I have to laugh. How are you going to prove that the user was notified? He may have missed the notice. Unless you create a click-wrap agreement where the user is bound by the terms of the agreement (EULA) you can't enforce your notices. Implied warranties apply under applicable law in that case.
I see you have a legal opinion. Are you a lawyer?
I'm not a lawyer, but I've observed disclaimers of warantee in small print in a number of different contexts where it looks like someone expected them to work even in the absence of any sort of contract or agreement to a license.
And as for "notices" attached somewhere: If the user doesn't willignly agree to them, he is not legally bound by them. Check the case law on click-wrap licenses.
You go check the case law on disclaimers of warantee.
But since the example you mentioned does not exist, it stands to reason that patents are working.
False, because there has never been a time where modern technology was being developed in the absence of patents. We don't know if such an environment would produce 1/10th as many inventions because people didn't think it was worth inventing with no monopoly - or 10 times as many inventions because they didn't have to worry about other people's patents getting in the way of commercializing their ideas.
We do know that without patents people and companies wouldn't have to pay large gobs of money to patent lawyers. That would make the whole thing more efficient. But without some idea of what the "results on innovation" would be in a patent free world it's impossible to compare the costs and benifits.
Now, it's possible to analyze the situation economically and come up with some idea as to what the world would look like without patents (and what the costs of patents are today). That's the only real way to understand the issue.
Absolutely right. You've just proven that property rights should be abolished, since people are going to continue making things, even though they'll just be stolen.
It'd take a pretty big leap of logic to get from what I said to there. All I said was that we don't have any information on what the world would look like without patents - so his claims of knowing exactly what such a world would be like (with no economic argument provided to back them) are absurd.
As for "property rights should be abolished", that's an utterly unrelated issue. Sure, there's been a fad since the 70's to refer to patents as "Intellectual Property", but that's really only a useful way to look at it when tallying up assets to determine the value of a corporation (under some of the circumstances where people do that sort of thing). Claiming that "Intellectual Property" has the same public policy implications as physical property is absurd.
The question of the costs and benefits of patents and whether they are economically and socially beneficial is a controversial one. If someone wants to argue a side, great - but don't pretend the issue is settled and the answer is obvious.
I'm sure the computers 70 years in the future will have no problem dealing with whatever "DRM" we put on our stuff now. Granted eventually Moore's Law will end and that principal will no longer be true.
The evidence strongly implies that Moore's law will end long before it becomes feasible to crack AES (and therefore AACS) by brute force. DRM is a social problem that should be dealt with - ignoring the problem because you think that it will magically get fixed in the future would be a very bad decision.
So, the MS-PL is like the BSDL and the MCL is like the GPL.
That's the oversimplification that the Microsoft PR department would like you to accept.
More accurately, the MCL sounds to be like the MPL or CDDL, and the MS-PL sounds like the BSD Protection License. The only effect that a license like that has is to unnessiarily (and for no advantage to the open source community) prevent code reuse - which is one of the reasons why the BSDPL isn't on anyone's approved license list. Basically, MS recreated a license that some guy already made just to be a jerk.
As for "permissive", that generally means that you can re-use the code in any project (open source or proprietary) without having to relicense everything. This license doesn't have that property, so the name is misleading.
As I wrote, you would be able to sue them based on IMPLIED warranties and liabilities under applicable laws. Fool.
False, because you've been *notified* that the implied warranties and liabilities had been disclaimed. That's how all disclaimers work. Agreeing to the license has nothing to do with it.
It is not that we will be deprived of this technology because of patents. It is the other way around. This technology would not exist without patents. Organizations would not spend money designing and researching technology if they didn't have a guarantee that they could sell that technology.
Do you have any evidence to support this claim at all? Perhaps an example of a time where people were developing modern technology in a patent-free environment? Wait - that never happened so you can't *possibly* have any evidence to support your point.
