Why stop there? How long until they're forced to offer options of different operating systems at startup?
That's not what antitrust abuse is about. It's about stopping abuse of monopolies into other markets, not slightly decreasing the power of the monopoly in the primary market. The EU can legally break up MS to get rid of their monopoly, but have no authority to force OEMs to install multiple OS's under antitrust law.
Which would be kinda neat, if your options were be comparable. You can't compare MS Paint with GIMP, or Notepad with vim.
I disagree.
But making the average Joe choose between Notepad and vim would certainly be a distaster for those that chose vim.
Which is why nobody in their right mind would give the average user such a choice, just as the average user isn't given a choice as to what drivers are installed on computers they buy. That's why OEMs exist, to assemble packages on behalf of consumers and get paid for it.
...and that Microsoft has been known to 'embrace and extinguish'.
You do know that phrase originated with MS's internal discussions of illegally destroying Web browsers and Web technologies that might threaten them, right?
HOWEVER, this knee-jerk reaction to the browser-wars is really fundamentally flawed.
What knee jerk reaction. MS undermined the free market in illegal ways. Is maybe that you just don't understand the logical reactions of people to the situation and thus brand them "kneejerk". That seems implied by your later failure to understand the issues of antitrust law.
I think it's time we realize that a music jukebox, dvd player, web browser, and text editor have become integral parts of an OS (per my definition).
Is a telephone an integral part of a telephone network? Sure. That doesn't matter because it is also a separate market from telephone service which is why AT&T can't require you to rent a telephone from them anymore, but must sell them separately from your wired connection. It's also the reason after a decade of stagnation we suddenly jumped forward and got push buttons, speed dial, and answering machines when AT&T's monopoly abuse was stopped.
The browser was and is a separate market and we're quite likely to see the same rapid innovation to the benefit of everyone as soon as MS's antitrust abuse is stopped. The thing most Slashdotters can't seem to wrap their heads around is an economic issue of markets, not a technological issue.
I say "rubbish. You might as well ask the user to choose different versions of the TCP stack, paint program, image libraries, and mouse drivers too."
Please do your research. We're talking about separate, preexisting markets. Of the things you mention, only the paint program applies under the law.
Go and get alternatives if you like, just as you're free to get another media player, paint program or ftp client.
Which does nothing to address the broken market or criminal acts or to improve innovation and lower costs. I have an idea, why don't you learn why antitrust laws exist before declaring them to be wrong?
I don't see noise directed against Apple or Linux or BSD, likely because they are {not monopolies | high enough in market share | something else that I can't grok}.
I'll try to explain with an analogy. Murder is illegal. Firing a gun is legal. Firing a gun at a person in a way that murders them is illegal. Bundling is legal. Bundling in a way that undermines the free market is illegal.
In this analogy, only MS has a gun. Apple and Canonical can bundle browsers and OS's all they want because they don't even have to power undermine the market if they wanted to. Apple, on the other hand, is close to having sufficient power in the portable, digital music player market that the EU has looked into restricting them with regard to bundling things with iPods. Companies in the US and EU regularly consider antitrust issues when they have dominance in markets. The real difference here is not the way laws are applied, but that MS has so blatantly disregarded the laws everyone else obeys.
This would suggest that the bundling of Safari on Mac, or Mozilla on Linux is not fundamentally wrong, and is also not wrong on Windows.
Hopefully from my previous comments you now understand that no one suggests bundling is fundamentally wrong. Undermining the free market is fundamentally wrong. Bundling in particular circumstances in ways that undermine markets is what is illegal and detrimental to society.
Perhaps this is unfair to the hapless (as far as tech goes) politicians, but they seem little more than shills for lobbyists, and don't seem to really understand the dangerous precedent they might be setting.
...those other browsers are free so who cares if Windows users are forced to use IE?
I do, because I'd rather be able to develop to standards and I'd rather Web technologies could move forward again instead of being held back by one, dominant, least common denominator browser.
The solution to the problem is to force Microsoft to allow OEMs to bundle other browsers with Windows the same way they do anything else.
That would once have been a viable solution. That is no longer the case. The remedy for a knife wound is more than removing the knife. The EU needs to repair the damage done to the market, and that means restoring the browser market to a competitive state. OEMs have plenty of incentive to bundle only IE, resulting from the current, broken state of the market, even if they are not forbidden from installing others. If the EU is really looking to restore a competitive free market where innovation is driven by the market they need to go further. Requiring the inclusion of a standards compliant browser prevents IE from blocking the advancement of Web standards and jumpstarts the broken market.
While I agree with the rest of your post, this one is wrong - a specific make and model of car is an original work of authorship fixed in a tangible medium of expression. There is a copyright on each individual car.
I do not believe you are correct. Here's an excerpt from an explanation of copyright law which uses an automobile as an example of what cannot be copyrighted:
Copyright protection is generally not available to articles which have a utilitarian function. Examples of these types of "useful articles" would include lamps, bathroom sinks, clothing, and computer monitors. Under the Copyright Act, the only copyright protection available to these items is for "features that can be identified separately from, and are capable of existing independently of, the utilitarian aspects of the article." Unfortunately, this test is inherently ambiguous when deciding the scope of copyright protection for certain useful articles.
Some distinctions are clear. For instance, a painting on the side of a truck is protectable under copyright law even though the truck is a useful article. The painting is clearly separable from the utilitarian aspects of the truck. The overall shape of the truck, on the other hand, would not be copyrightable since the shape is an essential part of the truck's utility. Another commonly considered example is that of clothing. The print found on the fabric of a skirt or jacket is copyrightable, since it exists separately from the utilitarian nature of the clothing. However, there is no copyright in the cut of the cloth, or the design of the skirt or jacket as a whole, since these articles are utilitarian. This is true even of fanciful costumes; no copyright protection is granted to the costume as a whole.
Does that make sense to you or do you have some citation that indicates this is no longer true?
Technically, aside from the design patents, Ford could also be sued for copyright infringement if they made a Fordota Famry that was nigh-indistinguishable from a Toyota Camry
I think you're confusing copyright with trademark. In the above case Ford could be sued for trademark violation for making a product confusingly similar to Toyota's "Camry" trademark.
