Was it moderated down because it expressed an opinion contrary to that of major publishers of non-free works? Or was it moderated down because it made a claim that a field of law ought to be discarded and failed to back up this claim with evidence? I'm inclined to assume the latter.

Where does standing on shoulders of giants (as Bernard of Chartres put it) end and misappropriation begin? Where should it?

Does "anywhere" include on a city bus? What I'd like to be officially able to do is queue up some 1- to 10-minute videos to watch, download them (possibly using encryption) while connected to the Internet, disconnect, and watch them. Even if offline viewing were restricted to 360p, that'd still be better than having to pay hundreds of USD per year for cellular Internet for my Nexus 7 tablet.

Copyright is already coercion of the public. If YouTube is asking for coercion, it's asking governments to replace coercion that serves incumbent middlemen with coercion that serves the public.

Anonymous Coward

Whose fault is it that IP multicast over the public Internet remains unimplemented?

Unfamiliarity with the GUI didn't stop people from taking to the iPad. The reason has to be more subtle.

There is a user-accessible option to open Internet Explorer, type windows 8 classic shell into the Bing search box (which produces this SERP), and click the first result. Or is your complaint that Microsoft provides no means to discover that such a classic shell exists in the first place? If that's true, then the same is true of obscure registry settings that do exist in Windows, and it's true of the existence of web browsers other than IE.

Speaking of IE, Microsoft got in trouble with competition law for including things with Windows. I'm guessing this is why Microsoft declined to ship MSE bundled with Windows XP, Windows Vista, and Windows 7 so as not to be perceived as using its Windows market power to gain antivirus market power.

Microsoft did one better by providing hooks for third party developers to create classic shells for Windows 8. I know of at least two classic shells, one of which is actually called Classic Shell.

In Windows 8 (x86 and x86-64), it is required. In Windows RT, it is forbidden. And other comments to this topic speculate that Microsoft is likely to license Windows 10 like Windows RT in this respect.

Good luck finding new "machines which cannot run the Secure Boot feature" at an affordable price once virtually every name-brand home PC not made by Apple ships with Secure Boot turned on in Windows-only mode. The last time GNU/Linux had a reasonable chance to ship on home PCs was netbooks, and Microsoft quickly killed that by offering deeply discounted Windows XP licenses for ULCPCs.

From the page you linked: "The court found that [...] The style, design, shape and movement of the puzzle pieces were not inextricably connected to the ideas, rules and functioning of the game and therefore wereprotectible elements." From the opinion itself: "Xio was also free to design a puzzle game using pieces of different shapes instead of using the same seven pieces used in Tetris." This made it pretty clear to me that the exact shapes of the Tetriminos, not just their colors and textures, are copyrighted. And even if the shapes themselves weren't copyrighted, standardizing the colors is like standardizing green means go and red means stop.

It's a CRT HDTV that he bought along with the house. He pays for a cable TV tier that happens to include HD service but doesn't use HD much himself. Instead, he leaves the TV set on stretch because he's used to stretch, or at least dislikes stretch less than he dislikes having to relearn the channel order.

Until 51 percent of readers agree with this hypothetical reader and take this agreement to the voting booth, copyright continues to exist as the statius quo.

Tell that to Xio Software, who got successfully sued by The Tetris Company for making a block-stacking game that uses pieces made of four square blocks.

That depends on whether accepting such a "bribe" would cost a student athlete his amateur status and thus his eligibility.