'' The EU is basically demanding MS to hand over their IP for free. ''
Actually, they are not. What MS is supposed to hand over for free is in no way intellectual property.
Lets say for some reason a product needs to transmit two numbers A and B. They could be transmitted in the order A, B or B, A. They could be transmitted as decimal numbers in text format, or binary. If binary, they could be transmitted as 8, 16, 24 or 32 bits in various byte orderings. All these variations are completely arbitrary and cannot be considered to have any intellectual value. However, for compatibility a competitor needs to know which of these arbitrary variations a product uses.
This information could at most be considered a trade secret. In this case, however, keeping that secret a secret would be illegal, therefore it is not a trade secret.
There is no reason at all why Microsoft should get any compensation for this information.
'' To me, a great minimum would be zero RAM and zero HDD. Then I could populate it with what I like.
But I think I see Apple's desire to sell an operational machine - it'd be hard to support a machine if it is untestable in the store - '''
I was always wondering: Does anyone know if there are legal reasons why Apple (or Dell, or anyone else) wouldn't be allowed to sell machines without RAM or harddisk, that is machines that cannot possibly work out of the box?
'' Emulating a CISC architecture on a RISC architecture is not that hard. The other way around is much harder - you cant very well emulate a PPC/SPARC/MIPS on a x86-computer. Then you would suffer 10x clock-for-clock reduction. ''
MS Office for PowerPC works quite well on my Intel MacBook. Definitely better than on a 183 MHz PowerPC.
'' Could you really expect to stream down the maximum amount of traffic possible 24/7 and pay the same as checking email once per day? ''
If it says unlimited, then yes. My ISP offers contracts with a limit of 2 GB, 6 GB, and 30 GB per month, at different cost. I have a 6 GB contract. If I went with a competitor who offers "unlimited", then I would expect more than the 30 GB limit that my current ISP offers, and definitely not less than my current 6 GB contract.
'' For once the EU seems to be applying one of the more useful laws they made. It always seemed wrong to me that you could blatently discriminate customers on the basis of their nationality. ''
But they don't. British citizens can buy in the French iTunes Music Store - if they live in France and have a French credit card. Americans living in Britain can buy from the UK store, Americans living in Germany can buy from the German store and so on. It is discrimination based on residency.
'' I imagine Apple will probably make it quite easy to search "only premium (and thus DRM free) content" as well. ''
Perhaps in the future, if some record companies have lets say 50% of their songs without DRM, and the rest DRM only. But today, this would for example filter out Sony completely, and I bet there is something in their contract that prevents that from happening. Not that this isn't a good idea.
'' Unless this contract with EMI prevents Apple from selling DRM free music from other labels, does this mean that anyone who wants to sell their music DRM free can negotiate this kind of deal? ''
Such a contract would first be illegal, and second Apple would never agree to it. You should expect Apple to offer exactly the same contract to every single independent record company and to the other big companies. Once most of the independents have signed, Apple is at 40 percent DRM free, and that will put a lot of pressure on the rest. Especially if (as I hope) EMI will have increased revenue.
'' 1. Critics have maintained that Apple should allow independent artists to offer their music iTMS without DRM, but the standard response is that this would be technically infeasible. Now that this is not the case, I hope to see Apple offer DRM-free music from independent producers soon. ''
Some have said it would be technically infeasible. I have always said that (1) Apple insisted on having exactly the same contracts with each independent as with each of the big companies and (2) selling some music with DRM and some without with no further difference would have been a serious marketing problem.
What I expect is that Apple will take the EMI contract and offer everyone (the other big four, and all small ones) to sign exactly the same contract. Same argument for the independent companies as before: If EMIs super expensive lawyers think the contract is ok, then it should be ok for you. So I would expect that very soon many independents will do exactly the same deal: $1.29 per DRM-free track, $9.99 per DRM-free album, $0.30 per upgrade from DRM/128 to noDRM/256.
By the way, I think EMI will do really well with this deal. First, lots of upgraders. Second, lots of album purchasers and upgraders. Third, I'd think 10-20% more money from the same number of single track purchases. And one group is people who don't want DRM because it is not future proof. I don't mind having DRM on my Mac+iPod today, but I worry about what happens in five years. Now I can buy music from EMI _with_ DRM and know that I can make copies when I want to (by paying the difference). These people can now buy music with DRM because they _know_ it can be removed.
