense. Oh dear.
These must be some odd jobs you're looking at. All the gaming ones I've seen say "at least one previously published title minimum". Not much way of spinning that with interests.
In my CS course, for example, the only nod to anything about gaming was a Graphics course in the third year.
Assembly language? Are you sure? I've never heard of a Windows-based game including assembly, and I rather thought that most console firms required you to use their C libraries for hardware interaction for QA purposes.
But I think the real big warning has already been given. A "games programmer" does nothing but read a precisely stated design document, translate it into C, and document that fact. (Which, oddly enough, is almost exactly what any programmer does.) Designing games is now done by marketers and committees. That's why they're so generic these days. Sorry.
Well, "does all the glitz and glamour stifle innovation?" Of course it does. Innovation = competition. If it didn't stifle competition, companies wouldn't buy it.
But I'm not so sure it's completely black and white. Some games do get away without the mega graphics and things and still do at least reasonably well. Grand Theft Auto, Roll Away, Chu Chu Rocket and especially **POKEMON** are names that come to mind.
So now a ringtone is a derivative work of a full piece of music, and all the work in encoding the music is irrelevant because it's derivative?
I can understand that.. but surely that means that a full piece of music can be a derivative of a ringtone. After all, you can just take the ringtone as the melody and add lyrics and orchestration, but that's irrelevant - it's still derivative. (I always thought that "having the potential to be a derivative work" was pretty much strictly commutative (*being* one isn't because it depends on which one was (c)'d first).)
Also, ringtones don't take up much space. And they have a limited range of values...
Anyone for a distributed.net style project to enumerate all possible ringtones? By their logic we'd also enumerate all possible music, so all music produced would be derivative of something in the ringtone space. Then GPL the ringtone archive..
Saying that free services can no longer continue because people consumed them doesn't make sense. If people had not been "leechers", and had instead paid for the free services, then they would not really have been free (a "moral duty" to pay is still a duty to pay) and the internet would already have been "going for the wallet".
There's a big ol' problem with subscriptions, though: the web really just isn't set up to support them.
The key aspect of the web in tying together information has always been the use of links. But nobody will link to a subscription site - what's the point? The reader probably won't have access to the linked content. Search engines would also be dead, since there's no way they could be given access to search the subscribers' content (doing so would open massive security holes regarding faking a search engine, using multiple search requests to retrieve the entire content by assembling the return contexts, etc..) and without it they'd be restricted to searching the site's own summary keywords - and it'd take only a few sites abusing the keyword system ("sex sex sex sex sex sex sex sex" anyone?) to make that useless. The "web" would become a set of radiating lines. Furthermore this would raise the possibility of midstream providers charging for relaying: international packets cost more people money than national ones, after all. The result of *that* would be that the web would be reduced back to the ye olde BBS days - every site seperate, different costs for accessing them, massive information redundancy because of the seperation, etc. etc. etc.
So what can be done? Well, firstly, the reason for the death of advertising can only be to the silliness by which it was performed. Measuring click-throughs was a silly idea, really, because consumers are simply not used to ads that require an active response. Furthermore, the only reason for clicking through an ad to an e-commerce site would be an impulse buy - and nobody impulse-buys over the internet because you have to wait for the goods to be delivered which negates the impulse. (Some of them had silly ideas too. Like putting the ad at the top of the page, so "the user doesn't have to scroll down". Unfortunately the only result of that is that the ad gets skipped with the browser chrome and UI stuff at the top of the window. Or putting all the ads on a centralised server. Lag caused by ads is a far greater nuisance than the ads themselves.)
So what can happen now? Well, there's a chance that the cost of bandwidth will fall: less demand (remember, "demand" in economics means desire *backed up by money*), same supply (do you see any T1's being ripped out?) = price falls. People have already suggested new advertising models, but companies will need to accept that people aren't going to madly click on ads for info. Everyone's used to ads that they keep in mind for later buying.
The problem with Copyright is that it's a great idea, but it has a whole bunch of breakdowns.
