Microsoft has broken European Union antitrush law and could face sanctions and hundreds of millions of dollars in fines, according to a draft decision expect to win endorsement on Monday from an advisory committee to the 15 EU states.Essentially there is a struggle going on worldwide with respect to media and entertainment. The issue is who controls the ``channel'' between the producer (e.g. the musician) and the consumer. The winner in this game will determine the future direction of all entertainment delivery. Microsoft wants that control. In order to gain that control position Microsoft is using the same tactic it used to kill off Netscape and gain control of the brower market. Microsoft ``bundles'' their software into their operating system. They give the software away essentially for free because it is covered by the cost of getting the operating system. Other businesses cannot compete with free and cannot convince the consumer to pay for an add-on program that to do what Microsoft already does. Thus, the competition disppears and Microsoft owns the market. It worked with Netscape (and dozens of other programs) and now it is working against Real, the supplier of media player software. In particular, against Real, they have used a second predatory tactic. The idea is that Microsoft ``partners'' with the company and gets a license to use the technology. Once they understand the technology they add it to their own software and then break the partnership. Thus the partner company has lost its differentiating features. This tactic was used against Stak (maker of doublespace) and Sendo (maker of cell phones) and many others. Once Microsoft has the technology and has given the technology away for free it then claims that the technology is ``embedded'' into Windows and cannot be separated. They refuse to ship add-on tools like media players separately. Thus, Microsoft uses the fact that it has a monopoly on the desktop to kill off competition. The tactics are illegal and Microsoft has twice faced U.S. Federal Antitrust trials, neither of which had any effect. The European Union sees that a U.S. corporation has the ability to kill off competition in the European market and is moving to stop the behavior. They are insisting that Microsoft ship two versions of the operating system, one with Media player and one without. Microsoft says it cannot do that. Rumor has it that Microsoft will force a decision where they get to control the outcome (as happened in the U.S.) to their favor. The likely result will be that the decision allows Microsoft to offer a ``broken'' version of Windows but only if you buy it directly from the company. The ``broken'' version (non-Media version) will not be pre-installed and will be very hard to install (since Microsoft will insist that you get special drivers for your hardware from the manufacturer rather than bundling them). Microsoft has never lost one of these fights and I don't believe they will lose this one. In any case, whatever the decision is, there will be an appeal which will take several years to ajudicate. By the time a decision is reached Real will no longer exist and there will be no media competition. Justice delayed is justice denied.
A draft letter purportedly circulated by Bill Lockyer to fellow state attorneys general characterizes P2P software as a ``dangerous product'' and describes the failure of technology makers to warn consumers of those danger as a deceptive trade practice.
However, the metadata associated with the Microsoft Word document indicates it was either drafted or reviewed by a senior vice president of the Motion Picture Association of America. According to the metadata (automatically generated by the Word application), the document's author or editor is ``stevensionv.''
Now Vans Stevenson is the MPAA's senior vice president for state legislative affairs.
The idea is that if they can get the free peer-to-peer programs classified as a dangerous product they can regulate, fine, and remove such programs from the internet. Essentially the game is to make file sharing illegal.
The above letter is being delivered this week at a nationwide conference attended by all of the states attorneys general. If they can convince all of the states to pass legislation to classify P2P software as dangerous they can arrest the authors and users who share and send them to prison.
Your elected officials are watching out for your rights. Not.
BEVERLY, Mass., February, 26 2004 - Groove Networks Inc., a leading provider of secure virtual office software that lets teams of people work over the network as if they were in the same location, today announced that its software is a core component of an information-sharing network that Department of Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge announced Tuesday, calling it "a key part of our national homeland security strategy." A public demonstration of the Homeland Security Information Network (HSIN) will occur Thursday at the AFCEA Homeland Security Conference at the Ronald Reagan International Trade Center in Washington, D.C.
Marking the one-year anniversary of the Department of Homeland Security, Ridge said HSIN will expand upon the Joint Regional Information Exchange System (JRIES) that includes Groove Workspace as a core component for real-time, secure, intra- and inter-agency collaboration. JRIES has been developed by state and local officials in partnership with the federal government. The exchange system allows multiple federal, state and local agencies and emergency operations centers to receive and share the same intelligence and tactical information, giving everyone involved the same "situational awareness."
Ridge said HSIN will be expanded to "all 50 states, five territories, tribal governments, and 50 major urban areas" and eventually to the private sector so it can coordinate preparedness efforts with government officials.
Groove software's unique decentralized architecture provides an agile, secure and extensible collaboration infrastructure to support inter-agency decision-making. Information shared within Groove workspaces is encrypted both 'over the wire' and on the user's hard drive. The software provides secure communication across insecure networks, is self-synchronizing, supports on- and off-line use, and employs a "web of trust" user authentication model.
Groove uses P2P to coordinate their file sharing. P2P may be illegal shortly (because it has no non-infringing uses) but that won't stop the government from using it (for non-infringing purposes).
