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Yes.. if fact maybe the main problem is a lack of conherence and predictability in antitrust presecution and antitrust judgements. See the paper "The Incoherence of Punishment in Antitrust" by S. W. Waller, Chicago-Kent Law Review, Vol. 78, p. 207, 2003.

It is more likely they looked at previous (MS) antitrust settlements and decided that an anti-competitive strategy was an attractive move for execs and shareholders alike.

Yes :-(

and you certianly have no clue what the harm could be in monitoring for patterns.

I huighly recommend this paper:
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id =998565

to clue you in on the various aspects of privacy.

While most people in law enforcement are honest hard working people, some aren't.
Some will look for any reason to bust someone of a different race, some people will use information to try and peg a crime on someone, anyone not just the perpetrator.

There is plenty of abuses you can read about.

and missus almost all of privacy except one small piece.
That issue is addressed in:
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id =998565

Privacy is more then data, it's having control of that data.

That entire post is built upon a fallacy.

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id =998565

I got that from a previous slashdot story. It brings up some good points to think about.

This is nothing new. William Landes and Richard Posner (two U Chicago Law Professors) made almost the exact same claim in 2002. See it for yourself here: Indefinitely Renewable Copyright

Also, where is this linked article that you speak of? I don't see it in your message...

It's here and it was in my original message :)

BTW, I agree with everything that you said.

It almost sounds like they don't really want to sell the things.

No, it sounds like the damn carrier (AT&T in this case), as usual, has way too much power and is holding back true innovation by restricting what the device maker (Apple) in this case can offer to their customers.

Motorola, Nokia, etc, etc all have the same complaints about American carriers. Crippled phones that consumers don't want, disabled bluetooth profiles, the complete carrier control over what goes on the phone, etc, etc, etc. None of this is new.

I've linked this document before, but I'll link it again. A call to apply wireless network neutrality and Carterfone rules to the cell industry. A must read for anybody that thinks need practices need to end. Forward it to your State and Federal elected officials. Sooner or later this has to stop.

Put in a "succession clause" if the fed tries to subvert the state constitution and see what happens.

This article is as simple and provocative as its title suggests: it explores the legal implications of the word fuck. The intersection of the word fuck and the law is examined in four major areas: First Amendment, broadcast regulation, sexual harassment, and education. The legal implications from the use of fuck vary greatly with the context. To fully understand the legal power of fuck, the nonlegal sources of its power are tapped. Drawing upon the research of etymologists, linguists, lexicographers, psychoanalysts, and other social scientists, the visceral reaction to fuck can be explained by cultural taboo. Fuck is a taboo word. The taboo is so strong that it compels many to engage in self-censorship. This process of silence then enables small segments of the population to manipulate our rights under the guise of reflecting a greater community. Taboo is then institutionalized through law, yet at the same time is in tension with other identifiable legal rights. Understanding this relationship between law and taboo ultimately yields fuck jurisprudence.

Actually, a good economic argument does exist for perpetual copyright ... but that same argument would require copyright owners to perpetually pay fees to re-register their works so that the "deadwood" -- works with worthless copyrights -- would fall into the public domain within very short amounts of time, sometimes within 10 years of creation. Thus, the 0.01% of works that are actually worth money 100 years after their creation would continue to be subject to copyright laws, while the 99.99% that isn't making any amount of money would fall into the public domain.

For a full economic analysis see this article (for which I'm copying the abstract):

William Landes & Richard Posner, Indefinitely Renewable Copyright

"Abstract:
In this paper we raise questions concerning the widely accepted proposition that economic efficiency requires that copyright protection be limited in its duration (often shorter than the current term). We show that just as an absence of property rights in tangible property would lead to inefficiencies, so intangible works that fall into the public domain may be inefficiently used because of congestion externalities and impaired incentives to invest in maintaining and exploiting these works. Although a system of indefinite renewals could lead to perpetual copyrights or very long terms, this is unlikely. Our empirical analysis indicates that (1) fewer than 11 percent of the copyrights registered between 1883 and 1964 were renewed at the end of their 28-year term, even though the cost of renewal was small; (2) copyrights are subject to significant depreciation and have an expected or average life of only about 15 years; and (3) copyright registration and renewals are highly responsive to economic incentives for the shorter the expected life of a copyright and the higher the registration and renewal fees, the less likely are both registration and renewal. This in turn suggests that a system of modestly higher registration and renewal fees than at present, a relatively short initial term (20 years or so), and a right of indefinite renewal (possibly subject to an overall maximum term of protection of say 100 years) would cause a large number of copyrighted works to be returned to the public domain quite soon after they were created. A further benefit of indefinite renewal is that it would largely eliminate the rent-seeking problem that is created by the fact that owners (and users) of valuable copyrights that are soon to expire will expend real resources on trying to persuade (dissuade) Congress to extend the term."

