Yes, you're right, the FAT patents have been issued, they are just being reexamined. But I think they issued pretty recently.
But this situation isn't new; we had the same thing with GIF. Did RedHat even get sued? Did lots of users get sued? Did the web suddenly become UNISYS proprietary? And what would the damages be to Microsoft? This just doesn't seem like a big deal to worry about, at least not yet.
Almost certainly not (at least in the US). There is no patent yet, so there is no legal basis on which Microsoft can demand license fees right now. And if RedHat stops using FAT should a patent issue, then they have never infringed a patent, Microsoft has no basis for taking them to court, and they can't recover anything.
You can get X11 servers that are a few hundred K total of code, and require less than a megabyte to run. For several years, I was working on a UNIX-based PC with an X11 desktop on a 33MHz machine with 4Mbytes of RAM.
Your desktop X11 server may be big and slow in comparison, but that's because you permit it to grow that large, because current desktops cache lots of bitmaps in the server, and because the XFree86 implementation of it isn't all that great. And if you look at the size and speed of XP and Quartz, you'll see that even XFree86 is pretty good in comparison. The biggest culprit in poor GUI performance (and Linux GUIs can be sluggish, though no more so than Windows and Mac) are Gnome and KDE.
I'm sure that you could create a display server optimised for applications running locally on a desktop machine with a single monitor {most people's configuration} and it probably would be less resource-intensive.
All three major desktop window systems (XP, X11, Quartz) these days have a client/server architecture. X11, like all the others, supports local IPC mechanisms and shared memory on local machines.
All of them can, in principle, be remoted. The thing that makes X11 "network transparent" is that it has standards for how to actually do that; if you try to remote a Windows app in the same way you might remote an X11 app, all sorts of things stop working correctly (unfortunately, this is a misfeature that both Gnome and KDE have started to copy).
You can break network transparency, but it won't make your window system any faster or any less bloated.
Isn't Oracle afraid that it could catch the GPL bug? One wrong key and they will have to open their entire empire of code to everyone.
First of all, the bought InnoDB, so they can do with it whatever they like; the GPL only applies to other people.
Second, if Oracle shipped binaries that include GPL licensed code, they may be liable for hundreds of millions of dollars of damages and they must remove the code, but putting their code under the GPL is neither necessary nor sufficient to resolve the situation after they have violated the GPL.
The Windows features are popular precisely because they are superior. [...] MS Office features, for example, did not become popular just for the sake of popularity. Instead, they were superior and beat out Lotus 1-2-3, Wordperfect, etc.
You've gotta be kidding. Microsoft killed those other packages through bundling, tying, and proprietary formats. We simply don't know what preferences users have because users have not had a realistic choice in a long time.
Younger people may not realize it but the standardization of the Office toolbar across all applications was a HUGE feature.
And younger people like you apparently think that when Microsoft fixes something that Microsoft messed up in the first place, that constitutes "innovation".
I was being sarcastic. Of course, that's the law in Britain. It just happens to be a bad law.
I suggest a simple principle: nothing you can type by hand into the location field in your web browser should ever constitute "hacking" or a "computer crime"; the duty for protecting their sites that much should be with web site creators.
There has been concern that if the FAT patents are upheld, Microsoft may claim that Linux infringes on Microsoft technology and will seek a royalty. Any monetary compensation could threaten the operating system, which under GPL terms may not be distributed if it contains patented technology that requires royalty payments.
That's pure FUD. Even if Microsoft's preposterous claims were upheld, the FAT file system would simply be removed immediately from the default kernel installation and the Linux kernel distribution would continue unchanged otherwise. Anybody who needed FAT access would have a variety of short-term workarounds available, and in the long term, there would be some non-infringing implementation, at least for reading the format.
Painful though this would be in the short term, I would consider it a good thing in the long term: FAT really deserves to be shot and killed, and Microsoft patent claims on it are just the thing to do it.
Microsoft has cross-licensing agreements with many of the major players in the software industry. Minor players can be coerced by Microsoft to license whatever patents Microsoft wants because any small software company likely violates many of Microsoft's patents and can be shut down by the mere threat of a Microsoft lawsuit. The only people who can claim infringement against Microsoft are patent lawyers and IP firms with no product, and there aren't enough of those around.
