Exactly. People upgraded from vinyl and cassettes to CDs because vinyl was hefty and inconvenient and was highly susceptible to wear and tear and scratches, while cassettes had the annoyance of having to fast-forward and rewind. Similarly, most people upgraded to DVD from VHS (though many are still on VHS only) for the convenience of not having to rewind, the smaller size, and the extra features on the DVD... not for the quality.
With most people being content with MP3, which is a step down in quality from CDs, there's no way they're going to get the masses to pay extra just for a step up in quality.
Their best bet will be to sell hybrid SACDs for the same price or lower than current CDs, and hope that the added value will encourage a higher volume of purchases.
I personally won't be buying any SACD-only discs until
(1) I can copy them to my hard drive. If they're copy-protected it's too annoying to have to keep finding and changing physical CDs when I just want to sit back and relax and listen for hours. I rarely bought any CDs until MP3 and ripping came along a few years ago.
(2) Regular consumer hard drives become big enough to comfortably hold dozens of uncompressed SACD albums, like they can do now with uncompressed CD albums. There's no use in getting the extra quality just to wash it out with compression.
and
(3) my sound card, amplifier and speakers have all been upgraded so they can properly reproduce the SACD quality.
I don't see all those three events happening within the next decade.
A 5-disc CD changer won't give me the ability to continuously listen to 100 songs of which no more than three songs came from the same CD. Even a 200-CD jukebox doesn't provide a convenient way to arrange the 100 songs in the order I want, or to edit out the fluff from songs that are longer than I want to listen to.
I now have about 200 CDs in my collection, and there is no way I would have bought so many if I didn't have a method of playing them as conveniently as a computer allows. Before 1998 when I discovered ripping software and MP3, my CD purchases were about one every two months. Since then it has gone up to about 3-4 per month, except in recent months it has declined to about 1 per month because the RIAA has decided to piss me off with the DMCA and copy-protected CDs.
"And I'd rather have a system that awards too many patents, requiring the lowly peon to challenge the big goliath in a court of law to get a patent busted, than have a system that's abused the other way, preventing the lowly peon from getting deserved patents, while their well-financed competition steals their idea and puts it in practice much faster with their larger capital backing. (disclaimer: I am the lowly peon)"
A system that awards too many patents is more detrimental to the lowly peon than one that awards too few patents. It creates a situation where big business gets a huge wad of undeserved patents and uses them to keep the lowly peon out of the market because the lowly peon does not have the lawyers or a heavy patent portfolio of his/her own to challenge the bogus patents or defend against lawsuits.
"While there are some good ideas in here, I think the author misses the point of the patent system, which is not so much to reward people for being innovative, as it is to reward them for making their innovations public."
I am very well aware that was the (original) intent of the patent system. Which is all the more reason to be very restrictive of how patents are awarded, because many patented "innovations" would have been made public anyway without the patent. The priority should be weighted towards what is best for the public, not what reward the patent applicant deserves. The granting of the patent is only a means to accomplish the goal of increasing the innovations which can benefit the public. That is why business methods should not be patentable, because if a company can increase profits by changing their method of doing business, the company who thought of it will do it anyway regardless of whether they can obtain a patent for it. Or somebody else would think of it and implement it. And that is exactly what they were doing until recently when business methods were declared patentable.
"People who gripe about software patents might feel a little better if they view them as a reward for open-sourcing their code (eventually:-)."
Software patents do not require the patent holder to reveal any source code. The patent holder only has to show the algorithms. Publishing but restricting the use of an algorithm for twenty years does less to foster innovation than if the algorithm were kept secret and everybody else was left to come up with another similar algorithm on their own (of which many will be voluntarily published) and were more free to build upon existing algorithms.
"It's very easy to say that something is obvious even 1.5 years in the future."
Which is why there needs to be some sort of obviousness test performed before the entire contents of the patent are made available, as I described in my original message.
"If the patent is *so* obviously bogus, no one will actually avoid infringing it, and if it isn't where do they get off being so self-righteous about it?"
Barnes and Noble had to avoid using "one click shopping" because of Amazon's patent. Web sites and software developers have had to avoid GIF and JPEG because of the patent claims on them. There are many other cases where people have had to do expensive modifications to work around bogus patents, or they infringe the patent accidentally and get hit with a lawsuit or at least a chilling "cease and desist" letter from lawyers.
"The patent office handles literally hundreds of thousands of applications a year. I challenge anyone to find that large of a system with an error rate of zero."
The main reason why they hundreds of thousands of applications in the first place is because they have a high tendency to grant many patents for trivial products or prior art. The patent office and the lawmakers have created a situation where they are likely to be bogged down by so many applications that they cannot give them the proper scrutiny.
If the standards for granting patents were as rigorous as they should be, there would be far fewer applications for them to review because most people would realize that their creation doesn't have a chance of getting approved, and the patent office would have more time to dedicate towards the applications which do get submitted.
Playing a DVD on a Linux PC is not a criminal act. Creating your own personal "various artists" CD out of a dozen albums which you have paid for is not a crime. Moving music you have paid for from a CD to a portable MP3 player is not a crime.
