Your honor, much like P2P networks, Viacom only provided one copy. The fact that millions may have pulled down their own copies is not Viacom's problem. All they did was host it locally on their own transmitter for their own personal use (so they could stream the content to their own homes) and they cannot help the fact that others discovered their "server." I Your Honor and kind folks of the jury, I submit to you that the defendant should be ruled to be innocent of copyright in light of these facts, and that the plaintiff is, if I may use a technical term, full of shit.
Does that mean it would also extend to software, and vista should be uploaded with a text file reading:
Vista Review (by vb3r 1337 p1r473)
This software is defective by design. I rate it a 0 on a scale of 1 to 10. To see for yourself how craptastic this OS is, install it from a DVD burned using this ISO. Enter the key foo12-bar34-zag56-nut78-poo90 and then run the included v1574cr4ck.exe in c:\windows\system32 on the first boot to begin experiencing my pain.
and maybe include a couple of videos streamlined into the Vista install of some geek reading the above view, and have those videos play right after v1574cr4ck.exe is executed. Then, the requirement of commentary to legitimize the Fair Use claim is legitimized.
Those "unsophisticated" users you are referring to are either not updating their windows boxes at ALL, or are unknowingly relying upon only what automatic updates will pull down. The "sophisticated" users who are low maintenance users (low support costs, never need to use the "free" install support incidents, etc) and their own OEMs and partners are the ones who seek out tools like Autopatcher - in fact, in many cases decision makers for small to mid size companies.
Every time Microsoft pulls shit like this, they are costing themselves customers, and pushing more future sales to Linux, OS X, and BSD. If they were smart, they would ENCOURAGE the Autopackage folks to continue what they've been doing, because it decreases the load on their servers and it makes Windows less painless for OEMs and IT departments to install.
In summary: bad move, Microsoft.
Want to support the Autopackage folks? Email Microsoft and tell them what you think. Be polite or as rude as you want, but let them know you think they are MORONS for shutting down Autopackage and that it is a disservice to paying customers (especially rural customers and commercial broadband customers dealing with "unpublished" caps) and only legitimizes slipstreamed "Pirate" versions of Windows.
Is WSUS going to let you bring a CD of updates home? Does WSUS help you if you don't run Windows 2003 Server? Does WSUS make it easy to snail mail updates to friends who live in rural communities? Does WSUS give you much-needed but PITA-to-get hotfixes? Does WSUS allow you to install all updates in one fell swoop with only one or two reboots?
No? Try reading the thread. All these reasons and more are covered.
They turned on their customers because they've peaked and know it. They're desperate to maintain their monopoly and in their desperation are making mistakes which are resulting in PR blunders.
I have a CD of SoftICE from a friend who bought it in China in his home town - it's on a pressed CD, but handwritten label. I didn't ask him if he literally bought it off a street vendor, or from an established store, but does it matter?
The CD's contents is presumably identical to the retail release (if it were still able to be purchased legitimately that is). I keep it around just because it's an interesting conversation piece about what passes for legitimate product in China.
So much for small business and residential users in rural areas. You know, this will hurt ONLY paying customers; not the "pirates" downloading slipstreamed ISOs off of IRC and torrent networks (or buying "pirated" CDs in the streets, etc). This also hurts small businesses on cable and DSL connections where there are "unspecified" download caps to their "unlimited" internet services.
Congratulations, Microsoft. You've shut down yet another tool useful for installing and deploying legitimate Windows, thereby increasing the value of "pirated" Windows offerings AND provided more reasons for users to choose alternatives such as Linux, OS X, and BSD. Good move there.
Why not actually, oh, I don't know, innovate some new features for Windows rather than harassing small third-party developers who offer FREE utilities to make YOUR piece of crap offering easier to manage? Like, say, I dunno, work on a better filesystem or something.
The scope of their use is pretty limited, too. For example: they can't syndicate it or resell it to other services, but they can use it as a featured video on google video or youtube, or an article or op-ed written by you as a feature on their google news page, or if you wrote a short story, feature it in their online book indices. They're not giving themselves all-you-can-eat buffet access to your content, and unlike some other companies, they acknowledge that work submitted by you is by default copyrighted to you and as such you have exclusive right to control your content outside of the limited scope of uses you are granting them in exchange for using their free services.
