"...and we passionately believe that working in partnership with ISPs to develop first-class, safe, legal, digital music services is the way forward."
Digital music services that are controlled by BPI members that is. Not music services controlled by "new media" companies or independent record labels.
"the [ISPs] need to educate their customers not to steal music..."
The ISPs need to educate their users not to take advantage of the fact that modern packet-switched networks make it very easy to transfer information and that ultimately music is just information. The ISPs need to educate their users that only the big, 20th century media companies that grew big by distributing music on plastic discs of various sorts (when that was the most technologically cutting edge way of distributing music) can distribute music in the 21st century, even when music consumers are voting in droves with their wallets and saying that they aren't so interested in plastic discs of finite capacity containing semi-arbitrary selections of tracks any more. The ISPs need to educate their customers not to circumvent these old business models. Also the ISPs need to educate their users that the copyright laws of the printing press era are rigid and unchangeable, even when they are spectacularly unsuited to and incapable of dealing with "mass piracy" brought on by the aforementioned ease of transferring information.
Yes, that's what ISPs need to educate their users about in the eyes of Big Media.
Apart from OpenServer, which is SVR3.2-based, they don't have much. The Court ruling is that Novell owns the copyrights to SVR4 and the general consensus on Groklaw and Investor Village SCOX board is that SCOs old and new added very little new to UNIXWare post-1995 that they can claim copyright on. Even if they did, part of their whole problem is that SVR4 is a mess copyrights-wise with lots of Intel, Microsoft and even unattributed BSD code in there. Forget open-sourcing it, it's not going to happen.
Minor nitpick but SCO's Investor Relations site is outsourced so you won't directly use SCO's bandwidth:
host ir.sco.com ir.sco.com is an alias for cald.client.shareholder.com. cald.client.shareholder.com is an alias for webcenter360.shareholder.com. webcenter360.shareholder.com has address 170.224.5.57 ir.sco.com is an alias for cald.client.shareholder.com. cald.client.shareholder.com is an alias for webcenter360.shareholder.com. ir.sco.com is an alias for cald.client.shareholder.com. cald.client.shareholder.com is an alias for webcenter360.shareholder.com.
host sco.com sco.com has address 132.147.63.12 sco.com mail is handled by 10 mail.ut.sco.com.
Depending on one's definition of "technical problems" then there's a lot of patching to do because many of the problems are very deeply embedded. I don't just mean the infamous "auto space like Word 95" tags, but the lack of support for dates before 1900, the redefinition of the colourspace to clash with existing ISO standards and the hard-coded definition of non-working days to be Saturday and Sunday (which they are in Western culture but aren't in the Arabic world). A fairly comprehensive list of OOXML's failures is at http://www.grokdoc.net/index.php/EOOXML_Objections _Clearinghouse and it's an editable wiki as well.
Given that CC tries to create analogous licenses for non-software to those that already exist for software (sharealike == GPL, attribution required == BSD) I would say RMS is entitled to his opinion but I respectfully disagree. We know RMS disapproves of the BSD license and prefers the GPL, on account of maintaining the freedom of the software - fine, his opinion given freely. He doesn't seem to explicitly say so, but does he disapprove of the CC attribution license? His problem seems to be one of terms and definitions - not all CC licenses are free it's true, but this sounds more like a small marketing problem for the folks behind CC, rather like the perennial "open source" v. "free software" debate (neither term truly captures the meaning of GPL-like licenses). He does note that the GPL is unsuited, in his opinion, to a book or printed work and I'm struggling to see how it can be applied to other artistic works: do any other class of works (baking recipes being the only example I can think of right now, or maybe the exact colour combinations and brush techniques used in a painting?) have the distinction between human-readable/machine unreadable and human unreadable/machine readable representations of the same work? The GPL is all about ensuring software stays human readable, which is fine, but this isn't the problem with other types of creative work - the problem there is how to legally maintain one's right to a monopoly on the distribution of the work as a whole whilst also allowing others to use substantial portions to build their own works. Let people choose the license they want, is my opinion.
