The benefit to the patent holder is supposed to be a head start in the market by allowing them to establish name recognition and other first mover advantages, not to milk customers in a non-competitive market for near forever. When the country began, it took much longer to develop and execute a plan to enter the market. Now days, if you can't get your foothold in a year or two, you never will. If fewer companies see shorter patents worth applying for, all the better.
There isn't supposed to be any advantage for the inventor. An inventor used to be free to keep his invention secret, and milk it for all it is worth. You are absolutely free to make an invention, don't show it to anyone, and turn it into products making tons of money forever because nobody is capable of reproducing it. Patents are a bargain that the government allows you to make: You publish your invention, so that the world can learn from it and improve the state of art instead of it being away, and as exchange for that information, you get a limited monopoly.
That exchange doesn't work anymore. If you look at patent applications, what the patent applicant publishes will usually not give anything of use to the world, so giving him a limited monopoly in exchange for useless information is pointless.
What the patent examiners should really decide is: Does the publication of this patent benefit society in a sufficient way to justify giving the applicant a limited monopoly? If not, they should tell the applicant: Go away. Do with your invention whatever you like. Keep it secret, hide it away, we don't care.
The other side is that many companies refuse to pursue innovations unless they see parts that can be patented to lock in the monopoly returns. Lesser profits just aren't worth the trouble of pursing innovation as they see it these days.
You've got that completely wrong. Due to the fucked up nature of the US patent system, patents are valuable to a company. Either for blackmailing companies that produce actual value, or for preventing blackmail from competitors. There is no innovation behind them.
My company tries to get patents exactly for the reason to prevent blackmail from competitors, who have patents in the same area. That works quite fine, as long as our competitors are doing well because when they are doing well, they can't afford mutual destruction by patent lawyers. Where it goes wrong is in a case like RIMM, where they totally beat their competitor in the market place, so their competitor had no reason anymore to be afraid from RIMM's patent, and could use their own patents in an offensive way.
The reason why my company innovates is not because of patents, it is because we want to offer our customers competitive products, so that they buy ours and not our competitors, and that way we make money. We do _not_ innovate to get patents. We do, however, like everyone else, turn our innovation and also our failed innovations into legalese to get patent.
I feel quite badly for iceland, they are suffering under a significant economic downturn affected by just a few banker types.
It is too funny. One of the most common errors on internet posts is to use "effect" instead of the verb "affect". The chances of "effect" being correct as a verb are probably one in thousand. Here we have one of these very, very rare cases. An opportunity not to be missed. You missed it.
This economic downturn is effected by the bankers, not affected.
On my iMac, a clean build consisted of about two seconds disk activity, followed by eight minutes two CPUs running at hundred percent, followed by two seconds disk activity for the linker and symbol files. Probably less than two seconds.
The best MLC flash I'm aware of is only rated for a million write cycles.
The guy is worrying about updating files several times a day from CVS. If he updates ever single byte on the drive 20 times a day, a million write cycles last for 140 years.
And who says magnetic drives have an infinite number of write cycles?
Yes, it's theoretically possible that someone stole your bandwidth to download the songs that just happened to be on your computer, but that's not reasonable.
1. Since downloading music owned by the RIAA's members without paying is illegal and attracts lawsuits, it is completely reasonable to assume that whoever does it will try to cover his tracks. So the chances that the person identified is not the downloader are quite high. Like if a car with your license plate goes past a red traffic light, it's quite reasonable to assume it is your car; if a car with your license plate is used in a bank robbery then it is much less likely, because nobody would be so stupid to use their own car in a bank robbery.
2. If you have lots of music on your computers, then chances are quite good that there are matches between the music on your computer and music that an arbitrary person downloads.
Surprisingly, when the defendants hit the stand they didn't bash copyright or take a libertarian approach...
Why surprisingly? This happened in a court room. That kind of behavior in the court room will just upset the judge who will think you are a nutcase, and gets the case decided against you. Even if the judge completely agreed with you, being a copyright-bashing libertarian or whatever, he or she would apply the law as it is to judge.
The only sensible approach if you don't want to lose your case is to do exactly what the defendants did: Explain that they didn't do what they are accused of, or find reasons _within the existing law_, why they were allowed to do what they did.