There is no such thing as an Intellectual Property law. That's a big blanket that the megacorps want to pull over our eyes in order to gain more power.

And they are doing a fine job of it, with the uncritical repetition in this article of curious notion of "intellectual property thieves".

Intellectual "property" is a terrible metaphor. "Property" is a legal machine that is designed to enforce capture of negative externalities. That is, when you own property, you are responsible for its upkeep. Without property rights you could dump your wastes or graze your sheep on the commons, and not ever pay any costs for that. The notion of property, first and foremost, forces you to pay your own way on your own property.

Intellectual "property" on the other hand is a legal machine that is intended to enforce capture of positive externalities: good things that happen to other people because of your work.

Patents, trademarks and copyright are sufficiently unlike property that any attempt to reason about them using property metaphors is doomed to failure from the outset. It is a tad disturbing that this failed metaphor has become so much a part of the popular legal consciousness that even the Attorney General is able to remember it.

This is not to say that individuals cannot have rights in patents, trademarks and copyrights. But those rights are not ownership rights to property, and violating those rights is not theft.

Agreed. The NET Act is horrible public policy. Not only that, the guy himself says that "criminal sanctions do not deter warez traders", linking to this paper on warez trading and the law, which "...discusses the motivations for warez trading, how criminalizing the behavior may counterproductively encourage it, and why legislators and prosecutors continue to target warez trading despite the counterproductive effects," in order to state his case, but then turns around and says that "[r]emoving warez traders from the Net, one by one, is a crude but ultimately effective method for curtailing warez trading" becuase "a couple of hundred warez traders have been busted by the law." (Whoop-de-doo!) So, uh, which is it? The law doesn't deter warez traders, or is the law effecting in curtailing them? You can't have it both ways.

I'm not meaning to preach, but what historical indicators are you using to base this on? What exactly about this makes you think that our current system ended this any better? What makes you think it would have been 33 instead of 32 if it had been harder for the shooter to get a gun?

Here you go...

Multiple Victim Public Shootings, Bombings, and Right-to-Carry Concealed Handgun Laws: Contrasting Private and Public Law Enforcement

JOHN R. LOTT Jr.
State University of New York - Department of Economics
WILLIAM M. LANDES
University of Chicago Law School; National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER)

Abstract:
Few events obtain the same instant worldwide news coverage as multiple victim public shootings. These crimes allow us to study the alternative methods used to kill a large number of people (e.g., shootings versus bombings), marginal deterrence and the severity of the crime, substitutability of penalties, private versus public methods of deterrence and incapacitation, and whether attacks produce copycats. Yet, economists have not studied this phenomenon. Our results are surprising and dramatic. While arrest or conviction rates and the death penalty reduce normal murder rates, our results find that the only policy factor to influence multiple victim public shootings is the passage of concealed handgun laws. We explain why public shootings are more sensitive than other violent crimes to concealed handguns, why the laws reduce both the number of shootings as well as their severity, and why other penalties like executions have differential deterrent effects depending upon the type of murder.

I'm actually agreeing with drinkypoo! Perhaps if just one of the law-abiding citizens involved had been armed, much of this would have been avoided...

It sounds counter-intuitive to many, but here's a study which supports your position:

Multiple Victim Public Shootings, Bombings, and Right-to-Carry Concealed Handgun Laws: Contrasting Private and Public Law Enforcement

JOHN R. LOTT Jr.
State University of New York - Department of Economics
WILLIAM M. LANDES
University of Chicago Law School; National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER)

Few events obtain the same instant worldwide news coverage as multiple victim public shootings. These crimes allow us to study the alternative methods used to kill a large number of people (e.g., shootings versus bombings), marginal deterrence and the severity of the crime, substitutability of penalties, private versus public methods of deterrence and incapacitation, and whether attacks produce copycats. Yet, economists have not studied this phenomenon. Our results are surprising and dramatic. While arrest or conviction rates and the death penalty reduce normal murder rates, our results find that the only policy factor to influence multiple victim public shootings is the passage of concealed handgun laws. We explain why public shootings are more sensitive than other violent crimes to concealed handguns, why the laws reduce both the number of shootings as well as their severity, and why other penalties like executions have differential deterrent effects depending upon the type of murder.

