The patent fiascos continue to roll in. Now SCO is waving around alleged Unix “intellectual property” against a variety of other operating systems including Linux.
I’ve been assuming Microsoft would be the patent-wielding attacker of open-source software, and I’m still sure our favorite monopolist will pull this weapon out of its arsenal at some point. But I didn’t expect a company that claims to support Linux to do this. Go figure.
Reuters: Obesity Suit Against McDonald’s Dismissed. U.S. District Judge Robert Sweet said the plaintiffs — including a 400-pound teenager who said he eats at McDonald’s every day — failed to show that customers of the world’s largest fast-food chain were unaware that eating too much McDonald’s fare could be unhealthy.
This won’t stop the lawyers, but maybe it’ll slow them down. This lawsuit is absurd.Anyone who doesn’t know that too much fast food is going to make you fat and unhealthy is just not paying attention. I’m no fan of McDonald’s tactics — they make it easier to buy too much fatty garbage instead of something healthier — but the legal system is not the place to stop this.
The legal profession is going to sue itself out of business one of these days. That would be a real shame, because we need liability suits for the issues that really matter.
Doc Searls says Hollywood won the Eldred case, allowing for essentially unlimited copyright terms, in part because the entertainment companies have gotten the rest of us to frame the debate on their inaccurate and loaded terms — copyright equals property.
“So the work we have cut out for us isn’t just legal and political.” Doc says. “It’s conceptual. Until we find a way to win that one, we’ll keep losing in Congress as well as the courts.”
How do we prevent the entertainment cartel from torturing language and logic? We can’t. But the rest of us have to be more forceful in challenging the lies and misrepresentations. (I talked about these issues in this column last summer.)
It would be useful, for example, if people wrote letters to newspapers, commenting on slanted articles that take Hollywood’s word that any form of copying is piracy. It’s not, usually.
Turning this around will take years. Let’s get started.
This is the 20th anniversary of a technology development that gets little attention outside its relatively small area. Two decades ago, companies shipped the first musical instruments using the MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface) standard.
I stopped by a huge trade show in southern California last week, and was dazzled by how far we’ve come in bringing excellent capabilities to the average person.
More in my Sunday column.
Our broadband future is the central topic of this year’s meeting of the Pacific Telecommunications Council. Later today I’m chairing the opening plenary session, which features Qualcomm’s founder and CEO, Irwin Jacobs.
I’m still trying for clarity on the profusion of mobile standards and whether the entire world is going to be paying CDMA royalties to Qualcomm for the next couple of decades. Another Microsoft in the making?
Cnet: Court: Network Associates can’t gag users. New York state Supreme Court Justice Marilyn Shafer issued a ruling, made public this week, prohibiting the security software specialist from trying to use its end-user license agreements to ban product reviews or benchmark tests. The judge called the company’s attempted ban “deceptive” because it implied consumers who conducted the reviews would be violating the law, when they would not. Shafer has not ruled on damages.
I don’t quite get the “deceptive” part of this, but the ruling is a good one in any case. Stifling criticism is a lousy idea no matter what the reason.Network Associates says it just wants to prevent unfair or inaccurate reviews and comparisons. Gosh, I have a feeling that politicians would like to force reporters into similar boxes.
The company has only a passing acquaintance, apparently, with an old-fashioned thing we call free speech. Unfortunately, the protectors of free speech have done such a lousy job in recent years — not in defending it legally but making clear to people why it’s so crucial — that Network Associates’ argument may sound appealing to those who don’t think it through.
The way to combat speech you don’t like is more speech — better speech. Perhaps someone should remind the Network Associates lawyers that the First Amendment still stands for something.
Cnet: Apple silences iTunes P2P software . Apple Computer has forced a developer to stop distributing a plug-in that turned its iTunes music player into peer-to-peer music-sharing software.
Apple can’t seem to decide whether it’s on the side of customers when it comes to their ability to use digital media as they see fit. The company is better than some of its peers, if you’ll pardon the expression, but actions like this one tend to undercut its pro-customer reputation.Here’s hoping that iCommune can find a way around this blockage. Meanwhile, Apple should get its corporate head around doing what’s right for the people who buy its gear.
Ever since I’ve been using Mac OS X I’ve been getting this annoying dialog box when I log in:
I called Apple Tech Support and was told they had no idea (!) what this was. I assume it has something to do with Software Update in System Preferences, but I unchecked the auto-update box the minute I installed the OS (I do it manually).
Can any of you good folks explain why this might be happening? If so, let me know.
UPDATE: A reader suggested I check MacReporter to see if that was misbehaving. I am using it and just reinstalled. Fingers crossed…
FURTHER UPDATE: I sent an e-mail to the folks at Inferiis, which makes MacReporter (a product I like and paid for), asking if this was the culprit. Turns out all I had to do was disable one setting in the Preferences of MacReporter.
Another great Net story: I asked, I was advised, I checked further, I got the answer.
The stock market values the America Online part of AOL Time Warner at approximately zero, as far as I can tell. Steve Case, who’s quitting as chairman (Washington Post), should have been able to depart with the online operation that he built.
Of course that wasn’t going to happen. But there’s been so much illogic in this saga that one more bizarre event wouldn’t have surprised anyone.
I tend to agree with Doc Searls that AOL is toast, but I qualify this feeling by saying the online arm could save itself. How? By splitting off from Time Warner and returning to what it does best.
AOL is still the easiest-to-use service around, but its progress has lagged. And the brain-dead idea to pull Time Warner content AOL’s walled garden for online viewing was the best evidence of a flailing company’s reach for some internal convergence.
There’s been speculation, apparently informed, that AOL is planning to introduce some kind of blogging capability. This makes eminent sense. AOL grew in part because of its chat rooms — user content, in other words — and blogging fits right into that arena. Too little, too late?
I’m not ready to write off Steve Case. But AOL is looking pretty bad.
After several days in Las Vegas at the Consumer Electronics Show, I’m coming to the conclusion that the entertainment industry’s wish for absolute control over copyrighted material is going to be a more difficult slog than it thinks. I’m not being Pollyana-ish, I hope.
More in my Sunday column.
