The European Commission is to fine Bill Gates’ Microsoft Corp for what it claims is the firms’ continuing misuse of its ‘dominant’ market position and will force it to change how its Media Player software is distributed, according to Reuters.
I don’t want to get into the complex issues of whether Gates has or has not ‘abused’ his market position in any way but rather address the core issue: does Bill Gates and his colleagues have a right to exploit the source code they have created, or not? If Microsoft cannot do so, what is the point of intellectual property rights and patents? And how does the Commission judge if a firm X holds a ‘dominant’ position in a particular market? Is it claiming that Microsoft salesmen force to us to buy their products at the point of a gun? Surely not.
Using alternatives to Micrsosoft’s products may be – and often is – inconvenient. Ask any computer user. But unless the EU, the U.S. Justice Dept or any other bunch of property-right grabbers can show that a firm forces us to use its products, such claims should be treated with scorn. Just because a firm is very big, as Microsoft unquestionably is, does not by itself confer coercive power on such a firm. Of course such firms can try to acquire this by screwing privileges out of government, but that is a separate issue.
Bill Gates is not everyone’s idea of a victim, and frankly he is not the most endearing of business leaders. That, however, is besides the point. He and his colleagues created a source code. Over the years, and due to some savvy business decisions, they have made this code the basis of a hugely successful business. Obviously this is mighty troubling to some, even those who may claim to be in favour of free enterprise.
The EU is telling Bill Gates, “Don’t get too big for your boots, and certainly don’t get too successful”.
Well, aside from indications that they did not in fact create the “source code” to which you refer it , MS are so wealthy because of
a) some rather dodgy business practices (which we’ll pass over) and
b) because states act to prevent the voluntary sharing of programs and to constrain the spread of ideas.
I suggest that the issue is NOT “does Bill Gates and his colleagues have a right to exploit the source code they have created, or not?”
Of course they do.
The issue is whether they have _abused_ that right.
Property rights are protected by the state’s/community’s laws and those not entirely conterminous bodies have a practical as well as moral right to set forth rules by which to use those property rights.
Apparently Gates has gone over the edge.
Sounds conventional but not everything done by great-grand daddy and mommy (etc etc) was dumb.
Frankly, I don’t care. Between Bill Gates and the EU, I’m on Bill Gates’ side however dodgy his practices. I do not want the EU to have any triumphs under any circumstances because a triumph would lend them a tiny, thin-end-of-the-wedge slivver of legitimacy that Tony Blair could point to and say, “See?”.
“Well, yes, sir, this Ford automobile comes bundled with these green woolly socks. Yes, you must wear the socks when you drive the car – the two are mechanically interdependent. Yes, you can wear your own socks in addition to our socks, but we certainly don’t recommend it. Well, no, you don’t have to buy a Ford, you’re free to buy any car you choose. Of course, we’ve entered into exclusive licensing agreements with the petrol stations, so you may find it a leetle tough to fuel up a Chrysler. Enjoy your socks, sir.”
There aren’t good analogies for Microsoft, since there aren’t historical situations analogous to computers and operating systems.
MS parlayed a lousy product into dominance by a combination of pure luck and pure ruthlessness. Microsoft owns the secret bowels of every machine running their OS. From this position, they can pretend that unrelated products like browsers and media players are intimately entertwined with their mystery code, using the pious justification of an imaginary customer demand.
No, I absolutely do not favor government stepping in and trying to do something about it. There are very few questions to which government is the answer, and this isn’t one of the few. But I’m damned if I’ll see Bill Gates as an honest capitalist codesmith merely seeking to profit from the work of his hands. Feh.
The market’s going to have a tough time righting this one, because it’s genuinely much more convenient and cost-effective to have a single OS to deal with (and the alternative products have their own problems). Which is how we got here in the first place.
I think the interesting thing about this one is, ignoring the content of the complaints against MS, the contrast between the EU and US ways of doing things.
The DoJ prosecutes the company, and the matter goes to court. It is for the DoJ to prove violations of the law. The Competition Directorate of the Commission (a bureaucratic arm of what we are constantly told is not a state) simply investigates, reports, and fines, though Microsoft may be able to appeal against the decision to the court and attempt to prove itself innocent.
Weasel,
“they can pretend that unrelated products like browsers and media players are intimately entertwined with their mystery code, using the pious justification of an imaginary customer demand.”
Sorry? Customer demand for browsers is imaginary?
S. Weasel wrote:
“Well, yes, sir, this Ford automobile comes bundled with these green woolly socks.
Interestingly, your car comes bundled with airbags, which Big Government forces you to have. Sometimes when those products go off, they decapitate smaller people.
And yet if you suggest that Big Government ought to be responsible for making you use this dangerous product, you’re treated as a lunatic.
Sorry? Customer demand for browsers is imaginary?
Noooo, customer demand for browsers that are an intimate component of the Operating System are imaginary.
