1. The new standards, XML, etc, are going to be controlled as much outside the browser, by the productivity suite, as they will be within it. The standards for basic browsers have more or less solidified at this point. There's no more control to be taken here.
I think this sort of control was always very much the "consolation prize" for MSFT. (One of) the original point(s) of bundling IE in with Windows was probably to try and force people, via "embrace and extend", over to using Windows NT servers and IIS to serve content. Unfortunately this was the first example of them underestimating The Power of Open Source(TM) as Apache emerged at round about the same time, and could scale far better than NT4/IIS could, on proprietary Unices before the true rise of Linux.
2. The browser market has been driven into the ground. There's no money to be made here anymore, as decent free alternatives are available, and the market has gotten used to not paying for their browser. There won't be another Netscape threat.
If you're implying that MS perceived Netscape as a threat in a revenue sense, then I think you're a bit off base. Remember, the anti-trust trial witnesses explained at great length about the "applications barrier to entry" (namely, the positive feedback circle that Windows is popular because it has loads of applications written for it, which in turn feeds its popularity so more applications are written for it). Netscape, and especially Java (remember the still-born WordPerfect for Java?) threatened to undermine that barrier if the browser could become the platform for applications. With Mozilla and technologies like XUL, this threat is more alive than ever.
3. The whole "browser as your desktop" idea has faded away. MS is no longer in danger of losing its OS or productivity-suite sales to a browser company.
Possibly, but even KDE and GNOME perpetuate the "tradition" of using the same application for browsing the local file system and the web. I kind of agree about the threat to MSFT's OS business not coming from a browser company, but I think that's partly an artefact of history - MSFT's continued anti-competitive behaviour made it pretty clear that ANY serious threat to them would have to come from a decentralised organisation (e.g. FOSS) simply because MSFT would crush, by fair means or foul, any other company that tried to compete with them.
3. IE doesn't make them money anyway. At this point, the various holes are costing them more than IE provides them both in actual dollars in support and programmer hours that have to be devoted to containing the mess, and in PR.
Did IE EVER make them any money? OK, we never knew what the cost of Win95b and Win98 would have been if MSFT had been forced to unbundle IE, but it didn't directly make them money IMO. I think your last sentence is closer to the truth than you realise - MSFT has limited programming resources and I read a statistic (can't remember the source alas) that 80% of the Longhorn developers have had to be pulled off Longhorn work, to patch 2000/XP/2003 (and by implication, IE since the codebases are so inter-twined). It's worth reviewing ESR's discussion of Moore's Law as part of Halloween IX - basically, the easily-overlooked consequence of computer power roughly doubling every 18 months is that the software to make use of that power must also double in complexity concurrently with this. IMO, MSFT is becoming a classic victim of this, just as [old and new] SCO did. Of course, MSFT has far more programming resources than SCO does/did, but it will only buy them time and the continued delays and feature shedding of Longhorn are precisely the sort of symptoms to look for.
Terry Nation (and hence his estate) owns the rights to the Daleks 50/50 with the BBC. On a handul of Dalek episodes that were not written by Nation he is either credited as "Daleks Created By Terry Nation", or, if this credit was omitted, a voice over announcement to the effect was made. Such announcements can be heard on off-air audio recordings of some 60s Dalek stories. The designer who created the first physical Dalek from Nation's ideas (one Raymond Cusick) got (in 1963) 250 and a pat on the back, as I believe he has said in several interviews since.
'Cos it's a Release Candidate - a potential release-grade 0.9 if no serious bugs are found. OpenOffice.org 1.1RC5 is actually the same as the official 1.1.0 release - there were no bugs serious enough reported, so this candidate for release was chosen to be the release version. (What confused me was when K3B went from 0.9 to 0.10 - seemed like a huge retrograde step at first to me!)
I disagree. There are far greater pressures for switching platforms (such as the MS licensing fees hike and the pressure to upgrade to give MS another cash injection - not to mention Sasser and Blaster) now than there were 10 years ago when OS/2 was at the peak of its fitness. Like it or not, MS Office at least has become the standard and if you want to persuade the corporate users to switch, you need to support it. Also recall what Disney said about Photoshop - it was the last thing that kept them switching their animation studio over to 100% Linux desktops, so they paid Codeweavers $15k to support it.
There was no real incentive to switch to OS/2 from Windows as the state of the market was then. 10 years later there is, and I don't think the comparision is valid any more.
