The reason Stallman's idea doesn't work(aside from the fact that he's a loony) is that he's solving the wrong problem. Well he's not really solving the wrong problem as he would love to see companies like Microsoft and Intel broken up, but that's solving his problem, not the problem he's associating the fix to.
There's no such thing as "too big to fail", the issue is "too important to fail" and is an awful lot harder to solve.
Companies like Intel, Microsoft and/or Apple pretty much can't become too important to fail because, barring some sort of extraordinary act of corporate stupidity they only really go out of business because no one wants their product and if no one wants their product there's no real impact to the loss of said company. Even if they do make such a massive mistake, if the underlying business is sound someone will inevitably buy them up and keep going essentially as you go.
The companies that can become too important to fail are essentially companies which provide an essential service. Utilities, Banks, Hospitals, Transport etc. The loss of these kinds of companies, even when the companies in question are small has a significant impact on their customers, and the loss of a sufficiently large percentage of the service provision(either through one large entity or many small ones) failing is in essence catastrophic. This is difficult to legislate because as previously mentioned, having smaller companies doesn't necessarily solve the problem. Having your bank close down is a serious impact, even if everyone else's stays up. In addition, industry standards or lack thereof being what they are, gross misconduct of the kind which caused the GFC tends to be endemic in an entire industry. In essence, if you'd had 1000 smaller wall street banks, the likelihood would be that at least 80% of them would have been just as crooked and you'd still have needed to bail them out since losing 80% of the financial services sector is catastrophic no matter how many companies make that up.
The most common solution to this problem, even in the US, is to socialize these kinds of institutions. Even in the US, with the notable exception of banks, most companies which would fall under "too important to fail" are either fully publicly run or heavily regulated and subsidized. The idea here being that without the profit motive a lot of the asinine behavior dissipates.
For those who find the idea of fully socializing critical infrastructure too terrifying, there's something along the lines of the UK model where you bail the banks out when they fail, but instead of letting the people who caused them to fail or profiited by their failure to walk away into the sunset with loads of cash they get prosecuted and their assets seized(the UK didn't quite do this, but they came closer to this than the US did). This means that while the idiocy of a few people doesn't destroy the economy, the executives who caused the crash get heavily punished and the stock holders in these companies take heavy losses(as a shareholder, even a minor shareholder you are culpable, at least insofar as the value of your investment for the actions of the company). This provides a sort of compromise wherein taking stupid risks or allowing a company you hold shares in to take a stupid risk still causes you to pay a heavy price, but the rest of us who did not have a say in how that company was run don't.
Then of course you have the US model where you do something like buy up 90% of AIG without putting any government representatives on the board, allow the people who caused the mess in the first place to retain their jobs and profits and see shareholders walk away with a good ROI even though the company they invested in was criminally negligent. In essence you have the model wherein the idiots who took gigantic risks walk away handsomely rewarded while John Q Public takes it up the backside and millions of people who aren't rich enough to have their own lobbyists or friends in the administration lose their jobs and livelihoods and ge
Actually taxation is a way of using the free market to create societal changes.
You might disagree with the change their trying to create, and you're more than welcome under a taxed environment to continue your chosen behavior, albeit at a higher cost, but having to pay more doesn't actually affect your freedom in any way shape or form.
Next thing you'll be saying that Coca Cola encourages a Nanny State because it has the gall to charge you for its products instead of giving you caffeine for free.
You are indeed correct, I assumed the assignee on the patent front page was the current one, I am not a patent lawyer.
In actual fact, taking a closer look, the most interesting thing about the patent is that it expires in November(20 years from date of filing) of this year. If the OP hasn't released his product yet, maybe he can hold off till then, who knows.
The patent in question appears to be held by AT&T. IANAL, but presuming this law firm actually represents AT&T(it's possible they are just trying to scam you) and presuming that the idea of you violating said patent isn't laughably ridiculous(ie your product doesn't connect to any kind of network whatsoever, not just doesn't infringe said patent) you're pretty much screwed. The odds of you beating without going bankrupt are pretty near to zero so find yourself a lawyer, find out if the law firm actually represents AT&T, and find out what you need to do to either license the wretched thing or if there's a legal way for you to bin the product.
I'm also slightly confused. Your average US CD goes for what? About $13 or so? over approximately 10-13 tracks on average? So you're looking at about a dollar per sale(which might then be listened to a few hundred times or more). So even if we presume that the artist was getting 100% of the price of the CD, which they sure as heck weren't, if you can get someone to listen to your song 200 times(which isn't exactly unreasonable) and you've got a good solid album with songs people actually want to listen to as opposed to one song people can hear just by turning on the radio and 12 tracks no one cares about, you're pretty much in the same boat you were before.
Given that artists weren't getting anywhere close to 100% of the CD sales and that you could probably get more than 200 listens per customer out of a good song, artists could actually do a lot better than before.
It's not a panacea to allow bands with a few thousand listener to make a living out of it, but short of people massively changing the way they value entertainment, that's just really not going to happen.
