Re:This happens all the time...
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Faking a Company
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· Score: 1
This isn't the 1960s any more, and we're talking about NEC, a major electronics manufacturer. Unless the fraudsters were substituting their own firmware, microcode, and other copyrightable components of goods they were knocking off, they most certainly were engaging in copyright violations.
Um, why ? We are talking about fraudsters here. Why would a fraudster treat his investors any more honestly than his customers ?
Because he actually wants the money? He might possibly be able to get away with ripping off a huge number of legit investors once, but he's going to find it increasingly difficult to raise the money if he establishes a pattern of doing this. Realistically, the investors need to be as crooked as the fraudster is.
Why set up a criminal organization if you have a plausible legitimate business plan, you ask ? Because the criminal one has higher profit potential, and simply because the plan is plausible-sounding enough to fool some investors doesn't mean that it would actually work.
No, it doesn't. I just went through that with you. The person who produces the fraudulant goods is going to have to produce them for a much, much, cheaper price than an Apple or Creative would have to do to make any kind of profit at all. Not "What Apple would sell them for if they could only sell the same number as the counterfieter" (which is already much higher than what Apple already sells them for) but "20, 10% of the price of what Apple, who makes them by the millions, sells them for." The wholesale goods are going to be sold to a distributor that's taking a massive risk by taking them on and who can't buy in serious quantities akin to a nationwide distributor of iPods. That distributor is going to want to both offload the devices cheaply, much cheaper than the "real" goods, and want massive margins. The distributor also doesn't want a lot of stock. The profit potential is minimal if not non-existant. You'd be better off not repackaging the MP3 players, but selling them as is. You'll be able to sell them for a higher value per unit than the counterfiets because you can sell to legitimate distributors who will not have to worry about being shut down.
Other than minor savings in the R&D department, that are largely covered by the quantity of sales companies like Apple can engage in that a fraudster can't, you've shown no way whatsoever in which this has a higher profit potential. In the mean time, you pointedly are not addressing the tighter margins and lower volumes that the pirate has.
A counterfeiter is, in the majority of cases, a moron. They will not make anything like as much profit per unit as a legitimate manufacturer, and they're taking a MUCH bigger risk. They're more likely to go bust. They're more likely to go to prison. And they're more likely to get physically roughed up or killed.
Re:This happens all the time...
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Faking a Company
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· Score: 1
The FA actually implied that some of the products being sold were knock-offs of legitimate NEC products. So can we quit the "There's no piracy here" meme? Copyright infringement, which is one of the definitions of "piracy" according to 99% of dictionaries for the last God-knows how many years, certainly has occurred.
You're forgetting a number of steps that I specifically mentioned in my write up:
1) Buy generic mp3 player innards off general market for next to nothing
2) Wrap iPod shuffle lookalike plastic
3) Sell as iPod
4) Profit
Let's insert 0) Raise money for (1) and (2), from investors who need a rough idea of what you're doing. This limits you to organized crime. Congratulations.
Between 2) and 3) you need to insert "2.5) Find distributors for a product who know you're not Apple but will be selling a product branded as Apple, therefore putting themselves at risks of lawsuits. This limits you to organized crime, and they'll be demanding a high margin on the products. Which they'll be selling discounted anyway. Congratulations.
4) needs to be replaced with "Get some money, pay back your investors, and hope you're not caught"
So: to recap: you're having to get your money from people who'll kneecap you if you don't pay it back. Despite the high price of the legit product, you'll be making a tiny margin, if one at all, because you're selling to distributors who will be taking a massive risk and will want to be compensated for it and who don't want to sell for the same price as the legit product, you're restricted in terms of the number of sales anyway. Where's the profit?
Your second example, of the legitimate company, is absolutely laughable. Have you seen Apple's profits lately?
Re:Wow, that is so cool
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Faking a Company
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· Score: 4, Insightful
You may feel that's the case. I'm baffled by it, to be honest.
There are a lot of "counterfieting" operations where the work involved makes you wonder why they didn't go legit. People selling "fake" iPod Shuffles, for instance, that actually work, they're just not real shuffles. Someone's taken the time and trouble to organize the manufacturing of this item, including a certain amount of R&D, for a working product. And then they proceed to spoil the entire enterprise by putting someone's else's name on it, meaning:
- they can't sell via legitimate distributors
- they can't get funding except from organized crime.
