Still, if he's got that much faith in it, patent it, or write it up and copyright the description (not really ironclad, but it could get a settlement if OmniCorp steals the idea).
NO. Two incorrect assumptions here:
First, copyright provides no protection to an inventor whose invention is described in a copyrighted work. Consider the consequences. I write up a description of someone else's unpatented invention. I then hold the copyright on that description. Should I be able to assert any rights over that invention? In your system, I would. I don't think I should.
Second, there's the implication that submission to the LoC is required for copyright to attach. Just not true. Copyright attaches as soon as the work is fixed in a tangible form. You only need to register if you plan to sue someone for infringement, and even then there's no requirement that you register within a certain time of creation. This is one of the many reasons copyrights on descriptions do not confer even minimal patent rights over described inventions. I can just write up copyrighted descriptions of anything, at any time, with no requirement of registration or date-stamping.
The USPTO has cheap ways to file preliminary invention descriptions to get a firm date-stamp while pursuing a patent. Use those. Don't think copyright has anything to do with it; the only thing it'll keep OmniCorp from doing is reproducing the text of the description. You'd have a hard time arguing that an implementation of the described process of invention is a "derivative work" and that copyright infringement took place.
Moreover, the definition of "disability" in the text of the ADA is even stricter:
(2) Disability.--The term "disability" means, with respect to an
individual--
(A) a physical or mental impairment that substantially limits one
or more of the major life activities of such individual;
(B) a record of such an impairment; or
(C) being regarded as having such an impairment.
Note the "substantially limits... major life activities" bit. It's significant. Keeps people from asserting dumb or small things as disabilities.
Remember, when arguing about legal definitions, that statutes tend to define key or controversial terms very carefully in the text of the statute, to avoid having a "battle of the dictionaries" later on.
In that regard, if the idea is to protect the developer (and OSI / OSS / FS developers in general) from a lawsuite, why not just say "by accepting this license, you agree not to file lawsuites against any OSI / OSS / FS software developer?
Because then nobody would use the software, probably even including you. Imagine the following hypothetical:
Some 31337 h4x0r roots your box. This rooting of your box costs you lots of money (say he stole your credit card number, or took down your business website, or something). It just so happens that this particulat 31337 h4x0r also contributed some code to $yourGPLdMailClient. Instead of being able to sue the little brat, you're high and dry.
Now, if we limit the clause to "licensees may not sue any OSS developer for patent infringement", the problems you or I would have using the software go away. However, this is a Bad Thing for large-scale corporate adoption of OSS. If the company has any software patent portfolio at all, their legal department will demand that all OSS stays off all of their boxen, since otherwise they may as well forget about ever enforcing their software patents on anyone. (Say I'm sued for doing some really egregious and horrible software patent infringement. But hey -- I once contributed some code to Mozilla! I'm off the hook!)
Rosen's license is cool, but scary. It's far too easy to come up with hypos that make patent-suit-stopping clauses bad news.
The idea is that exclusive rights = $$, and that this will always be true. The amount of $$ certainly diminishes, but granting an extra 20 years of exclusive rights on top of the 70 already granted represents some amount of additional money for the copyright holders.
The more money one expects to get by doing something, the more likely one is to do it. So by adding to the term length prospectively, Congress is making it more likely that people will create, since they have an added financial incentive to do so.
Absolutely, if you don't mind reading the actual papers filed with the court. They're still legal documents, but 100 times clearer than your average EULA. All of the briefs in the Supreme Court record filed by the respondents (Ashcroft, et al.) can be found here.
Re:Whats wrong with this law?
on
Eldred vs. Ashcroft
·
· Score: 5, Informative
Agreed that this should go away through Congress. However, the constitutional case against it isn't as weak as you suggest.
As Lessig, Sullivan, et al.'s brief notes, the argument is not that Congress doesn't have the right to regulate copyright, but that the clause imposes limits:
"To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts" -- The key word here is "progress." While it can be said that handing a pile of cash to Disney and RIAA/MPAA members will lead them to produce more content (since they have a pile of money), the petitioners say this isn't good enough. They say that promoting progress can't be done just by handing piles of money to, say, Gershwin's estate, at the public's expense, since Gershwin's estate can't do anything for progress, since Gershwin's dead.
