The key question is once you have yours are you going to share your gains with the rest of the planet?
No means you are a selfish bastard that somehow thinks they deserve everything and the rest of the planet doesn't.
Yes means you are a criminal infringing copyrights and stealing money from people's pockets.
Tough, huh? Yes, that is where we are today. The problem is right now it is impossible to separate one person's "fair use" in format-shifting their content to another device and another person's sharing the content with the planet, destroying the value of the work and bankrupting the creator.
Personally, I believe we should focus on the bankrupting part. If something is sold that can be represented in digital form it should be copied and distributed in such a widespread manner that it is impossible for the creator to obtain any value from their work. If this is done successfully there will be an answer to the above conundrum. Soon, because right now the economy of the Western world is dependent on value for digital representations. So there will be a solution.
Right now we are at the "kids shoplifting" stage. It is annoying but it isn't (yet) putting content owners completely out of business. We are seeing business models that involve "loss prevention" for music today and some of the techniques are actually innovative. But it is still only annoying rather than threatening. Escalation is needed before real solutions will emerge.
Problem is that today the telephone subsidizes the Internet connectivity. If you were paying the full cost of your DSL connection it would likely be $60-70 a month instead of $14.95. The $14.95 is a grab for market share and little else, but it is supported because of the people paying for long distance.
Should the telecom companies decide that nothing is left except IP connections, my guess is that we are going to see the same players just continue on. There would likely be some "consolidation"... to the point that there would be only one. There isn't enough money in IP service to support all there is today.
Ameritech (now SBC) had a very simple procedure. All new "neighborhoods" were wired fiber-to-vault with an underground vault which split it out into copper pairs for the homes in that area. The vault is pretty small and was designed long before there was DSL. Since every CLEC or DSL provider's DSLAM could not be put into the vault the only way around the 1996 decree was that no DSLAM (including Ameritech's own) could be put in a vault. Physical impossibility never entered into the lawmaking process - if they had DSL available, every DSL carrier/CLEC had to be supported in the vault.
Therefore, if your house was built after 1980 there is no possibility of getting DSL service in the Ameritech service area. At least in Illinois and a good part of Wisconsin that I know of.
I would expect DSL to be a transitory service because sooner or later everybody is going to be served from a vault with a minimum amount of copper. Copper to the CO is pointless from a telecom perspective and expensive to install and maintain. I am not sure the current rules can be used to force 5-10 different DSLAM devices at the fiber termination, but if having one means the door is open to requiring all of them to be present you can forget about DSL being available with this type of service.
Do you assume that "higher education" (past high school) is necessary for employment?
Further, do you assume that everyone is capable of making use of such "higher education"?
We seem to be pointed down this road in the US today and the truth is the answers to the two questions above are "no" and "oh my". So far, we're pretty far down the road of importing non-outsourceable low-skill jobs and moving everything else somewhere else so all the low-skill jobs don't exist for Americans. This isn't a long-term sustainable model because some people just aren't going to make it as "knowledge workers". Are these folks supposed to sit at home and collect welfare while illegal immigrants do the low-skill work?
As long as it is limited to rather dusty tomes that are "out of copyright" this is going to have limited, if not zero, value to most people. What exactly is the difference between Open Library and Project Gutenberg? Aren't they going to have 99% overlapping content?
The government has a specific interest in not putting companies out of business.
If a "open" network that allows VOIP existed, would any cellular carrier still exist? OK, assuming Verizon still has out-of-major-city towers, would any carrier that is mostly big-cities-only (Tmobile) still exist?
Sure, the government doesn't guarantee that a business will exist forever, but if the government starts making a habit out of squashing businesses how long will it be before nobody decides to take the risk on a startup because the government might?
Sort of like competing with Microsoft - they release a new free add-on to Windows that replaces whatever it is you decided to publish. Nobody does that anymore just because Microsoft "might". It happened maybe 8 times total, so it isn't as if Microsoft did it to 100 different players.
So no wonder AT&T would fight it. It is their entire operation at stake. And it is a very difficult question to answer if the government should ever do something like that. Something I am sure the courts are going to have lots of fun with.
It's great as long as there is only one of these plants. After that, well...
The problem is that when there is no market for turkey processing waste it is free or extremely low cost. When the second plant comes online there is now a bidding process that is going to happen (one way or another) for the raw materials - see, they aren't waste anymore. They are valuable raw materials now.