Ok here is where I have an argument. The conceptual difference between "copyright infringement" and "stealing" is null. So why the obfuscation and insistence that what you are doing is not stealing. Illegal enrichment is illegal enrichment.
Fraud is not theft. Murder is not theft. Rape is not theft. Most things that are illegal are not theft. Calling copyright infringement "theft" is just stupid.
There is also the principle that the law makers know what they are talking about and that when a law says what it says that is intentional. The US law says that theft is taking something away illegally from the rightful owner to deprive him of his property (thus a policeman taking a cigarette lighter away from the rightful owner who wants to light a cigarette at a petrol station with spilled fuel is not committing theft). When the law says "to deprive the rightful owner", they mean it. If the rightful owner is not deprived of anything, it is not theft in US law. For comparison, German law says it is theft to "take something away illegally from the rightful owner to enrich yourself". Immaterial items are excluded for other reasons, but the argument that the owner is not deprived of anything would not count in German law.
It sounds like the judge is really pissed at being lied to and made a fool over the penalty he imposed, and is setting up the legal basis to say "We award the plaintiff their actual damages of $.20 for the lost profit per son in online sale. The total comes to $5.80. The defendant may pay by cash or check immediately."
I don't think she should get away that lightly. I'd order her to pay the wholesale price, times three for punishment, that is estimated 3 x 69 cents times 24 songs. or about $50, with the RIAA paying all the cost, both hers and their own, place pay the court for the wasted time. That I would consider a fair outcome.
Maybe MS could be nailed for discriminatory patent licensing if we find that, say, TomTom is the only unlicensed infringer being targeted?
There is such a thing as "patent abuse", but that would apply to the opposite situation: If MS licensed FAT32 to everyone in the world except that they refused to license it to TomTom, that could be "patent abuse". If it is true that MS has _demanded_ that TomTom should get a license for this patent, then "patent abuse" wouldn't apply here.
Tom Tom, from what I've read, has been a bad open-source citizen.
Right now, the source code for all the GPL'd software shipping on a TomTom device is available, and there are quite a few third party applications that you can download and run on a TomTom. One has been written specifically for use with the OpenStreetMap project, which allows you to record a trace of all positions visited with your TomTom and to upload this trace to the OpenStreetMap website.
And TomTom uses Ogg Vorbis to record the voices giving you directions when you drive around; that should drive any Open Source fan to ecstasy:-;
I'll be honest, I own an iPhone so I'm a bit biased here, but this Japanese P905-whatever may have every feature under the sun, but it doesn't change the fact that it looks clumsy and (I'm assuming), like all Japanese phones it has a buggy non-intuitive mess of an OS.
You have the choice of using an easy to use phone like the iPhone, or using a buggy non-intuitive mess like a Japanese phone. Your choice. One of these two choices clearly demonstrates that you are highly intelligent, the other choice demonstrates just as clearly that you are beyond stupid.
It seems that Americans and Japanese disagree which of the two choices shows that you're clever, and which one shows that you are stupid.
Japanese teen says: "I am a rocket scientist because I can use this complicated phone".
American rocket scientist says: "I am a rocket scientist, I don't have the time to waste on this complicated phone".
Justice Secretary Jack Straw's email account has been hacked by internet fraudsters who sent out messages to hundreds of his contacts which claimed he was stranded in Nigeria and needed 3,000 dollars to fly home.
I would think if a government minister was really stranded somewhere in Africa, they would contact the nearest British embassy, which would surely know their whereabouts anyway, and the embassy would get them home easily. There are dangers on the internet; this is not one of them.
If you don't hire a technical writer you will face all kinds of problems. You'll have technical people with poor English skills writing incomplete directions because they make assumptions about what the reader knows. You'll have 50 manuals with 50 different writing styles. You'll have 10 instructions in one sentence with no commas. You'll have unfortunate typos and grammatical errors which change the meaning of the sentence.
You get 90 percent of the value just by using the right attitude. And the right attitude is: If someone is given instructions, and cannot follow the instructions, then the fault is with the instructions, not the person who can't follow it. Assume that the reader of the instructions is a reasonably intelligent person who doesn't have the slightest clue what you are writing about and who is completely incapable of reading your mind. And that they will give you a call at three am in the night and get you out of bed if they can't figure out your instructions.
