No, I made a statement correcting your assumption:
Most of the people writing books are not employees of the publisher, so their work is owned by them until they sell it to a publisher.
You made a blanket statement with a factual error. The error is that state that the work is ALWAYS owned by the employer. This is factually not true. The employee-employer contract determines who owns what and what responsibility who has. It defines it by explicitly stating who has what rights, or by omitting those statements and relying on statutory and case law. (I will not get into exceptions to paragraph b, or State-Federal issues, both of which are quite large.)
My statement was simply:
"That depends very much on the terms of your contract."
There is NOTHING unclear about this. There is NOTHING factually incorrect about this. There is no assumption to anything. It is a factual statement that is entirely true.
I then followed up with a concrete example of such an instance that was an exception to your statement. I used my self because I am 100% familiar with the details in question and therefor less likely to have a factual error in my statement.
Up until the current paragraph I have not made any statement on the percentage of people who retain copyright on their source code. Nor have I previously taken issue with the percentage of source code which the creator retains copyright. Frankly there is no real way to determine either of those values. I would guess that you would be surprised at the number of people who retain copyright to their work. I would likewise guess that the amount of source code retained by the person who wrote it (or donated by the author into the public domain) would significantly higher than you would guess. Notice that these two are assumption and can be debated, unlike anything else I have said.
Lastly, I would like to point out that until the last two paragraphs I have not made one non-factual assertion. I simply stated things that are undeniably true (that contract terms define who owns what, that *I* own *my* code, that under US copyright law, source code and a book are no different). I also did not attack what I assume to be your premise, "most people don't own the code they write" [paraphrased of course]. I would suggest you actually read what I wrote. I would suggest that you use this practice in the future as well.
I will also take issue with your statement:
It depends on your status as an employee or a contractor unless you happen to have a contract.
Under most US State jurisdictions ANY employment agreement is considered a contract (by most I mean every single jurisdiction I have ever encountered). In fact under common law a contract is defined as, "an agreement between two or more parties where an item(s) or service(s) is exchanged". That definition pretty much covers all agreements about anything. Specifically, any time you agree to do anything for a sum of money there exists either a written or verbal contract. That contract has a very large set of default base values based on statutory and case law. For example, if you were in Vermont and was offered $150 to drive a car from Vermont to Connecticut and you agreed, you would have a verbal contract (either an employee or service contract). Even if you had not talked about liability in the case of crash, there would still be (mostly) clear rules on who was liable for what in a given circumstance.
So to take this principle and apply it to our discussion:
1) You always have a contract with your employer.
2) Your contract may or may not have a clause(s) discussing copyright law. If it does not have a clause(s), then statutory and case law define the terms.
Summary conclusion on who owns a copyright (quoting myself, again):
That depends very much on the terms of your contract.
(a) Initial Ownership. -- Copyright in a work protected under this title vests initially in the author or authors of the work. The authors of a joint work are coowners of copyright in the work.
(b) Works Made for Hire. -- In the case of a work made for hire, the employer or other person for whom the work was prepared is considered the author for purposes of this title, and, unless the parties have expressly agreed otherwise in a written instrument signed by them, owns all of the rights comprised in the copyright.
Notice the your entire argument fails when you read the text. To quote myself:
That depends very much on the terms of your contract. *I* for example, have never given up any rights to my software. My employers have always had a non-exclusive right to use and distribute the software, but I have always retained my full rights to it.
That depends very much on the terms of your contract. *I* for example, have never given up any rights to my software. My employers have always had a non-exclusive right to use and distribute the software, but I have always retained my full rights to it. Also, a great many book authors work under distribution contracts in which they give away all distribution rights to the publisher. The author has absolutely no right to do anything with the book until after the VERY long contract has ended.
The basic rights are the same for any thing your write, be it a novel or source code. Both are covered under 17 U.S.C. 101, the Federal Copyright Act. The details are in the contract you sign. I should point out that I am referring to US copyright law, other countries are, I am sure, different.
For a more information about book contracts you can read an interesting perspective on the subject of book contracts, below:
I disagree. This whole set of statues is vague, badly worded and unethical. What do you do when a law is bad, vague and unethical? You either change the statute or you have a series of court cases where case law puts a more definite explanation of the law.
