...because at this very moment, I'm sitting in small office (with only one network connection, but I'm not allowed to hook up a hub to give me more), listening to an asshole who likes to brag to the rest of us about how little work he's done in the past week, and makes up "we don't support that" rules to suit his whims, loudly lecture another co-worker about politics ("If the [insert party here]s don't like what [insert elected official here] is doing, that tells me that he's doing exactly the right thing!")
I'd tell him to shut up or to take it somewhere else, but I've only worked here for two months, and I'm not sure if he's one of my "superiors" or not.
Harping about incomplete VPN support is one thing; complaining that they didn't include your fave kewl game in the distro is a bit of tunnel-vision.
Even assuming the developer allows it to be freely distributed, there's plenty of reason a company (not referring to Xandros in particular here) might not want to include America's Army in their distro. 1) It'd add a whole 'nother CD to the package, which is more than any other single app demands. 2) It was developed as promotional tool, and the company may not want to include a big "product placement" in their package... at least not without being paid for it. 3) The particular thing being promoted is the U.S. Army, which could be seen as a "political" statement, and that's the sort of things businesspeople try to steer clear of. 4) It would clash with the pretty pastoral wallpaper. {grin}
so why the default browser was Mozilla rather than Konqueror?
They're aiming to be Windows-like, and Mozilla is an app that crosses the Lin/Win border. Granted, most Windows users are more familiar with IE, but the folks who are already familiar with Mozilla or Netscape will presumably be more comfortable with that, than with the completely-new-to-them Konqueror.
Also, the Gecko engine is on more web developers' testing lists than KHTML is (though Safari's starting to change that), so there should be fewer surprises with sites that don't render properly.
Furthermore, Novell has pointed out a clause in the contract with Santa Cruz Operation (now Tarentella) that states that a "change of control" of the company to Caldera Systems (now SCO Group) would terminate parts of the agreement.
For the record, what did they sell to SCO, anyway?
As I understand Novell's side of the story: they sold Caldera A) the right to use the whole source tree of UnixWare, and B) copyright ownership of some vaguely-defined subset which was "required for SCO to exercise its rights to the acquisition of UNIX and UnixWare technologies". The case will probably be decided based on the court's interpretation of that clause.
Help, I think I've fallen into a parallel universe.
So in your universe does Forbes usually champion the folks who are sick of intrusive marketing, instead of catering to the mindset that capitalists and business owners should be free to do anything they want to try to make money?
I'd treat this event as a getting-to-know-you opportunity, and stop there. Be your best, most professional, likeable, and qualified version of yourself, to establish yourself to the suits as someone who cares about the company. If there are things they need to hear, you'll then have a better chance of them being taken seriously later, in a less hazardous context.
I'm not really an expert on Canadian IP law, but I know that you simply cannot copyright a name, in any country whose copyright laws conform to international copyright treaties (which is nearly all of them). If that were possible, I could copyright "Scott Speaks" and then sue people for reproducing the full text of my name in print. (Fair Use under Canadian law would permit only reproducing one or two letters of it.) I could charge royalties for saying my name aloud in a public performance. That'd be ridiculous, and it's why copyright can only be applied to a substantive, creative work. Anything less than, say, a haiku is just too insubstantial to copyright.
I've always been a firm believer in the ability for individuals to register domains based on their name, and this is a good example of that.
There's a pretty substantial body of case law covering people whose names happen to conflict with trademarks that have been established by major corporations. Any individual case still comes down to the particulars of the situation, the quality of the legal representation, the biases of the judge/jury, and the phase of the moon, but there are still some patterns.
A guy named McDonald who wants to use his name on a restaurant would probably be out of luck, but if he were opening an electronics store, he'd be OK (and could probably even defend his ownership of mcdonalds.com... if he'd registered it before Kroc's outfit did).
Mike Rowe is probably going to lose this. Not because his registration was "in bad faith" (he pretty clearly intended to use the domain for himself, and only asked for $10K after Microsoft made him a lesser offer), but because of the underlying trademark conflict; the domain registration is only the tip of the iceberg. He's trying to use the name MikeRoweSoft in one of the same categories of business that Microsoft is using their name. His best defence is that no one would seriously confuse the two companies. The fact that it's his name might score him a point with a sympathetic judge. But unlike copyright law, trademark law doesn't recognise parody or irony, and I think the phonetic similarity of the two will prevail. And if he loses once, there's no way he'll be able to afford an appeal.
