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Seems like a very slow and clumsy way to implement a nomic. Is it any good?

It's quite easy to explain. They don't sue the person, they sue the person's property (e.g. The United States of America vs $124,700 in United States Currency). Where does it say that property has the right to be secure in itself? (Quite similar to a Scam in Nomic)

Furthermore, they bridge over the others using civil, rather than criminal, court.

Well then, if slashdotters should stay out of the law business then perhaps patent lawyers should stay out of the software business.

Fact is, people will discuss anything that affects them. Patent law is currently affecting millions of software developers badly and so will be discussed.

Certainly lawyers on slashdot should correct technical errors about the law-as-it-is if possible but they should not pretend that the law-as-it-is is perfect and the only answer. People will discuss the law-as-it-is versus the law-as-it-should-be and no amount of bitching by lawyers taking advantage of the law-as-it-is is going to change that. Fortunately.

Lawyers in general and lawyers in congress are trying to run a gigantic game of nomic for their own benefit on the general population, incrementally trying to apply law to more and more of daily life, patents being the most obvious example. This will only be fixed when non-lawyers tell the lawyers to take a leap.

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Creating simple artificial scarcity with copyright and patents on things that can be copied billions of times at minimal cost is a fundamentally stupid economic idea.

Yeah, businesses like restaurants.

No, businesses historically and businesses in many parts of the world. What we've got now is an historical aberration.

Any company that develops anything usually has lots of patents.

They are necessary to protect against being sued by your competitors for infringing _their_ patents.

In other words an arms race where everybody loses except the patent mafia. Great ethical basis that.

Not to mention, if you don't patent something, someone else will patent it and sue you for infringement. Unless you want to spend hundreds of millions of bucks proving prior art, you will have to pay licensing fees.

Nonsense. As the patent mafia are fond of claiming all you have to do is to publish to get prior art. No need to patent.

This happens on a daily basis -- for example, Creative patented the iPod interface (that they stole from Apple in the first place) and now wants money from Apple. That's the simple reality of how it works.

Nope, the simple reality of a broken legal system that people are ignoring wholesale. The Prohibition all over again.

Grow up. Sure, lawyers are parasites. Until you need one to protect your interests.

Where did I say all lawyers are parasites? The problem is parasite lawyers protecting their own "interests" (parasitising the rest of the community for little in return). Every new law, copyrighted item and patent is another opportunity for a lawyer to make money at the expense of the general community. Unfortunately there's currently very few checks and balances to stop the growth of these, particularly patents. Judges are former lawyers, congress is mainly lawyers. Unfortunately, the founding fathers were unable to anticipate and deal with the parasitism in the legal profession. It's a gigantic real life game of nomic.

Sure, our business worked fine before we started changing the way things get done. But we've invented new ways to do things, and so now we do it better. For some of those things, we rely on patents to be able to keep doing things better than the competiton for a few years.

It's a "nice to have" from the perspective of your company, not a "be able to".

Profit incentive is what makes high risk ventures worthwhile.

No, profit incentive and the average expected return is the reason all businesses, of any risk profile, are created.

Patents are often how you make those profits.

No. Patents are an additional incentive. Like most business ideas first-mover advantage, local expertese and bragging rights are equally important. Patents distort the free market. Patents or other forms of incentive may be required to get a very small fraction of ideas over the profit threshold but the vast majority of ideas are not in that category, despite what the IP lawyers might like to claim. Distorting the market that much so that a very small fraction of ideas can see the light of day is anti-capitalist and anti-free-market.

The patent system needs to be fixed, but I disagree with your implication that the entire idea is invalid.

I have the idea of opening a hardware store in a town that's never had a hardware store. I invest a lot of time, money and effort in making my store a reality. It turns out there's a real demand for hardware in this town so somebody else decides they're going to open a hardware store too. Why shouldn't I be able to get a patent on my idea so I have no competition in that suburb/town/state/country? Or patent the idea that imports from Tibet are profitable even though it's never been done before? Or patent the idea of selling life insurance to women aged between 40 and 42 in towns with names of 20 letters in length?

Because it's anti-free market is why and the entire patent system is anti-free market in the same way. The problems it purports to solve are probably tiny compared to the damage it does.

I'd support patents if much of the systemic unfairness was fixed (e.g. independent invention is recognised), there was scientific, objective evidence for it's benefit in every technological area where it was applied and significant research was done to figure out the best way to create innovation incentives (patents as currently implemented are only one of an infinite number of possibilities). The current patent system isn't even remotely close to that.

The FDA has the concept of "generally recognized as safe," or GRAS, for drugs in wide use before government drug acceptance testing was introduced. The FDA now does extensive testing of GRAS to make sure they are, in fact, safe. It's time we did the same thing with laws, like patent law, that have a billion dollar impact on business. It's also time we researched good law rather than leaving it to the lawyers to come up with self-serving law. The bulk of both houses of congress are former lawyers, judges are former lawyers, and even with the best will in the world they all look after the interests of the people they identify with first (i.e. lawyers) at the expense of the general population. It's all a gigantic real life game of nomic and every day people like you make it worse by encouraging it.

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Like software, intellectual property law is a product of the mind, and can be anything we want it to be. Let's get it right.

First, it's great fun. Inventing is cathartic.