I don't think Windows needs to be punished all the way to 65%.
Woah! You lost me here. Antitrust punishments aren't about reducing market share in the monopolized market. They're about protecting other markets. Potentially Microsoft would be broken up to remove their monopoly and their ability to abuse it, but they are never going to be punished in such a way that their OS market share decreases.
Microsoft dropping to about 65% of the desktop OS market would have to come about due to slow increases for other players, at which point MS starts to have small enough share they can't do quite as much damage to Apple through illegal actions without severely hurting themselves. Apple would be idiotic to try making deals with OEMs for pre-installs until MS's monopoly is seriously weakened.
Make no mistake, Apple won't be licensing "clones". They'll be simply permitting their OS on other PC hardware,...
I don't see the distinction. Apple systems are PCs. Apple will have to license their OS to OEMs in bulk deals to move into that market. Individuals installing their own copies is too small to help Apple, but can hurt their high end sales. It's not a good move until they have real deals with other OEMs.
Yes, it has come up. One of the things that Apple sued for was DMCA violation.
You're right, I did a little research and Apple did append one of their complaints with a DMCA clause.
And Psystar's answer was "Apple is an evil monopolist...
Yeah, but the courts tossed that argument pretty much immediately and it is now back to a simple copyright dispute with regard to enforceable/unenforceable parts of the EULA.
Apple's DRM in MacOS X is quite well documented. There is a chip on the Macintosh motherboard containing a 64 bit number which is used by the OS to decrypt several important modules.
Can you provide a citation. Last I heard it was all software. Apple did put a TPM chip on their first Intel machines but stopped after only a few months and it was never used for DRM on the OS.
What kind of an idiot CEO decides with a very small company and almost no capital, to lock horns with one of the largest companies out their with a very. . . let's say 'speculative' business proposition at best?
They named their clone OpenMac. It's such a blatant trademark violation one can only conclude these people had no idea what they were doing going into this and did not bother to consult a lawyer or a book or post and AskSlashdot question.
I mean, if I pay Apple for Mac OS X, in order to put it on a different computer, I fail to see how that has infringed their *COPY* rights...
Here's how the courts have viewed it. In order to actually use OS X, you have to make a copy of the data on the DVD on your hard drive. To do this, you need more than to have bought the DVD, you need a license to make said copy. That license is Apple's EULA. Now, this is mitigated by the fact that you need to make a copy to use it (gives you more leeway) and that you can't read the EULA until after you buy.
...they shouldn't have any say in what I do with that copy or what hardware I run it on...
But legally they do have say in what you can do in the process of making copies. That say, however, is limited.
...once the copy is licensed...
The license applies to making copies, like by installing. You don't license the OS when you buy it in a box at the store. You buy it packaged with a license that grants you the right to copy it in limited ways.
it was obvious Apple would try to stop them with a lawsuit
I'd say it was obvious to any normal person that Apple would stop them and will. We're just seeing what lengths Apple will have to go to to do it.
and they'd have to fight the total GARBAGE law known as the DMCA
The DMCA has not come up in this legal battle that I know of. Apple might, however, add DRM and use the DMCA to stop Pystar and others going forward.
...before they could ever get to the point of, hopefully, getting a ruling that they weren't infringing...
Actually Pystar is hoping to get the Apple hardware only provision of the license declared null. I don't know how they think this will help in the long term though as Apple can simply stop selling boxed copies without DRM or take any one of several other methods to protect their brand and profits.
I agree, stability would be an excellent reason. But the pure truth of the matter is, even with the change to Intel, Mac's are priced more on brand name than the cost of the parts that go into them.
The last review I read showed their markups were almost exactly the same as other "premium" computer sellers with similar hardware reliability numbers. They are higher than average, certainly, but so is Sony and everyone else who doesn't sell a large volume of low end stuff.
Apple will never (in it's[sic] current incarnation and under Steve) allow anyone but Apple sell Apple computers.
It would be an idiotic business move for Apple to license their OS to other companies until the desktop OS market was moderately competitive with Windows down to say 65%.
. Period.
Gah! period period period? Can you get any more redundant? In spoken communication saying the punctuation can be an emphasis. In written communication it is simply redundant. You already put a period at the end of the sentence. You don't need to then write the word and add another one. Okay? Question mark?
Great, why don't you move to Estonia or one of the other wonderful paradises that have a flat tax. Of course no place has one for long since they are not sustainable.
Why should those who work hard for their millions get taxed more? Not fair I say...
You know what else isn't fair, pretty much everything. The fact that some people inherit millions and others are born in abject poverty isn't fair. The fact that some people built wealth for a hundred years using slave labor and the former person's decedents have been able to leverage that wealth to exploit the descendants of their former slaves isn't fair. The fact that some people are born owning dozens of homes while dozens of people spend their whole lives paying rent to the first person, because they were born poor isn't fair.
You know what is fair? 100% inheritance tax. When you die all your money goes to the state and every single person is given the same amount of money to start life out. Of course it's also totally impractical and inefficient, but it's fair.
Progressive taxation is a compromise. It's not as fair as 100% inheritance tax, but not as wasteful either. The problem with a flat tax is wealth condensation. It means the more money you have, the more earning power you have, an economic factor that makes our economy nowhere near a meritocracy. With a flat tax, wealth consolidates constantly until all the wealth is owned by a tiny percentage of the population. When the disparity reaches critical levels, the economy destabilizes. Sometimes this mens an economic depression like the great depression and right now. Usually what happens is the poor take their knives, go kill the wealthy and redistribute the wealth while forming a new government. Occasionally, there are huge economic reforms instead which redistribute wealth, like the New Deal.
BTW, I'm a poor military person who's also a poor student...I see unfairness in the tax system...
Sure it is, but it's unfair in a way that tries to balance out other unfairness in such a way that our economy is stable. If you want to seriously advocate a flat tax, I recommend reading some basic economic texts and looking at what happens both according to all major economic models and historically. One of our biggest problems is our taxation has become increasingly less progressive and the wealthy have taken too much at an alarming rate. If Obama pushes through all the tax reforms he has been trying we'll be lucky to stabilize our economy in a decade.
