Note that the parent's quote is attributed to one Keith Peer, CEO of Linux antivirus vendor Central Command. Of course he wants to play up the need for antivirus programs on the Linux desktop -- it makes him $$.
Has anyone without such a vested stake in the issue said something similar?
IGNFF: I've heard different stories. One was that it was never intended to be in the film, that it was just a let's see if we can do this, and replace it later. The other school of thought was, it was always supposed to be there.
KURTZ: Well, the original idea was that it was supposed to be there. It is in the script... but it was a guy, a human being, this sort of fat guy... looked a bit like Sydney Greenstreet... and the scene is pretty much, I mean dialogue wise, it's exactly what you see in the Special Edition. But it was a person that was there, and we had technical difficulties with that scene. We shot it over three times for camera problems, focus problems, and film stock problem, and then abandoned it because we ran out of time. We just said, "Well, the bulk of the information that comes across in that scene, about Jabba threatening Han Solo and wanting his money and all of that, we could get across in the scene in the Cantina, with Greedo." It's basically the same kind of information. So we just added some bits to the Greedo scene to make it a little bit longer that gets across that information, and then jettisoned that other scene. This all happened while we were shooting. It wasn't done in the cutting room.
(End excerpt)
Lucas seems to have forgotten, or simply doesn't care, why that Jabba scene was cut in the first place and that the film was reworked at the time to account for that. Without shortening the Greedo scene, Jabba's scene really does come across as a pointless rehash of what we just learned -- not to mention ruining the introduction of the Millenium Falcon (originally not seen until Luke first sees it), tossing in a pointless Boba Fett cameo, and undermining Jabba's threat somewhat. Of all the changes Lucas has made to the films, I think this one is tied with the infamous one as the worst.
Watch, MS will copyright some key element that allows the OS to interface with the USB devices - prohibiting anyone from making compatible software.
On top of that, if you simply bypass their key element - it's copyright circumvention because it bypasses that security check or whatever that MS implemented.
Ahh, but this avenue of attack has taken a severe blow from the courts recently. In the Chamberlain v. Skylink case, Chamberlain did much what you suggest with their garage door openers: put some software code in it that handled the key exchange between its transmitter and receiver. When Skylink came out with a transmitter that could open Chamberlain door openers, Chamberlain claimed Skylink was circumventing an access-control mechanism and took them to court over it.
Chamberlain lost. The court basically said, if it's your hardware, you've got the right to access it, and that Chamberlain's proposed construction of the DMCA was too unreasonable to accept. There had to be a genuine case of copyright infringement at hand before the DMCA's anti-circumvention provision could be invoked, and the court found there wasn't one in Chamberlain's case. (That in itself is a good statement; the DMCA itself doesn't actually state that, and until that ruling I had been thinking it could very well make an end-run around public domain works or fair use.)
I would think that trying to pull the same stunt around accessing your own USB device on your own computer would meet with a similar result. (Although, there's the matter of printer cartridges, which the courts haven't seemed to have issued a similar slap-down on...)
The latest info I can find dates from around May, but Infineon is one of the DRAM makers facing a patent-infringement lawsuit from Rambus, and if that doesn't go well for them (Rambus had an initial setback but has been getting favourable rulings since; anyone who wants to cry "submarine patent!" better read up on the history, it's nowhere near that cut-and-dry) they could very well go under. I think they will lose it, and get hit with willful infringment for triple damages, which will easily run the damages into the billions. I doubt Infineon could absorb that.
In my opinion, the only thing he did wrong was to not put a clause into his license that when the user clicks on it specifically authorizes the code to delete the home directory if it chooses to.
Yeah, right. I defy you to try and pass that sort of condition off as enforceable under contract law or copyright law when the victim hauls you before a judge with a lawsuit for damages. It is simply an unreasonable contract term (what could you possibly give me as consideration to make me agree to take on the risk that your program could destroy all my data?), and copyright law certainly does not authorize a copyright holder to destroy someone else's property in event of an alleged infringement (Orrin Hatch's lame-brain ideas notwithstanding).
