Other than the fact that this guy is out of his bloody mind?
This guy does have some issues. Some of his reform ideas are universally and vociferously panned. For instance, he wants applicants to "designate" a few patent claims that will be examined - and the rest of the claims aren't, so that the patent issues with completely unexamined claims. Very bad idea.
Then there's this comment: "It's a proven system, over 200 years old..." - Anyone even tangentially involved in the patent system should know, off the top of their head, that the current system really goes back only to either 1836, which re-introduced the idea of patent examination, and that the modern system of peripheral patent claiming (probably the defining element of patent prosecution) only dates to somewhere between the patent acts of 1870 and 1952. What we had before 1836 was patent registration, which was a hideous mess. No one involved in the patent system should be making such mistaken characterizations... let alone the head of the USPTO.
But the rest of your comments are spurious. For instance:
Software patents: totally ridiculous, and putting a huge hurt on an area that should be boiling with creativity.
Are you seriously suggesting that software isn't boiling with creativity? Look at everything Google is doing, and all of the Linux distros, and all of the stuff on SourceForge. Look at the rapid development of Web 2.0 apps in the last two years. Look at the rate of deployment of software across a huge range of devices, from 64-bit super-pipelined machines to UMPCs to dinky cellphone processors. What part of this is "crippled?" Software development is limited only by the rate of our collective imagination. Patents aren't hampering anything.
First guy with the money into the patent system and with the wherewithal to defend the patent wins. Nothing to do with the actual inventor; totally centered about money. Anything wrong with that? Only that it suppresses any inventor without corporate backing, which ought to be a crime in and of itself.
You are misinformed.
Sole inventors have the power to defend their inventions - all they have to do is to publish them. If they were truly the first inventors, their publications will trump any second inventor's attempt to patent it! Any such patents will be invalidated by their publication - see 35 USC 102(a). True, they will not have the benefit of a patent monopoly - but they didn't pay for that privilege.
And oh yeah, the other inventor(s) who worked on this? A second late to file, and they are well and truly locked out. Is that fair? Is that even slightly fair?
Thomas Jefferson certainly thought so. In fact, he thought it was important enough to include in the U.S. Constitution. You are welcome to take it up with him in the afterlife.
The US patent system is a well of misery, corporate bootlicking, and "let's crush the little guy" methodologies.
Again, you are misinformed. Patents are too expensive to assert against "little guys." Patents are almost solely used by large corporations against other large corporations. In practice, the "little guys" - sole inventors - are almost never accused with patent infringement. Why bother? It's too expensive, and there's no benefit for the corporation.
The copyright system, on the other hand, is deeply diseased and deeply in need of reform. The RIAA's antics are proof positive of that.
So anyone, even the very same "small group of unpaid media hackers" in question, would have to spend a large amount of effort trying to come up with better and better obfuscation schemes. While cracking the DRM will take far less resources, focus, or time.
Your analysis is correct, but inaccurately aimed. The parent poster wasn't comparing the skill of the RIAA R&D branch vs. the unpaid hacker community in performing the same task. (S)he was comparing the DRM creation effort vs. the DRM destruction effort. The parties behind it are incidental (even though there's a certain refreshing karma at work here.;) )
...but the new List<> class is its excellent replacement in the System.Collections.Generic namespace, along with the generic Hashtable replacement, Dictionary<,>.
Wow. You've just made my life easier.:) Thank you!
(I think they generally change the names so that the original implementation remains intact. They did the same thing with DataGrid, for instance - the "upgraded" class (I hate them both, though) is called DataGridView.
While I understand their rationale, I find this nomenclature very confusing, and ultimately self-limiting. I mean, we're on C# version 2, and already IntelliSense is starting to look very cluttered with junk that I don't recognize.
I'd mention the single greatest thing about C#, IMHO its saving grace: C/C++ interop.
Yeah, that stuff is at least pretty good, from what I've seen. Don't have much chance to use it, aside from the rare need to register a hotkey with Windows or call a Beep function.;)
Thanks for the kind words.:) I do have an answer to your concern, which is this:
The biggest concern to me is not the size of the task - but the fact that US law, if a legal battle can prove the 'wilful and intentional' infridgement of patents, the court will automatically apply triple damages.
Well, "willful infringement" is exactly as it sounds: you know that the patent it out there, and you believe that it applies to your work, yet you continue infringing it. That's illegal, and if you did that, you would be rightfully punished with the treble-damages stick.
But there are three scenarios for Linux's patent review (or yours of FPGA patents, or any such review) that avoid this scenario:
Linux develops a good-faith belief that a certain patent doesn't infringe. Even if a court and judge disagree, they can't attribute "willfulness" if Linux can produce its analysis substantiating a good-faith noninfringement posture.
Linux understands that a certain Microsoft patent may infringe, and therefore changes its software.
Linux understands that a certain Microsoft patent may infringe, and therefore licenses it from Microsoft for its continued use.
All three of those scenarios beat both the "willful infringement" tactic, and the "ostrich"/FUD tactic that Linux is now utilizing. This can't go on. Other options exist.
Nevar! C# and the.NET framework are things of beauty!
That's probably overstating it by a fair margin.;)
Many parts of C# are awesome, and work very nicely:
GDI+ is extremely easy to use and predictable.
I like the way they've organized System.IO and System.Collections.
The Win.Forms control set is very, very well-done.
XML web services and Regex are also quite passable.
Reflection is nice, even though I don't often have a chance to use it.
ADO.NET's simple classes (Connection, Command, DataReader) are very straightforward, and I use them all the time in my database stuff.
The Setup and Deployment projects are absurdly easy to use. I love it!
Other parts are so-so. They work, but they're not really intuitive, and I frequently find myself referring back to previous projects in order to remember how it works. Examples:
System.Security.Cryptography, for instance, has a whole lot of junk. When all I want is to generate a set of RSA keys and encrypt something, I still have to refer back to prior code samples.
Their weird proliferation of Stream types, with all of those weird Formatters, is very confusing. I don't like it.
Globalization has a lot of byzantine stuff in it that I find very confusing.
DataSet and DataAdapter are overly complex.
Events and Delegates are a little too crufty. I don't like the syntax (event += event handler? are you kidding?), and I don't like the fact that if the event doesn't have at least one subscriber, it's Null, and will thrown an exception if you raise it. That's stupid.
Then there are the parts that completely suck:
Resource files? Totally botched! I still have no idea how to create a stupid resource file containing some bitmaps, and have it bundled into the application.
DataBinding. It is practically impossible to glue a textbox to a string, and have bidirectional updating. I don't understand how MS could have so badly wrecked this stuff.
