As a matter of fact, a major cable company rolled out voice-over-broadband as a test service a few years ago. The problem of not being able to call 911 in case of emergency was such a big one that they ended up supplying all of their customers with cellphones and a charger, just for emergency calling.
People who currently get mp3's for free aren't buying CDs. People who buy CDs probably aren't going to stop. If the Industry would offer a for-pay mp3 service they could (possibly) pull some of the free mp3 people over to the paying side.
Like you said, people who get mp3s for free aren't paying, and they're probably not going to pay as long as they can continue to get things free. Relying on people's sense of "fair play" is a pretty poor business strategy, particularly given the open hostility many show for the recording industry-- they only thing that might encourage those people to pay is if you could offer a service that's so much easier and more convenient to access that it was worth the money, and as things stand, it'd have to be a pretty low price to meet that condition.
At the same time, the honest "CD-buying" crowd is currently willing to shell out $16-$64 per month in order to get their hands on 2-8 hit singles, because they've been convinced that "buying the album" (including the 8 songs they probably don't care about) for $16 is a worthwhile way to spend their money. You're going to have to come up with a compromise between the low price that the MP3 sharers want, and the high prices you require in order to maintain the same revenue you get from the CD-buying people as they move over to music downloading.
And don't forget that you're going to be throwing an amazing business model (CDs) out the window in, and in its place you'll be offering people a service that will satisfy their craving for those singles without forcing them to buy tracks they don't want. You might find that they don't want to spend $16-64 for that service, the way they did to buy the extra fluff on the CDs.
The real kicker is, once you get Joe Sixpack accustomed to buying his music on the computer, or he realizes that he doesn't need to pay for the album to get the tracks he wants, you're going to find yourself in competition with services that charge nothing and have no restrictions. At the same time, you'll be undermining you beautiful CD business model. Ever wonder why cable and satellite TV companies force you to buy packages of channels including things like HGTV, when all you want is SciFi? Bundling is good business.
And yes, some people buy CDs cause they like the album. But don't overdo that assumption. Perhaps at one time, the majority of new albums were filled with great tracks, but the music industry knows, and has known for a long time, that it only takes one or two really desirable (read "heavily marketed") singles to sell a whole album, and they take advantage of it.
How about monthly mp3 download subscriptions? I'd pay $10 a month to get a mp3 version of new releases as they happen.
Nobody wants to offer this service because the record companies make more money doing what they do now: namely, packaging one or two hit songs onto an $18 disc and convincing consumers to buy two or more per month. Do the math and you'll see why they don't like the idea of a $10 or even $20 subscription-- at least, one that gives you a large number of new releases that don't expire.
The problem is, for them to make money selling CDs online, they'd have to charge much higher prices than what you propose, just to keep their revenue flat. People don't want to pay what the record companies would have to charge, especially with all of the free alternatives out there.
What we're seeing is a classic example of executive punting. Whether they realize it or not, the label executives have put their business on a course of nearly guaranteed disaster. Their customers will hate them, those affected by draconian copyright legislation will hate them, and in the end it will all fail. However, no executive wants to be the guy who embraced online music at a reasonable price, and consequently reduced earnings by 30-50% over the golden-goose CD model. They'd never work again. (I've heard various industry professionals acknowledge the gist of this argument in private, though few yet acknowledge the contention that sharing-prevention efforts are doomed to failure.)
In other words, any exec who does the long-term intelligent thing for the industry, namely putting its long-term survival over short-term profits, would be destroying his or her career. So it won't happen, and the idiots will get high-paying jobs elsewhere while the recording industry suffers the fallout of those short-sighted decisions.
So I propose that we let them tweak their software with these beta releases.
I'd have a little bit more sympathy for your argument if they weren't charging $99 for their beta releases. That's a pretty high price to charge someone who's supposedly going to be helping you tweak your software.
Now, I don't think it makes much of a difference under the GPL whether they're charging or not. But the fact that they're making a profit by selling sourceless GPLed code certainly hurts their "good-faith" argument in my eyes.
Beta testing is a grey area, is it a public distribution or is it internal? But it seems to me a resonable interpretation.
I don't know of any legal principle that treats a $99 sale to somebody outside of the corporation as an "internal use".
If the guy had hired the beta testers as part-time employees, he might have been able to call it internal use, but as it stands, he has no leg to stand on.