And please try not to call it "pirating". That's a term coined by the mpaa (if I remember correctly) to try to make it sound really bad. If we, the geeks, are careful to call it what it is, copyright infringement or illegal copying, we can perhaps change public perception of the issues a little.
It's a little bit too late for that at this point. Even the pirates are calling themselves pirates now (i.e. thepiratebay.org). The tactic that's needed now is de-stigmatizing the word.
That shouldn't be that hard. Think about what the pirates are doing: Distributing Movies, Music, etc to everyone at no charge in spite of legal risks and mostly for no personal gain other than scene rep. How could people like that *possibly* be the bad guys?
(Yea, I know thepiratebay makes money off banner ads. For their legal indexing activity. That's 100% acceptable IMO.)
And when it does, will that system be called GNU/X.org?
No more than FreeBSD is called FreeBSD/X.org.
However much you may want to make the GNU+Linux issue about naming every contributor, that's not the issue. It's not even about naming the major contributors. It's about properly describing the operating system being used. The fact that distributions generally include a ton of applications make it easy for you to try to confuse the issue "Oh, and we have to name MySQL and FreeCiv", but those aren't part of the core operating system.
Look at it this way: Take RHEL or Debian or Gentoo or Mandriva or Ubuntu. What did Linux contribute? A component. What did X.org contribute? A component. What did the GNU Project contribute? A mostly complete operating system. What should the resulting system be called? GNU. But that won't even boot. So we compromise and call it GNU+Linux - the minimum subset of the distro that makes for a functional operating system.
If it's only those which have asked, does that mean I can write an init script, then come back five years later and demand that the system be called GNU/Linux/SanitysInit?
That wouldn't be reasonable because a single init script isn't a major operating system component by any reasonable definition. The GNU project was working on their contribution to todays GNU+Linux systems for 7 years before Linus even started coding. It should be pretty obvious that that's a relevant distinction.
Fine, then, edit Wikipedia pages. But stop trying to edit our language.
When someone does that, someone with your "the GNU project deserves no credit" viewpoint will revert the edit because "the GNU project didn't contribute anything that significant - just some command line tools that no-one sees".
It's a bit like the whole hacker/cracker problem. It may make me twitch every time I hear someone talking about "hacking" into something, or how someone in a game is "hacking", but really, I know what they mean. I'd rather communicate than not communicate, and launching into a rant about why they should call it "cracking" or "cheating" (respectively), and what "hacking" really means, is a surefire way not to communicate.
The hacker/cracker thing is a linguistic issue. Word usage evolves. The GNU+Linux thing is an issue of credit. Every time someone describes an OS in that family, they have the choice of intentionally giving credit to the GNU project or not. The GNU contribution to that OS is significant enough that giving them credit by naming them is a reasonable choice.
Except that's not what this debate has been about. This debate has been about whether Red Hat is willing to change their name as a way of giving them credit.
At this point, I'm pretty sure that RMS would be reasonably happy if Red Hat replaced (or supplemented) the "Linux was created in 1991" story with the "the GNU project was started in 1984" story in their press releases, and mentioned the GNU project in appropriate places in their PR material.
And if you continue that for too long, you realize that while everyone would get credit, it would simply be too long a name to put Ubuntu/GNU/Linux/X.org/KDE/Freedesktop/... all in the name. Personally, I would rather just use "Linux", or "Ubuntu", or "KDE", or whatever I feel is relevant at the time.
Calling Ubuntu simply Ubuntu is perfectly reasonable. But if you're going to start giving contributors credit it makes no sense to give credit to Linux without giving credit to GNU, the GNU project having made the earlier and at least equally significant contribution...
And you do know that glibc isn't the only libc for Linux, right? And that gcc isn't the only compiler?
Right. If you swap out glibc the resulting OS will be one component less GNU-ish. But all of the general purpose GNU+Linux distributions *do* use glibc (along with many other GNU components). That's why they're GNU-class operating systems. If they didn't use those components, then they wouldn't be GNU-class systems anymore. If you replaced all the FreeBSD components in FreeBSD, it wouldn't be FreeBSD anymore either.
