Oops, hit enter too quickly. The DMCA does not prevent you using a DRM-circumvention tool, but it does prevent you writing one in the US, or distributing it in the US.
If it's hosted offshore from the US, then it's not illegal under the DMCA to download and use it on something you legally own.
The DMCA does not prevent you circumventing copyright protection schemes, only distributing a tool that does so. Using said tool that's hosted outside the US is perfectly legal.
When you purchase a song from the iTMS, you are purchasing the (revocable) rights to said song, something Apple can exercise at their leisure.
Then by definition it cannot be a sale. if your ownership of the song is revokable, it's a lease, not a sale.
However,it's not a lease simply because the vendor says it is.
It is a sale if: they give you a tangible product. You pay them for it.
Since you have a legal copy of the song on your harddrive, they advertise the product as a sale (buy this track...) and you can burn it to CD and keep it, regardless of what Apple does with the DRM, it's a sale. Of course, we'll only get a bulletproof legal definition of that when someone takes Apple to court to allow them to resell a DRM-encoded itunes track to someone else. This doesn't mean Apple can't use DRM restrictions if you let them; it's just that they have no legal basis to stop you removing them i.e. because it's a sale, then you are fully entitled to remove the DRM, as first sale doctrine dictates they cannot impose any further restrictions (i.e. use restrictions) on your product than copyright law allows.
Oh, and those EULA 'contracts' you click 'I Agree' on? They're simply not legally binding. They are applied post sale, they are not a legally authorised signature (my 2 year old nephew always clicks OK when I'm away from the computer, the little tinker), and there is no opportunity to negotiate the terms. With the exception of the handful of US states with UCITA laws (which specifically declare EULA's binding), EULA's are not, and never will be legal contracts. They're nothing more than FUD.
The contract stiplulates the penalty for breaking the contract: refusal of service.
Right. Which means if you run PlayFair or Hymn or I'mABigScriptKiddieLookAtMeWoo or whatever on one of your iTunes songs, you are no longer legally authorized to listen to any of your iTunes songs. You are, at that point, engaging in copyright violation, which if you do it enough is a felony!
Simply not true. once they've sold you a track, the doctrine of first sale applies, and apple CANNOT impose greater restrictions than copyright law allows. Copyright law prevents you distributing copies (and a few other rights such as not pretending you wrote the music). Nothing else.
It specifically does not prevent you playing those tracks back. If you violate your TOS with apple, they can refuse to sell you any more tracks, but they cannot prevent you using, decoding, transcoding, ripping, or even deleting your existing itunes tracks. They can sue you if you give them to others, nothing else. Once they've taken your money, and the sale is completed, the contract with them regarding that track is over.
a) Terms Of Service are not a contract. They are terms which if you do not obey, they are grounds for terminating your business relationship. I.e. if apple catch you removing DRM from itunes tracks, they can refuse to sell you any more tracks. However, once they've (Apple) sold you something, first sale doctrine dictates that they cannot use copyright law to impose further restrictions. Specifically, use restrictions (i.e. you cannot do this with our product) are simply not enforceable post purchase. The music is not licenced, it is sold, and the only restrictions are those of copyright itself, i.e. you cannot distribute your copies to other people.
b) even if by some legal juggling*, these TOS could be treated like a contract, i.e. you were considered to be licensing the music, not buying it, you cannot give up your legal rights by contract. No more than you can sign into slavery, or sign away your first amendment rights in the US. Such a clause would be, and has been judged to be an illegal clause, and thus stricken from the contract. Since fair use rights are not constitutionally granted rights, it would be less clear cut; but there is a strong precedent for fair use rights not being revocable by contract terms. But in this case it's a moot point, as there's emphatically not a contract post sale.
c) There are in fact two offences you could be taken to court over. The first is copyright infringement. Your fair use rights are a defence to this charge, as long as you do not distribute copies to anyone else. Potentential to distribute has nothing to do with it, you have to actually be spreading those tracks on a p2p network. Therefore, making copies to play on another device would be legal. The second charge would be with the DMCA. However, it's not illegal to use a DRM-removal tool under the DMCA, only to write or distribute one. Therefore, stripping music you own of drm to use on another device is also fully legal.
Ergo, despite what Apple and it's fans tell you, removing DRM from music you own is 100% legal. Distributing it to others without permission is 100% illegal. Since the article contains instructions on how to play your legally purchased music on other devices you legally own, that is a 100% legal action.
