A quick look at pricewatch shows several companies selling Win2K with 5 CAL's for $600 or less.
The comparison is wrong though. With RedHat you're buying a software subscription, it's $800 annually. With Win2K it's $600 for the life of the product.
Spin it however you like, but if we were talking about Lindows Advanced Server nobody would be defending these prices. It's comical how many people are claiming these prices are reasonable, that the support terms are acceptable, that per-server licensing is ok. I feel quite confident that the next quarterly report from RedHat will show just how little enthusiasm RHAS has generated from those who can actually afford to pay for it. 12500 RHAS/ES installs at $800 a pop represents $10 million in sales for a company that had only $25 million in sales for it's last quarter. 31000 RHAS/ES installs would DOUBLE their sales. If you really think that's likely, you should be buying up their stock.
Why are people soo willing to put a good spin on a company that's jerking around it's massive installed base for the sake of a few thousand commercial licenses?
For ADHD slashdotters: A design consists of the visual ornamental characteristics embodied in, or applied to, an article of manufacture...
In general terms, a "utility patent" protects the way an article is used and works (35 U.S.C. 101), while a "design patent" protects the way an article looks (35 U.S.C. 171)...
Clearly a design that simulates a well-known or naturally occurring object or person is not original as required by the statute. Furthermore, subject matter that could be considered offensive to any race, religion, sex, ethnic group, or nationality is not proper subject matter for a design patent application (35 U.S.C. 171 and 37 CFR 1.3).
I'm gonna wait for the distro to pick it up, they'll make sure it's stable enough.
Depends which distros your talking about.. Some seem to care more about buzzwords than stability. But there are a few exceptions.
Personally, I wouldn't touch it with a 10 foot pole.. I don't pretend that I can help debug it in a meaningfull way...and this new version doesn't make my current version work one bit less.
Stability issues aside though, I'm overjoyed to hear that Radeon support is still improving. I'll pass a brick when DRI + Xinerama works with the OS Radeon drivers. Improving support for built in 3D chipsets is also great news. Even minimal performance is a godsend. These guys are doing great work.
Game colsoles are a better comparison. No one disputes that Microsoft has every right to include their own software bundled with the XBox. What you do with it after the fact is your own business.
The companies plan to first push Red Hat Linux Advanced Server for a modest level of certification: Evaluation Assurance Level (EAL) 2.
Sheesh... How much pushing does RHAS need? Show me a TCO study where RHAS at $800/server/year beats any free Linux distro. Simply plugging in a $800/server/year cost into most of the TCO studies I've seen makes Windows look like a bargain.
This certainly isn't the first or last attempt to wrap a user friendly UI on top of MySQL, but I think attempts to push MySQL + a nice GUI as an Access killer are mistaken.
My own experience with Access is fairly limited, but from what work I have done with Access, it seems that the biggest benefit is entirely ignored by this and other products like The Kompany's Data Architect. Access lets you take everything (data, reports, forms, queries, etc) and shove it all into a single portable file. Burning a copy to CD-R or Floppy is a snap, and it seems to be much easier for the clueless to wrap their heads around the idea of a database + reports + forms as a single file. I tried to sell a non-profit organization on the idea of MySQL + custom interfaces as a replacement to their quirky Access databases and they were completely unplussed by the idea.
It seems like such a simple idea to combine perl or Python forms, HTML, XML or PDF reports, and Data into a single gzipped file (maybee even a file that runs on it's own without any third party software other than a perl or python interpriter.) I don't get why so much effort seems to be directed at making MySQL user friendly instead. MySQL seems like complete overkill as an Access replacement. GNutrition is a good example of this problem.. Why in the world do you need a MySQL server for something so simple?
On-line and other mail-order merchants who don't have to collect sales tax have an unfair price advantage over local bricks-and-mortar stores
Yeah right.. so if this is the case, why are all the merchants they mention brick-and-mortar mainstreams. Do these folks believe that making online sales unattractive will bring customers back into their stores? Let's see Ebay and Amazon sign on to this voluntarily... Then we'll see if this doesn't hurt online sales.
More importantly, if this goes all the way through and Rambus wins in the end, it sets a pattern for companies to follow in the future...we all know how much Microsoft wants OpenGL to succeed.
It's suprising that some folks are just now finding this out. I noticed this a while back while trying to get a decent fix for the fubar xinetd package Redhat is pushing on its pre-8.0 distros.