It's too bad, because I do sympathize with his goals, if not the way he put them into practice. Clearly he wants to get his product tested and released before his improvements to Wine find themselves publicly available (and therefore curb the momentum for his launch.) I don't blame the GPL for his current dilemma, though. I blame his decision to distribute the beta externally and charge for it. Doesn't the guy have an IP lawyer on retainer somewhere?
To see their point of view, I can imagine people using 1800COLLECT or callback services to route around the system. That might, in the FCCs mind, mean that numbers dialed during the "content" portion of the call are still call-identifying.
Of course, I highly doubt that they'll actually make any sort of distinction between your dialing a number that routes phone calls and any other numbers, so they'd be able to get content information in the process, without a pesky warrant standing in their way.
Fortunately, touch tone voice-mail type systems may be going the way of the dinosaur as good voice-recognition/dialog systems become adopted.
I'm actually surprised that Sun is devoting this much energy to Java when there isn't much profit to be made from it, but it sure is great.
I can testify that the only reason we still use Suns is as a platform for Weblogic and Java-based services, along with Windows. If we had to build our apps separately to run on Windows and Solaris, we might not make the effort.
This is interesting, because I don't see that in the bill. Admittedly, it's hard to read because it says things like "the following paragraph will be inserted into section 301.4b of the...". What I don't see is where PACs are distinguished from individuals, nonprofits, and even corporations, both of which seem to have been clearly exempted from anything more than reporting requirements.
Can you clear up the PAC distinction for me?
My reading of the First Amendment is "Congress shall make no law... abridging the freedom of speech" Not, "Congress will make only those limitations on Free Speech necessary to..."
Yes, that's your reading of the 1st amendment. And a noble one. But not the one that the courts use. In any case, I'm still not convinced that this bill actually limits anything more than what political parties do with 1 particular type of money. But I'm willing to be corrected.
I'd like to understand the bill before I make my decision about how dangerous it is, and it's becoming clear to me that neither I nor most people really do understand it.
I'm still uncomfortable having a Federal Bureacracy, the FEC, smell testing speech from organizations like NOW, the NRA, unions, etc. at some arbitrary deadline before election day.
Well, you shouldn't be. From my reading of the bill, private organizations and PACs like NOW and the NRA won't be restricted in any way as long as they use donations from individuals/corporations/unions, and don't use any money contributed by political parties. They will be required to disclose what money they spend on candidate-specific ads, but the amounts won't be limited.
Secondly, if I understand correctly, the Supreme court made the definition of a "candidate-specific ad" ludicrously limited. It must include one of a handful of specified terms, and if it doesn't, then anything goes. The most controversial part of this bill is the part that tries to tighten that definition up (by specifying that any ad that mentions a candidate is candidate-specific). This is very likely to result in some limitations by the Court, but ultimately I wouldn't be too worried about either way (the bill has a severability provision, meaning that if any part is found unconstitutional, the rest is ok.)
In fact, far from being a "threat to free speech", this bill probably doesn't do enough.
And.NET delivers on all the promises that Sun had made of Java. (M$ has beaten them - intsead of "write once, run anywhere,".NET offers "compile once, run anywhere.")
And.NET has much wider support for quantum computers than Java. Just as soon as Microsoft gets around to implementing it, of course.
I don't see any sense at all to describe it as "pulp sci-fi" rather than mythology, because pulp sci-fi is also based on mythology.
The author makes a good point that it's much safer to acknowledge mythological influences than to say, "yeah, I got Tatooine from Herbert's Dune, or Coruscant from Asimov's Foundation."
As he points out in his article, one set of influences is under copyright, and the other is not.
Of course, we all know that it's far more likely that Lucas got ideas directly from these works than from his reading of Homer. He admits this, or used to, in fact, but declines to say which works he borrowed from. Now we're not just talking about simple notions like "the hero being called to adventure" or "the supernatural figure who comes to inspire him", but more concrete settings and storylines.
Personally, I think there's nothing wrong with borrowing like that, but it's sad that Lucas doesn't feel comfortable giving details. Blame the law, blame greed and ego maybe.
When Star Wars was first released to theaters, it wasn't labeled Episode IV. It was just called Star Wars, plain and simple.
I was under the impression that the scroll-by at the beginning of the movie always said Episode IV. Am I wrong about this?
If it said Episode IV rather clearly at the beginning of the film, than I think it's irrelevant what the movie posters said. After all, if would have been silly and confusing to market the movie as the 4th part of a series nobody'd every heard of... The only other movie I can think of that tried this was Leonard Part 6.
As to the notion that the Episode IV bit was tongue in cheek, now that's a little bit more interesting.
