Well, I don't think the Judge's decision was based on Apple being bigger so much as it is really, really difficult to get a preliminary injunction. TigerDirect would have to have proven irreperable harm and an exceedingly high chance of winning the case to justify a preliminary injunction. This case could still go in TigerDirect's favor and it all rests on whether mail-order computer seller and an operating system are considered the same industry.
I actually think that Apple has a right to use the UNIX trademark the way they have. They say that their system is based on UNIX, which I think 99.9% of people will agree with - heck, even the people who own the UNIX trademark agree. Here, they want Apple to pay in order to use the trademark.
If I make a product that is based off of Linux, do I need Linus Torvalds permission to say "this is based on Linux"? No. I would need his permission to call it CoolBeansLinux because that would be creating a trademark based off his trademark, but stating informationally that it uses Linux is fine.
Did I just say cool beans?
Actually, with Microsoft it wasn't because Windows is a common English word. You can trademark common words. If you can't trademark common words, I can use "Apple" for any computer related thing I want. I can come out with my Apple Word Processor or Apple OS. Windows was a commonly used word to refer to something in computers before Microsoft used it. Apple already used the word (as well as many others) to refer to, well, windows in a computer environment. It was already a term in use in computers.
Also, the court did !!!!NOT!!!! rule that Microsoft couldn't trademark Windows. It was brought up that there might be a problem because it was already a generic computer term before Microsoft's use, but Windows is still a trademark of Microsoft. I can NOT come out with a My Name Windows.
Finally, you aren't allowed to take part of a trademark and use it. Here, Apple is taking the primary term of Tiger and removing the modifier Direct. What if I wanted to start a mail-order catalogue called TigerComputers? Should that be legal? I can tell you it isn't.
Apple's only hope here is to claim that an operating system is a different industry than mail-order computer catalogues. That claim can be made quite well and whether it is good enough will depend on who is hearing the case. Of course, the Firefox name came about because a database was close enough to a web browser. Of course, those are two pieces of software. You can debate whether Apple is in the same industry as TigerDirect, but if they are in the same industry, TigerDirect's case is air tight.
TigerDiret is a company that I would never do business with, but do you really think their case has no basis in this case? I mean, when Apple came out with Jaguar, they weren't allowed to market it as Jaguar in Brittain because of Jaguar cars. Now that case had no basis and yet Jaguar cars got their way. Here, TigerDirect uses the name "Tiger" for computer stuff. Apple is also trying to use it for computer stuff. The founder of RedHat said he'd license the trademark to Apple for free, but his trademark comes from sports, not computing.
TigerDirect has a pretty good case here. Apple is using a name they used before Apple in the same industry. Could I come out with an operating system called OS X? Apple doesn't have anything called OS X, but they do have a Mac OS X. By the same token, TigerDirect doesn't have anything named Tiger, but they do have TigerDirect. While this case might not have been good enough for an injunction, that is a far cry from saying that the case is baseless.
As a lifelong Mac user (until this Linux box which will be replaced by another Mac soon), this is one of those cases where Apple just didn't do their research. Apple didn't mean to do anything bad, but they picked a name that was already being used in their industry. It was a mistake. Apple doesn't want to fix it because they have put a lot of money into the Tiger name. It's a crappy situation for all.
My ID card is already machine readable. All drivers licenses in Massachusetts have a 2-dimentional barcode on them. I'm sure that a lot of other states have these barcodes or mag-stripes. I don't think it's going to make much of a difference in that department.
Now, if people actually start reading the information on my car with readers, that would be a huge change. I'm not too worried about this because I know when I hand someone my license that I'm handing over information. Now, if it were an RFID setup - that's SCARY! Imagine people being able to see your license without your knowledge. It's one thing to make it mandatory for me to show ID for something. It's another for someone to look at it without me handing it to them. **shudder**
Unfortunately, they aren't going to have the bandwidth. Brandeis is currently implementing a video-over-IP solution (actually the same one Dartmouth is going with too) and it requires a lot of bandwidth. The problem with doing it over WiFi is that WiFi bandwidth is per base-station not per computer. A network that can get 54Mbps can't get 54Mbps per computer. And for a video stream you are going to need a lot of bandwidth.
