You're being somewhat naive; what M$ says and does are often completely different. It's a large organisation, different people have different opinions and given the mess that is the current patent system a submarine patent could easily turn up.
and even if it turns out they do, licenses are granted under RAND terms.
RAND terms to M$ often means "(except GPL)" and "with lots of arbitrary restrictions and sufficient legal roadblocks to make fair competition impossible."
They could've published a patent license as an addendum to the specification license, even though they claim they know of no relevant patents. The fact that they didn't is telling. I could be generous and say it's an oversight or bureaucratic inertia or a small risk that M$ does not want to take but given M$' history I'm not going to be generous and will assume until proven otherwise it's M$ playing their cards close to their chest as usual.
If M$ published a patent license with the final spec, and make legally clear that there are no possible legal and commercial roadblocks to others implementing and interroperating with the spec then that would be worth something.
The parent is a typical Slashbot kneejerk post, that adds nothing that we haven't heard for the last decade.
Well, since M$ hasn't changed their attitude to open standards in more than a decade, in fact since they were established, it's entirely appropriate to repeat it. The fact that a M$ engineering representative said they want to interroperate is almost completely irrelevant. M$ has a long history of talking the talk but not walking the walk.
M$ might one day reform but it will take a huge effort to cancel out their history, not just a few minor marketing ploys. IBM was able to do it; I'm hopeful M$ can too.
I've no doubt the technical people behind this proposal mean well, but what M$ does with standards is driven by their lawyers, marketing 'droids and managers, not their engineers.
True but patent rights might motivate somebody to actually make a product we could use in a shorter time frame.
And it might not. Nobody knows. This is the usual PTO wishful thinking. The PTO has no scientific, objective evidence that patents in large areas of technology do anything more than hinder progress and interfere in the citizen's business. There is plenty of anecdotal evidence that patents in wide areas cause more harm than good and cost billions of dollars. This should be regarded as criminal negligence by public servants.
In this case it might stop many Asian companies creating cheap versions of the product and creating a big market instead of a niche product.
I find it very noticeable that most patented ideas end up as expensive, niche products instead of a high impact mass market items with realistic free market competition. By the time the patent has expired the market has moved on. It's the non-patented stuff (e.g. the web or the idea of opening a simple/modern furniture chain like Ikea) that has the big impact.
And please, no nonsense about how people will not think up new things with no patent protection. In large areas of technology and industry this is simply not true.
Likewise, in the music industry, there is an overabundance of acts willing to sign on the dotted line with record companies to contracts which many underinformed idiots on slashdot somehow believe to be "unfair to the artist."
It's simply statistics; in a society of a few billion people it's easy to find a few dozen photogenic people per year (0.000001%) who will sign up. And yes, it is unfair, see this and this). For both the artists who are signed and the vast majority (99.9%+) who are not. The arts industry makes huge money, almost none of which goes to the artists.
---
It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work. It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons. Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
Please reread his post. Like a lot of similar complainers you are confusing what a person thinks should be the law with what the law says on paper. He and other similar posters are well aware of the difference; please stop assuming he isn't.
Yes, we have existing, crap software patent laws created largely created by a self-serving patent industry. This is not even remotely okay nor does it mean something better cannot be envisaged.
---
The name "Copy Right" is incorrect. It's really "Copy Control Privilege". "Patent" is incorrect. It's really "Idea Control Privilege".
Agreed. This is nothing more than a sligtly sophisticated form of "I want free JPEGs!!!1"
No, it's "My elected representatives have made a mistake, employing empire builders who gave patent monopoly privileges (not rights) unfairly." In a truly free market that would not have happened.
The whole technology area of data compression was in ferment at the time with many different approaches being tried. Researchers were well aware of the need for it given the limitations of communication and storage technology at the time. Software/mathematical algorithm patents did nothing but FUBAR the process. By default, government representatives should not be interfering in the citizen's business.
---
It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work. It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons. Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
In OOo with multiple user profiles, this is saved PER USER!
So what?
You cannot expect a user to do this on every machine.
No, why would I?
I either need this globally set or some other elegant solution.