'' There is still a missing piece for us "Indy" people. AFAIK, Apple still expects us to be exclusive to them i.e. they demand exclusive online distribution. ''
It is common knowledge that Apple offers independent record companies _exactly_ the same deal as they offer the big companies. And I mean _exactly_ the same, take it or leave it. Since the big companies don't have exclusive deals, the independent ones don't have exclusive deals either.
'' If legal push comes to legal shove, it really doesn't matter if Apple considers it a computer, it matters if a court thinks it's a computer(and I would think that the court would base their decision on whether a typical person would reasonable consider it a computer...). ''
No, what really matters is whether Apple would take you to court or not. If you are taken to court, it will cost you lots of money, whether you are right or not, as long as Apple wasn't acting completely unreasonable in taking you to court. (And saying that the Apple TV is not a computer may be right or wrong, but it is not unreasonable. )
But I'm quite sure if thousand hackers install MacOS X on thousand MacTVs then Apple doesn't care very much. And if a few people make MacOS X run on a Dell, and fix it every time Software Update has been running, they still don't care. I'm sure they would go after anyone who sold AppleTVs with MacOS X installed, or Dells with MacOS X installed.
'' In quite a few countries, there is no way to legally enforce such bundling. That is, if one buys an Intel Mac with Mac OS X for x86, he can freely install it on his PC, any license clauses preventing that notwithstanding. ''
AFTER removing it from the Macintosh it came on. Otherwise it is a clear case of copyright infringement.
'' So what exactly is their justification for leaving DRM on the $0.99 tracks? It can't be that they are afraid people will release them into the wild if the higher quality tracks are now DRM free, so why not remove it? ''
Your post seems to assume that all the players involved are acting rational. The music industry most certainly isn't. Starting with that knowledge, what happens is entirely logical and actually quite clever:
1. EMI wouldn't let Apple sell the same music as it sells now, just without DRM, at the same price. (Why would they? )
2. Apple wouldn't sell the same music as it sells now, just without DRM, at a higher price. That would only lead to some there disturbing questions, like "why should we pay more for something we should have got in the first place? "
3. Apple's workaround: Combine non-DRM with higher quality. This gives an excellent excuse for raising the price. Actually not just an excuse. There are good reasons why the higher quality should cost more money; because it takes more server space and more bandwidth and actually increases Apple's cost.
Now the music industry's biggest problem seems to be that people buy single songs and not albums; if it is true that albums will sell at higher quality without DRM at same price as before, that should really help them with album sales.
I would also assume that Apple will offer exactly the same contract to independents, including those independents who were willing to sell without DRM anyway. There the artists will actually benefit from the higher price.
'' The thing a judge would (or should) look at is that the image was changed intentionally for the specific purpose of having that image appear on McCain's website. ''
The judge would also figure out that he was completely in his rights to do this.
That is untrue. For large parts of a C compiler, like gcc, you don't need any knowledge of assembler whatsoever. Only the backends need assembler language knowledge at all. However, they don't require knowledge of assembler language - they need knowledge of the processor instruction set, and that is something totally different. (gcc is an exception because its output is assembler language, but that is an abomination).
"You don't really know why buffer overflows are bad"
Make a post in comp.lang.c. Buffer overflows are just one case of "undefined behavior", and undefined behavior is bad. No need to know why.
"You can't write a device driver ''
The device drivers I've helped writing couldn't possibly have been written in assembler.
'' Do not delude yourself into thinking assembly is the ultimate gateway to speed though. I would bet most of the people advocating assembly language programming to make your code go faster cannot write assembly better than today's optimizing compilers. Similarly, you probably won't be able to do better than the compiler either, with one major exception: Compilers do not generate effective SIMD code yet (gcc is slowly trying to add it, but it is pretty primitive). This is because popular programming languages do not express data-parallel algorithms in a way that makes it easy for compilers to spot them and generate the appropriate code. Many media libraries use assembly language primarily for this reason, and not because they are bad-ass programmers who can allocate registers better than gcc. ''
I can write assembler code that is faster than equivalent C code. However, it is an awful lot of work. Writing assembler code is not an awful lot of work, but writing assembler code that is _faster_ than C is. Instead of using my time to write assembler code, I can use the same time to understand the underlying problem better and improve the algorithm, or understand the surrounding situation better and possibly avoid having to solve the problem altogether. This approach has two advantages: The result is portable, and it is not a dead-end: If my faster C code is still not fast enough, I can switch to assembler as the last resort. But I can also improve the algorithm further. Once you're at the assembler level, you're stuck.