AES, RSA, and all the rest are published standards. Now, some companies claim that they can't reveal what kind of encryption they use or it would severely degrade their product. I'm not naming names because I have none, this is just a vague recollection. Just go with the high level idea.
I once encountered a product that protected some internal information with the RSA algorithm. The key was the product of two large prime numbers. The large prime numbers were the tenth prime number above 2^63, and the tenth prime number below 2^60. Looks like they took their large primes from Knuth's "Art of Computer Programming". I factored the product using pen and paper:-)
Subject says it all. Several fighter planes of the French air force had to be grounded because their Windows-based computers got infected by a virus.
Malware creators don't need source code to find vulnerabilities. However, knowing that your source code can be seen by the world gives a really strong incentive to write code that not only is good, but that is obviously good. Take as an example the recent Zune disaster where all Zunes had problems with the 29th of February. That bug was caused by code that was just written in a stupid way. Any experienced programmer would have known just by looking at the code from a distance that this bit of code was "asking for trouble". It looked like code that was written by someone with no understanding of the problem and modified again and again until it mostly worked. Which wasn't good enough. Open source applications avoid that kind of code, because you don't want the whole world to see that you don't know your stuff.
So you're saying that choosing the same hardware from the same hardware manufacturers that Apple chose to use in their computers and deciding to install OSX on it is illegal.
You can (probably) buy a chip that has exactly the same functionality as the SMC chip that Apple uses, except for the tiny bit inside it that contains a 64 bit code. You need that 64 bit code to run MacOS X unmodified. If you add that 64 bit code, then you are violating the DMCA. That little 64 bit code is an effective technical means to prevent you from using a copy of MacOS X. It is not _very_ effective, but it doesn't have to be. Just effective enough so that breaking this protection violates the DMCA.
"Effective" probably means that Apple has a contract in place with the manufacturer not to supply chips with the code to anyone else. I bet they've done that. If, for example, Dell could purely accidentally build a MacOS X compatible box, then Apple's case would be somehow weaker. Except that installing on such a computer is still in breach of the license, and the chip is not available to buy with Apple's little 64 bit code.
Does the GPL allow me to develop a modified version under a nondisclosure agreement?
Yes, because it is a different situation. Let's say big company X finds out about some open source software. They would like to use that software with some modifications. They want to hire you to make those changes, not tell anybody about them, and give the software only to X and nobody else. So _you_ sign the contract, take your money, download the software from Redhat, and modify it. Company X hasn't done any distributing at this point, so they can ask you to sign any contract you both agree to. You are free to accept any restrictions. You cannot restrict others, but you can accept restrictions yourself. What you can't do after you pass the modified software on to X is try to make them accept the software under any restrictions. So a contract where you give the software only to X and X is not allowed to pass it on would be a GPL violation as soon as you give the software to X.
It sounds easy, but it is actually very difficult to keep from distributing. You see, a distribution is a transfer between any two legal entities. So, for example, you hire a consultant and give him a copy of the software. Then you decide not to use the consultant any longer. He's annoyed, and he asserts his GPL rights on your entire product, and distributes it. You go to sue, and the copyright holder of the GPL piece gets involved and makes a case that you don't have the rights you think you did. Your NDA does not apply to GPL software because GPL prohibits you from adding incompatible terms.
Two questions:
1. Is it correct that a company _can_ give software licensed under the GPL to its _employees_ and tell them not to distribute it any further? And if an employee _does_ distribute it without permission, then it is not the company's problem, but the problem of the employee who can't fulfil the terms of the GPL?
2. In your example of giving a copy to an independent consultant, if this constitutes distribution, then it is distribution whether the consultant asserts their rights or not. So if you don't give him or her the software together with source code, I think anybody in the world would already be entitled to demand the source code from you. Now of course the world doesn't know that... But from a legal point of view, would it be the safest to give that consultant software + source code and hope that he or she doesn't redistribute it?
It was announced today that a German company called PearC is starting to sell their own Mac clones. They claim that, according to German law, the conditions of a EULA that users can't see before purchase cannot be enforced. Since the EULA is inside the box and users can't see it, the argument will be that the parts about not installing OS X on non-Apple hardware are void. Article at Ars Technica.
