Yep, if history is any guide, this is just a negotiating ploy by Sony to get better OEM pricing for Windows or marketing dollars from Microsoft. This will follow the usual playbook - deal is reached, then Sony will claim they were just "studying the idea" and the results will show that users overwhelmingly prefer IE and how great a partner Microsoft is.

Since there's now a patent, these other companies would have to pay for a license in order to use this method to spy on their employees.

With all due respect, your MBA economics teacher seems pretty clueless about the actual market. Success in the market has almost nothing to do with hiring programmers and making hardware. In the vast majority of cases, it's all about marketing and product positioning, and most market segment leaders have held that position for far more than two years.

Where's the "iPod killer"? Who's displacing Skype? Where's the auction site competing with eBay? Who's coming up to challenge Google, Craigslist, Amazon, Facebook? Some of these companies have been at the top of the heap for over a decade, with no serious competitor in sight.

Many of these folks are leaders because of the network effect of their services - something programmers and hardware can't change.

Lyntons' company, "Sony Pictures Entertainment" was created when Sony purchased Columbia Pictures. The guy that started and ran Columbia, Harry Cohn, was famous for saying "Give the public what they want and they'll come out for it."

It appears that Lynton actually knows what his customers want - he just chooses to ignore them, at his company's peril, even as other companies such as Apple have clearly shown the way.

Lynton is the CEO of Sony *Pictures*, not Sony.

The actual CEO of Sony, Sir Howard Stringer, is quite a bit more enlightened about the value of the Internet, but clearly has a long way to go to convince his divisional heads.

I was a Seaworld in San Diego a few weeks back and one of these was driving around the various pathways taking shots for Street View. Haven't seen the data go live yet, though.

Anyone notice the increase in stories in the mainstream media connecting Craigslist to various crimes - the "Craigslist robber", selling babies on Craigslist, Cragislist hookers, Craigslist attempted murderers, Craigslist scammers, etc, etc.

It seems that every struggling newspaper in the country goes to some effort to tie Craigslist to any local crime. I don't recall any of these papers connecting crimes to their own classified ads. It's almost like these papers have some sort of agenda...

Sue you. Even if you win, you're still out the money and time it cost to defend yourself. If you're lucky, you might get awarded your reasonable costs, but that doesn't pay for the stress and time.

From a regulatory standpoint, monopolies don't apply to markets consisting of individual products from individual companies, only an individual company dominating an entire market segment.

The are many smart phones out there, and the iPhone doesn't even have the largest fraction of that market -according to NPD, RIM is by far the dominant player in the US, with three of the top five best-selling smart phone devices.

Without copyright law, there would be nothing to enforce access to source code, therefore a company could take an otherwise "open" pool of code, modify it and distribute it without disclosing the modifications. Add a dash of DRM to defeat unauthorized (but otherwise legal, without copyright) redistribution of binaries, and you've got a closed system.

I hear Somalia is more receptive to piracy.