Not putting the production server in a separate, locked room: Sounds careless, but may be excused by the lack of available facilities (as in, only one suitable server room.
Not even signs on the machines that say which is the development server and which is the production server: Priceless example of stupidity.
The plan is not entirely stupid, if it replaces old oil or gas heatings that only created heat. Cogeneration gets more use out of the same amount of fossil fuels.
Of course, that can only be a temporary solution because these fossil fuels will run out some day.
If you work in a large company, you might already have that situation. Because the server room is considered too sensitive to let everybody who feels qualified tinker with the servers. My last job was in a medium sized company in the 100-200 employee range, and even there the server room was locked up. With access only for the dedicated hardware monkeys.
According to the Tolkien trust, they already had a contract that gave them 7.5% of the gross revenue (source: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2008/02/11/financial/f115544S35.DTL&tsp=1). Based on that, the trick with "all the money from the box office was spent on advertising" (or similar) should have been blocked in the first place. But it seems New Line still found an excuse for not paying.
For the next film, you may be right about the flat fee up front. If I was a manager of the Tolkien trust, that would be the only way I'd sign a deal with New Line again.
Since the amount was undisclosed, it may have been the full sum. We just don't know. But I consider it possible that New Line paid up rather than being told to pay by the court (with judgment).
Cyberdyne = the fictional company that built Skynet in the Terminator movies HAL = the computer in "2001: A Space Odyssey"
You're obviously not a science fiction geek;-)
And I'm surprised that a real company calls itself Cyberdyne and uses HAL as an acronym for a real product. While I appreciate the humor, most companies want reputable sounding rather than funny names. That way, Japanese Cyberdyne is a big exception.
TFA is rather vague about how the playkey is meant to be protected from copying. The first thing that comes to mind is "stealing" it with a device that purports to be another DPP supporting device, but really just emulates one and will dump the key to a freely available log file.
Without a convincing specification on how to prevent this, I call DPP wishful thinking.
Counting the 8 songs as 8 units seems appropriate, since that is the precedent from other file sharing cases. Jammie Thomas and Joel Tenenbaum did not get to argue that their shared songs should be counted as a smaller number of albums.
Which leaves us with $80K per song (Thomas) times 8 or $22.5K per song (Tenenbaum) times 8. That is $640K or $180K. Looks like appropriate damages because this is large scale infringement as you wrote. In the Thomas and Tenenbaum cases I consider it excessive.
This said, Mexican law counts here and the sums may be much lower. Unless Sony also distributed that CD in the US as well, then Fernandez might want to sue in the US too;-)
Where did you get the idea that the Mexican Police was bribed?
There is nothing about that in TFA. Besides, raids on suspected copyright infringers are nothing new. There have been similar raids on The Pirate Bay, and Sony certainly operates on a comparable scale. That is not some school kid who shares a few albums on his computer.
If the allegations are true, this is a case of commercial copyright infringement. A rather big fish, certainly bigger than Tenenbaum or Thomas.
But when cracked, they usually did not auto-execute anymore. The autostart got in the way of file sharing (back then done via floppies). Therefore many crackers would remove it and replace it by a "SYS XXXX" command that required the BASIC interpreter.
Background: The autostart was usually done by overwriting the stack and thus feeding the "return"(from subroutine) assembler command a wrong address. At that address, a JMP command would lead to the actual jump in address of the game. Once you had removed the autostart, you had to supply a replacement, often in form of a SYS call to said jump in address.
One might mistake it for some uncommon.50 cal sniper rifle. Even for that it is too large, but close enough for a honest mix-up. But an AK 47? If someone thinks he recognizes the model and then says "AK 47" he is a moron;-)
What you really need is multiple vendors competing. Right now launching heavy cargoes into space is an oligopol of a few government organizations. AFAIK only NASA, ESA and the Russian FKA have high capacity launching systems at the moment.
Companies like Space-X are entering the market, but their Falcon 9 hasn't flown yet and might need a few more years if it can take commercial payloads.
WOW has rather modest hardware requirements. That makes it one of the few current games that might run well on a netbook. This said, I would not buy a netbook with the intention of playing games.
Meanwhile, i4i loses their business to microsoft's infringing product, and potentially runs out of money
You have a point about the risk of bankruptcy. Otherwise, I disagree: Until a final verdict is reached, the court should avoid doing something irreversible. Like crashing the market for MS Office. On the other hand, money can be redistributed later if necessary. As in "Microsoft, you have infringed the patent. Pay $20 for each copy of Word since 2009".
According to chapter 1 of "Against Intellectual Monopoly" (see my first post), the patents of Boulton and Watt impeded the development of the steam engine rather than promoting it. That was 200+ years ago. Today we still have similar problems. That is reason enough to doubt the usefulness of patents in general.
