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FTC and JD Holding Hearings on IP
hondo77 writes "The U.S. Federal Trade Commission and the Justice Department are holding hearings on intellectual property laws over the next few weeks (the first one was Feb 6). They're looking at the balance between IP rights and the free market."
I suspect that the possibility of any outcome between Justice and the FTC is going to be a blatant corporate lovefest. Let's face it, Ashcroft is firmly in the pocket of big business, and the FTC, while trying to get a grip on reality, fails to do so much of the time. The big IP corps are goning to simply take the ball here and write their own rules. Is there any way to get in front of this bus and stop it? YES. Get off your dead ass and send snailmail to your congress critters. Write to the head of the FTC. I'm not even going to include links, your mostly smart people out there, you know how to use Google. Get after it!
--- Think of it as evolution in action ---
I'm constantly amazed at the idealism shown on Slashdot. Politicians are about one thing, and one thing only: How can I get re-elected? The easiest way to get re-elected is to have lots of money to campaign with. The easiest way to get lots of money to campaign with is to get it from corporations. The easiest way to get lots of money from corporations is to use the "I scratch your back, you scratch mine" mentality.
They're going to uphold the current IP laws because it lets people make patents out of a Peanut Butter and Jelly Sandwich.
Total agreement here, even with the Enron fartcloud envolping Washington, after that "Axis of evil" comment by Bush, I'm convinced the cherry is off the "war on terrorism" victory and W. is back to halfwit status. Particularly with the extremely soft stance with regard to Microsoft and the DoJ and M$ wanting to get the whole thing wrapped up fast so they can get back into the bedroom and continue screwing people. The current administration is a bunch of coldwarriors, corporate whores and dingbats, Colin Powell the notable exception, but tainted by association, nonetheless. If anything comes out of this it's probably the FTC and DoJ looking for any wrangling room left over Intellectual Property that they can lock up in favor of the GOP's big campaign donors.
While you're writing to your reps, tell them to vote for the campaign finance reform act to bring an end to the charade of people you've never heard of having $70 million before a presidential campaign even gets started.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
And whilst you're at it read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html.
Stephen
"Don't write down to your readers, the only people less intelligent than you can't read" - Sign on Newspaper Office Wall
Millions of people in third world countries dying because of patents on drugs.
Kids and adults lacking intelligence due to patents on information which could enlighten the world.
Innovation controlled by big corperations using patents, and all for a profit, milk the old technology for 40 years or more until profits force you to change.
Government controlled by companies like Enron who take advantage of the flaws in the system.
Criminals and organized crime taking advantage of capitalism, people being killed for a buck, and wars being faught over money issues.
Whens it going to end? Capitalism is fine, but too much of anything is bad. When will people figure out, too much capitalism, too much competition, and not enough sharing is bad? Yes moderate competition fuels innovation, too much competition however makes the enviornment so competitive that no one can innovate.
Imagine the innovation and the new technologies we'd have, if third world countries had access to all the information in the world, and any kid rich or poor could be the next einstien or bill gates, any living person, any of the 6 billion people could come out with an idea, which changes the world and shares the idea for free.
Money needs to be made people say, just because you share an idea doesnt mean you'll turn that idea into a product. The product is what people buy, the service is what people pay for, not the idea or the information.
My opinion is, more focus should be on sharing information, less focus on competiton, more focus on ways to earn money from hard work and not from information, ideas, or earning money from having money.
We also need to fix the problems in our government, the current administration is just a joke, they got into office in a suspicious manner, and now we here stuff about Eron, corruption within the government should be removed, it will be difficult but its possible.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
simple reason: Most things you can buy and sell are scarce items. Intellectual "property" isn't scarce, so the same rules CANNOT apply exactly. Plain and simple.
Take a good look around what happens when you are a fan and make a fansite, the way IP attorneys gorge themselves encouraging the MPAA and RIAA in their folly of copy protection, or Rambus tried to destroy inexpensive fast memory with an excessive tariff on DDR SDRAM license and using it to get their own RDRAM more accepted.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Copyright and IP are radically different things.
