Apple is doing something that the RIAA thinks is good, but in reality, I think it's the surest sign that they're dying.
Their profit margins are sky-high because they bundle content. You want that hit song? Sure, with these 14 crap songs, all at just over a buck each.
On a song-by-song basis, they'll make more money selling songs now, with electronic distribution. But they won't sell any copies of the 14 crap songs. They'll go from 40% or so (what I've heard is label profit from a $20 CD) of $20, for one good song, to 60% of a dollar (assuming they keep all the gains from cutting out physical distribution and don't give any extra to the artist - a safe assumption).
They're also cutting the throats of their retail partners. They need to own retail completely to keep their monopoly control. If they betray retail, retail is going to betray them. Selling indie music, not price-fixing, all these terrible things.
This helps the consumer because, assuming we buy, we're buying more quality music and less crap. (Quality meaning, what we want, not any objective standard.) We're getting it at a much lower price, and there's no brand loyalty. We'll shop at Apple because they're the only one, for now, but as soon as another site offers it we'll jump ship for $.02 savings. There'll be fan sites listing the price differences at the sales sites.
They'll have done what they always fought against, turned their music into an uncontrollable commodity. Sure, they'll get paid for each track, but their fantastic profits are gone. With that goes their huge advertising budgets and all of a sudden it's reasonable for other companies to compete in the publishing/promotions business.
Windows doesn't come with Kazaa either, but all the joe-average users I know have managed to install it. Hell, most of them managed to get divx working, back when it was a real pain. All it takes is motivation.
As oggs get more common, the average joe will go to google and search for "ogg music" and within minutes they'll be listening to their new music.
That's only valid if the after-market parts you buy are really the problem. The car companies would like to disclaim all warranties on cars that use third-party tires but unless the tire quality actually caused the problem, they can't.
If you put a 486 fan on an Athlon and it died, you're unprotected. If you exercise due care and buy an Athlon-rated fan and the CPU dies for some other reason, AMD is liable for it, if it's in the warranty period. They can try to get around this by not certifying any fans for new CPUs but any judge would throw that out after seeing the cooler benchmarks you find on the hardware sites, that show how after-market CPU HSFs perform better.
Of course open source software would be exempt from liability. It's *FREE*. If you don't pay for something you have no valid recourse against the maker for accidental damages.
You're saying open source advocates are being hypocritical because they don't believe you should be able to sue people when the no-strings-attached gift they give you stops working. Jerk.
Many large companies don't want open source. They want support, they want assurance, they want compliance with existing standards.
All of which are benefits of open source.
Support is available. Some for free, but if you want enterprise support you pay for it. But it'll still be cheaper than the service contracts you pay for now.
You want assurance? You can't beat the assurance you get from being able to hire a consultant to come and fix your problems. Every now and then someone talks about how MS actually did pay attention and write a fix in less than a day. With your own coders that's how it always is. Make a call, get a patch.
Compliance with existing standards? There's no profit motive for open source developers to break compatibility in the first place. Intentionally non-standard formats, like MS uses, are the result of a policy of forcing upgrades and breaking competitor's import routines.
Pick an open source package and get the code. Spend some time (or pay someone to) find someone related to the project (one of the peripheral developers) who is available for on-call consulting with regards to it. You'll spend about as much as you would to call tech support at an existing company but you'll go straight to someone with the skills and approval to make real changes, and they're working for you. Even if everyone else drops the project it'll never be end-of-lifed. You'll never be stuck because of security holes that the company won't fix (Office 97) which force you into an expensive upgrade you don't need or want.
Then there's cost. Get away from proprietary software and you per-seat cost becomes that of the hardware and a small incremental cost for support. Consider rolling out application servers and thin clients. A $300 PC is a great thin-client, no local hardware except a CD-RW, mouse, keyboard, and monitor. Buy a $3k server and you're running office apps for 20 - 40 people at once, for a total cost of less than a third of your old hardware budget alone.
You want assurance? Here's one. If a company completely controls your software and your access to fixes for that software, they are *not* going to be benevolent. They'll guess how much they think you can afford and they'll charge you that much. Their site licenses will disclaim all damages caused by the software, even due to negligence on their part. You sue them and they'll spend more than your whole corporate budget on a legal team. There's your assurance.