"For limited times" -- True, 90 years is a limited time. However, there has to be a limit to Congress's power to extend otherwise the time wouldn't be limited. And if there is a limit, we've reached or exceeded it. The retroactive portion of the CTEA really pushes the outside of any reasonable definition of "limited".
There's no doubt that copyright fosters invention and discovery. We're not talking about abolishing copyright itself. We're just saying that handing out a longer copyright for a piece of progress that's already completed can't possibly foster invention or discovery, especially when most of these windfalls are going to corporations representing the works of dead guys.
-- Dreamword (Becoming a common law fan more and more each day)
Sure, the 7th Amendment gives a right to trial by jury. But juries don't decide questions of law, only questions of fact. If there aren't any questions of fact, do you really want 12 of your peers sitting around twiddling their thumbs? Why do you want them to sit there if it's totally clear that they can't reasonably find the facts to be different then those stipulated by the parties or determined by the judge?
Or do you want all questions of fact decided by juries, no matter how obvious?
Summary judgment increases the efficiency of the system, minimizing citizens' thumb-twiddling. It's a Good Thing. If you lose on summary judgment, you would have lost anyway.
Tomorrow, if a student turns in an assignment where s/he clearly lifted a picture or two, and claims that her/his son threw that in, will it be OK? Maybe this analogy isn't right, but the point is: shouldn't somebody be held accountable, just like my students are held accountable? Will this case weaken MIT faculty's sermons in classes about plagiarism? Shouldn't MIT be held to a higher standard, since it is indeed a place of higher learning ?
I think MIT should absolutely be held to a higher moral standard regarding the misuse of other people's work and the representation of other people's work as their own. Had MIT's response been , "it's fair use; buzz off!," I'd agree that while they're not doing anything illegal, they'd still be doing something wrong.
However, issuing a public apology and taking steps to keep the offending illustration from further distribution are enough. It's plenty difficult, I'm sure, for such an institution and such a professor, both of whom have a huge interest in getting future grants, to say publicly that they acted improperly on this grant application. I agree that it still weakens MIT's anti-plagarism sermonizing, but firing a professor -- especially one who just got a huge grant for the Institute -- over a misattributed, non-substantive illustration goes too far.
Even a formal internal sanction of some kind, even without a penalty, would be inappropriate; the guy didn't check up on what he should have checked up on, but it doesn't amount to either copyright infringement or academic misconduct. It's sloppy and lazy, but not actionably wrong.
The question here, though, is not whether the professor was academically dishonest. It's whether the Radix guys have a basis to sue MIT. By defending against a claim of infringement (if one is ever brought), MIT isn't weakening its stance against academic dishonesty, plagarism, or anything else. Saying "what we did is not ILLEGAL" is not the same as saying that student plagarism is OK. Student plagarism is usually quite legal; the student probably won't be sued for lifting a sentence or two from Britannica, and if he did he'd have a good defense. It's still unacceptable and actionable in an academic context, with academic sanctions.
Perhaps a better programming analogy would be that the drawing of the soldier was like a splash screen. If you turned in a program with a really slick splash screen that included images lifted from various copyrighted sources, it would not be a substantive part of your program -- just like the soldier image was not a substantive part of their grant proposal. You're not being graded on your artistic skills, but your coding skills; their proposal was not being evaluated on the quality of their illustrations, but on the quality of their proposed research.
Fire the offending researcher? I'm from the University of Wisconsin, where after a prof was indicted for misuse of federal funds, he kept on teaching. Tenured profs are hard to get rid of, and not being properly diligent in checking up on his daughter is not a good enough reason for dismissal.
A side note -- the Radix guys should remember where they (likely) got their name: "radix malorum est cupiditas". "The love of money is the root of all evil." If they get greedy and sue, the attorneys' fees will almost certainly outpace the judgement in their favor.
