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It didn't cost that much to make the other plants to have diesel generators that didn't fail. Completely preventable.

"other sites had the good sense to have emergency diesel generators protected in buildings. Fukushima 2 escaped unharmed because of this simple safety measure. In contrast, the site at Fukushima 1 had crucial seawater pumps for the backup generators exposed to the environment. Not a smart decision, as it turns out."

http://k.lenz.name/LB/?p=1159 [lenz.name]

Or how about they just dump seawater on it to begin with? Sure you would have lost the plant, but you wouldn't end up with a meltdown.

Compare that with the cost of *trillions* that tax payers may spend.
http://nuclear-news.net/2011/05/06/fukushima-nuclear-accident-could-cost-tax-payer-trillions/

And if we aren't willing to carry that responsibility and cost, then we shouldn't have it to begin with.

Why did only Fukushima 1 fail?

http://k.lenz.name/LB/?p=1159
http://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/nn20110406a4.html

*sigh*

It appears you are wrong.

http://k.lenz.name/LB/?p=1159
http://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/nn20110406a4.html

Read my other post for what I think the real reason is.

The EU has figured this one out ... secret laws! http://k.lenz.name/LB/?p=31

No, sorry, "Japanese Only" signs are very common in Japan these days, unfortunately. And YES, finger printing is racist, because it will mainly apply to foreigners, i.e., non-Japanese people. I have lost all respect for Japan, and I am ashamed to drive a Japanese car http://k.lenz.name/LB/archives/000973.html http://www.wordpress.tokyotimes.org/?p=1900 http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?ItemID=6669 http://www.debito.org/misawaexclusions.html Open your eyes.

Empirical research which JUST DOESN'T SHOW that patents are in any way beneficial, only that, AT BEST, they've failed to be catastrophically bad! (note that "research" is only counting software startups, and I've got a sneaking suspicion its counting software patent troll startups AS "software startups" too. The two are not substitutable. Any company that employs (or retains) more lawyers than programmers is not a "software company"!).

See Lenz's take on the paper: http://k.lenz.name/LB/?p=10 -
And Kinsella's (in comments): http://271patent.blogspot.com/2006/09/have-patents -killed-software-industry.html

Wow, what a strong argument for patents: they have not harmed the software industry that much!

You might want to read Lenz' blog on this study: http://k.lenz.name/LB/?p=10

"That paper shows empirical proof that there is still a software industry left in America."

Enjoy!

It may be a nice (if strange) ideal to think that lawyers only have the opinions they are paid to have, but it simply isn't true.

It doubt it's the end of capitalism, but it may be signalling the end of the patent system. These pro-swpat extremists are heading on a self-destruct course. We are in fact the ones trying to make it workable and reasonable again. See this nice blog entry on that topic.

Normally, turning a political agreement in a common position is just a formality. That's the reason why it can be done by any kind of Council formation.

Of course, in this case we have the fact that Poland really abstained in May (although they were recorded as voting in favour) and that since November change of voting weights there no longer is a qualified majority because of this, the fact that the Dutch parliament asked its government to change the pro-vote into an abstention, a similar motion by the German Bundestag etc.

Diplomatic inertia is a powerful force to fight, however: political agreements are "always" turned into a common position, so they want to do it this time as well, even though it's completely against democratic principles.

Respectfully, I am not sure what organizations you are referring to.

I posted links in my original reply to you. For clarity's sake:

• AIPLA statement: see point 10.
• IPO statement: see point 10 (and 6)

It sounds strange, since the whole concept of IP is based on economic incentive.

That's the theory, yes. In practice, not all types of IP are able to meet that goal. There is no economic law that says "more and stronger exclusion rights per definition result in a healthier economy". And there's also no juridical law that says "lawyers will always defend what's in the best interest of the economy as a whole".

Actually, I was talking about investment incentive, not incentives to innovate. Competition indeed promotes innovation. But property rights promote investment.

One person's rights are another person's limitation. You always need a proper balance to get good results on the whole. You cannot look at single entities in the market and conclude from that it must be beneficial on the whole (or harmful for that matter).