* Note, in order for it be a valid contract, the seller has to have to have an ongoing relationship with you regarding the product post sale. If, on the other hand, they give you something, and you give them money, and you get nothing more from them after that other than their legal obligations like warranties (and you pay them nothing more for that particular product) it is a sale, and the contract is finished regarding that item, regardless of what the vendor would have you believe by tacking on EULA's, use clauses, licences or anything else. The only things that apply from that point on are the relevent laws of the land, and the vendor *cannot* restrict you any further than the law allows. And I will keep saying this till people stop spreading false information to the contrary.
Now that's fair. The parent comment gets a +5 insightful; a comment DIRECTLY addressing the privacy implications of doing the same thing as groklaw (i.e. a reply to the parent) for other cases ends up a -1 offtopic.
Nice.
The thing about government monitoring and privacy is this:
a) it's involuntary. People don't mind their doctors having their medical records, their electric company having their usage data so it can predict their bills, the phone company recording what numbers they called for how long for billing. People do mind someone taking all that data, without permission, and collecting it.
If you want to look at central agencies knowing a lot about us, look at credit reference agencies. A lot of the time, the information they hold is out of date or just plain wrong. Personally, I dislike that some credit agency has so many records on me, but since it's impossible to get loans without such a record, and you can't stop them collecting the info on you anyway, I just have to suck it up. A government agency doing the same would be just as inaccurate in it's data, and would use it for far worse things, i.e. bugging people to gather evidence, interrogating them in secret for intelligence, or worst of all, lock them up without trial for an unlimited period - all based upon indications in a private database we know nothing about, don't have access to, and didn't agree to be collected.
b) which leads onto my second point. Such a government database is unbalanced. They know all about us, we know nothing about them. In a small community, you have virtually no privacy. But the people that move there through choice like that. It's balanced, everyone knows everything about everyone else, and it leads to greater social interaction. Equally, if you live in a city centre, you likely will know nothing at all about most or even all of your neighbours. But again, that privacy is equal - nobody knows anything.
In a sense, that distributed, non-profit internet based investigation would resolve both those problems. The information it gathers is hardly held in secret, it's there for anybody who wants it. The information it would gather would, de facto, be information in the public domain, i.e. information publically given out. Don't forget, the p-p-powerbook scammer gave over his email address, physical address and telephone number voluntarily, in the process of trying to commit fraud. Finally, it would be balanced (mostly) as anyone could try to use such a system to gain information, judged on it's merits to the crowd - a form of meta jury.
The biggest flaw I see in such a system is not the invasion of privacy (as long as they don't start doing illegal things, like bugging phone conversations) but that it could turn into mob justice - a crowd so convinced of someones guilt, they ignore the evidence and jump straight to punishment. Sending a joke package to defraud a fraudster has a certain amount of karmic justice to it, but imagine if they'd sent something dusted with a diuretic? or a poison? Imagine, if instead of reporting the scammer to the police, the London agents had just taken him out back in the alley, and given him a kicking? (Assuming they'd found him) Not that I'm impuging the SA guys, and saying they would have; but it's a thin line between a mob investigation, and a mob action, as many a modern lynching illustrates.
Ah, is that part of TRIPS? I know that it defines minimum standards of patents, which doesn't include software patents - I left that out for simplicity, the post was too long as it was - but I wasn't aware that if something was patented in enough countries, it became automatically valid elsewhere!
Thanks for the heads up, I'll do more digging.
The numbers are accurate - if you look closer,
it's the EU that's 10% larger than the US.
However, I agree the parents phrasing made me think at first that he was saying the US was larger.
Europe's economy might only be 10% larger, but that's still a hefty chunk of change!
And the orginal posters point still stands; with a larger population AND economy than anywhere else in the world, the 25-nation EU bloc (especially the big 4, germany, france, the UK and italy) it's not some minor body to ignore when it comes to business or international law.
Add to that, if OPEC does switch to pricing oil in euros, as they've been threatening to do, it would cripple the US economy and skyrocket the euro-using nations in the EU.
Simple. there's no patent treaty between the US and the EU.
With copyright, (the Berne convention) once it's written, it's automatically copyrighted in all Berne nations (which is most of them). Registering is still a good idea if you're expecting someone else to claim ownership on the same or very similar work. Licensing said works though, still has to be done via national bodies, which is one reason itunes hasn't come to europe yet.
With patents, you need to register in every country you want patent protection in. The patent rules are not universal, and at least between the EU countries and the US, there's no treaty recognising each others patents. However, I believe it is possible to use patents from other nations to demonstrate prior art, and if you have a patent in one country, it can speed up the prior art examination in another.