Open source probably comes out best in this regard. Open source projects generally don't infringe deliberately and have licenses that expressly prohibit the use of patented technologies. They also usually have no direct revenue stream against which to assess damages. Except in really unusual circumstances, a FOSS project will just fix infringement upon notification and go on as if nothing has happened. Hopes by Microsoft to be able to shut down or significantly affect FOSS projects through patents are a pipe dream.
Microsoft may eventually lose interest in patents because they are only effective tools against smaller competitors and there aren't a lot of those around anymore, but I doubt Microsoft will ever actively oppose patents.
Hmm... so how is what HBO are doing any different from say you preventing a burgular from nicking yout television ?
Well, that may be a reasonable analogy, since you are actually not permitted to take arbitrary actions to prevent a burglar from "nicking your television".
HBO are basically going "Hey! People are stealing our stuff!", and then setting about making sure that what they steal becomes as junky as possible.
Again, there are limits. You may not booby-trap your television with the intent of injuring a burglar.
They could of course just send the lawyers and/or police around...
They're advertising that you can download data from them.
That "advertising" involves knowingly injecting faulty data into an existing peer network for the express purpose of interfering with its intended operation, and that constitutes computer tampering.
One can argue about whether that kind of computer tampering is justifiable (I don't think it is), but that doesn't change the facts that it is, a priori, computer tampering.
By analogy, you can argue about whether killing another human being is murder or self-defense, but it is always homicide.
Yet we're apparently quite comfortable around here with individuals who do exactly the same thing.
Doing exactly what thing? And who is "we"?
Rome is a current show and would have been protected under even the most limited copyright acts of the past.
Copyrighted, yes. But that doesn't automatically make sharing it on-line illegal.
Or is your point that they've pushed the system to the point of declaring war on consumers [...] and now "all's fair"
I certainly have sympathy for that point of view. One can make a good argument that the people want file sharing and would get it if law making lived up to its democratic ideals. Yet, companies dominate the discussion and the political process in this area.
for individuals to lay waste to the entertainment cartels by any means necessary?
On-line file sharing would be a lousy way of doing it, because it probably actually helps those companies get exposure.
I actually wish that entertainment companies stopped being so stupid and finally managed to protect their content. Then, open content would finally have the opportunity to lay waste to them.
Then I guess you should call the feds and complain to them that HBO is interfering with your ability to infringe upon HBO's copyright. Let me know how that works out for you.
<sarcasm>Ah, yes, because legality and morality is, as we all know, determined by what the Feds decide to prosecute, right?</sarcasm>
So you're saying lying to the police shouldn't be considered a crime?
In general, no. Lying to the police should only be a crime in well-defined circumstances. It may however be considered evidence that someone knew their behavior was wrong.
No sane business operator enters a contract in which one party has the right to disregard its terms at will,
Contracts frequently contain terms that are unenforceable because some law makes them unenforceable. For example, many employment contracts contain unenforceable non-compete agreements. Unenforceable terms of a contract can, of course, be disregarded at will. Businesses that don't want their customers to disregard contractual terms should simply avoid putting unenforceable terms into their contracts.
If HR-1201 becomes law, every consumer could legally hack any TPM by claiming fair use, and as fair use isn't codified, there would be as many definitions of it as there are consumers
Quite right: that's the way copyright is supposed to work. Works that attempt to restrict fair use provisions, contractually or by technical means, shouldn't even receive copyright protection at all; it's an accident of recent history that they do, and it is about time that we correct that.
Copyright is a social contract, and companies attempting to restrict fair use provisions are not holding up their part of the bargain.
A "right" does not give you a privilege of being catered to.
At issue is not that HBO fails to make their shows available for download themselves, at issue is that HBO actively interferes with the legitimate operation of a network service, a service that happens to distribute their shows and that is (apparently) legal in Sweden.
So because it's arguable that it's legal in one country, they should therefore let it happen anywhere in the world?
HBO's actions interfere with the operation of other people's network services. That's a computer crime, no matter what the motivation or purpose of that interference is. And the fact that it may interfere with legitimate file sharing in other nations only makes it worse.
We live in a nation of laws, and under our laws, victims of crimes cannot appoint themselves to be jury and executioner, no matter what the crime and no matter how careful they are about it.
No kidding... it's hard for some people to even consider the fact that HBO IS IN THE RIGHT!
The issue is not whether HBO is (formally) in the right--they probably are. The issue is that whether HBO is in the right, as well as the remedies, are a matter for a court of law to determine. We don't want a world in which companies decide for themselves whether they are in the right and then decide for themselves how to enforce the rights they themselves have determined they have.