The rest of your post is reasonable; this part does not stand even the slightest scrutiny.
Browsing the mailing list, I came across this message from Matt Sergeant of MessageLabs, about a conversation he had with Craig Spietzle of MS. Notable excerpt:
I pressed him: "Will you fix the license?". I never really got a confirmed
yes or no, but my feeling was "no" when we ended the conversation. I
suggested that they give their IP to the IETF (such as I believe there is
precedence of - I know that IBM has committed patents to the public domain
before in a similar act of openness), to which I was told that Craig
believed this was a reasonable idea, but that
Bill Gates himself had
vetoed that idea because of the current focus on patent gathering and IPR
issues at Microsoft.
The operators of this BitTorrent tracker site got hit with a DMCA C&D from Dreamworks over alleged hosting of a copy of "Shrek 2". One little problem: the site's in Sweden, where the DMCA doesn't apply. (Obviously).
As you may or may not be aware, Sweden is not a state in the United States of America. Sweden is a country in northern Europe. Unless you figured it out by now, US law does not apply here. (...)
It is the opinion of us and our lawyers that you are fucking morons, and that you should please go sodomize yourself with retractable batons.
There are legitimate uses for P2P (as many torrents show), but when something is used for 99.9% copyright violation, something needs to be done.
99.9%? Not even the **AA lawyers go that far. The best they could do in the recent Grokster case was to argue that about 90% of the files (about 700 million total) on the network were infringing. The judge replied that that meant 10% of that total, or about 70 million, were legit, which in his view qualified as a "substantial noninfringing use", which is the legal standard to apply by virtue of the Sony Betamax case. (IIRC, he didn't base his decision on that point but rather the lack of a central indexing server which meant Streamcast did not have knowledge of or ability to police any infringement.)
See here for a transcript of the oral arguments and links to audio files.
The judge opined in his ruling that distribution under the Copyright Act required a "positive action", like advertising. Those words appear nowhere in the law and he cited no precedents to back that opinion up. I think that's a fatal flaw with his ruling and I believe it will get overturned eventually.
Shortly after the ruling, the Minister of Canadian Heritage spoke at the Juno awards (our equivalent of the Grammys) of the need to strengthen copyright law to protect the music industry. Yuck.
I don't think this semi-legal sharing situation will last more than a year or two up here.
"Invasion of privacy" isn't a crime. Trespassing sure is, and unlocked door or no, you could still get nailed for that.
While we tech-heads might like to think that anything that could be circumvented can't be "effective", do you seriously think a judge would go that far? That would pretty well kill the bill outright since any measure that could be circumvented would therefore not fall under the bill's protection in the first place! Which would mean that truly "effective" measures would not be possible to circumvent, rendering the bill pointless..
Then you've got something like a chicken-and-egg problem. If the protection hasn't been circumvented yet, would it then be "effective"? Making it illegal to (try to) circumvent? But the moment you circumvent it, the protection's no longer "effective", making it legal?
Oy, I just made my head spin. There's an argument in there to be made for why that provision should be unconstitutional, if someone can word it better than that.
1201.(a)(1)(A) No person shall circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title.
If "No person shall circumvent" doesn't outlaw use, what does it do?
(a)(1)(A) doesn't care about fair use as it doesn't reference copyright at all -- it never defines this violation as any form of copyright infringement. So, sure, your use might be fair, but that just gets you off the hook for infringement. If you circumvented, you still violated (a)(1)(A). It's a blatant and grotesque end-run around fair use, no question, but I wouldn't want to rely on (c)(1) to defend against it.