I was really suprised by this since a long lifespan is the one thing that RedHat had over Mandrake (Mandrake's product lifespan is 2 years from date of initial release..) I don't know about the rest of you, but I have servers running right now with 2 years of uptime..some are in the same city as me, some are colocated in other cities. I can't upgrade these systems without either flying to the colocation site or having them mailed to me.
I came to precisely the same conclusion as the folks in this article. If you're using Linux on a server, it's stupid to use anything other than Debian. The commercial distros NEED you to upgrade, whether or not there are any compelling new features in their new versions. The Debian developers could care less about you buying a new set of CDs every six months.
It's pretty funny that RedHat seems to be following right in Mandrake's footsteps here. It will be a great boon for virus writers if they really do drop support for all those 7.2 installs out there...but I can't imagine that serious sysadmins will put up with this for very long.
If someone is to create something that they feel is theirs then they should not be forced to give up their rights to it after an expiration of a legal copyright.
You have every right to do this..and it's incredibly simple to do with or without copyrights. If you feel that something you've written or invented should be your property alone, don't publish it or tell anyone about it.
When you start publishing your ideas, it becomes part of the collective body of knowledge, and others quite naturally want to build upon it. If you don't want them to do this, keep it to yourself. Don't share it with anyone. Then you can die with the great satisfaction that you invented a perfect method for cold fusion, wrote three of the greatest books mankind has never seen and no-one else "stole" your work from you.
The details of what Houston was asking for begin on page 10. I don't see how either MS Office or OpenOffice could fit this contract. Take a look at items 7 (a disk explorer that saves deleted files on a remote server), 8 (virtual tape backup via the net), and 10 (MS Access clone...when the hell is OO going to clone Access?) And the whole thing is supposed to "run on Windows-based computers as well as Apple MacIntosh, Unix, and Linux-Based computers and operating systems."
Here's a nice little article about the negative impact of licensing.
It's funny how the merits of a CS degree for programming are debated on slashdot, and this sort of suggestion gets any discussion at all. Come on now, you can teach the basics of computer repair to a twelve year old in a day or two. Car mechanics are expected to diagnose and fix component level problems.. No one extects a PC tech to do that any more.
It proves to be difficult to configure IIS in a precisely controlled way. The metabase is obscure and poorly documented, and produced too many surprises. Furthermore, a system created using sysprep does not produce a ready-to-run metabase... Figuring out the metabase structure, which elements needed to be set, and how to suppress the unwanted elements (for example, the trees defining the default and administration site) was the most complex and error-prone part of the entire setup design. Considerable reverse engineering was necessary. Major improvement is needed in the way the metabase is described to users, and the way that administrators can script the commonest tasks.
Microsoft's engineers can't figure out their own configuration files.
Wouldn't it be nice if everyone who read this thread and thought, "that's just wrong" let their families know that they didn't want any items from these stores for Chistmas, and why.
"So JD, what do you want for Christmas?"
"Clothes, computer crap, etc...but nothing from Best Buy, Staples, WalMart, or Target...they seem to think you're a cyber terrorist if you discuss their prices."
I was Mech Infantry from 1996 to 2000 in the 1st Infantry Division. I've never seen this POS before. We used a UCOFT simulator (page 9) for regular gunnery training, and CCTT for company level training.
Although I can't find anything on the net to back me up, if I remember right, the UCOFT ran on VAX/VMS. The graphics were about up to the level of bzFlag.
CCTT is a fairly recent creation though. The graphics in CCTT are quite good, but the last time I got to play in one (1999) the AI was completely braindead. I believe the simulators in CCTT ran on Windows, but I never saw a BSOD to back this up.
The TRUELY comical simulator was the MACS. This POS was a Nintendo light-gun built in the shape on of M-16 attached to a Commodore 64. My company still had these (though they were RARELY used) when I left in 2000.
Please don't take my comments the wrong way...You're preaching to the converted, but I really believe these items are essential to a newbies guide to installing Debian.
The problem with Nvidia drivers is much worse than with the commercial distros.. A newbie would have to (a) figure out how to install the kernel source, (b) figure out that the kernel.config file is in the/boot directory and doesn't come with the source, (c) figure out that he needs to "make oldconfig" (if he is used to "make menuconfig" as I was, he'll need to discover "apt-get install libncurses5-dev"), (d) deal with the regular Nvidia installation problems. Yes, I know this is all Nvidia's fault, but it's much more complex than "urpmi NVIDIA*.rpm" and should really be mentioned. I don't have an ATI card, but I would bet that their binary drivers are equally problematic.