End result, Pystar and their ilk die and Apple's customers are inconvenienced with DRM. Gee, thanks guys.
What bullshit. Apple has the choice, either they can be douchebags or not. They may choose to be douchebags and DRM the OS, but if they do, it's because they chose to do it.
Of course they would have chosen to do it. Apple is a business and will do what makes the most business sense. In the face of significant erosion of their Mac business to clone makers or to threats to their brand, that's probably to move away from their currently DRM free, trust the user, policy and towards a DRM lockdown.
Not because Psystar or a few Hackintosh builders forced them to.
Apple doesn't give a rat's ass about hackintosh. It is no threat and suing individuals would be a bad business move. Also Pystar isn't forcing Apple to do anything, they're motivating them to do something. Personally, I think they're incompetent who did not think their business plan through and who have tried to adapt to stay in business despite having no idea what the legal ramifications of their business model were or bothering to consult a lawyer.
Every business operates this way. If you get too successful, the government will kill you with Anti-Trust and Monopoly action.
You're an idiot. It's perfectly legal to run a business so successfully you gain a monopoly. It's only illegal to abuse that monopoly by damaging other markets. There are plenty of companies that have been run well and gained monopolies or near monopolies and have not been shut down by antitrust action, because they took the normal, necessary legal steps to be careful how they interacted with other markets.
You could bundle a whole Mini with a clone tower Mac, move the licensed OS from Mini to the clone and ship the Mini kitted out as a 'free' Mythtv/whatever settop box.
How does this help? Apple can still use DRM to lock the OS copy to the specific machine. Getting around that would still be illegal under the DMCA and whoever ships machines with that business model would be guilty of contributory copyright infringement. Not to mention the number of people willing to buy a Mac mini and a clone tower and with the ability to hack the system to get it installed and who won't just hackintosh it themselves without some company helping is probably pretty tiny.
I think you're engaging in wishful thinking. You'd like to be able to buy OS X clones so you defend the position that there is a real business model for selling them in the face of Apple's attempts to stop it. I sympathize, but I don't agree with your theories.
You don't read very carefully do you? He didn't insinuate that the commission discriminates...
Yes he did.
merely that the case would involve a native company and a foreign company. An EU company obviously has political channels not available to foreign companies.
That would be discrimination.
A monopoly is judged based upon various criteria : Originally merely being massively larger than the 2nd biggest competitor sufficed, but IBM & others weaseled their way out from under that trusty criteria.
You don't have any idea what you're talking about.
Now you need "anti competitive behavior".
You've always needed anti-competitive behavior since having a monopoly has never been illegal in and of itself, although certain methods of acquiring them have been forbidden.
A feature of the anti competitive behavior criteria is that government may apply it to competitors that aren't the monopolist.
You're full of it. There are weaker consumer protection laws that apply to companies that are not monopolists (or part of a trust), but those aren't anti-trust laws. I also don't know of any that apply here.
Apple is behaving anti-competitively in this case by restricting aftermarket modifications of their software.
Umm, isn't that a prime function of copyright law, to prevent alteration and redistribution of copyrighted material like OS X?
A car company wouldn't succeed in similarly restricting aftermarket modifications.
A car isn't copyrighted intellectual property. Your analogy is fundamentally broken.
So you expect them to just give up on the rather lucrative sales of OSX to all their old macs? I bought leopard for my 3 year old macbook along with a new hard drive. Thats $150.00 of almost pure profit for Apple, that they wouldnt have gotten from me otherwise, I had restore CD's, I could have used them, but I wanted expose and spaces and time machine.
I highly doubt they'd give up that second sale just to spite another company.
All Apple's software sales together make up about 6% of their profits. That includes iWork and all their professional software. OS X is probably less than 1%. It is fairly insignificant in the grand scheme of things. They can eat the cost. They can raise the cost of Macs ever so slightly and people will pay it, especially if the value of macs goes up by having free OS upgrades. Or they can incorporate the sales into the.mac service thus increasing profits by getting people to subscribe to a yearly service when they mostly just want on OS update. Or, as per my first suggestion, they can move to all online sales and lock it down with DRM.
I highly doubt they'd give up that second sale just to spite another company.
Spite another company? I don't recall suggesting any such thing. They're protecting their market for PC's which is about half their income and at the same time preventing the Apple and OS X brands against dilution. They might not do it to stop a very small company, but the larger any such competitor grows the stronger the business case for such a move.
They don't even have to bother with the EULA deal, they just sue them over trademark infringement. I'm sure putting "Mac" in your name makes you a prime candidate.
Yeah, the fact that Pystar originally named their machine the "OpenMac" pretty much proved they did not have even moderately competent legal advice when they created their business plan.
You must have missed the clone companies in the 1990s.......they were eating Apple's lunch.
Unfortunately 90% of the Mac clones sold were junk that used Apple's valuable brand to make the sale then devalued it when the machine broke after a few months or crashed constantly. The only really decent clone maker was Power Computing, which Apple actually acquired.
Mac clones were a bust for Apple and not sustainable in the long term given the very broken desktop OS market, which persists to this day. Until that market is restored to something close to competitive, Apple would be idiotic to try and build a business model relying upon it instead of their current model which bypasses said market.
Why would anyone want to run Mac OS on unsupported hardware? It's going to be unstable, missing features, and chances are that getting updates from Apple to install with or without hosing your installation is going to be a bitch.
A friend of mine runs it on a netbook he bought for a few hundred bucks. He wanted a cheap, small, ultra-portable OS X box and didn't mind messing around with things. It makes sense to me.
You can build a Hackintosh yourself. Bootloaders and such are out there - you can run Leopard on a regular PC, as long as you are careful to only use supported components. Amazingly enough, Apple has been remarkably nonchalant about this. So why do they have such a big problem with Psystar?
Apple jealously guards their brand. They work hard in support and towards reliability and packaging such that they are consistently rated top in the industry by their customers. OS X is Apple's crown jewels and is strongly associated with Apple's brand.
