Its amazing. 100% Guaranteed, if you point out something drastic happening in the EU, people start throwing you examples about how bad things are in the US.
Yeah, here on Slashdot that is likely true because the majority of users are from the US. As a general trend, however, I see a difference between the attitudes of people in the EU and US as follows: Most people in the both US and EU assume everything in the US is superior to the rest of the world, while a minority of more informed people tend to assume things in the US are worse than in the EU and a very small majority try not to make any assumptions at all and research topics individually; the difference being that people in the EU have firsthand experience with the EU, whereas people in the US have firsthand experience with the US. The same conclusion is drawn from very different data sets which may be used to infer different social trends. Or maybe the people I've met are selected in such a way as to make it seem like these are real trends.
Microsoft simply announce they are ceasing all operations in the EU as of March 1, 2008. All customers will be given a copy of Linux.
Gee where to start with this one. First, doing that would break contracts they have with literally thousands of multinational corporations who would all sue them in the courts of a country they are doing business in. By the time that was all over, MS would be broke and all their rights would be owned by someone.
Second, punishing their own customers in this way would be an extreme case of antitrust abuse and the EU would probably confiscate their intellectual property including the copyrights to the windows and MS Office software. The US, as a Berne signatory would be obligated to respect that copyright transfer and MS would be banned from selling Windows in the US as well. (Contrary to popular opinion here, the courts in both the US and EU have seized intellectual property rights in the past, mostly in bankruptcies.)
Third, if by some manipulation of the US government MS managed to keep the US from transferring their rights and they could still sell Windows in the US, the international courts would sanction the US and since the source code for Windows has been supplied to numerous governments and businesses under the "shared source" agreement the EU would have no problem acquiring a copy and auctioning off the rights to use it to one or more European companies who could develop a fork of it or open sourcing it.
Fourth, as an international corporation, MS has a lot of assets overseas, including in the EU and their corporate officers probably travel a bit. Those assets would be instantly seized and the state of their executives would be a bit like DeBeers, where they have to be very careful not to travel to the US or anywhere that might arrest them and extradite them to the US for prosecution.
Fifth, ignoring all of the above, MS would have just walked away from roughly 30% of the world's wealth and an even larger portion of the world's businesses. They would have forced the creation of their own largest rival (either using the Windows source, OS X, Linux, or some combination) not just for businesses in the EU, but also for all of the world's largest businesses who like standardizing across their operations. Basically, they would be creating exactly their own worst fear, a viable competitor they have to bid against.
Not that I'm a fan of Microsoft...but if M$ was a European company do you think the EU would go after them so hard?
We don't have to wonder, we just have to look at the EU council's record of prosecuting companies based in the EU for antitrust abuse. (They've done it many times.)
I think not.
You research not... but you still make uninformed assertions.
No, but it does become obsolete that fast. Features new to Leopard that were not in Tiger include:
The ability to create Widgets by selecting portions of Web pages
Stacks - folder icons that dynamically change to indicate what is in the folder
A system-wide grammar checker and the system-wide spelling checker/dictionary/theasaurus expanded to include wikipediaand more dictionaries (include non-English languages)
A new type of viewing in the window/file manager that lets you pan through giant preview "icons" of files
Updates and new features for most of the consumer applications (mail, calendar, IM, Web browser, Media players, and PDF viewer/image viewer)
Remote desktop access and sharing integrated into the IM client
New supported file systems and improved remote filesystem server/client
Parental controls that include application specific restrictions (no Web browsing after 11pm for little Jimmy)
Virtual desktops
Expanded, indexed system-wide searching
Automated backup/versioning from the GUI
Completely redone UI for the handicapped (braille boards, audio interface, etc.)
Dtrace ported from Solaris for developers, and a bunch of other dev tools and new APIs
Application layer firewall
Built in mandatory access controls/sandboxes and app signing for security
A guest account that resets itself to a clean default state each login
Does OSX really change that much from version to version?
Yes. 10.n to 10.n+1 is major upgrade akin to going from XP to Vista. As one of those people who doesn't read the manual before diving into something, I'm still finding new features and I've had it for months. Just yesterday I noticed in an e-mail a friend sent me about a concert he was going to downtown "next friday at 9:00", that right clicking on the time, gave me the option of automatically creating an event in the calendar program for that day at that time labelled with the concert name. That's exactly the kind of stuff a book about Leopard is nice for finding out about.
I'd prefer to have seen Microsoft go the way of Standard Oil or "Ma Bell". The problem was, I don't think anyone in the courts at the time really understood the issue.
I agree splitting up MS is the best solution to their antitrust abuse, but I wish it would be done better than Ma Bell. The focus for splitting up MS should be based upon preventing the same problem from recurring. The best way to fix the monopolized desktop OS market in my opinion would be splitting off the applications into one company and the services into another company and last and most critically, creating at least two companies who both have full rights to all the Windows source code and trademarks (and half the human resources) and forbidding those new companies from any nonpublic communication.
If 2009 were the year when users could go into Walmart and buy a Dell that came bundled with Windows A (from company A) or a Sony that came bundled with Windows B (from company B), where both were forks of the Windows code base, well we'd pretty much have solved the market problem. Windows fans would have more choices and both companies could bundle whatever they felt like without worrying about antitrust issues. Mac fans could still buy Macs. OEMs would be able to invest in Linux as a competitor without worrying their investment was doomed by having to compete against a monopoly. Software developers would invest more in cross-platform coding solutions. Consumers would finally have real choices to make based upon the real merits of OS's, rather than having to deal with the many artificial problems MS introduces into other products. Standards for interoperability would also be a naturally beneficial feature for both OS vendors and and users.
What monopoly? I'm confused, why can't I go install Linux or use Firefox or Opera on Windows. Oh, wait. I can.
The EU ruled MS has a monopoly on "desktop operating systems." That is to say the primary purchasers of desktop OS's (being OEMs like Dell or Sony) have no realistic choice but to purchase Windows to include in the computer systems they sell. Put it this way. If you were hired to be CEO of Dell, what OS would you tell your employees to purchase to include on the computers you sell? Remember if that choice would result in being fired before the end of the week it is not a viable option. Also note, Apple refuses to license OS X, so it is not an option.
Yeah, that's what I thought.
You seem to have a misunderstanding of what "unfair" means. Consumers are the goal. Depriving them of functionality just so John Widget Vendor can sell his crappy alternative doesn't help anyone.
Banning MS from bundling IE or WMP or tying their desktop OS to their server OS doesn't deprive consumers of anything. It just means OEMs like Dell have to decide what they want to ship on their systems instead of MS deciding.
Then again, the EU is largely a socialist's utopia so I guess I shouldn't be surprised.
Ha! What a joke. The US and EU both have a large number of socialist programs and many EU members have less socialism than the US. The difference is the US's biggest socialist enterprise is the military, while other countries spend more on healthcare and helping the poor. The most amusing thing about your post is the EU has taken an action to keep the server OS and media player software markets as capitalist free markets, instead of allowing them to be undermined by antitrust abuse that rewards inferior products with market share instead of allowing the best product to win based upon its merits to consumers.
The unescapable fact you people willfully ignore is that there is no monopoly in the desktop OS market.
The inescapable fact is you don't understand how a market is defined. The US courts, EU courts, and dozens of other courts around the world have all ruled otherwise... but I suppose you are a genius and have a PhD in economics and know better than all the experts huh?
This is provably so. Now, you can narrowly enough define something so that Microsoft has what you can make-believe define as a "monopoly", but that doesn't make it rational.
Please stop embarrassing yourself and go buy a book on the basics of economics. Just reading a 10 page summary of antitrust law is enough education to demonstrate how flawed your understanding is. Isn't Econ 101 a requirement for a bachelor's degree anymore? So much for the US educational system... I suppose you'll blame your ignorance on that on the fact that it is a socialist program huh?