The point of a DMCA takedown notice is to provide a certain amount of legal cover to people who might be hosting copyrighted content on behalf of others. While Germany(NZ has realy crappy internet, Mega is not hosted there) does not have a DMCA, they do have copyright and DMCA or no, knowingly hosting copyrighted material is likely in violation of German law. The crappy parts of the DMCA relate to the circumvention of copy protection mechanisms even for legal purposes(this is where the "it's illegal to unlock your phone under contract" actually comes from a I understand it). The safe harbor provisions and takedown notices, while often abused by big content are actually good for content hosts (like Mega.com) in that they provide them a way to avoid liability. Kim DotCom is not the pirate bay, he is not trying to fight for you right to pirate content, he's fighting for his right to be paid by people who pirate content. It's a fine distinction, but an important one.
Can you explain to me exactly how he was a) a wannabe patent troll, how b) that makes a damned bit of difference either way to the case and c) what exactly the judge is supposed to do about it even if he was?
The guy had filed for a patent before, doesn't make him a troll, he might be, but I certainly don't have enough info to say he was and I doubt you do either
Samsung wasn't arguing against patents, or against design patents, they were arguing that they didn't violate Apple's patents and only as a backup that the patents were invalid. Having filed for a patent and being in favor of patents doesn't really give any implied bias.
Judges have incredibly limited capacity to overturn a juries finding of fact in any case whatsoever, we might not like this all that much, but it's none the less true. Juries don't have to tell you how they decided anything and can use pretty much whatever insane logic they like. They shouldn't of course, but there's not much a judge can do about it (ya see this is how Slashdot's favorite pet rule of Jury Nullification works). This is for the blindingly obvious reason that if judges can simply overturn the findings of juries on a whim, we may as well just get rid of juries all together and give everyone bench trials with all that that entails.
I know that groklaw is violently anti-patent and in this case is violently anti-apple and so any legal decision which is made in Apple's favor must ipso facto be a huge screw up, but just because you don't like the result doesn't mean that the result wasn't fair, nor does it mean that the judge can do a damned thing about it whether it's fair or not.
Microsoft did all that too, they released the dev tools well in advance, they're free, and they've run lots of contests and whatnot to try and get people to develop for it, doesn't seem to be working.
The success of Android was pretty much identical to the success of the iPhone in the first place, they found a market segment that wasn't being catered to(specifically people who wanted a smart phone that wasn't crap and couldn't or didn't want to pay for an iPhone). That segment allowed them to succeed well enough that they're probably only a year or so away from being able to compete directly with Apple for the top end market share. Apple did exactly the same thing barring the pay issue, they marketed to people who wanted a smartphone that didn't suck.
That doesn't mean the current duopoly can't be broken, of course it can, app stores aside, people are extraordinarily fickle about these kinds of devices and all it wouldn't take much to massively swing the market, but the issue isn't really about how they treat the developers(though it's a factor).
Well leaving aside the "relinquish copyright" clause is stupid on the face of it, a disgruntled Microsoft employee probably doesn't actually have the right to relinquish said copyright and is not the copyright holder. There probably is someone(s) at Microsoft who can do that, and it would be interesting to see what the outcome of them doing such an upload might be from a legal perspective, but if they've gone rogue the company has bigger problems.
Kim DotCom created mega as a content sharing site which he intends to profit from. He's fully aware that said site will be used for copyright infringement at least in part and from a personal point of view he could care less. The point of the encryption on mega is not to secure the files, or to protect the users of said service(though it could perform said task at least in theory), the purpose is to cover Kim DotCom's gigantic read end.
Mega, like MegaUpload complies with DMCA take down notices as it is legally obligated to do. The problem with MegaUpload that Mega tries to solve is that the copyright holders felt that Kim DotCom should have done more to actively filter what they believe to be illegitimate content. Now on the grounds that from all appearances Kim DotCom doesn't give a crap about copyright, wants as many users as possible and doesn't want spend the money to do this kind of filtering, this was sort of a problem. To deal with this, they put in default encryption and if you keep your keys secret it's not horrible encryption and should protect you from "the man". If you share links which contain the decryption keys to decrypt said data and the RIAA/MPAA or the feds(depending on what you're trying to hide) will issue a take down notice with which Mega will comply.
The argument is that, unless the user provides those decryption keys, In theory, Mega cannot at any point determine what content is being stored on its servers(nor can anyone hosting a node for his distributed version of this system). Which should, at least by Kim's legal theorizing allow him to essentially sit on his rear end raking in the money and only act against content upon specific request. Personally I'd like to see this defense used successfully before I even contemplated being a node for something like this(or TOR for that matter).
Under these circumstances DMCA take down notices are expected and will be complied with as they were on megaupload.
I was referring to first releases of ideas not first releases of products. Windows 8 is obviously not the first release of Windows, but it is Microsoft's first stab at an OS which works in a touch and desktop environment. The core windows stuff is actually pretty great, the desktop/touch part(which is the bit which is new) is an abomination unto nuggen and must be scoured from the earth. Similarly Vista is Microsoft's first attempt to try and modernize their OS and enforce any kind of significant security whatsoever, it sucked(7 was pretty damned good though). IE7/8 are Microsoft trying to build a standards compliant browser and they suck, 9's not so bad though.
Fundamentally Microsoft releases their ideas half baked, and they do it a lot. When they actually finish baking the idea it's often quite good(I personally think that Microsoft can make an OS which functions on a phone a tablet and a desktop, at least they can if they stop thinking that embracing touch means no one wants to use a mouse anymore, whether they will or not, who knows).
