Ballmer wondered aloud why the content of his speech was not being captured and translated automatically, while also being synchronized with real-time video and a copy of his Microsoft PowerPoint presentation.
Because the speech was encoded using WMA Digital Rights Management, restricting the delegates from recording his words except via an audio stream licensed from Microsoft. Extracting audio "snippets" was prohibited by the DRM software, which meant that reporters on radio could either stream his entire speech or none of it.
A separate license was required to decode the real-time audio, with royalties paid by-the-minute (even modern-day-techno-savy journo's don't want to pay to broadcast Ballmer looking like a monkey) to the owners of the audio-streaming technology, which in this case happened to be Microsoft.
Finally, the PowerPoint presentation was similarly protected by traditional copyright law (its binary), the DMCA (its digital transmission), and - if it's been XML exported with the latest Office - probably patent law as well.
I'm rather fascinated to learn about the source code as since learning the Compaq IBM BIOS story n years ago I could never understand why the Compaq engineers had to sign contracts stating that they'd never seen the source. I'd presumed that it was in case they'd worked for IBM at some stage. I didn't realise it was because the source was publicly available.
It certainly makes a lot more sense now - I guess I've been working in the "code is copyrighted and secret" world for too long:)
Troll? I was mis-informed. I knew that Compaq had to reverse-engineer the BIOS to make their PC's IBM compatible; I was not aware that they needed to do this despite the source code being available.
This is no doubt something they would very much like to change.
They've cut all hardware except mice and keyboards.
Because they don't need to sell hardware - except to promote hardware as being "Windows ready". But on the other hand they've tried their hand at mobile phone OS's to compete with Symbian, and they have Windows CE. They don't need to sell hardware if they can get enough software licensees. Zero distribution cost, and no hardware outlay risk.
Their home software (outside Encarta) was a disaster (remember Microsoft Beethoven?) The Xbox doesn't have anywhere close to the market share they were hoping for. Very few people use MSN.
Although some of their home software has been a disaster, one only needs to look at MS Flight Simulator, Halo, and Age of Empires for areas where they have done very well indeed in home software (I'm reasonably sure that games are not business software). You could, of course, also look at the OS itself: Windows Media Player is shipped with every version of Windows. As is IE. As is MS Messenger. These are all 'home software', and Microsoft dominates these areas because, and in many cases, in spite of them.
What MS is doing is no different than Apple, although they actually aren't quite as bad because they're not locking people into hardware they create
Because they don't need to create hardware to lock you in to something. And in Microsoft's case that "something" is far more profitable than hardware: it's Windows. You buy an MS DRM encoded track you will most likely only ever be able to play it on Windows. And the biggest difference between Apple and Microsoft is: will you be able to legally convert a DRM encoded WMP file into a DRM-free MP3? You can do this with Apple, but the DRM restrictions for the MS system don't appear to have been released.
The company is helping to create a "Plays for sure" logo that will be used by device makers and online music services to assure consumers that purchases from participating companies will be compatible with each other, sources familiar with the plans say.
I think its fair to say then that, somewhat ironically, Apple won't be one of their partners. I'm fairly sure that Jobs won't want a "Plays for sure" logo on iPods, or iTMS. Which makes me wonder:
Given the huge popularity of iTMS and the iPod so far, will we see the beginning of another "Betamax vs VHS"-style technology battle? Will this be the move that forces Apple to license FairPlay in order to keep sales of iPods up? After all, if this is likely to be bundled in future versions of Windows, or even - perhaps - in future interim releases, then that's some 9x% of the planet with a music player that's tied to services that aren't apple, and using a music format that is not compatible with the iPod.
Or (somewhat unlikely), is this going to be the service that people finally realise what it means to be locked into vendor platforms? After all, all I saw on zdnet was a mention that it used Janus for DRM encoding - what was not mentioned was what limited rights was it permitting you to exercise? Surely if something like this hits the mainstream music-buying public there will be some kind of backlash.
Perhaps the most obvious penalty that Microsft faces is that to the trade press this is news. There's often no need to require advertisers to print a retraction of their claims, as the headlines will say it all.
How many people in the IT industry, for example, are not aware that Apple were forced to withdraw their G5 claims?
Except that if you actually were an official movie censor your opinion would carry far more weight in deciding whether to prosecute than if you were an unofficial movie censor.