If i4i wins the appeal, the court can make Microsoft pay for the unlicensed use of the patent. This way the patent still does what patents are supposed to do in most general terms: reward the inventor for sharing his inventor with the public. If Microsoft wins, i4i might not be able to reimburse them for lost sales.
The grace period can be made to work if it only counts for the party who made the first public disclosure, and does not override a patent that was filed before the disclosure. This way, it can also work in a first-to-file system. In detail: If both company A and company B publish an invention, but A's publication was earlier -A can use the grace period and file a patent afterwards. B cannot. -If B had already filed a patent before A's publication, the patent stands and A is out of luck.
This said, first-to-invent is a problem but not the biggest problem of the US patent system. The extremely low standard for the inventive step is worse, because it leads to huge numbers of trivial patents that only serve to extort license fees from others, without making a meaningful contribution to the state of the art.
As long as the US keep the essentially hands-off approach, it is fine. But as someone from the EU, I don't trust the USA to always play fair and would like to see the capacity to run a separate DNS if necessary. Because the internet is just as vital to our business.
Considering the existing root servers: Looking at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Root_nameserver there are three out of thirteen that are not under US control. I hope those would be sufficient to keep things going.
Finally, I agree about not relying on the internet for critical infrastructure. I also agree that the law might not help, because in case of something like a DDOS there is no single attacker to cut off from the net. You can only cut off the attacked facility. Which gets you exactly the problem you wanted to avoid, because the critical infrastructure now misses the connection it needs.
From the US point of view, your position makes sense. But for the rest of the world, US control of the root servers is a bit worrying if the USA reserve the right to switch them off (or do something similar).
So I hope other countries like Russia or the EU are smart enough to set up backup name servers and coordinate emergency switchover with at least their major ISPs. Including the traditionally US-maintained top level domains like.com. A split of the DNS would be troublesome, but may be necessary if the US take too many liberties with the original.
My last LAN party (about 5 years ago) was in an industry building without internet access. At least without internet access that was available to the party guests. The organizer picked that building because it easily had room for a dozen people. But the trend towards games that always require an internet connection started to bite us even back then: A few people who already had the Steam version of "Day Of Defeat" installed ended up creating parallel installations for the LAN party. IIRC back then the offline mode sucked badly.
My first idea in such a case would be "so the UK has violated the EU treaty, but the law is still valid". That a law can actually be invalid because of such an administrative error is surprising and I wonder what other things like this are hidden in the legalese of the EU treaty. I also wonder why a national government accepts this so easily. Do they, perhaps, hope to upset the balance of powers through the EU?
Games could be downloaded, or flash memory could become cheap that games are distributed on memory cards (again). Only this time in a smaller format. That alone would make the consoles of the future smaller.
Otherwise, it depends on with how much heat to get rid of they start out. If the example of the Wii (to try something new rather than maximize graphics performance) catches on, even the first generation of a new console might be smaller than we are used to.
And since I'm burning karma anyway lemme toss another sacred cow onto the grill. Enough with this continual blather about the 'disadvantaged/poor/etc.' if you nitwits aren't going to deal with the actual problem. To a very high degree of correlation, the 'poor' aren't living in poverty because of a lack of money. They lack money because they have make poor lifestyle decisions that RESULT in a lack of money. Things like failure to get an education (or worse reject the value of knowledge entirely), become a single parent, waste money on substance abuse or Xbox... but I repeat myself.
Well, it has become more difficult to earn money if you are willing to work but not very educated. Low skill jobs are increasingly replaced by machines who are cheaper. So if you missed a good education because of some bad decision in your youth, or just being not bright enough, it is more difficult today to earn a living than in the 80s. Even some qualified jobs tend to be outsourced to India these days (IT support...).
And all of the plausible explanations why do have a political angle.
Globalization with more outsourcing to third world countries? Could be slowed down by more protectionism. Which has its own disadvantages, but the decision to use more or less protectionism is a political one. Since I'm at it, here is my idea how to handle it: Keep the international trade free as it (mostly) is, but extend the first sale doctrine (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_sale_doctrine) to cover international sales, so parallel imports (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_import) become fully legal. This way, consumer prices will be forced down and the current working poor will be financially better off. In short: Currently globalization is mostly good for big corporations. Lets change it so the consumers profit too.
Karl Marx's predictions finally coming true? I think there is some truth to that, and the social market economy (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_market_economy) in 20th century Germany was a reasonable compromise. You might strongly disagree with that, but again the decision what to do is a political one.
Slashdot Mirror
That one deserves an article at http://thedailywtf.com/.
Not putting the production server in a separate, locked room:
Sounds careless, but may be excused by the lack of available facilities (as in, only one suitable server room.
Not even signs on the machines that say which is the development server and which is the production server:
Priceless example of stupidity.