But the fact of the matter is that Microsoft has not done anything that other companies don't do on a regular basis.
Such as being sued by a range of State and National governments, as well as potential competitors, for violating anti-trust laws? I think you under-estimate the depth of feeling in the corporate world against MS - particularly after the Licensing 6 treadmill has come, been and gone without people getting anything for their money apart from the warmed-over rehash Office 2003. I would not be surprised if there are a large number of FOSS trials going on, but being kept very secret out of the desire to retain a competitive advantage over rivals that are still paying their MS taxes.
I'm not sure you are comparing like-for-like between WalMart and Microsoft. Has WalMart ruthlessly exploited a monopoly in one area, through product tying, to gain an unfair advantage in other markets? Can they actively prevent others from interoperating with their products and exert customer "lock-in"? These are genuine, if perhaps rhetorical, questions.
And that is to collapse under the weight of their own financial setup. I found this article, entitled Microsoft Financial Pyramid to be very enlightening. It's written by a qualified accountant so it must be true;-) In essence, Microsoft's $50 billion in the bank is almost literally unreal - it's been built up by paying their employees a very poor basic salary and making up for it by offering lots of very attractive share options. The problem comes if those employees decide to start exercising those options - say if MSFT starts dropping in value. This might create a chain reaction: other option-holders start panicking and exercising their options as well - and all this would create yet more downward pressure on the price of MSFT. To keep this from happening, the only option will be for Microsoft to start buying its stock back - this $50 billion might not be enough if the pressure gets too great...
Now bear in mind that (a) there are challenges from all sides coming at Microsoft (they have failed to gain much of a foothold in markets outside their core products of Windows and Office, both core markets now under heavy attack from Free alternatives) and (b) the price of MSFT has almost halved over the past 5 years (in fact, it was almost touching $100 a share in Feb 2000) and you might just think it's not all rosy in the MSFT garden. So much so that co-founder Paul Allen sold all his MSFT stock and got out whilst the going was good. This is also why MS decided last year to pay a dividend on their stock for the first time - they have to prevent institutional investors from jumping ship. The stock setup is their one (big) weakness.
It's called the European Union Copyright Directive and it was enacted into the national law of many member states last year. Imagine the fun if the worst provisions of this Directive get adopted into national law (they may not necessarily be so enacted) and the EU caves in over software patents - could a programmer's bank account be frozen and his house be raided at midnight for unkonwingly infringing a trivial and obvious patent? As has been remarked round these parts, George Orwell was right but out by 20 years...
I'd also point out that I have been downloading heaps of free, and legal, music from Sharing The Groove and ETree. It's mostly music from bands that permit taping and distribution of their concerts. It's a great way to try out new music as well. If I wasn't unemployed I might retaliate by buying some concert tickets...
Sorry Napster. Even if you weren't WMA-only you still don't have the sort of music I want to listen to.
Without going way way OT, that's the entire point. "Hobbyist venture" sounds straight from the Microsoft Book of FUD Volume 1, but this aside do you not see the relevance to the music discussion? Software (music) can be easily copied these days so treating it as a product is becoming an obsolete business model - there's no need for centralised "cathedrals" of programming (recording) expertise like Microsoft (the RIAA member companies). So you make money of services related to the commodity item like tech support and consulting, which is how Red Hat makes its money (admittedly I can't yet see a truly analogous concept in music to this but it will no doubt come to me). It's also beyond doubt that Red Hat and SuSE have "IP" in the Linux kernel but yet they're "giving it away" (under the GPL) and to an extent "losing control" over it - but they still make money. To my mind, this proves my original point but I'm suspecting you're more trolling than anything else so maybe I should just HAND.
It's true that iTunes "works" in the sense that people are using it, but as some point out it's just a perpetuation of the same tired "selling discrete amounts of music for a defined price" model, and the artists are really no better off than under the current system. This is my fundamental objection to all these online music stores. Also don't forget the BBC Talking Point which recently aired about these issues. Interestingly, for ages I never saw the BBC post comments which pointed out the "loss of control" factor as being the real thrust of the recording industry's complaint ($DEITY knows, I submitted enough of them) but now they have published a few of these. They took ages to have a talking point on the issue but once they did, and the overwhelmingly anti-RIAA mindset of the readers became clear, it seemed to have a definite effect on their other articles with less use of words like "piracy" and "stealing music" - and less simple rehashing of record industry press releases.