My CD-RW experience required not only editing lilo.conf (obvious as you mentioned), but also adding:
Somewhere in the/etc/modutils/ directory, then running "update-modules". (Perhaps I brought this upon myself by recompiling the Kernel, but I don't believe that is the case.)
But the worst of all is not mentioning hdparm... A fresh Debian install crawls without UDMA enabled. It's a configuration issue, not an install issue, but it should certainly be mentioned. Don't Mandrake, RedHat and SuSE take care of this during the install?
Like I said though, I do think this article makes a great starting point for an "Idiot's Guide to Installing Debian." It would be even better with screenshots illustrating the different steps. It just needs to go further into initial configuration.
This is a nice start, but it leaves a lot of hurdles for a new user to overcome.
(1) DMA still needs to be turned on for the hard-disk.
(2) It may sound heretical, but most folks will want the Nvidia OpenGL drivers (this is a real pain)
(3)/etc/fstab will need to be edited if the newbie wants to see his Windows partition.
(4) printing...
(5) As mentioned in the article, most people use KDE or Gnome.
(6) CD-RW and DVD
(7+) I'm sure I've missed something. Just thinking back to the last time I set up a desktop system, I seem to remember adding my user account into a number of different groups to get things working properly.
Anyway, this isn't a bad article...it looks like a great place to start, but I think any newbie moving from Mandrake to Debian following these instructions will be left completely pissed off that their machine is now incredibly slow (1 above) and can't play a game like Chromium (2 above).
They don't have to build an infinite fence.. They only have to build one big enough to go around you...to trap you inside...
Call the fence "patented extensions" for instance. They can't make your FreeBSD any less free, but they can make any given piece of FreeBSD software incompatible with windows software while maintaining compatability the other way around.
The GPL (or better still, LGPL) stops them from doing so. There is a reason why GPL'd Linux has made an impression where BSD and BeOS were unable to... The GPL strikes back!
Since software can be infinitely copied and distributed with no loss, think of it as an infinite stretch of arable land. Proprietary guys come along and fence off a section with a sign saying "keep out". GPL guys come along and fence off a section saying "free for everyone". BSD guys come along and notice that fences are utterly irrelevant...
...and then the Redmond guys show up and build a fence around everyone else, put up a big "All your base are belong to us" sign and dance around singing "embrace and extend!" The proprietary guys eventually start to starve and move in with the GPL guys... The GPL guys build AK-47s and start assaulting the Redmond fence that's surrounding everyone... The BSD guys build a camp fire and tell stories about how "once upon a time it was all free land as far as the eye could see."
The text you point out was published in March 1999. Unfortunatlely, the court case it refers to was reversed on appeal in November 1999 (Full text of appeal decision here.) I can't find any records of CBS taking this to the Supreme Court. I would assume CBS just shelled out some blood money after losing.
But that's not even the point. Copyright law is so incredibly confusing there is simply no way of knowing what is or isn't in the public domain. As this case shows, something that was public domain in March 1999 becomes private property again in November 1999. What happens when CBS or ABC realizes they lost something juicy that was released prior to 1923 and decides to get it back by changing the laws retroactively again?
I find it very troubling that MLK's speech would be licensed for use in commercials by his heirs. But, of course, they've systematically pimped MLK's legacy for profit.
After reading the arguments, it's hard to imagine the court with rule totally in line with what the government wants...that only Congress gets to interpret what "limited times" means. In fact, it seems like they're agreeing that retroactive extensions SHOULD be wrong, but that it will upset too much existing law and cause major problems in the short term.
It's fairly obvious that Conress isn't unrestricted by the wording.. They can't simply decide that all works past and future have a copyright term of 999,999,999 years, but the government seems to be arguing that Congress does have that authority. It will be really interesting to see what the court decides on as a test to guarantee that future changes to copyright law both promote science and the creative arts and only last for a limited time.
I really get the gut feeling that in the future Congress will not have the authority to do retroactive extensions, and even this will be great news. At least we'll have unhindered access to most of our 20th century history and culture sometime in the 21st century. I may still be living when it's perfectly legal to stand in front of the Lincoln Memorial and recite the "I Have a Dream" speech without permission from MLK's decendents.
Slashdot Mirror
A quick look at pricewatch shows several companies selling Win2K with 5 CAL's for $600 or less.
The comparison is wrong though. With RedHat you're buying a software subscription, it's $800 annually. With Win2K it's $600 for the life of the product.
