Driving your competition out of the marketplace isn't a PERMANENT condition - if it took below-cost prices to take over the market, it'll take below-market prices to keep control of the market.
You're forgetting lock-in. Once a company has a monopoly, it can set it's own standards and doesn't have to worry about interoperability with other people's software, and can use it's own position to make interoperability with itself as hard as possible.
Take microsoft office for example; competitors not only have to be free (or at least much cheaper) to even get into the market at all, they have to work with non-standard undocumented office files.
IE is another; look at how many sites only render properly in IE because people have coded to it's broken implementation of CSS and java, rather than go the extra mile to code to standards AND IE's cackhanded version of them.
Hell, look how microsoft is using it's desktop monopoly to push windows media player and it's DRM codecs. Only a couple of a days I had a student who lost all his recorded wma files because he didn't realise DRM was on by default, and now his backups are worthless because he didn't backup the licence files too. By making windows media codecs the default for all windows users, they're starting to push out the competition.
Assuming they succeed, there's nothing to stop them sticking to form and making longhorn only able to work with Windows Media drm formats, thus forcing you to stick to windows (and its media player) if you want to access your own music or home videos, or listen to internet radio, or watch internet films.
Lock-in lets monopolies keep their position without lowering prices, or innovating, or improving quality.
And before someone says it, no, IE and WMP are not free. You just pay it as part of the tax when you buy a new PC that's very hard to get without windows (and it's only the courts that have made even that possible, given microsoft used to use OEM agreements to make every computer ship with windows.)
I also disagree that microsoft has lowered prices. Last I heard, microsoft made 80%+ profit on windows. Windows 95 cost £39. Windows XP Pro costs £151. And the CAL costs... wow, they've gone up a lot. 5 years ago, I paid £5 a seat for NT licences. Now, at a school, we're expected to pay £30 a seat. I don't think inflation is that bad.
FF isn't the only game in town, and I would argue not even the best. Matter of opinion of course, but your not a moron if you don't use FF either.
Not using Firefox does not make you a moron. Still, the vulnerabilities in IE are legion, and constantly being expanded. Take this one for example.
Some vulnerabilities have been discovered in Internet Explorer, which allows a malicious web site to execute arbitrary commands or install code on your computer without any user interaction.
That exploit was discovered in october 2004, and XP SP2 users are still vulnerable with all updates (even on 12-1-2005, after microsoft had theoretically closed this hole, but only partially suceeded)
Firefox has problems, certainly (what program doesn't?) but they are of a far less serious nature, and patched much, much quicker. Some IE holes have never been patched.
Me, I'd rather not take the risk. The primary purpose of a firewall is to cut down vectors of attack. Stopping using IE is a similar tactic, in my book.
Under these criteria, the model of selling content that is easily obtainable for free IS destined to fail, whether demand exists or not, since the demand exists at a price point (free) that is by definition unable to generate profits.
By that logic, water supply companies and bottled water companies cannot exist, as I can go down the local river and fill my own buckets for free.
However, both quality of product and convenience are factors, as well as price, which some media-selling companies have picked up on. Magnatune, itunes, and allofmp3 all sell music. Magnatune gives free copies of music, but sells the higher quality versions, and also relies on the honour system. iTunes sells convenience. Allofmp3 is both cheap, and offers a wide range of formats.
The answer to fighting a free product is not to try and eliminate it (which with the ease of distribution, is a nigh impossible task) but to compete with it in other areas.
TV shows could be sold online shortly after broadcast, without adverts and at high quality. That'd be a massive market which is currently only used by p2p, as DVD's are way too late, and way too expensive. Hell, you could make the first few episodes available for free to plump up demand, or even all of them at low quality with adverts, with reminders to buy the nice version. Works for software.
You could do something similar with films. Netflix demonstrates that a reasonable entry price with a lot of choice and convenience CAN be more attractive than free.
Microsoft can go to radio websites, online video suppliers etc and says 'Hey! 90% of your users are running windows, and they ALL have windows media player and our nice DRM-enabled codecs, then you might as well stream/upload your content in our nice low-cost codec. AND we can update the player remotely and automatically if the DRM gets hacked.'
These sites then go 'Hmm. 90% of our customers have these codecs and the player, and they can't uninstall it even if they want to? We'll use your method for sure, rather than that inconvenient realplayer, or that unprotected mp3!'
The end result is, online music and video files require you to a) use windows media player and thus b) have windows.