I am very much hoping that this will end up in at the SCOUTS so we can have a clear answer on many of these ambiguous legal issues.
Napoleon in Europe cost me $80, Diplomacy cost me $60, Settlers of Catan with expansions cost me $180 ($45 x 3 + $15 x 3), Through the Ages costs $70 right now, History of the World was $65. Some of us like good board games. (I own all of those except Through the Ages and History of the World, which a friend owns).
I have not even mentioned any games by Games Workshop. If you include them, the iPad + Phones would be cheaper...
There have been many other sources, myself included. If you read what I wrote you would have noticed, "During the week I was unable to access Live, I was also hounded by the collections agency calling at all hours of the day for a week." They broke their end of the service agreement (not to mention several Federal and State laws). Also note that while this was going on I could not sign in, nor could I access any downloaded content, nor could I access any content that I had purchased but had not downloaded.
Microsoft is absolutely responsible for account issues. How about someone who has had their XBOX banned? Has that happened to you? If not, how can you judge?/. ran an article stating that about half a million have been banned, do you know that every single one of those absolutely broke the service agreement? I would bet that a small portion of them were banned by mistake. Each one would qualify for this lawsuit.
While we are on that issue, what happens if I purchase X software from live but have not downloaded it (I am going to tomarrow). Latter that day my account is banned. How do I download the software? I am unable to do so. That seems to match the stated issue in the case.
I should note that this guy does seem a slease ball, HOWEVER that does not mean there are not legit cases of this issue out there (mine included).
I'm intrigued to know what sort of errors would arise that would prevent a small number of users downloading files? If the download servers are working for everyone else, that means that the servers are up, that people are being routed to the content. When we're talking about errors for such a small number of users the problem is almost certainly going to be to do with routing to Microsoft's servers from outside of Microsoft's network, a faulty router on the users side, or something similar. Microsoft is most certainly not responsible for rectifying errors outside of it's network.
Well the first thing that comes to mind is a banned dynamic IP address. You see if you have a non-static IP address (which most home users do) and a previous user of that IP address did something like a DDoS attack on one of the hundreds of MS IP's it may get black holed. The next person who gets this IP will have no service and no idea what is going on. Again MS black holed the IP which means it is their action that caused the issue. At work I have had to un-blackholed 3 IP addresses in the past few years for just this such issue (we got hit by a DDoS, blackholed a range of IP's latter on we had to remove these IP's from the ignore list).
Next we have any number of account issues such as happened to me. Next we could have an issue with the non-MS hosted content going offline as was reported in the/. comments by two different posters.
How about issues relating to region tracking? You could have moved from Guam to Japan to Florida (as in a friend of mine in the US Navy just did). Wanna bet that you would have some problems in that case.
Has the guy provided any evidence whatsoever himself that this actually happened? All I see listed are hollow claims, something he apparently has a history of against large companies.
You have read a single news story. Have you read the complaint (as in legal complaint starting the lawsuit)? Have you investigated in any way beyond reading/.?
How about we search Google:
Here is an intersting one on the first page of results:
That is the point, you have NO IDEA what happened to others. *I* have not had any bad experiences with XBOX Live either. (In fact I have not had a single download issue so far.) That does not mean *SOMEONE ELSE* might not. Mistakes happen and when they do they must be rectified. As someone who writes software for a living and manages a corporate network as well I can think of dozens of technical issues that could cause a loss or prevention of service. In each case MS would be responsible for rectifying the issue.
Mistakes happen all the time, errors happen all the time. The two issues that the case will deal with are. 1) Did the user experience unacceptable issues in the purchase/delivery process? 2) Did Microsoft do enough to rectify the situation?
Unless you have some other source of information other than TFA you have absolutely no way of judging this issue.