Same thing happens with used vegetable oil. It is cheap and works fine as long as there is no market. Once there is a market, all bets are off.
Without government price controls (unlikely) we have no idea where the price for such materials would fall.
Let's say you invent some new physical item, obtain a patent and line up licensing with a manufacturer to produce the product. In the first six months you manage to line up significant interest in large retailers for this product and the money starts flowing in.
Two months later you discover your retailers are deserting you and are buying an identical product made in China. Your revenue ceases because nobody wants your overpriced product when they can buy the cheap knockoff made in China. Unless there are substantial reasons to purchase your original (which there probably aren't), nobody is interested.
You are now looking at your investors that put up the money to get the product manufactured and advertised. They would like the big returns you were promising them and looked like they were going to get. Instead, you are bankrupt and have no friends (they were all investors).
50 years ago US Customs would have blocked the import of a patent-violating product. I don't know when they stopped, but today it is common to find products made in foreign countries that violate US patents and other licensing agreements. Where do you think all those cheap DVD players come from when it is $5 per player for the license? Any player under $100 retail is unlicensed and the Customs folks know it.
Rule 1: If it is a physical product that can be duplicated, it will be. Rule 2: International trade is a race to the bottom with the lowest cost winning, always. Rule 3: Patents and copyrights are only as good as the enforcement behind them.
Today, enforcement is a joke. You can sue someone in the US for violating a patent, but if they are violating it from outside the US (say, from China) you can't sue them. China would laugh - they don't enforce US laws. Customs will not block imports. Do you believe you can sue Wal-Mart for selling the product? You can't prevent people from getting cheap stuff - it is almost the 11th item on the Bill of Rights these days.
What this means is that patents are only good as tokens to impress potential buyers of a company with.
So how do you keep something from being duplicated? Have some encrypted software required to operate the device. The R&D effort to duplicate the development would make copying the product too expensive. Sure, they can copy the hardware but without copying the software they have a useless piece of junk. Maybe you can license the software to them, but doing so would be suicide - it turns your company from a hardware vendor into a software supplier.
If the application screws up the uninstall - something that hasn't really changed since 1995 - then the publisher should be the one blamed and complained to.
Microsoft built a framework. If the application doesn't follow it and requires you to "reinstall to uninstall" or some such nonsense it is hardly a Microsoft problem.
Ha ha ha. If you are "a coder" you too can spend six months studying the code to figure out how to add a trivial feature or fix some obvious bug.
If you aren't then you can pay someone full-time to learn the code enough to fix a trivial bug. That is, assuming they aren't already very, very familar with it. Then you have other requirements that may be involved, such as interfacing with other hardware or software.
No, it isn't as easy as "just pay someone". You might have to find them first, or pay for them to learn the code. Best case possible would be they agree to "learn the code" on their own time and will call back when they feel comfortable enough to work productively with a piece of software. That would be very unusual but possible for someone trying to learn their way around.
If the install does not include provisions for uninstall, then no standard uninstall is possible.
If the information for uninstall is deleted from the registry, then no uninstall is possible.
Sure, Microsoft might have some secret agenda whereby Yahoo Messenger and other "uninstall" information is silently deleted but that makes about as much sense as saying under Linux there isn't an Uninstall button.
How about Yahoo screwing up with their latest installer so the Uninstall option isn't there anymore?
How does someone selling something illegal get paid? If I open an auction site for heroin it would be greeted with great fanfare, even by the law enforcement community. Because they could just arrest the "winners" (actually losers). Sounds like a real money-maker for about 30 seconds.
OK, so there is an open auction for a remote exploit for Yahoo Messenger. So if I wanted to steal bank account information from lots of Yahoo Messenger users, this would be a good start. The minimum bid is 2000 Euro, which sounds pretty fair for something that could be used to grab millions of dollars from unsuspecting users worldwide. I would assume that similar exploits could be used in a similar fashion - to steal from people. Isn't that the new way to make money on the Internet from Eastern Europe?
But then we would be interfering with other nation's soverign rights to do things the way they want to. The WTO would hardly allow a tariff to be introduced that blocked trade based on environmental or wage standards, so it isn't going to happen.
How do Japan and China work around this? They decided they don't care if anyone imports stuff to them at all and nobody can refuse to buy their stuff. The US, on the other hand, is prett dependent on keeping some kind of trade balance with EU and other countries.
