Linked by Nescio on Mon 9th Mar 2009 08:05 UTC
Numerous irrelevant issues and feelings about them are ventilated in comments on the case. However, there are only two important issues. One is what the law is, the other is what we think the law should be.
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Publishers should NOT have the right...
by cjcoats on Mon 9th Mar 2009 16:21
in reply to "RE: Unfortunately..."
Member since:2006-04-16
If I buy a book, then except for the rights restricted by the Copyright Act, I own it. I am free to re-sell it. I am free to cut out objectionable passages before I hand it to my children. I am free to use it as raw materials for making paper doilies if I want.
And on June 1, 1908 in Bobbs-Merrill v. Straus, the US Supreme Court has ruled I have these rights (look up "first sale doctrine" in a case, over a century ago).
Electronic publishers want to deny me these rights. The only private property they believe in is their own. They should be condemned as un-American adherents of Old-World mercantilism.
RE: Publishers should NOT have the right...
by Soulbender on Mon 9th Mar 2009 16:34
in reply to "Publishers should NOT have the right..."
Member since:2005-08-18
If I buy a book, then except for the rights restricted by the Copyright Act, I own it.
Oh come on, you know software is different. It's NEW! It's amazing! it's D I G I T A L! It is stored on CD's! And it's so much more expensive to create than other products, like books and movies..., so obviously it needs special protection from the evil consumers.
Member since:2005-11-13
Most people understand what they get, and what they don't get when they buy a book.
They are allowed to read it, as many times as they want, wherever they want, and lend it to friends. They can quote bits of it in discussion papers and essays. What they cannot do is copy it whole over and over and sell the copies for their own profit.
Why should a CD, a DVD or a Software Application on CD be considered any different to this?
What rights do or should software vendors have that book publishers do not have?
They are allowed to read it, as many times as they want, wherever they want, and lend it to friends. They can quote bits of it in discussion papers and essays. What they cannot do is copy it whole over and over and sell the copies for their own profit.
Why should a CD, a DVD or a Software Application on CD be considered any different to this?
What rights do or should software vendors have that book publishers do not have?
Unlike a piece of software, when you lend a book to friends (or whoever else), you don't have the original anymore until you get it back. With software, you can 'loan' it to a friend, and a million other people in the process, and still keep the original.
I'm not here to say what rights people should or shouldn't have with digial media, because it's a pretty complicated issue. I'm just describing the difference between physical objects and digital media. And, in my opinion, it's a pretty significant difference.
I don't know what's going to happen whenever we're able to duplicate physical objects just like we copy a file. That's going to be a whole new can of worms.
RE[3]: Unfortunately...
by Thom_Holwerda on Tue 10th Mar 2009 00:27
in reply to "RE[2]: Unfortunately..."
Member since:2005-06-29
Unlike a piece of software, when you lend a book to friends (or whoever else), you don't have the original anymore until you get it back. With software, you can 'loan' it to a friend, and a million other people in the process, and still keep the original.
Software and books are exactly the same. contrary to what you're saying, it is impossible to duplicate a CD. All you can do is copy its contents to another medium. You can do the exact same thing with a book by using a photocopier or a scanner/printer.
The book is the DVD; the words, sentences, and stories in a book are the movie/program/game on a DVD. There's a medium, there's a message.
People have this weird notion that you cannot copy books, which is nonsense. Sure you can, it's just a lot more cumbersome. However, copyright law doesn't give a rat's bum about how easy it is to copy copyrighted material.
RE[3]: Unfortunately...
by Delgarde on Tue 10th Mar 2009 00:51
in reply to "RE[2]: Unfortunately..."
Member since:2008-08-19
Unlike a piece of software, when you lend a book to friends (or whoever else), you don't have the original anymore until you get it back. With software, you can 'loan' it to a friend, and a million other people in the process, and still keep the original.
True for books, but software still isn't unique in that regard. For CDs and DVDs, a user can copy them to a computer or portable player, and loan the physical media to someone else. Yet the question of licensing doesn't come up with those - nobody buys a CD or DVD and has to agree to a EULA before they can listen to or watch it. Where's the law that says different rules apply to software, distributed on the same media?
I buy a movie on DVD, I have an right to use it. I buy a game on DVD, I don't? Why's software different?
News
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/18/13 21:06 UTC
"At the end of a week in which Electronic Arts confirmed it wasn't developing a thing for the Wii U, one of the software engineers in EA Sports' Canada studio, in a series of since-deleted tweets, disparaged the console as 'crap' and suggested Nintendo should give up on hardware altogether. 'The Wii U is crap. Less powerful than an Xbox 360. Poor online/store. Weird tablet', tweeted Bob Summerwill, listed as a senior software engineer at EA Canada, in a reply to a tweet posting a link about EA's no-Wii U news. 'Nintendo are walking dead at this point'." The Wii U is turning into the 21st century's Virtual Boy.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/18/13 7:37 UTC
"In NixOS, the entire operating system - the kernel, applications, system packages, configuration files, and so on - is built by the Nix package manager from a description in a purely functional build language. The fact that it's purely functional essentially means that building a new configuration cannot overwrite previous configurations. Most of the other features follow from this." Interesting approach. A Linux distribution, sure, but with some very refreshing ideas about system configuration.