Unfortunately, the copy-protection mechanisms often force people to use circumvention techniques to perform the above legal activities. There are many legally justified reasons for using circumvention techniques, but the entertainment industry wants to make circumvention itself illegal even though it often is not used as "an action for preparing for a crime".
The patent system is broken, and the fact that they issued 187,882 patents in a single year is itself evidence of that. Patents are essentially like world records; there is no way so many new and nonobvious creations can be produced in a year.
The USPTO's procedure is to give the benefit of the doubt to the would-be patentee, and then let the courts sort it afterwards if its validity is questioned. This is based on their apparent philosophy that to mistakenly NOT grant a patent that has validity is more harmful than granting an invalid patent, so they prefer to err on the side of the patent applicant.
But reality works the other way. It is more harmful to grant a bad patent than to deny a good patent application. Denying a patent does not necessarily mean the product will not be produced. The rejected patentee can still go ahead and create the product, and the rest of the world is also free to create the product, although they would not have the benefit on the monopoly. On the other hand, granting a patent that should not have been granted prevents or hinders everybody else from producing it (and derivative products) even though they could have thought of it on their own. In addition, sometimes the patentee does not even produce any working models of the product, so the effect is that the patent has caused the product not to be produced at all. Caution should be exercised in favor of the rest of the world, not the patent applicant.
There should be a penalty for submitting a patent that gets rejected on the basis of prior art. If the fine is kept by the USPTO, they will have plenty incentive to search properly for prior art, and the applicants will also have added incentive to search for it. If the patent is actually granted and the applicant uses the patent to extract license fees, and prior art is discovered afterwards, the penalty should be based on the license fees which the patentee has extracted.
Sounds brutal, but by making a patent application you are making an extremely strong claim against the rest of the human race -- that none of the other 6 billion people has done what you have done -- and attempting to put a restriction on their behavior, that you better be damn well sure that your creation is so brilliant that nobody else has done it before. One of the main reason why the USPTO has so little time to review patents is the high volume of trivial patent applications. If you aren't just about 100% sure that no prior art exists, get out of the way and keep the system open for those who do have actual legitimate inventions.
To help enforce the nonobviousness aspect of it, when a patent application is submitted there should be a short description, of maybe 50 words or less that summarizes what the supposed invention does, with care taken not to reveal any of the claims or how it is actually done. Then that summary should be published, after which there is a set time period of maybe a month or two during which the public is allowed to submit documentation or even a working product that does the same thing. If somebody else can come up with a solution in a few weeks based on such a short description, it does not meet the novel and nonobvious criteria. If any the submitted documents or products are substantially similar to the patent application, the patent must be rejected. Some things would only need a short phrase like "online auction" or "one click shopping" or "swinging on a swing" for somebody else to come up with a solution in a few days or even hours. ("Substantially similar" can be defined as whether the submission would be likely to be guilty of patent infringement if the patent were actually granted and the submission created afterwards, and there can be a nominal fee for such submissions to discourage frivilous challenge submissions, if the volume is too high.)
Modern games with their CD checks and copy protection have pissed me off to the point that I've stopped buying and playing them.
They take up hundreds of megabytes on your hard drive, and then they STILL force you to put in the CD every time. Dammit, if it is going to require the CD to play, there should be the option to run straight from the CD, using the hard drive for nothing more than the few kilobytes required to save options and the game state. Make me use my hard drive space or make me use the CD, but not both.
So I've stopped buying games. I still get lots of joy out of older games including the infinite levels of Doom that are available, especially now that I can play the Direct3D-enhanced JDoom. And JHeretic. And Quake. And the Tomb Raider series. And a whole bunch of other games from the mid to late 90s that I haven't played yet, which I can buy used (or new in a bargain bin) for $10 when I want and not have to worry about copy protection and CD checks.
When the game companies stop using up my hard drive like it's theirs while still requiring me to find the CD every time, then I'll think about giving the newer games a shot.
As a software developer, I'd like to see EULA's remain legal. I don't want to be sued because some idiot misused or ran a virus infected version of my executable and bad things happened to that PC. I don't want to be sued when the same idiot installs an older software application that overwrites a bunch of MFC and ATL DLL's and then complains that "it dunnit work no more - yee haw"
And as a software developer myself, I see no good reason for EULAs. Either consumers will ignore EULAs thereby making them practically useless, or if they are enforced with sufficient teeth that consumers actually follow it, they will purchase less software because of fear of the repercussions.
Copyright law is sufficient protection, and EULAs won't stop you from being sued by idiots anyway. You don't need an EULA to give people a warning about what the purpose of the software is and the dangers (if any) of using the software.
If EULAs are unenforceable, as you claim, because there is no agreement between the software provider and the customer then, by your reasoning, the GPL is equally unenforceable.
You have misunderstood the GPL. The GPL gives the user MORE rights than copyright law. Under copyright law, you cannot make as many copies of the software as you want and distribute them. GPL allows you to distribute an unlimited number of copies, as long as certain conditions are met such as releasing the source code. If you don't accept the GPL, the copies you distribute of GPL'd software would be illegal.
Music CDs have defied the laws of economics for too long. No matter the quality or popularity of an album, or how "hot" it is, it always sells for $14-20, with the exception of a few titles that end up in bargain bins for $9 because they've been taking up space for too long.