The credentialing (Code Access Security, User Security, etc.) is so hopelessly complicated that I won't touch it with a ten-foot pole.
ASP.NET is very, very, very clunky. None of the controls work right, or in a predictable fashion. They don't even work anything like their Win.Forms counterparts! I can design very beautiful Win.Forms GUIs, but my ASP.NET projects always come out looking like third-grade HTML projects. Terrible!!
I had big hopes for C# 2.0 - but it seems to be a little less stable and predictable. Generics, for instance, are a much-needed feature - but Microsoft didn't bother to implement it for ArrayList, the data structure that I use most often. And the new ADO.NET stuff is hopelessly complicated and useless.
So despite its flaws, C# is still the drop-dead easiest API I've ever used. I've written several dozen projects in it, and I will continue to use it until something cleaner comes along. (I'm not holding my breath on that one!)
Well, only the American and Japanese (and maybe Australian ? I don't remember) Linux community can have a problem with software patents, so the solution could also be : change the law in America to be compatible with European law and foster America's software company competition.
Completely wrong. Europe allows software patents. So does every other nation that allows a patent on a "method," which is all of them.
Let's look at how Europeans and U.S. inventors claim software inventions. We'll use a really simple inventory system (and we'll look past any prior art issues; we're just looking at claim form.)
Here's how it would look in code:
----
class InventoryObject { stuff };
Hashtable hashInventory = new Hashtable();
public void StoreInventoryObjectLocation(InventoryObject i, string strLocation) {
hashInventory.Add(i.GetHashcode(), strLocation);
}
public string GetInentoryObjectLocation(InventoryObject i) {
return (string) hashInventory[i.GetHashcode()];
}
Pretty straightforward, right? Well, campers - foregoing prior art problems, this algorithm would be patentable in both the U.S. and in Europe. The only real difference between Europe and the U.S. is that European inventors have to be a little more clever about how they go about describing their invention.
-----
Here's a U.S. claim for this algorithm:
1. A software algorithm for tracking items in an inventory, comprising:
a dictionary-style data collection, consisting of data records, wherein each record has a key value and a stored value;
a key-calculating algorithm for calculating a key value for an inventory item;
an algorithm for creating a record in the dictionary-style data collection, wherein the key value of the record is the key value of the item returned by the key-calculating algorithm, and the stored value is the location of the item; and
an algorithm for identifying the location of an item, comprising the steps of: retrieving the record in the dictionary-style data collection corresponding to the item, and returning the stored value representing the location of the item.
-----
Now here's a European claim for the same algorithm:
1. A system for tracking items in an inventory, comprising:
a memory component, wherein the memory holds a collection of data records, wherein each record has a key value and a stored value;
a key value calculation component for calculating a key value for an inventory item;
a data storage component for creating a record in the memory component, wherein the key value of the record is the key value of the item returned by the key value calculation component, and the stored value is the location of the item; and
a data retrieval component for identifying the location of an item, comprising the steps of: retrieving the record in the memory compnent corresponding to the item, and returning the stored value representing the location of the item.
-----
The former, allowable only in the U.S. and a few other countries, clearly describes the software that the inventor has in mind.
The latter is written in more broad and abstract language. It merely talks about "components" in a "system" that interact to achieve the same purpose. The end result: The claimed invention isn't software - so it wouldn't run afoul of the EPO's ban on patents for "software as such." It could be implemented as software, or circuitry, or mechanical components. Hell, the biotech people could probably engineer up a DNA-based computer that does it; or physicists might cook up a quantum computer capable of doing it on interacting atoms. It's just a method.
But aren't they both the same thing? Yes. Yes, they are. The difference is semantics. And that's what the EPO's resistance to "software patents" amounts to: pure semantics. Arguably, the U.S.'s position is wiser: the first claim is more straightforward and more easi
I kind of doubt that you're going to find 17,532 people in the Linux "community" who're capable of objectively evaluating all of MS's patents and determining their "impact" on Linux.
(1) You're assuming that each person evaluates one patent. I imagine that some may evaluate dozens, and a few key souls may evaluate a hundred or more.
(2) The "yeah, that sucks" syndrome is exactly why I suggested three people. These aren't people working together - these are three independent reviewers. You'll get three independent opinions, and hopefully somewhere in there will be a little bit of guidance. Look - at the very least, if their opinions are worthless, it's better than what Linux is doing now: flatly ignoring all of them.
I think we can reasonably say that the risk is about patent infrigment here, and not source code copying.
And that's exactly the point that the author of the article misses. With statements like this:
Microsoft does hold a lot of patents and while Linux is open source and we can all take a look at the source code, only Microsoft has access to most of its source code so it isn't all that difficult for it to prove - to itself at any rate - that there are IP infringements contained in Linux.
...the author proves that he really doesn't understand patents anyway.
Patent infringement is not determined by comparing the infringer's product against the patentee's product. Rather, the infringer's product is compared against the invention claimed in the patent. The patentee's product is irrelevant to this process.
But let's get down to brass tacks. The problem is that Linux is fighting FUD with FUD. Microsoft is kinda-sorta playing the SCO Card by using veiled threats over its IP. Since Linux (as a whole) hasn't done any kind of research, it has to fall back on its own wholly conclusory claims that everything's A-OK, and stupid veiled threats over GPL v3. (The latter tactic strikes me as the equivalent of "bringing a knife to a gunfight," only it's more like a toothpick.)
This sucks, folks. At the end of the day, FUD is worthless - Linux's as much as Microsoft's. And since that's all anyone has at the moment, we're deadlocked.
But let's look at this another way. Patents are open documents. The Linux community has a ton of free manpower. And the open-source community loudly touts its decentralized-group-organization powers.
The solution write itself, people: The Linux community needs to conduct a comprehensive review of Microsoft's patents.
At this moment, Microsoft owns 5,844 patents. It wouldn't be all that impossible for the Linux community to divvy up the work, and have three people look at each patent to see how it impacts Linux. A coherent review of every such document would have pretty strong power - some power for legal purposes, and much more power for business and social purposes.
Actually, the amount of work that the techs got done was irrelevant. If she worked for 4 hours and the first time they paid her $500 but the second time they paid her $1000 for that 4 hours then she still got paid twice as much for the same amount of work.
But the context makes a connection here. If there were no connection, the mention of the techs' productivity would be a complete non sequitur. Rather, her statement suggests that the techs were working with her - and together, they finished their work (presumably the same quantity of actual work) in half the time.
Wait - why am I arguing this? I don't actually care.;)
For 'Halo 1' Taylor got about $500 for a four-hour session. For 'Halo 2' she got twice that.... 'they got twice the amount of work done in half the time. So my actual pay was about the same.'