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id =969984/

The best scams are those that make the sucker think he's pulling a fast one. It doesn't work. The "smart" people trying to cash in on this lose.

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id =920553

"Before brokerage fees, the average investor who buys a stock on the day it is most heavily touted and sells it 2 days after the touting ends will lose approximately 5.5%. For the top half of most thoroughly touted stocks, a spammer who buys at the ask price on the day before unleashing touts and sells at the bid price on the day his or her touting is the heaviest will, on average, earn 5.79%."

You think you can squeeze a profit while the spammer is cashing out and the price is falling, good luck. They know the game, you don't.

Hi All,

A couple of clarifications:

1. We measured multitasking as the number of simultaneous projects, not as the number of simultaneous tasks (like talking on the phone and surfing the web at the same time). This variable could also be called 'workload' or 'project multitasking' in a sense. Interestingly, we found that multitasking improved productivity up to a certain optimum point, beyond which it reduced productivity. This gels well with the context switching results that several people have mentioned. With more simultaneous tasks, people tend to switch contexts more often, and the additional work getting done is at some point outweighed by the drag on efficiency that results from trying to juggle too many projects.

2. We measured networks using email data and we found that the structure of your contact network (not just the size) was important. We found that employees with diverse network structures multitasked more, generated more revenue, and completed more projects per unit time. We speculate in this paper that these diverse networks are giving employees access to diverse pools of information that they use to solve problems and conduct their tasks more effectively.

In a subsequent study, we analyzed the *content* of the email messages and found that in fact employees with more diverse social networks did have access to more diverse information (as measured across the content of their email). We also found that this link - between network diversity and information diversity - explained productivity and performance differences: Wokers with access to diverse information through diverse social networks generated more revenue, completed more projects and completed projects faster, controlling for a host of traditional demographic and human capital variables such as age, gender, education, industry experience etc.

The paper can be found here:

Aral, Sinan and Van Alstyne, Marshall W., "Network Structure & Information Advantage: Structural Determinants of Access to Novel Information and Their Performance Implications" (January 18, 2007). Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=958158

3. We found that more IT use and IT skills did in fact speed work holding the level of multitasking constant and that younger employees were more comfortable with IT on average and used IT more on average than older employees. (IT was defined as use of company DBs, Intranets, email etc).

4. Several people have mentioned the "quality" of work (rather than quantity). This is an important point and one we deal with explicitly in the paper. In the case of executive recruiting, filling a position for a client can be thought of as delivering a candidate that meets a minimum threshold of quality. So, filling more positions and filling them faster is a "quality controlled" measure of output in this context. That said, this measure of quality is noisy, so in our current work we are explicitly seeking better measures of quality (for example error rates).

5. Executive recruiting is only one industry. So, in order to study these phenomena more broadly, we are now expanding our research to study other information workers -- accountants, consultants, digital media producers, stock brokers etc. We also hope to study programmers. Although, a lot has already been published about what drives productivity in coding.

Best

Sinan Aral
NYU Stern School of Business & MIT Sloan School of Management

Hi All,

A couple of clarifications:

1) We measured multitasking by the number of simultaneous projects, not the number of simultaneous tasks (like being on the phone and searching the web at the same time). The measure could also be called 'workload' I guess. And, in fact, we found that this type of multitasking increased productivity up to an optimum point, after which, due the the difficulty of jugging many projects, it reduced productivity. This gels well with context switching drain on productivity that several people mentioned.

2) We found that people with greater IT use and higher IT skills (who also happened to be younger on average) completed projects faster holding their level of multitasking constant.

3) We also found those with diverse social networks (links into multiple pools of information) multitasked more and were more productive. Although it is admittedly difficult to tease apart whether those that multitask more and are more productive seek diverse social networks or whether diverse social networks drive greater productivity. (We actually go through this in the paper a bit).