The difference between trademark and copyright (and let's not forget patents) is a topic covered in the first week of Intellectual Property 101, and anyone with a stake in IP (like users or developers of open-source software) needs to understand which is which. Saying "copyright" when you're talking about a "trademark" is like typing "rm" when you mean "ls": it's your own fault if the shell misunderstands you.
Copyright - literally "the right to copy" - Covers a particular creative expression of an idea, such as a song, a movie, a poem, or a C++ program. Currently lasts longer than any of us will live.
Trademark - literally "a mark used in trade" - Covers names, slogans, logos, and such when used in the packaging and marketing of a product or service. Lasts as long and only as long as it's in active use.
Patent - literally "openly disclosed" - Gives temporary exclusive rights to a invention [insert debate over definition of "invention" here] in exchange for publishing the details of how it works. Currently lasts longer than the technology is likely to be useful.
(The so-called fourth kind of IP is a trade secret, which is the opposite of a patent: instead of publishing a how-to, the inventor keeps it private, so they can try to keep exclusivity indefinitely.)
Whether I'm standing on an actual street corner shouting about The Truth, or I'm sitting at a computer typing The Truth for an avatar to shout on a simulated street corner, I'm still an actual person saying the same things to actual people. I have the same free speech rights and social responsibilities. The same rules (whatever the right ones are, that's a separate question) not only should apply to virtual reality... they do!
A privately-owned-and-operated virtual reality is no different from a privately-held TV station: the owner can restrict the content. That's probably not a Good Thing, but the same thing is happening in actual communities, with public spaces disappearing. The solution is to create more public spaces (virtual or actual, same difference) where public rules still apply.
I think a far more interesting question applies to conduct in virtual reality, because what we "do" in a simulated environment is not something we're doing in actual reality. If I beat up someone in The Sims Online, that's not actual assault and battery. And it sounds to me like what's becoming a problem in this situation is what people are doing, not what they're saying. Even free-speech absolutists will usually support restrictions on conduct (killing, theft, etc.) in actual reality. But what about virutal reality?
I explained that I didn't spend all this time in college to answer phones.
Um, I didn't spend all that time getting two degrees in college, and working for 16 years in IT (most of that at the analyst/sysadmin level) to answer phones, either. Guess what I now spend nearly half of my time doing every week? (The other half is spent replacing bad keyboards, unjamming printers, installing software, and troubleshooting dead network connections.)
There's no shame in taking entry-level grunt work, even if it's beneath you. In fact, I think you'll find it easier at your age than I'm finding it at mine.
Unless you and everybody else in your department and/or company lost your job simultaneously, chances are VERY GOOD that it's because you sucked
Or because the company's finances got so bad they had to make cuts across the board in every department. I've seen it happen in a previous job, and it happened to me. It was either that or everyone had to take a pay cut, and management figured it was better to have fewer overworked employees rather than a bunch of underpaid ones. So no one was given the option of taking a pay cut.
I would have been perfectly willing to take a pay cut, and in the job I eventually found, I effectively did. I swallowed my pride and applied applied for jobs (the few I could find) which demanded a fraction of my qualification, with no success for 10 months. Sneering that it's the laid-off person's fault for being complacent or greedy, when it could just as easily be managerial stupidity, economic disaster, and other reasons, is absurd.
Pick a noun. Is it a trade mark ? You bet.
Pick a verb. Is it a trade mark ? You bet.
Not a winning bet.
Even if the USPTO approves a trademark registration for a simple noun or verb, it wouldn't stand up well in court. For an enforceable trademark you need to combine it with some other word to form a distinctive phrase (such as Apple Mortgage, Apple Attache, Apple Books, Apple Signs, Apple Records, or Apple Computer) or use it in combination with an original logo or design (e.g. the word "Apple" with the missing-bite outline graphic).
The problem with everyday words is the opposite of what you saying: they aren't useful as trademarks, so no one wants them. But a newly-coined word (e.g. Alticor, Verizon, Wellbutrin, Viagra) makes for a very strong trademark registration, easily exercised in court, even in unrelated categories of commerce. (Try marketing a "Viagra Insurance" product, and watch Pfizer come down on you like a ton of bricks.) Those are the trademarks you want.
