The problem with trying to show "piracy" hurts sales, "piracy" by the individual rather than commercial piracy, does not effect sales. There are many many examples of this and many many reports that prove this is in fact false. It is an attempt at a straw horse by the entertainment companies (games, movie, music, books, etc) that is completely false. They spend far more money on trying to stop "piracy" than they will ever recover in sales if there was absolutely no "piracy". It is a stalking horse that has nothing to do with "piracy" and everything to do with controlling the market and setting things up for the future so they will not loose control or be forced out by something cheap, better and more agile in the future. The media companies are colluding together because so many of them are tied to each other through corporate divisions and mergers and what not. They are trying to divide things up like the mafia and are using whatever means needed to do it. The DOJ really should look into the media companies, their contracts with artists and everyone including promotion, and their ties to each other to price fix and protect each other and their positions in the market. They have created artificial barriers in an attempt to keep everyone else out of the markets.
You are making way too many assumptions there with absolutely no foundation of facts. You have not proven that if you remove "piracy" that sales would increase. Why you even think that would be true I have no idea. DRMed e-books have not increased book sales. In fact if you look at Baen Books the opposite is true. If you release e-books without DRM your book sales for those authors will increase dramatically across their entire current and back catalog. So in fact this is one clear example that completely disproves what you are saying here.
You also assume they would be better customers if there was no piracy. Are you sure of that? Can you prove it? Do you know for a fact that returns won't suddenly skyrocket? Do you know that distribution costs and middle man percentages won't go up because of this? You have absolutely no proof of your claims and assumptions here. In fact there are many many examples to the contrary and no example to prove your point. If you look at indie games that have no DRM versus indie games with DRM. You see higher sales across the board for indie games with no DRM. Look at any of the reports by any of the indie distribution portals to see this. Steam is not an example of this because their games have DRM, even the indie titles. So there is another example that disproves your point.
Removing piracy does not and will not increase sales and it won't increase profits either. This has been shown time and time again.
Because it has absolutely nothing to do with profits in reality. Instead it is about whining to congress that they aren't making enough money because of the "pirates". So they get copyright length extentions. They get laws passed that try and force everyone to buy through them. MPAA and RIAA don't even like used products to be sold and have several times tried to talk congress into limiting used sales. The gaming industry is doing the exact same thing. They are just greedy and want to kill used sales because they think the person will instead buy the $40-$50 version when the market has clearly shown that is false. If people were willing to buy it new they wouldn't bother with used. People buy used because they are unwilling to pay for the product at the new price point. If I can't get used products so my choice is new or not at all, then I choose not at all. Their products are not worth that to me with my very limited budget. The media companies aren't connect with 150% profits they want to legislate 300% profits. They want to sell you the exact same product in new formats every 5-10 years so you pay over and over and over for the same exact thing. They want to renege on the promise of putting things in the public domain in exchange for a limited term of exclusive use. Personally I think if a media company isn't dropping the same number of products into the public domain every year as they get new copyrights for, then they should not be getting more new copyrights. New copyrights each year should be limited to the same number of products put into the public domain if you are a company more than 20 years old. I don't care if your copyright hasn't expired. If you can't make your money back in 20 years then you don't deserve a copyright on it. Corporations have to be held to the promise of increasing the public domain or they shouldn't be allowed any copyrights. Personally I think corporations should not be allowed to hold copyrights or patents only actual live humans, not fictitious legal creations. We are suppose to be rewarding the inventor(s) not some company that exploits their workers and takes all their creativity and ideas for themselves.
How about just show them the original DVDs that they/you have purchased? I have probably about 400+ DVDs I have bought that I could show a survey person without any problem. I could take pictures and attach it to a survey if they wanted. It's isn't all that hard to prove that you actually own a crap load of DVDs.
I am not saying there is anything wrong with Minecraft but it doesn't have any game design. Creating a bunch of things and seeing what players like and what works and then adding or removing, that is not game design. It's the idea of throw everything on the wall and see what sticks. Minecraft is very similar to Gary's Mod in terms of "play" style. There isn't a game, just something cool to play with and make your own stuff. There are clearly people who like that, but I would think that the ability to capture people's attention long term is going to be a problem. Just like a good novel there should be some reason to come back and experience it again to experience a story or idea again. If the concept is build your own experience then getting around to returning to it has a much higher re-entry level and that discourages the desire to come back and re-experience something because it was a product of your time and those around you contributing at the time. Basically you can't re-experience it again because it is gone and it is not repeatable. Not everyone likes to re-read a book or watch a movie again, but there is a decent percentage of the population that does. The same is true of games and you will see people talking about going back and playing a favorite game again or a game that resonated with the person. Playing with Legos 6 months or a year later does not have the same experience as when you first played with them.
What you are describing is clearly a lack of design focus and skill. This is the same exact problem a lot of indie titles face and some open source games. They have all this interesting tech ideas in them but there is no game design and game development skill applied to them so they end up as interesting toys for awhile and then get boring quickly because there is no clear design and no clear purpose for the game. This is where an experienced game designer begins to show his worth. An experienced game designer can add that level of focus and consistency that is needed to turn it from a neat/interesting/cute idea into a real game that you want to play over and over again. Some people think a designer doesn't really do all that much other than come up with the basic idea or ideas of a game, and that is not the case as the unfocused nature of Minecraft shows.
