Enforcement of the patent is selective. The patent holder must initiate action against the infringer. Mike Doyle is saying that this is a way to knock MS down a few pegs and give other manufacturers the opportunity to re-enter the "Browser War". He would do this by prohibiting MS from marketing IE, but would not enforce his ownership against the other companies.
Now, it is true that the owner of a patent must take reasonable steps to protect that ownership. However, all that he would have to do is charge the other companies a nominal license fee to use his technology. This can be done by simply charging the companies $1.
I would gladly pay that dollar for Opera to see them get a fair shake at the browser market.
My bank will allow you to use Opera but it doesn't work completely. Typically, Opera chokes on menu trees and the like, usually done with DHTML. A shame, really, since the banking site is the only reason that I even still have IE on my machine. And emulating IE doesn't fix the problem. Once Opera finally gets the issue remedied (sort of an "if you can't beat 'em, join 'em" type of thing), I'll be able to use it 100% of the time, rather than just 99%.
And boy, oh boy, am I looking forward to that day.
Good point, Alexo. There is a difference between allowing the vendor to install a remotely accessible service on your system and merely giving them permission to do so.
Sort of like giving a person your permission to shoot you in the head. Just because you tell them it's alright to do so, doesn't necessarily mean that they will.
If it's all the same to you, I would rather not give them the permission in the first place. Nor will I hand them the gun with which to do it.
That said, I am not going to install their service packs and, thus, I am not going to give them the opportunity to install such services on my systems.
Do they really install a back door? I'm not even going to allow the risk inherent in finding out.
That still doesn't change the fact that the latest service packs for XP and 2000 (and Windows Media Player) provide a back door for remote access by MS and any third parties that they decide to provide access to.
Given their history, how secure do you suppose that service is going to be?
I'll stick with NAV, thank you, which, amusingly enough, picked out Bugbear from an email sent to me this morning.
I've had one of these babies for well over a year now. They're $50 and you can get them at Radio Shack. Works great, weeding out probably 90% of telemarketing calls. Looks like the other guys are starting to catch on.
IIRC, the court did not rule in favor of either party. Instead, it judged that the arbitration clause of the EULA was valid and the case was moved to arbitration.
>> For clarification, most contracts do _not_ need to be signed to be legally binding.
Contracts are bound by the laws of the state in which they are drawn. Your generalization that contracts do not need to be signed is inaccurate. Furthermore, likening a EULA to a handshake as am implied agreement is also false. A handshake contract, which is tenuous at best, is recognized by some as binding because it is based on a custom that actually pre-dates written contract law. The laws pertaining to contracts varies by the state in which they are written. Enforceability of a contract in implied terms is also subject to the local customs where the agreement is made. EULAs are not based on custom, nor are they based on commonly accepted terms of negotiation. They are ex post facto and, as the courts will eventually show, invalid.
Also, minors can bind contracts and enforce them against adults. However, the contract is voidable at the option of the minor.
In general, the courts consider a minor to lack the capacity to enter into a binding agreement. The contract is voidable at the option of the minor because it isn't legally enforeable in the first place. Rights and limitations on minors and their involvement in binding agreements varies from state to state.
Most EULAs do stipulate that the software can be returned if you reject the EULA
As you stated, this is not feasible. The contract of sale of a software package exists between the retail seller and the customer and is subject to the terms of sale agreed upon between the two prior to the point of sale. This is why you see return policies posted at a store's cash registers. With very few exceptions (e.g. Electronics Boutique), stores will not allow you to return a software package if it has been opened. As the EULA invariably is not posted on the outside of the packaging for the customer's review prior to the point of sale, this is not a valid recourse.
does not give you the right to agree and subsequently break your agreement.
I wasn't aware that this was stated as an option.
I am not a lawyer but have studied law...and therefore are not a lawyer. I, on the otherhand, while not a lawyer myself, have worked extensively with various legal teams to ascertain the legality, enforceability and consequences of EULAs.