Somewhere in the general context of the MS/Netscape suit, Gates put it about that Explorer had to be an intimate part of Windows, remember? Because customers wanted it that way? And the next release, the lines between Windows Explorer and Internet Explorer got unpleasantly muddled, and directories defaulted to View as Web Page in My Computer and there was some nonsense about all-singing, all-dancing desktops refreshed from the web and…stuff. The first thing everyone in my office did when issued XP was fiddle with the buttons and knobs to make it look and act more like 98 and NT.
Customer demand, my foot.
S. Weasel, I don’t agree. The source code of Microsoft being in the base of most computers does not mean were are FORCED to use Microsoft. Other software exists. I take it you have heard of Linux.
Microsoft haters love to claim that somehow we are all coerced into using his stuff, and that any other standard is automatically zapped out of the sky. I am not a computer expert but surely the idea that Gates has been able to bully us all into jellyfish the last 20 years is not credible.
For most, being compatible with MS is good business sense. That is not the same as being FORCED to use his stuff. It s good business sense for me to use floppy disks of a certain size, but again, that doesn’t mean I am somehow being coerced. That is the key to my original post.
Anti-trust is nothing more than government-sponsored assault on business. It is based on mistaken neo-classical economic assumptions of “perfect competition” which, as the Austrian school has pointed out, ignores the essential point that competition is a dynamic process which is not dependent on their being a given number of firms in a particular sector.
The source code of Microsoft being in the base of most computers does not mean were are FORCED to use Microsoft.
Where did I say anyone was forced to do anything of the kind? I hate it when people argue with the voices in their heads and address it to me.
I don’t get it.
The browser is free. You can install it and not use it. Considering the cost and size of Hard Disks these days, the footprint is not that big.
Of course, if you are running an IBM XT with a 10 Meg disk, you have a problem. But then Windows won’t run either.
The media player is also free. — all of the above apply to this software also.
I have both installed — don’t use Media Player (any version) and rarely use Internet Explorer.
What people seem to be complaining about is how the stuff is packaged. What they seem to be asking for is wheels from a Chevy, engine from a VW and transmission from Vovo.
What they are really doing is dissing Microsoft for what amount to religious reasons — even our bloody athiests!
A pox on all your houses. If you hate Microsoft, buy Mac or an abacus and keep the damned government out of it.
Now if Microsoft sends a bunch of thugs over to the local abacus factory to beat the crap out of Steve Jobs, then the government has a role to play.
The browser is only part of the question. Take Server 2003, it comes with a bunch of really neat digital rights software.
Of course, if you run a business making and selling DRM software, how do you compete if Biull Gates gives it away for free as part of his “standard” offering?
S. Weasel writes, “The market’s going to have a tough time righting this one”
I think the market _is_ beginning to right it. Linux is demonstrably more cost effective than Windows, and businesses are increasingly starting to make the switch. I have noticed that stories like this are becoming more common.
Microsoft is successful in part because it has made difficult interoperability between operating systems (through the use of, for example, the proprietary Word .doc format). As more ways around this problem become available, more people will see that there are viable alternatives, and MS’s monopoly will be eroded. Government intervention is not required.
What they seem to be asking for is wheels from a Chevy, engine from a VW and transmission from Vovo.
A car isn’t much good without wheels, an engine and a transmission. An OS works just fine without a browser, an email client and a media player. The only reason to include them is to attempt to gain market share in areas unrelated to the OS.
Which is just fine. No objection at all. If you can decline to load them, unload them after the fact and load alternatives. But, because MS owns the bedrock layer of software (AKA the operating system), they can make this process messy and difficult.
Even if you want the damn things, the special relationship between the OS and MS applications has awkward consequences. For example, it’s difficult-to-impossible to load multiple versions of Internet Explorer on one machine. No doubt, MS sees that as a feature. If you do web development, though, you very badly need to have all the likely versions of IE around to test on.
S. Weasel writes:
“Somewhere in the general context of the MS/Netscape suit, Gates put it about that Explorer had to be an intimate part of Windows, remember? Because customers wanted it that way? And the next release, the lines between Windows Explorer and Internet Explorer got unpleasantly muddled, and directories defaulted to View as Web Page in My Computer and there was some nonsense about all-singing, all-dancing desktops refreshed from the web and…stuff.”
Netscape originally announced that their browser would be turned into an Operating System that would make MS Windows unnecessary. Microsoft took them at their word, and came up with their version – integrate the browser into the OS. They did this while Netscape were still boasting about how they would “bury” Microsoft, but hadn’t actually done anything about it.
At the MS anti-trust trials, MS tried to prove that removing Internet Explorer would FUBAR Windows; this was thoroughly debunked. You can now buy a little piece of third-party software which will do it for you automatically. (Your choice – a free-market solution costing a few bucks, or an EU commission costing ghodknowshowmany euros…)
MS have the right to bundle what they like with their OS. I don’t deny that. What we need in return is the right to discombobulate the bundle to choose the parts we want.
The Union Pacific Railroad has, through coersive and monopolistic measures, set their rail gauge to 56.5 inches. This prevents people wishing to sell, rent, or otherwise use railcars of different gauges from shipping products.