When I visited the UK a couple of years ago, what struck me was the unnatural glow that's ever-present around the horizon at night from the incredible amount of light being poured into the night sky; it looks as if it's perpetually an hour after sunset. Very few stars ever come out. Most of that light was probably from London, even though I was over an hour's drive north of the city. Being raised in rural Canada, I could always just go out into the front yard, look up, and get an awesome view of the night sky, including the Milky Way on a clear, moonless night. I feel some pity for kids being raised in those environments where they'll never be able to see it.
It is already mandatory in many european countries to carry ID with you at all times.
That includes Spain. Any government that wants to go ahead with introducing mandatory ID on "security" grounds should ask them if it did any good stopping that train bombing this spring.
Re:Those are 'prior art' pictures, to show contras
on
Microsoft Patents sudo
·
· Score: 1
The patent is apparently for MS's improvment of the concept by actually showing small recognizable representations of each desktop in a "preview" pane that shows all the desktops
Which, to anyone skilled in the art, should be obvious and non-patentable. It's a matter of speed/performance tradeoff whether to spend the CPU/VPU cycles to create a full mini-render of the virtual desktop in the pager or just show it as shadows. It would in essence be the same type of image processing algorithm that a resize/zoom function performs in any image processing application. You're just taking that tool and applying it to this problem.
and for being able to transfer application windows from a different virtual desktop to the current one, without actually bringing up the other desktop.
And KDE already does this, just right-click on the application in the task bar and you get a "To Desktop" sub-menu, or if the app is in your current desktop, just right-click on its title bar. Since KDE has had multiple virtual desktops since the 1.x days, this feature's probably been there since it first came out.
As I understand it, the RIAA usually files a John/Jane Doe case to subpoena the evidence needed to establish their victim's identity.
True, but remember RIAA used to be able to use the DMCA's fast-track subpoena provision, until a couple of ISP's stood up to them and got that procedure blocked in court. We may be seeing the results of the cases from before that happened, when RIAA could get the names without ever having to file a suit (and thus decide whether to pursue it or quietly drop it if a high-profile name came up); the article doesn't say whether or not this is the case.
In 1982, proven world oil reserves were 696 billion barrels. Since then the world has consumed 452 billion barrels, but proven world reserves are now over 1 trillion barrels.
So in 22 years, you're saying we've consumed 452 billion barrels of oil, and found 1000-696=304 billion barrels of oil.
See the problem with that? We're finding less than we're using, and what we're using is going up all the time. Eventually those two trends will collide, and the wreck won't be pretty.
Note in the article that what each word is using "Gmail" to refer to are slightly different. That may allow enough wiggle room for the USPTO to sort everything out. For instance:
Google wants it to offer a general-purpose web-based email service to the general public.
The investment firm uses it as a subscription-based mailing list for traders, bankers, brokers, etc.
The Gospel Music Association uses it to refer to their newsletter.
The fourth firm, it doesn't say specifically, only that it's involved in high-tech equipment design.
Remember that a trademark only protects your mark in your specific line of business; it doesn't give you the undisputed use of the name in all arenas. Not that it stops the big companies from trying to throw their weight around, mind you (Like Nissan)
I thought that the reason SCO bought the slander of title case against Novell was because Novell didn't just publicly state that they owned the copyrights, but they filed the copyrights in with the copyright office with the intent to use the filings to undermine SCO's case(s).
The way I understand the overall web of cases SCO is involved in (and IANAL, so bear with me), is that they chose slander of title so that they could continue to assert, both publically and in other court cases, that they undisputably owned the copyrights. If they had chosen to sue Novell to establish ownership of the copyrights (probably in a breach of contract case arguing that Novell did not properly assign SCO the copyrights), it would have gutted significant portions of their other cases (in the motion to dismiss, Novell points this out w.r.t the Red Hat case by turning SCO's defense in that case against them) -- I believe AutoZone could have immediately gotten a stay, and copyright issues could also have been stayed in IBM. Not to mention BayStar, who hold the sword of Damocles over SCO's head and are getting increasingly grouchy with them. SCO could hardly afford to admit in a court filing that it might not own the copyrights or BayStar would drop that sword.