If CD prices had not been artifically propped up like they have been for so many years, a new album by a very popular artist would cost more than an albums by an artist of less demand (except for niches where the few afiniciados are willing to pay extra), and the price should drop over time.
Even movies follow that pattern even though they generally all start off at the same $8-$10 price. After a few months, they become available on cable or satellite pay-per-view for $4 and discount theaters for $1-$2. Then some time after that they become free (OK, ad-supported) on TV. But with music it's the same price no matter how hot or how cold, how new or how old.
The states should have gone for the full $480 million. Settling for a sum which is less than the amount of violations just encourages them to do it more in the future, because it sends the message that the penalty for future violations is less than the cost of conducting business in a legitimate manner.
Accoding to the article (which it pays to read), the price-fixing (MAP) was applied to the final price, not the wholesale price. In other words, the recording industry alleged they didn't really make any money off the practice because the wholesale price remains the same.
The price-fixing of retail prices does lead to higher wholesale prices. If the record industry can engineer a scheme that artificially inflates the retail prices, it makes the retailers more likely to tolerate paying high wholesale prices. For example, if free market competition would bring retail prices down to $9, there is no way the record industry could continue to collect more than $10 per CD at wholesale.
I think the poster is referring to people in the IT field who actually had jobs despite their near-total lack of skills - not undergraduates and recent graduates without experience. I have come across several such people during my career, and I agree that it is actually a good thing for the economy that those people are no longer in the field because they were costing their companies more than they were getting paid.
But the bad part is that the layoffs have hit both the good and the useless workers, as many companies have gone out of business completely, or large companies did layoffs at random. Now the truly qualified workers' resumes get buried under a mile high pile, and the HR drones don't know how to tell the difference between the pretenders and the real professionals. Not to mention that many good programmers don't know how to put together a good resume, as programming ability and marketing savvy (a resume is "marketing" yourself) have nothing to do with each other.
Well, it is a fact that sales of XP at the campus bookstore are way up. Here's a quote from the article.
The bookstore, which usually sells three to five copies of Windows XP in two to three months, has sold 30 copies in the last two weeks, according to Andy Schramm, student supervisor of the bookstore's computer department.
"Every customer that I've helped that bought the upgrade has bought it to upgrade from Windows 2000 and because of the ban, not because they felt it was time to upgrade their software," he said.
Another tactic from Microsoft to force people to pay for an upgrade to Win XP? I wonder how much in donations Microsoft has given to UCSB.
Sure, some students will choose Linux as a result of this, but the percentage who do so will be small enough that Microsoft still profits from the 95%+ who upgrade to XP, especially since XP will give Microsoft tighter control over their PCs (all hardware changes must be approved by Microsoft!).
Please remember that the folklore Disney built on was hundreds of years old, if not thousands.
Wrong. Some of it like the classical music in Fantasia was hundreds of years old, but many others were much more recent. The last of the Grimm brothers died in 1863, not hundreds of years before Disney. Disney even released some works such as a short Cinderella film in 1922, which would not have been allowed if the Grimm brothers were granted "life plus 70 years" on their copyright. And Disney's "Steamboat Willie" film was based on Buster Keaton's "Steamboat Bill".
A lot of people want to make a quick buck selling merchandise based on characters they didn't have the creativity to invent themselves.
So, Walt Disney didn't have any creativity because he made works based on characters he didn't create himself? Like Snow White, Alice in Wonderland, Cinderella, and the rest? You seem to forget that artistic creativity can exist on top of previous creativity, just as scientific accomplishments are almost always based on someone else's prior accomplishments. Once material enters the public domain, people won't be able to make "a quick buck" very easily because anybody else in the world has the same material from which to do the same thing. The ones who will make any significant money are those who can use their own creativity to add value to the original creation, not the ones who merely disseminate what is already infinitely available elsewhere.
All you do when you make something open source is change the set of people who know how the thing works.
It doesn't merely change the set of people who know it, it increases the set of people from just the people who created the code, to the people who created the code PLUS any programmers in the world who have the willingness and ability to understand it. The more people know, the better. Even if you don't understand the code, the mere fact that it is published will be a great deterrent to fraud at the software level.
This set still doesn't include the people responsible for election security because they most likely are not programmers and even if they are, how are they going to verify thousands of lines of code? And then they need to verify the compiler as well. I think you'd need to execute the machine code by hand to understand exactly what the processor. Then you need someone to verify exactly what the CPU does, presumably with a logic analyzer, etc. When she says FULLY verified, she is talking about all these details.
We won't be able to personally verify the machines and software, but technical representatives can be appointed by each party to do the physical verification. Once the verification has been done, the machines must be turned off and locked down until election day.
I don't believe either of these to really be true. I have a set amount of money I'm willing to spend on music in a given year. I'll spend that much, and then I'll stop, because I have to budget for other expenses. Doesn't matter if I am buying unlimited-play music CDs, or pay-per-play music. Once I hit that magic dollar amount, I'm done. If I spent it on unlimited-play music CDs, I'll just keep listening to those for the rest of the year, and not get new ones. If I did pay- per-play music, I'll find other forms of entertainment.