Three MS products are involved in this prosecution. Their desktop OS, which has been declared a monopoly, is the first. The other two are the Windows Media Player and Windows Server OS which are being given an unfair advantage in their respective markets as a result of MS's criminal actions. I think banning MS from selling (or shipping for free) the latter two would be a fairly effective and useful punishment that would appropriately address the crime.
does this mean the EU will ban the bundling of OS X with Apple computers forcing people to buy it separately?
No. Apple does not have a monopoly on desktop OS's or on complete computer systems. The EU is, however, looking into what Apple bundles with iPods, since Apple is close to having a monopoly on portable music players. The EU may force Apple to not tie either the iTunes software or the iTunes music store service to the iPod... regardless of what MS bundles with their Zune or what Creative bundles with the MuVo.
The law is being applied the same to everyone. The problem is that most people even on Slashdot don't bother to understand what the law is or why it exists.
This is going to be modded to oblivion, but isn't 1.4bn rather excessive?
I don't think so. The punishment has to be significant to the criminal or they are not motivated to change their behavior. To put this in perspective MS made about $9 billion in profit from selling Windows Server in the EU last year, a large portion of which would likely have gone to Linux/UNIX servers if not for MS's deliberate tying of their server and desktop OS. $1.4 billion as a fine for many years of abuse is probably significantly less than the profit MS made by breaking the law and gives MS little real incentive to change their behavior. This fine was more of a warning than anything else, indicating that the EU will fine them and keep fining them larger amounts until they comply with the law.
Don't the success of OS X and Firefox, and RealPlayer and Quicktime, indicate that MS's platform is still open enough to have competition?
Okay, let me try to break down your query. OS X is an OS that is only licensed in conjunction with Apple hardware. Boxed copies of it are sold, but in amounts negligible to the "Desktop Operating System" market MS has been ruled to monopolize. Further OEMs which are the primary customers for desktop OS's cannot buy OS X to include on their systems. As a result, OS X's popularity is completely irrelevant to this case.
Firefox is likewise irrelevant as this case was about only two abuses, that is to say two products tied to their desktop OS monopoly: Windows Media Player and Windows Server.
As for RealPlayer and Quicktime, both have been losing market share while WMP as been gaining, with WMP already holding about 65% of the streaming media market it is coming close to qualifying as yet another market monopolized by Microsoft via leveraging their OS monopoly.
If there's not enough competition for people to replace MS's media player why should the EU take special measures to make it easier for the competition?
Umm, I' not sure I understand that sentence. It is illegal to use one monopoly to gain market share in a separate market. MS has been using their desktop OS monopoly to gain market share in many other markets. What trends have shown is that the EU's attempt to make the media player market competitive failed miserably and were ineffective (as anyone with a brain could have told you they would be). Also, the EU's attempt to make the server market competitive has not had enough time to see if it worked or not, since it took until only a short time ago to get MS to actually obey the court order. We will see if it makes a real difference over the next few years.
Why not get MS to debundle notepad because it competes with UltraEdit-32? Because UltraEdit-32 is such an improvement that some people will pay for it, and if they don't then notepad is enough for their needs.
Nope. It is just that there was not an existing, competitive market for text editors at the time MS gained their OS monopoly.
They're opening up new anti-trust commissions as well, and they seem to be trying to force MS to debundle their media player and internet browser, as if any desktop OS on earth ships without a media browser or internet browser.
The new antitrust investigations are with regard to MS Office and IE. MS was convicted of abusing their OS monopoly to promote IE in the US, but the EU has not yet charged or punished MS, let alone required them to change their behavior. Neither the US nor EU has investigated MS with regard to MS Office since every time MS is sued with regard to MS Office they settle out of court (they settled with Novell for half a billion just 7 days after Novell filed suit)
Your comment about what is bundled with other OS's is irrelevant. Bundling is not illegal by itself. Bundling products from one market into a product from a market you have monopolized is illegal. It is illegal for your local power company to bundle a Web
They do. Remember from the trial, Apple was NOT considered competition because Macs aren't PCs.
That was the US lawsuit not the EU one. The EU lawsuit defined MS's monopoly as a monopoly on "desktop operating systems." Apple is a player in that market, since they sell boxed copies of their OS, but they sell so few as to be negligible. Primarily Apple sells complete computer systems and their OS is one part of the bundle. The compete against Dell, Sony, HP etc. in a market that is not monopolized.
Apple does indeed have a monopoly selling Mac OSes.
You concept of a market is fundamentally flawed. You have to define a market according to what consumers consider for their purchase, not the brand name. Right now a consumer can buy a Macintosh or a Thinkpad or an Inspiron, all of which have comparable market share. The reason MS has a monopoly is because when the CEO of Dell looks for an OS to buy to preinstall on systems they ship, Windows is the only option that won't get them fired within the week. He can't buy MacOS because Apple will not license it. He can't license a Linux variant because the vast majority of consumer software is not compatible with it. Hence, he has no realistic choice and has to buy from Microsoft.
How does it make sense for Office to have to be compatible? Microsoft Office is a Microsoft Program.
Office and Windows are both copyrighted works by MS. Windows has been ruled to be a monopoly by the courts. Office has not been ruled to be, but then the EU has not ruled that office has to be compatible with the ODF format. What several EU members have done is created purchasing rules for the government itself requiring bids to comply with interoperability standards. This is no different that requiring vehicles purchased by the government meet minimum emissions standards, as any company bidding can create products that meet those criteria.
Now onto the more confusing part. There are two factors that differ from the situation above. One, where MS uses their OS monopoly to gain share in the Office suite market. So far MS has taken several actions that fit into this category. First, they bundle a basic editor with all copies of Windows that reads and writes the MS Office word processing format, but not the formats of other word processors on the market. This ties their monopoly to MS Office. Second, in the past MS has granted discounts to OEMs selling MS Office and Windows bundled together with hardware. This action also leverages their monopoly on desktop OS's.
The second reason the EU has to investigate MS with regard to their office suite, is that MS Office may have monopoly influence in the Office suite market all by itself. This type of ruling terrifies MS. They have settled every single allegation of this sort quickly and quietly out of court. For instance, they paid Novell $536 million to drop their antitrust lawsuit, just seven days after it was filed. For comparison, the EU began investigating Apple's influence on the portable music player market when street evaluations of their market share hit about 70% (which is a rule of thumb often applied to antitrust allegations). Most analysts estimate MS Office has about 80% of the office suite market.
Office 2007 puts Ooo to shame on all fronts.
That's all well and good, but it does not have anything to do with whether or not MS has violated antitrust laws. The law doesn't prohibit them from making crappy products. It prohibits them from leveraging monopolies in one market to gain share in other markets.
Next thing you know, the EU is going to rule that the Wii, due to its dominant market position, has to run XBox 360 and PS3 games.
First, the Wii has about 37% of the global game console market, which is nowhere near a monopoly. In fact, the game console market is a very healthy market right now, with three big competitors each trying to outdo the others. Second, the markets you're talking about are the console market and the game market. So in order for the Wii to be leveraged into the game market, it would require a tie between them. That means Nintendo would have to stop bundling games with their console and provide a way for game makers to create Nintendo games using the same APIs as Nintendo. The latter is already true and the former is not a large consideration, even if Nintendo did have a monopoly (which they clearly do not).
Declaring their copyrights fair game would definitely be an absolute last resort. It would effectively be the same as outlawing MS. It would also probably go against international treaties and piss off the US of A.
