Accuser: You did something nasty just now. You're terrible. Accused: No. I did it quite a while ago - you only noticed now. Accuser: Oh, okay. No harm then.
If it's outrageous that MS did something, it's still outrageous even if the date was wrong.
Soon consumer protection laws will make it illegal for MS or anyone else to tamper with the customer experience after a sale. Perhaps they could deny you a Passport(tm) account if you don't jump through extra hoops, but turning off any expected functionality because of that? Book publishers tried to say "This book cannot be resold" in an attempt to make that law. That never was legal, but was such an egregious fraud that there's actually a body he "first sale doctrine"(in the USA) that specifically states that the publishers rights end at the first sale - once someone buys it.
But, whatever. That anyone who knows about this, regardless of the date, uses the product is... enlightening.
Disclosing someone's lies is always proportional to telling them. If you don't want to have your lies spilled to the world, please try to conduct your affairs so that fraud and misrepresentation are not required. Thanks.
This company long ago gave up its right to call on the law for protection when it used illegal means to tamper with data transmissions, push rootkits, lie about their actions and affiliations, and provide unsupportable and knowingly weak "evidence" in trials.
It's like self defense. If you attack me, you give up your rights not to be attacked. Not just legally, but morally. You can't expect people in *any* system to sit and take illegal behavior and not fight back.
This was leaked to destroy this company's credibility - to protect those they were attacking. It's not like someone picked an innocent company and started blackmailing the CEO, or threatening to disclose trade secrets.
When the company is engaged in many active criminal enterprises (misrepresentation for gain) I think it's perfectly reasonable to notify the authorities. The data they gather and their slack methods and disregard for truth are all putting innocent people in court at great cost. Anything less than blowing the whistle on their crimes would be indefensible.
Besides, this company gave permission for people to log into their systems/etc. It was when they started supporting spyware and rootkits.
To drive a lying corporation out of business when we can't do it any other way. They were part of the RIAAs unwarranted lawsuits against people chosen to be sued because they were unable to pay and thus likely to settle out of court.
As for evidence, I guess most lawyers will subpoena their own copy of these emails before court rather than printing them out from the torrent. The torrent however will be useful if they try to release partial records.
Actually, your attitude disgusts me. That clear evidence of this sort of corruption and might be sat on by you, if you came into possession of it, simply because we weren't intended to see it. Well, duh. We're the victims genius! Of course they want to lie to us while they lie and entrap.
Okay, I've got a Linux server in the corner. Repartition it and install Windows XP, Dual boot. Patch XP fully.
You do understand that Microsoft goes out of their way to make it difficult for other OSes to read/write to their partitions and access their data formats? NTFS keeps changing subtly with every version of Windows. I doubt Win2k could successfully partition that drive.
Both Windows XP and Half-Life 2 have always carried notices about activation requirements on the outside of their retail packaging. If what you say is strictly true, then all disclaimers are useless.
If they're small print and mean "this isn't a sale", they probably are useless. Any reasonable person is going to assume that they own what they purchase. Stores that sell software also sell blank disks, computers, USB cables, and many other products. What's the difference? If you call it a sale the cashiers will take your money. That's pretty telling. Quacks like a sale...
As for the anti-circumvention statute, what does that have to do with needing a license to run software? That only covers cracking/etc. Also, an access control measure can't indiscriminately block legitimate users or they'd allowed to work around it for interoperability reasons.
Besides, none of that would relieve them of the contractual burden to provide you with an unencumbered and usable product. If the DMCA prevented your use, consumer protection laws wouldn't allow them to sell it knowing that.
If the average customer walking into the store concludes that the box contains an actual working copy of MS Windows, that's what it had better contain.
If Vista CDs were selling for $5 and were clearly marked as a trial copy, where you could activate later with a credit card, there wouldn't be any confusion and MS would be right, you'd have an opportunity to agree to the EULA in a real contractual situation.
However, these boxes clearly contain the operating system, in its non-trial form. The price in a non-trial price. The purchase is clearly a sale instead of a borrow/lease agreement. Microsoft clearly says you have the full thing. They merely disagree with US Copyright Law when they say you aren't allowed to use it without agreeing to a license.