Listing this as a Microsoft announcement might be interesting except that most of the work done by the guy was probably when he was working for Novell. He only came to work for Microsoft in Feb. 2011. So not exactly a huge amount of time. Not to mention the modification are supposedly very small ones and are only done in the Microsoft module for their VM, that is still in the staging area from 2+ years ago.
Why we even want Microsoft's VM module I will never understand given Microsoft wants to see Linux rot in hell and never be allowed to surface again. Microsoft as a company calls us a virus that infects everything ruining everything it touches, thieves and intellectual pirates. You should never accept anything from someone actively trying to stab you in the back. When the person is getting behind you it isn't for encouragement but rather so they get a better angle to stab you in the back.
Except that completely ignores the issue of Microsoft claiming that Linux violates their patents. I wonder if Microsoft employees and legal counsel for Microsoft has signed off on any patents that might be included in the module work they are doing for their own virtualization to be included in the Linux kernel. You ask me and I see absolutely no point in including Microsoft's module. They have had 2 years and done absolutely nothing with it. All the changes that were done were lots of little ones and the module still isn't ready to leave the staging area. So while the numbers sound interesting and it makes it seem like Microsoft is helping, they are actually doing squat all to get their code into a release and usable format for the Linux kernel.
I still want to know why the Linux kernel should contain anything from a company that constantly assaults the community. A company who calls us thieves and intellectual pirates. Microsoft is going after Android OEMs saying that Linux violates their patents so they have to pay up on licensing fees. Yet Microsoft won't publicly announce what any of those patents are. In fact when Barnes and Noble called BS on Microsoft and refused to sign the NDA. It turned out Microsoft didn't sue over Linux they sued over web browsing and the interface, which is a long long way from Linux itself or even any Linux distribution.
The Linux community should absolutely not accept anything from a company or anyone else who is active trying to put a knife in our back and running around to OEMs who work with the community and black mailing them and telling them sign this NDA so you can see the issues, but you can never tell anyone what they are. That whole thing sounds like BS and Microsoft knows if they are ever announced that the patents will be broken and then Microsoft will be on the hook for all those license payments that they may actually have to pay back.
I want to know why the federal government and the DOJ are not looking in to Microsoft's behavior in this matter given this is exactly the same type of monopoly behavior that Microsoft does and did that got them convicted of being an illegal monopoly in the EU and the US. Microsoft has to play by completely different rules than everyone given the fact they are a company convicted of breaking the law. When you break the law everything is different for you compared to everyone else. So it may be true some other company could do this type of thing without an issue, but we are talking about Microsoft who is a convicted illegal monopoly. So they must play by different rules, and they seem to be breaking those rules and going back to their old illegal ways.
People and companies have said that exact thing many times. Microsoft has complained when they get hit with patent lawsuits and loose. Other companies have said the same thing when hit with patent lawsuits. The problem is the system of patent M.A.D. has been going on so long and the lawyers keep upping the ante to get into the game and keep making the penalties higher and higher for not playing by their rules that it would take major reform of the legal and patent systems to make the kind of changes you are talking about. No lawyer is about to touch that given it would put some legal practices completely out of business and majorly cut in to the legal billable hours for other firms. Lawyers have no interest or incentive to change the system. The companies can't change the system or they risk being nuke and left as smoldering mess on the side of the road. So everyone keeps playing the same stupid game. Eventually something is going to have to give or commerce is going to grind to an extremely slow place because creating a new product or new software will become a complete field landmine of patent violations to try and walk through.
How about Microsoft being so desperate to keep the Nortel patents out of Google's hands that they were willing to partner with several other companies and pay stupid amounts of money to keep them out of Google's hands. Microsoft clearly fears tGoogle and sees them as a very real and serious threat to them. Microsoft isn't sure how to take Google on other than by denying them things. I want to know if Google ever filed a lawsuit against the auction. It would seem to me that the group Microsoft put together to buy the patents could be a violation of monopoly laws and possibly illegal restraint of trade. At which point the auction would be invalid or those bids would be invalid and Google would end up with the patents. I personally hope Google does go after all of them for illegal restraint of trade and illegal monopoly actions. Microsoft has already been convicted once so it wouldn't be a stretch to show the same pattern of behavior by Microsoft and get them slapped around by the courts again. A pending lawsuit/filing it may be exactly why Google hasn't done anything about Microsoft yet, because they are getting ready to pull the rug out from under Microsoft before Microsoft even knows what happened.
Clearly Microsoft doesn't believe that the patents will stand up to scrutiny otherwise they would publicly announce the patents and then go after each company violating them. That Microsoft keeps everything a secret says tons about what Microsoft thinks of their patents being able to hold up to extremely close scrutiny by 100,000+ people. If you only have to convince 10-20 people that is far easier to do than try and convince 100,000+ people that you have great patents and there is no way to invalidate them.
