A lot of the comments here presume that the intent of copyright was to provide people the incentive to be creative. Copyright is nothing of the sort. Copyright was intended as a means to prevent monopolies on publication and distribution. Look it up. The presumption has always been that there will always be artists and creativity and that it's not necessary to provide incentives for creativity.
In fact, in light of the original goals of copyright, it's hard to argue that copyright is even necessasry anymore. Thanks to technology, everyone has the means to publish and distribute their works.
Personally, what I'd like to see is not longer copyrights, but shorter ones that may extended for a period through a for-fee registration process. If you really believed copyrights are intended to provide incentive to create, then they ought to expire quickly so that people need to create more often to reap the benefits. In a practical sense, it's quite rare that a copyrighted work yields profit. Of those that do, most realize their commercial value within 10 years.
I'd also like to see copyrights made non-transferrable rights granted to the author(s). "Works for hire" would cease to transfer copyright away from the author, but rather represent a limited-term exclusive license arrangement (for example, a record company would never own an artist's work, they would just receive a limited term exclusive right to marketing and distribution). Group authorship should be treated as each individual as an original author and a licensee of the work (like a work for hire).
I have a 2003 Civic Hybrid and I almost never see 50 mpg when commuting. When I drive long distances on the Interstate, I generally get about 60 mpg (Boston to Bangor). Perhaps the EPA drivers drive like they're in NASCAR...
The technology is a Fair Use Circumvention Kit, consisting of equal parts technology, marketing, and industry-written legislation.
The term Fair Use Circumvention Kit is not only much more descriptive of the true nature of the beast, the acronym is also easy to remember, catchy, and equally descriptive.
Blogspot should ignore the takedown notice. The DMCA covers digital content, not digital reproductions of non-digital content. Further, it's not clear that any access-control technology was circumvented in the process.
In the US, companies are generally treated as people under the law ("juristic persons"). This stems from a series of cases from the late 19th century involving the railroads that made it to the US Supreme Court (the most famous being Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Company [118 U.S. 394 (1886)]). The Court didn't actually rule that corporations were people under the law, but that's how many people understood it, and that's more or less how we've operated ever since. Most legal and constitutional rights are afforded to corporations just as they are to individuals.
This has all sorts of very negative implications with regard to attempting to regulate business. Many people feel that it make the individuals second-class citizens in the eyes of the law -- and there's some really good arguments to that effect. Your "free speech" rights probably end at your employer's door, and if you sue you have to pay for your lawyers while for a company it's a tax-deductible expense (e.g., it's effectively subsidized by the government).
Verizon's blowing proverbial smoke through it's corporate anus here, though. Free speech is a poor argument in this case. First, not all speech is "free speech" and violating the reasonable confidence of a client would not be considered free speech. Factual or not, the information is of a personal nature and the individual would have a reasonable cause to believe it to remain private. It's no more free speech than if a lawyer violated the attorney-client privilege, of a psychologist had done the same.
Further, in Verizon's case, the "speech" consitutes aiding and abetting a criminal act: the government's violation of the 4th ammendment rights of Verizon's customers. While the government was engaged in the criminal activity, they could not have done so without the complicity of the company, who thus became an accessory to the crime.
George Bush famously said "there ought to be limits to free speech," and there are -- this is one such case. You can't cry "fire" in a crowded theater, you can't spread viscous rumors to torpedo someone's career, you can't talk about magic numbers that can be used to access digital media (OK, that's just stupid), and you can't provide sensitive information to the government that the explicitly requires them to obtain only with a court order after presenting a reasonable cause that an individual might be involved in criminal activity.
The original framers of the Constitution did not imagine patent trolls at all. At that time, one needed to demonstrate a working prototype of the invention. That prototype was also referred to to remove ambiguity as to what was being patented.
Not true any more.
I'd point out that the patent was filed for more than 20 years ago, but not granted until 1991.
I'd also point out that the patent implies an implementation much different than how such things are implemented today. The idea is not subject to patent, only the implementation -- which is demonstrably different.
This is a poor article on several points. First, the entropy of the data in the files isn't quantified. Second, the strategy used for compression isn't described at all. If WinRK compresses so well on very high entropy data, there must be some filetype specific strategies used.
