yeah, better is a subjective term.
in my subjective experience, I've never encountered an app incompatibility, so the whole 'android is fragmented' hue and cry has always struck me as odd. But I have an evo, which to my understanding is one of the better-updated non-nexus android phones, so, i guess that would make sense.
As far as stats and whatnot go, i've recently been stuck between screen size and battery life. I know iphone 4s has a much technically better display, but i cant help thinking, when i use a friend's, that it just seems like a toy, being comparatively so small. It is actually hard to use after a year and a half with so much more real estate.
At the same time, I'm getting sick of the paltry battery life. really really sick of it. If the iphone 5 has a reasonably sized screen I'll switch in a heartbeat.
an online service still in beta proves unreliable, asshats ascribe intent to the service's provider. in other news, sun still rising in east, setting in west. film at 11.
Actually copyright is exempted from sovereign immunity. So the case would be evaluated on fair use principles which is basically a big balancing test to determine if the use was only enough to satisfy legitimate goals. So if the E-Reserve system in question was making whole books available for a 10 page reading assignment, which students were then printing off and sharing with friends, or worse, reselling, the publishers might have a case. Without the school making a profit off the reserves, and so long as the reserves were only enough as was required for classes, seems like a tough case to make, however.
OMG ITS NOT THE SAME RESOLUTION AS THE RETINA IF YOU HOLD IT FAR ENOUGH AWAY FROM YOUR EYE APPLE IS FULL OF LIARRRRRRS!!!!!1.
i really do not understand this shit. 'apple develops fanciful name for technology.' NOTHING TO SEE HERE MOVE ALONG. So Apple has a silly name for something. who fucking cares? the silly-named tech is better than the android phone 'equivalent.' care to rip on it for being even lower res than iphone4?
They charge what the market will bear. Just because the market is comprised of idiots who dont understand how badly they're being ripped off doesnt mean that the inkjet companies are colluding. people selling goods often charge a lower per-unit price for larger quantities and amounts. Its real. go to the supermarket and check out the price per ounce labels on different sizes of canned goods or ketchup. That the 'oh ink tech is super expensive' explanation is patently bullshit is enough. bullshit price-fixing conspiracy-theories are totally unnecessary.
who the fuck modded this insightful?
First of all, your analogies as to scientific peer review are, well, not analogous. Both the 9/11 conspiracy nuts and the your individual support department are limited subsets of larger groups - people who have investigated 9/11 and support departments across the nation, respectively. the whole point of scientific peer review is to prevent the exact situations you have described. If you think that the scientific community is one big monolithic entity that is capable of coherent self-interested behavior like that, well, you're fucking retarded. They're just as petty as the rest of us, and if scrambling for funding isnt enough reason to pick apart and disprove a competing scholar's work, if only for the recognition, then i don't know what is. It is a very adversarial, if cordial, system, and its a miracle when there's a scientific consensus about anything.
you say you've looked into it for yourself. well, congratulations. maybe you should also consider the possibility that you don't actually understand a fucking thing about climatology. The only thing reputable science doesnt agree on is the timescale of global warming, so hey, maybe you won't live to be proved a moron.
no, the phone was in a case that made it look, at first glance, like it was a 3g/3gs. But it wouldnt boot, and had noticeably different buttons on the side, and a flash on the back. with all the proper holes cut in the case. If i found a phone and couldn't get it to boot to find out whose it was, try to get it back to them, i'd definitely start looking at it more closely, and i'd certainly notice an iphone with a flash. and then take the case off, and then, wow, that's not an iphone i've seen. This would happen in maybe, what, 5 minutes? Clearly, the finder was a tool, and once he discovered what he had he started trying to shop it after making a perfunctory pass at returning it to apple.