That would be a rather stupid argument, since they have opened at least one box and now they know the license. The other problem with the argument is that if you type "macosx license" or "macos x license" into google, you find a link to all of Apple's licenses right at the top of the page and if you have a business selling computers, you can be expected to do a simple check like this. (For example, in a case of GPL violation a German court ruled that a German software developer can be expected to read and understand a license written in English).
I can't imagine any German court standing for this kind of nonsense. Remember how SCO fared in Germany: In the USA, they managed to keep IBM in court for several years and cost them millions using nothing than completely groundless allegations. In Germany, they were told to shut up or show evidence. They didn't have evidence, so they received a fine every single time any of their allegations against Linux appeared on their German website.
I thought I read elsewhere here (from other commenters) that Psystar was modifying the code, including the Apple Updates. Perhaps I misunderstood, or maybe those posters were misinformed.
If let's say Dell had some engineers have a quick look at a Mac Pro, make a list of parts they can identify, and build a nice, good quality box using all the same parts, then an unmodified copy of MacOS X would be guaranteed not to work, no matter how good a job these engineers do. The reason is that one of the chips on Apple's motherboards contains a 64 bit code which is used to decrypt several important parts of the operating system. This is not particularly well hidden, and not particularly hard to circumvent.
There are three ways to get around this problem: One is to modify the OS. Instead of reading this 64 bit code from the chip (it is the same on every Macintosh), you could put the same number hardcoded into the decryption software. The other way is to add a chip with this code inside, or to change the EFI (roughly similar to BIOS) to _pretend_ that such a chip is there. If you use the second or third method, you don't need to modify the OS anymore. On the other side, that kind of thing is exactly what the DMCA act makes illegal.
Psystar is providing a service of pre-installing the OS on a machine for their users, and then effectively transferring the license agreement over to you.
Hopefully the courts will find Apple's license unconscionable and violating of natural laws.
Installing MacOS X without permission by the license is copyright infringement. So Psystar is not providing a service, they are committing copyright infringement. By doing so, the license is automatically voided, similar to the GPL license. That box they used to install MacOS X is now worthless, because it doesn't have a license anymore. There is no license left that Psystar could transfer.
And the same court that made the current decision has already stated very, very clearly that Apple is absolutely in its right as the copyright holder to license MacOS X in exactly the way it wants and no other way.
I'm sorry, but in this instance, it very much is personal computers that run OS X. The whole point of all this is because Apple want to be the only company that supplies computers with OS X preinstalled. Let me run that by you one more time. The only company that supplies computers with OS X preinstalled. If that isn't the definition of a monopoly, please do tell me what is.
The problem with your "definition" is that "computers with OS X preinstalled" is not a market.
Determining what is or is not a market can be a bit difficult, but the following can help: There are many things I would like to buy. Typically, if I buy something in one market, I still want the things from other markets, but I have less desire to buy things in the same market. I might be looking at LCD TVs and Plasma TVs. If I buy one of them, I suddenly don't have any desire for the other anymore; I conclude that LCD TVs and Plasma TVs are in the same market. But TVs and DVD players are in different markets; after buying the TV, I still want the DVD player.
Now lets at the "computers with OS X preinstalled": Someone might go to two computer shops, looking at a computer with OS X preinstalled and a computer with Windows preinstalled. After buying one of these computers, that person is suddenly much much less interested in the other computer. Conclusion: Same market. Therefore: No monopoly.
Actually, they do have a monopoly. If you buy an Mac you have to buy parts from Apple; ford mustang - I can go to an after-markets store to buy their product which was not made in a ford factory. If you want OS-X, where are you legally allowed to get that...yea...
Let's see. I have bought RAM for several Macs I owned, and it was never from Apple. I bought hard drives for most Macs I owned, and they were never from Apple. I bought a replacement battery and charger for my MacBook; I didn't buy them from Apple (strangely enough, they both have "Apple" printed on them...). I bought a USB card, two new fans, a monitor, and they were all not from Apple. I could install alternative operating systems, and they wouldn't be from Apple but probably from Redhat or Novell or Microsoft.
So where do you see Apple having a monopoly again?