The first, for example, is the requirement for expression to be tangible and fixed. They have to do that to make the law even vaguely implementable, but it immediately unbalances it, because it means that to get credit for your "intellectual property", you have to get it instantiated in a way that's physical rather than intellectual! Since the capitalist distribution system controls the physical resources necessary to do that, people who can't afford to create fixed expression can't ever be protected by copyright no matter how many fantastic expressions they might create. A homeless guy who hums a tune to himself and a pop singer who plays the tune on a guitar to millions have both done the same creative work in thinking of the tune (once you've throught of the tune, playing it on a guitar doesn't need any extra creativity), yet one's work is rewarded by gaining ownership of IP and the other is not.
A similar one is the parallel development law - now not only must it be fixed, but you have to make sure that lots of people have heard/seen your expression, otherwise they can recreate it and claim parallel development. This means that marketable works are more easily copyrighted than non-marketable ones because the marketable ones can be more easily distributed on the market, even though it may take just as much creative work to come up with a non-marketable expression as a marketable one.
The result of that is that the stated aim of Copyright mentioned in the message - enabling people to earn a living by producing creative expression, and so enabling them to concentrate on doing so and produce better expressions - is negated, because to even get a copyright they have to produce a first expression that's attractive enough to be marketed. (If it's not attractive enough to be marketed, nobody will ever hear it and it can be redeveloped in parallel.)
But if they could do that, then they were ALREADY capable of producing good creative work without needing copyright to get them a living, and the law is redundant; if they cannot do that, then they never get a copyright because they never get anything TO copyright, so the law does nothing to get them a living.
The DMCA is really a clear admission of the other problem with copyright law. It strikes me as being an acceptance of the fact that copyright is very hard to enforce, and if it was enforced it would only result in the prosecution of a huge number of citizens who had committed no other crime and who were otherwise productive and useful to society. Hence, they have to fudge it by trying to make it impossible to commit.
How would the DMCA, I wonder, deal with mutually exclusive copy protections? Ie, a situation between two protection algorithms where applying one protection breaks the other, and vice versa? Both have substantial noninfringing uses (giving protection), so the devices shouldn't be illegal, but neither could resist the other's breaking attempts, because doing so would also be breaking the protection the other would provide, and hence violating the DMCA.
Microsoft could probably release a new version of Word 2000 or Excel 2000 that wouldn't work under wine, but who cares if the current version does?
It isn't like there have actually been many actual advances in word processing technology. Most of the Office upgrades haven't done much except add prettier icons, busier menus, and meaningless toys (like the fold-down menus) so that nontechnical people can think "Oh, I'm getting distracted by all this technical stuff, but hey, I'm using a COMPUTER, so I must be being productive!"
I think that the recent furore over Napster is indicative of a basic conflict over copyright law. The real problem is that copyright law is, basically, a fair principle, and it's one that we do need to have in order that people can do things properly in society. (And although I like free software as much as the next chap, that doesn't mean you can do without copyright: if there was no intellectual property provision, anyone could grab Linux, rip it apart and sell it at a profit, and nobody could stop them because the authors and similar would have no rights; the GPL couldn't exist, since there would be nothing to license) But recently copyright law has been very much seen by many people as the enemy, because it stops them doing things, and many people don't feel they are being protected by it themselves. Hence, people don't respect it, and companies and legislators are forced into heavy-handed manuevers (like distrustful hardware and the DMCA) to attempt to force it on people. This means it is seen even more as an enemy, and the cycle continues. This is what we need to change. The only people who do not get the protection of copyright are people who don't produce any original work, but I can't imagine that ANYONE doesn't produce any original *intellectual* work ever in their lives. So, my thought is as follows: firstly, abolish the parallel development provision. Parallel development normally states that you don't violate copyright by producing an idea that's the same as someone else's as long as you