Price-restrictive advertising that is not coop-supported, however, may remain per se unlawful. In the context of traditional brick-and-mortar dealers or distributors, this means that a manufacturer may run afoul of the antitrust laws by requiring adherence to MAP with respect to in-store promotions or other advertisements that are not coop-supported. In the context of the Internet, MAP restrictions binding an entire web site may constitute a violation if the manufacturer paid for only part of the site. Even if the manufacturer paid for the entire site, it may not restrict the prices advertised on other web sites linked to the original site. Complications may also arise if the dealer's or distributor's web site serves not only to advertise a product but also to take purchase orders. Under these circumstances, the manufacturer's advertising restriction may well be deemed the functional equivalent of resale price maintenance, and it would be unlawful per se.
Limitations on dealers' advertising of discounts on the Internet may also be problematic, at least where websites take purchase orders and posted prices might be considered the equivalent of instore price stickers.
and also has this to say about being careful how you control your dealer's behavior:
Since the Sherman Act prohibits only "agreements in restraint of trade," manufacturers can unilaterally announce in advance that they will deal only with distributors who adhere to their pricing policies and can terminate those who depart from such a policy. On the other hand, a manufacturer that goes further and, confronted with a distributor that is not complying with its pricing policy, rather than terminate the distributor, coerces or induces the distributor into changing its prices, may violate the law. The problem is that subsequent compliance in response to pressure may be considered to form an "agreement" on prices. Thus, while "exposition, persuasion or argument" to influence dealers is generally allowed, threats of sanctions, policing, requiring approval of deviations, retaliatory price increases, and the like may support a finding of an illegal agreement, when they succeed in securing some indication of a dealer's assent.
In other words, while that partially supports your contention that you can require dealers to adhere to a pricing policy, you have to be VERY careful about how you enforce that. And, Apple is not a dealership, and I doubt they take any co-op advertising money from any labels. Any indication of collusion by the labels would also be a big problem for them - see my earlier reference to DOJ document regarding what kind of evidence they'd be looking for.
Of course they're competitors, you said that if one were to sell at a lower price, the others would go out of business because all of their customers would go to the one who lowered the prices. Just because YOU are the one setting the prices, they're still all agreeing to abide by that. That just makes you a co-conspirator.
Now, if all of the dealers you're talking about are "Pharmboy's Hot Tub Dealer" stores, then they're actually a PART of your business - same with franchises like McDonald's, the whole store is the brand. However, if McDonald's were to sell frozen hamburgers to the grocery store (as White Castle does), McDonald's couldn't dictate to that store how much they could charge. McDonald's could charge whatever they want, of course, and that will have an effect on the price, but they can't dictate it directly, just as if you were to sell your hot tubs through Farm & Fleet, you couldn't dictate prices to them, all you can do is set your wholesale price.
If you want to limit yourself to closely affiliated dealerships, then yes you can exert a lot of control. If you want to take advantage of a wider network of outlets, you have much less control.
From Dealer and Distributor Terminations in Ohio, although it is mostly analyzing Ohio law (and makes reference to some other states), it has this to say about the Sherman Act:
Section 1 of the Sherman Act prohibits a manufacturer from reaching an agreement with a dealer or distributor on the minimum price at which goods may be resold. Such an agreement is deemed per se unlawful. The United States Supreme Court held in 1997 in State Oil Co. v. Khan that a maximum resale price agreement, in contrast, may be permissible under a "rule of reason" analysis. Under this analysis, a restraint is evaluated to determine whether its pro-competitive effects outweigh any anti-competitive effects. Other business practices that have indirect effects on pricing may also fall under antitrust scrutiny, including suggested retail prices, cooperative advertising and dealer assistance programs, but these practices will not expose a supplier to antitrust liability in the usual case, and they are not per se illegal.
