in reply to The SSSCA, Microsoft's answer to anti-trust?

You have no chance, make your time. Muhahaha.

I think your analysis is correct. Whether or not competing companies will band together remains to be seen.

I think that even if it does go through, it won't be so bad. Combine the general apathy and stupidity of the general populace with MS's inability to get it right and you have a system that just won't work. People will decide it's too much hassle, and not buy. Companies will look at the offerings and say "you have got to be kidding".

I know that it will be law to use microsoft products, but if you think that your average computer user cares about law then you should log onto gnutellanet and do a search for mp3.

Of course a lot of people are going to get hurt in the meantime, but that is a constant.

Incidentally I think the resistance to MS will be quite high, ironically from within the government. As soon as the Department of Defence figures out that MS will have the keys to their computers, they will go out of their mind.

Well, good luck fighting this one down, and remember the price of freedom.

____________________
Jeremy
I didn't believe in evil until I dated it.

  • Comment on Re: The SSSCA, All your bits are belong to us?

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Re: Re: The SSSCA, All your bits are belong to us?
by Mungbeans (Pilgrim) on Sep 11, 2001 at 15:40 UTC
    It won't just be against the law to use these products, it will be illegal to distribute them in any form whatsoever.

    Hitting the users won't have much effect as it is too hard and expensive to do large numbers of small prosecutions.

    Hitting the distributors is MUCH easier. Who will you work for if only Microsoft is allowed to distribute software? And note that market would be defined I believe as "publicise in any form regardless of whether the product is free or not". And that's not even opening the whole can of worms designed thing.

    (3) INTERACTIVE DIGITAL DEVICE. -- The term "interactive digital device" means any machine, device, product, software, or technology, whether or not included with or as part of some other machine, device, product, software, or technology, that is designed, marketed or used for the primary purpose of, and that is capable of, storing, retrieving, processing, performing, transmitting, receiving, or copying information in digital form.

    "The future will be better tomorrow." ... from the collected wisdom of George W Bush.

[reply]
      This is true, and yet... look in your local paper. Is there anyone offering to mod chip your playstation or DVD drive to read all country codes? Remember the old times when you went to your local user group to get copies of programs that could copy protected games? Going back to sneaker net will hurt, but it can be done. And even better, if we all have proper encryption then how will anyone know what those 650Mbs are? Unless the government sticks clipper back in.

      It would also hurt to lose some of the fantastic developers the the OS community has, but Linux was developed outside America, and can continue to do so. In the meantime, you can download a copy or /msg me and I'll send you a copy.

      Down here in Gods own country, the government has passed bizarre copyright laws that make it safer to be using GPL stuff than commercial stuff. More power us.

      ____________________
      Jeremy
      I didn't believe in evil until I dated it.

[reply]
        With respect, I think you're still missing the point. They don't care about you or I or any other individual.

        It will be perfectly legal for you to continue to use your current flavor of UNIX. It will not, however, be legal for any other company to develop a new version of this OS without it meeting the terms of this bill. And what if someone decides to do this underground or outside the country? I doubt they really care. What they know is that companies will not use this product for threat of legal reprocussions. It will drive virtually all companies to abandon UNIX implementations unless they want to stay with what they have a very long time. It will force all new implememtations to .NET. And once that happens, what's to stop them from limiting which "clients" can access these "approved" servers? Of course it will be done in the name of security.

        Just because you can avoid the direct impact of this at the moment doesn't mean that you'll like the world that's left beyond your router. That is, if you can even get to it.

        Rich

[reply]
        A significant detail which I am surprised that nobody has been commenting on. The SSSCA is not a copyright bill. People have mentioned that it doesn't say "fair use". It doesn't have to.

        IANAL, but after several readings I think that this is all justified under the Commerce Clause.

[reply]

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