Unfortunately, those other nasty low-standards places are soverign nations. They don't like other people telling them what their rules should be.
So we should just not trade with people with lower standards? That would be illegal now. Against the WTO practices. So it isn't likely to happen unless the rest of the world gets behind the idea.
How does the concept of a compulsory license escape you?
This is not a decision related to RIAA copyrights, it is a decision that affects all music from everywhere.
The way playing music in public or on the radio works is you have to pay a fee to do it to a licensing organization who then distributes the collected revenue to the copyright holders. It doesn't matter if it is John's Backroom Band or some big-name band where Sony holds the copyright.
All music, foreign and domestic, is subject to this compulsory license for US venues and broadcasters. Other countries have similar arrangements as well so there really isn't any escaping this. At least not for very long.
I know something about the 321 Studios product DVD X Copy. The company was raking in well over $15,000,000 per month while this product was on the store shelves. With around a $50 price tag, that equates to 300,000 new users each month. Were they just buying it to have it and didn't intend on using it?
This is one product and the company was sued out of existance. There are dozens of products available today some free, some costing $50 or more. The folks behind 321 Studios are apparently selling their product from Canada now. Do you think there are no customers?
I suspect there are still well over 300,000 acquisitions (free or otherwise) each month of some type of DVD copying software. In the years since this got started this probably means there are over 100 million users.
An interesting question is what were the terms of the materials that MediaMax licensed the software to Sony under. Assuming they were not utter idiots, there was almost certainly a clause in the license that says they can't be sued for consequential damages. Would a court override such a clause in the contract?
Sony certainly seems to think they can get somewhere with it or they wouldn't have bothered filing such a lawsuit.
What does this mean? Well, for starters unless very, very narrowly constructed such an argument could be made against any software product including a free one. A precedent of overriding or ignoring such a license clause could then result in a bunch of lawsuits against software makers for such consequential damages. Absolutely, Microsoft could be held accountable for spreadsheet errors, viruses, identity theft and who knows what else. The authors of free software could be held accountable for errors and omissions that result in consequential damages to businesses or even individuals.
Sounds like a terrible precedent to set. I would expect an avalanche of lawsuits being filed the next day. Microsoft would probably last six months, if even that. Adobe would be right behind them, as would every other software publisher that had someone that lost money because of software.
I believe the primary reason for such disclaimers of liability are because today it is nearly impossible for some third party to tell the difference between a defect in the software design and a user error. Making user-proof software would not be fun at all, nor would it be very usable. Think what designing an application with "CYA protection" built in from the beginning would be like.
The idea that the President should take a poll to decide what to have for breakfast and "do the will of the people" leads to utter non-leadership. The Senate was designed to be far less responsive to the "will of the people" from the beginning and the President seems to have been assumed to be even less so.
You vote based on a number of factors and the elected President then implements what his position is. What you are advocating is no position at all. If the polls show people like cornflakes, breakfast will be cornflakes. If the polls show the death penalty is popular, lots of executions result. If the following week the death penalty is less popular then stop the executions. All this does is present an ever-changing face to the world that nobody can rely on. There are no principals, there is no basis for anything except a fickle population.
Clinton tried to govern this way and it didn't work very well.
My understanding (limited as it is) is that you cannot sign away "moral rights" in Germany. This has many implications legally. It applies to everything that is copyright-able, such as books, movies, help files for software products, manual, artwork, etc.
Obviously, the article is from a spammer
on
Hotmail vs Goodmail
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Aside from that, I think it is fair to say that email is pretty much something that is useless for any commercial application and pointless for something like a "newsletter". The spam vs. ham ratio has gotten to about 1000 to 1 these days, even if they aren't directly seeing it. And that is part of the problem.
It is assumed to be acceptable for an ISP to block "spam". It is assumed to be OK for anyone to get in the way of mail to a recipient to save them from receiving the torrent of spam that they would otherwise be subjected to. False positives are considered to be something that just happens. None of the agents preventing delivery of mail offer any notification to the user that mail may be waiting for them in the "bulk" or "spam" folder, nor offer any recourse if the mail is simply deleted without delivery.
With that in mind, email is suitable for something for friends and family only. If you are trying to send a receipt to someone for an online purchase, such email is commonly considered to be "commercial" which equates to "spam" in some people's minds. Outlook by default takes anything from sales@abcdef.com and puts it into the deleted items folder, just confirming the view that anything related to "sales" must be spam.