Versions of the programs aren't given, nor the compile-time options (for the open source ones).
Finally, Windows Vista isn't a suitable platform for conducting the tests. Most of these tools target WinXP in their current versions and changes to Vista introduced systematic differences in very basic things like memory usage, file I/O properties, etc.
The idea of the article is fine, it's just that the analysis is half-baked.
Under current US law, anything you create -- anything you write/type/doodle/paint/record is a work to which you have the copyright. If there is an exemption to a law that applies to copyright holders, and everyone is a copyright holder, then logically everyone is exempt.
Actually, the International Copyright Treaty is what allows you to bring the CD from one country to the next. It also means to protect the right of the licensee to access a work from one region in any other region. All of the WTO member countries are signatories. In principle, none of the countries can enforce rules/laws/contracts that segment the markets or artificially place access controls on works solely on the basis of geographical factors.
The problem here is that while international law says the contracts Apple has can't enforce caluses that create a segmented global market, the contracts themselves do and if you break the terms, the labels will take their ball and go home.
Apple is claiming that they cannot distribute the music because the actual labels have agreements in place that only permit certain music to be distributed in certain countries. While this is true, the EU knows that under WTO rules, this practice is no longer defensible. Sure you can write a contract that makes the restriction, but it can no longer be enforced. The same with DVD region codes.
Companies that distribute for media companies, produce players and software, etc that enforce various region-based market segmentation strategies are, in their mind, complicit in engaging in restricting free trade. Apple knows that the rules allow them to distribute to provide a single global store for all customers in WTO signatory countries (which includes the US, EU, Japan, etc.), but doesn't. Apple doesn't do it, not because they can't, but because they don't want to to anger the labels that provide the actual content. While they couldn't be sued for ignoring the locale of the customer and distributing freely among the various countries, the labels would probably yank any further cooperation in retaliation.
Apple's between a rock and a hard place.
A similar situation exists with DVD region codes. Despite the fact that they are no longer legally enforcable, and outright illegal in certain jurisdictions, hardware manufacturers and software developers still support them. Why? So they can maintain a positive relationship with the media industry that still demands it. Meanwhile, most vendors make their products easy to modify to be made region-free (what the consumer wants).
It would have been much easier if the WTO explicitly outlawed regional segmentation of markets. The way it is worded make it so it's still legal to do, but any attempt to "enforce" such artificial segmentat or make others respect same is not permitted. I guess that's a way of saying that you can choose not to sell in a particular country, but you can't refuse someone the right to distribute or use your products (after they legally obtain them from you) in another country.
The RIAA is NOT claiming a crime was committed. They are claiming that a contract violation was committed. Big difference.
They realize that the burden of proof for criminal infringement claims is way to high -- they could never possibly prove it. Instead, they are suing for simple copyright infringement which is a tort -- basically a contract violation. That is to say, they are claiming that the defendant violated the implied contract that stipulates that in return for the work eventually becoming part of the public domain people will not copy or distribute it without permission.
Of course, since it's unlikely that the defendant would see the work go into the public domain during their lifetime, it might be hard to show that the copyright contract is strictly legal. Generally speaking, those terms would preclude its enforcement if challenged (not that anyone has challenged it on those terms).
The DMCA doesn't have exceptions to the Safe Harbor provision. As written, the provision always applies. Also, just as with regular copyright, whether or not the accused benefits from the infringment is immaterial to the infringement claim. It is only material when damages are determined.
More important, however, is that is absolutely the case that the copyright holder, not any other party, is responsible for identifying potentially infringing content. Why? Because the simple fact that the content is copied/used is no indicator that there is infringment, even if the content creator and submitter are not one and the same. That's true for two reasons. First, any use is generally considered a fair-use and not infringing until the copyright holder files a complaint and the use is adjuicated as infringing. Infrginement is identified ex post facto.