There should be a law, and railroads / shippers would be free to use any gauge they desire.
Sometimes I would like to drive on the left side of the road, too, but GM makes it extremely difficult to buy a left-hand drive car. I may sue.
Intellectual Properety and patents? In the words of one “founding father” – “a damnation on them all”.
I think patents are an infringement of liberty. If I use my own reasoning and my own efforts to make something, then I take great exception to being told that I cannot benefit from my actions because someone, somewhere “thought of it first”.
Intellectual property = intellectual tyranny
Robert Simposn writes:
“Sometimes I would like to drive on the left side of the road, too, but GM makes it extremely difficult to buy a left-hand drive car. I may sue.”
And if GM had forced just about all the other car makers out of business by foul as well as fair means, you’d have every right to.
You might even win. And you’d deserve to
It is an interesting propaganda move by states to divert attention away from their own, actual coercion and harm caused toward the imagined coercion and harm of a (highly successful) private company. Like you say, no one forces us to use WMP, or IE or even Windows itself. Someone can, however, force us to have to do without them as standard in any WinXP installation. No prizes for guessing who.
“The issue here is not whether we broke a few rules, or took a few liberties with our female party guests — we did. [winks at Dean Wormer] But you can’t hold a whole fraternity responsible for the behavior of a few, sick twisted individuals. For if you do, then shouldn’t we blame the whole fraternity system? And if the whole fraternity system is guilty, then isn’t this an indictment of our educational institutions in general? I put it to you, Greg — isn’t this an indictment of our entire American society? Well, you can do whatever you want to us, but we’re not going to sit here and listen to you badmouth the United States of America!”
–Otter
Let us not forget that the main instigators of the DOJ suit against MS were Sun, Oracle and Netscape who, fearing increased competition from the Tyrannosaurus Rex of predators Bill Gates decided to call Big Government for help. The ?we do it for the consumerTM? reason was just a legal cover. As soon as the Feds were at it, States joined the game. Of course the EU does not want to be left out.
As much as I habitually curse the MS software I fail to see what good the lawsuit brought. Netscape is gone, but they screwed up on their own, while instead of pushing their competitive advantage they sat out 2 crucial years when Bill was in his ?Internet? Who needs a stinking Internet? mode. Oracle and Sun are doing OK, sort of, maybe. As a consumer, I am still subjected to shitty software from all and sundry. And I don’t even use IE or Netscape browsers (Safari works better than either).
So, who benefited here? MS spent endless millions on lawyers. DOJ spent endless (taxpayer) millions on lawyers. MS may not be hiring that many engineers those days, but we can be assured that they keep an army of well paid and really top quality lawyers. And now MS will never forget to kick in the protection money (aka campaign contributions) to the politicians (who are mostly lawyers).
I don?t give a damn if Bill Gates is not lovable teddy bear without a penny to his soul. I want businessman to be cutthroat bastards bent on making their companies as big and successful as possible (and if they will get fabulously rich in the process, that?s great, otherwise, why would they bother?) I want to buy best products at the the lowest possible prices, want to invest in these companies and work for these companies. That can be done only within a framework of free market competition. Yes, I know that MS stretching the concept of ?competition? to the breaking point, but for me this is clear case of cure being worse than the original complaint.
What I don?t want is the Government sticking its lawyerly political nose in the business battle. Whenever they do something to protect me, the consumer, I know that my wallet will get significantly lighter, but somebody political career is about to take off. Did I mention that lawyers will also get rich in the process? 🙂
Full disclosure: I use both PC and Mac + all sorts software, don?t have any investment in the companies mentioned.
Unrelated to all the OS-fighting above (which I’m too sick of to go into), I wonder what exactly would happen if MS told the EC to “go fuck yourself – and just try and collect that fine, too, Claude!” AFter all, unlike the US, MS lives outside of the EU/EC’s jurisdiction, and doesn’t have to fear for its life if it tells the EC off completely.
Would the EC back down? Or would it halt the sale (and use?) of Microsoft products? If so, what effects woudl that actually have? (I’m suspecting they’d all be more negative for the EU than for MS.)
For that matter, why does anyone even pretend to care about the bundling of Media Player? Do they think they’re fooling anyone? I can’t help but suspect that there’s a European Native (ie, French or German) media company that put them up to this…
There are several issues in this whole Microsoft deal that need to be separated out when the arguments start. (My brother-in-law is a computer person who hates MS, so I’ve heard a lot of it)
First, let’s remember that the reaon MS-DOS sits on top of the heap was that they had purchased an operating system to enter into the competition to provide same for IBM when IBM decided to enter the PC market. There was much comment at the time that IBM was too late, not paying enough attention, etc., but when they finally rolled out the original IBM PC, it quickly became the model for most of the other manufacturers to “clone”. And with that went MS-DOS.
Secondly, the growth of the computer industry, in all its various permutations of software and hardware, was largely unregulated, or even realized by the government, for quite some time.