And thus microsoft uses its desktop monopoly to lock every other platform and player out of the lucrative media market.
A similar effect happens when people rip their own films (off DV cameras) and their CDs, and end up with them in DRM microsoft formats by default, because they used the bundled programs. Now they can't easily back them up, or play them on anything other than a windows machine, thus again locking them into windows media player and windows.
This is already starting to happen, more and more sites use windows media audio streaming, and windows media video. It needs to be stopped before it becomes another monopoly.
Thanks for the link. I've added my name to the letter, and included a personal note thanking Wlodzimierz Marcinski and his government for his actions in staving off the undemocratic action of the council in trying to sneak this legislation through the back door.
With regards world war II, the goalposts of war crimes have moved since.
The Geneva Convention was extended after the war, to include things other than the treatment of POW's and medical personel/wounded soldiers. Bombing of civilian targets (unless it was an Open City, i.e. undefended) wasn't against the articles of war at the time, AFAIK.
As far as I'm aware, the german luftwaffe weren't prosecuted for the bombing of London either. At the time, people accepted, even desired, the retaliatary attacks against german infrastructure and cities, as it was an Us or Them situation.
Also, when you compare Dresden or Coventry against modern examples, they were war crimes; when you put them in perspective against 6 million jews dead, or the horrific losses by the Russians, or indeed the losses of WWI (as they were by people of the time) they unfortunately seem rather small potatoes.
Unfortunately, things still haven't changed that much. Look at the civilan deaths in bosnia, chechnya, or iraq as examples of modern bombing campaigns. Human rights organisations complain, and the airforces continue doing what they're doing.
War is a really nasty business, and lots of innocent people due during them, despite the best efforts of the soldiers. I wish people would remember that before they were so eager to send troops over 'to give so-and-so a kicking'.
You pay a yearly premium to the insurance company, and whenever you buy a new piece of software one of their representatives (known as an "opener") stops by and deshrinkwraps the package for you.
I have a cheaper solution. I could just go nextdoor and get my 8 year old neighbour to install any software. He's too young to legally enter a contract. He can't be bound by it's terms, and I didn't see the contract, let alone agree to it.
Alternatively, I'll just buy a cat, and leave it alone with my keyboard whenever I get to that stage of installation. I'd like to see them take my cat to court for contract violation...
This makes no sense. Technology makes existing things easier, and new things possible. When it comes to distribution, tech greatly eases the mechanism, and hugely lowers the cost of entry.
There's no NEED to artificially limit distribution technology with laws or other technology; such attempts are doomed to fail.
There is still scarcity in the system; scarcity of skilled creation. As long there is a demand for people's creations, and people willing to create, there will be a market. The middle men, who relied on scarcity of distribution, well, if they can't find ways to add value to the process, then they're better off out of business.
It's not like there was no art, music, or writing before copyright; at absolute worst, we could go back to direct patronage. Either by government funding, or the paypal model (give me 5000 quid in total and I release my new album).
Live performances will always be worth something.
And hell, plenty of people are willing to pay for convenience, even when free alternatives are available, as itunes and bottled water proves. Besides, people aren't stupid. They realise that if nobody pays, nothing will happen. Smart people realise though, that not everyone will pay. The students, the kids, the poor; they can enjoy the stuff for free (just like the library or the radio), while those with more money and less time can just buy what they want on demand.
The P2P model of content distribution is here to stay; it means the costs to the orginal author are much lower, making it far cheaper to get in the game in the first place, as well as increase the number of potential audience.
More sellers, more buyers, cheaper distribution - better for everyone but the middleman. And even they have a role to play, if they choose; acting like a filter, to help us choose the good from the bad. But the days of everyone being controlled and screwed by the middleman cartels are soon to be over.
[sarcasm] Oh yeah, cos I spent so much on that copy of mozilla, and I expect warranty support having coughed up all my hard earned money. If I don't get satisfaction, I'll sue!
I mean, it's not like microsoft force you to buy a copy of their OS every time you buy a new computer, and it's so easy to uninstall internet explorer from their OS so you don't have to be vulnerable if you don't want to use that particular piece of embedded software.
[/sarcasm]
Seriously. Microsoft charge a monopoly rent for their software, and stops you removing buggy components. Mozilla offers a free piece of addon software. I think it's a little unfair to hold them to the same standard of financial responsibility...
For what it's worth, I used to be rather unfond of realplayer/realone, and the 'hunt the spam' options, and tended to avoid it where possible.