I think the "uniqueness" aspect is going to come back to haunt a lot of the shortcut-formula trademarks, as the courts will (barring the intervention of really good expensive corporate lawyers) eventually conclude that e____ and i_____ are not distinctive enough to count as original coinages, and don't get the same level of protection as the more imaginative (or silly) ones.
20 years ago, my parents bought me a Goldstar color TV to use as a monitor for my new Commodore 64. I don't use the C64 anymore, but I still watch VHF/UHF broadcasts on the monitor.
The oldest sold-as-a-monitor I still use is a nicely compact no-brand 14" monochrome VGA on my web/mail server.
Sure, film will still be around, just like vinyl records.
Vinyl is merely a distribution medium, not a creative medium. A better analogy would be to compare chemical photo film to oil paints or other classical illustrative media. Chemical photography rendered illustration and painting "obsolete" decades ago, but I can assure you that artists and hobbyists are still working with oils, pencils, watercolors, etc. We'll continue to use film-based photography as well.
The mutually incompatible responses (accusing MPlayer of being the derivative work, whilst questioning the enforceability of the GPL) are a standard legal defence tactic. You present every possible counter-argument you can think of, and depending on what the "facts" turn out to be, you've already gone on record defending yourself against them. It's actually a wise move when you're not sure whether you can establish the facts in court or not. Credible or not (it sounds a bit like Bart Simpson's "I didn't do it, and nobody saw me do it"), it's what our legal system encourages.
I could replace it in about five minutes if I could get Pontiac to sell me the part. But they won't, not without purchasing the entire headlight module, for 300 dollars.
Several years ago, my dad's car (some fancy domestic sedan) had a faulty indicator in his dashboard display, and the only way to fix it was to replace the entire dashboard. Fortunately it was under warranty, so he didn't have to pay for it. Plus the new dash came with a (digital) odometer reading of "00000.0" miles. {grin}
...that LEGO is getting back to basics. I know I'm dating myself here (I can't get anyone else to), but back when I was a kid (and not just up to age 7) LEGOs were "only" bricks of various sizes and colors... and one of my favorite toys. They didn't have any "sets" that tell you what you're supposed to make out of them, with pre-built "people" figures and whatnot. Just building blocks, which you could make into absolutely anything your imagination came up with. Who needs a LEGO-licensed character, when you can make your own?
Putting this on billboards - or otherwise making a big PR hullaballoo about this - would be a major mistake. IBM's big and powerful, but this ain't 1981 anymore and they cannot afford to make an outright enemy of Microsoft. Even Apple maintains good diplomatic relations with Redmond, largely to ensure that Office:Mac remains in development.
If IBM declared war on King Bill, they'd face Least Favored Nation licensing terms for Windows (maybe even an embargo), which would hurt their ability to compete with HPaq, Dell, and Gateway. While many/.ers would love to see IBM boxes shipping without the Windows tax added into the price, mainstream corporate purchasers would be far less happy, and the SOHO market - many of whom actually think of MS as the swell people who "innovated" all these nifty technological geegaws - would come to regard IBM as a freakish Big Bad Blue monster.
Slashdot Mirror
I'd tell him to shut up or to take it somewhere else, but I've only worked here for two months, and I'm not sure if he's one of my "superiors" or not.
Even assuming the developer allows it to be freely distributed, there's plenty of reason a company (not referring to Xandros in particular here) might not want to include America's Army in their distro. 1) It'd add a whole 'nother CD to the package, which is more than any other single app demands. 2) It was developed as promotional tool, and the company may not want to include a big "product placement" in their package... at least not without being paid for it. 3) The particular thing being promoted is the U.S. Army, which could be seen as a "political" statement, and that's the sort of things businesspeople try to steer clear of. 4) It would clash with the pretty pastoral wallpaper. {grin}
They're aiming to be Windows-like, and Mozilla is an app that crosses the Lin/Win border. Granted, most Windows users are more familiar with IE, but the folks who are already familiar with Mozilla or Netscape will presumably be more comfortable with that, than with the completely-new-to-them Konqueror.
Also, the Gecko engine is on more web developers' testing lists than KHTML is (though Safari's starting to change that), so there should be fewer surprises with sites that don't render properly.
Maybe cell phones wouldn't have gotten such a bad rap in this survey if they hadn't done it by y'know... calling people on the phone. :)
Furthermore, Novell has pointed out a clause in the contract with Santa Cruz Operation (now Tarentella) that states that a "change of control" of the company to Caldera Systems (now SCO Group) would terminate parts of the agreement.