A vertical restraint in connection with termination of a supply relationship may be a per se violation of Section 1 if the restraint includes some agreement on minimum resale price levels. The Supreme Court has held that Section 1 may be violated if a manufacturer terminates a discounting dealer pursuant to agreement with a competing dealer that the competing dealer will not sell the manufacturer's products below a certain price. The successful plaintiff in a federal antitrust case can recover treble damages and its attorney fees.
An agreement between a manufacturer and its dealer or distributor limiting the territory in which the dealer ordistributor can sell the manufacturer's products, the location from which it can sell or the customers to which it can sell is subject to rule of reason analysis. Courts recognize the pro-competitive benefits of such an agreement and rarely disturb it unless it has a significant net adverse effect on interbrand competition.
As pointed out in this article, which references the State Oil v. Khan Supreme Court decision, there's a lot of unclarity to the whole thing. However, at least from what I understand of those, while maximum price fixing may be generally ok, minimum price fixing is still a per se violation, even with a dealership.
Most criminal antitrust prosecutions involve price fixing, bid rigging, or market division or allocation schemes. Each of these forms of collusion may be prosecuted criminally if they occurred, at least in part, within the past five years. Proving such a crime does not require us to show that the conspirators entered into a formal written or express agreement. Price fixing, bid rigging, and other collusive agreements can be established either by direct evidence, such as the testimony of a participant, or by circumstantial evidence, such as suspicious bid patterns, travel and expense reports, telephone records, and business diary entries.
Under the law, price-fixing and bid-rigging schemes are per se violations of the Sherman Act. This means that where such a collusive scheme has been established, it cannot be justified under the law by arguments or evidence that, for example, the agreed-upon prices were reasonable, the agreement was necessary to prevent or eliminate price cutting or ruinous competition, or the conspirators were merely trying to make sure that each got a fair share of the market.
Price Fixing
Price fixing is an agreement among competitors to raise, fix, or otherwise maintain the price at which their goods or services are sold. It is not necessary that the competitors agree to charge exactly the same price, or that every competitor in a given industry join the conspiracy. Price fixing can take many forms, and any agreement that restricts price competition violates the law. Other examples of price-fixing agreements include those to:
Establish or adhere to price discounts.
Hold prices firm.
Eliminate or reduce discounts.
Adopt a standard formula for computing prices.
Maintain certain price differentials between different types, sizes, or quantities of products.
Adhere to a minimum fee or price schedule.
Fix credit terms.
Not advertise prices.
In many cases, participants in a price-fixing conspiracy also establish some type of policing mechanism to make sure that everyone adheres to the agreement.
[ . . . ]
Market Division
Market division or allocation schemes are agreements in which competitors divide markets among themselves. In such schemes, competing firms allocate specific customers or types of customers, products, or territories among themselves. For example, one competitor will be allowed to sell to, or bid on contracts let by, certain customers or types of customers. In return, he or she will not sell to, or bid on contracts let by, customers allocated to the other competitors. In other schemes, competitors agree to sell only to customers in certain geographic areas and refuse to sell to, or quote intentionally high prices to, customers in geographic areas allocated to conspirator companies.
Detecting Bid Rigging, Price Fixing, And Other Types Of Collusion
Bid rigging, price fixing, and other collusion can be very difficult to detect. Collusive agreements are usually reached in secret, with only the participants having knowledge of the scheme. However, suspicions may be aroused by unusual bidding or pricing patterns or something a vendor says or does.
[ . . . ]
Prices
Identical prices may indicate a price-fixing conspiracy, especially when:
Prices stay identical for long periods of time.
Prices previously were different.
Price increases do not appear to be supported by increased costs.
Discounts are eliminated, especially in a market where discounts historically were given.
Vendors are charging higher prices to local customers than to distant customers. This may indicate local prices are fixed.
Sounds like what you're doing, and sounds like what the music labels would be doing if they all of a sudden "just decided" to cut Apple out of the loop if Apple doesn't agree to raise prices.
No, you don't have the right to limit what they can charge. Not allowing them to display a price in advertising is right on the edge of price fixing, but specifying a minimum advertised price or minimum price to sell something at is the very essence of price fixing.