Copyright protects a produced product. IP protects an idea. As far as providing protection for an idea, I think we're headed in the wrong direction. The "One-Click Patent" is a prime example of this. The idea that it "protects" is "fast customer service", hardly an original idea.
A number of years ago there was a big movement in the US to "emulate" (pronounced copy) the Japanese industrial method. We were getting our butts trounced in the manufacturing world and decided on the "if you can't beat 'em, join 'em" solution. Imagine if a Japanese company had been able to patent an "employee motivational regime". Imagine if one of the first web startups had patented "stock option incentive plans". These are all simply ideas, not new inventions.
We need to get the USPTO to revisit the "non-obvious" part of the patent laws and look at the idea/motivation behind the idea being patented. If it's just a somewhat new way of doing an old idea then it doesn't deserve a patent. At best, Amazon should have gotten the normal first adopter's advantage for using "One-Click" and then have to improve it to keep up with the competition.
Hmmm, anyone want to work with me on the "One Mouse Hover and Wait 3 Seconds" shopping patent?
--- I wish I could hear the soundtrack to my life. That way I'd know when to duck.
...that IP rights are supposed to be balanced with "free market" (what I consider to be a political doctrine on the border of being a religious belief) and not consumer protection, freedom of expression, advance of technology, science and human thought, or other real things that are threatened by overbroad patents and other kinds IP abuse.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
James Rogan, director of the U.S. patent office:
> "The entry of patent law into these areas was
> greeted with predictions of disaster,"
> said "Yet the United States is the
> international leader in [software] and other
> technological areas."
The U.S. is the richest nation in the world. It was the international leader in software and other technological areas long before software patents reared their ugly head. But Mr. Rogan sounds surprised...
"How can this be? The U.S. has passed laws that allow us to arrest foreign programmers whose code we dislike and throw them in jail! We put export restrictions on encryption software! We grant patents on algorithms that are then included in ISO standards! We allow corporations to rip off huge quantities of code and call it "the Windows (R) network stack", and give them laws to allow the prosecution of anyone who makes unauthorised copies of it! How come we're the world leader?"
> "A return by competition regulators to viewing
> IP rights with a 1970s-era suspicion would risk
> interfering with these market-based incentives
> to innovate."
Market-based incentives to innovate are only incentives to the people involved in the marketing. You can't persuade an inventor to "invent more" by offering cash. You can only persuade firms to invest more in R&D, which isn't quite the same. Just as musical people would write and perform music whether or not they ever had a chance of becoming millionaires, so creative people would continue to create and invent. This is particularly true of software, where the cost of distribution is virtually nil. The deal is - money is (or should be) the means of exchange, not an end in itself.
The crunch comes with patents on drugs, where the initial investment is so large. There will never be (if you like to think in these terms) a medical-research Linus Torvalds to play the role of nemesis to the evil Glaxo-Smithkline, because you need more than a couple of PCs and some skill to cure cancer. I think this is a much more interesting and important area, and one that's a lot less easy to solve in the long run.
I dunno.
These sigs are more interesting tha
Software should not be able to patent. Its far to easy to solve a problem and take patent on the problem rather than the way to solve it. One-click from Amazon is an excellent example of patenting the problem (buying with a click). I wouldnt have opposed if it had been a patent on HOW to make one-klick working. Software is to fluid to be mesured up by a patent office because of the extremaly many ways to solve a specific task. Many of those ways fall under patent that hasnt anything with the patent at all, they just solve a problem in one of many ways possible.
I say, if they still want software patents then narrow them down so specific that they only patent real code and no just air like BTs patent on hyperlinks (or what you can call it).