If you make twice as much, but the techs get twice as much done in half the time... doesn't that mean you end up making half as much?
What happens if you simply simulate all the neurons in the human mind in a computer simulation?
If only it were so simple...
Here's a corollary for you: protein folding.
The basic processes of genetics (transcription and translation) are grade-school simple. You have a long string of DNA (well, two intertwined strings that you separate), and the DNA is just a long string of four compounds (letters): adenine (A), guanine (G), cytosine (C), and tyrosine (T). Some proteins read off these numbers in sequence, in sets of three, and translates each set of three into a specific amino acid (one of twenty, based solely - dumbly, almost - on the trio of compounds so read.) These amino acids then assemble into a long string of protein, and some folding happens magically, and VOILA! A full protein.
Simulating this should be really damn easy. We know exactly what makes up (physically) each of the twenty elements: they're very well-known and quite simple. So we should be able to synthesize the self-assembly process.
Yet, our simulation processes for protein folding fail terribly! They often produce very inaccurate representations of that intended protein sequence. Even today, in 2006, Ph.D. researchers still rely on old benchtop techniques and microphotography in order to map the structure of a protein. The modeling programs are used to visualize the protein once you know what it looks like.
Now, that's for an extraordinarily straightforward process, with a handful of well-known elements. Yet we can't simulate it with perfect, acceptable, or even modest accuracy. How confident are you that the much more varied, complex, and nuanced terrain of the brain's neural structure can be so easily modeled?
The Wright Brothers didn't build an airplane by copying a bird's biologically structure.
True, but they also didn't build an airplane by crafting a quadrillion randomly-shaped objects, throwing them all in the air, and seeing which ones succeeded.
The goal is not to mimic human intelligence. (That would be stupid and disastrous - the last thing anyone wants is a forgetful, sentimental, immature supercomputer that's vulnerable to Alzheimer's!) Rather, the goal is to design intelligence that is competitive with the best intelligence that we know: namely, ourselves. So it makes perfect sense to understand first why we excel - that's a critical part of this competitive design process.
But creativity != useful results. On a mass scale, that's precisely the same process the human society takes to innovate...
Oh, I wholeheartedly disagree.
Modern AI simulates creativity in, essentially, a two-step process:
Randomize some part of a known process.
Carry out the process and evaluate the result.
Certainly many kinds of inventions are created that way. We have a term for that, and it's not "creative invention" or "engineering" - it's "serendipity."
There are at least two other ways in which invention happens:
Creative invention involves sensing that a variation (randomly, let's say) is not just different, but interesting and potentially useful. You don't just see something new and try it with unexpectedly beneficial results - you predict the benefit before the experiment.
Engineering involves logical analysis of a problem, and the assembly of an elegant solution. If your prototype suffers a particular drawback, you don't prepare trillions of random variations and just try them until one works. You analyze the problem, consider alternatives, etc.
We really have no idea how to model either of these behaviors yet. We've programmed around the problem by having computers "just try everything," which is hideously inefficient.
Ray continually states over and over again that raw computing power -,while a necessary condition - is insufficient by itself, and without the "software" to create intelligence, that computing power is just nothing but really fast unintelligent number crunching. He makes the case for that and repeats it numerous times.
My sense of his position comes right from The Age of Spiritual Machines, which is sitting on my bookshelf about 15 feet from me. I read it cover-to-cover, and I recall his timeline resting almost exclusively on computing power. He just presumed that the rest would occur.
It's possible that he has changed his tune since that text was published. He is a brilliant and accomplished technologist.
The problem is that they can only detect trends and can't really predict real things. So when you see a futurist going out on a limb and claiming that X is only 10 years away, they are hedging their bets that you will forget they ever made such a silly prediction 10 years from now.
Some of these trends are predictably reliable, though. Moore's Law is by no means perfect, but it's extremely likely that computers will continue to grow in processing power at a steady, exponential rate, at least for the next few decades.
The problem is that some - including the typically brilliant Ray Kurzweil - believe that AI is limited by computational power. I don't believe that's the case. I believe that AI is limited by a woefully primitive understanding of several components of intelligence. It is impossible to produce artistic, emotive, sentient machines by applying today's AI models to tomorrow's supercomputers.
Reliable predictions:
Computers will continue to scale up in power.
AI models will continue to evolve.
Thanks to (2), We will eventually succeed at modeling the individual components of intelligence.
Thanks to (1) and (3), we will eventually produce truly intelligent machines.
That's the most any futurologist can tell you about AI. Anyone who promises more is trying to sell you their book.;)
I know some people that aren't any smarter than my current computer. Heck, in terms of chess, I'm one of them... my computer can kick my ass at chess. Right now we have computers that can feign intelligence, i.e. use the internet to pass a multiple-choice test, but this is not a true measure of intelligence.
Intelligence is like terrorism (or pornography), in that it's definable only with broad, nebulous, debatable borders. Chess is one kind of intelligence, and our current logic models are excellent here. Art is another kind of intelligence, and our current logic models are terrible here.
The problem with modern AI (and the flaw in Ian Pearson's predictions) is that we really don't understand many kinds and elements of intelligence. For instance:
Spontaneous thought: Why do we think? What motivates us to keep thinking when we don't have a task to solve, or a logical process to follow?
Associative memory: What element of our memory structure allows us to make prescient associations on the fly? Not just "green is a color, and so is blue," but "this song reminds me of one time when I was eating ice cream?"
Creativity: Why are we good at coming up with surprising and unexpected insights? Modern AI tries this by billions and trillions of fumbling attempts to introduce randomness - but most of them are rubbish. But this is like evolution - which takes thousands or millions of years to innovate (randomly, clumsily) - and not like creative engineering.
Emotion: We don't understand emotion at all. We've identified regions of the brain in which emotions occur, and particular hormones and hormone receptors that are involved. That's about it. The neuological basis of emotion remains a mystery.
These are just a few things that any human-competitive intelligence would need, but that we don't understand. Accordingly, it's completely impossible to predict when we will be able to model it, since we don't even understand it yet.
Anyone who tells you differently is trying to sell you their book.;)
No it's not like that at all. It's not like anything, except the plain statement that patents, designed for finite, physical objects, should not be applied to infinitely reproducible items like software.
You are talking about the U.S. patent system, right?
I ask because the U.S. patent system has never - IN ITS ENTIRE HISTORY - been limited to "finite, physical objects." The U.S. Patent Act has had four major versions, and all of these acts affirmatively permitted patents on intangible inventions.
Patent Act of 1790, Sec. 1: Patents to be issued for "any useful art, manufacture, engine, machine, or device, or any improvement therein not before known or used..."