So in other words, telecommuting in rural areas is near impossible even though telcos and cable companies have been subsidized many billions to make the nationwide broadband rollout happen.
People are spoiled by the phone/cable companies "giving" the modem to you.
They GIVE it to you? No. In the case of DSL, it's built into the costs, especially the activation fees. For cable, you rent it or buy it. They don't just give it to you.
Broadcasting an SSID and not locking the WAP is an invitation to use the connection. Don't want people on it? Read the freaking manual and lock it down. Don't invite people in. This is akin to putting a television out on the front lawn with a sign saying "free TV" and then pressing charges for larceny when someone takes that advertised television.
They really ought to push to outlaw speakers and headphones. After all, if you can hear it, you can remember it, and each time you get an earworm, you are "enjoying" an uncompensated performance of that copyrighted material. Likewise, if you can hear it, it can be recorded. Clearly, analog devices such as speakers and headphones are designed primarily for the purpose of copy infringement and ought to be outlawed.
No, to make a FPS game consisting of eye-candy or takes a lot of cash.
GREAT games, like Commander Keen, Sonic the Hedgehog, Cosmo, Super Mario Brothers, and so forth take a lot less cash to code. They take more in the planning stages; planning out the puzzles and fun gameplay overall.
FPS games were great, and I think the height of them was Hexen II (opengl version). After that, the graphics got so good that they quit focusing on game play and started focusing on eye candy and blood and gore. Return to Castle Wolfenstein is playable, IMHO, but Quake 3 and Doom3 are just boring. Of course, YMMV, etc.
The end result is obvious: eventually every player is going to be pushing drives that handle both high-capacity/high-def formats as well as DVD and CD, much like we saw with DVD-R vs. DVD+R. I agree though: this has been the only good news on HD-DVD's side in a while.
1) It is still unsolicited e-mail. You may think that there's something I really, really want. You may believe to the core of your being it is something I care about. You may still be wrong. There may well be people in those restricted countries that just don't give a shit. Perhaps all of the web they care about is allowed through the filters. Thus they really don't want to hear from you.
Or maybe, just maybe, Chinese citizens will discover that there are countries where freedom of expression without fear of reprisal exists (it used to here in America but now can supposedly land you on a no-fly-list or worse) and they may discover things that they do care deeply about once they're exposed to it, and no, I am not referring to pr0n.
It doesn't HAVE to crash the Internet. See, the media giants and ISPs can encourage users to set up networks where they share out what they downloaded, signing into central servers just to negotiate, establish, and track connections, and transfer files directly to one another. The server can not just help negotiate and track the connections, but keep track of the number of completed diodes. Since the clients transfer the data directly to one another, we could call these Peer-to-peer networks, or "P2P" for short. The companies running the "tracking" (or "tracker") servers can report the stats back to the media companies, who can then determine and adjust the rates for the advertising embedded in the free content. Advertisers will be happy because they will know EXACTLY how many people download the content, media companies will be happy because they have stats proving their offerings are popular and ISPs will be happy because a lot of the bandwidth will remain within their networks, and not extend out over their links to the backbone, keeping overhead down --- hey, I think I'm onto something here. Excuse me while I patent the idea!;)
That may be valid if in fact the software can be returned. The simple fact is that once you purchase software online, or in most stores, and disagree with the EULA, the return will be refused. You're left holding the bag. In such cases the EULA is pretty much irrelevent and you still have your right of first sale, so you can pretty much do what you darn well please with that commodity good.
Now, for a phone directory? It's factual information, and not subject to copyright. Were the software a work for hire I'd agree that the contract law ruling would hold water, but where it was offered as a commidity good, Zeidenberg should have pushed the appeal process much further.
Well, where software is concerned, EULAs are moot. You see the EULA after you make the purchase and open the package. Open the package, the store will refuse to accept it. Your right of first sale (it's a commodity good, NOT a work for hire) allows you to use it for its intended purpose without restriction. You are still of course bound by patents and copyrights, but not to use the package for its advertised purpose, or even to resell it to someone else when you're finished with it.
With AT&T, you're buying a service; it amounts to a work for hire, in essence. As such, they can require you to agree to certain terms, but not ones which would restrict you from certain rights, e.g., if they work with the government to subert your constitutional rights (e.g., engaged in wiretapping without a warrant), engage in fraud and charge you for services you do not receive, or falsely advertise their services (advertising them as unlimited), and so forth, it is unreasonable for a court to accept that waiver of such rights is valid or even possible.