SIMD is quite easy to handle by most compilers by making the SIMD primitives available as C intrinsic functions. I have seen media code written for PowerPC; they had C versions of the code and handwritten Altivec assembler code that ran about twice as fast. By rewriting that assembler code in C with intrinsic functions, everything became so much clearer that optimizations could be lifted one level higher, making everything four times faster again.
'' I'm not a lawyer and have difficulty understanding Legalese, but doesn't this sort of orchestrated fictionalization and avoidance of answering questions qualify as some kind of contempt of court? It struck me that SCO's attorneys had no respect whatever for the judge or the process. Redacted to its essence, I could hear a snotty voice intoning, "NYAH-nyah-NYAH-nyah-nyah!" Or does the judge have to put up with this kind of bratty behavior? ''
I think the judge doesn't care at all. He just looks through the papers, sees what in there is evidence (nothing), what in there refutes what IBM is saying (nothing), and ignores anything else. It's his job, and he is used to that. It's like if you gave me twenty lines of code that don't do what they are supposed to do, plus hundred pages of text claiming that your code actually works - those hundred pages won't confuse me, because I just look at the twenty lines and see they don't work. When you or I as a non-lawyer read SCOs nonsense, we are just confused. The judge isn't. He checks: Is it evidence? Does it refute IBM's claims? if it doesn't, it can be ignored.
'' Sure hippie. Just as soon as you explain to me how, without patents, a drug company would invest $100M in R&D for a drug that will take comptetitors $1M to copy, driving the price down to the point that they never recover their initial investment. ''
In German law, this would be very simple: You would sue your competitor for "unfair competition". That was for example the way to handle software pirates in the years before it was established that you could have copyright on software. Worked quite well. It is still used to protect phonebooks on CD, or maps, which are not the kind of material that can be protected by copyright: Copying phonebooks and selling the copies is "unfair competition" unless you hired a bunch of people who typed the material in themselves, using a scanner and OCR software to read them or just copying someone else's CDs is "unfair competition" and therefore illegal.
'' On 60% of Microsoft's sales. That is not a good thing for Apple. Microsoft can afford to flat out waste billions of dollars and still have higher operating margins than Apple. ''
Maybe. If that's bad for Apple, then it is absolutely shitty for Dell. Apple did actually substantially beat Dell on profits in the last quarter.
'' If you read IBM lawyers remarks to the court they relatively easy to understand as a layman. However, I try to read the SCO responses to the court and I can not understand why the hell they are try to say. ''
That's fine with the IBM lawyers. They say "We think SCO did some horrible stuff and here is the evidence that we believe shows it". SCO then has an opportunity to show evidence that what IBM claims is not true. You read through it and don't understand a word. Which means they haven't shown any such evidence. IBM's lawyers don't have to understand it. All they need to know is that SCO doesn't show any evidence that refutes IBM's claims.
Same with the judge. He starts reading some SCO paper. He reads "waffle waffle waffle". He thinks: This is not evidence that IBM has done something wrong. He reads more "waffle waffle waffle". Again, no evidence. He doesn't ask: How is this relevant to the case? It isn't, so he doesn't care.
'' Here's how "loser pays" played out in a case involving a friend and co-worker of mine a while back. His father died, and the estate was sued in a palimony suit by the deceased's "girlfriend" who had known the father for less than a year. My friend lived in Chicago and his father in Florida. He had to hire a Florida attorney, who advised him that if the plaintiff won even a single dollar, he would have to pay her court costs and lawyer fees in the $10's of thousands. Since the estate was only worth 5 figures, he was advised to settle, and did, for almost half of the estate. ''
That's not how "loser pays" in a sensible system. You say five digits, say $50,000. In the German court system, the judge has a chart which says: $50,000, that will cost $2500 for the court, $2500 for the defendants lawyer, $2500 for the plaintiffs lawyer. That's how much the lawyers are allowed to charge, and that will limit the amount of work they do. "Losing" is defined by how much the plaintiff got. If she asked for the whole $50,000 and got $10,000, that's 20%, you pay 20% of the cost, she pays 80%. She'd better ask for say $20,000 which keeps the cost down in the first place and reduces her percentage of the cost. You can offer some small payment (for example if your lawyer tells you it is likely the court will ask you to pay $10000, then you just offer to pay that before the case starts).
