The whole purpose of a copyright is to grant a limited-time monopoly, too. And you can release copyrightable material into the public domain quite easily.
But, still, people feel the need to use actual copyrights and license agreements like the GPL to create things like "open source software".
Conceptually, one can easily see the same thing being done with patents, the main barrier is the enormous expense, whereas copyrights are free.
You are correct that the "poor man's copyright" isn't even good for documenting copyright rights, and certainly isn't good for documenting prior art to prevent someone else from patenting your work.
OTOH, I'd think you could use a regular registered copyright (vastly cheaper and easier and quicker than a patent) to demonstrate that any idea you came up with existed at the time of registration, simply by documenting it in a work amenable to copyright and registering it. I'm incredibly lazy about looking it up right now, but IIRC a registered copyright takes filling out a form, paying like $20, and depositing two copies of the work.
In theory, you should be able to use a non-registered, free copyright to do that just by complying with the deposit requirement of the copyright act, but ISTR that the Copyright Office is selective as to what deposits they retain.
Though, if you want to preserve something as open in a sense parallel to the way the GPL does with copyright-protectable work, you probably need a real patent with license terms that require openness -- while releasing something in the public domain will (with adequate proof of the art) prevent someone else from getting an enforceable patent on it, they won't prevent someone from using it in a proprietary work that is protected by other patents.
Maybe in 1980. In 2006? I think getting a book published is pretty easy, once you assemble the material you want in it, through any number of services that do POD publishing on a fee-per-copy basis.
Getting the book distributed may be hard, but is that the goal, or is it just documentation?
Seems to me writing up the description of the process to the necessary detail to demonstrate that it is prior art if someone tries to patent the same idea is the hard (and, if you need professional advice to assure yourself you've met that target, expensive) part -- well, after coming up with the idea in the first place. Taking that documentation and getting it into a book (and then doing something to document rather firmly when it was created, like getting it notarized or, heck, registering the copyright on the book) is, comparatively, easy and cheap these days.
Getting that material somewhere where it will be noticed by patent examiners searching for prior art is harder, of course, so mostly publishing an obscure book just provides evidence for someone challenging the patent after its granted, which is better than nothing, but not ideal.
Well, to be fair, quadrophonic sound died because there were just so few four-eared audiophiles willing to shell out for an extra pair of speakers.
This sounds sensible at first, but am I supposed to understand, then, that the popularity of various 4-channel, 4+1, 5+1, 6+1, etc. surround sound formats is the result of an explosion of mutations producing 4+ eared consumers?
So, Microsoft just needs to update the tool every few months. Once John and Dave have shipped their machines with pre-loaded pirate copies of Windows, they can't update them - but Microsoft can.
Who says they can't? If they've hacked the system in the first place, surely they can place software that check for, download, and install -- all silently, naturally -- their own updates periodically.
...everyone seems to focus (well, in addition to paranoia), on video conferencing, but it seems like, with the right software, this would enable some interesting UI advances, with interfaces that respond to gestures.
I wonder how much each of those individual sensors is going to pick up? Presumably its more than one pixel, otherwise (as others have suggested) you've just got a contact scanner. If each is in effect a mini-digital-pinhole camera, it seems like it could have 3D imaging capability, which could be really interesting.
How is it any scarier from a privacy angle than a webcam? You chose whether you buy this kind of monitor, after all.
Its more convenient than a webcam, but not necessarily scarier. Sure, screens outside of your control could have this functionality, but its not like concealed cameras in spaces under otehr people's control aren't a possibility (and frequent fact) of life without these new monitors.
The point is to confuse customers and to unnecessarily inflate the price of the more "advanced" version... as if leaving out features actually saves Microsoft money in producing it.
I don't think confusion is the point, though there is a grain of truth here. The idea is to segment the market to extract maximum price from each segment. Its the same reason full-featured software is sold at reduced "academic" prices to students: software vendors (mostly) aren't charitably supporting education. Its not like there is much marginal cost for selling a piece of software.
So why have 21 different versions of Vista if NOT to have a consumer version with as much protection as possible with as few services running as possible?
As I recall, one of the changes from WinXP to Vista in terms of structure of the product line is that the various Vista versions are supposed to be strict supersets with no or minimal basic configuration differences (for the common features) so that if something can be done on various versions of the OS, the procedure will be the same, and the only compatibility issue will be whether or not a particular feature is available at all, not different OS configuration required depending on which version is being used. This certainly would be an advantage to those dealing with heterogenous environments.
