I'd like this to be an exhibit at every trial in which gigantic money damages are claimed for copyright infringement.
So would the attorneys for the plaintiff.
The geek casts himself as the hero in his own courtroom melodrama. In the real world, the jury is more likely to see him as a candidate a stout oak and thirty feet of hemp.
American juries are middle-aged, middle-class, small-C Conservative and firmly of the opinion that property rights matter, that there is no such thing as a free lunch.
The geek's sense of entitlement really pisses them off.
First up: Any government department that's got a significant investment in IT can't just go out and replace, say, Microsoft Office with LibreOffice overnight.
Microsoft treats MS Office as one component of an integrated office system that scales to an enterprise of any size.
Client-Server-Web applications. Tools for deployment. Tools for management.
Strong third-party support. Tutorials and resources of every kind. Training and staff available everywhere south of the Artic Circle.
While LibreOffice is fundamentally nothing more than an immature, stand-alone, office suite recently forked from OpenOffice.org.
The game doesn't even run remotely. All you get is streaming video/audio and all the lag you'd expect (including controller lag), which is a recipe for disaster in North America.
But all you need is the client app and a wireless game controller for your Internet enabled HDTV, Blu-Ray player or set top box. Upfront cost $50 to $100.
The significance of lag depends on the game and your style of play. Not everyone has the reflexes for an intense first person shooter. There are other genres which are no less engaging, just paced a little differently.
The rental and subscrption model has been a success for Netflix. There is no good reason to believe it won't be a success for OnLive.
Let me give you an example.. the concept of a magnetic breakaway safety mechanism for power cords was invented in the 1990's for deep fryers (though it may actually have a longer history than that). In the early 2000s, Apple got a patent for the same concept when applied to electronic devices.
The key word here is "concept."
The patent is not for the idea.
The patent is for the device or the machine or the process.
The solution that works for the deep fryer is not necessarily the right solution or the best solution for every superficially similiar problem.
A lot of problems would go away if the US would simply get rid of its government flood insurance program.
It is the sort of thing kids used to be taught about geography in grade school.
You build along the river because the river provides cheap transportation, fresh water and power. The river often ends in a seaport - giving you a chance to become a major player in coastal and foreign trade.
Periodic flooding means that your valley remains fertile, perhaps as fertile as the Mississippi Delta.
For extra credit:
Map the flood plain of the Mississippi, the Missouri and their tributaries.
Count the number of people dependent on these rivers for their living, calculate the cost of moving every one of them to higher ground --- including the cost to American trade, agriculture and industry.
It's a pretty decent news site with a horrible tabloid editorial slant.
When they're publishing press releases or writing humour, they're fine, but their opinion pieces & editorials are more often than not sensationalist nonsense.
Thats how the inferior Windows won and how Office beat the better Lotus 123 and Wordperfect. It is why the green screen ugly, slow, 640 k ram limited, pc speaker beeping, single tasking, CLI OS DOS won over the supperior Amiga and Macintosh at the time to dismay over people who had multimedia 10 years earlier.
WordPerfect was a DOS era product ported to every platform known to man - each with its own little fiefdom within the company. It was late to see Windows as a threat - it was late to get credible product on the market for Win 3.1 and Win 95.
The MS-DOS PC was positioned as an office workhorse. The natural upgrade path from the eight-bit world of CP/M. Sold with an industrial strength keyboard and a large - readable - 80 column display. It would prove equally at home on the shop room floor.
The modular design of the PC meant that audio and video upgrades could be easily installed and competitively priced.
Sentencing for Oliveras is scheduled Oct. 28, 2011, at 9:00 a.m. EDT. He faces a maximum penalty of 20 years in prison and a fine of $1,541,349 on the wire fraud charge, and two years in prison and a $250,000 fine on the identity theft charge.
No, it would set the legal bar exactly where it should be: requiring the police to actually identify a person as a suspect. If the police are unable to do so, then they should not be granted a warrant -- this is not a country where we grant the police general search warrants, and it is better to let some criminals walk free than to harass innocent people.
When requesting a warrant, all you really need to do is to persuade a judge that this is reasonable place to search for evidence of a crime.
