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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'd tend to agree on abolishing many of the copyrights, IP, etc... on the internet, but the fact still remains that someone somewhere must be paid for something to be developed or innovated and that particular person/company will want people to know and maybe even pay for something that has taken them so much time to develop. Think about the music industry, if someone said, OK you can copy the music as much as you like then the recording industry would simply stop releasing music, then there would be nothing to copy! maybe im on completely the wrong track here, but the way id understand this particular article is that everything should be free, I just dont know if that could be, as i said, someone somewhere has to foot the bill to pay someones wages to develop whatever is being trade marked.
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Make it idiot proof and someone will make a better idiot.
The problem is, this isnt a free market.
Since rich people control the information, the rich get richer by exploiting the information which they have.
Hows it free? I'll believe in capitalism with IP when i start seeing poor people from third world countries starting companies and beating our companies.
Afterall we are outnumbered, its kinda funny we are the ones benifiting from capitalism and no one else.
Maybe thats because we have the unfair advantage of already being rich, already controlling most of the information in the world, having all the patents and having enough monopolies to maintain the unfair advantage.
Thats why the global economy idea will never work, good on paper, bad in practice.
Poor people do not have information to educate themselves to our level giving us the unfair advantage, a kid who cant afford books to the quality of ours, who cant even afford medicine to stay healthy enough is too busy trying to survive to think about innovative stuff.
It will always be like that as long as we control information.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
Agreed - my congress critter, John Shimkus, showed some cluefulness by starting an email newsletter. He actually requested email, because any snail mail takes ages to get through security.
-- When a fool hears of the Tao, he will laugh out loud.
Information control leads to thought control.
When we have the ability to communicate via thoughts, will there be a law saying "That thought is patented"
I'm sure we will see patented thoughts, and some thoughts will be illegal, you'll have police arresting you for thinking bad thoughts, you'll get sued for thinking of thoughts which have owners, and you'll pay a fine for thinking of thoughts which are deemed as dangerous.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
everything is based off of something thats already been done
Well you just succesfully bashed everything. I mean every modern OS, every modern programming language, every piece of modern hardware. Dammit you even bashed every modern language and even staplers.
Everything we make is based off of something that was created earlier going back throughout history. The trick is to take something and make it better. That is the definition of innovation. Now has Microsoft made anything better? That is not an argument I am about to make one way or the other.
Stupid patent examiners are a problem.
There are certainly some ideas which are sufficiently new and non-obvious that they deserve patent protection. I think the Fast Fourier Transform would have been one of them. But right now there's a huge number of patents being issued for stuff which is neither new nor non-obvious... and that is where the problem lies.
Let's take an example... searching for patents which include the phrase "hash table" in their title reveals ten patents.
The first patent (Dec 2001) is on a hash table which uses key mod N as an index and stores key div N inside the hash bucket (instead of storing the complete key). Hello set-associative content addressable memory. Every major cpu manufacturer has prior art on this one.
I can't make any sense out of the second patent.
The third patent is on using a hash table inside a switch to speed up finding a MAC address/port combination. Obvious to anyone with a background in algorithms: If you want to find something quickly, stick it in a hash table.
The fourth patent is on using two hash tables, and placing records into the second if they encounter a collision in the first. Prior art: Any 1st year data structures & algorithms textbook.
I can't make any sense out of the fifth patent.
The sixth patent is on inserting data into a hash table by writing the data first and the key last, in order to maintain thread safeness. Obvious to anyone who has written multi-threaded code.
The seventh patent is on growing and shrinking a hash table when it gets too full (or empty). Prior art: Any 1st year data structures & algorithms textbook.
The eighth patent actually looks like something intelligent; the ninth patent seems to be a duplicate.
I can't make any sense out of the tenth patent.
Ok, so out of nine distinct patents, we have five which should clearly have never been granted based on prior art or obviousness; three which I can't understand; and one which looks to be worthy of patent protection.
Here's an idea: If the USPTO grants a patent, and someone later demonstrates prior art or obviousness, the person who invalidates the patent should get to claim all the fees paid by the patent filer. I have a feeling that if this happened, we'd see a very rapid deflation in the number of dumb patents on the books.
