Looks too much like them there gay acronyms (LGBT, etc.) for Sen. Coburn.
Not necessarily. I suspect that it has a lot more to do with reducing the acronym confusion that revolves around government. He probably figures that other senators (who haven't been known for their technical competence) would see LMGTFYA and would think it has something to do with the military or social security. The White House may know what LMGTFY or ROTFLMAO means, but I think you might find it hard to find a Senator that doesn't have to ask their interns what those acronyms mean.
Is the open beer in the cup holder visible from outside of the vehicle? If so, I think *that* would be justification in pulling you over. Most states have really well written open container laws (as in, you have an open container in your car, in the passenger compartment.)
However, people swerve all the time, and usually for legitimate reasons (making room for the motorcycle illegally lane-splitting at 90 mph, road debris, etc.) Someone swerving in their lane doesn't really tell you that they are drunk or just avoiding an obstacle on the road. Even swerving once or twice over the fog-line, or over the lane divider doesn't really tell you much (tire tread from a truck can break into multiple pieces, and is usually bad for your tires.) When they swerve into the right lane, then swerve into the left lane, then drive down the road occupying two lanes, it is a pretty good bet. Usually you have to follow someone for a while to determine if they may be DUI or maybe falling asleep.
Either Netflix (or other service) has permission to deliver to their subscribers the products they're requesting or Netflix doesn't. How it gets there shouldn't be a matter for debate.
It shouldn't, but it is, and the reason it is so is because of the interpretation of the law in physical land vs on the internet (like everything else.) For physical land, the mailman is delivering a piece of plastic. The piece of plastic contains a copy of the movie which has been licensed ahead of time to the owner/possessor of the piece of plastic. On the internet, there is no piece of plastic, and thus, the producer limits their license to allow for it to be distributed only during particular times/reasons.
Congress will need to fix the law to prevent the copyright maximalists from differentiating the two (which they won't, because their paymasters don't want the current system to change.)
What would be really interesting is to see Hollywood's current model for online distribution pushed into the physical realm (which they've already tried to do a number of times, to limited success.) Imagine Hollywood having a system in place where that piece of plastic wouldn't work if an exclusive window was entered or if the movie was deemed to be no longer worth distributing. DRM at its worse. I suspect that is really what AACS is about...not preventing piracy, but enforcing windowing in a physical medium (hence the required callback mechanism when a Bluray is played.)
I guess the order and combination of such notes from different instruments in different rhythms is what makes each music different so in the end what you actually "own" is your own, live performance of that song and the cultural bonus of being associated with it.
Most songs are amazingly similar to one another, using the same chords and chord progression (google Axis of Awesome's awesome music video 4 chord song.) Throw in the fact that we humans tend to forget where we got tunes from, and it is really surprising you don't have much more copyright infringement lawsuits for "the same music."
Doesn't this fall under "other accounts" of the game? Still illegal (if you believe fair use clips are illegal).
Every time I hear that said during a broadcast of a MLB game, I laugh. Talk about fraud...facts cannot be copyrighted (though there are a few judges that have disagreed,) and thus reporting accounts of the game should not be actionable.
According to their statement, me saying the Padres lost yesterday (opening day) 3 to 2 against the Dodgers would leave me in a world of hurt, along with Techdirt (though I doubt MLB would try to pursue it,) even though all I am saying is facts about an event (that shouldn't be copyrightable.)
And at least MLB pays their athletes. Not a single dime goes to the NCAA athletes.
Copyright holder loses copyright to work they claimed was infringed
Even better after 3 strikes/5 strikes, copyright holder loses all copyrights, all work in their possession enters the public domain, and they are forbidden from taking new copyrights until they sit through an hour long web-based course on proper copyright etiquette made by the Open Source community. Kind of like a reverse "bad-uploaders" Content-ID system.
Hey, it works for the copyright maximalists, should work fine against them too.
Before the DMCA, you could buy and distribute cracking tools.
I am confused. How does the DMCA prevent UK residents from buying and distributing cracking tools? Sure, if they are trying to buy them from US companies or distribute them to US citizens, they might have problems with US law enforcement agencies trying to enforce their laws on foreign countries, but the DMCA should have no barring on UK citizens.
Are you suggesting that atomic energy is as boring as copyright?
Not at all, though I'd put the atomic energy (now nuclear energy) merit badge on the same level as the computer merit badge when it comes to stuff in Boy Scouts which isn't needed in order to obtain your Eagle Scout rank and is included to give you options to make you a well rounded scout.