Here is an example of a mistake that happened to me involving XBOX Live. Four years ago MS had an error with there Live payment. They billed me for another year subscription. Something happened on there end and they both received payment from me AND SENT MY ZERO DOLLAR BILL TO A COLLECTIONS AGENCY. I spent a week arguing with Microsoft AND the collections agency. Finally I got them to talk to each other and read the balance owed on the account, $0.00 US. During the week I was unable to access Live, I was also hounded by the collections agency calling at all hours of the day for a week.
I would have been justified in suing MS for their actions. They caused a problem, did nothing to fix the problem, then did not admit fault. That is a very clear grounds for a successful lawsuit. Very simply, if this guy had a similar experience then he has grounds for a successful lawsuit.
The problem with his argument is that you can redownload content whenever you want to, so even if the download servers did fail for a couple of days, you'd still be able to download it after that.
I have no idea about this lawsuit or this guy. BUT your whole statement is that it does not matter if the download fails because you can just download it again. Well my question to you is, how many times does it have to fail before it matters?
Would your opinion change if the download failed twice in a row? How about four times? Ten times? Thirty times? How about if you were unable to download a purchase for three months?
How long would you try to download a purchase before you decided that it was no longer worth it and demand a refund?
The whole point of digital download systems is that you can access them RIGHT NOW. If I purchase something and I can't access it RIGHT NOW why should I not be given a refund so I can drive across town and purchase the same item? The system advertised a feature that it could not deliver on plain and simple. I can also say with absolute certainty that in my home State that MS would be required to refund the purchase in this case (both the software purchase and the MS points if done to buy the software).
When you agree to a purchase both the seller and purchaser have certain legal obligations. In this case, Microsoft, selling the MS points has an obligation to ensure that the system works reasonably well. I've never had problems, however, if MS failed to ensure that their system worked at a minimum standard then they would reasonably be required to refund the real dollars this guy handed over. This is a very simple legal principle and common sense.
The crux of the case depends on what problems this guy faced and what was MS's response. If he was repeatedly denied adequate service followed by MS refusing to correct the issue or refund him, then he should have a very strong case.
The effect would be delayed a bit, but after the first 6 months accidents would be down by a whole lot. Also I would suggest investing in your local funeral home...
Out of the 100 programmers or so I work with on a regular basis only one uses a Mac. He uses it as a dumb terminal to telnet into our almost 40 year old server systems. His other computer is in his office, it IS a dumb terminal.
...the ruling means Redmond has managed to avoid hundreds of millions in potential damages
All of which would have gone to the lawyers.
And this matters why?
The point of this kind of lawsuit is not to make money, it is to punish a perpetrator for wrong doing. So if Microsoft looses 2 Billion US, why should I care where it goes. The point is that Microsoft had to pay money for its actions and is hopefully less likely to repeat that action.
You could also just request copies from the national archives for about $4.00 US...
As for warrants, the system of warrants was already established under the Common Law system in use in the Colonies. When we went from Colonies to States the powers of the judiciary were by and large already understood and well defined. If you look at case law you can see a chain of events that leads back, in some cases, 600 years.
Oh EA understands this kind of loyalty, but they don't make money that way. They make money by you buying the NEXT version, which most people will. This just means that people who don't care quite as much about having the most recent version, have that much less incentive to purchase last years Madden at the used game store.
If you want to do human computer interface, you don't need math (or a brain).
I strongly disagree with this statement. Like all tasks anyone CAN do it, but few can do it well. Anyone can throw together an interface but it takes effort and a bit of understanding psychology, anatomy and the business practice at hand to design an interface that works WITH the user.
Recently I tuned my boss's computer. Prior to any changes it would take over 2 minutes from typing user/password (+enter) to actually being able to run anything. Afterwards it only took about 50 seconds. The computer was still bad, but it was LESS bad...
If you know what you are doing you can really smooth out how a machine (any machine be it computer or not) runs. The problem is that most people have no clue what they are doing.
...maybe a group of large companies quietly tells Apple "you either throw this case or we're going to do X, Y and Z, which will be A LOT worse for you".
We have words for that, its called blackmail, also, violations of anti-trust laws.
Again, I NEVER said that out side parties would not have an interest in this case, or that they would not want Apple to not use these patents. However, Apple is looking at loosing a substantial amount of money here. We are talking conservatively at more than 1 out every 100 dollars Apple makes in revenue. That is A LOT of money. That also does not count punitive damages.