If you can't propagate a configuration value like this or even a software installation to all the machines you administer in seconds with minimal user impact you are a very poor system administrator and no amount of advice on/. is going to help you. It's just a file copy operation, no elegance needed.
---
DRM =>Total Customer Control = Ultimate Customer Lockin = Death of the free market.
Because these folks like Linux and open source projects even if it means they have to jimmy-rig the entire network on a shoestring and potato-chips.
No, because we are professionals who recognise that a glossy marketing brochure and pretty icons do not make a professional package, and that the license and long term viability is an important part of a program featureset, despite the marketing droids and commercial software bigots trying to pretend otherwise.
But you make a good point... OfficeXP is lightyears ahead of OO.org.
Nonsense. For 95%+ of office tasks it's completely equivalent, in many cases better. To talk about light years ahead" is just a commercial software bigotry.
---
DRM = Total Customer Control = Ultimate Customer Lockin = Death of the free market.
very few documents are imported correctly with OpenOffice.
Many complaints I see are probably due to missing fonts. OO.o import works okay but it can't magically create new fonts. Font substitution is only a partial solution if the substitute font is not an exact replica with exactly the same proportions. This is particularly noticeable with symbolic/icon fonts where substitutes are likely to be completely wrong.
the group who made it promised that while it is patented, it'll be free to implement the basic standard.
This says nothing about submarine patents - patents that the development committee is unaware of. Patent searches help but but particularly given the PTO's incompetence when dealing with software terminology (i.e. they think a different name is the same as different concept) this is no guarantee. It also says nothing about the patent situation in individual countries nor what happens with patents when companies controlling them are sold.
DRM = Total Customer Control = Ultimate Customer Lockin = Death of the free market.
If the original work can be fully reproduced/checked by other scientists without access to the work covered by the NDA (remember the re in research), and it is clear what work the NDA covers so that other scientists can make their own assessment as to whether the NDA work is material, then maybe.;-)
There are plenty of mediocre scientists out there who publish unreproduceable/uncheckable work because they do not make available material parts of the work e.g. code or specialised techniques. They can do this in part because their are busy or mediocre scientists doing the publishing reviews.
This is not a standard to be admired or emulated; progress in science depends fundamentally on openness. Sometimes this ideal sometimes cannot be fully realised, but work which isn't fully open is of a lower standard.
---
I'm not worried about the use of DRM. I'm worried about the abuse.
But wouldn't a company earning large profits from the patents expand, grow, create jobs, pay more taxes, and get the wheels of the economy going? Now that I'm in a position to possibly use a patent, they become easy to rationalize.
Any income you get from a patent is zero-sum. Any money you get, somebody else loses. Patents work in the long term because they concentrate wealth where it's likely to be used to create new wealth. Other businesses could be doing all the nice things your business is doing with the money they saved if they didn't have to pay for your patent.
Buying/selling patented products in theory is not zero-sum because buyer and seller both benefit when competition forces the seller to reduce the price to less than what it is worth to the buyer so both parties have a net profit. However, products these days are often so tied up with patents and DRM that the customer is locked in, there is no competition and the net benefit to the customer is approaching zero.
Many forms of ideas are not protectable by patents but nobody bats an eyelid. e.g. I have the idea of opening a hardware store in a town that turns out to be very profitable because nobody thought to open one there before. Should I be able to take a patent on that idea, stopping anybody from opening a similar store in that town? Why [not]? I have the idea of selling a Mickey Mouse styled computer (not of Mickey Mouse). Should I be able to take a patent on that idea? Why [not]? I have the idea of a Mickey Mouse themed tour. Ditto. I have the idea writing a new program with an OSS license that reads DVD's. Ditto.
Why is it that some ideas are protected and others aren't? Nobody has a clue, and people are spending billions on trying to protect and control some ideas and not others. Most people don't even have a clear idea about what an "idea" actually is. It's insane.
Like software, IP law is a pure product of the mind and could be anything we want it to be. I think IP law is way overdue for a massive rethink, major scientific/economic study and top level political discussion to determine what works and what doesn't. As it is we appear to be headed for a world of DRM'ed ghetto's, widespread virtual world escapism and no incentive to create new things nor to compete.
---
Just like evidence based medicine we need scientific, evidence based IP law.