I'm not entirely sure why 'contact HTC/Apple' is reduced to 'call nameless drone in a call center and decide that's good' in your mind. to be honest, i'd be operating more on a 'get as far away from the unreleased apple hardware as possible' strategy (once i'd satisfied my own curiosity at least). Apple isnt nice about leaks. I prob would have gone to nearest apple store, asked to speak to the most senior manager in private, said 'ok, i'm sure you're not cleared for this either, but here,' shoved it at him, and been rid of it. And legally, there are fairly well established rules for determining whether or not an employee can be determined to be speaking on behalf of the corporation, when determining agency. I dont think even the general manager of an apple store would fit that bill, but he or she would likely have the ability to get someone who did on the phone with little fuss.
um... yes. If i found an HTC Evo, on the ground in a bar, i would contact HTC. Even playing along with the idiotic assumption that a pre-release tester device would belong to the individual engineer or tester, this is still the most expedient means of returning it to its owner. As a pre-release device, the manufacturer would be remiss if they couldn't track down exactly who had had possession of it last. And no tester will be given ownership of a pre-release device. that's just silly. Maybe, MAYBE, members of the board might be outright given units from the first production run. But no major company, and certainly not apple, who as was posted on here the other day, fired an employee for showing Woz, in good-faith, mind you, the 3g ipad before he was supposed to, no major company would transfer ownership of a tester device. because the owner of a chattel can do whatever the fuck he pleases with it. why would apple, HTC or any other company do that?
"seems to have outlawed parodies" is a little harsh.
decided to err on the side of taking down parodies not likely to stand up to suit under a fair use defense, sure. the downfall vids would likely not be able to muster a strong fair use defense, as their commentary was not about The Downfall, but usually either in comparing some other social figure or movement to hitler, or making fun of hitler. legally a parody must be in some way a parody of the original, not just the ideas.
Artistically, i think this is really stupid, but its how the courts have been interpreting the law.
Well, yeah, but its way funner to rant about how google is evil and ignoring fair use without understanding what is and is not fair use.
2) With all due respect, you're probably knee-jerking anyway. From my experience working in usability, when people say phrases like "nearly unbearable" without any solid reasons to dislike it, they're just reacting out of habit. People hate change. But that says nothing about the quality of the product.
haha, there *may* have been some hyperbole in there. ok, there obviously was. mainly its a sort of low level feeling that i'm being disrespected. At the atlas-buddies' urging, i used bing for a week, and just got sick of having to bully it into giving me what i wanted every time. the tendency of bing to give precedence to links selling me things rather than informing me about things got old.
I'm well aware that i'm not exactly in the majority with the paid search click-through and i wholly understand that it facilitates my preferred search engine's existence. I dont watch commercials on tv, either. shrug.
Yeah, I think part of my problem with this is the blending of the paid search and user experience arguments. I've got a couple buddies at atlas who can go on about attribution for longer than is really credible, but dont seem to understand my 'but the actual search experience on bing is nearly unbearable to me' response. I know (from getting almost immediately lost when they get into the behind the scenes workings of it on their end) that the intricacies of paid search are more complicated than i really have a handle on. However:
I rarely if ever click on a paid link, and cannot think of any instance off the top of my head where a paid link looked more appropriate than one of the top organic search results. I occasionally see a word or two in a paid link that might have improved original search - so i refine my search.
Search is a very strange business to be in. the user and the customer aren't the same person. I will use which ever search engine gives me the best results, not which ever one has the least sleazy billing method for paid links. Really, it strikes me that Search is itself a sleazy business, insofar as it necessarily can only make money by enticing the user to click not on the result it deems to be the most relevant to the user's search criteria, but rather to the result that has paid to be displayed in conjunction with the user's search criteria.
I love my buddies at Atlas dearly, but I'm not their customer, and as such, that they provide better service and value to their customers than google really couldnt concern me less. I find Bing's search engine inferior.
They can also inflate their inventory's value by taking advantage of the fact that the majority of people use their search engine like a URL bar.
Is this google's business model, or is the the general public being stupid with browsers, and in what way is this unique to Google? What about bing will make my internet illiterate (i still can't convince him that he doesnt need to double-click links) father decide that, unlike the google search pane in firefox, the bing search pane in IE isn't for entering urls?
nothing. obviously. and as Bing corners the market on people not internet skilled enough to know better, i have a feeling that this particular behavior will tend to skew toward it over Google.
This seems to me to be the key issue here: do you know how to search for what you want, or do you not? Do you want a decision engine or a search engine? I'm actually sort of surprised that more hasnt been made of the 'decision engine' business. Microsoft seems pretty up front about their 'we're making this search engine for people who either dont know how or are too lazy to properly seek out the information they want' strategy. And in a way, i actually support this. I was back home over christmas, helpin dad with some internets, and watching him fail to use google properly was really quite painful. he should be using bing. However, I, too, will continue using the search engine that both works and respects my intelligence.
