They could've enforced their copyright by gentler means; did they ever just ask him to take the files down? If he told them to piss off, then they could start legal proceedings; and why not a civil suit? It probably could've been settled for $10K or less along with an agreement not to do it again. Why sic the feds on him? Now the poor bastard has to fight off federal prosecutors and risk serving jail time along with a criminal record -- all for hosting files on a webserver. Yes, this is a real danger to society we're dealing with here!
Either there's still a chunk of story we're missing, or MPAA/FBI have blown this way out of proportion.
I think you've got things backwards; cancelling something isn't the accident you should be trying to prevent. Worst-case scenario there is the user just has to do whatever he did again. Loss of time, that's all, with a side dose of aggrivation, I'm sure.
Accidental action is what you want to prevent; where the user does something and realizes, "Holy shit! I didn't want to do that! Stop, stop!!!" This is especially important for an action you can't undo.
It's loosely analogous to control systems design, where you have to anticipate failures in your system and make sure the system being controlled goes to a safe state on those failures (i.e. wire start/stop buttons such that a broken wire will prevent a motor from running at all until the wire is fixed by cutting power to the starter coil). The failure in this case, I'd think, is a user accustomed to seeing the order of the buttons as they've been for the past -- how long now, a decade at least? -- and hitting the wrong one, or a just plain lazy user who hits a default button without thinking about it.
This is a combined Continuation of U.S. application Ser. No. 08/641,010, filed on Apr. 29, 1996, and entitled "COMPUTER-IMPLEMENTED TRANSPORT OF ELECTRONIC INFORMATION OBJECTS," which is a Continuation-in-Part of U.S. application Ser. No. 08/251,824, filed on May 31, 1994, and entitled "SYSTEM FOR AUTOMATIC UNATTENDED ELECTRONIC INFORMATION TRANSPORT BETWEEN A SERVER AND A CLIENT BY A VENDOR PROVIDED TRANSPORT SOFTWARE WITH A MANIFEST LIST," which as U.S. Pat. No. 5,420,820 on May 30, 1995, and U.S. application Ser. No. 08/982,157, filed on Dec. 1, 1997, now U.S. Pat. No. 6,125,388 and entitled "COMPUTER-IMPLEMENTED TRANSPORT OF ELECTRONIC INFORMATION OBJECTS," which is a Continuation of the aforementioned Ser. No.08/251,724 filed May 31, 1994 (now U.S. Pat. No. 5,694,546). All of the above-identified applications are incorporated herein by reference in their entirety.
I count three "Continuation"'s in there, dating as far back as 1994.
To be an MVP, from what I could see on Usenet, you don't have to do much else than lick Microsoft's boots in every single on-line comment you ever make (try to find an MVP who thinks product activation is a bad idea, for instance, or who disputes the Microsoft interpretation of an EULA), and demonstrate that you have competent skill (and even that I'm not so sure about, from when I still read the microsoft.public.* groups).
Why wouldn't this be proferred to those with MCSE credentials or MSDN subscriptions -- y'know, those guys who pay to know all this stuff?
Believe me, if they get the term extended to 95 years, the Slashdot headline in July 2049 will be about how the Elvis recordings are about to enter the public domain, and the music industry is lobbying the government to extend the term to 150 years so they can keep making money.
They can keep making money even if it's public domain! Make a new "best of" Elvis CD and sell it? They can do that. Remix his tunes with whatever hot new teeny-bopper's on the top 10? They can do that (that even gets them a fresh copyright on the new derived work).
What they can't do, is prevent anyone else from doing it as well. So we get *gasp* competition! A foreign concept for the pigopolists, to be sure, and one they're deathly afraid of, but any "we can't make money" argument is undeniably horseshit and they should be called on it at every opportunity.
The fact is that there have been 0, that is zero, as in one minus one attacks on America since September 11. Since 9/11 we have rounded up all the shitskins that worship the laughable "religion of peace" and questioned them, detained them when necessary, deported those that weren't here legally and by all evidence prevented all terrorist attacks to this date. With this facutal evidence (...)