Not all monopolies are abusive. I have no serious objection to Intel's or Cisco's market dominance, and IMHO SBC falls into the same category
As a natural monopoly, companies like SBC and Verizon are (in theory) regulated. They do everything they can to avoid regulations, including giving huge amounts of their monopoly-guaranteed cash to politicians, but they still have certain controls on them. This is a fundamental difference.
Cisco equipment is generally interoperable with other routing equipment, at least in the sense that they both deal with IP. Therefore, if you're forced to buy some other router-manufacturer's equipment, you may be inconvenienced but you're not SOL. And even Intel has some competition, though I wouldn't go so far as to say it's enough.
Microsoft's greatest strengths have always been the ability to see which way the ship is headed, and when it turns out they're going in the wrong direction, to turn on a dime.
You're giving them a lot of credit for essentially catching onto something that was about as difficult to ignore as, say, Woodstock going on in your backyard. With the billions of dollars and expectations pouring into companies like Netscape, it would have required nothing short of a deliberate act of self-destruction for MS to ignore what was going on.
Purchasing and developing a web browser in order to compete with a company that had very publicly vowed to put you out of business and buying web services like hotmail (for embarassingly high prices) do not brilliant business strategy make. Even today IIS is not the dominant web server, despite years of aggressive marketing.
As far as I can see, all Microsoft has done is react and trade on their already tough-to-beat desktop monopoly and cash reserves like they were going out of style. With.NET, they're just doing more reacting, at least so far, by implementing what is essentially a Java lookalike and backing it up with Microsoft monopoly and marketing clout.
If they can slough off the people downloading 5GB a week, their profits go up.
Not if those users are parents whose kids run up bandwidth bills in the night. Enough incidents like that and you'd scare off your whole market for residential broadband. It's a very young and fragile market, struggling to justify its existence, and a few unpleasant experiences will hurt adoption badly.
I think it makes much more sense to use traffic shaping (particularly traffic shaping that doesn't affect short downloads like web pages), and allow people to voluntarily sign up for higher service levels. It's not like people actually monitor their internet usage.
But think about what the equivelent to a standard cable connection (100 - 200 K/sec) would cost if it was bought as a T1 line, and ask how their business plan would look if they provided it for $39.95/month
Yes, but that's like comparing a 10-mile limousine ride to an equivalent trip on the subway. T1s are much more expensive to run, hook up and operate than a shared medium like cable, and they're overpriced as it is. The raw internet connectivity is only a fraction of the cost of a T1.
Whatever you think about the costs, I think this is a risky business model to adopt for such a young medium, and it will probably result in a lot of unhappy customers dropping broadband when they see a $50 charge on their bill from their kids downloading crap in the middle of the night. If the cable companies were only concerned about bandwidth, they'd drop packets to discourage network usage and let people pay for higher levels of service.
In other words, the prohibition against the media reporting seizures is irrelevent, because no one the media would care to report on will be targetted by the seizure provisions.
My understanding was that the people who receive the warrant are also under the gag order. So it doesn't matter if the media wants to report on it or not-- if the police pick people who are easily cowed, the media never even gets to hear about it.
I doubt all these media companies are acting in concert or have some sort of conspiracy to keep the law in the books
Yes, to accept the far-fetched notion of corporate cooperation you'd have to believe that the media industry cooperated to lobby for the thing in the first place. Which'd be almost unimaginable, right? After all, everybody knows it was just one company who pushed the thing through Congress.
Or you'd have to accept the notion that the media companies pool their resources through "Associations" that work to lobby and further the industry's interests in Congress. Ridiculous.
But we all know that enormous media corporations rarely coordinate their efforts (even tacitly). I mean, it's like that whole misguided Federal case over price-fixing in the music industry. Why would multi-billion dollar corporations work together to further their interests?
Now, you might point out that laws like the DMCA represent required millions of dollars in political investments from the various corporations involved, but why not throw it all down the toilet at the first opportunity to shut some two-bit open source game project down?
Yes, I'm laying it on a little thick. But the fact remains: call it conspiracy if you want to conjure images of grassy knolls and tinfoil hats. This isn't conspiracy, it's just business. Good business.
The real debate, it would seem, is what the primary use of Bnetd is. It seems to me, in itself, to be a 100% legitimate program. But when the majority of it's users are using it to (essentially) circumvent the copy protection of Battle.net servers, Blizzard really has no choice but to go after Bnetd.
What Blizzard does, and what Blizzard should be able to get away with under the law, are two entirely different things.