As far as software goes, there is a specific exemption in EU patent law that disallows pure software patents. This is what the big companies are lobbying to remove, under the guise of 'tidying up' the law. This is because the EPO has been granting 'computer implemented inventions' on the basis that if it needs hardware to run, or is part of a hardware system, the whole thing can be patented. Of course, these patents are of very questionable legitimacy, so the patent holders have not been sueing for infringement in europe as the end result would probably be they'd lose the patent.
If they can change the law to legitimise their current patents though, and allow more, big US patent holders will be able to shut down large swathes of the EU software development houses (the EU has a huge number of small and medium companies, rather than the few big ones in the US, thus vulnerable to long winded patent ligitation)
Note, the European Patent Office allows you to register your patent with them, and ask for it to be as valid in as many of the EPC signing nations as you want to pay for. The EPC is a patent convention, harmonising patent law between the signing nations, which includes some nations outside the EU itself. Definitely not the US tho!
And my own position; patents on maths, ideas or business methods should remain illegal. We already have a method for protecting specific implementations of inventions in software, it's called copyright. Patents should be the process of protecting specific physical inventions, i.e. a specific mousetrap spring design, not the idea of 'a device that traps mammals'. Imagine if people started patenting plot ideas in novels or TV shows!
Re:what Microsoft is thinking
on
A Worm's Worm
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· Score: 3, Insightful
This was already tried with Welchia/nachi.
It scanned for machines with the RPC blaster vulnerability or a webdav vulnerability, infected them, and then downloaded the RPC patch from windows update and installed. Next time the machine rebooted, you were secure. It also had a self kill on 1st jan 2004.
The perfect anti-worm, yes? Except it was very aggressive with the ping scanning, and a few infected machines on a network could end up cripping it. Add to that, if a machine got infected with nachi, yet windows update wasn't directly available (login proxy for example) then the amount of bandwidth consumed could be huge. From the ISP's point of view, welchia was a worse worm than blaster. From the managers point of view, at least it was obvious if someone had blaster. With welchia, if you didn't have competent inhouse IT staff (and an awful lot of small companies don't) it was hard to find why your network was running rather slow.
In response to just turning on autoupdate, corporates often don't use windows update, but SUS or ghost or the like to roll out patches - once they've been fully tested. Don't forget, microsoft patches regularly break other applicatons. LSASS (sasser) update, for example:
"According to the article problem may arise on Windows 2000 operating systems if any of three drivers (ipsecw2k.sys, imcide.sys, dlttape.sys) are loaded. People might experience lockups at boot time, the inability to log on, or 100% CPU utilization."
Antiworms are a possible solution, but as with this new one leaving a big backdoor, so far they've been as bad as the virus they supplant. What they should do, at most, is a popup every time you logon saying you are infected with virus bob, list the symptoms, and tell them they have to go to this location to get the patch and the removal tool.
You could use evolution in fink. It's only in CVS at the moment, but I'm sure that evolution 2 will be supported officially in fink eventually. Alternatively, it looks like you could compile it yourself, when it's released: unofficial ximian guide to evolution on osx
The general method of detection is that they send you a letter if you haven't bought a licence for your house, such as when the previous owner moves out and takes their licence with them.
It's at that point where you buy a licence, or tell them you don't own a TV.
Obviously, I've never tried this personally, but scuttlebutt (and TV adverts) indicate they send someone out to your house to see if you really don't have a TV. If you're muppet enough to have your TV visible from the road when you're using it, then expect a nastygram threatening (civil) court proceedings. Up to 400 quid fine, I believe.
If you refuse to let them in (which you can do of course, they won't have a warrant), and they still suspect you of having a TV (aerial or satdish on the roof, for example) then they can send a TV detector van.
Theoretically, an operating TV also acts as a low power transmitter which can be picked up with a close range directional aerial. Vans wandering through the street looking for non-payers is a myth - they have to sit right outside your house with a directional aerial looking for the signal. I've never seen one personally.
Note, you can't go to jail for not paying and getting caught. It's a civil offence, not a criminal one. It's a bit like getting caught for not paying your road tax...
THAT person stated that software available for free would always be worth nothing - I'm pointing out that many people will pay for products even when they are available for free elsewhere, for various reasons.
No details yet - but this looks like it may well be part of the reason; specifically, he cannnot (and should not) have to shoulder the financial risk necessary to shift gentoo to its full Not For Profit status.
Given that he has a young family to support, I for one can sympathise with his position.
There's going to be an official announcement once the dust settles slightly, but thisappears to be the live gentoo forum thread.