Even then, there's also the problem that for a third party to know that a particular copy is infrgining a copyright, they need to be able to know that the copy neither qualifies as fair-use, that the work has not been released into the public domain by the copyright holder, AND that the provider of the copy doesn't have a right to the copy (e.g., they don't have some sort of license agreement to make and distribute the copies as they had). Determining if a work has been released to the public domain isn't generally possible, though one could operate on the general assumption that since little ever reaches the public domain, that any given work is unlikely to be in the public domain. Determining if the copy falls under fair-use isn't technically feasible as fair-use is not specifically defined and the courts have intentionally left it open to intepretation with the understaninf that fair-use will be evaluated on a case-by-case basis. And it's not feasible that a third-party, like Google, can determine the terms and nature of licenses granted between the individual submitter and the copyright holder. The closest they can get is a statement from the submitter that they believe that they have sufficient authority to submit to the service -- and Google already does that.
The safe-harbor provision of the DMCA exists to accomodate these realities of US copyright law. Viacom is simply foolish to pursue this claim. If they would like to go after individual posters to YouTube, that's their right, and they might win (though a 2 min clip from a 20 min show, particularly with editorial comments on the content, would seem to be a traditional fair-use and may very well be upheld as such by a US court). This is how, very intentionally, copyright law is structured in the USA.
Assuming Viacom did win -- after all, it's not about right and wrong but who has the most compelling lawyers -- what about the damages? It seems to me that the presence of the clips on YouTube have made the content itself much more valuable. The shows, as franchises, much more profitable as a result. So, are there damages? Perhaps fines, but since the service has benefitted Viacom, does that benefit offset the damages?
It's not that difficult. POSIX' value is in its portability. Win32's value is in the fact that it's the native model.
Generally speaking, the native model will always offer superior performance and a superset of the features of POSIX threads. Be that Win32, Solaris, Linux, or what have you -- it's a good rule of thumb that the native threading model and API performs better and is more flexible.
That said, the difference is generally small enough that it's eclipsed by the portability feature if portability will ever be a concern. The fact that the programmer can learn a single threading API and use it anywhere means more flexibility in development and finding developers, and generally higher code quality (since people that have a skill focus on multi-threaded programming are almost assuredly well-versed in the POSIX API).
The author lives in the USA, where this is a felony. You can't burn down a man's house for stealing a cookie. Not only that, but this particular type of thing now falls under certain provisions of various anti-terrorism laws. If it works, the author could find himself in prison for a very long time.
I've been doing this for years with large contigs to help visualize repeats. You'd be amazed at how good we humans are at picking out patterns visually.
Another possibility is getting all-in-one PCs or some of the mini-form-factor PCs. All-in-ones are typically redesigned laptops with the battery support removed. A good example is the Apple iMac, even the 24"LCD model peaks around 120W when pushing the CPU and GPU at 100%, thrashing the disk, and powering the display at full brightness. Many of the MicroATX kits use low-power components too.
There's a British company that makes UPS solutions where the PC can, via USB control, turn-off some of the outlets on it. You could automate the process and cut power to peripherals when not in use and power them up when needed. Hopefully something like it will be available in the states (the British company doesn't make 120V models).
The premise of the article is flawed. First, using DCA to treat cancer IS patentable -- it would be a new indication for the compound. Also, it's known to be moderately toxic in humans, causing organ damage and exacerbating certain cancers (esp. hepatic). Also, there's not any evidence that it may have the sames effect in humans as in mice. Further, the safety work for the drug, production, and formulation have been worked out long ago. Right now, one would only need to do a study to show efficacy and that'd likely cost less than $1 million; which is an amount for which grants are still widely available.
So, the article is a little misleading. Nobody (other than the article author) feels that this drug would cure cancer, or that it's even less toxic than current treatments. There's also most assuredly profit to be had from it.
... but the implementation is not very good (yet).
It basically attempts to implement something like QuickSilver but comes out being much more like the much simpler Katapult. It's curious then why they aren't copying stuff like the activation keys, etc. QuickSilver and Katapult share the same basic keystrokes and they're pretty comfortable too.
I like the idea of the spell-check feature. I was always curious why this isn't the default behavior for text boxes in Windows as it is in Linux/KDE (where it's automatic) or on the Mac (where sometimes you have to hit a key-combo). I've been fiddling around with Vista a bit and am still surprised about how many little UI niceties that MS hasn't lifted from their competition. There's some good stuff out there, and I can't believe that they aren't aware of it. I haven't done much coding for Windows in a while, but I can see how under pre-Vista versions of Windows these things might be a little tricky to implement (perhaps that explains the large size of this app, about 10x that of QuickSilver or Katapult).
