I couldn't disagree more with the principle of your post.
The reason that certain common practices are legal is usually down to explicit exemptions under copyright law or, as you mentioned, to collective licensing agreements. You seem to be implying that established practices somehow become legal after a time. While there are areas in the law where this idea is relevant, I think you'd have a lot of difficulty arguing that this is the case here. Copyright is not like a trademark: you do not have to defend it or lose it.
For example, in my country it is not legal to record and permanently archive TV content, and the fact that you're in a library is not carte blanche to copy whatever you like. Web search engines are usually legal under generic fair use-style legislation, not because they got there before expiring content, and robots.txt is nothing special (but see my earlier post on that subject).
When you do business in a new arena, it makes sense that the existing rules of the arena should apply.
Perhaps, but such conventions do not in general trump the law of the land.
Furthermore, I would argue that posting to a web page is implied permission because the owners do so expecting their work to be copied to personal computers.
But this isn't just copying to a personal computer, it's copying and redistributing in a modified form while passing on some of the expense to the original host site and concealing information that the original host site would otherwise have received.
In an interesting turn of events, private individuals are allowed to copy and archive web pages, but Google is not.
Individuals aren't, in general, allowed to redistribute entire works subject to others' copyright either.
As an aside, I also don't have a problem with a commercial corporation not automatically having the same rights as a private citizen. The world would be a better place if more legal systems understood that they are not the same.
I don't normally comment on these things, but it's deeply ironic that the parent post has been moderated (-1, Redundant). It is, in legal fact, one of relatively few accurate posts in this discussion, making it (+1, Informative). Moreover, looking at the number of people posting here who clearly do not appreciate this fact, it's clearly not (-1, Redundant).
Note to smart-ass AC parent: I am not a lawyer, but as far as I know, robots.txt has no special status in law anywhere. That's not to say that it is irrelevant. For example, you might reasonably assume that in the presence of a robots.txt file that specifically permits something, the site owner has actively given consent to that action using a recognised protocol that they understood. However, the absence of a robots.txt prohibiting indexing/caching/reproducing and selling a site most certainly does not imply consent to do those things. Copyright is opt-out, not opt-in, and has been for several years just about everywhere.
This being the case, I share the view of aussie_a in the first post to this thread: it's amazing anyone ever considered Google Cache legal in most jurisdictions. Just because they call it a cache does not mean that it actually is a cache in the usual sense of the technical term. In fact, it demonstrably isn't. For a start, it still doesn't seem to duplicate any images and plug-in content, referring to the original page for those. That both wiping out any dubious claims about providing a mirror service if the original site goes down and makes Google guilty of one of the oldest and most anti-social dirty tricks on the web, all in one go. Moreover, Google Cache does not reproduce web pages unmodified: it plants a huge great Google banner across the top of the page.
I've been saying for a while that Google have crossed the invisible line on copyright with several of their services. It only amazes me that it's taken this long for a major court ruling against them to arrive.
Minors don't have the maturity to decide whether giving someone naked pictures of themselves as children is a bad risk.
Of course they don't. In fact, it is well established that all human beings suddenly develop judgement and personal responsibility at midnight on their eighteenth birthday.
Unless their parents decide they do, which is a very iffy judgement.
Absolutely. That is why the law requires parental consent before those same 17-year-old kids have sex.
Teenage sex has thousands, millions of years of experience mitigating its risks. Sharing pictures has a few generations. The damage might not be as great with the pictures, but the probability of any damage is higher.
Your argument doesn't make sense. No damage was caused here. Even if the couple concerned split up in the future and one of them is nasty enough to distribute the photographs of the other more widely, that distribution won't mean that the taking of the photo in the first place suddenly became abusive, any more than every time I slept with my ex-girlfriend became rape just because at some later time things didn't work out and we split up. The laws against things like child pornography are there to prevent exploitation and abuse, and neither appears to have happened in this case. Nothing that happens in the future will change that.
(There could, of course, be other kinds of damage caused by distributing those pictures, but that would be true of adults with similarly bad manners too. I wouldn't object to making such distribution illegal on privacy grounds, but this has nothing to do with whether minors were involved.)
So people are responding to the article when rebutting me, not responding to me though I rebutted the article?
I was responding to both, and my views on the behaviour in the article are indepenent of my challenging your position on this issue.
And even a child should receive the appropriate discipline.
And you don't find it at all odd that in this case, the law says that the children are responsible enough to decide for themselves whether to have sexual relations -- something that could result in anything from bringing a new life into the world to prematurely ending their own as a result of an STD -- but not to decide whether to let a friend simply photograph them?