Patent Act of 1793, Sec. 1: Patents to be issued for "any new and useful art, machine, manufacture or composition of matter, or any new and useful improvement..."
Patent Act of 1836, Sec. 6: Patents to be issued for "any new and useful art, machine, manufacture, or composition of matter, or any new and useful improvement..."
Patent Act of 1952, Sec. 101: Patents to be issued for "any new and useful process, machine, manufacture, or composition of matter, or any new and useful improvement thereof..."
These classes are semantically unchanged from the original words of Ben Franklin. As a result, we've had process patents for 216 years, for every field of technology and industry. Have patents caused any industry to grind to a halt over process patents? Nope.
Even worse (for the viability of your argument): not only does your characterization not accurately reflect the U.S. patent system, it's not even a new mischaracterization. Thirty years ago, similarly misguided people were up in arms over process patents for biotechnology - making the same spurious claims that biotech would collapse under the weight of patents, that ordinary benchtop research would be blighted by the patent system, etc. Yet 36 years after Diamond v. Chakrabarty, biotech is explosively thriving, and has created a healthcare revolution.
So you're not just horribly misinformed about the nature of the patent system, you're also relying on arguments that have been proven completely false in similar contexts.
It is a solution that involves no learning on the part of the computer owner. This practically guarantees that the same problem will arise again on the new system. End result: ignorance-driven obsolescence.
Computers are complex - and are only becoming more so. Burnable optical discs and flash drives are better than floppy disks for many reasons, but they're also harder to use than stupidly simple 5.25"ers. Wireless networking is preferable to wired networking, but configuration can be much more painful. Etc.
If you're going to use modern technology, you have to keep up with the learning curve. Sad but true.
C&C is EAs property, not Microsofts. So if this mod would have become successfull, it would mean more C&C copies sold and EA makes more money, not exactly in the interest of Microsoft, since they get zero out of it.
Not necessarily true.
First, Microsoft clearly loses nothing from this mod, since it's unlikely to displace their sales of their own properties.
Second, the goodwill generated by the Halo mod - nostalgia, fondness for the franchise, etc. - may well have sold more copies of Halo for it... without Microsoft having had to lift a finger.
(Then there's also the small bit about not pissing off all of the Halo fans who wanted to see the mod.)
So it seems kind of ridiculous for Microsoft to make this move. I'm guessing that its primary interest is in retaining control of the dogma surrounding the Halo universe. Doesn't seem sufficient justification to me, but at least there's a core of rationality here.
Steve Jackson Games published this way back in the 80's (or late 70's?).
Played it. Loved it. Picked up the manual back in eighth grade in 1988... just flipped through it and marveled at the possibilities. Then finally hosted a few rounds during my wild 'n' crazy college-freshman days. "Death by seduction" was a fun option.;)
origami is mostly software, MS is relying on partners such as lenovo to build them. MS and lenovo are not competitors per se.
Not really.
The UMPC (formerly known as Origami) is a hardware/software specification set by Microsoft for this new class of devices. The software specification contains exactly one requirement: Windows XP Tablet PC Edition 2005.
The hardware, on the other hand, has several requirements:
Screen: Approximately 7" LCD, with a resolution of at least 800x480
Weight: Approximately 1kg (2lb)
Integrated touch screen
Integrated 802.11b
Integrated Bluetooth
That's it - anything with those specifications can be considered (and labeled) a UMPC.
Now here's the important question: Who would ever consider a machine with those specifications their primary device? The minimum specification doesn't include any kind of drive, speakers, or even a keyboard. As a standalone device, the UMPC is really cripped - without a drive, how do you load software?
But that's the point. Please, please repeat after me: THE UMPC IS NOT MEANT TO BE A PRIMARY OR STANDALONE PC. That is not its intended niche. It is a companion PC - a souped-up version of a PDA that runs all of the software you'd expect, and with a screen large enough to do actual work. (The tiny screen was the primary factor that limited the PDA to "address-book" status.)
It irritates me to see so many tech rags criticizing the UMPC as underpowered for primary computer use. They're just not understanding its purpose. I'm an ardent supporter of the platform (and I have no attachment to Microsoft, any UMPC manufacturer, the project, etc.) - I think it will be an excellent new device, with novel computing applications.
Uhh it *might* be true that the software implementation is unpatentable but likely in this case the DRM would be at least patentable. RSA, for instance, was under patent.
Who wrote anything about patents? That word doesn't appear in the original article, the article summary, the comment that I wrote - or anywhere else in this argument.
Copyrights and patents are 100% different forms of IP. In fact, they're usually mutually exclusive: most "inventions" are either functional concepts (hence patentable) or nonfunctional artistic expressions (hence copyrightable.) Even in software, they ostensibly cover different features: the functional concepts are patentable, and the particular way in which the programmer chose to express those concepts - the source code - may be copyrightable. But even here, the different forms of IP apply to different aspects: the invention, vs. an expressive representation of the invention.
(The only real area of overlap is the "design patent," a strange beast that no one truly understands.)
The fact that DRM might by copyrightable seems disturbing.
I share your concern, but not quite the way you put it.
Modern versions of computer-based DRM are simply software implementations, and are completely copyrightable under any modern body of copyright law. The philosophy here is that every batch of code is an "expression" of the underlying ideas, and that "expression" should be protected against unauthorized copying, derivation, etc. No real surprises there.
(Aside: I happen to disagree vehemently with this notion. I believe that software needs some kind of copying protection, but I don't buy this line about "expression" for most software works. But that's a discussion for a different thread.)
Also incorrect is the comment in the summary that the iPod law somehow violated "companies' copyright of their DRM software." That's completely wrong. The issue has nothing to do with the copyright over the DRM software. Is anyone "copying" the DRM software? Is anyone "deriving" it, or "publicly performing" it? The article makes no reference to the DRM software. In other words, the submitter is wildly off-track in mentioning it.
Fortunately, the submitter did choose the right buzz-clip to describe the meat of the issue: "[T]he council eliminated reduced fines for file sharing and said companies could not be forced, without compensation, to make music sold online compatible with any music device."
Now, here's what's wrong with that, and here's why you should be troubled.
The iPod law "forced" no one to do anything. Apple to take any action to maintain compliance with French law, nor was it threatened with criminal penalties for not opening iTunes to other MP3 players. Apple could have responded by doing nothing, and the law would have been A-OK with its inaction.
Rather, explicitly permitted users to engage in format translation - in order to transfer their iTunes music to a non-iPod MP3 device. If you want to use the word "force," then the law merely stopped forcing users to follow Apple's business model. As a consequence, Apple may have felt compelled to change iTunes in undesirable ways for its own business reasons, but that's completely different from a "forcing" law.
