Therefore, the non-MS market has just been downsized to 7.44% and Linux's share of that is accordingly bumped up to 13.44%.
However, the iPod touch (0.07%) is also not counted in the iPhone's 0.36% market share, so Apple's relative share of that same market goes up to 74.60%.
Another interesting tidbit from these (questionably reliable) numbers: Blackberry and Android are roughly tied in market share based on web traffic, both registering at 0.03%. This is probably a testament to the superior browser on Android rather than actual market share by units sold (and the same with the iPhone).
The NetApp data: Windows: 92.52% Mac OS X: 5.12% Linux (all flavors): 1.00% Other (including iPhone, Symbian, Java ME): 1.36%
That's 7.48% "non-MS share" on these numbers (and really only non-Windows--it's not apparent whether they count Windows Mobile as "Windows" or as "Other"). Linux, therefore has 13.37% of the "non-MS market". For comparison of the other ones broken out entirely, Apple has 73.26% of that market (Mac+iPhone). Java ME has 6.1%. Symbian has 2.5%
You seem to misunderstand what a "service" economy means.
It doesn't mean menial services, retail clerks, and Burger King employees.
It means all non-manufacturing labor, including engineers, doctors, programmers, analysts, and researchers. It includes entertainers, artists, architects, and designers.
In short, it is all labor, manual and intellectual, that is neither agrarian nor industrial manufacturing.
What happens when nothing is left but service jobs is a question already answered: the United States economy is a post-industrial service economy.
It is absolutely sustainable in the long run as long as you accept the basic reality of progress and population growth: there will be a point in which there are too many people and simply no need to employ them all.
We are dealing with it now by creating unnecessary jobs and intentionally slowing progress because we have no solution to supporting a society where 40% unemployment is the most efficient vehicle. It could be done with high taxes and redistribution, except that people feel so entitled to both a job that they're not uniquely suited for, and to all the proceeds from it.
You seem to suggest that the solution is maintaining a manufacturing base. For what? So we can create worthless jobs making worthless crap out of ever-dwindling resources? If you're going to employ people just for the sake of employing them, stick to the service sector.
The answer is not a refactoring of the economy itself, but finding a system that supports all of society with high unemployment. Whether that is better-managed socialism or just creating make-work jobs so everyone gets a paycheck (which is really just corporate socialism), it's a social problem and not an economic one.
When you have more people than are needed to maintain the economy, what do you do with the others? At a single company, you lay off the dead weight. When all companies do so, you've got high unemployment, which is only bad because of a social expectation that everyone should have a job. That's not an economic expectation.
No, because the purchase includes the OS. You're not required to agree to the terms or to use the OS, but you're not entitled to any sort of refund. Same goes with your GPS--it comes with software. You may choose to purge the internal flash memory and install your own software, but that choice does not come with a refund. Buy a digital camera from Canon, and you can use their included software or not, but you don't get a refund for the included software because you didn't want it--no money changed hands for it, so its refundable value is $0.
You can request a refund of Windows because Microsoft doesn't sell the PC--someone had to pay to create a bundle, driving the actual cost of the machine up through an actual business transaction. If Microsoft gave Windows away for free, or if Microsoft sold you a Microsoft-branded box, the refund value would, like with Apple, be $0.
When you purchase an Apple machine, there is no purchase making a secondary bundle. The added cost of the OS is $0. The machine also will always carry that original factory OS license as an option to all owners of the machine. Just take a secondhand Mac to an Apple store. For a nominal fee, they'll replace the original restore discs and/or put the machine in a bootable configuration. You won't have to buy a retail packaged OS unless you want to upgrade to something newer than the factory version.
No, he didn't sell it "for however long the term happens to be or changes to", he simply sold it. Period.
Actually, it's not a sale. It's an assignment. The copyright holder assigned his interest for a lump sum, usually to a publisher, with the mutual understanding that the interest would expire in a period of years.
The amount paid for that assignment is based on a discounted rate of future projected earnings, with termination at a particular time. The creator also assigned the work with the understanding that it would enter the public domain after that time.
A copyright can be sold, but this isn't that.
If I sell you a house, I'm not selling a house for X years, I'm selling a house. Period.
A house does not typically have a term. However, individuals that are granted life estates in property are permitted to sell that. Again, this is an assignment of interest. The purchaser of the life estate does not own the house; s/he owns the use of the house until the life estate ends, at which time it reverts to the designated successor.
In the case of copyright assignment, the buyer can only purchase the assignment; the public domain holds the reversionary interest
That's precisely the point. People here use an asinine pseudo-legal argument to say "infringement is not stealing", and then proceed to prove the argument that infringement is not theft.
Stealing and theft are not coterminous. It's the classic square/rectangle problem. ROM is non-volatile memory; non-volatile memory is not necessarily ROM. Theft is necessarily stealing; stealing is not necessarily theft. Plagiarism is stealing; it is not theft. Copyright is stealing; it is not theft. You cannot prove that infringement is not stealing by proving that it is not theft. In fact, at least one person already did so as of this comment. Another poster offered the verb "take", isolated a single definition, and then said it "proved" that 'stealing' did not apply.
It doesn't work that way. A word does not apply only if all accepted definitions do not apply. You can't say the thing across the river is not a bridge, because a "bridge" is a musical transition. The same phenomenon goes on here with alarming regularity and with blind devotion...all to disprove an argument that amounts to nothing at all. Calling it 'stealing' is factual and without consequence, either ethical or legal. It's a completely ridiculous position to take that utterly undermines the legitimate aspects of the debate.
Infringement is stealing. Period. There is no rational contrary argument. The debate is only what is and is not lawful, and whether or not it should be lawful to do. People steal all the time. Most of it is totally unobjectionable, and of the stealing that is objectionable, only a relatively small fraction is against the law. There's no substantive gain to be had by arguing that it isn't stealing; it only makes such people look like fools.
"1. To lay hold with one's hands; capture or gain possession; seize or capture; catch or get; accept and act upon; get or obtain; to assume or appropriate as if by right... (there are over 50 definitions in the OED)
2. (trans) to remove from a particular place."
"To take" is not confined to the definitions you list, nor can you say that any one is exclusively applicable.
"To take from", the transitive verb, is the one you're substituting for the word.
So again, nice try, but no. You are flat-out wrong.
There is no legal definition of stealing. There is no crime of stealing. It is not a term of art. Period. If you say "steal" in a pleading, it has exactly no consequences. A simple perusal of cases on issues as diverse as unfair competition and real estate law contain uses of this word in various forms.
There is theft, there is conversion, there is trespass to chattels, there is misappropriation, there is infringement, there is theft of service, there is embezzlement, there is robbery. All of these are specific forms of stealing codified by law. Stealing is not among them.
Non-physical works CANNOT be stolen. Unless you're talking about a PHYSICAL COPY, you cannot steal it by definition.