You're right that if they all independently decide to raise their price point (and what they're really raising is the price that Apple pays them - not what Apple sells it for), that would be legal. However, it just isn't going to happen. If ALL of the labels all of a sudden turn around at the same time and demand a higher price, it WILL be because it was collusion, and it WILL be possible to prove it. Phone records, e-mail records, people who saw X and Y and Z all in a meeting together the day before, etc. SOMEone will talk.
The claim is that at high speeds, the amount of aerodynamic lift from the body of the car is enough to keep it up, which is probably true. Still, a very inefficient airfoil, extremely low aspect ratio.
And, there are no powered lift aircraft certified that I've heard of, thus no powered lift certified pilots or instructors.
Also, there's a speed limit below 10,000 feet, 250 knots (288 MPH). 350 MPH is right out unless you want to climb up that high, which you won't want to do for a short trip (speed while climbing is likely to be significantly lower).
To add to the previous response, a lot of states have 15 1/2 as the age at which you can get a learner's permit, then 16 to get a driver's license - to get your license before age 18, you have to have passed a driver's education course (usually through your high school). After age 18, you don't even need that. Then you have to pass the (simple - half an hour's study will do it) written test, and take a driving test. Unless you take it when there's ice on the road, you don't have to demonstrate any particular skills, just normal driving in traffic, obeying signs, signaling, parallel parking and not killing or seriously endangering anyone. Probably doesn't even include driving on the freeway. License is then good for 4 years, renewal generally is just an eye test ("No, dear, are you sure that's an 8? Doesn't it look more like an S? It's an S? That's RIGHT! Good, you pass!"), although more states are adding in requirements for driving tests after age 70 or so. Moving to a new state, you can usually get a license on the basis of your previous license.
So calculate the sales tax after the fact. Make the tax a business tax, not a customer tax. True, the customer ultimately pays it, since it is actually passed along in the cost, but the complexities don't need to be dragged out.
At any location where the goods flow through, the state where it physically is determines how and when it gets taxed. That tax is just a cost of doing business in that state. A state with unreasonable rules or high rates will find businesses moving out. Businesses are much more mobile than citizens - they can move an operation and it only takes money, a person has to uproot their whole life if the state they're in becomes unfavorable. Thus, something like this would help moderate the behavior of the states.
They don't charge a Use Tax, nor a Sales Tax, unless the company you're buying from has a presence in your home state, in which case the rate they charge will be your home state tax rate. If they're charging you sales tax mistakenly, you should complain to them.
Standard production contract should be that if the series gets cut prematurely (to be defined in the contract), the network gets NO rights, not to DVDs, not to future incarnations on another network, nothing.
If you listen to the commentary on the DVD (or if you were really paying attention and noticed it yourself), the Alliance shots were done with a different style of camera work than those of the "real" world, specifically to evoke that sterile "Star Trek" feeling.
iTMS profit is somewhere around 0.4% of the gross profit, and that's assuming cost of sales is only what they pay to the labels. I think they can survive for a hell of a long time without it. Even if you take it straight out of their pre-tax net income, without assigning any R&D, marketing or operational costs to it, it's still only about 2%.
Apple's revenue in 2004 from the iTMS was somewhere in the range of $200M. Of that, about $190M apparently goes to the labels. CD sales in 2004 were about $11,446M, so Apple represents about 1.7%. TOTAL download sales were about 2% (by album, assuming 10 tracks/album) of the 666 million albums sold. So no, they're not going to lose a lot of money by pulling out of iTMS. However, it IS free money, and the bad publicity will hurt them.
"... for years now..." ? The iTMS has only existed for about 2.5 years total! I know people have short memories these days, and things that happened 10 years ago seem like a different century, but referring to something as "for years now" sort of implies more than 2 years - I'd probably interpret that to mean at least 5, if not 10 years. I mean, to say that Duke Nukem Forever hasn't come out for years now would be fine, but to say that Firefox has been taking market share away from Microsoft for years now would be pushing it a bit...