Obligatory Simpsons reference:
Homer: Ahh, not a bear in sight. The bear patrol must be working like a charm.
Lisa: That's spacious reasoning dad.
Homer: Thank you honey.
Lisa: By your logic, I can claim that this rock keeps tigers away.
Homer: Hmm..how does it work?
Lisa: It doesn't work.
Homer: Uh huh.
Lisa: Its just a stupid rock!
Homer: Uh huh.
Lisa: But you don't see any tigers around here, do you?
Homer: (looks around, thinks) Lisa, I wanna buy your rock.
UCITA only got passed into law in two states (Maryland and Virginia), and BSA has stopped lobbying for it in the face of growing opposition. I don't know if you'd call it "dead", knowing BSA, but it's at least in extended hibernation.
Don't forget the parallel with the political/military situation unfolding in the third/fourth seasons: the Klingons wanted to invade Cardassia out of fear that the Founders were there, but the Federation didn't believe them and wouldn't support or sanction the action. The Klingons went anyway, straining the Klingon/Federation alliance to the breaking point.
Now substitute "Americans" for "Klingons", "Iraq" for "Cardassia", "WMD" for "Founders", and "United Nations" for "Federation".
The analogy falls down after the Dominion handed the Klingons a major whuppin', though;).
1. To be fair, this isn't a Microsoft-specific problem. I've seen a fair amount of technobabble in the Mandrake-secure mailing list; several times I've had to check to see whether I even had a package installed that was discussed in an advisory, since the advisory sometimes doesn't give you anything but an obscure package name to go on. And there have been a fair lot of advisories; about 40-50 this year, including at least three kernel upgrades. Mandrake's graphical rpm manager is pretty good at sorting things out for you, though -- just pick the "Security updates" button and it shows you all the ones you need.
2. Automatic updates are available on Windows 2000, from service pack 3 I think. Doesn't mean it works worth a damn, though; I had to shut mine off at work because it kept prompting to download the same patch over and over and over again. Think I installed it 10-12 times over a 2-week span before I clued in.
Point 3 is spot-on, though I was pleasantly surprised this weekend when I installed a pair of "Critical Updates" on my XP Home box and didn't have to reboot.
Forget selling to the public; the studios will never be able to sell these to the rental chains. As it stands now, Blockbuster buys, say, 30 copies of a DVD per location, rents each copy out, oh, 100 or so times, then can resell the copies as they get used and no longer need to carry as many in stock. Easy.
Now the studios expect Blockbuster to carry 3000 copies per location to get that same number of rentals? Or order 30 copies per week, every week, for the same time period?
Shyeah, right. Blockbuster's a big enough corporation that they won't hesitate to tell the studios to get stuffed on this.
The case was not dismissed. SCO's motion to remand to state court was dismissed, meaning the court stays in federal court. Novell's motion to dismiss the case was partly denied; what got dismissed was SCO's pleading of "special damages", though the judge did give them 30 days to attempt to restate that claim. What it boils down to is that SCO has to prove in federal court that the UNIX copyrights it purports to own were in fact transferred, since copyright is a federal issue, not a state issue. SCO wanted the case heard strictly as a contract case in state court and did not want to have to prove it owned the copyrights.
There's a link to groklaw right in the article, for pete's sake. A cursory visit to the website would reveal the writeup is grossly misleading.
Using code from a previous employer isn't plagiarism if you wrote the code originally.
It sure as hell could be copyright infringement if you don't own the copyright to your own code. A lot of employment contracts will state up-front that the company owns the copyright/patent on anything you create while on the company dime, treating it as a "work for hire".
Re-implement what you remember based on your expertise, that's one thing -- the code would likely turn out very similar but slightly different and protect you from an infringement suit (or if there's only one way to implement what you're doing, the code would be "thinly" copyrighted in the first place, but I digress..). But a line-for-line copy of what you wrote before, especially if you're not supposed to possess any proprietary information after you leave the employ of your previous company? That would be a no-no.