I don't see how you could read my post about how the parents are responsible and somehow decide I'm saying that the courts are responsible.
This entire thread is about the courts (and by association, the prosecutors and related administration officials) deciding they are more responsible than the kids in question.
I wonder, are you as judgemental in other fields, or does this just offend some personal moral value you choose to impose on everyone else? Why is something not morally OK -- "irresponsible parenting" even -- if someone 17 years and 364 days old does it, but fine and down to personal choice and personal responsibility a day later? Does it even occur to you that many people find nudity an entirely natural state? It is, after all, how we're born.
Of course I don't support the sexual abuse of minors (or anyone else, for that matter), and if that's what was happening here then fine, throw the book at them. But that is clearly not what was happening here, at least as far as I've read so far. I don't see what business either the courts or someone like you have telling people who are mature enough to understand what they're doing and the potential consequences that they may not do it, when it causes no harm to anyone else. What happened to living in a free society, taking responsibility for one's own actions, having the self-discipline to think about things before doing them, and generally treating people like adults when they're old enough to behave like them?
Unfortunately, that is not how the capital markets work. Investors will take their money elsewhere.
In the short term, perhaps. Nevertheless, the market is good at exactly one thing: correcting itself. As I said, Big Pharma would still be hugely profitable even with a much smaller profit margin, and investors as a whole will not run from a sure return on investment. You seem to be confusing the share price of a company with several other things that are not the same number.
Your post is absolutely the most perceptive comment that I have ever seen on the single most grossly misleading political PR technique of the entire millenium. I concur wholeheartedly and without reservation, and so do all my imaginary friends.
But seriously, yes, it's damned annoying, and for what it's worth, I too wish people would remember how to argue a case using clear, objective, non-inflammatory language.
The other problem is that the US market is currently subsidizing drug and equipment development (even in other countries). If you make the US market like France or Germany, either everyone's costs will rise or the rate of drug/device/procedure development will slow.
Or the drug companies will simply make less money.
It's not rocket science - if money flow goes down, the research dollars will flow elsewhere.
Except that there's nowhere else for the drug companies to spend their money. Big Pharma is probably the most lucrative commercial R&D area since forever. Even with significantly lower prices, the companies would still be very profitable. They're not stupid, and not likely to back out of a good deal just because an obscenely good deal is no longer an option.
I personally guarantee that you can find--ironically with Google itself--at least 20 different respected people saying the exact same thing.
Except it wasn't 2007, it was 1997, and it wasn't Google. It was Netscape.
Netscape was never even on the same scale as Google today.
And one other thing, basically everything that Google is known for--sans Search and Mail--is a PURCHASED technology. Why is it that when Microsoft "innovates by osmosis" they get slammed, but with google it's "revolutionary?"
I didn't say it was revolutionary. In fact, I didn't say anything about it at all. I simply suggested that their business model was working out well for them, which it is.
Come back in five years, but don't be so sure you'll be the one laughing.
Back in 2002, five years ago, Google had only been profitable for a couple of years, and was starting to make it into the top-five most visited web sites in some countries. Its non-www-search offerings were in their infancy: it had just acquired Deja News (in 2001), and was starting up Google News around 2002.
Today, www.google.com is the most visited site on the web. GMail is one of the best-known e-mail services in the world -- not bad for a service that was only born about three years ago. Large numbers of people don't know the difference between Google Groups and Usenet. Novel services like Google Earth are grabbing the attention of the Internet-using public. Google's profits are going up and up, and their novel business model is proving very effective.
Say what you will about Google, their obviously-overvalued stock, and their increasingly dubious "corporate ethics" (what happened to not being evil?). They are without doubt the biggest business success story in IT in the past five years. If anyone's going to topple Microsoft's power base -- whose applications really aren't that great in many cases, remember -- it's going to be a heavy-hitter like Google.
I don't agree with automatic time limits on laws, particularly not constitutions (which can therefore be revoked simply by waiting long enough). However, I do agree with your underlying point that today's legal systems are vastly overcomplicated, and it is silly to expect everyone to understand them.
My personal "radical suggestion" has for a long time been that laws should be written as statements of principle that may be no longer than one page of normal size text. Discussion in the legislature should address whether the idea is correct, not some subsubsubclause on page 157 of a document only four MPs ever read. It should be left to the courts to consider the facts of any specific case in context and then decide whether or not the principles of the law have been violated, and to pass a suitable sentence if so.