I work for a small engineering firm and we can't deploy SP2 yet either. There are a number of Rockwell Software products that are known to break under SP2 due to the new firewall plus a number of DCOM changes, and we use those products extensively; I sent an email to everybody today reminding them not to install SP2 until Rockwell updates their applications. Any electrical or controls engineer should already be aware of this but take a gander here anyway to get the idea.
2) We are not "your consumers," we are "citizens." I had hoped that at least state attourny generals would get this. I guess I was wrong.
That Freudian slip caught my eye, as well; I think it pretty well shows that this letter wasn't written by the A-G's. Much more likely it was written by the industry lobbyists and/or their whores in the state houses and then just passed off to the A-G's. Isn't it nice to know the **AA have all their lobbying bases covered? Next we'll be hearing about letters being written by county police chiefs. Excuse me while I go vomit.
Yes, and note that the "IA-32" and "IA-64" are in reference to two specific products, not two specific architectures. To snip out some of the legalese:
1. The license grants contained in this section shall apply to all SCO Third Party Licensed Materials (...) the IA-32 Product and the IA-64 Product. (This doesn't quite get the exact meaning across, but it's especially clear from the capitalization that IA-32 and IA-64 are in reference to the products being licensed and not to architectures.)
2. (...) SCO hereby grants to IBM a worldwide,
non-exclusive, royalty free, perpetual and irrevocable right and license to (...) (i) prepare
or have prepared Derivative Works (...) limited only as
specifically described in Section (e) below. (Still nothing about an architectural limitation, and granting the license to make derivative works is a strong feather in IBM's cap that they were allowed to port it. But it gets better.)
Here's a section you didn't quote, the aforementioned section (e):
(e) Source Code Sublicensing
With respect to either party's Licensed Materials and Project Work contained in the IA-64 Product (as described in applicable Project Supplements), both parties rights to sublicense Source Code to third parties under the sections (c)(2) and (d)(2) above, shall be limited in the following manner:
When IBM sublicenses the IA-64 Product containing Licensed SCO Materials and/or SCO Project Work in Source Code form or when SCO sublicenses the IA-64 Product containing Licensed IBM Materials and/or IBM Project Work in Source Code form, the parties shall not grant the third party the right to further grant source sublicenses to the other party's Licensed Materials or Project Work. Further, when licensing such Source Code,
both parties shall only grant the right to create Derivative Works required for the following purposes:
1. Maintenance and support;
2. Translation and localization;
3. Porting, optimization and extensions;
4. Any other Derivative Works agreed to by SCO and IBM.
So on the one hand you've got the contract explicitly stating that IBM was allowed to prepare and distribute Derivative Works, and even that they could in turn allow sublicensees of those Derivative Works to port them, while on the other SCO is saying they never gave IBM the right to port it themselves?
Shyeah, right. Let's see if they can make the judge buy that line of FUD.
(1) - Depends on how we define "commercial". You're using a fairly loose interpretation, that simply by making the backup it's commercially related in that I won't have to pay for a replacement (and this is related to point 4, below; if that argument doesn't stand, neither does this one). A stricter definition of commercial would be copying for the purpose of selling, which a personal-use backup is not. Anyone know some relevant case law?
(2) - The way I understand this, is that "nature" refers to whether the work is factual or fictional, published or unpublished, etc. Quoting an excerpt from a published, factual work will get a broader fair use exemption than from an unpublished, fictional work, for instance. In the case of a movie, where it's already been published, the publisher cannot reasonably expect no copying/use to take place without his permission.
(3) - No argument.
