Software Piracy beyond the Street Corner
On January 23, 2003, the world’s leading computer networking equipment maker Cisco Systems, headquartered in San Jose California, filed a lawsuit against China-based Huawei Technologies and its United States subsidiaries Huawei America and FutureWei Technologies. In the lawsuit, Cisco alleged that Huawei stole intellectual property by copying its Internet Operating System (IOS) software and its copyrighted user manuals. Cisco also claimed that Huawei infringed on its patents. After numerous failed attempts to resolve these complaints directly with Huawei, which included a cease and desist letter to one of Huawei’s United Kingdom distributors, Cisco decided that a lawsuit was necessary to protect the company and its shareholder’s interests. The lawsuit was processed through United States District Court for the Eastern District of Texas. This paper will provide an overview of this landmark case and discuss whether each company had a different view of ethics that originated from differing cultural perspectives.
I. Case Background
Cisco Systems’ 77 page complaint filed in the United States District Court for the Easter District of Texas demanded a trial by jury in response to Huawei’s misappropriation and intellectual property infringement in the development of its competing Quidway routers. One of Huawei’s United States based wholly-owned subsidiary, FutureWei, is located in Plano, Texas; the other subsidiary Huawei America is located in California’s Silicon Valley, nearby Cisco Systems’ headquarters. The China-based parent company is a multi-billion dollar corporation that has manufactured network and telecommunications equipment since 1988.
Huawei marketed its Quidway router...
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... “Huawei: Cisco Code is Gone,” April 15, 2003, http://www.lightreading.com/document.asp?doc_id=31253
[3] “Cisco Wins Huawei Injunction,” June 9, 2003, http://www.lightreading.com/document.asp?doc_id=35058
[4] “Managing in the Multicultural Environment”, Charis Intercultural Training Corporation, 2004.
[5] “Differences of Opinion: The Cisco-Huawei Lawsuit”, The Hoffman Agency, China High Tech PR Newsletter, http://www.chinahightechpr.com/fullArticle.cfm?code=284
[6] “WTO Ministerial Conference Approves China’s Accession”, November 10, 2001 Press Release, http://www.wto.org/english/news_e/pres01_e/pr252_e.htm
[7] The United States and China: Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) and Protection, http://usinfo.state.gov/regional/ea/iprcn/
[8] Baase, S.; A Gift of Fire, 2nd edition, Prentice Hall, 2003.
Flags obtained from http://www.enchantedlearning.com
Many people know very little about how honey bees have been apart of our history from colonial times. Why were honey bees important to the colonial beekeeper? How were the bees kept? Does beekeeping now, vary from what it was then? These are all questions that must be asked. The honey bee is a unique insect that has been apart of the history of our country for centuries. Beekeeping has changed over time yet many of the essential results of keeping honey bees are unchanged. Lets look at their similarities and differences.
To be a great leader one mustn’t be egoistic rather they should be assertive and considerate for their people’s benefit. For example, the Portuguese lusted after the slaves because they needed them to work on the sugar plantations in Brazil, and saw Ndongo as a valuable entree into this lucrative trade, however, Queen Nzinga risking her own life did whatever she can to protect her people from being enslaved. Although Queen Nzinga fought many battles, however, she did try to keep alliances w...
What do you think when you think of bees? I think of honey, pollination, and soon, new life. According to Walt D. Osborne, “Bees are vital for the pollination of more than 90 fruit and vegetable crops worldwide, including almonds, peaches, soybeans, apples, pears, cherries, raspberries, blackberries, cranberries, watermelons, cantaloupes, cucumbers, and strawberries,” (Osborne 9-11) but each year a large percent of hives have vanished due to many different factors such as stress. Most people would declare that the average honey bee is insufficiently important to the world because bees are pests to home owners everywhere, but bees are extremely important to earths’ survival than any other pollinator in the world; they help pollinate most of the world’s agriculture; yet in the recent years bee populations have plummeted rapidly. I am writing this paper to create awareness that the agricultural society ought to stop or lessen the spraying of pesticides/ insecticides on crops, unnatural diets and overcrowding in the hives.