- they have to do business constantly looking over their shoulders.
Now, we're talking about creating a massive corporation. This solves the first part of the problem, but suddenly introduces brand new ones. We're no longer talking about a one-off production run of something that, once off loaded onto distributors, can be treated as a job done and, as time goes on with no knock on the door, a success that doesn't have to be worried about. We're talking about a business where you're guaranteed to get caught eventually. Your risks just went up massively. Even organized crime is going to be careful dealing with you. On top of this, you need the organizational ability and resources to hire a hell of a lot more people, which is going to be difficult to do if you either have to fool everyone in the organization that you're legit, or you limit yourself to a pool of people who don't really care about the almost certainty they'll end up in prison at the end of the game.
What the hell? If you're that skilled in business, why knock off NEC? Why not start something legitimate? Yeah, NEC's an established brand, but, c'mon!
Except PowerBook is objectively a stupid, inane, cheesy name that has everything to do with Apple wanting its first generation of well designed Mac laptops to have no connection to the Mac, which in 1990 was seen as underpowered compared to the rest of the industry.
I covered this in my journal some time ago. It baffles me completely that people would want to continue with Apple's tradition of disassociating its laptops from its desktop line, and worse still use a name that reeks of 1980s hype. The only reason Mac users don't cringe on hearing the word is that they're too used to it. If I make up names that would have been taken just as seriously in the 1980s and early nineties, such as SuperBook and TurboBook, not to mention names Apple might have chosen a few years ago, such as ExtremeBook, I think you'll see the point.
And if you don't, I have two words for you: Microsoft PowerPoint.
Yeah, Revolution sounds awesome. I mean, they were really taking that name to the max. We're looking at PowerGaming here, with a console that could only have been topped by the future Revolution: Xtreme.
Revolution was a cheesy name. It made sense from a code-word point of view, but as marketing goes, it was a word that brought to mind hype and pretty much nothing else. Microsoft had PowerPoint, to describe a presentation package. IBM was having difficulty with RISC in the 1980s and trying to get the message across that less is more: it finally decided to call its new architecture POWER. Apple couldn't figure out how to make a speed upgrade to the Airport 802.11 product look more interesting than... well, a speed bump. So it called it the Airport Extreme. Revolution was part of that genre. And just like all these names look ridiculous today, it'd have looked ridiculous too.
Is Wii better? Well, as people aren't generally referring to the Piss-Three or the Sex-box 360, I have to assume those who posted today thinking Wii is only going to be associated with Urine are probably wide of the mark.
It's not a bad word. It conveys fun ("Wheee!"), it also subtly highlights the new console's 802.11 features (WiFi), and the ads, using the anthromorphicized(sp) "i"s, look like they have potential. I think it's objectively better than "Revolution". Better names might exist, but this is a good one, and what it replaced was awful.
Still, I know people complaining that a certain operating system currently named after a wide view of the world should instead have been named after a cow, as it was originally. Some people are wierd...
Seriously, he's not Ghandi. He just doesn't *pay for software* That doesn't exactly make him a saint.
Perhaps if you understood his principles, you might understand why other people admire them. RMS is perfectly happy to pay for software, he just wants the freedom to be able to change and redistribute that software to anyone who needs it and his changes to it.
It's about being able to help one's fellow man, and about avoiding software that prevents that. That's something to be admired, especially when you consider how impractical what RMS was demanding was when he created the GPL.
As you might have gathered from the context, but obviously didn't, we're discussing players here, not frameworks. Clues to this might be found in the fact I was comparing QT to QT Pro, and the discussion compared VLC and WMP to QT.
In that context
But Quicktime, on both OS X and Windows, supports full screen playback, content editing and saving, format conversion, and a whole lot more.
is false. None of those features are supported by Quicktime Player in Mac OS X. The fact the infrastructure does doesn't really change that, because we're not talking about the infrastructure.
If this is a complaint that I should have referred to "Quicktime Player.app", then perhaps that's the complaint you should have made, rather than changing the subject in the pretext that by not referring to the entire name of the product, I must be talking about something else.
Coming next: How the lack of the word "Microsoft" changes a discussion of operating systems into a discussion about glass-covered holes in walls.
I'm not even sure that's true. In practice, I use Windows Media Player and VLC far more often than Quicktime, which generally gets used only if it's Quicktime(the app)-only Quicktime content.