Spin it however you like, but if we were talking about Lindows Advanced Server nobody would be defending these prices. It's comical how many people are claiming these prices are reasonable, that the support terms are acceptable, that per-server licensing is ok. I feel quite confident that the next quarterly report from RedHat will show just how little enthusiasm RHAS has generated from those who can actually afford to pay for it. 12500 RHAS/ES installs at $800 a pop represents $10 million in sales for a company that had only $25 million in sales for it's last quarter. 31000 RHAS/ES installs would DOUBLE their sales. If you really think that's likely, you should be buying up their stock.
Why are people soo willing to put a good spin on a company that's jerking around it's massive installed base for the sake of a few thousand commercial licenses?
"In January SCO hired David Boies, the attorney who prosecuted the U.S. Justice Department's antitrust case against Microsoft and defended Napster..."
Add to this the Gore recount, and you've got one hell of a resume. Why do people keep hiring him for these high profile cases?
The USPTO defines "design patents" here.
For ADHD slashdotters:
A design consists of the visual ornamental characteristics embodied in, or applied to, an article of manufacture...
In general terms, a "utility patent" protects the way an article is used and works (35 U.S.C. 101), while a "design patent" protects the way an article looks (35 U.S.C. 171)...
Clearly a design that simulates a well-known or naturally occurring object or person is not original as required by the statute. Furthermore, subject matter that could be considered offensive to any race, religion, sex, ethnic group, or nationality is not proper subject matter for a design patent application (35 U.S.C. 171 and 37 CFR 1.3).
I'm gonna wait for the distro to pick it up, they'll make sure it's stable enough.
Depends which distros your talking about.. Some seem to care more about buzzwords than stability. But there are a few exceptions.
Personally, I wouldn't touch it with a 10 foot pole.. I don't pretend that I can help debug it in a meaningfull way...and this new version doesn't make my current version work one bit less.
Stability issues aside though, I'm overjoyed to hear that Radeon support is still improving. I'll pass a brick when DRI + Xinerama works with the OS Radeon drivers. Improving support for built in 3D chipsets is also great news. Even minimal performance is a godsend. These guys are doing great work.
Game colsoles are a better comparison.
No one disputes that Microsoft has every right to include their own software bundled with the XBox.
What you do with it after the fact is your own business.
The companies plan to first push Red Hat Linux Advanced Server for a modest level of certification: Evaluation Assurance Level (EAL) 2.
Sheesh... How much pushing does RHAS need? Show me a TCO study where RHAS at $800/server/year beats any free Linux distro. Simply plugging in a $800/server/year cost into most of the TCO studies I've seen makes Windows look like a bargain.
This certainly isn't the first or last attempt to wrap a user friendly UI on top of MySQL, but I think attempts to push MySQL + a nice GUI as an Access killer are mistaken.
My own experience with Access is fairly limited, but from what work I have done with Access, it seems that the biggest benefit is entirely ignored by this and other products like The Kompany's Data Architect. Access lets you take everything (data, reports, forms, queries, etc) and shove it all into a single portable file. Burning a copy to CD-R or Floppy is a snap, and it seems to be much easier for the clueless to wrap their heads around the idea of a database + reports + forms as a single file. I tried to sell a non-profit organization on the idea of MySQL + custom interfaces as a replacement to their quirky Access databases and they were completely unplussed by the idea.
It seems like such a simple idea to combine perl or Python forms, HTML, XML or PDF reports, and Data into a single gzipped file (maybee even a file that runs on it's own without any third party software other than a perl or python interpriter.) I don't get why so much effort seems to be directed at making MySQL user friendly instead. MySQL seems like complete overkill as an Access replacement. GNutrition is a good example of this problem.. Why in the world do you need a MySQL server for something so simple?
On-line and other mail-order merchants who don't have to collect sales tax have an unfair price advantage over local bricks-and-mortar stores
Yeah right.. so if this is the case, why are all the merchants they mention brick-and-mortar mainstreams. Do these folks believe that making online sales unattractive will bring customers back into their stores? Let's see Ebay and Amazon sign on to this voluntarily... Then we'll see if this doesn't hurt online sales.
More importantly, if this goes all the way through and Rambus wins in the end, it sets a pattern for companies to follow in the future...we all know how much Microsoft wants OpenGL to succeed.
It's suprising that some folks are just now finding this out. I noticed this a while back while trying to get a decent fix for the fubar xinetd package Redhat is pushing on its pre-8.0 distros.
I was really suprised by this since a long lifespan is the one thing that RedHat had over Mandrake (Mandrake's product lifespan is 2 years from date of initial release..) I don't know about the rest of you, but I have servers running right now with 2 years of uptime..some are in the same city as me, some are colocated in other cities. I can't upgrade these systems without either flying to the colocation site or having them mailed to me.
