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The Demise of IP?
meetmeonaholiday writes "CNet has an interesting article on why intellectual property owners should worry. Melanie Wyne explains how open source and open standards will lead to the downfall of IP and hurt competition rather than aid it." From the article: "As part of the discussion between Massachusetts and software developers who would be affected by the state's mandate, the designer of the OpenDocument Format policy, Eric Kriss, flippantly stated: 'Here we have a true conflict between the notion of intellectual property and the notion of sovereignty, and I'd say that 100 percent of the time in a democracy, sovereignty trumps intellectual property.' This sounds positively pre-Boston Tea Party to me ... It reflects the currently fashionable idea that confiscatory government policy must be used to even the score (whatever that means), thrusting highly demanded, privately risked IP out of the hands of legitimate property owners and into the hands of other, favored actors to further 'develop' it."
So are we going to see a real-life Boston tea party all over again?
Are we going to (hopefully) see thousands of people throwing boxes of Microsoft products into the harbor?
Who can organize this and when can we have the party?
(I'm serious!)
and bring your x-box 360s too!
This is simply stupid - more spew from those that hate Open Source!
The reality is that Open Standards/Open Source will foster competition rater than stop it -
M-
This is not 'pre-Boston Tea Party', it's just that the sovereign state doesn't feel like being held hostage by proprietary formats - in this case, MS's .doc files
IP MUST DIE!
because we all know competing on the basis of the quality of software (in the massachusettes case) instead of proprietary format lock-in is really anti-competitive...
The Initiative for Software Choice is backed by Microsoft.
Yet another shill decrying the evil of sharing information.
There's no logical outcome to the situation at all unless it's more of the same.
fast as fast can be. you'll never catch me.
There was a time, not that long ago ... Americans, when the idea of Government itself was open source!
It's one thing for each of us to fear our government, but it's entirely another for our government to fear each of us.
The theory that we've all been taught is that copyrights are "intellectual
property" rights that protect creators, and give them an incentive to make
creative works that provide personal and public benefit. The truth is that
property rights exist to allocate finite resources, not to artificially
choke supply for the sake of incentive. Rather than protection, or a free
market property, copyrights are more like a regulation that micromanages how
people can use information. In practice, they are dangerous to rely on and
lock out more opportunity then they promote.
History has shown that just protection of property rights leads to strong
incentives, but coercion of incentive does not necessarily lead to just
property rights. Simply because an institution calls something a property
right, doesn't mean that it is. If, for example, an industry used the
government to artificially restrict the natural supply of food and called
shares of that monopoly a "property right", it would be very easy to see
how the artificial distortion of markets would not only cause opportunity
loss, but harm to society. Copyrights are a way for some industries to
use government to artificially restrict the natural supply of information
and force the market to center around information control rather than
service value. That causes opportunity loss, harm to society, and a burden
of enforcement that is too heavy to bear in the information age.
Normally copyright concerns would not be so eminent as they have been
effectively used for hundreds of years without failure. However, things are
different this time and faith in the copyright system is rather dangerous.
Just as the industrial revolution forced the commoditisation of the labor
market and the ugly death of the plantation system. The information age is
forcing the commoditisation of information and the ugly death of the
copyright system. It is not a coincidence that the speculative stock market
crash around 1857, regarding industrial technology is very similar to the
speculative stock market crash in 2001 regarding information technology. It
is not a coincidence that the slavery issue created a raging debate about
artificial "property rights" as copyrights have today. It is not a
coincidence the disproportional prosperity of the plantation system then and
the disproportional prosperity of the copyright industries today (That is,
unless one thinks hollywood is underpaid). Things like the harsh
punishments for merely teaching a person of color to read, vs copyright
crimes having punishments worse than rape today. These are all symptoms of
drastically changing markets and entrenched dying industries trying to
prevent change. As for those industries that thought that the entire purpose
and meaning of the industrial revolution was to leverage inventions like the
cotton-gin to expand their plantations for unlimited growth and profit - they
were deadly wrong in spite of all the money and intellect behind them. Those
industries today whom believe that the entire purpose and meaning of the
information age is to leverage inventions like the Internet to expand the
influence of copyright controls for vast growth and profit, well?
Well, over the next several years, the copyright system will not only be
changed, it will become effectively dead. All industries that center on
them will change or die a protracted death, and all institutions that rely
on a proprietary information infrastructure will be stuck in the mud as
they suffer numerous opportunity costs. The information age is doing for
information services what the industrial revolution did for production.
However, the copyright system doesn't center around the supply and demand
of service, but an artificial supply restrictions on information that
services bring about. Over the coming years as information becomes
commoditized and service value becomes more important than th
Hey man, ;), maybe capitalism is just a transitory stepping stone along how we go about doing things... A future where we don't have to eat soma would be nice too... Now, if this dang IntarWEb would just work all the time...
Shh.
TCP is Dying! IP is near demise, and Iraq's insurgency is in its last throes.
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
Replace "IP" with "government mandated monopoly" (which is what "IP" really is) in the article to realize just how silly it is. "Confiscatory government policy thrusting privately risked IP out of the hands of legitimate property owners"? Sounds just like what the government does when a patent is enforced against someone who has independently developed a piece of software.
There is a time and place for government protectionism, and some forms of "IP" do serve a greater good. But what the government grants, the government can take away. Ms. Whine^H^H^H^H^HWyne would do well to remember that.
Massachusetts wants their documents in a format that they can guarantee they will be able to use 10, 50, 100, 500 years from now. They could have used a patented standard except that no suitable patented standard even exists.
"It reflects the currently fashionable idea that confiscatory government policy must be used to even the score (whatever that means), thrusting highly demanded, privately risked IP out of the hands of legitimate property owners and into the hands of other, favored actors to further 'develop' it."
What a total crock of shit.
First, when it comes to the format of documents which are PUBLIC documents, there should be no argument that pushing for standards that allow them to be in a format *readable by any program that conforms* is pushing IP out of one hand and into another.
Second, when I use a program to create documents, the contents of that document are *mine*. And the information within shouldn't be culpable of being held ransom by any particular entity.