I am not a "TFS Admin" I administer my companies TFS system. That is to say I installed it, I will upgrade it to the new version, every once in a while I change some permissions in it and I make sure that it gets backed up. I perform this task because I am a developer with an operational background so I both understand what TFS is for and am not am trusted by my previous colleagues not to blow up their infrastructure so they let me have admin access on servers. This takes a percentage of my time which is so small as to be immeasurable. My reference to the fact that I do this was to say "I am not pulling this information out of my ass, I have actually done this and been paid for it(in the sense that I am paid for any other 30 minute activity I might perform in my job over the course of a year)"
I suppose you could have someone at a large enough organisation who does TFS as a full time job, but they'd probably be more of a build manager than an actual TFS admin(TFS is not a VCS it contains a VCS).
TFS is actually quite good now, the problem is that like nearly all of Microsoft's good ideas, the first release(s) kind of sucked(Vista, Windows Phone, Windows 8, IE7/8). You can see where they're trying to go, but it doesn't quite get there in the end. I think the problem is that while they allocate absolutely ridiculous amounts of money into R&D and usually end up in the right place, they always feel for whatever reason that they need to get a version out quickly. That wouldn't be so bad of course, but their current release cycles sort of mean that those releases stick around longer than they probably should.
Within certain contexts, they really do. Most of the frameworks in the.NET stack are open source now, they run codeplex which is a relatively thriving open source community, the licensing for the Windows store is actually really OSS friendly, mono is at least nominally sanctioned. They're not likely to Linux or LibreOffice any time soon, but in recent years if it's in their best interest or at the very least doesn't harm their bottom line, they're relatively pro open source. The days of "Free Software is Communism and must be destroyed" are long over at Microsoft, at least publicly(I don't work for them, so I have no idea how they behave behind closed doors).
Realistically they're substantially more open source friendly than Apple(apple utilize open source software and release exactly what they have to legally and not a drop more as far as I can tell). The core of their attitude is probably on par with Google(they'll open source pretty much anything they don't make money off of, but nothing that they do). Obviously Google's contributions to OSS are far greater, but the nature of the attitude is about the same.
For all that folks criticize current management and for all that it has a major problem with releasing unfinished ideas, the Microsoft of the 90's is, at least from all outward appearances, long gone.
Note that's not to say they aren't greedy, or that they like competition any more than they ever did, but it's not like it was.
Explicit checkouts have their reasons(primarily TFS is built for a market where being able to tell exactly who has a file they've modified but not checked in is a valuable tool), they can be a bit annoying of course, but if you're using the IDE they are mostly invisible to the end user(there are some noteable exceptions of course, if you're referencing libraries that aren't either in nuget or hosted on the server you can be in for some fun times if you forget to check them out when you update them)
The review is would be for the 2008 variation(given 2010 wasn't released till later that year. As my companies TFS admin I can tell you that 2010 is a hell of a let better than 2008 and 2012 is better still. Specifically one of the things they changed in 2010 was to put separate project collections out into their own databases(you couldn't do that with 2008) which needless to say allows you to scale a lot better than was the case when that review was written.
That said, if all you want is version countrol, you probably shouldn't use TFS as you'll find it a bloated pig in comparison to most of the competition. That's mostly because TFS isn't just a VCS it's also a bug tracker, sprint planner and automated test/build server. It actually (IMO) does a damned fine job of it. It's also free with any level of MSDN subscription which is pretty well a given if you're using Visual Studio professionally. If you need the features it provides and are using VS it's actually a pretty good product with no significant downsides(a few odd design choices, but what software doesn't).
Yes except for two things. For one, when I say "problem" I mean it in terms of the mistake Apple made, this is provided by the context of Apple needing to learn a lesson (there mistake was licensing the stuff). For another, Apple lost because the court determined that the items that Apple had not licensed were not protected because there was either prior art or they were the only solutions(from the article I linked). Specifically according to that article, the court found that Microsoft had copied 189 elements of which 179 were licensed and the other 10 were not protected.
Except that's not the lesson Apple needed to learn. Apple copyrighted all their design elements, they just then went and legally licensed them to Microsoft and got a bit upset when Windows didn't turn out to be a cheap knock off of their idea no one would want to buy. Patents wouldn't have helped a bit in this instance because they actually gave Microsoft a license.
As to this case specifically, it sort of depends on how it eventually gets granted, but it appears that Apple is overreaching by a reasonable margin. Design Patents have a certain amount of validity in that they form a sort of appearance trademark. There's an argument to be made that if someone makes a product that looks identical to yours in such a way that there is confusion as to what it actually is that this is a problem, both for you as a company, but also for consumers. As such the aggregate of an Apple store may potentially be potentially be a valid subject for a design patent, but I'm not sure individual elements should be or how much of that aggregate you would need to copy for it to be a violation.
For one, TFA doesn't actually say that they will never provide that energy, it says they won't do it right now, which is obvious to anyone with half a brain. Pretty much the only people who believe they can are the last few remaining anti-nuclear hypocrites who believe that Climate Change is the biggest threat to human life on this planet and will cause demographic collapse but simultaneously think that nuclear power is worse.
Aside from that the article is full of the usual reduce consumption bullshit which fails to understand human nature. Even if we were to follow her advice and cut back out standard of living dramatically, the only way to actually reduce aggregate energy usage would be to say that everyone who doesn't live in a western nation has to keep the standard of living they have now. Efficiency is great, making things like public transport actually work is also great, the idea that people are going to voluntarily make significant reductions in their standard of living or that they should is idiotic. We can and eventually will be less stupid with how we use energy, but there are the better part of 6 billion people whose standard of living is worse than we had in the 19th century, they're not going to cut their energy use and we can't cut ours enough to offset theirs.