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Your honor, much like P2P networks, Viacom only provided one copy. The fact that millions may have pulled down their own copies is not Viacom's problem. All they did was host it locally on their own transmitter for their own personal use (so they could stream the content to their own homes) and they cannot help the fact that others discovered their "server." I Your Honor and kind folks of the jury, I submit to you that the defendant should be ruled to be innocent of copyright in light of these facts, and that the plaintiff is, if I may use a technical term, full of shit.
and maybe include a couple of videos streamlined into the Vista install of some geek reading the above view, and have those videos play right after v1574cr4ck.exe is executed. Then, the requirement of commentary to legitimize the Fair Use claim is legitimized.
Yeah, I'm sure that will fly.
Every time Microsoft pulls shit like this, they are costing themselves customers, and pushing more future sales to Linux, OS X, and BSD. If they were smart, they would ENCOURAGE the Autopackage folks to continue what they've been doing, because it decreases the load on their servers and it makes Windows less painless for OEMs and IT departments to install.
In summary: bad move, Microsoft.
Want to support the Autopackage folks? Email Microsoft and tell them what you think. Be polite or as rude as you want, but let them know you think they are MORONS for shutting down Autopackage and that it is a disservice to paying customers (especially rural customers and commercial broadband customers dealing with "unpublished" caps) and only legitimizes slipstreamed "Pirate" versions of Windows.
Is WSUS going to let you bring a CD of updates home?
Does WSUS help you if you don't run Windows 2003 Server?
Does WSUS make it easy to snail mail updates to friends who live in rural communities?
Does WSUS give you much-needed but PITA-to-get hotfixes?
Does WSUS allow you to install all updates in one fell swoop with only one or two reboots?
No? Try reading the thread. All these reasons and more are covered.
They turned on their customers because they've peaked and know it. They're desperate to maintain their monopoly and in their desperation are making mistakes which are resulting in PR blunders.
I have a CD of SoftICE from a friend who bought it in China in his home town - it's on a pressed CD, but handwritten label. I didn't ask him if he literally bought it off a street vendor, or from an established store, but does it matter?
The CD's contents is presumably identical to the retail release (if it were still able to be purchased legitimately that is). I keep it around just because it's an interesting conversation piece about what passes for legitimate product in China.
So much for small business and residential users in rural areas. You know, this will hurt ONLY paying customers; not the "pirates" downloading slipstreamed ISOs off of IRC and torrent networks (or buying "pirated" CDs in the streets, etc). This also hurts small businesses on cable and DSL connections where there are "unspecified" download caps to their "unlimited" internet services.
Congratulations, Microsoft. You've shut down yet another tool useful for installing and deploying legitimate Windows, thereby increasing the value of "pirated" Windows offerings AND provided more reasons for users to choose alternatives such as Linux, OS X, and BSD. Good move there.
Why not actually, oh, I don't know, innovate some new features for Windows rather than harassing small third-party developers who offer FREE utilities to make YOUR piece of crap offering easier to manage? Like, say, I dunno, work on a better filesystem or something.
The scope of their use is pretty limited, too. For example: they can't syndicate it or resell it to other services, but they can use it as a featured video on google video or youtube, or an article or op-ed written by you as a feature on their google news page, or if you wrote a short story, feature it in their online book indices. They're not giving themselves all-you-can-eat buffet access to your content, and unlike some other companies, they acknowledge that work submitted by you is by default copyrighted to you and as such you have exclusive right to control your content outside of the limited scope of uses you are granting them in exchange for using their free services.
So in other words, telecommuting in rural areas is near impossible even though telcos and cable companies have been subsidized many billions to make the nationwide broadband rollout happen.
They GIVE it to you? No. In the case of DSL, it's built into the costs, especially the activation fees. For cable, you rent it or buy it. They don't just give it to you.
VOIP, VPN, VNC
No, none of those are important. It's all about the gaming, not telecommuting.
Why send out physical DVDs when this is an ideal problem for bittorrent to solve?
No, because [Continue][Cancel]unlike Windows[Continue][Cancel] Me, Windows [Cancel][Allow]Vista actually [Continue][Cancel]works.