It makes sense to consolidate video and voice onto the data network. For example, while rooms might have phone lines, those copper wires cost a lot to maintain as they age and that means ripping up ground to fix things. Same with the coax. When you go from 3 wires that you have to keep running to 1 wire, it really reduces costs.
Oh, but the VideoFurnace software is a really crappy Java player. They claim Linux compatibility, but not really.
I understand why a record company would pay for a radio station to play their songs. The more times it is played, the more people will purchase the songs - at least that's the hope. Of course, with an iPod, you've already purchased the songs (or otherwise appropriated them in permanent form). There is no more money to be had.
I would definitely count myself amoung the lazy, but this goes way above me. I mean, swiping is just such a pain that we need to be able to pay without touching things?
On a realistic note, I'm worried about the proximity thing. Radio doesn't have nice black and white cut-offs of how close something is. I like to have a tangible, physical connection when I'm paying just for the sake of knowing when I'm paying. When I'm spending money, I like it to be a tangible experience. Of course, Visa probably likes you to think of it as abstract as possible so that you spend more.
I really like the chip and pin combination that is being introduced in Europe. You put your card in the reader and enter a pin into the keypad. Now that's security. Right now, if someone steals my card, they have to fake my signature. Easy with the little checking that goes on, but still. With this, they won't have to fake anything should they get my card (and are purchasing under $25). Why not a nice pin code to keep us secure?
First, this isn't a surprise. They announced a while back that they might not even have an X11 port of OOo version 2 for OS X. While it is kinda crappy that they are completely abandoning it, there isn't much they can do if they don't have the developers.
As for their reasoning that an X11 port is better, it is completely flawed. Firefox shows that reason 1 and 2 are bogus as it is to market at the same time on all platforms with equal stability, reason 3 is actually a draw-back that they are trying to market as a feature (gotta love the Microsoft-ian logic there), and the last one is basically a way of stating that we already have an X11 port so it means less work for us. If any of these were valid points, Windows users would be running it in Cygwin right now. They're all just a way of saying "we don't care in the slightest about your platform, but we don't want to look like we don't care." Frankly, if you don't care, that's cool. This is your work. You don't have to support Mac OS X if you don't want to. Anyone is free to come along and pick it up if they are interested. That's what is so great about free software. Just don't trip me and tell me you did it because I looked lonely and you thought I could use a hug from the ground.
More importantly, OOo just isn't that good. It's amazingly slow and ugly, uses a fileformat that takes forever to save and creates huge files, and just plain worse than the other options out there. It's why there haven't been a lot of developers flocking to it from the Mac community. Something like Adium gets developers because it is the best. It's fully native, it's fast and clean, etc. There are a lot of other OSS projects on the Mac as well that are all good projects. OOo, by comparison, seems to employ a pretty terrible codebase and interface. While it has more features than AbiWord, AbiWord is clearly a better base. When you add Mac uses tendency toward well-done software with the fact that Mac users also don't mind paying for software as much as users of other platforms (lets face it, even Windows users don't pay for software - they pirate it), it means that OOo on the Mac doesn't have as much interest.
One of the big problems is that OOo only has the "free" aspect to draw users. WordPerfect Suite and Microsoft Office are still much, much better applications - this is coming from a user whose computer only has Ubuntu on it, not some OSS hater.
I've come down pretty hard on OOo here, but as a long term Mac user and now an Ubuntu user who loves Gnome, OOo is just terrible. Now, if you want the most featured office suite available, OOo is a great option for you. For a user like myself, and most Mac users, the features of OOo don't make up for the bloat and interface. Things like AbiWord and Apple's new Pages are much more attractive options even though they do less. Hopefully, OOo will become better in the future (I've run some of the 2.0 previews and wasn't that happy). Maybe AbiWord and OOo will start to converge toward each other like mySQL and PostgreSQL. But until OOo cleans itself up a lot, there isn't going to be the interest needed to bring it to the Macintosh because of how Mac users like their applications to work.