The ASA carries a big stick in this regard. Because they are the official trade organisation for advertising, a referral to the OFT from the ASA is far more likely to be prosecuted than a referral from a private individual. This is where their weight comes from. Add into the mix that the ASA actually has the funds to investigate whether a claim is misleading, and you have a far more powerful body than one that simply says "please don't do that".
Going back to your censor analogy: if you are an unofficial censor, then you have to get the funds to build a case against someone if you want to prosecute them. If you area an official censor, you have a bigger stick: you (usually) have better funding, better legal advice, and your voice carries more weight with those making the final descision.
The ASA is the industries own self-regulating group, and its "real power" is basically a loud voice.
It's "real power" is actually the Office of Fair Trading who are a government body and who can apply for a court injunction to prohibit the display of an advert.
The ASA works because the UK law is behind it, and advertisers know if they don't abide by the ruling they risk being taken to court.
Without region coding, I would be free to legally purchase a copy of a DVD from either www.amazon.com or www.amazon.co.uk. So even though I live in the domestic market, if I bought from Amazon's UK site, the producer would be benefitting from my business when the distributor is legally entitled to my business.
Even with region-encoding you are free to do so. It is simply impossible to exercise that right without buying a separate DVD player for each region from which you buy a DVD. There's nothing illegal in doing that. My region-free DVD player simply means that I do not need a separate DVD player for each region. Nothing more. Nothing less.
You haven't stolen anything, but you've caused someone to lose money and someone else to gain money.
Which, as I understood it, is the whole point of competition: even in a global market. If one distributor offers a DVD at price X, and another offers the DVD at price X*2, I'm perfectly at liberty to choose the DVD at price X. Furthermore, if no european distributor chooses to distribute a film, I perfectly at liberty to go to a distributor that does. The copyright holder has a monopoly only so far as he chooses the distribution channels. Once he has done that, the distributors are open for competition - if they don't like that business model: tough luck.
If the thinking behind the DVD region encoding is simply to prevent a producer selling DVD's in competition to a distributor, then I can only think that the distributors can't write contracts. If I were a distributor, and I wanted exclusive rights to distribute a film, I'd damn well say so in any contract, and I'd specify damages if that clause was broken. Then if the producer attempted to make another deal with another distributor in the same region, I'd sue.
I'd suggest that distributors are, in fact, very good at writing contracts. One only needs to look at book deals to see this. I find it hard to believe that a film distributor is completely incapable of writing an exclusive distribution agreement into a contract and enforcing it, whereas the book publishing industry has no such problem.
Thus if I buy a region-free DVD player (as I have) I fail to see how I have "stolen" anything from anybody. I certainly haven't stolen from the producer so long as I buy a copy of the film I watch; if the producer has a good contract, he still gets his royalty cheque. If the producer does not have a good contract, then the only person "stealing" anything from anybody is the big bad distributor.
Why do you do it? Do you think that servers and bandwidth pay for themselves? How do you expect sites to put up impartial (read: not sponsored) content without some way for the site owners to make enough money to pay the bills?
Adverts are images. Images are larger in terms of bytes than text. Many ISPs have a download cap which if you exceed starts costing you money. As such more of my bandwidth is used by viewing adverts than it is viewing the content sponsored by the advert. Or - to put it another way - it actually costs me, by virtue of my download limit, more money to view an advert than it does to view the content. I am no more obligated to view an advert than I am to remain on the same television station during a commercial break.
Besides, I would contend that the reason the on-line advertising market is in trouble is because the model is wrong. Advertisers believed that they could track the success of their advertising campaign on a particular site, based upon the number of people who clicked on an advert on that site. But advertising is not now, and never has been, about "click-through". It's about market awareness.
If you show your brand on 100 sites then you've increased your brand awareness, and you should pay those sites based upon the amount of advertising real-estate that you've used. You don't pay a magazine based upon the number of people who bought your product whilst reading an article, you pay a magazine based upon the number of people who read the article, and may have noticed your advert. Same with television, same with radio. Why should the web be any different?
I don't disagree with you at all. Indeed it is precisely because of SCO's constant ability to 'get out of jail free' that I made the remark. I don't for one instance believe that this is the end of the case, companies will always drag out a court case as long as they possibly can - and SCO has been particularly good in this respect.
The "scuppered. Again" comment was mainly as a result of this from Groklaw:
You don't want to miss reading page 76. It's where IBM tells the judge that as recently as August 4, 2004, SCO was *still* offering the Linux 2.4 kernel for download, the very code it is suing IBM over. [....] I think, therefore, that SCO's case just went poof, on this one issue alone.