Some corps have pure profit-driven agendas, but others are non-profit, profit sharing or have additional social agendas.
Technically you are correct but the vast majority of companies listed on the stock exchanges have profit as their only motive. Everything else is secondary. In that situation they are required by law to maximise their profit, because that's what is expected by shareholders. Not to mention the fact that the vast majority of company directors want to maximise their stock options and other bonuses.
In this specific case, what's wrong with Apple developing technology to make its products hard to emulate or reverse-engineer? Aside from its potential for harassing pirates, I don't see the harm in it.
In the short term not much harm. In the long term free markets are destroyed when other companies can't make devices interroperable, defacto and closed standards develop which new, small players cannot participate in and markets are created where the costs of entry get so high that cartels and monopolies develop.
No free markets, just ghetto's where different multi-nationals have a monopoly on their own product segment, have no incentive to create new things and have no incentive to reduce prices.
---
I'm not worried about the use of DRM. I'm worried about the abuse.
While the report 28% of 40% (or about 11%) of scientists had to stop their research due to patents, 55% of scientists state that they use patents to protect their IP. So it appears that patents help about 5 times as many research projects than it stops.
Your reasoning is fallacious. "Protecting IP" != helping research.
---
The name "Copy Right" is incorrect. It's really "Copy Control Privilege". "Patent" is incorrect. It's really "Idea Control Privilege".
One must be careful about quoting the figures posted in the above article due to the fact that the survey reported only the proportion of researchers affected by patent and licensing issues that were forced to delay change or abandon their research projects.
Very true however keep in mind this is the same standard of evidence that is used by patent proponents who feel it is okay for government to massively interfere in the citizen's business with new laws (patents) being created every day by PTO bureaucrats behind closed doors affecting billions of dollars of business with what is nothing more than a hand waving rationalisation.
---
Scientific, evidence based IP law. Now there's a thought.
Until they have a way of guaranteeing an impression every time you view (i.e., making it available only by live stream),
Why? They have no such guarantees in other media, just likelihoods. This is no different. And whatever happened to making ad's that people actually wanted to see?
---
"Copy Right" is incorrect. It's actually "Copy Control Privilege". "Patent" is incorrect. It's actually "Idea Control Privilege".
Apparently instead earning one's self a JD is automatically evil in your world?
Evil, no. Self serving, yes.
I want people in congress representing my interests, not just those of lawyers.
The drafting of laws is a technical function that should be relegated to the public service, just like programming and bridge building.
Having competing democratic/republican/whatever lawyers design the laws leads to a real life version of nomic.
---
It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work. It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons. Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
But, the simple truth is, it's not the fault of lawyers. They're working within the system, getting paid by clients to do what they do.
So what you're saying is if you're paid to do something it's okay?
I think I'll pay for a full page ad in the New York Times implying in some legal way you're a criminal.
Lawyers washing their hands of their dirty deeds are a major part of the problem whether you like it or not. cf. The Nuremberg Defense.
Lawyers are responsible for whatever they do, regardless of what others are doing and/or "order" them to do.
---
It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work. It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons. Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
It's both. The program should not have accepted easily recognised invalid input and the user should not have entered it.
I don't care if it's not in the spec, it's commonly accepted programming practice that all input should be bounds checked and any program that doesn't do that is crap.
Your rm example is not equivalent as command line programs are by design flexible; in unusual circumstances it may be exactly what the operator wants to do.
Slashdot Mirror
So they don't think they have any patents,
You're being somewhat naive; what M$ says and does are often completely different. It's a large organisation, different people have different opinions and given the mess that is the current patent system a submarine patent could easily turn up.
and even if it turns out they do, licenses are granted under RAND terms.
RAND terms to M$ often means "(except GPL)" and "with lots of arbitrary restrictions and sufficient legal roadblocks to make fair competition impossible."
They could've published a patent license as an addendum to the specification license, even though they claim they know of no relevant patents. The fact that they didn't is telling. I could be generous and say it's an oversight or bureaucratic inertia or a small risk that M$ does not want to take but given M$' history I'm not going to be generous and will assume until proven otherwise it's M$ playing their cards close to their chest as usual.
