Calm down. People are asking you questions in the form of "you seem to think <x>" because they have no idea of the point you're trying to get across. They're requests for clarification, not personal attacks or attempts to put words in your mouth. They're an opportunity for you clarify whatever the hell it is you're (trying) to say.
Sorry, but I don't like when people put words in my mouth to make me out to say something I'm not saying. If someone has trouble understanding what I'm getting at then all they have to do is say so. But it feels like most of this thread has been about people who don't agree with each other shouting at each other and trying to make each other look bad rather than actually 'discussing' anything.
I only have two real points on the whole matter and I'll try to make them perfectly clear for you.
1> I (and I believe many others as well) do not believe laws should support a company's decision to make up anything they'd like and put them in a Eula and then give you the 'choice' of obey or don't use it, even after you've paid good money to do just that. I believe lobbying by rich corporations and the like are responsible for the sad state of affairs the law is now in (DMCA, etc.) and such laws do not represent the will of the people. I believe balance must be restored and common sense used in laws that govern digital media.
The times have changed with the Internet and what was once one way is a different way now. The markets have to adapt with the times. The music industry did not want a store like iTunes. It wanted you to keep buying CDs for ever increasing costs even though manufacturing costs keep dropping. How dare you demand downloadable music! It's one example where the laws are outdated, outmoded and run by corporations who think about what can make them the most money, not what's innovative or convenient for the consumer (Who wants to buy a whole album of CRAP to get ONE good song, for example? Napster showed the way. There was no legal alternative at the time. Was the nation all crooks or were they sick of getting ripped off?)
2> You cannot easily make someone else understand your point-of-view. This is akin to you must walk in someone else's shoes to understand how they think. People here disagree whether Psystar should have the right to exist and it's based purely on whether they believe Apple should be allowed to have absolute control of their software or whether you believe society should place some limits to the ultimate level of control a company has in a marketplace for the good of society. This is really a matter of OPINION and thus you cannot 'win' such an argument. You can only try to get the other side to see and hopefully ultimately agree with your point-of-view. Well, that doesn't happen very often. They'd rather argue and tell each other off than say, hey, you've got a point but I simply disagree.
Really, that's all I've ever tried to say in this thread. If you want to know how I arrive at those conclusions, I'll be happy to share below some of my thinking. If you don't want to know, stop reading now.
Given the numbers cited for how many people 'stole' music via the old Napster and yet the soaring numbers for something like iTunes, it's pretty obvious in hindsight that people vote with their mice when they think something isn't fair and also when they DO think it's fair. The law may or may not represent that view because being ripped off in and of itself doesn't constitute the law itself. If people feel ripped off, they take action. If they don't feel ripped off, they take another action. The law is irrelevant, it seems. Yet, if 85% of the American people are downloading music illegally, why isn't the government passing laws to represent 85% of the population in a overwhelming majority? Have the people not spoken? Did they pour tea into Boston Harbor so long ago because they thought the laws were FAIR? Do you think the British thought those people were 'patriots' or more like 'terrorists'? Apparently, whose side your on matters how you are viewed. Thus one side here calls the other side names and vice versa because both sides see the other side as being stupid or worse. You cannot convince someone who sees a certain way to see another way. I've learned this through sheer frustration over the years of my life. Some people are simply set in their ways/views. So if someone says I'm stupid because I don't know what a monopoly is and I post the definition and they say I'm stupid again (because they were talking about the legal definition of a monopoly and I was talking about actual definition of a monopoly), do you think it really matters who is right? Right is in the eye of the beholder and so is fairness, it seems because I cannot say something should be 'fair' or 'for the greater good' without someone telling me I just said we should all go pirate ourselves silly even though I said no such thing.
Specifically, in this case, it would mean telling someone who paid $129 for a retail copy of OSX at a place like Best Buy that they cannot install that software on a computer. It doesn't matter which computer. My opinion is that the company has overstepped its bounds with regard to freedom of privacy and choice when it tells you what kind of computer you can put their operating system on that you've paid for. The other side believes they have that right to do that and current laws support it. I'm saying such laws were passed by special interests (read lobbyists) whose agenda is to promote the agendas of large corporations at the cost of the rights of the consumer. In this regard, lawmakers have failed the very constituents they swore to represent. This idea is not something new or one I made up in regards to lobbyists and special interests. It's a common topic on the news every day. It's very hard to get Congress to limit their interaction with lobbyists and corporations when they're the very ones being lobbied (legally bribed) by them. Our current economy with record gas prices, no energy plan to get away from the oil problem and government that has sold out the country's infrastructure and actually created INCENTIVES for corporations to move jobs overseas so that McDonald's and Walmart become the largest employers in the country is the DIRECT RESULT of that same government selling out to special interests for the good of the few (the rich).