No, Psystar didn't claim that they were shipping computers with unmodified copies of OS X. They were up-front about the fact that they were adapting OS X to run on the machines they sold.
actually, yes, they did. read their answer on groklaw. they liken what they did to swapping internet browsers, something clearly not part of the core copyrighted work. they explicitly deny that their modification was of apple's copyrighted work, or at least that if they are guilty than so is mozilla and any other company writing 3rd party software that replaces functionality bundled with the operating system.
The right to distribute this particular type of derivative work -- an adaptation made to run OS X on a particular machine -- is affected by 17 USC 117. (Fair use is irrelevant to this case.)
It is affected, but not permitted, by 117. 117a(1) provides for the essential step allowance for adaptation of a computer program. 117b allows the resale of those adaptations only with the authorization of the copyright owner. Pystar did not obtain apple's authorization, their behavior was infringement as a matter of law, as reflected by summary judgment.
First, it's not merely fair use (which is vaguely defined in law, and in practice defined by the courts)
actually its not that its vaguely defined so much as it is itself vague by nature. It is inherently a balance between contrary interests that must be evaluated on a case by case basis. Congress amended 117 in 1998, to its current form, setting out what are essentially fair-use exceptions. Unlike with art, however, the uses of computer programs excepted can be very narrowly defined, as they are in section a.
you can have a company like Psystar adapt it for you.
Indeed, I see no reason why you couldn't buy the computer and the OS from that same company, and have them patch it after you pay but before they ship it to you. Psystar lost apparently because they did this in the wrong order
here we agree. a business model where pystar is facilitating the end-user modifying his or her own copy of OS X seems like it should pass muster.
actually its not stupid, the car analogy is just flawed. We're talking about copyright, not strict property. Its not like adding a supercharger scoop on a car and then reselling it, its like replacing the first chapter of a book with a new and different one, then reselling it as the original That is different than selling that different first chapter as 'hey this makes the book way better, read it first'
by altering copyrighted code, pystar has created a derivative work, and the right of the copyright owner to distribute derivative works is not affected by fair use. Given that modification of software if it is necessary in order to use it is fair use for a non-distributing end-user, it may be that some future hackintosh business can exist if it merely facilitates the end-user making the modifications themselves.
No. 'necessary step' has only been applied to cases where, for example, a corporation commissions a computer system from a consultant as a work for hire, then has a falling out with the consultant. The consultant later brought suit against the corporation when they hired someone else to continue modifying the source code, to fix bugs and to make it compatible with the next iteration of windows. That is what the exception is for. So if you had yourself modified OS X to run on non-apple hardware and apple then sued your for copyright infringement, you would be able to rely on 117(a)1.
This is not what is happening with Pystar. Pystar is creating a new work, modifying Apple's copyrighted code, and distributing it without their permission. To be clear, 117(a) is concerned with the making of additional copies by the owner of a copy, 117(b) is concerned with transfer of these copies. copies of copies may only be transferred with the original copy, as a part of the original owner transferring all of his ownership of that copy. Modified copies may not be transferred except with the permission of the copyright owner, in this case, Apple. On this point, Pystar's only defense is arguing that what they do to OS X isnt actually a modification, which they made in their response to motion for summary judgment. It strikes me a ludicrous to compare tinkering with the inner workings of the OS and how it boots to swapping out internet browsers. One is clearly part of the internal workings of the OS, the other is an end-user applications running on the OS. I think it likely that infringement will be found as a matter of law on summary judgement.
you don't really understand the law at issue here. sale/license is irrelevant. If you recall the recent AutoCAD case in Washington, the courts have found the sale of a copy to be a SALE. Though in that case Autodesk was found to be under no requirement to honor a transfer of license, which would be required to receive updates to the transferred copy.