One label can cut Apple out (and that one label would probably lose a lot of money and market share because of it - not just because they wouldn't sell music through iTMS, but because they'd get bad publicity over the whole thing). However, if some (much less ALL) of the labels agreed to cut Apple out, in order to force Apple to agree to a higher price, the price-fixing lawsuit would happen so fast, you'd be reading about it in Groklaw the next day.
If they're subsidizing the phone (with my money, ultimately), then they shouldn't have a problem with offering a cheaper contract if I provide my own phone, right? That they don't shows they have too much of a monopoly position (either in a specific area, or simply that they are all acting in collusion).
No, the contract is generally that you stick with them for a fixed period of time or pay an early termination fee. In either case, the phone is offered to you to OWN. If you were renting it, they'd ask for it back at the end of the contract period.
The DMCA is designed to protect copyrighted works. Unlocking a phone doesn't let you make illegal copies of their firmware that you can use in another phone that didn't come with firmware or somehow had inferior firmware. There isn't even a consumer market for buying and selling firmware, not that it's even interchangeable between different models and brands. The DMCA is absolutely the wrong thing to be used here.
I don't see anything wrong with laws preventing companies from using abusive business practices. There are plenty of laws protecting them from things, why shouldn't they be required to operate within certain bounds? If they want to claim they are "giving you a free phone", then they should be bound by standard requirements of what it means to "own" something. In addition, for being granted the exclusive use of frequencies, they should also be subject to certain requirements as to openness - for example, that charges have to have at least SOME relation to how much it costs to provide the service - no charging MORE for airtime because you provided your own phone - the existence of a contract should be all the lock-in they should be allowed to create.
Trying to encourage competition and a "free market" is not served by allowing lock-in. Allowing companies to force consumers to eat the cost of millions of phones a year (after all, who's paying for it in the end?) in order to be able to get away with not providing good service is not good public policy.
If all the ISPs in an area started requiring that you buy a computer from them in order to connect to the Internet, and that such a computer would be locked down so you could only add programs you bought from the ISP, I think you'd find that to be unacceptable. Why should a cell phone be any different?
Companies do stupid things, non-optimal things, ALL THE TIME. Believing that "companies do what is successful and makes them the most money" is sheer foolishness. That's only what they TRY to do.
Most of the books I own have NO color in them at all. Most of them don't even have any images, drawings, graphics, figures or tables, either. Just text. I'd guess fewer than 5% of my books have any color in them. Certainly nice to have color for astronomy, geology, biology, chemistry, art, travel and the like, but I just don't have a whole lot of those compared to the rest. The most colorful part of most books is the cover.
Given that, a color e-paper would still be nice, and yes it is coming. If a color 8.5x11 costs $100 compared to $10 for a 4-gray-scale display of the same size and resolution, there will still be a big place for the cheaper one. 165 dpi 2-bit gray-scale display is actually quite good - get it up to 200 dpi and there won't be much call for any better.
But computers were quite capable of running multiple users interactively, eventually. They gained the ability not because a bunch of people were complaining that they couldn't, but that they got fast enough and flexible enough to do so.
The Internet wasn't FOR social interaction, but it was perfectly capable of doing that. It didn't get that ability because a bunch of people said "hey, this Internet thing doesn't have enough social interaction!".
Saying "this isn't FOR that" is simply stating a fact - the device doesn't have the capability, nor is it designed to have the capability, of playing DOOM or showing movies. If it does get fast enough to do so, it won't be because a bunch of people were saying "I sure wish this E-Ink stuff were fast enough to play DOOM", it will be because some other reason made it desirable, or at least not more difficult and expensive (and power hungry), to update faster. I think it's unlikely, that there will always be something else more suited to such uses, but it doesn't matter. It either will or won't, and it is unlikely that anyone will put a lot of effort into trying to make it more suitable as a general purpose (30 msec or faster update).
Color, of course, is a different matter - color applications are exactly what this is "FOR" - and if adding color makes it more usable for something that the designed didn't anticipate, then it will be used for that as well.