So some computer geek hacks a machine to run OS X, even in violation of the license. Why would Apple care? A geek knows it is going to have issues that aren't Apple's fault and taking individuals to court just gives them negative publicity for an issue that isn't costing them significant dollars.
When a company starts selling computers with Apple's software preloaded, however, they start to take significant money away from sales of Macs and at the same time provide OS X running in a suboptimal environment in a way Apple can't properly support. When it is a crashy mess, people blame Apple and tell others and Apple's brand loses value.
In short, Apple is a business. They make decisions based upon how much money they stand to make/lose. They're being nice to hackintosh individuals because it is in their own best financial interests. They're bringing the hammer down on Pystar for the same reason.
Apple would be violating anti-trust laws by not selling their operating system & upgrades separately, period.
I have two comments here. First, to be violating antitrust laws Apple would have to have a monopoly in one of the relevant markets. I suspect you know very little about antitrust laws, but on the off chance you are not clueless, what market do you think it is that Apple has monopolized? Second, writing the word "period" followed by the punctuation mark "." is redundant. I understand in speaking using this technique but it does not apply in written communication. Please stop it.
Psystar's case was legally winnable, but they didn't have the backers for winning in court.
Do you know what Pystar's case was about? Even if it was winnable, my post explains why it doesn't matter.
It might fair better for European clone makers since anti-trust laws will be enforced more correctly against non-European companies, i.e. Apple.
The EU antitrust laws are about the same as ours and I still don't see the monopoly you are predicating such action upon. Further, you specify non-European companies as though that makes a difference, which anyone with a clue knows is irrelevant. Please do a little research and see the hundreds of European companies the commission has taken action against before making such slanderously uninformed claims.
Or Apple could take advantage of the TPM chip that's been present in Macs since almost immediately after they moved to the x86 platform.
As I understand it they stopped including a TPM chip after a short time citing cost and lack of interest from developers. A quick Google search finds this: Tom's Hardware Article provide a source for such a claim (end of the first paragraph). Another response to your post claims Apple uses TPM to lock down OS X, but I've never heard any knowledgeable source make such a claim. Here's a detailed article explaining about Apple's use of TPM as a tool for cryptography and how it has never been used as DRM on OS X.
I dunno. The "Apple suing them in the face" problem was a pretty serious one, and is probably what did them in in the end; but their business model is by no means a certain failure.
I don't understand this opinion. So let's say in the best case, most realistic scenario Pystar and these other companies get the relevant provisions of Apple's OS X licensing declared unenforceable and they are removed from the license. They are now in the business of competing with Apple to sell hardware, while having to buy the OS from Apple. If they become moderately successful, what is there to stop Apple from no longer selling boxed copies of their OS and thus killing them?
Seriously. Selling boxed copies of OS X is a small part of Apple's business. They could switch to online distribution for upgrades and use DRM to prevent them from installing. End result, Pystar and their ilk die and Apple's customers are inconvenienced with DRM. Gee, thanks guys.
Or, Apple could go a more drastic route. They could simply ditch selling new versions of OS X and provide them free of charge to all Mac owners. It would barely dent their profits and lower their support and development costs considerably. Or they could take a middle road and sell a yearly service like their ".mac" service and include in that service upgrades to the OS and network services like e-mail, but provide no other upgrade path for individual licensors. Either way Pystar dies and Apple moves on without worrying about being undercut.
The way I see it, if Pystar and the like succeed, all they do is drive Apple to change policy enough to kill them. Any business model built upon being successful but not too successful lest the company you rely entirely upon kill you, is a doomed business model.
The EC case is based on the fact that Microsoft is considered a monopoly. That monopoly status was never tried in EU
Sorry it took so long for me to respond to this, I've been on a several day bender. Anyway, the EU did determine Microsoft to have a monopoly in their previous case against them. They did not rely on the US courts and I'm not certain that would even be legal. In fact they defined the market on which MS had a monopoly differently than the DoJ.
Umm, Microsoft is still breaking the law today. The complaint was filed last year.
Because they are not complying fully with the original decision.
You have no idea what you're talking about do you?
By that definition, you could create an antitrust case for MS bundling Notepad with windows.
Yes, you could.
Which were you thinking constituted a monopoly?
The fact that the ITunes store crushes competition comes to mind.
You don't seem to know what a monopoly even is. How can you be so ignorant, yet so full of yourself that you think to argue a case here? In the context of antitrust law a monopoly is a market where one company or trust controls and overwhelming market share. In order to abuse a monopoly, Apple has to have a monopoly. What market do you think they have a monopoly on?
If you would like, I guess I could say that Apple used it's Itunes monopoly to Sell IPods and Macs.
iTunes is a software jukebox. It competes against Windows Media Player, Songbird, Realplayer, etc. It does not have monopoly influence on that market.
Opera did not sue. They reported the crime. The EU is prosecuting the crime. There was no civil suit involved and Opera asked for no damages, just remedies.
Where were they when MS WAS being investigated in the US for Browser bundling?
Umm, the case in the US started off as some civil suits but was taken over by the states then the DoJ and made into a criminal case just like in the EU. Since MS never stopped the action they were convicted of in the US, they should expect to be convicted by the courts in every country where they do business.
Also. this is a first step. Getting a Guilty verdict here gives Opera a stronger case in court to go civil suit, since they can use this case as a precedent.
That's not what precedent is. You're thinking about reusing findings of fact. It's possible Opera will eventually sue MS, but there is no evidence of it. Just because you report a crime where you are a victim does not mean you will also sue for damages later. If you actually bothered to read the Opera complaint it is clear what they want. They want the EU to force MS to comply fully with Web standards so Opera does not have to waste all sorts of money working around broken Web pages resulting from MS's illegal dominance in the Web browser market.
The browser 'market?' How can you have a market for something that is free?
Easily. Just as AT&T about the "free" phones they used to supply. I'm sure you wish we were all stuck using rotary phones with no answering machines or speed dial or cordless options like we were until AT&T's monopoly was busted up huh? Or maybe you think it's a coincidence that modern phones began to innovate again immediately thereafter?