I think that Groklaw are probably right here. SCO no longer has the argument that they didn't know the code was still being distributed, so they have - by definition - been distributing disputed code under the GPL. Bang goes their case. But it's not the first time that their case has apparently gone Bang. All the claims of disputed code that turned out to be nonsense - for starters - should have scuppered their case. This one's going to drag on until SCO have no more money to fight with - IMHO.
I've been drinking too much. The presidential election was in 1932, not in 1933. I withdraw that statement. Similarly, the Riechstag election was in 1930, not in 1932.
To recap:
The presidential election was in 1932, where Hitler lost to Hindenburg. The Riechstag election was in 1930 where the Nazis became the second largest party, not the majority.
All complaints can be forwarded to Gelnfidich, Scotland.
The presidential election was in '33, not in '32. There was no Reichstag election in '33, it was in '32. The Nazi's became the second largest party, not the majority. I'd already stated that Hitler lost the presidency to Hindenburg.
I was well aware of the intent of the parent post, and don't recall disagreeing with it.
Hitler was not elected; he was appointed to the seat of Chancellor in 1933 by Hindenburg to whom Hitler had lost the presidential election to in 1932. He managed to convince Hindenburg to merge the seats of the Chancellor and President into one upon the death of Hindenburg.
Hitler became effective fuhrer after the Reichstag fire in 1933 when he claimed emergency powers that effectively quashed whilst not exactly outlawing political dissent. Strangely enough the merger of Chancellor and President was then approved by referrendum in 1934.
You are free to draw your own parallels if you wish.
The problem with that particular line of reasoning is that if you're not a terrorist there's no guarantee that you won't be fingered if the system thinks you're a terrorist. Fingerprint scanning - like all forms of identification - is imperfect, and like all imperfect systems its prone to false positives as well as false negatives.
It's not whether you are a terrorist or not, it's whether the system identifies you as a terrorist.
As an example: a case in south africa not so long ago, a British man was held for 21 days by South African authorities at the request of the FBI, because they mistakenly believed they "had their man". Imagine now that a system as falsely trusted as fingerprint scanning marks you - an innocent man - as a terrorist - the current bogey man. Your stay in a holding cell could well be beyond 21 days!
Of course, this is overlooking the fact that it would appear that these scanners are not likely to be linked to any central database!
If I've read this right then, the slander of title suit is not directly an attempt by SCO to prove that they owned the copyright they're claiming that they've already "proven" this, and Novell's filing of the copyright was contrary to a proven claim.
How peculiar. I'm not sure which is more weird - 'slander of title', or SCO's decision to chase this route!
Perhaps I'm missing something, but I thought that the reason SCO bought the slander of title case against Novell was because Novell didn't just publicly state that they owned the copyrights, but they filed the copyrights in with the copyright office with the intent to use the filings to undermine SCO's case(s).
If this slander case does get dismissed, does this mean that the copyright filing stands unchallenged? Or is there another route SCO can go down in order to have the filing retracted?
I'm not sure how copyright filings work in the US, as we don't have a similar system in the UK! (or not that I know of anyway)
How does it know you're breaking the law, and where's my right of appeal? There's no mention as to the accuracy of the program. If - for example - I'm driving from a 40mph limit into a 30mph limit, and I hit 30 just before or just after the 30 sign post, do I take a hit on my premium?
What if they get it wrong? Do I have a right to appeal?
I complain regularly about speeding drivers, but this is not a good solution!
There's regulation, and there's regulation I guess. On the one hand, there's regulation that says "thou shalt", on the other there's regulation that says "thou shalt not".
"Thou shalt monitor thy users activity because thine government demandest", vs.
"Thou shalt not monitor thy users activity because it is evil(tm)".
Personally, I'm agnostic on the subject of corporate regulation as regulation per-se is neither a Good Thing(tm) nor a Bad Thing(tm). Saying "thou shalt monitor thy customers" is a problem. Saying "thou shalt not con thy customers" is not a problem. But "regulation is A Problem(tm)" encompasses both outcomes.
Regulation is a tool. Like all tools it can be used well, or it can be used badly, but regulation in and of its self is neither Good(tm) nor Bad(tm)
Slashdot Mirror
Ballmer wondered aloud why the content of his speech was not being captured and translated automatically, while also being synchronized with real-time video and a copy of his Microsoft PowerPoint presentation.
Because the speech was encoded using WMA Digital Rights Management, restricting the delegates from recording his words except via an audio stream licensed from Microsoft. Extracting audio "snippets" was prohibited by the DRM software, which meant that reporters on radio could either stream his entire speech or none of it.