I think the Creative Commons are great, but they're not exactly what I meant. CC is mostly about free content and not fair use of non-free content. Free content is great, but there isn't a ton of it. I think that it would be great to be able to make backup copies of DVDs and that sort of thing that the CC doesn't deal with.
When did AOL start charging for AIM? I'm using Gaim and I haven't been asked for any money. Wouldn't my account be shut down if I wasn't paying.
Also, your link didn't show up in your post. You might want to repost the petition link.
But it IS stealing. You said it wasn't stealing. Stealing is taking something from someone without permission and unless you are saying that one cannot own ideas, creative works, or anything else that isn't tangible, then you are wrong.
http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=stealin g "To take (the property of another) without right or permission." That means that, unless you don't consider songs or movies to be property, filesharing is stealing.
Not really. While Apple calls their DRM "FairPlay" it means that I can't listen to their songs on any player other than their iPod or any jukebox software other than their iTunes or any operating system that isn't Windows or the Macintosh. Fair use would let me listen to their music on Linux. Fair use would let me choose which portable player I wanted to transfer the songs to. There's a big difference there.
It is stealing. Stealing is taking the property of another without permission. While you might argue that since it isn't tangible property that it isn't quite as bad as traditional stealing, it is most definitely stealing.
Under your definition it should be legal for me to relicense the Linux kernel under a propritary license and not show anyone the changes I made to it as I distribute it.
I wouldn't dismiss it so quickly if I were Microsoft. With the code for connecting to Microsoft's exchange servers GPL'd from Novell's Evolution, that could (possibly) be integrated into Lightning and Lightning would also be free rather than part of a very expensive office suite. While Lightning isn't here yet, if it can duplicate enough of Outlook's functionality, a lot of people might switch to it to avoid the high cost and security holes. It's a much easier sell than Firefox, in my opinion, because Outlook costs money while Internet Explorer doesn't.
Well, I think that there are a lot less users who need such a kiddy pool now-a-days. The internet has become much easier to use than it used to be and users have become much better at using it. Plus, with the connection speeds that people have today, the AOL program itself has become a bottleneck rather than a speed up - the fact that the graphics for its interface were stored on your computer used to be a big gain for AOL.
I remember when Apple started charging for its.Mac stuff. Steve Jobs said that the free internet was over. Well, it seems to have rebounded. Gmail now offers 1GB of storage and everyone else seems to be going that way too. The problem is that AOL is becoming less useful. They were offering their subscribers a tiny email box and dial-up access for $24 per month. At the same time, they could get nearly identical service - often better - from others for less than half that price. Heck, you can get it from AOL for less than half the price under their Netscape brand. This has led AOL to loose, I think, 4 million subscribers recently.
AOL never came up with a good broadband strategy and they never came up with content or tools that the internet didn't match or better. Put that together and AOL just doesn't look like a good value. With this strategy, AOL is trying to correct that mistake and leverage the AOL brand to offer things on the same playing field as its competitors.
I think it's a bit of a pitty because BitTorrent has/had such potential to revolutionize how the internet worked, but in the end it just became a place for illegal file sharing.
Everyone talks about filesharing and the terrible things that the RIAA and MPAA want to do to stop it, but they act like illegal filesharing is a good thing - like it is a pious act. The EFF has kept defending it as if they have a righteous cause. Filesharing technologies do have legitimate uses. At the beginning, the EFF was telling the RIAA/etc. to go after indivivuals who were using it for illegal purposes. Now, the EFF has decided that those illegal actions need to be defended too.