I don't know why I didn't get my computer merit badge (actually, I have to go back and look, because maybe I did)...at the time I was really into computers. The Atomic Energy badge fell into my lap because the troop had a counselor who worked for a nuclear plant and many of the scouts worked together to get the badge. The reason I remember the atomic energy one was because it was the omg we're all going to die nuclear symbol and I thought that was cool.
Actually most of the merit badges, even the ones we were required to get, were kinda boring, now that I think of it (this was more than 25 years ago.)
I can't remember a single session of D&D that hasn't been hilarious. I knew a few people over the years who did take the game serious, but I'd usually stop playing with them. Still get a kick over the game where one character through rocks at a tree, which landed near another character, and the hilarity ensued (which led to even more a couple years later when we saw Peter Jackson's Two Towers take, with the rock throwing Ents.
Each new iteration is what it always has been, people getting upset about other people sitting around the campfire telling ghost stories, usually because they didn't get involved in the fun themselves. My parents were happy I was socializing...
"After all, you don't give someone a car and tell them to go drive without any training."
Actually, in some states, you can. If you manage to pass the tests, they give you your driver's license. In California, you have the practical test with the DMV agent, but they can be fairly lenient. I know of a few people who never took driver training classes, but studied the book, passed the written test, barely passed the practical, and have been driving for 20 years now (and some of them I will not ride with because they are really, really dangerous.
But even then, there are many things from a security standpoint that you never hear in college computer classes. In my CS curriculum, there was only one class I took specifically related to security, and it was mostly cryptography, and a couple classes indirectly related to security (networking, system admin.) I had to learn to hack and defend myself, on my own.
"If they're clicking on "invoice.pdf" when it's really "invoice.pdf.exe", then shouldn't some of the blame fall on Microsoft for hiding the actual file type?"
Microsoft should bear most, if not all, of the blame. If you are going to hide something from me, the user, you better have a really good reason for doing so. Which is why I don't use Microsoft at home. I never have a problem with seeing invoice.pdf.exe (and with WINE locked down, it won't run .exe anyway.)
"Third, I would tell people to never, ever click on a link that comes from a "bank" or PayPal. Even if it looks 100% legit, always open a new browser window, log in, and check your account."
I wouldn't either. Well, at least until I got a bank that only supported their online stuff through email (you had to go through so much effort to get a live support person on the phone, and even then, the person you got was from half way around the world and couldn't understand what you were asking for even though both of you spoke English,) and they would send you important stuff like temporary passwords through unencrypted email with links to change your password (from one of the largest banks in the US.) When you have no control over who your mortgage gets sold off to and the only way to get away from them is to spend more money to refinance your loan, only to get sold right back to them, sometimes you have to change your standards.
"It's not a merit badge. It isn't even a national badge -- it is one optional patch offered by one local council."
The copyright maximalists stuff was added to the Computer merit badge. It may have been added elsewhere too.
What is interesting is, in the worksheet released in 2014 for this badge, they specifically ask scouts to define freeware and shareware, but not creative-commons, open-source, or the difference between GPL and BSD licenses and their derivatives.
I haven't been a Boy Scout or associated with BSA in 20+ years, so all I have is what they publish.
"On the upside, scouting offers lots of merit badges."
As a proud owner of the scouting "Atomic Energy" badge, not all of the boring optional merit badges were largely ignored by scouts. I wore it proudly next to my Camping, Orienteering, Swimming, Hiking, Lifesaving, and First Aid badges.
For the Boy Scouts, they added the copyright stupidity to the existing requirements for the Computer merit badge (which I never received.) What would have been interesting is to hear the discussion with my counselor at the time as to "why copyright laws exist" and "the restrictions and limitations of downloading music from the internet," but those requirements didn't exist when I was in Boy Scouts.
"I know a handful of people who seriously want to ban cars."
I'd love to ban cars. However, the problem is that like everything else, the lawyers would get involved and draft exceptions to the ban, and then the only thing left would be a ban on cars for me. Which actually wouldn't be bad if my employer would remove the stupid ban on telework that only bans me from working at home.
