sure... we're still waiting for SCO to sue us.
slimboyfatboyslim wrote:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/11/18/ballmer_linux_lawsuits/
PD-list@iem.at mailing list UNSUBSCRIBE and account-management -> http://iem.at/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/pd-list
slimboyfatboyslim wrote:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/11/18/ballmer_linux_lawsuits/
Suing your customers is a very bad marketing strategy. I suppose even more in Asia.
I read something about Ford. There was a patent called "Seldon" owned by a few car companies. Ford was not allowed to use the Seldon patent because his idea was to produce cars for the middle class. In the beginning, nobody cared because it was a legal battle between companies. But when some companies started to sue Ford's clients for buying their unlicensed cars, the public opinion reacted in favor of Ford. Then a long legal battle followed. In the end the Seldom patent was judged invalid. The rest is a very well known history...
B.T.W. slimboyfatboyslim, are you hoping to get sued by fatboyslim anytime soon to get some free advertising? ;-)
-- Marc
Lavallée Marc wrote:
slimboyfatboyslim wrote:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/11/18/ballmer_linux_lawsuits/
Suing your customers is a very bad marketing strategy. I suppose even more in Asia.
why esp in Asia?
I read something about Ford. There was a patent called "Seldon" owned by a few car companies. Ford was not allowed to use the Seldon patent because his idea was to produce cars for the middle class. In the beginning, nobody cared because it was a legal battle between companies. But when some companies started to sue Ford's clients for buying their unlicensed cars, the public opinion reacted in favor of Ford. Then a long legal battle followed. In the end the Seldom patent was judged invalid. The rest is a very well known history...
B.T.W. slimboyfatboyslim, are you hoping to get sued by fatboyslim anytime soon to get some free advertising? ;-)
-- Marc
haha,nice, actually I'm going to sue fatboyslim......let's wait and see.....
slimboyfatboyslim a écrit :
Suing your customers is a very bad marketing strategy. I suppose even more in Asia.
why esp in Asia?
They have their own identity and expertise, so they don't need M$ at all. Also, free software is "compatible" with the global market economy.
For example, in Iran, there's no copyright and patent laws, so everybody can copy M$. But since Iran wants to enter the WTO, the government is urging people to use free software, because the WTO rules would then impose Iran to pay their "fair" amount of M$ tax: http://www.iranexpert.com/2004/linux21september.htm -- Marc
of course microsoft is already battleing dozens of patent lawsuits over windows...
http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,1661094,00.asp
all software is riddled with patent violations, even our beloved PD.
slimboyfatboyslim wrote:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/11/18/ballmer_linux_lawsuits/
PD-list@iem.at mailing list UNSUBSCRIBE and account-management -> http://iem.at/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/pd-list
Josh Steiner wrote:
of course microsoft is already battleing dozens of patent lawsuits over windows...
http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,1661094,00.asp
all software is riddled with patent violations, even our beloved PD.
like the one : 'creating a program that produces sound from the soundcard' ?? ( and oh, sorry, we can't decipher jpg images too )
be against patents like the european will be, i hope. otherwise, you'll never be free again.
for video formats, we'll be only using theora soon ( and theora streemed on icecasr), so, yeh we could avoid some patents problems.
sevy
slimboyfatboyslim wrote:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/11/18/ballmer_linux_lawsuits/
PD-list@iem.at mailing list UNSUBSCRIBE and account-management -> http://iem.at/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/pd-list
be against patents like the european will be, i hope. otherwise, you'll never be free again.
you think europe is against patents? until now there is no tendency in that direction to be seen. we rather slowly implement a us-compatible patent law. the first steps are already taken ...
for video formats, we'll be only using theora soon ( and theora streemed on icecasr), so, yeh we could avoid some patents problems.
well. i'm quite sure that an industry standard like mpeg4 (and any other legally used codec) is far more secure than an open source project as theora can be. why? because e.g. apple (the de-facto authors of big parts of the mpeg4 standard) can afford lawyers to check the situation, while we can't. and they do deals to protect their assets while we can't.
does anyone know any patents pd infringes?
looks like a horrific future coming ...
lg martin
sevy
slimboyfatboyslim wrote:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/11/18/ballmer_linux_lawsuits/
PD-list@iem.at mailing list UNSUBSCRIBE and account-management -> http://iem.at/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/pd-list
PD-list@iem.at mailing list UNSUBSCRIBE and account-management -> http://iem.at/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/pd-list
martin pichlmair wrote:
be against patents like the european will be, i hope. otherwise, you'll never be free again.
you think europe is against patents? until now there is no tendency in that direction to be seen. we rather slowly implement a us-compatible patent law. the first steps are already taken ...
i thought polland has refused to sign the eu-law for software-patents. so there semems to be a tendency in that direction (but maybe i have mis-read the text)
mfg.asd.r IOhannes
On Fri, 19 Nov 2004, martin pichlmair wrote:
well. i'm quite sure that an industry standard like mpeg4 (and any other legally used codec) is far more secure than an open source project as theora can be. why? because e.g. apple (the de-facto authors of big parts of the mpeg4 standard) can afford lawyers to check the situation, while we can't. and they do deals to protect their assets while we can't.