It's a cost pain ratio thing. If it is cheaper to pay a company to go rather than fight them in court, almost every single time the corporation will pay to make it go away if the cost is lower enough than the cost of a lawsuit and how both would impact the company and profits. In this case it is pretty clear there is no one else standing behind Microsoft to pull the same crap so companies have to think of their shareholders and weigh the costs involved. I would bet big money Microsoft prices their extortion....I mean settlements so that it is cheaper to pay them off and less impact on the products being sold than a lawsuit. If Microsoft gets crazy with the amount they want to settle then eventually someone will say the cost is too high, see you in court and that is exactly what Microsoft wants to avoid. If you can pester someone to death and then say for $20 you'll go away then they will cough it up. If you pester someone and say pay me $30 to go away and you know they won't spend that then you are going to ask everyone for $20 all day long and then some. It's a crappy thing to do but it always comes down to money for corporations.
Wrong on all counts. Clearly you have never been involved in lawsuits with large corporations and nuance lawsuits. I have been involved in both. When a company is being sued there are two things they look at. The first what is the expense to prove in court that they are correct and how does that cost relate to the product they are selling. The second is how much is the cost to settle the case and make it go away so they can get back to their core business. A large majority of the time it is simpler to say here take some money and stop bothering me, now go away and don't come back. In a lawsuit with Microsoft I would bet that almost every single time that it is cheaper to pay Microsoft to go away rather than fight them in a lawsuit and I would bet Microsoft knows this and prices their extortion...I mean settlement to reflect this fact. I see corporations using their size to intimidate smaller companies all the time.
Not rare but impossible. Programmers are taught almost exactly the same way how to program in a language so programmers are going to make similar programs. If a programmer never looks at a patent filing, and they never do, then it is obvious and trivial. There is nothing in programming where this hasn't happened. Every single software patent some programmer will violate because it is obvious and they are trying to solve the same problem as the guy who got the patent. I did tons of work during the dot com era that was cutting edge and unique at the time. Now it is all common place and everyone does it. I didn't file for patents for 2 reasons. The first eventually someone else would have come up with the same ideas and clearly they did or amazingly my work was copied by entire industry, seriously doubtful. The second is that patents are amazingly expense to file and keep. Fighting a company with a patent lawsuit to enforce a patent is outrageously expensive. So I never bothered to patent the work and those are the reasons I will never patent my work no matter how far out in front of the crowd I am. Eventually the crowd will catch up, they always do, and I will be off ahead of them at that point doing something else which I enjoy doing, rather than sitting in court fighting over why no one else should be allowed to use the idea/procedure.
Wrong and thank you for playing. There is absolutely nothing you can come up with that another programmer who is in the same area of business won't come up with. Algorithms are not patentable for most of the world because they are simply math statements and thus eventually many people will discover the exact same math formula. The exact same thing is true of programming. Programmers are taught and trained a specific way or style due to the idiosyncrasies of a language so everyone in programming ends up very close to the same place. There is no problem you are trying to solve that someone else out there isn't try to solve as well. Programmer don't look through patent filings to get ideas. So if a programmer violates a software patent then it obvious and trivial and should be invalided. This is exactly why software patents are stupid and a complete scam.
Yanking Windows licenses is not the only tactic Microsoft can and does use. They threaten companies all the time, especially small ones and startups, that if they continue to try and bring a new product to market that may unseat Microsoft, or won't sell the technology and/or company to them, then Microsoft will bury them in lawsuits and make it last forever until they run out of money. I have had people in startups I know get this talk from Microsoft, and I have had the exact same threat used against me by large corporations. Microsoft can say we are sitting on $X billions of dollars and we are willing to spend $2 billion burying you with a lawsuit. No company wants to face a long expensive protracted lawsuit. So they look at the cost of the lawsuit versus paying off Microsoft and I would bet it is cheaper to pay off Microsoft rather than fight them. This is why you see so many companies folding when pressured by Microsoft. If you can threaten one at time to bury companies in $2 billion lawsuits but never have to actually spend the money then it is like taking candy from a baby. If companies could band together to fight Microsoft then Microsoft would be in trouble but Microsoft is going to great care to make sure that doesn't happen.
You mean the EU doesn't count as outside of the US where Microsoft was convicted of being an illegal monopoly as well? I could have sworn that the EU was not part of the US. I could have also sworn I read news articles from the EU about the Microsoft trial and conviction and subsequent oversight and changes that Microsoft had to make. Anyone remember the SAMBA part of the story where Microsoft had to open up all tech details on that as part of the punishment? That's why the SAMBA team was able to make a giant leap at that point is because Microsoft was forced to completely reveal network protocols and had supervision to make sure it happened and happened fully.
I will bet you money that the reason the companies caved is because of the expense of challenging a patent. If the patents became known to the public then they would fall apart and the game would be up for Microsoft, and Microsoft knows this. If they do it under an NDA and sealed agreements then the companies can't get any help to break the patents and can't afford to do an exhaustive prior art search themselves. If they could get a lot of people to help them search for prior art....say like the Open Source community then it would be a snap to find with hundreds of thousands of people looking for prior art. That is exactly what Microsoft wants to prevent. They know the patents are not iron clad and they are not about to risk loosing them by displaying them publicly to get ripped apart.