Case in point: offering one company a monopoly on selling things via the internet, makes investment in all online shopping companies a lot less attractive.

You also say "almost all studies...." I assume this means you have read some studies that support the arguments for patents in software.

Indeed, there is also one economical study in the entire world (that I know of, I really don't know any others) that claims that software patents are generally beneficial, and that patent thickets are a myth. You can find it here. And here's a rebuttal.

Litigation is not the only way patents are used. There is a large market in licensing, and lots of money changes hands based on patents without ever litigating.

Yes, but that's not productive. In fact, every time such a transfer occurs, you extract money from the software business and invest it in lawyers. Something like that is only defensible if the effects on the whole are positive, e.g. if such transfers are necessary to spread knowledge throughout the industry. That is not the case with the software sector (see the studies I pointed you to).

Your argument, respectfully, sounds like this: "Civil tort litigation can cost millions. Therefore we should do away with tort claims."

My argument was simply that small companies do not have the means to enforce software patents, and that therefore arguing that they are beneficial for small companies is at least very doubtful. That's not even specific to software patents, it's a general recognised problem of the patent system.

However, in some sectors this negative effect may be offset by other, positive effects that patents have (e.g., if you need tens of millions of dollars to even start doing your product development, the cost a few patents on top of that can be disregarded).

The point remains that lots of capital goes into software based on property rights.

You keep talking about "property rights" as if software patents are the only form of property rights in the software industry. They're not by a long shot, as you probably know. I'm also not asking for abolishment of copyright or trademarks or anything else.

Remove those rights and you will weaken the industry by reducing the amount invested in it.

I fail to see how you can weaken an industry by stopping to invest in something which hampers that same indust

Anyway, not all lawyers seem to be happy with this, but as Karl-Friedrich Lenz writes:

If in their view software patents are so desirable, the patent attorney community should eagerly volunteer to be the first in line for the fantastic technological advances they promise everybody else. Then, after the great leap ahead in patent attorney productivity gained by giving them patent protection for themselves becomes clear, we can consider gradually expanding the system to other areas.

"Any person who, in the course of business activity and for purposes of competition, commits acts contrary to honest practices may be enjoined from these acts and held liable for damages."

One way to fix this is to get rid of software patents altogether, as the European Parliament vote in September 2003 tried to do.

But as long as American lawmakers don't understand the damage done by software patents, one other possible workaround would be to build a Software Patent Defense Organization (SPDO) after the model of NATO. I described that briefly in a book on software patents I published in 2002 (in German).

The basic idea would be to copy Article 5 of the NATO Treaty. Members of the SPDO would treat any software patent based attacks on any member as an attack on themselves and promise to retaliate with all means at their disposal.

That might be a deterrent even for those obnoxious outfits that have no business themselves except that of suing from overbroad patents, so they can't be impressed by any counterclaims based on defensive patents. They would still need to assess the threat of having to fight every member of the SPDO at the same time.

The IBM and Apache open source software licenses cancelling all rights in retaliation to a software patents based attack are one step in this direction. But stronger measures might be necessary to keep the system from collapsing.

Basically it's just like spam. With the amount of damage by spam rising exponentially, people get annoyed and angry, and start to ask for strong countermeasures. With the amount of damage by software patent lawsuits rising, the same will be true here.

If even Amazon gets sued, now might be the point to start considering building a collective retaliation option.

One of the options the article discusses is to pay insurance premiums to prepare for the coming great onslaught of software patent litigation against open software projects.

The European Union has published a study on patent litigation insurance in March 2003. You can find it on their page on the Community Patent.

That study says that all experiments with this kind of insurance have not been particularly successful and have failed to provide adequate cover at affordable premiums.

I don't know if insurance or indemnification schemes will solve the problems ahead. However, both seem to be aimed at sharing the burden of dealing with litigation risks. That should be the basic idea. Just as people work together to develop great open source software, people should work together to defend it against litigation risks.

See also this post on my blog.