And what would those institutions of science teach if everyone kept everything they know a deep dark secret to protect it from being copied? The fact that patents get you paid are nice and that certainly helps foster innovation, but the thing you're actually paying for with the temporary monopoly is the publication. To get a patent you have to explain how your idea works(or that's the idea anyway), this means that inventors have to weigh up a guaranteed monopoly for a fixed period of time or a secret which could keep them on the gravy train for life or could be discovered tomorrow.
Patents help to guarantee us the shoulders of giants on which to stand.
That's not to say there aren't lots of issues with patents, or that the patent office is perfect, but there's a reasonable correlation between the advent and expansion of patents and the expansion of human knowledge, and the fact that patents require knowledge to be shared indicates this relationship might be at least partially causal. At the very least the argument that "patents would have stopped all human knowledge" is fundamentally wrong since a) they've been around since the 14th century, and b) a whole lot more stuff has been invented since then than was invented previously
And you need to find the right problem to try and solve.
Congress made what Aaron Schwartz did a felony, and in many cases the same actions with different intent should be a felony. This left the prosecutors with the choice of giving him a slap on the wrist and calling him a naughty boy or charging him with a felony. There was no intermediate action for them to take it was felony or nothing because there is no misdemeanor version of the acts he committed. If he'd plead down to some totally unrelated crime, a judge would probably have rejected the deal.
Yes you have a prosecutor trying to enhance his career with a celebrity case, but that isn't necessarily evil in and of itself, as letting him off with no penalty at all was not the right thing to do either. He knew what he was doing was wrong and needed to face a penalty for that.
Fundamentally in this case you have a brilliant young man who did something idiotic as young men often do. He was offered a couple of quite generous plea deals which for reasons of his own he rejected. After that he seems to have been brought to understand exactly what he was facing which was something damned scary. Again for reasons of his own he chose to end his own life rather than facing that pressure. Whether his current circumstances were the direct cause or just the straw that broke the camel's back neither you, nor I, nor anyone else will ever know. This was a tragedy for everyone involved including himself as, as I have stated, other options existed. I cannot say for certain he wouldn't have gotten 50 years, but even murderers generally don't get maximum sentences served consecutively. Personally I'd have been surprised if he got 5 years in minimum security, and he could very well have walked free.
The point of this is not to blame Aaron Schwartz, he did something stupid and suffered from a mental illness which got the better of him. It's not to say the prosecutors were angels. The point is to say that no one here was a monster. No one tortured Aaron Schwartz. No one killed him. Things could have been handled better and in hindsight maybe they would have been, but I've seen no evidence of gross misconduct on the part of anyone involved in this, maybe there's more we don't know about, and using threats of maximum sentences no one is going to serve to avoid a trial isn't exactly saintly behavior, but it's the behavior of humans, not monsters. Mostly what I haven't seen is evidence the justice system failed him, because it wasn't given a chance to.
We'd all rather Aaron Schwartz was still alive, we'd all rather he'd have been offered a plea that didn't involve a felony and that he'd taken it, but he isn't, and he wasn't, and no one killed him.
He got offered four months not fifty years and not even child molesters get maximum sentences served consecutively, he did something he knew was illegal and incredibly stupid.
Dud he deserve fifty years? No. Was there a snowball's chance in hell he'd have gotten fifty years? No. Do you have a legal right to a slap on the wrist and a warning because you're stupid? No. Aaron Schwartz killed himself, to avoid four months in jail and a felony conviction which for someone with his name recognition sound have had virtually no impact. Is that a tragedy? Sound there probably be a misdemeanor version of these crimes for people like assertion Aaron. Of course, but being told the maximum sentence isn't abuse, and if his defense lawyer didn't tell him that before he even rejected the plea the lawyer should be sacked.
I was referring to Wisconsin, and the congressional district populations which is what they're actually calling for are closer in population than I had thought. There's still gerrymandering going on, and I tend to knee jerk distrust any politician who suggests changing voting districts because they're all crooked.
I have no beef with the idea that conservatives or liberals should have their voices heard and that a more proportional voting system would be a better choice, but every time politicians are given the opportunity to divide up a group of voters they use it to rig the results, on both sides of the line, and they shouldn't be allowed to do it in this instance or any other.
Maybe I think that getting felt up by the TSA on the rare occasions I fly is at worst a minor inconvenience not some fundamental loss of freedom.
The Republican governor of my home state trying to make the electoral college votes if my home state proportional by voting district so 40% of the population get 80% of the vote is a bit more concerning and more if a threat to freedom, but disenfranchising half the population of a large number of swing states and rigging the presidential election for the foreseeable future is way less of a problem than having to wait half an hour to fly.
The patent system doesn't and shouldn't "guarantee" you success. It gives you 10 years to succeed, can't get it done in 10 years, tough luck.
The patent office is most certainly overworked and underfunded, but you won't solve that by screaming "eliminate patents", and Slashdot's definition of novelty is incredibly narrow(if it's not something out of star trek it's not novel) while their definition of prior art is incredibly broad(if star trek did it with a prop there's prior art). There are certainly bullshit patents out there, and there will probably always be bullshit patents out there, fortunately they only last 10 years so we only have to get better, not perfect.