The dictionary says the following meet the definition of 'steal', among others:
1. to take without permission or right. 2. dishonestly pass off (another person's ideas) as one's own. 3. to appropriate (ideas, credit, words, etc.) without right or acknowledgment. 4. to take, get, or win insidiously, surreptitiously, subtly, or by chance. 5. to move, bring, convey, or put secretly or quietly. 6. attract the most notice in (a scene or a theatrical production) while not being the featured performer
You can certainly steal music under, at the very least, definitions 1 through 4.
This argument is among the dumbest advanced by Slashdotters. All it takes is a glance at a dictionary to disprove.
You cannot say a word does not apply by selecting one of its many correct and ubiquitous definitions. No definition of stealing requires the deprivation of physical property.
You are confusing that definition with a number of criminal acts, none of which are, in fact, termed "stealing" and all of which have specific names and elements.
If you want to use an appropriate term for what Microsoft supposedly did with this GPL code, it's called plagiarism. Sure, it's called "stealing" nowadays,
It was always called stealing. Plagiarism is stealing. Theft is stealing. Conversion is stealing. Infringement is by definition stealing (you are asserting a property right which is the exclusive property of another--the entire basis for its illegality). Misappropriation is stealing. Trespass to chattels is stealing. Theft of service is stealing (and utterly lacking in tangibility).
"Stealing" is nothing more than a colloquial term for unauthorized takings, including such takings that are not unlawful, including plagiarism and the ubiquitous "He stole my idea!" uttered by at least one student in every science fair across the globe. It is nothing short of moronic to pretend otherwise. There is nothing about "stealing" that is confined to acts of taking a finite, tangible object from another person to the exclusion of all else. It's time to get over that.
"Label" is a term of art referring to the affixation of a mark. It means "an informative display of written or graphic matter, such as a logo, title, or similar marking, affixed to goods or services to identify their source." (Black's, 8th Ed.) The label need not be a trademark, but it often is.
Your Apple sticker does not identify the machine as Apple-sourced, nor was the machine affixed as such by Apple. It is therefore not Apple-labeled, no matter how many stickers you slap on it. It has been tested in court, many times, and comes up quite often in counterfeit goods cases.
Look, there is nothing special about the Iphone OS any more.
That just isn't true. Android 2.0 is pretty attractive on the surface, but it's still plagued with UI and usability kinks that have yet to be worked out. Multi-touch still isn't quite right, nor is it fluid. Android's interaction on the desktop is much better than most of its competitors, but it still lags behind the iTunes experience. There are plenty of advantages to the iPhone platform, including the iPhone OS.
When someone writes a wrapper for these App store Apps that allows them to run on Android, its game over for this particular advantage.
That's what they said about Linux and Windows in 1996. Easier said than done. We're still waiting.
But lets face it, the hardware has no particular advantage any more
The pile of hardware components was never the advantage to begin with. The devil's in the details. It'd be a trivial effort to out-spec the iPhone's hardware, but that doesn't get you anywhere on its own. Look at the terrible state of video playback at the time on smartphones even with the same muscle as the first generation iPhone.
Whether you love the iPhone or hate it, it's indisputable that it was a kick in the pants for everyone else. Now they're actually trying to make good products, and competitors are addressing their failings and adapting what they can from Apple's lead. That's how it should have worked, even if the iPhone never existed, but it just didn't. Even Windows Mobile, while still painful to use, is at least easier to look at these days.
But Android has the advantage of youth, and none of the baggage of middle age.
Drama much? The iPhone is "middle-aged"? What does that make RIM/Blackberry? A pensioner?
"For one more example, the proper use of adjusted opacity can also"...make pop-up messages and certain dialog boxes more functional (e.g. search-and-replace operations).
There's zero functionality derived from transparency for UI elements.
No, that's just not true. There may be zero functionality derived from gratuitous transparency, but the problem there isn't the method, but the implementation.
For example, proper transparency can serve functional purposes: terminal editors can overlay on other documents, allowing you to work on code and have other materials still visible in the background (e.g. developer documentation). It can also create usable overlay controls in graphics editors/viewers, giving you the controls and tools you need without obscuring the document itself. For one more example, the proper use of adjusted opacity can also.
It also serves general workflow aesthetic purposes. A tool palette that "fades" to partial transparency when not in use helps drive focus to active parts of the desktop. When conservatively used on UI chrome, it also reduces the visual weight of windows, which has proven invaluable in studies to people who consider a pile of windows and palettes to be a jumbled, cluttered mess.
It's the UI equivalent of spinners and under-chassis neon lighting.
No, the UI equivalent of spinners and neon lighting is anything introduced just for show. There are certainly examples of that (and I think the OS X menu bar is one), but there are plenty of counterexamples for intelligent and functional use of lowered opacity.
The fade-in on hover controls in Preview and Quicktime on OS X are strong examples of those.
The Vista/Windows 7 window borders are actually a good use of delineation and proper weight to make the UI chrome less bulky and in-your-face. Same goes with the HUD-style backgrounds in OS X Quick Look/Stacks.
Not everyone has to like it--but it cannot be dismissed that there are legitimate reasons to use it at times. It can't just be categorically dismissed as "zero functionality" because it is so frequently overused and employed in inappropriate situations. Any UI element can be abused in that way (and each and every one of them has been by someone, sometime).
Not really. The study is about retail shopping. I don't think it stretches the bounds of reason to say that people who buy in brick and mortar retail stores aren't really buying $1000+ machines. The study doesn't pretend to say that 91% of the overall market goes to Apple, but considering Apple's overall market share of about ~9%, of which probably 8% or more is above $1000, it's not hard to see a market where the over $1000 segment is 15% or less of the total computer market.
In that case, Apple would have roughly half of the overall market share. That they'd have 90% of the B&M dollars isn't shocking.
At that kind of price, you either find a better deal online or get more configurable options online. Apple is the only manufacturer that actually has a retail presence that appeals to buyers in that market segment. The Dell kiosks and Sony stores don't even come close.
NYCL blogs about the issue and is much more actively engaged in Slashdot than I am. I write articles in journals, participate in panels and round tables, and work. I participate in forums that matter, with people who are engaged and where deluded souls are the minority. NYCL bravely participates here instead.
More to the point, without this kind of sensationalism, submissions don't make it through the Firehose and just browsing through the comments of completed discussion, anything that offers a fair and real-world analysis is more likely than not to be trolled into oblivion. Maybe that explains the increasing inaccuracy and sensationalism of the submissions, but it doesn't excuse them. If you trade on your professional image to gain notoriety and attract an audience, there is a clear duty to speak honestly, carefully, accurately, and comport oneself as a neutral professional offering a balanced analysis. That has been plainly lacking.
I empathize. Anyone who actually deigns to provide a balanced analysis rooted in actual jurisprudence and the law has a hard time around here because of the irredeemable skew of the Slashdot userbase, who are great fans of treating novel theories and glib reductio ad absurdum as accepted fact when it comes to IP, its history, and its practice.