Agree 100%, and then some. Not only would pay-per-use fail to increase the music industry's revenue, but it is likely to decrease their revenue by reducing the entertainment value of the products which are paid for. Music in a format that limits the length of time or number of times you can listen to it, is a lot less attractive than a format that allows unlimited listening. As a result, people would be more likely to redirect a greater portion of their entertainment budget towards things other than music.
If the anomalies are so minor that a proper test can not detect them, they are probably not significant statistically, probably something on the order of thousandths of a percent.
The frequency of error occurrence and the margin of error in the result are two different things. The software could have been written with bugs or intentional hacks that make it return a perfect result 99.9% of the days it is used, but return a 5% error during the other 0.1% of the time. And remember that the margin of victory in Florida was only a few thousands of a percent.
Also, how do you make a machine that is intentionally biased against a candidate when you don't know who that might be? I'm sure they didn't hardcode the candidates and parties into the machine.
Easy. They could hardcode conditions into the program that look for certain patterns like "Republican" or "Gore, Albert" and alter the internal behavior of the machine accordingly. And you wouldn't know they hardcoded anything, because the software is closed source.
It would be difficult to ensure that every machine is running the correct, valid code if you can randomly check the md5sum.
That's why the veracity of single machine must be checked using md5sums and any other technical means available to the technical representatives, and then shut down and locked down until the polls open.
You are aware of the fact that there are things such as independent certification procedures that are designed to find flaws in machines?
Yes, but black-box testing may not be enough to spot rarely occuring anomalies (intentional or erroneous) that would have otherwise been revealed if the code was open.
Who the hell would make code/firmware for a voting machine open-source?
Everybody who made voting machines would, if the government made it a required condition for supplying the machine. Plus, the code would not actually have to be open source in the sense of being freely modifiable and redistributable so competitors can use it; but it should be open to the public for review. Closed-source voting software probably even violates the Freedom of Information Act. Somebody is bound to start a lawsuit to force them to open the code.
How the heck do you know that the program in the machine is the same program that you have the source code for?
Simple. By having the MD5Sums of the software and compiled code published, and having the compilation process and MD5Sums witnessed by technical representatives of all candidates in the election.
Also, you do realize that the computerized optical scanners or punchcard readers that were used before these machines aren't open-source, either?
So? They should have been.
Closed source may not have been the actual reason for the failures in this instance. But if there is ever another election as close as Florida's November 2000 fiasco, using closed source software all across the state(s) involved, you can bet there will be lawsuits claiming that the software was biased in the favor of one party or another. Especially if the software company is a contributor to anybody's campaign.
"it's a sort of life insurance policy. it insures that no one will wipe you out to start making money off your idea because he himself won't live to see the copyright expire!!! do you think it's mere coincidence that the average life expectancy is 77 years?"
That could have been accomplished by making the length of time to be a fixed period independent of anybody's lifetime, say 40 years. That may happen to go beyond a person's lifetime, just as the 5-year limited warranty on a car I buy may happen to extend beyond my lifetime, but at least it is not guaranteed by definition to be longer than a lifetime. And "life + 75 years" is also tied to the lifetime of the person, which still leaves a small incentive to whack people off to reduce the term of their copyright.
Of course, some people will say "what if somebody outlives the copyright period and becomes old without any source of income"?
My answers to that are:
1) For over 95% of copyrighted works, over 95% of of the revenue they will ever get comes within the first 10 years. Anything that still has enough demand to draw significant revenue after 40 years would have already made a serious load of bucks during that first 40 years, which could and should have been saved by the creator.
2) As a corollary from (1) above, when people create copyrighted works, they do so with the expectation that they won't be getting anything from it after decades have passed since publication. So the extended copyright periods are a negligible incentive to people who create content. The reason the corporations are fighting so hard to extend copyrights is mainly because they want to preserve the ongoing existence of their proven long-lived cash cows like Mickey Mouse. I doubt they would have lobbied so hard for extended copyright if it only applied to works created after the extension law was passed, and I even more seriously doubt that they would be willing to pay a fee at the time of creation of each work, if such fee was required to give them a longer copyright term.
3) It provides a bigger incentive for the creator to get up and create something else, knowing that they may outlive the copyright term of their current cash cow.
4) If copyrights were given a more reasonable limit like 40 years, the creator would have a larger base of public domain works from which to draw upon for creating derivative works for the purpose of producing additional income, like what Disney did with the Grimm fairy tales and others did with Shakespeare and Tarzan and Dracula.
5) The people who built the place I live in and the car I drive aren't going to receive a lifetime stream of income for creating the building and car. And a home and car are way more important than watching a movie or listening to a music album. What makes authors and singers and actors so special that they should be given a lifetime stream of income for their work, unlike the other 99.99% of the population, most of whom provide even more vital services than entertainment?
The ironic thing about all this is that by perpetually extending copyrights, corporations are hurting their own profits. If copyrights were capped with a time period of 50 years or less, like they used to be over a century ago, the content creators would have now become able to make money from derivative works based on other people's stories and music from the mid and early 1900s, just as Disney made a fortune by creating derivatives of works from the 1800s.