Does it happen? Definitely. Is it ethical? Questionable. It is legal? Doubtful.
What the devil did they see as "questionable" in this song?
Louis Armstrong "What A Wonderful World"
I see trees of green, red roses too
I see them bloom for me and you
And I think to myself, what a wonderful world
I see skies of blue and clouds of white
The bright blessed day, the dark sacred night
And I think to myself, what a wonderful world
The colours of the rainbow, so pretty in the sky
Are also on the faces of people going by
I see friends shakin' hands, sayin' "How do you do?"
They're really saying "I love you"
I hear babies cryin', I watch them grow
They'll learn much more than I'll ever know
And I think to myself, what a wonderful world
Yes, I think to myself, what a wonderful world
The only thing that's even close is the colours/faces passage -- but if anyone's going to find offense in that, they should do society a favour and walk around with blinders & earplugs to protect their overly delicate sensibilities!
How can an EULA make you stop using the software? Yes, I know there's all the legalese about how the EULA "grants" you the right to install & use the software, but it runs right up against Section 117 of US copyright law that says the owner of a copy of software has the right to install & use that copy on a machine link.
So right off the bat the EULA is lying. You already have the right to install and use your copy of the software; Microsoft can't grant you what you already have. Now, nothing says you can't give up this right in a binding contract, so MS would have to successfully argue before a judge that the EULA is a binding contract in order to hold you to its terms.
Fat chance, says I. I can think of a couple of defences right off the bat: coercion (if I don't want to agree to the EULA but exercise my statutory right anyway, the software gives me no means to do so), no consideration (MS doesn't give me anything in exchange for agreeing to its terms), and some take on first-sale doctrine (I bought my copy from a third party, not MS; MS shouldn't get to impose additional terms on me after a sale it wasn't even involved in).
MS has never even taken an end-user to court to attempt to enforce its terms, either, to my knowledge. They came up with product activation instead to act as their own judge.
Two notes: this scenario wouldn't apply to commercial use of the software, especially for firms that sign license agreements before any copies of software change hands; and this assumes you could afford to fight off the MS-megabuck lawyers in the first place.
Well, we all know Apple lost their copyright suit against Microsoft for "look and feel", so any copyright suit Apple would file would surely be a dead end.
I don't think you can trademark a GUI. The name of it, yes, the logo of it, yes, but not the GUI itself. Probably also a dead end.
But patents? If Apple filed for any iTunes/iPhoto-related user-interface patents (and we know they've filed for a patent on the iPod UI, so it's definitely possible), they've probably got a hammer they can drop.
The law society wasn't defending in that case out of the goodness of their hearts, mind you.
They were the ones being sued.
The case was brought by the publishers of legal texts, which included court decisions (non-copyrightable!) in those texts. The lawyers had a silver-bullet defence to infringement in that most of the copying was done for purposes of research. And on top of that, they posted notices & disclaimers near the photocopiers outlining society guidelines for copying.
The case was a very weak one right from the get-go on the part of the pubishers, and it would've been an absolute shocker if the publishers had won it.
The decision was 7-2 in that case (about the consitutionality of the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act). Dunno what he thinks of the dissenting judges (Breyer & Stevens) but I can guess:).
Pan is a close second to XNews, but XNews is only available under Windows. A few things I miss from XNews after moving from WinXP to Mandrake at home:
Ability to open multiple newsgroups at once; this is useful to download the headers from a binaries newsgroup while reading a discussion newsgroup.
Ability to automatically filter a binaries newsgroup to show complete multi-part attachments only. Pan can show complete attachments, but can't filter single-parters from multi-parters. In multimedia newsgroups, this is nice to filter out all the "txt"/"nfo"/"sfv"/"par"/etc attachments and just see the actual media files.