(4) - Your point about illicitly sharing the backups is a slippery-slope fallacy; we're trying to determine if making the backup is an infringement, not considering what happens to the backup after it's been made. Now it comes down to reducing re-sales of replacement copies. I'd say that's a point of debate for policy makers, whether or not commercial interest in re-sales trumps personal interest in having a backup. In a court, that could turn either way. I'd argue that it's a reasonable limit on the copyright holder to expect to only sell one copy of the work to one citizen/household; because a citizen makes a backup does not mean the copyright holder can't sell another copy of the work to someone who doesn't already own it (and can't legally acquire it from the citizen who made the backup).
So I think the only test that undisputably fails is #3, while #2 leans toward a failure, and there is significant room for argument on #1 and #4 which are related and probably will end up being the determining factors.
NCIX makes good on that warranty, too; I bought an ATI Radeon 8500 OEM card through them a couple of years ago and it cooked after about nine months (no, I wasn't overclocking it). Got RMA number, sent back, got new card all in about 10 days. Still using the replacement card, no worries. Not bad considering I'm on the east coast and they're on the west.
This is modded funny, but Microsoft (or at least, any MS chuckleheads who monitor Usenet) has been known to yank posts from the microsoft.public.* newsgroups (at least from their own NNTP servers) that are overly critical of Microsoft policies -- do a Google on a chap named "kurttrail" in microsoft.public.windowsxp.general. He's a very outspoken critic of product activation and Microsoft EULA policies, and MS has attempted to censor his opinions on more than one occasion under flimsy pretexts (i.e. "this topic is not for a general newsgroup").
Usenet being what it is, the censorship is pretty ineffective (generally, most news servers won't honour third-party cancel requests in unmoderated newsgroups) but it is quite petty. Especially since kurttrail is a damn good debater and tends to come out on top in any real debate the MS-defenders get into with him, which only makes MS's positions look worse.
Slashdot Mirror
Has anyone without such a vested stake in the issue said something similar?
Earlier on, but you're right. There's a reason for that:
Link
IGNFF: I've heard different stories. One was that it was never intended to be in the film, that it was just a let's see if we can do this, and replace it later. The other school of thought was, it was always supposed to be there.
KURTZ: Well, the original idea was that it was supposed to be there. It is in the script ... but it was a guy, a human being, this sort of fat guy... looked a bit like Sydney Greenstreet... and the scene is pretty much, I mean dialogue wise, it's exactly what you see in the Special Edition. But it was a person that was there, and we had technical difficulties with that scene. We shot it over three times for camera problems, focus problems, and film stock problem, and then abandoned it because we ran out of time. We just said, "Well, the bulk of the information that comes across in that scene, about Jabba threatening Han Solo and wanting his money and all of that, we could get across in the scene in the Cantina, with Greedo." It's basically the same kind of information. So we just added some bits to the Greedo scene to make it a little bit longer that gets across that information, and then jettisoned that other scene. This all happened while we were shooting. It wasn't done in the cutting room.
(End excerpt)
Lucas seems to have forgotten, or simply doesn't care, why that Jabba scene was cut in the first place and that the film was reworked at the time to account for that. Without shortening the Greedo scene, Jabba's scene really does come across as a pointless rehash of what we just learned -- not to mention ruining the introduction of the Millenium Falcon (originally not seen until Luke first sees it), tossing in a pointless Boba Fett cameo, and undermining Jabba's threat somewhat. Of all the changes Lucas has made to the films, I think this one is tied with the infamous one as the worst.
Ahh, but this avenue of attack has taken a severe blow from the courts recently. In the Chamberlain v. Skylink case, Chamberlain did much what you suggest with their garage door openers: put some software code in it that handled the key exchange between its transmitter and receiver. When Skylink came out with a transmitter that could open Chamberlain door openers, Chamberlain claimed Skylink was circumventing an access-control mechanism and took them to court over it.
Chamberlain lost. The court basically said, if it's your hardware, you've got the right to access it, and that Chamberlain's proposed construction of the DMCA was too unreasonable to accept. There had to be a genuine case of copyright infringement at hand before the DMCA's anti-circumvention provision could be invoked, and the court found there wasn't one in Chamberlain's case. (That in itself is a good statement; the DMCA itself doesn't actually state that, and until that ruling I had been thinking it could very well make an end-run around public domain works or fair use.)