Slashdot Mirror
Exactly. People upgraded from vinyl and cassettes to CDs because vinyl was hefty and inconvenient and was highly susceptible to wear and tear and scratches, while cassettes had the annoyance of having to fast-forward and rewind. Similarly, most people upgraded to DVD from VHS (though many are still on VHS only) for the convenience of not having to rewind, the smaller size, and the extra features on the DVD ... not for the quality.
With most people being content with MP3, which is a step down in quality from CDs, there's no way they're going to get the masses to pay extra just for a step up in quality.
Their best bet will be to sell hybrid SACDs for the same price or lower than current CDs, and hope that the added value will encourage a higher volume of purchases.
I personally won't be buying any SACD-only discs until
(1) I can copy them to my hard drive. If they're copy-protected it's too annoying to have to keep finding and changing physical CDs when I just want to sit back and relax and listen for hours. I rarely bought any CDs until MP3 and ripping came along a few years ago.
(2) Regular consumer hard drives become big enough to comfortably hold dozens of uncompressed SACD albums, like they can do now with uncompressed CD albums. There's no use in getting the extra quality just to wash it out with compression.
and
(3) my sound card, amplifier and speakers have all been upgraded so they can properly reproduce the SACD quality.
I don't see all those three events happening within the next decade.
A 5-disc CD changer won't give me the ability to continuously listen to 100 songs of which no more than three songs came from the same CD. Even a 200-CD jukebox doesn't provide a convenient way to arrange the 100 songs in the order I want, or to edit out the fluff from songs that are longer than I want to listen to.
I now have about 200 CDs in my collection, and there is no way I would have bought so many if I didn't have a method of playing them as conveniently as a computer allows. Before 1998 when I discovered ripping software and MP3, my CD purchases were about one every two months. Since then it has gone up to about 3-4 per month, except in recent months it has declined to about 1 per month because the RIAA has decided to piss me off with the DMCA and copy-protected CDs.
"And I'd rather have a system that awards too many patents, requiring the lowly peon to challenge the big goliath in a court of law to get a patent busted, than have a system that's abused the other way, preventing the lowly peon from getting deserved patents, while their well-financed competition steals their idea and puts it in practice much faster with their larger capital backing. (disclaimer: I am the lowly peon)"
A system that awards too many patents is more detrimental to the lowly peon than one that awards too few patents. It creates a situation where big business gets a huge wad of undeserved patents and uses them to keep the lowly peon out of the market because the lowly peon does not have the lawyers or a heavy patent portfolio of his/her own to challenge the bogus patents or defend against lawsuits.
"While there are some good ideas in here, I think the author misses the point of the patent system, which is not so much to reward people for being innovative, as it is to reward them for making their innovations public."
I am very well aware that was the (original) intent of the patent system. Which is all the more reason to be very restrictive of how patents are awarded, because many patented "innovations" would have been made public anyway without the patent. The priority should be weighted towards what is best for the public, not what reward the patent applicant deserves. The granting of the patent is only a means to accomplish the goal of increasing the innovations which can benefit the public. That is why business methods should not be patentable, because if a company can increase profits by changing their method of doing business, the company who thought of it will do it anyway regardless of whether they can obtain a patent for it. Or somebody else would think of it and implement it. And that is exactly what they were doing until recently when business methods were declared patentable.
"People who gripe about software patents might feel a little better if they view them as a reward for open-sourcing their code (eventually:-)."
Software patents do not require the patent holder to reveal any source code. The patent holder only has to show the algorithms. Publishing but restricting the use of an algorithm for twenty years does less to foster innovation than if the algorithm were kept secret and everybody else was left to come up with another similar algorithm on their own (of which many will be voluntarily published) and were more free to build upon existing algorithms.
"It's very easy to say that something is obvious even 1.5 years in the future."
Which is why there needs to be some sort of obviousness test performed before the entire contents of the patent are made available, as I described in my original message.
"If the patent is *so* obviously bogus, no one will actually avoid infringing it, and if it isn't where do they get off being so self-righteous about it?"
Barnes and Noble had to avoid using "one click shopping" because of Amazon's patent. Web sites and software developers have had to avoid GIF and JPEG because of the patent claims on them. There are many other cases where people have had to do expensive modifications to work around bogus patents, or they infringe the patent accidentally and get hit with a lawsuit or at least a chilling "cease and desist" letter from lawyers.
"The patent office handles literally hundreds of thousands of applications a year. I challenge anyone to find that large of a system with an error rate of zero."
The main reason why they hundreds of thousands of applications in the first place is because they have a high tendency to grant many patents for trivial products or prior art. The patent office and the lawmakers have created a situation where they are likely to be bogged down by so many applications that they cannot give them the proper scrutiny.
If the standards for granting patents were as rigorous as they should be, there would be far fewer applications for them to review because most people would realize that their creation doesn't have a chance of getting approved, and the patent office would have more time to dedicate towards the applications which do get submitted.
Playing a DVD on a Linux PC is not a criminal act. Creating your own personal "various artists" CD out of a dozen albums which you have paid for is not a crime. Moving music you have paid for from a CD to a portable MP3 player is not a crime.
Unfortunately, the copy-protection mechanisms often force people to use circumvention techniques to perform the above legal activities. There are many legally justified reasons for using circumvention techniques, but the entertainment industry wants to make circumvention itself illegal even though it often is not used as "an action for preparing for a crime".
