Although there is much debate surrounding this topic i think it might help to draw some other real world parallels to the debate (as Mike often does) to kind of help to put things in to perspective. IMHO (aside from the actual reasons for the NY Times to make their argument) if you want to boil down their argument to its most basic form you could say that basically they want the government (or other third part) to regulate Googles "secret sauce". Well lets put that into perspective. Googles secret sauce is what makes them stand out in the crowd of a marketplace. The same could be said of other companies secret sauce that make them stand out in the market place and the one that immediately came to mind (for whatever reason but i have a cooking background) is A1 brand Steaksauce. Now I must admit that i cannot find any specific data relating to Krafts market share with this or it's related products but i think it would be safe to assume that they are likely in a dominant position with them (as can be seen by simply going down the condiment aisle). If you note on the side of the bottle it has these specific ingredients (copied from Krafts website) TOMATO PUREE (WATER, TOMATO PASTE), DISTILLED VINEGAR, CORN SYRUP, SALT, RAISIN PASTE, CRUSHED ORANGE PUREE, SPICES AND HERBS, DRIED GARLIC AND ONION, CARAMEL COLOR, POTASSIUM SORBATE (TO PRESERVE FRESHNESS), XANTHAN GUM. Note the portion that says Spices and Herbs. it does not detail which ones. That is their secret sauce. Given the fact that you eat steak sauce and being that is specific contents are unknown, one could have a bad or fatal reaction. On the flip side though using Google if you have a bad experience you simply click away with your health intact. Why then should we regulate a the "secret sauce"? Please counter my argument or suggest better examples.
I completely agree and having thought about this all day i cannot understand from a business perspective how this could really help very much. I recently spoke to a Verizon rep who is also a "Modder" and he explained that; at the store level, a phone with a non-oem rom is impossible to detect. Only when it finally gets to Moto can they determine that. I am sure this costs Moto some money. It cannot possibly be thta much though that they would take such a departure from the previous actions regardless of their stance of ". Securing the software on our handsets, thereby preventing a non-Motorola ROM image from being loaded, has been our common practice for many years". This is not how it is supposed to be. I sort of sympathetic to them though and te real world solution should be to give store level personell the ability to detect a phone bricked either via an attempt to subvert the current ROM or from something else. I agree with most everyone else that this could make the iPhone antenna fiasco seem like a minor PR Stumble. On another note though i am curious about the actual legality of including a self destruct device in a piece of consumer electronics or anything for that matter. If you are reading this please reply with where one could research such legality/illegality.
Please do not believe that i was in any way justifying her actions. Personally i believe that although illegal the way laws used to be written and enforced was to allow leeway for actions like this that were not in the intent of breaking the spirit of the law as opposed to the letter of the law. Yes she broke it and eventually was released because someone saw that her intent was not against the spirit of the law. That said my commentary was merely on the way things happened subsequent to her arrest and how ridiculous they were until her release.
Aside from all of the others issues i may take exception to in this case. The one that truly disturbing is in the post from Wired where it states near the bottom "The suit claims that, once local officers took the woman to the station, they called the MPAA for guidance. The suit says the MPAA recommended destroying the footage and releasing her" Why in the world is a police department seeking guidance from a private third party entity and NOT the local DA? I cannot fathom that. The only parties the police should have been contacting are plaintiffs, defendants, and the DA. The MPAA was none of them in this case so why?
I have already emailed a request to the author to please clarify his posting. Although it is a minor stab it is still blatantly out there as a stand alone sentence meant to stand out in the mind of the reader. My response:
I just wanted to take a moment to ask you why you have blatantly included a Line of FUD in this article
Law enforcement authorities have traced the video-cam recordings of movies to organized crime.
I would hope that a respected technology journalist could have by now separated him/herself from this old party line from the entertainment industry. Without going into any great detail please imagine for a minute how "organised Crime" could possibly benefit by giving something away? Making a movie available online at no cost to the consumer but cost to the uploader makes zero sense. Also it has been repeatedly "debunked" that there even is a connection. I would respectfully ask that you would edit your post to reflect only that which is known fact and not conjecture and FUD on behalf of the entertainment industry or make it know that a particular statement is conjecture or a politically correct acronym for FUD. I would encourage your reading of this post.
As of this posting i am at the Ballmer Peak (Google XKCD and Ballmer Peak). IMHO I think that aside from all of the programmatic questions, statements and verbal lashings is the fundamental question: and that is, can you copyright a question? This is essentially what is being stated as being copyrighted (disclosure, Newbie SQL player). As i understand from all that is available and from my own limited knowledge the contractor formulated a question to a DB with a specific format to the answer. How is this any different than say.. a Defense attorney asking a witness a question in a trial but stating that the witness can only answer yes or no or true or false (another disclosure, i used to watch tons of Law and order!) but seriously how is it any different? if this was a SQL statement to modify the DB and not a Query it might hold (a very, very small amount) of water, but it is not. It is a question to a computer looking for an answer in a desired format. I am no expert on any of these topics, but I have been a loyal reader for over five years and I don't see how it should be possible to copyright a question, although it may well be quite possible. Now, to really bake your noodle (Matrix) could this also be construed (very disgustingly) as a derivative work since it is almost identical to say...an answer key? Fundamentally i would say yes. (http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20091030/1549296745.shtml)
where is the difference but where is the sense? It is a pickle no doubt about that.