Email is pointless for any commercial use. Companies trying to resurrect email as a viable communications medium are starting to notice this. Sure, pay to send email and some percentage of your customers won't have your email blocked. What percentage? 10%? This means you need to budget tens of thousands of dollars for "email protection" if you are going to go this way.
Face it, email is pointless and unreliable. You will never know if your email is being blocked. You can't tell a complaining customer that never got their receipt that you will "fix" this somehow. It is broken and you need to figure out a different delivery mechanism.
Interesting idea, but what do you do about copycat products? Let's say Palm creates a new, open, unlocked phone that one-ups the iPhone. Today, what would stop a company in China from taking all that documentation and producing an identical product based on that information?
Nothing, that's what would stop them. They would immediately benefit from any R & D that Palm put into the product and be able to copy it exactly. End result would be the Chinese copy could be sold at a much lower price. Great for consumers, really really bad for Palm. Pretty much this would put them out of business, leaving the copycat company producing the product. Of course, they wouldn't be able to produce a follow-on because they "stole" the plans for the original.
You basically cannot sue "John Doe". The RIAA has been able to file temporarily for discovery purposes but I am sure they have amend their filing quickly as soon as the identity of the person is discovered.
Without an identity, you can't sue. Period. So if a "copyright infringer's" identity is not available, there is nothing that can be done. Obtaining the identity is the first step in a civil procedure.
The problem with Windows is the ease-of-use. Let's see... I can email a link to an executable file to someone and when the click the link it runs the program. I can also email the executable itself and upon opening the attachment it will run the program.
This is very helpful in a corporate environment. When there are malicious people on the Internet this is a disaster. Which is the "right" way?
Sure, Windows could be made more secure. Unfortunately, all the security in the world will not prevent a machine from being compromised if the user runs a program. This is the "hole" in Vista - if you run a program and authorize it to run it will run and can affect the operation of the machine. Period.
Would a secure root/user logon environment make Windows secure? No. That is what Vista has implemented and it does not prevent the machine from being compromised.
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The key question is once you have yours are you going to share your gains with the rest of the planet?
No means you are a selfish bastard that somehow thinks they deserve everything and the rest of the planet doesn't.
Yes means you are a criminal infringing copyrights and stealing money from people's pockets.
Tough, huh? Yes, that is where we are today. The problem is right now it is impossible to separate one person's "fair use" in format-shifting their content to another device and another person's sharing the content with the planet, destroying the value of the work and bankrupting the creator.
Personally, I believe we should focus on the bankrupting part. If something is sold that can be represented in digital form it should be copied and distributed in such a widespread manner that it is impossible for the creator to obtain any value from their work. If this is done successfully there will be an answer to the above conundrum. Soon, because right now the economy of the Western world is dependent on value for digital representations. So there will be a solution.
Right now we are at the "kids shoplifting" stage. It is annoying but it isn't (yet) putting content owners completely out of business. We are seeing business models that involve "loss prevention" for music today and some of the techniques are actually innovative. But it is still only annoying rather than threatening. Escalation is needed before real solutions will emerge.
Problem is that today the telephone subsidizes the Internet connectivity. If you were paying the full cost of your DSL connection it would likely be $60-70 a month instead of $14.95. The $14.95 is a grab for market share and little else, but it is supported because of the people paying for long distance.
... to the point that there would be only one. There isn't enough money in IP service to support all there is today.
Should the telecom companies decide that nothing is left except IP connections, my guess is that we are going to see the same players just continue on. There would likely be some "consolidation"
I've not heard of a volume license agreement from Microsoft that didn't include "home" copies for Office applications.
Ameritech (now SBC) had a very simple procedure. All new "neighborhoods" were wired fiber-to-vault with an underground vault which split it out into copper pairs for the homes in that area. The vault is pretty small and was designed long before there was DSL. Since every CLEC or DSL provider's DSLAM could not be put into the vault the only way around the 1996 decree was that no DSLAM (including Ameritech's own) could be put in a vault. Physical impossibility never entered into the lawmaking process - if they had DSL available, every DSL carrier/CLEC had to be supported in the vault.
Therefore, if your house was built after 1980 there is no possibility of getting DSL service in the Ameritech service area. At least in Illinois and a good part of Wisconsin that I know of.