However, after RP10 for windows and helix player for linux especially, I'm definitely learning to appreciate your work now.
In fact, I've got BBC radio running flawlessly in the helix player right now, and given how much fun I've had trying to get that working in linux before, that's no minor feat, and i'm frankly rather happy with it.
Hopefully it's some comfort that at least some geeks appreciate the changes that have been forthcoming, and look forward to see what else is coming.
I won't go into the the many different types of thin client setup you can do with linux, as many others already have;
But if you want to run microsoft office and/or internet explorer on your linux thin clients, I strongly recommend crossover office - it's virtually flawless at running both apps, along with a number of other windows programs. It's a commercial spin off of wine, and it makes installing and running windows software on the clients a lot easier.
The 3512 is supported natively using the sata_sil driver in any kernel above 2.6.5.
There's also a driver for it from silicon image themselves (to tie into their winmodem like 'hardware' raid) but after my experiences with their 3112 driver, you're probably better of using the linux native one and using md software raid (if you need it).
Fraid I don't use fedora, but if it doesn't support it with a stock install, you might need a newer kernel.
My take on it is that all this talk of security is pretty ridiculous. You're average American belongs to the safest and least threatened group in the entire world.
Uhh, what?
I recognise your solutions as valid ones, but you also need to recognise how urgently they're required because the average security of your citizens frankly, sucks (especially those in the cities)
http://www.mercerhr.com/pressrelease/details.jht ml ?idContent=1084835
The highest ranking spot for a north american city last year was 40th, graded on personal security. Canadian cities were ranked 25th, and western europe took the highest spots. Unsurprisingly, the lowest spots are wartorn african cities...
They still haven't linked to the torrents yet in the announcement.
The tlm-project torrents only appear to include the stock livecd's and the generic (x86 and i686) package GRP/package CDs, NOT the P4 and athlon-xp package CDs. Since the announcement specifically states that the platform specific CDs are not available from the normal mirrors, only bittorrent, you need the following
Which has all the arch-specific livecds, and all the arch package CD's, include P3,P4,athlon-xp, amd64, ppc etc etc. If you don't trust the md5's on the torrent mirror, there are most of them in here, while the release notes give the details of the PGP signing.
I suspect that if the GPL was considered invalid, then, so would any other software license- including, for example, any from MS.
They're not really the same thing. a EULA from microsoft acts after purchase, to grant microsoft more rights than copyright law does (you must allow MS to automatically install software on your system, for example), and to take away some of your rights you would normally hold under copyright and other laws, such as reverse engineering, publishing benchmarks, or moving your copy of windows from one computer to another.
In effect, EULA's take away your rights, with nothing granted in return except the right to limited use your software that you'd already paid for. You certainly get no extra rights to distribute. The most important thing is though, you have to agree to it to install and run the software.
The GPL on the other hand, has no effect on use at all. You can print out the GPL and use it as toilet paper, and you can still use GPL software how you choose. Under plain copyright law, you can't distribute copies though, no more than you can legally distribute say, windows xp. The GPL, unlike a EULA, does grant you the right to make copies, under certain conditions, such as releasing the source code.
So EULA's deal with use of the software, and add greater restrictions than copyright. They do not allow distribution. The GPL does not affect use, but does grant extra rights than copyright law for distribution.
Ergo, if one is found valid or invalid, it doesn't really affect the other; they deal with different parts of copyright law.
Well, unless we have some really bizarre ruling such that no principles of copyright may be changed by contract, in which case pretty much every copyrighted work in the US would be undistributable...
Slashdot Mirror
Driving your competition out of the marketplace isn't a PERMANENT condition - if it took below-cost prices to take over the market, it'll take below-market prices to keep control of the market.
You're forgetting lock-in. Once a company has a monopoly, it can set it's own standards and doesn't have to worry about interoperability with other people's software, and can use it's own position to make interoperability with itself as hard as possible.
Take microsoft office for example; competitors not only have to be free (or at least much cheaper) to even get into the market at all, they have to work with non-standard undocumented office files.
IE is another; look at how many sites only render properly in IE because people have coded to it's broken implementation of CSS and java, rather than go the extra mile to code to standards AND IE's cackhanded version of them.
Hell, look how microsoft is using it's desktop monopoly to push windows media player and it's DRM codecs. Only a couple of a days I had a student who lost all his recorded wma files because he didn't realise DRM was on by default, and now his backups are worthless because he didn't backup the licence files too. By making windows media codecs the default for all windows users, they're starting to push out the competition.