Dev kits are often much more expensive than the retail product will be. They don't WANT to sell to thousands of hobbyists at this time, they probably don't have the capacity. A real company won't even flinch at spending 3K for an advance peek at something like this, and a few hobbyists with plenty of money will also probably buy one.
Besides, where this really gets interesting is when such a display comes out at least the size of a page in a book or a piece of paper (e.g. 8.5x11, which would be about 1400x1800, at the 165 dpi this thing is apparently at). I'd really like to get an idea of what kind of price they think something like that will sell for.
For a practical look at the level of hardware protection that will be in such devices, take a look at the HDCP specifications, or more specifically the license agreement (PDF), look in Exhibit D (page 45 of the linked PDF) for the "Robustness Rules".
It won't be anywhere near impossible, but it will take significant effort to crack. If they do it right, a successful crack will only allow them to compromise the specific device they're working on. While that will certainly be enough to then start siphoning out protected content, it won't be able to be done on a wide-scale basis, and that's all they need to do to keep most people from re-distributing tunes they've bought.
What it doesn't solve is that content will still be found on the Internet, and if they make it too difficult to use what you buy in the way you want to use it, people will start turning to such unauthorized copies as the only way to do it - and a significant number of them, who never would have done it otherwise, will then decide "why bother paying" for a crippled version.
From my experience, I would say that the main problem of getting people to contribute is that a whole lot of developers seem to think that if someone asks for a feature or complains about a bug, they're whiners. If your response to such contacts is to ignore it, or tell the person to RTFM, or "yes, yes, yes, I know that's a problem, we've had 50 other reports of that, why can't you look over the other bug reports before you report something (you idiot)", then you're the problem.
It takes a LOT of effort for someone to even get to the point of being able to try to submit a bug report or feature request, or even to tell you about a spelling mistake in the documentation. Most people who have even tried have found a cold reception, and have come to the reasonable conclusion that it just isn't worth it. If you really want support from people, make it easy, and be welcoming.
If you don't have an easily searchable bug database, a searchable user forum, a developer's forum that's open for reading, a good FAQ with an active maintainer, don't complain that people aren't helping.
Something that turns off developers from helping out are your choice of language, insistence on a particular platform or development environment or model, coding style, abrasive personalities, and lack of skill. I've looked at a few projects I've been interested in, looked at the code, picked my jaw up off the floor and realized there was no way I could fix any of that code without insulting them, and there was no way I could work on that code base without fixing it up. In one case, it was just easier to take what they had, use it for what I needed it for after fixing it (without worrying about if I could merge my changes back to them) and just ignore the original project after that. I didn't even bother tracking it.
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Fine, here's some commentary on MAP (which, in some cases is allowable, in others is not), from Product Distribution and the Internet: The Antitrust Issues:
and see Cooperative Advertising Programs and Minimum Advertised Price (PDF) which says in part: and also has this to say about being careful how you control your dealer's behavior: In other words, while that partially supports your contention that you can require dealers to adhere to a pricing policy, you have to be VERY careful about how you enforce that. And, Apple is not a dealership, and I doubt they take any co-op advertising money from any labels. Any indication of collusion by the labels would also be a big problem for them - see my earlier reference to DOJ document regarding what kind of evidence they'd be looking for.Of course they're competitors, you said that if one were to sell at a lower price, the others would go out of business because all of their customers would go to the one who lowered the prices. Just because YOU are the one setting the prices, they're still all agreeing to abide by that. That just makes you a co-conspirator.
Now, if all of the dealers you're talking about are "Pharmboy's Hot Tub Dealer" stores, then they're actually a PART of your business - same with franchises like McDonald's, the whole store is the brand. However, if McDonald's were to sell frozen hamburgers to the grocery store (as White Castle does), McDonald's couldn't dictate to that store how much they could charge. McDonald's could charge whatever they want, of course, and that will have an effect on the price, but they can't dictate it directly, just as if you were to sell your hot tubs through Farm & Fleet, you couldn't dictate prices to them, all you can do is set your wholesale price.
