All works are essentially based upon other peoples works. Your work is most certainly derivative from many other works, some conscious and others subconscious. The only thing allowing you to have a monopoly on your particular idea at all is society. In exchange society requires you to give it back eventually. If you want to keep it from other people forever, it is simple - don't play it for other people.
Secondly, your comparison is not accurate. A car is made for a single user, and priced accordingly. A movie, game or application is made with some estimation of sales, based upon the market size and product quality. Nobody makes Photoshop or Lightwave and expects to sell one copy. If you are in the target market, and get use from the product, yet you take it for free, then of course you are affecting the producer of the product. The fact that nothing physical was moved from a to b makes no difference.
Yes, the products are priced for their target audience, but the price itself helps determine the target audience. When Photoshop is priced at $649, it is defining it's target audience. The people downloading Photoshop for home use (and, for this argument, I will assume businesses are not downloading pirated software) are unlikely willing (or often able) to pay the retail price. Yes, it is not legal, yes they should probably be downloading the Gimp and using that, but we can not pretend that they would actually be a sale. In truth, Adobe is happier that they are using Photoshop over the Gimp. That way the 1% of them or so that actually need to do photo editing at work will lobby their boss to buy photoshop, instead of just downloading the Gimp. The companies are choosing the price-point ASSUMING some degree of piracy. Piracy is part of the factors they use. It is convenient for companies to say that all the people using Photoshop illegally should be sales, but we all know that is not true. The problem comes about when these companies actually believing that all of those piracies should be sales, when that is clearly not true.
As I understand it, inkjet printers tend to be sold at cost and the companies are using the consumables as the source of their profit. I believe that when most consumers are faced with two feature identical printers - one "Proprietary Consumable" for $125 and another that is "Open Consumables" for $250 - most will see the price difference and go with the Proprietary one regardless that the total cost of ownership is much higher. IT professionals look at TCO, average consumers do not.
This patent was filed almost four years ago! Although it just recently issued, Intel did not need a patent to implement this overclocking prevention technology - they could have started implementing it as soon as the filed the patent (to prevent itself from being prior art). If they had any intention of putting this into production processors they most likely would have done so by now. I believe the Pentuium 4 was not out by late 1999 and they could have modified the socket to support the required 32KHz crystal or other changes necessary for this technology. I am assuming that they just decided that it was a bad business idea, as it would aggravate their customers.
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All works are essentially based upon other peoples works. Your work is most certainly derivative from many other works, some conscious and others subconscious. The only thing allowing you to have a monopoly on your particular idea at all is society. In exchange society requires you to give it back eventually. If you want to keep it from other people forever, it is simple - don't play it for other people.
As I understand it, inkjet printers tend to be sold at cost and the companies are using the consumables as the source of their profit. I believe that when most consumers are faced with two feature identical printers - one "Proprietary Consumable" for $125 and another that is "Open Consumables" for $250 - most will see the price difference and go with the Proprietary one regardless that the total cost of ownership is much higher. IT professionals look at TCO, average consumers do not.
This patent was filed almost four years ago! Although it just recently issued, Intel did not need a patent to implement this overclocking prevention technology - they could have started implementing it as soon as the filed the patent (to prevent itself from being prior art). If they had any intention of putting this into production processors they most likely would have done so by now. I believe the Pentuium 4 was not out by late 1999 and they could have modified the socket to support the required 32KHz crystal or other changes necessary for this technology. I am assuming that they just decided that it was a bad business idea, as it would aggravate their customers.