Bags are not allowed in my collages book store, for precisly this reason.
Yes, but the production of bags in general isn't outlawed in order to prevent shoplifting. And people'd probably have some serious difficulties accepting a law that tried to do so. It's not a perfect analogy, but it's much closer than yours, and you should recognize it.
We also don't exhort the "bag using" community to "police their own"-- which is laughable, when our hypothetical bookstores clearly can't even police their own customers...
and that a license fee of one wet honey glazed ham is due if the software is used consecutively for more than sixty thousand years.
+1.
Though, I would imagine that no real modifications to the GPL would be required in the "redistributable at no charge" department, considering that the GPL doesn't actually require distribution at no charge. You can, as we all know, charge any price you can get for a GPLed project, and you can charge a reasonable fee to folks who request the source code (but no more than your cost of physically delivering it-- does this represent a violation?)
getting a $2500 bonus hardly explains the crazy patent scenario. For the extra effort involved you might as well get a paper route, you'd make similar money either way. And that's even with the help of the big company lawyers assisting with the writeup.
Sure, but it's your job anyway. You could spend the same number of hours doing something that doesn't result in a bonus. Or you could spend just as much time and receive a modest bonus to boot. This is all aside from the real reason that researchers seek patents-- to pretty up their CVs.
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As a matter of fact, a major cable company rolled out voice-over-broadband as a test service a few years ago. The problem of not being able to call 911 in case of emergency was such a big one that they ended up supplying all of their customers with cellphones and a charger, just for emergency calling.
Like you said, people who get mp3s for free aren't paying, and they're probably not going to pay as long as they can continue to get things free. Relying on people's sense of "fair play" is a pretty poor business strategy, particularly given the open hostility many show for the recording industry-- they only thing that might encourage those people to pay is if you could offer a service that's so much easier and more convenient to access that it was worth the money, and as things stand, it'd have to be a pretty low price to meet that condition.
At the same time, the honest "CD-buying" crowd is currently willing to shell out $16-$64 per month in order to get their hands on 2-8 hit singles, because they've been convinced that "buying the album" (including the 8 songs they probably don't care about) for $16 is a worthwhile way to spend their money. You're going to have to come up with a compromise between the low price that the MP3 sharers want, and the high prices you require in order to maintain the same revenue you get from the CD-buying people as they move over to music downloading.
And don't forget that you're going to be throwing an amazing business model (CDs) out the window in, and in its place you'll be offering people a service that will satisfy their craving for those singles without forcing them to buy tracks they don't want. You might find that they don't want to spend $16-64 for that service, the way they did to buy the extra fluff on the CDs.
The real kicker is, once you get Joe Sixpack accustomed to buying his music on the computer, or he realizes that he doesn't need to pay for the album to get the tracks he wants, you're going to find yourself in competition with services that charge nothing and have no restrictions. At the same time, you'll be undermining you beautiful CD business model. Ever wonder why cable and satellite TV companies force you to buy packages of channels including things like HGTV, when all you want is SciFi? Bundling is good business.
And yes, some people buy CDs cause they like the album. But don't overdo that assumption. Perhaps at one time, the majority of new albums were filled with great tracks, but the music industry knows, and has known for a long time, that it only takes one or two really desirable (read "heavily marketed") singles to sell a whole album, and they take advantage of it.
Nobody wants to offer this service because the record companies make more money doing what they do now: namely, packaging one or two hit songs onto an $18 disc and convincing consumers to buy two or more per month. Do the math and you'll see why they don't like the idea of a $10 or even $20 subscription-- at least, one that gives you a large number of new releases that don't expire.
The problem is, for them to make money selling CDs online, they'd have to charge much higher prices than what you propose, just to keep their revenue flat. People don't want to pay what the record companies would have to charge, especially with all of the free alternatives out there.
What we're seeing is a classic example of executive punting. Whether they realize it or not, the label executives have put their business on a course of nearly guaranteed disaster. Their customers will hate them, those affected by draconian copyright legislation will hate them, and in the end it will all fail. However, no executive wants to be the guy who embraced online music at a reasonable price, and consequently reduced earnings by 30-50% over the golden-goose CD model. They'd never work again. (I've heard various industry professionals acknowledge the gist of this argument in private, though few yet acknowledge the contention that sharing-prevention efforts are doomed to failure.)
In other words, any exec who does the long-term intelligent thing for the industry, namely putting its long-term survival over short-term profits, would be destroying his or her career. So it won't happen, and the idiots will get high-paying jobs elsewhere while the recording industry suffers the fallout of those short-sighted decisions.