If a programmer invented it and another programmer invented the same exact thing and never ever saw the patent filed for it. The the process is trival and obvious to anyone in the field. There is nothing you can program that won't occure to another program as a way to solve a problem. It just isn't possible because of the way that computer languages have been created and taught. Someone will end up making the exact same method and code very close to what the patent claims was innovative. Programmers never look at patents but are accused of violating patents. That right there says the patent was obvious and trivial for someone in the field.
The reason Microsoft doesn't want to release the patent numbers is for the same reason someone mentioned. It is too expensive for a company to research 45+ patents. It is a snap for the Open Source community to research 45+ patents and get prior art for all of them. Microsoft knows that if their patents aren't rock solid and iron clad that the Open Source community will rip them to shreds as they have done before. Microsoft doesn't stand a chance in hell of keeping the patents once they are public and they know it. Microsoft knows they didn't do a deep prior art search because it is expensive, but 100,000+ people searching for prior art and all of a sudden it isn't a needle in a haystack. It's a thin layer of straw with a giant magnet to find the needle. Microsoft knows this and Microsoft's lawyers know this. They have absolutely no intention of allowing the army of the Open Source community anywhere near them to try and attack them. Microsoft isn't stupid and they know they can't take on the army of the Open Source community intent on smashing Microsoft's patents. It would the death of a thousand cuts and Microsoft has no plans to open that nasty can of worms and huge set of problems on themselves. This is exactly why they hide everything but make outrageous claims. It is the same tactics Microsoft has used for years and the tactics that got Microsoft convicted of being an illegal monopoly in the US and the EU.
Can you imagine what would happen if every time a software patent was filed and before it was granted it was made known to the Open Source community? I would bet money that very very few of the software patents, if any, would survive the assault on them. Corporations know this and they want absolutely no part of seeing thousands of people working to invalid a patent. They will do almost anything to prevent that because they know doing deep prior art research is expensive and no one ever does a serious deep prior art research. Lawyers aren't paid to tell clients, sorry someone else was there before you. They are paid to make sure the patent is granted. This is the exact reason the patent office is so broke.
There is absolutely nothing you can invent that someone else at the same time isn't working on. If you are trying to solve a problem then you can be guaranteed that someone else out there is trying to solve the exact same problem. You see this over and over and over again in history for radio, tv, electricity to cities, lights and the list goes on and on. Patents in this day and age do absolutely nothing but stifle innovation. No inventor or company ever goes through the patents to try and find a new invention or way to do something. Companies actively tell inventors and programmers not to go looking at patents. So if no one is looking at them and they invent the same exact thing then it definitively isn't novel to someone in the industry because they did the exact same thing all on their own with no idea of what someone else did. Patents have only screwed commerce and society over by putting a serious drag on science and technologies. Don't even think medicine is different either. The exact same thing happens there with drugs. In fact if you look at drug companies SEC filings you will see they spend more on advertising instead of R&D. R&D is one of their lowest costs. So patents don't help the drug industry either. Drug companies are never all alone in inventing drugs. If you think that then you don't know the drug industry at all. They are all competing with each other to be the first to patent some drug to treat something. They all know what the other companies are researching but don't know their progress level. So even in drugs patents are not needed. Drug companies would still fight to be the first to market to make that first to market money and get entrenched before any other drug company.
Except that over the years the federal government has given away moon rocks as gifts to different countries and people. So no the federal government does not own every moon rock out there.
I would argue that the state of Alaska has no standing. Since it was thrown out in the trash they lost ownership of it. Now if the federal government or NASA wants to say it was on loan to the museum then they would have standing to deal with the lawsuit.
Do we even know for a fact this is a moon rock other than this guy says it is?
I can tell you for a fact that you if put something in the trash and I can easily get to it then I can legally have whatever you threw away and legally said you didn't want anymore and that someone needed to come a get rid of it for you. The exception to this is if you lock your trash dumpsters, then someone can not break in to the trash dumpster to get at the trash. This is exactly why corporations started locking their trash dumpsters. There were too many hackers and other people dumpster diving and getting all kinds of juicy information from the trash that was that was thrown out and it was all legal. So corporations started locking their trash dumpsters and it legally stopped dumpster diving. The lock showed that they were not removing all legal claims. They give a key to their trash guy and they are contracting a service to have that container/contents (dumpster) transported to another location for processing.
You can hide evidence all you want. It is up to the police and prosecutor to find that evidence that you hid and convict you. You bury the body of someone you killed in a national forest. You are not required to tell them you did that and/or where to find the body.
If they have a search warrant for a safe in the study. They do not all of a sudden get the right to open a gun safe in the basement or tear your matress up looking for the evidence. You do not have to help them open the safe either. They are free to use whatever idea or force they can come up with to open the safe.