I came to precisely the same conclusion as the folks in this article. If you're using Linux on a server, it's stupid to use anything other than Debian. The commercial distros NEED you to upgrade, whether or not there are any compelling new features in their new versions. The Debian developers could care less about you buying a new set of CDs every six months.
It's pretty funny that RedHat seems to be following right in Mandrake's footsteps here. It will be a great boon for virus writers if they really do drop support for all those 7.2 installs out there...but I can't imagine that serious sysadmins will put up with this for very long.
If someone is to create something that they feel is theirs then they should not be forced to give up their rights to it after an expiration of a legal copyright.
You have every right to do this..and it's incredibly simple to do with or without copyrights. If you feel that something you've written or invented should be your property alone, don't publish it or tell anyone about it.
When you start publishing your ideas, it becomes part of the collective body of knowledge, and others quite naturally want to build upon it. If you don't want them to do this, keep it to yourself. Don't share it with anyone. Then you can die with the great satisfaction that you invented a perfect method for cold fusion, wrote three of the greatest books mankind has never seen and no-one else "stole" your work from you.
Here's the RFP that they won.
The details of what Houston was asking for begin on page 10. I don't see how either MS Office or OpenOffice could fit this contract. Take a look at items 7 (a disk explorer that saves deleted files on a remote server), 8 (virtual tape backup via the net), and 10 (MS Access clone...when the hell is OO going to clone Access?) And the whole thing is supposed to "run on Windows-based computers as well as Apple MacIntosh, Unix, and Linux-Based computers and operating systems."
Here's a nice little article about the negative impact of licensing.
It's funny how the merits of a CS degree for programming are debated on slashdot, and this sort of suggestion gets any discussion at all. Come on now, you can teach the basics of computer repair to a twelve year old in a day or two. Car mechanics are expected to diagnose and fix component level problems.. No one extects a PC tech to do that any more.
It proves to be difficult to configure IIS in a precisely controlled way. The metabase is obscure and poorly documented, and produced too many surprises. Furthermore, a system created using sysprep does not produce a ready-to-run metabase... Figuring out the metabase structure, which elements needed to be set, and how to suppress the unwanted elements (for example, the trees defining the default and administration site) was the most complex and error-prone part of the entire setup design. Considerable reverse engineering was necessary. Major improvement is needed in the way the metabase is described to users, and the way that administrators can script the commonest tasks.
Microsoft's engineers can't figure out their own configuration files.
Wouldn't it be nice if everyone who read this thread and thought, "that's just wrong" let their families know that they didn't want any items from these stores for Chistmas, and why.
"So JD, what do you want for Christmas?"
"Clothes, computer crap, etc...but nothing from Best Buy, Staples, WalMart, or Target...they seem to think you're a cyber terrorist if you discuss their prices."
That link I gave to the UCOFT also has details about MCOFT (page 12).
I was Mech Infantry from 1996 to 2000 in the 1st Infantry Division. I've never seen this POS before. We used a UCOFT simulator (page 9) for regular gunnery training, and CCTT for company level training.
Although I can't find anything on the net to back me up, if I remember right, the UCOFT ran on VAX/VMS. The graphics were about up to the level of bzFlag.
CCTT is a fairly recent creation though. The graphics in CCTT are quite good, but the last time I got to play in one (1999) the AI was completely braindead. I believe the simulators in CCTT ran on Windows, but I never saw a BSOD to back this up.
The TRUELY comical simulator was the MACS. This POS was a Nintendo light-gun built in the shape on of M-16 attached to a Commodore 64. My company still had these (though they were RARELY used) when I left in 2000.
Mandrake Expert comes to mind.
Please don't take my comments the wrong way...You're preaching to the converted, but I really believe these items are essential to a newbies guide to installing Debian.
.config file is in the /boot directory and doesn't come with the source, (c) figure out that he needs to "make oldconfig" (if he is used to "make menuconfig" as I was, he'll need to discover "apt-get install libncurses5-dev"), (d) deal with the regular Nvidia installation problems. Yes, I know this is all Nvidia's fault, but it's much more complex than "urpmi NVIDIA*.rpm" and should really be mentioned. I don't have an ATI card, but I would bet that their binary drivers are equally problematic.
/etc/modutils/ directory, then running "update-modules". (Perhaps I brought this upon myself by recompiling the Kernel, but I don't believe that is the case.)