4) In a subsequent study, we analyzed the *content* of email messages and found that in fact employees with more diverse social networks had access to more diverse information (as measured across the content of their email). We also found that this link - between network diversity and information diversity - explained productivity and performance differences: Wokers with access to diverse information through diverse social networks generated more revenue, completed more projects and completed projects faster, controlling for a host of traditional demographic and human capital variables such as age, gender, education, industry experience etc.

The paper can be found here:

Aral, Sinan and Van Alstyne, Marshall W., "Network Structure & Information Advantage: Structural Determinants of Access to Novel Information and Their Performance Implications" (January 18, 2007). Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=958158

Best

Sinan Aral
NYU Stern School of Business & MIT Sloan School of Management

"It seems like that if you are against software patents you must be against patents in order for it to make sense..."

It may seem like that but only if you have little if any knowledge of the patent system - its history, economics and law - and an extremely distorted view of what the opposition to software patents is all about.

http://eupat.ffii.org/vreji/cusku/index.en.html#iu ris http://www.bailii.org/ew/cases/EWHC/Patents/2005/1 589.html http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id =959931 http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue8_3/kahin/i ndex.html#k7 http://www.researchineurope.org/policy/patentdirlt r.htm

It is also important to realise that the Patent Offices are not and never can be the arbiters of what constitute the great inventions of the day. The patent system is not some prize-giving system, only granting patents to the truly worthy inventors, and in order to be fair and objective, the P.Os can only - at best - reject the truly meritless or clearly unpatentable applications. It may be possible to raise the "inventive step" a little and improve patent quality a little but only in hindsight and in the subjective opinion of some is the 1-click patent a "stupid" patent. In fact a case can easily be made that it was more desirable from the point of view of the economic rationale of the patent system to grant the 1-click patent than it was to grant the RSA patent. The salient point though is that it was neither necessary nor efficient to grant either patent in order that society, the economy and the progress of the sciences and useful arts would benefit from those inventions.

Youtube didn't pay to produce it so they have no right to benefit financially from it.

You know, that simply doesn't reflect how the economy works. If I put up a cinema, there's no reason, moral, legal or otherwise, why you shouldn't open up a restaurant next door and make a profit from the customers I draw. True, you have no positive right to do so, but there's no restriction on such activity either. Do you want to live in a world in which companies and individuals can control all positive externalities of their actions? As Lemley explains, monopolies are the best way to achieve that kind of control. The pernicious idea that copyright confers an exclusive right to profits (both direct and indirect) is at variance with almost all other market activity.

Whoever puts the money into producing the material should control it. If you make something it belongs to you unless you give or sell the rights to some one else. That isn't copyright that's been true for roughly twelve thousands years or more.

Where on earth does this come from? Market economies and the labor theory of value are a modern phenomena. Most societies in history have been organized quite differently, with vastly different conceptions of property and ownership. (Your claim preceeds the earliest writing by thousands of years!)

If you ask me, Viacom's action is a negotiating tactic. They know they benefit from the distribution of their programing. But they also know there's money to be made here, so they want as big a cut as possible. Both sides are in a contest to determine how to divide up the pie - which really comes down to a question of relative strength and weakness, not right and wrong.

Well, if a job is created elsewhere that could have been created in the US, isn't that a job lost?

Actually, copyright is specifically NOT a natural right in the US, although it is considered one in Europe. That was a major hangup in copyright treaties, until they agreed to disagree.

I argue that exactly because of those patents and greed, the last 10 years worth of medical research hasn't had anywhere near the impact that it could have.

You argue this without the least bit of understanding of the science and financial realities behind drug development and you ignore the empirical evidence of many successful drugs being developed on patent (and the near absolute lack innovation in countries which don't). The business would simply collapse without patents.

You may also want to consider some empirical studies like this:

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id =932989

It compares EU price controls and their effects on R&D spending vs that of the US.

There's nothing like an extreme example! Let's say I develop a pill that can magiclly cure AIDS and any cancer AND adds 50 years to the patient's lifespan all with just one dose. Sale price $1,000,000,000 per dose. Total effect on average lifespan would be zero since the average patient couldn't afford it even given 50 years to pay for it.

That is an absurd hypothetical. What if every farmer decided to charge 1 billion dollars per ounce of crop? People would starve! Should be eliminate the free market? Of course not. This would not be profit maximizing activity and ignores the fact that drugs are, in fact, quite affordable relative to the overall costs of development.