I'm getting soooo sick of this sense of self-entitlement... "give me everything for free" attitude.
Many companies have that attitude, and they have the lobbying power to get their free handouts. Laws like the DMCA and the Sonny Bono Copyright Extension Act are such an egregious violation of the fundamental social contract behind copyright laws that, ethically, these companies don't have a leg to stand on as far as I'm concerned.
What HBO is doing is what every business should be doing instead of taking the RIAA's route.
That's called "vigilante justice", and there are laws against it. Maybe HBO's particular denial of service attack on BitTorrent is both harmless and specific in this case, but the next attempt at vigilante justice may end up shutting down the OpenSuSE distribution as a side effect.
HBO's actions amount to computer hacking and denial of service, and they should be treated as such by the legal system. On the other hand, if HBO wishes to claim copyright infringement, they should bring legal cases; nobody other than a court of law can determine whether copyright infringement has taken place.
No matter whether HBO's reasons are legitimate, they are actually just executing a simple denial of service attack on BitTorrent, one that can be handled by blocking a range of IP adddresses. As long as people need to do that manually, it will keep many people from downloading, but this particular attack is easy to detect and prevent automatically.
Cleartype is just a small Microsoft variation on an old idea, a variation that Microsoft claims makes slightly better tradeoffs between color and intensity. I doubt you'd even be able to notice the difference.
That's why Macintosh and Linux both have subpixel antialiasing, they just happen not to have Microsoft's patented variation of it.
Open source developers don't usually copy Windows features because they think they are good, they copy them in order to make it easer for Windows users to switch. OpenOffice, for example, could be a much better office suite if it weren't constrained by the shitty Microsoft application it is trying to replace.
And many of the features you may think of as open source copying from Windows weren't actually invented at Microsoft at all--a Microsoft product is simply the first time you happen to have seen them.
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Yes, you're right, the FAT patents have been issued, they are just being reexamined. But I think they issued pretty recently.
But this situation isn't new; we had the same thing with GIF. Did RedHat even get sued? Did lots of users get sued? Did the web suddenly become UNISYS proprietary? And what would the damages be to Microsoft? This just doesn't seem like a big deal to worry about, at least not yet.
Almost certainly not (at least in the US). There is no patent yet, so there is no legal basis on which Microsoft can demand license fees right now. And if RedHat stops using FAT should a patent issue, then they have never infringed a patent, Microsoft has no basis for taking them to court, and they can't recover anything.
Unfortunately, you still can't by Mac hardware without an OS.
Furthermore, YDL does not support even all built-in hardware because Apple keeps some stuff secret.
Hopefully, things will get better with the x86-based Macs: selling those in a choice of OSX, Windows, Linux, and empty would make sense.
What eats resources is the X11 windowing system.
You can get X11 servers that are a few hundred K total of code, and require less than a megabyte to run. For several years, I was working on a UNIX-based PC with an X11 desktop on a 33MHz machine with 4Mbytes of RAM.
Your desktop X11 server may be big and slow in comparison, but that's because you permit it to grow that large, because current desktops cache lots of bitmaps in the server, and because the XFree86 implementation of it isn't all that great. And if you look at the size and speed of XP and Quartz, you'll see that even XFree86 is pretty good in comparison. The biggest culprit in poor GUI performance (and Linux GUIs can be sluggish, though no more so than Windows and Mac) are Gnome and KDE.
I'm sure that you could create a display server optimised for applications running locally on a desktop machine with a single monitor {most people's configuration} and it probably would be less resource-intensive.
All three major desktop window systems (XP, X11, Quartz) these days have a client/server architecture. X11, like all the others, supports local IPC mechanisms and shared memory on local machines.
All of them can, in principle, be remoted. The thing that makes X11 "network transparent" is that it has standards for how to actually do that; if you try to remote a Windows app in the same way you might remote an X11 app, all sorts of things stop working correctly (unfortunately, this is a misfeature that both Gnome and KDE have started to copy).
You can break network transparency, but it won't make your window system any faster or any less bloated.
Isn't Oracle afraid that it could catch the GPL bug? One wrong key and they will have to open their entire empire of code to everyone.
First of all, the bought InnoDB, so they can do with it whatever they like; the GPL only applies to other people.