didn't actually copy it. Although it sounds reasonable, it causes a problem: a person who is famous and/or rich or similar can take an idea they've had and make it so ambient in society (having it played on the radio or TV, broadcast in shops, etc.) that nobody can claim parallel development, whereas an average citizen who has an idea and isn't famous or whatever, or is perhaps just *meek* and doesn't consider it worthwhile to put their ideas forward for evaluation, cannot do this and hence any rights they might claim to the idea become wholly ineffectual since any other person can use it and claim parallel development. This violates the idea of intellectual property, which is after all meant to be *intellectual*; the value of an idea shouldn't change based on your ability to broadcast it. Ideally, we should have it that if you think of a good tune, you should be able to copyright it even if you can't write music or play a musical instrument, or indeed if you're completely crippled - you still did the *intellectual* bit, after all. Of course, this can't be implemented because we tend to need proof that the work was written. The second idea is to use the internet to make copyright friendly. Instead of warring against the internet, open the copyright libraries onto the internet for free upload. If you have an idea: sketch it and scan it, type it, hum it and sample it, whatever, then head over to http://itsmyidea.gov/, hit the upload button, and presto - you own the copyright (assuming it's not somebody else's idea already, which would have to be checked). Internet cafes could provide equivalents for people who don't have access to the necessary multimedia hardware. A quality scale of copyright would need to be set up, so that submitting a hummed tune would be as good as a full orchestral arrangement (otherwise, again, you're valuing physical production values over intellectual value). Hopefully when all people have an equal state in intellectual property, and even the average man on the street can recieve a copyright payment, then the law will be more respected and the horrible technological attitudes will be relaxed.
Slashdot Mirror
Your argument works exactly the other way. Bandwidth is a privilege, not a right, so there's nothing giving cable users the right to use more than anyone else.
Remember, by having cable as a private customer, you are not providing anything to the net. In fact, you are potentially consuming a great deal.
To which the only response can be, "It's not the modem users' fault that the game authors don't know how to write low bandwidth sync code."
Failed downloads can be resumed.
The example shows only that max user limits are a flawed model, because a 56k user takes up far less bandwidth than a cable user. Not only does a cable user take up masses of bandwidth, they also submit requests faster.
Also, bear in mind that cable isn't available in some countries. Since country of origin is intimately linked to race, requiring cable is racism.
I've seen a TV program on "the sound". It didn't sound much like chussssh, though. It sounded like a loud burst of low-frequency tones. The idea of it there was to place a sound generator under a surveillance camera. When you cross a certain point, "the sound" plays, and the subject (yes, this has been tested) tends to localise it. In doing so, they look at the camera. This prevents people from hiding their faces from surveillance cameras. This worked only when they were not told about it. The scientist himself, who knew, could stop himself localising but only by consciously thinking that he knew what it was.
Unfortunately, it seems very unlikely that this is going to work. Why?
First, although cross-platform apps make it easier to migrate, they provide no incentive to do so. After all, if your apps will run as well on Windows as on Linux, why switch? Windows's reputation will ensure people continue to choose it; they'll stick with what they know; and not all apps will be cross-platform (Office, anyone?)
Also, being cross-platform is a lousy tradeoff. Generally, cross-platforms apps are slow, have awkward user interfaces, are locked to the lowest common denominator of platform features, and similar. And the tradeoff - being able to run the same binary on multiple platforms - is worthless to the majority of users, since most of them only use one platform anyway, and those that don't would be perfectly capable of handling two binaries that apply to different platforms.
The only possible benefits are for programmers who can't be bothered to maintain their code for different platforms. In a commercial environment, users will not be prepared to trade away so many of their features to make things easy for the programmers. After all, they are trading away a fair amount of money in exchange for the programmer doing something hard. Sorry.
The belief that programmers will somehow be "forced" to write cross-platform software and so a Linux-available set of applications will become available by the "back door" is pretty ridiculous, too.
There are only a few problems with your idea.