That is the $64,000 question. Right now it can't be answered and the RIAA is determined it won't be, since of course loss of control over distribution is their real problem with P2P, not the potential monetary losees. If P2P were completely legal and say industry-sponsored download sites emerged, we'd probably see swapping not so much of the music itself but playlists. A lot more effective than admittedly useful practice of linking to independent/unsigned artists' web sites? This IMO is where the RIAA companies COULD go if they chose - there's the problem you touch on of of too much music available for everyone to plough through. There's a golden opportunity for a Google-like service to index all this music - whilst the function of the record companies that truly is obsolete is distribution, the function they might still usefully perform is filtering the vast array of music sources down to a user's persoanl preferences.
Considering their real problem with file sharing is not the loss of money but loss of control over music distribution, anything that tries to tackle their public complaint whilst not addresing their real beef is bound to be rejected. Kudos to the EFF for trying but I think this is still 12 to 24 months ahead of its time. Congressman Boucher and Congresswoman Lofgren to the white courtesy phone please...
The WIPO treaties effectively neutralise themselves though, because they state that legal protection of "effective technical measures" is only applicable when the act of defeating them is intended to infringe copyright. It's really a pointless thing which is why the DMCA and the EUCD are so harsh - either you outlaw all methods of defeating TPMs, or you leave the door open for massive copyright infringement (since the tools to achieve fair use could also be used to infringe copyrights). It's one reason the whole notion of copyright is flawed in an age when digital copying is so easy.
Don't forget IBM's countersuit which WILL bankrupt SCO. The patent claims alone are enough to do that. It also depends on what Novell counter-sues for (they are 110% certain to file some sort of countersuit I'd say) and who gets to the winning post first. Novell might get its licensing rights back by default from the corpse of SCO...
Groklaw has a detailed eye-witness account. It seems SCO's new claims might just be about IBM continuing to distribute AIX after SCO "revoked" their license. And apparently IBM's lawyers wiped the floor with SCO's counsel (it wasn't Darl's brother this time!). Great reading - enjoy!
The elements in this area of the periodic table are all highly radioactive. They are INCREDIBLY unstable - we're talking half lives of seconds or less and production scales of maybe one atom a week. The theory is rather complex, but basically the binding energies of these super-heavy nucleii aren't enough to hold them togetehr, AIUI. That said, the same theory predicts a "sea of stability" at even larger atomic numbers (around 130 IIRC). That's not to say that such elements would be non-radioactive but they may be stable enough to isolate in sufficient quantities to do "normal" chemistry experiments on. Element 114 may not be stable enough even to detect in these minute levels.
By al means include a media player. Just don't force us to install it and (maybe?) don't allow them to force their own propietary codecs into the market by exploiting the Windows monopoly. Not that they would ever do a thing like this, of course.
I hope the EU goes through with the proposal to force MS to unbundle Media Player. It will be so great to watch them squirm if this happens: there's no technical reason why not (XP Embedded) and it will force their hand over the bundling of IE (again). A large fine will barely dent their $50b cash reserves:-/
The Wikipedia is a collection of CREATIVE WORKS. Databases are collections of FACTS. Fesit v. Rural Telephone Service Co. was about exactly this issue. Databases that just collect facts are NOT creative works and so are not covered by copyright. The Wikpedia IS a collection of creative works and is covered by copyright, however the copyright owners choose to license it.
SCO pretty much had to do this. If they didn't, an end user or anyone else they sued could just ask for their case to be postponed whilst SCO and Novell sort out the copyright issue between them. Only, SCO can't win this one because Novell's interpretation of the Asset Purchase Agreement is pretty obviously the correct one. Novell didn't need to sue SCO as the issue of whether the contract gives SCO the copyrights would doubtless be sorted out in the IBM case, but SCO does need to try to get their interpretation of the Novell purchase contract deemed correct. Of this I am sure they have no chance.
By suing they have effectively lost it IMO. If you read the Asset Purchase Agreement over at Groklaw, it's fairly clear that Novell is correct. Also Novell has claimed in the past that SCO has asked them to transfer the copyrights, but they (Novell) refused. If they can bring hard evidence of this out (and I would bet they can) then that proves SCO knew Novell retained the copyrights.
Also look out for the Novell counter-suit about SCO's actions in claiming the Novell acquisition of SuSE violated the non-competition portions of the (old) SCO-Novell contract.
Novell have played a vital role over the past few months in hastening SCO's demise. If SCO hadn't sued Novell they would still not get the UNIX copyrights. SCO can't win this one either way, much as they can't win the IBM suit. Ha ha.