Second, if Oracle shipped binaries that include GPL licensed code, they may be liable for hundreds of millions of dollars of damages and they must remove the code, but putting their code under the GPL is neither necessary nor sufficient to resolve the situation after they have violated the GPL.
The Windows features are popular precisely because they are superior. [...] MS Office features, for example, did not become popular just for the sake of popularity. Instead, they were superior and beat out Lotus 1-2-3, Wordperfect, etc.
You've gotta be kidding. Microsoft killed those other packages through bundling, tying, and proprietary formats. We simply don't know what preferences users have because users have not had a realistic choice in a long time.
Younger people may not realize it but the standardization of the Office toolbar across all applications was a HUGE feature.
And younger people like you apparently think that when Microsoft fixes something that Microsoft messed up in the first place, that constitutes "innovation".
I was being sarcastic. Of course, that's the law in Britain. It just happens to be a bad law.
I suggest a simple principle: nothing you can type by hand into the location field in your web browser should ever constitute "hacking" or a "computer crime"; the duty for protecting their sites that much should be with web site creators.
The government can put stems in their recreational smoking products, HBO may not. If you don't understand the difference, you shouldn't be voting.
There has been concern that if the FAT patents are upheld, Microsoft may claim that Linux infringes on Microsoft technology and will seek a royalty. Any monetary compensation could threaten the operating system, which under GPL terms may not be distributed if it contains patented technology that requires royalty payments.
That's pure FUD. Even if Microsoft's preposterous claims were upheld, the FAT file system would simply be removed immediately from the default kernel installation and the Linux kernel distribution would continue unchanged otherwise. Anybody who needed FAT access would have a variety of short-term workarounds available, and in the long term, there would be some non-infringing implementation, at least for reading the format.
Painful though this would be in the short term, I would consider it a good thing in the long term: FAT really deserves to be shot and killed, and Microsoft patent claims on it are just the thing to do it.
Microsoft has cross-licensing agreements with many of the major players in the software industry. Minor players can be coerced by Microsoft to license whatever patents Microsoft wants because any small software company likely violates many of Microsoft's patents and can be shut down by the mere threat of a Microsoft lawsuit. The only people who can claim infringement against Microsoft are patent lawyers and IP firms with no product, and there aren't enough of those around.
Open source probably comes out best in this regard. Open source projects generally don't infringe deliberately and have licenses that expressly prohibit the use of patented technologies. They also usually have no direct revenue stream against which to assess damages. Except in really unusual circumstances, a FOSS project will just fix infringement upon notification and go on as if nothing has happened. Hopes by Microsoft to be able to shut down or significantly affect FOSS projects through patents are a pipe dream.
Microsoft may eventually lose interest in patents because they are only effective tools against smaller competitors and there aren't a lot of those around anymore, but I doubt Microsoft will ever actively oppose patents.
Remember, without BT, there would be no WWW; after all, you do know that BT invented the hyperlink.
Hmm ... so how is what HBO are doing any different from say you preventing a burgular from nicking yout television ?
...
Well, that may be a reasonable analogy, since you are actually not permitted to take arbitrary actions to prevent a burglar from "nicking your television".
HBO are basically going "Hey! People are stealing our stuff!", and then setting about making sure that what they steal becomes as junky as possible.
Again, there are limits. You may not booby-trap your television with the intent of injuring a burglar.
They could of course just send the lawyers and/or police around
Yes, that is the proper thing to do.
They're advertising that you can download data from them.
That "advertising" involves knowingly injecting faulty data into an existing peer network for the express purpose of interfering with its intended operation, and that constitutes computer tampering.
One can argue about whether that kind of computer tampering is justifiable (I don't think it is), but that doesn't change the facts that it is, a priori, computer tampering.
By analogy, you can argue about whether killing another human being is murder or self-defense, but it is always homicide.
Yet we're apparently quite comfortable around here with individuals who do exactly the same thing.
Doing exactly what thing? And who is "we"?
Rome is a current show and would have been protected under even the most limited copyright acts of the past.
Copyrighted, yes. But that doesn't automatically make sharing it on-line illegal.
Or is your point that they've pushed the system to the point of declaring war on consumers [...] and now "all's fair"
I certainly have sympathy for that point of view. One can make a good argument that the people want file sharing and would get it if law making lived up to its democratic ideals. Yet, companies dominate the discussion and the political process in this area.
for individuals to lay waste to the entertainment cartels by any means necessary?
On-line file sharing would be a lousy way of doing it, because it probably actually helps those companies get exposure.