If M$ published a patent license with the final spec, and make legally clear that there are no possible legal and commercial roadblocks to others implementing and interroperating with the spec then that would be worth something.
---
Keep your options open!
The parent is a typical Slashbot kneejerk post, that adds nothing that we haven't heard for the last decade.
Well, since M$ hasn't changed their attitude to open standards in more than a decade, in fact since they were established, it's entirely appropriate to repeat it. The fact that a M$ engineering representative said they want to interroperate is almost completely irrelevant. M$ has a long history of talking the talk but not walking the walk.
M$ might one day reform but it will take a huge effort to cancel out their history, not just a few minor marketing ploys. IBM was able to do it; I'm hopeful M$ can too.
I've no doubt the technical people behind this proposal mean well, but what M$ does with standards is driven by their lawyers, marketing 'droids and managers, not their engineers.
True but patent rights might motivate somebody to actually make a product we could use in a shorter time frame.
And it might not. Nobody knows. This is the usual PTO wishful thinking. The PTO has no scientific, objective evidence that patents in large areas of technology do anything more than hinder progress and interfere in the citizen's business. There is plenty of anecdotal evidence that patents in wide areas cause more harm than good and cost billions of dollars. This should be regarded as criminal negligence by public servants.
In this case it might stop many Asian companies creating cheap versions of the product and creating a big market instead of a niche product.
I find it very noticeable that most patented ideas end up as expensive, niche products instead of a high impact mass market items with realistic free market competition. By the time the patent has expired the market has moved on. It's the non-patented stuff (e.g. the web or the idea of opening a simple/modern furniture chain like Ikea) that has the big impact.
And please, no nonsense about how people will not think up new things with no patent protection. In large areas of technology and industry this is simply not true.
---
You communist! Breathing shared air!
More likely it was due to the fact that OpenOffice.org, while young and promising, still sucks terribly for real-world daily usage.
Marketing nonsense. For 95%+ of people OO.o works just fine for real-world, daily usage.
---
The majority of modern marketing is nothing more than an arms race to get mind share. Everybody loses except the parasitic marketing "industry".
The unemployment soared to 30%. Pundents blame the lack of supply chain jobs.
Yep, all the money not spent on the M$ tax simply evaporated. The broken window fallacy.
---
Marketing talk is not just cheap, it has negative value. Free speech can be compromised just as much by too much noise as too little signal.
Stop being insulting. Just because somebody disagrees with you does not make them an idiot.
---
Don't be a programmer-bureaucrat; someone who substitutes marketing buzzwords and software bloat for verifiable improvements.
Likewise, in the music industry, there is an overabundance of acts willing to sign on the dotted line with record companies to contracts which many underinformed idiots on slashdot somehow believe to be "unfair to the artist."
It's simply statistics; in a society of a few billion people it's easy to find a few dozen photogenic people per year (0.000001%) who will sign up. And yes, it is unfair, see this and this). For both the artists who are signed and the vast majority (99.9%+) who are not. The arts industry makes huge money, almost none of which goes to the artists.
---
It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work.
It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons.
Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
Please reread his post. Like a lot of similar complainers you are confusing what a person thinks should be the law with what the law says on paper. He and other similar posters are well aware of the difference; please stop assuming he isn't.
Yes, we have existing, crap software patent laws created largely created by a self-serving patent industry. This is not even remotely okay nor does it mean something better cannot be envisaged.
---
The name "Copy Right" is incorrect. It's really "Copy Control Privilege". "Patent" is incorrect. It's really "Idea Control Privilege".
Agreed. This is nothing more than a sligtly sophisticated form of "I want free JPEGs!!!1"
No, it's "My elected representatives have made a mistake, employing empire builders who gave patent monopoly privileges (not rights) unfairly." In a truly free market that would not have happened.
The whole technology area of data compression was in ferment at the time with many different approaches being tried. Researchers were well aware of the need for it given the limitations of communication and storage technology at the time. Software/mathematical algorithm patents did nothing but FUBAR the process. By default, government representatives should not be interfering in the citizen's business.
---
It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work.
It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons.
Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
In OOo with multiple user profiles, this is saved PER USER!
So what?
