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Microsoft's only sin here...Microsoft's only sin here...Posted Jul 20, 2006 21:03 UTC (Thu) by kmw (guest, #38039)Parent article: Free Software Sets the Computing Agenda
...is its refusal to stand up for its right to offer its products as it
As the eminent 20th-century Russian-American philosopher Ayn Rand proved,
And before you all scream, "Microsoft isn't a person, it's a company!",
I suggest you all read http://www.capmag.com/article.asp?ID=4730
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"Microsoft isn't a person, it's a company!" Posted Jul 21, 2006 6:19 UTC (Fri) by xoddam (subscriber, #2322) [Link] > Microsoft's only sinNo-one is accusing a company of a sin; the concept is a nonsense. Companies are mechanisms for profit, they don't exist in any moral sphere. They do exist in a *legal* sphere. For instance, Microsoft exists in a legal environment where individuals' right to make copies is severely restricted by the power of the state. > Who owns companies? Who runs them? Who works for them? The state provides a mechanism whereby individuals may collectively engage in enterprise for profit and be shielded from individual responsibility for the debts and crimes of the company. Corporations are established under and protected by the law. If a corporation breaks the law, sanctions apply against the collective and to its legal officers who have voluntarily taken this responsibility, not to random individual shareholders and employees as you seem to imply. Protections afforded to people and companies by the state are things like monopolies on copyrights and patents. Without rigorous state enforcement of the copyright law (with such sanctions as fines for companies and imprisonment for individuals), Microsoft would be worthless. It is only fair that Microsoft should also pay a penalty for its violation of legal orders. > no majority is entitled to trample on the rights of the individual While we could debate all day the niceties of whether the state has a right to enforce its laws or to exist at all, or whether it represents a majority or merely a ruling class, that's utterly irrelevant to companies and courts which take the legal framework as an *axiom*. Individuals are forced to play by the rules all the time. The degree to which force is applied to lawbreaking individuals by the state is usually in inverse proportion to personal wealth. The same applies to corporations, so it's nice to see the law being applied with such a heavy hand against such a big company, for a change. Whether the fine will ever actually be paid is a separate issue. (There's a much more subtle question, as to the validity of antitrust laws, which the article you link to mentions but which doesn't seem to be part of your own argument. The essence of antitrust is that the state arrogates the right to collect taxes to itself: private interests aren't entitled to impose their own taxes. So here's a better question: should Microsoft have the 'right' to impose the Microsoft Tax?)
"Microsoft isn't a person, it's a company!" Posted Jul 21, 2006 15:39 UTC (Fri) by kmw (guest, #38039) [Link] Your argument rests on the false assumption that intellectual property,copyrights, trademarks, and patents are mere legal constructs.
They are not.
They are objective moral principles--rights inherent to all creations
Furthermore, rights are not something that can be "granted" or "revoked",
Furthermore, your characterization of the supposedly inflated end-user
Second, your understanding of what a "tax" is is completely wrong. A tax
Your assertion that Microsoft does not exist in a moral sphere is also
Finally, obedience to the law is not a virtue in its own sake. There is
Certainly, the state may be able to get away with enforcing illegitimate
"Microsoft isn't a person, it's a company!" Posted Jul 21, 2006 16:28 UTC (Fri) by zlynx (subscriber, #2285) [Link] Copyright and other intellectual property may be a moral right, in that we believe people have a right to profit from the work they do.
However, the precise amount of profit and the limits of control certainly are mere legal constructs. These are specifics that everyone disagrees with but can usually compromise on.
For example, an artist may have a moral right to profit from a song she has written. However, does she have that right for 25 years or life? What are the limits to what she can charge? Does she have any right to control the uses of her song once she sells a copy?
These specifics are not moral rights.
Copyrights, trademarks and patents have a basis in a moral right to benefit from our own work but the specifics are mere legal constructs. Therefore, xoddam makes no false assumptions.
"Microsoft isn't a person, it's a company!" Posted Jul 21, 2006 21:15 UTC (Fri) by giraffedata (subscriber, #1954) [Link] Copyright and other intellectual property may be a moral right, in that we believe people have a right to profit from the work they do. Furthermore, the moral aspect of copyrights and patents are almost never what we're talking about when we speak of copyrights and patents. We're nearly always talking about the laws. Those laws were written with no consideration of a person's moral right to his creations, but rather with a pragmatic social engineering goal. Copyright laws create legal rights out of thin air, with no pretense that they're founded on moral rights.