Under such a system, I suspect you could store the entire useful content of most legal systems in a single ring-binder. As a bonus, lawyers would have to rely on making principled arguments with supporting evidence rather than legal technicalities or auto-pilot prosecutions.
Oh, well, a man can still dream of a better world, can't he?:-)
Re:Are we really making it better for us, or worse
on
Finding New Code
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· Score: 1
I've talked to NO LESS THAN a dozen commercial companies in the last 2-3 years where they're actively taking FOSS source and incorporating it into their products, because.. (and I quote) "..Its freeware, so we can use it however we wish."
<shrug> That's what you get for calling your software free when it's not. </shrug>
Note to mods about to mark me down because they don't agree: would you be thinking the same if I were objecting to the phrase "intellectual property theft"?
Freedom of religion should not be extended to religions that are clearly made up.
Freedom of religion is simply a horrible concept. People should have freedom of belief, and freedom of expression. Whether or not what you choose to believe in or advocate is called a religion by anyone should be irrelevant.
Similarly, the reasonable practice of religion (for example, by gathering for collective worship) is generally covered by other established freedoms, such as movement and association.
This being the case, the expression "freedom of religion" is usually used as an excuse, an implicit claim to more rights than someone else has, or to have one's own wishes valued more highly than another's. Following a certain religion does not earn you those rights, any more than someone following a different religion (or no religion) has those rights at your expense.
One can readily extend this argument to anti-discrimination legislation. Why should it be necessary to prohibit discrimination on explicit criteria? If something is important enough to protect in this way, why not simply require that any decision be made based only on information relevant to the matter at hand?
No, you can't, though there are plenty of organisations with a vested interest in pretending you can. Martial arts groups are some of the worst for this, but then they are all too frequently run by people with severe ego issues and absolutely no knowledge of the relevant law. Much of the dancing world is, alas, full of politics and cult worship at high levels too: in particular, professionals in many dance styles are infamous for defending their turf against amateur competition (even if those amateurs are in fact better dancers/teachers/judges/whatever) using any legal trickery they can get their hands on.
What you can copyright is an arrangement of choreography. This is broadly and non-legally analogous to copyright for a musical score: it is not a specific performance that is subject to copyright (well, not this copyright, anyway) but rather the instruction book.
Of course, all the obvious groups of basic figures have been in use since forever in most dance styles and aren't protected. You can't protect the leading lady walking to centre-stage pushing the male dancers over into a press-up position one by one. You can't protect a spin, check and body ripple. You can't protect a feather step, reverse turn and feather finish. This sort of law is only really useful for protecting things like the complete arrangement of dance routines for a musical stage production (and since that requires a lot of skill and creativity, I personally don't have a problem with that).
Or at least, everything in the above paragraph should be the case. Whether it actually is depends on the ruling in cases like this one, I guess.:-/
I like to think I'm a reasonably well-rounded person. However, I developed my social skills, presentation and communications skills, organisational skills, time management skills, people management skills and so on outside of my major studies. I learned the basics in a lot of these areas during my degree, but I did it by debating with people, reading around the subject (and reading material of interest but not directly related to my studies), joining and later helping to run student societies, even participating in on-line forums like Slashdot.
However, my chosen subject is very broad, and I certainly did not invest all that time and money for someone to waffle at me about unrelated material. IMHO, it would be a rare degree course in today's world of falling educational standards that could contain lots of unrelated material, yet still do justice to the subject itself.
I'll tell you what is hard: Finding a job coming out of college. Everyone looks at you like you have no idea how to code because you have no experience.
That's because most people coming out of college with no experience have no idea how to code.
There are a very small number of exceptions. Usually, you can spot them a mile away. The rest just think they're better than they are.
CS grads with first class degrees got them by being good at everything.
If only that were true.
And no, that isn't bitterness. I was pretty high up in the year group in my CS studies. But a few years later, I also now mentor new starters at work, and there are plenty of guys out there who got great qualifications but still don't get it.
A lot of people applying for a degree in Computer Science do not even know what they're getting into.
In my experience, most people who've finished a CS course still don't know exactly what CS is. I'm pretty sure I couldn't give you a robust definition with which no-one equally or better qualified would disagree.
And this isn't just me. If memory serves, some big names in computing at various US universities recently produced a paper that was supposed to identify the differences between things like computer science, computer engineering, software engineering, and several other related courses. Even in that, they basically came up with a relatively vague definition with lots of overlap between many of the course titles. The differences cited were more in the flavour of the course -- the perspective, if you like -- than in the actual areas of study.
