Time to get creative!

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 17 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

Late last night, I wanted to write a blog post which quoted a portion of someone else’s copyrighted work. After researching fair use legislation (and finding out that the UK equivalent is fair dealing), it seemed that what I was doing constituted criticism, review and news reporting under the terms of fair dealing in the United Kingdom Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 (CDPA) but I was caught up in a haze of legal doubt. I made clear that I was not the originator of this work, credited the artists but even so I felt that I needed to disclaim my use of the work on the blog post and I’m no legal expert – what if I’ve got it all wrong? I’m not making vast sums of money from this blog and what if I get sued?

Whilst my problem related to copyrighted work and fair use/fair dealing is very vague, there is an answer for content publishers who do want to share their work – it’s been around for a while now and is really starting to get some traction – that answer is Creative Commons. I first heard about Creative Commons on an episode of TWiT a year or so back and when I recently redesigned this website, I turned it over to a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.0 UK: England & Wales License – effectively retaining some rights over the work whilst allowing others to use it in the manner that I see fit.

Basically, if anything is copyrighted (and under many jurisdictions it is automatically copyrighted – whether or not the © symbol is displayed) then permission is required to use it (subject to the vagaries of fair use/fair dealing). Creative Commons licenses are intended to make it easy to skip intermidiaries and to grant others permission to use creative works.

Creative Commons licenses are standard copyright licenses provided free of charge via the Internet. Written for lawyers and courts, they are translated for people, and again for computers. The are used to retain copyright whilst granting permission for certain uses, subject to some conditions (images are from Creative Commons):

AttributionAttribution. You let others copy, distribute, display, and perform your copyrighted work – and derivative works based upon it – but only if they give credit the way you request.
Noncommercial Noncommercial. You let others copy, distribute, display, and perform your work – and derivative works based upon it – but for noncommercial purposes only.
No Derivative Works No Derivative Works. You let others copy, distribute, display, and perform only verbatim copies of your work, not derivative works based upon it.
Share Alike Share Alike. You allow others to distribute derivative works only under a license identical to the license that governs your work.

Any content may be protected with Creative Commons license, e.g. files, photos, drawings, websites, films, sounds, books, or weblogs – there is even a Creative Commons search engine.

To find out more, watch the video clip below:

Get creative!

Gagging orders…

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 18 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

Oh! The joys of legal agreements… for the next 2 days, I’m attending the Exchange Server “12” Ignite training tour and the first thing I’ve had to do on arrival is to sign a non-disclosure agreement (NDA) which prohibits me from reproducing or summarising any confidential information gained for the next 5 years! To be fair, these things are pretty standard and much of what I do at work is covered by one NDA or another, but it does effectively prevent me from writing about anything I learn on this course. I guess when the product is released to manufacturing, the information will cease to be confidential, but in the meantime I guess I’ll have to keep quiet about E12!

What I can say is that the bag provided as part of the delegate information pack reminds me a bit of my earliest experiences with messaging – my days a newspaper delivery boy.

This time it’s Apple who’s heading to court

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 18 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

Generally, news about yet another anti-trust suit bores me. Intended to protect consumer interests against monopolistic suppliers, it seems to me that anti-trust court cases rarely have that effect and are more often than not just a chance to beat up an established supplier when another vendor’s product fails to gain the market share that they think it should.

In a world of marketing and hype, the best products don’t always become popular. Betamax was better than VHS but VHS is still in many of our homes today. MiniDisc was better than DCC, but ultimately they both lost out to recordable CD (and then DVD).

Just over a year ago, I set out my views on why I think the EU’s sanctions against Microsoft were wrong. Sure, Microsoft is playing along and stretching things out as long as they can, but the EU seems to be getting tough and the US DoJ is starting to wake up again too.

The trouble is that, by the time a technology case gets to court, the damage is already done. In the same post about why Microsoft shouldn’t have to unbundle Windows Media Player, I pointed out that Apple were acting monopolistically with the way they force iPod owners to use iTunes. Now, after years of acting in this manner, Apple are finally being sued. In last Friday’s Windows IT Pro magazine network WinInfo Daily Update, Paul Thurrott reports that:

“This week, a federal judge in California cleared the way for the first-ever antitrust suit against Apple because of the iPod… noting that the complaint alleges Apple has an 80 percent share of the market for legal digital music files and more than 90 percent of the market for portable hard-drive digital music players. Like Microsoft, Apple is being sued under the Sherman Antitrust Act.”

I have to agree with Paul’s summary of the situation:

“If Apple opens up the iPod to Microsoft’s Windows Media Audio (WMA) format – including songs purchased from competing online music services – all will be well.”

That would certainly make me happy.

IT and the law

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 18 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

Some time ago, I stumbled across the About Cookies site which contains a really interesting (and useful) description of what cookies (of the browser variety) are, how they are (and should be) used, and how web site designers need to act in order to comply with the law. AboutCookies.org was produced by a law firm – Pinsent Masons – and they have another site called OUT-LAW which they claim has “5,000 pages of free legal news and guidance, mostly on IT and e-commerce issues. These issues can affect any organisation, and OUT-LAW is as much for those in a software start-up as it is for the compliance team at a bank”.