Perhaps so. But (a) as others have pointed out, in legal practice one has to phrase one's requests very exactingly, not least because the other side will give you literally what you ask for and nothing more and (b) more to the point, as IBM has pointed out several times to the Court, SCO's FUD when they started this lawsuit 30 motnhs ago (yes, thirty months...) included public puffing that they had mountains of evidence. Indeed Darl is quoted at one point as saying they had all the evidence they needed and would be fine to go to trial with what they had (early to mid 2003) without needing to do discovery. Yet now they demand IBM turns over all the material they have and will ever possibly have in the future on Linux, "non-public Linux contributions" plus AIX and Dynix. I'll bet a goodly number of quatloos that this point is hammered home in IBM's reply to this.
Of course, don't forget the deadline for closure of fact discovery is rapidly looming (27th Jan 2006 according to Groklaw's timeline of the IBM case) and since SCO doesn't have anything they need to manufacture a delay somehow. I would be very surprised if they get it though.
No. If SCO was to declare bankruptcy then an administrator would be appointed to manage the assets, in place of the current team (McBride, Sontag et al). One of his first acts would be to settle the lawsuit SCO started with IBM and he'd have pretty much no choice but to do it on IBM's terms - such as a full and public admission that SCO never had a case, they were just blowing smoke etc. No-one will buy SCO because of IBM's counter-claims against them and also Red Hat's claims. If SCO lose or settle, then the trade libel claims Red Hat and IBM have made against them (for claiming they have found millions of lines of Unix code, that Red Hat's continued selling Linux is "painting a big liability target on their customers' backs" etc.) would be a slam-dunk. Anyone who bought SCO would inherit these legal liabilities and the massive fines that go with them.
I expect IBM to refile its motions for summary judgement early in 2006 because from the evidence apparently filed here, SCO is still doing the same old dance about JFS, RCU and NUMA which no-one in their right mind believes are either copyright or contract infringing.
The Register's "Security Report: Windows vs Linux" published last October. Yes, OS X isn't Linux but the two share a common ancestor. The report demolishes, with evidence, the suggestion that Windows is more prone to malware because it's more popular. I've barely touched an OS X Mac so perhaps some of the criticisms levelled at Windows (e.g. that it encourages you to use the GUI to admin a server) are relevant to OS X as well, but my gut feeling is that Apple have made far fewer mistakes than Microsoft in their operating system design. *BSD is also well known for its inherent security. I wonder if someone's trying to make a bit of news on a quiet day?
That the situation has been allowed to degenerate to such an extent here in.uk. I mean, suing filesharers has had no effect on stemming the rising tide of music sharing in the US and now the UK companies want to go headlong down the same path.
A couple of months ago I did manage to get a (heavily edited) letter published in The Times newspaper here in the UK. Although they wanted hard references for many of my points, which I was caught off guard and not able to supply them with over the phone (such as the assertion that file sharing has no effect on CD sales - shortly before the OECD study was published that said the same thing) I did manage to persuade them to publish my opinion that the record industry's stance was borne out of a desire to maintain 20th century monopolies rather than anything else. The only followup I saw came a week later from a professional musician who said that he was scared of internet file sharing as well, because he believed he should be paid each time his music was performed, because this is how he earns his living, and this was nothing to do with "a futile attempt to preserve 20th century monopolies" (to quote my original letter).
This got me thinking, and I still am. Half of me thinks this guy is right and that he does deserve to be paid for the performance of his compositions (but EVERY time - insert credit card into CD player before pressing play?) But half of me thinks he is, in his own way, still living in the 20th century.
In summary, music isn't scarce any more and it CAN be copied easily. If our collective governments were wise, instead of letting the 20th century media barons cripple new technology, and force DRM-laden crap down our throats (Windows Vista and Intel's digitally restricted new chips spring to mind), they'd be busy devising new copyright laws that respect the fact that we all have "perfect copying machines" (computers) linked together in a worldwide network. The fact that they aren't says a great deal to my over-active and depressed thought state on this particular subject...