I think that someone needs to create a movement around real fair use. Nothing more, nothing less. Not stealing and not totalitarian MPAA/RIAA crap. Something that would allow me to use my music in the ways that I should be able to and for a fair price without resorting to stealing. Something that the majority of people in America (and the world) could agree with.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, I don't think the Judge's decision was based on Apple being bigger so much as it is really, really difficult to get a preliminary injunction. TigerDirect would have to have proven irreperable harm and an exceedingly high chance of winning the case to justify a preliminary injunction. This case could still go in TigerDirect's favor and it all rests on whether mail-order computer seller and an operating system are considered the same industry.
I actually think that Apple has a right to use the UNIX trademark the way they have. They say that their system is based on UNIX, which I think 99.9% of people will agree with - heck, even the people who own the UNIX trademark agree. Here, they want Apple to pay in order to use the trademark. If I make a product that is based off of Linux, do I need Linus Torvalds permission to say "this is based on Linux"? No. I would need his permission to call it CoolBeansLinux because that would be creating a trademark based off his trademark, but stating informationally that it uses Linux is fine. Did I just say cool beans?
Actually, with Microsoft it wasn't because Windows is a common English word. You can trademark common words. If you can't trademark common words, I can use "Apple" for any computer related thing I want. I can come out with my Apple Word Processor or Apple OS. Windows was a commonly used word to refer to something in computers before Microsoft used it. Apple already used the word (as well as many others) to refer to, well, windows in a computer environment. It was already a term in use in computers.
Also, the court did !!!!NOT!!!! rule that Microsoft couldn't trademark Windows. It was brought up that there might be a problem because it was already a generic computer term before Microsoft's use, but Windows is still a trademark of Microsoft. I can NOT come out with a My Name Windows.
Finally, you aren't allowed to take part of a trademark and use it. Here, Apple is taking the primary term of Tiger and removing the modifier Direct. What if I wanted to start a mail-order catalogue called TigerComputers? Should that be legal? I can tell you it isn't.
Apple's only hope here is to claim that an operating system is a different industry than mail-order computer catalogues. That claim can be made quite well and whether it is good enough will depend on who is hearing the case. Of course, the Firefox name came about because a database was close enough to a web browser. Of course, those are two pieces of software. You can debate whether Apple is in the same industry as TigerDirect, but if they are in the same industry, TigerDirect's case is air tight.
TigerDiret is a company that I would never do business with, but do you really think their case has no basis in this case? I mean, when Apple came out with Jaguar, they weren't allowed to market it as Jaguar in Brittain because of Jaguar cars. Now that case had no basis and yet Jaguar cars got their way. Here, TigerDirect uses the name "Tiger" for computer stuff. Apple is also trying to use it for computer stuff. The founder of RedHat said he'd license the trademark to Apple for free, but his trademark comes from sports, not computing.
TigerDirect has a pretty good case here. Apple is using a name they used before Apple in the same industry. Could I come out with an operating system called OS X? Apple doesn't have anything called OS X, but they do have a Mac OS X. By the same token, TigerDirect doesn't have anything named Tiger, but they do have TigerDirect. While this case might not have been good enough for an injunction, that is a far cry from saying that the case is baseless.
As a lifelong Mac user (until this Linux box which will be replaced by another Mac soon), this is one of those cases where Apple just didn't do their research. Apple didn't mean to do anything bad, but they picked a name that was already being used in their industry. It was a mistake. Apple doesn't want to fix it because they have put a lot of money into the Tiger name. It's a crappy situation for all.
My ID card is already machine readable. All drivers licenses in Massachusetts have a 2-dimentional barcode on them. I'm sure that a lot of other states have these barcodes or mag-stripes. I don't think it's going to make much of a difference in that department.
Now, if people actually start reading the information on my car with readers, that would be a huge change. I'm not too worried about this because I know when I hand someone my license that I'm handing over information. Now, if it were an RFID setup - that's SCARY! Imagine people being able to see your license without your knowledge. It's one thing to make it mandatory for me to show ID for something. It's another for someone to look at it without me handing it to them. **shudder**
Unfortunately, they aren't going to have the bandwidth. Brandeis is currently implementing a video-over-IP solution (actually the same one Dartmouth is going with too) and it requires a lot of bandwidth. The problem with doing it over WiFi is that WiFi bandwidth is per base-station not per computer. A network that can get 54Mbps can't get 54Mbps per computer. And for a video stream you are going to need a lot of bandwidth.