You're completely wrong. Actors' union contracts at the time the episodes were made specified only one repeat max, and that within 5 years of first broadcast. Also Dr Who was videotaped and later recorded onto film (what the US refers to as "kinescope" recordings) for overseas sale. The main BBC library only had a mandate to keep filmed shows until the late 1970s, and the film recordings mostly stayed with BBC Enterprises (the comercial arm of the BBC). When Enterprises needed space they junked a load of their films, thinking the BBC Film Library had them safe and that these were only their sales prints. Unfortunately, they were wrong...
Looks like Penn State is getting Napster for free. There are (well-founded IMO) allegations of a conflict of interest on the part of one Barry Robinson who is not only a trustee of Penn State, but also an RIAA lawyer.
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1. The new standards, XML, etc, are going to be controlled as much outside the browser, by the productivity suite, as they will be within it. The standards for basic browsers have more or less solidified at this point. There's no more control to be taken here.
I think this sort of control was always very much the "consolation prize" for MSFT. (One of) the original point(s) of bundling IE in with Windows was probably to try and force people, via "embrace and extend", over to using Windows NT servers and IIS to serve content. Unfortunately this was the first example of them underestimating The Power of Open Source(TM) as Apache emerged at round about the same time, and could scale far better than NT4/IIS could, on proprietary Unices before the true rise of Linux.
2. The browser market has been driven into the ground. There's no money to be made here anymore, as decent free alternatives are available, and the market has gotten used to not paying for their browser. There won't be another Netscape threat.
If you're implying that MS perceived Netscape as a threat in a revenue sense, then I think you're a bit off base. Remember, the anti-trust trial witnesses explained at great length about the "applications barrier to entry" (namely, the positive feedback circle that Windows is popular because it has loads of applications written for it, which in turn feeds its popularity so more applications are written for it). Netscape, and especially Java (remember the still-born WordPerfect for Java?) threatened to undermine that barrier if the browser could become the platform for applications. With Mozilla and technologies like XUL, this threat is more alive than ever.
3. The whole "browser as your desktop" idea has faded away. MS is no longer in danger of losing its OS or productivity-suite sales to a browser company.
Possibly, but even KDE and GNOME perpetuate the "tradition" of using the same application for browsing the local file system and the web. I kind of agree about the threat to MSFT's OS business not coming from a browser company, but I think that's partly an artefact of history - MSFT's continued anti-competitive behaviour made it pretty clear that ANY serious threat to them would have to come from a decentralised organisation (e.g. FOSS) simply because MSFT would crush, by fair means or foul, any other company that tried to compete with them.
3. IE doesn't make them money anyway. At this point, the various holes are costing them more than IE provides them both in actual dollars in support and programmer hours that have to be devoted to containing the mess, and in PR.
Did IE EVER make them any money? OK, we never knew what the cost of Win95b and Win98 would have been if MSFT had been forced to unbundle IE, but it didn't directly make them money IMO. I think your last sentence is closer to the truth than you realise - MSFT has limited programming resources and I read a statistic (can't remember the source alas) that 80% of the Longhorn developers have had to be pulled off Longhorn work, to patch 2000/XP/2003 (and by implication, IE since the codebases are so inter-twined). It's worth reviewing ESR's discussion of Moore's Law as part of Halloween IX - basically, the easily-overlooked consequence of computer power roughly doubling every 18 months is that the software to make use of that power must also double in complexity concurrently with this. IMO, MSFT is becoming a classic victim of this, just as [old and new] SCO did. Of course, MSFT has far more programming resources than SCO does/did, but it will only buy them time and the continued delays and feature shedding of Longhorn are precisely the sort of symptoms to look for.
Terry Nation (and hence his estate) owns the rights to the Daleks 50/50 with the BBC. On a handul of Dalek episodes that were not written by Nation he is either credited as "Daleks Created By Terry Nation", or, if this credit was omitted, a voice over announcement to the effect was made. Such announcements can be heard on off-air audio recordings of some 60s Dalek stories. The designer who created the first physical Dalek from Nation's ideas (one Raymond Cusick) got (in 1963) 250 and a pat on the back, as I believe he has said in several interviews since.
'Cos it's a Release Candidate - a potential release-grade 0.9 if no serious bugs are found. OpenOffice.org 1.1RC5 is actually the same as the official 1.1.0 release - there were no bugs serious enough reported, so this candidate for release was chosen to be the release version. (What confused me was when K3B went from 0.9 to 0.10 - seemed like a huge retrograde step at first to me!)
