I don't know if as many people would have a problem with this sentiment per se. However, the patent system is regularly abused by people who haven't spent time and money inventing something and aren't actually going to spend any time and money producing the product either, but simply look to sit on the patent and make their money from suing anyone who does put the effort in and brings the product to market.

The other problem is the granting of patents (especially software patents) for things that the patent office may think is novel and worthy of protection, but we all know is so obvious that it wouldn't occur to any of us to try to patent. However, once the patent is granted, again the patentee puts all their real effort into suing anyone who dares to come up with the same idea.

It is this leeching and obstructive use of patents that I would imagine that most people have problems with.

What about a double-decker arrangement? The keyboard would be on the desk in the usual way, but the touch pad would be on a shelf below the desk.

This would be a bit like some workstations currently position the keyboard (on a retractable shelf) only, because you dont need to see the touchpad when you are using it, the shelf doesn't need to be able to be pulled out.

Would the tremendous increase in bandwidth and reduction in costs of changing to a digital infrastructure have anything to do with this, or is it all just down to competition?

In the UK, the telecoms provider (BT) was privatised, not as a result of any political ideology, but so that they could borrow the billions required to digitise the network without the government's involvement. In the end however, they didn't need to borrow anything as the massive savings they made from digitising the first parts of the network more than paid for each subsequent upgrade.

Being digital, the new infrastructure enabled BT to do many things from a computer keyboard that they previously had to schedule a highly trained engineer out to do and BT soon found that it was making a profit from the standing charges alone - any money made from people actually making calls was a (huge) bonus.

All this success was sold as being as a result of privatisation, rather than digitisation, which in turn led to a rush to sell off anything that wasn't nailed down - usually at, what later investigations found to be, significantly below real value.

Of course none of the subsequent utility sell-offs had anything that corresponded to BT's digitisation and have instead led to inefficient monopolies. In the fine tradition of BT however, the privatised companies rarely actually have to put their hands in their own pockets as all upgrades are paid for by large, government approved levies added to the bills - long before any benefit (if any) to the consumer is actually provided.

These levies ensure that dividends are not affected by the need to invest in the infrastructure but, being able to have their cake and eat it, the value of these infrastructure improvements (paid for by the customers and not the shareholders) significantly boosts the value of the company and so the share price.

Back in the day when Microsoft Office had more competition from the likes of WordPerfect, a business I was working for went out and bought Word for all its PCs (a couple of hundred) because a senior manager had a "pirated" copy at home.

Unlike some other software at that time which employed dongles and other copy prevention measures, Microsoft didn't seem to have any real security on their software - you just copied the disks. It seemed as if they almost meant it to be copied a few times in order to get market exposure and more sales (looks like it worked as well).

I can see what you are getting at, but I'm not sure your analogy is correct.

Ignoring the fact that if I steal the car, the dealer no longer has a car to sell, whereas if I copy the car, he still does, there is still the issue of power.

To have a real market, the buyer and seller have to have an equal footing, which is why attention is paid to things such as price fixing and other anti-trust issues.

In the case of the car dealer, he does not have a monopoly and so his competitors can offer the same car under different terms and you, as the customer, can choose which offering suits your requirements the best. In this way a true marketplace exists and, other than the "no stealing rule", the government need not be involved.

In the case of the entertainment industry, there is a monopoly - if you want to listen to a track by your favourite band, being offered the choice between that band and one you don't want to listen to, is no real choice at all.

In this case however, rather than looking at this situation as a monopoly one and regulating in favour of the customer, in order to balance the market position, governments (perhaps as a result of lobbying) instead legislate in favour of the music industry, thereby distorting the market further and significantly disadvantaging the consumer by reducing their legal rights (e.g. not being able to take advantage of their fair use rights as this will contravene the industry's new rights to protect their encryption, etc)

You might not agree, but it is not necessarily entirely surprising that, being put in such a disadvantaged position, the customers look to subvert the status quo, by circumventing the controls the seller tries to impose.

When entertainment began, it is more likely that people would perform and then pass the hat round to get what people watching thought it was worth.

I'm not sure that copyright laws existed back then either, which begs the question; how did anyone ever make a living?

Copyright was originally introduced to cover written works such as books. Go to any decent library and you will find books that have lasted a lot longer than most films do.

In reality, copyright laws were introduced to encourage creative people to create more stuff for the enrichment of society as a whole. The terms of these copyrights were carefully chosen to give the creator enough time to make some money, but not so long that they could simply stop creating and sit back and live of an afternoon's work they put in fifty years before in a recording studio.

...and if they pay and they watch, only to find that it doesn't live up to the hype that got them wanting to watch in the first place, we give them back their money?

I don't know if they do or not, but I definitely get the feeling at times that there are many people who use Linux because it distinguishes them from Joe Sixpack and his mates, as much as for any other reason.

If this is the case then, consciously or sub-consciously, they would not want Linux adopted much more widely than it is at present - after all, if the world and her granny are all using Linux, what makes it so special any more?

(I fully acknowledge that there are many Linux users whose motivation is very different to this, its just that this is how it seems at times)

What's to stop either side in a case disseminating plausible but fake information around sites that rank highly in Google for searches relating to the case?

In this way a jury member that is looking there for "all the information at their disposal" could be significantly prejudiced without the other side being aware.

Surely this is one of the reasons why such rules exist?

I agree, but I was responding to the original article:

No one. However if you want to build market share, how do you convince someone to change from running their business on M$ software, backed (as they would see it), by a large, dependable company, to running their business on a bunch of software knocked up by a bunch of hobbyists, who rightly point out that they owe them no on-going support beyond that which they feel like giving?

I can see your point and all the other points raised here but, if the Linux market share is to grow, I am not your audience, the current M$ customers are.

I share a lot of your sentiment here, but surely the suggestion is being made due to the lack of market share growth. If so, to grow the market share, you are inevitably going to involve people who are strangers to Linux, aren't you?

Many people from the M$ world (who would surely make up the majority of the target audience for market share growth) possibly don't even know that Debian, Ubuntu, openSUSE, etc are all actually Linux and may therefore be put off by the confusion.

A lot of people come to new ideas through word of mouth and in the early days, it can be very much a case of the blind leading the blind. What if a recent convert recomends "Linux" to a friend, only for that friend to download a different distro (why would that matter, they're all Linux after all, aren't they?). How long would it take before they both get frustrated with the constant "oh doesn't that fix it? that's how I got it working on my PC"

I think that one of the biggest problems is that possibly, many Linux users (and I have to include myself here) have a great deal of difficulty in understanding how the less tech savvy see the world and so lack enough common frames of reference to be able to educate them to the point where they too can join in.