Punitive damages in this case could exceed Apple's gross revenue for 2009. That is a very large amount indeed. Remember, currently Nokia is claiming that EVERY Apple product is infringing.
This is a situation where Apple would have to weigh what would be more to its advantage, make some COMPETITORS to Apple uneasy verses loosing a whole year of income, or at very least more than a percentage point. Given the accusations and Apple's legal history, I would expect that they don't back down.
Again that has no relevance in THIS case. That may be relevant to a great many other parties, but those parties have no way of effecting this case. At best they can present prior art (the same prior art that Nokia could produce independently) or attempt to file a friend of the court brief. Neither of these items is going to have any real impact on this case.
I am NOT saying that those other parties will not be mad, or will not be affected. I am saying that the only issue before THIS case is if Nokia infringed (at least as far as the counter claims are concerned). Anything else is beyond the scope of the counter claim and legally moot.
I correct myself. The following is a list of patents Nokia claims Apple infringed upon:
* No. 5, 634, 074 : Serial I/O device identifies itself to a computer through a serial interface during power on reset then it is being configured by the computer
* No. 6, 343, 263 B1 : Real-time signal processing system for serially transmitted data
* No. 5,915,131 : Method and apparatus for handling I/O requests utilizing separate programming interfaces to access separate I/O services
* No. 5,555,369: Method of creating packages for a pointer-based computer system
* No. 6,239,795 B1: Pattern and color abstraction in a graphical user interface
* No. 5,315,703: Object-oriented notification framework system
* No. 6,189,034 B1: Method and apparatus for dynamic launching of a teleconferencing application upon receipt of a call
* No. 7,469,381, B2: List scrolling and document translation, scaling, and rotation on a touch-screen display
* No.RE 39, 486 E: Extensible, replaceable network component system
* No. 5,455,854: Object-oriented telephony system
* No. 7,383,453 B2: Conserving power by reducing voltage supplied to an instruction-processing portion of a processor
* No. 5,848,105: GMSK signal processors for improved communications capacity and quality
* No. 5, 379,431: Boot framework architecture for dynamic staged initial program load
Slashdot Mirror
You made a blanket statement with a factual error. The error is that state that the work is ALWAYS owned by the employer. This is factually not true. The employee-employer contract determines who owns what and what responsibility who has. It defines it by explicitly stating who has what rights, or by omitting those statements and relying on statutory and case law. (I will not get into exceptions to paragraph b, or State-Federal issues, both of which are quite large.)
My statement was simply:
"That depends very much on the terms of your contract."
There is NOTHING unclear about this. There is NOTHING factually incorrect about this. There is no assumption to anything. It is a factual statement that is entirely true.
I then followed up with a concrete example of such an instance that was an exception to your statement. I used my self because I am 100% familiar with the details in question and therefor less likely to have a factual error in my statement.
Up until the current paragraph I have not made any statement on the percentage of people who retain copyright on their source code. Nor have I previously taken issue with the percentage of source code which the creator retains copyright. Frankly there is no real way to determine either of those values. I would guess that you would be surprised at the number of people who retain copyright to their work. I would likewise guess that the amount of source code retained by the person who wrote it (or donated by the author into the public domain) would significantly higher than you would guess. Notice that these two are assumption and can be debated, unlike anything else I have said.
Lastly, I would like to point out that until the last two paragraphs I have not made one non-factual assertion. I simply stated things that are undeniably true (that contract terms define who owns what, that *I* own *my* code, that under US copyright law, source code and a book are no different). I also did not attack what I assume to be your premise, "most people don't own the code they write" [paraphrased of course]. I would suggest you actually read what I wrote. I would suggest that you use this practice in the future as well.
I will also take issue with your statement:
It depends on your status as an employee or a contractor unless you happen to have a contract.