The first is a danger in letting official distributions spring up for a profit. What I think is one of the big benefits of the viral GPL is that it prevents a company from getting GNU software, selling it commercially, and then suing THE ORIGINAL AUTHOR for illegally copying the software. Of course, they didn't do so.. but they still have to prove it in court, and they still have to have a lawyer to say so. In evidence, the company has a boxed product and the original author has a bunch of files on an FTP server - which looks more like the pirated copy? The author also has the old problems of being sued by a monied company, such as the company pumping up their own legal costs so that the defendant is ruined if costs go against them, or (in one case which actually happened, although it was about patented hardware rather than copyrighted software) suing for multiple violations all at once so the author can't afford to be represented in all the suits. The GPL at the moment blocks that, not least because in many GPLed works the firm could not identify an author to sue (Do. Do. Do. Do. and Do., anyone?), and also because a boxed copy of a distribution would have to be GPLed and therefore the concept of illegally copying it doesn't exist.
The other problem is the one you point out clearly. Most individuals cannot afford to be solely responsible for distributing a piece of software. Whereas WRITING software for free still gets them a benefit (they can still use the software themselves), making effort to distribute it for free costs money (copies, bandwidth, etc) and if they ask money for the distribution those costs go up even more because the firms they get them from all start demanding a piece of the pie.
Furthermore, allowing the person "who last modified that generation of the software" exclusive rights to distribution of that generation is guaranteed to cause problems with the scope required to create a "modification". You write your neato latest distribution and put it up on a few free ftp sites, then your local company buys one copy, adds a few zeroes to the end of the main binary and adds their name to the author field to constitute a "modification", and throws the result into a $5m marketing and distribution machine. Where's your reward for work now? (If we believe the ridiculous argument I saw earlier, that the CD layout of an image of GPL'd files is not derivative of those files, then all they need to do to get modification rights is to reburn the disc with the files in a different order!)
No, the original post made it clear.
There is a reward for commercial development. That reward is money. There is also a reward for GPLed development. That reward is that others will also develop under the GPL, and more and better software will be available for free. Hence, indirectly GPL developers gain money too - because they can get software without needing to pay, and thus save the money they would otherwise have paid for the software. (If I write some stuff for Linux, then Linux gets better, so Linux sticks around, so other people write stuff for Linux, so I don't have to buy Windows.) Even those who don't develop help, because they create communities which effectively provide customer support for GPLed products.
Allowing GPLed code to be used for commercial purposes would deny that reward to GPL developers in the same way that allowing commercial code to be given away for free denies the reward to commercial developers.
*Somebody* is going to have to sue Sony for this. I am not a lawyer, so this is only a thought, but I seem to recall there's a section in copyright law which says that a copyright can lapse if it isn't defended. If no legal action is taken, then POSE's copyright could fall off, which will render its license irrelevant.
The problem is, this could be easily used as a way of wiping off GPLs. All it takes is for three or four big companies to break GPL on a single product at once. Somebody's then got to fight them all, or lose the copyright for nondefense. Oh dear.
These must be some odd jobs you're looking at. All the gaming ones I've seen say "at least one previously published title minimum". Not much way of spinning that with interests.
It depends completely on the course you're doing.
In my CS course, for example, the only nod to anything about gaming was a Graphics course in the third year.
Assembly language? Are you sure? I've never heard of a Windows-based game including assembly, and I rather thought that most console firms required you to use their C libraries for hardware interaction for QA purposes.
But I think the real big warning has already been given. A "games programmer" does nothing but read a precisely stated design document, translate it into C, and document that fact. (Which, oddly enough, is almost exactly what any programmer does.) Designing games is now done by marketers and committees. That's why they're so generic these days. Sorry.
Well, "does all the glitz and glamour stifle innovation?" Of course it does. Innovation = competition. If it didn't stifle competition, companies wouldn't buy it.
But I'm not so sure it's completely black and white. Some games do get away without the mega graphics and things and still do at least reasonably well. Grand Theft Auto, Roll Away, Chu Chu Rocket and especially **POKEMON** are names that come to mind.
So now a ringtone is a derivative work of a full piece of music, and all the work in encoding the music is irrelevant because it's derivative?
I can understand that.. but surely that means that a full piece of music can be a derivative of a ringtone. After all, you can just take the ringtone as the melody and add lyrics and orchestration, but that's irrelevant - it's still derivative. (I always thought that "having the potential to be a derivative work" was pretty much strictly commutative (*being* one isn't because it depends on which one was (c)'d first).)