Slashdot Mirror
The benefit to the patent holder is supposed to be a head start in the market by allowing them to establish name recognition and other first mover advantages, not to milk customers in a non-competitive market for near forever. When the country began, it took much longer to develop and execute a plan to enter the market. Now days, if you can't get your foothold in a year or two, you never will. If fewer companies see shorter patents worth applying for, all the better.
There isn't supposed to be any advantage for the inventor. An inventor used to be free to keep his invention secret, and milk it for all it is worth. You are absolutely free to make an invention, don't show it to anyone, and turn it into products making tons of money forever because nobody is capable of reproducing it. Patents are a bargain that the government allows you to make: You publish your invention, so that the world can learn from it and improve the state of art instead of it being away, and as exchange for that information, you get a limited monopoly.
That exchange doesn't work anymore. If you look at patent applications, what the patent applicant publishes will usually not give anything of use to the world, so giving him a limited monopoly in exchange for useless information is pointless.
What the patent examiners should really decide is: Does the publication of this patent benefit society in a sufficient way to justify giving the applicant a limited monopoly? If not, they should tell the applicant: Go away. Do with your invention whatever you like. Keep it secret, hide it away, we don't care.
The other side is that many companies refuse to pursue innovations unless they see parts that can be patented to lock in the monopoly returns. Lesser profits just aren't worth the trouble of pursing innovation as they see it these days.
You've got that completely wrong. Due to the fucked up nature of the US patent system, patents are valuable to a company. Either for blackmailing companies that produce actual value, or for preventing blackmail from competitors. There is no innovation behind them.
My company tries to get patents exactly for the reason to prevent blackmail from competitors, who have patents in the same area. That works quite fine, as long as our competitors are doing well because when they are doing well, they can't afford mutual destruction by patent lawyers. Where it goes wrong is in a case like RIMM, where they totally beat their competitor in the market place, so their competitor had no reason anymore to be afraid from RIMM's patent, and could use their own patents in an offensive way.
The reason why my company innovates is not because of patents, it is because we want to offer our customers competitive products, so that they buy ours and not our competitors, and that way we make money. We do _not_ innovate to get patents. We do, however, like everyone else, turn our innovation and also our failed innovations into legalese to get patent.
I feel quite badly for iceland, they are suffering under a significant economic downturn affected by just a few banker types.
It is too funny. One of the most common errors on internet posts is to use "effect" instead of the verb "affect". The chances of "effect" being correct as a verb are probably one in thousand. Here we have one of these very, very rare cases. An opportunity not to be missed. You missed it.
This economic downturn is effected by the bankers, not affected.
I think the iPod touch keyboard is really bad. Trying to enter an search string in iPod touch would be a nightmare.
Have you used one?
On my iMac, a clean build consisted of about two seconds disk activity, followed by eight minutes two CPUs running at hundred percent, followed by two seconds disk activity for the linker and symbol files. Probably less than two seconds.
The best MLC flash I'm aware of is only rated for a million write cycles.
The guy is worrying about updating files several times a day from CVS. If he updates ever single byte on the drive 20 times a day, a million write cycles last for 140 years.
And who says magnetic drives have an infinite number of write cycles?
Yes, it's theoretically possible that someone stole your bandwidth to download the songs that just happened to be on your computer, but that's not reasonable.
1. Since downloading music owned by the RIAA's members without paying is illegal and attracts lawsuits, it is completely reasonable to assume that whoever does it will try to cover his tracks. So the chances that the person identified is not the downloader are quite high. Like if a car with your license plate goes past a red traffic light, it's quite reasonable to assume it is your car; if a car with your license plate is used in a bank robbery then it is much less likely, because nobody would be so stupid to use their own car in a bank robbery.
2. If you have lots of music on your computers, then chances are quite good that there are matches between the music on your computer and music that an arbitrary person downloads.
Surprisingly, when the defendants hit the stand they didn't bash copyright or take a libertarian approach...
Why surprisingly? This happened in a court room. That kind of behavior in the court room will just upset the judge who will think you are a nutcase, and gets the case decided against you. Even if the judge completely agreed with you, being a copyright-bashing libertarian or whatever, he or she would apply the law as it is to judge.
The only sensible approach if you don't want to lose your case is to do exactly what the defendants did: Explain that they didn't do what they are accused of, or find reasons _within the existing law_, why they were allowed to do what they did.