Sorry, X.org is NOT part of the GNU System.
Wrong. The GNU System refers to the complete OS that the GNU project set out to build (and has never formally released). X.org was not developed for the GNU System, but if they GNU System is ever released as an OS distribution it will most likely include X.org.
Maybe it would help to look at it this way: Red Hat Enterprise Linux is based on the GNU System in the same way that Mandriva Linux is based on Red Hat. You'll note that in the Wikipedia Article for Mandriva Linux, the fact that it's based on Red Hat is mentioned in the first paragraph. In contrast, the GNU System / GNU Project isn't mentioned in the Red Hat Enterprise Linux article at all. It's that sort of mention that this whole GNU+Linux debate is about - it would seem reasonable for the GNU Project to get credit at least where it's *obviously* appropriate.
In any case, either you're demanding that X.org be included in the name of Unix-like operating systems with GUIs or you're not. Earlier you said you aren't - have you changed your mind?
You do know there are statically linked applications, right?
Sure thing. I can't think of any major "Linux" apps that are shipped that way though.
I know I'm probably wasting my time, but I'll try another angle. Here's a simple logical argument:
"Red Hat Enterprise Linux" is based on the GNU System. This is hard to argue - without core components built for the GNU system, RHEL wouldn't even boot.
A representative of the GNU project has requested that Red Hat give the GNU Project credit.
Red Hat has refused to do so.
That makes the people who made that decision at Red Hat jerks.
I think that narrows our argument down a bit. Specifically:
X.org is offtopic because A.) they haven't asked for credit and B.) you've already stated that you aren't demanding unrequested credit for them.
GNU-free Linux systems are offtopic, because no-one is requesting that credit be given to the GNU project by anyone who isn't using their stuff.
I'm saying that, presuming the CDDL allows this, if Oracle took OpenSolaris, swapped out the Kernel from some third party kernel (will call it Zoolix), bundled a version of the Oracle Database Server and other related software, and released the result as the "Oracle Zoolix Operating System", that Sun would be nutty to whine that they really ought to call it an "OpenSolaris/Zoolix" operating system, and to go around referring to it themselves as "OpenSolaris/Zoolix".
Kernels aren't special. Let's say that they introduced an Oracle file system (oraclefs) based on their database, and distributed a version of OpenSolaris called "Oracle OS" with the new file system by default. Now let's say five or six other groups started distributing OpenSolaris (pulled from OpenSolaris.org) with oraclefs and calling it "OracleOS" (and spreading the story that they wrote the whole OS in 2007 as new venture into Open Source). If Sun started complaining then, would you think that was reasonable?
Because all general purpose "Linux distributions" are the GNU System with a single component swapped out. RMS "crys foul" for precisely the same reason that the NetBSD people would think I was a dick if I built a version of NetBSD with a new default shell and spread a story around about how "Chandon Seldon Developed ChandOS, a complete operating system, in 2007 because he was bored".
Linux is a kernel. When you combine it with the most of the GNU system, you get a complete Unix-like OS like any of the others that are available (*BSD, Solaris, AIX, HPUX, etc). If you don't combine it with the GNU system, you have either nothing or a reasonably bare-bones embedded OS that can't even run dynamically linked binaries, much less any "Linux Applications".
I see it as something which I call "Linux", but which, if I deconstruct it, GNU is really only a very small part of it.
This is your misunderstanding.
Your best response so far seems to be drawing lines where none exist. Saying "This bit over here is an essential part of the operating system, and this isn't." Or saying "It's really the GNU operating system, but it uses X.org."
And you refuse to see lines where they do exist, or try to place them in nonsensical places to prove your point.