Linked by fran on 05/18/13 1:38 UTC
Appfour added, among other features, C/C++ support to its new version of AIDE. From Android-IDE, "Now you can write parts of your app or your whole app in C/C++ on your device. AIDE supports the Standard Android NDK toolchain (GCC 4.6 + Bionic, STL, ...). No changes are necessary if you want to build an app developed on a PC with Eclipse. C/C++ development is fully integrated: Build errors appear in the error list and files can easily be navigated to with Go to file. The editor supports C/C++ syntax highlighting."
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/17/13 23:35 UTC, submitted by kragil
Ars nails it: "The answer is that Google did announce what amounts to a fairly substantial Android update yesterday. They simply did it without adding to the update fragmentation problems that continue to plague the platform. By focusing on these changes and not the apparently-waiting-in-the-wings update to the core software, Google is showing us one of the ways in which it's trying to fix the update problem."
Linked by MOS6510 on 05/17/13 22:22 UTC
"It is good for programmers to understand what goes on inside a processor. The CPU is at the heart of our career. What goes on inside the CPU? How long does it take for one instruction to run? What does it mean when a new CPU has a 12-stage pipeline, or 18-stage pipeline, or even a 'deep' 31-stage pipeline? Programs generally treat the CPU as a black box. Instructions go into the box in order, instructions come out of the box in order, and some processing magic happens inside. As a programmer, it is useful to learn what happens inside the box. This is especially true if you will be working on tasks like program optimization. If you don't know what is going on inside the CPU, how can you optimize for it? This article is about what goes on inside the x86 processor's deep pipeline."
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/17/13 22:15 UTC, submitted by Tom
"It was the only moment I heard regret slip into Otellini's voice during the several hours of conversations I had with him. 'The lesson I took away from that was, while we like to speak with data around here, so many times in my career I've ended up making decisions with my gut, and I should have followed my gut,' he said. 'My gut told me to say yes.'" The world would've been a much different place - Apple would have been less dependant on Samsung for its chips, which probably would've meant less money for Samsung to develop its Galaxy business.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/16/13 21:41 UTC
Glass is getting some love at Google I/O as well. New applications have been released - Facebook, Twitter, Evernote, Elle, Tumblr, and CNN. Perhaps more interesting: the newly announced Google Glass Developer Kit will allow offline applications and direct hardware access - great for hacking and expanding Glass' potential. This kit will really allow hackers to put Glass through its paces.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/16/13 17:04 UTC
"But Beck and Merrill decided that simply banning toxic players wasn't an acceptable solution for their game. Riot Games began experimenting with more constructive modes of player management through a formal player behavior initiative that actually conducts controlled experiments on its player base to see what helps reduce bad behavior. The results of that initiative have been shared at a lecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and on panels at the Penny Arcade Expo East and the Game Developers Conference." Absolutely fascinating stuff. I'm a League of Legends player, and to be honest, the community isn't nearly as bad as some make it out to be. I'm happy Riot games has the guts to employ science to address the issue.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/16/13 13:17 UTC
"Android and iOS, the number one and number two ranked smartphone operating systems worldwide, combined for 92.3% of all smartphone shipments during the first quarter of 2013 as Windows Phone crept past BlackBerry for 3rd place. According to the International Data Corporation Worldwide Quarterly Mobile Phone Tracker, Android smartphone vendors and Apple shipped a total of 199.5 million units worldwide during 1Q13, up 59.1% from the 125.4 million units shipped during 1Q12." Windows Phone doubles from a few to twice few, iOS loser market share as its growth is slower than that of the overall market. BlackBerry continues slide into irrelevance.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/16/13 12:06 UTC
"According to the latest research from our Wireless Smartphone Strategies service, global Android smartphone profits reached US$5 billion in total during the first quarter of 2013. Samsung dominated and captured an impressive 95 percent share of all Android smartphone profits." Wow.More News »
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Member since:
2007-02-17
And the software which is merely licenced to their use(which they must agree before they can use it). The same thing goes for a Music CD or a DVD (you can still do what you want with the CD and DVD but not with the content of it, my god this is confusing).
There is no communication about this, because people don't want to be stripped of their sense of ownership,
imagine how people would react if they were told at the cash register that they do not own what they just bought for and only the medium.
Music/Film/Software company are in the same basket concerning this issue, So I guess Apple is not so guilty, just doing it the same thing as others (weird for a "think different" company).
Most people understand what they get, and what they don't get when they buy a book.
They are allowed to read it, as many times as they want, wherever they want, and lend it to friends. They can quote bits of it in discussion papers and essays. What they cannot do is copy it whole over and over and sell the copies for their own profit.
Why should a CD, a DVD or a Software Application on CD be considered any different to this?
What rights do or should software vendors have that book publishers do not have?
Edited 2009-03-09 12:05 UTC