Also, ringtones don't take up much space. And they have a limited range of values...
Anyone for a distributed.net style project to enumerate all possible ringtones? By their logic we'd also enumerate all possible music, so all music produced would be derivative of something in the ringtone space. Then GPL the ringtone archive..
This is a silly thing to say.
Saying that free services can no longer continue because people consumed them doesn't make sense. If people had not been "leechers", and had instead paid for the free services, then they would not really have been free (a "moral duty" to pay is still a duty to pay) and the internet would already have been "going for the wallet".
There's a big ol' problem with subscriptions, though: the web really just isn't set up to support them.
The key aspect of the web in tying together information has always been the use of links. But nobody will link to a subscription site - what's the point? The reader probably won't have access to the linked content. Search engines would also be dead, since there's no way they could be given access to search the subscribers' content (doing so would open massive security holes regarding faking a search engine, using multiple search requests to retrieve the entire content by assembling the return contexts, etc..) and without it they'd be restricted to searching the site's own summary keywords - and it'd take only a few sites abusing the keyword system ("sex sex sex sex sex sex sex sex" anyone?) to make that useless. The "web" would become a set of radiating lines. Furthermore this would raise the possibility of midstream providers charging for relaying: international packets cost more people money than national ones, after all. The result of *that* would be that the web would be reduced back to the ye olde BBS days - every site seperate, different costs for accessing them, massive information redundancy because of the seperation, etc. etc. etc.
So what can be done? Well, firstly, the reason for the death of advertising can only be to the silliness by which it was performed. Measuring click-throughs was a silly idea, really, because consumers are simply not used to ads that require an active response. Furthermore, the only reason for clicking through an ad to an e-commerce site would be an impulse buy - and nobody impulse-buys over the internet because you have to wait for the goods to be delivered which negates the impulse. (Some of them had silly ideas too. Like putting the ad at the top of the page, so "the user doesn't have to scroll down". Unfortunately the only result of that is that the ad gets skipped with the browser chrome and UI stuff at the top of the window. Or putting all the ads on a centralised server. Lag caused by ads is a far greater nuisance than the ads themselves.)
So what can happen now? Well, there's a chance that the cost of bandwidth will fall: less demand (remember, "demand" in economics means desire *backed up by money*), same supply (do you see any T1's being ripped out?) = price falls. People have already suggested new advertising models, but companies will need to accept that people aren't going to madly click on ads for info. Everyone's used to ads that they keep in mind for later buying.
The problem with Copyright is that it's a great idea, but it has a whole bunch of breakdowns.
The first, for example, is the requirement for expression to be tangible and fixed. They have to do that to make the law even vaguely implementable, but it immediately unbalances it, because it means that to get credit for your "intellectual property", you have to get it instantiated in a way that's physical rather than intellectual! Since the capitalist distribution system controls the physical resources necessary to do that, people who can't afford to create fixed expression can't ever be protected by copyright no matter how many fantastic expressions they might create. A homeless guy who hums a tune to himself and a pop singer who plays the tune on a guitar to millions have both done the same creative work in thinking of the tune (once you've throught of the tune, playing it on a guitar doesn't need any extra creativity), yet one's work is rewarded by gaining ownership of IP and the other is not.
A similar one is the parallel development law - now not only must it be fixed, but you have to make sure that lots of people have heard/seen your expression, otherwise they can recreate it and claim parallel development. This means that marketable works are more easily copyrighted than non-marketable ones because the marketable ones can be more easily distributed on the market, even though it may take just as much creative work to come up with a non-marketable expression as a marketable one.
The result of that is that the stated aim of Copyright mentioned in the message - enabling people to earn a living by producing creative expression, and so enabling them to concentrate on doing so and produce better expressions - is negated, because to even get a copyright they have to produce a first expression that's attractive enough to be marketed. (If it's not attractive enough to be marketed, nobody will ever hear it and it can be redeveloped in parallel.)