This is only a debate in the sense that the tobacco companies debate findings that cigarettes cause cancer.
The legal precedents are *very* clear. When you buy something, you own it. You have the right to use it in any legal fashion (decided by law, not by company claims) and to resell it. US copyright law includes a provision specifically allowing copies of software to be made, as required to allow the intended functioning of the product. If it needs to be copied onto the HD to run, and into RAM, then the company implicitly allowed this by offering it for sale and claiming it runs.
The EULA already isn't enforceable. It's an after-sale restriction. That sort of thing is specifically forbidden in contract law.
The only binding thing in buying Windows is that it will do what it says it will on the back of the box. Copyright law has special provisions allowing you to copy software, as required for the normal expected use. This was the sticking point, software companies claimed you couldn't copy it onto the HD, or into RAM, without agreeing to a license. This isn't true or they wouldn't be bribing politicians to pass the UCITA, the only purpose of which is to make the EULAs binding.
EULAs aren't legally binding. They might be, if they were part of an online purchase, but in the form we see them, as shrinkwrap licenses there's *no* legal precedent that would suggets they're legal.
The legal agreement is that the product does what is claimed on the box. If MS doesn't claim that VFP works under WINE you don't have the right to complain when it doesn't.
But, you don't cost MS anything by using Linux, you only don't make them any money. This is a crucial difference. So far, it's still legal to choose not to do business with someone.
And yes, I did two hardware swaps recently, upgrading two test machines from P2-99 motherboards to CUV4X motherboards, with roughly the safe stuff. Redhat 7.3 detected it perfectly and worked without a tweak. Win2k was bitching like crazy and I may have to reinstall to get it to work correctly. But yeah, Linux is hard to install...
How about all those poor users who would mistake a Pontiac Firebird for a RDBMS?
This may astound you, but the world is full of similarly named yet completely different products. People are able to cope. People know it's the Pinto *car* that explodes, not the pinto *bean*. (Well, those explode, just later...)
You seem to think that people will be hearing great things about Firebird, but have no idea what is it. "Wow, that Firebird sounds *amazing*, I don't know if it's an experimental new plane, or a tooth-whitener, but I've got to try it!"
Really, people hear things like "We installed that Firebird database", "You've got to use Firebird for you web browsing", "This Firebird energy drink is amazing", and other contextual uses. They know not to go looking at 7-11 for a database, or at Source Forge for an energy drink.
Admittedly, if they google for Firebird and hit "I Feel Lucky", they may get the wrong site, but that's easily taken care of by trading "If you meant to find Firebird the (Browser|RDBMS) click here!" links. Any of those people who made a mistake, either way, would have learned about a new product to try, and been able to find the one they were looking for.
Would it have been so unreasonable for one guy from FirebirdSQL to send *one* email someone at Mozilla, maybe CCing a few other people there, and ask that if they take the name they put a "If you meant to find FirebirdSQL, the database, click here" link on the download page?
Currently in the top-ten on Google, searching for Firebird, there's the database, a drag-strip, Pontiac, a book store, a rock-and-gem store, and more. If the FirebirdSQL guys didn't want to get confused with someone else maybe they should have picked a distinctive name. Here's hint #1, if you see more than a million hits for that name on google, even if none are for an identical product, maybe you should pick a new name. If a product has ever been advertised on TV with the same name (even in a different market) you should pick a new name. If you fail to do this, at least have the decency to not bitch about the number of other people using the same name.
Wah. Take a common name, run into collisions. Deal with it.
If you weren't a jackass about it you could probably have gotten Mozilla people to put a "If you meant to find Firebird SQL the database, go here instead" on their download page. Instead, they know you're spamming babies and they won't give you the time of day. Way to fuck it up.
There's two ways to look at this...
1) There are only 13(?) industry categories for the purposes of trademarks, *all* computer related products fall into one of them. This means that if someone used the name Firebird years ago on an Apple// side-scroller game, you couldn't trademark it now because it's not distinctive enough. This calls into question your right to be using the name, let alone telling others what they can do.