This was (more or less) true until 1996. In that year the US became signatory to the World Intellectual Property Organization International Copyright Treaty. Under those new rules, all such restrictions are eliminated as was legal protection for region-based access control (like region-coding).
It's not that companies don't artificially segment the market for marketing reasons -- they do. There's still region codes on DVDs today despite the treaty basically saying that the countries agree to not enforce any law that validates or protects the practice (e.g., you can legally circumvent the region-locking of DVDs).
Today, market regionalization is nothing more than an artifact. It's simply a gentlemen's agreement to not dilute local markets with foreign content which might compete with the local stuff. I'm sure that in the case of iTunes, Apple has been requested to maintain the artifice as a condition for the rights to resell the content. The practical result being that consumers see a view of the music scene prepared carefully prepared by the industry for local consumption to maximize profit.
DCA is already a commercially available as a compound and has been studied quite a bit as a treatment for various disorders (congenital lactic acidosis, MELAS, mitochondrial disorders, etc.)
It's relatively toxic (liver damage, neuropathy). I would guess that a company that would try it as a cancer treatment could develop some much-simplified trials since the toxicology is pretty well worked out. It's also very cheap to make and prepare.
Even without a patent, I would guess that you could turn a profit in this case. There's no development cost, no toxicology, just efficacy trials for the new indication.
That said, companies are poor choices for finding cures for diseases. Treating a disease is profitable, curing it much less so. Cures for diseases out to be sought by non-profits and academic institutions, and then once something passes FDA muster, it can be turned over to drug companies for production and distribution as a generic drug. This isn't generally how it is done, but there's also no reason it cannot be done this way.
Slashdot Mirror
A lot of the comments here presume that the intent of copyright was to provide people the incentive to be creative. Copyright is nothing of the sort. Copyright was intended as a means to prevent monopolies on publication and distribution. Look it up. The presumption has always been that there will always be artists and creativity and that it's not necessary to provide incentives for creativity.
In fact, in light of the original goals of copyright, it's hard to argue that copyright is even necessasry anymore. Thanks to technology, everyone has the means to publish and distribute their works.
Personally, what I'd like to see is not longer copyrights, but shorter ones that may extended for a period through a for-fee registration process. If you really believed copyrights are intended to provide incentive to create, then they ought to expire quickly so that people need to create more often to reap the benefits. In a practical sense, it's quite rare that a copyrighted work yields profit. Of those that do, most realize their commercial value within 10 years.
I'd also like to see copyrights made non-transferrable rights granted to the author(s). "Works for hire" would cease to transfer copyright away from the author, but rather represent a limited-term exclusive license arrangement (for example, a record company would never own an artist's work, they would just receive a limited term exclusive right to marketing and distribution). Group authorship should be treated as each individual as an original author and a licensee of the work (like a work for hire).
Should read "I never see LESS THAN 50mpg"... Slashdot took out the less-than sign...
I have a 2003 Civic Hybrid and I almost never see 50 mpg when commuting. When I drive long distances on the Interstate, I generally get about 60 mpg (Boston to Bangor). Perhaps the EPA drivers drive like they're in NASCAR...
The technology is a Fair Use Circumvention Kit, consisting of equal parts technology, marketing, and industry-written legislation.
The term Fair Use Circumvention Kit is not only much more descriptive of the true nature of the beast, the acronym is also easy to remember, catchy, and equally descriptive.
Blogspot should ignore the takedown notice. The DMCA covers digital content, not digital reproductions of non-digital content. Further, it's not clear that any access-control technology was circumvented in the process.
In the US, companies are generally treated as people under the law ("juristic persons"). This stems from a series of cases from the late 19th century involving the railroads that made it to the US Supreme Court (the most famous being Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Company [118 U.S. 394 (1886)]). The Court didn't actually rule that corporations were people under the law, but that's how many people understood it, and that's more or less how we've operated ever since. Most legal and constitutional rights are afforded to corporations just as they are to individuals.