It is lunatic to argue that the police must name a suspect before they can even begin to look for the evidence that may point them in the right direction.
The IP address takes you to a street address or to a particular machine.
It probably also gives you the name of the primary account holder, the head of household, for example.
But that for the moment is irrelevant.
_____
The constitutional prohibition is against "unreasonable" search and seizures.
When the purpose of a search is the solution of a crime, many things become more reasonable and more necessary. That the search is inconvenient and uncomfortable does not make it harassment.
The Ninth Circuit (California area) is the most liberal circuit and is reversed by the Supreme Court more than any other Circuit.
Jurisduction Of The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals
Alaska Arizona California Guam Hawaii Idaho Montana Nevada Northern Mariana Islands Oregon Washington
Representing 20% of the population of the US.
It woud be diffcult to imagine a more complex racial, economic and political mix. Though about half the cases reaching the court will come from California.
So few cases reach oral argument and decision by the Supreme Court these days that to talk of how often a circuit court is reversed seems almost meaningless.
I think I'm going to wait until the 5th edition American Heritage comes out in November. That dictionary is pretty much the standard for most professional writers and editors in the U.S
The American Heritage Dictionary has its origins in scenes like this:
Mr. Wolfe is in the middle of a fit. It's complicated. There's a fireplace in the front room, but it's never lit because he hates open fires. He says they stultify mental processes. But it's lit now because he's using it. He's seated in front of it, on a chair too small for him, tearing sheets out of a book and burning them. The book is the new edition, the third edition, of Webster's New International Dictionary, Unabridged, published by the G. & C. Merriam Company of Springfield, Massachusetts. He considers it subversive because it threatens the integrity of the English language. In the past week he has given me a thousand examples of its crimes. He says it is a deliberate attempt to murder the --- I beg your pardon. I describe the situation at length because he told me to bring you in there, and it will be bad.
The Usage Panel makes it explicitly a writer's dictionary:
For expert consultation on words or constructions whose usage is controversial or problematic, the American Heritage Dictionary relies on the advice of a usage panel. In its current form, the panel consists of 200 prominent members of professions whose work demands sensitivity to language. Present and former members of the usage panel include novelists (Isaac Asimov, Barbara Kingsolver, David Foster Wallace, and Eudora Welty), poets (Rita Dove, Galway Kinnell, Mary Oliver, and Robert Pinsky) playwrights (Terrence McNally and Marsha Norman), journalists (Liane Hansen and Susan Stamberg), literary critics (Harold Bloom), columnists and commentators (William F. Buckley, Jr., and Robert J. Samuelson), linguists and cognitive scientists (Steven Pinker and Calvert Watkins), and humorists (Garrison Keillor and David Sedaris).
Nothing says "faith in god"
like bullet-proof glass.
Look at the photographs. The Pope has no protection.
Following the attempted assassination of Pope John Paul II in 1981, the popemobile was fitted with bulletproof glass on four sides. However, it was sometimes driven with open windows.
The 20 ft. stetch limo conversion was completed in ten days.
In time for the Pope's vist to the UN, a Mass at Yankee Statium and a vist to the Vatican Pavilion at the New York World's Fair (where Michelangelo's "Pieta" was on display.)
This early Popemobile is quite interesting as an example of the intersection between technology and celebrity --- and surprisingly, in the wake of the Kennedy assasination, it doesn't appear to have had any significant armoring.
The stretched wheelbase is a massive 160" with an overall length of nearly 21 feet. Exterior step plates and handrails for security, additional interior seating for aides and prelates, a special seat for the Pontiff that can be raised and lowered, supplemental interior lighting, public address system, auxiliary power from a bank of seven batteries were only a few of the many detail changes.
Might the "legal complications" have something to do with a cultural preference for songs that established professionals in the music industry have written over songs that members of the general public have written? That says more about the lack of participatory culture in the industrialized world than about any underlying technical problem.
The first profssional songwriter in the U.S. was Stephen Foster, who was born in 1826. In 1850 the showman P.T Barnum offered Jenny Lind $150,000 for her first American tour, all expenses paid.
$3,882,061.04, adjusted for inflation.