Slashdot Mirror
Why stop there? How long until they're forced to offer options of different operating systems at startup?
That's not what antitrust abuse is about. It's about stopping abuse of monopolies into other markets, not slightly decreasing the power of the monopoly in the primary market. The EU can legally break up MS to get rid of their monopoly, but have no authority to force OEMs to install multiple OS's under antitrust law.
Which would be kinda neat, if your options were be comparable. You can't compare MS Paint with GIMP, or Notepad with vim.
I disagree.
But making the average Joe choose between Notepad and vim would certainly be a distaster for those that chose vim.
Which is why nobody in their right mind would give the average user such a choice, just as the average user isn't given a choice as to what drivers are installed on computers they buy. That's why OEMs exist, to assemble packages on behalf of consumers and get paid for it.
...and that Microsoft has been known to 'embrace and extinguish'.
You do know that phrase originated with MS's internal discussions of illegally destroying Web browsers and Web technologies that might threaten them, right?
HOWEVER, this knee-jerk reaction to the browser-wars is really fundamentally flawed.
What knee jerk reaction. MS undermined the free market in illegal ways. Is maybe that you just don't understand the logical reactions of people to the situation and thus brand them "kneejerk". That seems implied by your later failure to understand the issues of antitrust law.
I think it's time we realize that a music jukebox, dvd player, web browser, and text editor have become integral parts of an OS (per my definition).
Is a telephone an integral part of a telephone network? Sure. That doesn't matter because it is also a separate market from telephone service which is why AT&T can't require you to rent a telephone from them anymore, but must sell them separately from your wired connection. It's also the reason after a decade of stagnation we suddenly jumped forward and got push buttons, speed dial, and answering machines when AT&T's monopoly abuse was stopped.
The browser was and is a separate market and we're quite likely to see the same rapid innovation to the benefit of everyone as soon as MS's antitrust abuse is stopped. The thing most Slashdotters can't seem to wrap their heads around is an economic issue of markets, not a technological issue.
I say "rubbish. You might as well ask the user to choose different versions of the TCP stack, paint program, image libraries, and mouse drivers too."
Please do your research. We're talking about separate, preexisting markets. Of the things you mention, only the paint program applies under the law.
Go and get alternatives if you like, just as you're free to get another media player, paint program or ftp client.
Which does nothing to address the broken market or criminal acts or to improve innovation and lower costs. I have an idea, why don't you learn why antitrust laws exist before declaring them to be wrong?
I don't see noise directed against Apple or Linux or BSD, likely because they are {not monopolies | high enough in market share | something else that I can't grok}.
I'll try to explain with an analogy. Murder is illegal. Firing a gun is legal. Firing a gun at a person in a way that murders them is illegal. Bundling is legal. Bundling in a way that undermines the free market is illegal.
In this analogy, only MS has a gun. Apple and Canonical can bundle browsers and OS's all they want because they don't even have to power undermine the market if they wanted to. Apple, on the other hand, is close to having sufficient power in the portable, digital music player market that the EU has looked into restricting them with regard to bundling things with iPods. Companies in the US and EU regularly consider antitrust issues when they have dominance in markets. The real difference here is not the way laws are applied, but that MS has so blatantly disregarded the laws everyone else obeys.
This would suggest that the bundling of Safari on Mac, or Mozilla on Linux is not fundamentally wrong, and is also not wrong on Windows.
Hopefully from my previous comments you now understand that no one suggests bundling is fundamentally wrong. Undermining the free market is fundamentally wrong. Bundling in particular circumstances in ways that undermine markets is what is illegal and detrimental to society.
Perhaps this is unfair to the hapless (as far as tech goes) politicians, but they seem little more than shills for lobbyists, and don't seem to really understand the dangerous precedent they might be setting.
Yeah, enforcing the same
...those other browsers are free so who cares if Windows users are forced to use IE?
I do, because I'd rather be able to develop to standards and I'd rather Web technologies could move forward again instead of being held back by one, dominant, least common denominator browser.
The solution to the problem is to force Microsoft to allow OEMs to bundle other browsers with Windows the same way they do anything else.
That would once have been a viable solution. That is no longer the case. The remedy for a knife wound is more than removing the knife. The EU needs to repair the damage done to the market, and that means restoring the browser market to a competitive state. OEMs have plenty of incentive to bundle only IE, resulting from the current, broken state of the market, even if they are not forbidden from installing others. If the EU is really looking to restore a competitive free market where innovation is driven by the market they need to go further. Requiring the inclusion of a standards compliant browser prevents IE from blocking the advancement of Web standards and jumpstarts the broken market.
While I agree with the rest of your post, this one is wrong - a specific make and model of car is an original work of authorship fixed in a tangible medium of expression. There is a copyright on each individual car.
I do not believe you are correct. Here's an excerpt from an explanation of copyright law which uses an automobile as an example of what cannot be copyrighted:
Copyright protection is generally not available to articles which have a utilitarian function. Examples of these types of "useful articles" would include lamps, bathroom sinks, clothing, and computer monitors. Under the Copyright Act, the only copyright protection available to these items is for "features that can be identified separately from, and are capable of existing independently of, the utilitarian aspects of the article." Unfortunately, this test is inherently ambiguous when deciding the scope of copyright protection for certain useful articles.
Some distinctions are clear. For instance, a painting on the side of a truck is protectable under copyright law even though the truck is a useful article. The painting is clearly separable from the utilitarian aspects of the truck. The overall shape of the truck, on the other hand, would not be copyrightable since the shape is an essential part of the truck's utility. Another commonly considered example is that of clothing. The print found on the fabric of a skirt or jacket is copyrightable, since it exists separately from the utilitarian nature of the clothing. However, there is no copyright in the cut of the cloth, or the design of the skirt or jacket as a whole, since these articles are utilitarian. This is true even of fanciful costumes; no copyright protection is granted to the costume as a whole.
Does that make sense to you or do you have some citation that indicates this is no longer true?
Technically, aside from the design patents, Ford could also be sued for copyright infringement if they made a Fordota Famry that was nigh-indistinguishable from a Toyota Camry
I think you're confusing copyright with trademark. In the above case Ford could be sued for trademark violation for making a product confusingly similar to Toyota's "Camry" trademark.