According to some very informative posts on the Yahoo SCOX stock board, Symantec has the rights to a very key patent in this area and McAfee has a perpetual, fully paid-up license to the said patent. Neither company would relish MSFT moving in on their nice little market and may well have solid legal grounding for setting $FELINE amongst $AVIANS.
A nice paper. It makes out from the start that "all" that is threatened are current business models - not the end of the world, as the pigopolists would have us believe. A nice quote: "The new technologies vitiating those practical barriers... are demonstrating just how empty those legal rights may be and how poorly matched they may be with cultural norms and practice. Consumers are exploiting the exciting potential for greater interactivity and involvement with content, and are thus finding themselves in conflict with many of those who make content possible." I haven't read the paper too deeply yet but I do take issue with the "make content possible" bit - the ones who make content possible are generally the ARTISTS, not the middlemen whose business model is being circumvented by P2P. Plenty of artists support P2P distribution.
Also the paper's title touches on something that is rarely found in the mainstream media: control. There's some balance: "evidence that file sharing has caused losses to the music industry is controversial and film industry revenue is currently on the rise, online infringements
reasonably can be expected to reduce revenues in the long run." Some core truths are expressed in an iron fist/velvet glove manner: "Many believe that DRM is an illusory barrier to piracy. Even if DRM were able to preclude most people from distributing a given work, even one unencrypted copy can quickly propagate through a P2P system. No DRM is uncrackable, and, even without circumventing, files can be re-encoded into an unencrypted format once burned to CD or as they are outputted in analog form."
This looks like a very interesting paper and I shall enjoy reading it.
Apparently (according to the nosoftwarepatents.com link posted earlier) FFII Poland has been particularly active in helping Polish ministers to understand the issues. It could also help that Poland has no real hi-tech industry of its own (AFAIK) to lobby FOR patents but may see its future economic growth as being in that direction. I'm still angry with my own (UK) Government for refusing to listen and blatantly following the UK Patent Office's agenda (the UKPO has been one of the strongest pushers FOR software patents) - after the meeting organised earlier this month I still can't decide whether it's malice or just incompetence. Reports are that experienced software developers almost fell about laughing at the Government's proposed "technical effect" test, which is what they use to distinguish patentable from non-patentable software: the only trouble being that they refuse to define "technical" and the European and UK Patent Offices have made it plain that they consider almost any software to have a "technical effect"...
And about time too
on
The VHS is Dead
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
VHS was kind of good for the 1980s - but now it's rather showing its age. If S-VHS (and S-VHS ET, which allows you to record S-VHS standard recordings on decent high-grade VHS tapes) had come earlier to market we might have been a bit better off. It seems that electronic picture enhancement systems from Betamax could have been applied to VHS as well (but weren't). There is still something very clunky about using cassettes the size of paperback books to record on, when recordable disc technology exists. Even though you can still buy brand-name VCRs (like Sony), they aren't made by Sony any more.
Unfortunately, we already have the Euro-DMCA - it's called the European Union Copyright Directive (EUCD) and it has been ratified by several EU states, including the UK. It's maybe slightly less onerous than the DMCA but not much so. It goes back to what I was saying about US IP laws tending to be "exported"...
Firstly there are already rumblings of a European Broadcast Flag equivalent (despite the fact that unencumbered DTV equipment has been on sale over here for 6 years or more, providing an even more massive hole than the anything-up-to-July-2005 FTC rulemaking). We all know how US media interest-sponsored IP laws tend to get "exported".
More importantly, this affects all of us because of the economies of scale. If unencumbered equipment can't be sold in the US, it will be at least more expensive elsewhere as a massive potential market is cut off. Think of the Taiwanese motherboard industry being forced to produce two models - one DRMd for the US and the other unrestricted for non-US use.
Yes, even as a non-US resident, I care deeply about the foolishness going on in the US. If only I knew what to do about it, besides donate to the EFF...