You cannot expect a user to do this on every machine.
No, why would I?
I either need this globally set or some other elegant solution.
If you can't propagate a configuration value like this or even a software installation to all the machines you administer in seconds with minimal user impact you are a very poor system administrator and no amount of advice on /. is going to help you. It's just a file copy operation, no elegance needed.
---
DRM =>Total Customer Control = Ultimate Customer Lockin = Death of the free market.
Because these folks like Linux and open source projects even if it means they have to jimmy-rig the entire network on a shoestring and potato-chips.
No, because we are professionals who recognise that a glossy marketing brochure and pretty icons do not make a professional package, and that the license and long term viability is an important part of a program featureset, despite the marketing droids and commercial software bigots trying to pretend otherwise.
But you make a good point... OfficeXP is lightyears ahead of OO.org.
Nonsense. For 95%+ of office tasks it's completely equivalent, in many cases better. To talk about light years ahead" is just a commercial software bigotry.
---
DRM = Total Customer Control = Ultimate Customer Lockin = Death of the free market.
very few documents are imported correctly with OpenOffice.
Many complaints I see are probably due to missing fonts. OO.o import works okay but it can't magically create new fonts. Font substitution is only a partial solution if the substitute font is not an exact replica with exactly the same proportions. This is particularly noticeable with symbolic/icon fonts where substitutes are likely to be completely wrong.
---
Paid marketers are the worst zealots.
the group who made it promised that while it is patented, it'll be free to implement the basic standard.
This says nothing about submarine patents - patents that the development committee is unaware of. Patent searches help but but particularly given the PTO's incompetence when dealing with software terminology (i.e. they think a different name is the same as different concept) this is no guarantee. It also says nothing about the patent situation in individual countries nor what happens with patents when companies controlling them are sold.
DRM = Total Customer Control = Ultimate Customer Lockin = Death of the free market.
If the original work can be fully reproduced/checked by other scientists without access to the work covered by the NDA (remember the re in research), and it is clear what work the NDA covers so that other scientists can make their own assessment as to whether the NDA work is material, then maybe. ;-)
There are plenty of mediocre scientists out there who publish unreproduceable/uncheckable work because they do not make available material parts of the work e.g. code or specialised techniques. They can do this in part because their are busy or mediocre scientists doing the publishing reviews.
This is not a standard to be admired or emulated; progress in science depends fundamentally on openness. Sometimes this ideal sometimes cannot be fully realised, but work which isn't fully open is of a lower standard.
---
I'm not worried about the use of DRM. I'm worried about the abuse.
But wouldn't a company earning large profits from the patents expand, grow, create jobs, pay more taxes, and get the wheels of the economy going? Now that I'm in a position to possibly use a patent, they become easy to rationalize.
Any income you get from a patent is zero-sum. Any money you get, somebody else loses. Patents work in the long term because they concentrate wealth where it's likely to be used to create new wealth. Other businesses could be doing all the nice things your business is doing with the money they saved if they didn't have to pay for your patent.
Buying/selling patented products in theory is not zero-sum because buyer and seller both benefit when competition forces the seller to reduce the price to less than what it is worth to the buyer so both parties have a net profit. However, products these days are often so tied up with patents and DRM that the customer is locked in, there is no competition and the net benefit to the customer is approaching zero.
Many forms of ideas are not protectable by patents but nobody bats an eyelid. e.g. I have the idea of opening a hardware store in a town that turns out to be very profitable because nobody thought to open one there before. Should I be able to take a patent on that idea, stopping anybody from opening a similar store in that town? Why [not]? I have the idea of selling a Mickey Mouse styled computer (not of Mickey Mouse). Should I be able to take a patent on that idea? Why [not]? I have the idea of a Mickey Mouse themed tour. Ditto. I have the idea writing a new program with an OSS license that reads DVD's. Ditto.
Why is it that some ideas are protected and others aren't? Nobody has a clue, and people are spending billions on trying to protect and control some ideas and not others. Most people don't even have a clear idea about what an "idea" actually is. It's insane.