Confiscating some copyright and making it public domain would not outlaw MS. It would just kill a huge chunk of their sales. MS would undoubtedly just release a new version of each that was different, and charge for that version. The main difference is they would have to make it significantly better than the old versions in order to motivate sales. (You know like companies in non-monopolized market do.)
As for violating treaties, seizing intellectual property assets from criminals has been done in plenty of Berne signatory countries including the US. I doubt that any of the copyrights were for as widely distributed works, but that is just a matter of degree, not principal. As for the rest of your post, you're probably right. It is a lot less messy to simply seize their money from a bank.
...but what does that even mean? It's impossible that they received no funding, or the authors would've starved to death.
If you look at the list, these are all academics. That usually means they were paid a salary, but did not receive funds earmarked for this study, i.e. no grants specifically for this project.
...they received salaries from their departments, perhaps, but where did those departments get their funding? Could be anywhere.
Having done some work in academia, I think it would be very odd for a researcher to bias results based upon funding their university gets, but which does not go directly to their project. I suppose it was possible, but frankly it sounds less plausible than some drug company handing them cash in the men's room.
While the results are interesting and worth keeping an eye on as a basis for further research, we should retain heavy skepticism here. It would be absurd and incredibly stupid to draw major conclusions already from this one small study (like the slashdot headline does).
I agree that it is important to maintain skepticism while reading any article, but I think you might have a slightly wrong idea about this. It was not a "study' per se, but a meta-analysis. That is to say, this is a study that attempts to look at a large number of previous studies and determine what as a whole those studies are indicating. In this case, they looked at the published studies, then they looked at the published studies in combination with studies the drug companies had commissioned, but then conveniently ignored.
And for all we know this study could've been funded by a company whose main competition is anti-depressants...
The study itself lists the people who collaborated to create it, discloses their funding, and discloses the one researcher (Irving Kirsch from University of Hull) who has competing interests as he has worked as a consultant for Squibb and Pfizer. I guess what I'm saying is implications about the researchers are probably unfounded. That is not to say their meta-analysis is necessarily correct. Hopefully peer review will help to illuminate the likely accuracy.
...that doesn't mean no drugs have value and doesn't mean that nobody other than drug companies have reasons to be biased.
The problem being the drug companies are biased and the data they present has been tweaked to ignore some of their own studies. I'd say the onus of proof is upon them to show a given antidepressant is beneficial beyond the threshold of statistical insignificance. That has been called into question by this meta-analysis and hopefully, this will lead to more independent studies i the future that can confirm or contradict this one.
As for my leg to stand on, how about Amazon's store, for instance?
Yeah, that is a deal Amazon signed less than 6 months ago, long after the deal with Apple and long after Apple took enough market share to make the RIAA nervous about how much power Apple was getting and what that would do to the RIAA. They gave Amazon a better deal because they want to make sure Apple has less influence in the future and does not become the Walmart of online music (Walmart is undermining the RIAA in the brick and mortar space). As I said there was no store that had a better deal at the time Apple signed their contract.
Which comes back to my original point: other stores can sell DRM-free music, and yet Apple, whose CEO wrote about how much he dislikes DRM, choses not to do so.
Umm, I take it you missed the news about Apple offering DRM free music from the Apple store? Here is a link to the article when Apple made their first deal to remove DRM from some RIAA music. Here is the link for when they set the price of those songs to the same as the DRM'd versions, basically phasing out DRM.
if Steve Jobs has the music industry's distribution channels by the balls as the RIAA's complaining would have you think he does, why can't he press for another deal which would rid his store's music of the DRM which he supposedly hates?
Apple currently has more influence than any other online music store, but online music is still a small portion of the RIAA's income. They still will make decisions to weaken any player that becomes to strong by giving a better deal to other stores. This is to make sure no one player is big enough to push them in any direction in the future.
For the record, "providing an out" of re-ripping music from a CD is hardly consumer friendly.
Considering the state of online music when Apple first offered that solution, it was hugely user friendly. At that time, you couldn't burn a CD of music you purchased online, often could only play it on one set of hardware, and could not play it unless your system was currently hooked up to the internet. Apple made great strides, probably because the RIAA was getting worried about MS having all online music in WMA format.
Allowing iPods to write songs off its disk to a computer or taking off DRM completely, that would be consumer friendly.
As I said they have taken off DRM for most of their catalogue now, including a lot of the Indy stuff (probably those from the big indy labels that agreed to it).
I have to admit, you're gradually convincing me that DRM is not in Apple's best interest.
I should hope so. All you have to do is look at their revenue numbers.
However, I'm sticking to my main point: if Apple hates DRM so much, it should put its money where its mouth is and not show the kind of hostility to anti-DRM efforts that it has.
Apple has legal obligations due to the contracts it had to sign to get the RIAA to allow them to carry their music. They are probably more restricted with regard to older DRM'd music than a company that signs on to carry RIAA music today. Right now the deal you can get is probably no DRM, a kickback to the RIAA, restrictions on any hardware you make to play music, and mandatory watermarking in the music files shipped.
I'm guessing this letter from Apple is something mandatory in their old contract with the RIAA. It could be just an overactive lawyer at Apple, but I think that less likely since it seems a very specific thing to sue when encryption is being broken and the DMCA applies while not suing when it is bypassed without breaking the encryption.It would be great if Apple let people re-download all their music DRM free, but I don't see why the RIAA would allow that to happen when they probably have a contract with Apple specifying otherwise.
And Google has a virtual lock on the internet advertising market (75% world wide in 2007 IIRC).
According to Microsoft, Google had about 65% of the worldwide online advertising market in 2007. But that is just according to how much profit each company reported and does not necessarily reflect how much potential money there is if you count on one or more of those companies selling at below market value (probably Microsoft at least as this is what they do in everything but OS and Office suite markets and they have piles of cash) in order to try to gain ground.
I also dislike your phrasing. Google has a large share (although less than most countries would consider an antitrust issue) but you specifically said "lock" and I don't see it. What actions has Google taken (using their market share) to prevent advertising buyers from switching to another service or using multiple services? That is where we need to be careful since that is where large market share starts to undermine the free capitalist market and negatively affect the industry. So far, I haven's seen any such actions. Have you and can you cite examples?
That people keep repeating the myth about Apple DRM being more friendly, when it is easily proven untrue by anyone who actually checks, is a testiment to the genious of Apple PR&marketing (including calling the DRM FairPlay..), and the user friendliness of a closed (and well designed) eco system.
Okay, I've addressed that one in another post. EMusic does not sell RIAA music because the RIAA won't do business with them. Do you want to bet that one of the terms in the contract Apple signed with the RIAA did not stipulate that all music Apple sold under their first license had to be DRM'd, regardless of if it was from the RIAA or from indie publishers? I don't know that it was and you don't know that it wasn't because the deal is a trade secret. Now Apple has a second license allowing them to sell RIAA music without DRM at a different quality level for a different price. Maybe the new contract allows them to sell indie music under those same terms and maybe it doesn't but I'll bet you $50 that it specifies they can't sell indie music at the same quality without DRM at a lesser price. Is this legal? Probably not, but it will never reach the courts. This is the RIAA we're talking about. They've been convicted multiple times of collusion and price fixing and they had the leverage. Think about it.
Now maybe you'd have a leg to stand on if another music service sold both RIAA music and DRM free indie music at the same time as Apple's deal, but no such service existed. Why is that, do you suppose?
You're claiming that a technology (Fairplay) that only allows music to be played on Apple devices is not lock-in to Apple's products? That argument makes no sense. How could it not be lock in? These songs can't be played anywhere else!