I think this is a big part of the problem today. No-one really knows what CS is, including most university CS departments.
Sure. And for what it's worth, I happen to believe that that is a better approach. After all, if someone has paid for a fair copy of the software, why shouldn't they be allowed to install and use it without further conditions? What else were they paying for?
Unfortunately, the legal situation in some jurisdictions doesn't seem to be clear on this point, hence all the confusion over EULAs of various types.
Maybe there should be a disciplinary procedure applied to lawyers who work on contracts that they (as trained and qualified legal advisers) can reasonably expect to be unenforceable, even if the general public (who aren't trained in law) might not appreciate that, in the same way that in some places there are rules against barratry and the like.
> almost no-one is buying new computers at home at the moment.
Irrelevant. The home market isn't very significant.
Sorry, I think we've lost the plot here. We're talking about the potential impact of Vista on the gaming market, are we not? In that case, surely the home market is the only thing that is significant!
Slashdot Mirror
I couldn't disagree more with the principle of your post.
The reason that certain common practices are legal is usually down to explicit exemptions under copyright law or, as you mentioned, to collective licensing agreements. You seem to be implying that established practices somehow become legal after a time. While there are areas in the law where this idea is relevant, I think you'd have a lot of difficulty arguing that this is the case here. Copyright is not like a trademark: you do not have to defend it or lose it.
For example, in my country it is not legal to record and permanently archive TV content, and the fact that you're in a library is not carte blanche to copy whatever you like. Web search engines are usually legal under generic fair use-style legislation, not because they got there before expiring content, and robots.txt is nothing special (but see my earlier post on that subject).
Perhaps, but such conventions do not in general trump the law of the land.
But this isn't just copying to a personal computer, it's copying and redistributing in a modified form while passing on some of the expense to the original host site and concealing information that the original host site would otherwise have received.
Individuals aren't, in general, allowed to redistribute entire works subject to others' copyright either.
As an aside, I also don't have a problem with a commercial corporation not automatically having the same rights as a private citizen. The world would be a better place if more legal systems understood that they are not the same.
I don't normally comment on these things, but it's deeply ironic that the parent post has been moderated (-1, Redundant). It is, in legal fact, one of relatively few accurate posts in this discussion, making it (+1, Informative). Moreover, looking at the number of people posting here who clearly do not appreciate this fact, it's clearly not (-1, Redundant).
Note to smart-ass AC parent: I am not a lawyer, but as far as I know, robots.txt has no special status in law anywhere. That's not to say that it is irrelevant. For example, you might reasonably assume that in the presence of a robots.txt file that specifically permits something, the site owner has actively given consent to that action using a recognised protocol that they understood. However, the absence of a robots.txt prohibiting indexing/caching/reproducing and selling a site most certainly does not imply consent to do those things. Copyright is opt-out, not opt-in, and has been for several years just about everywhere.
This being the case, I share the view of aussie_a in the first post to this thread: it's amazing anyone ever considered Google Cache legal in most jurisdictions. Just because they call it a cache does not mean that it actually is a cache in the usual sense of the technical term. In fact, it demonstrably isn't. For a start, it still doesn't seem to duplicate any images and plug-in content, referring to the original page for those. That both wiping out any dubious claims about providing a mirror service if the original site goes down and makes Google guilty of one of the oldest and most anti-social dirty tricks on the web, all in one go. Moreover, Google Cache does not reproduce web pages unmodified: it plants a huge great Google banner across the top of the page.
I've been saying for a while that Google have crossed the invisible line on copyright with several of their services. It only amazes me that it's taken this long for a major court ruling against them to arrive.
First things first: everyone working for the FBI, NSA, CIA and other TLAs should give credit to Jack Bauer for devising their new and improved SOPs.
Of course they don't. In fact, it is well established that all human beings suddenly develop judgement and personal responsibility at midnight on their eighteenth birthday.
Absolutely. That is why the law requires parental consent before those same 17-year-old kids have sex.
Your argument doesn't make sense. No damage was caused here. Even if the couple concerned split up in the future and one of them is nasty enough to distribute the photographs of the other more widely, that distribution won't mean that the taking of the photo in the first place suddenly became abusive, any more than every time I slept with my ex-girlfriend became rape just because at some later time things didn't work out and we split up. The laws against things like child pornography are there to prevent exploitation and abuse, and neither appears to have happened in this case. Nothing that happens in the future will change that.