Quicktime for Mac doesn't even do full screen (you have to get QT Pro for that, because, y'know, full screen is a pro function. There are, apparently, AppleScript hacks you can use, but running a third party script to get basic functionality in a media player strikes me as ludicrous.)
Windows Media Player also has a better UI. It looks better. It doesn't open a new window for every movie (because, y'know, you're going to want to watch three movies at once, right?), I'm baffled Quicktime is criticised less than The Finder, it's right up there on the list of "Most stupid aspects of Mac OS X".
I don't see any reason to doubt it. Nick de Plume may be concerned when, say, someone who has a job in Steve Job's office rings him up and notifies him that Apple are about to launch the new iBox 360 (or some other similar rumour); but what exactly would be the legal comeback if an employee who has been fired from Apple phones him up and tells him he's been fired and the department has been disbanded, and, as there's not much more Apple can do to him at this time, it's ok to make public the name is Apple comes suing?
What's Apple going to do? Fire the already fired employee? What's the point?
The truth is this rumour actually passes muster. It's something de Plume can easily report without worrying about Apple. It's also very probable. Aperture isn't just not what Apple hoped, but it's also about to face competition from Adobe, and Apple really doesn't want to compete with its third party developers unless they're screwing up and putting out lousy products (or alternatively have a technology Apple would like to include in the OS, but that's another story.)
That was my first thought, I really don't know if that's what will happen but you just hope the most obscene abuses will bring about reform.
On the other hand, if that's their business model, then they're probably better off keeping as much of it as possible off the radar, ensuring their royalty rates are not excessive, and limiting charges to the most established players.
Yeah, me too. I don't know, but the last few days, Slashdot seems to have attracted more dumbness than usual.
What we have here is actually fascinating. It's an entirely new way of looking at the command line. It moves from the file based systems we've used since computing began, and instead looks at the high level programming and works within that framework. I think that's great, personally. If Microsoft could produce an operating system that eschews Win32/Win16/DOS et al completely and is pure.NET, with this as the shell, they would be producing something entirely radical and interesting at the same time, something that may well end up being several orders of magnitude more usable and useful than the Unix-based competition.
I'd have appreciated a good discussion about it. As it is, I guess I'll have to wait until John Siracuse does an article for Ars Technica on the subject, and I'm not certain he will.
FireWire 800 (9-pin) is included, in addition to FireWire 400 (6-pin) (so no, FireWire, and particularly FireWire 800, is not dead, as some like to continually predict)
I hardly think that continuing to have Firewire 800 on the most high end model of Powerbook/Macbook, while removing it from everything else it was on (so far, perhaps the replacement to the PowerMac will also have it, but again, we're talking about FireWire 800 ONLY on HIGH END gear) represents any kind of reason for confidence when it comes to Apple's long term support for the standard.
It's very clear that as a consumer technology, Firewire IS being deprecated by Apple. They've taken steps to actively discourage its use by iPod users, by, for example, not even including the (custom) cable required to enable it; iPod nanos and shuffles have no FW support. And of the new computer systems, covering every market, launched in recent months, only one, this MacBook Pro, has support for it.
I know you like the technology. So do I. But it's in the same position as SCSI was in the late nineties, it hasn't taken off as hoped, SATA and various network-based technologies have eaten its lunch in the storage market, and the video market is slowly going USB for very obvious practical reasons. If the latter shows sign of acceleration, and especially if video over USB is standardized in much the same way as HID, USB Storage, ACM, etc, I wouldn't be surprised to see Apple drop the technology completely. They've done this before. Just as most DV cameras are Firewire today, most scanners were SCSI in 1997. That didn't stop Apple dropping SCSI.
I don't think one can realistically say "Aha! ONE model of Mac, aimed at high-end "pro" users, STILL has Firewire 800" as meaning "Apple isn't deprecating the technology." If we see FW800 on Mac minis, or Firewire cables bundled with iPods, including nanos, then we'll have cause for (some) hope.
Both of my comments pointing out the above is false have been modded out of view, and the parent REMAINS, despite being an outright lie AND a bizarre attempt to ensure the actual reasons for this issue are not discussed continues to be modded up to +5. I appreciate some people want everything to be "Idealist copyright infringers vs Evil Money grabbers" because it makes the issues so simple to side on, but I don't understand for the life of me why you feel the need to lie about it.