I'd have a little bit more sympathy for your argument if they weren't charging $99 for their beta releases. That's a pretty high price to charge someone who's supposedly going to be helping you tweak your software.
Now, I don't think it makes much of a difference under the GPL whether they're charging or not. But the fact that they're making a profit by selling sourceless GPLed code certainly hurts their "good-faith" argument in my eyes.
I don't know of any legal principle that treats a $99 sale to somebody outside of the corporation as an "internal use".
If the guy had hired the beta testers as part-time employees, he might have been able to call it internal use, but as it stands, he has no leg to stand on.
It's too bad, because I do sympathize with his goals, if not the way he put them into practice. Clearly he wants to get his product tested and released before his improvements to Wine find themselves publicly available (and therefore curb the momentum for his launch.) I don't blame the GPL for his current dilemma, though. I blame his decision to distribute the beta externally and charge for it. Doesn't the guy have an IP lawyer on retainer somewhere?
Of course, I highly doubt that they'll actually make any sort of distinction between your dialing a number that routes phone calls and any other numbers, so they'd be able to get content information in the process, without a pesky warrant standing in their way.
Fortunately, touch tone voice-mail type systems may be going the way of the dinosaur as good voice-recognition/dialog systems become adopted.
I can testify that the only reason we still use Suns is as a platform for Weblogic and Java-based services, along with Windows. If we had to build our apps separately to run on Windows and Solaris, we might not make the effort.
Can you clear up the PAC distinction for me?
My reading of the First Amendment is "Congress shall make no law... abridging the freedom of speech" Not, "Congress will make only those limitations on Free Speech necessary to ..."
Yes, that's your reading of the 1st amendment. And a noble one. But not the one that the courts use. In any case, I'm still not convinced that this bill actually limits anything more than what political parties do with 1 particular type of money. But I'm willing to be corrected.
I'd like to understand the bill before I make my decision about how dangerous it is, and it's becoming clear to me that neither I nor most people really do understand it.
Well, you shouldn't be. From my reading of the bill, private organizations and PACs like NOW and the NRA won't be restricted in any way as long as they use donations from individuals/corporations/unions, and don't use any money contributed by political parties. They will be required to disclose what money they spend on candidate-specific ads, but the amounts won't be limited.
Secondly, if I understand correctly, the Supreme court made the definition of a "candidate-specific ad" ludicrously limited. It must include one of a handful of specified terms, and if it doesn't, then anything goes. The most controversial part of this bill is the part that tries to tighten that definition up (by specifying that any ad that mentions a candidate is candidate-specific). This is very likely to result in some limitations by the Court, but ultimately I wouldn't be too worried about either way (the bill has a severability provision, meaning that if any part is found unconstitutional, the rest is ok.)
In fact, far from being a "threat to free speech", this bill probably doesn't do enough.
And .NET has much wider support for quantum computers than Java. Just as soon as Microsoft gets around to implementing it, of course.
The author makes a good point that it's much safer to acknowledge mythological influences than to say, "yeah, I got Tatooine from Herbert's Dune, or Coruscant from Asimov's Foundation."
As he points out in his article, one set of influences is under copyright, and the other is not.
Of course, we all know that it's far more likely that Lucas got ideas directly from these works than from his reading of Homer. He admits this, or used to, in fact, but declines to say which works he borrowed from. Now we're not just talking about simple notions like "the hero being called to adventure" or "the supernatural figure who comes to inspire him", but more concrete settings and storylines.
Personally, I think there's nothing wrong with borrowing like that, but it's sad that Lucas doesn't feel comfortable giving details. Blame the law, blame greed and ego maybe.
After reading a handful of other comments, I now stand somewhat corrected: the "IV" was added in the re-release.
I was under the impression that the scroll-by at the beginning of the movie always said Episode IV. Am I wrong about this?
If it said Episode IV rather clearly at the beginning of the film, than I think it's irrelevant what the movie posters said. After all, if would have been silly and confusing to market the movie as the 4th part of a series nobody'd every heard of... The only other movie I can think of that tried this was Leonard Part 6.
As to the notion that the Episode IV bit was tongue in cheek, now that's a little bit more interesting.
As a natural monopoly, companies like SBC and Verizon are (in theory) regulated. They do everything they can to avoid regulations, including giving huge amounts of their monopoly-guaranteed cash to politicians, but they still have certain controls on them. This is a fundamental difference.