(There could, of course, be other kinds of damage caused by distributing those pictures, but that would be true of adults with similarly bad manners too. I wouldn't object to making such distribution illegal on privacy grounds, but this has nothing to do with whether minors were involved.)
I was responding to both, and my views on the behaviour in the article are indepenent of my challenging your position on this issue.
And you don't find it at all odd that in this case, the law says that the children are responsible enough to decide for themselves whether to have sexual relations -- something that could result in anything from bringing a new life into the world to prematurely ending their own as a result of an STD -- but not to decide whether to let a friend simply photograph them?
This entire thread is about the courts (and by association, the prosecutors and related administration officials) deciding they are more responsible than the kids in question.
I wonder, are you as judgemental in other fields, or does this just offend some personal moral value you choose to impose on everyone else? Why is something not morally OK -- "irresponsible parenting" even -- if someone 17 years and 364 days old does it, but fine and down to personal choice and personal responsibility a day later? Does it even occur to you that many people find nudity an entirely natural state? It is, after all, how we're born.
Of course I don't support the sexual abuse of minors (or anyone else, for that matter), and if that's what was happening here then fine, throw the book at them. But that is clearly not what was happening here, at least as far as I've read so far. I don't see what business either the courts or someone like you have telling people who are mature enough to understand what they're doing and the potential consequences that they may not do it, when it causes no harm to anyone else. What happened to living in a free society, taking responsibility for one's own actions, having the self-discipline to think about things before doing them, and generally treating people like adults when they're old enough to behave like them?
In the short term, perhaps. Nevertheless, the market is good at exactly one thing: correcting itself. As I said, Big Pharma would still be hugely profitable even with a much smaller profit margin, and investors as a whole will not run from a sure return on investment. You seem to be confusing the share price of a company with several other things that are not the same number.
Damn, I can't spell millennium. I suck. Sorry.
Your post is absolutely the most perceptive comment that I have ever seen on the single most grossly misleading political PR technique of the entire millenium. I concur wholeheartedly and without reservation, and so do all my imaginary friends.
But seriously, yes, it's damned annoying, and for what it's worth, I too wish people would remember how to argue a case using clear, objective, non-inflammatory language.
Or the drug companies will simply make less money.
Except that there's nowhere else for the drug companies to spend their money. Big Pharma is probably the most lucrative commercial R&D area since forever. Even with significantly lower prices, the companies would still be very profitable. They're not stupid, and not likely to back out of a good deal just because an obscenely good deal is no longer an option.
Netscape was never even on the same scale as Google today.
I didn't say it was revolutionary. In fact, I didn't say anything about it at all. I simply suggested that their business model was working out well for them, which it is.
Come back in five years, but don't be so sure you'll be the one laughing.
Back in 2002, five years ago, Google had only been profitable for a couple of years, and was starting to make it into the top-five most visited web sites in some countries. Its non-www-search offerings were in their infancy: it had just acquired Deja News (in 2001), and was starting up Google News around 2002.
Today, www.google.com is the most visited site on the web. GMail is one of the best-known e-mail services in the world -- not bad for a service that was only born about three years ago. Large numbers of people don't know the difference between Google Groups and Usenet. Novel services like Google Earth are grabbing the attention of the Internet-using public. Google's profits are going up and up, and their novel business model is proving very effective.
Say what you will about Google, their obviously-overvalued stock, and their increasingly dubious "corporate ethics" (what happened to not being evil?). They are without doubt the biggest business success story in IT in the past five years. If anyone's going to topple Microsoft's power base -- whose applications really aren't that great in many cases, remember -- it's going to be a heavy-hitter like Google.
I don't agree with automatic time limits on laws, particularly not constitutions (which can therefore be revoked simply by waiting long enough). However, I do agree with your underlying point that today's legal systems are vastly overcomplicated, and it is silly to expect everyone to understand them.
My personal "radical suggestion" has for a long time been that laws should be written as statements of principle that may be no longer than one page of normal size text. Discussion in the legislature should address whether the idea is correct, not some subsubsubclause on page 157 of a document only four MPs ever read. It should be left to the courts to consider the facts of any specific case in context and then decide whether or not the principles of the law have been violated, and to pass a suitable sentence if so.
Under such a system, I suspect you could store the entire useful content of most legal systems in a single ring-binder. As a bonus, lawyers would have to rely on making principled arguments with supporting evidence rather than legal technicalities or auto-pilot prosecutions.