Tarsnap: Online backups for the truly paranoid
>Sure. I'm all for IP. I think being able to own
:)
>ideas is a *good* thing. I think that people
>against it are primarily doing so because they
>themselves don't know how to make money.
No. It's usually because they actually can't.
IP is supposed to protect ideas. But, you can't get any legal protection of your IP unless you realise your idea ("fixed in a tangible representation"). That's fair enough, say the IP fans: an idea that never gets realised is no use to society, and giving people IP on unrealised ideas would let them use licencing to make it unattractive for anyone to realise them.
But realising an idea is hard. You need to buy tools and possibly raw materials to do it with. And those tools and raw materials are expensive, because they sell to people who are already established in the IP industry and can afford high prices. Not only that, but you may not be able to get them, because you can't prove you aren't just going to use them to copy other people's material. To prove that you need a reputation, which you can never get because you can't get started without the tools.
So, suppose you've paid a load of money and gotten the tools. Now you have to do the work. This takes time. And, you have to eat while you're working. And, you can forget about having a day job to pay the bills, because your employer can use your contract to grab all your IP if you do that. So you've just lost even MORE money. (Or, far more likely, you've found you can't afford it and given up or never started.)
And if you manage to get a realised idea - you still have to get it distributed if you want to make money, and you also need distribution to get meaningful IP protection because otherwise anyone can copy you and claim parallel development. But again you are stuck: distributors and publishers are *really* only interested in reputation, which you can still never get because you can't get started. You could try internet distribution, but that's rather variable.
And even if you get a product out there - you still need to advertise, because your competitors are going to. And guess what? There is NO WAY to afford that unless you're established, because the demand for advertising by the established companies is high enough to keep the prices in more figures than you'll probably ever see.
Basically, you're screwed. To even get to market requires so much money that you'd be hard pressed to ever get it if you're starting from scratch. If you get to market, you then have to compete with the established firms - in a market where the one who spends most money on hype usually wins. Guess who that won't be?
And all of this acts the same way: to freeze the common person out from making money from their IP. Corporations are very fond of saying they "just don't have talent", but there is (I believe) no scientific evidence for talent even existing (and if it did, it would make IP nothing more than genetic fascism). Is it then no surprise that people do not respect IP law? Is it not possible that at least some of the 'freeware' today is just the result of the average joe throwing his hands up in the air and surrendering any attempt at making money from his own work?
And this is the old point. IP advocates like saying things like "If you spend the time writing a really awesome program, and I spend my time watching trash TV, don't you deserve the rights to what you've done and a reward for it?" The answer is yes, but even if you write that program you're not going to get a reward for it.
Is there anything that can be done about this? I don't know. My pet IP revolution would be:
- Create an inverse ultra vires on copyright: "Any act, which is explicitly permitted, or which is not explicitly prohibited, by copyright law, is raised to the status of an inaliable right."
- The inverse DMCA: "It is an offense to use technology to block any of the rights created by the above modification, to artifically complicate any of the rights so created, or to omit to include an interface permitting their exercise in a piece of technology whose hardware is capable of doing so."
- Block can't-progress-without-it agreements: "The rights created by the above modification, together with (other ones to be determined), may never be surrended or waived, not even voluntarily."
Which somewhat helps. Of course, you then have to sort out the markets:
- Criminalise advertising. (Harsh and sounds ridiculous, but it's the only way to stop those who have money already always being the ones who win the market wars.)
- Criminalise irresponsible consumer behaviour (as a very minor crime; capitalism assumes responsible and selective consumers, so if you don't behave as one, you're breaking it).
But I think those might be a little bit extreme for this debate.
The Great Rogerborgio will use his mysterious powers of prediction to determine what will happen in this debate:
Flame away, but far better if you get over to WIPOUT and actually write it down where someone other than the /. regulars might read it.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
Even when votes are properly recorded the voting record itself is attached to the bill as a static text document. There are many votes and votes on similar bills. It is impossible for the average person to sift through all the bills and find out the voting record of their elected officials. The only sane way to get this information is to look at congressional watchdog groups that will tally votes and keep a proper database of voting records, but even this account may not be accurate as usually these groups have a bias or only focus on one type of legislation.
Last year there was a bill that would have created an online database of congressional voting. This bill failed, good luck finding out what the bill number was or who voted against it.
We have the best government that money can buy.