2) The intended use of the products differs greatly, so while both are software, used on a computer, one is a database and the other a viewer for web pages, no overlap involved. (While Mozilla may use a DB backend to store settings, and PhoenixSQL may incorporate some HTML parsing, they aren't close to overlapping functionality.)
#2 is obviously the more reasonable. Not only because it involves you acting like an adult and getting on with things, but because it suggests you have a right to the name Firebird without stepping on someone else's toes. I mean, it's not like you guys really used your imagination coming up with a new and unique name.
Try sending apologetic email to the Mozilla crew, for being a total cock-goblin, and invite them to use the name Firebird. Offer to make a "If you're looking for the web browser, click here" link and politely ask that they do the same. They're adults, they'll forgive you.
And hey, people going to download the browser, probably *thousands* of times more people than use your database, will see the link "FirebirdSQL" and think "Hey, I've been meaning to get that database installed..." and will check you out. Otherwise they'll simply head off to PostgreSQL, MySQL, or something else they've heard of.
This is the root of the problem. Everyone's so paranoid that someone is going to profit from something related to *their* property. If you ever manage to make a living by selling crib notes to a book I wrote, using "fair use" quotes, etc, go for it. Ditto if you sell additional levels for a game I wrote.
There are too many x86 servers running non-MS OSes for Palladium to ever be mandated. Think how badly the web would run if everyone had to serve everything from IIS. Are there any SSH servers for Windows? How would you securely and remotely admin them?
And the thing about viruses is silly. Most "email viruses" aren't, they're outlook exploits or similar. Palladium computers will still suffer from this, moreso I'd imagine. Your email client is still going to have permission to write to your email (and delete messages) and send email, so email "viruses" can still be written to trick it into doing the wrong thing.
And, security that's too strict will be turned off. If users can't see the dancing_baby.exe they'll turn off signature checking, and if you don't let them, they'll stick with an older version of the OS. It's like making user password too hard to remember, they'll be on sticky-notes on the monitors.
What dependency hell? All the big applications (OpenOffice, VMWare, Mozilla, etc) are packaged with an installed. Run it, a GUI pops up and asks where to install it. More importantly, the admin can do this remotely or in a scripted fashion.
Is the app doesn't have an installer it's probably packages like an RPM or DEB, that's just like the.MSI format Windows uses. And it works about as well. (Perfectly, if it's written well, somewhat worse otherwise.)
The only time you worry about dependencies is when you compile code, this is essentially impossible in a Windows environment (even if you have the compiler installed, nobody releases packages in source format on Windows) so it's not a valid comparison.
It's free, but there's more corporate level support than for Windows. Sure you can get an MS tech on the phone, but they'll just walk you through the KB articles, you can get a Redhat service contract that goes from there all the way to 24/7 on-site response.
Software isn't licensed, like a service or otherwise. It's bought, like a book. Only if you sign a contract up front, like a site license, is it otherwise.
If you walk into a store and buy it, the EULA doesn't mean shit because it's post sale and *every* court that's ever ruled on such a thing in North America has upheld the basic idea of contract law, you can't be bound by extra conditions added after the contract (in this case, of sale) was accepted. You don't know what the EULA says, so you can't agree to it unseen.
That's what they tell you. But when you buy a car you're able to use any of the parts of it, embedded processor or otherwise, in any project you want.
Microsoft doesn't support the continued use of the OEM version on another machine, but unless your *pre-sale* agreement with Dell said otherwise, their opinion doesn't matter.
Yeah, I'd hate to be called in on the weekend to fix something that tested properly in our browser, yet crashed when it went out to customers because they had a slightly different browser revision.
Much better to have a stricter debugging phase, during regular work hours, and ship a solid product.
If you can detect a watermark, you can usually remove it, being that you know what to look for and can simply remove those marks. (Well, not *simply*, but...) It's hard to remove watermarks when you can't read them, you're usually limited to screwing up the signal more and more until a reader device doesn't see the mark.
Watermarks are pretty much secure only as long as they're either quite lossy (ie, noticable, but you can't get rid of them because they threw away data - like pasting an opaque logo onto a picture) or secret, and you don't know what to look for.