Again this is somewhat of a Slashdot bias, companies certainly seem to trying to weasel out of their disclosure requirements and some amorphous patents have been approved, but it probably isn't as bad as we'd like to believe(most of us want every patent we don't like to be invalid). Once again though, we won't fix this problem by eliminating patents, we'll fix it by doing patents right. Given how important getting the patent system right is for everyone it's probably a department we ought to spend a bit more money on.
Slashdot Mirror
The reason Stallman's idea doesn't work(aside from the fact that he's a loony) is that he's solving the wrong problem. Well he's not really solving the wrong problem as he would love to see companies like Microsoft and Intel broken up, but that's solving his problem, not the problem he's associating the fix to.
There's no such thing as "too big to fail", the issue is "too important to fail" and is an awful lot harder to solve.
Companies like Intel, Microsoft and/or Apple pretty much can't become too important to fail because, barring some sort of extraordinary act of corporate stupidity they only really go out of business because no one wants their product and if no one wants their product there's no real impact to the loss of said company. Even if they do make such a massive mistake, if the underlying business is sound someone will inevitably buy them up and keep going essentially as you go.
The companies that can become too important to fail are essentially companies which provide an essential service. Utilities, Banks, Hospitals, Transport etc. The loss of these kinds of companies, even when the companies in question are small has a significant impact on their customers, and the loss of a sufficiently large percentage of the service provision(either through one large entity or many small ones) failing is in essence catastrophic. This is difficult to legislate because as previously mentioned, having smaller companies doesn't necessarily solve the problem. Having your bank close down is a serious impact, even if everyone else's stays up. In addition, industry standards or lack thereof being what they are, gross misconduct of the kind which caused the GFC tends to be endemic in an entire industry. In essence, if you'd had 1000 smaller wall street banks, the likelihood would be that at least 80% of them would have been just as crooked and you'd still have needed to bail them out since losing 80% of the financial services sector is catastrophic no matter how many companies make that up.
The most common solution to this problem, even in the US, is to socialize these kinds of institutions. Even in the US, with the notable exception of banks, most companies which would fall under "too important to fail" are either fully publicly run or heavily regulated and subsidized. The idea here being that without the profit motive a lot of the asinine behavior dissipates.
For those who find the idea of fully socializing critical infrastructure too terrifying, there's something along the lines of the UK model where you bail the banks out when they fail, but instead of letting the people who caused them to fail or profiited by their failure to walk away into the sunset with loads of cash they get prosecuted and their assets seized(the UK didn't quite do this, but they came closer to this than the US did). This means that while the idiocy of a few people doesn't destroy the economy, the executives who caused the crash get heavily punished and the stock holders in these companies take heavy losses(as a shareholder, even a minor shareholder you are culpable, at least insofar as the value of your investment for the actions of the company). This provides a sort of compromise wherein taking stupid risks or allowing a company you hold shares in to take a stupid risk still causes you to pay a heavy price, but the rest of us who did not have a say in how that company was run don't.
Then of course you have the US model where you do something like buy up 90% of AIG without putting any government representatives on the board, allow the people who caused the mess in the first place to retain their jobs and profits and see shareholders walk away with a good ROI even though the company they invested in was criminally negligent. In essence you have the model wherein the idiots who took gigantic risks walk away handsomely rewarded while John Q Public takes it up the backside and millions of people who aren't rich enough to have their own lobbyists or friends in the administration lose their jobs and livelihoods and ge
Actually taxation is a way of using the free market to create societal changes.
You might disagree with the change their trying to create, and you're more than welcome under a taxed environment to continue your chosen behavior, albeit at a higher cost, but having to pay more doesn't actually affect your freedom in any way shape or form.
Next thing you'll be saying that Coca Cola encourages a Nanny State because it has the gall to charge you for its products instead of giving you caffeine for free.
You are indeed correct, I assumed the assignee on the patent front page was the current one, I am not a patent lawyer.
In actual fact, taking a closer look, the most interesting thing about the patent is that it expires in November(20 years from date of filing) of this year. If the OP hasn't released his product yet, maybe he can hold off till then, who knows.
The patent in question appears to be held by AT&T. IANAL, but presuming this law firm actually represents AT&T(it's possible they are just trying to scam you) and presuming that the idea of you violating said patent isn't laughably ridiculous(ie your product doesn't connect to any kind of network whatsoever, not just doesn't infringe said patent) you're pretty much screwed. The odds of you beating without going bankrupt are pretty near to zero so find yourself a lawyer, find out if the law firm actually represents AT&T, and find out what you need to do to either license the wretched thing or if there's a legal way for you to bin the product.
I'm also slightly confused. Your average US CD goes for what? About $13 or so? over approximately 10-13 tracks on average? So you're looking at about a dollar per sale(which might then be listened to a few hundred times or more). So even if we presume that the artist was getting 100% of the price of the CD, which they sure as heck weren't, if you can get someone to listen to your song 200 times(which isn't exactly unreasonable) and you've got a good solid album with songs people actually want to listen to as opposed to one song people can hear just by turning on the radio and 12 tracks no one cares about, you're pretty much in the same boat you were before.
Given that artists weren't getting anywhere close to 100% of the CD sales and that you could probably get more than 200 listens per customer out of a good song, artists could actually do a lot better than before.