This has all sorts of very negative implications with regard to attempting to regulate business. Many people feel that it make the individuals second-class citizens in the eyes of the law -- and there's some really good arguments to that effect. Your "free speech" rights probably end at your employer's door, and if you sue you have to pay for your lawyers while for a company it's a tax-deductible expense (e.g., it's effectively subsidized by the government).
Verizon's blowing proverbial smoke through it's corporate anus here, though. Free speech is a poor argument in this case. First, not all speech is "free speech" and violating the reasonable confidence of a client would not be considered free speech. Factual or not, the information is of a personal nature and the individual would have a reasonable cause to believe it to remain private. It's no more free speech than if a lawyer violated the attorney-client privilege, of a psychologist had done the same.
Further, in Verizon's case, the "speech" consitutes aiding and abetting a criminal act: the government's violation of the 4th ammendment rights of Verizon's customers. While the government was engaged in the criminal activity, they could not have done so without the complicity of the company, who thus became an accessory to the crime.
George Bush famously said "there ought to be limits to free speech," and there are -- this is one such case. You can't cry "fire" in a crowded theater, you can't spread viscous rumors to torpedo someone's career, you can't talk about magic numbers that can be used to access digital media (OK, that's just stupid), and you can't provide sensitive information to the government that the explicitly requires them to obtain only with a court order after presenting a reasonable cause that an individual might be involved in criminal activity.
I would think that a decent prosecutor could make the case that it's extortion.
The original framers of the Constitution did not imagine patent trolls at all. At that time, one needed to demonstrate a working prototype of the invention. That prototype was also referred to to remove ambiguity as to what was being patented.
Not true any more.
I'd point out that the patent was filed for more than 20 years ago, but not granted until 1991.
I'd also point out that the patent implies an implementation much different than how such things are implemented today. The idea is not subject to patent, only the implementation -- which is demonstrably different.
This is a poor article on several points. First, the entropy of the data in the files isn't quantified. Second, the strategy used for compression isn't described at all. If WinRK compresses so well on very high entropy data, there must be some filetype specific strategies used.
Versions of the programs aren't given, nor the compile-time options (for the open source ones).
Finally, Windows Vista isn't a suitable platform for conducting the tests. Most of these tools target WinXP in their current versions and changes to Vista introduced systematic differences in very basic things like memory usage, file I/O properties, etc.
The idea of the article is fine, it's just that the analysis is half-baked.
Under current US law, anything you create -- anything you write/type/doodle/paint/record is a work to which you have the copyright. If there is an exemption to a law that applies to copyright holders, and everyone is a copyright holder, then logically everyone is exempt.
Actually, the International Copyright Treaty is what allows you to bring the CD from one country to the next. It also means to protect the right of the licensee to access a work from one region in any other region. All of the WTO member countries are signatories. In principle, none of the countries can enforce rules/laws/contracts that segment the markets or artificially place access controls on works solely on the basis of geographical factors.
The problem here is that while international law says the contracts Apple has can't enforce caluses that create a segmented global market, the contracts themselves do and if you break the terms, the labels will take their ball and go home.
Apple is claiming that they cannot distribute the music because the actual labels have agreements in place that only permit certain music to be distributed in certain countries. While this is true, the EU knows that under WTO rules, this practice is no longer defensible. Sure you can write a contract that makes the restriction, but it can no longer be enforced. The same with DVD region codes.
Companies that distribute for media companies, produce players and software, etc that enforce various region-based market segmentation strategies are, in their mind, complicit in engaging in restricting free trade. Apple knows that the rules allow them to distribute to provide a single global store for all customers in WTO signatory countries (which includes the US, EU, Japan, etc.), but doesn't. Apple doesn't do it, not because they can't, but because they don't want to to anger the labels that provide the actual content. While they couldn't be sued for ignoring the locale of the customer and distributing freely among the various countries, the labels would probably yank any further cooperation in retaliation.
Apple's between a rock and a hard place.
A similar situation exists with DVD region codes. Despite the fact that they are no longer legally enforcable, and outright illegal in certain jurisdictions, hardware manufacturers and software developers still support them. Why? So they can maintain a positive relationship with the media industry that still demands it. Meanwhile, most vendors make their products easy to modify to be made region-free (what the consumer wants).