I don't see what your problem with this is. Contract law is pretty clear on post-sale restrictions. Copyright law is pretty about not needing a license to use a work, even going so far as to explicitly allow it with software.
Claiming to sell A, then selling a box with B in it is fraud. If the customer wanted B, they could have bought B. Instead they completed a sale for A, which if you were paying attention, is ownership of the product.
Can you imagine if this was tried anywhere else? You buy food, take it home, and when you try to eat it find out that it's only pictures of food - if you agree not to share the food with other people or attempt to recreate the food later, then you can login to the company's website, enter your serial number, driver's license number, address, phone number, and let it fingerprint your PC. Then they'll send you the actual food. In 1-2 working days.
It's obviously farcical. You can't run around altering contracts after the fact. If you let people buy Windows, they own Windows.
That you think this makes sense betrays how little you've thought about it. Obviously, if you've contracted to sell me something you're going to be in breach of that contract if you don't deliver. It won't save you to say "Oh, if you don't like the new deal come into the office and negotiate for a refund."
Sure, a click can indicate accent, or saying "Yes, I agree completely" can indicate nothing if you've got a gun to your throat.
Clickwraps would be valid if they were an offer. In the case of EULAs though, they offer nothing so they aren't a valid contract.
If a click-wrap said "By agreeing you get extended tech support, by not agreeing you only get the functionality you bought at the store" then it *would* be legal. If however it says that you must agree to use the software, and offers an invalid contract, then it's surely not binding.
These cases get through because to some judge software isn't the same as a car so they're addled by the technical parts. A sale is a sale. You can't conclude a sale and tack extra restrictions on the item. The "right of return" that ProCD case hinged on is the worst sort of judicial nonsense. By that logic, nothing would have to be what you sold. You could make people jump through hoops later before actually providing service.
"You wanted a can of walnuts. Read the 10-page contract and press the 'I Agree' button. Walnuts (and some other mixed nuts) will be delivered to your house shortly. If you do not agree to this, you must return this unactivated can to the store from which you bought it and try to negotiate for a refund."
You're legally entitled to use copyrighted works without a license. You're also prevented from putting further restrictions on a purchase after the sale.
If Microsoft wants their agreements to be binding they need to describe them to you before purchase. "MS Windows - requires signing contract X - $300".
Some on an EULA might be binding if presented first (as with the experimental car analogy) but post-sale... Imagine if they said, immediately after you bought the car, that you would be bound to a bunch of silly restrictions and have to buy gas with them, etc? Would it make any difference if they printed this "contract" on a plastic wrapper that you had to tear through to access the car?
I was thinking of the free ad-supported newspapers. Go grab one from the box.
They expect that you'll want to read it, but it's legal to take one and use it as a bird-cage liner.
I'm still seeing a very strong similarity here. They give something away hoping you'll look at ads, but don't have a way to make skipping ads illegal. They can try to distribute the paper/page only to those who will read it (not to people with ad blockers) but unless they make you promise up front to read the whole thing (a valid and enforceable contract), you're free to skip any pieces you wish.
In general, you can't force someone to do something just because just because you want them to. If I sell you a sled and you decide to burn it for warmth instead of sledding on my hill ($$) I've made a bad investment, but you've done nothing illegal.
How about if we had a media format that allows multiple tracks and scriptable transitions. Then you write a playlist file that includes their CC music, and your CC video.
A list of time-coded transitions is no more a derivative work than telling someone to watch a movie muted with a CD for a soundtrack would be.
Movie reviews are obviously about a movie, but they're not derivative works. This seems similar.
Exactly. The GPL'd GNU/Linux environment is a far more stable and and corruption-proof than any proprietary environment. As wacky as a GPL'd spec may be, the reference implementation is free to use when writing a converter. Whatever you may think of OOXML, you can't say that about it.
The IBM PC with MS-DOS won because it was the most open standard.
People invent so many doom and gloom scenarios around not being allowed to use your code (in something they release)... like 99% of everything else they see on the net.
The more you give people, the more they whine when it's less than absolutely 100%.
Slashdot and Google, both ad funded, allow total blocking of their ads. Go figure.