You don't have to go to the 3rd world to find people dying for the lack of a modern drug, many seniors in the U.S. routinely skip prescribed medications or take half doses due to inability to afford their prescription.

And yet our seniors are living longer and healthier lives than ever before despite the growth of diabetes (a major epidemic) and obesity. I'm not saying that things are perfect here, far from it, but that the consequences of government price regulation and/or eviscerating patents would be far more severe over the long term than any short term benefits that we might gain.

Others in the same financial boat are able to smuggle their prescriptions across the border from Canada.

Just because Canada and a select number of other countries institute price controls and enjoy a free ride does not mean that major markets like the US can do this without having a severe negative impact on the development of new drugs worldwide (and moreso locally).

Also a large amount of this behavior owes to ignorance of the part of the buyer. Canada forces the brand name drug companies to drop their prices on drugs closer to that of their generic equivalents so that the branded product is priced significantly less in Canada. Many of these buyers do not realize that most of their medications can be purchased from non-branded generics for less than the branded product in Canada (and more often than not even their generics) and that in the vast majority of cases generics are a perfectly acceptable substitute (in some rare cases the formulation isn't consistent and it can make a difference...though doctors will usually indicate this). If you compare the prices of drugs still on patent the difference are appreciably smaller.

In case you don't believe me...

The idea that there is a ton of money to be saved by stripping drug companies of their excess profits is very much flawed. The average profit margin of the drug companies is around 25% (and significantly lower if you look at it over time). This means that you're unlikely to achieve much more than a 25% reduction in average prices on overtime without stripping them of their budgets for R&D and other critical areas that are necessary to sustain the business (yes, even marketing and sales) even if you are to assume that profits are irre

Christ in a sidecar. If I had a nickel for every time I wished I could access my email account from somewhere other than the computer lab back in the mid 80's, I'd have enough money to pay a goon to knock some sense into your head. Mere portability of an existing system is not a novel fucking innovation, you dumbshit.

Is the ad hominem really necessary?

The NTP patents don't cover the broad "portable email access," they cover a specific functionality that allows portable email access. Just thinking something is a good idea is NOT prior art under the law.

You don't even understand the problem with the current system, do you. The problem RIM had was that the legal test to disprove novelty requires documentation (generally from a previous patent), and people don't waste time writing down and meticulously documenting the bloody obvious. This is why (as the GP poster said) the current test is rubbish.

I understand the current system, warts and all, very well, thank you. My problem isn't that the current system is perfect -- it isn't, not by a long shot -- but my problem is, what's a better way to do it? I'm not going to repeat everything I've written in other posts, but there are a lot of things to consider -- hindsight being the biggest one, biases amongst "experts" in the field, who is an "expert" that is qualified to opine on whether or not an invention is "obvious," etc. There might be a better test out there -- personally, I like the (what are known as) the Deere factors for obviousness -- evidence of longfelt need, acceptance by the marketplace, failed attempts by others -- but those aren't what the law uses to determine legal obviousness, they are just factors that tend to support or reject obviousness in a certain case.

The problem is, unless the law itself is changed (and maybe it needs to be), non-obviousness is a legal requirement for a patent. And as long as it is a requirement, there need to be tests to determine what is, and what is not, obvious. The current test is an attempt to determine obviousness while trying to minimize the impact of hindsight. Here's a paper you might (or might not) find an interesting read: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id =928662

I think every university and law school that operates a legal clinic should be in the business of defending RIAA suits against poor and working class people, for the reasons enunciated by the ACLU, Public Citizen, Electronic Frontier Foundation and others. See http://www.ilrweb.com/viewILRPDF.asp?filename=capi tol_foster_amicus and, for an example of a law student's contribution, see http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id =660601 (whole Note available on Westlaw).

While the Patent Act doesn't provide such an exemption, case law used to. A concise summary: "Early U.S. judicial decisions spoke approvingly of a common law-based doctrine that would exempt unlicensed uses of patented technology for purposes of scientific experimentation or purely personal use. More recently, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, which since 1982 has exercised exclusive nationwide jurisdiction over patent-based appeals, has also recognized the experimental use exemption. The court interprets the exemption so narrowly, however, that for all practical purposes it has become a nullity." http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id =691424

So when I learned about the personal tinkering exemption in school in the 70's, it was still useful. But today it's so restricted that it practically doesn't exist.