Go easy on it, the forums are pretty heavily loaded at the best of times, and the last thing the place needs is a full blown slashdotting!
I've not tried OOo with older versions, but v6 of Documents to Go has worked flawlessly so far with OOo 1.1 on my windows XP box, with natively created OOo files, converted old DOCs, and new files created on my palm m130.
Grin, I don't think you remember all the facts. IIRC this is how it went...
NCSA wrote the original mosaic. Spyglass licenced the tech and trademark from NCSA, and wrote spyglass mosaic from the ground up.
(mosaic communications corporation) MCC was a spin off company of a bunch of the staff from NCSA, and after a trademark wrangle they renamed to Netscape.
Spyglass mosaic went down the embedded road, i.e. a rendering engine for other software, netscape went the standalone browser road.
Then came the formation of the W3C, and the (brief) netscape/mosaic wars.
After that, Microsoft licenced spyglass mosaic to use as an addon for windows 95 - IIRC IE2 was basically mosaic, IE3 was a big upgrade, and IE4 was when microsoft rewrote most of it. Of course, by that point microsoft was outspending netscape in a major way, and the rest is well, well known.
But I stand by my original point (which was meant to be a joke) - without competition, we'd all be using mosaic, or as it came to be known, Internet Explorer;)
Actually, I use konqueror these days as my primary browser, rather than firefox.
For a start, being able to have a tab with an sftp session next to a samba session next to a webdavs session next to a https session is very useful when web developing, or even just integrating stuff between different servers.
Secondly, konqueror launches a damn sight faster.
Finally, it integrates a lot nicer into my kde desktop than firefox or it's other gtk-varients.
Now, if you could use the gecko engine as a kpart, that would rock quite nicely. That said, with safari feeding back their improvements into khtml, konqueror is moving ahead by leaps and bounds, and it's a rare page i have rendering problems with these days.
All power to the mozilla team - I deployed thunderbird onto the staff windows machines at work as the standard imap client - and I think integration of firebird further into the linux desktop is a very good thing for both parties.
Ultimately though, a bit of healthy competition is a good thing - otherwise, we'd all just be using IE!
This is not about defending copyright infringement. It's about a lobbying organisation being able to indoctrinate children with a blatantly one sided and biased view of what copyright is, and what it's intended to do.
Copyright is not a property right, it's a limited monopoly on distribution with a number of exemptions.
I would be equally disgusted with an agency funded solely by macdonalds and pizza hut giving lessons on healthy nutrition to children in the classroom, which is what this amounts to.
Nod, convenience of the packaging (which applies to itunes too - no having to schlep down the shops) is a purchasing factor;
But it's more usually a factor of which product to buy, rather than whether to buy it at all, which is why I left it out of the list in the end. Don't know about the states, but I pay for mains water supply here - it's just a lot cheaper than buying those huge bottles...
People never want to pay for anything. People are willing to pay when they have no other choice... if all software could be had for free, then no software would be worth anything.
This is patently untrue. By that rationale, people would never buy: - bottled water - packaged software - 99c tracks off itunes.
After all, all those things are available for free, right? And why would anybody buy an armani suit, when they can get one that looks virtually identical for a tenth of the price?
People will buy when: - the price is within their means - they consider the price fair for the good - they want the good - the inconvenience of buying the good from the vendor is not too high (i.e. DRM. Personally, any DRM is too high for me, but I recognise that's not universally true)
Case in point. I used to buy a lot of major label music CD's. Now the price is 50% greater than it used to be (~16 retail), now that the style of music I listen to is not to be found very often, now they put DRM on CD's to restrict my use of said CD's (won't play in my car, for example) - combine that with my ethical distaste at said labels current actions, and I have a bonafide reason not to buy their music.
However, I did recently order from CDBaby half a dozen new CD's. The first music I've bought for myself this year. Even though it was inconvenient (getting through customs), even though I had half of them already from legal free samples. Because having a physical CD I could do a high quality rip from was worth the price. Especially given they were half the price of a major label CD. That, and I felt the artists deserved the money.
Acts of skilled creation are scarce, and thus valuable. Making digital copies of said creation is not a scarce act, and no amount of legislation, enforcement or legal tactics will make it otherwise.
As long as people want what scarce (in a technical sense) decent material that's available, then a way will be found to finance those who create. It just may not involve copyright in its current form.
And if you think I'm talking complete crap - well, the guys at the baen free library have demonstrated that giving stuff away increases sales - even of the material they're giving away!
Slashdot Mirror
Oops, hit enter too quickly. The DMCA does not prevent you using a DRM-circumvention tool, but it does prevent you writing one in the US, or distributing it in the US.
