Slashdot Mirror

Most of the software "patents" won't stand up in court, as they are for trivial, obvious and non-innovative features. The USPTO is fucked up, rubber-stamping anything and everything these days, and leaving it to the courts to re-examine patents that don't meet the standard for patentability.

Even copyright doesn't protect from work-alike development :-)

I used the Brain back in the 1.x stages, and enjoyed it. I stopped using it after they 'forgot' about the end-user community and started going after companies. I guess now that they're up to version 3, perhaps they went back to the users again. Too late, since I already moved to a wiki, which I can hit from any OS with a browser.

Back then, I also wasn't excited about their patent. So I found another tool.

This AEI-Brookings Joint Center for Regulatory Studies article by Mark S. Nadel is also relevant to showing the case against intellectual property.

http://www.aei.brookings.org/publications/abstract .php?pid=302

From the abstract: This article questions the economic justification for copyright laws prohibition against unauthorized copying. Building on the thesis of Stephen Breyers 1970 Harvard Law Review article, The Uneasy Case for Copyright, it contends that not only may copyright laws prohibition against unauthorized copying (17 U.S.C. 106) not be necessary to stimulate an optimal level of new creations, but that 106 appears to have a net negative effect on such output! It observes that the higher revenues that 106 generates for popular creations are, in the lottery-like entertainment markets, generally used for promotional efforts (rent seeking), and that such marketing crowds out many borderline creations. The article also identifies and explains how new technologies and social norms provide many viable business models for financing new creations relying on only a heavily abridged version of 106. Hence, the article questions whether the current 106 could survive the intermediate scrutiny standards of the First Amendment, given the lack of evidence that the benefits of 106 exceed its costs.

This is a fantastic paper. It is full of references and numbers a lot of hard work and scholarship obviously went into it.

For support for eliminating copyrights or greatly reducing their terms, see Richard Stallman, especially here:
http://www.memes.net/index.php3?request=displaypag e&NodeID=650

and also Brian Martin's essay "Against intellectual property" (part of a large book -- _Information Liberation_)
http://www.uow.edu.au/arts/sts/bmartin/pubs/98il/i l03.html

You can also see lots of other ongoing discussion here on Lawrence Lessig's blog here http://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/lessig/blog/ and in his two books.

Here are some of my own comments on the situation: http://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/mt/mt-comments.cgi?en try_id=898 http://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/mt/mt-comments.cgi?en try_id=889

For support for elimitating copyrights or greatly reducing their terms, see Richard Stallman, especially here:
http://www.memes.net/index.php3?request=displaypag e&NodeID=650

and also Brian Martin's essay "Against intellectual property" (part of a large book -- _Information Liberation_)
http://www.uow.edu.au/arts/sts/bmartin/pubs/98il/i l03.html

You can also see lots of ongoing discussion on Lawrence Lessig's blog http://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/lessig/blog/ which I have been posting at specifically in this Doc's diagnosis topic comments section here: http://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/mt/mt-comments.cgi?en try_id=889

and also Brian Martin's essay "Against intellectual property" (part of a large book -- _Information Liberation_)
http://www.uow.edu.au/arts/sts/bmartin/pubs/98il/i l03.html

You can also see lots of ongoing discussion on Lawrence Lessig's blog http://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/lessig/blog/ which I have been posting at specifically in this Doc's diagnosis topic comments section here: http://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/mt/mt-comments.cgi?en try_id=889

I could never quite figure out the reason for the rotating plex in TheBrain (a tool for organizing everything in a computer using a series of graphical linkages). But it is really saying the same thing the Apple II was saying. The rotating plex has the added feature that it can be set to reverse directions at random intervals. There's an open source version (without the links) here. Something along these lines would go a long way way toward eliminating the multiple entry point problem with Windows-type GUIs, though the TheBrain itself is far from going open source. Imagine something like TheBrain linking Java-based programs.

Although you have an investment in oracle have you looked at MysqlFS . MySQL is perhaps not the most functional of RDBMS' but it's certainly very fast and may provide all of what you require without wasting your expensive oracle licenses.