Showing headlines posted by BernardSwiss

This obviously isn't a new question for us here at Techdirt. It's been a point of logical frustration for consumers that content producers often seem to want their output treated like property when it suits them, but as a service or license when it does not. This leads to, at the very least, the appearance of double-dipping on the part of content producers. For gamers, where used games are such an intregal part of the marketplace, the frustration often boils over. In my estimation, it's quite difficult to draw up a logical proof for limiting the rights to a product for the consumer while strengthening the rights for the producer. Such an arrangement is simply too one-sided in who is giving up whose rights.

We've talked in the past about how unfortunate it is that the US Copyright Office seems almost entirely beholden to the legacy copyright players, rather than to the stated purpose of copyright law. That is, instead of looking at how copyright can lead to the maximum benefit for the public ("promoting the progress of science") it seems to focus on what will make the big legacy players -- the RIAA and MPAA -- happy. Part of this, of course, is the somewhat continuous revolving door between industry and the Copyright Office.

I suppose it's not shocking or newsworthy (to most people) when an open source project changes its license. Some projects involve a small number of developers, making consensus around such changes easy; some projects have a contributor agreement whereby copyright is assigned to a single entity, averting the need for consensus. However, when an open source project has many contributors and no contributor agreement, then such a switch is indeed attention-grabbing. Why? Because to do so means obtaining the permission for the license change from each contributor—a task that is undoubtedly arduous and tedious, requiring an unswerving attention-to-detail and perseverance. But it can be done, as so proved by the efforts of Jean-Baptiste Kempf in switching VLC from GPLv2 to LGPLv2.1.

At the 2013 CES convention, CNET's editorial staff loved the Dish Hopper DVR and nominated it "Best in Show." That journalistic decision was quickly tossed out, however, by the legal department at CBS, CNET's corporate parent. CBS is involved in litigation against Dish over the Hopper.

US District Judge Lucy Koh, who oversaw the blockbuster Apple v. Samsung trial in San Jose last summer, published three orders late yesterday that cover all but one of the post-trial issues in that litigation. The orders cover a wide range of issues, but there are two clear takeaways. First, Apple isn't getting anything more than the $1.05 billion it won at trial. And for Samsung, there's no big escape hatch from the poor results of this trial.

But note the phrasing above: “Dell is an important part of Microsoft’s plans…” Better vertical integration without having to pay the full price for ownership, the putative “several billion dollars” would give Microsoft a significant ownership, 10% or 15%. This is completely at odds with the buyout’s supposed intent: Getting out of the PC clone race to the bottom.

Or maybe there’s another story behind Microsoft’s beneficence: The investor syndicate struggles and can’t quite reach the $22B finish line. Microsoft generously — and very publicly — offers to contribute the few missing billions. Investors see Microsoft trying to reattach the PC millstone to their necks — and run away.

Hats off to Steve Ballmer: Microsoft looks generous – without having to spend a dime – and forces Dell keep making PCs.

Until recently it was illegal to jailbreak your own iPhone, and after Saturday it will be illegal to unlock a new smartphone, thereby allowing it to switch carriers. This is a result of the exception to the DMCA lapsing. It was not a mistake, but rather an intentional choice by the Librarian of Congress, that this was no longer fair use and acceptable. The Electronic Frontier Foundation among other groups has detailed the many failings of the DMCA Triennial Rulemaking process, which in this case led to this exception lapsing.

Soverain isn't in the e-commerce business; it's in the higher-margin business of filing patent lawsuits against e-commerce companies. And it's been quite successful until now. The company's plan to extract a patent tax of about one percent of revenue from a huge swath of online retailers was snuffed out last week by Newegg and its lawyers, who won an appeal ruling that invalidates the three patents Soverain used to spark a vast patent war.

Whether you use your Android device for business or for personal endeavors, storing some of that data on the limited memory of a handset or a tablet is not always sufficient. Not to mention it’s nice to be able to access those files from either a tablet, a smartphone, or a computer.

Fortunately, there are a plethora of cloud storage services available. Many offer free storage options that can give users a little boost in space, as well as monthly subscriptions for more space than a user might know what to do with. You may already know about Dropbox and Google Docs, but there are other players in the cloud game that offer some of the same features and functionality—and improved security, too.

Now Macmillan, another one of the “Big Six” publishers, announced Thursday its new plan for selling e-books to American public libraries. Macmillan now says its titles will cost $25 (by comparison, some of its same bestselling titles in the Kindle store go for $8 to $12)—and once acquired by a library, each will be available for two years or 52 check-outs, whichever comes first.