Documents using open standards allow more flexibility in choosing a product to create/read said documentation, which invites more competition, and improves the probability that those documents will still be readable by other products, should a particular vendor decide not to license their product or go out of business.
In that case, we might as well listen and start switching to IPv6....
Sounds like it's about time to read Atlas Shrugged and wonder what direction our society is going and ask yourself the question "Who is John Galt."
For those of you who are not familiar, the book deals w/ the ideas of capitalism vs. socialism, and specifically the stealling of intellectual property for the "greater good" of the "state"....which basically meant for the benefit of politicians and their friends....
Interesting read...
Government is standing up to IP owners? That must be why the US Congress keeps on extending the copyright term, or why just yesterday, it became known that the music industry is trying to hijack serious crime legislation in Europe, which would equate file sharers with terrorists and mobsters.
The suggestion that the IP debate is balanced against IP owners seems ludicrous to me. See this article for more more arguments (Bugmenot - countrywise/globalportal).
or is that article so full of shit that it's hard to know where to start?
All together now: "Intellectual Property"* is a privilege, not a right.
Your patent does not make you a unique and beautiful snowflake. The gov't does not usually invalidate patents outright. More often than not, they force you into a compulsory licensing scheme.
OMG ITS COMPULSORY!!!111
Calm down. Some governments won't even bother to license it.
Asian bird-flu example.
If the government feels that its national security is more important than your patent, it can and will take your "IP". In a small fraction of cases, the government says "You can't patent that idea. It is to sensitive." And guess what... you can't file a patent.
Ultimately, patents are a gift from the government to you.
*In this case I'm not including copyright...
even though its a privilege granted by Congress,
it has the word 'right' in it.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Exactly! The only thing the government could possibly be "confiscating" is the monopoly it granted in the first place! These people should dump their fucking sense of entitlement and realize that when someone does you a favor and you spit in their face, they might just want to take their favor back!
That's all that's happening here. Nothing to see, please move along.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
That sums it up exactly though. There is no natural right to intellecual property. It is an artifical grant by the state for a definate purpose. Of COURSE sovereignty trumps it, the right of the sovereign is the only thing that permits it to exist in the first place!
In other words, when the people give you an intellectual property right because doing so promotes a good they wish to happen, when they decide that another good is a higher priority, damn straight they'll take it away, and be perfectly in the right to do so!
Of course IP people have to worry this is why Copyright now goes on pratically for ever, why patents are granted for the bleeding obvious and why no actually owns anything they buy these days they just license it.
The Economist had a more interesting, and realistic, section on this a couple of weeks back, they were saying there would be MORE IP economy not less, but that things like opening up IP often helped areas.
To imply that the US Goverment, the creator of the world's most corporate friendly IP regime is in-fact loosening the controls is about as barking as it gets.
To then follow that up with a complete misunderstanding of the importance of standards for communication and information sharing (802.11x anyone?) and imply that specifying open standards is a constraint on IP put this article right in the "honey-nut fruit loops" category of journalism.
Specifying standards is about creating commodity marketplaces and reducing the cost of entry, and as any free-market economist (as opposed to close market politicians pretending to be economists) will tell you, reducing the cost of entry increases competition, standardising a market has the ability to decrease the cost of an individual good (product) but raise the total value of the market. 802.11x is a great example of this, and so is Apple v MS in terms of how the protectionism of Apple created a SMALLER market for them as they insisted on total control of their IP.
Releasing IP is often smart for business. Morons who have political opinions masquerading as journalists really irritate me.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
I see...
So having standard electrical plugs, standards for phone jacks & POTS destroyed creativity and wealth. I see...
When I think of the number of coroporations that benefited from ignoring patents in the 19th century, like Nestle, I find this argument of stronger IP = stronger economy a lot of bull[crap].
The bitter lessons of a veteran coder: http://bitterprogrammer.blogspot.com
Who cares about the IP owners. They are not the bulk of society. The original idea behind IP was as an incentive for the developer to contribute to society. The concept has become perverted over the years to "I ownze you all" "send me money".
Government funded research is new since the concept of IP was invented.
The economic theories of communisim (forget the political slants and look at the tragedy of the commons) are new since the concept of IP was invented.
It is certainly time to review the concept and application of Intellectual Property.
When you can't sing "Happy Birthday" to someone without having to write a check the world is indeed a strange place.
That article made no sense. Massachusetts wants to ensure that the documents handled by the government will be accessible for time eternal, not locked up in a proprietary format. What good is it to have the government store files electronically if in 10 years time there is no LEGAL program left that can open them.
Through privately owned and developed IP, American and European IP companies have given back untold public benefit.
That may be true but it's also possible we may have had the same results without them. Look at the big picture. Take any major technology breakthrough in history: Europeans crossing the Atlantic, the vacuum tub, transistor, integrated circuit, atomic bomb, computer, space travel; you'll find massive government funding.
The idea that competition creates new technology seems to be a Wall Street myth, not least because they're the ones who stand to gain the most.
Competition is important for production but when it comes to milestones in technology, the emphasis is nearly always on cooperation not competition. That's why the truly significant and most important discoveries come from universities, not private companies.
Germany could've popped right back up if the US companies hadn't decided to ignore proper ownership rights.
fast as fast can be. you'll never catch me.
Right now, you need to understand that if you use proprietary, closed document formats, your data is being held to ransom. If Microsoft bring out a new version of Office, your choice is: buy it, or get everybody else in the whole wide world to save their files that they want to send you in the older format. Which really doesn't sound to me like much of a choice. Finally, someone who gets it: some things are more important than money. The right of all the people to access government documents is more important than the {supposed} right of one company to make money by charging the people a fee -- no matter how small -- to access government documents. The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, and the needs of the few outweigh the whims and caprices of the many.
As for mentioning the Boston Tea Party
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
maybe he meant to say that IP hinders competition. The sentence sounds like Open source is the one hindering competition. This latter interpretation contradicts the context of the whole submission, i got a bit confused by it, too.
I seemed to vaguely remember something about ISC and MS so I searched and got this explanation of Initiative for Software Choice.
Why doesn't cnet not point out a connection like this? I can't remember every damn organization and who they're affiliated with.
I think you misunderstand the author's point.