And yes, there's no reason you can't have multiple watermarks. This means you could still prove ownership even after a Do-Not-Play mark was removed.
Can't be done. The only way you can make a watermark that I can't detect (and thus remove) is if I don't know what I'm looking for, a secret in other words.
You simply can't keep something like the key needed to detect the watermark secret when it'll be integrated into the chips of every audio playback device in the world.
Most smart-cards have been cracked and they're expensive to make. The companies making these devices don't care if the system is cracked, only the studios. When it comes to a budget crunch they're going to "accidently" skimp on security.
I just hope that whoever releases the crack for this stuff waits until the system is widely adopted. That way there'll be riots if they disable the old devices and expect people to buy new ones. (Like what they're doing with HDTV, except that not enough people own HDTVs yet.)
The GPL isn't a license in the sense that Microsoft uses the word.
A shrink-wrap license tries to dictate what you can do with a product you already own. This is 100% bad, and goes against all existing contract law.
Site licenses are pre-sale terms and conditions, they're reasonable, just like asking the merchant if they'll sell case-lots cheaper.
The GPL is more like the last one. When you receive a GPLed piece of software you're able to use it in any legal way you'd like. You can't copy it, that's a copyright violation. But you also can't print it out and beat someone to death with it, that's murder. These restrictions are always in place.
But... The GPL says "Want to be able to copy and distribute this? Do these things... 1)... 2)... etc)... and go right ahead." If you want to do these things, which you normally wouldn't be able to do, you can agree to the license. If you don't, you simply don't agree to the license and don't do those things that it was offering to let you do.
That's much like buying MS Office and in the box it comes with an offer to let you throw a pie at Bill, for $5 at a fund-raiser. As long as the box didn't say "Buy this and get to throw a pie" you wouldn't expect to be able to do so, so it wouldn't be covered under the sale agreement. It's essentially an offer to do something totally unrelated, that just happens to be packaged with the software because users might want to do it.
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Apple is doing something that the RIAA thinks is good, but in reality, I think it's the surest sign that they're dying.
Their profit margins are sky-high because they bundle content. You want that hit song? Sure, with these 14 crap songs, all at just over a buck each.
On a song-by-song basis, they'll make more money selling songs now, with electronic distribution. But they won't sell any copies of the 14 crap songs. They'll go from 40% or so (what I've heard is label profit from a $20 CD) of $20, for one good song, to 60% of a dollar (assuming they keep all the gains from cutting out physical distribution and don't give any extra to the artist - a safe assumption).
They're also cutting the throats of their retail partners. They need to own retail completely to keep their monopoly control. If they betray retail, retail is going to betray them. Selling indie music, not price-fixing, all these terrible things.
This helps the consumer because, assuming we buy, we're buying more quality music and less crap. (Quality meaning, what we want, not any objective standard.) We're getting it at a much lower price, and there's no brand loyalty. We'll shop at Apple because they're the only one, for now, but as soon as another site offers it we'll jump ship for $.02 savings. There'll be fan sites listing the price differences at the sales sites.
They'll have done what they always fought against, turned their music into an uncontrollable commodity. Sure, they'll get paid for each track, but their fantastic profits are gone. With that goes their huge advertising budgets and all of a sudden it's reasonable for other companies to compete in the publishing/promotions business.
Windows doesn't come with Kazaa either, but all the joe-average users I know have managed to install it. Hell, most of them managed to get divx working, back when it was a real pain. All it takes is motivation.
As oggs get more common, the average joe will go to google and search for "ogg music" and within minutes they'll be listening to their new music.
That's only valid if the after-market parts you buy are really the problem. The car companies would like to disclaim all warranties on cars that use third-party tires but unless the tire quality actually caused the problem, they can't.
If you put a 486 fan on an Athlon and it died, you're unprotected. If you exercise due care and buy an Athlon-rated fan and the CPU dies for some other reason, AMD is liable for it, if it's in the warranty period. They can try to get around this by not certifying any fans for new CPUs but any judge would throw that out after seeing the cooler benchmarks you find on the hardware sites, that show how after-market CPU HSFs perform better.