And make no mistake, the information showing the parent is lying is out in the public domain. The vast majority of articles discussing this are talking about the objection being about moral rights, not about money.
Moderators: Don't shoot the messenger. You may not agree with "moral rights", but that doesn't mean that this isn't the central issue here. You may feel - wrongly as it happens - that Google just "copied the style" and therefore no copyright infringement is alleged to have occurred in the first place. In fact, both the ARS and the family are saying that specific elements of Miro's work were copied. Not just the style, but actual elements. You may feel that Google was trying to promote Miro, and that may be true and very nice of them, but the fact is that has little bearing on why Miro's family have objected.
It remains unfathomable to me why the parent remains at +5, despite being absolutely 100% false, and the efforts to correct it have been modded out of visibility. This is abuse. I think most mods know it otherwise they wouldn't be using "Overrated" to mod down posts pointing out it's not about money. For the rest of you, see you in metamoderation.
Mysteriously (hah), this comment has been modded +5, despite making an allegation which has no evidence to support it whatsoever (that the family's motivation is "money"), whereas my comment explaining what the issue is about has been modded out of view (using the cowardly "overrated" option), so to repeat:
This isn't about money. It's about the family of the artist wanting to assert the artist's "moral rights". They don't want the artist's work associated with Google.
You may agree or disagree with the family's desire to do this. You may agree or disagree with the fact copyright gives them the right to enforce those moral rights. But the fact is that saying this is about money is lying, and does nothing to deal with the issues that are central to this case.
Saying "I don't want my art to be associated with Google" is no more about money than saying "I don't want the code I contribute to GNU/Linux being put in a proprietary product".
Again, abusive moderation means my original comment has been hidden. The parent is FALSE.
As I said before, it isn't a new work created using the same style. It contains specific copyrighted elements, and is a derived work, which is why the discussion has come up in the first place. Your comment is objectively untrue.
I'm not sure why you're modded at +5 (like the GGP) for (like the GGP) actively posting misleading nonsense, while attempts to put out corrections are getting modded to oblivion, but the fact is, you're wrong. The fact is that this is about moral rights, not money. And the fact is this is about Google producing a derived work that, as far as the family and ARS are concerned, violates copyrights by allegedly copying specific elements of specific works (The Escape Ladder, 1940, Nocture, 1940, and The Beautiful Bird Revealing the Unknown to a Pair of Lovers 1941); the complaint is NOT about style.
The mods seem to be on crack today. It seems to be a case of "If you imply Google is right, or that copyright doesn't apply, or that anyone complaining about copyright violations is either evil or wrong or both, MOD UP +5 INCITEPHUL!!!!1!!! If you point out the facts don't match, then you get modded down. Which is a shame, because there's a whole interesting debate about moral rights here that seems to have been swept under the carpet in the Slashbot's zeal to simplify every discussion of copyright to banal "Freedom fighters vs Mammon" arguments.
10.1 was a discounted upgrade to 10.0. All the others were full price. There are no longer updates for 10.3 or lower, except the odd security fix, and new Apple software rarely works with Jaguar (10.2) or prior versions of the OS.
That's right. In the vast majority of cases, Apple doesn't sell software that runs on operating systems that were bundled with Macs three years ago.
As I said before, it isn't. It contains specific copyrighted elements, and is a derived work, which is why the discussion has come up in the first place.
I'm not sure why you're modded at +5 (like the GGP) for (like the GGP) actively posting misleading nonsense, while attempts to put out corrections are getting modded to oblivion, but the fact is, you're wrong. The fact is that this is about moral rights, not money. And the fact is this is about Google producing a derived work that, as far as the family and ARS are concerned, violates copyrights by allegedly copying specific elements of specific works (The Escape Ladder, 1940, Nocture, 1940, and The Beautiful Bird Revealing the Unknown to a Pair of Lovers 1941); the complaint is NOT about style.
The mods seem to be on crack today. It seems to be a case of "If you imply Google is right, or that copyright doesn't apply, or that anyone complaining about copyright violations is either evil or wrong or both, MOD UP +5 INCITEPHUL!!!!1!!! If you point out the facts don't match, then you get modded down. Which is a shame, because there's a whole interesting debate about moral rights here that seems to have been swept under the carpet in the Slashbot's zeal to simplify every discussion of copyright to banal "Freedom fighters vs Mammon" arguments.