But if they could do that, then they were ALREADY capable of producing good creative work without needing copyright to get them a living, and the law is redundant; if they cannot do that, then they never get a copyright because they never get anything TO copyright, so the law does nothing to get them a living.
The DMCA is really a clear admission of the other problem with copyright law. It strikes me as being an acceptance of the fact that copyright is very hard to enforce, and if it was enforced it would only result in the prosecution of a huge number of citizens who had committed no other crime and who were otherwise productive and useful to society. Hence, they have to fudge it by trying to make it impossible to commit.
How would the DMCA, I wonder, deal with mutually exclusive copy protections? Ie, a situation between two protection algorithms where applying one protection breaks the other, and vice versa? Both have substantial noninfringing uses (giving protection), so the devices shouldn't be illegal, but neither could resist the other's breaking attempts, because doing so would also be breaking the protection the other would provide, and hence violating the DMCA.
How about the phrase "Note: This article is a piece of satire" at the end of the text?
Microsoft could probably release a new version of Word 2000 or Excel 2000 that wouldn't work under wine, but who cares if the current version does?
It isn't like there have actually been many actual advances in word processing technology. Most of the Office upgrades haven't done much except add prettier icons, busier menus, and meaningless toys (like the fold-down menus) so that nontechnical people can think "Oh, I'm getting distracted by all this technical stuff, but hey, I'm using a COMPUTER, so I must be being productive!"
I think that the recent furore over Napster is indicative of a basic conflict over copyright law. The real problem is that copyright law is, basically, a fair principle, and it's one that we do need to have in order that people can do things properly in society. (And although I like free software as much as the next chap, that doesn't mean you can do without copyright: if there was no intellectual property provision, anyone could grab Linux, rip it apart and sell it at a profit, and nobody could stop them because the authors and similar would have no rights; the GPL couldn't exist, since there would be nothing to license)
But recently copyright law has been very much seen by many people as the enemy, because it stops them doing things, and many people don't feel they are being protected by it themselves. Hence, people don't respect it, and companies and legislators are forced into heavy-handed manuevers (like distrustful hardware and the DMCA) to attempt to force it on people. This means it is seen even more as an enemy, and the cycle continues.
This is what we need to change. The only people who do not get the protection of copyright are people who don't produce any original work, but I can't imagine that ANYONE doesn't produce any original *intellectual* work ever in their lives.
So, my thought is as follows: firstly, abolish the parallel development provision. Parallel development normally states that you don't violate copyright by producing an idea that's the same as someone else's as long as you didn't actually copy it. Although it sounds reasonable, it causes a problem: a person who is famous and/or rich or similar can take an idea they've had and make it so ambient in society (having it played on the radio or TV, broadcast in shops, etc.) that nobody can claim parallel development, whereas an average citizen who has an idea and isn't famous or whatever, or is perhaps just *meek* and doesn't consider it worthwhile to put their ideas forward for evaluation, cannot do this and hence any rights they might claim to the idea become wholly ineffectual since any other person can use it and claim parallel development. This violates the idea of intellectual property, which is after all meant to be *intellectual*; the value of an idea shouldn't change based on your ability to broadcast it. Ideally, we should have it that if you think of a good tune, you should be able to copyright it even if you can't write music or play a musical instrument, or indeed if you're completely crippled - you still did the *intellectual* bit, after all. Of course, this can't be implemented because we tend to need proof that the work was written.
The second idea is to use the internet to make copyright friendly. Instead of warring against the internet, open the copyright libraries onto the internet for free upload. If you have an idea: sketch it and scan it, type it, hum it and sample it, whatever, then head over to http://itsmyidea.gov/, hit the upload button, and presto - you own the copyright (assuming it's not somebody else's idea already, which would have to be checked). Internet cafes could provide equivalents for people who don't have access to the necessary multimedia hardware. A quality scale of copyright would need to be set up, so that submitting a hummed tune would be as good as a full orchestral arrangement (otherwise, again, you're valuing physical production values over intellectual value).
Hopefully when all people have an equal state in intellectual property, and even the average man on the street can recieve a copyright payment, then the law will be more respected and the horrible technological attitudes will be relaxed.