It would have been much easier if the WTO explicitly outlawed regional segmentation of markets. The way it is worded make it so it's still legal to do, but any attempt to "enforce" such artificial segmentat or make others respect same is not permitted. I guess that's a way of saying that you can choose not to sell in a particular country, but you can't refuse someone the right to distribute or use your products (after they legally obtain them from you) in another country.
The RIAA is NOT claiming a crime was committed. They are claiming that a contract violation was committed. Big difference.
They realize that the burden of proof for criminal infringement claims is way to high -- they could never possibly prove it. Instead, they are suing for simple copyright infringement which is a tort -- basically a contract violation. That is to say, they are claiming that the defendant violated the implied contract that stipulates that in return for the work eventually becoming part of the public domain people will not copy or distribute it without permission.
Of course, since it's unlikely that the defendant would see the work go into the public domain during their lifetime, it might be hard to show that the copyright contract is strictly legal. Generally speaking, those terms would preclude its enforcement if challenged (not that anyone has challenged it on those terms).
The DMCA doesn't have exceptions to the Safe Harbor provision. As written, the provision always applies. Also, just as with regular copyright, whether or not the accused benefits from the infringment is immaterial to the infringement claim. It is only material when damages are determined.
More important, however, is that is absolutely the case that the copyright holder, not any other party, is responsible for identifying potentially infringing content. Why? Because the simple fact that the content is copied/used is no indicator that there is infringment, even if the content creator and submitter are not one and the same. That's true for two reasons. First, any use is generally considered a fair-use and not infringing until the copyright holder files a complaint and the use is adjuicated as infringing. Infrginement is identified ex post facto.
Even then, there's also the problem that for a third party to know that a particular copy is infrgining a copyright, they need to be able to know that the copy neither qualifies as fair-use, that the work has not been released into the public domain by the copyright holder, AND that the provider of the copy doesn't have a right to the copy (e.g., they don't have some sort of license agreement to make and distribute the copies as they had). Determining if a work has been released to the public domain isn't generally possible, though one could operate on the general assumption that since little ever reaches the public domain, that any given work is unlikely to be in the public domain. Determining if the copy falls under fair-use isn't technically feasible as fair-use is not specifically defined and the courts have intentionally left it open to intepretation with the understaninf that fair-use will be evaluated on a case-by-case basis. And it's not feasible that a third-party, like Google, can determine the terms and nature of licenses granted between the individual submitter and the copyright holder. The closest they can get is a statement from the submitter that they believe that they have sufficient authority to submit to the service -- and Google already does that.
The safe-harbor provision of the DMCA exists to accomodate these realities of US copyright law. Viacom is simply foolish to pursue this claim. If they would like to go after individual posters to YouTube, that's their right, and they might win (though a 2 min clip from a 20 min show, particularly with editorial comments on the content, would seem to be a traditional fair-use and may very well be upheld as such by a US court). This is how, very intentionally, copyright law is structured in the USA.
Assuming Viacom did win -- after all, it's not about right and wrong but who has the most compelling lawyers -- what about the damages? It seems to me that the presence of the clips on YouTube have made the content itself much more valuable. The shows, as franchises, much more profitable as a result. So, are there damages? Perhaps fines, but since the service has benefitted Viacom, does that benefit offset the damages?
It's not that difficult. POSIX' value is in its portability. Win32's value is in the fact that it's the native model.
Generally speaking, the native model will always offer superior performance and a superset of the features of POSIX threads. Be that Win32, Solaris, Linux, or what have you -- it's a good rule of thumb that the native threading model and API performs better and is more flexible.
That said, the difference is generally small enough that it's eclipsed by the portability feature if portability will ever be a concern. The fact that the programmer can learn a single threading API and use it anywhere means more flexibility in development and finding developers, and generally higher code quality (since people that have a skill focus on multi-threaded programming are almost assuredly well-versed in the POSIX API).
The author lives in the USA, where this is a felony. You can't burn down a man's house for stealing a cookie. Not only that, but this particular type of thing now falls under certain provisions of various anti-terrorism laws. If it works, the author could find himself in prison for a very long time.