HP sells Linux systems based on the Mandrake distribution. They just don't mention it. Mandrake is currently in bankruptcy proceedings. HP has an SCO binary-only license and is in a strange limbo of being licensed to run binaries-only but forced to ship sources because of the GPL. But they do sell Linux pre-installed on computers.
And it is on desktop machines so HP has entered the desktop wars. The interesting thing is that large companies want to buy from other large companies who will support their products. HP certainly qualifies as a large company. It should be interesting to see what level of support they provide.
Two computer projects designed to preserve the privacy of Americans were quietly killed while Congress was restricting Pentagon data-gathering research in a widely publicized effort to protect citizens from futuristic anti-terrorism tools.
Admiral John Poindexter created an effort, called Genisys, to scan government and commercial records. He also created an effort, called Bio-ALIRT, to scan medical records. There was a huge data-mining effort called Total Information Awareness which would review all of these records. Both scanning programs were supposed to hide the names of the individuals unless concrete information of a terror link was found. All of these programs were ``officially killed'' but have been transferred to the intelligence gather agencies (where work does not get reported) rather than at DARPA (where reports are required).
Technology companies should be required to ensure that law enforcement agencies can install wiretaps on Internet traffic and new generations of digital communications, the Justice Department says.
The push would effectively expand the scope of the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act, a 1994 law that requires the telecommunications industry to build into its products tools that U.S. investigators can use to eavesdrop on conversations with a court order.
This affects open source programmers in mysterious ways. If you build a program to do VOIP (voice over IP) you may be required to modify the program to make sure the U.S. federal government can monitor your traffic. Thus it MAY be illegal to encrypt the traffic if you don't provide a way to decrypt it without the user's consent.
SCO sued IBM for breach of contract. IBM counter-sued for patent violations. IBM has a very wide and deep patent portfolio and selected four patents that apply directly to SCO's software.
This is really a two-edged sword. IBM uses patents defensively to give it freedom to work. If you try to block IBM they will generally show up with some patents you are violating and then negotiate a settlement that allows them to continue working. Not every company uses patents defensively and there are rumors that Microsoft is amassing a huge software patent portfolio to use against open source.
In general, even though they are being applied to good purpose in this case, I hate patents. I even have a patent and I hate patents.
The EU's draft Directive on the enforcement of intellectual property rights sets out to make it dramatically easier to enforce copyrights, patents, and trademarks in Europe, and to punish people who tamper with technical mechanisms designed to prevent copying or counterfeiting. The directive has been welcomed by the music and film industries. But it divides the computer industry - Microsoft is for, while Sun is against - and the telecomms industry is strongly opposed. Supermarkets also stand to lose. Resistance is building, for example in the European press. Online liberties are also at risk, as well as commercial interests.
Even the `normal' trademark disputes that arise in business will now become absolutely explosive. An example is the case between Renault and Audi when Renault introduced the `Quadra' and got sued by Audi on the grounds that this model name was too similar to its `Quattro'. Audi won (1993). If the directive had been in force then, it would not just have involved some damages and a rebranding exercise: Audi could have forced Renault to withdraw all the vehicles sold in the meantime, then disposed of them by passing them to a charitable organisation or scrapping them, got compensation of Renault's profits plus double licence fees, etc. This is surely excessive.
Effects of harsher enforcement: In these turbulent waters, the Commission has launched a draft Directive that will criminalise all acts of intellectual property infringement that are carried out deliberately in the course of a business, rather than just serious cases as at present. It will also make generally available some intimidatory techniques that until now have existed only in some jurisdictions - such as the UK's Anton Piller and Mareva orders, which respectively allow searches and the freezing of bank accounts in civil cases, and a Dutch provision that an infringer can be compelled to recall goods from the market at his own expense. In the UK, where they were invented, Anton Piller orders turned out to be dangerous instruments and open to abuse; as a result, many safeguards have been developed in the UK since its introduction in 1976. The Directive does not compel Member States to enact these safeguards and it is predictable that many will not.
Effects on free software: There are likely victims who cross the boundary between the industrial and the cultural victims. The most obvious of these is the free software community. The main reason that Microsoft is not completely dominant in the operating systems market is the competition from free operating systems such as BSD and GNU/linux that are maintained by armies of volunteers. These groups do not really have the resources to defend against large civil suits; a recent action against Linux by SCO is causing some concern. Until now, Microsoft has forborne to use its own patent portfolio against its free competitors, but this may change. Tilting the playing field by introducing the threat of criminal penalties will make life significantly harder for the free software community in the long term. Many of the developers and maintainers are university graduate students who treat their work as a training exercise; however, universities are more risk-averse than commercial IS! Ps when faced with the threat of copyright lawsuits (even vexatious threats). The elimination of free software would have serious effects for commercial software based on it (such as Apple's OS/X) and would likely result in significant price rises. It would also threaten large European public investments in software based on free platforms.