Actually, I read them. As a developer, I have to be concerned with what provisions companies put into their EULAs regarding distribution and use of their tools. I'm much too lazy to go digging for the references, but there are many examples of frivolous restrictions being placed in the EULA. For example, Microsoft's specification that its tools may not be used in open source development.
In addition to this, as a consumer, I look through the EULA for clues that there might be trojan processes in the software. Microsoft's Media Player is a good example of this whereby they reveal in their EULA that they can remotely access your machine and install arbitrary "updates." This has been covered here before so there is really no need to retread it again.
As for the legality of the EULA, no, it is not enforceable. The EULA is supposed to be a precursor to the purchase and subsequent use of the software. However, as you cannot view the EULA before purchasing, and as the software is invariably non-returnable, the agreement is non-binding.
By law, you have a set term to review a contract before signing it. In most states, this is three business days. A contract cannot be introduced and imposed ex post facto (after the fact). Typically, a contract is not legally binding unless it is signed by both parties and in the presence of at least one witness. Further, a contract is not binding to a minor unless that minor's parent or guardian also signs. So the whole notion of EULAs in video games is nonsense.
Ultimately, the enforceability of a EULA relies on the ignorance of the parties involved. The consumer who believes that it is binding and the vendor who finds comfort in the mistaken belief that an enforceable contract has been executed.
I personally do not know of a single court case where a EULA has been tested, which suggsests to me that the software manufacturers and their legal teams realize that a EULA is nothing more than a facade.
With respect to the inclusion of EULA legistlation in Lofgren's bill, I would suspect that that was put there as a bargaining chip. In negotiations, you always ask for more than you expect to receieve and you always ask for things that you don't care too much about. This way, you have something that you can concede to the other parties without actually losing something that you want.
...which both note that there is no chance of these bills being passed this year.
...or any year, for that matter.
Granted, it's not binding anyway, but you'll probably see Hillary Rosen doing iPod commercials before companies like Microsoft et. al. give up the facade of the "enforceable" EULA.
How is this insightful? The US Patent Office operates at a deficit and is not anywhere near profitability. In fact, they are not even profit-driven (meaning that profitability is not within their charter). They are severely under-funded and under-staffed. If anything, they are concerned with through-put, not profit.
Check out this article from the New York Times. The article has already been discussed here on Slashdot
During the setup process, you are prompted to specify a password. However, at the same time, you are also given the opportunity to specify that only one person will be using the machine which, in turn, will disable the initial logon prompt when entering Windows. This is what he is referring to.
If Microsoft really wanted to drive everyone to the XBox and kill off the PC as the de-facto gaming platform, all that they would have to do is stop releasing DirectX and retract any existing licenses (as provided in their developer license agreements).
Of course, since DirectX is their surest method of distributing their DRM trojan (a la Media Player), that's not likely to happen.
Ok, yes, I should have said that DVD's don't count. And by any chance are you in school? I remember that I had zero space for anything when I was in college. Also, most people don't have a 21" monitor. The default size is still 15" on most consumer-grade machines, although you see a lot of 17 inchers now. Also, how big is the screen going to be in a 700mb package? Probably not full size, I'd bet. So, we're back to watching a postage stamp. Granted ASF does compress better than AVI or MPEG...but still.
But apart from that, I don't think that this is going to be a viable offering. For example, do you think that the streams will support that sweet 5.1 speaker setup? I doubt that. The amount of space needed to carry a dolby digital track would probably make this method of viewing prohibitive.
have you taken a look at their site? With the exception of Potter which, let's face it, everyone who is going to own it has already bought it, the rest of it is B-grade flicks. All of the films are out on video, and who is really going to spend 2+ hours downloading it? Not to mention that, unless they are using one of the professional codecs (the $40,000 per license kind), the video quality is going to be small, to say nothing of the audio.
Is any one actually watching downloaded, full-length movies on their PC?
IIRC, the Sega Dreamcast also works in a similar fashion and was easily defeated. Basically, the disc contents were read off through the system's serial port and saved into a new format. Then a generic loader was created that replaced the DC's loader. The two were then burned onto a standard CD-R. When the DC would boot, it would read and run the loader which, in turn, operates on the copied data.
