Posts by Mark Stewart

Comet 'sold 94,000 pirate Windows CDs', claims Microsoft

I think most of the posts are almost right

Haven't read all the posts to this but this is how it should be...

If you look at the shiny original Microsoft Windows disc it states to not make copies of its software. I believe Comet probably just ignored this thinking that they were doing a service to their customers in good faith whilst thinking they could just side step this teeny weenie little copyright since they were doing it on behalf of the customer.

Comet could have avoided this legal wrangle if they bothered to contact Microsoft in the first place and requested to have the right to make such copies for their customers as a service. Charging a fee for this service is not the argument in this case. Dell and other companies charge a fee to create discs for their customers so to cover things like manufacturing, power, labour costs etc.

Microsoft is probably not concerned about getting a kick back or anything due to these discs being made but because Comet didn't seek an exemption to start with. This is where the legal wrangle centres around.

So to summarise:

Comet made discs illegally because they didn't seek Microsoft's approval to start with. Therefore Microsoft sued them because of it. Comet could have avoided this by asking for approval to start with.

End result: Comet will settle out of court as they know Microsoft will ultimate win this argument.

This is not petty on Microsoft's behalf. This is simply doing business and in business, you do things properly.

Jobs: 'I'll spend my dying breath destroying Android'

That is to say that IF he offered $5 billion.

Oz watchdogs howl over 'Cyber-Safety' net filter

Don't Look Up Down Under! You might find a nasty surprise!

Before we know it our freedoms will be masked with the governments "good intentions".

I'd hate to say this is one of the worst schemes ever come up by our so called democratic government. They will try to implement this new content filtering system and discover that it is a lot harder than they'd imagine and will have budget blowouts typical of any project undertaken by the goverment.

The government will push on claiming it is in the best interests of our country where they'll subvertly start talking about filtering terrorist content and anything which may be considered dangerous to us as a country.

Then citizens of our great country will start complaining that normal websites are being content blocked and there is no way to get it unblocked. After much time and lobbying, the goverment will be forced to put in a system dedicated to solely looking after the complaints and there will be another cost to the system which will be taxpayer funded.

Then after many years of futile attempts to protect us from ourselves they discover not only did it not stop all the pornography from coming through but there was a free service out on the net which does a reasonable job of what they set out to achieve in the first place.

OpenDNS.com will be considered the defacto standard in content filtering and will be recommended by the government for householders and ISPs where parents are concerned about what their children look at on the net.

So then it will all come back to this. Parents should be the one responsible for looking after their children and if they have such concerns they should take the appropriate measures to make sure that their children are not able to search for porn.