A separate license was required to decode the real-time audio, with royalties paid by-the-minute (even modern-day-techno-savy journo's don't want to pay to broadcast Ballmer looking like a monkey) to the owners of the audio-streaming technology, which in this case happened to be Microsoft.
Finally, the PowerPoint presentation was similarly protected by traditional copyright law (its binary), the DMCA (its digital transmission), and - if it's been XML exported with the latest Office - probably patent law as well.
I'm rather fascinated to learn about the source code as since learning the Compaq IBM BIOS story n years ago I could never understand why the Compaq engineers had to sign contracts stating that they'd never seen the source. I'd presumed that it was in case they'd worked for IBM at some stage. I didn't realise it was because the source was publicly available.
:)
It certainly makes a lot more sense now - I guess I've been working in the "code is copyrighted and secret" world for too long
Troll? I was mis-informed. I knew that Compaq had to reverse-engineer the BIOS to make their PC's IBM compatible; I was not aware that they needed to do this despite the source code being available.
Mod parent overrated I agree. But troll?
What d'ya know. I didn't know that!
I stand corrected!
IBM's technical references for the original PCs contained nearly all of the engineering data needed to build a PC.
Except for one of the key components to make a PC: the "Build your own BIOS" reference.
Except MS doesn't dominate in all fields.
This is no doubt something they would very much like to change.
They've cut all hardware except mice and keyboards.
Because they don't need to sell hardware - except to promote hardware as being "Windows ready". But on the other hand they've tried their hand at mobile phone OS's to compete with Symbian, and they have Windows CE. They don't need to sell hardware if they can get enough software licensees. Zero distribution cost, and no hardware outlay risk.
Their home software (outside Encarta) was a disaster (remember Microsoft Beethoven?) The Xbox doesn't have anywhere close to the market share they were hoping for. Very few people use MSN.
Although some of their home software has been a disaster, one only needs to look at MS Flight Simulator, Halo, and Age of Empires for areas where they have done very well indeed in home software (I'm reasonably sure that games are not business software). You could, of course, also look at the OS itself: Windows Media Player is shipped with every version of Windows. As is IE. As is MS Messenger. These are all 'home software', and Microsoft dominates these areas because, and in many cases, in spite of them.
What MS is doing is no different than Apple, although they actually aren't quite as bad because they're not locking people into hardware they create
Because they don't need to create hardware to lock you in to something. And in Microsoft's case that "something" is far more profitable than hardware: it's Windows. You buy an MS DRM encoded track you will most likely only ever be able to play it on Windows. And the biggest difference between Apple and Microsoft is: will you be able to legally convert a DRM encoded WMP file into a DRM-free MP3? You can do this with Apple, but the DRM restrictions for the MS system don't appear to have been released.
The company is helping to create a "Plays for sure" logo that will be used by device makers and online music services to assure consumers that purchases from participating companies will be compatible with each other, sources familiar with the plans say.
I think its fair to say then that, somewhat ironically, Apple won't be one of their partners. I'm fairly sure that Jobs won't want a "Plays for sure" logo on iPods, or iTMS. Which makes me wonder:
Given the huge popularity of iTMS and the iPod so far, will we see the beginning of another "Betamax vs VHS"-style technology battle? Will this be the move that forces Apple to license FairPlay in order to keep sales of iPods up? After all, if this is likely to be bundled in future versions of Windows, or even - perhaps - in future interim releases, then that's some 9x% of the planet with a music player that's tied to services that aren't apple, and using a music format that is not compatible with the iPod.
Or (somewhat unlikely), is this going to be the service that people finally realise what it means to be locked into vendor platforms? After all, all I saw on zdnet was a mention that it used Janus for DRM encoding - what was not mentioned was what limited rights was it permitting you to exercise? Surely if something like this hits the mainstream music-buying public there will be some kind of backlash.
Perhaps the most obvious penalty that Microsft faces is that to the trade press this is news. There's often no need to require advertisers to print a retraction of their claims, as the headlines will say it all.
How many people in the IT industry, for example, are not aware that Apple were forced to withdraw their G5 claims?
Except that if you actually were an official movie censor your opinion would carry far more weight in deciding whether to prosecute than if you were an unofficial movie censor.