If you're that concerned that he's crossed the line from just spinning to acting unethically (say under Rule 8.4(c) or (d) of the Model Rules of Professional Conduct), then draft a complaint to the New York Bar.
I don't know if you're being intentionally obtuse or just contrarian, but you can't honestly be serious here.
If you don't think the case against him is strong enough for that, then it is probably best to argue that the stories are sensationalist rather than arguing that the submitter is unprofessional.
There's no issue with doing both, and I have done so. These summaries are sensationalized, and such an action is inherently unprofessional. Whether it is worthy of a complaint to the Bar is a totally separate question, and clearly there's something wrong with your thought process.
If the stories are sensationalist, the submitter has engaged in unprofessional conduct. Not all unprofessional conduct is worthy of a complaint, with significant possible consequences for the attorney.
Also, New York does not use the Model Rules.
Arguing the former is tactful, arguing the latter is personal.
I disagree. Both are tactful and personal.
NYCL and a lot of/. posters often seem to attack the lawyers representing recording companies and the executives of those recording companies rather than just their arguments and decisions. Do you really want to be part of the crowd that is quick to attack people and motives?
Really? That's what you've got to say on that? You came here to lecture, unilaterally assigning affront and motive to a third party. You're part of that crowd, so you tell me.
Unprofessional conduct is unprofessional conduct. If you look at the attacks made by Slashdot posters and the inflammatory comments made by NYCL in many of his comments, there is no comparison to my post, which was nothing but neutral in tone and factual. You're drawing an arbitrary distinction between his conduct of being sensationalist and unprofessional. Either way, it's his conduct.
If you argue that NYCL is erroneous in an instance, is it fair to assume that you support the RIAA?
No.
If someone argues that NYCL is not erroneous in an instance (or that accusations of unprofessionality are too hostile), is it fair to assume that said someone is blindly devoted to NYCL?
Considering that there was no hostility to begin with and you bought into the fallacious and sensationalized submission hook, line, and sinker, yes, in this case, it's absolutely fair. You didn't put the pom-poms down long enough even to consider the fact that no one was being attacked. It was flat and neutral criticism and nothing more. You took personal offense to an obvious consequence.
The summaries that have been posted lately have been biased, inaccurate, sensationalized, and have exhibited dubious analysis. Such action is ipso facto unprofessional. There's no personal insult there, no hostility, and nothing worth your asinine foray into etiquette patrol.
But consider this: if you treat the motion as an omnibus motion consisting of a motion to protect revenues and a motion to protect agreements, then the actual order could be treated as an omnibus order denying the motion to protect revenues and granting the motion to protect agreements.
It's a motion to protect proprietary information, which includes more than what you stated. Even dividing it artificially as you have is inaccurate: some of the information that would necessarily be classed as "revenue" in your schema falls on the "granted" side.
Is the summary misleading? Sure. Does it reach a level of "unprofessional" deception. Maybe, maybe not. Is arguing it going to be persuasive of anything significant? Probably not.
Be nice. NYCL has a viewpoint and he likes to express it loud and clear, but accusations regarding professionality are uncalled for.
Attorneys have a number of ethical duties, and many of these submissions either contain outright false statements or other distortions of the very same caliber complained against in those very same submissions. Just because he happens to be on your side doesn't mean he's free from obligations to comport himself in compliance with the rules of professional responsibility, especially since he does practice in this area. It is highly unprofessional to speak out from a position of influence gained by being a professional in a way that is biased, sensationalized, hyperbolic, or incendiary. Everybody gets knocked for it from time to time, and NYCL has been flirting with ethical standards quite a bit these past few months. What's uncalled for is the blind devotion and defense of a local "celebrity" just because he lends his voice to a popular viewpoint.
In the summary itself, it indicates that their motion was "denied". It wasn't. It was granted in part and denied in part, which is a common outcome. In fact, reviewing the order, you see that they in fact got just about everything they argued for. They didn't get the freebie they put in the proposed order. That's hardly surprising, and it's certainly not a denial of their request.
It isn't any use arguing what the RIAA would have done had the judge signed off on their prosed protective order. They should have vetted it before submitting it to avoid any appearance of deceptive behavior. Since they didn't, then they deserve a little nose tweaking.
It very likely was vetted. Proposed orders are just that: proposed. You don't get more than you ask for, and it's not uncommon for litigators to ask for more than they could support in their argument. What you see really just appears to be zealous advocacy and an attentive judge smacking down their overstatement. There's no deceptive behavior in that--there's no indication of deceptive behavior, except that it's the RIAA so automatically they're on their heels and NYCL gets praise for taking easy pot shots at a thoroughly unlikeable party.
And no, they did not get everything they wanted. The judge refused to protect the revenue information of the plaintiffs. They did seem to get what they wanted with regards to the non-revenue information.
Did you read the motion and the order? They got everything their arguments supported, which is exactly the way it's supposed to work.
The way most things work in court is that your response is due based on the order from the judge. If you are ordered to provide tax information by 7/31, you have a number of options. Only one of them is actually providing that information. You can also respond by challenging the order, requesting a limitation on the order, showing cause why you can't comply with the order, and depending on the situation, other options.
The deadline is the due date for the responsive filing. As long as the response isn't completely devoid of rationality or some support, the court will review the response and then either adjust the original order or respond by saying, "nice try, but now do what I said". It's not contempt to push back in civil litigation unless you're doing it solely for the sake of wasting time or money.
In this case, because a protective order was issued, it obviously wasn't devoid of a real issue.
Now, sometimes, an order is an order and the only permitted responses are (a) compliance or (b) a request for more time to comply (which may or may not be granted, especially if dropped on the court at the last minute). This is rarely the case.
Moreover, the summary is again biased and sensationalized, part of a pattern that shows increasingly unprofessional conduct on the part of the submitter. The RIAA offered a proposed order that was greater in scope than what they had argued for. Had the judge and her clerks read only the moving papers and then just signed the order, the RIAA would have had that order amended upon discovery of the inconsistency. The RIAA actually got the protective order it had argued for--it just didn't get the overbroad proposal they submitted.
You could automatically bounce back to "the RIAA is evil and incompetent", which no one would disagree with, but there's almost no chance that this would have ever worked--it's not like the judge is powerless upon discovery of the problem, which is almost inevitable unless opposing counsel is beyond incompetent, and attempting to slip an expanded order in intentionally opens them up to all kinds of sanctions. The thing is, you rarely get more than what you ask in a proposed order attached to a motion--so it's not uncommon to "shoot for the moon" and then the court writes a narrower order based on how much it's willing to give you. In most cases, it's not a plot. It's just the way the game is played.
There can be an antitrust complaint against anyone at any time for any reason. It doesn't mean it would get anywhere.