Assuming they succeed, there's nothing to stop them sticking to form and making longhorn only able to work with Windows Media drm formats, thus forcing you to stick to windows (and its media player) if you want to access your own music or home videos, or listen to internet radio, or watch internet films.
Lock-in lets monopolies keep their position without lowering prices, or innovating, or improving quality.
And before someone says it, no, IE and WMP are not free. You just pay it as part of the tax when you buy a new PC that's very hard to get without windows (and it's only the courts that have made even that possible, given microsoft used to use OEM agreements to make every computer ship with windows.)
I also disagree that microsoft has lowered prices. Last I heard, microsoft made 80%+ profit on windows. Windows 95 cost £39. Windows XP Pro costs £151. And the CAL costs... wow, they've gone up a lot. 5 years ago, I paid £5 a seat for NT licences. Now, at a school, we're expected to pay £30 a seat. I don't think inflation is that bad.
I'm european, you insensitive clod ;)
FF isn't the only game in town, and I would argue not even the best. Matter of opinion of course, but your not a moron if you don't use FF either.
Not using Firefox does not make you a moron. Still, the vulnerabilities in IE are legion, and constantly being expanded. Take this one for example.
Some vulnerabilities have been discovered in Internet Explorer, which allows a malicious web site to execute arbitrary commands or install code on your computer without any user interaction.
That exploit was discovered in october 2004, and XP SP2 users are still vulnerable with all updates (even on 12-1-2005, after microsoft had theoretically closed this hole, but only partially suceeded)
Firefox has problems, certainly (what program doesn't?) but they are of a far less serious nature, and patched much, much quicker. Some IE holes have never been patched.
Me, I'd rather not take the risk. The primary purpose of a firewall is to cut down vectors of attack. Stopping using IE is a similar tactic, in my book.
Under these criteria, the model of selling content that is easily obtainable for free IS destined to fail, whether demand exists or not, since the demand exists at a price point (free) that is by definition unable to generate profits.
By that logic, water supply companies and bottled water companies cannot exist, as I can go down the local river and fill my own buckets for free.
However, both quality of product and convenience are factors, as well as price, which some media-selling companies have picked up on. Magnatune, itunes, and allofmp3 all sell music. Magnatune gives free copies of music, but sells the higher quality versions, and also relies on the honour system. iTunes sells convenience. Allofmp3 is both cheap, and offers a wide range of formats.
The answer to fighting a free product is not to try and eliminate it (which with the ease of distribution, is a nigh impossible task) but to compete with it in other areas.
TV shows could be sold online shortly after broadcast, without adverts and at high quality. That'd be a massive market which is currently only used by p2p, as DVD's are way too late, and way too expensive. Hell, you could make the first few episodes available for free to plump up demand, or even all of them at low quality with adverts, with reminders to buy the nice version. Works for software.
You could do something similar with films. Netflix demonstrates that a reasonable entry price with a lot of choice and convenience CAN be more attractive than free.
The threat is the codecs.
Microsoft can go to radio websites, online video suppliers etc and says 'Hey! 90% of your users are running windows, and they ALL have windows media player and our nice DRM-enabled codecs, then you might as well stream/upload your content in our nice low-cost codec. AND we can update the player remotely and automatically if the DRM gets hacked.'
These sites then go 'Hmm. 90% of our customers have these codecs and the player, and they can't uninstall it even if they want to? We'll use your method for sure, rather than that inconvenient realplayer, or that unprotected mp3!'
The end result is, online music and video files require you to a) use windows media player and thus b) have windows.
And thus microsoft uses its desktop monopoly to lock every other platform and player out of the lucrative media market.
A similar effect happens when people rip their own films (off DV cameras) and their CDs, and end up with them in DRM microsoft formats by default, because they used the bundled programs. Now they can't easily back them up, or play them on anything other than a windows machine, thus again locking them into windows media player and windows.
This is already starting to happen, more and more sites use windows media audio streaming, and windows media video. It needs to be stopped before it becomes another monopoly.
Thanks for the link. I've added my name to the letter, and included a personal note thanking Wlodzimierz Marcinski and his government for his actions in staving off the undemocratic action of the council in trying to sneak this legislation through the back door.
With regards world war II, the goalposts of war crimes have moved since.
The Geneva Convention was extended after the war, to include things other than the treatment of POW's and medical personel/wounded soldiers. Bombing of civilian targets (unless it was an Open City, i.e. undefended) wasn't against the articles of war at the time, AFAIK.