Well, actually things might be a bit different than you think.
Copyright is not on an idea, but on the expression of an idea. Things that have to be written the way they are written and cannot be written any other way cannot be copyrighted. If I ask you to write a program that performs task X, everything in your code that you had to write that way because X cannot be achieved in a different way cannot be copyrighted. Everything that you could have written differently is _your_ expression of the idea and can be copyrighted.
So strangely the bits that made your code valuable (the parts that followed my spec and made the code work as it should) cannot be copyrighted. The fluffy bits (like comments) that I could remove from your code without damaging it can be copyrighted.
'' 2) Apple's supposed monopoly is in the digital music market, not the portable music player market. ''
For f***s sake, can you stop that idiocy about "digital music market"? 95 percent of the "digital music market" is still CDs. What you mean is "downloadable music market". Just because there are plenty of brainless idiots in the press who can't think doesn't mean you have to repeat that nonsense.
'' Neither I nor anyone else outside of the highest echelons at Apple can say for sure, but I suspect that Apple has agreements in place with the major labels to the effect that all music sold through the iTMS will have the same DRM, regardless of where it comes from. ''
I don't think it is exactly what happened. I think Apple has a contract with big label #1 to sell _their_ music with DRM, with whatever other stuff you would want to put into such a contract. And it has an identical contract with big label #2, big label #3 and #4. And Apple offers any label, no matter how tiny, to sell their music, and the contract offered is exactly the same one that the big labels signed. That saves cost in lawyers, and gives the small label some confidence that they don't get ripped off.
So if a tiny label said "I know you pay the big guys 70cent per song, but I'm happy with 50 cent", then Apple won't change the contract. And if a tiny label says "you don't have to put DRM onto our songs", then Apple still won't change the contract.
Slashdot Mirror
'' The EU is basically demanding MS to hand over their IP for free. ''
Actually, they are not. What MS is supposed to hand over for free is in no way intellectual property.
Lets say for some reason a product needs to transmit two numbers A and B. They could be transmitted in the order A, B or B, A. They could be transmitted as decimal numbers in text format, or binary. If binary, they could be transmitted as 8, 16, 24 or 32 bits in various byte orderings. All these variations are completely arbitrary and cannot be considered to have any intellectual value. However, for compatibility a competitor needs to know which of these arbitrary variations a product uses.
This information could at most be considered a trade secret. In this case, however, keeping that secret a secret would be illegal, therefore it is not a trade secret.
There is no reason at all why Microsoft should get any compensation for this information.
'' To me, a great minimum would be zero RAM and zero HDD. Then I could populate it with what I like.
But I think I see Apple's desire to sell an operational machine - it'd be hard to support a machine if it is untestable in the store - '''
I was always wondering: Does anyone know if there are legal reasons why Apple (or Dell, or anyone else) wouldn't be allowed to sell machines without RAM or harddisk, that is machines that cannot possibly work out of the box?
'' Emulating a CISC architecture on a RISC architecture is not that hard. The other way around is much harder - you cant very well emulate a PPC/SPARC/MIPS on a x86-computer. Then you would suffer 10x clock-for-clock reduction. ''
MS Office for PowerPC works quite well on my Intel MacBook. Definitely better than on a 183 MHz PowerPC.
'' But you do _not_ want to do that in your first pass with a mechanical translator, especially if it's the first one you've ever written. ''
And anyway, would you know what happens if you reverse the direction flag in the instruction trace interrupt while the STOSD is exeuting?
'' I agree that they should not be allowed to market it as 'unlimited' if it's not, but saying that 5GB is too little is just insane. ''
5 GB is too little when you sell it as "unlimited".
Nobody would complain if they advertised and sold it as "limited to 5 GB per month".
'' Could you really expect to stream down the maximum amount of traffic possible 24/7 and pay the same as checking email once per day? ''
If it says unlimited, then yes. My ISP offers contracts with a limit of 2 GB, 6 GB, and 30 GB per month, at different cost. I have a 6 GB contract. If I went with a competitor who offers "unlimited", then I would expect more than the 30 GB limit that my current ISP offers, and definitely not less than my current 6 GB contract.