If it's hosted offshore from the US, then it's not illegal under the DMCA to download and use it on something you legally own.
The DMCA does not prevent you circumventing copyright protection schemes, only distributing a tool that does so. Using said tool that's hosted outside the US is perfectly legal.
When you purchase a song from the iTMS, you are purchasing the (revocable) rights to said song, something Apple can exercise at their leisure.
Then by definition it cannot be a sale. if your ownership of the song is revokable, it's a lease, not a sale.
However,it's not a lease simply because the vendor says it is.
It is a sale if:
they give you a tangible product. You pay them for it.
Since you have a legal copy of the song on your harddrive, they advertise the product as a sale (buy this track...) and you can burn it to CD and keep it, regardless of what Apple does with the DRM, it's a sale. Of course, we'll only get a bulletproof legal definition of that when someone takes Apple to court to allow them to resell a DRM-encoded itunes track to someone else. This doesn't mean Apple can't use DRM restrictions if you let them; it's just that they have no legal basis to stop you removing them i.e. because it's a sale, then you are fully entitled to remove the DRM, as first sale doctrine dictates they cannot impose any further restrictions (i.e. use restrictions) on your product than copyright law allows.
Oh, and those EULA 'contracts' you click 'I Agree' on? They're simply not legally binding. They are applied post sale, they are not a legally authorised signature (my 2 year old nephew always clicks OK when I'm away from the computer, the little tinker), and there is no opportunity to negotiate the terms. With the exception of the handful of US states with UCITA laws (which specifically declare EULA's binding), EULA's are not, and never will be legal contracts. They're nothing more than FUD.
The contract stiplulates the penalty for breaking the contract: refusal of service.
Right. Which means if you run PlayFair or Hymn or I'mABigScriptKiddieLookAtMeWoo or whatever on one of your iTunes songs, you are no longer legally authorized to listen to any of your iTunes songs. You are, at that point, engaging in copyright violation, which if you do it enough is a felony!
Simply not true. once they've sold you a track, the doctrine of first sale applies, and apple CANNOT impose greater restrictions than copyright law allows. Copyright law prevents you distributing copies (and a few other rights such as not pretending you wrote the music). Nothing else.
It specifically does not prevent you playing those tracks back. If you violate your TOS with apple, they can refuse to sell you any more tracks, but they cannot prevent you using, decoding, transcoding, ripping, or even deleting your existing itunes tracks. They can sue you if you give them to others, nothing else. Once they've taken your money, and the sale is completed, the contract with them regarding that track is over.
a) Terms Of Service are not a contract. They are terms which if you do not obey, they are grounds for terminating your business relationship. I.e. if apple catch you removing DRM from itunes tracks, they can refuse to sell you any more tracks. However, once they've (Apple) sold you something, first sale doctrine dictates that they cannot use copyright law to impose further restrictions. Specifically, use restrictions (i.e. you cannot do this with our product) are simply not enforceable post purchase. The music is not licenced, it is sold, and the only restrictions are those of copyright itself, i.e. you cannot distribute your copies to other people.
b) even if by some legal juggling*, these TOS could be treated like a contract, i.e. you were considered to be licensing the music, not buying it, you cannot give up your legal rights by contract. No more than you can sign into slavery, or sign away your first amendment rights in the US. Such a clause would be, and has been judged to be an illegal clause, and thus stricken from the contract. Since fair use rights are not constitutionally granted rights, it would be less clear cut; but there is a strong precedent for fair use rights not being revocable by contract terms. But in this case it's a moot point, as there's emphatically not a contract post sale.
c) There are in fact two offences you could be taken to court over. The first is copyright infringement. Your fair use rights are a defence to this charge, as long as you do not distribute copies to anyone else. Potentential to distribute has nothing to do with it, you have to actually be spreading those tracks on a p2p network. Therefore, making copies to play on another device would be legal.
The second charge would be with the DMCA. However, it's not illegal to use a DRM-removal tool under the DMCA, only to write or distribute one. Therefore, stripping music you own of drm to use on another device is also fully legal.
Ergo, despite what Apple and it's fans tell you, removing DRM from music you own is 100% legal. Distributing it to others without permission is 100% illegal. Since the article contains instructions on how to play your legally purchased music on other devices you legally own, that is a 100% legal action.