If you want to limit yourself to closely affiliated dealerships, then yes you can exert a lot of control. If you want to take advantage of a wider network of outlets, you have much less control.
From Dealer and Distributor Terminations in Ohio, although it is mostly analyzing Ohio law (and makes reference to some other states), it has this to say about the Sherman Act:
As pointed out in this article, which references the State Oil v. Khan Supreme Court decision, there's a lot of unclarity to the whole thing. However, at least from what I understand of those, while maximum price fixing may be generally ok, minimum price fixing is still a per se violation, even with a dealership.
Can you explain how what you're describing doesn't fit the DOJ definition of price fixing?
Sounds like what you're doing, and sounds like what the music labels would be doing if they all of a sudden "just decided" to cut Apple out of the loop if Apple doesn't agree to raise prices.
No, you don't have the right to limit what they can charge. Not allowing them to display a price in advertising is right on the edge of price fixing, but specifying a minimum advertised price or minimum price to sell something at is the very essence of price fixing.
You're right that if they all independently decide to raise their price point (and what they're really raising is the price that Apple pays them - not what Apple sells it for), that would be legal. However, it just isn't going to happen. If ALL of the labels all of a sudden turn around at the same time and demand a higher price, it WILL be because it was collusion, and it WILL be possible to prove it. Phone records, e-mail records, people who saw X and Y and Z all in a meeting together the day before, etc. SOMEone will talk.
It was a joke, son.
The claim is that at high speeds, the amount of aerodynamic lift from the body of the car is enough to keep it up, which is probably true. Still, a very inefficient airfoil, extremely low aspect ratio.
And, there are no powered lift aircraft certified that I've heard of, thus no powered lift certified pilots or instructors.
Also, there's a speed limit below 10,000 feet, 250 knots (288 MPH). 350 MPH is right out unless you want to climb up that high, which you won't want to do for a short trip (speed while climbing is likely to be significantly lower).
To add to the previous response, a lot of states have 15 1/2 as the age at which you can get a learner's permit, then 16 to get a driver's license - to get your license before age 18, you have to have passed a driver's education course (usually through your high school). After age 18, you don't even need that. Then you have to pass the (simple - half an hour's study will do it) written test, and take a driving test. Unless you take it when there's ice on the road, you don't have to demonstrate any particular skills, just normal driving in traffic, obeying signs, signaling, parallel parking and not killing or seriously endangering anyone. Probably doesn't even include driving on the freeway. License is then good for 4 years, renewal generally is just an eye test ("No, dear, are you sure that's an 8? Doesn't it look more like an S? It's an S? That's RIGHT! Good, you pass!"), although more states are adding in requirements for driving tests after age 70 or so. Moving to a new state, you can usually get a license on the basis of your previous license.
So calculate the sales tax after the fact. Make the tax a business tax, not a customer tax. True, the customer ultimately pays it, since it is actually passed along in the cost, but the complexities don't need to be dragged out.
At any location where the goods flow through, the state where it physically is determines how and when it gets taxed. That tax is just a cost of doing business in that state. A state with unreasonable rules or high rates will find businesses moving out. Businesses are much more mobile than citizens - they can move an operation and it only takes money, a person has to uproot their whole life if the state they're in becomes unfavorable. Thus, something like this would help moderate the behavior of the states.
They don't charge a Use Tax, nor a Sales Tax, unless the company you're buying from has a presence in your home state, in which case the rate they charge will be your home state tax rate. If they're charging you sales tax mistakenly, you should complain to them.
Standard production contract should be that if the series gets cut prematurely (to be defined in the contract), the network gets NO rights, not to DVDs, not to future incarnations on another network, nothing.
As long as you're spoiling, I have to say I started thinking Blake's 7 right around that point.