I would expect DSL to be a transitory service because sooner or later everybody is going to be served from a vault with a minimum amount of copper. Copper to the CO is pointless from a telecom perspective and expensive to install and maintain. I am not sure the current rules can be used to force 5-10 different DSLAM devices at the fiber termination, but if having one means the door is open to requiring all of them to be present you can forget about DSL being available with this type of service.
Do you assume that "higher education" (past high school) is necessary for employment?
Further, do you assume that everyone is capable of making use of such "higher education"?
We seem to be pointed down this road in the US today and the truth is the answers to the two questions above are "no" and "oh my". So far, we're pretty far down the road of importing non-outsourceable low-skill jobs and moving everything else somewhere else so all the low-skill jobs don't exist for Americans. This isn't a long-term sustainable model because some people just aren't going to make it as "knowledge workers". Are these folks supposed to sit at home and collect welfare while illegal immigrants do the low-skill work?
As long as it is limited to rather dusty tomes that are "out of copyright" this is going to have limited, if not zero, value to most people. What exactly is the difference between Open Library and Project Gutenberg? Aren't they going to have 99% overlapping content?
The government has a specific interest in not putting companies out of business.
If a "open" network that allows VOIP existed, would any cellular carrier still exist? OK, assuming Verizon still has out-of-major-city towers, would any carrier that is mostly big-cities-only (Tmobile) still exist?
Sure, the government doesn't guarantee that a business will exist forever, but if the government starts making a habit out of squashing businesses how long will it be before nobody decides to take the risk on a startup because the government might?
Sort of like competing with Microsoft - they release a new free add-on to Windows that replaces whatever it is you decided to publish. Nobody does that anymore just because Microsoft "might". It happened maybe 8 times total, so it isn't as if Microsoft did it to 100 different players.
So no wonder AT&T would fight it. It is their entire operation at stake. And it is a very difficult question to answer if the government should ever do something like that. Something I am sure the courts are going to have lots of fun with.
It's great as long as there is only one of these plants. After that, well...
The problem is that when there is no market for turkey processing waste it is free or extremely low cost. When the second plant comes online there is now a bidding process that is going to happen (one way or another) for the raw materials - see, they aren't waste anymore. They are valuable raw materials now.
Same thing happens with used vegetable oil. It is cheap and works fine as long as there is no market. Once there is a market, all bets are off.
Without government price controls (unlikely) we have no idea where the price for such materials would fall.
Let's say you invent some new physical item, obtain a patent and line up licensing with a manufacturer to produce the product. In the first six months you manage to line up significant interest in large retailers for this product and the money starts flowing in.
Two months later you discover your retailers are deserting you and are buying an identical product made in China. Your revenue ceases because nobody wants your overpriced product when they can buy the cheap knockoff made in China. Unless there are substantial reasons to purchase your original (which there probably aren't), nobody is interested.
You are now looking at your investors that put up the money to get the product manufactured and advertised. They would like the big returns you were promising them and looked like they were going to get. Instead, you are bankrupt and have no friends (they were all investors).
50 years ago US Customs would have blocked the import of a patent-violating product. I don't know when they stopped, but today it is common to find products made in foreign countries that violate US patents and other licensing agreements. Where do you think all those cheap DVD players come from when it is $5 per player for the license? Any player under $100 retail is unlicensed and the Customs folks know it.
Rule 1: If it is a physical product that can be duplicated, it will be.
Rule 2: International trade is a race to the bottom with the lowest cost winning, always.
Rule 3: Patents and copyrights are only as good as the enforcement behind them.
Today, enforcement is a joke. You can sue someone in the US for violating a patent, but if they are violating it from outside the US (say, from China) you can't sue them. China would laugh - they don't enforce US laws. Customs will not block imports. Do you believe you can sue Wal-Mart for selling the product? You can't prevent people from getting cheap stuff - it is almost the 11th item on the Bill of Rights these days.
What this means is that patents are only good as tokens to impress potential buyers of a company with.
So how do you keep something from being duplicated? Have some encrypted software required to operate the device. The R&D effort to duplicate the development would make copying the product too expensive. Sure, they can copy the hardware but without copying the software they have a useless piece of junk. Maybe you can license the software to them, but doing so would be suicide - it turns your company from a hardware vendor into a software supplier.
This isn't a Microsoft problem.
It is stupid application problem.
If the application screws up the uninstall - something that hasn't really changed since 1995 - then the publisher should be the one blamed and complained to.