As far as I'm aware, the german luftwaffe weren't prosecuted for the bombing of London either. At the time, people accepted, even desired, the retaliatary attacks against german infrastructure and cities, as it was an Us or Them situation.
Also, when you compare Dresden or Coventry against modern examples, they were war crimes; when you put them in perspective against 6 million jews dead, or the horrific losses by the Russians, or indeed the losses of WWI (as they were by people of the time) they unfortunately seem rather small potatoes.
Unfortunately, things still haven't changed that much. Look at the civilan deaths in bosnia, chechnya, or iraq as examples of modern bombing campaigns. Human rights organisations complain, and the airforces continue doing what they're doing.
War is a really nasty business, and lots of innocent people due during them, despite the best efforts of the soldiers. I wish people would remember that before they were so eager to send troops over 'to give so-and-so a kicking'.
Well, if you substitute baby poo for cat poo, you've just described Sims 2....
Anything which is critical of police action is terrorism, of course.
I find HijackThis to be pretty effective at removing browser helper objects. Just add that to your other utilities.
I'd also recommend you use firefox or opera if you're not already, thus removing one main infection vector.
You pay a yearly premium to the insurance company, and whenever you buy a new piece of software one of their representatives (known as an "opener") stops by and deshrinkwraps the package for you.
I have a cheaper solution. I could just go nextdoor and get my 8 year old neighbour to install any software. He's too young to legally enter a contract. He can't be bound by it's terms, and I didn't see the contract, let alone agree to it.
Alternatively, I'll just buy a cat, and leave it alone with my keyboard whenever I get to that stage of installation. I'd like to see them take my cat to court for contract violation...
Try HijackThis
, I've found it effective at removing BHO embedded in IE. Combined with Ad-aware, I've found it clears off pretty much everything.
speed controllers on ships (full speed ahead, and damn the torpedos!)
Gear sticks, especially on automatic cars.
Levers to hold open windows are usually graduated on a linear scale.
Linear controls make most sense when you have a limited number of finite positions, especially when they are a linear progression from each other.
This makes no sense. Technology makes existing things easier, and new things possible. When it comes to distribution, tech greatly eases the mechanism, and hugely lowers the cost of entry.
There's no NEED to artificially limit distribution technology with laws or other technology; such attempts are doomed to fail.
There is still scarcity in the system; scarcity of skilled creation. As long there is a demand for people's creations, and people willing to create, there will be a market. The middle men, who relied on scarcity of distribution, well, if they can't find ways to add value to the process, then they're better off out of business.
It's not like there was no art, music, or writing before copyright; at absolute worst, we could go back to direct patronage. Either by government funding, or the paypal model (give me 5000 quid in total and I release my new album).
Live performances will always be worth something.
And hell, plenty of people are willing to pay for convenience, even when free alternatives are available, as itunes and bottled water proves. Besides, people aren't stupid. They realise that if nobody pays, nothing will happen. Smart people realise though, that not everyone will pay. The students, the kids, the poor; they can enjoy the stuff for free (just like the library or the radio), while those with more money and less time can just buy what they want on demand.
The P2P model of content distribution is here to stay; it means the costs to the orginal author are much lower, making it far cheaper to get in the game in the first place, as well as increase the number of potential audience.
More sellers, more buyers, cheaper distribution - better for everyone but the middleman. And even they have a role to play, if they choose; acting like a filter, to help us choose the good from the bad. But the days of everyone being controlled and screwed by the middleman cartels are soon to be over.
[sarcasm]
Oh yeah, cos I spent so much on that copy of mozilla, and I expect warranty support having coughed up all my hard earned money. If I don't get satisfaction, I'll sue!
I mean, it's not like microsoft force you to buy a copy of their OS every time you buy a new computer, and it's so easy to uninstall internet explorer from their OS so you don't have to be vulnerable if you don't want to use that particular piece of embedded software.
[/sarcasm]
Seriously. Microsoft charge a monopoly rent for their software, and stops you removing buggy components. Mozilla offers a free piece of addon software. I think it's a little unfair to hold them to the same standard of financial responsibility...
For what it's worth, I used to be rather unfond of realplayer/realone, and the 'hunt the spam' options, and tended to avoid it where possible.
However, after RP10 for windows and helix player for linux especially, I'm definitely learning to appreciate your work now.