You still haven't given me a good reason, other than convention (as adopted by other systems), to explain why X.org should not be included in the name. And where that convention is followed, GNU usually isn't mentioned either.
You can feel free to talk about NetBSD/Xorg all you want - I'll accept the convention and keep calling it NetBSD. As for it not being GNU/NetBSD, that's because NetBSD isn't based on GNU - it's a whole operating system with all it's own components.
That is exactly the problem, Linux will never become a significant OS player until most of the developers are interested in the customer (or my) needs. So long as the developers continue to develop for themselves without thinking about how the app is percieved by a non-linux user; users will never have a compeling reason to switch.
First, let's get one thing straight - there is no set of changes that could feasibly be made to GNU+Linux that would make every desktop user in the world switch to it tomorrow. Hell, there is no infeasible set of changes that would accomplish that result. Any uptake will necessarily continue as it has been going - slow and steady.
Second, there are things that matter other than the desktop. The desktop may be most visible to you personally, but GNU+Linux is seeing a significant amount of practical use elsewhere. No good would come from abandoning large segments of the existing user base. Further, creep from server and embedded deployments is likely to be a major driver on the desktop in the future.
What's important now is what's possible now. And getting everyone in the world to use GNU+Linux on the desktop isn't possible. Nor is getting every free software developer in the world to focus on whatever poorly thought out usability issue your theoretical "consumer" cares about.
One could consider this an infringement of rights protected by the Second Amendment, but that is one of the least favorite of many of those who make the rules.
I think you'll find that the only amendments that they don't routinely disparage and disregard are #3, #7, and #8.
As for "least favorite", that'd be #10. No one's paid attention to that one in living memory.
The name of the distribution is "Nexenta OS". The OS family is "GNU/Solaris". The name of the OS I'm running is "Ubuntu". The family is "GNU/Linux".
From the site:
NexentaOS is a complete GNU-based open source operating system built on top of the [WWW] OpenSolaris kernel and runtime.
Contrast this to:
Ubuntu is a community developed, linux-based operating system that is perfect for laptops, desktops and servers.
All RMS wants is for people to tend towards the first pattern rather than the second one. In the same way, he requests attribution in the case where the OS family is included in the distribution title (i.e. "Red Hat Enterprise Linux" vs. "Debian GNU/Linux").
In practice, most of the distributions that have just "Linux" in their title don't mention the GNU project *anywhere* on their website aside from including the GNU GPL text in the places where they are legally required to. Given that what their distributing is a GNU-class Unix-like operating system, that seems rather impolite.
Fraudulent takedown notices are perjury. I'd say that carries a pretty clear and enforceable penalty.
Who's going to prosecute this? How long is it going to take to get a clear ruling? How much will that cost? How can you prove that a notice was fraudulent rather than just some sort of mistake?
When I say "clear and enforceable", I mean something on the order of "either the ISP or user targeted by an inaccurate take down notice can file a complaint - unless the notice sender can demonstrate standing to send the contested takedown notice, they owe the challenger $500". This is how the law against junk faxes works, false take down notices seem at least as worthy of sanction.
If they truly decide to develop Rage in DirectX, a port would be much harder, requiring lots of rewrites... not something you just spontaneously decide to do around shipping time.
The minute the PS3 supports DirectX, that'll become a possibility. Until then, any serious game engine will need both an OpenGL and a DirectX render path.
I just played around a bit with translating a 850 page PDF book to HTML and then pasting the resulting formatted text into OO Writer. It worked perfectly - typing stuff, changing formatting, inserting more images. I've got a decent machine - but it's not a factor of 20 better than yours.
There is one giant benifit that the DMCA provides: It makes hosts not liable for user-caused copyright infringement as long as they respond to take-down notices. This is what makes sites like YouTube even legally possible.
My understanding is that two small changes would make the DMCA much less obnoxious:
Clear and enforcible penalties for fraudulent/inaccurate takedown notices.
The removal of the anti-research / anti-archival provisions.