They recognize that having more members/users benefits the other users, and so on. If they blocked anyone for not viewing ads their "paying" users would have less people to talk to.
Also, they might have a false-positive and block the wrong user. And the pros could avoid the blocking anyways. You'd have to be an idiot to play the copy-protection/DRM game.
If we insist on rules forcing people to view ads to view content we hurt Google, by making giving their competitors a huge step up. No corporate welfare!
I don't get you. You sound like you're some sort of "just work, you bitches" uber-capitalist. Yet you want us to obey some unwritten law and just hand a valuable resource to companies because they want us to, not because they actually do a good enough job and convince us?
I don't see a contract with these web authors that says I must view every part of their sites. Free newspapers exist (presumably often ad supported) and yet they don't come with a contract requiring me to read all the ads. So why should one industry get welfare and not the others?
Works in paper form don't come with these protections. I'm free to cut out the dirty words from Harry Potter and resell it. (I couldn't misrepresent it as unaltered, but otherwise...) There's no reason to believe that the web enjoys more protection, especially as skipping ads usually means not viewing a whole new site, something analogous to a flier folded in the newspaper.
Google and Slashdot are both ad-supported companies who welcome everyone, blocking or not, because they recognize that the network effect of a larger community helps everyone, themselves included. Besides, the only way to guarantee zero false positives in your anti-ad-blocker campaign of blocking users is to not have any such policy. Anything else could and will go wrong, ala Microsoft's Genuine "Advantage" and id Software's Quake master servers. All of which have disable legitimate users and hardly touched piracy.
So anyways, I think advocating a no-blocking policy hurts companies like Google and Slashdot who manage to do it right by giving an unfair boost to their less-capable competition.
What!? Healthcare costs money? I thought it was just made by the fairies who provide fresh water, roads, etc.
Do you think you're being insightful?
Your whole point is that this isn't free?
Personally, I'm not as short-sighted as you. I'd rather our homeless drive up costs by going to the hospital when they need it than getting really sick and either making this a third-world-hellhole by dying on the street, or mugging me for their medical expenses.
Come to Canada for a while. You can use hospitals without ID, I have almost total freedom in picking GPs. I just call up and ask if they can take a new patient. No HMO. No government forms. Totally my choice.
You do need referrals from that doctor to specialists, but it's almost always forthcoming. I've never been turned down, even when the doctor said "I don't think you need this, but..." So, you call or visit your GP and pick your specialist (or they'll suggest one) and off you go.
I've similarly been able to get blood tests and such that we're "strictly necessary" just by saying that I was just afraid of getting Diabetes, etc.
You see it as a system of very strict rationing. Personally, I see it as a land of plenty. It's so easy to see a doctor. One of our homeless could walk into one of the better clinics and get an appointment in an hour. They could go to a hospital and get treated immediately.
That means I don't need to worry about a junkie stealing to afford a doctor. I don't need to worry about a Typhoid Mary wandering the streets. I don't need to worry that I lost my ID in an accident and won't get expensive treatment until they find it.
Sure, if I get a weird brain cancer, I might have a better chance in the USA with my $20Mil. Of course, I don't have $20M and far more people die of untreated trivial infections than rare cancers, but hey...
Personally I think they blew *all* their credibility by demanding that someone make the other guys stop having an opinion.
Their speech shouldn't be censored. We need everyone to look at them and see the folly and intolerance of their views, but it's as low as you can possibly get without shooting someone for their views. They tried to stifle the conversation instead of talking.
And, as the original poster pointed out, that PC attitude in voluntary settings (Facebooks, etc) leads to people supporting censorship elsewhere.
Slashdot Mirror
Accuser: You did something nasty just now. You're terrible.
... enlightening.
Accused: No. I did it quite a while ago - you only noticed now.
Accuser: Oh, okay. No harm then.
If it's outrageous that MS did something, it's still outrageous even if the date was wrong.