If a third party product tried to use Microsoft's closed protocols for their Zunes, they'd be in the exact same boat. If the Zune were the dominant player and WMP the dominant desktop software for that player, Palm still wouldn't be able to use the Zune syncing code and force Microsoft to maintain compatibility of its self-funded, closed, internal protocols with a competing product. You don't get to pass your hardware off as someone else's and offload the responsibility to support your product to another party.
Microsoft would have no obligation not to break compatibility with future versions of its internal sync protocol.
Palm didn't try to write a plugin and it didn't try to write a sync manager that accessed the library data. Whether the third party in that scenario is Apple or Microsoft makes no difference.
iTunes is a defacto monopoly now and Apple better start treading more carefully.
Why? The iTunes Store enables media acquisition, desktop playback, library organization, and is written to sync with Apple devices. All your downloads are sitting pretty, right there on your hard drive, fully available for you to use as you please. Anything you downloaded with DRM you got with the known caveat that it would only work with Apple products.
Using tie ins to build new monopolies, which seems to be what they are doing here, is especially dangerous.
If by build new monopolies, you mean not supporting syncing of third-party devices on their unpublished, internal protocol, then sure. But that's an uphill battle to convince anyone that that is an unlawful monopoly.
An antitrust regulator might be inclined to say Apple's defacto monopoly on online music sales is giving them an unfair advantage in other markets, in this case the smartphone market.
Not really. It gives them an advantage in the internal syncing department, but as a natural effect of them making both products.
If Palm wants to access the iTunes library XML file and use that to load information in its own sync software, the file's sitting right there for them to use. Failing that, it can read the file/folder structure and metadata directly and compile its own library.
The Pre isn't disabled. Palm tried to piggyback on iTunes using an undocumented and unsupported hack to capture a competitor's market with zero effort. Talk about unfair advantage.
If a competitor can't bring a new smartphone to market because they can't access online music because of a monopoly
Where can't they? 1. Buy music from Amazon, iTunes, Walmart, Microsoft, whatever. 2. Transfer files to Pre. 3. Profit.
You can argue competitors just have to start their own competing MP3 service
Like the rest of your comment, it's entirely off base and out of scope. Palm doesn't need an MP3 service. All they have to do, and all they had to do from the start, was put a modicum of effort into writing their own synchronization software. There's nothing particularly special about the media storage of iTunes (files and folders) or the library database (XML).
Palm just noticed that there was a way they could get plug-and-chug support for free, and leave Apple holding the bag of dog crap when future versions of iTunes no longer worked with whatever hacked-together code was stuffed onto the Pre. Suddenly "iTunes broke my Pre!" would ring out all across the Internet.
that is a very tall order, especially since it requires inking deals with a relatively small number of recording companies that are something of cartel themselves.
Apple did it, and did it before the lucrative nature of the setup had empirical evidence. If anything, it should be easier to compete now.
Get real. The iTunes Store has almost nothing to do with this. The iTunes client software, developed by Apple, supports syncing Apple devices. They're not, nor in any rational world would they be, required to support third party data transfer.
If you want to put all smartphone manufacturers in a room and tell them to come up with an open standard for data synchronization, fine, but until that's the case, get real.
You're babbling about nothing. Palm never had any right or reasonable expectation to be able to use Apple's unpublished protocols and expect it to work in a production environment. No one's stopping Palm from syncing the media or selling their smartphones.
"Wardrobing" is not unlawful when there is a return policy specifically governing interactions with the customer, and the customer operates within the confines of that policy.
The good faith requirement does exist, and can be pursued as a form of fraudulent misrepresentation. where there is no return policy or where the return policy is sufficiently qualified, because your contract requires a good faith intent of entering into the mutually agreed transaction.
However, because the more typical retailer practice is to engage in a transaction referencing and incorporating a general return policy, that policy becomes the governing document. Return fraud is real, and it is illegal, but "renting" is neither. It's unethical and has an unmistakably negative impact on other consumers and the business itself, but it is also recognized as part of the cost of doing business. If your intent is to utilize the store's written and published policies, what you are doing is merely opportunistic, greedy, and unethical. It is not, however, illegal, let alone a crime.
The above is true for California and most states adopting the Uniform Commercial Code. There are some states, however, where this practice may indeed be illegal by statute--as I recall, some of the upper Midwestern states may have passed more restrictive return fraud laws.
Of course, as I've said previously, it's all about balance and acceptable risk. When a liberal return policy is abused to the point of causing unusually high losses, that policy will be reconsidered and tweaked. Ultimately, it is further restricted, which harms those customers who legitimately had cause to return the item, and because of more restrictive policies, no longer can. Abuse of return policies was, after all, the impetus of restocking fees.
Note the kinds of products most often carrying restocking fees: GPS units, portable computers, cellular phones--all the kinds of things that might be purchased for a specific purpose (a vacation, a cross-country move, a road trip) and then returned.
Though this practice is not fraudulent and not illegal as return fraud, depending on how high profile it is, it might be unjust enrichment--your use of the product for a period of time had some material value to you, and the retailer bore all the risk and suffered the entire loss of value in the product. Of course your liability there would only be the retailer's losses as a result of your action, and only if they bothered to pursue it.
That caveat works fine for a scenario like this, until it's systemically abused, prompting AT&T to change its policies when it has too many returned phones (not just iPhones, but any other data-enabled device that might be used for just such a trick).
It works now because of the balance--it's a good supply of refurbed phones, which are still profitable for the carrier, to a point. As with most things, it's all about balance.
No, it's still your DVR. You can keep your recordings on it until you run out of space. Each cable account will have its own designated storage account, with access to programs recorded based on your cable subscription level. This is the only way it works, as Cablevision was forced earlier in the litigation to argue a 1:1 relationship in order to avoid the direct infringement of public performances. Whether, in fact, their data storage system keeps bit-for-bit separate copies for each account or just an alias will undoubtedly be part of future litigation. A strict reading of this decision requires that each customer have their own dedicated hard drive, just physically relocated to a server farm. A less strict reading simply requires each customer to have their current 80 hours of HD recording space, which cannot be accessed by any other customer. Cable companies undoubtedly want the latter to save on storage space, but it's not clear that that usage is out of the litigation woods just yet.
The cable companies want this because it means no longer having to buy expensive hardware for each DVR customer. All the cable box needs is a way to connect to the video storage center and authenticate against your video "mailbox" and pull the recordings.
The theoretical benefit is lower prices (or slower price increases) and greater storage space (or improved video bitrates) for consumers. The practical benefit, of course, is more profit for the cable companies.
Slashdot Mirror
Windows Mobile's 0.04% market share is not included in the 92.52% of Windows machines reported, but rather, part of "other":
http://marketshare.hitslink.com/operating-system-market-share.aspx?qprid=8
Therefore, the non-MS market has just been downsized to 7.44% and Linux's share of that is accordingly bumped up to 13.44%.