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The problem with trying to show "piracy" hurts sales, "piracy" by the individual rather than commercial piracy, does not effect sales. There are many many examples of this and many many reports that prove this is in fact false. It is an attempt at a straw horse by the entertainment companies (games, movie, music, books, etc) that is completely false. They spend far more money on trying to stop "piracy" than they will ever recover in sales if there was absolutely no "piracy". It is a stalking horse that has nothing to do with "piracy" and everything to do with controlling the market and setting things up for the future so they will not loose control or be forced out by something cheap, better and more agile in the future. The media companies are colluding together because so many of them are tied to each other through corporate divisions and mergers and what not. They are trying to divide things up like the mafia and are using whatever means needed to do it. The DOJ really should look into the media companies, their contracts with artists and everyone including promotion, and their ties to each other to price fix and protect each other and their positions in the market. They have created artificial barriers in an attempt to keep everyone else out of the markets.
You are making way too many assumptions there with absolutely no foundation of facts. You have not proven that if you remove "piracy" that sales would increase. Why you even think that would be true I have no idea. DRMed e-books have not increased book sales. In fact if you look at Baen Books the opposite is true. If you release e-books without DRM your book sales for those authors will increase dramatically across their entire current and back catalog. So in fact this is one clear example that completely disproves what you are saying here.
You also assume they would be better customers if there was no piracy. Are you sure of that? Can you prove it? Do you know for a fact that returns won't suddenly skyrocket? Do you know that distribution costs and middle man percentages won't go up because of this? You have absolutely no proof of your claims and assumptions here. In fact there are many many examples to the contrary and no example to prove your point. If you look at indie games that have no DRM versus indie games with DRM. You see higher sales across the board for indie games with no DRM. Look at any of the reports by any of the indie distribution portals to see this. Steam is not an example of this because their games have DRM, even the indie titles. So there is another example that disproves your point.
Removing piracy does not and will not increase sales and it won't increase profits either. This has been shown time and time again.
Because it has absolutely nothing to do with profits in reality. Instead it is about whining to congress that they aren't making enough money because of the "pirates". So they get copyright length extentions. They get laws passed that try and force everyone to buy through them. MPAA and RIAA don't even like used products to be sold and have several times tried to talk congress into limiting used sales. The gaming industry is doing the exact same thing. They are just greedy and want to kill used sales because they think the person will instead buy the $40-$50 version when the market has clearly shown that is false. If people were willing to buy it new they wouldn't bother with used. People buy used because they are unwilling to pay for the product at the new price point. If I can't get used products so my choice is new or not at all, then I choose not at all. Their products are not worth that to me with my very limited budget. The media companies aren't connect with 150% profits they want to legislate 300% profits. They want to sell you the exact same product in new formats every 5-10 years so you pay over and over and over for the same exact thing. They want to renege on the promise of putting things in the public domain in exchange for a limited term of exclusive use. Personally I think if a media company isn't dropping the same number of products into the public domain every year as they get new copyrights for, then they should not be getting more new copyrights. New copyrights each year should be limited to the same number of products put into the public domain if you are a company more than 20 years old. I don't care if your copyright hasn't expired. If you can't make your money back in 20 years then you don't deserve a copyright on it. Corporations have to be held to the promise of increasing the public domain or they shouldn't be allowed any copyrights. Personally I think corporations should not be allowed to hold copyrights or patents only actual live humans, not fictitious legal creations. We are suppose to be rewarding the inventor(s) not some company that exploits their workers and takes all their creativity and ideas for themselves.
How about just show them the original DVDs that they/you have purchased? I have probably about 400+ DVDs I have bought that I could show a survey person without any problem. I could take pictures and attach it to a survey if they wanted. It's isn't all that hard to prove that you actually own a crap load of DVDs.
I am not saying there is anything wrong with Minecraft but it doesn't have any game design. Creating a bunch of things and seeing what players like and what works and then adding or removing, that is not game design. It's the idea of throw everything on the wall and see what sticks. Minecraft is very similar to Gary's Mod in terms of "play" style. There isn't a game, just something cool to play with and make your own stuff. There are clearly people who like that, but I would think that the ability to capture people's attention long term is going to be a problem. Just like a good novel there should be some reason to come back and experience it again to experience a story or idea again. If the concept is build your own experience then getting around to returning to it has a much higher re-entry level and that discourages the desire to come back and re-experience something because it was a product of your time and those around you contributing at the time. Basically you can't re-experience it again because it is gone and it is not repeatable. Not everyone likes to re-read a book or watch a movie again, but there is a decent percentage of the population that does. The same is true of games and you will see people talking about going back and playing a favorite game again or a game that resonated with the person. Playing with Legos 6 months or a year later does not have the same experience as when you first played with them.
What you are describing is clearly a lack of design focus and skill. This is the same exact problem a lot of indie titles face and some open source games. They have all this interesting tech ideas in them but there is no game design and game development skill applied to them so they end up as interesting toys for awhile and then get boring quickly because there is no clear design and no clear purpose for the game. This is where an experienced game designer begins to show his worth. An experienced game designer can add that level of focus and consistency that is needed to turn it from a neat/interesting/cute idea into a real game that you want to play over and over again. Some people think a designer doesn't really do all that much other than come up with the basic idea or ideas of a game, and that is not the case as the unfocused nature of Minecraft shows.