Ok here is where I have an argument. The conceptual difference between "copyright infringement" and "stealing" is null. So why the obfuscation and insistence that what you are doing is not stealing. Illegal enrichment is illegal enrichment.
Fraud is not theft. Murder is not theft. Rape is not theft. Most things that are illegal are not theft. Calling copyright infringement "theft" is just stupid.
There is also the principle that the law makers know what they are talking about and that when a law says what it says that is intentional. The US law says that theft is taking something away illegally from the rightful owner to deprive him of his property (thus a policeman taking a cigarette lighter away from the rightful owner who wants to light a cigarette at a petrol station with spilled fuel is not committing theft). When the law says "to deprive the rightful owner", they mean it. If the rightful owner is not deprived of anything, it is not theft in US law. For comparison, German law says it is theft to "take something away illegally from the rightful owner to enrich yourself". Immaterial items are excluded for other reasons, but the argument that the owner is not deprived of anything would not count in German law.
It sounds like the judge is really pissed at being lied to and made a fool over the penalty he imposed, and is setting up the legal basis to say "We award the plaintiff their actual damages of $.20 for the lost profit per son in online sale. The total comes to $5.80. The defendant may pay by cash or check immediately."
I don't think she should get away that lightly. I'd order her to pay the wholesale price, times three for punishment, that is estimated 3 x 69 cents times 24 songs. or about $50, with the RIAA paying all the cost, both hers and their own, place pay the court for the wasted time. That I would consider a fair outcome.
Maybe MS could be nailed for discriminatory patent licensing if we find that, say, TomTom is the only unlicensed infringer being targeted?
There is such a thing as "patent abuse", but that would apply to the opposite situation: If MS licensed FAT32 to everyone in the world except that they refused to license it to TomTom, that could be "patent abuse". If it is true that MS has _demanded_ that TomTom should get a license for this patent, then "patent abuse" wouldn't apply here.
Tom Tom, from what I've read, has been a bad open-source citizen.
Right now, the source code for all the GPL'd software shipping on a TomTom device is available, and there are quite a few third party applications that you can download and run on a TomTom. One has been written specifically for use with the OpenStreetMap project, which allows you to record a trace of all positions visited with your TomTom and to upload this trace to the OpenStreetMap website.
:-;
And TomTom uses Ogg Vorbis to record the voices giving you directions when you drive around; that should drive any Open Source fan to ecstasy
I'll be honest, I own an iPhone so I'm a bit biased here, but this Japanese P905-whatever may have every feature under the sun, but it doesn't change the fact that it looks clumsy and (I'm assuming), like all Japanese phones it has a buggy non-intuitive mess of an OS.
You have the choice of using an easy to use phone like the iPhone, or using a buggy non-intuitive mess like a Japanese phone. Your choice. One of these two choices clearly demonstrates that you are highly intelligent, the other choice demonstrates just as clearly that you are beyond stupid.
It seems that Americans and Japanese disagree which of the two choices shows that you're clever, and which one shows that you are stupid.
Japanese teen says: "I am a rocket scientist because I can use this complicated phone".
American rocket scientist says: "I am a rocket scientist, I don't have the time to waste on this complicated phone".
Justice Secretary Jack Straw's email account has been hacked by internet fraudsters who sent out messages to hundreds of his contacts which claimed he was stranded in Nigeria and needed 3,000 dollars to fly home.
I would think if a government minister was really stranded somewhere in Africa, they would contact the nearest British embassy, which would surely know their whereabouts anyway, and the embassy would get them home easily. There are dangers on the internet; this is not one of them.
If you don't hire a technical writer you will face all kinds of problems. You'll have technical people with poor English skills writing incomplete directions because they make assumptions about what the reader knows. You'll have 50 manuals with 50 different writing styles. You'll have 10 instructions in one sentence with no commas. You'll have unfortunate typos and grammatical errors which change the meaning of the sentence.
You get 90 percent of the value just by using the right attitude. And the right attitude is: If someone is given instructions, and cannot follow the instructions, then the fault is with the instructions, not the person who can't follow it. Assume that the reader of the instructions is a reasonably intelligent person who doesn't have the slightest clue what you are writing about and who is completely incapable of reading your mind. And that they will give you a call at three am in the night and get you out of bed if they can't figure out your instructions.