No, it's a derived work, it contains elements of his work. It's not merely stylistic. From TFA:
Google's logo allegedly incorporated images from Miro's ``The Escape Ladder,'' 1940, ``Nocture,'' 1940, and ``The Beautiful Bird Revealing the Unknown to a Pair of Lovers,'' 1941.
This isn't about merely style.
But whether you and an abusive mod think I'm right isn't actually relevent here. The family, ARS, and apparently Google are in agreement about this.
There's a difference between abusing a work for purposes its creator would never want (your "Blacklung Cigarettes for kids") and Google parodying its logo to mark holidays and special events.
I covered that.
And what's with the knee-jerk free software reaction? Once again, way off in left field. Nobody thinks free software developers are in it for the money.
I'm having difficulty understanding what part of my comment you're refering to here. The only time I mentioned free software was pointing out an example understandable to Slashdotters where people enforce their copyrights for reasons that aren't to do with money. The idiot GGP seemed to think otherwise.
It's a derived work. Which means it's covered by copyright. Which is why Google have had to pull it. Sorry, but your overrated response (what crack are the mods on today?) is wrong.
Mysteriously (hah), this comment has been modded +5, despite making an allegation which has no evidence to support it whatsoever (that the family's motivation is "money"), whereas my comment explaining what the issue is about has been modded out of view (using the cowardly "overrated" option), so to repeat:
This isn't about money. It's about the family of the artist wanting to assert the artist's "moral rights". They don't want the artist's work associated with Google.
You may agree or disagree with the family's desire to do this. You may agree or disagree with the fact copyright gives them the right to enforce those moral rights. But the fact is that saying this is about money is lying, and does nothing to deal with the issues that are central to this case.
Saying "I don't want my art to be associated with Google" is no more about money than saying "I don't want the code I contribute to GNU/Linux being put in a proprietary product".
I've read about the case in several places, and I can't see anywhere anything implying that this is about money.
This is the family objecting to the misuse of the artist's moral rights. They simply do not want arbitrary businesses associating themselves with the artist's work. This is not about the family wanting money, it's about the family not wanting Google to associate itself with Miro.
I do get rather annoyed with typically myopic rants from people who are absolutely sure that because they do everything for money, everyone else does too. I don't particularly dislike Google, so I can't comment on Miro's family's particular issue here, but if I produced art (software is not art), I'd be annoyed if:
- Philip Morris used my theme music to promote their new "Blacklung Cigarettes for kids"
- Hiatt etched one of my drawings on their special edition "Nerve Twister" handcuffs for the Saudi Arabian secret religious police.
- Monsanto released a novel based on my characters, fictional world, and one of my plots, where the hero is able to save the developer of a unique brand of corn that turns poisonous and explodes without warning if grown by unlicensed farmers from a group of patent pirates who plan to remove the license-control genes in order to allow third world countries to grow the corn without a license.
At the very least, I'd want any connection between my name (even if just implied) and the three company's "tributes" to my art removed. Copyright law currently allows that, so I'd be well within my legal rights to do so. This wouldn't be about Philip Morris, Hiatt, or Monsanto giving me money, it would be about my not wanting to be associated with those products.
And as a matter of principle, I'd want other companies that I don't necessarily have anything like as extreme objections to, to ask my permission first.
THAT is what this case is about. Not money.
There is, hard though it may be for many myopic-techies to understand, more to life than money. If you're having trouble understanding that, imagine this is about GNU, not art. Ask yourself how many free software advocates are demanding GPL compliance "for the money"?
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This isn't the 1960s any more, and we're talking about NEC, a major electronics manufacturer. Unless the fraudsters were substituting their own firmware, microcode, and other copyrightable components of goods they were knocking off, they most certainly were engaging in copyright violations.
Other than minor savings in the R&D department, that are largely covered by the quantity of sales companies like Apple can engage in that a fraudster can't, you've shown no way whatsoever in which this has a higher profit potential. In the mean time, you pointedly are not addressing the tighter margins and lower volumes that the pirate has.
A counterfeiter is, in the majority of cases, a moron. They will not make anything like as much profit per unit as a legitimate manufacturer, and they're taking a MUCH bigger risk. They're more likely to go bust. They're more likely to go to prison. And they're more likely to get physically roughed up or killed.
The FA actually implied that some of the products being sold were knock-offs of legitimate NEC products. So can we quit the "There's no piracy here" meme? Copyright infringement, which is one of the definitions of "piracy" according to 99% of dictionaries for the last God-knows how many years, certainly has occurred.