Under most US State jurisdictions ANY employment agreement is considered a contract (by most I mean every single jurisdiction I have ever encountered). In fact under common law a contract is defined as, "an agreement between two or more parties where an item(s) or service(s) is exchanged". That definition pretty much covers all agreements about anything. Specifically, any time you agree to do anything for a sum of money there exists either a written or verbal contract. That contract has a very large set of default base values based on statutory and case law. For example, if you were in Vermont and was offered $150 to drive a car from Vermont to Connecticut and you agreed, you would have a verbal contract (either an employee or service contract). Even if you had not talked about liability in the case of crash, there would still be (mostly) clear rules on who was liable for what in a given circumstance.
So to take this principle and apply it to our discussion:
1) You always have a contract with your employer.
2) Your contract may or may not have a clause(s) discussing copyright law. If it does not have a clause(s), then statutory and case law define the terms.
Summary conclusion on who owns a copyright (quoting myself, again):
That depends very much on the terms of your contract.
Notice the your entire argument fails when you read the text. To quote myself:
That depends very much on the terms of your contract. *I* for example, have never given up any rights to my software. My employers have always had a non-exclusive right to use and distribute the software, but I have always retained my full rights to it.
That depends very much on the terms of your contract. *I* for example, have never given up any rights to my software. My employers have always had a non-exclusive right to use and distribute the software, but I have always retained my full rights to it. Also, a great many book authors work under distribution contracts in which they give away all distribution rights to the publisher. The author has absolutely no right to do anything with the book until after the VERY long contract has ended.
The basic rights are the same for any thing your write, be it a novel or source code. Both are covered under 17 U.S.C. 101, the Federal Copyright Act. The details are in the contract you sign. I should point out that I am referring to US copyright law, other countries are, I am sure, different.
For a more information about book contracts you can read an interesting perspective on the subject of book contracts, below:
http://www.fonerbooks.com/contract.htm
Authors of software own the source code exactly like a book author owns the book.
I disagree. This whole set of statues is vague, badly worded and unethical. What do you do when a law is bad, vague and unethical? You either change the statute or you have a series of court cases where case law puts a more definite explanation of the law.
I am very much hoping that this will end up in at the SCOUTS so we can have a clear answer on many of these ambiguous legal issues.
Sometimes I wish you could Mod and talk. I agree with you entirely (maybe not on the MS Surface bit, but everything else).
Just about the only advantage for a computerized version of a board game is to play against an AI when you don't have a human player(s) available.
Napoleon in Europe cost me $80, Diplomacy cost me $60, Settlers of Catan with expansions cost me $180 ($45 x 3 + $15 x 3), Through the Ages costs $70 right now, History of the World was $65. Some of us like good board games. (I own all of those except Through the Ages and History of the World, which a friend owns).
I have not even mentioned any games by Games Workshop. If you include them, the iPad + Phones would be cheaper...
http://www.boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/3518/napoleon-in-europe
http://www.boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/483/diplomacy
http://www.boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/13/the-settlers-of-catan
http://www.eaglegames.net/ProductDetails.asp?ProductCode=CBG001
http://www.boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/224/history-of-the-world
There have been many other sources, myself included. If you read what I wrote you would have noticed, "During the week I was unable to access Live, I was also hounded by the collections agency calling at all hours of the day for a week." They broke their end of the service agreement (not to mention several Federal and State laws). Also note that while this was going on I could not sign in, nor could I access any downloaded content, nor could I access any content that I had purchased but had not downloaded.
Microsoft is absolutely responsible for account issues. How about someone who has had their XBOX banned? Has that happened to you? If not, how can you judge? /. ran an article stating that about half a million have been banned, do you know that every single one of those absolutely broke the service agreement? I would bet that a small portion of them were banned by mistake. Each one would qualify for this lawsuit.
While we are on that issue, what happens if I purchase X software from live but have not downloaded it (I am going to tomarrow). Latter that day my account is banned. How do I download the software? I am unable to do so. That seems to match the stated issue in the case.
I should note that this guy does seem a slease ball, HOWEVER that does not mean there are not legit cases of this issue out there (mine included).