I've been doing this for years with large contigs to help visualize repeats. You'd be amazed at how good we humans are at picking out patterns visually.
Mandatory labeling of sexually explicit images will make them much easier to find.
Another possibility is getting all-in-one PCs or some of the mini-form-factor PCs. All-in-ones are typically redesigned laptops with the battery support removed. A good example is the Apple iMac, even the 24"LCD model peaks around 120W when pushing the CPU and GPU at 100%, thrashing the disk, and powering the display at full brightness. Many of the MicroATX kits use low-power components too. There's a British company that makes UPS solutions where the PC can, via USB control, turn-off some of the outlets on it. You could automate the process and cut power to peripherals when not in use and power them up when needed. Hopefully something like it will be available in the states (the British company doesn't make 120V models).
The premise of the article is flawed. First, using DCA to treat cancer IS patentable -- it would be a new indication for the compound. Also, it's known to be moderately toxic in humans, causing organ damage and exacerbating certain cancers (esp. hepatic). Also, there's not any evidence that it may have the sames effect in humans as in mice. Further, the safety work for the drug, production, and formulation have been worked out long ago. Right now, one would only need to do a study to show efficacy and that'd likely cost less than $1 million; which is an amount for which grants are still widely available.
So, the article is a little misleading. Nobody (other than the article author) feels that this drug would cure cancer, or that it's even less toxic than current treatments. There's also most assuredly profit to be had from it.
Are these folks just too lazy to go to the library and rip DVDs from there? Young people today!
That's nice and all, but that's not what the application is attempting to do. It's not a hotkey tool.
... but the implementation is not very good (yet).
It basically attempts to implement something like QuickSilver but comes out being much more like the much simpler Katapult. It's curious then why they aren't copying stuff like the activation keys, etc. QuickSilver and Katapult share the same basic keystrokes and they're pretty comfortable too.
I like the idea of the spell-check feature. I was always curious why this isn't the default behavior for text boxes in Windows as it is in Linux/KDE (where it's automatic) or on the Mac (where sometimes you have to hit a key-combo). I've been fiddling around with Vista a bit and am still surprised about how many little UI niceties that MS hasn't lifted from their competition. There's some good stuff out there, and I can't believe that they aren't aware of it. I haven't done much coding for Windows in a while, but I can see how under pre-Vista versions of Windows these things might be a little tricky to implement (perhaps that explains the large size of this app, about 10x that of QuickSilver or Katapult).
This was (more or less) true until 1996. In that year the US became signatory to the World Intellectual Property Organization International Copyright Treaty. Under those new rules, all such restrictions are eliminated as was legal protection for region-based access control (like region-coding).
It's not that companies don't artificially segment the market for marketing reasons -- they do. There's still region codes on DVDs today despite the treaty basically saying that the countries agree to not enforce any law that validates or protects the practice (e.g., you can legally circumvent the region-locking of DVDs).
Today, market regionalization is nothing more than an artifact. It's simply a gentlemen's agreement to not dilute local markets with foreign content which might compete with the local stuff. I'm sure that in the case of iTunes, Apple has been requested to maintain the artifice as a condition for the rights to resell the content. The practical result being that consumers see a view of the music scene prepared carefully prepared by the industry for local consumption to maximize profit.
DCA is already a commercially available as a compound and has been studied quite a bit as a treatment for various disorders (congenital lactic acidosis, MELAS, mitochondrial disorders, etc.)
It's relatively toxic (liver damage, neuropathy). I would guess that a company that would try it as a cancer treatment could develop some much-simplified trials since the toxicology is pretty well worked out. It's also very cheap to make and prepare.
Even without a patent, I would guess that you could turn a profit in this case. There's no development cost, no toxicology, just efficacy trials for the new indication.
That said, companies are poor choices for finding cures for diseases. Treating a disease is profitable, curing it much less so. Cures for diseases out to be sought by non-profits and academic institutions, and then once something passes FDA muster, it can be turned over to drug companies for production and distribution as a generic drug. This isn't generally how it is done, but there's also no reason it cannot be done this way.