And anyway, I have the impression that Apple's music DRM is the only one that still works. If you bought music with Apple's DRM ten years ago, you can still play it. Try playing PlayForSure music. No chance. It doesn't work anymore. I think there are some other schemes that stopped working. (If anyone knows of any other music DRM that still works, I'd be interested to hear about it).

And Apple's DRM could always be removed legally by burning the music onto a CD using Apple's own iTunes software, and today Apple's DRM can be removed legally (unfortunately not for free) by subscribing to iTunes Match once.

The plaintiff's claims were nowhere near as sensible as the things you asked about. (Actually, Apple's legal reply to most of the claims was "what you are claiming doesn't make any sense". Usually a legal reply to a reasonable accusation either says "we didn't do it" or "we were allowed to do it". )

I suggest you read what the case was actually about. Apple is claimed to have prevented Realnetworks from adding Apple's DRM to Realnetworks' DRM music and copying it onto Apple's iPods. The reality is that Realnetworks created an awful hack and damaged the data on an iPod in the process to an extent that Apple's software thought the iPod was broken and reformatted it.

To your question "How can DRM ever be defined as good for customers": Without DRM, it would be impossible to rent videos online for cheap instead of having to buy them for three times as much. And in 2006 when this happened, without DRM there would have been no online music stores. Surely offering you to buy music with DRM is better than not offering you to buy music without DRM.

Just in case that you still have a reasonable amount of music with FairPlay DRM: You can buy Apple's "iTunes Match" for a year, which will among other things allow you to replace any music bought from Apple, and any music from anywhere that the software recognises, with DRM free 256 Kbit/sec copies. Costs about $25 or so. If you have lots of music with DRM or in lower quality, it's worth it.

I think you are making the mistake of thinking that Apple was sued for something that remotely makes sense. They weren't.

Apple sold music with DRM in 2006. That music was hard or impossible to copy, as music with DRM should be. But that's not what Apple was sued for. And making it impossible for music with DRM to be copied is actually what DRM is there for.

Realnetworks had developed their own DRM "solution". Which had the unfortunate disadvantage that it didn't play on iPods, and it didn't play on Microsoft "Playforsure" compatible players either. So it was quite dead in the water. So Realnetworks decided to create a hack where they removed their own DRM, then put fake "FairPlay" (that's Apple's DRM) around it, and copied that to the iPod.

It turned out that they damaged directory structures on the iPod, and the iPod's "FairPlay" implementation noticed that there was something fishy about these files. Altogether so bad that Apple's software suggested that you reformat the iPod. And that is what these lawyers complain about: That Apple didn't allow their hacked DRM to play on an iPod.

The obvious and 100% iPod compatible solution would have been to remove the DRM and _not_ to try to add Fairplay DRM to the music. Music without DRM, like mp3, AAC, WAV, ALAC has always played on all iPods.

No, she was the largest vessel, briefly afloat :-)

Most likely the sale is only entered at a later stage. Could be if the charge your credit card, could be if the ship.

And most likely, they have terms and conditions that basically say "we offer what you see on the website, except if there are obvious mistakes". And the only way you could complain is if you spot a pattern, like if this happens repeatedly, or if they refuse to sell to you but don't change the advertised price.

Now all that said, from all I've heard the authors of the GPL were quite competent in what they were doing, so it is quite likely that the GPL says what they meant.

I think the most important thing is about remedies, and there is quite strong precedence. It seems that if you use open-sourced software and don't do what you are supposed to do according to the license, you are a copyright infringer, and not someone in breach of contract. So the damages are those of a copyright infringer (up to $150,000 per work, or the proven damage), and not those of a person in breach of contract.

I really wouldn't think so. Sure, it has to be made clear that the license for the software doesn't include the license for the patents. But it would make absolute sense if a patent holder made it easy for companies to actually use their patent by providing open source software to use the patent, instead of everyone having to create their own proprietary software.

Well... Copyright law is about different things, mostly about copying and creating derivative works. A judge would decide whether someone made a copy, or whether someone created a derivative work, according to the law, and the GPL cannot override this. With that decided, the judge will then conclude that either you did need permission by the GPL, or you didn't need permission by the GPL to do what you did.

On the other hand, the GPL can say in its own terms what it allows you to do. They could say "you are allowed to create a derivative work if you do A, B and C; we consider it a derivative work if you did X, Y and Z". Then the judge would check if you did X, Y and Z to decide whether you needed to do A, B and C to get permission from GPL.

If you didn't need permission, then it doesn't matter what the GPL says. If you did need permission, then it matters.

Even so, what the lawyers who created the license intended doesn't matter. Or what he was told that the license should achieve, doesn't matter either. The text of the license matters.

The taxi drivers are arguing that since there is a shitload of rules and regulations that they have to follow to be allowed to drive people to their destination and charge, others shouldn't be allowed to do so without following the same shitload of rules and regulations.

They are also probably worried that prices are driven down by a company exploiting people who just want to make a bit of extra money. I'd love to see what percentage of Uber drivers have proper insurance and pay their taxes.

They just received 1200 million dollars funding. Astorturfing is cheap.

In the UK, a few years ago they had a "petrol strike" where drivers refused to transport fuel to petrol stations. Panic ensued. One owner of a petrol station who still had fuel left decided to double the price.

Three days later the strike was over. Two months later, the station closed down, bankrupt.

Well, look at the guys. Their religion tells them to dress and to behave towards women so that no woman would touch them with a barge pole unless forced to. The average bearded muslim looks ten times worse than the average Unix programmer and has a tenth of the brain, so they have no chance to get laid by any woman volunteering without getting paid.

And that just drives them nuts and hateful. Instead of shaving and getting a decent haircut and doing something to make themselves a bit attractive, they believe some fairy tales of virgins waiting for them in heaven. Sorry, guys, heaven is not where you are going! No virgins for you!