It's not a panacea to allow bands with a few thousand listener to make a living out of it, but short of people massively changing the way they value entertainment, that's just really not going to happen.
The point of a DMCA takedown notice is to provide a certain amount of legal cover to people who might be hosting copyrighted content on behalf of others. While Germany(NZ has realy crappy internet, Mega is not hosted there) does not have a DMCA, they do have copyright and DMCA or no, knowingly hosting copyrighted material is likely in violation of German law. The crappy parts of the DMCA relate to the circumvention of copy protection mechanisms even for legal purposes(this is where the "it's illegal to unlock your phone under contract" actually comes from a I understand it). The safe harbor provisions and takedown notices, while often abused by big content are actually good for content hosts (like Mega.com) in that they provide them a way to avoid liability. Kim DotCom is not the pirate bay, he is not trying to fight for you right to pirate content, he's fighting for his right to be paid by people who pirate content. It's a fine distinction, but an important one.
Can you explain to me exactly how he was a) a wannabe patent troll, how b) that makes a damned bit of difference either way to the case and c) what exactly the judge is supposed to do about it even if he was?
The guy had filed for a patent before, doesn't make him a troll, he might be, but I certainly don't have enough info to say he was and I doubt you do either
Samsung wasn't arguing against patents, or against design patents, they were arguing that they didn't violate Apple's patents and only as a backup that the patents were invalid. Having filed for a patent and being in favor of patents doesn't really give any implied bias.
Judges have incredibly limited capacity to overturn a juries finding of fact in any case whatsoever, we might not like this all that much, but it's none the less true. Juries don't have to tell you how they decided anything and can use pretty much whatever insane logic they like. They shouldn't of course, but there's not much a judge can do about it (ya see this is how Slashdot's favorite pet rule of Jury Nullification works). This is for the blindingly obvious reason that if judges can simply overturn the findings of juries on a whim, we may as well just get rid of juries all together and give everyone bench trials with all that that entails.
I know that groklaw is violently anti-patent and in this case is violently anti-apple and so any legal decision which is made in Apple's favor must ipso facto be a huge screw up, but just because you don't like the result doesn't mean that the result wasn't fair, nor does it mean that the judge can do a damned thing about it whether it's fair or not.
Microsoft did all that too, they released the dev tools well in advance, they're free, and they've run lots of contests and whatnot to try and get people to develop for it, doesn't seem to be working.
The success of Android was pretty much identical to the success of the iPhone in the first place, they found a market segment that wasn't being catered to(specifically people who wanted a smart phone that wasn't crap and couldn't or didn't want to pay for an iPhone). That segment allowed them to succeed well enough that they're probably only a year or so away from being able to compete directly with Apple for the top end market share. Apple did exactly the same thing barring the pay issue, they marketed to people who wanted a smartphone that didn't suck.
That doesn't mean the current duopoly can't be broken, of course it can, app stores aside, people are extraordinarily fickle about these kinds of devices and all it wouldn't take much to massively swing the market, but the issue isn't really about how they treat the developers(though it's a factor).
Well leaving aside the "relinquish copyright" clause is stupid on the face of it, a disgruntled Microsoft employee probably doesn't actually have the right to relinquish said copyright and is not the copyright holder. There probably is someone(s) at Microsoft who can do that, and it would be interesting to see what the outcome of them doing such an upload might be from a legal perspective, but if they've gone rogue the company has bigger problems.
It's a little bit more nuanced than that.
Kim DotCom created mega as a content sharing site which he intends to profit from. He's fully aware that said site will be used for copyright infringement at least in part and from a personal point of view he could care less. The point of the encryption on mega is not to secure the files, or to protect the users of said service(though it could perform said task at least in theory), the purpose is to cover Kim DotCom's gigantic read end.
Mega, like MegaUpload complies with DMCA take down notices as it is legally obligated to do. The problem with MegaUpload that Mega tries to solve is that the copyright holders felt that Kim DotCom should have done more to actively filter what they believe to be illegitimate content. Now on the grounds that from all appearances Kim DotCom doesn't give a crap about copyright, wants as many users as possible and doesn't want spend the money to do this kind of filtering, this was sort of a problem. To deal with this, they put in default encryption and if you keep your keys secret it's not horrible encryption and should protect you from "the man". If you share links which contain the decryption keys to decrypt said data and the RIAA/MPAA or the feds(depending on what you're trying to hide) will issue a take down notice with which Mega will comply.
The argument is that, unless the user provides those decryption keys, In theory, Mega cannot at any point determine what content is being stored on its servers(nor can anyone hosting a node for his distributed version of this system). Which should, at least by Kim's legal theorizing allow him to essentially sit on his rear end raking in the money and only act against content upon specific request. Personally I'd like to see this defense used successfully before I even contemplated being a node for something like this(or TOR for that matter).
Under these circumstances DMCA take down notices are expected and will be complied with as they were on megaupload.
I was referring to first releases of ideas not first releases of products. Windows 8 is obviously not the first release of Windows, but it is Microsoft's first stab at an OS which works in a touch and desktop environment. The core windows stuff is actually pretty great, the desktop/touch part(which is the bit which is new) is an abomination unto nuggen and must be scoured from the earth. Similarly Vista is Microsoft's first attempt to try and modernize their OS and enforce any kind of significant security whatsoever, it sucked(7 was pretty damned good though). IE7/8 are Microsoft trying to build a standards compliant browser and they suck, 9's not so bad though.