I would think that trying to pull the same stunt around accessing your own USB device on your own computer would meet with a similar result. (Although, there's the matter of printer cartridges, which the courts haven't seemed to have issued a similar slap-down on...)
The latest info I can find dates from around May, but Infineon is one of the DRAM makers facing a patent-infringement lawsuit from Rambus, and if that doesn't go well for them (Rambus had an initial setback but has been getting favourable rulings since; anyone who wants to cry "submarine patent!" better read up on the history, it's nowhere near that cut-and-dry) they could very well go under. I think they will lose it, and get hit with willful infringment for triple damages, which will easily run the damages into the billions. I doubt Infineon could absorb that.
Yeah, right. I defy you to try and pass that sort of condition off as enforceable under contract law or copyright law when the victim hauls you before a judge with a lawsuit for damages. It is simply an unreasonable contract term (what could you possibly give me as consideration to make me agree to take on the risk that your program could destroy all my data?), and copyright law certainly does not authorize a copyright holder to destroy someone else's property in event of an alleged infringement (Orrin Hatch's lame-brain ideas notwithstanding).
The rest of your post is reasonable; this part does not stand even the slightest scrutiny.
(emphasis added)
The reply letter included these gems:
99.9%? Not even the **AA lawyers go that far. The best they could do in the recent Grokster case was to argue that about 90% of the files (about 700 million total) on the network were infringing. The judge replied that that meant 10% of that total, or about 70 million, were legit, which in his view qualified as a "substantial noninfringing use", which is the legal standard to apply by virtue of the Sony Betamax case. (IIRC, he didn't base his decision on that point but rather the lack of a central indexing server which meant Streamcast did not have knowledge of or ability to police any infringement.)
See here for a transcript of the oral arguments and links to audio files.
Two additional points:
The judge opined in his ruling that distribution under the Copyright Act required a "positive action", like advertising. Those words appear nowhere in the law and he cited no precedents to back that opinion up. I think that's a fatal flaw with his ruling and I believe it will get overturned eventually.
Shortly after the ruling, the Minister of Canadian Heritage spoke at the Juno awards (our equivalent of the Grammys) of the need to strengthen copyright law to protect the music industry. Yuck.
I don't think this semi-legal sharing situation will last more than a year or two up here.
"Invasion of privacy" isn't a crime. Trespassing sure is, and unlocked door or no, you could still get nailed for that.
While we tech-heads might like to think that anything that could be circumvented can't be "effective", do you seriously think a judge would go that far? That would pretty well kill the bill outright since any measure that could be circumvented would therefore not fall under the bill's protection in the first place! Which would mean that truly "effective" measures would not be possible to circumvent, rendering the bill pointless..
Then you've got something like a chicken-and-egg problem. If the protection hasn't been circumvented yet, would it then be "effective"? Making it illegal to (try to) circumvent? But the moment you circumvent it, the protection's no longer "effective", making it legal?
Oy, I just made my head spin. There's an argument in there to be made for why that provision should be unconstitutional, if someone can word it better than that.
Somehow you overlooked the killer:
1201.(a)(1)(A) No person shall circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title.
If "No person shall circumvent" doesn't outlaw use, what does it do?
(a)(1)(A) doesn't care about fair use as it doesn't reference copyright at all -- it never defines this violation as any form of copyright infringement. So, sure, your use might be fair, but that just gets you off the hook for infringement. If you circumvented, you still violated (a)(1)(A). It's a blatant and grotesque end-run around fair use, no question, but I wouldn't want to rely on (c)(1) to defend against it.