* Note, in order for it be a valid contract, the seller has to have to have an ongoing relationship with you regarding the product post sale. If, on the other hand, they give you something, and you give them money, and you get nothing more from them after that other than their legal obligations like warranties (and you pay them nothing more for that particular product) it is a sale, and the contract is finished regarding that item, regardless of what the vendor would have you believe by tacking on EULA's, use clauses, licences or anything else. The only things that apply from that point on are the relevent laws of the land, and the vendor *cannot* restrict you any further than the law allows. And I will keep saying this till people stop spreading false information to the contrary.
Now that's fair. The parent comment gets a +5 insightful; a comment DIRECTLY addressing the privacy implications of doing the same thing as groklaw (i.e. a reply to the parent) for other cases ends up a -1 offtopic. Nice.
The thing about government monitoring and privacy is this:
a) it's involuntary. People don't mind their doctors having their medical records, their electric company having their usage data so it can predict their bills, the phone company recording what numbers they called for how long for billing. People do mind someone taking all that data, without permission, and collecting it.
If you want to look at central agencies knowing a lot about us, look at credit reference agencies. A lot of the time, the information they hold is out of date or just plain wrong. Personally, I dislike that some credit agency has so many records on me, but since it's impossible to get loans without such a record, and you can't stop them collecting the info on you anyway, I just have to suck it up. A government agency doing the same would be just as inaccurate in it's data, and would use it for far worse things, i.e. bugging people to gather evidence, interrogating them in secret for intelligence, or worst of all, lock them up without trial for an unlimited period - all based upon indications in a private database we know nothing about, don't have access to, and didn't agree to be collected.
b) which leads onto my second point. Such a government database is unbalanced. They know all about us, we know nothing about them. In a small community, you have virtually no privacy. But the people that move there through choice like that. It's balanced, everyone knows everything about everyone else, and it leads to greater social interaction. Equally, if you live in a city centre, you likely will know nothing at all about most or even all of your neighbours. But again, that privacy is equal - nobody knows anything.
In a sense, that distributed, non-profit internet based investigation would resolve both those problems. The information it gathers is hardly held in secret, it's there for anybody who wants it. The information it would gather would, de facto, be information in the public domain, i.e. information publically given out. Don't forget, the p-p-powerbook scammer gave over his email address, physical address and telephone number voluntarily, in the process of trying to commit fraud. Finally, it would be balanced (mostly) as anyone could try to use such a system to gain information, judged on it's merits to the crowd - a form of meta jury.
The biggest flaw I see in such a system is not the invasion of privacy (as long as they don't start doing illegal things, like bugging phone conversations) but that it could turn into mob justice - a crowd so convinced of someones guilt, they ignore the evidence and jump straight to punishment. Sending a joke package to defraud a fraudster has a certain amount of karmic justice to it, but imagine if they'd sent something dusted with a diuretic? or a poison? Imagine, if instead of reporting the scammer to the police, the London agents had just taken him out back in the alley, and given him a kicking? (Assuming they'd found him) Not that I'm impuging the SA guys, and saying they would have; but it's a thin line between a mob investigation, and a mob action, as many a modern lynching illustrates.
Both. The EU patent process theoretically prevents software patents. In practise, the EPO has been granting them like no tomorrow.
Ah, is that part of TRIPS? I know that it defines minimum standards of patents, which doesn't include software patents - I left that out for simplicity, the post was too long as it was - but I wasn't aware that if something was patented in enough countries, it became automatically valid elsewhere! Thanks for the heads up, I'll do more digging.
The numbers are accurate - if you look closer, it's the EU that's 10% larger than the US. However, I agree the parents phrasing made me think at first that he was saying the US was larger.
Europe's economy might only be 10% larger, but that's still a hefty chunk of change!
And the orginal posters point still stands; with a larger population AND economy than anywhere else in the world, the 25-nation EU bloc (especially the big 4, germany, france, the UK and italy) it's not some minor body to ignore when it comes to business or international law.
Add to that, if OPEC does switch to pricing oil in euros, as they've been threatening to do, it would cripple the US economy and skyrocket the euro-using nations in the EU.
Simple. there's no patent treaty between the US and the EU.
With copyright, (the Berne convention) once it's written, it's automatically copyrighted in all Berne nations (which is most of them). Registering is still a good idea if you're expecting someone else to claim ownership on the same or very similar work. Licensing said works though, still has to be done via national bodies, which is one reason itunes hasn't come to europe yet.
With patents, you need to register in every country you want patent protection in. The patent rules are not universal, and at least between the EU countries and the US, there's no treaty recognising each others patents. However, I believe it is possible to use patents from other nations to demonstrate prior art, and if you have a patent in one country, it can speed up the prior art examination in another.