Apple provided an out. You can burn a disk and re-rip it and most people never notice a difference in quality. But I'm not arguing that Fairplay is not lock-in. I'm arguing that Apple doesn't particularly want it to be lock-in because that won't make them more money. Apple has consistently made little or no money selling music according to their financial reports. They run the service as a way to motivate people to buy iPods. That is where all the money comes from. Apple has no motivation to lock-in users because it frustrates them. Apple wants iPod use to be as easy as possible and DRM hinders that. Given that so little music on the average iPod is encumbered by Fairplay, most users would buy another player, find out a couple albums would not transfer to their new player, get mad at Apple and badmouth them, but probably not return the new player. The PR problem is worse for them than the lock-in benefits them. They have a really strong offerings in the mainstream portable player market and great brand perception. How does risking the latter for 1% more sales benefit them?
Look I'm happy to badmouth DRM in general and I'm happy to point out when Apple screws up or fails. I just don't see the argument that Apple is pushing the DRM as making any business sense at all. It is possible, but highly unlikely given the sentiment against it expressed at the top of the chain of command. Apple has played a role in killing DRM for audio and had the RIAA running scared to the point of giving Amazon a really good deal just to lessen Apple's power in the market. In this way we have all won. The real danger for the future is video and the MPAA has probably looked really hard at where the RIAA screwed up and will do whatever it takes to make sure Apple does not do the same to them. For that there will have to be a new champion (maybe Google). I appreciate what Apple has done, but I'm not assigning them benevolent motives here. Apple was out to make money and protect their computer sales business from being ostracized from modern media by Microsoft. They made smart moves that benefitted all of us in the long run, but not because they were fighting evil. It just happened to be a good way for them to make money in the long run. I see where their interest in profit happened to align with the people's interest in music re-use and ease of use and I don't think they were as stupis and blind as the motivations you assign to them would indicate.
He did? Why didn't we see this implemented in iTunes then?
He did. Don't you remember? Before iTunes/Fairplay no RIAA approved DRM allowed the user to burn a standard CD from which the user could have a backup and (if so inclined) get a DRM free version. Few if any allowed even playing music when there was no internet connection available and none allowed the music to play on multiple devices (like a home system and a laptop at the same time. None combined both features.
The other stores offered you more copies of the song on multiple machines, copying off of mp3 player to new machine, easy redownload if you lost the song or wanted it on another machine (within limit, usually 5). Apple even DRMed songs indi labels didn't want DRM on.
Most of the indie stores don't offer RIAA label music, which means they did not enter into a contract with the RIAA. Want to bet such a cartel didn't make Apple sign a contract that said all the music they sold from anyone would have DRM so they were not disadvantaged to indie? As for more recent offerings, Apple had largely cornered the market for players and for online downloads and the RIAA was willing to make anyone a good deal in the hopes that Apple would lose influence, (anyone but Walmart that is, who they have been treating the same as Apple in the brick and mortar world).
That people keep repeating the myth about Apple DRM being more friendly, when it is easily proven untrue by anyone who actually checks, is a testiment to the genious of Apple PR&marketing (including calling the DRM FairPlay..), and the user friendliness of a closed (and well designed) eco system.
I strongly disagree. I don't own an iPod and I don't buy music from Apple. That said, I've tried a lot of them out and when the iPod shipped there was no other hardware/software/service that was near as easy to use or where the DRM did not get in my way (of offerings that had RIAA music). I'd agree that since then there have been offerings, but that was after Apple blazed the way and after the RIAA was scared by them.
Don't you think every member of the RIAA and indeed every employee of every record company in existence tells themselves the same thing?
Probably. The difference is Apple had actually gained enough market share and publicity that they were making a difference by getting looser DRM and pushing for none strongly enough that the RIAA had to comply and to give lower prices to Amazon in the hopes that Apple's influence would wane.
Except for companies like Amazon, who have deals with the major music labels and no DRM. For the same price. No, I'd have to agree, Steve is pretty two-faced (or a crappy negotiator, and locked himself into a long-term deal he now can't get out of... which sucks for him, again, given the market position Amazon is now in)
Apple has a worse deal because the RIAA loses leverage with each deal. Amazon has a better bargain because the RIAA saw Apple winning the battle such an extent that they were gaining as much influence as the RIAA, or perhaps more. The RIAA retains power by making sure none of the distributors gains too much share, so that they can cut anyone off at any time, thus ruining their business. In the brick and mortar world Walmart has grown to nearly make a lie of that, and they struggle to minimize Walmart's influence. Their deal to Amazon was to try to stop Apple from becoming another such. Remember, Apple has been pressing them hard for along time and making public statements ridiculing the DRM and pressuring them in the press. The deal with Amazon is to try to make sure they can play Apple and Amazon and a few others against one another.
I do not find that collection of factoids persuasive. Apple would not license Fairplay (aside from a few phone deals) because they did not want an embrace and extend from Microsoft, who controlled all the rest of DRM'd music via one of their two DRM schemes.
As to the quote from an Apple lawyer that they would not drop the DRM if given the option, it seems a bit less persuasive in the light that Apple has dropped the DRM on music from several publishers. Claiming that someone at Apple once said they won't seems more than a little contradicted. Claiing that Fairplay was for the purpose of lock-in is also absurd given Apple's own published statistics that only 1% of music on iPods was Fairplay encumbered.
I think SAP is a poor fit. Yahoo fits Microsoft's needs. Microsoft wants to further entrench user lock-in to their company. Buying SAP gets them more income directly, perhaps, but that money coming from big companies who can demand flexibility or hire IBM and go open source if need be. What Microsoft wants is to get their claws into more users' online services, which can be tied to Windows and MS specific protocols and formats. Their greatest fear is that the Web will allow other companies to supply al a user's basic needs via the browser, meaning those users can buy a Linux box or an OS X box or a Solaris box or an iPhone or a Blackberry or anything that is not Windows.
MS doesn't need more revenue. Their users will continue to pay because they have no choice. MS has their data and their networks locked up and the expense of switching is too high. MS doesn't want Yahoo to get more revenue. Almost all Yahoo users are Windows users and MS already collects their tithes. MS wants Yahoo to make sure Yahoo users are not given a choice of migrating to being Yahoo/Linux users or Yahoo/MacOS users instead of Yahoo/Windows users. Further they want the lion's share of the market so that most people are locked in. Right now, between Google and Yahoo, most users are not locked in for their mail and messaging and calendaring and in a short time, perhaps their office suite and IM and internet phone and internet TV and whatever else becomes a Web service. If they have most users then they can use that to break compatibility with Google and so Google will have to waste time, effort, and money trying to reverse engineer all of their proprietary apps, to the point of having to screen scrape to get data back to an open and usable format (which they already had had to do to some degree).
In summary, MS wants to buy people so they can use their normal tactics instead of competing to create a better product. If they were interested in making money on their acquisitions they would not have bought dozens of game companies and created the XBox. They want a presence in the living room so they can lock in people even more. Once they have lock-in they can take all the money they wish from people for perpetual upgrades and fees, so long as they make the pain of getting away from them greater than the cost at any given time.
I don't think that is two-faced. Jobs position has always been that DRM on music is counter productive and a flawed concept. His position has also been, that it is a necessary evil if you want to do business with the RIAA cartel which controls the music distribution in the US. First he pushed for the most user friendly and unrestrictive DRM of any company reselling RIAA music. Then he pushed to get them to sell some music with no DRM, for a slightly higher price.
Sometimes you can not agree with something, but still have to put up with it to do business.
If their monopoly power was so great Apple & Linux wouldn't be here.
Gee brilliant reasoning there sport. MS's primary customers are PC OEMs, like Dell, not end users. Can Dell buy MacOS to preinstall on their machines? Nope. That disqualifies Apple as a competitor in that market. And do I really need to go into Linux? When the closest thing you have to a competitor is a communal, nonprofit collaboration using creative licensing to bypass traditional methods of destruction using market economics, well that's a pretty sure sign that the market is not healthy. How many copies of Linux were sold last year? What did you say? None? Gee, that sounds like they are a pretty strong competitor.