Microsoft built a framework. If the application doesn't follow it and requires you to "reinstall to uninstall" or some such nonsense it is hardly a Microsoft problem.
Ha ha ha. If you are "a coder" you too can spend six months studying the code to figure out how to add a trivial feature or fix some obvious bug.
If you aren't then you can pay someone full-time to learn the code enough to fix a trivial bug. That is, assuming they aren't already very, very familar with it. Then you have other requirements that may be involved, such as interfacing with other hardware or software.
No, it isn't as easy as "just pay someone". You might have to find them first, or pay for them to learn the code. Best case possible would be they agree to "learn the code" on their own time and will call back when they feel comfortable enough to work productively with a piece of software. That would be very unusual but possible for someone trying to learn their way around.
If the install does not include provisions for uninstall, then no standard uninstall is possible.
If the information for uninstall is deleted from the registry, then no uninstall is possible.
Sure, Microsoft might have some secret agenda whereby Yahoo Messenger and other "uninstall" information is silently deleted but that makes about as much sense as saying under Linux there isn't an Uninstall button.
How about Yahoo screwing up with their latest installer so the Uninstall option isn't there anymore?
How does someone selling something illegal get paid? If I open an auction site for heroin it would be greeted with great fanfare, even by the law enforcement community. Because they could just arrest the "winners" (actually losers). Sounds like a real money-maker for about 30 seconds.
OK, so there is an open auction for a remote exploit for Yahoo Messenger. So if I wanted to steal bank account information from lots of Yahoo Messenger users, this would be a good start. The minimum bid is 2000 Euro, which sounds pretty fair for something that could be used to grab millions of dollars from unsuspecting users worldwide. I would assume that similar exploits could be used in a similar fashion - to steal from people. Isn't that the new way to make money on the Internet from Eastern Europe?
But then we would be interfering with other nation's soverign rights to do things the way they want to. The WTO would hardly allow a tariff to be introduced that blocked trade based on environmental or wage standards, so it isn't going to happen.
How do Japan and China work around this? They decided they don't care if anyone imports stuff to them at all and nobody can refuse to buy their stuff. The US, on the other hand, is prett dependent on keeping some kind of trade balance with EU and other countries.
Unfortunately, those other nasty low-standards places are soverign nations. They don't like other people telling them what their rules should be.
So we should just not trade with people with lower standards? That would be illegal now. Against the WTO practices. So it isn't likely to happen unless the rest of the world gets behind the idea.
How does the concept of a compulsory license escape you?
This is not a decision related to RIAA copyrights, it is a decision that affects all music from everywhere.
The way playing music in public or on the radio works is you have to pay a fee to do it to a licensing organization who then distributes the collected revenue to the copyright holders. It doesn't matter if it is John's Backroom Band or some big-name band where Sony holds the copyright.
All music, foreign and domestic, is subject to this compulsory license for US venues and broadcasters. Other countries have similar arrangements as well so there really isn't any escaping this. At least not for very long.
DVD players made before 2000 often do not support recordable discs. This is intentional to prevent piracy.
I know something about the 321 Studios product DVD X Copy. The company was raking in well over $15,000,000 per month while this product was on the store shelves. With around a $50 price tag, that equates to 300,000 new users each month. Were they just buying it to have it and didn't intend on using it?
This is one product and the company was sued out of existance. There are dozens of products available today some free, some costing $50 or more. The folks behind 321 Studios are apparently selling their product from Canada now. Do you think there are no customers?
I suspect there are still well over 300,000 acquisitions (free or otherwise) each month of some type of DVD copying software. In the years since this got started this probably means there are over 100 million users.
Yeah, not as prevalent as once thought. Sure.
An interesting question is what were the terms of the materials that MediaMax licensed the software to Sony under. Assuming they were not utter idiots, there was almost certainly a clause in the license that says they can't be sued for consequential damages. Would a court override such a clause in the contract?
Sony certainly seems to think they can get somewhere with it or they wouldn't have bothered filing such a lawsuit.
What does this mean? Well, for starters unless very, very narrowly constructed such an argument could be made against any software product including a free one. A precedent of overriding or ignoring such a license clause could then result in a bunch of lawsuits against software makers for such consequential damages. Absolutely, Microsoft could be held accountable for spreadsheet errors, viruses, identity theft and who knows what else. The authors of free software could be held accountable for errors and omissions that result in consequential damages to businesses or even individuals.
