This is a big deal. A really big deal, and really good news. It allows brokers, it allows you to sell your software once done. It allows you to treat digital property like you would a physical object. You can give it, sell it, lend it to someone else.
This is the work of austerity, the good side of austerity. This is Europe saying, “no, we aren’t going to pay intellectual rent to America.” (Yes, other countries make software, but America is still the big winner in the software stakes.) When Europe was prosperous, they were willing to pay. The international order, whatever its problems, was delivering for them. Now that it isn’t, they won’t pay.
S Brennan
Hmmm, let me see.
Software companies in the US are documented to be the biggest abuser of H1-B, L1 and an alphabet soup of labor programs. As a business practice, Software companies regularly falsify immigration documents and openly discriminate against their fellow citizens.
Software companies body of work is an abuse of copyright, their IP rights should be protected ONLY under patent law…and in most cases there is nothing remotely original or unique in software programs…and they know it.
Software companies are the biggest abusers of tax law…they don’t pay taxes because the nature of software allows a company to “ship” their product to another country and then to another in a round robin of tax avoidance. How do you know it’s bullshit…show me your duty stamp and tariffs paid…got none? Okay, no paid tariffs, you didn’t “ship” anything.
Software companies in the US that pay the least in taxes for a given net revenue stream, these tax cheats then use an inordinate amount government resources in pursuit of their IP “protection”. Sort of like having the US Military working for a mafia that pays no US taxes.
Finally, because many nations such as China [correctly] think the US copyright laws applied to software is public fraud, they crack and use sophisticated programs that they pay NOTHING for and make American workers compete against them with software that Americans must buy and pay servicing agreements for…in one case I use, that’s 16,000.00 USD upfront and 6,000.00 USD per year. Software companies are a big reason US labor is uncompetitive.
When you can easily bribe Senators, Congress, Judges and Presidents to engage in treason with the money you save by not paying your taxes you are on the road to riches in the USA.
StewartM
I agree, though I point out that an increasing number of us in the US as well are moving away from closed-source proprietary software to open-source software to get away from the Microsoft/Apple rentier duopoly. I say that as someone who has installed Linux on a number of peoples’ computers, and help them maintain those systems. It’s been a quiet revolution.
To my mind, in a supposed democracy, your computer shouldn’t be spying on you for some corporate or governmental betters.
StewartM
Mary Mac
“To my mind, in a supposed democracy, your computer shouldn’t be spying on you for some corporate or governmental betters.”
StewartM,
There is your loophole right there.
Julien
That’s alright, big software companies already have a solution for that. Two of them actually. One is called the App Store and the other is called Cloud Computing.
With the App Store model, there is simply no way to transfer ownership of a piece of software. The judgement says that a company cannot prevent you from reselling software, it does not mean that a company has an obligation to enable you to do so. Bake the App Stores into your platforms and make them easy to use, and presto! Due to the general laziness of your customers, most will never step outside, if your platform even allows for that in the first place.
For the rest, there’s Cloud Computing. Everything will run from a server somewhere in the great InterWebs in the sky and nothing will be downloaded locally anymore. Then it becomes a pure licensing agreement, not covered by this judgement or any other. And when they flip the switch off, you’re left with nothing.
It’s not just enterprise software either (Amazon Web Services, Google App Engine), it’s going to be office suites (Google Docs, Office 365, iCloud), games (OnLive, Gakai), video (Netflix, Amazon, iTunes), audio (iTunes Match), books (Amazon, iBooks). Every program you have installed now on your computer, if it has been made by a large corporation, is migrating to the cloud.
Problem solved for everybody!
Well, except for us, of course. But then, that was never the point, right?
Mary Mac
Jesus Gawd, what a perfect way to sensor the intertubes-Cloud Computing.
groo
maybe this is a preparation for the next round of ACTA-pushing.
Idea.
IP must be bought first, before it can be sold.
This hurts some in the first round, but who has the last laugh?
The ‘pirates’ (party) are sailing on a different ship.
On the other hand I doubt that anybody has the intellectual capacity ton think this all through till the last round.
Anyway. The move could have been worse, as the battlefield currently is occupied.
Which would have meant that the conflict would have been intensified at the wrong time.
So the basic message from a conspiracy point of view seems to be:
Slow down, retreat, this is not the right time.