The two previous batches of regulations, issued in 2006 and 2010, respectively, granted users permission to unlock their phones in order to switch wireless carriers. But in the wake of a 2010 decision holding that software is licensed rather than sold, the Library reversed itself and declared phone unlocking illegal once again. The Librarian was also influenced by claims that there are more unlocked phones on the market than there were three years ago.

The YouTube "dancing baby" takedown case, made Internet-famous by lawyers at the Electronic Frontier Foundation back in 2007, looks like it will actually go to a jury about six years after it was filed.

US District Judge Jeremy Fogel ruled today [PDF] that neither Universal Music Group, which asked for this video of a dancing toddler to be taken off YouTube, nor EFF, which represented the child's mother, will win their case on summary judgment. Today's order, which responds to issues raised at an October hearing, means the case will have to proceed to a jury trial if there's no settlement.

In 1997, at the height of his PC-fueled bravado, Dell CEO Michael Dell said publicly that Apple, then in decline, should be dissolved. "I'd shut it down and give the money back to shareholders." Now Apple sits near the pinnacle of the industry, and Dell is looking at giving his company's stockholders their money back—and taking the company private. And it looks like Microsoft is going to give him a hand with that.

If a federal appeals court strikes down the Federal Communications Commission’s open Internet rules later this year, lawmakers will again press for legislation to codify the principle of net neutrality, a prominent House Democrat said on Tuesday.

In a keynote address here at the annual State of the Net tech policy conference, Rep. Anna Eshoo (D-Calif.), a co-chair of the Congressional Internet Caucus, argued that forceful rules that would bar Internet service providers from blocking or slowing certain online content are a critical consumer protection.

Microsoft and Hewlett Packard won't share a study claiming that the German city of Munich had its numbers wrong when it calculated switching from Windows to Linux saved the city millions -- although an HP employee did provide the data to a German publication that reported on the results. By switching from Windows to its own Linux distribution, LiMux, Munich has saved over ¬11 million (US$14.3 million) so far, the city announced in November. But a Microsoft-commissioned Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) study conducted by HP suggests that the city's numbers are wrong, and claims that Munich would have saved ¬43.7 million if it had stuck with Microsoft, German weekly Focus reported earlier this week.

Why bother? Canonical kernel team manager Leann Ogasawara explained in a Google hangout today that this proposal is on the table because Canonical thinks it can deliver both stability and cutting-edge features with rolling releases. For the two years between LTS releases, there would be no new versions but there would be lots of updates.

Nothing is "set in stone," but "when we hit the next 14.04 release it could go from 14.04 to 16.04, and everything in between is what we consider a rolling release. You're going to be pushed and following the latest package releases, not only from the kernel but also from the entire distribution."

We've talked in the past about how the heirs of Martin Luther King Jr. and James Joyce have a long and unfortunate history of being ridiculous about letting anyone quote their dead ancestors. Both families have abused copyright law to demand excessive payments, even for researchers and memorials and the like. Now we can add the heirs of Winston Churchill to the bunch.

We've been discussing the ridiculousness of the prosecution against Aaron Swartz, including the fact that if a federal prosecutor decides to take you down, it's not at all difficult to find something they can try to pin on you, especially when it comes to "computer" crimes. Law professor James Grimmelmann explains how it's quite possible that prosecutors could go after him under the same laws as it went after Swartz. He notes that he used to run the (excellent) blog LawMeme (which we used to link to frequently). After it died, he wanted to preserve many of the articles, and so he wrote a script to pull the articles off of the Internet Archive. While it all depends on your interpretation, he shows how a prosecutor could make the argument that he violated the Internet Arvchive's terms of service -- and that some of the decisions he made in writing the script could be taken out of context to be used against him.

The folks at Fight for the Future noticed the proximity of Internet Freedom Day to Martin Luther King Jr. Day, and decided an interesting form of celebrating internet freedom would be to share a video of MLK's famous "I have a dream..." speech.

Redmond first announced CU-RTC-Web in August. Along with the specification itself, the company produced a rationale; a list of reasons why it felt that WebRTC was a bad fit for the problem at hand, and why CU-RTC-Web was a superior solution. Perhaps the most specific complaint was that WebRTC was quite deeply linked to a specification called SDP, an open industry standard used extensively for VoIP and video conferencing systems in conjunction with SIP, with Microsoft arguing that this is over-complicated and hinders interoperability with non-SDP systems. SDP is used to negotiate the parameters of the connection; things like the bandwidth, the IP addresses and port numbers to use, and so on.

It just happens that Microsoft has non-SDP products of its own—Skype (which remains stubbornly proprietary and undocumented) and Lync (which can bridge with SIP systems, and hence understands SDP, but offers alternative APIs too).