Listing this as a Microsoft announcement might be interesting except that most of the work done by the guy was probably when he was working for Novell. He only came to work for Microsoft in Feb. 2011. So not exactly a huge amount of time. Not to mention the modification are supposedly very small ones and are only done in the Microsoft module for their VM, that is still in the staging area from 2+ years ago.
Why we even want Microsoft's VM module I will never understand given Microsoft wants to see Linux rot in hell and never be allowed to surface again. Microsoft as a company calls us a virus that infects everything ruining everything it touches, thieves and intellectual pirates. You should never accept anything from someone actively trying to stab you in the back. When the person is getting behind you it isn't for encouragement but rather so they get a better angle to stab you in the back.
So nothing to see here move along.
Except that completely ignores the issue of Microsoft claiming that Linux violates their patents. I wonder if Microsoft employees and legal counsel for Microsoft has signed off on any patents that might be included in the module work they are doing for their own virtualization to be included in the Linux kernel. You ask me and I see absolutely no point in including Microsoft's module. They have had 2 years and done absolutely nothing with it. All the changes that were done were lots of little ones and the module still isn't ready to leave the staging area. So while the numbers sound interesting and it makes it seem like Microsoft is helping, they are actually doing squat all to get their code into a release and usable format for the Linux kernel.
I still want to know why the Linux kernel should contain anything from a company that constantly assaults the community. A company who calls us thieves and intellectual pirates. Microsoft is going after Android OEMs saying that Linux violates their patents so they have to pay up on licensing fees. Yet Microsoft won't publicly announce what any of those patents are. In fact when Barnes and Noble called BS on Microsoft and refused to sign the NDA. It turned out Microsoft didn't sue over Linux they sued over web browsing and the interface, which is a long long way from Linux itself or even any Linux distribution.
The Linux community should absolutely not accept anything from a company or anyone else who is active trying to put a knife in our back and running around to OEMs who work with the community and black mailing them and telling them sign this NDA so you can see the issues, but you can never tell anyone what they are. That whole thing sounds like BS and Microsoft knows if they are ever announced that the patents will be broken and then Microsoft will be on the hook for all those license payments that they may actually have to pay back.
I want to know why the federal government and the DOJ are not looking in to Microsoft's behavior in this matter given this is exactly the same type of monopoly behavior that Microsoft does and did that got them convicted of being an illegal monopoly in the EU and the US. Microsoft has to play by completely different rules than everyone given the fact they are a company convicted of breaking the law. When you break the law everything is different for you compared to everyone else. So it may be true some other company could do this type of thing without an issue, but we are talking about Microsoft who is a convicted illegal monopoly. So they must play by different rules, and they seem to be breaking those rules and going back to their old illegal ways.
People and companies have said that exact thing many times. Microsoft has complained when they get hit with patent lawsuits and loose. Other companies have said the same thing when hit with patent lawsuits. The problem is the system of patent M.A.D. has been going on so long and the lawyers keep upping the ante to get into the game and keep making the penalties higher and higher for not playing by their rules that it would take major reform of the legal and patent systems to make the kind of changes you are talking about. No lawyer is about to touch that given it would put some legal practices completely out of business and majorly cut in to the legal billable hours for other firms. Lawyers have no interest or incentive to change the system. The companies can't change the system or they risk being nuke and left as smoldering mess on the side of the road. So everyone keeps playing the same stupid game. Eventually something is going to have to give or commerce is going to grind to an extremely slow place because creating a new product or new software will become a complete field landmine of patent violations to try and walk through.
How about Microsoft being so desperate to keep the Nortel patents out of Google's hands that they were willing to partner with several other companies and pay stupid amounts of money to keep them out of Google's hands. Microsoft clearly fears tGoogle and sees them as a very real and serious threat to them. Microsoft isn't sure how to take Google on other than by denying them things. I want to know if Google ever filed a lawsuit against the auction. It would seem to me that the group Microsoft put together to buy the patents could be a violation of monopoly laws and possibly illegal restraint of trade. At which point the auction would be invalid or those bids would be invalid and Google would end up with the patents. I personally hope Google does go after all of them for illegal restraint of trade and illegal monopoly actions. Microsoft has already been convicted once so it wouldn't be a stretch to show the same pattern of behavior by Microsoft and get them slapped around by the courts again. A pending lawsuit/filing it may be exactly why Google hasn't done anything about Microsoft yet, because they are getting ready to pull the rug out from under Microsoft before Microsoft even knows what happened.
Clearly Microsoft doesn't believe that the patents will stand up to scrutiny otherwise they would publicly announce the patents and then go after each company violating them. That Microsoft keeps everything a secret says tons about what Microsoft thinks of their patents being able to hold up to extremely close scrutiny by 100,000+ people. If you only have to convince 10-20 people that is far easier to do than try and convince 100,000+ people that you have great patents and there is no way to invalidate them.