I met Ben at the Internet Law Program at the Berkman Center earlier this summer. I was hoping something like this would happen; he'll make an ideal defendant.
In a test case like this, what we're looking for is an unimpeachable plaintiff -- someone whose motives can't really be questioned, who actually has a good reason to want to do what he's doing, who has great credentials, and who's really bright. They've got that in Ben; he basically has the clout of Harvard University behind him. Not to mention the near-total respect of everyone at the Berkman Center; they refer to him as their "boy genius".
There is one potential problem: he's already written software that does nearly what he wants to do without violating the DMCA. For the ACLU's last test case on filtering, he wrote a script that tried to access everything in non-porn categories of Yahoo's directory, keeping track of what it wasn't able to access. This is a reasonably good (though not perfect) method of determining the contents of the blocked-sites list. We have to hope that the court doesn't decide that scripts like the one Ben already wrote are "good enough," and that there is no legitimate research need to create and disseminate a program that decrypts the list itself.
And it was a truly great program. I recommend it highly to those who have a deep interest in the legal and political issues surrounding the internet.
All of the professors, and most of the attendees, were extremely clueful. Though Larry Lessig painted a very convincing and very dire picture of the future of the internet, I was given hope by the fact that many of the attendees both "get it" and are in the position to influence the powerful towards the implementation of good policy.
One of my favorite moments was during a discussion of deep linking, when the recent NPR linking policy issue came up as an example of how some large organizations, even those ostensibly seeking wide dissemination of quality news and information, really didn't understand how central linking is to the way the web works. At this point, the deputy general counsel of NPR, who happened to be in attendance, introduced herself and gave an excellent description of why the NPR policy was wrong-headed. She'd always thought it was a bad policy (I believe her word was "stupid"), and was glad it had come to light.
Once my hosting provider overcomes some technical problems, I'll post my notes from the conference.
Any other attendees have good stories to share? I know a significant portion of the crowd there reads slashdot.
You can patent software. You can then sue people who make software which violates your patent. You can win.
It used to be the case that computer programs were legally considered similar to mathematical algorithms. Being abstract ideas, they can't be patented. (It's not that you can't patent math because no math ideas are novel; it's just that you can't patent math ideas because they're too abstract to be patented.)
Now, however, most governments (including USA) and other patent-granting authorities grant patents on software. You can't create unauthorized implementations of MPEG codecs without infringing on some valid, enforceable patents.
Sucks, but it's true. It would be *very* hard to argue that an implementation of an MPEG codec is somehow "natural" and not original. It would be slightly less difficult -- though futile, since this question has been decided by the courts already -- to argue that an MPEG implementation is just a reflection of abstract mathematical ideas, and is thus not patentable.
Oh, don't assume that it wouldn't be laughed out of court. All that Agfa did is send some letters threatening legal action -- which they can do until they go blue in the face, whether or not their case has any merit.
No judge is currently taking this seriously; that's because no judge has seen this case. Right now, it's just at the point of mean and scary-sounding letters talking about what Agfa might do if Tom refuses to capitulate.
This is not a case of "you can't do what you want to your own fonts".
Rather, this is a case of "while you can do what you want with your own fonts, you can't distribute a tool to let other people do what they want to their fonts without writing their own software".
It's still wrong and still probably outside the scope of the DMCA, but not quite as bleak as you state.
While my example has parallels with the EULA-remover, they key difference is that using "Coca-Cola" as a mark is against the law, while violating a contract you never entered into is not against the law.
Allow me to clarify: Just as trademarks are *enforceable* regardless of whether the "infringer" occluded the notice of trademark, EULAs are *unenforceable* regardless of whether the "infringer" occluded the license agreement. My point was that occluding the license agreement doesn't make an enforceable agreement unenforceable, nor does it make the unenforceable EULA any less enforceable.
If anything, this trickery implies that software users consider EULAs to be binding, and as such must be occluded to avoid binding acceptance. I find that to be counter-productive.
We are in agreement, I believe.
(BTW, no, I am not a law student. I will be in the fall; I assume that my legal education will beat the 'speciousness' out of me.)