Oh, well, a man can still dream of a better world, can't he? :-)
<shrug> That's what you get for calling your software free when it's not. </shrug>
Note to mods about to mark me down because they don't agree: would you be thinking the same if I were objecting to the phrase "intellectual property theft"?
Freedom of religion is simply a horrible concept. People should have freedom of belief, and freedom of expression. Whether or not what you choose to believe in or advocate is called a religion by anyone should be irrelevant.
Similarly, the reasonable practice of religion (for example, by gathering for collective worship) is generally covered by other established freedoms, such as movement and association.
This being the case, the expression "freedom of religion" is usually used as an excuse, an implicit claim to more rights than someone else has, or to have one's own wishes valued more highly than another's. Following a certain religion does not earn you those rights, any more than someone following a different religion (or no religion) has those rights at your expense.
One can readily extend this argument to anti-discrimination legislation. Why should it be necessary to prohibit discrimination on explicit criteria? If something is important enough to protect in this way, why not simply require that any decision be made based only on information relevant to the matter at hand?
No, you can't, though there are plenty of organisations with a vested interest in pretending you can. Martial arts groups are some of the worst for this, but then they are all too frequently run by people with severe ego issues and absolutely no knowledge of the relevant law. Much of the dancing world is, alas, full of politics and cult worship at high levels too: in particular, professionals in many dance styles are infamous for defending their turf against amateur competition (even if those amateurs are in fact better dancers/teachers/judges/whatever) using any legal trickery they can get their hands on.
What you can copyright is an arrangement of choreography. This is broadly and non-legally analogous to copyright for a musical score: it is not a specific performance that is subject to copyright (well, not this copyright, anyway) but rather the instruction book.
Of course, all the obvious groups of basic figures have been in use since forever in most dance styles and aren't protected. You can't protect the leading lady walking to centre-stage pushing the male dancers over into a press-up position one by one. You can't protect a spin, check and body ripple. You can't protect a feather step, reverse turn and feather finish. This sort of law is only really useful for protecting things like the complete arrangement of dance routines for a musical stage production (and since that requires a lot of skill and creativity, I personally don't have a problem with that).
Or at least, everything in the above paragraph should be the case. Whether it actually is depends on the ruling in cases like this one, I guess. :-/
I like to think I'm a reasonably well-rounded person. However, I developed my social skills, presentation and communications skills, organisational skills, time management skills, people management skills and so on outside of my major studies. I learned the basics in a lot of these areas during my degree, but I did it by debating with people, reading around the subject (and reading material of interest but not directly related to my studies), joining and later helping to run student societies, even participating in on-line forums like Slashdot.
However, my chosen subject is very broad, and I certainly did not invest all that time and money for someone to waffle at me about unrelated material. IMHO, it would be a rare degree course in today's world of falling educational standards that could contain lots of unrelated material, yet still do justice to the subject itself.
That's because most people coming out of college with no experience have no idea how to code.
There are a very small number of exceptions. Usually, you can spot them a mile away. The rest just think they're better than they are.
If only that were true.
And no, that isn't bitterness. I was pretty high up in the year group in my CS studies. But a few years later, I also now mentor new starters at work, and there are plenty of guys out there who got great qualifications but still don't get it.
In my experience, most people who've finished a CS course still don't know exactly what CS is. I'm pretty sure I couldn't give you a robust definition with which no-one equally or better qualified would disagree.
And this isn't just me. If memory serves, some big names in computing at various US universities recently produced a paper that was supposed to identify the differences between things like computer science, computer engineering, software engineering, and several other related courses. Even in that, they basically came up with a relatively vague definition with lots of overlap between many of the course titles. The differences cited were more in the flavour of the course -- the perspective, if you like -- than in the actual areas of study.
I think this is a big part of the problem today. No-one really knows what CS is, including most university CS departments.
Sure. And for what it's worth, I happen to believe that that is a better approach. After all, if someone has paid for a fair copy of the software, why shouldn't they be allowed to install and use it without further conditions? What else were they paying for?
Unfortunately, the legal situation in some jurisdictions doesn't seem to be clear on this point, hence all the confusion over EULAs of various types.
Maybe there should be a disciplinary procedure applied to lawyers who work on contracts that they (as trained and qualified legal advisers) can reasonably expect to be unenforceable, even if the general public (who aren't trained in law) might not appreciate that, in the same way that in some places there are rules against barratry and the like.
Sorry, I think we've lost the plot here. We're talking about the potential impact of Vista on the gaming market, are we not? In that case, surely the home market is the only thing that is significant!