The ASA carries a big stick in this regard. Because they are the official trade organisation for advertising, a referral to the OFT from the ASA is far more likely to be prosecuted than a referral from a private individual. This is where their weight comes from. Add into the mix that the ASA actually has the funds to investigate whether a claim is misleading, and you have a far more powerful body than one that simply says "please don't do that".
Going back to your censor analogy: if you are an unofficial censor, then you have to get the funds to build a case against someone if you want to prosecute them. If you area an official censor, you have a bigger stick: you (usually) have better funding, better legal advice, and your voice carries more weight with those making the final descision.
The ASA is the industries own self-regulating group, and its "real power" is basically a loud voice.
It's "real power" is actually the Office of Fair Trading who are a government body and who can apply for a court injunction to prohibit the display of an advert.
The ASA works because the UK law is behind it, and advertisers know if they don't abide by the ruling they risk being taken to court.
Without region coding, I would be free to legally purchase a copy of a DVD from either www.amazon.com or www.amazon.co.uk. So even though I live in the domestic market, if I bought from Amazon's UK site, the producer would be benefitting from my business when the distributor is legally entitled to my business.
Even with region-encoding you are free to do so. It is simply impossible to exercise that right without buying a separate DVD player for each region from which you buy a DVD. There's nothing illegal in doing that. My region-free DVD player simply means that I do not need a separate DVD player for each region. Nothing more. Nothing less.
You haven't stolen anything, but you've caused someone to lose money and someone else to gain money.
Which, as I understood it, is the whole point of competition: even in a global market. If one distributor offers a DVD at price X, and another offers the DVD at price X*2, I'm perfectly at liberty to choose the DVD at price X. Furthermore, if no european distributor chooses to distribute a film, I perfectly at liberty to go to a distributor that does. The copyright holder has a monopoly only so far as he chooses the distribution channels. Once he has done that, the distributors are open for competition - if they don't like that business model: tough luck.
If the thinking behind the DVD region encoding is simply to prevent a producer selling DVD's in competition to a distributor, then I can only think that the distributors can't write contracts. If I were a distributor, and I wanted exclusive rights to distribute a film, I'd damn well say so in any contract, and I'd specify damages if that clause was broken. Then if the producer attempted to make another deal with another distributor in the same region, I'd sue.
I'd suggest that distributors are, in fact, very good at writing contracts. One only needs to look at book deals to see this. I find it hard to believe that a film distributor is completely incapable of writing an exclusive distribution agreement into a contract and enforcing it, whereas the book publishing industry has no such problem.
Thus if I buy a region-free DVD player (as I have) I fail to see how I have "stolen" anything from anybody. I certainly haven't stolen from the producer so long as I buy a copy of the film I watch; if the producer has a good contract, he still gets his royalty cheque. If the producer does not have a good contract, then the only person "stealing" anything from anybody is the big bad distributor.
Why do you do it? Do you think that servers and bandwidth pay for themselves? How do you expect sites to put up impartial (read: not sponsored) content without some way for the site owners to make enough money to pay the bills?
Adverts are images. Images are larger in terms of bytes than text. Many ISPs have a download cap which if you exceed starts costing you money. As such more of my bandwidth is used by viewing adverts than it is viewing the content sponsored by the advert. Or - to put it another way - it actually costs me, by virtue of my download limit, more money to view an advert than it does to view the content. I am no more obligated to view an advert than I am to remain on the same television station during a commercial break.
Besides, I would contend that the reason the on-line advertising market is in trouble is because the model is wrong. Advertisers believed that they could track the success of their advertising campaign on a particular site, based upon the number of people who clicked on an advert on that site. But advertising is not now, and never has been, about "click-through". It's about market awareness.
If you show your brand on 100 sites then you've increased your brand awareness, and you should pay those sites based upon the amount of advertising real-estate that you've used. You don't pay a magazine based upon the number of people who bought your product whilst reading an article, you pay a magazine based upon the number of people who read the article, and may have noticed your advert. Same with television, same with radio. Why should the web be any different?
I don't disagree with you at all. Indeed it is precisely because of SCO's constant ability to 'get out of jail free' that I made the remark. I don't for one instance believe that this is the end of the case, companies will always drag out a court case as long as they possibly can - and SCO has been particularly good in this respect.
The "scuppered. Again" comment was mainly as a result of this from Groklaw:
You don't want to miss reading page 76. It's where IBM tells the judge that as recently as August 4, 2004, SCO was *still* offering the Linux 2.4 kernel for download, the very code it is suing IBM over. [....] I think, therefore, that SCO's case just went poof, on this one issue alone.