Which suggests that the still quite rual nineteeth century American audience had had all of the "participatory culture" it could stand.
For the very first time in its history, the top 10 rating of vulnerabilities includes products from just two companies: Adobe and Oracle (Java), with seven of those 10 vulnerabilities being found in Adobe Flash Player alone. Microsoft products have disappeared from this ranking due to improvements in the automatic Windows update mechanism and the growing proportion of users who have Windows 7 installed on their PCs.
Wrong question with "firefox is better", etc etc. The real question is, who the hell uses IE9 in the first place?
About 7 in 10 Windows 7 users in the states.
As we've mentioned before, Microsoft skipped XP support for Internet Explorer 9 in order to compete more effectively on Windows 7. In July on Windows 7, Internet Explorer 9 hit 18.5% share worldwide and 24.8% in the United States. There are indications that this strategy is working. Although Internet Explorer lost usage share on XP, on Windows 7, Microsoft increased global usage share, going from 54.6% in June to 54.8% in July. And in the U.S., Internet Explorer share on Windows 7 grew 0.6% to 68.1%.
I dont' care how good it is at "blocking malicious content" if the underlying OS is still completely unsafe, which is due to what consumers put on their PC's.
I don't get it -- there are about 8 bajillion tech books like this one: Beginners guide to XYZ, This-and-That for dummies, ABC inside-and-out. Why would a book review for any of them make the front page of slashdot?
The short answer is the guy who is fantastically productive and articulate about working with Photoshop or Blender may know next to nothing about audio editing and Audacity.
Why does Mozilla keep treating Firefox like it's something they need to apologize for? Why are they acting like Chrome and others are setting the standards now? Why do they act like they're in some kind of pissing contest with Google?
Because Moz lives and dies by the add-click.
A cool $100 million in royalties each year or damn close to it - and almost all of it from Google.
The one thing Moz cannot allow to happen is to lose market share to up-and-coming Chrome browser. Not when Internet Explorer, Safari and the rest are looking reasonably secure in their core markets:
In July on Windows 7, Internet Explorer 9 hit 18.5% share worldwide and 24.8% in the United States.
Do not blame Mozilla because you are too lazy or don't care enough to unzip the addon, open the config file, and change the max version number yourself.
The non-technical end user should never - ever - be told to jump through these hoops.
The user doesn't understand the rules for development or the relationship between the developer and Mozilla. They only know that the Firefox browser has disabled an extension they need.
But most folks are just concerned with the abuses of power that the RIAA and MPAA engage in and the robbing of the public domain to profit an oligarchy.
Let's be clear about something here.
Disney's copyright on "Cinderella" and "Beauty and Beast" extends only to its unique take on these stories and to clearly derivative works.
The Rogers and Hammerstein musical owes nothing to the Disney studio. Neither did Jim Henson's adaptation for the CBC and HBO.
Search Amazon.com for "Beauty and the Beast" and you will find:
503 Videos 2,000 MP3s 1,849 Books 107 Titles For The Kindle 612 Toys & Games 353 CDs 31 Video Games
7,636 Products In All Categories.
Search Amazon.com for "Robin Hood" and you will find 8,000 products in all catagories, for "Peter Pan," 10,000.
What the geek seems to be lookig for is a Disney coloring book or a paint-by-number set. Because that is about as far as his own imagination or knowledge of popular culture can take him.
Not to mention trade secrets have no protection under law, in fact that's why copyright law exists in the first place.
Never say never.
Approximately 40 states have adopted the model Uniform Trade Secrets Act (USTA). The USTA defines a trade secret as "information, including a formula, pattern, compilation, program device, method, technique, or process, that: (i) derives independent economic value, actual or potential, from not being generally known to, and not being readily ascertainable by proper means by, other persons who can obtain economic value from its disclosure or use, and (ii) is the subject of efforts that are reasonable under the circumstances to maintain its secrecy."
The USTA specifies remedies for violation of trade secrets including injunctions, damages, and attorney's fees. It also gives courts the authority to grant protective orders to ensure the secrecy of a trade secret during the discovery phase of litigation, and prevents disclosure of confidential information by witnesses.