Between 2) and 3) you need to insert "2.5) Find distributors for a product who know you're not Apple but will be selling a product branded as Apple, therefore putting themselves at risks of lawsuits. This limits you to organized crime, and they'll be demanding a high margin on the products. Which they'll be selling discounted anyway. Congratulations.
4) needs to be replaced with "Get some money, pay back your investors, and hope you're not caught"
So: to recap: you're having to get your money from people who'll kneecap you if you don't pay it back. Despite the high price of the legit product, you'll be making a tiny margin, if one at all, because you're selling to distributors who will be taking a massive risk and will want to be compensated for it and who don't want to sell for the same price as the legit product, you're restricted in terms of the number of sales anyway. Where's the profit?
Your second example, of the legitimate company, is absolutely laughable. Have you seen Apple's profits lately?
There are a lot of "counterfieting" operations where the work involved makes you wonder why they didn't go legit. People selling "fake" iPod Shuffles, for instance, that actually work, they're just not real shuffles. Someone's taken the time and trouble to organize the manufacturing of this item, including a certain amount of R&D, for a working product. And then they proceed to spoil the entire enterprise by putting someone's else's name on it, meaning:
- they can't sell via legitimate distributors
- they can't get funding except from organized crime.
- they have to do business constantly looking over their shoulders.
Now, we're talking about creating a massive corporation. This solves the first part of the problem, but suddenly introduces brand new ones. We're no longer talking about a one-off production run of something that, once off loaded onto distributors, can be treated as a job done and, as time goes on with no knock on the door, a success that doesn't have to be worried about. We're talking about a business where you're guaranteed to get caught eventually. Your risks just went up massively. Even organized crime is going to be careful dealing with you. On top of this, you need the organizational ability and resources to hire a hell of a lot more people, which is going to be difficult to do if you either have to fool everyone in the organization that you're legit, or you limit yourself to a pool of people who don't really care about the almost certainty they'll end up in prison at the end of the game.
What the hell? If you're that skilled in business, why knock off NEC? Why not start something legitimate? Yeah, NEC's an established brand, but, c'mon!
I covered this in my journal some time ago. It baffles me completely that people would want to continue with Apple's tradition of disassociating its laptops from its desktop line, and worse still use a name that reeks of 1980s hype. The only reason Mac users don't cringe on hearing the word is that they're too used to it. If I make up names that would have been taken just as seriously in the 1980s and early nineties, such as SuperBook and TurboBook, not to mention names Apple might have chosen a few years ago, such as ExtremeBook, I think you'll see the point.
And if you don't, I have two words for you: Microsoft PowerPoint.
There. I said it.
Wii's a damned fine name.
Revolution was a cheesy name. It made sense from a code-word point of view, but as marketing goes, it was a word that brought to mind hype and pretty much nothing else. Microsoft had PowerPoint, to describe a presentation package. IBM was having difficulty with RISC in the 1980s and trying to get the message across that less is more: it finally decided to call its new architecture POWER. Apple couldn't figure out how to make a speed upgrade to the Airport 802.11 product look more interesting than... well, a speed bump. So it called it the Airport Extreme. Revolution was part of that genre. And just like all these names look ridiculous today, it'd have looked ridiculous too.
Is Wii better? Well, as people aren't generally referring to the Piss-Three or the Sex-box 360, I have to assume those who posted today thinking Wii is only going to be associated with Urine are probably wide of the mark.
It's not a bad word. It conveys fun ("Wheee!"), it also subtly highlights the new console's 802.11 features (WiFi), and the ads, using the anthromorphicized(sp) "i"s, look like they have potential. I think it's objectively better than "Revolution". Better names might exist, but this is a good one, and what it replaced was awful.
Still, I know people complaining that a certain operating system currently named after a wide view of the world should instead have been named after a cow, as it was originally. Some people are wierd...
It's about being able to help one's fellow man, and about avoiding software that prevents that. That's something to be admired, especially when you consider how impractical what RMS was demanding was when he created the GPL.
In that context
is false. None of those features are supported by Quicktime Player in Mac OS X. The fact the infrastructure does doesn't really change that, because we're not talking about the infrastructure.If this is a complaint that I should have referred to "Quicktime Player.app", then perhaps that's the complaint you should have made, rather than changing the subject in the pretext that by not referring to the entire name of the product, I must be talking about something else.