Soon consumer protection laws will make it illegal for MS or anyone else to tamper with the customer experience after a sale. Perhaps they could deny you a Passport(tm) account if you don't jump through extra hoops, but turning off any expected functionality because of that? Book publishers tried to say "This book cannot be resold" in an attempt to make that law. That never was legal, but was such an egregious fraud that there's actually a body he "first sale doctrine"(in the USA) that specifically states that the publishers rights end at the first sale - once someone buys it.
But, whatever. That anyone who knows about this, regardless of the date, uses the product is
Disclosing someone's lies is always proportional to telling them. If you don't want to have your lies spilled to the world, please try to conduct your affairs so that fraud and misrepresentation are not required. Thanks.
This company long ago gave up its right to call on the law for protection when it used illegal means to tamper with data transmissions, push rootkits, lie about their actions and affiliations, and provide unsupportable and knowingly weak "evidence" in trials.
It's like self defense. If you attack me, you give up your rights not to be attacked. Not just legally, but morally. You can't expect people in *any* system to sit and take illegal behavior and not fight back.
This was leaked to destroy this company's credibility - to protect those they were attacking. It's not like someone picked an innocent company and started blackmailing the CEO, or threatening to disclose trade secrets.
When the company is engaged in many active criminal enterprises (misrepresentation for gain) I think it's perfectly reasonable to notify the authorities. The data they gather and their slack methods and disregard for truth are all putting innocent people in court at great cost. Anything less than blowing the whistle on their crimes would be indefensible.
Besides, this company gave permission for people to log into their systems/etc. It was when they started supporting spyware and rootkits.
For the sole end of embarrassment? No.
To drive a lying corporation out of business when we can't do it any other way. They were part of the RIAAs unwarranted lawsuits against people chosen to be sued because they were unable to pay and thus likely to settle out of court.
As for evidence, I guess most lawyers will subpoena their own copy of these emails before court rather than printing them out from the torrent. The torrent however will be useful if they try to release partial records.
Actually, your attitude disgusts me. That clear evidence of this sort of corruption and might be sat on by you, if you came into possession of it, simply because we weren't intended to see it. Well, duh. We're the victims genius! Of course they want to lie to us while they lie and entrap.
It's fairly obvious that the company didn't create the content. Which specific user created any given section may be in question, but that's all.
Whatever the legal status of wiki posts is, you can be sure that the rights of everyone involved don't magically disappear just because it's complex.
Okay, I've got a Linux server in the corner. Repartition it and install Windows XP, Dual boot. Patch XP fully.
You do understand that Microsoft goes out of their way to make it difficult for other OSes to read/write to their partitions and access their data formats? NTFS keeps changing subtly with every version of Windows. I doubt Win2k could successfully partition that drive.
Both Windows XP and Half-Life 2 have always carried notices about activation requirements on the outside of their retail packaging. If what you say is strictly true, then all disclaimers are useless.
If they're small print and mean "this isn't a sale", they probably are useless. Any reasonable person is going to assume that they own what they purchase. Stores that sell software also sell blank disks, computers, USB cables, and many other products. What's the difference? If you call it a sale the cashiers will take your money. That's pretty telling. Quacks like a sale...
As for the anti-circumvention statute, what does that have to do with needing a license to run software? That only covers cracking/etc. Also, an access control measure can't indiscriminately block legitimate users or they'd allowed to work around it for interoperability reasons.
Besides, none of that would relieve them of the contractual burden to provide you with an unencumbered and usable product. If the DMCA prevented your use, consumer protection laws wouldn't allow them to sell it knowing that.
If the average customer walking into the store concludes that the box contains an actual working copy of MS Windows, that's what it had better contain.
If Vista CDs were selling for $5 and were clearly marked as a trial copy, where you could activate later with a credit card, there wouldn't be any confusion and MS would be right, you'd have an opportunity to agree to the EULA in a real contractual situation.
However, these boxes clearly contain the operating system, in its non-trial form. The price in a non-trial price. The purchase is clearly a sale instead of a borrow/lease agreement. Microsoft clearly says you have the full thing. They merely disagree with US Copyright Law when they say you aren't allowed to use it without agreeing to a license.
I don't see what your problem with this is. Contract law is pretty clear on post-sale restrictions. Copyright law is pretty about not needing a license to use a work, even going so far as to explicitly allow it with software.