The patent system is broken, and the fact that they issued 187,882 patents in a single year is itself evidence of that. Patents are essentially like world records; there is no way so many new and nonobvious creations can be produced in a year.
The USPTO's procedure is to give the benefit of the doubt to the would-be patentee, and then let the courts sort it afterwards if its validity is questioned. This is based on their apparent philosophy that to mistakenly NOT grant a patent that has validity is more harmful than granting an invalid patent, so they prefer to err on the side of the patent applicant.
But reality works the other way. It is more harmful to grant a bad patent than to deny a good patent application. Denying a patent does not necessarily mean the product will not be produced. The rejected patentee can still go ahead and create the product, and the rest of the world is also free to create the product, although they would not have the benefit on the monopoly. On the other hand, granting a patent that should not have been granted prevents or hinders everybody else from producing it (and derivative products) even though they could have thought of it on their own. In addition, sometimes the patentee does not even produce any working models of the product, so the effect is that the patent has caused the product not to be produced at all. Caution should be exercised in favor of the rest of the world, not the patent applicant.
There should be a penalty for submitting a patent that gets rejected on the basis of prior art. If the fine is kept by the USPTO, they will have plenty incentive to search properly for prior art, and the applicants will also have added incentive to search for it. If the patent is actually granted and the applicant uses the patent to extract license fees, and prior art is discovered afterwards, the penalty should be based on the license fees which the patentee has extracted.
Sounds brutal, but by making a patent application you are making an extremely strong claim against the rest of the human race -- that none of the other 6 billion people has done what you have done -- and attempting to put a restriction on their behavior, that you better be damn well sure that your creation is so brilliant that nobody else has done it before. One of the main reason why the USPTO has so little time to review patents is the high volume of trivial patent applications. If you aren't just about 100% sure that no prior art exists, get out of the way and keep the system open for those who do have actual legitimate inventions.
To help enforce the nonobviousness aspect of it, when a patent application is submitted there should be a short description, of maybe 50 words or less that summarizes what the supposed invention does, with care taken not to reveal any of the claims or how it is actually done. Then that summary should be published, after which there is a set time period of maybe a month or two during which the public is allowed to submit documentation or even a working product that does the same thing. If somebody else can come up with a solution in a few weeks based on such a short description, it does not meet the novel and nonobvious criteria. If any the submitted documents or products are substantially similar to the patent application, the patent must be rejected. Some things would only need a short phrase like "online auction" or "one click shopping" or "swinging on a swing" for somebody else to come up with a solution in a few days or even hours. ("Substantially similar" can be defined as whether the submission would be likely to be guilty of patent infringement if the patent were actually granted and the submission created afterwards, and there can be a nominal fee for such submissions to discourage frivilous challenge submissions, if the volume is too high.)
Associate Notepad with the ".java" extension, and try the search again.
Modern games with their CD checks and copy protection have pissed me off to the point that I've stopped buying and playing them.
They take up hundreds of megabytes on your hard drive, and then they STILL force you to put in the CD every time. Dammit, if it is going to require the CD to play, there should be the option to run straight from the CD, using the hard drive for nothing more than the few kilobytes required to save options and the game state. Make me use my hard drive space or make me use the CD, but not both.
So I've stopped buying games. I still get lots of joy out of older games including the infinite levels of Doom that are available, especially now that I can play the Direct3D-enhanced JDoom. And JHeretic. And Quake. And the Tomb Raider series. And a whole bunch of other games from the mid to late 90s that I haven't played yet, which I can buy used (or new in a bargain bin) for $10 when I want and not have to worry about copy protection and CD checks.
When the game companies stop using up my hard drive like it's theirs while still requiring me to find the CD every time, then I'll think about giving the newer games a shot.
Seems like the judge understands that just because you have music downloaded or available for download doesn't mean you didn't buy the CD.
Or the music could have been released by the artist for free distribution, as many independent artists have done.
As a software developer, I'd like to see EULA's remain legal. I don't want to be sued because some idiot misused or ran a virus infected version of my executable and bad things happened to that PC. I don't want to be sued when the same idiot installs an older software application that overwrites a bunch of MFC and ATL DLL's and then complains that "it dunnit work no more - yee haw"
And as a software developer myself, I see no good reason for EULAs. Either consumers will ignore EULAs thereby making them practically useless, or if they are enforced with sufficient teeth that consumers actually follow it, they will purchase less software because of fear of the repercussions.
Copyright law is sufficient protection, and EULAs won't stop you from being sued by idiots anyway. You don't need an EULA to give people a warning about what the purpose of the software is and the dangers (if any) of using the software.
If EULAs are unenforceable, as you claim, because there is no agreement between the software provider and the customer then, by your reasoning, the GPL is equally unenforceable.
You have misunderstood the GPL. The GPL gives the user MORE rights than copyright law. Under copyright law, you cannot make as many copies of the software as you want and distribute them. GPL allows you to distribute an unlimited number of copies, as long as certain conditions are met such as releasing the source code. If you don't accept the GPL, the copies you distribute of GPL'd software would be illegal.
Music CDs have defied the laws of economics for too long. No matter the quality or popularity of an album, or how "hot" it is, it always sells for $14-20, with the exception of a few titles that end up in bargain bins for $9 because they've been taking up space for too long.