When I visited the UK a couple of years ago, what struck me was the unnatural glow that's ever-present around the horizon at night from the incredible amount of light being poured into the night sky; it looks as if it's perpetually an hour after sunset. Very few stars ever come out. Most of that light was probably from London, even though I was over an hour's drive north of the city. Being raised in rural Canada, I could always just go out into the front yard, look up, and get an awesome view of the night sky, including the Milky Way on a clear, moonless night. I feel some pity for kids being raised in those environments where they'll never be able to see it.
That includes Spain. Any government that wants to go ahead with introducing mandatory ID on "security" grounds should ask them if it did any good stopping that train bombing this spring.
Which, to anyone skilled in the art, should be obvious and non-patentable. It's a matter of speed/performance tradeoff whether to spend the CPU/VPU cycles to create a full mini-render of the virtual desktop in the pager or just show it as shadows. It would in essence be the same type of image processing algorithm that a resize/zoom function performs in any image processing application. You're just taking that tool and applying it to this problem.
And KDE already does this, just right-click on the application in the task bar and you get a "To Desktop" sub-menu, or if the app is in your current desktop, just right-click on its title bar. Since KDE has had multiple virtual desktops since the 1.x days, this feature's probably been there since it first came out.
True, but remember RIAA used to be able to use the DMCA's fast-track subpoena provision, until a couple of ISP's stood up to them and got that procedure blocked in court. We may be seeing the results of the cases from before that happened, when RIAA could get the names without ever having to file a suit (and thus decide whether to pursue it or quietly drop it if a high-profile name came up); the article doesn't say whether or not this is the case.
So in 22 years, you're saying we've consumed 452 billion barrels of oil, and found 1000-696=304 billion barrels of oil.
See the problem with that? We're finding less than we're using, and what we're using is going up all the time. Eventually those two trends will collide, and the wreck won't be pretty.
Google wants it to offer a general-purpose web-based email service to the general public.
The investment firm uses it as a subscription-based mailing list for traders, bankers, brokers, etc.
The Gospel Music Association uses it to refer to their newsletter.
The fourth firm, it doesn't say specifically, only that it's involved in high-tech equipment design.
Remember that a trademark only protects your mark in your specific line of business; it doesn't give you the undisputed use of the name in all arenas. Not that it stops the big companies from trying to throw their weight around, mind you (Like Nissan)
The way I understand the overall web of cases SCO is involved in (and IANAL, so bear with me), is that they chose slander of title so that they could continue to assert, both publically and in other court cases, that they undisputably owned the copyrights. If they had chosen to sue Novell to establish ownership of the copyrights (probably in a breach of contract case arguing that Novell did not properly assign SCO the copyrights), it would have gutted significant portions of their other cases (in the motion to dismiss, Novell points this out w.r.t the Red Hat case by turning SCO's defense in that case against them) -- I believe AutoZone could have immediately gotten a stay, and copyright issues could also have been stayed in IBM. Not to mention BayStar, who hold the sword of Damocles over SCO's head and are getting increasingly grouchy with them. SCO could hardly afford to admit in a court filing that it might not own the copyrights or BayStar would drop that sword.
I work for a small engineering firm and we can't deploy SP2 yet either. There are a number of Rockwell Software products that are known to break under SP2 due to the new firewall plus a number of DCOM changes, and we use those products extensively; I sent an email to everybody today reminding them not to install SP2 until Rockwell updates their applications. Any electrical or controls engineer should already be aware of this but take a gander here anyway to get the idea.
That Freudian slip caught my eye, as well; I think it pretty well shows that this letter wasn't written by the A-G's. Much more likely it was written by the industry lobbyists and/or their whores in the state houses and then just passed off to the A-G's. Isn't it nice to know the **AA have all their lobbying bases covered? Next we'll be hearing about letters being written by county police chiefs. Excuse me while I go vomit.
1. The license grants contained in this section shall apply to all SCO Third Party Licensed Materials (...) the IA-32 Product and the IA-64 Product. (This doesn't quite get the exact meaning across, but it's especially clear from the capitalization that IA-32 and IA-64 are in reference to the products being licensed and not to architectures.)
