Dis-Harmony Petition

[munkle]

Absolute power corrupts.....its a historical FACT and Microsoft is about as corrupt as a hard drive that has been thrown into a 10,000* furnace.

Historical FACT is going a bit far! Without descending into quoting Popper, there are plenty of examples where absolute power corrupts but there are also examples where people have not abused their positions, therefore saying it is a certainty is well, just wrong!

Nevertheless it doesn't change my point that being a market leader does not translate into you becoming an abusive monopoly. And I agree that a prime example of a monopoly abusing their position is Microsoft!

 

[patrick0brien]

Interesting...but is .doc a format that Microsoft seeks to license? For example MP3 is a proprietary format and Apple must pay royalties to encode and decode MP3 files. Apple doesn't try to reverse engineer the MP3 format. Surely there is a difference between reading a format, which doesn't appear to be actively protected, and 'hacking' a format to forego licensing restrictions. But I agree it is a thin line.

-munkle

Well yes. The line is drawn by what the IP holder wants to do - it is their property after all.

Peronally, I feel Apple should not only look into licensing the Fairplay technology, but submit it to the Motion Pictures Expert Group (MPEG) for standards review. But then, I also think we're a little early for that. We don't know that DRM is even going to exist 5 years, 10 years down the line (for certain).