She's saying that it's open source that is the despot here - she's suggesting that we should throw Linux CDs into the water, and keep MS products.
IP protect file formats means MS is taxing us for the right to communicate. Every email containing a word document I receive is tantamount to saying I can't communicate unless I pay MS (and by that token, contribute to the US economy :-) ) for the privilage. Every JPG copied to a FAT formatted solid-state drive which is taxed by MS represents a limitation on Free speech etc.
That's why OpenStandards are the opposite of pre-Boston tea party, in fact they are the Boston tea party.
Chuck the tea in the river, let's brew our own!
This should be expected in a state that seizes private property!
Liberals are lazy! "Why work when the ambitious and energetic will and we can claim it!"
Liberals even swear everything was their original idea !! Internet == Al Gore....
The only thing new in this world is the history that you don't know.[Harry Truman]
This Very Cogent Argument reminds me of a famous quote: "Human sacrifice, dogs and cats, living together... mass hysteria!" - Dr. Peter Venkman, Ghostbuster
--My signature is six words long.--
I thought the Mass. deal was only about in what format documents were to be stored in. Gee, they have so many standard forms for drivers licenses, employment reports , and more. So much more that a few less standard forms might be good. So what is different here? The PDF part confuses me a bit also. But did Mass say you had to use Company XYZ software to produce these documents? Are the standards proprietary so any vendor that wishes to comply must pay an "Open Document License Fee?". The writer sees so much more than I do.
..TURKEY and CNET :)
Please my stupidity embarrass me so much I need help here...what is she talking about?
Well there is only one thing i can think of now
I'm pro open source, don't get me wrong. I've used it to learn a great deal about writing my own code. However, I'm not in favor of everything being open source. What if Google open sourced everything they were doing throughout their growth? Companies with money (ex1: Microsoft) would have replicated everything overnight and used their marketing power to considerably damage Google's long term growth. It is still in Google's best interest to hold much of their IP privately until they choose to do otherwise.
I'll go as far as saying my stance is pro-open source for everything just under highly innovative and original ideas, and once a group goes mainstream (i.e.: secures their place in the industry) open source their IP if they choose for the betterment of mankind. But if the government interferes to force open source prematurely, or make closed source projects unfavorable, innovation will decline.
There is a place for both open and closed source and people should stop picking sides.
I'm wrong and so are you.
The strongest argument in favor of copyright protection is the GPL.
Without copyright, there are no licenses, which is almost the same as using the BSD license. So the fact that open source projects tend to prefer GPL to BSD means that even open source advocates appreciate the value of copyright.
Ironically, Richard Stallman's greatest contribution may have been to illustrate the power of copyright protection.
Toronto-area transit rider? Rate your ride.
Well, you could argue that since only open source word processors support the standard, this standard requires open source software.
It would be a stupid argument but one I'm sure MS would be quite happy to make. Of course, MS would be a perfectly viable vendor as long as they produce a version of Word that will load and save in this format.
The idea that, once Microsoft has wiped out all its office software competitors, governments the world over should pay what MS thinks office software ought to cost for every computer they have is looney. But maybe if MS hires enough shills, some of them will get published, some of those will make Slashdot, some of those will influence the decision makers and influencers...
Everybody's a libertarian 'till their neighbour's becomes a crack house.
This person is laying out unprovable assertions all over this article.
This policy has pitted those in favor of government mandates to meet "larger considerations" against others in the industry who favor a more market-oriented approach.
The approach of MA is market based. Anyone can play.
Others believe that it represents a mandate for a single type of software model, one purposely imposed to limit competition, not strengthen it.
No, it makes the competitors compete in a way that is favourable to MA, not the supplier. It also levels the playing field so that the competition can be more fair.
"Here we have a true conflict between the notion of intellectual property and the notion of sovereignty, and I'd say that 100 percent of the time in a democracy, sovereignty trumps intellectual property."
This sounds positively pre-Boston Tea Party to me.
Huh? Nobody is seizing anyone's copyrights, trademarks, patents, or trade secrets here.
Through privately owned and developed IP, American and European IP companies have given back untold public benefit.
What? Last time I checked there was very little true public benefit, and the recent extension of copyright has 'tolled' the public for 25 years more. For the benefit to be truly public, the work, device, or mark must be public domain. If not, it remains a private benefit.
It may be human nature to wish for the demise of your competitors. Yet to do so through the tool of blunt, confiscatory government policy is a tidal wave that can't be controlled. Regardless of the development model, the IP community in depends on strong IP rights to prosper and grow. Governments must resist the temptation to take this property.
Here is more with the confiscation business. Perhaps someone should let her know that NO IP IS BEING CONFISCATED. Even were it being confiscated, it would still not be 'Pre Boston Tea Party'. IP Rights are granted by the government to create incentives and benefit the public. If the government, as instructed by the electorate, makes the decision that the public is not being benefitted or the artificial monopoly created does more harm than good, it is within their rights to take back what rightly belongs to everyone.
Chicken Little, please go back inside and suck on a MicroTeat.
This is utter crap!
Follow the money trail to see who is paying for this mouthpiece. This reeks just like the Microsoft-sponsored we-trump-linux rhetoric.
Slashmail.org "The Open Source Email Company"
By mandating that the state of Mass use the OpenDocument format the state is just saying that they want to be able to access documents in an open way. They don't wan their documents tied to proprietary software.
How is this stealing Microsoft's IP? How is this weakening IP laws?
Are you it was WW2 and not WWI? I remember a lot of American subsidiaries had to be spun off into true American companies to protect their IP (e.g., Bayer).
I was unaware Germany didn't "pop back up" after WWII because of this. Could you provide a reference?
The bitter lessons of a veteran coder: http://bitterprogrammer.blogspot.com
We are seeing expensive proprietrary products (Windows) being replaced by cheaper commodity alternatives (Linux/BSD). The same process has been going on for 200 year since the start of the Industrial Revolution. The encumbents always oppose newer and cheaper technology that is seen as a threat.
But we're very much awake now to these tricks. There's no stopping the replacement of old proprietary technologies by cheaper alternatives. There is no threat to IP and having open standards can only bring down costs.