Well the first thing that comes to mind is a banned dynamic IP address. You see if you have a non-static IP address (which most home users do) and a previous user of that IP address did something like a DDoS attack on one of the hundreds of MS IP's it may get black holed. The next person who gets this IP will have no service and no idea what is going on. Again MS black holed the IP which means it is their action that caused the issue. At work I have had to un-blackholed 3 IP addresses in the past few years for just this such issue (we got hit by a DDoS, blackholed a range of IP's latter on we had to remove these IP's from the ignore list).
Next we have any number of account issues such as happened to me. Next we could have an issue with the non-MS hosted content going offline as was reported in the /. comments by two different posters.
How about issues relating to region tracking? You could have moved from Guam to Japan to Florida (as in a friend of mine in the US Navy just did). Wanna bet that you would have some problems in that case.
You have read a single news story. Have you read the complaint (as in legal complaint starting the lawsuit)? Have you investigated in any way beyond reading /.?
How about we search Google:
Here is an intersting one on the first page of results:
http://www.xbox360achievements.org/forum/showthread.php?t=93301
FOR YOU!
That is the point, you have NO IDEA what happened to others. *I* have not had any bad experiences with XBOX Live either. (In fact I have not had a single download issue so far.) That does not mean *SOMEONE ELSE* might not. Mistakes happen and when they do they must be rectified. As someone who writes software for a living and manages a corporate network as well I can think of dozens of technical issues that could cause a loss or prevention of service. In each case MS would be responsible for rectifying the issue.
Mistakes happen all the time, errors happen all the time. The two issues that the case will deal with are. 1) Did the user experience unacceptable issues in the purchase/delivery process? 2) Did Microsoft do enough to rectify the situation?
Unless you have some other source of information other than TFA you have absolutely no way of judging this issue.
Here is an example of a mistake that happened to me involving XBOX Live. Four years ago MS had an error with there Live payment. They billed me for another year subscription. Something happened on there end and they both received payment from me AND SENT MY ZERO DOLLAR BILL TO A COLLECTIONS AGENCY. I spent a week arguing with Microsoft AND the collections agency. Finally I got them to talk to each other and read the balance owed on the account, $0.00 US. During the week I was unable to access Live, I was also hounded by the collections agency calling at all hours of the day for a week.
I would have been justified in suing MS for their actions. They caused a problem, did nothing to fix the problem, then did not admit fault. That is a very clear grounds for a successful lawsuit. Very simply, if this guy had a similar experience then he has grounds for a successful lawsuit.
I have no idea about this lawsuit or this guy. BUT your whole statement is that it does not matter if the download fails because you can just download it again. Well my question to you is, how many times does it have to fail before it matters?
Would your opinion change if the download failed twice in a row? How about four times? Ten times? Thirty times? How about if you were unable to download a purchase for three months?
How long would you try to download a purchase before you decided that it was no longer worth it and demand a refund?
The whole point of digital download systems is that you can access them RIGHT NOW. If I purchase something and I can't access it RIGHT NOW why should I not be given a refund so I can drive across town and purchase the same item? The system advertised a feature that it could not deliver on plain and simple. I can also say with absolute certainty that in my home State that MS would be required to refund the purchase in this case (both the software purchase and the MS points if done to buy the software).
When you agree to a purchase both the seller and purchaser have certain legal obligations. In this case, Microsoft, selling the MS points has an obligation to ensure that the system works reasonably well. I've never had problems, however, if MS failed to ensure that their system worked at a minimum standard then they would reasonably be required to refund the real dollars this guy handed over. This is a very simple legal principle and common sense.
The crux of the case depends on what problems this guy faced and what was MS's response. If he was repeatedly denied adequate service followed by MS refusing to correct the issue or refund him, then he should have a very strong case.
The effect would be delayed a bit, but after the first 6 months accidents would be down by a whole lot. Also I would suggest investing in your local funeral home...
Out of the 100 programmers or so I work with on a regular basis only one uses a Mac. He uses it as a dumb terminal to telnet into our almost 40 year old server systems. His other computer is in his office, it IS a dumb terminal.
...the ruling means Redmond has managed to avoid hundreds of millions in potential damages
All of which would have gone to the lawyers.
And this matters why?