I mean, not adapting as in sticking to the model of proprietary software that may have served them well for 15 years, but is now becoming unmanageable. You cite the security issues and the steps they are taking to address them - I think this is a symptom of a much bigger problem, namely that Windows is now too big a project to manage in house. CPU power doubles every 18-24 months (a la Moore's Law) and that means your software has to increase in complexity to take full advantage of it - distributing this workload is one of the chief advantages of the open source model. IMO the delays to and feature losses from Longhorn are a symptom of the same problem.
It's well known that 90% or more of MS' profit comes from Windows and Office. The other divisions you cite either lose money or just about break even/make a small profit (check MS' annual reports for full details). That profit isn't enough to keep the MS shareholders happy - yet a lot of MS' corporate debt is "hidden" in share options and they need to keep the share price high. A few months ago, MS had a higher market capitalisation (i.e. shares outstanding times share price) than IBM but which would you rather have your pension fund invested in?
Netware (hammered throughout the 90s by Wintel servers) and Unixware (offloaded to Santa Cruz Operation after only about 3 years) was "all" that Novell had. They are going through a painful, but necessary and promising, transition into a software services company. I think the more accurate summation of MS' problem is that they've angered far too many people for far too long, and even if they take the Damascus road tomorrow they may find a severe lack of partners and customers would kill them instead.
History is full of companies who fell out of the limelight because they couldn't or wouldn't adapt to new technology. One is happening right now as Kodak struggles to remain relevant in the world of digital photography (and it seems to me, they are trying to earn money from "traditional" photographic services such as printing, applied to digital photography - I'm not sure this will be successful). Where are all the typewriter manufacturers in a world of word processing? Despite the FUD and lock-in tactics (tactics that are becoming less and less successful with each iteration IMO), the same fate awaits Microsoft it they refuse to adapt. In contrast, look at IBM - in hibernation throughout much of the 1990s but emerging ready to do business with open source - and that's just one example of how they've adapted over the course of their history. Gates and Ballmer would do well to study this.
Well said - I agree completely. I think it's very interesting to note that, despite the paranoia here on/. about DRM "slipping in the back door" because uneducated Joe Public will "just accept it", the evidence is that this just isn't happening. I don't think it's a coincidence that the market leader in "legal" music downloads (iTunes Music Store) is also the one with the least restrictive DRM. A lot of the pessimism is starting to be misplaced I think - "Joe Public" knows damn well that change is in the air for the music business (even if they can't put their finger on why - improved communications == easier copying == no need for specialist distributors of music) and they also figure that DRM is likely to stop them doing what they want with their music. And sensibly, they aren't buying the devices that the consumer electronics companies (under pressure from the RIAA) want to sell them - devices crippled with DRM that let you do LESS with the music you've bought! I also don't think it's a coincidence that the market leader in portable music devices (the iPod) is one that primarily supports a completely unencumbered music format (MP3). Despite the hype about being the "Walkman for the 21st century" the offerings from Sony that insist on burdensome conversion to ATRAC, and harsh DRM, are nowhere - for this exact reason.
I also find it instructive, whenever a music industry lapdog or article starts lauding "copy protection" (as this article does) to mentally substitute the phrase "business model protection" because that's what it's all about (protecting rights to exclusive distribution of music). But there's no doubt in my mind that consumers have rumbled this and won't let the market players get away with it.
...at The Importance Of... - basically he makes the very sound point that this obfuscated distribution system is entirely unnecessary. All US Government documents are public domain (non-copyrighted) so any web site could put them up for static download without fear of DMCA attacks. It would make them far easier to find just by using Google. Instead "I go to the outragedmoderates.org website, go to the "Government Document Library," look up the documents I want, ignore the fact that I could download them from the website, start a P2P program, enter a search for the document name and/or outragedmoderates.org user name, and then download the documents, remembering that if I don't download the documents from outragedmoderates.org I might be getting inauthentic files."
You're not entirely correct. Yes, the lyrics and music of the song are still covered by copyright, but THIS PARTICULAR RECORDING of the song will not be, after 31st Dec 2004. So two Europeans could share an MP3 of it on Kazaa perfectly legally, or you could sample it and remix THIS RECORDING (a la JXL v. Elvis) - anything that involves the "mechanical reproduction" of this particular recording will not be covered by copyright any more.