Claiming to sell A, then selling a box with B in it is fraud. If the customer wanted B, they could have bought B. Instead they completed a sale for A, which if you were paying attention, is ownership of the product.
Can you imagine if this was tried anywhere else? You buy food, take it home, and when you try to eat it find out that it's only pictures of food - if you agree not to share the food with other people or attempt to recreate the food later, then you can login to the company's website, enter your serial number, driver's license number, address, phone number, and let it fingerprint your PC. Then they'll send you the actual food. In 1-2 working days.
It's obviously farcical. You can't run around altering contracts after the fact. If you let people buy Windows, they own Windows.
That you think this makes sense betrays how little you've thought about it. Obviously, if you've contracted to sell me something you're going to be in breach of that contract if you don't deliver. It won't save you to say "Oh, if you don't like the new deal come into the office and negotiate for a refund."
Sure, a click can indicate accent, or saying "Yes, I agree completely" can indicate nothing if you've got a gun to your throat.
Clickwraps would be valid if they were an offer. In the case of EULAs though, they offer nothing so they aren't a valid contract.
If a click-wrap said "By agreeing you get extended tech support, by not agreeing you only get the functionality you bought at the store" then it *would* be legal. If however it says that you must agree to use the software, and offers an invalid contract, then it's surely not binding.
These cases get through because to some judge software isn't the same as a car so they're addled by the technical parts. A sale is a sale. You can't conclude a sale and tack extra restrictions on the item. The "right of return" that ProCD case hinged on is the worst sort of judicial nonsense. By that logic, nothing would have to be what you sold. You could make people jump through hoops later before actually providing service.
"You wanted a can of walnuts. Read the 10-page contract and press the 'I Agree' button. Walnuts (and some other mixed nuts) will be delivered to your house shortly. If you do not agree to this, you must return this unactivated can to the store from which you bought it and try to negotiate for a refund."
Sure. That's legal.
You're legally entitled to use copyrighted works without a license. You're also prevented from putting further restrictions on a purchase after the sale.
If Microsoft wants their agreements to be binding they need to describe them to you before purchase. "MS Windows - requires signing contract X - $300".
Some on an EULA might be binding if presented first (as with the experimental car analogy) but post-sale... Imagine if they said, immediately after you bought the car, that you would be bound to a bunch of silly restrictions and have to buy gas with them, etc? Would it make any difference if they printed this "contract" on a plastic wrapper that you had to tear through to access the car?
I was thinking of the free ad-supported newspapers. Go grab one from the box.
They expect that you'll want to read it, but it's legal to take one and use it as a bird-cage liner.
I'm still seeing a very strong similarity here. They give something away hoping you'll look at ads, but don't have a way to make skipping ads illegal. They can try to distribute the paper/page only to those who will read it (not to people with ad blockers) but unless they make you promise up front to read the whole thing (a valid and enforceable contract), you're free to skip any pieces you wish.
In general, you can't force someone to do something just because just because you want them to. If I sell you a sled and you decide to burn it for warmth instead of sledding on my hill ($$) I've made a bad investment, but you've done nothing illegal.
Considering that WinCE is available in the range of embedded devices I'm talking about, I'll have to disagree.
Certainly, if you're writing an OS for a heart-monitor it's likely not relevant. However, if you're building a PDA or a phone...
How about if we had a media format that allows multiple tracks and scriptable transitions. Then you write a playlist file that includes their CC music, and your CC video.
A list of time-coded transitions is no more a derivative work than telling someone to watch a movie muted with a CD for a soundtrack would be.
Movie reviews are obviously about a movie, but they're not derivative works. This seems similar.
Are you implying that it would not be legal for me to buy a newspaper, dissect it in any fashion I wish, and resell some of the parts?
That seems unlikely. Marking up textbooks and reselling them is fairly common...
I meant, corrupt like Mexican police. Like the OOXML standards process.
And thus, 'stable' was in the sense of no forced upgrade treadmill, ill-conceived standards, etc.
Exactly. The GPL'd GNU/Linux environment is a far more stable and and corruption-proof than any proprietary environment. As wacky as a GPL'd spec may be, the reference implementation is free to use when writing a converter. Whatever you may think of OOXML, you can't say that about it.