The point of this kind of lawsuit is not to make money, it is to punish a perpetrator for wrong doing. So if Microsoft looses 2 Billion US, why should I care where it goes. The point is that Microsoft had to pay money for its actions and is hopefully less likely to repeat that action.
(some of us remember big iron - dumb terminal models from way back)
Some of us are still using a big dumb terminal to view this site, you insensitive clod!
You could also just request copies from the national archives for about $4.00 US...
As for warrants, the system of warrants was already established under the Common Law system in use in the Colonies. When we went from Colonies to States the powers of the judiciary were by and large already understood and well defined. If you look at case law you can see a chain of events that leads back, in some cases, 600 years.
Oh EA understands this kind of loyalty, but they don't make money that way. They make money by you buying the NEXT version, which most people will. This just means that people who don't care quite as much about having the most recent version, have that much less incentive to purchase last years Madden at the used game store.
I strongly disagree with this statement. Like all tasks anyone CAN do it, but few can do it well. Anyone can throw together an interface but it takes effort and a bit of understanding psychology, anatomy and the business practice at hand to design an interface that works WITH the user.
Recently I tuned my boss's computer. Prior to any changes it would take over 2 minutes from typing user/password (+enter) to actually being able to run anything. Afterwards it only took about 50 seconds. The computer was still bad, but it was LESS bad...
If you know what you are doing you can really smooth out how a machine (any machine be it computer or not) runs. The problem is that most people have no clue what they are doing.
No, he would be depriving them of their life, not their liberty.
Some of us believe the order of importance is, "liberty, life and the pursuit of happiness." So dieing would be more acceptable than loss of liberty.
...Over 9000... *cringes*
We have words for that, its called blackmail, also, violations of anti-trust laws.
Again, I NEVER said that out side parties would not have an interest in this case, or that they would not want Apple to not use these patents. However, Apple is looking at loosing a substantial amount of money here. We are talking conservatively at more than 1 out every 100 dollars Apple makes in revenue. That is A LOT of money. That also does not count punitive damages.
Punitive damages in this case could exceed Apple's gross revenue for 2009. That is a very large amount indeed. Remember, currently Nokia is claiming that EVERY Apple product is infringing.
This is a situation where Apple would have to weigh what would be more to its advantage, make some COMPETITORS to Apple uneasy verses loosing a whole year of income, or at very least more than a percentage point. Given the accusations and Apple's legal history, I would expect that they don't back down.
=P
I almost corrected my self. Does anyone have the list of Nokia patents in question?
Again that has no relevance in THIS case. That may be relevant to a great many other parties, but those parties have no way of effecting this case. At best they can present prior art (the same prior art that Nokia could produce independently) or attempt to file a friend of the court brief. Neither of these items is going to have any real impact on this case.
I am NOT saying that those other parties will not be mad, or will not be affected. I am saying that the only issue before THIS case is if Nokia infringed (at least as far as the counter claims are concerned). Anything else is beyond the scope of the counter claim and legally moot.
I correct myself. The following is a list of patents Nokia claims Apple infringed upon:
* No. 5, 634, 074 : Serial I/O device identifies itself to a computer through a serial interface during power on reset then it is being configured by the computer
* No. 6, 343, 263 B1 : Real-time signal processing system for serially transmitted data
* No. 5,915,131 : Method and apparatus for handling I/O requests utilizing separate programming interfaces to access separate I/O services
* No. 5,555,369: Method of creating packages for a pointer-based computer system
* No. 6,239,795 B1: Pattern and color abstraction in a graphical user interface
* No. 5,315,703: Object-oriented notification framework system
* No. 6,189,034 B1: Method and apparatus for dynamic launching of a teleconferencing application upon receipt of a call
* No. 7,469,381, B2: List scrolling and document translation, scaling, and rotation on a touch-screen display
* No.RE 39, 486 E: Extensible, replaceable network component system
* No. 5,455,854: Object-oriented telephony system
* No. 7,383,453 B2: Conserving power by reducing voltage supplied to an instruction-processing portion of a processor
* No. 5,848,105: GMSK signal processors for improved communications capacity and quality
* No. 5, 379,431: Boot framework architecture for dynamic staged initial program load