Because of the 50 year rule for recorded music copyrights, a lot of famous recordings are entering the public domain in Europe - for example the work of Maria Callas. Indepedent record labels can therefore release their own compilations of these recordings - often at bargain prices.
It's important that we fight this issue, if it comes round to the European Parliament - they might not act quickly enough to "save" these particular recordings - BUT on 1st Jan 2013 the recordings of a certain Liverpool quartet will start to enter the public domain. If EMI is still around at this stage, and haven't forced a change of the law through, then you can bet there will be the most almighty wailing...
Hang on... If you're using XP Pro, that doesn't have Product Activation (as in, ring up MS to get a code based on a hash of your CD key and major computer components). Only XP Home does this - XP Pro is just authenticated via a CD key, as "normal" for MS products.
Gates says "If you don't want to create jobs or intellectual property..." (emphasis added). What kinds of intellectual property are there, and what might be affected by open source?
- Copyrights: open source software is still copyrighted as much as closed source software. He can't be talking about this sort of intellectual property.
- Patents: can also apply equally well to open or closed source software - indeed, some people call for software patents to explicitly include source code showing how the claimed "invention" is implemented.
- Trademarks: not really relevant; they're concerned with brand names and don't depend on if one chooses to share the underlying source code to a program or not.
- Trade secrets. Ah. We might be onto something here! Yes, something isn't a secret if you share it openly. Gee whizz - who'da thunk that?!
Yes, what Gates is saying is that you can't have trade secrets if you have open source software - only that's far too obvious a statement to make and any audience would see straight through it. So he uses the meta-FUD term "intellectual property" instead. What a sham. As with the RIAA and MPAA, what Microsoft really needs is a law that forbids circumventing an "effective" business model...
Slashdot Mirror
Also reading between the lines can be amusing.
"...and we passionately believe that working in partnership with ISPs to develop first-class, safe, legal, digital music services is the way forward."
Digital music services that are controlled by BPI members that is. Not music services controlled by "new media" companies or independent record labels.
"the [ISPs] need to educate their customers not to steal music..."
The ISPs need to educate their users not to take advantage of the fact that modern packet-switched networks make it very easy to transfer information and that ultimately music is just information. The ISPs need to educate their users that only the big, 20th century media companies that grew big by distributing music on plastic discs of various sorts (when that was the most technologically cutting edge way of distributing music) can distribute music in the 21st century, even when music consumers are voting in droves with their wallets and saying that they aren't so interested in plastic discs of finite capacity containing semi-arbitrary selections of tracks any more. The ISPs need to educate their customers not to circumvent these old business models. Also the ISPs need to educate their users that the copyright laws of the printing press era are rigid and unchangeable, even when they are spectacularly unsuited to and incapable of dealing with "mass piracy" brought on by the aforementioned ease of transferring information.
Yes, that's what ISPs need to educate their users about in the eyes of Big Media.
Apart from OpenServer, which is SVR3.2-based, they don't have much. The Court ruling is that Novell owns the copyrights to SVR4 and the general consensus on Groklaw and Investor Village SCOX board is that SCOs old and new added very little new to UNIXWare post-1995 that they can claim copyright on. Even if they did, part of their whole problem is that SVR4 is a mess copyrights-wise with lots of Intel, Microsoft and even unattributed BSD code in there. Forget open-sourcing it, it's not going to happen.
Minor nitpick but SCO's Investor Relations site is outsourced so you won't directly use SCO's bandwidth:
host ir.sco.com
ir.sco.com is an alias for cald.client.shareholder.com.
cald.client.shareholder.com is an alias for webcenter360.shareholder.com.
webcenter360.shareholder.com has address 170.224.5.57
ir.sco.com is an alias for cald.client.shareholder.com.
cald.client.shareholder.com is an alias for webcenter360.shareholder.com.
ir.sco.com is an alias for cald.client.shareholder.com.
cald.client.shareholder.com is an alias for webcenter360.shareholder.com.
host sco.com
sco.com has address 132.147.63.12
sco.com mail is handled by 10 mail.ut.sco.com.