Don't conflate invention with patents. They are completely different.

Second, patents look great on your resume.

Only if want a job at a firm which idolises patent parasites.

Third, you can keep your job. No big anyway, because now your resume has patents on it.

And maybe he can keep his job anyway. Or maybe he can get a job at a company that appreciates true inventiveness rather than the parasitism that most patents promote.

Fourth, you get a lot of exposure to the intellectual property legal system.

And this is a good thing how? The more time that is wasted on a fucked up legal system and supporting parasites the less time you have working on worthwhile things. You have only one life, don't waste it.

It's time to get over the whole "software patents suck thing:" they already exist, they already affect you, and your failure to patent something doesn't mean someone else won't try to patent it.

If everybody was like you we'd still be living in caves. We need to fix the system, not pretend it's "normal".

In a war, you have to shoot people because they are shooting at you.

There are different ways of "shooting". Yours is a bad way that just perpetuates a broken system where the parasites win.

If you don't kill them, they will kill you.

While we're using idiotic analogies: If you starve the patent parasites of oxygen then maybe they'll get more worthwhile jobs where they contribute to the community instead of being parasites.

This software patent thing is a war.

No it isn't. It's parasitism by a patent mafia. A real world version of nomic where lawyers are manipulating the legal system for their own benefit. Why do you think this is going to stop at patents? If this keeps up soon every area of life will have a lawyer-parasite attached to it.

You enlisted when you took a computer job.

No, you just took a computer job.

So what if you've been in the rear echelon since basic training. Every Marine a rifleman, every coder an inventor.

And invention has very little to do with the patent system as it stands today. Patents can't even handle the real world reality of simultaneous independent invention, let alone anything more subtle like progressive refinement or concepts having multiple terminologies.

Hooah

This is not a game. It's a bunch of arseholes trying to parasitise the rest of society. Don't pretend it's business as usual.

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Like software, intellectual property law is a product of the mind, and can be anything we want it to be. Let's get it right.

Maybe they tried and the patent holder was not reasonable, but I imagine had they thrown the guy a few more bucks (perhaps a nice round US$10 million) they could have just solved the problem and spared their customers a lot of stress and expense.

That would just encourage more members of the patent mafia to try their luck. There are tens of thousands of bogus software patents out there and tens of thousands of parasitic lawyers who want to make money off them.

Every new law, patent and copyrighted item is another opportunity for a lawyer to make money at the expense of the wider community. Real life nomic.

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The name "Copy Right" is incorrect. It's really "Copy Control Privilege". "Patent" is incorrect. It's really "Idea Control Privilege".

One course should be enough to at least cover the crucial basics.

I agree with you in part but you need to be careful. If software student learns more about law then they're learning less about software.

A lot of law is like real life nomic, an arms race where the only winners are the lawyers. By putting more legal expertese into the community all you're doing is raising the bar overall so people waste even more resources on legal manoeuvres rather than actually producing something worthwhile.

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The USA and Europe should harmonize their software patent laws with China and India.

Don't forget: Every new law, patent and copyrighted item is another opportunity for a lawyer to make money.

"Harmonization", almost always architected by lawyers, will usually be in the direction of more money and opportunities for them and less money and opportunities for the general population. Copyleft is the opposite of that.

Real life nomic; adjust the rules and victory conditions so you win.

This reminds me of Nomic.

First found in Peter Suber's book "The Paradox of Self-Amendment" or something of the sort.

From the nomic.net Wiki entry on Agora: Agora Nomic is the longest continuously running Nomic known. Agora started in 1993 and has been going on ever since.

I was a player in it for a while, however had to eventually drop out due to lack of time. If you have an interest in Nomic, it is definately a Nomic to check out.

For more information on Nomic in general, also be sure to check out nomic.net.

From the nomic.net Wiki entry on Agora: Agora Nomic is the longest continuously running Nomic known. Agora started in 1993 and has been going on ever since.

I was a player in it for a while, however had to eventually drop out due to lack of time. If you have an interest in Nomic, it is definately a Nomic to check out.

For more information on Nomic in general, also be sure to check out nomic.net.

See Nomic.Net.

I'm reminded of the Terrible Proposals from Nomic World - particularly #6, which (if adopted) would have required all future proposals to include page 106 of the 1961 Vladivostok telephone directory. (Nomic is a family of games in which changing the rules is a type of move. The Terrible Proposals were designed to exploit a rule that awarded points based on voting.)

If you've enjoyed Fluxx, you might also enjoy Nomic. Dave Sirlin recommended both in the same article, and I trust his judgement.

Top 3 Things You Don't Want To Hear At The European Center for Nuclear Research:

3. Oops
2. You are turning into a Penguin. Stop it!
1. Is that Rob Malda over by the button that says "engage" on it?

If worst comes to worst, you best re-familiarize yourself with old betsy.

Agora, one of the longest running nomics on the net, has had for long periods of its history no defined way to win the game at all. (Currently, it does, but most of its players seem supremely unconcerned about winning the game.)

(Note: if you've played other rule-changing games, Nomic is different from most of them in a subtle way. Most rule-changing games have a central unchangeable core of rules, which typically include the rules about how other rules are changed. In Nomic, all the rules, including those about how the rules are changed, are subject to change.)