It’s certainly true that the legal issues surrounding IT are becoming ever more complex (and are something I find interesting reading – itself a worrying observation!). I’m neither qualified to comment on the law, nor affiliated with any legal firms, but it seems to me that OUT-LAW is probably worth a read for anyone who wants to ensure that their site (and business IT) is compliant with all necessary legislation.

Why some middleware should be bundled with the operating system

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 19 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

Anti-trust laws are supposed to protect consumers from monopolistic companies. As such, it is hardly surprising that Microsoft regularly finds itself in court facing yet another anti-trust suit, but the latest move by the US government concerns me greatly.

I have a licensed version of Windows XP Professional on my laptop, so I’m not bothered by the Windows Genuine Advantage program, whereby users have to prove that their copy of Windows is legitimate before downloading additional software.

According to the Windows IT Pro magazine network WinInfo Daily Update:

“Windows Genuine Advantage is designed to reward owners of non-pirated Windows copies with value-added advantages for being legitimate customers. Like Product Activation, Windows Genuine Advantage seeks to curb software piracy, which various analyst groups say is rampant around the world. IDC reports that software piracy is a $30 billion problem, with pirated software accounting for about 30 percent of all software used worldwide; in the United States, that figure is 23 percent.”

After all, Microsoft is facing competition in areas where it has previously dominated (desktop and low-mid range server operating systems, office productivity suites) and it needs to protect its revenues whilst not being seen as anti-competitive. As such, users need to see that they get something back – additional functionality for example, which is where my anti-trust worries come into play.

Last week, federal regulators at the US Department of Justice (DOJ) revealed that they will soon begin an investigation of the next version of Windows (codenamed Longhorn) to ensure that it doesn’t violate the terms of Microsoft’s US antitrust settlement. The DOJ are also voicing concerns about Windows XP Service Pack 2 (SP2), claiming that they require further information from Microsoft in order to determine whether Windows satisfactorily honours user middleware choices.

SP2 is a massive security update, but it does include some new functionality – most significantly a much improved Windows Firewall. That may or may not be considered middleware, but we can’t continue to lampoon Microsoft for security flaws at the same time as stopping them from shipping security features within the operating system. On the same level, we should expect anti-malware functionality too, and for that matter, anti-spam capabilities in Exchange. These features are all being implemented, but if the DOJ (and the European Union) get their way, Microsoft will be severely limited in what it can ship to its legitimate, paying customers.

In the same way that many of the infrastructure deployment techniques that I have practised for years are now viewed as commodities and my company has to find new areas in which to add value, so are some of the software products which Microsoft is criticised for bundling within Windows (browser, firewall, etc.). Or to take another example, who would consider an operating system without a TCP/IP stack today? (something which once upon a time was an added extra with an associated cost). Those who have built a business around such commodities must find new areas in which to innovate, and leave Messrs Gates, Torvalds, and Jobs to include what have become basic system requirements in their operating systems.

Why the EU’s sanctions against Microsoft are wrong

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 19 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

I don’t normally bother to read about Microsoft’s latest legal battle when yet another competitor cries out that nobody buys their product because it’s free/cheaper/better/more widely available* (*delete as appropriate) from Microsoft, but yesterday’s rejection of Microsoft’s appeal against European Union sanctions concerns me greatly.

Forget the €497m fine – Microsoft can afford it!

Forget the trade secrets – Microsoft’s crown jewels are Windows and Office – most of that source code is still safely locked up in Redmond. Besides which, perhaps we’ll get a better quality of third-party software if it works more closely with Windows.

What worries me is that Microsoft has been forced to ship a version of Windows without Media Player.

It may sound inconsequential but its the wider ramifications of this ruling that concern me. Last week, Microsoft bought an anti-spyware company. Many believe that this sort of technology should be bundled with the operating system (more so than a media player), but this latest legal ruling in Brussels means that Microsoft now needs to be wary when including any new technologies in Windows, just in case a competitor cries foul.

The unbundling of Windows Media Player achieves nothing – those of us who use it will go and download it from Windows Update instead. Real Networks are upset because they only have a tiny proportion of the market. Boo hoo! Apple’s proprietary iTunes service is tied to the iPod meaning that they have a huge percentage of the portable digital music market sewn up, but as far as I am aware no-one is challenging them in court for that (only for charging more for downloads in the UK than elsewhere in Europe). My past experience of RealPlayer is that it is unstable, that I can’t download it without giving away my e-mail address and that it keeps popping up messages on my desktop. I only use it at all because I need it for certain websites that only offer digital media content in RealPlayer format (i.e. the BBC Radio Player). That is the crux of this issue – consumers will use whatever player they need to access their content, be that Apple QuickTime Player, Real Networks RealPlayer or Microsoft Windows Media Player – it often depends on the technologies used by the website serving the content, not what is bundled with the operating system.