The addition of a child into a family’s home is a happy occasion. Unfortunately, some families are unable to have a child due to unforeseen problems, and they must pursue other means than natural pregnancy. Some couples adopt and other couples follow a different path; they utilize in vitro fertilization or surrogate motherhood. The process is complicated, unreliable, but ultimately can give the parents the gift of a child they otherwise could not have had. At the same time, as the process becomes more and more advanced and scientists are able to predict the outcome of the technique, the choice of what child is born is placed in the hands of the parents. Instead of waiting to see if the child had the mother’s eyes, the father’s hair or Grandma’s heart problem, the parents and doctors can select the best eggs and the best sperm to create the perfect child. Many see the rise of in vitro fertilization as the second coming of the Eugenics movement of the 19th and early 20th century. A process that is able to bring joy to so many parents is also seen as deciding who is able to reproduce and what child is worthy of birthing.
Modern piracy has touched nearly every corner of the globe and has increased with globalization. The tentacles of piracy now extend from South America to the South China Sea. The greatest numbers of piracy incidents occur along maritime commercial trade routes. Since China dominates the world’s container shipping industry, the South China Sea has become a hotspot for piracy (Kraska 2011). The prominence of cargo activity increases opportunity for pirates and indisputably triggered the sixty- nine incidents of piracy that were reported in 2009 in the South China Sea (Kraska 2011).
Think for a moment of a world without bees; a world without our buzzing friend. They might look like they barely do much to help our ecosystem. However, bees are a vital part of our agriculture and this makes it vital that we keep them around. The bee population decline in recent years is troubling for both us and our little friends. As their friends, we must do all we can in order to ensure their survival which in turn will ensure our own.
When we think of those skilled in the art of rhetoric, we often jump to those we know are trying to convince us of something, like politicians, salesmen, lawyers, etc. We do not always consider corporate CEOs part of that group though Netflix CEO, Reed Hastings, would have us believing another thing. On March 20th, 2014, Hastings published an article titled “Internet Tolls And The Case For Strong Net Neutrality” on Netflix’s official blog. Just under a month before the blog was posted, Netflix settled a deal paying Comcast, America’s largest cable and Internet service provider (ISP), for faster and more reliable service to Comcast’s subscribers (Cohen and Wyatt). These “internet tolls” go against the culture of net neutrality in America, which in its essence is when no piece of information is prioritized over another on broadband networks. Hastings took to their blog to advocate for net neutrality and against abusive ISPs. Whether he was conscious of his rhetorical finesse or not, he wrote quite convincingly thus turning this blog into an excellent rhetorical artifact. Reed Hastings’ blog post aims to convince American Internet consumers that strong net neutrality is important by appealing to their values of choice, frugality and empathy while simultaneously making ISPs seem ill intentioned and Netflix seem honorable.
A Worldwide Problem Software piracy is defined as the illegal copying of software for commercial or personal gain. Software companies have tried many methods to prevent piracy, with varying degrees of success. Several agencies like the Software Publishers Association and the Business Software Alliance have been formed to combat both worldwide and domestic piracy. Software piracy is an unresolved, worldwide problem, costing millions of dollars in lost revenue. Software companies have used many different copy protection schemes. The most annoying form of copy protection is the use of a key disk. This type of copy protection requires the user to insert the original disk every time the program is run. It can be quite difficult to keep up with disks that are years old. The most common technique of copy protection requires the user to look up a word or phrase in the program's manual. This method is less annoying than other forms of copy protection, but it can be a nuisance having to locate the manual every time. Software pirates usually have no trouble "cracking" the program, which permanently removes the copy protection. After the invention of CD-ROM, which until lately was uncopyable, most software companies stopped placing copy protection in their programs. Instead, the companies are trying new methods of disc impression. 3M recently developed a new technology of disc impression which allows companies to imprint an image on the read side of a CD-ROM. This technology would not prevent pirates from copying the CD, but it would make a "bootleg" copy differ from the original and make the copy traceable by law enforcement officials (Estes 89). Sometimes, when a person uses a pirated program, there is a "virus" attached to the program. Viruses are self-replicating programs that, when activated, can damage a computer. These viruses are most commonly found on pirated computer games, placed there by some malignant computer programmer. In his January 1993 article, Chris O' Malley points out that if piracy was wiped out viruses would eventually disappear (O' Malley 60). There are ways that a thrifty consumer can save money on software without resorting to piracy. Computer companies often offer discounts on new software if a person has previously purchased an earlier version of the software. Competition between companies also drives prices low and keeps the number of pirated copies down (Morgan 45). People eventually tire or outgrow their software and decide to sell it.