It makes sense to consolidate video and voice onto the data network. For example, while rooms might have phone lines, those copper wires cost a lot to maintain as they age and that means ripping up ground to fix things. Same with the coax. When you go from 3 wires that you have to keep running to 1 wire, it really reduces costs.
Oh, but the VideoFurnace software is a really crappy Java player. They claim Linux compatibility, but not really.
I understand why a record company would pay for a radio station to play their songs. The more times it is played, the more people will purchase the songs - at least that's the hope. Of course, with an iPod, you've already purchased the songs (or otherwise appropriated them in permanent form). There is no more money to be had.
I would definitely count myself amoung the lazy, but this goes way above me. I mean, swiping is just such a pain that we need to be able to pay without touching things?
On a realistic note, I'm worried about the proximity thing. Radio doesn't have nice black and white cut-offs of how close something is. I like to have a tangible, physical connection when I'm paying just for the sake of knowing when I'm paying. When I'm spending money, I like it to be a tangible experience. Of course, Visa probably likes you to think of it as abstract as possible so that you spend more.
I really like the chip and pin combination that is being introduced in Europe. You put your card in the reader and enter a pin into the keypad. Now that's security. Right now, if someone steals my card, they have to fake my signature. Easy with the little checking that goes on, but still. With this, they won't have to fake anything should they get my card (and are purchasing under $25). Why not a nice pin code to keep us secure?
First, this isn't a surprise. They announced a while back that they might not even have an X11 port of OOo version 2 for OS X. While it is kinda crappy that they are completely abandoning it, there isn't much they can do if they don't have the developers.
As for their reasoning that an X11 port is better, it is completely flawed. Firefox shows that reason 1 and 2 are bogus as it is to market at the same time on all platforms with equal stability, reason 3 is actually a draw-back that they are trying to market as a feature (gotta love the Microsoft-ian logic there), and the last one is basically a way of stating that we already have an X11 port so it means less work for us. If any of these were valid points, Windows users would be running it in Cygwin right now. They're all just a way of saying "we don't care in the slightest about your platform, but we don't want to look like we don't care." Frankly, if you don't care, that's cool. This is your work. You don't have to support Mac OS X if you don't want to. Anyone is free to come along and pick it up if they are interested. That's what is so great about free software. Just don't trip me and tell me you did it because I looked lonely and you thought I could use a hug from the ground.
More importantly, OOo just isn't that good. It's amazingly slow and ugly, uses a fileformat that takes forever to save and creates huge files, and just plain worse than the other options out there. It's why there haven't been a lot of developers flocking to it from the Mac community. Something like Adium gets developers because it is the best. It's fully native, it's fast and clean, etc. There are a lot of other OSS projects on the Mac as well that are all good projects. OOo, by comparison, seems to employ a pretty terrible codebase and interface. While it has more features than AbiWord, AbiWord is clearly a better base. When you add Mac uses tendency toward well-done software with the fact that Mac users also don't mind paying for software as much as users of other platforms (lets face it, even Windows users don't pay for software - they pirate it), it means that OOo on the Mac doesn't have as much interest.
One of the big problems is that OOo only has the "free" aspect to draw users. WordPerfect Suite and Microsoft Office are still much, much better applications - this is coming from a user whose computer only has Ubuntu on it, not some OSS hater.
I've come down pretty hard on OOo here, but as a long term Mac user and now an Ubuntu user who loves Gnome, OOo is just terrible. Now, if you want the most featured office suite available, OOo is a great option for you. For a user like myself, and most Mac users, the features of OOo don't make up for the bloat and interface. Things like AbiWord and Apple's new Pages are much more attractive options even though they do less. Hopefully, OOo will become better in the future (I've run some of the 2.0 previews and wasn't that happy). Maybe AbiWord and OOo will start to converge toward each other like mySQL and PostgreSQL. But until OOo cleans itself up a lot, there isn't going to be the interest needed to bring it to the Macintosh because of how Mac users like their applications to work.