This software is no solution. Imagine the following 'solution':
I make brown, sugary, cola-flavored carbonated beverages. I hit upon a great name for my product -- "Coca-Cola". Now, "Coca-Cola" is a trademark. It says so right on the can I'm holding.
The obvious solution? I take out a marker and scratch out the "(R)" symbol next to the mark "Coca-Cola". I make a template that goes over the can so that other people can scratch out the "(R)" never having seen it, knowing only that it might be in their best interests to scratch it out.
Now, is "Coca-Cola" no longer a defensible trademark? Am I allowed to call my brown sugary beverage "Coca-Cola", since I never saw the little "(R)"? Are the users of my template allowed to do so? No.
Now, there are huge problems with EULAs anyway (no meeting of minds = no enforcable contract), but this is not the solution.
In the March 1994 issue of Wired (2.04), there's a speculative article about what the arguments among the Justices would be if such a case ever came up. Interesting to compare Samuel Gelerman's speculation to the real arguments in the decision:
For those in Wisconsin, a good source of old and (mostly) cheap computer and techie bits is the University of Wisconsin SWAP shop. It's the surplus shop for the University and certain state agencies. One major plus is that their inventory is posted on the web here.
dreamword
Proud owner of a 17" monochrome NeXT monitor that I have no idea what to do with, but couldn't pass up
I'd say the judicial conduct in both cases was somewhat inappropriate, but T.P. Jackson's mistakes were much larger.
It's common for judges to harshly treat one side or another during the trial; many judges, regardless of their own thoughts, tend to beat up on both sides in order to identify any weaknesses in either argument that could help decide the case.
If one side is treated truly unfairly (as definitely occurred in the Microsoft trial, and may have occurred in the DeCSS case), it's known as an "appealable issue". It's badf news short-term for the wronged party (they probably lose the case), but good news long-term (they have a good argument for a new trial come appeals time).
There's a big difference between harsh judicial scrutiny (and even public contempt from the bench) and public name-calling in interviews granted to the media outside the courtroom. Both judges may have erred, but T.P.J. erred both significantly and publicly, in a way he should have known would jeopardize his ruling.
-jcg
Wondering if the Microsoft trial judge's friends call him "T.P."...
Re:Categorization of audio gear & recommendations
on
Insanely Audiophile
·
· Score: 1
Right on with #3.
Pro audio gear tends to be more durable and less costly / snobby than comparable-sounding audiophile gear. I'm currently running my signal to self-powered Event 20/20bas biamplified self-powered studio monitor speakers through a small Behringer mixer (acting as preamp). IT sounds better than many audiophile rigs I've heard costing many multiples of the $600 this rig cost (used).
Also -- about the 5.1 situation. This is changing. I work in theatrical sound design, and new, small, cheap digital mixing consoles with excellent 5.1 support (but without any Dolby Digital or other decoding) are coming out left and right. For way less than a high-end surround preamp ($10,000+), you could buy a used Yamaha 02Rv2 ($5,000+) and mix your own...
dw
There are several brands of off-the-shelf devices to stick high-quality audio over ethernet available, but all of them are, predictably, multi-thousand-dollar rackmount devices. The cheapest way to do multiple-channel realtime (or near-RT) audio over networks is using plain ol' computers -- and cheap ones at that.
Last summer I saw a demo at an AES meeting of a multichannel audio transport system at the Banff Centre for the Arts that used a couple of computers running Linux, some cheap 8-channel audio cards, some custom software and a wicked fast campus network to do remote multichannel recording of things in the concert hall from the recording studio a couple blocks away. Neat stuff...
Slashdot Mirror
NO. Two incorrect assumptions here:
The USPTO has cheap ways to file preliminary invention descriptions to get a firm date-stamp while pursuing a patent. Use those. Don't think copyright has anything to do with it; the only thing it'll keep OmniCorp from doing is reproducing the text of the description. You'd have a hard time arguing that an implementation of the described process of invention is a "derivative work" and that copyright infringement took place.
