Update on Friday's post: The person I quoted who referred to "trademark" has corrected it to "copyright". It was just a typo. I kinda figured that, since the rest of the message was well-thought out.
Update on Friday's post: The person I quoted who referred to "trademark" has corrected it to "copyright". It was just a typo. I kinda figured that, since the rest of the message was well-thought out.
If I had my way, when all was said and done, while I'd clean up the system and eliminate a lot of ambiguity, which might immediately seem to constrict the rights people currently seem to have (like, oh, say, public annotation), it would actually contract the 'rights' significantly. Kiss the DMCA goodbye, for instance. (Making the act of breaking copyright protection for the legal purpose of creating a backup copy? Nonsense!)
In the Microsoft case, indeed in almost all of the digital monopoly cases, the dominant company will have to build its strategies around the contours of the original state monopoly we call intellectual property. Expand those rights, and the monopolies form quicker, grow larger.
The state is involved in creating [intellecutal-property based] monopolies, because there are choices to be made in designing property systems. Lots of them, in fact. One can agree with the idea that there should be intellectual property rights without answering the question "How far should those rights stretch? What conditions should Microsoft be able to attach to its software licenses? Restraints on competition? On criticism? To get the benefits of the state property grant, should it have to make source code available under a compulsory license? Should it be able to use copyright law to restrict its competitors from making "interoperable" products?"
Missing the point on Microsoft: I missed this article on Friday... it has some great stuff in it.
Amusement: When I went to The Register's article, guess who had an advertisement in the sidebar? (Yep.)
It's so hard to quantify and express, because we do not have an alternate universe where everybody agrees with standards, but please believe me when I say that this arrogance from Microsoft will cost you personally, both in additional exprenses for developing the software you use (always passed on to the consumer, one way or another), and in software you will never see.
Even as I've been going into spastic twitching fits over Mozilla (If you've ever seen Disney's Alladin, think Jafar's first few seconds of being a genie... "The power! The incredible power! The stars leap at my command!" or something to that effect), Microsoft has been bringin' me down over IE5.5 for Windows. The Web Standards Projects had some stuff to say about it, and I second it.
However, I reconsidered my opinion on the recent ruling as code-as-expression, and I'm not as optimistic as I was. I posted this in the Userland DG, but I'll reproduce it here:
I'm feeling bad today and I'll soon be going home (where my Internet access is really bad) for the weekend, so no more updates.