Automatically jump to watched threads when opening a newsgroup.
A plonker. (A bit redundant with a score file, but it's quicker to hit "K" and begone with a troll than have to edit the full score file; personal preference I suppose.)
Cleaner UI for adding entries to the score file, especially when you want the entry to apply to all newsgroups. In Pan, you have to edit the newsgroup name to read ".", which isn't intuitive. The format of the score file under Pan isn't quite as friendly as XNews, either, but that's also kind of a personal preference.
Hopefully in a couple more releases Pan will close the gap and surpass XNews.
If I'm thinking of the same ruling you are, keep in mind that that ruling referred to the photocopying of legal documents & court records, which for the most part are matters of public record anyway (uncopyrightable). The publishers in that case had a very thin assertion to copyright (i.e. primarily in the layout & compilation), and the court rightfully saw through it.
software companies were claiming that copying a program off a disk into RAM in order to execute it was a copyright violation
My IIRC is the same as yours:). I believe the reason they wanted to classify that as a copyright infringement was to make EULAs legally binding -- the argument goes, if it would be an infringement to make a copy in RAM, then you must have the copyright holder's explicit permission to do so, and what's the permission take the form of? EULA!
This is one area of copyright law that the lawmakers got right.
Compared to ours, they're a nightmare. Have a look at a sample ballot for the municipal election in San Francisco held in November: http://web.sfgov.org/site/uploadedfiles/election/Docs/Sample_Ballots.pdf
You gotta vote for mayor, district attorney, sheriff, and 14 -- count 'em, 14 referendum-style questions! So their system is vastly more complicated than ours; we only vote for one thing at a time, but that ballot there is effectively 17 elections in one.
Now imagine how much worse it'll be this November, when you've got President, Senator, Congressman, plus state houses, governorships, local state questions, all on one ballot.
Slashdot Mirror
Either there's still a chunk of story we're missing, or MPAA/FBI have blown this way out of proportion.
I think you've got things backwards; cancelling something isn't the accident you should be trying to prevent. Worst-case scenario there is the user just has to do whatever he did again. Loss of time, that's all, with a side dose of aggrivation, I'm sure.
Accidental action is what you want to prevent; where the user does something and realizes, "Holy shit! I didn't want to do that! Stop, stop!!!" This is especially important for an action you can't undo.
It's loosely analogous to control systems design, where you have to anticipate failures in your system and make sure the system being controlled goes to a safe state on those failures (i.e. wire start/stop buttons such that a broken wire will prevent a motor from running at all until the wire is fixed by cutting power to the starter coil). The failure in this case, I'd think, is a user accustomed to seeing the order of the buttons as they've been for the past -- how long now, a decade at least? -- and hitting the wrong one, or a just plain lazy user who hits a default button without thinking about it.
This is a combined Continuation of U.S. application Ser. No. 08/641,010, filed on Apr. 29, 1996, and entitled "COMPUTER-IMPLEMENTED TRANSPORT OF ELECTRONIC INFORMATION OBJECTS," which is a Continuation-in-Part of U.S. application Ser. No. 08/251,824, filed on May 31, 1994, and entitled "SYSTEM FOR AUTOMATIC UNATTENDED ELECTRONIC INFORMATION TRANSPORT BETWEEN A SERVER AND A CLIENT BY A VENDOR PROVIDED TRANSPORT SOFTWARE WITH A MANIFEST LIST," which as U.S. Pat. No. 5,420,820 on May 30, 1995, and U.S. application Ser. No. 08/982,157, filed on Dec. 1, 1997, now U.S. Pat. No. 6,125,388 and entitled "COMPUTER-IMPLEMENTED TRANSPORT OF ELECTRONIC INFORMATION OBJECTS," which is a Continuation of the aforementioned Ser. No.08/251,724 filed May 31, 1994 (now U.S. Pat. No. 5,694,546). All of the above-identified applications are incorporated herein by reference in their entirety.