It's a cost pain ratio thing. If it is cheaper to pay a company to go rather than fight them in court, almost every single time the corporation will pay to make it go away if the cost is lower enough than the cost of a lawsuit and how both would impact the company and profits. In this case it is pretty clear there is no one else standing behind Microsoft to pull the same crap so companies have to think of their shareholders and weigh the costs involved. I would bet big money Microsoft prices their extortion....I mean settlements so that it is cheaper to pay them off and less impact on the products being sold than a lawsuit. If Microsoft gets crazy with the amount they want to settle then eventually someone will say the cost is too high, see you in court and that is exactly what Microsoft wants to avoid. If you can pester someone to death and then say for $20 you'll go away then they will cough it up. If you pester someone and say pay me $30 to go away and you know they won't spend that then you are going to ask everyone for $20 all day long and then some. It's a crappy thing to do but it always comes down to money for corporations.
Wrong on all counts. Clearly you have never been involved in lawsuits with large corporations and nuance lawsuits. I have been involved in both. When a company is being sued there are two things they look at. The first what is the expense to prove in court that they are correct and how does that cost relate to the product they are selling. The second is how much is the cost to settle the case and make it go away so they can get back to their core business. A large majority of the time it is simpler to say here take some money and stop bothering me, now go away and don't come back. In a lawsuit with Microsoft I would bet that almost every single time that it is cheaper to pay Microsoft to go away rather than fight them in a lawsuit and I would bet Microsoft knows this and prices their extortion...I mean settlement to reflect this fact. I see corporations using their size to intimidate smaller companies all the time.
Not rare but impossible. Programmers are taught almost exactly the same way how to program in a language so programmers are going to make similar programs. If a programmer never looks at a patent filing, and they never do, then it is obvious and trivial. There is nothing in programming where this hasn't happened. Every single software patent some programmer will violate because it is obvious and they are trying to solve the same problem as the guy who got the patent. I did tons of work during the dot com era that was cutting edge and unique at the time. Now it is all common place and everyone does it. I didn't file for patents for 2 reasons. The first eventually someone else would have come up with the same ideas and clearly they did or amazingly my work was copied by entire industry, seriously doubtful. The second is that patents are amazingly expense to file and keep. Fighting a company with a patent lawsuit to enforce a patent is outrageously expensive. So I never bothered to patent the work and those are the reasons I will never patent my work no matter how far out in front of the crowd I am. Eventually the crowd will catch up, they always do, and I will be off ahead of them at that point doing something else which I enjoy doing, rather than sitting in court fighting over why no one else should be allowed to use the idea/procedure.
Wrong and thank you for playing. There is absolutely nothing you can come up with that another programmer who is in the same area of business won't come up with. Algorithms are not patentable for most of the world because they are simply math statements and thus eventually many people will discover the exact same math formula. The exact same thing is true of programming. Programmers are taught and trained a specific way or style due to the idiosyncrasies of a language so everyone in programming ends up very close to the same place. There is no problem you are trying to solve that someone else out there isn't try to solve as well. Programmer don't look through patent filings to get ideas. So if a programmer violates a software patent then it obvious and trivial and should be invalided. This is exactly why software patents are stupid and a complete scam.
Yanking Windows licenses is not the only tactic Microsoft can and does use. They threaten companies all the time, especially small ones and startups, that if they continue to try and bring a new product to market that may unseat Microsoft, or won't sell the technology and/or company to them, then Microsoft will bury them in lawsuits and make it last forever until they run out of money. I have had people in startups I know get this talk from Microsoft, and I have had the exact same threat used against me by large corporations. Microsoft can say we are sitting on $X billions of dollars and we are willing to spend $2 billion burying you with a lawsuit. No company wants to face a long expensive protracted lawsuit. So they look at the cost of the lawsuit versus paying off Microsoft and I would bet it is cheaper to pay off Microsoft rather than fight them. This is why you see so many companies folding when pressured by Microsoft. If you can threaten one at time to bury companies in $2 billion lawsuits but never have to actually spend the money then it is like taking candy from a baby. If companies could band together to fight Microsoft then Microsoft would be in trouble but Microsoft is going to great care to make sure that doesn't happen.
You mean the EU doesn't count as outside of the US where Microsoft was convicted of being an illegal monopoly as well? I could have sworn that the EU was not part of the US. I could have also sworn I read news articles from the EU about the Microsoft trial and conviction and subsequent oversight and changes that Microsoft had to make. Anyone remember the SAMBA part of the story where Microsoft had to open up all tech details on that as part of the punishment? That's why the SAMBA team was able to make a giant leap at that point is because Microsoft was forced to completely reveal network protocols and had supervision to make sure it happened and happened fully.