AES, RSA, and all the rest are published standards. Now, some companies claim that they can't reveal what kind of encryption they use or it would severely degrade their product. I'm not naming names because I have none, this is just a vague recollection. Just go with the high level idea.
I once encountered a product that protected some internal information with the RSA algorithm. The key was the product of two large prime numbers. The large prime numbers were the tenth prime number above 2^63, and the tenth prime number below 2^60. Looks like they took their large primes from Knuth's "Art of Computer Programming". I factored the product using pen and paper :-)
Subject says it all. Several fighter planes of the French air force had to be grounded because their Windows-based computers got infected by a virus.
Malware creators don't need source code to find vulnerabilities. However, knowing that your source code can be seen by the world gives a really strong incentive to write code that not only is good, but that is obviously good. Take as an example the recent Zune disaster where all Zunes had problems with the 29th of February. That bug was caused by code that was just written in a stupid way. Any experienced programmer would have known just by looking at the code from a distance that this bit of code was "asking for trouble". It looked like code that was written by someone with no understanding of the problem and modified again and again until it mostly worked. Which wasn't good enough. Open source applications avoid that kind of code, because you don't want the whole world to see that you don't know your stuff.
So you're saying that choosing the same hardware from the same hardware manufacturers that Apple chose to use in their computers and deciding to install OSX on it is illegal.
You can (probably) buy a chip that has exactly the same functionality as the SMC chip that Apple uses, except for the tiny bit inside it that contains a 64 bit code. You need that 64 bit code to run MacOS X unmodified. If you add that 64 bit code, then you are violating the DMCA. That little 64 bit code is an effective technical means to prevent you from using a copy of MacOS X. It is not _very_ effective, but it doesn't have to be. Just effective enough so that breaking this protection violates the DMCA.
"Effective" probably means that Apple has a contract in place with the manufacturer not to supply chips with the code to anyone else. I bet they've done that. If, for example, Dell could purely accidentally build a MacOS X compatible box, then Apple's case would be somehow weaker. Except that installing on such a computer is still in breach of the license, and the chip is not available to buy with Apple's little 64 bit code.
Does the GPL allow me to develop a modified version under a nondisclosure agreement?
Yes, because it is a different situation. Let's say big company X finds out about some open source software. They would like to use that software with some modifications. They want to hire you to make those changes, not tell anybody about them, and give the software only to X and nobody else. So _you_ sign the contract, take your money, download the software from Redhat, and modify it. Company X hasn't done any distributing at this point, so they can ask you to sign any contract you both agree to. You are free to accept any restrictions. You cannot restrict others, but you can accept restrictions yourself. What you can't do after you pass the modified software on to X is try to make them accept the software under any restrictions. So a contract where you give the software only to X and X is not allowed to pass it on would be a GPL violation as soon as you give the software to X.
It sounds easy, but it is actually very difficult to keep from distributing. You see, a distribution is a transfer between any two legal entities. So, for example, you hire a consultant and give him a copy of the software. Then you decide not to use the consultant any longer. He's annoyed, and he asserts his GPL rights on your entire product, and distributes it. You go to sue, and the copyright holder of the GPL piece gets involved and makes a case that you don't have the rights you think you did. Your NDA does not apply to GPL software because GPL prohibits you from adding incompatible terms.
Two questions:
1. Is it correct that a company _can_ give software licensed under the GPL to its _employees_ and tell them not to distribute it any further? And if an employee _does_ distribute it without permission, then it is not the company's problem, but the problem of the employee who can't fulfil the terms of the GPL?
2. In your example of giving a copy to an independent consultant, if this constitutes distribution, then it is distribution whether the consultant asserts their rights or not. So if you don't give him or her the software together with source code, I think anybody in the world would already be entitled to demand the source code from you. Now of course the world doesn't know that... But from a legal point of view, would it be the safest to give that consultant software + source code and hope that he or she doesn't redistribute it?
It was announced today that a German company called PearC is starting to sell their own Mac clones. They claim that, according to German law, the conditions of a EULA that users can't see before purchase cannot be enforced. Since the EULA is inside the box and users can't see it, the argument will be that the parts about not installing OS X on non-Apple hardware are void. Article at Ars Technica.