The disturbing thing here is the French Constitutional Council's summary of this law. By using the term "without compensation," they're characterizing it as an uncompensated governmental taking - a limitation of the copyright over music sold via iTunes. That's completely bogus.
Copyright is a property right offered by a government. Artists only enjoy the rights associated with copyright because the government provides them; no one is "entitled" to any particular right under copyright. In other words, government is free to extend or restrict the scope of copyright as it sees fit. Even under the U.S. Constitution, artists are entitled only to have some form of copyright protection available; they have no right to any particular form over any other.) Also, copyright law is a "social contract" between artists and the public - which the government should have very broad power to define, and adjust as necessary.
A useful analogy here is zoning law. You have a strong property right to the use of your land. However, a local government may restrict your use of it through zoning law - it may even re-zone your land to declare your current use illegal. This modification of your property rights is not a "taking." (Village of Euclid, Ohio v. Ambler Realty Co.) You are not due any compensation. Rather, your property rights as a whole are protected from uncompensated seizure, but some specific details of your property rights are subject to state law.
Now, why is this troubling? Apparently, the French Constitutional Council has exercised its power to declare a law unconstitutional on a very flawed understanding of intellectual property law. The likely basis is political pressure: it sought to redress the per
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This guy does have some issues. Some of his reform ideas are universally and vociferously panned. For instance, he wants applicants to "designate" a few patent claims that will be examined - and the rest of the claims aren't, so that the patent issues with completely unexamined claims. Very bad idea.
Then there's this comment: "It's a proven system, over 200 years old..." - Anyone even tangentially involved in the patent system should know, off the top of their head, that the current system really goes back only to either 1836, which re-introduced the idea of patent examination, and that the modern system of peripheral patent claiming (probably the defining element of patent prosecution) only dates to somewhere between the patent acts of 1870 and 1952. What we had before 1836 was patent registration, which was a hideous mess. No one involved in the patent system should be making such mistaken characterizations... let alone the head of the USPTO.
But the rest of your comments are spurious. For instance: Software patents: totally ridiculous, and putting a huge hurt on an area that should be boiling with creativity.
Are you seriously suggesting that software isn't boiling with creativity? Look at everything Google is doing, and all of the Linux distros, and all of the stuff on SourceForge. Look at the rapid development of Web 2.0 apps in the last two years. Look at the rate of deployment of software across a huge range of devices, from 64-bit super-pipelined machines to UMPCs to dinky cellphone processors. What part of this is "crippled?" Software development is limited only by the rate of our collective imagination. Patents aren't hampering anything.
First guy with the money into the patent system and with the wherewithal to defend the patent wins. Nothing to do with the actual inventor; totally centered about money. Anything wrong with that? Only that it suppresses any inventor without corporate backing, which ought to be a crime in and of itself.
You are misinformed.
Sole inventors have the power to defend their inventions - all they have to do is to publish them. If they were truly the first inventors, their publications will trump any second inventor's attempt to patent it! Any such patents will be invalidated by their publication - see 35 USC 102(a). True, they will not have the benefit of a patent monopoly - but they didn't pay for that privilege.
And oh yeah, the other inventor(s) who worked on this? A second late to file, and they are well and truly locked out. Is that fair? Is that even slightly fair?
Thomas Jefferson certainly thought so. In fact, he thought it was important enough to include in the U.S. Constitution. You are welcome to take it up with him in the afterlife.
The US patent system is a well of misery, corporate bootlicking, and "let's crush the little guy" methodologies.
Again, you are misinformed. Patents are too expensive to assert against "little guys." Patents are almost solely used by large corporations against other large corporations. In practice, the "little guys" - sole inventors - are almost never accused with patent infringement. Why bother? It's too expensive, and there's no benefit for the corporation.
The copyright system, on the other hand, is deeply diseased and deeply in need of reform. The RIAA's antics are proof positive of that.
- David Stein
Your analysis is correct, but inaccurately aimed. The parent poster wasn't comparing the skill of the RIAA R&D branch vs. the unpaid hacker community in performing the same task. (S)he was comparing the DRM creation effort vs. the DRM destruction effort. The parties behind it are incidental (even though there's a certain refreshing karma at work here. ;) )
- David Stein
Wow. You've just made my life easier. :) Thank you!
(I think they generally change the names so that the original implementation remains intact. They did the same thing with DataGrid, for instance - the "upgraded" class (I hate them both, though) is called DataGridView.
While I understand their rationale, I find this nomenclature very confusing, and ultimately self-limiting. I mean, we're on C# version 2, and already IntelliSense is starting to look very cluttered with junk that I don't recognize.
I'd mention the single greatest thing about C#, IMHO its saving grace: C/C++ interop.
Yeah, that stuff is at least pretty good, from what I've seen. Don't have much chance to use it, aside from the rare need to register a hotkey with Windows or call a Beep function. ;)
- David Stein
The biggest concern to me is not the size of the task - but the fact that US law, if a legal battle can prove the 'wilful and intentional' infridgement of patents, the court will automatically apply triple damages.
Well, "willful infringement" is exactly as it sounds: you know that the patent it out there, and you believe that it applies to your work, yet you continue infringing it. That's illegal, and if you did that, you would be rightfully punished with the treble-damages stick.
But there are three scenarios for Linux's patent review (or yours of FPGA patents, or any such review) that avoid this scenario:
- Linux develops a good-faith belief that a certain patent doesn't infringe. Even if a court and judge disagree, they can't attribute "willfulness" if Linux can produce its analysis substantiating a good-faith noninfringement posture.
- Linux understands that a certain Microsoft patent may infringe, and therefore changes its software.
- Linux understands that a certain Microsoft patent may infringe, and therefore licenses it from Microsoft for its continued use.
All three of those scenarios beat both the "willful infringement" tactic, and the "ostrich"/FUD tactic that Linux is now utilizing. This can't go on. Other options exist.- David Stein
That's probably overstating it by a fair margin. ;)
Many parts of C# are awesome, and work very nicely:
- GDI+ is extremely easy to use and predictable.
- I like the way they've organized System.IO and System.Collections.
- The Win.Forms control set is very, very well-done.
- XML web services and Regex are also quite passable.
- Reflection is nice, even though I don't often have a chance to use it.
- ADO.NET's simple classes (Connection, Command, DataReader) are very straightforward, and I use them all the time in my database stuff.
- The Setup and Deployment projects are absurdly easy to use. I love it!