Of course open source software would be exempt from liability. It's *FREE*. If you don't pay for something you have no valid recourse against the maker for accidental damages.
You're saying open source advocates are being hypocritical because they don't believe you should be able to sue people when the no-strings-attached gift they give you stops working. Jerk.
All of which are benefits of open source.
Support is available. Some for free, but if you want enterprise support you pay for it. But it'll still be cheaper than the service contracts you pay for now.
You want assurance? You can't beat the assurance you get from being able to hire a consultant to come and fix your problems. Every now and then someone talks about how MS actually did pay attention and write a fix in less than a day. With your own coders that's how it always is. Make a call, get a patch.
Compliance with existing standards? There's no profit motive for open source developers to break compatibility in the first place. Intentionally non-standard formats, like MS uses, are the result of a policy of forcing upgrades and breaking competitor's import routines.
Pick an open source package and get the code. Spend some time (or pay someone to) find someone related to the project (one of the peripheral developers) who is available for on-call consulting with regards to it. You'll spend about as much as you would to call tech support at an existing company but you'll go straight to someone with the skills and approval to make real changes, and they're working for you. Even if everyone else drops the project it'll never be end-of-lifed. You'll never be stuck because of security holes that the company won't fix (Office 97) which force you into an expensive upgrade you don't need or want.
Then there's cost. Get away from proprietary software and you per-seat cost becomes that of the hardware and a small incremental cost for support. Consider rolling out application servers and thin clients. A $300 PC is a great thin-client, no local hardware except a CD-RW, mouse, keyboard, and monitor. Buy a $3k server and you're running office apps for 20 - 40 people at once, for a total cost of less than a third of your old hardware budget alone.
You want assurance? Here's one. If a company completely controls your software and your access to fixes for that software, they are *not* going to be benevolent. They'll guess how much they think you can afford and they'll charge you that much. Their site licenses will disclaim all damages caused by the software, even due to negligence on their part. You sue them and they'll spend more than your whole corporate budget on a legal team. There's your assurance.
This is only a debate in the sense that the tobacco companies debate findings that cigarettes cause cancer.
The legal precedents are *very* clear. When you buy something, you own it. You have the right to use it in any legal fashion (decided by law, not by company claims) and to resell it. US copyright law includes a provision specifically allowing copies of software to be made, as required to allow the intended functioning of the product. If it needs to be copied onto the HD to run, and into RAM, then the company implicitly allowed this by offering it for sale and claiming it runs.
The EULA already isn't enforceable. It's an after-sale restriction. That sort of thing is specifically forbidden in contract law.
The only binding thing in buying Windows is that it will do what it says it will on the back of the box. Copyright law has special provisions allowing you to copy software, as required for the normal expected use. This was the sticking point, software companies claimed you couldn't copy it onto the HD, or into RAM, without agreeing to a license. This isn't true or they wouldn't be bribing politicians to pass the UCITA, the only purpose of which is to make the EULAs binding.
EULAs aren't legally binding. They might be, if they were part of an online purchase, but in the form we see them, as shrinkwrap licenses there's *no* legal precedent that would suggets they're legal.
The legal agreement is that the product does what is claimed on the box. If MS doesn't claim that VFP works under WINE you don't have the right to complain when it doesn't.
But, you don't cost MS anything by using Linux, you only don't make them any money. This is a crucial difference. So far, it's still legal to choose not to do business with someone.
And yes, I did two hardware swaps recently, upgrading two test machines from P2-99 motherboards to CUV4X motherboards, with roughly the safe stuff. Redhat 7.3 detected it perfectly and worked without a tweak. Win2k was bitching like crazy and I may have to reinstall to get it to work correctly. But yeah, Linux is hard to install...
I mean, why would an idiot install an RDBMS? I don't doubt that it installs easily.
Mozilla wasn't paranoid about someone else having a similar name, obviously.
And this idiot is going to have installed a high-end RDBMS? I doubt it.
How about all those poor users who would mistake a Pontiac Firebird for a RDBMS?
This may astound you, but the world is full of similarly named yet completely different products. People are able to cope. People know it's the Pinto *car* that explodes, not the pinto *bean*. (Well, those explode, just later...)