The location, size and number of encryption keys are made available on JVC's protected cd scheme. How long could this possibly take to defeat?
Now, I don't particularly care to be able to pirate software, but I do want the ability to use no-cd patches on my games. When a game installs itself using 2GB of hard drive space for its 3 CDs, there is absolutely no reason why I should have to go fishing behind my desk for the "key" disk. But, again, it's not as if this is going to take a long time to defeat.
Gah! Don't you hate it when you hit submit only to find out that a half-dozen other people already posted the same, tired, worn-out cliched joke that you thought was so clever just before the caffeine kicked in?
That's right! And "no one will ever need more than 640k of RAM". =)
I personally would like a high-capacity, transportable, cost-effective storage mechanism, and I am excited at the prospect of 40-50GB discs. I'm not looking forward to the fact that it'll take 27 days to fill one of these puppies up, but hey, progress marches on. Seriously, tho, for those of us who deal with very large amounts of data (e.g. databases), this backup platform would be of great interest. Not to mention the fact that one of these discs would contain the equivalent of 78 CDs (@ 640MB per).
That would certainly make it much easier to hide the pr0n collection from the missus!
Oh jeez, don't even get me started in that direction. That whole scenario is such bullshit. How big a sigh of relief do you think echoed through the halls of Congress when the WorldCom scandel broke, taking the heat off of the Enron scandel?
Do you think the general public, with their limited attention span, even remembers Enron?
5.4 Million...2.2 Trillon.....regardless of the fine, when it's such a large number and the intention is to close down the company, I have to wonder just how effective that might be in a case like this. More than likely, Fax.com is a corporation which means that any debts and liabilities are the responsibility of the corporate entity itself and not of its owners. So sure, such large fines would shut down the company - they simply declard bankruptcy. And then owners of fax.com simply start up another company to do the same exact thing.
So, in the end, other than setting a legal precedent, what was achieved? Can these guys really be stopped? Are there any other cases similar to this where judgement was awarded against a spammer?
I have personally purchased two licenses - one for each of my machines. I will purchase upgrades for version 7. And I will continue to support developers of quality software.
The people that you know are thieves and only help to undermine what folks like Opera set out to achieve.
My impression was that a large portion of Atlas Shrugged served as a warning against corporate welfare. The idea that too much legislation was a dangerous thing that, when taken to its logical end, could have dire consequences on a nation's economy. While the book centered around the characters' obstinate attitude that "we will do it our way or no way", they at least had taken the initiative to follow through on that threat. Rather than contribute to a socio-political environment that they did not support and that was viewed as dangerous, they abandoned what was considered to be a failing and corrupt system to start their own - hence the utopian view for those unfamiliar with the story.
Too many people are quick to respond to Rand's points without understanding them. Her message was not that it was ok to walk over homeless people, as was suggested before. Certainly, the [brother] would have done that, but he was not portrayed in a heroic light. In fact, he was blamed for having contributed to a large part of the country's misguided economic policies - in it for his own good. Dagny was the person to take your lesson from and that lesson was quite simply this: don't apologize for being good at what you do. Throughtout the book she was persecuted for being dedicated, working hard, achieving her goals, and taking pride in her accomplishments. And for that, she was ostracized. If nothing else, her main fault was that she was too much of an idealist. She was the last to resist giving up on the dying world around her, instead trying to nurture and aid it back to health. In fact, the book's catchphrase, "Who is John Gault?", is representative of the one thing that she despises the most: apathy. Only when she had exhausted all possible avenues of changing the system from within did she abandon it. And then, only with a tremendous amount of guilt.