If you listen to the commentary on the DVD (or if you were really paying attention and noticed it yourself), the Alliance shots were done with a different style of camera work than those of the "real" world, specifically to evoke that sterile "Star Trek" feeling.
iTMS profit is somewhere around 0.4% of the gross profit, and that's assuming cost of sales is only what they pay to the labels. I think they can survive for a hell of a long time without it. Even if you take it straight out of their pre-tax net income, without assigning any R&D, marketing or operational costs to it, it's still only about 2%.
Apple's revenue in 2004 from the iTMS was somewhere in the range of $200M. Of that, about $190M apparently goes to the labels. CD sales in 2004 were about $11,446M, so Apple represents about 1.7%. TOTAL download sales were about 2% (by album, assuming 10 tracks/album) of the 666 million albums sold. So no, they're not going to lose a lot of money by pulling out of iTMS. However, it IS free money, and the bad publicity will hurt them.
"... for years now ..." ? The iTMS has only existed for about 2.5 years total! I know people have short memories these days, and things that happened 10 years ago seem like a different century, but referring to something as "for years now" sort of implies more than 2 years - I'd probably interpret that to mean at least 5, if not 10 years. I mean, to say that Duke Nukem Forever hasn't come out for years now would be fine, but to say that Firefox has been taking market share away from Microsoft for years now would be pushing it a bit...
Next you'll be talking about how mature XML is.
One label can cut Apple out (and that one label would probably lose a lot of money and market share because of it - not just because they wouldn't sell music through iTMS, but because they'd get bad publicity over the whole thing). However, if some (much less ALL) of the labels agreed to cut Apple out, in order to force Apple to agree to a higher price, the price-fixing lawsuit would happen so fast, you'd be reading about it in Groklaw the next day.
If they're subsidizing the phone (with my money, ultimately), then they shouldn't have a problem with offering a cheaper contract if I provide my own phone, right? That they don't shows they have too much of a monopoly position (either in a specific area, or simply that they are all acting in collusion).
No, the contract is generally that you stick with them for a fixed period of time or pay an early termination fee. In either case, the phone is offered to you to OWN. If you were renting it, they'd ask for it back at the end of the contract period.
The DMCA is designed to protect copyrighted works. Unlocking a phone doesn't let you make illegal copies of their firmware that you can use in another phone that didn't come with firmware or somehow had inferior firmware. There isn't even a consumer market for buying and selling firmware, not that it's even interchangeable between different models and brands. The DMCA is absolutely the wrong thing to be used here.
I don't see anything wrong with laws preventing companies from using abusive business practices. There are plenty of laws protecting them from things, why shouldn't they be required to operate within certain bounds? If they want to claim they are "giving you a free phone", then they should be bound by standard requirements of what it means to "own" something. In addition, for being granted the exclusive use of frequencies, they should also be subject to certain requirements as to openness - for example, that charges have to have at least SOME relation to how much it costs to provide the service - no charging MORE for airtime because you provided your own phone - the existence of a contract should be all the lock-in they should be allowed to create.
Trying to encourage competition and a "free market" is not served by allowing lock-in. Allowing companies to force consumers to eat the cost of millions of phones a year (after all, who's paying for it in the end?) in order to be able to get away with not providing good service is not good public policy.
If all the ISPs in an area started requiring that you buy a computer from them in order to connect to the Internet, and that such a computer would be locked down so you could only add programs you bought from the ISP, I think you'd find that to be unacceptable. Why should a cell phone be any different?
Companies do stupid things, non-optimal things, ALL THE TIME. Believing that "companies do what is successful and makes them the most money" is sheer foolishness. That's only what they TRY to do.
Most of the books I own have NO color in them at all. Most of them don't even have any images, drawings, graphics, figures or tables, either. Just text. I'd guess fewer than 5% of my books have any color in them. Certainly nice to have color for astronomy, geology, biology, chemistry, art, travel and the like, but I just don't have a whole lot of those compared to the rest. The most colorful part of most books is the cover.