The plan is not entirely stupid, if it replaces old oil or gas heatings that only created heat. Cogeneration gets more use out of the same amount of fossil fuels.
Of course, that can only be a temporary solution because these fossil fuels will run out some day.
If you work in a large company, you might already have that situation. Because the server room is considered too sensitive to let everybody who feels qualified tinker with the servers. My last job was in a medium sized company in the 100-200 employee range, and even there the server room was locked up. With access only for the dedicated hardware monkeys.
According to the Tolkien trust, they already had a contract that gave them 7.5% of the gross revenue (source: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2008/02/11/financial/f115544S35.DTL&tsp=1). Based on that, the trick with "all the money from the box office was spent on advertising" (or similar) should have been blocked in the first place. But it seems New Line still found an excuse for not paying.
For the next film, you may be right about the flat fee up front. If I was a manager of the Tolkien trust, that would be the only way I'd sign a deal with New Line again.
Since the amount was undisclosed, it may have been the full sum. We just don't know. But I consider it possible that New Line paid up rather than being told to pay by the court (with judgment).
Cyberdyne = the fictional company that built Skynet in the Terminator movies
HAL = the computer in "2001: A Space Odyssey"
You're obviously not a science fiction geek ;-)
And I'm surprised that a real company calls itself Cyberdyne and uses HAL as an acronym for a real product. While I appreciate the humor, most companies want reputable sounding rather than funny names. That way, Japanese Cyberdyne is a big exception.
TFA is rather vague about how the playkey is meant to be protected from copying. The first thing that comes to mind is "stealing" it with a device that purports to be another DPP supporting device, but really just emulates one and will dump the key to a freely available log file.
Without a convincing specification on how to prevent this, I call DPP wishful thinking.
Counting the 8 songs as 8 units seems appropriate, since that is the precedent from other file sharing cases. Jammie Thomas and Joel Tenenbaum did not get to argue that their shared songs should be counted as a smaller number of albums.
Which leaves us with $80K per song (Thomas) times 8 or $22.5K per song (Tenenbaum) times 8. That is $640K or $180K. Looks like appropriate damages because this is large scale infringement as you wrote. In the Thomas and Tenenbaum cases I consider it excessive.
This said, Mexican law counts here and the sums may be much lower. Unless Sony also distributed that CD in the US as well, then Fernandez might want to sue in the US too ;-)
Where did you get the idea that the Mexican Police was bribed?
There is nothing about that in TFA.
Besides, raids on suspected copyright infringers are nothing new. There have been similar raids on The Pirate Bay, and Sony certainly operates on a comparable scale. That is not some school kid who shares a few albums on his computer.
If the allegations are true, this is a case of commercial copyright infringement. A rather big fish, certainly bigger than Tenenbaum or Thomas.
But when cracked, they usually did not auto-execute anymore. The autostart got in the way of file sharing (back then done via floppies). Therefore many crackers would remove it and replace it by a "SYS XXXX" command that required the BASIC interpreter.
Background:
The autostart was usually done by overwriting the stack and thus feeding the "return"(from subroutine) assembler command a wrong address. At that address, a JMP command would lead to the actual jump in address of the game. Once you had removed the autostart, you had to supply a replacement, often in form of a SYS call to said jump in address.
One might mistake it for some uncommon .50 cal sniper rifle. Even for that it is too large, but close enough for a honest mix-up. But an AK 47? ;-)
If someone thinks he recognizes the model and then says "AK 47" he is a moron
What you really need is multiple vendors competing. Right now launching heavy cargoes into space is an oligopol of a few government organizations. AFAIK only NASA, ESA and the Russian FKA have high capacity launching systems at the moment.
Companies like Space-X are entering the market, but their Falcon 9 hasn't flown yet and might need a few more years if it can take commercial payloads.
WOW has rather modest hardware requirements. That makes it one of the few current games that might run well on a netbook. This said, I would not buy a netbook with the intention of playing games.
Meanwhile, i4i loses their business to microsoft's infringing product, and potentially runs out of money
You have a point about the risk of bankruptcy. Otherwise, I disagree:
Until a final verdict is reached, the court should avoid doing something irreversible. Like crashing the market for MS Office. On the other hand, money can be redistributed later if necessary. As in "Microsoft, you have infringed the patent. Pay $20 for each copy of Word since 2009".
But did patents ever work as expected?
According to chapter 1 of "Against Intellectual Monopoly" (see my first post), the patents of Boulton and Watt impeded the development of the steam engine rather than promoting it. That was 200+ years ago. Today we still have similar problems. That is reason enough to doubt the usefulness of patents in general.
If i4i wins the appeal, the court can make Microsoft pay for the unlicensed use of the patent. This way the patent still does what patents are supposed to do in most general terms: reward the inventor for sharing his inventor with the public. If Microsoft wins, i4i might not be able to reimburse them for lost sales.