So when I say that laws should be passed to represent the greater good or rather the most people I mean the idea that majority rules and that a republic is supposed to represent the citizens in that republic, not just large corporations. Copyright laws and even patents were originally created to give someone the right to make a living off their ideas for a limited amount of time, at which point the copyright or patent becomes public domain.
Corporations like Disney have lobbied hard to change that. They don't want anyone to be able to freely copy something like Alice In Wonderland or use characters like Mickey Mouse even though some of the Disney property is overdue already by the original laws. Walt Disney is dead. He made his money off Mickey Mouse. His country afforded him plenty of time to make that money and it was more than fair. But ever since we made corporations into legal entities...well corporations don't 'die' EVER. So if we lease an idea to a corporation it never goes to the public domain? Can you imagine if Beethoven still carried a copyright hundreds of years later so some descendant who has nothing but a few genes in common can make money off his ideas? That's not in the interest of society, only those descendants who may wish to get free money.
The invention of the VCR brought a new concept to copyrights. You could now record a tv show or movie. Time-shifting was invented. Hollywood didn't like that one bit. You're 'copying' their works when you record something off TV. Yet to prevent recording was to kill the VCR. Courts ruled in favor of "fair use". This was one of the few times that an abused law (copyrights) in the modern age was shot down by those that realized there has to be limits to copyrights or technology comes to a halt. With the DMCA, suddenly there are no fair use rights, it seems. As someone with two engineering degrees, I'm telling you that it should make no difference whether a VCR records analog waveforms or represents those waveforms with ones and zeroes. But lobbyists don't WANT fair use. They want control and they want your money. They don't care one bit whether your D-VHS has a use or not. Look at Tivo. You can suddenly fast forward through commercials. We can't have that! (and Tivo has caved to put ADS during searches!) The same people that limit dynamic range so that their commercials appear to sound MUCH louder than the regular program (just in case you decided to wander into the kitchen to make a sandwich so you can still HEAR that incredibly annoying ad for some pill designed to make a certain part of the male anatomy larger) don't want you to skip their commercial even if you've seen it 10 times already. (Head On! Apply directly to the forehead! Head On! Apply directly to the forehead! Head On! Head On! Head On!) Drill that crap into your brain. You're NOT ALLOWED to say NO, according to the other side of the argument. Those commercials pay for your programming. IT doesn't matter if you have interest in the products or not. You HAVE to watch them or your STEALING the program, according to their way of thinking.
In fact, EVERYTHING contrary to what corporations want is labeled STEALING. No matter that no product was taken. No one lost property. You watched a tv show without watching the commercial so you STOLE (as in a cut your hand off offence in the Middle East) that tv show! If you press MUTE during a commercial or change the channel to avoid watching a Girls Gone Wild commercial you STOLE that tv show. Remember that, because it's a term you'll hear your entire life. You can go to the library and 'borrow' a DVD, watch it for FREE without commercials and it's NOT STEALING (because someone in a time long forgotten had this great idea for libraries that companies WISH NEVER HAPPENED, but they're kind of ingrained now so they're tolerated), but if you DOWNLOAD a vastly lower quality version of that same movie off the internet and even delete it after you've watched it, you just STOLE that movie! You're a thief! You should go to jail! Never mind you saw the same content as going down to the local library and in worse quality no less, you're a thief because some lawmaker said so! And gaging by posts in this thread, a LOT of people agree with them because they spit out the same sorts of arguments.
You can go to a WalMart and actually steal a real DVD and get a lesser potential punishment than COPYING a DVD your neighbor lent you. It's true. It's a federal crime to copy a DVD, but only a misdemeanor to steal one. I'm in NO WAY advocating stealing DVDs, but it serves to demonstrate just how ridiculous some of these copyright laws have become...laws that were designed originally so that book authors could make a living have become weapons of terror with threats of 5 years of prison for EACH offense so you could easily get a life prison sentence for copying 20 DVDs but only get 8 years for running someone over with your car during an incident of road rage, maybe less with good behavior.
But wait! I was talking about BUYING OS X, not copying it. Not copying my neighbors disc, but buying it at the store. I'm talking about buying the computer hardware there too. I'm allowed to buy both, but I'm not allowed to install OS X on that computer. Apple says so and I'm ALLOWED to click 'decline' after reading their EULA, but like credit cards where they send you amended rules agreements out of the blue and say you can write them to decline the (always worse for you) changes, you then have your account canceled. So in reality, you're not allowed to decline anything. You're really saying you'll lose your credit card or take OS X back to the store (that's IF they'll let you return opened software; most places will NOT take it back if it's open regardless if you 'declined' the EULA. So they just ripped you out of $129 and too bad you hit decline. That's IF you even read the legal-speak found within. Polls show most people do NOT read ANY of them EVER.