After it became very clear that a new “automobile” industry was being created, (by which I mean a new product had appeared which was rapidly becoming an integral part of everything we did), various government agents and political folks began to talk about the dangers of monopoly power, and how to regulate and tax the various aspects of computer use that were not covered by existing laws.
Thirdly, Microsoft simply ignored politics for many years, while its competitors cultivated political contacts, and complained loudly that what MS was doing was a matter for anti-trust. The end result was a huge DoJ investigation and several charges from the Federal and States’ Attorneys’ General.
The final result of all of this expense and litigation was, as has been pointed out above, very little in any actual restrictions or penalties on MS, the disappearence of one of the major competitors, and a great deal of wasted time and money. That the statists at the EU decided to stick the boot in after everything was pretty much resolved here is not surprizing.
Finally, a major part of this whole phenomenon which is rarely commented on is the repeated charge over the last 100+ years of anti-trust demagogery that the problem with this or that business is that it has gotten too big and powerful. The charge has been made against the railroads, the oil trusts, the automobile industry, the electronics industry, the telephone/telegraph industry, the computer industry (IBM before PCs), and the software industry.
The most obvious common feature in all these cases is that these very industries exist in some of the most ferociously competitive environments in the historical record. Each has had a short period in which the sun shone very brightly, and then major competiative pressures appeared, either from another part of the industry or from another industry altogether.
The railroads have been a basket case for decades as they attempted to compete with trucks, planes and cars. Several oil companies started up in the same decade that the big Standard Oil trust busting case was going on. The auto industry faces worldwide competition, and the electronics industry in this country has practically disappeared. IBM has had to reinvent itself, and the big case against it literally evaporated as the computer landscape made the entire affair meaningless. Any newspaper contains so many ads for competing telephone services that no one can understand them any more.
In much the same way, the big software case was noise and fury, signifying little and accomplishing less. Along the way, the impression constantly reinforced by political types and media hypesters is that of the evil, huge corporate monster waiting for its chance to devour your children, while, oddly enough, it is providing the average middle class working person with a lifestyle that would be the envy of Augustus Ceasar at the height of the Empire.
The current drumbeat of hatred for the pharmeceutical industry is the latest example of this culture of cutting one’s nose off to spite one’s face. Everybody wants all the newest wonder drugs and treatments, but nobody wants to pay the freight.
The obvious question that needs to be asked repeatedly of the next politico who starts to thunder is: Microsoft employs thousands of well payed people to serve an industry which has revolutionized the entire culture in which we live. How many productive jobs have you created?
veryretired brings up an important point about the railroads, the oil trusts, the automobile industry, the electronics industry, the telephone/telegraph industry, the computer industry (IBM before PCs), and the software industry.
However what if one company had so much power that what they say goes FOR ALL OF THESE INDUSTRIES. The one company has a product that actually enables 90% of all companies to function. Billing, advertising, manufacturing, sales, development, purchasing etc. all controlled by one company. Add gaming, news, songs, video as well into the soup. Oh yeah and the $40bn in the bank. You do have the choice to not use WMP or IE, but what if that was the only way you could connect to news? Or British radio stations from France? Or your bank account? When one looks back a few years wasn’t the breaking up of companies like AT&T of immense benefit in the long run? Does capitalism = choice or monopoly?
And my final thought for the night : if a European company had this much power in the US it would be swiftly cut down. The EU is just trying to reduce its dependence on MS just that little bit.
I do think the market will correct the Microsoft problem, I just wish it didn’t take twenty to thirty years to do it. Microsoft’s dreadful software has held us all back, both those of us who realise it and those who don’t.
Microsoft became big of course, not by making “great software” as Gates vainly puts it, but in fact by catching a piggyback ride on IBM, another dreadful company. IBM is the firm that used its enormous network of typewriter salesmen to discount sell (‘dump’ in economics parlance) computers that were lower quality in the 1950s than the real innovators UniVac. Once UniVac had been killed off by below-cost selling of substandard computers from IBM the comptometer-and-cash-register firm to their uninformed customer base, IBM then clawed back huge profits by “upgrading” (ie ripping off) their customers’ computers at literally hundreds of times real cost – often charging a couple of thousand dollars each year to send over a technician to change one fifty-dollar circuit-board.
In a true irony of government interference meeting market-monopoly abuse, IBM’s predecessor Tabulating Machine got its big start compiling data on the 1890 US census (so IBM is not a triumph or tragedy of the free market, but of the government-procurement-funded freeish market), and it was an anti-trust suit against IBM in the 1970s which led IBM to buy MS-DOS in 1980, instead of developing the software themselves.
So IBM was helped off the hook for its decades of market abuse that imposed lower-quality hardware on the rest of us by helping an obscure company writing substandard code to suddenly gain a partner role in market abuse imposing lower-quality software on the rest of us. Once Microsoft was aboard the IBM machine, it had the market-share snowball rolling, and no-one else could sell a system as compatible with as many machines as MS could, even if it was the worse system – it already had the dominant standard.