However, the iPod touch (0.07%) is also not counted in the iPhone's 0.36% market share, so Apple's relative share of that same market goes up to 74.60%.
Another interesting tidbit from these (questionably reliable) numbers: Blackberry and Android are roughly tied in market share based on web traffic, both registering at 0.03%. This is probably a testament to the superior browser on Android rather than actual market share by units sold (and the same with the iPhone).
How?
The NetApp data:
Windows: 92.52%
Mac OS X: 5.12%
Linux (all flavors): 1.00%
Other (including iPhone, Symbian, Java ME): 1.36%
That's 7.48% "non-MS share" on these numbers (and really only non-Windows--it's not apparent whether they count Windows Mobile as "Windows" or as "Other"). Linux, therefore has 13.37% of the "non-MS market". For comparison of the other ones broken out entirely, Apple has 73.26% of that market (Mac+iPhone). Java ME has 6.1%. Symbian has 2.5%
You seem to misunderstand what a "service" economy means.
It doesn't mean menial services, retail clerks, and Burger King employees.
It means all non-manufacturing labor, including engineers, doctors, programmers, analysts, and researchers. It includes entertainers, artists, architects, and designers.
In short, it is all labor, manual and intellectual, that is neither agrarian nor industrial manufacturing.
What happens when nothing is left but service jobs is a question already answered: the United States economy is a post-industrial service economy.
It is absolutely sustainable in the long run as long as you accept the basic reality of progress and population growth: there will be a point in which there are too many people and simply no need to employ them all.
We are dealing with it now by creating unnecessary jobs and intentionally slowing progress because we have no solution to supporting a society where 40% unemployment is the most efficient vehicle. It could be done with high taxes and redistribution, except that people feel so entitled to both a job that they're not uniquely suited for, and to all the proceeds from it.
You seem to suggest that the solution is maintaining a manufacturing base. For what? So we can create worthless jobs making worthless crap out of ever-dwindling resources? If you're going to employ people just for the sake of employing them, stick to the service sector.
The answer is not a refactoring of the economy itself, but finding a system that supports all of society with high unemployment. Whether that is better-managed socialism or just creating make-work jobs so everyone gets a paycheck (which is really just corporate socialism), it's a social problem and not an economic one.
When you have more people than are needed to maintain the economy, what do you do with the others? At a single company, you lay off the dead weight. When all companies do so, you've got high unemployment, which is only bad because of a social expectation that everyone should have a job. That's not an economic expectation.
No, because the purchase includes the OS. You're not required to agree to the terms or to use the OS, but you're not entitled to any sort of refund. Same goes with your GPS--it comes with software. You may choose to purge the internal flash memory and install your own software, but that choice does not come with a refund. Buy a digital camera from Canon, and you can use their included software or not, but you don't get a refund for the included software because you didn't want it--no money changed hands for it, so its refundable value is $0.
You can request a refund of Windows because Microsoft doesn't sell the PC--someone had to pay to create a bundle, driving the actual cost of the machine up through an actual business transaction. If Microsoft gave Windows away for free, or if Microsoft sold you a Microsoft-branded box, the refund value would, like with Apple, be $0.
When you purchase an Apple machine, there is no purchase making a secondary bundle. The added cost of the OS is $0. The machine also will always carry that original factory OS license as an option to all owners of the machine. Just take a secondhand Mac to an Apple store. For a nominal fee, they'll replace the original restore discs and/or put the machine in a bootable configuration. You won't have to buy a retail packaged OS unless you want to upgrade to something newer than the factory version.
No, he didn't sell it "for however long the term happens to be or changes to", he simply sold it. Period.
Actually, it's not a sale. It's an assignment. The copyright holder assigned his interest for a lump sum, usually to a publisher, with the mutual understanding that the interest would expire in a period of years.
The amount paid for that assignment is based on a discounted rate of future projected earnings, with termination at a particular time. The creator also assigned the work with the understanding that it would enter the public domain after that time.
A copyright can be sold, but this isn't that.
If I sell you a house, I'm not selling a house for X years, I'm selling a house. Period.
A house does not typically have a term. However, individuals that are granted life estates in property are permitted to sell that. Again, this is an assignment of interest. The purchaser of the life estate does not own the house; s/he owns the use of the house until the life estate ends, at which time it reverts to the designated successor.
In the case of copyright assignment, the buyer can only purchase the assignment; the public domain holds the reversionary interest
That's precisely the point. People here use an asinine pseudo-legal argument to say "infringement is not stealing", and then proceed to prove the argument that infringement is not theft.
Stealing and theft are not coterminous. It's the classic square/rectangle problem. ROM is non-volatile memory; non-volatile memory is not necessarily ROM. Theft is necessarily stealing; stealing is not necessarily theft. Plagiarism is stealing; it is not theft. Copyright is stealing; it is not theft. You cannot prove that infringement is not stealing by proving that it is not theft. In fact, at least one person already did so as of this comment. Another poster offered the verb "take", isolated a single definition, and then said it "proved" that 'stealing' did not apply.
It doesn't work that way. A word does not apply only if all accepted definitions do not apply. You can't say the thing across the river is not a bridge, because a "bridge" is a musical transition. The same phenomenon goes on here with alarming regularity and with blind devotion...all to disprove an argument that amounts to nothing at all. Calling it 'stealing' is factual and without consequence, either ethical or legal. It's a completely ridiculous position to take that utterly undermines the legitimate aspects of the debate.
Infringement is stealing. Period. There is no rational contrary argument. The debate is only what is and is not lawful, and whether or not it should be lawful to do. People steal all the time. Most of it is totally unobjectionable, and of the stealing that is objectionable, only a relatively small fraction is against the law. There's no substantive gain to be had by arguing that it isn't stealing; it only makes such people look like fools.
Take:
"1. To lay hold with one's hands; capture or gain possession; seize or capture; catch or get; accept and act upon; get or obtain; to assume or appropriate as if by right ... (there are over 50 definitions in the OED)
2. (trans) to remove from a particular place."
"To take" is not confined to the definitions you list, nor can you say that any one is exclusively applicable.
"To take from", the transitive verb, is the one you're substituting for the word.
So again, nice try, but no. You are flat-out wrong.
There is no legal definition of stealing. There is no crime of stealing. It is not a term of art. Period. If you say "steal" in a pleading, it has exactly no consequences. A simple perusal of cases on issues as diverse as unfair competition and real estate law contain uses of this word in various forms.
There is theft, there is conversion, there is trespass to chattels, there is misappropriation, there is infringement, there is theft of service, there is embezzlement, there is robbery. All of these are specific forms of stealing codified by law. Stealing is not among them.
You cited to definitions of theft.
Theft is a legal term of art. Stealing is not.
Non-physical works CANNOT be stolen. Unless you're talking about a PHYSICAL COPY, you cannot steal it by definition.