Coming next: How the lack of the word "Microsoft" changes a discussion of operating systems into a discussion about glass-covered holes in walls.
Quicktime for Mac doesn't even do full screen (you have to get QT Pro for that, because, y'know, full screen is a pro function. There are, apparently, AppleScript hacks you can use, but running a third party script to get basic functionality in a media player strikes me as ludicrous.)
Windows Media Player also has a better UI. It looks better. It doesn't open a new window for every movie (because, y'know, you're going to want to watch three movies at once, right?), I'm baffled Quicktime is criticised less than The Finder, it's right up there on the list of "Most stupid aspects of Mac OS X".
What's Apple going to do? Fire the already fired employee? What's the point?
The truth is this rumour actually passes muster. It's something de Plume can easily report without worrying about Apple. It's also very probable. Aperture isn't just not what Apple hoped, but it's also about to face competition from Adobe, and Apple really doesn't want to compete with its third party developers unless they're screwing up and putting out lousy products (or alternatively have a technology Apple would like to include in the OS, but that's another story.)
On the other hand, if that's their business model, then they're probably better off keeping as much of it as possible off the radar, ensuring their royalty rates are not excessive, and limiting charges to the most established players.
I'd like to see the Free Software community take this ball and run with it too.
What we have here is actually fascinating. It's an entirely new way of looking at the command line. It moves from the file based systems we've used since computing began, and instead looks at the high level programming and works within that framework. I think that's great, personally. If Microsoft could produce an operating system that eschews Win32/Win16/DOS et al completely and is pure .NET, with this as the shell, they would be producing something entirely radical and interesting at the same time, something that may well end up being several orders of magnitude more usable and useful than the Unix-based competition.
I'd have appreciated a good discussion about it. As it is, I guess I'll have to wait until John Siracuse does an article for Ars Technica on the subject, and I'm not certain he will.
It's very clear that as a consumer technology, Firewire IS being deprecated by Apple. They've taken steps to actively discourage its use by iPod users, by, for example, not even including the (custom) cable required to enable it; iPod nanos and shuffles have no FW support. And of the new computer systems, covering every market, launched in recent months, only one, this MacBook Pro, has support for it.
I know you like the technology. So do I. But it's in the same position as SCSI was in the late nineties, it hasn't taken off as hoped, SATA and various network-based technologies have eaten its lunch in the storage market, and the video market is slowly going USB for very obvious practical reasons. If the latter shows sign of acceleration, and especially if video over USB is standardized in much the same way as HID, USB Storage, ACM, etc, I wouldn't be surprised to see Apple drop the technology completely. They've done this before. Just as most DV cameras are Firewire today, most scanners were SCSI in 1997. That didn't stop Apple dropping SCSI.
I don't think one can realistically say "Aha! ONE model of Mac, aimed at high-end "pro" users, STILL has Firewire 800" as meaning "Apple isn't deprecating the technology." If we see FW800 on Mac minis, or Firewire cables bundled with iPods, including nanos, then we'll have cause for (some) hope.
Best. Analogy. Ever!
And make no mistake, the information showing the parent is lying is out in the public domain. The vast majority of articles discussing this are talking about the objection being about moral rights, not about money.
Moderators: Don't shoot the messenger. You may not agree with "moral rights", but that doesn't mean that this isn't the central issue here. You may feel - wrongly as it happens - that Google just "copied the style" and therefore no copyright infringement is alleged to have occurred in the first place. In fact, both the ARS and the family are saying that specific elements of Miro's work were copied. Not just the style, but actual elements. You may feel that Google was trying to promote Miro, and that may be true and very nice of them, but the fact is that has little bearing on why Miro's family have objected.
It remains unfathomable to me why the parent remains at +5, despite being absolutely 100% false, and the efforts to correct it have been modded out of visibility. This is abuse. I think most mods know it otherwise they wouldn't be using "Overrated" to mod down posts pointing out it's not about money. For the rest of you, see you in metamoderation.
As I said before, it isn't a new work created using the same style. It contains specific copyrighted elements, and is a derived work, which is why the discussion has come up in the first place. Your comment is objectively untrue.