[SPOILER] It's not until the end of the book that we learn who and what John Gault is and the catchphrase becomes a call to question misguided governmental dictums, not blindly accept them. Something, interestingly enough, that is done here on a daily basis. [/SPOILER]
The warnings found within Atlas Shrugged are just as important today as it was when it was published. The lesson in the book was that anytime the government gets involved with regulating business, it inadvertantly harms that industy. Now, it's much too early in the morning for me to present this argument correctly, and I am certainly not a monopolist, but the government does have a history of mucking up business and economy with its interference. While I'm not a big fan of Microsoft and their predatory practices, they have managed to enforce a consistent platform with near total industry acceptance. For a software developer like myself, that has helped to create a much wider customer base with deeper saturation to individual companies and has benefited me as an individual. This is because corporations are much more willing to standardize on something that is a standard itself. Equally beneficial is the strong support for non-MS platforms suck as Solaris and *nix. I benefit from those as well as many companies are ferverently interested in alternative platforms.
I find it interesting that so many people rail against Rand's writing. In the spirit of full disclosure, I have only read Atlas Shrugged and perhaps I'm missing something from the other books that has so many people getting their underwear in a wad, but I suspect that a large portion of the dissentors have only read it as well - provided, of course that they even got that far. Too many people seem to be inhibited by its length (1074 pages) and often only read as far as the reviews posted here and on Amazon. After all, not many people talk about the Fountainhead here - they talk about Atlas Shrugged. It was the repeated references to that book that motivated me to read it and, I suspect, it is the same for many others.
Lastly, if you don't feel that Rand's warnings against corporate welfare were warranted (and you're certainly welcome to your opinion), just remember that the complaints and call-to-actions presented in these forums against the RIAA/MPAA seeking favorable (for them) legistlation is a cry against corporate welfare. Companies can't compete on their own merits, so they turn the the government to enforce the consumption of their products. It may not be the same as the corporate equality laws (and I'm not about to kick off a debate on equal opportunity and affirmative action legislation here either - I know better than that) presented in Atlas Shrugged, but it does not take much imagination to see how things could progress to that point. Given that we will not be able to watch/listen to any "non-MPAA/RIAA sactioned" content in their near future due to DRM controls (some of which have already been mandated), no, it doesn't take much imagination at all.
Slashdot Mirror
Enforcement of the patent is selective. The patent holder must initiate action against the infringer. Mike Doyle is saying that this is a way to knock MS down a few pegs and give other manufacturers the opportunity to re-enter the "Browser War". He would do this by prohibiting MS from marketing IE, but would not enforce his ownership against the other companies.
Now, it is true that the owner of a patent must take reasonable steps to protect that ownership. However, all that he would have to do is charge the other companies a nominal license fee to use his technology. This can be done by simply charging the companies $1.
I would gladly pay that dollar for Opera to see them get a fair shake at the browser market.
MTV Drum Jammer
My bank will allow you to use Opera but it doesn't work completely. Typically, Opera chokes on menu trees and the like, usually done with DHTML. A shame, really, since the banking site is the only reason that I even still have IE on my machine. And emulating IE doesn't fix the problem. Once Opera finally gets the issue remedied (sort of an "if you can't beat 'em, join 'em" type of thing), I'll be able to use it 100% of the time, rather than just 99%.
And boy, oh boy, am I looking forward to that day.
Good point, Alexo. There is a difference between allowing the vendor to install a remotely accessible service on your system and merely giving them permission to do so.
Sort of like giving a person your permission to shoot you in the head. Just because you tell them it's alright to do so, doesn't necessarily mean that they will.
If it's all the same to you, I would rather not give them the permission in the first place. Nor will I hand them the gun with which to do it.
That said, I am not going to install their service packs and, thus, I am not going to give them the opportunity to install such services on my systems.
Do they really install a back door? I'm not even going to allow the risk inherent in finding out.
That still doesn't change the fact that the latest service packs for XP and 2000 (and Windows Media Player) provide a back door for remote access by MS and any third parties that they decide to provide access to.
Given their history, how secure do you suppose that service is going to be?
I'll stick with NAV, thank you, which, amusingly enough, picked out Bugbear from an email sent to me this morning.
I've had one of these babies for well over a year now. They're $50 and you can get them at Radio Shack. Works great, weeding out probably 90% of telemarketing calls. Looks like the other guys are starting to catch on.
IIRC, the court did not rule in favor of either party. Instead, it judged that the arbitration clause of the EULA was valid and the case was moved to arbitration.