Sure other desktop OS's exist. That does not mean the free market is functioning. Both are examples of bypassing the OS market because it is so unhealthy. In a truly competitive market Apple would not be able to bundle their OS and hardware because they would be being undercut by more agile developers of both. As it is the broken market forces them to bundle and so compete in the "computer system" market against Dell and HP because that is a reasonably healthy market. As for Linux, it is an attempt by people so fed up with the results of the broken market that they're willing to work for free on the weekend to avoid having to use the abortion created by MS's abuse of their monopoly.
You can't have it both ways.. The death of Microsoft and Linux/Apple winning! Or Microsoft is so powerful the government has to destroy it for others to compete.
The government destroy Microsoft? Who said that was going to happen or was even proposed? If anything the government breaking up Microsoft would motivate them to make good products again, because they would have to or go out of business... just like every other company.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, here on Slashdot that is likely true because the majority of users are from the US. As a general trend, however, I see a difference between the attitudes of people in the EU and US as follows: Most people in the both US and EU assume everything in the US is superior to the rest of the world, while a minority of more informed people tend to assume things in the US are worse than in the EU and a very small majority try not to make any assumptions at all and research topics individually; the difference being that people in the EU have firsthand experience with the EU, whereas people in the US have firsthand experience with the US. The same conclusion is drawn from very different data sets which may be used to infer different social trends. Or maybe the people I've met are selected in such a way as to make it seem like these are real trends.
Gee where to start with this one. First, doing that would break contracts they have with literally thousands of multinational corporations who would all sue them in the courts of a country they are doing business in. By the time that was all over, MS would be broke and all their rights would be owned by someone.
Second, punishing their own customers in this way would be an extreme case of antitrust abuse and the EU would probably confiscate their intellectual property including the copyrights to the windows and MS Office software. The US, as a Berne signatory would be obligated to respect that copyright transfer and MS would be banned from selling Windows in the US as well. (Contrary to popular opinion here, the courts in both the US and EU have seized intellectual property rights in the past, mostly in bankruptcies.)
Third, if by some manipulation of the US government MS managed to keep the US from transferring their rights and they could still sell Windows in the US, the international courts would sanction the US and since the source code for Windows has been supplied to numerous governments and businesses under the "shared source" agreement the EU would have no problem acquiring a copy and auctioning off the rights to use it to one or more European companies who could develop a fork of it or open sourcing it.
Fourth, as an international corporation, MS has a lot of assets overseas, including in the EU and their corporate officers probably travel a bit. Those assets would be instantly seized and the state of their executives would be a bit like DeBeers, where they have to be very careful not to travel to the US or anywhere that might arrest them and extradite them to the US for prosecution.
Fifth, ignoring all of the above, MS would have just walked away from roughly 30% of the world's wealth and an even larger portion of the world's businesses. They would have forced the creation of their own largest rival (either using the Windows source, OS X, Linux, or some combination) not just for businesses in the EU, but also for all of the world's largest businesses who like standardizing across their operations. Basically, they would be creating exactly their own worst fear, a viable competitor they have to bid against.
We don't have to wonder, we just have to look at the EU council's record of prosecuting companies based in the EU for antitrust abuse. (They've done it many times.)
I think not.You research not... but you still make uninformed assertions.
No, but it does become obsolete that fast. Features new to Leopard that were not in Tiger include:
- The ability to create Widgets by selecting portions of Web pages
- Stacks - folder icons that dynamically change to indicate what is in the folder
- A system-wide grammar checker and the system-wide spelling checker/dictionary/theasaurus expanded to include wikipediaand more dictionaries (include non-English languages)
- A new type of viewing in the window/file manager that lets you pan through giant preview "icons" of files
- Updates and new features for most of the consumer applications (mail, calendar, IM, Web browser, Media players, and PDF viewer/image viewer)
- Remote desktop access and sharing integrated into the IM client
- New supported file systems and improved remote filesystem server/client
- Parental controls that include application specific restrictions (no Web browsing after 11pm for little Jimmy)
- Virtual desktops
- Expanded, indexed system-wide searching
- Automated backup/versioning from the GUI
- Completely redone UI for the handicapped (braille boards, audio interface, etc.)
- Dtrace ported from Solaris for developers, and a bunch of other dev tools and new APIs
- Application layer firewall
- Built in mandatory access controls/sandboxes and app signing for security
- A guest account that resets itself to a clean default state each login
Does OSX really change that much from version to version?Yes. 10.n to 10.n+1 is major upgrade akin to going from XP to Vista. As one of those people who doesn't read the manual before diving into something, I'm still finding new features and I've had it for months. Just yesterday I noticed in an e-mail a friend sent me about a concert he was going to downtown "next friday at 9:00", that right clicking on the time, gave me the option of automatically creating an event in the calendar program for that day at that time labelled with the concert name. That's exactly the kind of stuff a book about Leopard is nice for finding out about.
I agree splitting up MS is the best solution to their antitrust abuse, but I wish it would be done better than Ma Bell. The focus for splitting up MS should be based upon preventing the same problem from recurring. The best way to fix the monopolized desktop OS market in my opinion would be splitting off the applications into one company and the services into another company and last and most critically, creating at least two companies who both have full rights to all the Windows source code and trademarks (and half the human resources) and forbidding those new companies from any nonpublic communication.
If 2009 were the year when users could go into Walmart and buy a Dell that came bundled with Windows A (from company A) or a Sony that came bundled with Windows B (from company B), where both were forks of the Windows code base, well we'd pretty much have solved the market problem. Windows fans would have more choices and both companies could bundle whatever they felt like without worrying about antitrust issues. Mac fans could still buy Macs. OEMs would be able to invest in Linux as a competitor without worrying their investment was doomed by having to compete against a monopoly. Software developers would invest more in cross-platform coding solutions. Consumers would finally have real choices to make based upon the real merits of OS's, rather than having to deal with the many artificial problems MS introduces into other products. Standards for interoperability would also be a naturally beneficial feature for both OS vendors and and users.
Oh well. If wishes were fishes...
The EU ruled MS has a monopoly on "desktop operating systems." That is to say the primary purchasers of desktop OS's (being OEMs like Dell or Sony) have no realistic choice but to purchase Windows to include in the computer systems they sell. Put it this way. If you were hired to be CEO of Dell, what OS would you tell your employees to purchase to include on the computers you sell? Remember if that choice would result in being fired before the end of the week it is not a viable option. Also note, Apple refuses to license OS X, so it is not an option.
Yeah, that's what I thought.
You seem to have a misunderstanding of what "unfair" means. Consumers are the goal. Depriving them of functionality just so John Widget Vendor can sell his crappy alternative doesn't help anyone.Banning MS from bundling IE or WMP or tying their desktop OS to their server OS doesn't deprive consumers of anything. It just means OEMs like Dell have to decide what they want to ship on their systems instead of MS deciding.
Then again, the EU is largely a socialist's utopia so I guess I shouldn't be surprised.Ha! What a joke. The US and EU both have a large number of socialist programs and many EU members have less socialism than the US. The difference is the US's biggest socialist enterprise is the military, while other countries spend more on healthcare and helping the poor. The most amusing thing about your post is the EU has taken an action to keep the server OS and media player software markets as capitalist free markets, instead of allowing them to be undermined by antitrust abuse that rewards inferior products with market share instead of allowing the best product to win based upon its merits to consumers.
The unescapable fact you people willfully ignore is that there is no monopoly in the desktop OS market.The inescapable fact is you don't understand how a market is defined. The US courts, EU courts, and dozens of other courts around the world have all ruled otherwise... but I suppose you are a genius and have a PhD in economics and know better than all the experts huh?