In seriousness though, banning anything is never the solution to anything. I wish the politicians would get the picture. There is never a worthwhile 100% solution to any problem that involves banning. I would love to use iodine to sanitize my carboys, but the government has seriously reduced the amount of iodine I can purchase to sanitize stuff because I could possibly use it to manufacture meth, even though I don't. But yet, the guys who make meth have no problem accessing iodine. Same is true with guns, cars, and everything else. If we could somehow convince the government to make a ban on banning things, I would be a very happy camper.
Isn't the new standard operating procedure for this type of thing to seize the domain, all funds from US banks, and everything else, or is that option only available to IP companies like AACS?
Seems like AACS got the judge to do all these things against DVDFAB, an international company who didn't show up and defaulted in a US court. Not that I think that was the right way of doing business in order to enforce a BS US law against a foreign company which is not subject to that law, but it sure smacks of high court/low court in this case.
Small steps would render the entirety of this "market" completely unprofitable.
I agree that education is one of the solutions. The problem is that we also need to fix the problems that make it easy for these criminals to operate. It works great to tell my parents to not respond to emails that look like they are scams, up until the bank they actually use sends an email to them that looks like a scam email even though it is real and they get penalized for not responding. It works well to tell my parents to use a unique/random password for every service they use and store the password in an encrypted vault, only to have Amazon respond to a phone-call from a scammer who asks Amazon to change the password to their account and then asks them if they want access to their e-books to pay him off. Educating users not to open attachments from people they don't trust only works up until worms start distributing themselves using address books, and many browsers make it difficult for the user to determine if the file is invoice.pdf or invoice.pdf.exe.
They can only be as secure as the services/companies they use, and quite frankly, I believe most of these companies are screwing the pooch and then blaming it on the whistle-blowers who discover the flaws and let them know about them, or ignoring the problem until millions of card numbers get published. It is just too easy for the companies to ignore security right now, because it is easier to just take the loss since the people who are actually losing the most right now are the customers.
The problem becomes far worse when the criminals are able to easily infiltrate or set up their own help-lines. How many people are roped in by the Windows Technical Support calls? The same people we want to save are the same people these criminals are targeting with their "your computer is sending signals to our server that says you are infected with a virus."
> Uh? Didn't they dump Microsoft because of the raid? I think you have your ordering of the events confused here.
Yes, they did. However, I remember a report from around 2010 about them getting raided again. Can't seem to find it, so maybe it was my imagination, but I seem to remember at the time of reading it, that their CEO complained to the BSA that the whole reason they weren't running Windows was because of the initial raid. I may just be confused.
A more effective way to blacklist the BSA is to only use free/open source software.
That may work. However, given that Ernie Ball dumped Microsoft and went with Linux, then suffered a raid that shut down his business for a while, or the other companies that have had BSA show up and complain that their Windows tools wouldn't run on the Linux Servers, or attempt to destroy systems that were running free/open source software because they weren't running Windows, you might have further problems blacklisting the BSA.
The better method would be to outlaw the system of legalized extortion that companies like Prenda and the BSA use.
You'd think that organizations so concerned with infringement would be extra careful to avoid engaging in it themselves.
Every time they do, they bring up one of two issues, neither of which make them look good. Either they simply don't care about infringement when they do it, or accidental infringement is so easy that even they can't avoid it.
I'd vote for the former. They don't care about infringement...they care about their legal extortion, and that is about it. The moment Congress comes in and makes what they do illegal, or the moment that some Judge comes along and beats them up, they will be screaming to everyone that listens about the poor software companies they service, whom without them, those companies would have to go directly after their customers instead and how they are really important to world peace and everyone's livelihood.
The truth is they are hypocrites and legal extortionists who care only about the money they are getting by abusing their customers/former customers with the most obtrusive process they can, especially if the accused has the gall to dump Microsoft and go with a real operating system (i.e. Ernie Ball.)
On the post: Sen. Coburn Offers To Put An Outdated Agency Out Of Its Misery With His 'Let Me Google That For You' Bill
Re: An alternative path for NTIS
They could all get jobs at Comcast. I hear they are hiring engineers that couldn't get a job working for Google, Facebook, Microsoft, or Apple.
On the post: Sen. Coburn Offers To Put An Outdated Agency Out Of Its Misery With His 'Let Me Google That For You' Bill
Re: Re:
Not necessarily. I suspect that it has a lot more to do with reducing the acronym confusion that revolves around government. He probably figures that other senators (who haven't been known for their technical competence) would see LMGTFYA and would think it has something to do with the military or social security. The White House may know what LMGTFY or ROTFLMAO means, but I think you might find it hard to find a Senator that doesn't have to ask their interns what those acronyms mean.