As I understand Novell's side of the story: they sold Caldera A) the right to use the whole source tree of UnixWare, and B) copyright ownership of some vaguely-defined subset which was "required for SCO to exercise its rights to the acquisition of UNIX and UnixWare technologies". The case will probably be decided based on the court's interpretation of that clause.
So in your universe does Forbes usually champion the folks who are sick of intrusive marketing, instead of catering to the mindset that capitalists and business owners should be free to do anything they want to try to make money?
It's different here.
Beagle hit my employer (a community college in the American midwest) yesterday morning.
I'd treat this event as a getting-to-know-you opportunity, and stop there. Be your best, most professional, likeable, and qualified version of yourself, to establish yourself to the suits as someone who cares about the company. If there are things they need to hear, you'll then have a better chance of them being taken seriously later, in a less hazardous context.
I'm not really an expert on Canadian IP law, but I know that you simply cannot copyright a name, in any country whose copyright laws conform to international copyright treaties (which is nearly all of them). If that were possible, I could copyright "Scott Speaks" and then sue people for reproducing the full text of my name in print. (Fair Use under Canadian law would permit only reproducing one or two letters of it.) I could charge royalties for saying my name aloud in a public performance. That'd be ridiculous, and it's why copyright can only be applied to a substantive, creative work. Anything less than, say, a haiku is just too insubstantial to copyright.
There's a pretty substantial body of case law covering people whose names happen to conflict with trademarks that have been established by major corporations. Any individual case still comes down to the particulars of the situation, the quality of the legal representation, the biases of the judge/jury, and the phase of the moon, but there are still some patterns.
A guy named McDonald who wants to use his name on a restaurant would probably be out of luck, but if he were opening an electronics store, he'd be OK (and could probably even defend his ownership of mcdonalds.com... if he'd registered it before Kroc's outfit did).
Mike Rowe is probably going to lose this. Not because his registration was "in bad faith" (he pretty clearly intended to use the domain for himself, and only asked for $10K after Microsoft made him a lesser offer), but because of the underlying trademark conflict; the domain registration is only the tip of the iceberg. He's trying to use the name MikeRoweSoft in one of the same categories of business that Microsoft is using their name. His best defence is that no one would seriously confuse the two companies. The fact that it's his name might score him a point with a sympathetic judge. But unlike copyright law, trademark law doesn't recognise parody or irony, and I think the phonetic similarity of the two will prevail. And if he loses once, there's no way he'll be able to afford an appeal.
Copyright - literally "the right to copy" - Covers a particular creative expression of an idea, such as a song, a movie, a poem, or a C++ program. Currently lasts longer than any of us will live.
Trademark - literally "a mark used in trade" - Covers names, slogans, logos, and such when used in the packaging and marketing of a product or service. Lasts as long and only as long as it's in active use.
Patent - literally "openly disclosed" - Gives temporary exclusive rights to a invention [insert debate over definition of "invention" here] in exchange for publishing the details of how it works. Currently lasts longer than the technology is likely to be useful.
(The so-called fourth kind of IP is a trade secret, which is the opposite of a patent: instead of publishing a how-to, the inventor keeps it private, so they can try to keep exclusivity indefinitely.)
And if you'd taken the trouble to read the rest of my post, you'd see where I discussed that very issue of privately-owned "space".
A privately-owned-and-operated virtual reality is no different from a privately-held TV station: the owner can restrict the content. That's probably not a Good Thing, but the same thing is happening in actual communities, with public spaces disappearing. The solution is to create more public spaces (virtual or actual, same difference) where public rules still apply.
I think a far more interesting question applies to conduct in virtual reality, because what we "do" in a simulated environment is not something we're doing in actual reality. If I beat up someone in The Sims Online, that's not actual assault and battery. And it sounds to me like what's becoming a problem in this situation is what people are doing, not what they're saying. Even free-speech absolutists will usually support restrictions on conduct (killing, theft, etc.) in actual reality. But what about virutal reality?
Um, I didn't spend all that time getting two degrees in college, and working for 16 years in IT (most of that at the analyst/sysadmin level) to answer phones, either. Guess what I now spend nearly half of my time doing every week? (The other half is spent replacing bad keyboards, unjamming printers, installing software, and troubleshooting dead network connections.)