The dictionary says the following meet the definition of 'steal', among others:
1. to take without permission or right.
2. dishonestly pass off (another person's ideas) as one's own.
3. to appropriate (ideas, credit, words, etc.) without right or acknowledgment.
4. to take, get, or win insidiously, surreptitiously, subtly, or by chance.
5. to move, bring, convey, or put secretly or quietly.
6. attract the most notice in (a scene or a theatrical production) while not being the featured performer
You can certainly steal music under, at the very least, definitions 1 through 4.
This argument is among the dumbest advanced by Slashdotters. All it takes is a glance at a dictionary to disprove.
You cannot say a word does not apply by selecting one of its many correct and ubiquitous definitions. No definition of stealing requires the deprivation of physical property.
You are confusing that definition with a number of criminal acts, none of which are, in fact, termed "stealing" and all of which have specific names and elements.
If you want to use an appropriate term for what Microsoft supposedly did with this GPL code, it's called plagiarism. Sure, it's called "stealing" nowadays,
It was always called stealing. Plagiarism is stealing. Theft is stealing. Conversion is stealing. Infringement is by definition stealing (you are asserting a property right which is the exclusive property of another--the entire basis for its illegality). Misappropriation is stealing. Trespass to chattels is stealing. Theft of service is stealing (and utterly lacking in tangibility).
"Stealing" is nothing more than a colloquial term for unauthorized takings, including such takings that are not unlawful, including plagiarism and the ubiquitous "He stole my idea!" uttered by at least one student in every science fair across the globe. It is nothing short of moronic to pretend otherwise. There is nothing about "stealing" that is confined to acts of taking a finite, tangible object from another person to the exclusion of all else. It's time to get over that.
"Label" is a term of art referring to the affixation of a mark. It means "an informative display of written or graphic matter, such as a logo, title, or similar marking, affixed to goods or services to identify their source." (Black's, 8th Ed.) The label need not be a trademark, but it often is.
Your Apple sticker does not identify the machine as Apple-sourced, nor was the machine affixed as such by Apple. It is therefore not Apple-labeled, no matter how many stickers you slap on it. It has been tested in court, many times, and comes up quite often in counterfeit goods cases.
That qualifies as a "nice try" defense, though.
Spoken like a review from a windowshopper.
Look, there is nothing special about the Iphone OS any more.
That just isn't true. Android 2.0 is pretty attractive on the surface, but it's still plagued with UI and usability kinks that have yet to be worked out. Multi-touch still isn't quite right, nor is it fluid. Android's interaction on the desktop is much better than most of its competitors, but it still lags behind the iTunes experience. There are plenty of advantages to the iPhone platform, including the iPhone OS.
When someone writes a wrapper for these App store Apps that allows them to run on Android, its game over for this particular advantage.
That's what they said about Linux and Windows in 1996. Easier said than done. We're still waiting.
But lets face it, the hardware has no particular advantage any more
The pile of hardware components was never the advantage to begin with. The devil's in the details. It'd be a trivial effort to out-spec the iPhone's hardware, but that doesn't get you anywhere on its own. Look at the terrible state of video playback at the time on smartphones even with the same muscle as the first generation iPhone.
Whether you love the iPhone or hate it, it's indisputable that it was a kick in the pants for everyone else. Now they're actually trying to make good products, and competitors are addressing their failings and adapting what they can from Apple's lead. That's how it should have worked, even if the iPhone never existed, but it just didn't. Even Windows Mobile, while still painful to use, is at least easier to look at these days.
But Android has the advantage of youth, and none of the baggage of middle age.
Drama much? The iPhone is "middle-aged"? What does that make RIM/Blackberry? A pensioner?
That makes it a trademark, not a patent.
It's not a mark, and that makes it a design patent.
The difference is important. It's the difference between confusing a Mickey Mouse mark and an arrangement of nonfunctional design elements.
"For one more example, the proper use of adjusted opacity can also"...make pop-up messages and certain dialog boxes more functional (e.g. search-and-replace operations).
Not sure why the rest of that sentence vanished.
There's zero functionality derived from transparency for UI elements.
No, that's just not true. There may be zero functionality derived from gratuitous transparency, but the problem there isn't the method, but the implementation.
For example, proper transparency can serve functional purposes: terminal editors can overlay on other documents, allowing you to work on code and have other materials still visible in the background (e.g. developer documentation). It can also create usable overlay controls in graphics editors/viewers, giving you the controls and tools you need without obscuring the document itself. For one more example, the proper use of adjusted opacity can also.
It also serves general workflow aesthetic purposes. A tool palette that "fades" to partial transparency when not in use helps drive focus to active parts of the desktop. When conservatively used on UI chrome, it also reduces the visual weight of windows, which has proven invaluable in studies to people who consider a pile of windows and palettes to be a jumbled, cluttered mess.
It's the UI equivalent of spinners and under-chassis neon lighting.
No, the UI equivalent of spinners and neon lighting is anything introduced just for show. There are certainly examples of that (and I think the OS X menu bar is one), but there are plenty of counterexamples for intelligent and functional use of lowered opacity.
The fade-in on hover controls in Preview and Quicktime on OS X are strong examples of those.
The Vista/Windows 7 window borders are actually a good use of delineation and proper weight to make the UI chrome less bulky and in-your-face. Same goes with the HUD-style backgrounds in OS X Quick Look/Stacks.
Not everyone has to like it--but it cannot be dismissed that there are legitimate reasons to use it at times. It can't just be categorically dismissed as "zero functionality" because it is so frequently overused and employed in inappropriate situations. Any UI element can be abused in that way (and each and every one of them has been by someone, sometime).
Not really. The study is about retail shopping. I don't think it stretches the bounds of reason to say that people who buy in brick and mortar retail stores aren't really buying $1000+ machines. The study doesn't pretend to say that 91% of the overall market goes to Apple, but considering Apple's overall market share of about ~9%, of which probably 8% or more is above $1000, it's not hard to see a market where the over $1000 segment is 15% or less of the total computer market.
In that case, Apple would have roughly half of the overall market share. That they'd have 90% of the B&M dollars isn't shocking.
At that kind of price, you either find a better deal online or get more configurable options online. Apple is the only manufacturer that actually has a retail presence that appeals to buyers in that market segment. The Dell kiosks and Sony stores don't even come close.
NYCL blogs about the issue and is much more actively engaged in Slashdot than I am. I write articles in journals, participate in panels and round tables, and work. I participate in forums that matter, with people who are engaged and where deluded souls are the minority. NYCL bravely participates here instead.
More to the point, without this kind of sensationalism, submissions don't make it through the Firehose and just browsing through the comments of completed discussion, anything that offers a fair and real-world analysis is more likely than not to be trolled into oblivion. Maybe that explains the increasing inaccuracy and sensationalism of the submissions, but it doesn't excuse them. If you trade on your professional image to gain notoriety and attract an audience, there is a clear duty to speak honestly, carefully, accurately, and comport oneself as a neutral professional offering a balanced analysis. That has been plainly lacking.