Would there be an Open Office without Microsoft Office?
Open Office and many other open source projects are modeled from
intellectual property.
If there was a Boston Tea Party of sorts and people threw away
or refused to use or own software that wasn't open we would
rely on open source to lead the way. I wonder if advancements would
equal or match those from for-profit software companies.
When I think of the number of coroporations that benefited from ignoring patents in the 19th century, like Nestle, I find this argument of stronger IP = stronger economy a lot of bull[crap].
Wait. Are you saying that corporations stealing IP is a GOOD thing because it creates companies like Nestle?
Ok, I'll bite. What's the purpose of a contract (or any law) that's not government-enforced?
Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
If the current state of IP wasn't so ridiculous, then there wouldn't be a problem. What the problem is, is that patents have a completely unreasonable scope that totally overlaps with pretty much everything. Now patent holders are having tantrums because there is an area of inovation that they cannot control, and rightfully so. It will be a very sad day when absolutely anything can be sold or owned.
Atlas Shrugged is nothing but wank material for spoiled children who have always had everything handed to them on a silver plate, and have never had to deal with real-world issues.
Look at the biography:
"Melanie Wyne is executive director of the **Initiative for Software Choice**, a global coalition run by the Computing Technology Industry Association."
Initiative for Software Choice = Microsoft Front Pseudo-Organization. The whole article is just very poorly veiled Microsoft propaganda. Congrats to CNet for once again demonstrating they have no journalistic standards.
Um...
All of these were developed, and patented, by corporations that did (and still do) invest heavily in R&D, and profit from their extensive patent portfolios. Two of the three technologies you describe hale from the legendary Bell Labs, which is probably still the most prolific source of inventions in all of history, and was also the source of Unix, C, and C++.
ANY CUSTOMER should be in the same boat: they should be picking a product based on THEIR business requirements, not Microsoft's wants. That they've been able to dictate formats for this long only reinforces their monopoly status.
The strongest argument in favor of copyright protection is the GPL.
Ever hear of fight fire with fire? I doubt RMS who created the GPL would agree.
Without copyright, there are no licenses, which is almost the same as using the BSD license
With the BSD license, I can fork of my own proprietary license and sue people who copy it - that is anything but like a copyright free world.
But there's also something bigger going on. It points to a perfect storm that can't be good for those who depend on intellectual property, or IP, to prosper.
Just like locks can't be good for those who depend on theft to prosper. This is infantile.
"Here we have a true conflict between the notion of intellectual property and the notion of sovereignty, and I'd say that 100 percent of the time in a democracy, sovereignty trumps intellectual property."
This sounds positively pre-Boston Tea Party to me.
What do you think folks? It it that she doesn't understand the distinction between sovereignty (a government's supremacy of authority within it's own territory) and monarchy (being ruled by a hereditary sovereign), or is she deliberately trying to conflate the two in order to confuse the issue? In either case I'd have expected better from CNet.
It reflects the currently fashionable idea that confiscatory government policy...
Reflects how, exactly? No one is confisating anyone's property here, intellectual or otherwise, so how can it reflect this allegedly fashionable idea?
Lies and distortions designed to spread FUD. If that's the best argument against...
Don't let THEM immanentize the Eschaton!
When people make statements like these do they ever put what they are referring to in a historical context? By saying this aren't you aligning yourself with the British and ignoring all the good that came from the event? How odd...
I work at print shop where we have a first come, first serve policy. It doesn't matter how big your job is, how much money you're going to spend, everyone gets in line and the jobs are done in order. I once had a customer who placed a relatively small order who was shocked that I wouldn't do it for her right away and stormed out while yelling, "I've had enough of your silly egalitarian system." Should the words silly and egalitarian ever be anywhere near each other?
sig.
"Intellectual property" is nothing but government-granted monopoly. Without a sovereign punishing those who copy your ideas, your "IP" isn't worth shit.
This is completely different from real property, which can actually be defended by its owner. "Intellectual" property, however, is completely dependent on an all-powerful government entity and obtrusive laws for enforcement. And, even then, a large percentage of people just completely ignore IP anyways, and get away with it.
I'd say the best way to prove the absurdity of these "property" owners whining is to start taking away the ridiculous laws that government enforces on behalf of intellectual property, and see what happens.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
It's a combination of the growth of Asian economies with historically little value for Western IP laws, and an increasing exportation of R&D to countries that would have few qualms with simply nationalizing the assets (IP or otherwise) of Western companies in their countries should their own international significance reach a point where it wouldn't disadvantage them to do so. And they'll receive little sympathy about it, because certain companies like to pretend that IP protections are without expiration because their business models consist mostly of squatting ideas and art. They like to live off of the backs of others and stifle human progress, and then act like they're the biggest victims in the world.
Copyrights and patents are issued by the government. It is in no way "confiscatory" for them to simply cease doing so.
Ideas aren't and never have been property. Copyright and patent holders are not property holders.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
I've got a couple of technical questions about TFA (which I have read).
First, and most importantly, when Ms Wyne writes that "Eric Kriss flippantly stated 'Here we have a true conflict...'", what is the technical meaning of the word "flippant" in the context of IP - FOSS discussions?
I think this might very well be the first time anyone has taken the word "flippant" from if its native context (of discussing behaviors at cocktail parties) and used it in the realm of communications and data standards. So I'm rather confused about what meaning I can attach to it, and about how I can validate that Kriss did indeed make his statement "flippantly", and not, perhaps, "jocularly" or maybe "whimsically".
My second question is this: whine, WINE, Wyne... What's up with all this whining? And why do the guys across the pond spell it "whinge"? What's with that??
OK, that second question really isn't a technical question.
Massachusetts also finds itself between a rock and a hard place. The rock is MS' near-monopoly; the hard place is the definition of 'public document'. All the various laws regarding open government and freedom of information, etc. require state documents to be widely available. Storing them in a proprietary format puts the state in a position of supporting and endorsing a near-monopoly; essentially requiring its citizens to fall in line. Lawsuits have been threatened if Mass. did NOT make this move.
"confiscatory"?
I learned a new word on thanksgiving, thank you slashdot!