The IBM PC with MS-DOS won because it was the most open standard.
People invent so many doom and gloom scenarios around not being allowed to use your code (in something they release)... like 99% of everything else they see on the net.
The more you give people, the more they whine when it's less than absolutely 100%.
Slashdot and Google, both ad funded, allow total blocking of their ads. Go figure.
They recognize that having more members/users benefits the other users, and so on. If they blocked anyone for not viewing ads their "paying" users would have less people to talk to.
Also, they might have a false-positive and block the wrong user. And the pros could avoid the blocking anyways. You'd have to be an idiot to play the copy-protection/DRM game.
If we insist on rules forcing people to view ads to view content we hurt Google, by making giving their competitors a huge step up. No corporate welfare!
I don't get you. You sound like you're some sort of "just work, you bitches" uber-capitalist. Yet you want us to obey some unwritten law and just hand a valuable resource to companies because they want us to, not because they actually do a good enough job and convince us?
I don't see a contract with these web authors that says I must view every part of their sites. Free newspapers exist (presumably often ad supported) and yet they don't come with a contract requiring me to read all the ads. So why should one industry get welfare and not the others?
Works in paper form don't come with these protections. I'm free to cut out the dirty words from Harry Potter and resell it. (I couldn't misrepresent it as unaltered, but otherwise...) There's no reason to believe that the web enjoys more protection, especially as skipping ads usually means not viewing a whole new site, something analogous to a flier folded in the newspaper.
Google and Slashdot are both ad-supported companies who welcome everyone, blocking or not, because they recognize that the network effect of a larger community helps everyone, themselves included. Besides, the only way to guarantee zero false positives in your anti-ad-blocker campaign of blocking users is to not have any such policy. Anything else could and will go wrong, ala Microsoft's Genuine "Advantage" and id Software's Quake master servers. All of which have disable legitimate users and hardly touched piracy.
So anyways, I think advocating a no-blocking policy hurts companies like Google and Slashdot who manage to do it right by giving an unfair boost to their less-capable competition.
What!? Healthcare costs money? I thought it was just made by the fairies who provide fresh water, roads, etc.
Do you think you're being insightful?
Your whole point is that this isn't free?
Personally, I'm not as short-sighted as you. I'd rather our homeless drive up costs by going to the hospital when they need it than getting really sick and either making this a third-world-hellhole by dying on the street, or mugging me for their medical expenses.
Yes, seriously, socialized medicine.
..." So, you call or visit your GP and pick your specialist (or they'll suggest one) and off you go.
Come to Canada for a while. You can use hospitals without ID, I have almost total freedom in picking GPs. I just call up and ask if they can take a new patient. No HMO. No government forms. Totally my choice.
You do need referrals from that doctor to specialists, but it's almost always forthcoming. I've never been turned down, even when the doctor said "I don't think you need this, but
I've similarly been able to get blood tests and such that we're "strictly necessary" just by saying that I was just afraid of getting Diabetes, etc.
You see it as a system of very strict rationing. Personally, I see it as a land of plenty. It's so easy to see a doctor. One of our homeless could walk into one of the better clinics and get an appointment in an hour. They could go to a hospital and get treated immediately.
That means I don't need to worry about a junkie stealing to afford a doctor. I don't need to worry about a Typhoid Mary wandering the streets. I don't need to worry that I lost my ID in an accident and won't get expensive treatment until they find it.
Sure, if I get a weird brain cancer, I might have a better chance in the USA with my $20Mil. Of course, I don't have $20M and far more people die of untreated trivial infections than rare cancers, but hey...
Personally I think they blew *all* their credibility by demanding that someone make the other guys stop having an opinion.
Their speech shouldn't be censored. We need everyone to look at them and see the folly and intolerance of their views, but it's as low as you can possibly get without shooting someone for their views. They tried to stifle the conversation instead of talking.
And, as the original poster pointed out, that PC attitude in voluntary settings (Facebooks, etc) leads to people supporting censorship elsewhere.
Regardless of if we're officially at war in East Asia, we're dropping a lot of bombs there...