I would agree, but a company has another choice than affording lawyers. They can settle right away, licensing the patent, and this has no global positive effect, it only solves the problem for THEM. So if, for a given patent, companies tend to settle, the opensource side is screwed.
looks like a horrific future coming ...
Sort of like this:
http://artengine.ca/matju/riaaswat.jpg
but grimmer. :-)
Mathieu Bouchard -=- Montréal QC Canada -=- http://artengine.ca/matju
Mathieu Bouchard wrote:
On Fri, 19 Nov 2004, martin pichlmair wrote:
well. i'm quite sure that an industry standard like mpeg4 (and any other legally used codec) is far more secure than an open source project as theora can be. why? because e.g. apple (the de-facto authors of big parts of the mpeg4 standard) can afford lawyers to check the situation, while we can't. and they do deals to protect their assets while we can't.
I would agree, but a company has another choice than affording lawyers. They can settle right away, licensing the patent, and this has no global positive effect, it only solves the problem for THEM. So if, for a given patent, companies tend to settle, the opensource side is screwed.
no way, like what happen to the piracy thing in China, the States always want to sue the piracy companies but they simply can't, there are too many people......
don't panic, collective force is a way out...........
looks like a horrific future coming ...
Sort of like this:
http://artengine.ca/matju/riaaswat.jpg
but grimmer. :-)
and they are pointing at a shivering penguin..........
Mathieu Bouchard -=- Montréal QC Canada -=- http://artengine.ca/matju
PD-list@iem.at mailing list UNSUBSCRIBE and account-management -> http://iem.at/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/pd-list
Cheers, SFS
if you all want really do some action, please check out following pages:
http://nosoftwarepatents.com http://www.ffii.org/
Cheers,
Malte
slimboyfatboyslim a écrit :
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/11/18/ballmer_linux_lawsuits/
I know it's a bit off-topic, but here's a little follow-up. Excerpts from http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,1730114,00.asp (as seen on /.)
"Open source faces no more, if not less, legal risk than proprietary software. The market needs to understand that the study Microsoft is citing actually proves the opposite of what they claim it does."
"There is no reason to believe that GNU/Linux has any greater risk of infringing patents than Windows, Unix-based or any other functionally similar operating system. Why? Because patents are infringed by specific structures that accomplish specific functionality"
"Patents don't care how the infringing article is distributed, be it under an open-source license, a proprietary license or not at all. Therefore, if a patent infringes on Linux, it probably also infringes on Unix, Windows, etc."
"Consider this—not a single open-source software program has ever been sued for patent infringement, much less been found to infringe. On the contrary, proprietary software, like Windows, is sued and found guilty of patent infringement quite frequently."
What follows had been discussed, but I'm just taking this opportunity to express it one more time. :-)
Its important to realise that PD is no more at risk than any other proprietary software; it would be a shame to consider PD as a bad choice for education, art or even commercial applications, because of M$ FUD.
It's a better choice to invest our collective expertise in PD than in any other proprietary alternative, even if PD would be infringing thousands of ridiculously obvious patents. The development model of free software is transparent, so it is already a good protection. Since nobody would make money suing a bunch of individual developpers, we're pretty safe. Our best protection in the long run is still to boycott companies who falsely claim that we could be acting illegally. As programmers and users of free software, those companies don't deserve the money we need to sustain the development model of free software.
Artists not involved in computer programming often believe that free software is only for programmers, and that proprietary software is for "non-technical" users like them; they should be aware that in lots of situations, if not most of them, they're better served by colleagues with programming skills than by any power user of proprietary software; most projects made with proprietary software tend to look and feel the same because they can't be easily customised to better fit each project. There's also a trend in all kind of artistic institutions that calls for collaboration with the "industry". Such costly collaborations are likely to profit the industry and a few artistic elites, not the free software programming and artistic communities.
There are technical, esthetic, ethical and political reasons to use and program free software for art purposes, despite all potential patent infringement risks. If the laws are bad, we can always change them; but unlike software, it takes much more time, so we better make the right ideological choices right now by using the right technical tools.
-- Marc
-
IOhannes m zmoelnig -
Josh Steiner -
Lavallée Marc -
Malte Steiner -
Marc Lavallée
-
martin pichlmair -
Mathieu Bouchard -
Pall Thayer -
slimboyfatboyslim -
Yves Degoyon