You seem to think that people will be hearing great things about Firebird, but have no idea what is it. "Wow, that Firebird sounds *amazing*, I don't know if it's an experimental new plane, or a tooth-whitener, but I've got to try it!"
Really, people hear things like "We installed that Firebird database", "You've got to use Firebird for you web browsing", "This Firebird energy drink is amazing", and other contextual uses. They know not to go looking at 7-11 for a database, or at Source Forge for an energy drink.
Admittedly, if they google for Firebird and hit "I Feel Lucky", they may get the wrong site, but that's easily taken care of by trading "If you meant to find Firebird the (Browser|RDBMS) click here!" links. Any of those people who made a mistake, either way, would have learned about a new product to try, and been able to find the one they were looking for.
Would it have been so unreasonable for one guy from FirebirdSQL to send *one* email someone at Mozilla, maybe CCing a few other people there, and ask that if they take the name they put a "If you meant to find FirebirdSQL, the database, click here" link on the download page?
Currently in the top-ten on Google, searching for Firebird, there's the database, a drag-strip, Pontiac, a book store, a rock-and-gem store, and more. If the FirebirdSQL guys didn't want to get confused with someone else maybe they should have picked a distinctive name. Here's hint #1, if you see more than a million hits for that name on google, even if none are for an identical product, maybe you should pick a new name. If a product has ever been advertised on TV with the same name (even in a different market) you should pick a new name. If you fail to do this, at least have the decency to not bitch about the number of other people using the same name.
Wah. Take a common name, run into collisions. Deal with it.
// side-scroller game, you couldn't trademark it now because it's not distinctive enough. This calls into question your right to be using the name, let alone telling others what they can do.
If you weren't a jackass about it you could probably have gotten Mozilla people to put a "If you meant to find Firebird SQL the database, go here instead" on their download page. Instead, they know you're spamming babies and they won't give you the time of day. Way to fuck it up.
There's two ways to look at this...
1) There are only 13(?) industry categories for the purposes of trademarks, *all* computer related products fall into one of them. This means that if someone used the name Firebird years ago on an Apple
2) The intended use of the products differs greatly, so while both are software, used on a computer, one is a database and the other a viewer for web pages, no overlap involved. (While Mozilla may use a DB backend to store settings, and PhoenixSQL may incorporate some HTML parsing, they aren't close to overlapping functionality.)
#2 is obviously the more reasonable. Not only because it involves you acting like an adult and getting on with things, but because it suggests you have a right to the name Firebird without stepping on someone else's toes. I mean, it's not like you guys really used your imagination coming up with a new and unique name.
Try sending apologetic email to the Mozilla crew, for being a total cock-goblin, and invite them to use the name Firebird. Offer to make a "If you're looking for the web browser, click here" link and politely ask that they do the same. They're adults, they'll forgive you.
And hey, people going to download the browser, probably *thousands* of times more people than use your database, will see the link "FirebirdSQL" and think "Hey, I've been meaning to get that database installed..." and will check you out. Otherwise they'll simply head off to PostgreSQL, MySQL, or something else they've heard of.
This is the root of the problem. Everyone's so paranoid that someone is going to profit from something related to *their* property. If you ever manage to make a living by selling crib notes to a book I wrote, using "fair use" quotes, etc, go for it. Ditto if you sell additional levels for a game I wrote.
There are too many x86 servers running non-MS OSes for Palladium to ever be mandated. Think how badly the web would run if everyone had to serve everything from IIS. Are there any SSH servers for Windows? How would you securely and remotely admin them?
And the thing about viruses is silly. Most "email viruses" aren't, they're outlook exploits or similar. Palladium computers will still suffer from this, moreso I'd imagine. Your email client is still going to have permission to write to your email (and delete messages) and send email, so email "viruses" can still be written to trick it into doing the wrong thing.
And, security that's too strict will be turned off. If users can't see the dancing_baby.exe they'll turn off signature checking, and if you don't let them, they'll stick with an older version of the OS. It's like making user password too hard to remember, they'll be on sticky-notes on the monitors.