In fact, I've got BBC radio running flawlessly in the helix player right now, and given how much fun I've had trying to get that working in linux before, that's no minor feat, and i'm frankly rather happy with it.
Hopefully it's some comfort that at least some geeks appreciate the changes that have been forthcoming, and look forward to see what else is coming.
Oh yeah, that's a quality looking mouse all right. I'd rather keep my universal ms wheel mouse optical thanks. I kinda use the scroll wheel a lot.
I won't go into the the many different types of thin client setup you can do with linux, as many others already have;
But if you want to run microsoft office and/or internet explorer on your linux thin clients, I strongly recommend crossover office - it's virtually flawless at running both apps, along with a number of other windows programs. It's a commercial spin off of wine, and it makes installing and running windows software on the clients a lot easier.
The 3512 is supported natively using the sata_sil driver in any kernel above 2.6.5.
There's also a driver for it from silicon image themselves (to tie into their winmodem like 'hardware' raid) but after my experiences with their 3112 driver, you're probably better of using the linux native one and using md software raid (if you need it).
Fraid I don't use fedora, but if it doesn't support it with a stock install, you might need a newer kernel.
On linux, for kde there's juk, or the gtk based easytag.
Easytag is more 'power user', juk is easier to use. I use both, depending upon what I'm doing.
My take on it is that all this talk of security is pretty ridiculous. You're average American belongs to the safest and least threatened group in the entire world.
t ml ?idContent=1084835
Uhh, what?
I recognise your solutions as valid ones, but you also need to recognise how urgently they're required because the average security of your citizens frankly, sucks (especially those in the cities)
http://www.mercerhr.com/pressrelease/details.jh
The highest ranking spot for a north american city last year was 40th, graded on personal security. Canadian cities were ranked 25th, and western europe took the highest spots. Unsurprisingly, the lowest spots are wartorn african cities...
The tlm-project torrent mirror linked in the parent(s) only has some of the torrents;
Try the gentoo.de official torrent mirror for the complete set of trackers for all package CDs and arch-specific liveCDs.
They still haven't linked to the torrents yet in the announcement.
The tlm-project torrents only appear to include the stock livecd's and the generic (x86 and i686) package GRP/package CDs, NOT the P4 and athlon-xp package CDs. Since the announcement specifically states that the platform specific CDs are not available from the normal mirrors, only bittorrent, you need the following
torrent mirror
Which has all the arch-specific livecds, and all the arch package CD's, include P3,P4,athlon-xp, amd64, ppc etc etc. If you don't trust the md5's on the torrent mirror, there are most of them in here, while the release notes give the details of the PGP signing.
HTH!
I suspect that if the GPL was considered invalid, then, so would any other software license- including, for example, any from MS.
They're not really the same thing. a EULA from microsoft acts after purchase, to grant microsoft more rights than copyright law does (you must allow MS to automatically install software on your system, for example), and to take away some of your rights you would normally hold under copyright and other laws, such as reverse engineering, publishing benchmarks, or moving your copy of windows from one computer to another.
In effect, EULA's take away your rights, with nothing granted in return except the right to limited use your software that you'd already paid for. You certainly get no extra rights to distribute. The most important thing is though, you have to agree to it to install and run the software.
The GPL on the other hand, has no effect on use at all. You can print out the GPL and use it as toilet paper, and you can still use GPL software how you choose. Under plain copyright law, you can't distribute copies though, no more than you can legally distribute say, windows xp. The GPL, unlike a EULA, does grant you the right to make copies, under certain conditions, such as releasing the source code.
So EULA's deal with use of the software, and add greater restrictions than copyright. They do not allow distribution. The GPL does not affect use, but does grant extra rights than copyright law for distribution.
Ergo, if one is found valid or invalid, it doesn't really affect the other; they deal with different parts of copyright law.
Well, unless we have some really bizarre ruling such that no principles of copyright may be changed by contract, in which case pretty much every copyrighted work in the US would be undistributable...
The problem with that is though, it's ignoring common english usage.
More means addition, fine. (one more slice, please!)
Times means multiplication, fine. (two times two is four)
They then go on to literally interpret 5 times more of x to mean x+(5*x), and 6 times less to mean x-(6*x).
However, the common english usage means that when they are combined, it governs the side of the multiplication. I.e.
x is 5 times more than y means 5 * x = y
x is 6 times less than y means, x = 6 * y
so you could also say y is 6 times more than x.
Semantically incorrect maybe, but hey, nobody said english wouldn't boldly go where anal pedants don't want it to...