I empathize. Anyone who actually deigns to provide a balanced analysis rooted in actual jurisprudence and the law has a hard time around here because of the irredeemable skew of the Slashdot userbase, who are great fans of treating novel theories and glib reductio ad absurdum as accepted fact when it comes to IP, its history, and its practice.
If you're that concerned that he's crossed the line from just spinning to acting unethically (say under Rule 8.4(c) or (d) of the Model Rules of Professional Conduct), then draft a complaint to the New York Bar.
I don't know if you're being intentionally obtuse or just contrarian, but you can't honestly be serious here.
If you don't think the case against him is strong enough for that, then it is probably best to argue that the stories are sensationalist rather than arguing that the submitter is unprofessional.
There's no issue with doing both, and I have done so. These summaries are sensationalized, and such an action is inherently unprofessional. Whether it is worthy of a complaint to the Bar is a totally separate question, and clearly there's something wrong with your thought process.
If the stories are sensationalist, the submitter has engaged in unprofessional conduct. Not all unprofessional conduct is worthy of a complaint, with significant possible consequences for the attorney.
Also, New York does not use the Model Rules.
Arguing the former is tactful, arguing the latter is personal.
I disagree. Both are tactful and personal.
NYCL and a lot of /. posters often seem to attack the lawyers representing recording companies and the executives of those recording companies rather than just their arguments and decisions. Do you really want to be part of the crowd that is quick to attack people and motives?
Really? That's what you've got to say on that? You came here to lecture, unilaterally assigning affront and motive to a third party. You're part of that crowd, so you tell me.
Unprofessional conduct is unprofessional conduct. If you look at the attacks made by Slashdot posters and the inflammatory comments made by NYCL in many of his comments, there is no comparison to my post, which was nothing but neutral in tone and factual. You're drawing an arbitrary distinction between his conduct of being sensationalist and unprofessional. Either way, it's his conduct.
If you argue that NYCL is erroneous in an instance, is it fair to assume that you support the RIAA?
No.
If someone argues that NYCL is not erroneous in an instance (or that accusations of unprofessionality are too hostile), is it fair to assume that said someone is blindly devoted to NYCL?
Considering that there was no hostility to begin with and you bought into the fallacious and sensationalized submission hook, line, and sinker, yes, in this case, it's absolutely fair. You didn't put the pom-poms down long enough even to consider the fact that no one was being attacked. It was flat and neutral criticism and nothing more. You took personal offense to an obvious consequence.
The summaries that have been posted lately have been biased, inaccurate, sensationalized, and have exhibited dubious analysis. Such action is ipso facto unprofessional. There's no personal insult there, no hostility, and nothing worth your asinine foray into etiquette patrol.
But consider this: if you treat the motion as an omnibus motion consisting of a motion to protect revenues and a motion to protect agreements, then the actual order could be treated as an omnibus order denying the motion to protect revenues and granting the motion to protect agreements.
It's a motion to protect proprietary information, which includes more than what you stated. Even dividing it artificially as you have is inaccurate: some of the information that would necessarily be classed as "revenue" in your schema falls on the "granted" side.
Is the summary misleading? Sure. Does it reach a level of "unprofessional" deception. Maybe, maybe not. Is arguing it going to be persuasive of anything significant? Probably not.
QED.
If
Be nice. NYCL has a viewpoint and he likes to express it loud and clear, but accusations regarding professionality are uncalled for.
Attorneys have a number of ethical duties, and many of these submissions either contain outright false statements or other distortions of the very same caliber complained against in those very same submissions. Just because he happens to be on your side doesn't mean he's free from obligations to comport himself in compliance with the rules of professional responsibility, especially since he does practice in this area. It is highly unprofessional to speak out from a position of influence gained by being a professional in a way that is biased, sensationalized, hyperbolic, or incendiary. Everybody gets knocked for it from time to time, and NYCL has been flirting with ethical standards quite a bit these past few months. What's uncalled for is the blind devotion and defense of a local "celebrity" just because he lends his voice to a popular viewpoint.
In the summary itself, it indicates that their motion was "denied". It wasn't. It was granted in part and denied in part, which is a common outcome. In fact, reviewing the order, you see that they in fact got just about everything they argued for. They didn't get the freebie they put in the proposed order. That's hardly surprising, and it's certainly not a denial of their request.
It isn't any use arguing what the RIAA would have done had the judge signed off on their prosed protective order. They should have vetted it before submitting it to avoid any appearance of deceptive behavior. Since they didn't, then they deserve a little nose tweaking.
It very likely was vetted. Proposed orders are just that: proposed. You don't get more than you ask for, and it's not uncommon for litigators to ask for more than they could support in their argument. What you see really just appears to be zealous advocacy and an attentive judge smacking down their overstatement. There's no deceptive behavior in that--there's no indication of deceptive behavior, except that it's the RIAA so automatically they're on their heels and NYCL gets praise for taking easy pot shots at a thoroughly unlikeable party.
And no, they did not get everything they wanted. The judge refused to protect the revenue information of the plaintiffs. They did seem to get what they wanted with regards to the non-revenue information.
Did you read the motion and the order? They got everything their arguments supported, which is exactly the way it's supposed to work.
The way most things work in court is that your response is due based on the order from the judge. If you are ordered to provide tax information by 7/31, you have a number of options. Only one of them is actually providing that information. You can also respond by challenging the order, requesting a limitation on the order, showing cause why you can't comply with the order, and depending on the situation, other options.
The deadline is the due date for the responsive filing. As long as the response isn't completely devoid of rationality or some support, the court will review the response and then either adjust the original order or respond by saying, "nice try, but now do what I said". It's not contempt to push back in civil litigation unless you're doing it solely for the sake of wasting time or money.
In this case, because a protective order was issued, it obviously wasn't devoid of a real issue.
Now, sometimes, an order is an order and the only permitted responses are (a) compliance or (b) a request for more time to comply (which may or may not be granted, especially if dropped on the court at the last minute). This is rarely the case.
Moreover, the summary is again biased and sensationalized, part of a pattern that shows increasingly unprofessional conduct on the part of the submitter. The RIAA offered a proposed order that was greater in scope than what they had argued for. Had the judge and her clerks read only the moving papers and then just signed the order, the RIAA would have had that order amended upon discovery of the inconsistency. The RIAA actually got the protective order it had argued for--it just didn't get the overbroad proposal they submitted.
You could automatically bounce back to "the RIAA is evil and incompetent", which no one would disagree with, but there's almost no chance that this would have ever worked--it's not like the judge is powerless upon discovery of the problem, which is almost inevitable unless opposing counsel is beyond incompetent, and attempting to slip an expanded order in intentionally opens them up to all kinds of sanctions. The thing is, you rarely get more than what you ask in a proposed order attached to a motion--so it's not uncommon to "shoot for the moon" and then the court writes a narrower order based on how much it's willing to give you. In most cases, it's not a plot. It's just the way the game is played.