The problem with Nvidia drivers is much worse than with the commercial distros.. A newbie would have to (a) figure out how to install the kernel source, (b) figure out that the kernel
My CD-RW experience required not only editing lilo.conf (obvious as you mentioned), but also adding:
alias scd0 sr_mod
pre-install sg modprobe ide-scsi
pre-install sr_mod modprobe ide-scsi
Somewhere in the
But the worst of all is not mentioning hdparm... A fresh Debian install crawls without UDMA enabled. It's a configuration issue, not an install issue, but it should certainly be mentioned. Don't Mandrake, RedHat and SuSE take care of this during the install?
Like I said though, I do think this article makes a great starting point for an "Idiot's Guide to Installing Debian." It would be even better with screenshots illustrating the different steps. It just needs to go further into initial configuration.
I was just asking for this same thing on Debian Community.
/etc/fstab will need to be edited if the newbie wants to see his Windows partition.
This is a nice start, but it leaves a lot of hurdles for a new user to overcome.
(1) DMA still needs to be turned on for the hard-disk.
(2) It may sound heretical, but most folks will want the Nvidia OpenGL drivers (this is a real pain)
(3)
(4) printing...
(5) As mentioned in the article, most people use KDE or Gnome.
(6) CD-RW and DVD
(7+) I'm sure I've missed something. Just thinking back to the last time I set up a desktop system, I seem to remember adding my user account into a number of different groups to get things working properly.
Anyway, this isn't a bad article...it looks like a great place to start, but I think any newbie moving from Mandrake to Debian following these instructions will be left completely pissed off that their machine is now incredibly slow (1 above) and can't play a game like Chromium (2 above).
They don't have to build an infinite fence.. They only have to build one big enough to go around you...to trap you inside...
Call the fence "patented extensions" for instance. They can't make your FreeBSD any less free, but they can make any given piece of FreeBSD software incompatible with windows software while maintaining compatability the other way around.
The GPL (or better still, LGPL) stops them from doing so. There is a reason why GPL'd Linux has made an impression where BSD and BeOS were unable to... The GPL strikes back!
Can we do some Star Wars analogies now?
Since software can be infinitely copied and distributed with no loss, think of it as an infinite stretch of arable land. Proprietary guys come along and fence off a section with a sign saying "keep out". GPL guys come along and fence off a section saying "free for everyone". BSD guys come along and notice that fences are utterly irrelevant...
...and then the Redmond guys show up and build a fence around everyone else, put up a big "All your base are belong to us" sign and dance around singing "embrace and extend!" The proprietary guys eventually start to starve and move in with the GPL guys... The GPL guys build AK-47s and start assaulting the Redmond fence that's surrounding everyone... The BSD guys build a camp fire and tell stories about how "once upon a time it was all free land as far as the eye could see."
The text you point out was published in March 1999. Unfortunatlely, the court case it refers to was reversed on appeal in November 1999 (Full text of appeal decision here.) I can't find any records of CBS taking this to the Supreme Court. I would assume CBS just shelled out some blood money after losing.
But that's not even the point. Copyright law is so incredibly confusing there is simply no way of knowing what is or isn't in the public domain. As this case shows, something that was public domain in March 1999 becomes private property again in November 1999. What happens when CBS or ABC realizes they lost something juicy that was released prior to 1923 and decides to get it back by changing the laws retroactively again?
I find it very troubling that MLK's speech would be licensed for use in commercials by his heirs. But, of course, they've systematically pimped MLK's legacy for profit.
After reading the arguments, it's hard to imagine the court with rule totally in line with what the government wants...that only Congress gets to interpret what "limited times" means. In fact, it seems like they're agreeing that retroactive extensions SHOULD be wrong, but that it will upset too much existing law and cause major problems in the short term.
It's fairly obvious that Conress isn't unrestricted by the wording.. They can't simply decide that all works past and future have a copyright term of 999,999,999 years, but the government seems to be arguing that Congress does have that authority. It will be really interesting to see what the court decides on as a test to guarantee that future changes to copyright law both promote science and the creative arts and only last for a limited time.
I really get the gut feeling that in the future Congress will not have the authority to do retroactive extensions, and even this will be great news. At least we'll have unhindered access to most of our 20th century history and culture sometime in the 21st century. I may still be living when it's perfectly legal to stand in front of the Lincoln Memorial and recite the "I Have a Dream" speech without permission from MLK's decendents.
(1) Build P2P network
(2) ????
(3) Sell movie rights
(4) Profit!