That would be redundant; everything coming out of Redmond lately is already pretty dicey. ;)
I'm sorry, but this is slashdot. We do not understand analogies unless they involve either cars or nazis. Can you rephrase your post please? ;)
Broadcasting an SSID and not locking the WAP is an invitation to use the connection. Don't want people on it? Read the freaking manual and lock it down. Don't invite people in. This is akin to putting a television out on the front lawn with a sign saying "free TV" and then pressing charges for larceny when someone takes that advertised television.
HTH!
Sorry, I patented that business method. You will be hearing from my lawyer.
They really ought to push to outlaw speakers and headphones. After all, if you can hear it, you can remember it, and each time you get an earworm, you are "enjoying" an uncompensated performance of that copyrighted material. Likewise, if you can hear it, it can be recorded. Clearly, analog devices such as speakers and headphones are designed primarily for the purpose of copy infringement and ought to be outlawed.
No, to make a FPS game consisting of eye-candy or takes a lot of cash.
GREAT games, like Commander Keen, Sonic the Hedgehog, Cosmo, Super Mario Brothers, and so forth take a lot less cash to code. They take more in the planning stages; planning out the puzzles and fun gameplay overall.
FPS games were great, and I think the height of them was Hexen II (opengl version). After that, the graphics got so good that they quit focusing on game play and started focusing on eye candy and blood and gore. Return to Castle Wolfenstein is playable, IMHO, but Quake 3 and Doom3 are just boring. Of course, YMMV, etc.
Here is a solution which is guaranteed to work: print to a PDF via PDF Creator.
The end result is obvious: eventually every player is going to be pushing drives that handle both high-capacity/high-def formats as well as DVD and CD, much like we saw with DVD-R vs. DVD+R. I agree though: this has been the only good news on HD-DVD's side in a while.
Or maybe, just maybe, Chinese citizens will discover that there are countries where freedom of expression without fear of reprisal exists (it used to here in America but now can supposedly land you on a no-fly-list or worse) and they may discover things that they do care deeply about once they're exposed to it, and no, I am not referring to pr0n.
It doesn't HAVE to crash the Internet. See, the media giants and ISPs can encourage users to set up networks where they share out what they downloaded, signing into central servers just to negotiate, establish, and track connections, and transfer files directly to one another. The server can not just help negotiate and track the connections, but keep track of the number of completed diodes. Since the clients transfer the data directly to one another, we could call these Peer-to-peer networks, or "P2P" for short. The companies running the "tracking" (or "tracker") servers can report the stats back to the media companies, who can then determine and adjust the rates for the advertising embedded in the free content. Advertisers will be happy because they will know EXACTLY how many people download the content, media companies will be happy because they have stats proving their offerings are popular and ISPs will be happy because a lot of the bandwidth will remain within their networks, and not extend out over their links to the backbone, keeping overhead down --- hey, I think I'm onto something here. Excuse me while I patent the idea! ;)
That may be valid if in fact the software can be returned. The simple fact is that once you purchase software online, or in most stores, and disagree with the EULA, the return will be refused. You're left holding the bag. In such cases the EULA is pretty much irrelevent and you still have your right of first sale, so you can pretty much do what you darn well please with that commodity good.
Now, for a phone directory? It's factual information, and not subject to copyright. Were the software a work for hire I'd agree that the contract law ruling would hold water, but where it was offered as a commidity good, Zeidenberg should have pushed the appeal process much further.
Well, where software is concerned, EULAs are moot. You see the EULA after you make the purchase and open the package. Open the package, the store will refuse to accept it. Your right of first sale (it's a commodity good, NOT a work for hire) allows you to use it for its intended purpose without restriction. You are still of course bound by patents and copyrights, but not to use the package for its advertised purpose, or even to resell it to someone else when you're finished with it.
With AT&T, you're buying a service; it amounts to a work for hire, in essence. As such, they can require you to agree to certain terms, but not ones which would restrict you from certain rights, e.g., if they work with the government to subert your constitutional rights (e.g., engaged in wiretapping without a warrant), engage in fraud and charge you for services you do not receive, or falsely advertise their services (advertising them as unlimited), and so forth, it is unreasonable for a court to accept that waiver of such rights is valid or even possible.