>> For clarification, most contracts do _not_ need to be signed to be legally binding.
...and therefore are not a lawyer. I, on the otherhand, while not a lawyer myself, have worked extensively with various legal teams to ascertain the legality, enforceability and consequences of EULAs.
Contracts are bound by the laws of the state in which they are drawn. Your generalization that contracts do not need to be signed is inaccurate. Furthermore, likening a EULA to a handshake as am implied agreement is also false. A handshake contract, which is tenuous at best, is recognized by some as binding because it is based on a custom that actually pre-dates written contract law. The laws pertaining to contracts varies by the state in which they are written. Enforceability of a contract in implied terms is also subject to the local customs where the agreement is made. EULAs are not based on custom, nor are they based on commonly accepted terms of negotiation. They are ex post facto and, as the courts will eventually show, invalid.
Also, minors can bind contracts and enforce them against adults. However, the contract is voidable at the option of the minor.
In general, the courts consider a minor to lack the capacity to enter into a binding agreement. The contract is voidable at the option of the minor because it isn't legally enforeable in the first place. Rights and limitations on minors and their involvement in binding agreements varies from state to state.
Most EULAs do stipulate that the software can be returned if you reject the EULA
As you stated, this is not feasible. The contract of sale of a software package exists between the retail seller and the customer and is subject to the terms of sale agreed upon between the two prior to the point of sale. This is why you see return policies posted at a store's cash registers. With very few exceptions (e.g. Electronics Boutique), stores will not allow you to return a software package if it has been opened. As the EULA invariably is not posted on the outside of the packaging for the customer's review prior to the point of sale, this is not a valid recourse.
does not give you the right to agree and subsequently break your agreement.
I wasn't aware that this was stated as an option.
I am not a lawyer but have studied law
Which is precisely why I click on the "I Do Not Agree" button and terminate the installation.
Actually, I read them. As a developer, I have to be concerned with what provisions companies put into their EULAs regarding distribution and use of their tools. I'm much too lazy to go digging for the references, but there are many examples of frivolous restrictions being placed in the EULA. For example, Microsoft's specification that its tools may not be used in open source development.
In addition to this, as a consumer, I look through the EULA for clues that there might be trojan processes in the software. Microsoft's Media Player is a good example of this whereby they reveal in their EULA that they can remotely access your machine and install arbitrary "updates." This has been covered here before so there is really no need to retread it again.
As for the legality of the EULA, no, it is not enforceable. The EULA is supposed to be a precursor to the purchase and subsequent use of the software. However, as you cannot view the EULA before purchasing, and as the software is invariably non-returnable, the agreement is non-binding.
By law, you have a set term to review a contract before signing it. In most states, this is three business days. A contract cannot be introduced and imposed ex post facto (after the fact). Typically, a contract is not legally binding unless it is signed by both parties and in the presence of at least one witness. Further, a contract is not binding to a minor unless that minor's parent or guardian also signs. So the whole notion of EULAs in video games is nonsense.
Ultimately, the enforceability of a EULA relies on the ignorance of the parties involved. The consumer who believes that it is binding and the vendor who finds comfort in the mistaken belief that an enforceable contract has been executed.
I personally do not know of a single court case where a EULA has been tested, which suggsests to me that the software manufacturers and their legal teams realize that a EULA is nothing more than a facade.
With respect to the inclusion of EULA legistlation in Lofgren's bill, I would suspect that that was put there as a bargaining chip. In negotiations, you always ask for more than you expect to receieve and you always ask for things that you don't care too much about. This way, you have something that you can concede to the other parties without actually losing something that you want.
...which both note that there is no chance of these bills being passed this year.
...or any year, for that matter.
Granted, it's not binding anyway, but you'll probably see Hillary Rosen doing iPod commercials before companies like Microsoft et. al. give up the facade of the "enforceable" EULA.
How is this insightful? The US Patent Office operates at a deficit and is not anywhere near profitability. In fact, they are not even profit-driven (meaning that profitability is not within their charter). They are severely under-funded and under-staffed. If anything, they are concerned with through-put, not profit.