I think the Creative Commons are great, but they're not exactly what I meant. CC is mostly about free content and not fair use of non-free content. Free content is great, but there isn't a ton of it. I think that it would be great to be able to make backup copies of DVDs and that sort of thing that the CC doesn't deal with.
When did AOL start charging for AIM? I'm using Gaim and I haven't been asked for any money. Wouldn't my account be shut down if I wasn't paying. Also, your link didn't show up in your post. You might want to repost the petition link.
But it IS stealing. You said it wasn't stealing. Stealing is taking something from someone without permission and unless you are saying that one cannot own ideas, creative works, or anything else that isn't tangible, then you are wrong.
n g
http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=steali
"To take (the property of another) without right or permission." That means that, unless you don't consider songs or movies to be property, filesharing is stealing.
Not really. While Apple calls their DRM "FairPlay" it means that I can't listen to their songs on any player other than their iPod or any jukebox software other than their iTunes or any operating system that isn't Windows or the Macintosh. Fair use would let me listen to their music on Linux. Fair use would let me choose which portable player I wanted to transfer the songs to. There's a big difference there.
It is stealing. Stealing is taking the property of another without permission. While you might argue that since it isn't tangible property that it isn't quite as bad as traditional stealing, it is most definitely stealing.
Under your definition it should be legal for me to relicense the Linux kernel under a propritary license and not show anyone the changes I made to it as I distribute it.
I wouldn't dismiss it so quickly if I were Microsoft. With the code for connecting to Microsoft's exchange servers GPL'd from Novell's Evolution, that could (possibly) be integrated into Lightning and Lightning would also be free rather than part of a very expensive office suite. While Lightning isn't here yet, if it can duplicate enough of Outlook's functionality, a lot of people might switch to it to avoid the high cost and security holes. It's a much easier sell than Firefox, in my opinion, because Outlook costs money while Internet Explorer doesn't.
Worry Microsoft! WORRY!
Well, I think that there are a lot less users who need such a kiddy pool now-a-days. The internet has become much easier to use than it used to be and users have become much better at using it. Plus, with the connection speeds that people have today, the AOL program itself has become a bottleneck rather than a speed up - the fact that the graphics for its interface were stored on your computer used to be a big gain for AOL.
AOL's market just isn't there anymore.
I remember when Apple started charging for its .Mac stuff. Steve Jobs said that the free internet was over. Well, it seems to have rebounded. Gmail now offers 1GB of storage and everyone else seems to be going that way too. The problem is that AOL is becoming less useful. They were offering their subscribers a tiny email box and dial-up access for $24 per month. At the same time, they could get nearly identical service - often better - from others for less than half that price. Heck, you can get it from AOL for less than half the price under their Netscape brand. This has led AOL to loose, I think, 4 million subscribers recently.
AOL never came up with a good broadband strategy and they never came up with content or tools that the internet didn't match or better. Put that together and AOL just doesn't look like a good value. With this strategy, AOL is trying to correct that mistake and leverage the AOL brand to offer things on the same playing field as its competitors.
I think it's a bit of a pitty because BitTorrent has/had such potential to revolutionize how the internet worked, but in the end it just became a place for illegal file sharing. Everyone talks about filesharing and the terrible things that the RIAA and MPAA want to do to stop it, but they act like illegal filesharing is a good thing - like it is a pious act. The EFF has kept defending it as if they have a righteous cause. Filesharing technologies do have legitimate uses. At the beginning, the EFF was telling the RIAA/etc. to go after indivivuals who were using it for illegal purposes. Now, the EFF has decided that those illegal actions need to be defended too. I think that someone needs to create a movement around real fair use. Nothing more, nothing less. Not stealing and not totalitarian MPAA/RIAA crap. Something that would allow me to use my music in the ways that I should be able to and for a fair price without resorting to stealing. Something that the majority of people in America (and the world) could agree with.