Federal Protection for Trade Secrets
The Economic Espionage Act of 1996 federally criminalizes the theft or misappropriation of trade secrets under two key provisions. The first makes it illegal to steal trade secrets for the benefit foreign powers; the second, makes it illegal to steal trade secrets for commercial or economic purposes regardless of who benefits.
The reverse engineering of software faces considerable legal challenges due to the enforcement of anti reverse engineering licensing provisions and the prohibition on the circumvention of technologies embedded within protection measures. By enforcing these legal mechanisms, courts are not required to examine the reverse engineering restrictions under federal intellectual property law. In circumstances involving anti reverse engineering licensing provisions, courts must first determine whether the enforcement of these provisions within contracts are preempted by federal intellectual property law considerations. Under DMCA claims involving the circumvention of technological protection systems, courts analyze whether or not the reverse engineering in question qualifies under any of the exemptions contained within the law.
This is very obviously a "version 1" product. Give it a few years and software revisions and it could be a worthwhile offering.
Perhaps.
But if you are 71 today, you were 41 when the IBM PC was released and 61 when Windows 95 took the world by storm.
Which means we are close to the point where ownership of a Mac or Windows PC or tablet or both can be considered a given for anyone who retires with a middle class income ---
and make no mistake about it, the $700 "net appliance" is and always has been middle class.
Slashdot Mirror
I'd like this to be an exhibit at every trial in which gigantic money damages are claimed for copyright infringement.
So would the attorneys for the plaintiff.
The geek casts himself as the hero in his own courtroom melodrama. In the real world, the jury is more likely to see him as a candidate a stout oak and thirty feet of hemp.
American juries are middle-aged, middle-class, small-C Conservative and firmly of the opinion that property rights matter, that there is no such thing as a free lunch.
The geek's sense of entitlement really pisses them off.
First up: Any government department that's got a significant investment in IT can't just go out and replace, say, Microsoft Office with LibreOffice overnight.
Microsoft treats MS Office as one component of an integrated office system that scales to an enterprise of any size.
Client-Server-Web applications. Tools for deployment. Tools for management.
Strong third-party support. Tutorials and resources of every kind. Training and staff available everywhere south of the Artic Circle.
While LibreOffice is fundamentally nothing more than an immature, stand-alone, office suite recently forked from OpenOffice.org.
The game doesn't even run remotely. All you get is streaming video/audio and all the lag you'd expect (including controller lag), which is a recipe for disaster in North America.
But all you need is the client app and a wireless game controller for your Internet enabled HDTV, Blu-Ray player or set top box. Upfront cost $50 to $100.
The significance of lag depends on the game and your style of play. Not everyone has the reflexes for an intense first person shooter. There are other genres which are no less engaging, just paced a little differently.
The rental and subscrption model has been a success for Netflix. There is no good reason to believe it won't be a success for OnLive.
Let me give you an example .. the concept of a magnetic breakaway safety mechanism for power cords was invented in the 1990's for deep fryers (though it may actually have a longer history than that). In the early 2000s, Apple got a patent for the same concept when applied to electronic devices.
The key word here is "concept."
The patent is not for the idea.
The patent is for the device or the machine or the process.
The solution that works for the deep fryer is not necessarily the right solution or the best solution for every superficially similiar problem.
A lot of problems would go away if the US would simply get rid of its government flood insurance program.
It is the sort of thing kids used to be taught about geography in grade school.
You build along the river because the river provides cheap transportation, fresh water and power. The river often ends in a seaport - giving you a chance to become a major player in coastal and foreign trade.
Periodic flooding means that your valley remains fertile, perhaps as fertile as the Mississippi Delta.
For extra credit:
Map the flood plain of the Mississippi, the Missouri and their tributaries.
Count the number of people dependent on these rivers for their living, calculate the cost of moving every one of them to higher ground --- including the cost to American trade, agriculture and industry.
It's a pretty decent news site with a horrible tabloid editorial slant.
When they're publishing press releases or writing humour, they're fine, but their opinion pieces & editorials are more often than not sensationalist nonsense.
"News for nerds," eh?