There's no shame in taking entry-level grunt work, even if it's beneath you. In fact, I think you'll find it easier at your age than I'm finding it at mine.
Or because the company's finances got so bad they had to make cuts across the board in every department. I've seen it happen in a previous job, and it happened to me. It was either that or everyone had to take a pay cut, and management figured it was better to have fewer overworked employees rather than a bunch of underpaid ones. So no one was given the option of taking a pay cut.
I would have been perfectly willing to take a pay cut, and in the job I eventually found, I effectively did. I swallowed my pride and applied applied for jobs (the few I could find) which demanded a fraction of my qualification, with no success for 10 months. Sneering that it's the laid-off person's fault for being complacent or greedy, when it could just as easily be managerial stupidity, economic disaster, and other reasons, is absurd.
Pick a verb. Is it a trade mark ? You bet.
Not a winning bet.
Even if the USPTO approves a trademark registration for a simple noun or verb, it wouldn't stand up well in court. For an enforceable trademark you need to combine it with some other word to form a distinctive phrase (such as Apple Mortgage, Apple Attache, Apple Books, Apple Signs, Apple Records, or Apple Computer) or use it in combination with an original logo or design (e.g. the word "Apple" with the missing-bite outline graphic).
The problem with everyday words is the opposite of what you saying: they aren't useful as trademarks, so no one wants them. But a newly-coined word (e.g. Alticor, Verizon, Wellbutrin, Viagra) makes for a very strong trademark registration, easily exercised in court, even in unrelated categories of commerce. (Try marketing a "Viagra Insurance" product, and watch Pfizer come down on you like a ton of bricks.) Those are the trademarks you want.
I think the "uniqueness" aspect is going to come back to haunt a lot of the shortcut-formula trademarks, as the courts will (barring the intervention of really good expensive corporate lawyers) eventually conclude that e____ and i_____ are not distinctive enough to count as original coinages, and don't get the same level of protection as the more imaginative (or silly) ones.
The oldest sold-as-a-monitor I still use is a nicely compact no-brand 14" monochrome VGA on my web/mail server.
Hamster is a usenet/mail server, not a web server. ;)
Vinyl is merely a distribution medium, not a creative medium. A better analogy would be to compare chemical photo film to oil paints or other classical illustrative media. Chemical photography rendered illustration and painting "obsolete" decades ago, but I can assure you that artists and hobbyists are still working with oils, pencils, watercolors, etc. We'll continue to use film-based photography as well.
To say nothing of Florida (home of NASA's launch facility and Gov. Jeb Bush) and Texas (home of Mission Control and the rest of the Bush clan).
The mutually incompatible responses (accusing MPlayer of being the derivative work, whilst questioning the enforceability of the GPL) are a standard legal defence tactic. You present every possible counter-argument you can think of, and depending on what the "facts" turn out to be, you've already gone on record defending yourself against them. It's actually a wise move when you're not sure whether you can establish the facts in court or not. Credible or not (it sounds a bit like Bart Simpson's "I didn't do it, and nobody saw me do it"), it's what our legal system encourages.
Several years ago, my dad's car (some fancy domestic sedan) had a faulty indicator in his dashboard display, and the only way to fix it was to replace the entire dashboard. Fortunately it was under warranty, so he didn't have to pay for it. Plus the new dash came with a (digital) odometer reading of "00000.0" miles. {grin}
...that LEGO is getting back to basics. I know I'm dating myself here (I can't get anyone else to), but back when I was a kid (and not just up to age 7) LEGOs were "only" bricks of various sizes and colors... and one of my favorite toys. They didn't have any "sets" that tell you what you're supposed to make out of them, with pre-built "people" figures and whatnot. Just building blocks, which you could make into absolutely anything your imagination came up with. Who needs a LEGO-licensed character, when you can make your own?
If IBM declared war on King Bill, they'd face Least Favored Nation licensing terms for Windows (maybe even an embargo), which would hurt their ability to compete with HPaq, Dell, and Gateway. While many /.ers would love to see IBM boxes shipping without the Windows tax added into the price, mainstream corporate purchasers would be far less happy, and the SOHO market - many of whom actually think of MS as the swell people who "innovated" all these nifty technological geegaws - would come to regard IBM as a freakish Big Bad Blue monster.