Depending on one's definition of "technical problems" then there's a lot of patching to do because many of the problems are very deeply embedded. I don't just mean the infamous "auto space like Word 95" tags, but the lack of support for dates before 1900, the redefinition of the colourspace to clash with existing ISO standards and the hard-coded definition of non-working days to be Saturday and Sunday (which they are in Western culture but aren't in the Arabic world). A fairly comprehensive list of OOXML's failures is at http://www.grokdoc.net/index.php/EOOXML_Objections _Clearinghouse and it's an editable wiki as well.
Given that CC tries to create analogous licenses for non-software to those that already exist for software (sharealike == GPL, attribution required == BSD) I would say RMS is entitled to his opinion but I respectfully disagree. We know RMS disapproves of the BSD license and prefers the GPL, on account of maintaining the freedom of the software - fine, his opinion given freely. He doesn't seem to explicitly say so, but does he disapprove of the CC attribution license? His problem seems to be one of terms and definitions - not all CC licenses are free it's true, but this sounds more like a small marketing problem for the folks behind CC, rather like the perennial "open source" v. "free software" debate (neither term truly captures the meaning of GPL-like licenses). He does note that the GPL is unsuited, in his opinion, to a book or printed work and I'm struggling to see how it can be applied to other artistic works: do any other class of works (baking recipes being the only example I can think of right now, or maybe the exact colour combinations and brush techniques used in a painting?) have the distinction between human-readable/machine unreadable and human unreadable/machine readable representations of the same work? The GPL is all about ensuring software stays human readable, which is fine, but this isn't the problem with other types of creative work - the problem there is how to legally maintain one's right to a monopoly on the distribution of the work as a whole whilst also allowing others to use substantial portions to build their own works. Let people choose the license they want, is my opinion.
Of course, don't forget the deadline for closure of fact discovery is rapidly looming (27th Jan 2006 according to Groklaw's timeline of the IBM case) and since SCO doesn't have anything they need to manufacture a delay somehow. I would be very surprised if they get it though.
I expect IBM to refile its motions for summary judgement early in 2006 because from the evidence apparently filed here, SCO is still doing the same old dance about JFS, RCU and NUMA which no-one in their right mind believes are either copyright or contract infringing.
The Register's "Security Report: Windows vs Linux" published last October. Yes, OS X isn't Linux but the two share a common ancestor. The report demolishes, with evidence, the suggestion that Windows is more prone to malware because it's more popular. I've barely touched an OS X Mac so perhaps some of the criticisms levelled at Windows (e.g. that it encourages you to use the GUI to admin a server) are relevant to OS X as well, but my gut feeling is that Apple have made far fewer mistakes than Microsoft in their operating system design. *BSD is also well known for its inherent security. I wonder if someone's trying to make a bit of news on a quiet day?
A couple of months ago I did manage to get a (heavily edited) letter published in The Times newspaper here in the UK. Although they wanted hard references for many of my points, which I was caught off guard and not able to supply them with over the phone (such as the assertion that file sharing has no effect on CD sales - shortly before the OECD study was published that said the same thing) I did manage to persuade them to publish my opinion that the record industry's stance was borne out of a desire to maintain 20th century monopolies rather than anything else. The only followup I saw came a week later from a professional musician who said that he was scared of internet file sharing as well, because he believed he should be paid each time his music was performed, because this is how he earns his living, and this was nothing to do with "a futile attempt to preserve 20th century monopolies" (to quote my original letter).
This got me thinking, and I still am. Half of me thinks this guy is right and that he does deserve to be paid for the performance of his compositions (but EVERY time - insert credit card into CD player before pressing play?) But half of me thinks he is, in his own way, still living in the 20th century.