As far as software goes, there is a specific exemption in EU patent law that disallows pure software patents. This is what the big companies are lobbying to remove, under the guise of 'tidying up' the law. This is because the EPO has been granting 'computer implemented inventions' on the basis that if it needs hardware to run, or is part of a hardware system, the whole thing can be patented. Of course, these patents are of very questionable legitimacy, so the patent holders have not been sueing for infringement in europe as the end result would probably be they'd lose the patent.
If they can change the law to legitimise their current patents though, and allow more, big US patent holders will be able to shut down large swathes of the EU software development houses (the EU has a huge number of small and medium companies, rather than the few big ones in the US, thus vulnerable to long winded patent ligitation)
Note, the European Patent Office allows you to register your patent with them, and ask for it to be as valid in as many of the EPC signing nations as you want to pay for. The EPC is a patent convention, harmonising patent law between the signing nations, which includes some nations outside the EU itself. Definitely not the US tho!
And my own position; patents on maths, ideas or business methods should remain illegal. We already have a method for protecting specific implementations of inventions in software, it's called copyright. Patents should be the process of protecting specific physical inventions, i.e. a specific mousetrap spring design, not the idea of 'a device that traps mammals'. Imagine if people started patenting plot ideas in novels or TV shows!
This was already tried with Welchia/nachi.
It scanned for machines with the RPC blaster vulnerability or a webdav vulnerability, infected them, and then downloaded the RPC patch from windows update and installed. Next time the machine rebooted, you were secure. It also had a self kill on 1st jan 2004.
The perfect anti-worm, yes? Except it was very aggressive with the ping scanning, and a few infected machines on a network could end up cripping it. Add to that, if a machine got infected with nachi, yet windows update wasn't directly available (login proxy for example) then the amount of bandwidth consumed could be huge. From the ISP's point of view, welchia was a worse worm than blaster. From the managers point of view, at least it was obvious if someone had blaster. With welchia, if you didn't have competent inhouse IT staff (and an awful lot of small companies don't) it was hard to find why your network was running rather slow.
In response to just turning on autoupdate, corporates often don't use windows update, but SUS or ghost or the like to roll out patches - once they've been fully tested. Don't forget, microsoft patches regularly break other applicatons. LSASS (sasser) update, for example:
"According to the article problem may arise on Windows 2000 operating systems if any of three drivers (ipsecw2k.sys, imcide.sys, dlttape.sys) are loaded. People might experience lockups at boot time, the inability to log on, or 100% CPU utilization."
Antiworms are a possible solution, but as with this new one leaving a big backdoor, so far they've been as bad as the virus they supplant. What they should do, at most, is a popup every time you logon saying you are infected with virus bob, list the symptoms, and tell them they have to go to this location to get the patch and the removal tool.
Imagine trying to defrag it though...
You could use evolution in fink. It's only in CVS at the moment, but I'm sure that evolution 2 will be supported officially in fink eventually. Alternatively, it looks like you could compile it yourself, when it's released: unofficial ximian guide to evolution on osx
Novell bought Ximian in August last year; Ximian wrote evolution, and the exchange connector plugin.
The general method of detection is that they send you a letter if you haven't bought a licence for your house, such as when the previous owner moves out and takes their licence with them.
It's at that point where you buy a licence, or tell them you don't own a TV.
Obviously, I've never tried this personally, but scuttlebutt (and TV adverts) indicate they send someone out to your house to see if you really don't have a TV. If you're muppet enough to have your TV visible from the road when you're using it, then expect a nastygram threatening (civil) court proceedings. Up to 400 quid fine, I believe.
If you refuse to let them in (which you can do of course, they won't have a warrant), and they still suspect you of having a TV (aerial or satdish on the roof, for example) then they can send a TV detector van.
Theoretically, an operating TV also acts as a low power transmitter which can be picked up with a close range directional aerial. Vans wandering through the street looking for non-payers is a myth - they have to sit right outside your house with a directional aerial looking for the signal. I've never seen one personally.
Note, you can't go to jail for not paying and getting caught. It's a civil offence, not a criminal one. It's a bit like getting caught for not paying your road tax...
And YOU didn't read the comment I replied to.
THAT person stated that software available for free would always be worth nothing - I'm pointing out that many people will pay for products even when they are available for free elsewhere, for various reasons.
No details yet - but this
looks like it may well be part of the reason;
specifically, he cannnot (and should not) have to shoulder the financial risk necessary to shift gentoo to its full Not For Profit status.
Given that he has a young family to support, I for one can sympathise with his position.