...with the anti-IP movement is that so much of it seems to be an excuse to get popular contemporary movies and music for free.
Software patents, copyright extensions beyond the end of time, DMCA or similar provisions against "morally fair" use (as opposed to "legally fair"), all of these things are serious, and important, and deserve fair consideration by everyone involved.
As soon as the argument starts involving copyright for creative works, though, all of the fair and logical points you want to make get tarred with the "pirate" brush. In my opinion, that's not a war that can be won, or should be - to me, true freedom *as a creator* includes being able to have a fair say in how your creation is used, especially by people seeking to make a profit from it.
Game dev and music blog
hmmm...
First off, how does open source as an option interfere with these stated goals? I think that every open-source project would like to be considered for use by guvs and corps alongside their closed-source counterparts on an equality basis.
How the hell do they think "interoperability through platform-neutral standards" and "strong intellectual property protections" can coexist? With some notable exceptions, protected standards aren't open... when there's a problem to be solved, every company puts people to work and creates a proprietary standard, and then haggles with the competitors over which one wins. (blu-ray hd-dvd, beta vhs etc etc etc).
In the long-term, strong protections will result in only closed standards.
I'm amused that I started writing about IP in my journal this morning... this will certainly add fuel for my upcoming entries.
If you think imaginary property and real property are the same, when does your house become public domain?
----Would there be an Open Office without Microsoft Office?
Open Office and many other open source projects are modeled from
intellectual property.
You do realized that office suites existed prior to MS Office right?
Appleworks anyone?
What Melanie Wyne doesn't get is that it takes government effort -- and tax dollars -- to enforce IP. Physical property can be guarded by the owner, but aside from having a government police force and court system to prevent intellectual property from flying around on P2P networks, how does one protect IP? And the costs are rising every minute as the internet becomes more pervasive.
There are other ways for content producers to make money for their work. They may not be as potentially lucrative as today, with an effective subsidy provided by government's artifical intellectual property rights, but there will be lots of opportunity -- especially once money stops going towards enforcing the current IP system and is instead spent directly on entertainment.
GRATUITOUS SPAM: I'm personally involved with one agency that is using alternative economic models for paying content producers. Check it out here.
"It reflects the currently fashionable idea that confiscatory government policy must be used to even the score (whatever that means), thrusting highly demanded, privately risked IP out of the hands of legitimate property owners and into the hands of other, favored actors to further "develop" it."
"confiscatory government policy" ??? Mandating a standard (open) document format for government use is "confiscatory" policy? What in heavens name is "confiscated"? Not the holy IP anyway.
What is "confiscated" is the possibility for the currently dominant Office software vendor to maintain a lock on office software through proprietary document formats. And how is that bad? Every software writer on the planet can use the Open Document standard for free. Including the current heavyweight. Funny thing is ... if the document format becomes standardised, then you loose an argument for buying the next version of MS Office. Competition will be more on price and performance. Bad news for Mircrosoft, the firm wich currently has market dominance, good news for everyone else. If that is "confiscatory" then I can live with it.
But who is this Initiative for Software Choice anyway? According to the Economist, the Initiative for Software Choice, is a Microsoft-supported lobby group that also made itself heard to decry the adoption of Linux in Munich. (see http://www.economist.com/business/displayStory.cfm ?story_id=2054746)/
Ah, now it starts to make sense. If you want to villify something in US public perception, call it "Socialist", or even better "Communist". "Anti-property" will do nicely too. If you can make that stick, then you have them on the defensive no matter what. In the absence of credible evidence try the next best thing ... and call it "confiscatory government policy".
What better way to try and rub off a scary association onto Open Document than to have an innocuously sounding "initiative" worriedly denounce it as "confiscatory". It doesn't make sense but that it doesn't matter. PR pieces don't have to make sense, they have to make a splash.
Well done Initiative for Software Choice, and well done News.Com for publishing it without comment or research!
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Wow, it's not every day a Troll manages to post bait on the front page. meetmeonaholiday, you are a master of your craft
Would there be a United States without King George III?
The US and many other Democratic Republics are modeled from
the Parliamentary system.
If there was a Boston Tea Party of sorts and people threw away the British government we would rely on the Colonists to lead the way. I wonder if advancements would
equal or match those from the UK?
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
From the Initiative for Software Choice:
To encourage continued software innovation and promote broad choice, governments are encouraged to consider the following neutral principles:
* Procure software on its merits, not through categorical preferences
* Promote broad availability of government funded research
* Promote interoperability through platform-neutral standards
* Maintain a choice of strong intellectual property protections
YEAH, really neutral!
The reason Germany didn't "pop back up" is because the war had devastated it. It's hard to do anything with patents alone. And "proper ownership" doesn't really sound like something you can talk about when IP is the subject.
having standard electrical plugs, standards for phone jacks & POTS destroyed creativity and wealth. I see...
Standards are useful; but yes, they do also stifle creativity and invention. With all the electronic equipment we have these days, running 60Hz 120V AC (or whatever your local standard is) through our walls is rather suboptimal; if we could supply 12V DC to our equipment instead of having an AC/DC converter inside every box, we could obtain significant savings in equipment costs, reductions in power usage (those wall warts are horribly inefficient!), and improvements in reliability.
Now, in this particular case the benefits of having a standard probably outweigh the costs of limiting innovation; but this certainly isn't going to apply in general.
Tarsnap: Online backups for the truly paranoid
Well, I suppose it depends on what you define as recovery. Certainly I'd like to see the criteria the GP uses here.
But I'm even more interested in how he managed to gauge the extent of that recovery in that parallel universe in which german patents were honoured by the US. Assuming he's not just making stuff up at random, that is.
Don't let THEM immanentize the Eschaton!
"Melanie Wyne explains how open source and open standards will lead to the downfall of IP and hurt competition rather than aid it."
Can Open Source hurt competition? If you define competition as only existing between corporations pushing their own product then I suppose so. However, if you do not use such a narrow definition, corporations will have to compete against open source in some sense or embrace it.