2. (...) SCO hereby grants to IBM a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty free, perpetual and irrevocable right and license to (...) (i) prepare or have prepared Derivative Works (...) limited only as specifically described in Section (e) below. (Still nothing about an architectural limitation, and granting the license to make derivative works is a strong feather in IBM's cap that they were allowed to port it. But it gets better.)
Here's a section you didn't quote, the aforementioned section (e):
(e) Source Code Sublicensing
With respect to either party's Licensed Materials and Project Work contained in the IA-64 Product (as described in applicable Project Supplements), both parties rights to sublicense Source Code to third parties under the sections (c)(2) and (d)(2) above, shall be limited in the following manner: When IBM sublicenses the IA-64 Product containing Licensed SCO Materials and/or SCO Project Work in Source Code form or when SCO sublicenses the IA-64 Product containing Licensed IBM Materials and/or IBM Project Work in Source Code form, the parties shall not grant the third party the right to further grant source sublicenses to the other party's Licensed Materials or Project Work. Further, when licensing such Source Code, both parties shall only grant the right to create Derivative Works required for the following purposes:
1. Maintenance and support;
2. Translation and localization;
3. Porting, optimization and extensions;
4. Any other Derivative Works agreed to by SCO and IBM.
So on the one hand you've got the contract explicitly stating that IBM was allowed to prepare and distribute Derivative Works, and even that they could in turn allow sublicensees of those Derivative Works to port them, while on the other SCO is saying they never gave IBM the right to port it themselves?
Shyeah, right. Let's see if they can make the judge buy that line of FUD.
Some of your interpretations can be disputed.
(1) - Depends on how we define "commercial". You're using a fairly loose interpretation, that simply by making the backup it's commercially related in that I won't have to pay for a replacement (and this is related to point 4, below; if that argument doesn't stand, neither does this one). A stricter definition of commercial would be copying for the purpose of selling, which a personal-use backup is not. Anyone know some relevant case law?
(2) - The way I understand this, is that "nature" refers to whether the work is factual or fictional, published or unpublished, etc. Quoting an excerpt from a published, factual work will get a broader fair use exemption than from an unpublished, fictional work, for instance. In the case of a movie, where it's already been published, the publisher cannot reasonably expect no copying/use to take place without his permission.
(3) - No argument.
(4) - Your point about illicitly sharing the backups is a slippery-slope fallacy; we're trying to determine if making the backup is an infringement, not considering what happens to the backup after it's been made. Now it comes down to reducing re-sales of replacement copies. I'd say that's a point of debate for policy makers, whether or not commercial interest in re-sales trumps personal interest in having a backup. In a court, that could turn either way. I'd argue that it's a reasonable limit on the copyright holder to expect to only sell one copy of the work to one citizen/household; because a citizen makes a backup does not mean the copyright holder can't sell another copy of the work to someone who doesn't already own it (and can't legally acquire it from the citizen who made the backup).
So I think the only test that undisputably fails is #3, while #2 leans toward a failure, and there is significant room for argument on #1 and #4 which are related and probably will end up being the determining factors.
Only on Slashdot will you see a guy boasting about playing computer games while in bed with his girlfriend.
NCIX makes good on that warranty, too; I bought an ATI Radeon 8500 OEM card through them a couple of years ago and it cooked after about nine months (no, I wasn't overclocking it). Got RMA number, sent back, got new card all in about 10 days. Still using the replacement card, no worries. Not bad considering I'm on the east coast and they're on the west.
Usenet being what it is, the censorship is pretty ineffective (generally, most news servers won't honour third-party cancel requests in unmoderated newsgroups) but it is quite petty. Especially since kurttrail is a damn good debater and tends to come out on top in any real debate the MS-defenders get into with him, which only makes MS's positions look worse.