(IANAL - I learned all my law from Groklaw :-)

You have already covered the legal argument for this result here. I'd encourage readers to check out the article.

This reminds me of a a good paper by Ilya Somin of George Mason Law School re voter ignorance.

Here are a couple:

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id =457760

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id =916963

This reminds me of a a good paper by Ilya Somin of George Mason Law School re voter ignorance.

Here are a couple:

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id =457760

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id =916963

In general, if I am using a Linux product I use it at least partially because of its rather clean non-encumbered IP position. The hope is that the GPL assists in that protection as well.

While it would be nice to be able to say "Well, if Novell (or whoever) is willingly putting IP encumbered stuff into their Linux then I don't want to use them", the reality is you can't really make that statement: the IP systems currently in play make disclosing the problematic elements a major no-no.

There has been basically one study (from 2004--New York based Open Source Risk Management will announce it has studied the Linux kernel and discovered it infringes on about 283 issued patents. Twenty-seven of those patents are owned by Microsoft.") so far that has addressed this IP problem in the kernel--the kernel, not the applications that run in that infrastructure.

Yes, we know a few of the items of interest, but 283 of 'em? And you can't exactly find the list because of the little perverse "if you knew then you willfully violated IP..." issue in patent law.

We (the Linux community in general) need to spend a little time making sure our IP is spotless against such (hopefully) groundless diatribes from the likes of Microsoft (and SCO, etc...).

Ultimately tho, companies with big pockets will always be able to sue (with cause or with malice) smaller entities and make them go away.

A few nice links:

Willfullness issue (just an abstract):
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id =472901

The OSRM position paper on IP issues in Linux (minus the specifics of course... )
http://www.osriskmanagement.com/pdf_articles/linux patentpaper.pdf

Another piece from D. Ravicher (of OSRM/PubPat fame) re: Ballmer's comments:
http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,1729908,00.as p

"Software patents are generally considered to add to the legal costs of large enterprises, as well as creating a hostile legal environment for smaller software businesses and open source projects" By the Slashdot crowd, maybe. The latest research suggests that in the U.S., the barriers to entry and industry concentration of the software industry are no higher than they were in the time before software patents became prevalent. http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id =926204 And besides, patents increase legal costs across _all_ industries. The reason we have them is they're still the best way we've figured out to reward companies and people who innovate, rather than just hoping the market allocates the rewards for us (and often letting the spoils instead go to whatever corporate megalith can spend the most marketing dollars or undercut the acutal innovators) In other words, if you're a small software provider and you've come up with a neat idea, you'd better hope that you can get patent protection, because nothing else is going to stop Microsoft from using your idea, cutting your price, and taking away customers with armies of marketroids.

Incidentally, in case you'd like to read the measured legal opinion of someone who, you know, actually knows what he's talking about, take a look at this analysis of Yahoo's case in France regarding auction listings of Nazi memorabilia.

Well, if the study Porn Up, Rape Down is correct... then no. The author shows a strong correlation between increased access to pornography and a statistical reduction in reported rapes. Further, the author showed geographical correlations within the US whereby locally reduced access to pornography occurred in the same locations as areas with high rape rates.

Things that make you go Hmmmm....

A patent may not be obtained though the invention ... if the differences between the subject matter sought to be patented and the prior art are such that the subject matter as a whole would have been obvious at the time the invention was made to a person having ordinary skill in the art to which said subject matter pertains. Patentability shall not be negatived by the manner in which the invention was made. (35 U.S.C. 103 (A))

In the last twenty years, the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit has dramatically limited the application of PHOSITA in its obviousness analysis. In a number of cases, the Federal Circuit only invalidated patents for obviousness when there was evidence in the prior art that presented a "suggestion or incentive" to combine the prior art. ACS Hospital Systems, Inc. v. Montefiore Hospital, 732 F.2d 1572, 1577 (Fed. Cir. 1984). This is known as the "suggestion test." Under the suggestion test, a PHOSITA's ability to reason two prior art references together does not matter. As a matter of law, the "suggestion test" finds no support in 103.

In fact, in an earlier Supreme Court decision, the court seemed to reject such a "suggestion test." In Graham v. John Deere Co., 383 U.S. 1, 9 (1966), the court rejected an argument that noted "nothing in the prior art suggest[s]" a "unique combination of these old features" in the claimed invention. However, since the Federal Circuit's invention of "suggestion test," the Supreme Court has yet to hear a case on obviousness.