I would like to think i have a decent grasp of both the article and th technology involved so please rebut in the comments if you do not agree. It would appear that this practice could be argued in a courtroom as a 419 scam and possibly prosecuted as such since they operate under nearly the same principle. True 419 scammers use illegally purchased databases of emails and domains to randomly blast emails with/from, but do they not seemingly operate the same in theory, hence arguable in court?
after i read the comments and the story i had time to consider how this should be approached and i honestly cannot say how you can view packaging IE as being monopolistic. IS it monopolistic to only provide vehicles capable of burning only one of two fuels? you need transportation in order to get to a place where you can make a change from the fuel you burn to something different if possible but most do not. So how can you call bundling an inferior browser with your software monopolistic, how would the vast majority of people be able to access the internet (Chrome, Opera, or firefox) without first having to use and dislike IE and subsequently search for something better or suffer with it. I cannot speak on behalf of or speculate about "Most People" because we all know there generally is no "most people" it is most of the people you happen to know. As for the people i interact with most are dimly aware that there is even a difference between the internet and IE. They think of them as one in the same since it is IE that brings the internet to them and they dont distinguish, why should they, it does not behave like any other "program" they interact with. combining that with the fact that Google can still stick its claws into IE with its toolbars I dont see how they expect this to do them any good at all as the author pints out that they too are getting more and more anti-trust attention as well. Let the people, the consumers, and the rest of the surfing world decide what is and is not right on the internet. not Governments. It did not take government involvement for people to join together and develop Linux into a better product than MS can offer, it took those who were dissatisfied to boycott MS in the form of making something better. Not a government. I love Google and i hate MS so I am a little biased but i must say that my bias stops at the point where it seems that regulation is the only answer. Sorry Google you are going to "f" this up.
Techdirt has not posted any stories submitted by Tank_Szuba.
Alternative Thinking
Although there is much debate surrounding this topic i think it might help to draw some other real world parallels to the debate (as Mike often does) to kind of help to put things in to perspective. IMHO (aside from the actual reasons for the NY Times to make their argument) if you want to boil down their argument to its most basic form you could say that basically they want the government (or other third part) to regulate Googles "secret sauce". Well lets put that into perspective. Googles secret sauce is what makes them stand out in the crowd of a marketplace. The same could be said of other companies secret sauce that make them stand out in the market place and the one that immediately came to mind (for whatever reason but i have a cooking background) is A1 brand Steaksauce. Now I must admit that i cannot find any specific data relating to Krafts market share with this or it's related products but i think it would be safe to assume that they are likely in a dominant position with them (as can be seen by simply going down the condiment aisle). If you note on the side of the bottle it has these specific ingredients (copied from Krafts website) TOMATO PUREE (WATER, TOMATO PASTE), DISTILLED VINEGAR, CORN SYRUP, SALT, RAISIN PASTE, CRUSHED ORANGE PUREE, SPICES AND HERBS, DRIED GARLIC AND ONION, CARAMEL COLOR, POTASSIUM SORBATE (TO PRESERVE FRESHNESS), XANTHAN GUM. Note the portion that says Spices and Herbs. it does not detail which ones. That is their secret sauce. Given the fact that you eat steak sauce and being that is specific contents are unknown, one could have a bad or fatal reaction. On the flip side though using Google if you have a bad experience you simply click away with your health intact. Why then should we regulate a the "secret sauce"? Please counter my argument or suggest better examples.
Re: Consumer **hardware** shouldn't have a self-destruct switch.
I completely agree and having thought about this all day i cannot understand from a business perspective how this could really help very much. I recently spoke to a Verizon rep who is also a "Modder" and he explained that; at the store level, a phone with a non-oem rom is impossible to detect. Only when it finally gets to Moto can they determine that. I am sure this costs Moto some money. It cannot possibly be thta much though that they would take such a departure from the previous actions regardless of their stance of ". Securing the software on our handsets, thereby preventing a non-Motorola ROM image from being loaded, has been our common practice for many years". This is not how it is supposed to be. I sort of sympathetic to them though and te real world solution should be to give store level personell the ability to detect a phone bricked either via an attempt to subvert the current ROM or from something else. I agree with most everyone else that this could make the iPhone antenna fiasco seem like a minor PR Stumble. On another note though i am curious about the actual legality of including a self destruct device in a piece of consumer electronics or anything for that matter. If you are reading this please reply with where one could research such legality/illegality.