That would be a rather stupid argument, since they have opened at least one box and now they know the license. The other problem with the argument is that if you type "macosx license" or "macos x license" into google, you find a link to all of Apple's licenses right at the top of the page and if you have a business selling computers, you can be expected to do a simple check like this. (For example, in a case of GPL violation a German court ruled that a German software developer can be expected to read and understand a license written in English).
I can't imagine any German court standing for this kind of nonsense. Remember how SCO fared in Germany: In the USA, they managed to keep IBM in court for several years and cost them millions using nothing than completely groundless allegations. In Germany, they were told to shut up or show evidence. They didn't have evidence, so they received a fine every single time any of their allegations against Linux appeared on their German website.
I thought I read elsewhere here (from other commenters) that Psystar was modifying the code, including the Apple Updates. Perhaps I misunderstood, or maybe those posters were misinformed.
If let's say Dell had some engineers have a quick look at a Mac Pro, make a list of parts they can identify, and build a nice, good quality box using all the same parts, then an unmodified copy of MacOS X would be guaranteed not to work, no matter how good a job these engineers do. The reason is that one of the chips on Apple's motherboards contains a 64 bit code which is used to decrypt several important parts of the operating system. This is not particularly well hidden, and not particularly hard to circumvent.
There are three ways to get around this problem: One is to modify the OS. Instead of reading this 64 bit code from the chip (it is the same on every Macintosh), you could put the same number hardcoded into the decryption software. The other way is to add a chip with this code inside, or to change the EFI (roughly similar to BIOS) to _pretend_ that such a chip is there. If you use the second or third method, you don't need to modify the OS anymore. On the other side, that kind of thing is exactly what the DMCA act makes illegal.
Psystar is providing a service of pre-installing the OS on a machine for their users, and then effectively transferring the license agreement over to you.
Hopefully the courts will find Apple's license unconscionable and violating of natural laws.
Installing MacOS X without permission by the license is copyright infringement. So Psystar is not providing a service, they are committing copyright infringement. By doing so, the license is automatically voided, similar to the GPL license. That box they used to install MacOS X is now worthless, because it doesn't have a license anymore. There is no license left that Psystar could transfer.
And the same court that made the current decision has already stated very, very clearly that Apple is absolutely in its right as the copyright holder to license MacOS X in exactly the way it wants and no other way.
I'm sorry, but in this instance, it very much is personal computers that run OS X. The whole point of all this is because Apple want to be the only company that supplies computers with OS X preinstalled. Let me run that by you one more time. The only company that supplies computers with OS X preinstalled. If that isn't the definition of a monopoly, please do tell me what is.
The problem with your "definition" is that "computers with OS X preinstalled" is not a market.
Determining what is or is not a market can be a bit difficult, but the following can help: There are many things I would like to buy. Typically, if I buy something in one market, I still want the things from other markets, but I have less desire to buy things in the same market. I might be looking at LCD TVs and Plasma TVs. If I buy one of them, I suddenly don't have any desire for the other anymore; I conclude that LCD TVs and Plasma TVs are in the same market. But TVs and DVD players are in different markets; after buying the TV, I still want the DVD player.
Now lets at the "computers with OS X preinstalled": Someone might go to two computer shops, looking at a computer with OS X preinstalled and a computer with Windows preinstalled. After buying one of these computers, that person is suddenly much much less interested in the other computer. Conclusion: Same market. Therefore: No monopoly.
Actually, they do have a monopoly. If you buy an Mac you have to buy parts from Apple; ford mustang - I can go to an after-markets store to buy their product which was not made in a ford factory. If you want OS-X, where are you legally allowed to get that...yea...
Let's see. I have bought RAM for several Macs I owned, and it was never from Apple. I bought hard drives for most Macs I owned, and they were never from Apple. I bought a replacement battery and charger for my MacBook; I didn't buy them from Apple (strangely enough, they both have "Apple" printed on them...). I bought a USB card, two new fans, a monitor, and they were all not from Apple. I could install alternative operating systems, and they wouldn't be from Apple but probably from Redhat or Novell or Microsoft.
So where do you see Apple having a monopoly again?