Note the "substantially limits
Remember, when arguing about legal definitions, that statutes tend to define key or controversial terms very carefully in the text of the statute, to avoid having a "battle of the dictionaries" later on.
In that regard, if the idea is to protect the developer (and OSI / OSS / FS developers in general) from a lawsuite, why not just say "by accepting this license, you agree not to file lawsuites against any OSI / OSS / FS software developer?
Because then nobody would use the software, probably even including you. Imagine the following hypothetical:
Some 31337 h4x0r roots your box. This rooting of your box costs you lots of money (say he stole your credit card number, or took down your business website, or something). It just so happens that this particulat 31337 h4x0r also contributed some code to $yourGPLdMailClient. Instead of being able to sue the little brat, you're high and dry.
Now, if we limit the clause to "licensees may not sue any OSS developer for patent infringement", the problems you or I would have using the software go away. However, this is a Bad Thing for large-scale corporate adoption of OSS. If the company has any software patent portfolio at all, their legal department will demand that all OSS stays off all of their boxen, since otherwise they may as well forget about ever enforcing their software patents on anyone. (Say I'm sued for doing some really egregious and horrible software patent infringement. But hey -- I once contributed some code to Mozilla! I'm off the hook!)
Rosen's license is cool, but scary. It's far too easy to come up with hypos that make patent-suit-stopping clauses bad news.
The more money one expects to get by doing something, the more likely one is to do it. So by adding to the term length prospectively, Congress is making it more likely that people will create, since they have an added financial incentive to do so.
Absolutely, if you don't mind reading the actual papers filed with the court. They're still legal documents, but 100 times clearer than your average EULA. All of the briefs in the Supreme Court record filed by the respondents (Ashcroft, et al.) can be found here.
As Lessig, Sullivan, et al.'s brief notes, the argument is not that Congress doesn't have the right to regulate copyright, but that the clause imposes limits:
There's no doubt that copyright fosters invention and discovery. We're not talking about abolishing copyright itself. We're just saying that handing out a longer copyright for a piece of progress that's already completed can't possibly foster invention or discovery, especially when most of these windfalls are going to corporations representing the works of dead guys.
-- Dreamword
(Becoming a common law fan more and more each day)
Are you serious?
Sure, the 7th Amendment gives a right to trial by jury. But juries don't decide questions of law, only questions of fact. If there aren't any questions of fact, do you really want 12 of your peers sitting around twiddling their thumbs? Why do you want them to sit there if it's totally clear that they can't reasonably find the facts to be different then those stipulated by the parties or determined by the judge?
Or do you want all questions of fact decided by juries, no matter how obvious?
Summary judgment increases the efficiency of the system, minimizing citizens' thumb-twiddling. It's a Good Thing. If you lose on summary judgment, you would have lost anyway.
I think MIT should absolutely be held to a higher moral standard regarding the misuse of other people's work and the representation of other people's work as their own. Had MIT's response been , "it's fair use; buzz off!," I'd agree that while they're not doing anything illegal, they'd still be doing something wrong.
However, issuing a public apology and taking steps to keep the offending illustration from further distribution are enough. It's plenty difficult, I'm sure, for such an institution and such a professor, both of whom have a huge interest in getting future grants, to say publicly that they acted improperly on this grant application. I agree that it still weakens MIT's anti-plagarism sermonizing, but firing a professor -- especially one who just got a huge grant for the Institute -- over a misattributed, non-substantive illustration goes too far.
Even a formal internal sanction of some kind, even without a penalty, would be inappropriate; the guy didn't check up on what he should have checked up on, but it doesn't amount to either copyright infringement or academic misconduct. It's sloppy and lazy, but not actionably wrong.
The question here, though, is not whether the professor was academically dishonest. It's whether the Radix guys have a basis to sue MIT. By defending against a claim of infringement (if one is ever brought), MIT isn't weakening its stance against academic dishonesty, plagarism, or anything else. Saying "what we did is not ILLEGAL" is not the same as saying that student plagarism is OK. Student plagarism is usually quite legal; the student probably won't be sued for lifting a sentence or two from Britannica, and if he did he'd have a good defense. It's still unacceptable and actionable in an academic context, with academic sanctions.