No one is going to argue that Open Source prevents innovation, I would agrue it stimulates it. However it is innovation and not competition that is the real issue. Competition without innovation is meaningless. We've seen it for years in the car industry. I'm not arguing that individual technologies used in automobiles haven't occured, but the essential reasons for purchasing vehicles (the user experience) are largely linked to asthetics and utility, and now with hybrids perhaps enviromental sensibility.
One could reasonably argue that Windows 9x-XP didn't really face a lot of external competition and didn't really innovate significantly either. Why has Longhorn been scrapped so many times? Pressure from Linux/OS X. I still don't consider Linux ready for primetime on the desktop (as in I wouldn't install it on my sister or grand parent's computers) but to Microsoft, and most of us, we can see it getting to the point where it will be a significant competitor on the desktop. This is forcing Microsoft to evolve and innovate.
The real issue is NOT competition - it is INNOVATION. Would Microsoft have to innovate if it didn't believe that reasonable alternatives exist, or would exist shortly?
Innovation is linked to competition, or atleast it should be, and Open Source enhances, not reduces this.
http://www.economist.com/business/displayStory.cfm ?story_id=2054746
Well, not directly anyway. The issue in Massachusetts is one of open standards. Either the Massachusetts government chooses to store their data in a format whereby anyone can produce software to read and write it (thus allowing market forces to act to improve value for money) or it chooses to adopt a standard that people can only develop for with Microsoft's permission, and on their terms (but of course, they'd never behave anticompetitively...). Which are likely to, for example, preclude GPLed software, among others.
The only connection that open source has to this situation is how easily Microsoft will be able to lock it out if Massachusetts chooses unwisely.
For the love of God, please learn to spell "ridiculous"!!!
In one hand I have an apple. In the other hand I have an orange. Put them together and you get a goat. Thank you very much.
"IP holders of the world, unite to defend from FOSS!"
Obviously, this is a Microsoft's manifesto, and if they are sucessfull (if they can unite with other IP defenders), we'll have a declared war. That is everything we need to make the other (normal?) people share our cause, isn't it? I would say that this is a very bad move from them.
Rethinking email
Nobody wants Microsoft to "give up their IP for the better good of the state." The Massachusetts IT department wants its document standards to be open.
If Microsoft wants to participate in massachusetts' open document process, they are welcome to support the open document standard that they helped to establish.
Microsoft is welcome to keep their IP proprietary as long as they wish. Massachusetts has simply stated that for their public documents, any vendor willing to support the open standard may participate.
This shit is fucking unbelievable. It's yet another case of Microsoft waving their fists in the air complaining that the whole world wants to take away their ability to compete. Total bullshit. They simply cannot compete with the only amorphous group that they haven't been able to beat to shit with their bloody monopoly.
How the hell do they think "interoperability through platform-neutral standards" and "strong intellectual property protections" can coexist? With some notable exceptions, protected standards aren't open... when there's a problem to be solved, every company puts people to work and creates a proprietary standard, and then haggles with the competitors over which one wins. (blu-ray hd-dvd, beta vhs etc etc etc).
I don't think these are neccesarily mutually exclusive. My understanding is that all applications will support open standards. The applications are free to offer open source or closed source licences, and support strong IP laws to protect this right. Of course, I could be completely wrong here, and it could mean a choice of DRM standards...
The Constitution gives Congress the right to grant exclusive rights, for a limited time, to authors and scientists. This is nowhere near the same thing as property, and it cannot be "stolen." The point, as the Constitution says, is to provide an economic incentive. That is the only defensible position regarding copyright, trademark, and patent law.
Anything beyond that, including this mistaken notion that people OWN ideas, is illegal and un-American.
Phrases like: "failure by the EU Parliament this summer to pass patent legislation" (which I would formulate as "success by the EP to block patent legislation) show just how biased this article is.
And then she jumps straight from open standards (who could possibly object to that?) to piracy and the threat to copyrights and that sort of crap. Even open source software is still copyrighted (which is why Sony's use of it is illegal).
I'm pretty sure this article is a dupe posted a month or so back.
Perhaps the writer's argument would've been more successful if applied to the current blackberry patent infringement mess. Goverment becomes dependent on a technology that infringes the rights of another, so sovereignty trumps the IP owner rights as determined by the courts.
perl -e '$_="\007/4`\cp%2,".chr(127);s/./"\"\\c$&\""/gees
However the fact that such applications exist does not demonstrate that copyright is benign, anymore than the abuses of the RIAA (for example) are sufficent to demonstrate the malignity of the mechanism.
What is required to evaluate the benefit to society overall of copyright, and to reform or remove it if it is fond necessary. I'm not yet convinced that copyright is irredeemably broken, but it'll take more than the example of the GPL to persuade me that it works well in its current form.
Don't let THEM immanentize the Eschaton!
"Here we have a true conflict between the notion of intellectual property and the notion of sovereignty, and I'd say that 100 percent of the time in a democracy, sovereignty trumps intellectual property."
That statement struck me as profound when I first heard it. And it is right on. What the Mr. Kriss was talking about is, when *CHOOSING* which formats for MA to use, when it came down to *A CHOICE* between sovereignty and IP-encumbrance, they have made the sovereignty-upholding *CHOICE* as it being more important.
He also went on to tell the Microsoft guy that if MS would support ODF, he would be delighted to continue with them. Microsoft *CHOSE* to fight rather than simply support the format, effectively *CHOOSING* to withdraw from being an approved vendor.
How can anyone's "IP" be threatened by this?
Anybody want a peanut?
A few flaws in your argument.
First, IP (Intellectual Property) is a misnomer. You can't own ideas or concepts. You may be granted a monopoly by the government in the use of an idea, but don't make the mistake thinking that you "own" it. This is the fallacy in every argument about "IP". If you don't own something, then it's not your property.
Second, the question you asked could easily be turned around. Would there be a Web browser with IP? Web servers? The concept of HTML? The fact that you are asking this question and others are viewing it over a system/network that was created without IP incentives is the largest irony of all.
I would easily argue (and win) that the greatest contributions to the world have come through cooperation and the free exchange of ideas.
While "IP" can bring incentives to innovate, make no mistake that it is the only driving force in innovation.
I had to read that several times to understand the point -- since I read it exactly backwards from the author's intent.