There was an excellent paper at the Workshop on Economics and Information Security a few weeks ago which showed that stock pump-and-dump spam works. It was also shown that as more people are discovering this fact they are riding the band-waggon, thereby making it work even better. If you can spot the scam, perpetrated by others, early in the cycle then you can trade the stock yourself and make a profit and not actually be breaking any securities laws, since you're not the one promoting the stock.

This house bill is at least taking the right approach to trying to prevent online gambling, no matter what one thinks of the harm such activity causes (or what regions of the country may be influencing the legislation). But I am curious how the bill will withstand judicial scrutiny if it requires ISPs to block access to certain sites, given that blocking technologies inevitably block protected speech as well. The better approach, and the one stressed in the bill, is impose liability on the payment intermediaries (like credit cards). The various options for curtailing internet gambling and controlling other internet activities are discussed in length in a paper available at: http://ssrn.com/abstract=696601.

Prof. Tim Wu at Columbia Law School testified before Congress on why Net Neutrality is necessary. Quoting from his testimony:

Problems of network discrimination are nothing new. ... The history, in fact, goes as far back as the 1860s, when Western Union, the telegraph monopolist, signed an exclusive deal with the Associated Press. Other wire services were priced-off the network -- not blocked, but discriminated against. The result was to build Associated Press into a news monopoly that was not just dangerous for business, but dangerous for American democracy. ... The AP monopoly had an agenda: it didn't just favor Google or Yahoo -- it went as far as to chose politicians it liked and those it didn't. ... AP used its Western Union backed monopoly to influence politics in the late 19th century, even going so far as to exercise censorship on behalf of the State. The method was simple: when faced with messages from disfavored politicians, the wires simply didn't carry them.

disclosure: I work for Prof. Wu. I just thought people here might be interested in some historical perspective on the current debate.

Congratulations.

You've just reinvented ad-hoc, debilitated, half-witted version of progressing pauperization a la Marx, the falling rate of profit et al.

There's just one problem: you see, it didn't work out that way. Somehow. And doesn't. In theory it doesn't work that way either. Hint: there's something happening to consumers money when they choose WM over other businesses. You missed that part on top of missing hundred other factors.

Ad hoc, silly, amateurish economics is just that. Group paranoia, folk economics:

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id =320940

The Law of Group Polarization

CASS R. SUNSTEIN

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id =199668

An unfortunate consequence is that his brand of extremism is likely to make more realistic claims and analyses less acceptable to the mainstream.

A fortunate possible consequence is that such extremism may shift the "center-of-opinion" towards (but not into) extremist alarmism

There's more at work here than just that I suspect. Various studies (try this for an example) have seen that like-minded groups tend to naturally polarise. That is, if you get a group of people who have simliar opinions on subject "x" together for a discussion then the members will tend to come away with a more extremist or polarised opinions on that subject. As we have more information at our disposal, usually far more than we can easily consume, there is a tendency to consume material from generally like minded individuals, thus further polarising your own opinions. Worse, as opinions move further to extremes it becomes increasingly easy to find differing opinions utterly unpalatable: they tend to be extremist in the opposite direction, and speak, effectively, in a different language. It is entirely possible that the "centre-of-opinion" doesn't move at all, but instead anyone on either side of the issue simply gets drawn to one extreme or the other. You can certainly witness this effect in US politics.

Jedidiah.

There has to be some way to protect intellectual effort and the first people that will tell you this are the drug companies which spend a tremendous amount of money finding how certain molecules will do certain things and not kill the humans that ingest them. Easy to copy those molecules and all that information unless they have a patent.

Frankly the patent office just doesn't have the time to thoroughly review the patent applications that come in. If you are serious about this subject, read Lemley's analysis of the Patent Office's "Rational Ignorance": http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id =261400. ("It is common to assert that the Patent and Trademark Office does a bad job of examining patents, and that it should spend more time and money weeding out bad patents. . . . [The fact is] that very few patents are actually litigated or licensed; most simply sit on a shelf unused, or are used only for noncontroversial purposes like financing. Because of this, society would be better off spending its resources in a more searching judicial inquiry into validity in those few cases in which it matters than paying for a more protracted examination of all patents ex ante. In economic terms, the patent office is 'rationally ignorant' of the objective validity of the patents it issues.")

