Congrats are in order: Happy Anniversary to the WIR!!
Thanks
Jack. We really appreciate your vigilant efforts!
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The company acquired the patent in late 2002, from a researcher who now serves as Altnet's chief scientist.
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I'm no expert and I haven't read the patent, but it seems likely that Altnet's patent would be invalidated by prior art. Of course, it'll cost at least a million dollars to overturn it in court, so most companies will either pay up or find an alternative. It's too easy to get patents nowadays, the USPTO merely collects fees and rubber-stamps the applications.
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"All copy protections can be hacked," Wiser said. "But if we give people what they are asking for in terms of value, they won't go out and steal it. It's called trusting the consumer."
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If hack is defined as "pressing shift" and "trusting" is synonymous with "restricting" then I'd agree. Still it's a rather amusing quote.
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And its statistics suggest 75 percent of the people illegally downloading music are now signed up to legal sites. (Say what!? – JS.)
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I think they left out a decimal point before the 7? However they don't specifically define "legal sites" so I'll assume that 75% of p2p users sign in to their ISPs homepage.