Check out this article from the New York Times. The article has already been discussed here on Slashdot
During the setup process, you are prompted to specify a password. However, at the same time, you are also given the opportunity to specify that only one person will be using the machine which, in turn, will disable the initial logon prompt when entering Windows. This is what he is referring to.
If Microsoft really wanted to drive everyone to the XBox and kill off the PC as the de-facto gaming platform, all that they would have to do is stop releasing DirectX and retract any existing licenses (as provided in their developer license agreements).
Of course, since DirectX is their surest method of distributing their DRM trojan (a la Media Player), that's not likely to happen.
I thought he was slumming it in the train tunnels? Or is that only during the warm months?
Ok, yes, I should have said that DVD's don't count. And by any chance are you in school? I remember that I had zero space for anything when I was in college. Also, most people don't have a 21" monitor. The default size is still 15" on most consumer-grade machines, although you see a lot of 17 inchers now. Also, how big is the screen going to be in a 700mb package? Probably not full size, I'd bet. So, we're back to watching a postage stamp. Granted ASF does compress better than AVI or MPEG...but still.
But apart from that, I don't think that this is going to be a viable offering. For example, do you think that the streams will support that sweet 5.1 speaker setup? I doubt that. The amount of space needed to carry a dolby digital track would probably make this method of viewing prohibitive.
have you taken a look at their site? With the exception of Potter which, let's face it, everyone who is going to own it has already bought it, the rest of it is B-grade flicks. All of the films are out on video, and who is really going to spend 2+ hours downloading it? Not to mention that, unless they are using one of the professional codecs (the $40,000 per license kind), the video quality is going to be small, to say nothing of the audio.
Is any one actually watching downloaded, full-length movies on their PC?
I'd rather get it from Pay-per-view or rental.
IIRC, the Sega Dreamcast also works in a similar fashion and was easily defeated. Basically, the disc contents were read off through the system's serial port and saved into a new format. Then a generic loader was created that replaced the DC's loader. The two were then burned onto a standard CD-R. When the DC would boot, it would read and run the loader which, in turn, operates on the copied data.
The location, size and number of encryption keys are made available on JVC's protected cd scheme. How long could this possibly take to defeat?
Now, I don't particularly care to be able to pirate software, but I do want the ability to use no-cd patches on my games. When a game installs itself using 2GB of hard drive space for its 3 CDs, there is absolutely no reason why I should have to go fishing behind my desk for the "key" disk. But, again, it's not as if this is going to take a long time to defeat.
Gah! Don't you hate it when you hit submit only to find out that a half-dozen other people already posted the same, tired, worn-out cliched joke that you thought was so clever just before the caffeine kicked in?
I really need to learn how to type faster.
That's right! And "no one will ever need more than 640k of RAM". =)
I personally would like a high-capacity, transportable, cost-effective storage mechanism, and I am excited at the prospect of 40-50GB discs. I'm not looking forward to the fact that it'll take 27 days to fill one of these puppies up, but hey, progress marches on. Seriously, tho, for those of us who deal with very large amounts of data (e.g. databases), this backup platform would be of great interest. Not to mention the fact that one of these discs would contain the equivalent of 78 CDs (@ 640MB per).
That would certainly make it much easier to hide the pr0n collection from the missus!
Oh jeez, don't even get me started in that direction. That whole scenario is such bullshit. How big a sigh of relief do you think echoed through the halls of Congress when the WorldCom scandel broke, taking the heat off of the Enron scandel?
Do you think the general public, with their limited attention span, even remembers Enron?
5.4 Million...2.2 Trillon.....regardless of the fine, when it's such a large number and the intention is to close down the company, I have to wonder just how effective that might be in a case like this. More than likely, Fax.com is a corporation which means that any debts and liabilities are the responsibility of the corporate entity itself and not of its owners. So sure, such large fines would shut down the company - they simply declard bankruptcy. And then owners of fax.com simply start up another company to do the same exact thing.
So, in the end, other than setting a legal precedent, what was achieved? Can these guys really be stopped? Are there any other cases similar to this where judgement was awarded against a spammer?
