"Filling out a text field with spaces" isn't something that usually gets tested.

Which is why peer reviews of code changes are conducted at many places these days.

FFS, Freedom of Speech is not some magic shield that guards you from the blowback of saying or doing something very stupid. While I do find it harsh that this man's career is taking a huge hit for a view he once had years ago (and may not even have anymore), the simple fact is that other people have the right to voice their opposition to his actions.

That's right. By age two, they've graduated to assembling iPads.

That wasn't prejudice the judge was showing. She saw a mountain of evidence during the pretrial that clearly showed Apple conspiring with publishers to fix prices. Her statement was not bias against Apple, it was a warning that based on the currently evidence in front of her, the law was not on Apple's side and unless they had overwhelming evidence to the contrary, it would be in Apple's best interest to plead guilty like all of the publishers in the case did. Apple, drunk on its own Kool-Aid, forged ahead with their not guilty plea. Since they failed to provide overwhelming evidence that contradicted the prosecution's evidence, the case ended exactly as the judge had warned in pretrial.

There is so much wrong with that statement, I hardly know where to begin. First of all, monopolies take advantage of the lack of competition to keep prices artificially high, not low. Secondly, even if Amazon was keeping prices artificially low, what they were doing was completely legal. On the other side, Apple was found guilty of conspiring with publishers to make it absolutely impossible for other resellers to sell their books cheaper than Apple. If Apple had just demanded that they got the same or lower price on ebooks as other resellers, then they would have likely escaped litigation. Instead, they conspired with publisher to fix the prices that other resellers could actually sell their products and that is classic price fixing. The publishers knew that and promptly pled guilty, but Apple thought they could get one by the legal system and got a sudden dose of reality. This isn't just another typical case of Slashdot hating on Apple - in this case there is legal justification for it and mountains of legal precedence.

It's rarely a good thing to be ahead of your time, and that applies twofold to technology. Releasing technology before it is capable of providing a solid user experience is counterproductive because it gives the technology a bad name, reducing interest in the required research necessary to provide a solid experience.

In the past, Virtual Reality did not work because the helmets were too heavy, the graphics were too demanding, the screen resolutions and refresh rates were too low, and the motion sensors were too slow. All of these issues combined to create a horrible user experience. But due to many advances made in the past couple of decades, graphics processing is much faster, screen resolutions and refresh rates are much higher, screens weigh much less, motion capture is much faster, and all of these technologies are becoming drastically cheaper. This means that Virtual Reality is quickly approaching a point where it will finally be feasible to provide the proper experience it has always attempted.

With that said, there are still a lot of tasks required to get all of the technologies integrated with each other to provide a smooth user experience, so I don't think that 2014 will be the year of Virtual Reality. But I would be surprised if there wasn't a solid product available by 2016.

Verizon did that to my connection to YouTube. It worked great over when I VPNed but I couldn't even stream more than 5% of a video without VPN. That was one of several reasons I dropped FIOS.

Remember how many people tried to tell you Network Neutrality was the road to a heavily regulated internet... Well here you go. If you regulate any aspect, eventually all aspects will fall under a web of regulations.

WTF are you talking about? Level 3 is complaining because they are now being extorted by ISPs who are trying to double-dip and charge them hefty fees for peering agreements. This was not a problem when net neutrality regulations were in place, but after Verizon won their case over net neutrality, it took Comcast only five weeks to go on a rampage and start extorting fees from other providers. So this is exactly what you get when you DON'T have net neutrality and you DON'T have regulation.

It's great for companies like Level 3

It's not great for companies like Level 3 because they are the ones being extorted. The current lack of regulation is great for companies like Comcast who are threatening to throttle connections of their own users if content providers don't pay Comcast an extortion fee. Again, it only took five weeks of the regulations being removed before Comcast started pulling this shit. It may be time for you to admit that moderate and sensible regulation is not a bad thing.

I guess ultimately I just wish copyright worked more like patents. With patents, you must disclose details about the work in order to get protection as part of the social contract. If you don't want to divulge the details, then you stick with trade secrets. But copyright provides all of the protection with no required disclosure. While that may be perfectly legal under current law, I can't think of any reasonable justification for this difference. If you truly believe that your work is worthy of copyright protection, then you should be perfectly happy going through a brief registration process. The registration could be as simple as a microtransaction on a government-sponsored web site. Then, similar to patents, when the copyright expires, the registration site could act like a public domain distribution site. This is fairly analogous to how the USPTO web site currently works (besides the fact that patent registration isn't exactly brief). Yes, I know that this would violate the Berne Convention but I'm not arguing what the law is, I'm arguing what I believe it should be.