On the post: Indiana Supreme Court Declares An Officer's Testimony Is More Reliable Than Video Evidence
Re: Re: Re: Re: Hmmmm....
Is the open beer in the cup holder visible from outside of the vehicle? If so, I think *that* would be justification in pulling you over. Most states have really well written open container laws (as in, you have an open container in your car, in the passenger compartment.)
However, people swerve all the time, and usually for legitimate reasons (making room for the motorcycle illegally lane-splitting at 90 mph, road debris, etc.) Someone swerving in their lane doesn't really tell you that they are drunk or just avoiding an obstacle on the road. Even swerving once or twice over the fog-line, or over the lane divider doesn't really tell you much (tire tread from a truck can break into multiple pieces, and is usually bad for your tires.) When they swerve into the right lane, then swerve into the left lane, then drive down the road occupying two lanes, it is a pretty good bet. Usually you have to follow someone for a while to determine if they may be DUI or maybe falling asleep.
On the post: The Cost Of Permission Culture: Or Why Netflix Streaming Library Sucks Compared To Its DVD Library
Re:
It shouldn't, but it is, and the reason it is so is because of the interpretation of the law in physical land vs on the internet (like everything else.) For physical land, the mailman is delivering a piece of plastic. The piece of plastic contains a copy of the movie which has been licensed ahead of time to the owner/possessor of the piece of plastic. On the internet, there is no piece of plastic, and thus, the producer limits their license to allow for it to be distributed only during particular times/reasons.
Congress will need to fix the law to prevent the copyright maximalists from differentiating the two (which they won't, because their paymasters don't want the current system to change.)
What would be really interesting is to see Hollywood's current model for online distribution pushed into the physical realm (which they've already tried to do a number of times, to limited success.) Imagine Hollywood having a system in place where that piece of plastic wouldn't work if an exclusive window was entered or if the movie was deemed to be no longer worth distributing. DRM at its worse. I suspect that is really what AACS is about...not preventing piracy, but enforcing windowing in a physical medium (hence the required callback mechanism when a Bluray is played.)
On the post: New Case By Notorious B.I.G. Estate May Finally Test Question Of Sampling Fair Use
Re: Re: Re:
Most songs are amazingly similar to one another, using the same chords and chord progression (google Axis of Awesome's awesome music video 4 chord song.) Throw in the fact that we humans tend to forget where we got tunes from, and it is really surprising you don't have much more copyright infringement lawsuits for "the same music."
On the post: Newscasters Reenact Final Four Moments Rather Than Wait For Game Highlight Rights To Clear
Re:
Every time I hear that said during a broadcast of a MLB game, I laugh. Talk about fraud...facts cannot be copyrighted (though there are a few judges that have disagreed,) and thus reporting accounts of the game should not be actionable.
According to their statement, me saying the Padres lost yesterday (opening day) 3 to 2 against the Dodgers would leave me in a world of hurt, along with Techdirt (though I doubt MLB would try to pursue it,) even though all I am saying is facts about an event (that shouldn't be copyrightable.)
And at least MLB pays their athletes. Not a single dime goes to the NCAA athletes.
On the post: Telemundo & Univision Copyright Claim On YouTube Takes Down US Congressional Appropriations Hearing
Re: Penalties for false claims
Even better after 3 strikes/5 strikes, copyright holder loses all copyrights, all work in their possession enters the public domain, and they are forbidden from taking new copyrights until they sit through an hour long web-based course on proper copyright etiquette made by the Open Source community. Kind of like a reverse "bad-uploaders" Content-ID system.
Hey, it works for the copyright maximalists, should work fine against them too.
On the post: UK Finally 'Legalizes' CD & DVD Ripping... But You're Still Not Allowed To Circumvent DRM
Re: I am the Law!
I am confused. How does the DMCA prevent UK residents from buying and distributing cracking tools? Sure, if they are trying to buy them from US companies or distribute them to US citizens, they might have problems with US law enforcement agencies trying to enforce their laws on foreign countries, but the DMCA should have no barring on UK citizens.
On the post: The TSA's Mental 'Coin Flip' That May Keep You From Traveling
Re: Stop it
I used to be a TSA agent like you, but then I took an arrow to the knee?