I have personally purchased two licenses - one for each of my machines. I will purchase upgrades for version 7. And I will continue to support developers of quality software.
The people that you know are thieves and only help to undermine what folks like Opera set out to achieve.
By the way, I just want to point out that it's discussions such as this one that I keep coming back to Slashdot.
Man, I love this place!
My impression was that a large portion of Atlas Shrugged served as a warning against corporate welfare. The idea that too much legislation was a dangerous thing that, when taken to its logical end, could have dire consequences on a nation's economy. While the book centered around the characters' obstinate attitude that "we will do it our way or no way", they at least had taken the initiative to follow through on that threat. Rather than contribute to a socio-political environment that they did not support and that was viewed as dangerous, they abandoned what was considered to be a failing and corrupt system to start their own - hence the utopian view for those unfamiliar with the story.
Too many people are quick to respond to Rand's points without understanding them. Her message was not that it was ok to walk over homeless people, as was suggested before. Certainly, the [brother] would have done that, but he was not portrayed in a heroic light. In fact, he was blamed for having contributed to a large part of the country's misguided economic policies - in it for his own good. Dagny was the person to take your lesson from and that lesson was quite simply this: don't apologize for being good at what you do. Throughtout the book she was persecuted for being dedicated, working hard, achieving her goals, and taking pride in her accomplishments. And for that, she was ostracized. If nothing else, her main fault was that she was too much of an idealist. She was the last to resist giving up on the dying world around her, instead trying to nurture and aid it back to health. In fact, the book's catchphrase, "Who is John Gault?", is representative of the one thing that she despises the most: apathy. Only when she had exhausted all possible avenues of changing the system from within did she abandon it. And then, only with a tremendous amount of guilt.
[SPOILER]
It's not until the end of the book that we learn who and what John Gault is and the catchphrase becomes a call to question misguided governmental
dictums, not blindly accept them. Something, interestingly enough, that is done here on a daily basis.
[/SPOILER]
The warnings found within Atlas Shrugged are just as important today as it was when it was published. The lesson in the book was that anytime the government gets involved with regulating business, it inadvertantly harms that industy. Now, it's much too early in the morning for me to present this argument correctly, and I am certainly not a monopolist, but the government does have a history of mucking up business and economy with its interference. While I'm not a big fan of Microsoft and their predatory practices, they have managed to enforce a consistent platform with near total industry acceptance. For a software developer like myself, that has helped to create a much wider customer base with deeper saturation to individual companies and has benefited me as an individual. This is because corporations are much more willing to standardize on something that is a standard itself. Equally beneficial is the strong support for non-MS platforms suck as Solaris and *nix. I benefit from those as well as many companies are ferverently interested in alternative platforms.
I find it interesting that so many people rail against Rand's writing. In the spirit of full disclosure, I have only read Atlas Shrugged and perhaps I'm missing something from the other books that has so many people getting their underwear in a wad, but I suspect that a large portion of the dissentors have only read it as well - provided, of course that they even got that far. Too many people seem to be inhibited by its length (1074 pages) and often only read as far as the reviews posted here and on Amazon. After all, not many people talk about the Fountainhead here - they talk about Atlas Shrugged. It was the repeated references to that book that motivated me to read it and, I suspect,
it is the same for many others.
Lastly, if you don't feel that Rand's warnings against corporate welfare were warranted (and you're certainly welcome to your opinion), just remember that the complaints and call-to-actions presented in these forums against the RIAA/MPAA seeking favorable (for them) legistlation is a cry against corporate welfare. Companies can't compete on their own merits, so they turn the the government to enforce the consumption of their products. It may not be the same as the corporate equality laws (and I'm not about to kick off a debate on equal opportunity and affirmative action legislation here either - I know better than that) presented in Atlas Shrugged, but it does not take much imagination to see how things could progress to that point. Given that we will not be able to watch/listen to any "non-MPAA/RIAA sactioned" content in their near future due to DRM controls (some of which have already been mandated), no, it doesn't take much imagination at all.