This is provably so. Now, you can narrowly enough define something so that Microsoft has what you can make-believe define as a "monopoly", but that doesn't make it rational.Please stop embarrassing yourself and go buy a book on the basics of economics. Just reading a 10 page summary of antitrust law is enough education to demonstrate how flawed your understanding is. Isn't Econ 101 a requirement for a bachelor's degree anymore? So much for the US educational system... I suppose you'll blame your ignorance on that on the fact that it is a socialist program huh?
Three MS products are involved in this prosecution. Their desktop OS, which has been declared a monopoly, is the first. The other two are the Windows Media Player and Windows Server OS which are being given an unfair advantage in their respective markets as a result of MS's criminal actions. I think banning MS from selling (or shipping for free) the latter two would be a fairly effective and useful punishment that would appropriately address the crime.
No. Apple does not have a monopoly on desktop OS's or on complete computer systems. The EU is, however, looking into what Apple bundles with iPods, since Apple is close to having a monopoly on portable music players. The EU may force Apple to not tie either the iTunes software or the iTunes music store service to the iPod... regardless of what MS bundles with their Zune or what Creative bundles with the MuVo.
The law is being applied the same to everyone. The problem is that most people even on Slashdot don't bother to understand what the law is or why it exists.
This is going to be modded to oblivion, but isn't 1.4bn rather excessive?
I don't think so. The punishment has to be significant to the criminal or they are not motivated to change their behavior. To put this in perspective MS made about $9 billion in profit from selling Windows Server in the EU last year, a large portion of which would likely have gone to Linux/UNIX servers if not for MS's deliberate tying of their server and desktop OS. $1.4 billion as a fine for many years of abuse is probably significantly less than the profit MS made by breaking the law and gives MS little real incentive to change their behavior. This fine was more of a warning than anything else, indicating that the EU will fine them and keep fining them larger amounts until they comply with the law.
Don't the success of OS X and Firefox, and RealPlayer and Quicktime, indicate that MS's platform is still open enough to have competition?
Okay, let me try to break down your query. OS X is an OS that is only licensed in conjunction with Apple hardware. Boxed copies of it are sold, but in amounts negligible to the "Desktop Operating System" market MS has been ruled to monopolize. Further OEMs which are the primary customers for desktop OS's cannot buy OS X to include on their systems. As a result, OS X's popularity is completely irrelevant to this case.
Firefox is likewise irrelevant as this case was about only two abuses, that is to say two products tied to their desktop OS monopoly: Windows Media Player and Windows Server.
As for RealPlayer and Quicktime, both have been losing market share while WMP as been gaining, with WMP already holding about 65% of the streaming media market it is coming close to qualifying as yet another market monopolized by Microsoft via leveraging their OS monopoly.
If there's not enough competition for people to replace MS's media player why should the EU take special measures to make it easier for the competition?
Umm, I' not sure I understand that sentence. It is illegal to use one monopoly to gain market share in a separate market. MS has been using their desktop OS monopoly to gain market share in many other markets. What trends have shown is that the EU's attempt to make the media player market competitive failed miserably and were ineffective (as anyone with a brain could have told you they would be). Also, the EU's attempt to make the server market competitive has not had enough time to see if it worked or not, since it took until only a short time ago to get MS to actually obey the court order. We will see if it makes a real difference over the next few years.
Why not get MS to debundle notepad because it competes with UltraEdit-32? Because UltraEdit-32 is such an improvement that some people will pay for it, and if they don't then notepad is enough for their needs.
Nope. It is just that there was not an existing, competitive market for text editors at the time MS gained their OS monopoly.
They're opening up new anti-trust commissions as well, and they seem to be trying to force MS to debundle their media player and internet browser, as if any desktop OS on earth ships without a media browser or internet browser.
The new antitrust investigations are with regard to MS Office and IE. MS was convicted of abusing their OS monopoly to promote IE in the US, but the EU has not yet charged or punished MS, let alone required them to change their behavior. Neither the US nor EU has investigated MS with regard to MS Office since every time MS is sued with regard to MS Office they settle out of court (they settled with Novell for half a billion just 7 days after Novell filed suit)
Your comment about what is bundled with other OS's is irrelevant. Bundling is not illegal by itself. Bundling products from one market into a product from a market you have monopolized is illegal. It is illegal for your local power company to bundle a Web
That was the US lawsuit not the EU one. The EU lawsuit defined MS's monopoly as a monopoly on "desktop operating systems." Apple is a player in that market, since they sell boxed copies of their OS, but they sell so few as to be negligible. Primarily Apple sells complete computer systems and their OS is one part of the bundle. The compete against Dell, Sony, HP etc. in a market that is not monopolized.
Apple does indeed have a monopoly selling Mac OSes.You concept of a market is fundamentally flawed. You have to define a market according to what consumers consider for their purchase, not the brand name. Right now a consumer can buy a Macintosh or a Thinkpad or an Inspiron, all of which have comparable market share. The reason MS has a monopoly is because when the CEO of Dell looks for an OS to buy to preinstall on systems they ship, Windows is the only option that won't get them fired within the week. He can't buy MacOS because Apple will not license it. He can't license a Linux variant because the vast majority of consumer software is not compatible with it. Hence, he has no realistic choice and has to buy from Microsoft.
Office and Windows are both copyrighted works by MS. Windows has been ruled to be a monopoly by the courts. Office has not been ruled to be, but then the EU has not ruled that office has to be compatible with the ODF format. What several EU members have done is created purchasing rules for the government itself requiring bids to comply with interoperability standards. This is no different that requiring vehicles purchased by the government meet minimum emissions standards, as any company bidding can create products that meet those criteria.
Now onto the more confusing part. There are two factors that differ from the situation above. One, where MS uses their OS monopoly to gain share in the Office suite market. So far MS has taken several actions that fit into this category. First, they bundle a basic editor with all copies of Windows that reads and writes the MS Office word processing format, but not the formats of other word processors on the market. This ties their monopoly to MS Office. Second, in the past MS has granted discounts to OEMs selling MS Office and Windows bundled together with hardware. This action also leverages their monopoly on desktop OS's.
The second reason the EU has to investigate MS with regard to their office suite, is that MS Office may have monopoly influence in the Office suite market all by itself. This type of ruling terrifies MS. They have settled every single allegation of this sort quickly and quietly out of court. For instance, they paid Novell $536 million to drop their antitrust lawsuit, just seven days after it was filed. For comparison, the EU began investigating Apple's influence on the portable music player market when street evaluations of their market share hit about 70% (which is a rule of thumb often applied to antitrust allegations). Most analysts estimate MS Office has about 80% of the office suite market.
Office 2007 puts Ooo to shame on all fronts.That's all well and good, but it does not have anything to do with whether or not MS has violated antitrust laws. The law doesn't prohibit them from making crappy products. It prohibits them from leveraging monopolies in one market to gain share in other markets.
Next thing you know, the EU is going to rule that the Wii, due to its dominant market position, has to run XBox 360 and PS3 games.First, the Wii has about 37% of the global game console market, which is nowhere near a monopoly. In fact, the game console market is a very healthy market right now, with three big competitors each trying to outdo the others. Second, the markets you're talking about are the console market and the game market. So in order for the Wii to be leveraged into the game market, it would require a tie between them. That means Nintendo would have to stop bundling games with their console and provide a way for game makers to create Nintendo games using the same APIs as Nintendo. The latter is already true and the former is not a large consideration, even if Nintendo did have a monopoly (which they clearly do not).
You don't hear about proprietary paper eh? Gee what else goes into printers that would be problematic. Maybe ink?