HTTP/1.1 400
tax cuts did not destroy SS or Medicade, the war on terror did......you do realise that about 5 times as much money was spent on the 3 months after Sept 11 than the sum of the entire tax cut (which by the way does not take even close to the full amount untill after the end of the projected deficets...about 5 years).
then the new budget is being decided....it is almost a give that we will allocate about 10 times more money over the next 10 years to fight terror than the whole of the bush tax cut.
before you cast blame on an insignificant (in comparison) amount of money, look at the whole picture and then realise that all the fools in washington put us here and that what we realy need is a erson in office who actualy cares about all the citizens and consumers' rights so we can stop the real threat to our freedoms...corprate power.
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
Right now patents in the software industry represent a security threat to the US economic interests long term. Countries who do not recognize software patents (or for that matter EULA's) will arguably have a faster rate of innovation than the US.
I can name a few that already are on thier way to killing our home grown software industries:
Linux
Linux wasn't invented in the US, and it is fast becomming a economic boost to those countries that can't afford to pay patents to Microsoft or the licensing fees. Linux does not recognize patents as a viable way to obtain money for software. No one in thier right mind would invest the kind of money required to obtain a better OS than Microsoft's in the US market with the current monopoly.
Which is my point, innovation has basically stopped in the OS market for the past 8 years in the United States.
Is this healthy for the market with 1 or two competitors?
Is this healthy long term for the US goverment that relies on economic activity to fund its Armed forces?
No I don't think it is.
Linux is based on an entirely new economic concept of "writing software is more important than the software itself." Therefore, people are at the center of this new economic model, not the software end product.
My concern, is that we defeated the USSR through economic means, as they represented a view of the world we didn't like. The US and such nations as up and comming China and India, who do not recognize patents or licensing, and who do not enforce it, could easily defeat the US eventually with a free market in those countries that do not have our limitations of doing business.
Long term monopolies represent stagnation both in invester stock evaluations and a very dangerous threat if something is introduced from the outside into a monopoly market that we have no control over and changes the rules to that market.
I suppose we could resort to bombing 1/3rd of the worlds population (India and China) if they don't accept our ways of doing business, but I do not think that would be wise if the US wants to stay an economic power.
In the end, patents and licensing are not in themselves bad, as long as they don't put up walls in the market place, and as long as the laws of the country in which they reside recognize this fact and enforce them to the ends of creating a competitive market.
This is where AntiTrust laws come into play over monopolies and this is no longer the case in the United States. These laws have failed in the past decade with respect to the US software industry. As a result we have a very unhealthy market, where value is low, and prices are very very high.
Why have these laws failed?
In the US, increasing business buyouts of government elected officials and thier cohesion with the wheels of business, are proving to be a real long term business threat to the US economy. Patent laws are not being used to the ends in which they were designed and AntiTrust laws are being blatently ignored.
The Enron scandal in the US is the tip of the Iceberg, in my opinion. Our government's unwilling recognition of the "Microsoft problem" and what to do about is are far more telling about how money and the US government are intertwined now days with business.
Patents are now a tool that:
1) Is designed to stamp out any startup capital that creates or designs new innovative solutions that would invalidate an existing patent.
Legally, most startups fold immediately. The tax revenue and the job's lost are incalcuable to the United States long term tax base.
I read about it all the time. X number of employees leave Y company and Z company is gone in 14 months because Y company killed Z in court.
2) It is very difficult to invest in such a patent world because you don't know if your money is going to be safe in a company attempting to break into an existing market. (Beyond what you think is a good idea of a product or not. You essentially have to have a lawyer to be an investor. Investing shouldn't be that hard.)
Patents do not encourage investment in a monopoly market. Worse, it would be better not to invest in the US, I think I will put my money over in China or India. (etc...)
3) Prices are cheaper in a monopoly market? Of course not. Long term, the interests of consumers are affected.
It is increasingly becomming clear that the US is heading for a collapse of Titanic proportions in my mind. Increasinging stagnation in a variety of industries from software to hardware business is increasingly becomming entangled in politics.