The EU is of course a bunch of jealous officials who couldn’t draw a picture of a computer, but I see here two corrupt states in conflict, not a state versus a modest private concern.
Microsoft got its place at the table in time-honoured stateist fashion – by selling something to what conmen have always seen as the real customer, the monopolist with the pull who needs to seem to share so as to stay on top of most of the cake. Microsoft’s rise has more in common with a Rasputin latching onto Nicholas II of Russia’s wife, or a John Law selling a bogus currency scheme to France’s King Louis XV in 1719 than any normal plan of selling a product to lots of discerning small customers investing their own carefully-saved income.
Forget the shrewd little people – find one rich and powerful customer, as big and corrupt as you’d like to be, and suck as many cocks as it takes to sell to him. That’s how Gates got rich.
I object to the EU trying to forcibly remove my freedom to trade. If I want to pay Microsoft money in return for use of their OS, complete with integral browser and media player, then that’s my right and no one can legitimately infringe it. Why should I have to suffer the hassle and expense of changing my OS, and acquiring a different web browser and media player? Who is anyone else to tell me what I can and can’t buy?
Also, how can making an offer to trade be abusive? Assuming one is of sound mind and judgement, it is logically impossible to be worse off having been made an offer, than if one had not been made the offer at all.
Finally, one may force Microsoft to make their product more attractive to consumers, and this may indeed be beneficial to the consumer. But let us be clear – that is no different to saying “Hey, Microsoft has loads of money – let’s slap them with a $20 billion supertax and give it to the man in the street!”.
MS DOS was comparable to CPM in design. In quality Gates didn’t get it right until version 6.X .
I do a lot of hardware oriented computing (control etc.) and if you just use it for utilities (no real time which I handle by turning off interrupts and using a timer in the speaker tone generator system for my real time clock. It is polled but with a 100 MHz processor that is not too big a handicap. ) it is not too bad.
I think his code is ugly and buggy for a reason. It is very complicated code written too quickly without sufficient quality control. This makes it hard to copy with a quality product in a reasonable time.
Any way I still use DOS for development and ROMDOS for embeds. The Windows stuff is only of passing interest to me because of it’s complications and non-realtime nature.
S. Weasel wrote:
The market’s going to have a tough time righting this one, because it’s genuinely much more convenient and cost-effective to have a single OS to deal with (and the alternative products have their own problems). Which is how we got here in the first place.
I disagree. A single operating system isn’t required for convenience and “cost-effectiveness” – what is required are standard protocols, which do exist despite all of Microsoft’s efforts to try to create their own “standards” which conveniently lock people into using Microsoft software. If a single standard OS with a single set of components were the most convenient way for things to operate surely Samizdata.net would be hosted using IIS on Windows rather than Apache on Linux (assuming the majority of Samizdata readers use Windows)?
S. Weasel also wrote:
Even if you want the damn things, the special relationship between the OS and MS applications has awkward consequences. For example, it’s difficult-to-impossible to load multiple versions of Internet Explorer on one machine. No doubt, MS sees that as a feature. If you do web development, though, you very badly need to have all the likely versions of IE around to test on.
I’d rather stick to standards than waste my development time trying to produce content which caters for the various nuances of different versions of Internet Explorer.
The software market traditionally dominated by Microsoft is beginning to change though, spurred on primarily by the recent success of Linux and other free and open source software. (For example, Microsoft recently reduced the price of Microsoft Office in the US – their past record has been to only ever increase the price of Office.)
For those who’ve had enough of Microsoft’s software there are very good (free and open-source) alternative products. I sometimes wonder though whether or not Linux would still be around if it had been a commercial venture which could have been subject to a Microsoft buy-out. Linux and free, open-source software offer a unique type of competitor for Microsoft because they’re not owned and managed by firms in any traditional sense (which has its advantages and disadvantages).
I’m not sure Gates and co are particularly innovative when it comes to software but he and his crew are clearly very good when it comes to business, management and marketing. It’s always worth remembering that under capitalism consumers can only buy what someone else is willing to sell to them – so if Gates insists that “Internet Explorer is part of the Windows product and I won’t sell you Windows without Internet Explorer” there is no right to an Internet Explorer-free version of Windows.
S. Weasel dislikes my implying that he believes Micrsoft forces folk to use his stuff. Sorry Weasel but I was not putting words in your mouth – I was summarising the overall thrust of your initial remarks, which included the word “dominance”. To dominate, in the sense in which Microsoft’s critics would have it, is to impose pressure on customers to use a product. Although using Microsoft is clearly the most convenient thing for many folk to do, it is not the same as being forced to do it.
Sorry if it appeared I was responding to voices in your head, Weasel.
As for the other comments above blasting Gates for how he rose to his billions, I do not know the ins and outs of his story, though I have to say that so much criticism seems to be motivated by sour grapes as to make me sceptical.
Mad Dog Barker says patents and copyrights are a form of tyranny. Interesting point of view. He nicely skates over the issue of how on earth are firms going to have any incentive to innovate if their products are almost immediately ripped off and copied by a competitor.