IP is strangling sovereignty. Not the government's sovereignty (which reserves for itself the right to ignore those "IP rights"), but an individual's sovereignty to control their own work.
Today, how many people have lost their personal or business records because the data format is no longer supported? How many times has this been because the business that produced the software has gone out of business? Under the wonders of the DMCA, it's illegal for anyone to even attempt to recover the content since (AFAIK) the prohibitions never end even if the company providing access goes away.
In a few years, if a few dying industries have their way, it will be illegal for you to record your own child's 3rd birthday party. Oh, you can probably record it on some ancient equipment but all of the modern gear will scream out PIRATE! PIRATE! if you dare to attempt to copy it from the camcorder to some DVD discs to mail to relatives. Or if you and your classmates produce their own amateur movie for fun or to showcase your skills.
Not everyone takes this to the libertarian extreme, but the whole reason behind open standards is to fight the real, not just theoretical, loss of our own work without recourse. If somebody wants to make their own work dependent on another company's continued good will, that's their choice. But I've kept much of my own work in simple text files precisely because I want to be able to revisit them in twenty years.
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. -- H L Mencken
"Melanie Wyne is executive director of the Initiative for Software Choice, a global coalition run by the Computing Technology Industry Association"
.."
e wsid=3651
.."
t eam/2100-7344_3-5942913.html?tag=nl
"Microsoft is a member of the Washington-based Initiative for Software
Choice, that has written to Australian MPs asking them to oppose open
source preference Bills
http://www.sam.org.au/club_news.asp?clubid=4685&n
"In August 2002, Microsoft became a member of the Initiative for Software
Choice. The ISC has close associations with the Computing Technology
Industry Association (CompTIA) based in Washington DC
http://www.linuxjournal.com/node/6927/print
"One editorial labeled Massachusetts' OpenDocument Format plan as the "domino" that will cause other governments and private parties to follow suit," Melanie Wyne
There *is* no mention of a 'domino` or any phrase to that effect on the linked to article. There is this quote thought:
"Heck, it's just standards...Outside of some politicians and some Microsoft-backed industry groups, there's an overwhelming support for this thing," he said. "It's kind of hard to argue against it." Bob Sutor, IBM
http://news.com.com/OpenDocument+format+gathers+s
"Through privately owned and developed IP, American and European IP companies have given back untold public benefit" Melanie Wyne
This is nonsence. It was because of the lack of IP legislation that companies prospered by utilising a common pool of knowlege. If it had been locked down we would have no national electricty grid, television, radio or a car industry.
What you are trying to do with your IP legislation is get a lock down on the developing markets. So they pay you to use their own software on their own computers.
FOSS will mean the destructive competition
of monopoly captitalism will be replaced by the
free imitation of the developing post capitalism.
This will happen in all industries eventually.
she is saying.
During the Boston harbor situation there were two governments in play: The British and the Massachusetts government. The Boston Tea party was essentially the Massachusetts government confiscating and destroying Tea which was protected by an artificial monopoly granted by the British government. What she ends up saying when viewed in this light is not to throw the modern equivalent of Tea, intellectual property, overboard.
However, it looks like she wants to say that the non-tariff tea is the equivalent of intellectual property, the modern Massachusetts government is the British government, Open Source is the tax stamp and the Boston Tea-party would be thowining open source overboard.
Which makes more sense?
If Ms. Wyne were truly concerned about confiscatory government policy, she would be outraged at the growing number of commonly held ideas that are confiscated by our government and turned into private monopolies through the abuses of our patent, copyright, and trademark policies. To suggest that the opposite is true, that freeing ideas is the same as confiscating them, is to pretend that water is dry and fire is cold.
I remember when people said that Internet would be great. We all would be ablle to visit museums and have access to libraries. We can now enter. We just are not allowed to see the paintings or read the books.
That, unless we pay the same price we would pay when we would buy these books in the bookstore or the paintings at an auction and with limited rights to top.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
"I think Congress is a much bigger threat than some Chinese guy selling bootleg tapes. This is a threat to the home base of IP protection, the motherland. Everyone expects to have their rights abused in China.."
Except that "IP" is a privelege in the United States, not a right. Which too many people seem to fail to grasp. Same as driving. You don't have a "right" to drive, it is a privelege granted by the government.
You have the rights to Freedom, Liberty, and Prosperity. You are granted the privilege to use of your ideas as you see fit, for a (supposedly) limited amount of time, after which your priveleges to exclusivity are overriden by the good of the people and it falls into public domain.
Open source material DEPENDS on strong copyright laws.
Open source is NOT public domain.
Gee lets look at the history of Chemistry. During the days when it was alchemy (roughly from AD500 to AD1500).... people holed up in thier caves and private 'security fortresses' --not unlike todays private research, patent-only labs-- and created all kinds of wonder and magic. If anyone came to call, they were told 'no one home!' Because no record of achievement was kept (it was all secret, even unto death), the wonders they invented in AD 500 were re-invented in AD1500 (1000 years later). About 1500, people started writing stuff down (those pesky information-sharing goodniks called it chemistry), then 200 years later, we have enough chemicals to poison the planet 100 times over. We know about nuclear reactions, and now we really can turn stuff into gold. So yeah, patenting and keeping IP a secret is a really good thing, yeah that's it, you know if you want civilization to stand still for 1000 years.....
this melanie wyne is the classical exemple of what anrchists and comunists like to call "capitalist pig"...
she takes something perfectly innocent and beneficial (a government demanding open file formats), equals it to a criminal activity (large scale piracy. and i mean the industrial level piracy we see in chinese sweatshops, not P2P) and distorts completly another fact (the eminent domain issue. a clear case of a corrupt government selling itself to real estate corporations) to paint a completelly wrong picture of the whole IP situation.
let me explain.
Massachusetts government IS NOT stealing IP from anyone, is not overcharging anyone, is not opressing the people or the corporations, it's only doing what it's suposed to do, protecting the people's right to access data in the future by adopting well documented file formats. if she feels microsoft was wronged here, is microsoft's own fault. they don't have to pay royalties to implement the OASIS file formats in their products.
it's not, as she says, "confiscatory government policy (...) used to even the score". it'd be confiscatory policy if Mass. had forced MS to open source MS Office at gun point, and this is not the case.
fortunatelly, i live in a country where being socialist (or in my case, anarchist) is not seen as a deadly sin, so i don't have to cope with trolls like melanie.
