That's what the copyright law is really for - to protect publishers and distributors.

Except that Apple has no monopoly. It has a high market share. That is a different thing entirely. Apple doesn't use that market share to lock people into its products. There are lots of competing products that are good solid competitors in any of its markets. You can use competing products with any of its products.

If you want to look at vendor lock-in you could look at gaming consoles, including Microsoft's offerings. But of course Florian you always defend Microsoft.

So if I go to my library and borrow a book for free, or a DVD or a CD I am stealing? Am I denying revenue to pay for creation and distribution of the content?

I and most people I know have been doing this for a long time with books and guess what - there are still books being written.

No there's nothing wrong with paying for apps that have been lovingly crafted and gone over by apple with a fine-tooth comb.

But it's wrong when they stop everyone downloading free apps or digging into the OS themselves if they want to are are willing to forego the guarantees.

Novell made all these bad decisions but still has wads of cash? Must've made some good decisions then.

Or you could outsource your pollution, industrial standards and workers wages and conditions to a place like China or India. Oh wait, you did that already.

Pictures or it didn't happen.

And it's up to representatives of industries worth trillions of dollars to lobby and create a climate of denial and for the rest of us who don't want anything to change to pretend it's not happening

Because when the vikings went there in the 900s it was green, or more precisely grøn. After that there was a small ice age.

This is complete rubbish. Carbon has 3 naturally occuring isotopes. There are differences based on the ratio of carbon isotopes.

Unfortunately while WIPO and others argue about counterfeiting watches and designer accessories and other fripperies which affect rich companies there is real and dangerous counterfeiting going on which really does kill people.

China has a huge number of operations counterfeiting medical drugs. These are sold inside China and exported, mainly to third world countries. They are often very good fakes and very difficult to tell from the real product and often contain very little of the active beneficial drug. Especially bad are the counterfeit antibiotics and anti-malarials. It's actually quite hard to get real medical drugs in China, and the counterfeting extends to traditional chinese herbal medicine.

A lot of the real designer goods are made in China anyway, the fakes often made at the same factories but without the QA provided by the contracting design companies.

It's interesting how companies that produce proprietary code have made all their code a trojan horse that can destroy anyone who copies their code and uses it.

And MS pays heavily in terms of $, time, and raw manpower to get paid astroturfers to comment on any articles about windows. Especially the "I've used linux for years but it's hard to get it working" variety and especially since W7 came out.

I've installed systems with linux that just worked, every bit. I've spent days installing windows and sundry applications - trying to download drivers for all the hardware MS didn't apparently write drivers for in those "millions of hardware devices". It's worse when you have to download drivers for the netork card.

But unfortunately for you, it is: http://www.linuxmark.org/

Patents are not about getting money back for spending it on something. Wrong. Patents are about getting a monopoly on a good idea so you can continue to have good ideas and be encouraged to tell everyone about them.

It's not for what you spent but for your idea. What you spent is irrelevant.