There can be an antitrust complaint against anyone at any time for any reason. It doesn't mean it would get anywhere.
If a third party product tried to use Microsoft's closed protocols for their Zunes, they'd be in the exact same boat. If the Zune were the dominant player and WMP the dominant desktop software for that player, Palm still wouldn't be able to use the Zune syncing code and force Microsoft to maintain compatibility of its self-funded, closed, internal protocols with a competing product. You don't get to pass your hardware off as someone else's and offload the responsibility to support your product to another party.
Microsoft would have no obligation not to break compatibility with future versions of its internal sync protocol.
Palm didn't try to write a plugin and it didn't try to write a sync manager that accessed the library data. Whether the third party in that scenario is Apple or Microsoft makes no difference.
iTunes is a defacto monopoly now and Apple better start treading more carefully.
Why? The iTunes Store enables media acquisition, desktop playback, library organization, and is written to sync with Apple devices. All your downloads are sitting pretty, right there on your hard drive, fully available for you to use as you please. Anything you downloaded with DRM you got with the known caveat that it would only work with Apple products.
Using tie ins to build new monopolies, which seems to be what they are doing here, is especially dangerous.
If by build new monopolies, you mean not supporting syncing of third-party devices on their unpublished, internal protocol, then sure. But that's an uphill battle to convince anyone that that is an unlawful monopoly.
An antitrust regulator might be inclined to say Apple's defacto monopoly on online music sales is giving them an unfair advantage in other markets, in this case the smartphone market.
Not really. It gives them an advantage in the internal syncing department, but as a natural effect of them making both products.
If Palm wants to access the iTunes library XML file and use that to load information in its own sync software, the file's sitting right there for them to use. Failing that, it can read the file/folder structure and metadata directly and compile its own library.
The Pre isn't disabled. Palm tried to piggyback on iTunes using an undocumented and unsupported hack to capture a competitor's market with zero effort. Talk about unfair advantage.
If a competitor can't bring a new smartphone to market because they can't access online music because of a monopoly
Where can't they? 1. Buy music from Amazon, iTunes, Walmart, Microsoft, whatever. 2. Transfer files to Pre. 3. Profit.
You can argue competitors just have to start their own competing MP3 service
Like the rest of your comment, it's entirely off base and out of scope. Palm doesn't need an MP3 service. All they have to do, and all they had to do from the start, was put a modicum of effort into writing their own synchronization software. There's nothing particularly special about the media storage of iTunes (files and folders) or the library database (XML).
Palm just noticed that there was a way they could get plug-and-chug support for free, and leave Apple holding the bag of dog crap when future versions of iTunes no longer worked with whatever hacked-together code was stuffed onto the Pre. Suddenly "iTunes broke my Pre!" would ring out all across the Internet.
that is a very tall order, especially since it requires inking deals with a relatively small number of recording companies that are something of cartel themselves.
Apple did it, and did it before the lucrative nature of the setup had empirical evidence. If anything, it should be easier to compete now.
Get real. The iTunes Store has almost nothing to do with this. The iTunes client software, developed by Apple, supports syncing Apple devices. They're not, nor in any rational world would they be, required to support third party data transfer.
If you want to put all smartphone manufacturers in a room and tell them to come up with an open standard for data synchronization, fine, but until that's the case, get real.
You're babbling about nothing. Palm never had any right or reasonable expectation to be able to use Apple's unpublished protocols and expect it to work in a production environment. No one's stopping Palm from syncing the media or selling their smartphones.
"Wardrobing" is not unlawful when there is a return policy specifically governing interactions with the customer, and the customer operates within the confines of that policy.
The good faith requirement does exist, and can be pursued as a form of fraudulent misrepresentation. where there is no return policy or where the return policy is sufficiently qualified, because your contract requires a good faith intent of entering into the mutually agreed transaction.
However, because the more typical retailer practice is to engage in a transaction referencing and incorporating a general return policy, that policy becomes the governing document. Return fraud is real, and it is illegal, but "renting" is neither. It's unethical and has an unmistakably negative impact on other consumers and the business itself, but it is also recognized as part of the cost of doing business. If your intent is to utilize the store's written and published policies, what you are doing is merely opportunistic, greedy, and unethical. It is not, however, illegal, let alone a crime.
The above is true for California and most states adopting the Uniform Commercial Code. There are some states, however, where this practice may indeed be illegal by statute--as I recall, some of the upper Midwestern states may have passed more restrictive return fraud laws.
Of course, as I've said previously, it's all about balance and acceptable risk. When a liberal return policy is abused to the point of causing unusually high losses, that policy will be reconsidered and tweaked. Ultimately, it is further restricted, which harms those customers who legitimately had cause to return the item, and because of more restrictive policies, no longer can. Abuse of return policies was, after all, the impetus of restocking fees.
Note the kinds of products most often carrying restocking fees: GPS units, portable computers, cellular phones--all the kinds of things that might be purchased for a specific purpose (a vacation, a cross-country move, a road trip) and then returned.
Though this practice is not fraudulent and not illegal as return fraud, depending on how high profile it is, it might be unjust enrichment--your use of the product for a period of time had some material value to you, and the retailer bore all the risk and suffered the entire loss of value in the product. Of course your liability there would only be the retailer's losses as a result of your action, and only if they bothered to pursue it.
If you also return the hardware, sure.
That caveat works fine for a scenario like this, until it's systemically abused, prompting AT&T to change its policies when it has too many returned phones (not just iPhones, but any other data-enabled device that might be used for just such a trick).
It works now because of the balance--it's a good supply of refurbed phones, which are still profitable for the carrier, to a point. As with most things, it's all about balance.
No, it's still your DVR. You can keep your recordings on it until you run out of space. Each cable account will have its own designated storage account, with access to programs recorded based on your cable subscription level. This is the only way it works, as Cablevision was forced earlier in the litigation to argue a 1:1 relationship in order to avoid the direct infringement of public performances. Whether, in fact, their data storage system keeps bit-for-bit separate copies for each account or just an alias will undoubtedly be part of future litigation. A strict reading of this decision requires that each customer have their own dedicated hard drive, just physically relocated to a server farm. A less strict reading simply requires each customer to have their current 80 hours of HD recording space, which cannot be accessed by any other customer. Cable companies undoubtedly want the latter to save on storage space, but it's not clear that that usage is out of the litigation woods just yet.
The cable companies want this because it means no longer having to buy expensive hardware for each DVR customer. All the cable box needs is a way to connect to the video storage center and authenticate against your video "mailbox" and pull the recordings.
The theoretical benefit is lower prices (or slower price increases) and greater storage space (or improved video bitrates) for consumers. The practical benefit, of course, is more profit for the cable companies.