Fundamentally Microsoft releases their ideas half baked, and they do it a lot. When they actually finish baking the idea it's often quite good(I personally think that Microsoft can make an OS which functions on a phone a tablet and a desktop, at least they can if they stop thinking that embracing touch means no one wants to use a mouse anymore, whether they will or not, who knows).
I am not a "TFS Admin" I administer my companies TFS system. That is to say I installed it, I will upgrade it to the new version, every once in a while I change some permissions in it and I make sure that it gets backed up. I perform this task because I am a developer with an operational background so I both understand what TFS is for and am not am trusted by my previous colleagues not to blow up their infrastructure so they let me have admin access on servers. This takes a percentage of my time which is so small as to be immeasurable. My reference to the fact that I do this was to say "I am not pulling this information out of my ass, I have actually done this and been paid for it(in the sense that I am paid for any other 30 minute activity I might perform in my job over the course of a year)"
I suppose you could have someone at a large enough organisation who does TFS as a full time job, but they'd probably be more of a build manager than an actual TFS admin(TFS is not a VCS it contains a VCS).
TFS is actually quite good now, the problem is that like nearly all of Microsoft's good ideas, the first release(s) kind of sucked(Vista, Windows Phone, Windows 8, IE7/8). You can see where they're trying to go, but it doesn't quite get there in the end. I think the problem is that while they allocate absolutely ridiculous amounts of money into R&D and usually end up in the right place, they always feel for whatever reason that they need to get a version out quickly. That wouldn't be so bad of course, but their current release cycles sort of mean that those releases stick around longer than they probably should.
Within certain contexts, they really do. Most of the frameworks in the .NET stack are open source now, they run codeplex which is a relatively thriving open source community, the licensing for the Windows store is actually really OSS friendly, mono is at least nominally sanctioned. They're not likely to Linux or LibreOffice any time soon, but in recent years if it's in their best interest or at the very least doesn't harm their bottom line, they're relatively pro open source. The days of "Free Software is Communism and must be destroyed" are long over at Microsoft, at least publicly(I don't work for them, so I have no idea how they behave behind closed doors).
Realistically they're substantially more open source friendly than Apple(apple utilize open source software and release exactly what they have to legally and not a drop more as far as I can tell). The core of their attitude is probably on par with Google(they'll open source pretty much anything they don't make money off of, but nothing that they do). Obviously Google's contributions to OSS are far greater, but the nature of the attitude is about the same.
For all that folks criticize current management and for all that it has a major problem with releasing unfinished ideas, the Microsoft of the 90's is, at least from all outward appearances, long gone.
Note that's not to say they aren't greedy, or that they like competition any more than they ever did, but it's not like it was.
Explicit checkouts have their reasons(primarily TFS is built for a market where being able to tell exactly who has a file they've modified but not checked in is a valuable tool), they can be a bit annoying of course, but if you're using the IDE they are mostly invisible to the end user(there are some noteable exceptions of course, if you're referencing libraries that aren't either in nuget or hosted on the server you can be in for some fun times if you forget to check them out when you update them)
The review is would be for the 2008 variation(given 2010 wasn't released till later that year. As my companies TFS admin I can tell you that 2010 is a hell of a let better than 2008 and 2012 is better still. Specifically one of the things they changed in 2010 was to put separate project collections out into their own databases(you couldn't do that with 2008) which needless to say allows you to scale a lot better than was the case when that review was written.
That said, if all you want is version countrol, you probably shouldn't use TFS as you'll find it a bloated pig in comparison to most of the competition. That's mostly because TFS isn't just a VCS it's also a bug tracker, sprint planner and automated test/build server. It actually (IMO) does a damned fine job of it. It's also free with any level of MSDN subscription which is pretty well a given if you're using Visual Studio professionally. If you need the features it provides and are using VS it's actually a pretty good product with no significant downsides(a few odd design choices, but what software doesn't).
Yes except for two things. For one, when I say "problem" I mean it in terms of the mistake Apple made, this is provided by the context of Apple needing to learn a lesson (there mistake was licensing the stuff). For another, Apple lost because the court determined that the items that Apple had not licensed were not protected because there was either prior art or they were the only solutions(from the article I linked). Specifically according to that article, the court found that Microsoft had copied 189 elements of which 179 were licensed and the other 10 were not protected.
Except that's not the lesson Apple needed to learn. Apple copyrighted all their design elements, they just then went and legally licensed them to Microsoft and got a bit upset when Windows didn't turn out to be a cheap knock off of their idea no one would want to buy. Patents wouldn't have helped a bit in this instance because they actually gave Microsoft a license.
As to this case specifically, it sort of depends on how it eventually gets granted, but it appears that Apple is overreaching by a reasonable margin. Design Patents have a certain amount of validity in that they form a sort of appearance trademark. There's an argument to be made that if someone makes a product that looks identical to yours in such a way that there is confusion as to what it actually is that this is a problem, both for you as a company, but also for consumers. As such the aggregate of an Apple store may potentially be potentially be a valid subject for a design patent, but I'm not sure individual elements should be or how much of that aggregate you would need to copy for it to be a violation.
For one, TFA doesn't actually say that they will never provide that energy, it says they won't do it right now, which is obvious to anyone with half a brain. Pretty much the only people who believe they can are the last few remaining anti-nuclear hypocrites who believe that Climate Change is the biggest threat to human life on this planet and will cause demographic collapse but simultaneously think that nuclear power is worse.