On the post: Girl Scouts Get A Badge In Intellectual Property Maximalism
Re: Re: Re:
Not at all, though I'd put the atomic energy (now nuclear energy) merit badge on the same level as the computer merit badge when it comes to stuff in Boy Scouts which isn't needed in order to obtain your Eagle Scout rank and is included to give you options to make you a well rounded scout.
I don't know why I didn't get my computer merit badge (actually, I have to go back and look, because maybe I did)...at the time I was really into computers. The Atomic Energy badge fell into my lap because the troop had a counselor who worked for a nuclear plant and many of the scouts worked together to get the badge. The reason I remember the atomic energy one was because it was the omg we're all going to die nuclear symbol and I thought that was cool.
Actually most of the merit badges, even the ones we were required to get, were kinda boring, now that I think of it (this was more than 25 years ago.)
On the post: A Lesson in Stupid Moral Panics: The History Of Dungeons And Dragons Bans
Re:
I can't remember a single session of D&D that hasn't been hilarious. I knew a few people over the years who did take the game serious, but I'd usually stop playing with them. Still get a kick over the game where one character through rocks at a tree, which landed near another character, and the hilarity ensued (which led to even more a couple years later when we saw Peter Jackson's Two Towers take, with the rock throwing Ents.
Each new iteration is what it always has been, people getting upset about other people sitting around the campfire telling ghost stories, usually because they didn't get involved in the fun themselves. My parents were happy I was socializing...
On the post: PSA: Don't Kill Yourself, Literally, Over BS Ransomware
Re: Education
Actually, in some states, you can. If you manage to pass the tests, they give you your driver's license. In California, you have the practical test with the DMV agent, but they can be fairly lenient. I know of a few people who never took driver training classes, but studied the book, passed the written test, barely passed the practical, and have been driving for 20 years now (and some of them I will not ride with because they are really, really dangerous.
But even then, there are many things from a security standpoint that you never hear in college computer classes. In my CS curriculum, there was only one class I took specifically related to security, and it was mostly cryptography, and a couple classes indirectly related to security (networking, system admin.) I had to learn to hack and defend myself, on my own.
"If they're clicking on "invoice.pdf" when it's really "invoice.pdf.exe", then shouldn't some of the blame fall on Microsoft for hiding the actual file type?"
Microsoft should bear most, if not all, of the blame. If you are going to hide something from me, the user, you better have a really good reason for doing so. Which is why I don't use Microsoft at home. I never have a problem with seeing invoice.pdf.exe (and with WINE locked down, it won't run .exe anyway.)
"Third, I would tell people to never, ever click on a link that comes from a "bank" or PayPal. Even if it looks 100% legit, always open a new browser window, log in, and check your account."
I wouldn't either. Well, at least until I got a bank that only supported their online stuff through email (you had to go through so much effort to get a live support person on the phone, and even then, the person you got was from half way around the world and couldn't understand what you were asking for even though both of you spoke English,) and they would send you important stuff like temporary passwords through unencrypted email with links to change your password (from one of the largest banks in the US.) When you have no control over who your mortgage gets sold off to and the only way to get away from them is to spend more money to refinance your loan, only to get sold right back to them, sometimes you have to change your standards.
On the post: Girl Scouts Get A Badge In Intellectual Property Maximalism
Re: Re:
The copyright maximalists stuff was added to the Computer merit badge. It may have been added elsewhere too.
What is interesting is, in the worksheet released in 2014 for this badge, they specifically ask scouts to define freeware and shareware, but not creative-commons, open-source, or the difference between GPL and BSD licenses and their derivatives.
I haven't been a Boy Scout or associated with BSA in 20+ years, so all I have is what they publish.
On the post: Girl Scouts Get A Badge In Intellectual Property Maximalism
Re:
As a proud owner of the scouting "Atomic Energy" badge, not all of the boring optional merit badges were largely ignored by scouts. I wore it proudly next to my Camping, Orienteering, Swimming, Hiking, Lifesaving, and First Aid badges.
For the Boy Scouts, they added the copyright stupidity to the existing requirements for the Computer merit badge (which I never received.) What would have been interesting is to hear the discussion with my counselor at the time as to "why copyright laws exist" and "the restrictions and limitations of downloading music from the internet," but those requirements didn't exist when I was in Boy Scouts.
On the post: Anti-Game Violence Crusader Leland Yee Arrested On Charges Of Bribery, Corruption And Arms Trafficking
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Ha, arms dealing...