This is not a question of direct transfer of a copy though. Pystar modifies OS X in order to make it run on its hardware. you say this is allowable under the 'necessary step' exception. It is not. The courts have allowed modification under 'necessary step' for correcting bugs, and for ensuring a piece of software will work on upgraded systems. 17 USC 117 (b) however, prohibits the transfer of such modified copies without the authorization of the copyright owner. This is designed to preserve the copyright holder's right to produce derivative works. what pystar is doing is analogous to buying copies of a book, unbinding it, replacing the first chapter with one they wrote, rebinding it, then selling it as the original work. Apple has not authorized Pystar to transfer the modified copies of OS X, therefore 17 USC 117 is not a defense.
subsection (b) right below that, however, states that 'adaptations' may not be transferred without the copyright holder's permission. As Pystar must modify OS X before it will work on their hardware, transferring (selling) the 'copy' it associates with any given machine against apple's wishes is not eligible for section 117 protection. This protects Apple's exclusive right to create derivative works of its copyrighted OS X code.
the kind of memory used is discussed in the case law defining copy for the purposes evaluating software under copyright law. obviously, unlike a book, software is copied from some manner of ROM to some manner of RAM to be used. As this is an essential step in the proper use of software it is not, as a matter of law, considered an unauthorized copying when in the course of legal use of software.
The basic argument in the case really isnt about the number of copies made. It strikes me as silly for apple to have even mentioned this, and from the linked article it is quite clear that this was taken somewhat out of context. The real technological issue as i read it is whether Pystar is modifying OS X or simply adding applications that allow it to be loaded. Pystar likens tinkering with the bootloader to adding Firefox or Word in place of Safari or TextEdit. It seems to me that code that determines how the OS is loaded is more properly classified as a part of the OS than a mere application. It is this modification of copyrighted code, not the copying of the modified OS X into RAM, that creates the unauthorized derivative work. From there, selling this modified OS X violates apple's right to create derivatives of its copyrighted work. the summary really takes 'unauthorized copy' out of context. copy of unauthorized derivative work is more accurate. If the version of OS X Pystar sells is found to be a derivative work rather than a pure copy, the "we purchase one copy of OS X per computer we sell, so it is all legitimate' defense falls flat.
So in this case, though i'm personally of the opinion that software is property not service, i'm more persuaded by apple's argument. Pystar is altering some of apple's code and then shipping it as if it is simply reselling it.
apple hardware owners are authorized to make the RAM copy both by the license agreement with apple and explicitly by copyright law. The key point you're missing is that if the copy on the hard drive is authorized, the RAM copy is also. If the hard drive copy is UNauthorized, the RAM copy is also.
setting aside for a moment the fact that "we'd like faster internet" and "we love oppressing minorities" are apples and oranges, please show your work. specifically, i'd like to know what rules and laws prohibit a local government from providing a service that private industry has refused to roll out. I think you're thinking of 'unreasonable' government competition. hint: if the private sector has refused to provide a service, the government isnt competing by providing it.
yeah, the whole 'access model' can just fuck right off.
i have a netflix subscription for things i only want access to. Some movies are, i have decided, awesome enough to have on hand at all times. Those I will OWN. If the possible of ownership is denied me, i will infringe. If they seriously think making it more of a hassle/expensive to acquire their content will encourage people to do so legally, they are too deluded to be in the movie business. Go be a patent troll or something, then you wouldn't even have to bother creating content...
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yeah, better is a subjective term. in my subjective experience, I've never encountered an app incompatibility, so the whole 'android is fragmented' hue and cry has always struck me as odd. But I have an evo, which to my understanding is one of the better-updated non-nexus android phones, so, i guess that would make sense. As far as stats and whatnot go, i've recently been stuck between screen size and battery life. I know iphone 4s has a much technically better display, but i cant help thinking, when i use a friend's, that it just seems like a toy, being comparatively so small. It is actually hard to use after a year and a half with so much more real estate. At the same time, I'm getting sick of the paltry battery life. really really sick of it. If the iphone 5 has a reasonably sized screen I'll switch in a heartbeat.
an online service still in beta proves unreliable, asshats ascribe intent to the service's provider. in other news, sun still rising in east, setting in west. film at 11.
...and a thrown chair under every tree...
Actually copyright is exempted from sovereign immunity. So the case would be evaluated on fair use principles which is basically a big balancing test to determine if the use was only enough to satisfy legitimate goals. So if the E-Reserve system in question was making whole books available for a 10 page reading assignment, which students were then printing off and sharing with friends, or worse, reselling, the publishers might have a case. Without the school making a profit off the reserves, and so long as the reserves were only enough as was required for classes, seems like a tough case to make, however.