I don't think Windows needs to be punished all the way to 65%.
Woah! You lost me here. Antitrust punishments aren't about reducing market share in the monopolized market. They're about protecting other markets. Potentially Microsoft would be broken up to remove their monopoly and their ability to abuse it, but they are never going to be punished in such a way that their OS market share decreases.
Microsoft dropping to about 65% of the desktop OS market would have to come about due to slow increases for other players, at which point MS starts to have small enough share they can't do quite as much damage to Apple through illegal actions without severely hurting themselves. Apple would be idiotic to try making deals with OEMs for pre-installs until MS's monopoly is seriously weakened.
Make no mistake, Apple won't be licensing "clones". They'll be simply permitting their OS on other PC hardware,...
I don't see the distinction. Apple systems are PCs. Apple will have to license their OS to OEMs in bulk deals to move into that market. Individuals installing their own copies is too small to help Apple, but can hurt their high end sales. It's not a good move until they have real deals with other OEMs.
Yes, it has come up. One of the things that Apple sued for was DMCA violation.
You're right, I did a little research and Apple did append one of their complaints with a DMCA clause.
And Psystar's answer was "Apple is an evil monopolist...
Yeah, but the courts tossed that argument pretty much immediately and it is now back to a simple copyright dispute with regard to enforceable/unenforceable parts of the EULA.
Apple's DRM in MacOS X is quite well documented. There is a chip on the Macintosh motherboard containing a 64 bit number which is used by the OS to decrypt several important modules.
Can you provide a citation. Last I heard it was all software. Apple did put a TPM chip on their first Intel machines but stopped after only a few months and it was never used for DRM on the OS.
What kind of an idiot CEO decides with a very small company and almost no capital, to lock horns with one of the largest companies out their with a very. . . let's say 'speculative' business proposition at best?
They named their clone OpenMac. It's such a blatant trademark violation one can only conclude these people had no idea what they were doing going into this and did not bother to consult a lawyer or a book or post and AskSlashdot question.
I mean, if I pay Apple for Mac OS X, in order to put it on a different computer, I fail to see how that has infringed their *COPY* rights...
Here's how the courts have viewed it. In order to actually use OS X, you have to make a copy of the data on the DVD on your hard drive. To do this, you need more than to have bought the DVD, you need a license to make said copy. That license is Apple's EULA. Now, this is mitigated by the fact that you need to make a copy to use it (gives you more leeway) and that you can't read the EULA until after you buy.
...they shouldn't have any say in what I do with that copy or what hardware I run it on...
But legally they do have say in what you can do in the process of making copies. That say, however, is limited.
...once the copy is licensed...
The license applies to making copies, like by installing. You don't license the OS when you buy it in a box at the store. You buy it packaged with a license that grants you the right to copy it in limited ways.
it was obvious Apple would try to stop them with a lawsuit
I'd say it was obvious to any normal person that Apple would stop them and will. We're just seeing what lengths Apple will have to go to to do it.
and they'd have to fight the total GARBAGE law known as the DMCA
The DMCA has not come up in this legal battle that I know of. Apple might, however, add DRM and use the DMCA to stop Pystar and others going forward.
...before they could ever get to the point of, hopefully, getting a ruling that they weren't infringing...
Actually Pystar is hoping to get the Apple hardware only provision of the license declared null. I don't know how they think this will help in the long term though as Apple can simply stop selling boxed copies without DRM or take any one of several other methods to protect their brand and profits.
I agree, stability would be an excellent reason. But the pure truth of the matter is, even with the change to Intel, Mac's are priced more on brand name than the cost of the parts that go into them.
The last review I read showed their markups were almost exactly the same as other "premium" computer sellers with similar hardware reliability numbers. They are higher than average, certainly, but so is Sony and everyone else who doesn't sell a large volume of low end stuff.
Apple will never (in it's[sic] current incarnation and under Steve) allow anyone but Apple sell Apple computers.
It would be an idiotic business move for Apple to license their OS to other companies until the desktop OS market was moderately competitive with Windows down to say 65%.
. Period.
Gah! period period period? Can you get any more redundant? In spoken communication saying the punctuation can be an emphasis. In written communication it is simply redundant. You already put a period at the end of the sentence. You don't need to then write the word and add another one. Okay? Question mark?
I am a fan of the flat tax.
Great, why don't you move to Estonia or one of the other wonderful paradises that have a flat tax. Of course no place has one for long since they are not sustainable.
Why should those who work hard for their millions get taxed more? Not fair I say...
You know what else isn't fair, pretty much everything. The fact that some people inherit millions and others are born in abject poverty isn't fair. The fact that some people built wealth for a hundred years using slave labor and the former person's decedents have been able to leverage that wealth to exploit the descendants of their former slaves isn't fair. The fact that some people are born owning dozens of homes while dozens of people spend their whole lives paying rent to the first person, because they were born poor isn't fair.
You know what is fair? 100% inheritance tax. When you die all your money goes to the state and every single person is given the same amount of money to start life out. Of course it's also totally impractical and inefficient, but it's fair.
Progressive taxation is a compromise. It's not as fair as 100% inheritance tax, but not as wasteful either. The problem with a flat tax is wealth condensation. It means the more money you have, the more earning power you have, an economic factor that makes our economy nowhere near a meritocracy. With a flat tax, wealth consolidates constantly until all the wealth is owned by a tiny percentage of the population. When the disparity reaches critical levels, the economy destabilizes. Sometimes this mens an economic depression like the great depression and right now. Usually what happens is the poor take their knives, go kill the wealthy and redistribute the wealth while forming a new government. Occasionally, there are huge economic reforms instead which redistribute wealth, like the New Deal.
BTW, I'm a poor military person who's also a poor student...I see unfairness in the tax system...
Sure it is, but it's unfair in a way that tries to balance out other unfairness in such a way that our economy is stable. If you want to seriously advocate a flat tax, I recommend reading some basic economic texts and looking at what happens both according to all major economic models and historically. One of our biggest problems is our taxation has become increasingly less progressive and the wealthy have taken too much at an alarming rate. If Obama pushes through all the tax reforms he has been trying we'll be lucky to stabilize our economy in a decade.