It's OK. It's the LAW, after all. It was passed to represent you the people, not Bill Gates or Steve Jobs wasn't it? Of course. It's good for you. It's good for everyone.
OK, so you don't OWN that movie you just bought. You have the disc in your hand, but you don't own it! You only own a license to watch the movie on the disc. What a concept. Wait, though; it gets better. You DO own the disc, but you don't own what's on the disc. I guess you don't own the PITS found on the DVD, just the substrate layer or something.... So then, what happens if you accidentally break or scratch the disc beyond usability? You bought a license to watch the movie, so the studio will send you a replacement for the material cost of the disc (about 10 cents, maybe less) right? WRONG. You have to buy ANOTHER copy for full price. But you own a license to watch it, don't you? Can't you just download a replacement off the internet? Nope. Apparently, you only owned a license to watch THAT SPECIFIC COPY of the movie on that specific disc! Too bad! You lose. Game Over. Get your wallet out.
But you have the right to backup your software right? That used to be true, but well, that's a little difficult to do when it's copy protected. So right off the bat the companies are fighting your legal right for a backup. In fact, my Nintendo64 cartridge manual say right on them that I'm NOT allowed to back them up even if I have the means to do so. It actually literally says I DO NOT NEED A BACKUP (like the cartridge is completely invulnerable to damage or failure or even losing it). So there you have it. The law told me I could back it up, but Nintendo says too bad.
But wait! It gets better yet. It's copy protected and I'm ALLOWED a backup of it, BUT due to the DMCA passed around the turn of the century, I'm NOT ALLOWED to break or bypass the copy protection on the disc. That could get me a prison sentence! So HOW am I supposed to make a legal back up of a copy protected disc then? You can't. TOO BAD! Corporations pulled yet another fast one you by passing a law that cancels another one and your fair use rights in the process. In essence, you have no fair use rights now.
OK, so I say the heck with OS X and Windows both and get Linux. Alright! Finally free of all that copyright stuff, right? Well, no. There's still a license on most of the compilers that limits what you can do with open source code. You could get BSD instead, I suppose. Thats' why OS X uses it. It's free to use as you please in commercial ventures and you have to give exactly nothing back to the community for taking it either. But wait. I just want to view that DVD on Linux! I paid for my DVD of Die Hard so now I want to watch it on my computer! Guess what? You can't! Well, you CAN, but not legally! DVD players on Linux are not licensed and therefore are illegal to use. You can buy the movie, but you can't legally watch it!
Are you starting to see yet the problems *I* see with the world here? I'm not saying it should be a free-for-all, take anything and do anything you want with it world. But I am saying if I paid for something, like that DVD movie I bought and I want to watch it in Linux, I shouldn't be threatened with imprisonment if I do so! I paid for it! I'm not selling copies of it or even giving them away! Likewise, if I paid for OS X, I should be able to put it on a computer I paid for, not just one that is the same inside, but happens to have an Apple logo on it and cost 2x as much as the one that does not have it. I never said YOU have to agree with me, but people should at least try to see that there is more than one viewpoint in the world.
Generally speaking, those that at least identify with the idea (even if they never can reach it) that they might some day make huge amounts of money by telling others exactly what do to with themselves tend to LIKE such laws and those that think they should have the right to watch a movie they paid for on any system they like tend to NOT like those laws.
Want another example? How about a law that put a surcharge tax on blank digital media to COMPENSATE the music industry for piracy? It's true. It's happened. Well, what if you don't pirate music? You're supposed to pay a FINE for those that DO pirate music? That's assuming guilt whereas the US Justice System is SUPPOSED to assume innocence. On the other side of the coin, if you're paying to compensate for piracy, does that mean you can then use those blanks to pirate music since the music industry has been compensated? That's where courts come in because those sorts of ridiculous situations are a little unambiguous (well I'd call them stupid, but that's me).
I could go on and on about the things that have driven me personally to the conclusions I have reached in my life and why I do not support Apple's attempt to outspend Psystar into the ground, but I doubt you've read this far as it is or even care, which only reiterates my point that people here are arguing with each other without purpose because each side couldn't care less what the other side has to say. They just look for little loopholes in the argument to attack with their POV again. They're not really considering what is being said at all.
Now by the size of this post it should also be clear why I want to drop out of this thread period. Do you know how much time it took me to write this post? I'm a fast typer, but even so I've spent more time than I care to admit in this thread and as I said, it's going nowhere and nothing any of us say will affect the outcome of the legal battle (or lack thereof) between Apple and Psystar.
"But WE just sold over a trillion iPhones so ATT can deliver printouts of everything you say, do, and download to Homeland Security, nyah nyah nyah!"
