[PLUG] Microsoft Earnings Report

Aaron Burt aaron at speakeasy.org
Thu Oct 23 17:31:07 UTC 2003


On Thu, 23 Oct 2003, Brian Quade wrote:

> I have some questions about this, if anyone knows the answers....  How
> much can MS isolate themselves and their market by using proprietary
> file formats that they "own".  For example, OpenOffice supports most MS
> file formats (doc, xls, ...).  Is this legal?  Can a company patent a
> file format?

Not as such.  A format is just a way of arranging info.  Can you patent
the order in which you shelve your books?  No.  Can a friend figure out
how you shelved your books and do the same with hers?  Yes.  However...

> I think Adobe owns Acrobat reader and the product (forgot the name) that
> creates PDF files.  Is it legal for me to create a PDF using rtf2pdf and
> put it on my web site without using their product?  I know that people
> do it all the time, but is it technically legal?

Adobe has released PDF as a public spec, so it doesn't even take
reverse-engineering (which has its own legal issues) to figure out how to
read and write it.  Adobe still gets plenty of income because Adobe
Distiller is the best-known way to make PDFs, and most nontechnical folks
aren't interested in the risk of trying another method.
(The same mechanism applies to MS Office.)

> Then that leads me to ask, what if I developed an open source streaming
> audio client program that recognizes rm files?

And that brings us to the However... part.  The exceptions to all of this
are encryption and copy-protection, which are protected by the DMCA.

The first use of the DMCA that I'm aware of was when RealNetworks sued
StreamBox over their "VCR" program for Windows.  StreamBox had figured out
the secret handshake between Real Player and Real Server, and had written
a program that would pretend to be a copy of Real Player, but instead of
decompressing and showing the stream, it would save it as-is for later
playback, much like a VCR does with TV signals.

RealNetworks won, claiming that the handshake was an encrypted copy-
protection device, and thus off-limits under the DMCA.  Similar cases
involving DVD-CSS (which actually has nothing to do with copy-protection)
and an eBook vendor (who'd used Adobe's Rot13 example as their encryption)
have been successfully brought under the DMCA.

So, if you're still reading, we get to the Big Scary Thing:  Encrypted
copy-protected Office documents.  MS is promising this Real Soon Now,
which means that (a) it will be *illegal* to figure out how to read/write
the latest Office documents without MS' say-so and (b) it means there'll
be documents that can't be leaked or used as evidence and have a specified
lifetime.  Just think: no more government or corporate scandals, because
all details will be secret forevermore.  No more history but the official
version, because there won't be much left to research.

And then there's TCPA and the broadcast-flag rule...

Write your congresscritter regularly,
  Aaron





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