If CD prices had not been artifically propped up like they have been for so many years, a new album by a very popular artist would cost more than an albums by an artist of less demand (except for niches where the few afiniciados are willing to pay extra), and the price should drop over time.
Even movies follow that pattern even though they generally all start off at the same $8-$10 price. After a few months, they become available on cable or satellite pay-per-view for $4 and discount theaters for $1-$2. Then some time after that they become free (OK, ad-supported) on TV. But with music it's the same price no matter how hot or how cold, how new or how old.
The states should have gone for the full $480 million. Settling for a sum which is less than the amount of violations just encourages them to do it more in the future, because it sends the message that the penalty for future violations is less than the cost of conducting business in a legitimate manner.
Accoding to the article (which it pays to read), the price-fixing (MAP) was applied to the final price, not the wholesale price. In other words, the recording industry alleged they didn't really make any money off the practice because the wholesale price remains the same.
The price-fixing of retail prices does lead to higher wholesale prices. If the record industry can engineer a scheme that artificially inflates the retail prices, it makes the retailers more likely to tolerate paying high wholesale prices. For example, if free market competition would bring retail prices down to $9, there is no way the record industry could continue to collect more than $10 per CD at wholesale.
I think the poster is referring to people in the IT field who actually had jobs despite their near-total lack of skills - not undergraduates and recent graduates without experience. I have come across several such people during my career, and I agree that it is actually a good thing for the economy that those people are no longer in the field because they were costing their companies more than they were getting paid.
But the bad part is that the layoffs have hit both the good and the useless workers, as many companies have gone out of business completely, or large companies did layoffs at random. Now the truly qualified workers' resumes get buried under a mile high pile, and the HR drones don't know how to tell the difference between the pretenders and the real professionals. Not to mention that many good programmers don't know how to put together a good resume, as programming ability and marketing savvy (a resume is "marketing" yourself) have nothing to do with each other.
Well, it is a fact that sales of XP at the campus bookstore are way up. Here's a quote from the article.
The bookstore, which usually sells three to five copies of Windows XP in two to three months, has sold 30 copies in the last two weeks, according to Andy Schramm, student supervisor of the bookstore's computer department.
"Every customer that I've helped that bought the upgrade has bought it to upgrade from Windows 2000 and because of the ban, not because they felt it was time to upgrade their software," he said.
Another tactic from Microsoft to force people to pay for an upgrade to Win XP? I wonder how much in donations Microsoft has given to UCSB.
Sure, some students will choose Linux as a result of this, but the percentage who do so will be small enough that Microsoft still profits from the 95%+ who upgrade to XP, especially since XP will give Microsoft tighter control over their PCs (all hardware changes must be approved by Microsoft!).
"No guh-noos is good guh-noos, with Gary guh-noo."
Every time I see or hear GNU/Linux I remember that stupid show.
Please remember that the folklore Disney built on was hundreds of years old, if not thousands.
Wrong. Some of it like the classical music in Fantasia was hundreds of years old, but many others were much more recent. The last of the Grimm brothers died in 1863, not hundreds of years before Disney. Disney even released some works such as a short Cinderella film in 1922, which would not have been allowed if the Grimm brothers were granted "life plus 70 years" on their copyright. And Disney's "Steamboat Willie" film was based on Buster Keaton's "Steamboat Bill".
A lot of people want to make a quick buck selling merchandise based on characters they didn't have the creativity to invent themselves.
So, Walt Disney didn't have any creativity because he made works based on characters he didn't create himself? Like Snow White, Alice in Wonderland, Cinderella, and the rest? You seem to forget that artistic creativity can exist on top of previous creativity, just as scientific accomplishments are almost always based on someone else's prior accomplishments. Once material enters the public domain, people won't be able to make "a quick buck" very easily because anybody else in the world has the same material from which to do the same thing. The ones who will make any significant money are those who can use their own creativity to add value to the original creation, not the ones who merely disseminate what is already infinitely available elsewhere.
All you do when you make something open source is change the set of people who know how the thing works.
It doesn't merely change the set of people who know it, it increases the set of people from just the people who created the code, to the people who created the code PLUS any programmers in the world who have the willingness and ability to understand it. The more people know, the better. Even if you don't understand the code, the mere fact that it is published will be a great deterrent to fraud at the software level.
This set still doesn't include the people responsible for election security because they most likely are not programmers and even if they are, how are they going to verify thousands of lines of code? And then they need to verify the compiler as well. I think you'd need to execute the machine code by hand to understand exactly what the processor. Then you need someone to verify exactly what the CPU does, presumably with a logic analyzer, etc. When she says FULLY verified, she is talking about all these details.
We won't be able to personally verify the machines and software, but technical representatives can be appointed by each party to do the physical verification. Once the verification has been done, the machines must be turned off and locked down until election day.
I don't believe either of these to really be true. I have a set amount of money I'm willing to spend on music in a given year. I'll spend that much, and then I'll stop, because I have to budget for other expenses. Doesn't matter if I am buying unlimited-play music CDs, or pay-per-play music. Once I hit that magic dollar amount, I'm done. If I spent it on unlimited-play music CDs, I'll just keep listening to those for the rest of the year, and not get new ones. If I did pay- per-play music, I'll find other forms of entertainment.