I count three "Continuation"'s in there, dating as far back as 1994.
Why wouldn't this be proferred to those with MCSE credentials or MSDN subscriptions -- y'know, those guys who pay to know all this stuff?
They can keep making money even if it's public domain! Make a new "best of" Elvis CD and sell it? They can do that. Remix his tunes with whatever hot new teeny-bopper's on the top 10? They can do that (that even gets them a fresh copyright on the new derived work).
What they can't do, is prevent anyone else from doing it as well. So we get *gasp* competition! A foreign concept for the pigopolists, to be sure, and one they're deathly afraid of, but any "we can't make money" argument is undeniably horseshit and they should be called on it at every opportunity.
Obligatory Simpsons reference:
Homer: Ahh, not a bear in sight. The bear patrol must be working like a charm.
Lisa: That's spacious reasoning dad.
Homer: Thank you honey.
Lisa: By your logic, I can claim that this rock keeps tigers away.
Homer: Hmm..how does it work?
Lisa: It doesn't work.
Homer: Uh huh.
Lisa: Its just a stupid rock!
Homer: Uh huh.
Lisa: But you don't see any tigers around here, do you?
Homer: (looks around, thinks) Lisa, I wanna buy your rock.
The non-funny version: correlation != causation.
UCITA only got passed into law in two states (Maryland and Virginia), and BSA has stopped lobbying for it in the face of growing opposition. I don't know if you'd call it "dead", knowing BSA, but it's at least in extended hibernation.
Link
Don't forget the parallel with the political/military situation unfolding in the third/fourth seasons: the Klingons wanted to invade Cardassia out of fear that the Founders were there, but the Federation didn't believe them and wouldn't support or sanction the action. The Klingons went anyway, straining the Klingon/Federation alliance to the breaking point.
;).
Now substitute "Americans" for "Klingons", "Iraq" for "Cardassia", "WMD" for "Founders", and "United Nations" for "Federation".
The analogy falls down after the Dominion handed the Klingons a major whuppin', though
In response to points 1 and 2:
1. To be fair, this isn't a Microsoft-specific problem. I've seen a fair amount of technobabble in the Mandrake-secure mailing list; several times I've had to check to see whether I even had a package installed that was discussed in an advisory, since the advisory sometimes doesn't give you anything but an obscure package name to go on. And there have been a fair lot of advisories; about 40-50 this year, including at least three kernel upgrades. Mandrake's graphical rpm manager is pretty good at sorting things out for you, though -- just pick the "Security updates" button and it shows you all the ones you need.
2. Automatic updates are available on Windows 2000, from service pack 3 I think. Doesn't mean it works worth a damn, though; I had to shut mine off at work because it kept prompting to download the same patch over and over and over again. Think I installed it 10-12 times over a 2-week span before I clued in.
Point 3 is spot-on, though I was pleasantly surprised this weekend when I installed a pair of "Critical Updates" on my XP Home box and didn't have to reboot.
Now the studios expect Blockbuster to carry 3000 copies per location to get that same number of rentals? Or order 30 copies per week, every week, for the same time period?
Shyeah, right. Blockbuster's a big enough corporation that they won't hesitate to tell the studios to get stuffed on this.
There's a link to groklaw right in the article, for pete's sake. A cursory visit to the website would reveal the writeup is grossly misleading.
It sure as hell could be copyright infringement if you don't own the copyright to your own code. A lot of employment contracts will state up-front that the company owns the copyright/patent on anything you create while on the company dime, treating it as a "work for hire".
Re-implement what you remember based on your expertise, that's one thing -- the code would likely turn out very similar but slightly different and protect you from an infringement suit (or if there's only one way to implement what you're doing, the code would be "thinly" copyrighted in the first place, but I digress..). But a line-for-line copy of what you wrote before, especially if you're not supposed to possess any proprietary information after you leave the employ of your previous company? That would be a no-no.