"Microsoft isn't a person, it's a company!" Posted Jul 21, 2006 22:05 UTC (Fri) by giraffedata (subscriber, #1954) [Link] As a corporation lawyer, I have to take this opportunity to tighten up some of the terminology.A company is a group of people working together. Often, what they're working on is a business, and they're employees of someone. A corporation is a legal construct that helps us write and enforce laws that involve large groups of people. The kind of corporation most people think of when they hear the term is a business corporation, in which case the large group of people are investors in a business. (Other kinds of corporations include charities and governments). In the case of a business such as Microsoft, "company" refers to the employees, not the investors. A company is not a legal entity. You can't sue one or make a contract with one. It isn't property; you can't legally buy or sell a company. (When we loosely refer to buying a company, we either mean buying the assets of the company or buying the corporation that operates the company). The way a corporation works is that the law treats it in many ways like a person, separate from the persons who are actually members of it. That way, millions of words of laws that have been developed to apply to a single businessman can be instantly adapted to apply to a group of a thousand investors as well. This, I believe, leads non-lawyers to think of the corporation as an actual person separate from the investors -- one who has emotions and personality, conscience and survival instinct. That's a mistake. Fining the Microsoft corporation means fining Microsoft shareholders; that's all. Each shareholder becomes poorer, and it's to recoup riches that reached that shareholder illicitly and to punish him for hiring directors and giving them money with which to do evil.
Thanks Posted Jul 24, 2006 2:24 UTC (Mon) by xoddam (subscriber, #2322) [Link] This clarification is much appreciated. I was aware of non-corporateuses of the term 'company', but not of its definition. > (When we loosely refer to buying a company, we either mean buying the > assets of the company or buying the corporation that operates the > company) If the company is simply the group of people who work together, wouldn't it be clearer to say that we mean either to buy the assets the company works with or to buy the corporation which *employs* the company? Or is 'operating' a group of people legitimate (and more general) legalese?
Thanks Posted Jul 24, 2006 3:31 UTC (Mon) by giraffedata (subscriber, #1954) [Link] I oversimplified the definition of company a little. It isn't exactly the collection of people -- it's the enterprise they're engaging in. The group of workers is the essence of it, but a (business) company is definitely said to have assets -- the things the employer owns that the workers use to do their thing. But the important thing is that there is no crisp legal definition of company because it isn't a legal entity -- not like for example a partnership. That's why lawyers get so much money for closing deals to sell a company -- it takes a lot of work to figure out just what is getting sold. And many are the small claims complaints I've seen get rejected because the defendant is named as "Joe's Garage." You can't sue somebody's garage. You have to sue Joe. It seems to me that the word "business" is replacing "company" in legal discussions, and it may be because people are not as fundamental to a business as they once were. I'll throw in one more tidbit: A company often has a name, one that is registered with the government, and that still doesn't make it a legal entity. Such a name is known in law as a "fictitious business name," and is nothing more than an alias for the person (or equivalent) who operates the company. On legal papers, it would say, "Acme Wastewater Treatment Inc. doing business as Woodland Spring Mineral Waters."
"Microsoft isn't a person, it's a company!" Posted Jul 22, 2006 2:51 UTC (Sat) by irwinr (guest, #39286) [Link] --snip---"Your argument rests on the false assumption that intellectual property, copyrights, trademarks, and patents are mere legal constructs.
They are not.
They are objective moral principles--rights inherent to all creations
Oh yeah? Prove it. If the law didn't force people to obey a certain way, they would not. If there were no law, and someone was holding a gun at your head because you pissed them off, and you said "You are obligated to spare my life because it is my right to live..." They would laugh at you and say "Says who?"
Rights ARE granted, and they are granted because the majority believes they should be 'rights' and thus a government is established to protect those rights. A 'Right' is a human idea. What is, or is not a 'right' can not be proven by any kind of experiment. You only have the rights you have because society deems it so and elects government officials who agree.
--snip---
Take an economics class. In a monopolistic environment, the rules for supply and demand are bent in such a way that demand is not as elastic, and therefore the monopolist can charge much more without greatly decreasing demand for it's products. Why? Because users have no choice, they buy from the monopolist or they do without significant and important technological innovations. (In this case, computers in general)
In this case, Microsoft was handed a monoply by IBM. Microsoft did not earn it's 90% market share by having the best product, it got there by being in the right place, at the right time. That, in and of itself, was not illegal. However, Microsoft abused their monopolistic position. They used illegal tactics to prevent competitors from being able to enter the market, and in economies that are based on a free market, such as in the US and the EU, this is ILLEGAL for good reasons.