'' For once the EU seems to be applying one of the more useful laws they made. It always seemed wrong to me that you could blatently discriminate customers on the basis of their nationality. ''
But they don't. British citizens can buy in the French iTunes Music Store - if they live in France and have a French credit card. Americans living in Britain can buy from the UK store, Americans living in Germany can buy from the German store and so on. It is discrimination based on residency.
'' I imagine Apple will probably make it quite easy to search "only premium (and thus DRM free) content" as well. ''
Perhaps in the future, if some record companies have lets say 50% of their songs without DRM, and the rest DRM only. But today, this would for example filter out Sony completely, and I bet there is something in their contract that prevents that from happening. Not that this isn't a good idea.
'' Unless this contract with EMI prevents Apple from selling DRM free music from other labels, does this mean that anyone who wants to sell their music DRM free can negotiate this kind of deal? ''
Such a contract would first be illegal, and second Apple would never agree to it. You should expect Apple to offer exactly the same contract to every single independent record company and to the other big companies. Once most of the independents have signed, Apple is at 40 percent DRM free, and that will put a lot of pressure on the rest. Especially if (as I hope) EMI will have increased revenue.
'' 1. Critics have maintained that Apple should allow independent artists to offer their music iTMS without DRM, but the standard response is that this would be technically infeasible. Now that this is not the case, I hope to see Apple offer DRM-free music from independent producers soon. ''
Some have said it would be technically infeasible. I have always said that (1) Apple insisted on having exactly the same contracts with each independent as with each of the big companies and (2) selling some music with DRM and some without with no further difference would have been a serious marketing problem.
What I expect is that Apple will take the EMI contract and offer everyone (the other big four, and all small ones) to sign exactly the same contract. Same argument for the independent companies as before: If EMIs super expensive lawyers think the contract is ok, then it should be ok for you. So I would expect that very soon many independents will do exactly the same deal: $1.29 per DRM-free track, $9.99 per DRM-free album, $0.30 per upgrade from DRM/128 to noDRM/256.
By the way, I think EMI will do really well with this deal. First, lots of upgraders. Second, lots of album purchasers and upgraders. Third, I'd think 10-20% more money from the same number of single track purchases. And one group is people who don't want DRM because it is not future proof. I don't mind having DRM on my Mac+iPod today, but I worry about what happens in five years. Now I can buy music from EMI _with_ DRM and know that I can make copies when I want to (by paying the difference). These people can now buy music with DRM because they _know_ it can be removed.
'' There is still a missing piece for us "Indy" people. AFAIK, Apple still expects us to be exclusive to them i.e. they demand exclusive online distribution. ''
It is common knowledge that Apple offers independent record companies _exactly_ the same deal as they offer the big companies. And I mean _exactly_ the same, take it or leave it. Since the big companies don't have exclusive deals, the independent ones don't have exclusive deals either.
'' If legal push comes to legal shove, it really doesn't matter if Apple considers it a computer, it matters if a court thinks it's a computer(and I would think that the court would base their decision on whether a typical person would reasonable consider it a computer...). ''
No, what really matters is whether Apple would take you to court or not. If you are taken to court, it will cost you lots of money, whether you are right or not, as long as Apple wasn't acting completely unreasonable in taking you to court. (And saying that the Apple TV is not a computer may be right or wrong, but it is not unreasonable. )
But I'm quite sure if thousand hackers install MacOS X on thousand MacTVs then Apple doesn't care very much. And if a few people make MacOS X run on a Dell, and fix it every time Software Update has been running, they still don't care. I'm sure they would go after anyone who sold AppleTVs with MacOS X installed, or Dells with MacOS X installed.
'' In quite a few countries, there is no way to legally enforce such bundling. That is, if one buys an Intel Mac with Mac OS X for x86, he can freely install it on his PC, any license clauses preventing that notwithstanding. ''
AFTER removing it from the Macintosh it came on. Otherwise it is a clear case of copyright infringement.
'' So what exactly is their justification for leaving DRM on the $0.99 tracks? It can't be that they are afraid people will release them into the wild if the higher quality tracks are now DRM free, so why not remove it? ''
Your post seems to assume that all the players involved are acting rational. The music industry most certainly isn't. Starting with that knowledge, what happens is entirely logical and actually quite clever:
1. EMI wouldn't let Apple sell the same music as it sells now, just without DRM, at the same price. (Why would they? )
2. Apple wouldn't sell the same music as it sells now, just without DRM, at a higher price. That would only lead to some there disturbing questions, like "why should we pay more for something we should have got in the first place? "
3. Apple's workaround: Combine non-DRM with higher quality. This gives an excellent excuse for raising the price. Actually not just an excuse. There are good reasons why the higher quality should cost more money; because it takes more server space and more bandwidth and actually increases Apple's cost.