Does it happen? Definitely. Is it ethical? Questionable. It is legal? Doubtful.
What the devil did they see as "questionable" in this song?
Louis Armstrong "What A Wonderful World"
I see trees of green, red roses too
I see them bloom for me and you
And I think to myself, what a wonderful world
I see skies of blue and clouds of white
The bright blessed day, the dark sacred night
And I think to myself, what a wonderful world
The colours of the rainbow, so pretty in the sky
Are also on the faces of people going by
I see friends shakin' hands, sayin' "How do you do?"
They're really saying "I love you"
I hear babies cryin', I watch them grow
They'll learn much more than I'll ever know
And I think to myself, what a wonderful world
Yes, I think to myself, what a wonderful world
The only thing that's even close is the colours/faces passage -- but if anyone's going to find offense in that, they should do society a favour and walk around with blinders & earplugs to protect their overly delicate sensibilities!
So right off the bat the EULA is lying. You already have the right to install and use your copy of the software; Microsoft can't grant you what you already have. Now, nothing says you can't give up this right in a binding contract, so MS would have to successfully argue before a judge that the EULA is a binding contract in order to hold you to its terms.
Fat chance, says I. I can think of a couple of defences right off the bat: coercion (if I don't want to agree to the EULA but exercise my statutory right anyway, the software gives me no means to do so), no consideration (MS doesn't give me anything in exchange for agreeing to its terms), and some take on first-sale doctrine (I bought my copy from a third party, not MS; MS shouldn't get to impose additional terms on me after a sale it wasn't even involved in).
MS has never even taken an end-user to court to attempt to enforce its terms, either, to my knowledge. They came up with product activation instead to act as their own judge.
Two notes: this scenario wouldn't apply to commercial use of the software, especially for firms that sign license agreements before any copies of software change hands; and this assumes you could afford to fight off the MS-megabuck lawyers in the first place.
(Insert usual IANAL disclaimer here.)
I don't think you can trademark a GUI. The name of it, yes, the logo of it, yes, but not the GUI itself. Probably also a dead end.
But patents? If Apple filed for any iTunes/iPhoto-related user-interface patents (and we know they've filed for a patent on the iPod UI, so it's definitely possible), they've probably got a hammer they can drop.
(Insert standard /. anti-software-patent-rant here.)
They were the ones being sued.
The case was brought by the publishers of legal texts, which included court decisions (non-copyrightable!) in those texts. The lawyers had a silver-bullet defence to infringement in that most of the copying was done for purposes of research. And on top of that, they posted notices & disclaimers near the photocopiers outlining society guidelines for copying.
The case was a very weak one right from the get-go on the part of the pubishers, and it would've been an absolute shocker if the publishers had won it.
The decision was 7-2 in that case (about the consitutionality of the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act). Dunno what he thinks of the dissenting judges (Breyer & Stevens) but I can guess :).
Hopefully in a couple more releases Pan will close the gap and surpass XNews.
If I'm thinking of the same ruling you are, keep in mind that that ruling referred to the photocopying of legal documents & court records, which for the most part are matters of public record anyway (uncopyrightable). The publishers in that case had a very thin assertion to copyright (i.e. primarily in the layout & compilation), and the court rightfully saw through it.
My IIRC is the same as yours :). I believe the reason they wanted to classify that as a copyright infringement was to make EULAs legally binding -- the argument goes, if it would be an infringement to make a copy in RAM, then you must have the copyright holder's explicit permission to do so, and what's the permission take the form of? EULA!
This is one area of copyright law that the lawmakers got right.
http://web.sfgov.org/site/uploadedfiles/electio
You gotta vote for mayor, district attorney, sheriff, and 14 -- count 'em, 14 referendum-style questions! So their system is vastly more complicated than ours; we only vote for one thing at a time, but that ballot there is effectively 17 elections in one. Now imagine how much worse it'll be this November, when you've got President, Senator, Congressman, plus state houses, governorships, local state questions, all on one ballot.