Confiscating some copyright and making it public domain would not outlaw MS. It would just kill a huge chunk of their sales. MS would undoubtedly just release a new version of each that was different, and charge for that version. The main difference is they would have to make it significantly better than the old versions in order to motivate sales. (You know like companies in non-monopolized market do.)
As for violating treaties, seizing intellectual property assets from criminals has been done in plenty of Berne signatory countries including the US. I doubt that any of the copyrights were for as widely distributed works, but that is just a matter of degree, not principal. As for the rest of your post, you're probably right. It is a lot less messy to simply seize their money from a bank.
...but what does that even mean? It's impossible that they received no funding, or the authors would've starved to death.If you look at the list, these are all academics. That usually means they were paid a salary, but did not receive funds earmarked for this study, i.e. no grants specifically for this project.
...they received salaries from their departments, perhaps, but where did those departments get their funding? Could be anywhere.Having done some work in academia, I think it would be very odd for a researcher to bias results based upon funding their university gets, but which does not go directly to their project. I suppose it was possible, but frankly it sounds less plausible than some drug company handing them cash in the men's room.
I agree that it is important to maintain skepticism while reading any article, but I think you might have a slightly wrong idea about this. It was not a "study' per se, but a meta-analysis. That is to say, this is a study that attempts to look at a large number of previous studies and determine what as a whole those studies are indicating. In this case, they looked at the published studies, then they looked at the published studies in combination with studies the drug companies had commissioned, but then conveniently ignored.
And for all we know this study could've been funded by a company whose main competition is anti-depressants...The study itself lists the people who collaborated to create it, discloses their funding, and discloses the one researcher (Irving Kirsch from University of Hull) who has competing interests as he has worked as a consultant for Squibb and Pfizer. I guess what I'm saying is implications about the researchers are probably unfounded. That is not to say their meta-analysis is necessarily correct. Hopefully peer review will help to illuminate the likely accuracy.
...that doesn't mean no drugs have value and doesn't mean that nobody other than drug companies have reasons to be biased.The problem being the drug companies are biased and the data they present has been tweaked to ignore some of their own studies. I'd say the onus of proof is upon them to show a given antidepressant is beneficial beyond the threshold of statistical insignificance. That has been called into question by this meta-analysis and hopefully, this will lead to more independent studies i the future that can confirm or contradict this one.
Yeah, that is a deal Amazon signed less than 6 months ago, long after the deal with Apple and long after Apple took enough market share to make the RIAA nervous about how much power Apple was getting and what that would do to the RIAA. They gave Amazon a better deal because they want to make sure Apple has less influence in the future and does not become the Walmart of online music (Walmart is undermining the RIAA in the brick and mortar space). As I said there was no store that had a better deal at the time Apple signed their contract.
Which comes back to my original point: other stores can sell DRM-free music, and yet Apple, whose CEO wrote about how much he dislikes DRM, choses not to do so.Umm, I take it you missed the news about Apple offering DRM free music from the Apple store? Here is a link to the article when Apple made their first deal to remove DRM from some RIAA music. Here is the link for when they set the price of those songs to the same as the DRM'd versions, basically phasing out DRM.
if Steve Jobs has the music industry's distribution channels by the balls as the RIAA's complaining would have you think he does, why can't he press for another deal which would rid his store's music of the DRM which he supposedly hates?Apple currently has more influence than any other online music store, but online music is still a small portion of the RIAA's income. They still will make decisions to weaken any player that becomes to strong by giving a better deal to other stores. This is to make sure no one player is big enough to push them in any direction in the future.
For the record, "providing an out" of re-ripping music from a CD is hardly consumer friendly.Considering the state of online music when Apple first offered that solution, it was hugely user friendly. At that time, you couldn't burn a CD of music you purchased online, often could only play it on one set of hardware, and could not play it unless your system was currently hooked up to the internet. Apple made great strides, probably because the RIAA was getting worried about MS having all online music in WMA format.
Allowing iPods to write songs off its disk to a computer or taking off DRM completely, that would be consumer friendly.As I said they have taken off DRM for most of their catalogue now, including a lot of the Indy stuff (probably those from the big indy labels that agreed to it).
I have to admit, you're gradually convincing me that DRM is not in Apple's best interest.I should hope so. All you have to do is look at their revenue numbers.
However, I'm sticking to my main point: if Apple hates DRM so much, it should put its money where its mouth is and not show the kind of hostility to anti-DRM efforts that it has.Apple has legal obligations due to the contracts it had to sign to get the RIAA to allow them to carry their music. They are probably more restricted with regard to older DRM'd music than a company that signs on to carry RIAA music today. Right now the deal you can get is probably no DRM, a kickback to the RIAA, restrictions on any hardware you make to play music, and mandatory watermarking in the music files shipped.
I'm guessing this letter from Apple is something mandatory in their old contract with the RIAA. It could be just an overactive lawyer at Apple, but I think that less likely since it seems a very specific thing to sue when encryption is being broken and the DMCA applies while not suing when it is bypassed without breaking the encryption.It would be great if Apple let people re-download all their music DRM free, but I don't see why the RIAA would allow that to happen when they probably have a contract with Apple specifying otherwise.
According to Microsoft, Google had about 65% of the worldwide online advertising market in 2007. But that is just according to how much profit each company reported and does not necessarily reflect how much potential money there is if you count on one or more of those companies selling at below market value (probably Microsoft at least as this is what they do in everything but OS and Office suite markets and they have piles of cash) in order to try to gain ground.
I also dislike your phrasing. Google has a large share (although less than most countries would consider an antitrust issue) but you specifically said "lock" and I don't see it. What actions has Google taken (using their market share) to prevent advertising buyers from switching to another service or using multiple services? That is where we need to be careful since that is where large market share starts to undermine the free capitalist market and negatively affect the industry. So far, I haven's seen any such actions. Have you and can you cite examples?
Okay, I've addressed that one in another post. EMusic does not sell RIAA music because the RIAA won't do business with them. Do you want to bet that one of the terms in the contract Apple signed with the RIAA did not stipulate that all music Apple sold under their first license had to be DRM'd, regardless of if it was from the RIAA or from indie publishers? I don't know that it was and you don't know that it wasn't because the deal is a trade secret. Now Apple has a second license allowing them to sell RIAA music without DRM at a different quality level for a different price. Maybe the new contract allows them to sell indie music under those same terms and maybe it doesn't but I'll bet you $50 that it specifies they can't sell indie music at the same quality without DRM at a lesser price. Is this legal? Probably not, but it will never reach the courts. This is the RIAA we're talking about. They've been convicted multiple times of collusion and price fixing and they had the leverage. Think about it.
Now maybe you'd have a leg to stand on if another music service sold both RIAA music and DRM free indie music at the same time as Apple's deal, but no such service existed. Why is that, do you suppose?
You're claiming that a technology (Fairplay) that only allows music to be played on Apple devices is not lock-in to Apple's products? That argument makes no sense. How could it not be lock in? These songs can't be played anywhere else!Apple provided an out. You can burn a disk and re-rip it and most people never notice a difference in quality. But I'm not arguing that Fairplay is not lock-in. I'm arguing that Apple doesn't particularly want it to be lock-in because that won't make them more money. Apple has consistently made little or no money selling music according to their financial reports. They run the service as a way to motivate people to buy iPods. That is where all the money comes from. Apple has no motivation to lock-in users because it frustrates them. Apple wants iPod use to be as easy as possible and DRM hinders that. Given that so little music on the average iPod is encumbered by Fairplay, most users would buy another player, find out a couple albums would not transfer to their new player, get mad at Apple and badmouth them, but probably not return the new player. The PR problem is worse for them than the lock-in benefits them. They have a really strong offerings in the mainstream portable player market and great brand perception. How does risking the latter for 1% more sales benefit them?