Like software, IP law is a pure product of the mind and could be anything we want it to be. I think IP law is way overdue for a massive rethink, major scientific/economic study and top level political discussion to determine what works and what doesn't. As it is we appear to be headed for a world of DRM'ed ghetto's, widespread virtual world escapism and no incentive to create new things nor to compete.
---
Just like evidence based medicine we need scientific, evidence based IP law.
Some corps have pure profit-driven agendas, but others are non-profit, profit sharing or have additional social agendas.
Technically you are correct but the vast majority of companies listed on the stock exchanges have profit as their only motive. Everything else is secondary. In that situation they are required by law to maximise their profit, because that's what is expected by shareholders. Not to mention the fact that the vast majority of company directors want to maximise their stock options and other bonuses.
---
Keep your options open!
In this specific case, what's wrong with Apple developing technology to make its products hard to emulate or reverse-engineer? Aside from its potential for harassing pirates, I don't see the harm in it.
In the short term not much harm. In the long term free markets are destroyed when other companies can't make devices interroperable, defacto and closed standards develop which new, small players cannot participate in and markets are created where the costs of entry get so high that cartels and monopolies develop.
No free markets, just ghetto's where different multi-nationals have a monopoly on their own product segment, have no incentive to create new things and have no incentive to reduce prices.
---
I'm not worried about the use of DRM. I'm worried about the abuse.
While the report 28% of 40% (or about 11%) of scientists had to stop their research due to patents, 55% of scientists state that they use patents to protect their IP. So it appears that patents help about 5 times as many research projects than it stops.
Your reasoning is fallacious. "Protecting IP" != helping research.
---
The name "Copy Right" is incorrect. It's really "Copy Control Privilege". "Patent" is incorrect. It's really "Idea Control Privilege".
I fail to see what the problem is.
If the work depends on NDA elements it cannot be peer reviewed and is not science.
---
The majority of modern marketing is nothing more than an arms race to get mind share. Everybody loses except the parasitic marketing "industry".
One must be careful about quoting the figures posted in the above article due to the fact that the survey reported only the proportion of researchers affected by patent and licensing issues that were forced to delay change or abandon their research projects.
Very true however keep in mind this is the same standard of evidence that is used by patent proponents who feel it is okay for government to massively interfere in the citizen's business with new laws (patents) being created every day by PTO bureaucrats behind closed doors affecting billions of dollars of business with what is nothing more than a hand waving rationalisation.
---
Scientific, evidence based IP law. Now there's a thought.
Until they have a way of guaranteeing an impression every time you view (i.e., making it available only by live stream),
Why? They have no such guarantees in other media, just likelihoods. This is no different. And whatever happened to making ad's that people actually wanted to see?
---
"Copy Right" is incorrect. It's actually "Copy Control Privilege". "Patent" is incorrect. It's actually "Idea Control Privilege".
Apparently instead earning one's self a JD is automatically evil in your world?
Evil, no. Self serving, yes.
I want people in congress representing my interests, not just those of lawyers.
The drafting of laws is a technical function that should be relegated to the public service, just like programming and bridge building.
Having competing democratic/republican/whatever lawyers design the laws leads to a real life version of nomic.
---
It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work.
It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons.
Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
But, the simple truth is, it's not the fault of lawyers. They're working within the system, getting paid by clients to do what they do.
So what you're saying is if you're paid to do something it's okay?
I think I'll pay for a full page ad in the New York Times implying in some legal way you're a criminal.
Lawyers washing their hands of their dirty deeds are a major part of the problem whether you like it or not. cf. The Nuremberg Defense.
Lawyers are responsible for whatever they do, regardless of what others are doing and/or "order" them to do.
---
It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work.
It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons.
Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
Yes, lets all "support the artists.". I'd suggest you read up on copyright myths before making that claim again for distribution cartel music.
I'm all for supporting the artists but buying distribution cartel music doesn't.
---
Paid marketers are the worst zealots.
It's not a software bug, it's a user error.
It's both. The program should not have accepted easily recognised invalid input and the user should not have entered it.
I don't care if it's not in the spec, it's commonly accepted programming practice that all input should be bounds checked and any program that doesn't do that is crap.
Your rm example is not equivalent as command line programs are by design flexible; in unusual circumstances it may be exactly what the operator wants to do.
---
Keep your options open!