Of course intellectual property rights in a full-blown libertarian order could and probably would be very different from the government-set rules we have at present. But it would be premature to conclude that no such property rights would exist at all. I don’t think the advent of Napster-style products, for example, necessarily means intellectual property rights are dead.
After all, Mr Mad Dog, ask yourself how you’d feel if you had pioneered a new product, tried to sell it and discovered that Bill Gates had stolen the idea and was making millions. I don’t think you would be talking about property rights = tyranny, somehow.
My concern with this is not so much the fine detail of excatly which OS is better, or exactly how software is bundled, but rather where the EU has simply given itself the power to truncate intellectual property rights – not directly, but by fining people for exercising them in ways that they (the EU) conisder not in the interests of their citizens.
Of course, it’s purely coincidental that the rights they have truncated are those of a gigantic US corporation.
The next step will be the EU unilaterally abrogating patent rights for high-value, low-cost products like drugs and medical equipment.
Intellectual property is always at risk from political games like this because it cannot be contained except by common consent, and is therefore an easy mark for statist governments to mess with.
llater,
llamas
Greetings Jonathen,
I HAVE been in a very similar situation when IBM took and sold one of my products without my license. It was even carrying a copyright sign! There are several other similar cases.
In some cases a member of the “populo picolo” thinks up some contraption and uses it for for some while only to find that in the meantime some corporate wag has patented it. What a joke it is trying to prove “prior knowledge” or independant invention. And above all that why should we have to anyway? If the Americans didn’t like Good King George – why should they like his invention, the patent.
In my case, the fact I had a copyright in my product was ignored by IBM who said (off the record) “look mate if you think you’ve got a case – then sue us”. I actually attempted this mad feat (at great cost) but was discouraged by the request to pay a very substantial surity into court to cover IBMs costs, should I loose my case. Unable to find 140,000 euros in cash I had to abandon the case.
So Jonathen I had developed the product, I had the intellectual property rights, but I am hard pushed to see how it served me.
On the other hand I do not recommend you try infringing one of IBMs copyrights. I am sure you see my point. The number of small guys winning against the big guys is not large. Mr Dyson probably being the notable exception. However the number of big guys trashing small companies that have a good legal claim to their product is quite considerable. There has been NO evidence to suggest that patents or other forms of intellectual property aid or improve the general economy anymore than taxation – so an economic based argument in their support is a bit tenuous.
After all patents are a tax on thinking. If one does not support taxes on labor then there is little credable argument for any such mental taxation.
(IBM lawyers – you know where I live. Look it up in the files. Come on if you think you’re hard enough)
A good example to illustrate the interference governments in “inalienable” intellectual property rights was given during the Anthrax scare during 2001.
In a effort to obtain quantities of the drug Cipro to control any possible outbreak of Anthrax in the U.S.A, the Bush administration said that it would ignore the fact that a German company held the patent to the medicine and produce it at a lower cost in the USA. This was in the “interests of national security”, a lovely statist remark if ever there was one. As the standard (and even reduced charge) offered was “too high a price to pay” for the administration to balance its budgets. Err, a great demonstration of free trade from the defenders of the worlds liberty. It is more typical of the “protectionist” actions of the former communist bloc.
But when American based companies are asked to allow foreign production of cheap drugs for third world HIV sufferes (eventually just as deadly as Antrax) – err, they plead economic collapse of the American pharmaceutical system.
Patents – have your cake and eat it (TM)
Mad Dog, my sympathies. But the upshot of your point is that some corporations can piss all over a person’s or rival firm’s property rights and then get away with it. That surely proves part of your point, namely that the current IP regime is a joke, but I don’t think it necessarily invalidates the idea of IPs such as patents per se.
Intellectual property rights is an enormous topic and clearly the electronic age is testing some of the templates of this notion to breaking point. But should we get rid of it entirely? I think not. After all, there are few arguments against IP that could not be used against property rights more generally, which is why I find it rather odd to see libertarian-minded folk dissing IP in the first place.
I’d rather stick to standards than waste my development time trying to produce content which caters for the various nuances of different versions of Internet Explorer.
If you don’t mind me saying so, well duh. But at the end of the day, once you’ve fried up a fresh batch of your conscientiously conformist html, you’d be a fool not to check how it actually looks on the most common browsers in your logs. No matter how assiduously you follow good coding practice, a table or style sheet may well look different on IE 6 than it does on 4, than Netscape 6 or 4, than Opera, than Galeon, than Mozilla, than Konqueror.
For once, that’s not really a criticism of Microsoft. (Now, Front Page – that’s a criticism of Microsoft).
It’s interesting that Gates has been unable to get his head around the Internet, right from the beginning.
mad dog barker –
I would be interested to see more of your thoughts surrounding this statement:
‘There has been NO evidence to suggest that patents or other forms of intellectual property aid or improve the general economy anymore than taxation’.