OMG ITS NOT THE SAME RESOLUTION AS THE RETINA IF YOU HOLD IT FAR ENOUGH AWAY FROM YOUR EYE APPLE IS FULL OF LIARRRRRRS!!!!!1.
i really do not understand this shit. 'apple develops fanciful name for technology.' NOTHING TO SEE HERE MOVE ALONG. So Apple has a silly name for something. who fucking cares? the silly-named tech is better than the android phone 'equivalent.' care to rip on it for being even lower res than iphone4?
They charge what the market will bear. Just because the market is comprised of idiots who dont understand how badly they're being ripped off doesnt mean that the inkjet companies are colluding. people selling goods often charge a lower per-unit price for larger quantities and amounts. Its real. go to the supermarket and check out the price per ounce labels on different sizes of canned goods or ketchup. That the 'oh ink tech is super expensive' explanation is patently bullshit is enough. bullshit price-fixing conspiracy-theories are totally unnecessary.
well, none of this matters without a Bambleweeny 57 Sub-Meson Brain.
you say you've looked into it for yourself. well, congratulations. maybe you should also consider the possibility that you don't actually understand a fucking thing about climatology. The only thing reputable science doesnt agree on is the timescale of global warming, so hey, maybe you won't live to be proved a moron.
no, the phone was in a case that made it look, at first glance, like it was a 3g/3gs. But it wouldnt boot, and had noticeably different buttons on the side, and a flash on the back. with all the proper holes cut in the case. If i found a phone and couldn't get it to boot to find out whose it was, try to get it back to them, i'd definitely start looking at it more closely, and i'd certainly notice an iphone with a flash. and then take the case off, and then, wow, that's not an iphone i've seen. This would happen in maybe, what, 5 minutes? Clearly, the finder was a tool, and once he discovered what he had he started trying to shop it after making a perfunctory pass at returning it to apple.
I'm not entirely sure why 'contact HTC/Apple' is reduced to 'call nameless drone in a call center and decide that's good' in your mind. to be honest, i'd be operating more on a 'get as far away from the unreleased apple hardware as possible' strategy (once i'd satisfied my own curiosity at least). Apple isnt nice about leaks. I prob would have gone to nearest apple store, asked to speak to the most senior manager in private, said 'ok, i'm sure you're not cleared for this either, but here,' shoved it at him, and been rid of it. And legally, there are fairly well established rules for determining whether or not an employee can be determined to be speaking on behalf of the corporation, when determining agency. I dont think even the general manager of an apple store would fit that bill, but he or she would likely have the ability to get someone who did on the phone with little fuss.
um... yes. If i found an HTC Evo, on the ground in a bar, i would contact HTC. Even playing along with the idiotic assumption that a pre-release tester device would belong to the individual engineer or tester, this is still the most expedient means of returning it to its owner. As a pre-release device, the manufacturer would be remiss if they couldn't track down exactly who had had possession of it last. And no tester will be given ownership of a pre-release device. that's just silly. Maybe, MAYBE, members of the board might be outright given units from the first production run. But no major company, and certainly not apple, who as was posted on here the other day, fired an employee for showing Woz, in good-faith, mind you, the 3g ipad before he was supposed to, no major company would transfer ownership of a tester device. because the owner of a chattel can do whatever the fuck he pleases with it. why would apple, HTC or any other company do that?
"seems to have outlawed parodies" is a little harsh. decided to err on the side of taking down parodies not likely to stand up to suit under a fair use defense, sure. the downfall vids would likely not be able to muster a strong fair use defense, as their commentary was not about The Downfall, but usually either in comparing some other social figure or movement to hitler, or making fun of hitler. legally a parody must be in some way a parody of the original, not just the ideas. Artistically, i think this is really stupid, but its how the courts have been interpreting the law.
Well, yeah, but its way funner to rant about how google is evil and ignoring fair use without understanding what is and is not fair use.
2) With all due respect, you're probably knee-jerking anyway. From my experience working in usability, when people say phrases like "nearly unbearable" without any solid reasons to dislike it, they're just reacting out of habit. People hate change. But that says nothing about the quality of the product.
haha, there *may* have been some hyperbole in there. ok, there obviously was. mainly its a sort of low level feeling that i'm being disrespected. At the atlas-buddies' urging, i used bing for a week, and just got sick of having to bully it into giving me what i wanted every time. the tendency of bing to give precedence to links selling me things rather than informing me about things got old.