Crippled seems a rather extreme description. Security software of various types with moderate defaults aren't all that rare -- e.g., SELinux in Fedora Core also doesn't default to the most strict ruleset possible -- simply because the strictest limits, while most secure, also provide barriers to the usability most people expect and want.
OTOH, the particular choice of defaults seems dumb to me -- the third party firewall I use at home is set to ask about creating a new policy when an unfamiliar program attempts to listen or send, which seems a lot more sensible than disabling outgoing blocking entirely by default. Nothing you want is ever blocked unless you tell it to be, but you don't get blindsided by anything sending out without you having cleared that program to do so.
And while I can see why enterprises might not want their desktop users faced with "Allow/Deny" popups, how hard is it to have a couple of basic default options (say "Ask" vs. "Allow" on all outgoing reqeusts) chosen on install?
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The whole purpose of a copyright is to grant a limited-time monopoly, too. And you can release copyrightable material into the public domain quite easily. But, still, people feel the need to use actual copyrights and license agreements like the GPL to create things like "open source software". Conceptually, one can easily see the same thing being done with patents, the main barrier is the enormous expense, whereas copyrights are free.
You are correct that the "poor man's copyright" isn't even good for documenting copyright rights, and certainly isn't good for documenting prior art to prevent someone else from patenting your work.
OTOH, I'd think you could use a regular registered copyright (vastly cheaper and easier and quicker than a patent) to demonstrate that any idea you came up with existed at the time of registration, simply by documenting it in a work amenable to copyright and registering it. I'm incredibly lazy about looking it up right now, but IIRC a registered copyright takes filling out a form, paying like $20, and depositing two copies of the work.
In theory, you should be able to use a non-registered, free copyright to do that just by complying with the deposit requirement of the copyright act, but ISTR that the Copyright Office is selective as to what deposits they retain.
Though, if you want to preserve something as open in a sense parallel to the way the GPL does with copyright-protectable work, you probably need a real patent with license terms that require openness -- while releasing something in the public domain will (with adequate proof of the art) prevent someone else from getting an enforceable patent on it, they won't prevent someone from using it in a proprietary work that is protected by other patents.
Maybe in 1980. In 2006? I think getting a book published is pretty easy, once you assemble the material you want in it, through any number of services that do POD publishing on a fee-per-copy basis. Getting the book distributed may be hard, but is that the goal, or is it just documentation? Seems to me writing up the description of the process to the necessary detail to demonstrate that it is prior art if someone tries to patent the same idea is the hard (and, if you need professional advice to assure yourself you've met that target, expensive) part -- well, after coming up with the idea in the first place. Taking that documentation and getting it into a book (and then doing something to document rather firmly when it was created, like getting it notarized or, heck, registering the copyright on the book) is, comparatively, easy and cheap these days. Getting that material somewhere where it will be noticed by patent examiners searching for prior art is harder, of course, so mostly publishing an obscure book just provides evidence for someone challenging the patent after its granted, which is better than nothing, but not ideal.
...everyone seems to focus (well, in addition to paranoia), on video conferencing, but it seems like, with the right software, this would enable some interesting UI advances, with interfaces that respond to gestures. I wonder how much each of those individual sensors is going to pick up? Presumably its more than one pixel, otherwise (as others have suggested) you've just got a contact scanner. If each is in effect a mini-digital-pinhole camera, it seems like it could have 3D imaging capability, which could be really interesting.
How is it any scarier from a privacy angle than a webcam? You chose whether you buy this kind of monitor, after all. Its more convenient than a webcam, but not necessarily scarier. Sure, screens outside of your control could have this functionality, but its not like concealed cameras in spaces under otehr people's control aren't a possibility (and frequent fact) of life without these new monitors.
Crippled seems a rather extreme description. Security software of various types with moderate defaults aren't all that rare -- e.g., SELinux in Fedora Core also doesn't default to the most strict ruleset possible -- simply because the strictest limits, while most secure, also provide barriers to the usability most people expect and want.
OTOH, the particular choice of defaults seems dumb to me -- the third party firewall I use at home is set to ask about creating a new policy when an unfamiliar program attempts to listen or send, which seems a lot more sensible than disabling outgoing blocking entirely by default. Nothing you want is ever blocked unless you tell it to be, but you don't get blindsided by anything sending out without you having cleared that program to do so.
And while I can see why enterprises might not want their desktop users faced with "Allow/Deny" popups, how hard is it to have a couple of basic default options (say "Ask" vs. "Allow" on all outgoing reqeusts) chosen on install?