Influencing government to keep markets static, keeping conditions poor for long term growth.
(i.e. Compaq and HP merger is just another example of real BAD ideas...being endorsed on a wide scale from Washington.)
Long term the Giant will awaken and squash the US high tech software industry like a bug if we don't start waking up ourselves and realize that our long term safety as a country is at stake.
The US government always has exceptions to rules of its "Hands Off" policies with regards to business. But in the end, when monopolies drive up prices, and squash long term new technologies in the name of keep the market "business as usual", one must realize exceptions to these rules need to be enforced for the betterment and health of the market place.
The government exists to level the playing field in business, to make it fair, to insure everyone plays by the rules and opportunity abounds.
Not too close markets too a few individuals in business.
In the end IP rights I believe are an archaic view of the world of technology. They will be increasingly hard to enforce as nations shuch as China and India grow up and learn that they can change the rules very quickly, without our help.
IP rights focus the importance of doing business and what is of value on the end product instead of the company or people creating the IP. I don't believe this way of doing business will survive long term, given the fast maturity rates of China and India in the free trade block, high tech sector.
Once you had a taste of Linux as they say, you never go back.
[:-)]
-hack
Got Geometrodynamics? Awe, too hard to figure out? Too bad.
A few years ago, McDonalds (I believe they were the first - if not, it still works) introduced the "Extra Value Meal". The idea is instead ordering a sandwich, maybe fries, maybe a drink, they tie all three together so it is a better deal than if you bought each seperatly. This way you WILL get fries and a drink. So they sell you three items for a quarter or two more than the two items you would have bought before. Because profit margins on fries and drinks are so high, it's not like they lose money.
So, next thing you know every fast food place from Dairy Queen to Burger King to Wendys has various meal deals by various names.
Did they all pay McDonalds a royalty for bundeling items together? I seriously doubt it. They looked at a business model and implemented it themselves.
Now...Amazon comes along and someone has the bright idea of "lets store the customer info so when they want something they don't need to fill that info out again". A wonderful new idea? Probably not...I'm sure tons of places have regular customers who the owners know and can have everything taken care of just by the customer calling up and saying "Hey Bob, I need another x number of y's". Bob knows his customer and ships them to the usual place with the usual billing. Probably been going on for years on end.
All Amazon did was to expand this system to all of their customers and cut down on the human part - which is what computers do well anyway.
So why shouldn't b&n, and every other company out there be able to do the same thing? Hey...look at that business idea...does it work - well hell, lets do it as well...just the same way as we take the old crap and mark it way down as clearance to move it so we don't take a loss---just like every other store.
I could see if B&N stole amazon's code, did a s/amazon/b&n/g on it and put it into place, but why should amazon be able to patent an idea they had. A segway, I can see where there would be a patent on that - they guy came up with an idea and actually implemented it, and patented that. I don't believe the patent is for "platform on wheels that moves".
I'm sorry, but this is bullshit. Money is not speech. Paying money to politicians in exchange for privledged access is bribery. If you want to spend your money buying a newspaper ad in support of a politician, that's free speech. Handing him an envelope of money at a dinner so that he'll give you special treatment is bribery. Giving large sums of money to both parties, which is what a lot of the big doners do, is especially blatent bribery.
If your little sound bite money is speach were true, then income tax would be unconstitutional. After all, how can you tax a person's first amendment rights? Face it, the whole 'money is speech' is a load of crap that the crooks use to cover up their crimes. You want to support a politician? Buy an ad yourself. Volunteer some time. Make phone calls. Go door to door. Get the word out. That's free speech. Passing bribes is a crime, not speech. Until folks like you open your eyes to the blatent corruption going on, nothing is going to improve.
Money is to legislation what software is to an operating system.
If speech (as software) does not qualify for full First Amendment protection (we are seeing this in the various DeCSS cases), why should speech (as money) qualify?
The thing about things we don't know is we often don't know we don't know them.