Now the music industry's biggest problem seems to be that people buy single songs and not albums; if it is true that albums will sell at higher quality without DRM at same price as before, that should really help them with album sales.
I would also assume that Apple will offer exactly the same contract to independents, including those independents who were willing to sell without DRM anyway. There the artists will actually benefit from the higher price.
'' The thing a judge would (or should) look at is that the image was changed intentionally for the specific purpose of having that image appear on McCain's website. ''
The judge would also figure out that he was completely in his rights to do this.
'' - You can't write a compiler ''
That is untrue. For large parts of a C compiler, like gcc, you don't need any knowledge of assembler whatsoever. Only the backends need assembler language knowledge at all. However, they don't require knowledge of assembler language - they need knowledge of the processor instruction set, and that is something totally different. (gcc is an exception because its output is assembler language, but that is an abomination).
"You don't really know why buffer overflows are bad"
Make a post in comp.lang.c. Buffer overflows are just one case of "undefined behavior", and undefined behavior is bad. No need to know why.
"You can't write a device driver ''
The device drivers I've helped writing couldn't possibly have been written in assembler.
'' Do not delude yourself into thinking assembly is the ultimate gateway to speed though. I would bet most of the people advocating assembly language programming to make your code go faster cannot write assembly better than today's optimizing compilers. Similarly, you probably won't be able to do better than the compiler either, with one major exception: Compilers do not generate effective SIMD code yet (gcc is slowly trying to add it, but it is pretty primitive). This is because popular programming languages do not express data-parallel algorithms in a way that makes it easy for compilers to spot them and generate the appropriate code. Many media libraries use assembly language primarily for this reason, and not because they are bad-ass programmers who can allocate registers better than gcc. ''
I can write assembler code that is faster than equivalent C code. However, it is an awful lot of work. Writing assembler code is not an awful lot of work, but writing assembler code that is _faster_ than C is. Instead of using my time to write assembler code, I can use the same time to understand the underlying problem better and improve the algorithm, or understand the surrounding situation better and possibly avoid having to solve the problem altogether. This approach has two advantages: The result is portable, and it is not a dead-end: If my faster C code is still not fast enough, I can switch to assembler as the last resort. But I can also improve the algorithm further. Once you're at the assembler level, you're stuck.
SIMD is quite easy to handle by most compilers by making the SIMD primitives available as C intrinsic functions. I have seen media code written for PowerPC; they had C versions of the code and handwritten Altivec assembler code that ran about twice as fast. By rewriting that assembler code in C with intrinsic functions, everything became so much clearer that optimizations could be lifted one level higher, making everything four times faster again.
'' I'm not a lawyer and have difficulty understanding Legalese, but doesn't this sort of orchestrated fictionalization and avoidance of answering questions qualify as some kind of contempt of court? It struck me that SCO's attorneys had no respect whatever for the judge or the process. Redacted to its essence, I could hear a snotty voice intoning, "NYAH-nyah-NYAH-nyah-nyah!" Or does the judge have to put up with this kind of bratty behavior? ''
I think the judge doesn't care at all. He just looks through the papers, sees what in there is evidence (nothing), what in there refutes what IBM is saying (nothing), and ignores anything else. It's his job, and he is used to that. It's like if you gave me twenty lines of code that don't do what they are supposed to do, plus hundred pages of text claiming that your code actually works - those hundred pages won't confuse me, because I just look at the twenty lines and see they don't work. When you or I as a non-lawyer read SCOs nonsense, we are just confused. The judge isn't. He checks: Is it evidence? Does it refute IBM's claims? if it doesn't, it can be ignored.
'' Sure hippie. Just as soon as you explain to me how, without patents, a drug company would invest $100M in R&D for a drug that will take comptetitors $1M to copy, driving the price down to the point that they never recover their initial investment. ''
In German law, this would be very simple: You would sue your competitor for "unfair competition". That was for example the way to handle software pirates in the years before it was established that you could have copyright on software. Worked quite well. It is still used to protect phonebooks on CD, or maps, which are not the kind of material that can be protected by copyright: Copying phonebooks and selling the copies is "unfair competition" unless you hired a bunch of people who typed the material in themselves, using a scanner and OCR software to read them or just copying someone else's CDs is "unfair competition" and therefore illegal.