Other parts are so-so. They work, but they're not really intuitive, and I frequently find myself referring back to previous projects in order to remember how it works. Examples:- System.Security.Cryptography, for instance, has a whole lot of junk. When all I want is to generate a set of RSA keys and encrypt something, I still have to refer back to prior code samples.
- Their weird proliferation of Stream types, with all of those weird Formatters, is very confusing. I don't like it.
- Globalization has a lot of byzantine stuff in it that I find very confusing.
- DataSet and DataAdapter are overly complex.
- Events and Delegates are a little too crufty. I don't like the syntax (event += event handler? are you kidding?), and I don't like the fact that if the event doesn't have at least one subscriber, it's Null, and will thrown an exception if you raise it. That's stupid.
Then there are the parts that completely suck:- Resource files? Totally botched! I still have no idea how to create a stupid resource file containing some bitmaps, and have it bundled into the application.
- DataBinding. It is practically impossible to glue a textbox to a string, and have bidirectional updating. I don't understand how MS could have so badly wrecked this stuff.
- The credentialing (Code Access Security, User Security, etc.) is so hopelessly complicated that I won't touch it with a ten-foot pole.
- ASP.NET is very, very, very clunky. None of the controls work right, or in a predictable fashion. They don't even work anything like their Win.Forms counterparts! I can design very beautiful Win.Forms GUIs, but my ASP.NET projects always come out looking like third-grade HTML projects. Terrible!!
I had big hopes for C# 2.0 - but it seems to be a little less stable and predictable. Generics, for instance, are a much-needed feature - but Microsoft didn't bother to implement it for ArrayList, the data structure that I use most often. And the new ADO.NET stuff is hopelessly complicated and useless.So despite its flaws, C# is still the drop-dead easiest API I've ever used. I've written several dozen projects in it, and I will continue to use it until something cleaner comes along. (I'm not holding my breath on that one!)
- David Stein
Completely wrong. Europe allows software patents. So does every other nation that allows a patent on a "method," which is all of them.
Let's look at how Europeans and U.S. inventors claim software inventions. We'll use a really simple inventory system (and we'll look past any prior art issues; we're just looking at claim form.)
Here's how it would look in code:
----
class InventoryObject { stuff };
Hashtable hashInventory = new Hashtable();
public void StoreInventoryObjectLocation(InventoryObject i, string strLocation) {
hashInventory.Add(i.GetHashcode(), strLocation);
}
public string GetInentoryObjectLocation(InventoryObject i) {
return (string) hashInventory[i.GetHashcode()];
}
Pretty straightforward, right? Well, campers - foregoing prior art problems, this algorithm would be patentable in both the U.S. and in Europe. The only real difference between Europe and the U.S. is that European inventors have to be a little more clever about how they go about describing their invention.
-----
Here's a U.S. claim for this algorithm:
1. A software algorithm for tracking items in an inventory, comprising:
a dictionary-style data collection, consisting of data records, wherein each record has a key value and a stored value;
a key-calculating algorithm for calculating a key value for an inventory item;
an algorithm for creating a record in the dictionary-style data collection, wherein the key value of the record is the key value of the item returned by the key-calculating algorithm, and the stored value is the location of the item; and
an algorithm for identifying the location of an item, comprising the steps of: retrieving the record in the dictionary-style data collection corresponding to the item, and returning the stored value representing the location of the item.
-----
Now here's a European claim for the same algorithm:
1. A system for tracking items in an inventory, comprising:
a memory component, wherein the memory holds a collection of data records, wherein each record has a key value and a stored value;
a key value calculation component for calculating a key value for an inventory item;
a data storage component for creating a record in the memory component, wherein the key value of the record is the key value of the item returned by the key value calculation component, and the stored value is the location of the item; and
a data retrieval component for identifying the location of an item, comprising the steps of: retrieving the record in the memory compnent corresponding to the item, and returning the stored value representing the location of the item.
-----
The former, allowable only in the U.S. and a few other countries, clearly describes the software that the inventor has in mind.
The latter is written in more broad and abstract language. It merely talks about "components" in a "system" that interact to achieve the same purpose. The end result: The claimed invention isn't software - so it wouldn't run afoul of the EPO's ban on patents for "software as such." It could be implemented as software, or circuitry, or mechanical components. Hell, the biotech people could probably engineer up a DNA-based computer that does it; or physicists might cook up a quantum computer capable of doing it on interacting atoms. It's just a method. But aren't they both the same thing? Yes. Yes, they are. The difference is semantics. And that's what the EPO's resistance to "software patents" amounts to: pure semantics. Arguably, the U.S.'s position is wiser: the first claim is more straightforward and more easi
(1) You're assuming that each person evaluates one patent. I imagine that some may evaluate dozens, and a few key souls may evaluate a hundred or more.
(2) The "yeah, that sucks" syndrome is exactly why I suggested three people. These aren't people working together - these are three independent reviewers. You'll get three independent opinions, and hopefully somewhere in there will be a little bit of guidance. Look - at the very least, if their opinions are worthless, it's better than what Linux is doing now: flatly ignoring all of them.
- David Stein
And that's exactly the point that the author of the article misses. With statements like this:
Microsoft does hold a lot of patents and while Linux is open source and we can all take a look at the source code, only Microsoft has access to most of its source code so it isn't all that difficult for it to prove - to itself at any rate - that there are IP infringements contained in Linux.
Patent infringement is not determined by comparing the infringer's product against the patentee's product. Rather, the infringer's product is compared against the invention claimed in the patent. The patentee's product is irrelevant to this process.
But let's get down to brass tacks. The problem is that Linux is fighting FUD with FUD. Microsoft is kinda-sorta playing the SCO Card by using veiled threats over its IP. Since Linux (as a whole) hasn't done any kind of research, it has to fall back on its own wholly conclusory claims that everything's A-OK, and stupid veiled threats over GPL v3. (The latter tactic strikes me as the equivalent of "bringing a knife to a gunfight," only it's more like a toothpick.)
This sucks, folks. At the end of the day, FUD is worthless - Linux's as much as Microsoft's. And since that's all anyone has at the moment, we're deadlocked.
But let's look at this another way. Patents are open documents. The Linux community has a ton of free manpower. And the open-source community loudly touts its decentralized-group-organization powers.
The solution write itself, people: The Linux community needs to conduct a comprehensive review of Microsoft's patents.
At this moment, Microsoft owns 5,844 patents. It wouldn't be all that impossible for the Linux community to divvy up the work, and have three people look at each patent to see how it impacts Linux. A coherent review of every such document would have pretty strong power - some power for legal purposes, and much more power for business and social purposes.
- David Stein
Also, "grey" has an advantage over "gray", since Scrabble has 12 E's and 9 A's.