Sounds like a terrible precedent to set. I would expect an avalanche of lawsuits being filed the next day. Microsoft would probably last six months, if even that. Adobe would be right behind them, as would every other software publisher that had someone that lost money because of software.
I believe the primary reason for such disclaimers of liability are because today it is nearly impossible for some third party to tell the difference between a defect in the software design and a user error. Making user-proof software would not be fun at all, nor would it be very usable. Think what designing an application with "CYA protection" built in from the beginning would be like.
I would say that you are completely wrong.
The idea that the President should take a poll to decide what to have for breakfast and "do the will of the people" leads to utter non-leadership. The Senate was designed to be far less responsive to the "will of the people" from the beginning and the President seems to have been assumed to be even less so.
You vote based on a number of factors and the elected President then implements what his position is. What you are advocating is no position at all. If the polls show people like cornflakes, breakfast will be cornflakes. If the polls show the death penalty is popular, lots of executions result. If the following week the death penalty is less popular then stop the executions. All this does is present an ever-changing face to the world that nobody can rely on. There are no principals, there is no basis for anything except a fickle population.
Clinton tried to govern this way and it didn't work very well.
My understanding (limited as it is) is that you cannot sign away "moral rights" in Germany. This has many implications legally. It applies to everything that is copyright-able, such as books, movies, help files for software products, manual, artwork, etc.
Aside from that, I think it is fair to say that email is pretty much something that is useless for any commercial application and pointless for something like a "newsletter". The spam vs. ham ratio has gotten to about 1000 to 1 these days, even if they aren't directly seeing it. And that is part of the problem.
It is assumed to be acceptable for an ISP to block "spam". It is assumed to be OK for anyone to get in the way of mail to a recipient to save them from receiving the torrent of spam that they would otherwise be subjected to. False positives are considered to be something that just happens. None of the agents preventing delivery of mail offer any notification to the user that mail may be waiting for them in the "bulk" or "spam" folder, nor offer any recourse if the mail is simply deleted without delivery.
With that in mind, email is suitable for something for friends and family only. If you are trying to send a receipt to someone for an online purchase, such email is commonly considered to be "commercial" which equates to "spam" in some people's minds. Outlook by default takes anything from sales@abcdef.com and puts it into the deleted items folder, just confirming the view that anything related to "sales" must be spam.
Email is pointless for any commercial use. Companies trying to resurrect email as a viable communications medium are starting to notice this. Sure, pay to send email and some percentage of your customers won't have your email blocked. What percentage? 10%? This means you need to budget tens of thousands of dollars for "email protection" if you are going to go this way.
Face it, email is pointless and unreliable. You will never know if your email is being blocked. You can't tell a complaining customer that never got their receipt that you will "fix" this somehow. It is broken and you need to figure out a different delivery mechanism.
Interesting idea, but what do you do about copycat products? Let's say Palm creates a new, open, unlocked phone that one-ups the iPhone. Today, what would stop a company in China from taking all that documentation and producing an identical product based on that information?
Nothing, that's what would stop them. They would immediately benefit from any R & D that Palm put into the product and be able to copy it exactly. End result would be the Chinese copy could be sold at a much lower price. Great for consumers, really really bad for Palm. Pretty much this would put them out of business, leaving the copycat company producing the product. Of course, they wouldn't be able to produce a follow-on because they "stole" the plans for the original.
You basically cannot sue "John Doe". The RIAA has been able to file temporarily for discovery purposes but I am sure they have amend their filing quickly as soon as the identity of the person is discovered.
Without an identity, you can't sue. Period. So if a "copyright infringer's" identity is not available, there is nothing that can be done. Obtaining the identity is the first step in a civil procedure.
The problem with Windows is the ease-of-use. Let's see... I can email a link to an executable file to someone and when the click the link it runs the program. I can also email the executable itself and upon opening the attachment it will run the program.
This is very helpful in a corporate environment. When there are malicious people on the Internet this is a disaster. Which is the "right" way?
Sure, Windows could be made more secure. Unfortunately, all the security in the world will not prevent a machine from being compromised if the user runs a program. This is the "hole" in Vista - if you run a program and authorize it to run it will run and can affect the operation of the machine. Period.
Would a secure root/user logon environment make Windows secure? No. That is what Vista has implemented and it does not prevent the machine from being compromised.