The DMCA is a reasonably complex law that does a number of things. Some of them are largely good, like the takedown notice process with its liability shield for hosting companies. Some sites miss-implement this takedown procedure, but the procedure itself isn't too flawed overall. Other parts - like the anti-archival / anti-research thing are not socially acceptable at all.
Slashdot Mirror
I see you have a legal opinion. Are you a lawyer?
I'm not a lawyer, but I've observed disclaimers of warantee in small print in a number of different contexts where it looks like someone expected them to work even in the absence of any sort of contract or agreement to a license.
You go check the case law on disclaimers of warantee.
False, because there has never been a time where modern technology was being developed in the absence of patents. We don't know if such an environment would produce 1/10th as many inventions because people didn't think it was worth inventing with no monopoly - or 10 times as many inventions because they didn't have to worry about other people's patents getting in the way of commercializing their ideas.
We do know that without patents people and companies wouldn't have to pay large gobs of money to patent lawyers. That would make the whole thing more efficient. But without some idea of what the "results on innovation" would be in a patent free world it's impossible to compare the costs and benifits.
Now, it's possible to analyze the situation economically and come up with some idea as to what the world would look like without patents (and what the costs of patents are today). That's the only real way to understand the issue.
It'd take a pretty big leap of logic to get from what I said to there. All I said was that we don't have any information on what the world would look like without patents - so his claims of knowing exactly what such a world would be like (with no economic argument provided to back them) are absurd.
As for "property rights should be abolished", that's an utterly unrelated issue. Sure, there's been a fad since the 70's to refer to patents as "Intellectual Property", but that's really only a useful way to look at it when tallying up assets to determine the value of a corporation (under some of the circumstances where people do that sort of thing). Claiming that "Intellectual Property" has the same public policy implications as physical property is absurd.
The question of the costs and benefits of patents and whether they are economically and socially beneficial is a controversial one. If someone wants to argue a side, great - but don't pretend the issue is settled and the answer is obvious.
The evidence strongly implies that Moore's law will end long before it becomes feasible to crack AES (and therefore AACS) by brute force. DRM is a social problem that should be dealt with - ignoring the problem because you think that it will magically get fixed in the future would be a very bad decision.
That's the oversimplification that the Microsoft PR department would like you to accept.
More accurately, the MCL sounds to be like the MPL or CDDL, and the MS-PL sounds like the BSD Protection License. The only effect that a license like that has is to unnessiarily (and for no advantage to the open source community) prevent code reuse - which is one of the reasons why the BSDPL isn't on anyone's approved license list. Basically, MS recreated a license that some guy already made just to be a jerk.
As for "permissive", that generally means that you can re-use the code in any project (open source or proprietary) without having to relicense everything. This license doesn't have that property, so the name is misleading.
False, because you've been *notified* that the implied warranties and liabilities had been disclaimed. That's how all disclaimers work. Agreeing to the license has nothing to do with it.
The "no warrantee" text in the GPL is a notice, not a license term.
Note how the standard GPL copyright statement looks: THIS PROGAM HAS NO WARANTEE (oh, and it's copyrighted and licenced under the GPL).
Do you have any evidence to support this claim at all? Perhaps an example of a time where people were developing modern technology in a patent-free environment? Wait - that never happened so you can't *possibly* have any evidence to support your point.
It's a little bit too late for that at this point. Even the pirates are calling themselves pirates now (i.e. thepiratebay.org). The tactic that's needed now is de-stigmatizing the word.
That shouldn't be that hard. Think about what the pirates are doing: Distributing Movies, Music, etc to everyone at no charge in spite of legal risks and mostly for no personal gain other than scene rep. How could people like that *possibly* be the bad guys?
(Yea, I know thepiratebay makes money off banner ads. For their legal indexing activity. That's 100% acceptable IMO.)
No more than FreeBSD is called FreeBSD/X.org.