There was no real incentive to switch to OS/2 from Windows as the state of the market was then. 10 years later there is, and I don't think the comparision is valid any more.
Such as being sued by a range of State and National governments, as well as potential competitors, for violating anti-trust laws? I think you under-estimate the depth of feeling in the corporate world against MS - particularly after the Licensing 6 treadmill has come, been and gone without people getting anything for their money apart from the warmed-over rehash Office 2003. I would not be surprised if there are a large number of FOSS trials going on, but being kept very secret out of the desire to retain a competitive advantage over rivals that are still paying their MS taxes.
I'm not sure you are comparing like-for-like between WalMart and Microsoft. Has WalMart ruthlessly exploited a monopoly in one area, through product tying, to gain an unfair advantage in other markets? Can they actively prevent others from interoperating with their products and exert customer "lock-in"? These are genuine, if perhaps rhetorical, questions.
Now bear in mind that (a) there are challenges from all sides coming at Microsoft (they have failed to gain much of a foothold in markets outside their core products of Windows and Office, both core markets now under heavy attack from Free alternatives) and (b) the price of MSFT has almost halved over the past 5 years (in fact, it was almost touching $100 a share in Feb 2000) and you might just think it's not all rosy in the MSFT garden. So much so that co-founder Paul Allen sold all his MSFT stock and got out whilst the going was good. This is also why MS decided last year to pay a dividend on their stock for the first time - they have to prevent institutional investors from jumping ship. The stock setup is their one (big) weakness.
To be fair, it seems the (in)famous Gates 640K quote is an urban legend.
It's called the European Union Copyright Directive and it was enacted into the national law of many member states last year. Imagine the fun if the worst provisions of this Directive get adopted into national law (they may not necessarily be so enacted) and the EU caves in over software patents - could a programmer's bank account be frozen and his house be raided at midnight for unkonwingly infringing a trivial and obvious patent? As has been remarked round these parts, George Orwell was right but out by 20 years...
I'd also point out that I have been downloading heaps of free, and legal, music from Sharing The Groove and ETree. It's mostly music from bands that permit taping and distribution of their concerts. It's a great way to try out new music as well. If I wasn't unemployed I might retaliate by buying some concert tickets... Sorry Napster. Even if you weren't WMA-only you still don't have the sort of music I want to listen to.
Without going way way OT, that's the entire point. "Hobbyist venture" sounds straight from the Microsoft Book of FUD Volume 1, but this aside do you not see the relevance to the music discussion? Software (music) can be easily copied these days so treating it as a product is becoming an obsolete business model - there's no need for centralised "cathedrals" of programming (recording) expertise like Microsoft (the RIAA member companies). So you make money of services related to the commodity item like tech support and consulting, which is how Red Hat makes its money (admittedly I can't yet see a truly analogous concept in music to this but it will no doubt come to me). It's also beyond doubt that Red Hat and SuSE have "IP" in the Linux kernel but yet they're "giving it away" (under the GPL) and to an extent "losing control" over it - but they still make money. To my mind, this proves my original point but I'm suspecting you're more trolling than anything else so maybe I should just HAND.
The various profitable Linux distributors would seem to disprove your simplistic assertion.
It's true that iTunes "works" in the sense that people are using it, but as some point out it's just a perpetuation of the same tired "selling discrete amounts of music for a defined price" model, and the artists are really no better off than under the current system. This is my fundamental objection to all these online music stores. Also don't forget the BBC Talking Point which recently aired about these issues. Interestingly, for ages I never saw the BBC post comments which pointed out the "loss of control" factor as being the real thrust of the recording industry's complaint ($DEITY knows, I submitted enough of them) but now they have published a few of these. They took ages to have a talking point on the issue but once they did, and the overwhelmingly anti-RIAA mindset of the readers became clear, it seemed to have a definite effect on their other articles with less use of words like "piracy" and "stealing music" - and less simple rehashing of record industry press releases.
That is the $64,000 question. Right now it can't be answered and the RIAA is determined it won't be, since of course loss of control over distribution is their real problem with P2P, not the potential monetary losees. If P2P were completely legal and say industry-sponsored download sites emerged, we'd probably see swapping not so much of the music itself but playlists. A lot more effective than admittedly useful practice of linking to independent/unsigned artists' web sites? This IMO is where the RIAA companies COULD go if they chose - there's the problem you touch on of of too much music available for everyone to plough through. There's a golden opportunity for a Google-like service to index all this music - whilst the function of the record companies that truly is obsolete is distribution, the function they might still usefully perform is filtering the vast array of music sources down to a user's persoanl preferences.