I'd love to ban cars. However, the problem is that like everything else, the lawyers would get involved and draft exceptions to the ban, and then the only thing left would be a ban on cars for me. Which actually wouldn't be bad if my employer would remove the stupid ban on telework that only bans me from working at home.
In seriousness though, banning anything is never the solution to anything. I wish the politicians would get the picture. There is never a worthwhile 100% solution to any problem that involves banning. I would love to use iodine to sanitize my carboys, but the government has seriously reduced the amount of iodine I can purchase to sanitize stuff because I could possibly use it to manufacture meth, even though I don't. But yet, the guys who make meth have no problem accessing iodine. Same is true with guns, cars, and everything else. If we could somehow convince the government to make a ban on banning things, I would be a very happy camper.
On the post: KlearGear No-Shows Hearing, Reinstates $3,500 Non-Disparagement Clause
Standard Operating Procedure...
Seems like AACS got the judge to do all these things against DVDFAB, an international company who didn't show up and defaulted in a US court. Not that I think that was the right way of doing business in order to enforce a BS US law against a foreign company which is not subject to that law, but it sure smacks of high court/low court in this case.
On the post: PSA: Don't Kill Yourself, Literally, Over BS Ransomware
Re:
I agree that education is one of the solutions. The problem is that we also need to fix the problems that make it easy for these criminals to operate. It works great to tell my parents to not respond to emails that look like they are scams, up until the bank they actually use sends an email to them that looks like a scam email even though it is real and they get penalized for not responding. It works well to tell my parents to use a unique/random password for every service they use and store the password in an encrypted vault, only to have Amazon respond to a phone-call from a scammer who asks Amazon to change the password to their account and then asks them if they want access to their e-books to pay him off. Educating users not to open attachments from people they don't trust only works up until worms start distributing themselves using address books, and many browsers make it difficult for the user to determine if the file is invoice.pdf or invoice.pdf.exe.
They can only be as secure as the services/companies they use, and quite frankly, I believe most of these companies are screwing the pooch and then blaming it on the whistle-blowers who discover the flaws and let them know about them, or ignoring the problem until millions of card numbers get published. It is just too easy for the companies to ignore security right now, because it is easier to just take the loss since the people who are actually losing the most right now are the customers.
The problem becomes far worse when the criminals are able to easily infiltrate or set up their own help-lines. How many people are roped in by the Windows Technical Support calls? The same people we want to save are the same people these criminals are targeting with their "your computer is sending signals to our server that says you are infected with a virus."
On the post: BSA Caught Using Infringing Image For Its 'Snitch' On Your Colleagues Anti-Piracy Campaign
Re: Re: Re: Re: Blacklist the BSA
Yes, they did. However, I remember a report from around 2010 about them getting raided again. Can't seem to find it, so maybe it was my imagination, but I seem to remember at the time of reading it, that their CEO complained to the BSA that the whole reason they weren't running Windows was because of the initial raid. I may just be confused.
On the post: BSA Caught Using Infringing Image For Its 'Snitch' On Your Colleagues Anti-Piracy Campaign
Re: Re: Blacklist the BSA
That may work. However, given that Ernie Ball dumped Microsoft and went with Linux, then suffered a raid that shut down his business for a while, or the other companies that have had BSA show up and complain that their Windows tools wouldn't run on the Linux Servers, or attempt to destroy systems that were running free/open source software because they weren't running Windows, you might have further problems blacklisting the BSA.
The better method would be to outlaw the system of legalized extortion that companies like Prenda and the BSA use.
On the post: BSA Caught Using Infringing Image For Its 'Snitch' On Your Colleagues Anti-Piracy Campaign
Re: Hilarious
Every time they do, they bring up one of two issues, neither of which make them look good. Either they simply don't care about infringement when they do it, or accidental infringement is so easy that even they can't avoid it.
I'd vote for the former. They don't care about infringement...they care about their legal extortion, and that is about it. The moment Congress comes in and makes what they do illegal, or the moment that some Judge comes along and beats them up, they will be screaming to everyone that listens about the poor software companies they service, whom without them, those companies would have to go directly after their customers instead and how they are really important to world peace and everyone's livelihood.
The truth is they are hypocrites and legal extortionists who care only about the money they are getting by abusing their customers/former customers with the most obtrusive process they can, especially if the accused has the gall to dump Microsoft and go with a real operating system (i.e. Ernie Ball.)
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