In summary, music isn't scarce any more and it CAN be copied easily. If our collective governments were wise, instead of letting the 20th century media barons cripple new technology, and force DRM-laden crap down our throats (Windows Vista and Intel's digitally restricted new chips spring to mind), they'd be busy devising new copyright laws that respect the fact that we all have "perfect copying machines" (computers) linked together in a worldwide network. The fact that they aren't says a great deal to my over-active and depressed thought state on this particular subject...
According to some very informative posts on the Yahoo SCOX stock board, Symantec has the rights to a very key patent in this area and McAfee has a perpetual, fully paid-up license to the said patent. Neither company would relish MSFT moving in on their nice little market and may well have solid legal grounding for setting $FELINE amongst $AVIANS.
Also the paper's title touches on something that is rarely found in the mainstream media: control. There's some balance: "evidence that file sharing has caused losses to the music industry is controversial and film industry revenue is currently on the rise, online infringements reasonably can be expected to reduce revenues in the long run." Some core truths are expressed in an iron fist/velvet glove manner: "Many believe that DRM is an illusory barrier to piracy. Even if DRM were able to preclude most people from distributing a given work, even one unencrypted copy can quickly propagate through a P2P system. No DRM is uncrackable, and, even without circumventing, files can be re-encoded into an unencrypted format once burned to CD or as they are outputted in analog form."
This looks like a very interesting paper and I shall enjoy reading it.
Apparently (according to the nosoftwarepatents.com link posted earlier) FFII Poland has been particularly active in helping Polish ministers to understand the issues. It could also help that Poland has no real hi-tech industry of its own (AFAIK) to lobby FOR patents but may see its future economic growth as being in that direction. I'm still angry with my own (UK) Government for refusing to listen and blatantly following the UK Patent Office's agenda (the UKPO has been one of the strongest pushers FOR software patents) - after the meeting organised earlier this month I still can't decide whether it's malice or just incompetence. Reports are that experienced software developers almost fell about laughing at the Government's proposed "technical effect" test, which is what they use to distinguish patentable from non-patentable software: the only trouble being that they refuse to define "technical" and the European and UK Patent Offices have made it plain that they consider almost any software to have a "technical effect"...
VHS was kind of good for the 1980s - but now it's rather showing its age. If S-VHS (and S-VHS ET, which allows you to record S-VHS standard recordings on decent high-grade VHS tapes) had come earlier to market we might have been a bit better off. It seems that electronic picture enhancement systems from Betamax could have been applied to VHS as well (but weren't). There is still something very clunky about using cassettes the size of paperback books to record on, when recordable disc technology exists. Even though you can still buy brand-name VCRs (like Sony), they aren't made by Sony any more.
Unfortunately, we already have the Euro-DMCA - it's called the European Union Copyright Directive (EUCD) and it has been ratified by several EU states, including the UK. It's maybe slightly less onerous than the DMCA but not much so. It goes back to what I was saying about US IP laws tending to be "exported"...
More importantly, this affects all of us because of the economies of scale. If unencumbered equipment can't be sold in the US, it will be at least more expensive elsewhere as a massive potential market is cut off. Think of the Taiwanese motherboard industry being forced to produce two models - one DRMd for the US and the other unrestricted for non-US use.
Yes, even as a non-US resident, I care deeply about the foolishness going on in the US. If only I knew what to do about it, besides donate to the EFF...
I mean, not adapting as in sticking to the model of proprietary software that may have served them well for 15 years, but is now becoming unmanageable. You cite the security issues and the steps they are taking to address them - I think this is a symptom of a much bigger problem, namely that Windows is now too big a project to manage in house. CPU power doubles every 18-24 months (a la Moore's Law) and that means your software has to increase in complexity to take full advantage of it - distributing this workload is one of the chief advantages of the open source model. IMO the delays to and feature losses from Longhorn are a symptom of the same problem.
It's well known that 90% or more of MS' profit comes from Windows and Office. The other divisions you cite either lose money or just about break even/make a small profit (check MS' annual reports for full details). That profit isn't enough to keep the MS shareholders happy - yet a lot of MS' corporate debt is "hidden" in share options and they need to keep the share price high. A few months ago, MS had a higher market capitalisation (i.e. shares outstanding times share price) than IBM but which would you rather have your pension fund invested in?