Perhaps a better programming analogy would be that the drawing of the soldier was like a splash screen. If you turned in a program with a really slick splash screen that included images lifted from various copyrighted sources, it would not be a substantive part of your program -- just like the soldier image was not a substantive part of their grant proposal. You're not being graded on your artistic skills, but your coding skills; their proposal was not being evaluated on the quality of their illustrations, but on the quality of their proposed research.
Fire the offending researcher? I'm from the University of Wisconsin, where after a prof was indicted for misuse of federal funds, he kept on teaching. Tenured profs are hard to get rid of, and not being properly diligent in checking up on his daughter is not a good enough reason for dismissal.
A side note -- the Radix guys should remember where they (likely) got their name: "radix malorum est cupiditas". "The love of money is the root of all evil." If they get greedy and sue, the attorneys' fees will almost certainly outpace the judgement in their favor.
I met Ben at the Internet Law Program at the Berkman Center earlier this summer. I was hoping something like this would happen; he'll make an ideal defendant.
In a test case like this, what we're looking for is an unimpeachable plaintiff -- someone whose motives can't really be questioned, who actually has a good reason to want to do what he's doing, who has great credentials, and who's really bright. They've got that in Ben; he basically has the clout of Harvard University behind him. Not to mention the near-total respect of everyone at the Berkman Center; they refer to him as their "boy genius".
There is one potential problem: he's already written software that does nearly what he wants to do without violating the DMCA. For the ACLU's last test case on filtering, he wrote a script that tried to access everything in non-porn categories of Yahoo's directory, keeping track of what it wasn't able to access. This is a reasonably good (though not perfect) method of determining the contents of the blocked-sites list. We have to hope that the court doesn't decide that scripts like the one Ben already wrote are "good enough," and that there is no legitimate research need to create and disseminate a program that decrypts the list itself.
All of the professors, and most of the attendees, were extremely clueful. Though Larry Lessig painted a very convincing and very dire picture of the future of the internet, I was given hope by the fact that many of the attendees both "get it" and are in the position to influence the powerful towards the implementation of good policy.
One of my favorite moments was during a discussion of deep linking, when the recent NPR linking policy issue came up as an example of how some large organizations, even those ostensibly seeking wide dissemination of quality news and information, really didn't understand how central linking is to the way the web works. At this point, the deputy general counsel of NPR, who happened to be in attendance, introduced herself and gave an excellent description of why the NPR policy was wrong-headed. She'd always thought it was a bad policy (I believe her word was "stupid"), and was glad it had come to light.
Once my hosting provider overcomes some technical problems, I'll post my notes from the conference.
Any other attendees have good stories to share? I know a significant portion of the crowd there reads slashdot.
Joe Gratz
Sorry, you're wrong. Wish you were right, though.
You can patent software. You can then sue people who make software which violates your patent. You can win.
It used to be the case that computer programs were legally considered similar to mathematical algorithms. Being abstract ideas, they can't be patented. (It's not that you can't patent math because no math ideas are novel; it's just that you can't patent math ideas because they're too abstract to be patented.)
Now, however, most governments (including USA) and other patent-granting authorities grant patents on software. You can't create unauthorized implementations of MPEG codecs without infringing on some valid, enforceable patents.
Sucks, but it's true. It would be *very* hard to argue that an implementation of an MPEG codec is somehow "natural" and not original. It would be slightly less difficult -- though futile, since this question has been decided by the courts already -- to argue that an MPEG implementation is just a reflection of abstract mathematical ideas, and is thus not patentable.
Oh, don't assume that it wouldn't be laughed out of court. All that Agfa did is send some letters threatening legal action -- which they can do until they go blue in the face, whether or not their case has any merit.
No judge is currently taking this seriously; that's because no judge has seen this case. Right now, it's just at the point of mean and scary-sounding letters talking about what Agfa might do if Tom refuses to capitulate.