Thats how the inferior Windows won and how Office beat the better Lotus 123 and Wordperfect. It is why the green screen ugly, slow, 640 k ram limited, pc speaker beeping, single tasking, CLI OS DOS won over the supperior Amiga and Macintosh at the time to dismay over people who had multimedia 10 years earlier.
WordPerfect was a DOS era product ported to every platform known to man - each with its own little fiefdom within the company. It was late to see Windows as a threat - it was late to get credible product on the market for Win 3.1 and Win 95.
The MS-DOS PC was positioned as an office workhorse. The natural upgrade path from the eight-bit world of CP/M. Sold with an industrial strength keyboard and a large - readable - 80 column display. It would prove equally at home on the shop room floor .
The modular design of the PC meant that audio and video upgrades could be easily installed and competitively priced.
No single vendor.
Now that *everyone* has a computer, computer crimes are no longer treated as a serious thing.
This is nonsense.
Computer Crime & Intellectual Property Section
Sentencing for Oliveras is scheduled Oct. 28, 2011, at 9:00 a.m. EDT. He faces a maximum penalty of 20 years in prison and a fine of $1,541,349 on the wire fraud charge, and two years in prison and a $250,000 fine on the identity theft charge.
BROOKLYN MAN PLEADS GUILTY TO ONLINE IDENTITY THEFT INVOLVING MORE THAN $700,000 IN REPORTED FRAUD [August 10]
No, it would set the legal bar exactly where it should be: requiring the police to actually identify a person as a suspect. If the police are unable to do so, then they should not be granted a warrant -- this is not a country where we grant the police general search warrants, and it is better to let some criminals walk free than to harass innocent people.
When requesting a warrant, all you really need to do is to persuade a judge that this is reasonable place to search for evidence of a crime.
It is lunatic to argue that the police must name a suspect before they can even begin to look for the evidence that may point them in the right direction.
The IP address takes you to a street address or to a particular machine.
It probably also gives you the name of the primary account holder, the head of household, for example.
But that for the moment is irrelevant.
_____
The constitutional prohibition is against "unreasonable" search and seizures.
When the purpose of a search is the solution of a crime, many things become more reasonable and more necessary. That the search is inconvenient and uncomfortable does not make it harassment.
Robert Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land (plus some of his older books as well) helped kill a patent for waterbeds IIRC.
Heinlein also wrote about near-light speed starships.
You can't patent the idea. You can only patent the solution. The blueprint.
The Ninth Circuit (California area) is the most liberal circuit and is reversed by the Supreme Court more than any other Circuit.
Jurisduction Of The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals
Alaska
Arizona
California
Guam
Hawaii
Idaho
Montana
Nevada
Northern Mariana Islands
Oregon
Washington
Representing 20% of the population of the US.
It woud be diffcult to imagine a more complex racial, economic and political mix. Though about half the cases reaching the court will come from California.
So few cases reach oral argument and decision by the Supreme Court these days that to talk of how often a circuit court is reversed seems almost meaningless.
I think I'm going to wait until the 5th edition American Heritage comes out in November. That dictionary is pretty much the standard for most professional writers and editors in the U.S
The American Heritage Dictionary has its origins in scenes like this:
Mr. Wolfe is in the middle of a fit. It's complicated. There's a fireplace in the front room, but it's never lit because he hates open fires. He says they stultify mental processes. But it's lit now because he's using it. He's seated in front of it, on a chair too small for him, tearing sheets out of a book and burning them. The book is the new edition, the third edition, of Webster's New International Dictionary, Unabridged, published by the G. & C. Merriam Company of Springfield, Massachusetts. He considers it subversive because it threatens the integrity of the English language. In the past week he has given me a thousand examples of its crimes. He says it is a deliberate attempt to murder the --- I beg your pardon. I describe the situation at length because he told me to bring you in there, and it will be bad.