Considering their real problem with file sharing is not the loss of money but loss of control over music distribution, anything that tries to tackle their public complaint whilst not addresing their real beef is bound to be rejected. Kudos to the EFF for trying but I think this is still 12 to 24 months ahead of its time. Congressman Boucher and Congresswoman Lofgren to the white courtesy phone please...
The WIPO treaties effectively neutralise themselves though, because they state that legal protection of "effective technical measures" is only applicable when the act of defeating them is intended to infringe copyright. It's really a pointless thing which is why the DMCA and the EUCD are so harsh - either you outlaw all methods of defeating TPMs, or you leave the door open for massive copyright infringement (since the tools to achieve fair use could also be used to infringe copyrights). It's one reason the whole notion of copyright is flawed in an age when digital copying is so easy.
Don't forget IBM's countersuit which WILL bankrupt SCO. The patent claims alone are enough to do that. It also depends on what Novell counter-sues for (they are 110% certain to file some sort of countersuit I'd say) and who gets to the winning post first. Novell might get its licensing rights back by default from the corpse of SCO...
Groklaw has a detailed eye-witness account. It seems SCO's new claims might just be about IBM continuing to distribute AIX after SCO "revoked" their license. And apparently IBM's lawyers wiped the floor with SCO's counsel (it wasn't Darl's brother this time!). Great reading - enjoy!
(e6003 - chemist and part-time geek).
By al means include a media player. Just don't force us to install it and (maybe?) don't allow them to force their own propietary codecs into the market by exploiting the Windows monopoly. Not that they would ever do a thing like this, of course.
I hope the EU goes through with the proposal to force MS to unbundle Media Player. It will be so great to watch them squirm if this happens: there's no technical reason why not (XP Embedded) and it will force their hand over the bundling of IE (again). A large fine will barely dent their $50b cash reserves :-/
The Wikipedia is a collection of CREATIVE WORKS. Databases are collections of FACTS. Fesit v. Rural Telephone Service Co. was about exactly this issue. Databases that just collect facts are NOT creative works and so are not covered by copyright. The Wikpedia IS a collection of creative works and is covered by copyright, however the copyright owners choose to license it.
SCO pretty much had to do this. If they didn't, an end user or anyone else they sued could just ask for their case to be postponed whilst SCO and Novell sort out the copyright issue between them. Only, SCO can't win this one because Novell's interpretation of the Asset Purchase Agreement is pretty obviously the correct one. Novell didn't need to sue SCO as the issue of whether the contract gives SCO the copyrights would doubtless be sorted out in the IBM case, but SCO does need to try to get their interpretation of the Novell purchase contract deemed correct. Of this I am sure they have no chance.
By suing they have effectively lost it IMO. If you read the Asset Purchase Agreement over at Groklaw, it's fairly clear that Novell is correct. Also Novell has claimed in the past that SCO has asked them to transfer the copyrights, but they (Novell) refused. If they can bring hard evidence of this out (and I would bet they can) then that proves SCO knew Novell retained the copyrights. Also look out for the Novell counter-suit about SCO's actions in claiming the Novell acquisition of SuSE violated the non-competition portions of the (old) SCO-Novell contract. Novell have played a vital role over the past few months in hastening SCO's demise. If SCO hadn't sued Novell they would still not get the UNIX copyrights. SCO can't win this one either way, much as they can't win the IBM suit. Ha ha.
You're completely wrong. Actors' union contracts at the time the episodes were made specified only one repeat max, and that within 5 years of first broadcast. Also Dr Who was videotaped and later recorded onto film (what the US refers to as "kinescope" recordings) for overseas sale. The main BBC library only had a mandate to keep filmed shows until the late 1970s, and the film recordings mostly stayed with BBC Enterprises (the comercial arm of the BBC). When Enterprises needed space they junked a load of their films, thinking the BBC Film Library had them safe and that these were only their sales prints. Unfortunately, they were wrong...
Looks like Penn State is getting Napster for free. There are (well-founded IMO) allegations of a conflict of interest on the part of one Barry Robinson who is not only a trustee of Penn State, but also an RIAA lawyer.