This is not a case of "you can't do what you want to your own fonts".
Rather, this is a case of "while you can do what you want with your own fonts, you can't distribute a tool to let other people do what they want to their fonts without writing their own software".
It's still wrong and still probably outside the scope of the DMCA, but not quite as bleak as you state.
You're right.
While my example has parallels with the EULA-remover, they key difference is that using "Coca-Cola" as a mark is against the law, while violating a contract you never entered into is not against the law.
Allow me to clarify:
Just as trademarks are *enforceable* regardless of whether the "infringer" occluded the notice of trademark, EULAs are *unenforceable* regardless of whether the "infringer" occluded the license agreement. My point was that occluding the license agreement doesn't make an enforceable agreement unenforceable, nor does it make the unenforceable EULA any less enforceable.
If anything, this trickery implies that software users consider EULAs to be binding, and as such must be occluded to avoid binding acceptance. I find that to be counter-productive.
We are in agreement, I believe.
(BTW, no, I am not a law student. I will be in the fall; I assume that my legal education will beat the 'speciousness' out of me.)
IANAL (yet), but --
This software is no solution. Imagine the following 'solution':
I make brown, sugary, cola-flavored carbonated beverages. I hit upon a great name for my product -- "Coca-Cola". Now, "Coca-Cola" is a trademark. It says so right on the can I'm holding.
The obvious solution? I take out a marker and scratch out the "(R)" symbol next to the mark "Coca-Cola". I make a template that goes over the can so that other people can scratch out the "(R)" never having seen it, knowing only that it might be in their best interests to scratch it out.
Now, is "Coca-Cola" no longer a defensible trademark? Am I allowed to call my brown sugary beverage "Coca-Cola", since I never saw the little "(R)"? Are the users of my template allowed to do so? No.
Now, there are huge problems with EULAs anyway (no meeting of minds = no enforcable contract), but this is not the solution.
In the March 1994 issue of Wired (2.04), there's a speculative article about what the arguments among the Justices would be if such a case ever came up. Interesting to compare Samuel Gelerman's speculation to the real arguments in the decision:
Herd Not Obscene, by Samuel Gelerman, from Wired 2.04
dreamword
Proud owner of a 17" monochrome NeXT monitor that I have no idea what to do with, but couldn't pass up
It's common for judges to harshly treat one side or another during the trial; many judges, regardless of their own thoughts, tend to beat up on both sides in order to identify any weaknesses in either argument that could help decide the case.
If one side is treated truly unfairly (as definitely occurred in the Microsoft trial, and may have occurred in the DeCSS case), it's known as an "appealable issue". It's badf news short-term for the wronged party (they probably lose the case), but good news long-term (they have a good argument for a new trial come appeals time).
There's a big difference between harsh judicial scrutiny (and even public contempt from the bench) and public name-calling in interviews granted to the media outside the courtroom. Both judges may have erred, but T.P.J. erred both significantly and publicly, in a way he should have known would jeopardize his ruling.
-jcg
Wondering if the Microsoft trial judge's friends call him "T.P."...
Pro audio gear tends to be more durable and less costly / snobby than comparable-sounding audiophile gear. I'm currently running my signal to self-powered Event 20/20bas biamplified self-powered studio monitor speakers through a small Behringer mixer (acting as preamp). IT sounds better than many audiophile rigs I've heard costing many multiples of the $600 this rig cost (used).
Also -- about the 5.1 situation. This is changing. I work in theatrical sound design, and new, small, cheap digital mixing consoles with excellent 5.1 support (but without any Dolby Digital or other decoding) are coming out left and right. For way less than a high-end surround preamp ($10,000+), you could buy a used Yamaha 02Rv2 ($5,000+) and mix your own... dw
Last summer I saw a demo at an AES meeting of a multichannel audio transport system at the Banff Centre for the Arts that used a couple of computers running Linux, some cheap 8-channel audio cards, some custom software and a wicked fast campus network to do remote multichannel recording of things in the concert hall from the recording studio a couple blocks away. Neat stuff...