Nero Wolfe
The Usage Panel makes it explicitly a writer's dictionary:
For expert consultation on words or constructions whose usage is controversial or problematic, the American Heritage Dictionary relies on the advice of a usage panel. In its current form, the panel consists of 200 prominent members of professions whose work demands sensitivity to language. Present and former members of the usage panel include novelists (Isaac Asimov, Barbara Kingsolver, David Foster Wallace, and Eudora Welty), poets (Rita Dove, Galway Kinnell, Mary Oliver, and Robert Pinsky) playwrights (Terrence McNally and Marsha Norman), journalists (Liane Hansen and Susan Stamberg), literary critics (Harold Bloom), columnists and commentators (William F. Buckley, Jr., and Robert J. Samuelson), linguists and cognitive scientists (Steven Pinker and Calvert Watkins), and humorists (Garrison Keillor and David Sedaris).
The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language
So you go out of your way to point out that he has no protection, and then link to an article that shows the vehicle with bulletproof glass.
Not the same vehicle and16 years later.
Nothing says "faith in god" like bullet-proof glass.
Look at the photographs. The Pope has no protection.
Following the attempted assassination of Pope John Paul II in 1981, the popemobile was fitted with bulletproof glass on four sides. However, it was sometimes driven with open windows.
Popemobile
and this is relevant to the /. community how?
The 20 ft. stetch limo conversion was completed in ten days.
In time for the Pope's vist to the UN, a Mass at Yankee Statium and a vist to the Vatican Pavilion at the New York World's Fair (where Michelangelo's "Pieta" was on display.)
This early Popemobile is quite interesting as an example of the intersection between technology and celebrity --- and surprisingly, in the wake of the Kennedy assasination, it doesn't appear to have had any significant armoring.
The stretched wheelbase is a massive 160" with an overall length of nearly 21 feet. Exterior step plates and handrails for security, additional interior seating for aides and prelates, a special seat for the Pontiff that can be raised and lowered, supplemental interior lighting, public address system, auxiliary power from a bank of seven batteries were only a few of the many detail changes.
Might the "legal complications" have something to do with a cultural preference for songs that established professionals in the music industry have written over songs that members of the general public have written? That says more about the lack of participatory culture in the industrialized world than about any underlying technical problem.
The first profssional songwriter in the U.S. was Stephen Foster, who was born in 1826. In 1850 the showman P.T Barnum offered Jenny Lind $150,000 for her first American tour, all expenses paid.
$3,882,061.04, adjusted for inflation.
Which suggests that the still quite rual nineteeth century American audience had had all of the "participatory culture" it could stand.
Secunia also posts stats on IE 9:
In 2011:
Three advisories, all patched by Microsoft. Two "Highly Critical," one not critical at all. Vulnerability Report: Microsoft Internet Explorer 9.x
This story caught my eye as well:
For the very first time in its history, the top 10 rating of vulnerabilities includes products from just two companies: Adobe and Oracle (Java), with seven of those 10 vulnerabilities being found in Adobe Flash Player alone. Microsoft products have disappeared from this ranking due to improvements in the automatic Windows update mechanism and the growing proportion of users who have Windows 7 installed on their PCs.
Kaspersky Lab: Turbulent quarter as hacktivism increases
Wrong question with "firefox is better", etc etc. The real question is, who the hell uses IE9 in the first place?
About 7 in 10 Windows 7 users in the states.
As we've mentioned before, Microsoft skipped XP support for Internet Explorer 9 in order to compete more effectively on Windows 7. In July on Windows 7, Internet Explorer 9 hit 18.5% share worldwide and 24.8% in the United States. There are indications that this strategy is working. Although Internet Explorer lost usage share on XP, on Windows 7, Microsoft increased global usage share, going from 54.6% in June to 54.8% in July. And in the U.S., Internet Explorer share on Windows 7 grew 0.6% to 68.1%.
Browser Wars [August 1, 2011]
I dont' care how good it is at "blocking malicious content" if the underlying OS is still completely unsafe, which is due to what consumers put on their PC's.
Unpatched 0%
Vendor Patch 100%
Microsoft Windows 7 Solution Status (Based on 28 advisories from 2011)
Does he not have the freedom of assembly? Does he not have the freedom to call for an assembly? What part of a water fight is not legal?
It comes usually down to when, where and how many people?
I don't get it -- there are about 8 bajillion tech books like this one: Beginners guide to XYZ, This-and-That for dummies, ABC inside-and-out. Why would a book review for any of them make the front page of slashdot?