Agree 100%, and then some. Not only would pay-per-use fail to increase the music industry's revenue, but it is likely to decrease their revenue by reducing the entertainment value of the products which are paid for. Music in a format that limits the length of time or number of times you can listen to it, is a lot less attractive than a format that allows unlimited listening. As a result, people would be more likely to redirect a greater portion of their entertainment budget towards things other than music.
If the anomalies are so minor that a proper test can not detect them, they are probably not significant statistically, probably something on the order of thousandths of a percent.
The frequency of error occurrence and the margin of error in the result are two different things. The software could have been written with bugs or intentional hacks that make it return a perfect result 99.9% of the days it is used, but return a 5% error during the other 0.1% of the time. And remember that the margin of victory in Florida was only a few thousands of a percent.
Also, how do you make a machine that is intentionally biased against a candidate when you don't know who that might be? I'm sure they didn't hardcode the candidates and parties into the machine.
Easy. They could hardcode conditions into the program that look for certain patterns like "Republican" or "Gore, Albert" and alter the internal behavior of the machine accordingly. And you wouldn't know they hardcoded anything, because the software is closed source.
It would be difficult to ensure that every machine is running the correct, valid code if you can randomly check the md5sum.
That's why the veracity of single machine must be checked using md5sums and any other technical means available to the technical representatives, and then shut down and locked down until the polls open.
You are aware of the fact that there are things such as independent certification procedures that are designed to find flaws in machines?
Yes, but black-box testing may not be enough to spot rarely occuring anomalies (intentional or erroneous) that would have otherwise been revealed if the code was open.
Who the hell would make code/firmware for a voting machine open-source?
Everybody who made voting machines would, if the government made it a required condition for supplying the machine. Plus, the code would not actually have to be open source in the sense of being freely modifiable and redistributable so competitors can use it; but it should be open to the public for review. Closed-source voting software probably even violates the Freedom of Information Act. Somebody is bound to start a lawsuit to force them to open the code.
How the heck do you know that the program in the machine is the same program that you have the source code for?
Simple. By having the MD5Sums of the software and compiled code published, and having the compilation process and MD5Sums witnessed by technical representatives of all candidates in the election.
Also, you do realize that the computerized optical scanners or punchcard readers that were used before these machines aren't open-source, either?
So? They should have been.
Closed source may not have been the actual reason for the failures in this instance. But if there is ever another election as close as Florida's November 2000 fiasco, using closed source software all across the state(s) involved, you can bet there will be lawsuits claiming that the software was biased in the favor of one party or another. Especially if the software company is a contributor to anybody's campaign.
"it's a sort of life insurance policy. it insures that no one will wipe you out to start making money off your idea because he himself won't live to see the copyright expire!!! do you think it's mere coincidence that the average life expectancy is 77 years?"
That could have been accomplished by making the length of time to be a fixed period independent of anybody's lifetime, say 40 years. That may happen to go beyond a person's lifetime, just as the 5-year limited warranty on a car I buy may happen to extend beyond my lifetime, but at least it is not guaranteed by definition to be longer than a lifetime. And "life + 75 years" is also tied to the lifetime of the person, which still leaves a small incentive to whack people off to reduce the term of their copyright.
Of course, some people will say "what if somebody outlives the copyright period and becomes old without any source of income"?
My answers to that are:
1) For over 95% of copyrighted works, over 95% of of the revenue they will ever get comes within the first 10 years. Anything that still has enough demand to draw significant revenue after 40 years would have already made a serious load of bucks during that first 40 years, which could and should have been saved by the creator.
2) As a corollary from (1) above, when people create copyrighted works, they do so with the expectation that they won't be getting anything from it after decades have passed since publication. So the extended copyright periods are a negligible incentive to people who create content. The reason the corporations are fighting so hard to extend copyrights is mainly because they want to preserve the ongoing existence of their proven long-lived cash cows like Mickey Mouse. I doubt they would have lobbied so hard for extended copyright if it only applied to works created after the extension law was passed, and I even more seriously doubt that they would be willing to pay a fee at the time of creation of each work, if such fee was required to give them a longer copyright term.
3) It provides a bigger incentive for the creator to get up and create something else, knowing that they may outlive the copyright term of their current cash cow.
4) If copyrights were given a more reasonable limit like 40 years, the creator would have a larger base of public domain works from which to draw upon for creating derivative works for the purpose of producing additional income, like what Disney did with the Grimm fairy tales and others did with Shakespeare and Tarzan and Dracula.
5) The people who built the place I live in and the car I drive aren't going to receive a lifetime stream of income for creating the building and car. And a home and car are way more important than watching a movie or listening to a music album. What makes authors and singers and actors so special that they should be given a lifetime stream of income for their work, unlike the other 99.99% of the population, most of whom provide even more vital services than entertainment?
The ironic thing about all this is that by perpetually extending copyrights, corporations are hurting their own profits. If copyrights were capped with a time period of 50 years or less, like they used to be over a century ago, the content creators would have now become able to make money from derivative works based on other people's stories and music from the mid and early 1900s, just as Disney made a fortune by creating derivatives of works from the 1800s.