I'm not sure why you're modded at +5 (like the GGP) for (like the GGP) actively posting misleading nonsense, while attempts to put out corrections are getting modded to oblivion, but the fact is, you're wrong. The fact is that this is about moral rights, not money. And the fact is this is about Google producing a derived work that, as far as the family and ARS are concerned, violates copyrights by allegedly copying specific elements of specific works (The Escape Ladder, 1940, Nocture, 1940, and The Beautiful Bird Revealing the Unknown to a Pair of Lovers 1941); the complaint is NOT about style.
The mods seem to be on crack today. It seems to be a case of "If you imply Google is right, or that copyright doesn't apply, or that anyone complaining about copyright violations is either evil or wrong or both, MOD UP +5 INCITEPHUL!!!!1!!! If you point out the facts don't match, then you get modded down. Which is a shame, because there's a whole interesting debate about moral rights here that seems to have been swept under the carpet in the Slashbot's zeal to simplify every discussion of copyright to banal "Freedom fighters vs Mammon" arguments.
That's right. In the vast majority of cases, Apple doesn't sell software that runs on operating systems that were bundled with Macs three years ago.
I'm not sure why you're modded at +5 (like the GGP) for (like the GGP) actively posting misleading nonsense, while attempts to put out corrections are getting modded to oblivion, but the fact is, you're wrong. The fact is that this is about moral rights, not money. And the fact is this is about Google producing a derived work that, as far as the family and ARS are concerned, violates copyrights by allegedly copying specific elements of specific works (The Escape Ladder, 1940, Nocture, 1940, and The Beautiful Bird Revealing the Unknown to a Pair of Lovers 1941); the complaint is NOT about style.
The mods seem to be on crack today. It seems to be a case of "If you imply Google is right, or that copyright doesn't apply, or that anyone complaining about copyright violations is either evil or wrong or both, MOD UP +5 INCITEPHUL!!!!1!!! If you point out the facts don't match, then you get modded down. Which is a shame, because there's a whole interesting debate about moral rights here that seems to have been swept under the carpet in the Slashbot's zeal to simplify every discussion of copyright to banal "Freedom fighters vs Mammon" arguments.
But whether you and an abusive mod think I'm right isn't actually relevent here. The family, ARS, and apparently Google are in agreement about this.
It's a derived work. Which means it's covered by copyright. Which is why Google have had to pull it. Sorry, but your overrated response (what crack are the mods on today?) is wrong.
This isn't about money. It's about the family of the artist wanting to assert the artist's "moral rights". They don't want the artist's work associated with Google.
You may agree or disagree with the family's desire to do this. You may agree or disagree with the fact copyright gives them the right to enforce those moral rights. But the fact is that saying this is about money is lying, and does nothing to deal with the issues that are central to this case.
Saying "I don't want my art to be associated with Google" is no more about money than saying "I don't want the code I contribute to GNU/Linux being put in a proprietary product".
This is the family objecting to the misuse of the artist's moral rights. They simply do not want arbitrary businesses associating themselves with the artist's work. This is not about the family wanting money, it's about the family not wanting Google to associate itself with Miro.
I do get rather annoyed with typically myopic rants from people who are absolutely sure that because they do everything for money, everyone else does too. I don't particularly dislike Google, so I can't comment on Miro's family's particular issue here, but if I produced art (software is not art), I'd be annoyed if:
- Philip Morris used my theme music to promote their new "Blacklung Cigarettes for kids"
- Hiatt etched one of my drawings on their special edition "Nerve Twister" handcuffs for the Saudi Arabian secret religious police.
- Monsanto released a novel based on my characters, fictional world, and one of my plots, where the hero is able to save the developer of a unique brand of corn that turns poisonous and explodes without warning if grown by unlicensed farmers from a group of patent pirates who plan to remove the license-control genes in order to allow third world countries to grow the corn without a license.
At the very least, I'd want any connection between my name (even if just implied) and the three company's "tributes" to my art removed. Copyright law currently allows that, so I'd be well within my legal rights to do so. This wouldn't be about Philip Morris, Hiatt, or Monsanto giving me money, it would be about my not wanting to be associated with those products.
And as a matter of principle, I'd want other companies that I don't necessarily have anything like as extreme objections to, to ask my permission first.
THAT is what this case is about. Not money.
There is, hard though it may be for many myopic-techies to understand, more to life than money. If you're having trouble understanding that, imagine this is about GNU, not art. Ask yourself how many free software advocates are demanding GPL compliance "for the money"?