'' On 60% of Microsoft's sales. That is not a good thing for Apple. Microsoft can afford to flat out waste billions of dollars and still have higher operating margins than Apple. ''
Maybe. If that's bad for Apple, then it is absolutely shitty for Dell. Apple did actually substantially beat Dell on profits in the last quarter.
'' If you read IBM lawyers remarks to the court they relatively easy to understand as a layman. However, I try to read the SCO responses to the court and I can not understand why the hell they are try to say. ''
That's fine with the IBM lawyers. They say "We think SCO did some horrible stuff and here is the evidence that we believe shows it". SCO then has an opportunity to show evidence that what IBM claims is not true. You read through it and don't understand a word. Which means they haven't shown any such evidence. IBM's lawyers don't have to understand it. All they need to know is that SCO doesn't show any evidence that refutes IBM's claims.
Same with the judge. He starts reading some SCO paper. He reads "waffle waffle waffle". He thinks: This is not evidence that IBM has done something wrong. He reads more "waffle waffle waffle". Again, no evidence. He doesn't ask: How is this relevant to the case? It isn't, so he doesn't care.
'' Here's how "loser pays" played out in a case involving a friend and co-worker of mine a while back. His father died, and the estate was sued in a palimony suit by the deceased's "girlfriend" who had known the father for less than a year. My friend lived in Chicago and his father in Florida. He had to hire a Florida attorney, who advised him that if the plaintiff won even a single dollar, he would have to pay her court costs and lawyer fees in the $10's of thousands. Since the estate was only worth 5 figures, he was advised to settle, and did, for almost half of the estate. ''
That's not how "loser pays" in a sensible system. You say five digits, say $50,000. In the German court system, the judge has a chart which says: $50,000, that will cost $2500 for the court, $2500 for the defendants lawyer, $2500 for the plaintiffs lawyer. That's how much the lawyers are allowed to charge, and that will limit the amount of work they do. "Losing" is defined by how much the plaintiff got. If she asked for the whole $50,000 and got $10,000, that's 20%, you pay 20% of the cost, she pays 80%. She'd better ask for say $20,000 which keeps the cost down in the first place and reduces her percentage of the cost. You can offer some small payment (for example if your lawyer tells you it is likely the court will ask you to pay $10000, then you just offer to pay that before the case starts).
'' Comments in code are not copyrightable. ''
Well, actually things might be a bit different than you think.
Copyright is not on an idea, but on the expression of an idea. Things that have to be written the way they are written and cannot be written any other way cannot be copyrighted. If I ask you to write a program that performs task X, everything in your code that you had to write that way because X cannot be achieved in a different way cannot be copyrighted. Everything that you could have written differently is _your_ expression of the idea and can be copyrighted.
So strangely the bits that made your code valuable (the parts that followed my spec and made the code work as it should) cannot be copyrighted. The fluffy bits (like comments) that I could remove from your code without damaging it can be copyrighted.
'' 2) Apple's supposed monopoly is in the digital music market, not the portable music player market. ''
For f***s sake, can you stop that idiocy about "digital music market"? 95 percent of the "digital music market" is still CDs. What you mean is "downloadable music market". Just because there are plenty of brainless idiots in the press who can't think doesn't mean you have to repeat that nonsense.
'' Neither I nor anyone else outside of the highest echelons at Apple can say for sure, but I suspect that Apple has agreements in place with the major labels to the effect that all music sold through the iTMS will have the same DRM, regardless of where it comes from. '' I don't think it is exactly what happened. I think Apple has a contract with big label #1 to sell _their_ music with DRM, with whatever other stuff you would want to put into such a contract. And it has an identical contract with big label #2, big label #3 and #4. And Apple offers any label, no matter how tiny, to sell their music, and the contract offered is exactly the same one that the big labels signed. That saves cost in lawyers, and gives the small label some confidence that they don't get ripped off. So if a tiny label said "I know you pay the big guys 70cent per song, but I'm happy with 50 cent", then Apple won't change the contract. And if a tiny label says "you don't have to put DRM onto our songs", then Apple still won't change the contract.