Yes, that patent system has flaws. So do all human endeavors. The same can be true for trial by jury, taxes, and democracy. But it's not as bad as people in the software industry make it out to be. If a patent is truly invalid, you have the chance to say so to the judge. It's not like it's the Wild West out there.

As it happens, I was just reading a slightly old (May 2005) issue of Bruce Schneier's Crypto-Gram that I'd printed off and not finished reading. it had a link to this article about the possible legal liability you carry for running an open access point.

This is the paper cited, it's about used books but I wonder if the same arguments could be applied to used video games.

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id =755824

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id =10571 Dodge vs. Ford Motor Co. (ca.1919) Michigan Supreme Court ...pg 36-37 of the companion book. FU!

Perception, my dear brpr. If I believe that this individual will not produce more value than the money I pay them, I will simply keep the money.

True, but you're missing the point. Most of the time, you pay people considerably less than what their work is worth to you (*) because competition is driving down the price of labour. For this reason, although the price of labour is limited (at least in theory) by the value of the labour performed to the employer, it is not determined by this value. Thus, a minimum wage is very unlikely to force an employer into paying more than an employee's labour is worth, since they're usually paying quite a bit less than that anyway.

Securing your server is an excellent example. What's it worth to you? Even if I am the only one in the world who can do it, if I try to charge more than securing the server is worth to you, you won't pay it.

True, but see above.

Nowhere do you deny that a minimum wage will price some workers out of the market, or some work from being done at all.

Indeed not, I merely note that it's an empirical issue, i.e. you cannot argue from first principles that a minimum wage will always cause unemployment, or even that it will cause unemployment most of the time. Empirical studies totally undermine your argument, for example this excellent paper (http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_i d=228689) which argues that unemployment is primarily linked to inequality ("...contradicting the often-repeated view that unemployment in Europe is attributable to rigid wage structures, high minimum wages and generous social welfare systems."). The paper shows that many factors which are totally ignored by your phony-deductive theory have a significant effect on unemployment levels. In my previous post, admittedly, I was more focused on the possible benefits of having a minimum wage even if it did lead to higher unemployment. Having looked into the issue a little more, I'm now more skeptical that a minimum wage would significantly increase unemployment.

What are you arguing against, anyway? You don't actually contradict me, except in the effort to promote/denigrate the "labor theory of value", when I was actually talking about the "value of labor".

I'm not sure if the the position I was attacking, even if it wasn't your position, was technically the labour theory of value (I'm genuinely not sure). I didn't attack your specific argument because the 3rd paragraph of your original post makes no sense to me. Why can I negotiate $x+1 tomorrow? If I make 50 widgets for you on Wednesday, why will another 50 widgets on Thursday be worth more to you? You might not even want any more widgets at all on Thursday! What is your argument in this paragraph even supposed to establish? That minimum wages don't increase the median wage? If so, this is flatly contradicted by the empirical evidence. I suspect that's not what it's meant to establish, but that's my best guess.

Oh, and "simplistic" doesn't mean wrong. It just means simple enough that people can understand it. If your theory cannot be explained simply, there is little value to your theory except to you.

I disagree. Sometimes the real world is complex, and even good theories cannot always get rid of this complexity entirely. An economic theory which is simple enough to be summed up in a paragraph or two is likely to be wrong, because economies are influenced by an enormous range of factors, including one of enormous complexity: human psychology. I'm not offering any particular alternative theory here, merely arguing that your theory is flawed and contradicted by the empirical evidence. If you're familiar with the economics literature, you'll be aware of the various alternatives.

(*) Another problem with your argument which I'm ignoring here for simplicity is that it's incredibly difficult to work o

i read this a while back... im just passing out the link, because of its economic leaning on something done from the outside?....

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id =294828

seeing some of the inside metrics they keep on their economy though im sure would be amazing ... they should open source their econ data....

Two of my law school profs used these (although it was before I arrived). They co-wrote a paper on it called "Taking Back the Law School Classroom: Using Technology to Foster Active Student Learning".

Their experience was part of a NY Times story in early 2004. (Story text from law school to avoid registration.)

If anyone wants more information on Prof. Caron and Dr. Gely's experience with these you can read the aforementioned paper.

- Neil Wehneman