Given that, a color e-paper would still be nice, and yes it is coming. If a color 8.5x11 costs $100 compared to $10 for a 4-gray-scale display of the same size and resolution, there will still be a big place for the cheaper one. 165 dpi 2-bit gray-scale display is actually quite good - get it up to 200 dpi and there won't be much call for any better.
But computers were quite capable of running multiple users interactively, eventually. They gained the ability not because a bunch of people were complaining that they couldn't, but that they got fast enough and flexible enough to do so.
The Internet wasn't FOR social interaction, but it was perfectly capable of doing that. It didn't get that ability because a bunch of people said "hey, this Internet thing doesn't have enough social interaction!".
Saying "this isn't FOR that" is simply stating a fact - the device doesn't have the capability, nor is it designed to have the capability, of playing DOOM or showing movies. If it does get fast enough to do so, it won't be because a bunch of people were saying "I sure wish this E-Ink stuff were fast enough to play DOOM", it will be because some other reason made it desirable, or at least not more difficult and expensive (and power hungry), to update faster. I think it's unlikely, that there will always be something else more suited to such uses, but it doesn't matter. It either will or won't, and it is unlikely that anyone will put a lot of effort into trying to make it more suitable as a general purpose (30 msec or faster update).
Color, of course, is a different matter - color applications are exactly what this is "FOR" - and if adding color makes it more usable for something that the designed didn't anticipate, then it will be used for that as well.
Dev kits are often much more expensive than the retail product will be. They don't WANT to sell to thousands of hobbyists at this time, they probably don't have the capacity. A real company won't even flinch at spending 3K for an advance peek at something like this, and a few hobbyists with plenty of money will also probably buy one.
Besides, where this really gets interesting is when such a display comes out at least the size of a page in a book or a piece of paper (e.g. 8.5x11, which would be about 1400x1800, at the 165 dpi this thing is apparently at). I'd really like to get an idea of what kind of price they think something like that will sell for.
For a practical look at the level of hardware protection that will be in such devices, take a look at the HDCP specifications, or more specifically the license agreement (PDF), look in Exhibit D (page 45 of the linked PDF) for the "Robustness Rules".
It won't be anywhere near impossible, but it will take significant effort to crack. If they do it right, a successful crack will only allow them to compromise the specific device they're working on. While that will certainly be enough to then start siphoning out protected content, it won't be able to be done on a wide-scale basis, and that's all they need to do to keep most people from re-distributing tunes they've bought.
What it doesn't solve is that content will still be found on the Internet, and if they make it too difficult to use what you buy in the way you want to use it, people will start turning to such unauthorized copies as the only way to do it - and a significant number of them, who never would have done it otherwise, will then decide "why bother paying" for a crippled version.
Absolutely right.
From my experience, I would say that the main problem of getting people to contribute is that a whole lot of developers seem to think that if someone asks for a feature or complains about a bug, they're whiners. If your response to such contacts is to ignore it, or tell the person to RTFM, or "yes, yes, yes, I know that's a problem, we've had 50 other reports of that, why can't you look over the other bug reports before you report something (you idiot)", then you're the problem.
It takes a LOT of effort for someone to even get to the point of being able to try to submit a bug report or feature request, or even to tell you about a spelling mistake in the documentation. Most people who have even tried have found a cold reception, and have come to the reasonable conclusion that it just isn't worth it. If you really want support from people, make it easy, and be welcoming.
If you don't have an easily searchable bug database, a searchable user forum, a developer's forum that's open for reading, a good FAQ with an active maintainer, don't complain that people aren't helping.
Something that turns off developers from helping out are your choice of language, insistence on a particular platform or development environment or model, coding style, abrasive personalities, and lack of skill. I've looked at a few projects I've been interested in, looked at the code, picked my jaw up off the floor and realized there was no way I could fix any of that code without insulting them, and there was no way I could work on that code base without fixing it up. In one case, it was just easier to take what they had, use it for what I needed it for after fixing it (without worrying about if I could merge my changes back to them) and just ignore the original project after that. I didn't even bother tracking it.