And don't get me started on this "bollocks" and "carport" and "wanker" rubbish. ;)
- David Stein
But the context makes a connection here. If there were no connection, the mention of the techs' productivity would be a complete non sequitur. Rather, her statement suggests that the techs were working with her - and together, they finished their work (presumably the same quantity of actual work) in half the time.
Wait - why am I arguing this? I don't actually care. ;)
- David Stein
If you make twice as much, but the techs get twice as much done in half the time... doesn't that mean you end up making half as much?
Aren't AIs supposed to be good at math?
- David Stein
If only it were so simple...
Here's a corollary for you: protein folding.
The basic processes of genetics (transcription and translation) are grade-school simple. You have a long string of DNA (well, two intertwined strings that you separate), and the DNA is just a long string of four compounds (letters): adenine (A), guanine (G), cytosine (C), and tyrosine (T). Some proteins read off these numbers in sequence, in sets of three, and translates each set of three into a specific amino acid (one of twenty, based solely - dumbly, almost - on the trio of compounds so read.) These amino acids then assemble into a long string of protein, and some folding happens magically, and VOILA! A full protein.
Simulating this should be really damn easy. We know exactly what makes up (physically) each of the twenty elements: they're very well-known and quite simple. So we should be able to synthesize the self-assembly process.
Yet, our simulation processes for protein folding fail terribly! They often produce very inaccurate representations of that intended protein sequence. Even today, in 2006, Ph.D. researchers still rely on old benchtop techniques and microphotography in order to map the structure of a protein. The modeling programs are used to visualize the protein once you know what it looks like.
Now, that's for an extraordinarily straightforward process, with a handful of well-known elements. Yet we can't simulate it with perfect, acceptable, or even modest accuracy. How confident are you that the much more varied, complex, and nuanced terrain of the brain's neural structure can be so easily modeled?
- David (Jim) Stein
True, but they also didn't build an airplane by crafting a quadrillion randomly-shaped objects, throwing them all in the air, and seeing which ones succeeded.
The goal is not to mimic human intelligence. (That would be stupid and disastrous - the last thing anyone wants is a forgetful, sentimental, immature supercomputer that's vulnerable to Alzheimer's!) Rather, the goal is to design intelligence that is competitive with the best intelligence that we know: namely, ourselves. So it makes perfect sense to understand first why we excel - that's a critical part of this competitive design process.
- David Stein
Oh, I wholeheartedly disagree.
Modern AI simulates creativity in, essentially, a two-step process:
Certainly many kinds of inventions are created that way. We have a term for that, and it's not "creative invention" or "engineering" - it's "serendipity."
There are at least two other ways in which invention happens:
We really have no idea how to model either of these behaviors yet. We've programmed around the problem by having computers "just try everything," which is hideously inefficient.
- David Stein
My sense of his position comes right from The Age of Spiritual Machines, which is sitting on my bookshelf about 15 feet from me. I read it cover-to-cover, and I recall his timeline resting almost exclusively on computing power. He just presumed that the rest would occur.
It's possible that he has changed his tune since that text was published. He is a brilliant and accomplished technologist.
- David Stein
Some of these trends are predictably reliable, though. Moore's Law is by no means perfect, but it's extremely likely that computers will continue to grow in processing power at a steady, exponential rate, at least for the next few decades.
The problem is that some - including the typically brilliant Ray Kurzweil - believe that AI is limited by computational power. I don't believe that's the case. I believe that AI is limited by a woefully primitive understanding of several components of intelligence. It is impossible to produce artistic, emotive, sentient machines by applying today's AI models to tomorrow's supercomputers.
Reliable predictions:
- Computers will continue to scale up in power.
- AI models will continue to evolve.
- Thanks to (2), We will eventually succeed at modeling the individual components of intelligence.
- Thanks to (1) and (3), we will eventually produce truly intelligent machines.
That's the most any futurologist can tell you about AI. Anyone who promises more is trying to sell you their book.- David Stein
Just breathe through your nose, honey.
Oh - wait - sorry, wrong problem...
- David Stein
Intelligence is like terrorism (or pornography), in that it's definable only with broad, nebulous, debatable borders. Chess is one kind of intelligence, and our current logic models are excellent here. Art is another kind of intelligence, and our current logic models are terrible here.
The problem with modern AI (and the flaw in Ian Pearson's predictions) is that we really don't understand many kinds and elements of intelligence. For instance:
- Spontaneous thought: Why do we think? What motivates us to keep thinking when we don't have a task to solve, or a logical process to follow?
- Associative memory: What element of our memory structure allows us to make prescient associations on the fly? Not just "green is a color, and so is blue," but "this song reminds me of one time when I was eating ice cream?"
- Creativity: Why are we good at coming up with surprising and unexpected insights? Modern AI tries this by billions and trillions of fumbling attempts to introduce randomness - but most of them are rubbish. But this is like evolution - which takes thousands or millions of years to innovate (randomly, clumsily) - and not like creative engineering.
- Emotion: We don't understand emotion at all. We've identified regions of the brain in which emotions occur, and particular hormones and hormone receptors that are involved. That's about it. The neuological basis of emotion remains a mystery.
These are just a few things that any human-competitive intelligence would need, but that we don't understand. Accordingly, it's completely impossible to predict when we will be able to model it, since we don't even understand it yet.Anyone who tells you differently is trying to sell you their book. ;)
- David Stein
You are talking about the U.S. patent system, right?
I ask because the U.S. patent system has never - IN ITS ENTIRE HISTORY - been limited to "finite, physical objects." The U.S. Patent Act has had four major versions, and all of these acts affirmatively permitted patents on intangible inventions.
Patent Act of 1790, Sec. 1: Patents to be issued for "any useful art, manufacture, engine, machine, or device, or any improvement therein not before known or used..."
Patent Act of 1793, Sec. 1: Patents to be issued for "any new and useful art, machine, manufacture or composition of matter, or any new and useful improvement..."
Patent Act of 1836, Sec. 6: Patents to be issued for "any new and useful art, machine, manufacture, or composition of matter, or any new and useful improvement..."
Patent Act of 1952, Sec. 101: Patents to be issued for "any new and useful process, machine, manufacture, or composition of matter, or any new and useful improvement thereof..."
These classes are semantically unchanged from the original words of Ben Franklin. As a result, we've had process patents for 216 years, for every field of technology and industry. Have patents caused any industry to grind to a halt over process patents? Nope.