I actually wish that entertainment companies stopped being so stupid and finally managed to protect their content. Then, open content would finally have the opportunity to lay waste to them.
Then I guess you should call the feds and complain to them that HBO is interfering with your ability to infringe upon HBO's copyright. Let me know how that works out for you.
<sarcasm>Ah, yes, because legality and morality is, as we all know, determined by what the Feds decide to prosecute, right?</sarcasm>
So you're saying lying to the police shouldn't be considered a crime?
In general, no. Lying to the police should only be a crime in well-defined circumstances. It may however be considered evidence that someone knew their behavior was wrong.
So, typing "/../" at the end of a URL is now considered a cybercrime?
No sane business operator enters a contract in which one party has the right to disregard its terms at will,
Contracts frequently contain terms that are unenforceable because some law makes them unenforceable. For example, many employment contracts contain unenforceable non-compete agreements. Unenforceable terms of a contract can, of course, be disregarded at will. Businesses that don't want their customers to disregard contractual terms should simply avoid putting unenforceable terms into their contracts.
If HR-1201 becomes law, every consumer could legally hack any TPM by claiming fair use, and as fair use isn't codified, there would be as many definitions of it as there are consumers
Quite right: that's the way copyright is supposed to work. Works that attempt to restrict fair use provisions, contractually or by technical means, shouldn't even receive copyright protection at all; it's an accident of recent history that they do, and it is about time that we correct that.
Copyright is a social contract, and companies attempting to restrict fair use provisions are not holding up their part of the bargain.
A "right" does not give you a privilege of being catered to.
At issue is not that HBO fails to make their shows available for download themselves, at issue is that HBO actively interferes with the legitimate operation of a network service, a service that happens to distribute their shows and that is (apparently) legal in Sweden.
So because it's arguable that it's legal in one country, they should therefore let it happen anywhere in the world?
HBO's actions interfere with the operation of other people's network services. That's a computer crime, no matter what the motivation or purpose of that interference is. And the fact that it may interfere with legitimate file sharing in other nations only makes it worse.
We live in a nation of laws, and under our laws, victims of crimes cannot appoint themselves to be jury and executioner, no matter what the crime and no matter how careful they are about it.
No kidding... it's hard for some people to even consider the fact that HBO IS IN THE RIGHT!
The issue is not whether HBO is (formally) in the right--they probably are. The issue is that whether HBO is in the right, as well as the remedies, are a matter for a court of law to determine. We don't want a world in which companies decide for themselves whether they are in the right and then decide for themselves how to enforce the rights they themselves have determined they have.
I'm getting soooo sick of this sense of self-entitlement... "give me everything for free" attitude.
Many companies have that attitude, and they have the lobbying power to get their free handouts. Laws like the DMCA and the Sonny Bono Copyright Extension Act are such an egregious violation of the fundamental social contract behind copyright laws that, ethically, these companies don't have a leg to stand on as far as I'm concerned.
What HBO is doing is what every business should be doing instead of taking the RIAA's route.
That's called "vigilante justice", and there are laws against it. Maybe HBO's particular denial of service attack on BitTorrent is both harmless and specific in this case, but the next attempt at vigilante justice may end up shutting down the OpenSuSE distribution as a side effect.
HBO's actions amount to computer hacking and denial of service, and they should be treated as such by the legal system. On the other hand, if HBO wishes to claim copyright infringement, they should bring legal cases; nobody other than a court of law can determine whether copyright infringement has taken place.
No matter whether HBO's reasons are legitimate, they are actually just executing a simple denial of service attack on BitTorrent, one that can be handled by blocking a range of IP adddresses. As long as people need to do that manually, it will keep many people from downloading, but this particular attack is easy to detect and prevent automatically.
Cleartype is just a small Microsoft variation on an old idea, a variation that Microsoft claims makes slightly better tradeoffs between color and intensity. I doubt you'd even be able to notice the difference.
That's why Macintosh and Linux both have subpixel antialiasing, they just happen not to have Microsoft's patented variation of it.
Open source developers don't usually copy Windows features because they think they are good, they copy them in order to make it easer for Windows users to switch. OpenOffice, for example, could be a much better office suite if it weren't constrained by the shitty Microsoft application it is trying to replace.
And many of the features you may think of as open source copying from Windows weren't actually invented at Microsoft at all--a Microsoft product is simply the first time you happen to have seen them.