Look I'm happy to badmouth DRM in general and I'm happy to point out when Apple screws up or fails. I just don't see the argument that Apple is pushing the DRM as making any business sense at all. It is possible, but highly unlikely given the sentiment against it expressed at the top of the chain of command. Apple has played a role in killing DRM for audio and had the RIAA running scared to the point of giving Amazon a really good deal just to lessen Apple's power in the market. In this way we have all won. The real danger for the future is video and the MPAA has probably looked really hard at where the RIAA screwed up and will do whatever it takes to make sure Apple does not do the same to them. For that there will have to be a new champion (maybe Google). I appreciate what Apple has done, but I'm not assigning them benevolent motives here. Apple was out to make money and protect their computer sales business from being ostracized from modern media by Microsoft. They made smart moves that benefitted all of us in the long run, but not because they were fighting evil. It just happened to be a good way for them to make money in the long run. I see where their interest in profit happened to align with the people's interest in music re-use and ease of use and I don't think they were as stupis and blind as the motivations you assign to them would indicate.
He did. Don't you remember? Before iTunes/Fairplay no RIAA approved DRM allowed the user to burn a standard CD from which the user could have a backup and (if so inclined) get a DRM free version. Few if any allowed even playing music when there was no internet connection available and none allowed the music to play on multiple devices (like a home system and a laptop at the same time. None combined both features.
The other stores offered you more copies of the song on multiple machines, copying off of mp3 player to new machine, easy redownload if you lost the song or wanted it on another machine (within limit, usually 5). Apple even DRMed songs indi labels didn't want DRM on.Most of the indie stores don't offer RIAA label music, which means they did not enter into a contract with the RIAA. Want to bet such a cartel didn't make Apple sign a contract that said all the music they sold from anyone would have DRM so they were not disadvantaged to indie? As for more recent offerings, Apple had largely cornered the market for players and for online downloads and the RIAA was willing to make anyone a good deal in the hopes that Apple would lose influence, (anyone but Walmart that is, who they have been treating the same as Apple in the brick and mortar world).
That people keep repeating the myth about Apple DRM being more friendly, when it is easily proven untrue by anyone who actually checks, is a testiment to the genious of Apple PR&marketing (including calling the DRM FairPlay..), and the user friendliness of a closed (and well designed) eco system.I strongly disagree. I don't own an iPod and I don't buy music from Apple. That said, I've tried a lot of them out and when the iPod shipped there was no other hardware/software/service that was near as easy to use or where the DRM did not get in my way (of offerings that had RIAA music). I'd agree that since then there have been offerings, but that was after Apple blazed the way and after the RIAA was scared by them.
Probably. The difference is Apple had actually gained enough market share and publicity that they were making a difference by getting looser DRM and pushing for none strongly enough that the RIAA had to comply and to give lower prices to Amazon in the hopes that Apple's influence would wane.
Apple has a worse deal because the RIAA loses leverage with each deal. Amazon has a better bargain because the RIAA saw Apple winning the battle such an extent that they were gaining as much influence as the RIAA, or perhaps more. The RIAA retains power by making sure none of the distributors gains too much share, so that they can cut anyone off at any time, thus ruining their business. In the brick and mortar world Walmart has grown to nearly make a lie of that, and they struggle to minimize Walmart's influence. Their deal to Amazon was to try to stop Apple from becoming another such. Remember, Apple has been pressing them hard for along time and making public statements ridiculing the DRM and pressuring them in the press. The deal with Amazon is to try to make sure they can play Apple and Amazon and a few others against one another.
I do not find that collection of factoids persuasive. Apple would not license Fairplay (aside from a few phone deals) because they did not want an embrace and extend from Microsoft, who controlled all the rest of DRM'd music via one of their two DRM schemes.
As to the quote from an Apple lawyer that they would not drop the DRM if given the option, it seems a bit less persuasive in the light that Apple has dropped the DRM on music from several publishers. Claiming that someone at Apple once said they won't seems more than a little contradicted. Claiing that Fairplay was for the purpose of lock-in is also absurd given Apple's own published statistics that only 1% of music on iPods was Fairplay encumbered.
I think SAP is a poor fit. Yahoo fits Microsoft's needs. Microsoft wants to further entrench user lock-in to their company. Buying SAP gets them more income directly, perhaps, but that money coming from big companies who can demand flexibility or hire IBM and go open source if need be. What Microsoft wants is to get their claws into more users' online services, which can be tied to Windows and MS specific protocols and formats. Their greatest fear is that the Web will allow other companies to supply al a user's basic needs via the browser, meaning those users can buy a Linux box or an OS X box or a Solaris box or an iPhone or a Blackberry or anything that is not Windows.
MS doesn't need more revenue. Their users will continue to pay because they have no choice. MS has their data and their networks locked up and the expense of switching is too high. MS doesn't want Yahoo to get more revenue. Almost all Yahoo users are Windows users and MS already collects their tithes. MS wants Yahoo to make sure Yahoo users are not given a choice of migrating to being Yahoo/Linux users or Yahoo/MacOS users instead of Yahoo/Windows users. Further they want the lion's share of the market so that most people are locked in. Right now, between Google and Yahoo, most users are not locked in for their mail and messaging and calendaring and in a short time, perhaps their office suite and IM and internet phone and internet TV and whatever else becomes a Web service. If they have most users then they can use that to break compatibility with Google and so Google will have to waste time, effort, and money trying to reverse engineer all of their proprietary apps, to the point of having to screen scrape to get data back to an open and usable format (which they already had had to do to some degree).
In summary, MS wants to buy people so they can use their normal tactics instead of competing to create a better product. If they were interested in making money on their acquisitions they would not have bought dozens of game companies and created the XBox. They want a presence in the living room so they can lock in people even more. Once they have lock-in they can take all the money they wish from people for perpetual upgrades and fees, so long as they make the pain of getting away from them greater than the cost at any given time.
I don't think that is two-faced. Jobs position has always been that DRM on music is counter productive and a flawed concept. His position has also been, that it is a necessary evil if you want to do business with the RIAA cartel which controls the music distribution in the US. First he pushed for the most user friendly and unrestrictive DRM of any company reselling RIAA music. Then he pushed to get them to sell some music with no DRM, for a slightly higher price.
Sometimes you can not agree with something, but still have to put up with it to do business.
Gee brilliant reasoning there sport. MS's primary customers are PC OEMs, like Dell, not end users. Can Dell buy MacOS to preinstall on their machines? Nope. That disqualifies Apple as a competitor in that market. And do I really need to go into Linux? When the closest thing you have to a competitor is a communal, nonprofit collaboration using creative licensing to bypass traditional methods of destruction using market economics, well that's a pretty sure sign that the market is not healthy. How many copies of Linux were sold last year? What did you say? None? Gee, that sounds like they are a pretty strong competitor.
Sure other desktop OS's exist. That does not mean the free market is functioning. Both are examples of bypassing the OS market because it is so unhealthy. In a truly competitive market Apple would not be able to bundle their OS and hardware because they would be being undercut by more agile developers of both. As it is the broken market forces them to bundle and so compete in the "computer system" market against Dell and HP because that is a reasonably healthy market. As for Linux, it is an attempt by people so fed up with the results of the broken market that they're willing to work for free on the weekend to avoid having to use the abortion created by MS's abuse of their monopoly.
You can't have it both ways.. The death of Microsoft and Linux/Apple winning! Or Microsoft is so powerful the government has to destroy it for others to compete.The government destroy Microsoft? Who said that was going to happen or was even proposed? If anything the government breaking up Microsoft would motivate them to make good products again, because they would have to or go out of business... just like every other company.