Even worse (for the viability of your argument): not only does your characterization not accurately reflect the U.S. patent system, it's not even a new mischaracterization. Thirty years ago, similarly misguided people were up in arms over process patents for biotechnology - making the same spurious claims that biotech would collapse under the weight of patents, that ordinary benchtop research would be blighted by the patent system, etc. Yet 36 years after Diamond v. Chakrabarty, biotech is explosively thriving, and has created a healthcare revolution.
So you're not just horribly misinformed about the nature of the patent system, you're also relying on arguments that have been proven completely false in similar contexts.
- David Stein
It is a solution that involves no learning on the part of the computer owner. This practically guarantees that the same problem will arise again on the new system. End result: ignorance-driven obsolescence.
Computers are complex - and are only becoming more so. Burnable optical discs and flash drives are better than floppy disks for many reasons, but they're also harder to use than stupidly simple 5.25"ers. Wireless networking is preferable to wired networking, but configuration can be much more painful. Etc.
If you're going to use modern technology, you have to keep up with the learning curve. Sad but true.
- David Stein
Not necessarily true.
First, Microsoft clearly loses nothing from this mod, since it's unlikely to displace their sales of their own properties.
Second, the goodwill generated by the Halo mod - nostalgia, fondness for the franchise, etc. - may well have sold more copies of Halo for it... without Microsoft having had to lift a finger.
(Then there's also the small bit about not pissing off all of the Halo fans who wanted to see the mod.)
So it seems kind of ridiculous for Microsoft to make this move. I'm guessing that its primary interest is in retaining control of the dogma surrounding the Halo universe. Doesn't seem sufficient justification to me, but at least there's a core of rationality here.
- David Stein
Played it. Loved it. Picked up the manual back in eighth grade in 1988... just flipped through it and marveled at the possibilities. Then finally hosted a few rounds during my wild 'n' crazy college-freshman days. "Death by seduction" was a fun option. ;)
Not really.
The UMPC (formerly known as Origami) is a hardware/software specification set by Microsoft for this new class of devices. The software specification contains exactly one requirement: Windows XP Tablet PC Edition 2005.
The hardware, on the other hand, has several requirements:
- Screen: Approximately 7" LCD, with a resolution of at least 800x480
- Weight: Approximately 1kg (2lb)
- Integrated touch screen
- Integrated 802.11b
- Integrated Bluetooth
That's it - anything with those specifications can be considered (and labeled) a UMPC.Now here's the important question: Who would ever consider a machine with those specifications their primary device? The minimum specification doesn't include any kind of drive, speakers, or even a keyboard. As a standalone device, the UMPC is really cripped - without a drive, how do you load software?
But that's the point. Please, please repeat after me: THE UMPC IS NOT MEANT TO BE A PRIMARY OR STANDALONE PC. That is not its intended niche. It is a companion PC - a souped-up version of a PDA that runs all of the software you'd expect, and with a screen large enough to do actual work. (The tiny screen was the primary factor that limited the PDA to "address-book" status.)
It irritates me to see so many tech rags criticizing the UMPC as underpowered for primary computer use. They're just not understanding its purpose. I'm an ardent supporter of the platform (and I have no attachment to Microsoft, any UMPC manufacturer, the project, etc.) - I think it will be an excellent new device, with novel computing applications.
- David Stein
Who wrote anything about patents? That word doesn't appear in the original article, the article summary, the comment that I wrote - or anywhere else in this argument.
Copyrights and patents are 100% different forms of IP. In fact, they're usually mutually exclusive: most "inventions" are either functional concepts (hence patentable) or nonfunctional artistic expressions (hence copyrightable.) Even in software, they ostensibly cover different features: the functional concepts are patentable, and the particular way in which the programmer chose to express those concepts - the source code - may be copyrightable. But even here, the different forms of IP apply to different aspects: the invention, vs. an expressive representation of the invention.
(The only real area of overlap is the "design patent," a strange beast that no one truly understands.)
- David Stein
I share your concern, but not quite the way you put it.
Modern versions of computer-based DRM are simply software implementations, and are completely copyrightable under any modern body of copyright law. The philosophy here is that every batch of code is an "expression" of the underlying ideas, and that "expression" should be protected against unauthorized copying, derivation, etc. No real surprises there.
(Aside: I happen to disagree vehemently with this notion. I believe that software needs some kind of copying protection, but I don't buy this line about "expression" for most software works. But that's a discussion for a different thread.)
Also incorrect is the comment in the summary that the iPod law somehow violated "companies' copyright of their DRM software." That's completely wrong. The issue has nothing to do with the copyright over the DRM software. Is anyone "copying" the DRM software? Is anyone "deriving" it, or "publicly performing" it? The article makes no reference to the DRM software. In other words, the submitter is wildly off-track in mentioning it.
Fortunately, the submitter did choose the right buzz-clip to describe the meat of the issue: "[T]he council eliminated reduced fines for file sharing and said companies could not be forced, without compensation, to make music sold online compatible with any music device."
Now, here's what's wrong with that, and here's why you should be troubled.
The iPod law "forced" no one to do anything. Apple to take any action to maintain compliance with French law, nor was it threatened with criminal penalties for not opening iTunes to other MP3 players. Apple could have responded by doing nothing, and the law would have been A-OK with its inaction.
Rather, explicitly permitted users to engage in format translation - in order to transfer their iTunes music to a non-iPod MP3 device. If you want to use the word "force," then the law merely stopped forcing users to follow Apple's business model. As a consequence, Apple may have felt compelled to change iTunes in undesirable ways for its own business reasons, but that's completely different from a "forcing" law.
The disturbing thing here is the French Constitutional Council's summary of this law. By using the term "without compensation," they're characterizing it as an uncompensated governmental taking - a limitation of the copyright over music sold via iTunes. That's completely bogus.
Copyright is a property right offered by a government. Artists only enjoy the rights associated with copyright because the government provides them; no one is "entitled" to any particular right under copyright. In other words, government is free to extend or restrict the scope of copyright as it sees fit. Even under the U.S. Constitution, artists are entitled only to have some form of copyright protection available; they have no right to any particular form over any other.) Also, copyright law is a "social contract" between artists and the public - which the government should have very broad power to define, and adjust as necessary.
A useful analogy here is zoning law. You have a strong property right to the use of your land. However, a local government may restrict your use of it through zoning law - it may even re-zone your land to declare your current use illegal. This modification of your property rights is not a "taking." (Village of Euclid, Ohio v. Ambler Realty Co.) You are not due any compensation. Rather, your property rights as a whole are protected from uncompensated seizure, but some specific details of your property rights are subject to state law.
Now, why is this troubling? Apparently, the French Constitutional Council has exercised its power to declare a law unconstitutional on a very flawed understanding of intellectual property law. The likely basis is political pressure: it sought to redress the per