I will bet you money that the reason the companies caved is because of the expense of challenging a patent. If the patents became known to the public then they would fall apart and the game would be up for Microsoft, and Microsoft knows this. If they do it under an NDA and sealed agreements then the companies can't get any help to break the patents and can't afford to do an exhaustive prior art search themselves. If they could get a lot of people to help them search for prior art....say like the Open Source community then it would be a snap to find with hundreds of thousands of people looking for prior art. That is exactly what Microsoft wants to prevent. They know the patents are not iron clad and they are not about to risk loosing them by displaying them publicly to get ripped apart.
If a programmer invented it and another programmer invented the same exact thing and never ever saw the patent filed for it. The the process is trival and obvious to anyone in the field. There is nothing you can program that won't occure to another program as a way to solve a problem. It just isn't possible because of the way that computer languages have been created and taught. Someone will end up making the exact same method and code very close to what the patent claims was innovative. Programmers never look at patents but are accused of violating patents. That right there says the patent was obvious and trivial for someone in the field.
The reason Microsoft doesn't want to release the patent numbers is for the same reason someone mentioned. It is too expensive for a company to research 45+ patents. It is a snap for the Open Source community to research 45+ patents and get prior art for all of them. Microsoft knows that if their patents aren't rock solid and iron clad that the Open Source community will rip them to shreds as they have done before. Microsoft doesn't stand a chance in hell of keeping the patents once they are public and they know it. Microsoft knows they didn't do a deep prior art search because it is expensive, but 100,000+ people searching for prior art and all of a sudden it isn't a needle in a haystack. It's a thin layer of straw with a giant magnet to find the needle. Microsoft knows this and Microsoft's lawyers know this. They have absolutely no intention of allowing the army of the Open Source community anywhere near them to try and attack them. Microsoft isn't stupid and they know they can't take on the army of the Open Source community intent on smashing Microsoft's patents. It would the death of a thousand cuts and Microsoft has no plans to open that nasty can of worms and huge set of problems on themselves. This is exactly why they hide everything but make outrageous claims. It is the same tactics Microsoft has used for years and the tactics that got Microsoft convicted of being an illegal monopoly in the US and the EU.
Can you imagine what would happen if every time a software patent was filed and before it was granted it was made known to the Open Source community? I would bet money that very very few of the software patents, if any, would survive the assault on them. Corporations know this and they want absolutely no part of seeing thousands of people working to invalid a patent. They will do almost anything to prevent that because they know doing deep prior art research is expensive and no one ever does a serious deep prior art research. Lawyers aren't paid to tell clients, sorry someone else was there before you. They are paid to make sure the patent is granted. This is the exact reason the patent office is so broke.
There is absolutely nothing you can invent that someone else at the same time isn't working on. If you are trying to solve a problem then you can be guaranteed that someone else out there is trying to solve the exact same problem. You see this over and over and over again in history for radio, tv, electricity to cities, lights and the list goes on and on. Patents in this day and age do absolutely nothing but stifle innovation. No inventor or company ever goes through the patents to try and find a new invention or way to do something. Companies actively tell inventors and programmers not to go looking at patents. So if no one is looking at them and they invent the same exact thing then it definitively isn't novel to someone in the industry because they did the exact same thing all on their own with no idea of what someone else did. Patents have only screwed commerce and society over by putting a serious drag on science and technologies. Don't even think medicine is different either. The exact same thing happens there with drugs. In fact if you look at drug companies SEC filings you will see they spend more on advertising instead of R&D. R&D is one of their lowest costs. So patents don't help the drug industry either. Drug companies are never all alone in inventing drugs. If you think that then you don't know the drug industry at all. They are all competing with each other to be the first to patent some drug to treat something. They all know what the other companies are researching but don't know their progress level. So even in drugs patents are not needed. Drug companies would still fight to be the first to market to make that first to market money and get entrenched before any other drug company.
Except that over the years the federal government has given away moon rocks as gifts to different countries and people. So no the federal government does not own every moon rock out there.
I would argue that the state of Alaska has no standing. Since it was thrown out in the trash they lost ownership of it. Now if the federal government or NASA wants to say it was on loan to the museum then they would have standing to deal with the lawsuit.
Do we even know for a fact this is a moon rock other than this guy says it is?
I can tell you for a fact that you if put something in the trash and I can easily get to it then I can legally have whatever you threw away and legally said you didn't want anymore and that someone needed to come a get rid of it for you. The exception to this is if you lock your trash dumpsters, then someone can not break in to the trash dumpster to get at the trash. This is exactly why corporations started locking their trash dumpsters. There were too many hackers and other people dumpster diving and getting all kinds of juicy information from the trash that was that was thrown out and it was all legal. So corporations started locking their trash dumpsters and it legally stopped dumpster diving. The lock showed that they were not removing all legal claims. They give a key to their trash guy and they are contracting a service to have that container/contents (dumpster) transported to another location for processing.
You can hide evidence all you want. It is up to the police and prosecutor to find that evidence that you hid and convict you. You bury the body of someone you killed in a national forest. You are not required to tell them you did that and/or where to find the body.
If they have a search warrant for a safe in the study. They do not all of a sudden get the right to open a gun safe in the basement or tear your matress up looking for the evidence. You do not have to help them open the safe either. They are free to use whatever idea or force they can come up with to open the safe.