I do realize that a work entering the public domain does not automatically mean that it has to, or even should, be made available. But with technology being what it is today, if we can develop a wayback machine, then why can't we do something to preserve cultural works? I guess I just feel that if everyone in society is giving up the freedom to copy certain works (as odd of a freedom as that may seem in the modern Western world), then we should get back as much as we can once that copyright expires. But that is clearly my opinion and obviously not a reflection of the current laws in place. In any event, I appreciate the info you have provided. Given my stance on intellectual property, I don't have too many civilized conversations with IP lawyers, so this was a nice change of pace and I was able to learn more details about the law, even if I don't necessarily agree with them.

The Library's collections remain in the library. If you wanted to go there, manually duplicate millions of lines of decades-old code, and then redistribute it, that'd be your only option.

At least that provides some option. And if someone did that for code that entered the public domain, they would be free to disseminate it to anyone who wished to host it online.

A return to registration requirements (prohibited under the 1886 Berne Convention) would not solve the issue you seem to have a problem with, which is the refusal of copyright holders to make articles generally available to the public during the copyright term.

It doesn't have to be during the term of the copyright. But after the copyright expires and the work is supposed to enter the public domain, it would be nice to know that there will be a copy available somewhere. Part of the social contract in offering patents and copyrights to creators is that the public will be free to copy those works and the knowledge and culture will persist. Thanks to neverending extensions of copyright terms, it will likely be incredibly hard to get a copy of a work by the time it enters public domain.

but if it's something you can read, then it's something copyrighted

I thought that there were exemptions to things that can be copyrighted such as recipes. Is that true?

You're already talking to one.

And I appreciate your input and the possibility to learn about an important facet of modern society. While I have your attention, can you confirm that source code is in fact covered under trade secret AND copyright law or only one of those? Thanks.

That sounds reasonable enough. However, in your example where the employee leaves a printout on a printer in a cafe, copyright law would forbid you from making or disseminating copies of that work while I don't believe trade secret would prevent you from doing whatever you wanted with it.

So in this case, a copy of the Windows source taken from a cafe printer would be useless (in the U.S.) while the recipe to Coca-Cola on a cafe printer could be a goldmine. Again, I'm not an IP lawyer - these are simply suppositions based on my slight-better-than-average knowledge of IP law.

General public release has NEVER been a requirement for copyright.

You are correct, but for a long time it was required that you register the copyrighted work with the government. When the copyright expired on that work, the government could then release that work since it would fall under public domain.

Copyright to software code works no differently. If you want to keep it secret, then you rely on trade secret and contractual nondisclosure requirements. If it leaks beyond that, then you have (and HAVE ALWAYS HAD) the right to prohibit further reproduction.

I have always heard different. What has been told to me is that once the trade secret has been revealed, the cat is out of the bag and your legal options are extremely limited (beyond suing the shit out of the party that leaked the secret). This would be the perfect time for an IP lawyer to jump in and set us straight.

And since Windows 8 is available to the public - I fail to see how your claim that the system is broken has any merit.

The compiled binaries are released to the public and they are covered under copyright law. The source code used to build those compiled binaries is also covered under copyright law (yet the source isn't usually released) AND it is simultaneously covered by trade secret.

Copyright has never required the creator to release the work products used in the creation, only the final work

But in this case, the copyright violation is on the work products used in the creation (the source code). Microsoft claims copyright on the Windows source and on the Windows binaries.

Further, that internal work products (like interim builds and unfinished releases) can be treated as confidential and trade secrets is a well established principle.

I'm not debating that they're considered trade secrets, my point is that they are covered under trade secret AND copyright at the same time which is highly unusual - I am not aware of any other work that gets both of those protections simultaneously. Throw in patents on top of it and you get a triple decker of IP madness.

Your belief that the system is broken is based on a fundamental cluelessness about how the system works.

Ah, Slashdot! Where everyone knows more than everyone else!

Copyrighted works need never be released to the public.

You're only proving my point. Copyright works currently do NOT need to be released despite the fact that the original intention of copyright law was to make sure the work WAS released.