I think that Groklaw are probably right here. SCO no longer has the argument that they didn't know the code was still being distributed, so they have - by definition - been distributing disputed code under the GPL. Bang goes their case. But it's not the first time that their case has apparently gone Bang. All the claims of disputed code that turned out to be nonsense - for starters - should have scuppered their case. This one's going to drag on until SCO have no more money to fight with - IMHO.
That's why I always mod in the morning before posting an article about SCO :-)
I've been drinking too much. The presidential election was in 1932, not in 1933. I withdraw that statement. Similarly, the Riechstag election was in 1930, not in 1932.
To recap:
The presidential election was in 1932, where Hitler lost to Hindenburg. The Riechstag election was in 1930 where the Nazis became the second largest party, not the majority.
All complaints can be forwarded to Gelnfidich, Scotland.
The presidential election was in '33, not in '32. There was no Reichstag election in '33, it was in '32. The Nazi's became the second largest party, not the majority. I'd already stated that Hitler lost the presidency to Hindenburg.
I was well aware of the intent of the parent post, and don't recall disagreeing with it.
Hitler was actually voted in.
Hitler was not elected; he was appointed to the seat of Chancellor in 1933 by Hindenburg to whom Hitler had lost the presidential election to in 1932. He managed to convince Hindenburg to merge the seats of the Chancellor and President into one upon the death of Hindenburg.
Hitler became effective fuhrer after the Reichstag fire in 1933 when he claimed emergency powers that effectively quashed whilst not exactly outlawing political dissent. Strangely enough the merger of Chancellor and President was then approved by referrendum in 1934.
You are free to draw your own parallels if you wish.
The problem with that particular line of reasoning is that if you're not a terrorist there's no guarantee that you won't be fingered if the system thinks you're a terrorist. Fingerprint scanning - like all forms of identification - is imperfect, and like all imperfect systems its prone to false positives as well as false negatives.
It's not whether you are a terrorist or not, it's whether the system identifies you as a terrorist.
As an example: a case in south africa not so long ago, a British man was held for 21 days by South African authorities at the request of the FBI, because they mistakenly believed they "had their man". Imagine now that a system as falsely trusted as fingerprint scanning marks you - an innocent man - as a terrorist - the current bogey man. Your stay in a holding cell could well be beyond 21 days!
Of course, this is overlooking the fact that it would appear that these scanners are not likely to be linked to any central database!
If I've read this right then, the slander of title suit is not directly an attempt by SCO to prove that they owned the copyright they're claiming that they've already "proven" this, and Novell's filing of the copyright was contrary to a proven claim.
How peculiar. I'm not sure which is more weird - 'slander of title', or SCO's decision to chase this route!
Perhaps I'm missing something, but I thought that the reason SCO bought the slander of title case against Novell was because Novell didn't just publicly state that they owned the copyrights, but they filed the copyrights in with the copyright office with the intent to use the filings to undermine SCO's case(s).
If this slander case does get dismissed, does this mean that the copyright filing stands unchallenged? Or is there another route SCO can go down in order to have the filing retracted?
I'm not sure how copyright filings work in the US, as we don't have a similar system in the UK! (or not that I know of anyway)
That's probably the reason for all the security: They're just making sure you're not drinking pepsi ;-)
That's the difference between "publicly" and "privately" accessible information.
The camera in the police car is not broadcasting around the world via the wonders of the world wide web.
How does it know you're breaking the law, and where's my right of appeal? There's no mention as to the accuracy of the program. If - for example - I'm driving from a 40mph limit into a 30mph limit, and I hit 30 just before or just after the 30 sign post, do I take a hit on my premium?
What if they get it wrong? Do I have a right to appeal?
I complain regularly about speeding drivers, but this is not a good solution!
There's regulation, and there's regulation I guess. On the one hand, there's regulation that says "thou shalt", on the other there's regulation that says "thou shalt not".
"Thou shalt monitor thy users activity because thine government demandest", vs.
"Thou shalt not monitor thy users activity because it is evil(tm)".
Personally, I'm agnostic on the subject of corporate regulation as regulation per-se is neither a Good Thing(tm) nor a Bad Thing(tm). Saying "thou shalt monitor thy customers" is a problem. Saying "thou shalt not con thy customers" is not a problem. But "regulation is A Problem(tm)" encompasses both outcomes.
Regulation is a tool. Like all tools it can be used well, or it can be used badly, but regulation in and of its self is neither Good(tm) nor Bad(tm)