It would appear that your dispute with IBM took place in Europe. I venture to suggest that you would not have found such roadblocks in your way had you been able to bring suit in the US. My employer just got done with a huge patent-infringement lawsuit, in which I was personally involved, where a single disgruntled ex-employee with virtually no resources whatever (and no case, but that’s another matter) kept us tied up in the courts for over a decade and cost us millions of dollars in defence. He did it all on a contingent-fee basis. The requirements for bonds or sureties under the English/European ‘loser-pays’ system is a not-often-discussed drawback.
Your Cipro example is a good one, although you neglect to mention that the US Government had the power to do what they threatened to do in the US under 28 USC 1498 – use by and for the government. In the immediate aftermath of the anthrax attacks and 9/11, their threat to do so might be seen as necessary. You’ll note that, when things got a little clearer, the threat was not used.
However, I think you fall down when you contrast that with US drug companies trying to protect their patent rights. If it was/is wrong for the US government to threaten to take away the patent rights of a foreign drug company (Bayer), then it is just as wrong for foreign governments to attempt to take away the patent rights of US drug companies. US drug companies and the US government are not the same thing – thank heavens.
llater,
llamas
OK, first off, I think we can all agree that the EU trying to solve the Microsoft problem will probably be about as effective as trying to solve global warming with nukes. And I certainly cannot imagine a clean government solution to this problem. But it IS a problem.
I think Jonathan and mad dog are both right. All but the most ardent anarchists can see value in copywrite & patent laws or intellectual property rights in general. But, in both the U.S. and EU, these laws are being used in a tyrannical way. They are being used by Goliath to trounce on David. Worse, and in almost complete violation of traditional view of IP rights, they are being used to LIMIT CUSTOMER CHOICE.
Sure, you don’t have to compete with Microsoft. You know you can write your own MP3 player or your own browser. And you can still make it to run on Windows. But, to do so, you have to buy a product (let’s assume we are all getting our software legally for the sake of argument) that exposes the Windows API. Someone, somewhere HAD to pay a license fee to get access to that API (for the unitiated, the API is simply what you need to get your programs to talk to windows). Sure, you can talk about choice, but you are an idiot if you choose not to develope for Windows when making a piece of softare (OK, idiot is harsh, you are just a niche player if you avoid windows). These are expenses you have to foot that MS does not.
I certainly do not think MS should be punished for having a dominant OS. Unlike some others here, I actually think it is a very good OS (granted, it took it a while to get it right). But what the libertarians need to understand is that this isn’t simply a debate about choice. You can’t run a piece of softare without an OS. The problem with Microsoft is not Windows, but it is in the way it leverages windows that creates an enormous barriar to entry for anyone who wants to compete head to head. A barriar to entry that simply does not exists for MS in non-OS markets.
This is how well the software world works for MS. Unless you want to participate in just the Mac or Linux world, TO COMPETE with Microsoft YOU HAVE TO PAY MICROSOFT. Clever huh? Why is this? Because, you have to buy Windows, or Microsoft developer licenses to develop for Windows.
Moreover, you want to get an idea about corporate tyranny? Read a Microsoft license agreement of the last 2 years. Particularly, read enterprise agreements for big companies.
Sure, companies could avoid these license agreements by just going with Linux. But, the costs to do so is prohibitives (new software licenses, support licenses, some hardware purchases, and don’t forget the training and human resource costs). And because MS has a monopoly position their licenses can now REQUIRE upgrades. Well, a lot of companies aren’t biting. But instead of switching to another platform, they simply aren’t upgrading AT ALL. That’s why MS is making upgrades a requirement because they are quickly learning that corporate upgrade cycles are slowing down dramatically. So, yes the market is solving the problem, but not by expanding choice or buying competitor products, but rather they are not buying ANYTHING (and we wonder why the U.S Tech economy is sputtering). OK, that’s enough disjointed comments for now. I’ll try to keep each post on a single aspect of this topic. As a quick read of this thread will show, this is not a simple cut and dry discussion between consumer choice, monopolies and government intervention. As S.Weasel tried to note this is a fairly unprecedented situation.
S. Weasel’s car example is quite apt. In fact to build on his socks example, MS basically says you can have the socks for free, although you are free to buy socks from another company as long as that company has a “works with Ford cars label.”
Because of Microsoft’s dominant OS position and dominant Office suite position, they can charge very high prices for those pieces of software. The margins on these two product groups are almost unattainable in any other industry. Because of that profit, they can lose money at almost every other market. Remember a few years back when you could get a “free computer” by simply agreeing to a two year contract for MSN? Could any other company afford a promotion like this? No, of course not. How did they afford it? Windows & Office profit margins, which, oh BTW, happen to come installed on those new computers (at least Windows did).
I cannot think of another industry that had a company not only developea standard but be able to charge a fee for competitors to use that standard. And that one company who could both AFFORD to pay the license for that standard DIDN”T HAVE TO.