I'm well aware that i'm not exactly in the majority with the paid search click-through and i wholly understand that it facilitates my preferred search engine's existence. I dont watch commercials on tv, either. shrug.
Yeah, I think part of my problem with this is the blending of the paid search and user experience arguments. I've got a couple buddies at atlas who can go on about attribution for longer than is really credible, but dont seem to understand my 'but the actual search experience on bing is nearly unbearable to me' response. I know (from getting almost immediately lost when they get into the behind the scenes workings of it on their end) that the intricacies of paid search are more complicated than i really have a handle on. However:
I rarely if ever click on a paid link, and cannot think of any instance off the top of my head where a paid link looked more appropriate than one of the top organic search results. I occasionally see a word or two in a paid link that might have improved original search - so i refine my search.
Search is a very strange business to be in. the user and the customer aren't the same person. I will use which ever search engine gives me the best results, not which ever one has the least sleazy billing method for paid links. Really, it strikes me that Search is itself a sleazy business, insofar as it necessarily can only make money by enticing the user to click not on the result it deems to be the most relevant to the user's search criteria, but rather to the result that has paid to be displayed in conjunction with the user's search criteria.
I love my buddies at Atlas dearly, but I'm not their customer, and as such, that they provide better service and value to their customers than google really couldnt concern me less. I find Bing's search engine inferior.
They can also inflate their inventory's value by taking advantage of the fact that the majority of people use their search engine like a URL bar.
Is this google's business model, or is the the general public being stupid with browsers, and in what way is this unique to Google? What about bing will make my internet illiterate (i still can't convince him that he doesnt need to double-click links) father decide that, unlike the google search pane in firefox, the bing search pane in IE isn't for entering urls?
nothing. obviously. and as Bing corners the market on people not internet skilled enough to know better, i have a feeling that this particular behavior will tend to skew toward it over Google.
This seems to me to be the key issue here: do you know how to search for what you want, or do you not? Do you want a decision engine or a search engine? I'm actually sort of surprised that more hasnt been made of the 'decision engine' business. Microsoft seems pretty up front about their 'we're making this search engine for people who either dont know how or are too lazy to properly seek out the information they want' strategy. And in a way, i actually support this. I was back home over christmas, helpin dad with some internets, and watching him fail to use google properly was really quite painful. he should be using bing. However, I, too, will continue using the search engine that both works and respects my intelligence.
No, Psystar didn't claim that they were shipping computers with unmodified copies of OS X. They were up-front about the fact that they were adapting OS X to run on the machines they sold.
actually, yes, they did. read their answer on groklaw. they liken what they did to swapping internet browsers, something clearly not part of the core copyrighted work. they explicitly deny that their modification was of apple's copyrighted work, or at least that if they are guilty than so is mozilla and any other company writing 3rd party software that replaces functionality bundled with the operating system.
The right to distribute this particular type of derivative work -- an adaptation made to run OS X on a particular machine -- is affected by 17 USC 117. (Fair use is irrelevant to this case.)
It is affected, but not permitted, by 117. 117a(1) provides for the essential step allowance for adaptation of a computer program. 117b allows the resale of those adaptations only with the authorization of the copyright owner. Pystar did not obtain apple's authorization, their behavior was infringement as a matter of law, as reflected by summary judgment.
First, it's not merely fair use (which is vaguely defined in law, and in practice defined by the courts)
actually its not that its vaguely defined so much as it is itself vague by nature. It is inherently a balance between contrary interests that must be evaluated on a case by case basis. Congress amended 117 in 1998, to its current form, setting out what are essentially fair-use exceptions. Unlike with art, however, the uses of computer programs excepted can be very narrowly defined, as they are in section a.
you can have a company like Psystar adapt it for you. Indeed, I see no reason why you couldn't buy the computer and the OS from that same company, and have them patch it after you pay but before they ship it to you. Psystar lost apparently because they did this in the wrong order
here we agree. a business model where pystar is facilitating the end-user modifying his or her own copy of OS X seems like it should pass muster.
by altering copyrighted code, pystar has created a derivative work, and the right of the copyright owner to distribute derivative works is not affected by fair use. Given that modification of software if it is necessary in order to use it is fair use for a non-distributing end-user, it may be that some future hackintosh business can exist if it merely facilitates the end-user making the modifications themselves.