End result, Pystar and their ilk die and Apple's customers are inconvenienced with DRM. Gee, thanks guys.
What bullshit. Apple has the choice, either they can be douchebags or not. They may choose to be douchebags and DRM the OS, but if they do, it's because they chose to do it.
Of course they would have chosen to do it. Apple is a business and will do what makes the most business sense. In the face of significant erosion of their Mac business to clone makers or to threats to their brand, that's probably to move away from their currently DRM free, trust the user, policy and towards a DRM lockdown.
Not because Psystar or a few Hackintosh builders forced them to.
Apple doesn't give a rat's ass about hackintosh. It is no threat and suing individuals would be a bad business move. Also Pystar isn't forcing Apple to do anything, they're motivating them to do something. Personally, I think they're incompetent who did not think their business plan through and who have tried to adapt to stay in business despite having no idea what the legal ramifications of their business model were or bothering to consult a lawyer.
Every business operates this way. If you get too successful, the government will kill you with Anti-Trust and Monopoly action.
You're an idiot. It's perfectly legal to run a business so successfully you gain a monopoly. It's only illegal to abuse that monopoly by damaging other markets. There are plenty of companies that have been run well and gained monopolies or near monopolies and have not been shut down by antitrust action, because they took the normal, necessary legal steps to be careful how they interacted with other markets.
You could bundle a whole Mini with a clone tower Mac, move the licensed OS from Mini to the clone and ship the Mini kitted out as a 'free' Mythtv/whatever settop box.
How does this help? Apple can still use DRM to lock the OS copy to the specific machine. Getting around that would still be illegal under the DMCA and whoever ships machines with that business model would be guilty of contributory copyright infringement. Not to mention the number of people willing to buy a Mac mini and a clone tower and with the ability to hack the system to get it installed and who won't just hackintosh it themselves without some company helping is probably pretty tiny.
I think you're engaging in wishful thinking. You'd like to be able to buy OS X clones so you defend the position that there is a real business model for selling them in the face of Apple's attempts to stop it. I sympathize, but I don't agree with your theories.
You don't read very carefully do you? He didn't insinuate that the commission discriminates...
Yes he did.
merely that the case would involve a native company and a foreign company. An EU company obviously has political channels not available to foreign companies.
That would be discrimination.
A monopoly is judged based upon various criteria : Originally merely being massively larger than the 2nd biggest competitor sufficed, but IBM & others weaseled their way out from under that trusty criteria.
You don't have any idea what you're talking about.
Now you need "anti competitive behavior".
You've always needed anti-competitive behavior since having a monopoly has never been illegal in and of itself, although certain methods of acquiring them have been forbidden.
A feature of the anti competitive behavior criteria is that government may apply it to competitors that aren't the monopolist.
You're full of it. There are weaker consumer protection laws that apply to companies that are not monopolists (or part of a trust), but those aren't anti-trust laws. I also don't know of any that apply here.
Apple is behaving anti-competitively in this case by restricting aftermarket modifications of their software.
Umm, isn't that a prime function of copyright law, to prevent alteration and redistribution of copyrighted material like OS X?
A car company wouldn't succeed in similarly restricting aftermarket modifications.
A car isn't copyrighted intellectual property. Your analogy is fundamentally broken.
So you expect them to just give up on the rather lucrative sales of OSX to all their old macs? I bought leopard for my 3 year old macbook along with a new hard drive. Thats $150.00 of almost pure profit for Apple, that they wouldnt have gotten from me otherwise, I had restore CD's, I could have used them, but I wanted expose and spaces and time machine. I highly doubt they'd give up that second sale just to spite another company.
All Apple's software sales together make up about 6% of their profits. That includes iWork and all their professional software. OS X is probably less than 1%. It is fairly insignificant in the grand scheme of things. They can eat the cost. They can raise the cost of Macs ever so slightly and people will pay it, especially if the value of macs goes up by having free OS upgrades. Or they can incorporate the sales into the .mac service thus increasing profits by getting people to subscribe to a yearly service when they mostly just want on OS update. Or, as per my first suggestion, they can move to all online sales and lock it down with DRM.
I highly doubt they'd give up that second sale just to spite another company.
Spite another company? I don't recall suggesting any such thing. They're protecting their market for PC's which is about half their income and at the same time preventing the Apple and OS X brands against dilution. They might not do it to stop a very small company, but the larger any such competitor grows the stronger the business case for such a move.
They don't even have to bother with the EULA deal, they just sue them over trademark infringement. I'm sure putting "Mac" in your name makes you a prime candidate.
Yeah, the fact that Pystar originally named their machine the "OpenMac" pretty much proved they did not have even moderately competent legal advice when they created their business plan.
You must have missed the clone companies in the 1990s.......they were eating Apple's lunch.
Unfortunately 90% of the Mac clones sold were junk that used Apple's valuable brand to make the sale then devalued it when the machine broke after a few months or crashed constantly. The only really decent clone maker was Power Computing, which Apple actually acquired.
Mac clones were a bust for Apple and not sustainable in the long term given the very broken desktop OS market, which persists to this day. Until that market is restored to something close to competitive, Apple would be idiotic to try and build a business model relying upon it instead of their current model which bypasses said market.
Why would anyone want to run Mac OS on unsupported hardware? It's going to be unstable, missing features, and chances are that getting updates from Apple to install with or without hosing your installation is going to be a bitch.
A friend of mine runs it on a netbook he bought for a few hundred bucks. He wanted a cheap, small, ultra-portable OS X box and didn't mind messing around with things. It makes sense to me.
You can build a Hackintosh yourself. Bootloaders and such are out there - you can run Leopard on a regular PC, as long as you are careful to only use supported components. Amazingly enough, Apple has been remarkably nonchalant about this. So why do they have such a big problem with Psystar?
Apple jealously guards their brand. They work hard in support and towards reliability and packaging such that they are consistently rated top in the industry by their customers. OS X is Apple's crown jewels and is strongly associated with Apple's brand.