Yes, MS has possibly the savviest business minds the world has ever seen. And, to their credit, unlike other monopolists they have not (necessarily) rested on their laurels. They have tried to improve the product. But, please don’t be such a starry eyed fan of free markets and not recognize that they use their monopoly position to bludgeon both competitors and customers, with the full knowledge that those customers and competitors are likewise DEPENDENT on Microsoft products. This is why this is not analogous to any other industry that I can think of.
And don’t say railroads are analogous. Railroads dealt largely with tangible assets. When dealing software, you are dealing almost exclusive with intellectual property, property that is intagible.
That’s why licenses (i.e. a legal document) is the actual product. To copy that license breaks the law. To avoid paying the license fee breaks the law. To resell the license is breaking the law (did you know reselling your OEM version of Win98 on ebay is technically a violation, even if you no longer intend to use it? Read the license) If you actually read these licenses, you’ll see that sometimes buying a competors product breaks the license, which can cause a lawsuit (so for all intents and purposes, it’s breaking the law). Just one example. Schools that want to have both Macs & Windows machines actually pay MS a windows license for each MAC THEY PURCHASE. Don’t believe me? Read the license. What’s the solution? No idea. But, please don’t feed me any philosophical stuff about the market deciding. Like mark said, I’d prefer it not take twenty to thirty years.
I’m sorry, but way too much of this crying is reminiscent of the whining “Why is Reardon the only one allowed to make Reardon Metal?”.
Those of you who relentlessly demand that government save you from big, bad MS should quietly sit down some where and total up all the dead from all the governments “saving” of people from big, mean capitalists throughout the last horrendous century. Then add up all the people Bill Gates has had killed to sell MS-DOS.
The answer should penetrate even the most confirmed statist mind that government coercion to “solve” the MS problem quickly is not the solution.
Heaven forbid someone should have to wait until a difficulty is worked out by free men acting freely. Much better to put a gun to the problem’s head and make an offer he can’t refuse.
I have to respect veryretired’s shrewd point about MS not having killed anyone. But this thread has made me think – elsewhere recently I made the mistake of calling the Catholic Church a state. So what can we call organisations like the Catholic Church and Microsoft if they are not actually states?
I can’t help thinking states are not the only enemies of liberty – there are also organisations doing anti-libertarian things by getting states to do the nasty enforcement bit for them.
On the topic of the railway gauge comparison, everyone in England agreed that Isombard Kingdom Brunel’s 7-foot gauge on his 19th-century Western railway trains offered a better, smoother ride than the by-then standard of 4-feet-8-and-a-half-inches, the one we still have. But Brunel was too late – the inferior standard was entrenched and market forces alone compelled him after a few years to change all his hundreds of miles of track back to the narrower gauge to avoid going out of business.
I can agree that running to Mummy State is not the solution for righting every wrong. But these are wrongs – so what are we going to do?
Why don’t we tryy to think of another way of tackling problems like unfair semi-monopolies without calling in air support from the ever-ambitious, many-tentacled state?
S. Weasel wrote:
If you don’t mind me saying so, well duh. But at the end of the day, once you’ve fried up a fresh batch of your conscientiously conformist html, you’d be a fool not to check how it actually looks on the most common browsers in your logs. No matter how assiduously you follow good coding practice, a table or style sheet may well look different on IE 6 than it does on 4, than Netscape 6 or 4, than Opera, than Galeon, than Mozilla, than Konqueror.
You make a fair point. Admittedly, whilst I maintain that well-developed open standards which promote interoperability should be respected by any professional as he goes about developing web content and software (something Microsoft clearly aren’t too keen on – you mentioned FrontPage, I’ll mention Visual Studio with the likes of Visual C++) it’s no good if 90% of the people viewing your website are using Internet Explorer and Microsoft have decided against sticking to W3C standards. However, even without a strong rival to Internet Explorer, which Netscape provided in the mid-1990s, Internet Explorer has slowly become more standards-compliant, for whatever reason – which means I don’t like to hassle myself with maintaing different versions of pages for Internet Explorer and for Mozilla/Netscape/Opera. I test my HTML with Konqueror 3.1 (which seems to be not fully standards-compliant and therefore suits the role of IE-testing) and Mozilla 1.4 and whilst my pages sometimes don’t render quite as I intended in Internet Explorer (the best way of testing seems to be to ask a few IE-using friends to visit the page), they do come out clean and readable, which is a step-up from in the mid-late-1990s when Microsoft were trying to push their own set of HTML tags ahead of agreed standards and many website developers were having to write two versions of their pages.
S. Weasel also wrote:
It’s interesting that Gates has been unable to get his head around the Internet, right from the beginning.
I get the impression that Gates is a businessman, not a geek. (It’s also worth bearing in mind that DOS and Windows were never designed for multiuser or network operation so Gates was probably hoping the Internet didn’t take off so soon because none of Microsoft’s products were designed with something like the Internet in mind, which is why most of the Internet’s content is served by Apache and the Unices – increasingly: Linux. Even today, the latest version of Windows is hardly multiuser or networkable in the way that Linux and UNIX OSes are.)