Ian Lynch wrote:
A school here rang me to say they had had a visit by FAST. UK version of
BSA. They were threatened with death if they had any pirate software and
then offered some software for £5000 to check and audit their servers.
That sounds to me very like extortion. At least demanding money with
menaces. Still probably difficult to prove in a court of law so morally
questionable rather than illegal.
That is unquestionably extortion and illegal. It would get you prison
time here on conviction. I have no idea why you would type that last
sentence; "...morally questionable rather than illegal." I would hazard
to bet that they weren't really from FAST but were merely garden-variety
criminals claiming to be to attempt extortion.
We really need to reserve some, if not most or all, or our
disapprobation for the politicians which aid and abet this nonsense.
We are all politicians as soon as we are part of a marketing project
that advocates a product.
Whatever. You know what I mean; Congress, Parliament... the guys that
make laws.
Some things that Microsoft has done *are* illegal, but it's kind of a
fuzzy situation in that these same actions wouldn't be illegal if they
had less market share.
If my aunty had balls she'd be my uncle.
And if they were fuzzy she'd be a monkey's uncle... or a tennis player. :)
If the law is to be respected,
its not a matter of being fuzzy. Its either breaking the law or it isn't
as determined by a court.
Unfortunately, that's after the fact. The law isn't a logical system of
axioms and theorems where you can plug in the values of variables and
come to a mathematical conclusion. If it were, there would be no such
thing as a split decision in judicial tribunals. Honest men can honestly
disagree.
If you want to be fuzzy, then the FAST example
above could be just as easily argued to be the mafia on the same basis.
I would suspect they really *were* the mafia pretending to be FAST. Or
perhaps just some petty criminals.
So phrases like "convicted monopolist"... I'm not
even sure what the hell that means.
It means that a court of law found them guilty of breaking the laws
related to abuse of monopoly.
I'm glad that's what you meant; too many on these lists seem to think
that MS is illegal simply by being a monopoly.
Abuse is defined by the legislation pretty clearly. For
companies with large legal departments, its inconceivable that they do
not know what they are doing. They are playing calculated risks hoping
the benefit outweighs the downside and to hell with everyone else. The
only real fault with the law from a technical point of view is that the
penalties are often not severe enough to deter the law breaking.
Well first of all, we're not talking about the same bodies of law -- UK
vs US. My impression on it over here is that we don't have terribly
strong laws in that regard. And when an action is taken, it tends to
drag on interminably and usually comes to an unsatisfying conclusion.
The last really strong action against a major corp that I can recall was
the breakup of the Bell system.
While the wording of the law may be clear, many of the underlying
concepts aren't. What constitutes abuse of monopoly power? It's sort of
like art, you know it when you see it, but it can be hard to solidly define.
It's a strange situation when something that's legal for me to do today
is illegal tomorrow
Having sex with a girl one day below the minimum age of consent is
illegal to-day but not tomorrow. This type of thing happens in the law
all the time because lines have to be drawn somewhere.
But at least you can conclusively prove the age of the girl in question
from a birth certificate. Here we're talking about making a judgment on
whether a company is "big enough" or has "enough" market share to
warrant the designation of monopoly. I believe that Microsoft *is* a
monopoly based on the definition I gave earlier -- more of a functional
definition than a numerical one. But others will point out that there
are literally dozens or even hundreds of competing OS's, depending on
how you count the Linux distros, so Windows obviously cannot be a monopoly.
In the U.S. we highly value a free, competitive, market-place.
But unfortunately you have one that is increasingly bound up in
litigation. I believe the US has more lawyers per capita than anywhere
else in the world. Still if the society is a democracy and the law is
based on that democracy its a bit facile to then say that the law is
fuzzy so it OK to break it. It can just as easily be argued that a
market dominated by a monopoly is anything but free.
What I'm saying is that the laws aren't particularly strong to start
with and the definitions of illegal behavior are subjective enough that
these trials normally drag on for years. Just launching an action by the
Justice Dept. is a major operation and politics are a major factor.
--
Rod
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