The Microsoft "tax" was indeed a tax. Why? Because if you didn't pay it, not only did you not receive Windows, but you were denied the ability to use your computer at all. Alternative software for other operating systems didn't exist (And in some cases still doesn't) because Windows held a 95% market share. Microsoft adopted the practice of not only making it's products completely incompatible with anyone elses, they also hid the details of these incompatibilities, and forced you to agree not to try to reverse engineer them or face civil and/or criminal charges.
Essentially, this would be like a car manufacturer creating a new type of hitch, and telling people they can't look at how the hitch is made, and no-one is allowed to create a 'bridge' that allows other hitches to connect to it. This type of behavior would be considered absurd in any other industry, but Microsoft got away with it for years. It has severely hurt technological innovation in this area, as other operating systems with more and better features, are unable to get the neccessary user support and funding neccessary to continue innovating, because they can't run software or even open files that were created using Microsoft products. These activities in and of themselves are not that bad, because there's nothing wrong with Microsoft wanting to keep secret it's own technologies. However, taken in the big picture, it just adds to the big list of Microsoft bully tactics.
Microsoft used a catch-22 to hold it's monopolistic position:
Make sure no competing products can be compatible with Microsoft products.
Make sure that no major OEM distributor can sell a competing product, or even bundle competing products along with Microsoft products.
It is literally impossible for any company to introduce a product to compete with this, because Microsofy even ensured that 3rd party programs that ran on Windows could ONLY run on Windows. So even if I invented a great new OS, it wouldn't run ANY of the existing software on the market. So why would anyone buy it? And because no-one will buy it and use it, none of the developers of those 3rd party programs will spend the massive amount of development it would take to essentially re-write their programs to run on this alternative OS.
Microsoft also forced OEM's to sell Windows on ALL their computers. It would not sell Windows to an OEM at all unless they agreed to this. And because there were few alternative products, none of which could run the software that users were demanding (Because Microsoft made sure that software could only run on Windows). OEM's were faced with a choice: Sell ONLY Windows, or go out of business.
Microsoft took many technologies that it did not own, (Java as an example), modified the format of the technology, rebranded it as it's own and bundled it with Windows in order to completely stomp out the company that created the technology. Lukcily, with Java, their contractual obligations with Sun explicitly prohibited this, and they got sued and were forced to stop. Do you feel Microsoft was wronged here too?
--snip---
First of all, just because someone wrote it in a book, does not mean it was 'proven'. Secondly, Microsoft's monopolistic practices put hundreds of businesses out of business. I guess according to your philosopher, those private profits were not as important as Microsoft's? What about the users who get the shaft when they're paying for a product that should be 1/3 the price they charge? What about society as a whole when technological innovation slows to a crawl because once you have a monopoly, and you literally control the market, you have no incentive to innovate. I guess everyone else is screwed because Microsoft should be allowed to own and control each and every one of us? What about everyone ELSE's rights here?
--snip---
I don't think I have ever read anything so short sighted, or just plain dumb. Who determines if a law is illegitimate? Tell me? I'm listening... Everyone has different morals. If someone decides it's 'moral' to kill someone for no reason, does that make it alright? I'm sorry, but you can not just 'decide' a law is legitimate or not, and then decide to obey or not to obey it. No-one can say a law is legitimate or not, and it be fact. That statement will always be an opinion, regardless of who says it or why. You can not prove or disprove the legitimacy of a law without using other laws as a reference. Society decides whether laws are legitimate or not by who they elect to public office. And even then, it's not 'proven' or 'fact', it's a consensus by the people of that society that the law should be how it is.
There are people in other countries that will say that you should not have the right to free speech, or that you should not have the right to earn a private profit, or the right to choose ones own religion. What makes them wrong and you right? We only have those 'rights' because humans fought and died for them, and because humans established a government to protect them. People like you disgust me, because you think that you have your rights just because you exist, or because some philosopher says so. If you feel that way, move to North Korea, or Iran, and let me know what they think about your obligation to your rights.
In this case, Microsoft broke the laws defined by society, knowing full well it was doing so. It is now paying the price for those actions. If you think that's wrong, too bad. Get a new set of legislatures elected... Otherwise you and Microsoft can take yourselves and go somewhere where these laws don't apply to you.
-Jeremy
"Microsoft isn't a person, it's a company!" Posted Jul 22, 2006 7:11 UTC (Sat) by h2 (guest, #27965) [Link] There's no point in trying to argue with someone who thinks ayn rand is a 'preemininent philosopher'. Author of mediocre novels, yes.
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