What dependency hell? All the big applications (OpenOffice, VMWare, Mozilla, etc) are packaged with an installed. Run it, a GUI pops up and asks where to install it. More importantly, the admin can do this remotely or in a scripted fashion.
.MSI format Windows uses. And it works about as well. (Perfectly, if it's written well, somewhat worse otherwise.)
Is the app doesn't have an installer it's probably packages like an RPM or DEB, that's just like the
The only time you worry about dependencies is when you compile code, this is essentially impossible in a Windows environment (even if you have the compiler installed, nobody releases packages in source format on Windows) so it's not a valid comparison.
It's free, but there's more corporate level support than for Windows. Sure you can get an MS tech on the phone, but they'll just walk you through the KB articles, you can get a Redhat service contract that goes from there all the way to 24/7 on-site response.
Care to FUD some more?
Software isn't licensed, like a service or otherwise. It's bought, like a book. Only if you sign a contract up front, like a site license, is it otherwise.
If you walk into a store and buy it, the EULA doesn't mean shit because it's post sale and *every* court that's ever ruled on such a thing in North America has upheld the basic idea of contract law, you can't be bound by extra conditions added after the contract (in this case, of sale) was accepted. You don't know what the EULA says, so you can't agree to it unseen.
That's what they tell you. But when you buy a car you're able to use any of the parts of it, embedded processor or otherwise, in any project you want.
Microsoft doesn't support the continued use of the OEM version on another machine, but unless your *pre-sale* agreement with Dell said otherwise, their opinion doesn't matter.
Yeah, I'd hate to be called in on the weekend to fix something that tested properly in our browser, yet crashed when it went out to customers because they had a slightly different browser revision.
Much better to have a stricter debugging phase, during regular work hours, and ship a solid product.
It's also for security. Never trust users.
If you can detect a watermark, you can usually remove it, being that you know what to look for and can simply remove those marks. (Well, not *simply*, but...) It's hard to remove watermarks when you can't read them, you're usually limited to screwing up the signal more and more until a reader device doesn't see the mark.
Watermarks are pretty much secure only as long as they're either quite lossy (ie, noticable, but you can't get rid of them because they threw away data - like pasting an opaque logo onto a picture) or secret, and you don't know what to look for.
And yes, there's no reason you can't have multiple watermarks. This means you could still prove ownership even after a Do-Not-Play mark was removed.
Can't be done. The only way you can make a watermark that I can't detect (and thus remove) is if I don't know what I'm looking for, a secret in other words.
You simply can't keep something like the key needed to detect the watermark secret when it'll be integrated into the chips of every audio playback device in the world.
Most smart-cards have been cracked and they're expensive to make. The companies making these devices don't care if the system is cracked, only the studios. When it comes to a budget crunch they're going to "accidently" skimp on security.
I just hope that whoever releases the crack for this stuff waits until the system is widely adopted. That way there'll be riots if they disable the old devices and expect people to buy new ones. (Like what they're doing with HDTV, except that not enough people own HDTVs yet.)
The GPL isn't a license in the sense that Microsoft uses the word.
A shrink-wrap license tries to dictate what you can do with a product you already own. This is 100% bad, and goes against all existing contract law.
Site licenses are pre-sale terms and conditions, they're reasonable, just like asking the merchant if they'll sell case-lots cheaper.
The GPL is more like the last one. When you receive a GPLed piece of software you're able to use it in any legal way you'd like. You can't copy it, that's a copyright violation. But you also can't print it out and beat someone to death with it, that's murder. These restrictions are always in place.
But... The GPL says "Want to be able to copy and distribute this? Do these things... 1)... 2)... etc)... and go right ahead." If you want to do these things, which you normally wouldn't be able to do, you can agree to the license. If you don't, you simply don't agree to the license and don't do those things that it was offering to let you do.
That's much like buying MS Office and in the box it comes with an offer to let you throw a pie at Bill, for $5 at a fund-raiser. As long as the box didn't say "Buy this and get to throw a pie" you wouldn't expect to be able to do so, so it wouldn't be covered under the sale agreement. It's essentially an offer to do something totally unrelated, that just happens to be packaged with the software because users might want to do it.