Does anyone use RealNetworks' software anymore? After RealPlayer rose to one of the biggest things in use on the net they added ads and bloatwared their apps to the point where almost nobody was using them. They went from being on every PC to being on next to none of them...

...after that does anyone use their software?

Also, FUCK YOU RealNetworks for Rhapsody. Not because it's shit but because you forced people who'd been using the name for more than a decade out of it.

Did you have to? It's half past nine in the morning and I haven't even had my toast yet.

"Subtly it is saying that trying to block the use of its software, when perfectly reasonably licensed, is a form of bullying, that the very act of issuing a suit against RealNetworks is an act of anti-trust."

Well yes, because there's no "loser pays" rule in the US, in general, whoever has more money or is more committed to the fight can quite easily bully other parties into capitulation. Filing suit is the first step, dragging it out until the target is bankrupt through legal costs the second.

The sue-happy US has become a place where the people try not to get noticed by the corporations, because even if they were 100% in the clear they could never afford to defend themselves.

Well someone had to find the holes in the DMCA. Real Networks may not be my favourite company and they may not have my best interests at heart, but they're fighting the good fight.

Fact is, the obvious next step for PMPs is for iTunes et al to support ripping DVD content, to transfer it to all your PMPs. We should have had this five years ago.

DMCA nixes this, but it *should* be possible to decrypt and reencrypt the content without breaking that law. "Circumventing" a lock means removing it, not replacing it with another lock.

(You should not even need a DVD-CCA license to do this, but allowing it with the license would be a start.)

If Real win, every PMP can finally get DVD and BluRay ripping support. Hurrah for that.

"The law is a computer program and the legal system is the computer."

Absolutely not.

One of our secretaries went off to law school, figuring it offered better career potential than running a reception desk. Back for a visit some months after starting, I asked her what was the most surprising thing she'd learned so far; what was most at odds with her preconceptions of the law?

Her response? That she'd thought of the law just as you do, a mechanism with a hopper into which you drop facts and which then, after a few turns of the crank, disgorges a verdict. But what she'd learned was that the law was almost entirely a matter of shades of gray, that absolutes were extremely rare.

But you can rip all your personally owned DVDs and CDs to your PMP already, easily everywhere and legally many places.

RIAA et Al fighting the wrong war.