There's going to be an official announcement once the dust settles slightly, but thisappears to be the live gentoo forum thread.
Go easy on it, the forums are pretty heavily loaded at the best of times, and the last thing the place needs is a full blown slashdotting!
I've not tried OOo with older versions, but v6 of Documents to Go has worked flawlessly so far with OOo 1.1 on my windows XP box, with natively created OOo files, converted old DOCs, and new files created on my palm m130.
Grin, I don't think you remember all the facts.
;)
IIRC this is how it went...
NCSA wrote the original mosaic. Spyglass licenced the tech and trademark from NCSA, and wrote spyglass mosaic from the ground up.
(mosaic communications corporation) MCC was a spin off company of a bunch of the staff from NCSA, and after a trademark wrangle they renamed to Netscape.
Spyglass mosaic went down the embedded road, i.e. a rendering engine for other software, netscape went the standalone browser road.
Then came the formation of the W3C, and the (brief) netscape/mosaic wars.
After that, Microsoft licenced spyglass mosaic to use as an addon for windows 95 - IIRC IE2 was basically mosaic, IE3 was a big upgrade, and IE4 was when microsoft rewrote most of it. Of course, by that point microsoft was outspending netscape in a major way, and the rest is well, well known.
But I stand by my original point (which was meant to be a joke) - without competition, we'd all be using mosaic, or as it came to be known, Internet Explorer
Actually, I use konqueror these days as my primary browser, rather than firefox.
For a start, being able to have a tab with an sftp session next to a samba session next to a webdavs session next to a https session is very useful when web developing, or even just integrating stuff between different servers.
Secondly, konqueror launches a damn sight faster.
Finally, it integrates a lot nicer into my kde desktop than firefox or it's other gtk-varients.
Now, if you could use the gecko engine as a kpart, that would rock quite nicely. That said, with safari feeding back their improvements into khtml, konqueror is moving ahead by leaps and bounds, and it's a rare page i have rendering problems with these days.
All power to the mozilla team - I deployed thunderbird onto the staff windows machines at work as the standard imap client - and I think integration of firebird further into the linux desktop is a very good thing for both parties.
Ultimately though, a bit of healthy competition is a good thing - otherwise, we'd all just be using IE!
This is not about defending copyright infringement. It's about a lobbying organisation being able to indoctrinate children with a blatantly one sided and biased view of what copyright is, and what it's intended to do.
Copyright is not a property right, it's a limited monopoly on distribution with a number of exemptions.
I would be equally disgusted with an agency funded solely by macdonalds and pizza hut giving lessons on healthy nutrition to children in the classroom, which is what this amounts to.
Nod, convenience of the packaging (which applies to itunes too - no having to schlep down the shops) is a purchasing factor;
But it's more usually a factor of which product to buy, rather than whether to buy it at all, which is why I left it out of the list in the end. Don't know about the states, but I pay for mains water supply here - it's just a lot cheaper than buying those huge bottles...
People never want to pay for anything. People are willing to pay when they have no other choice ... if all software could be had for free, then no software would be worth anything.
This is patently untrue. By that rationale, people would never buy:
- bottled water
- packaged software
- 99c tracks off itunes.
After all, all those things are available for free, right? And why would anybody buy an armani suit, when they can get one that looks virtually identical for a tenth of the price?
People will buy when:
- the price is within their means
- they consider the price fair for the good
- they want the good
- the inconvenience of buying the good from the vendor is not too high (i.e. DRM. Personally, any DRM is too high for me, but I recognise that's not universally true)
Case in point. I used to buy a lot of major label music CD's. Now the price is 50% greater than it used to be (~16 retail), now that the style of music I listen to is not to be found very often, now they put DRM on CD's to restrict my use of said CD's (won't play in my car, for example) - combine that with my ethical distaste at said labels current actions, and I have a bonafide reason not to buy their music.
However, I did recently order from CDBaby half a dozen new CD's. The first music I've bought for myself this year. Even though it was inconvenient (getting through customs), even though I had half of them already from legal free samples. Because having a physical CD I could do a high quality rip from was worth the price. Especially given they were half the price of a major label CD. That, and I felt the artists deserved the money.
Acts of skilled creation are scarce, and thus valuable. Making digital copies of said creation is not a scarce act, and no amount of legislation, enforcement or legal tactics will make it otherwise.
As long as people want what scarce (in a technical sense) decent material that's available, then a way will be found to finance those who create. It just may not involve copyright in its current form.
And if you think I'm talking complete crap - well, the guys at the baen free library have demonstrated that giving stuff away increases sales - even of the material they're giving away!