This is not what is happening with Pystar. Pystar is creating a new work, modifying Apple's copyrighted code, and distributing it without their permission. To be clear, 117(a) is concerned with the making of additional copies by the owner of a copy, 117(b) is concerned with transfer of these copies. copies of copies may only be transferred with the original copy, as a part of the original owner transferring all of his ownership of that copy. Modified copies may not be transferred except with the permission of the copyright owner, in this case, Apple. On this point, Pystar's only defense is arguing that what they do to OS X isnt actually a modification, which they made in their response to motion for summary judgment. It strikes me a ludicrous to compare tinkering with the inner workings of the OS and how it boots to swapping out internet browsers. One is clearly part of the internal workings of the OS, the other is an end-user applications running on the OS. I think it likely that infringement will be found as a matter of law on summary judgement.
This is not a question of direct transfer of a copy though. Pystar modifies OS X in order to make it run on its hardware. you say this is allowable under the 'necessary step' exception. It is not. The courts have allowed modification under 'necessary step' for correcting bugs, and for ensuring a piece of software will work on upgraded systems. 17 USC 117 (b) however, prohibits the transfer of such modified copies without the authorization of the copyright owner. This is designed to preserve the copyright holder's right to produce derivative works. what pystar is doing is analogous to buying copies of a book, unbinding it, replacing the first chapter with one they wrote, rebinding it, then selling it as the original work. Apple has not authorized Pystar to transfer the modified copies of OS X, therefore 17 USC 117 is not a defense.
subsection (b) right below that, however, states that 'adaptations' may not be transferred without the copyright holder's permission. As Pystar must modify OS X before it will work on their hardware, transferring (selling) the 'copy' it associates with any given machine against apple's wishes is not eligible for section 117 protection. This protects Apple's exclusive right to create derivative works of its copyrighted OS X code.
the kind of memory used is discussed in the case law defining copy for the purposes evaluating software under copyright law. obviously, unlike a book, software is copied from some manner of ROM to some manner of RAM to be used. As this is an essential step in the proper use of software it is not, as a matter of law, considered an unauthorized copying when in the course of legal use of software.
The basic argument in the case really isnt about the number of copies made. It strikes me as silly for apple to have even mentioned this, and from the linked article it is quite clear that this was taken somewhat out of context. The real technological issue as i read it is whether Pystar is modifying OS X or simply adding applications that allow it to be loaded. Pystar likens tinkering with the bootloader to adding Firefox or Word in place of Safari or TextEdit. It seems to me that code that determines how the OS is loaded is more properly classified as a part of the OS than a mere application. It is this modification of copyrighted code, not the copying of the modified OS X into RAM, that creates the unauthorized derivative work. From there, selling this modified OS X violates apple's right to create derivatives of its copyrighted work. the summary really takes 'unauthorized copy' out of context. copy of unauthorized derivative work is more accurate. If the version of OS X Pystar sells is found to be a derivative work rather than a pure copy, the "we purchase one copy of OS X per computer we sell, so it is all legitimate' defense falls flat.
So in this case, though i'm personally of the opinion that software is property not service, i'm more persuaded by apple's argument. Pystar is altering some of apple's code and then shipping it as if it is simply reselling it.
apple hardware owners are authorized to make the RAM copy both by the license agreement with apple and explicitly by copyright law. The key point you're missing is that if the copy on the hard drive is authorized, the RAM copy is also. If the hard drive copy is UNauthorized, the RAM copy is also.
setting aside for a moment the fact that "we'd like faster internet" and "we love oppressing minorities" are apples and oranges, please show your work. specifically, i'd like to know what rules and laws prohibit a local government from providing a service that private industry has refused to roll out. I think you're thinking of 'unreasonable' government competition. hint: if the private sector has refused to provide a service, the government isnt competing by providing it.
yeah, the whole 'access model' can just fuck right off. i have a netflix subscription for things i only want access to. Some movies are, i have decided, awesome enough to have on hand at all times. Those I will OWN. If the possible of ownership is denied me, i will infringe. If they seriously think making it more of a hassle/expensive to acquire their content will encourage people to do so legally, they are too deluded to be in the movie business. Go be a patent troll or something, then you wouldn't even have to bother creating content...