Winfree, R. . The conservation and restoration of wild bees. Annuals of the New York Academy of Sciences. Volume 1195, 3 May 2010, Pages 169 – 197.
Robbins et al. (2016, p.93), describes ethics in business as “a set of rules or principles that defines right and wrong”. Various theories centre around ethics in business, and a company adhering to a certain standard of ethics has the power to decide if they reach their maximum potential. Apple is one of the few exceptions of this concept. Panorama, the BBC’s longest running current affairs programme, dedicated an episode to exposing Apple and their shocking dishonesties covering a variety of areas of their business. The three focal points of Apple’s abandonment of ethics highlighted in the broadcast consist of; the employed workforce and their arduous lives at select factories around the globe, the Foxconn suicides incident, and the process in which Apple acquires their raw materials for their products. When something as simple and expected as respecting basic human rights must be called into question, there is a moral duty to shed light on the company’s exploitation of
All around the world honeybees are vanishing at an alarming rate, according to the documentary Vanishing of the Honeybees. This film features two commercial bee keepers and their fight to preserve their bee numbers. David Hackenburg was the first commercial bee keeper to go public the bee population was decreasing. Approximately two billions bees have vanished and nobody knows the reason why. Honeybees are used all across America to help pollinate monoculture crops like broccoli, watermelon, cherries, and other produce. Without the honeybees the price for fresh and local produce would be too much money. According, to this film commercial bee keeper’s help fifteen billion dollars of food get pollinated by commercial
Cisco faces intense competition in the networking and communications equipment markets (Cisco Systems Inc. SWOT Analysis, 2013).Cisco also faces price competition from rival competitors in Asia, mainly in China. The company also faces competition from customers to which it licenses or supplies technology. The nature of networking requires partnerships; the company must cooperate and at the same time compete with many companies to achieve its objectives. The inability to effectively manage these complicated relationships with customers, suppliers, and strategic alliance partners may have an adverse effect on Cisco’s business. Intense competition will continue to impact Cisco’s operating results, financial condition and market shares of the company in the future (Cisco Systems, Inc. SWOT Analysis, 2013).
Corporate copyright industry controllers publicly voice concerns about globally lost revenue, vocally touting that pirates take part in criminal action that pressures companies into downsizing employee numbers and decreasing investment in future endeavors. Music, film, TV, movie, and softwares industries are all worth billions of dollars, with record companies alone bringing in nearly $25 billion dollars. As a consumer, it’s hard to reconcile the thought of a $25 billion dollar industry claiming piracy revenue losses well into the hundreds of billions. Industry advocates cite any act of media piracy as a harmful act and an act that inhibits them from making money; therefore the perceived loss or potential loss of those hundreds of billions
The PC industry is just over 20 years old. In those 20 years, both the quality
The subject of my paper focuses on movie piracy. Movie Piracy by definition is the illegal copying of movies for personal or commercial use. This is a new epidemic that is affecting the film industry financially on a global level. What are the necessary steps that can be taken on behalf of the film industry that can stop this illegal practice from occurring? Once you walk down the city streets of New York, you can easily find vendors selling their bootleg DVD copies of new released movies for half the price of a movie ticket. At the moment the quality of the movies aren’t at its best, but with the technological advancements, the quality of these bootleg DVD’s are getting better, which means that movie piracy is actually on the rise. This continues to worry both film studios and copyright activist. Movie companies are the ones suffering the most from this illegal practice. While they continue to produce $100 million movies, their profits continue to fall, when people decide to either pick up a burned copy or download the movie off some illegal Internet site. This essay takes a look at the different forms of movie piracy and what different organizations, such as the MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America) and its international counterpart, MPA (Motion Picture Association), are doing to combat this illegal practice.