Netware (hammered throughout the 90s by Wintel servers) and Unixware (offloaded to Santa Cruz Operation after only about 3 years) was "all" that Novell had. They are going through a painful, but necessary and promising, transition into a software services company. I think the more accurate summation of MS' problem is that they've angered far too many people for far too long, and even if they take the Damascus road tomorrow they may find a severe lack of partners and customers would kill them instead.
History is full of companies who fell out of the limelight because they couldn't or wouldn't adapt to new technology. One is happening right now as Kodak struggles to remain relevant in the world of digital photography (and it seems to me, they are trying to earn money from "traditional" photographic services such as printing, applied to digital photography - I'm not sure this will be successful). Where are all the typewriter manufacturers in a world of word processing? Despite the FUD and lock-in tactics (tactics that are becoming less and less successful with each iteration IMO), the same fate awaits Microsoft it they refuse to adapt. In contrast, look at IBM - in hibernation throughout much of the 1990s but emerging ready to do business with open source - and that's just one example of how they've adapted over the course of their history. Gates and Ballmer would do well to study this.
I also find it instructive, whenever a music industry lapdog or article starts lauding "copy protection" (as this article does) to mentally substitute the phrase "business model protection" because that's what it's all about (protecting rights to exclusive distribution of music). But there's no doubt in my mind that consumers have rumbled this and won't let the market players get away with it.
...at The Importance Of... - basically he makes the very sound point that this obfuscated distribution system is entirely unnecessary. All US Government documents are public domain (non-copyrighted) so any web site could put them up for static download without fear of DMCA attacks. It would make them far easier to find just by using Google. Instead "I go to the outragedmoderates.org website, go to the "Government Document Library," look up the documents I want, ignore the fact that I could download them from the website, start a P2P program, enter a search for the document name and/or outragedmoderates.org user name, and then download the documents, remembering that if I don't download the documents from outragedmoderates.org I might be getting inauthentic files."
You're not entirely correct. Yes, the lyrics and music of the song are still covered by copyright, but THIS PARTICULAR RECORDING of the song will not be, after 31st Dec 2004. So two Europeans could share an MP3 of it on Kazaa perfectly legally, or you could sample it and remix THIS RECORDING (a la JXL v. Elvis) - anything that involves the "mechanical reproduction" of this particular recording will not be covered by copyright any more. Because of the 50 year rule for recorded music copyrights, a lot of famous recordings are entering the public domain in Europe - for example the work of Maria Callas. Indepedent record labels can therefore release their own compilations of these recordings - often at bargain prices. It's important that we fight this issue, if it comes round to the European Parliament - they might not act quickly enough to "save" these particular recordings - BUT on 1st Jan 2013 the recordings of a certain Liverpool quartet will start to enter the public domain. If EMI is still around at this stage, and haven't forced a change of the law through, then you can bet there will be the most almighty wailing...
Hang on... If you're using XP Pro, that doesn't have Product Activation (as in, ring up MS to get a code based on a hash of your CD key and major computer components). Only XP Home does this - XP Pro is just authenticated via a CD key, as "normal" for MS products.
- Copyrights: open source software is still copyrighted as much as closed source software. He can't be talking about this sort of intellectual property.
- Patents: can also apply equally well to open or closed source software - indeed, some people call for software patents to explicitly include source code showing how the claimed "invention" is implemented.
- Trademarks: not really relevant; they're concerned with brand names and don't depend on if one chooses to share the underlying source code to a program or not.
- Trade secrets. Ah. We might be onto something here! Yes, something isn't a secret if you share it openly. Gee whizz - who'da thunk that?!
Yes, what Gates is saying is that you can't have trade secrets if you have open source software - only that's far too obvious a statement to make and any audience would see straight through it. So he uses the meta-FUD term "intellectual property" instead. What a sham. As with the RIAA and MPAA, what Microsoft really needs is a law that forbids circumventing an "effective" business model...
...the "and no singing!!" sequence?!