This said, I think software patents are counterproductive and should be abolished. And maybe patents in general. For an interesting e-book on this topic, see http://www.dklevine.com/general/intellectual/against.htm
But it still would be fun to see Microsoft's cash cow whacked with the patent hammer. Especially after their petty lawsuit against TomTom.
The grace period can be made to work if it only counts for the party who made the first public disclosure, and does not override a patent that was filed before the disclosure. This way, it can also work in a first-to-file system. In detail:
If both company A and company B publish an invention, but A's publication was earlier
-A can use the grace period and file a patent afterwards. B cannot.
-If B had already filed a patent before A's publication, the patent stands and A is out of luck.
This said, first-to-invent is a problem but not the biggest problem of the US patent system.
The extremely low standard for the inventive step is worse, because it leads to huge numbers of trivial patents that only serve to extort license fees from others, without making a meaningful contribution to the state of the art.
As long as the US keep the essentially hands-off approach, it is fine. But as someone from the EU, I don't trust the USA to always play fair and would like to see the capacity to run a separate DNS if necessary. Because the internet is just as vital to our business.
Considering the existing root servers:
Looking at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Root_nameserver there are three out of thirteen that are not under US control. I hope those would be sufficient to keep things going.
Finally, I agree about not relying on the internet for critical infrastructure. I also agree that the law might not help, because in case of something like a DDOS there is no single attacker to cut off from the net. You can only cut off the attacked facility. Which gets you exactly the problem you wanted to avoid, because the critical infrastructure now misses the connection it needs.
From the US point of view, your position makes sense. But for the rest of the world, US control of the root servers is a bit worrying if the USA reserve the right to switch them off (or do something similar).
So I hope other countries like Russia or the EU are smart enough to set up backup name servers and coordinate emergency switchover with at least their major ISPs. Including the traditionally US-maintained top level domains like .com.
A split of the DNS would be troublesome, but may be necessary if the US take too many liberties with the original.
I'll mod you up if you can give a source for this
Now that you have a comment in this thread, you can't moderate it anymore.
FAIL.
My last LAN party (about 5 years ago) was in an industry building without internet access. At least without internet access that was available to the party guests. The organizer picked that building because it easily had room for a dozen people. But the trend towards games that always require an internet connection started to bite us even back then:
A few people who already had the Steam version of "Day Of Defeat" installed ended up creating parallel installations for the LAN party. IIRC back then the offline mode sucked badly.
My first idea in such a case would be "so the UK has violated the EU treaty, but the law is still valid".
That a law can actually be invalid because of such an administrative error is surprising and I wonder what other things like this are hidden in the legalese of the EU treaty.
I also wonder why a national government accepts this so easily. Do they, perhaps, hope to upset the balance of powers through the EU?
Knowing James Cameron, it won't be deep and philosophical but a decent action film.
Now, someone like Ridley Scott might actually turn this into a movie to remember ;-)
Games could be downloaded, or flash memory could become cheap that games are distributed on memory cards (again). Only this time in a smaller format. That alone would make the consoles of the future smaller.
Otherwise, it depends on with how much heat to get rid of they start out. If the example of the Wii (to try something new rather than maximize graphics performance) catches on, even the first generation of a new console might be smaller than we are used to.
And since I'm burning karma anyway lemme toss another sacred cow onto the grill. Enough with this continual blather about the 'disadvantaged/poor/etc.' if you nitwits aren't going to deal with the actual problem. To a very high degree of correlation, the 'poor' aren't living in poverty because of a lack of money. They lack money because they have make poor lifestyle decisions that RESULT in a lack of money. Things like failure to get an education (or worse reject the value of knowledge entirely), become a single parent, waste money on substance abuse or Xbox... but I repeat myself.
Well, it has become more difficult to earn money if you are willing to work but not very educated. Low skill jobs are increasingly replaced by machines who are cheaper. So if you missed a good education because of some bad decision in your youth, or just being not bright enough, it is more difficult today to earn a living than in the 80s. Even some qualified jobs tend to be outsourced to India these days (IT support...).
And all of the plausible explanations why do have a political angle.
Globalization with more outsourcing to third world countries?
Could be slowed down by more protectionism. Which has its own disadvantages, but the decision to use more or less protectionism is a political one. Since I'm at it, here is my idea how to handle it:
Keep the international trade free as it (mostly) is, but extend the first sale doctrine (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_sale_doctrine) to cover international sales, so parallel imports (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_import) become fully legal. This way, consumer prices will be forced down and the current working poor will be financially better off.
In short: Currently globalization is mostly good for big corporations. Lets change it so the consumers profit too.
Karl Marx's predictions finally coming true?
I think there is some truth to that, and the social market economy (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_market_economy) in 20th century Germany was a reasonable compromise. You might strongly disagree with that, but again the decision what to do is a political one.