The short answer is the guy who is fantastically productive and articulate about working with Photoshop or Blender may know next to nothing about audio editing and Audacity.
Why does Mozilla keep treating Firefox like it's something they need to apologize for? Why are they acting like Chrome and others are setting the standards now? Why do they act like they're in some kind of pissing contest with Google?
Because Moz lives and dies by the add-click.
A cool $100 million in royalties each year or damn close to it - and almost all of it from Google.
The one thing Moz cannot allow to happen is to lose market share to up-and-coming Chrome browser. Not when Internet Explorer, Safari and the rest are looking reasonably secure in their core markets:
In July on Windows 7, Internet Explorer 9 hit 18.5% share worldwide and 24.8% in the United States.
Browser Wars
Do not blame Mozilla because you are too lazy or don't care enough to unzip the addon, open the config file, and change the max version number yourself.
The non-technical end user should never - ever - be told to jump through these hoops.
The user doesn't understand the rules for development or the relationship between the developer and Mozilla. They only know that the Firefox browser has disabled an extension they need.
But most folks are just concerned with the abuses of power that the RIAA and MPAA engage in and the robbing of the public domain to profit an oligarchy.
Let's be clear about something here.
Disney's copyright on "Cinderella" and "Beauty and Beast" extends only to its unique take on these stories and to clearly derivative works.
The Rogers and Hammerstein musical owes nothing to the Disney studio. Neither did Jim Henson's adaptation for the CBC and HBO.
Search Amazon.com for "Beauty and the Beast" and you will find:
503 Videos
2,000 MP3s
1,849 Books
107 Titles For The Kindle
612 Toys & Games
353 CDs
31 Video Games
7,636 Products In All Categories.
Search Amazon.com for "Robin Hood" and you will find 8,000 products in all catagories, for "Peter Pan," 10,000.
What the geek seems to be lookig for is a Disney coloring book or a paint-by-number set. Because that is about as far as his own imagination or knowledge of popular culture can take him.
Not to mention trade secrets have no protection under law, in fact that's why copyright law exists in the first place.
Never say never.
Approximately 40 states have adopted the model Uniform Trade Secrets Act (USTA). The USTA defines a trade secret as "information, including a formula, pattern, compilation, program device, method, technique, or process, that: (i) derives independent economic value, actual or potential, from not being generally known to, and not being readily ascertainable by proper means by, other persons who can obtain economic value from its disclosure or use, and (ii) is the subject of efforts that are reasonable under the circumstances to maintain its secrecy."
The USTA specifies remedies for violation of trade secrets including injunctions, damages, and attorney's fees. It also gives courts the authority to grant protective orders to ensure the secrecy of a trade secret during the discovery phase of litigation, and prevents disclosure of confidential information by witnesses.
Federal Protection for Trade Secrets
The Economic Espionage Act of 1996 federally criminalizes the theft or misappropriation of trade secrets under two key provisions. The first makes it illegal to steal trade secrets for the benefit foreign powers; the second, makes it illegal to steal trade secrets for commercial or economic purposes regardless of who benefits.
Trade Secrets
The reverse engineering of software faces considerable legal challenges due to the enforcement of anti reverse engineering licensing provisions and the prohibition on the circumvention of technologies embedded within protection measures. By enforcing these legal mechanisms, courts are not required to examine the reverse engineering restrictions under federal intellectual property law. In circumstances involving anti reverse engineering licensing provisions, courts must first determine whether the enforcement of these provisions within contracts are preempted by federal intellectual property law considerations. Under DMCA claims involving the circumvention of technological protection systems, courts analyze whether or not the reverse engineering in question qualifies under any of the exemptions contained within the law.
Frequently Asked Questions (and Answers) about Reverse Engineering
This is very obviously a "version 1" product. Give it a few years and software revisions and it could be a worthwhile offering.
Perhaps.
But if you are 71 today, you were 41 when the IBM PC was released and 61 when Windows 95 took the world by storm.
Which means we are close to the point where ownership of a Mac or Windows PC or tablet or both can be considered a given for anyone who retires with a middle class income ---
and make no mistake about it, the $700 "net appliance" is and always has been middle class.
A product looking for a market.