However much you may want to make the GNU+Linux issue about naming every contributor, that's not the issue. It's not even about naming the major contributors. It's about properly describing the operating system being used. The fact that distributions generally include a ton of applications make it easy for you to try to confuse the issue "Oh, and we have to name MySQL and FreeCiv", but those aren't part of the core operating system.
Look at it this way: Take RHEL or Debian or Gentoo or Mandriva or Ubuntu. What did Linux contribute? A component. What did X.org contribute? A component. What did the GNU Project contribute? A mostly complete operating system. What should the resulting system be called? GNU. But that won't even boot. So we compromise and call it GNU+Linux - the minimum subset of the distro that makes for a functional operating system.
That wouldn't be reasonable because a single init script isn't a major operating system component by any reasonable definition. The GNU project was working on their contribution to todays GNU+Linux systems for 7 years before Linus even started coding. It should be pretty obvious that that's a relevant distinction.
When someone does that, someone with your "the GNU project deserves no credit" viewpoint will revert the edit because "the GNU project didn't contribute anything that significant - just some command line tools that no-one sees".
The hacker/cracker thing is a linguistic issue. Word usage evolves. The GNU+Linux thing is an issue of credit. Every time someone describes an OS in that family, they have the choice of intentionally giving credit to the GNU project or not. The GNU contribution to that OS is significant enough that giving them credit by naming them is a reasonable choice.
At this point, I'm pretty sure that RMS would be reasonably happy if Red Hat replaced (or supplemented) the "Linux was created in 1991" story with the "the GNU project was started in 1984" story in their press releases, and mentioned the GNU project in appropriate places in their PR material.
Calling Ubuntu simply Ubuntu is perfectly reasonable. But if you're going to start giving contributors credit it makes no sense to give credit to Linux without giving credit to GNU, the GNU project having made the earlier and at least equally significant contribution...
Right. If you swap out glibc the resulting OS will be one component less GNU-ish. But all of the general purpose GNU+Linux distributions *do* use glibc (along with many other GNU components). That's why they're GNU-class operating systems. If they didn't use those components, then they wouldn't be GNU-class systems anymore. If you replaced all the FreeBSD components in FreeBSD, it wouldn't be FreeBSD anymore either.
Wrong. The GNU System refers to the complete OS that the GNU project set out to build (and has never formally released). X.org was not developed for the GNU System, but if they GNU System is ever released as an OS distribution it will most likely include X.org.
Maybe it would help to look at it this way: Red Hat Enterprise Linux is based on the GNU System in the same way that Mandriva Linux is based on Red Hat. You'll note that in the Wikipedia Article for Mandriva Linux, the fact that it's based on Red Hat is mentioned in the first paragraph. In contrast, the GNU System / GNU Project isn't mentioned in the Red Hat Enterprise Linux article at all. It's that sort of mention that this whole GNU+Linux debate is about - it would seem reasonable for the GNU Project to get credit at least where it's *obviously* appropriate.
In any case, either you're demanding that X.org be included in the name of Unix-like operating systems with GUIs or you're not. Earlier you said you aren't - have you changed your mind?
Sure thing. I can't think of any major "Linux" apps that are shipped that way though.
I know I'm probably wasting my time, but I'll try another angle. Here's a simple logical argument:
I think that narrows our argument down a bit. Specifically:
Kernels aren't special. Let's say that they introduced an Oracle file system (oraclefs) based on their database, and distributed a version of OpenSolaris called "Oracle OS" with the new file system by default. Now let's say five or six other groups started distributing OpenSolaris (pulled from OpenSolaris.org) with oraclefs and calling it "OracleOS" (and spreading the story that they wrote the whole OS in 2007 as new venture into Open Source). If Sun started complaining then, would you think that was reasonable?