Reposition the forces.
Sun Tzu rule #x.
Remember: Brussels has nearly the same number of lobbyists per representative than Washington.
But I do not want to spoil the party when Ian has one of his rare moments of optimism.
StewartM
Julien,
My experience differs a bit.
Back in my usenet days, you’d see someone on an online service like AOL ask someone (about something ‘cool’ or custom) “How’d you do that?” and they’d get the answer: “You can’t do that on AOL; you need a real ISP.” True, there’d be a number who’d whine about how they should be able to do that on AOL, but you’d be surprised the number who actually *did* migrate away from AOL or the other old online services. There’s a reason why there’s no more Prodigy or Compuserve, and why AOL (“the internet on training wheels”) has only 1/6th the subscribers it once had.
And that’s only for doing things that were custom or *cool*. When you add “free” to equation, believe that generates a lot of motivation for people to learn. You wouldn’t have had people cracking DRM if that wasn’t so.
-StewartM
Julien
StewartM,
I agree, and that core of people with the hacker mentality will always be there. There’s a subset of people, in all area of life, whose first response to being told “You can’t do that.” will always be “Oh yeah? Just watch me.” They’re the ones behind jailbreaking and custom ROMs for smartphones, 0-day movie rips and software cracks. They are constantly pushing the envelope and I love them for it.
But it’s also hard to argue with the financial success Apple has had with its App Store. So much so that everyone and their grandmother are rolling out theirs. The fact that the Apple App Store could become so successful with such draconian restrictions speaks to the supreme appeal of convenience to a large swath of customers.
(That’s not to say the App Store model is pure evil. It does provide a lot of convenience and safety for the consumer, as well as a higher revenue share and built-in distribution system for developers. That’s valuable. But the trade-off is loss of control.)
Large corporations won’t be able to trap everyone, for sure, but so far, they’ve been able to trap a majority, and that’s probably good enough for them.
My reading is that, at this time, the pendulum is swinging that way. New technological tools and capabilities are appearing, thanks to ever increasing bandwidth and mobile computing, amongst others. The first movers are trying to gain control over those new areas. Eventually, that control will break down.
You mention the old Usenet days. I remember them as well. I remember connecting to the Internet through a local BBS ad then moving on to a proper provider, to break away from the limitations.
But I also remember from that era that Netscape, while most people now think of it as David to Microsoft’s Goliath, was the first to introduce proprietary HTML tags that would only render in Navigator and ushered the era of “This website is best viewed with Netscape Navigator” on the Web.
Today, the last bastion of the proprietary Web, Microsoft, has basically given up with the latest versions of IE, but that took time. So it will be with App Stores, in time, hopefully. But they won’t give up their control without a fight.
Jumpjet
By the by, Ian, Chris Hedges mostly agrees with your assessment that we’re in a pre-revolutionary period.
http://www.correntewire.com/transcript_of_chris_hedges_speaking_at_natgat
A storm is coming…
Jumpjet
By the way, I know you’ll all enjoy this: Happy Bastille Day!
Orion Drive
It wasn’t just the proprietary tags, the fad at the time was to serve up syntactically invalid HTML that just happened to come out “right” when viewed with Navigator, which made it nearly impossible for rivals to display “Netscape-HTML” short of duplicating every single undocumented quirk of Navigator’s parser and renderer.
In the end it all simply sealed their doom. For a company in Netscape’s position to attempt to out-Microsoft Microsoft was the height of insanity. The IE-fication of the Web that followed was the easily predictable and utterly inevitable consequence.
Petro
You’ve been quiet for awhile, Mr. Welsh. I trust you are doing OK?
(Being intimately familiar with blog-neglect myself :), I’m truly only asking after your health.)
Celsius 233
Petro PERMALINK
July 23, 2012
You’ve been quiet for awhile, Mr. Welsh. I trust you are doing OK?
(Being intimately familiar with blog-neglect myself , I’m truly only asking after your health.)
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
His absence may well be a sign of good health; healthy to step back now and again, no?
🙂
Ian Welsh
I’m fine, Petro, thanks. Such writing as I’ve been doing has been going into the book. Don’t find much worthy of comment in the world right now, what is there to say that I haven’t said already, and generally repeatedly?
No doubt I’ll feel the urge to blog again at some point.