Re: On the other hand...
Please do not believe that i was in any way justifying her actions. Personally i believe that although illegal the way laws used to be written and enforced was to allow leeway for actions like this that were not in the intent of breaking the spirit of the law as opposed to the letter of the law. Yes she broke it and eventually was released because someone saw that her intent was not against the spirit of the law. That said my commentary was merely on the way things happened subsequent to her arrest and how ridiculous they were until her release.
MPAA - the new DA?
Aside from all of the others issues i may take exception to in this case. The one that truly disturbing is in the post from Wired where it states near the bottom "The suit claims that, once local officers took the woman to the station, they called the MPAA for guidance. The suit says the MPAA recommended destroying the footage and releasing her" Why in the world is a police department seeking guidance from a private third party entity and NOT the local DA? I cannot fathom that. The only parties the police should have been contacting are plaintiffs, defendants, and the DA. The MPAA was none of them in this case so why?
More FUD, This time from CNET
I have already emailed a request to the author to please clarify his posting. Although it is a minor stab it is still blatantly out there as a stand alone sentence meant to stand out in the mind of the reader. My response:
I just wanted to take a moment to ask you why you have blatantly included a Line of FUD in this article
Law enforcement authorities have traced the video-cam recordings of movies to organized crime.
I would hope that a respected technology journalist could have by now separated him/herself from this old party line from the entertainment industry. Without going into any great detail please imagine for a minute how "organised Crime" could possibly benefit by giving something away? Making a movie available online at no cost to the consumer but cost to the uploader makes zero sense. Also it has been repeatedly "debunked" that there even is a connection. I would respectfully ask that you would edit your post to reflect only that which is known fact and not conjecture and FUD on behalf of the entertainment industry or make it know that a particular statement is conjecture or a politically correct acronym for FUD. I would encourage your reading of this post.
Umm?
normally i like to leave a thoughtful comment but... you were expecting Warner to make sense?
What Question
As of this posting i am at the Ballmer Peak (Google XKCD and Ballmer Peak). IMHO I think that aside from all of the programmatic questions, statements and verbal lashings is the fundamental question: and that is, can you copyright a question? This is essentially what is being stated as being copyrighted (disclosure, Newbie SQL player). As i understand from all that is available and from my own limited knowledge the contractor formulated a question to a DB with a specific format to the answer. How is this any different than say.. a Defense attorney asking a witness a question in a trial but stating that the witness can only answer yes or no or true or false (another disclosure, i used to watch tons of Law and order!) but seriously how is it any different? if this was a SQL statement to modify the DB and not a Query it might hold (a very, very small amount) of water, but it is not. It is a question to a computer looking for an answer in a desired format. I am no expert on any of these topics, but I have been a loyal reader for over five years and I don't see how it should be possible to copyright a question, although it may well be quite possible. Now, to really bake your noodle (Matrix) could this also be construed (very disgustingly) as a derivative work since it is almost identical to say...an answer key? Fundamentally i would say yes. (http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20091030/1549296745.shtml)
where is the difference but where is the sense? It is a pickle no doubt about that.
Consumer Fraud??
I would like to think i have a decent grasp of both the article and th technology involved so please rebut in the comments if you do not agree. It would appear that this practice could be argued in a courtroom as a 419 scam and possibly prosecuted as such since they operate under nearly the same principle. True 419 scammers use illegally purchased databases of emails and domains to randomly blast emails with/from, but do they not seemingly operate the same in theory, hence arguable in court?
Bad form for Google
after i read the comments and the story i had time to consider how this should be approached and i honestly cannot say how you can view packaging IE as being monopolistic. IS it monopolistic to only provide vehicles capable of burning only one of two fuels? you need transportation in order to get to a place where you can make a change from the fuel you burn to something different if possible but most do not. So how can you call bundling an inferior browser with your software monopolistic, how would the vast majority of people be able to access the internet (Chrome, Opera, or firefox) without first having to use and dislike IE and subsequently search for something better or suffer with it. I cannot speak on behalf of or speculate about "Most People" because we all know there generally is no "most people" it is most of the people you happen to know. As for the people i interact with most are dimly aware that there is even a difference between the internet and IE. They think of them as one in the same since it is IE that brings the internet to them and they dont distinguish, why should they, it does not behave like any other "program" they interact with. combining that with the fact that Google can still stick its claws into IE with its toolbars I dont see how they expect this to do them any good at all as the author pints out that they too are getting more and more anti-trust attention as well. Let the people, the consumers, and the rest of the surfing world decide what is and is not right on the internet. not Governments. It did not take government involvement for people to join together and develop Linux into a better product than MS can offer, it took those who were dissatisfied to boycott MS in the form of making something better. Not a government. I love Google and i hate MS so I am a little biased but i must say that my bias stops at the point where it seems that regulation is the only answer. Sorry Google you are going to "f" this up.