Because all general purpose "Linux distributions" are the GNU System with a single component swapped out. RMS "crys foul" for precisely the same reason that the NetBSD people would think I was a dick if I built a version of NetBSD with a new default shell and spread a story around about how "Chandon Seldon Developed ChandOS, a complete operating system, in 2007 because he was bored".
Linux is a kernel. When you combine it with the most of the GNU system, you get a complete Unix-like OS like any of the others that are available (*BSD, Solaris, AIX, HPUX, etc). If you don't combine it with the GNU system, you have either nothing or a reasonably bare-bones embedded OS that can't even run dynamically linked binaries, much less any "Linux Applications".
This is your misunderstanding.
And you refuse to see lines where they do exist, or try to place them in nonsensical places to prove your point.
You can feel free to talk about NetBSD/Xorg all you want - I'll accept the convention and keep calling it NetBSD. As for it not being GNU/NetBSD, that's because NetBSD isn't based on GNU - it's a whole operating system with all it's own components.
First, let's get one thing straight - there is no set of changes that could feasibly be made to GNU+Linux that would make every desktop user in the world switch to it tomorrow. Hell, there is no infeasible set of changes that would accomplish that result. Any uptake will necessarily continue as it has been going - slow and steady.
Second, there are things that matter other than the desktop. The desktop may be most visible to you personally, but GNU+Linux is seeing a significant amount of practical use elsewhere. No good would come from abandoning large segments of the existing user base. Further, creep from server and embedded deployments is likely to be a major driver on the desktop in the future.
What's important now is what's possible now. And getting everyone in the world to use GNU+Linux on the desktop isn't possible. Nor is getting every free software developer in the world to focus on whatever poorly thought out usability issue your theoretical "consumer" cares about.
I think you'll find that the only amendments that they don't routinely disparage and disregard are #3, #7, and #8.
As for "least favorite", that'd be #10. No one's paid attention to that one in living memory.
The name of the distribution is "Nexenta OS". The OS family is "GNU/Solaris". The name of the OS I'm running is "Ubuntu". The family is "GNU/Linux".
From the site:
Contrast this to:
All RMS wants is for people to tend towards the first pattern rather than the second one. In the same way, he requests attribution in the case where the OS family is included in the distribution title (i.e. "Red Hat Enterprise Linux" vs. "Debian GNU/Linux").
In practice, most of the distributions that have just "Linux" in their title don't mention the GNU project *anywhere* on their website aside from including the GNU GPL text in the places where they are legally required to. Given that what their distributing is a GNU-class Unix-like operating system, that seems rather impolite.
Who's going to prosecute this? How long is it going to take to get a clear ruling? How much will that cost? How can you prove that a notice was fraudulent rather than just some sort of mistake?
When I say "clear and enforceable", I mean something on the order of "either the ISP or user targeted by an inaccurate take down notice can file a complaint - unless the notice sender can demonstrate standing to send the contested takedown notice, they owe the challenger $500". This is how the law against junk faxes works, false take down notices seem at least as worthy of sanction.
The minute the PS3 supports DirectX, that'll become a possibility. Until then, any serious game engine will need both an OpenGL and a DirectX render path.
I just played around a bit with translating a 850 page PDF book to HTML and then pasting the resulting formatted text into OO Writer. It worked perfectly - typing stuff, changing formatting, inserting more images. I've got a decent machine - but it's not a factor of 20 better than yours.
That was my #2 above.
There is one giant benifit that the DMCA provides: It makes hosts not liable for user-caused copyright infringement as long as they respond to take-down notices. This is what makes sites like YouTube even legally possible.
My understanding is that two small changes would make the DMCA much less obnoxious:
The DMCA is a reasonably complex law that does a number of things. Some of them are largely good, like the takedown notice process with its liability shield for hosting companies. Some sites miss-implement this takedown procedure, but the procedure itself isn't too flawed overall. Other parts - like the anti-archival / anti-research thing are not socially acceptable at all.
I've also never encountered any of the problems you describe. Do you have a test case document that shows these problems in OOo?