Aside from that the article is full of the usual reduce consumption bullshit which fails to understand human nature. Even if we were to follow her advice and cut back out standard of living dramatically, the only way to actually reduce aggregate energy usage would be to say that everyone who doesn't live in a western nation has to keep the standard of living they have now. Efficiency is great, making things like public transport actually work is also great, the idea that people are going to voluntarily make significant reductions in their standard of living or that they should is idiotic. We can and eventually will be less stupid with how we use energy, but there are the better part of 6 billion people whose standard of living is worse than we had in the 19th century, they're not going to cut their energy use and we can't cut ours enough to offset theirs.
And what would those institutions of science teach if everyone kept everything they know a deep dark secret to protect it from being copied? The fact that patents get you paid are nice and that certainly helps foster innovation, but the thing you're actually paying for with the temporary monopoly is the publication. To get a patent you have to explain how your idea works(or that's the idea anyway), this means that inventors have to weigh up a guaranteed monopoly for a fixed period of time or a secret which could keep them on the gravy train for life or could be discovered tomorrow.
Patents help to guarantee us the shoulders of giants on which to stand.
That's not to say there aren't lots of issues with patents, or that the patent office is perfect, but there's a reasonable correlation between the advent and expansion of patents and the expansion of human knowledge, and the fact that patents require knowledge to be shared indicates this relationship might be at least partially causal. At the very least the argument that "patents would have stopped all human knowledge" is fundamentally wrong since a) they've been around since the 14th century, and b) a whole lot more stuff has been invented since then than was invented previously
.
And you need to find the right problem to try and solve.
Congress made what Aaron Schwartz did a felony, and in many cases the same actions with different intent should be a felony. This left the prosecutors with the choice of giving him a slap on the wrist and calling him a naughty boy or charging him with a felony. There was no intermediate action for them to take it was felony or nothing because there is no misdemeanor version of the acts he committed. If he'd plead down to some totally unrelated crime, a judge would probably have rejected the deal.
Yes you have a prosecutor trying to enhance his career with a celebrity case, but that isn't necessarily evil in and of itself, as letting him off with no penalty at all was not the right thing to do either. He knew what he was doing was wrong and needed to face a penalty for that.
Fundamentally in this case you have a brilliant young man who did something idiotic as young men often do. He was offered a couple of quite generous plea deals which for reasons of his own he rejected. After that he seems to have been brought to understand exactly what he was facing which was something damned scary. Again for reasons of his own he chose to end his own life rather than facing that pressure. Whether his current circumstances were the direct cause or just the straw that broke the camel's back neither you, nor I, nor anyone else will ever know. This was a tragedy for everyone involved including himself as, as I have stated, other options existed. I cannot say for certain he wouldn't have gotten 50 years, but even murderers generally don't get maximum sentences served consecutively. Personally I'd have been surprised if he got 5 years in minimum security, and he could very well have walked free.
The point of this is not to blame Aaron Schwartz, he did something stupid and suffered from a mental illness which got the better of him. It's not to say the prosecutors were angels. The point is to say that no one here was a monster. No one tortured Aaron Schwartz. No one killed him. Things could have been handled better and in hindsight maybe they would have been, but I've seen no evidence of gross misconduct on the part of anyone involved in this, maybe there's more we don't know about, and using threats of maximum sentences no one is going to serve to avoid a trial isn't exactly saintly behavior, but it's the behavior of humans, not monsters. Mostly what I haven't seen is evidence the justice system failed him, because it wasn't given a chance to.
We'd all rather Aaron Schwartz was still alive, we'd all rather he'd have been offered a plea that didn't involve a felony and that he'd taken it, but he isn't, and he wasn't, and no one killed him.
He got offered four months not fifty years and not even child molesters get maximum sentences served consecutively, he did something he knew was illegal and incredibly stupid.
Dud he deserve fifty years? No. Was there a snowball's chance in hell he'd have gotten fifty years? No. Do you have a legal right to a slap on the wrist and a warning because you're stupid? No. Aaron Schwartz killed himself, to avoid four months in jail and a felony conviction which for someone with his name recognition sound have had virtually no impact. Is that a tragedy? Sound there probably be a misdemeanor version of these crimes for people like assertion Aaron. Of course, but being told the maximum sentence isn't abuse, and if his defense lawyer didn't tell him that before he even rejected the plea the lawyer should be sacked.
I was referring to Wisconsin, and the congressional district populations which is what they're actually calling for are closer in population than I had thought. There's still gerrymandering going on, and I tend to knee jerk distrust any politician who suggests changing voting districts because they're all crooked.
I have no beef with the idea that conservatives or liberals should have their voices heard and that a more proportional voting system would be a better choice, but every time politicians are given the opportunity to divide up a group of voters they use it to rig the results, on both sides of the line, and they shouldn't be allowed to do it in this instance or any other.
Maybe I think that getting felt up by the TSA on the rare occasions I fly is at worst a minor inconvenience not some fundamental loss of freedom.
The Republican governor of my home state trying to make the electoral college votes if my home state proportional by voting district so 40% of the population get 80% of the vote is a bit more concerning and more if a threat to freedom, but disenfranchising half the population of a large number of swing states and rigging the presidential election for the foreseeable future is way less of a problem than having to wait half an hour to fly.