So some computer geek hacks a machine to run OS X, even in violation of the license. Why would Apple care? A geek knows it is going to have issues that aren't Apple's fault and taking individuals to court just gives them negative publicity for an issue that isn't costing them significant dollars.
When a company starts selling computers with Apple's software preloaded, however, they start to take significant money away from sales of Macs and at the same time provide OS X running in a suboptimal environment in a way Apple can't properly support. When it is a crashy mess, people blame Apple and tell others and Apple's brand loses value.
In short, Apple is a business. They make decisions based upon how much money they stand to make/lose. They're being nice to hackintosh individuals because it is in their own best financial interests. They're bringing the hammer down on Pystar for the same reason.
Apple would be violating anti-trust laws by not selling their operating system & upgrades separately, period.
I have two comments here. First, to be violating antitrust laws Apple would have to have a monopoly in one of the relevant markets. I suspect you know very little about antitrust laws, but on the off chance you are not clueless, what market do you think it is that Apple has monopolized? Second, writing the word "period" followed by the punctuation mark "." is redundant. I understand in speaking using this technique but it does not apply in written communication. Please stop it.
Psystar's case was legally winnable, but they didn't have the backers for winning in court.
Do you know what Pystar's case was about? Even if it was winnable, my post explains why it doesn't matter.
It might fair better for European clone makers since anti-trust laws will be enforced more correctly against non-European companies, i.e. Apple.
The EU antitrust laws are about the same as ours and I still don't see the monopoly you are predicating such action upon. Further, you specify non-European companies as though that makes a difference, which anyone with a clue knows is irrelevant. Please do a little research and see the hundreds of European companies the commission has taken action against before making such slanderously uninformed claims.
Or Apple could take advantage of the TPM chip that's been present in Macs since almost immediately after they moved to the x86 platform.
As I understand it they stopped including a TPM chip after a short time citing cost and lack of interest from developers. A quick Google search finds this: Tom's Hardware Article provide a source for such a claim (end of the first paragraph). Another response to your post claims Apple uses TPM to lock down OS X, but I've never heard any knowledgeable source make such a claim. Here's a detailed article explaining about Apple's use of TPM as a tool for cryptography and how it has never been used as DRM on OS X.
I dunno. The "Apple suing them in the face" problem was a pretty serious one, and is probably what did them in in the end; but their business model is by no means a certain failure.
I don't understand this opinion. So let's say in the best case, most realistic scenario Pystar and these other companies get the relevant provisions of Apple's OS X licensing declared unenforceable and they are removed from the license. They are now in the business of competing with Apple to sell hardware, while having to buy the OS from Apple. If they become moderately successful, what is there to stop Apple from no longer selling boxed copies of their OS and thus killing them?
Seriously. Selling boxed copies of OS X is a small part of Apple's business. They could switch to online distribution for upgrades and use DRM to prevent them from installing. End result, Pystar and their ilk die and Apple's customers are inconvenienced with DRM. Gee, thanks guys.
Or, Apple could go a more drastic route. They could simply ditch selling new versions of OS X and provide them free of charge to all Mac owners. It would barely dent their profits and lower their support and development costs considerably. Or they could take a middle road and sell a yearly service like their ".mac" service and include in that service upgrades to the OS and network services like e-mail, but provide no other upgrade path for individual licensors. Either way Pystar dies and Apple moves on without worrying about being undercut.
The way I see it, if Pystar and the like succeed, all they do is drive Apple to change policy enough to kill them. Any business model built upon being successful but not too successful lest the company you rely entirely upon kill you, is a doomed business model.
The EC case is based on the fact that Microsoft is considered a monopoly. That monopoly status was never tried in EU
Sorry it took so long for me to respond to this, I've been on a several day bender. Anyway, the EU did determine Microsoft to have a monopoly in their previous case against them. They did not rely on the US courts and I'm not certain that would even be legal. In fact they defined the market on which MS had a monopoly differently than the DoJ.
Umm, Microsoft is still breaking the law today. The complaint was filed last year.
Because they are not complying fully with the original decision.
You have no idea what you're talking about do you?
By that definition, you could create an antitrust case for MS bundling Notepad with windows.
Yes, you could.
Which were you thinking constituted a monopoly?
The fact that the ITunes store crushes competition comes to mind.
You don't seem to know what a monopoly even is. How can you be so ignorant, yet so full of yourself that you think to argue a case here? In the context of antitrust law a monopoly is a market where one company or trust controls and overwhelming market share. In order to abuse a monopoly, Apple has to have a monopoly. What market do you think they have a monopoly on?
If you would like, I guess I could say that Apple used it's Itunes monopoly to Sell IPods and Macs.
iTunes is a software jukebox. It competes against Windows Media Player, Songbird, Realplayer, etc. It does not have monopoly influence on that market.
Opera did not sue. They reported the crime. The EU is prosecuting the crime. There was no civil suit involved and Opera asked for no damages, just remedies.
Where were they when MS WAS being investigated in the US for Browser bundling?
Umm, the case in the US started off as some civil suits but was taken over by the states then the DoJ and made into a criminal case just like in the EU. Since MS never stopped the action they were convicted of in the US, they should expect to be convicted by the courts in every country where they do business.
Also. this is a first step. Getting a Guilty verdict here gives Opera a stronger case in court to go civil suit, since they can use this case as a precedent.
That's not what precedent is. You're thinking about reusing findings of fact. It's possible Opera will eventually sue MS, but there is no evidence of it. Just because you report a crime where you are a victim does not mean you will also sue for damages later. If you actually bothered to read the Opera complaint it is clear what they want. They want the EU to force MS to comply fully with Web standards so Opera does not have to waste all sorts of money working around broken Web pages resulting from MS's illegal dominance in the Web browser market.
The browser 'market?' How can you have a market for something that is free?
Easily. Just as AT&T about the "free" phones they used to supply. I'm sure you wish we were all stuck using rotary phones with no answering machines or speed dial or cordless options like we were until AT&T's monopoly was busted up huh? Or maybe you think it's a coincidence that modern phones began to innovate again immediately thereafter?