Cisco equipment is generally interoperable with other routing equipment, at least in the sense that they both deal with IP. Therefore, if you're forced to buy some other router-manufacturer's equipment, you may be inconvenienced but you're not SOL. And even Intel has some competition, though I wouldn't go so far as to say it's enough.
You're giving them a lot of credit for essentially catching onto something that was about as difficult to ignore as, say, Woodstock going on in your backyard. With the billions of dollars and expectations pouring into companies like Netscape, it would have required nothing short of a deliberate act of self-destruction for MS to ignore what was going on.
Purchasing and developing a web browser in order to compete with a company that had very publicly vowed to put you out of business and buying web services like hotmail (for embarassingly high prices) do not brilliant business strategy make. Even today IIS is not the dominant web server, despite years of aggressive marketing.
As far as I can see, all Microsoft has done is react and trade on their already tough-to-beat desktop monopoly and cash reserves like they were going out of style. With .NET, they're just doing more reacting, at least so far, by implementing what is essentially a Java lookalike and backing it up with Microsoft monopoly and marketing clout.
Not if those users are parents whose kids run up bandwidth bills in the night. Enough incidents like that and you'd scare off your whole market for residential broadband. It's a very young and fragile market, struggling to justify its existence, and a few unpleasant experiences will hurt adoption badly.
I think it makes much more sense to use traffic shaping (particularly traffic shaping that doesn't affect short downloads like web pages), and allow people to voluntarily sign up for higher service levels. It's not like people actually monitor their internet usage.
What percentage of users paying "extra" is appropriate?
I'm sorry. Did you say "users" or "ex-users"?
Yes, but that's like comparing a 10-mile limousine ride to an equivalent trip on the subway. T1s are much more expensive to run, hook up and operate than a shared medium like cable, and they're overpriced as it is. The raw internet connectivity is only a fraction of the cost of a T1.
Whatever you think about the costs, I think this is a risky business model to adopt for such a young medium, and it will probably result in a lot of unhappy customers dropping broadband when they see a $50 charge on their bill from their kids downloading crap in the middle of the night. If the cable companies were only concerned about bandwidth, they'd drop packets to discourage network usage and let people pay for higher levels of service.
My understanding was that the people who receive the warrant are also under the gag order. So it doesn't matter if the media wants to report on it or not-- if the police pick people who are easily cowed, the media never even gets to hear about it.
Yes, to accept the far-fetched notion of corporate cooperation you'd have to believe that the media industry cooperated to lobby for the thing in the first place. Which'd be almost unimaginable, right? After all, everybody knows it was just one company who pushed the thing through Congress.
Or you'd have to accept the notion that the media companies pool their resources through "Associations" that work to lobby and further the industry's interests in Congress. Ridiculous.
But we all know that enormous media corporations rarely coordinate their efforts (even tacitly). I mean, it's like that whole misguided Federal case over price-fixing in the music industry. Why would multi-billion dollar corporations work together to further their interests?
Now, you might point out that laws like the DMCA represent required millions of dollars in political investments from the various corporations involved, but why not throw it all down the toilet at the first opportunity to shut some two-bit open source game project down?
Yes, I'm laying it on a little thick. But the fact remains: call it conspiracy if you want to conjure images of grassy knolls and tinfoil hats. This isn't conspiracy, it's just business. Good business.
What Blizzard does, and what Blizzard should be able to get away with under the law, are two entirely different things.
Yes, but the production of bags in general isn't outlawed in order to prevent shoplifting. And people'd probably have some serious difficulties accepting a law that tried to do so. It's not a perfect analogy, but it's much closer than yours, and you should recognize it.
We also don't exhort the "bag using" community to "police their own"-- which is laughable, when our hypothetical bookstores clearly can't even police their own customers...
Now they don't have to build their own anymore!
and that a license fee of one wet honey glazed ham is due if the software is used consecutively for more than sixty thousand years.
+1.
Though, I would imagine that no real modifications to the GPL would be required in the "redistributable at no charge" department, considering that the GPL doesn't actually require distribution at no charge. You can, as we all know, charge any price you can get for a GPLed project, and you can charge a reasonable fee to folks who request the source code (but no more than your cost of physically delivering it-- does this represent a violation?)
Am I correct in this?
Sure, but it's your job anyway. You could spend the same number of hours doing something that doesn't result in a bonus. Or you could spend just as much time and receive a modest bonus to boot. This is all aside from the real reason that researchers seek patents-- to pretty up their CVs.