What ? Me, worry ?
Many of the success stories of todays industrial economies prospered without the overhead of 'intellectual property'. If anything the whole concept has only slowed growth, and stifled competition.
Time to abolish patents completely. I doubt there will be any effect on R&D spend, and perhaps there will be more corporate collaboration on research leading to faster results. The cultures that are most concerned with 'intellectual property' are tending to yield the least innovation these days.
I'm sorry to be a silly goose, it being turkey day here in the States and all. But in what way is the government taking anyone's IP here? It was my impression that the state was chosing a format to standardize information exchange. I've seen plenty of organizations standardize and require a Microsoft format for exchange, and there was no flap. I don't see anyone's property being taken. No one is even forcing you to use a tool in your business. You just have to send your information in a certain way to the government. If requireing data in a format is verboten, then anyone using a form (the IRS, for instance) is in BIG trouble.
I stopped reading when it was obvious that the whole argument rested on ingorance of the fact that F/OSS licenses/agreements do not take away copyrights.
:)
It's time to destroy the concept of "Intelectual Property" as there really is no such thing, it's an oxymoron in disguise. Stallman at his best:
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/not-ipr.xhtml
Thanks to whoever linked this originally here at Slashdot (I don't remember who you were).
Btw I have an alternative headline for the newsitem: "How dinosaurs think"
As I see it the people trying to use and defend the concept of "IP" in reality only have two choices (unless they just give up):
1. Continue the path they're on and cause a massive backlash that weakens any kind of regard for copyright, patents or trademarks (what we've seen so far is just the beginning unless they stop it)
2. Moderate themselves a lot so as to establish some sort of credibility for the original deals; about 20 years for a copyright, only physical patents (no abstract ideas, no business methods, no code be it biological, software, or similar), trademarks as idenfication rather than advertising/competition
They lost the fight for their vision of a "IP" future years ago, perhaps even a decade or more, but it's only slowly getting visible. It doesn't matter what laws are passed and so on, what matters is how people act and what they do: to look at the future look at the kids, it's obvious where this is all heading if they continue they way they do: the dinosaurs will make themselves extinct.
this comment is provided "as is" and without any express or implied legibility or congruity [...]
Sovereignity must not trump private property rights when it comes to intellectual property!
The only thing to do is get government completely out of Intellectual Property. Let's repeal all the laws regarding copyright, patent, and trademark. Then IP can be protected by market forces without government interference!
What's that you say? The very existence of exclusive intellectual property is due to government regulation? Oh, dear. Maybe this theory isn't all it's cracked up to be after all...
With reasonable men I will reason; with humane men I will plead; but to tyrants I will give no quarter. -- William Lloyd
If you produce a product or deliver a service you generate revenue...If as Greenspan points out; "America's main economic product has become "predominantly conceptual," based in large measure on IP assets. Perhaps as much as 75 percent of publicly traded company value in the U.S. comes from intangible assets, again largely IP-based" If, as the article points out, the majority of market value in US companies rests in their IP, does it not portent a fall in the value of these firms?
God forbid the government use freely available standards. This is the death of IP!!!
Did you ever notice that *nix doesn't even cover Linux?
The writer is (deliberately) confusing open source with open standards. Open standards are how progress happens. Take for example ASTM Think what would happen a a large construction company owned and wrote the ASTM building codes. This is the problem with a proprietary document format from one company. Microsot is free to implement OpenDoc, but then is will reduce their "lock in".
HPC for Primates. Read Cluster Monkey
Who owns the IP here? The people who created the document
using a commercial word processor. Or, the people who created
the word processor? Should be obvious. The statement at the
end of this story is ridiculous.
That's just a PR piece from Microsoft. Melanie Wyne is head of the "Institute for Software Choice", one of Microsoft's lobbying organizations. She used to be a lobbyist for Bank of America.
The article's author is the director of the "Software choice Initiative", with members tiny software firms, including one called M$. So M$ is lobbying for SOFTWARE CHOICE! Sounds like oxymoron
Although I support OSI (Open Source Initiative), I would like to point out
a difference from my knowledge between Copyright and Patents to some open-source
zelots since I seem to see some bashing of 'copyright' here.
Copyright simply says "you made this" and is usually used to prevent people
from altering or using an item in some fashion without permission unless
otherwise stated like in the case of GPL.
Patents on the other hand completely restrict everything based on an idea
or similar design whereas copyright just protects the actual item itself.
Patents are the real enemy here, not copyright. Patents were ment to allow
an inventor to be able to profit from his creation for a certain period of
time before allowing the public to make similar creations however in this
day and age patents have become the enemy of progress and are tools of the
rich and powerful to stomp on the little guy.
I believe in IP and OSI however unlike most OSI people, I also believe people
have a right to properietary rights and everything shouldn't be open source by
default as some OSI supports evangalize, infact this is the reputation
OSI has by the general public because of this.
I only believe something should be open source
if it was open source in the first place or if it were made open source.
People keep talking about "Piracy" in China.
But China is a Communist country.
Copyrights as they are used in the US, are not applicable in communist country. right?
Because the primary purpose copyright/patent in the US today (not the original exactly the purpose), is to be able to get rich from an invention, to encourage other people to invent and become rich.
That motivation is agaist the principles of Communism.
The copy restriction doesn't really fit with communism.
I find it interesting, that Bush and others go there, and say
"You need more religious/speech freedoms and less information sharing freedoms".
What motivation would they have to enforce US copyright laws? To help make US movie/music/software companies get richer?
I never used that word to describe things, but it fits here.
Melanie Wyne explains how [competition from] open source and open [=available to everyone] standards will lead to the downfall of IP and hurt competition rather than aid it.
Open source products already ARE a competition to all other products. They are a competitor with a different business model. These new competitors will also compete between themselves. Does Melanie understand what 'competition' means?
Fight Frist Psoting!
Browse Slashdot with 'Newest First'!
Nothing is stopping you or anyone else from working on getting the standards changed to include your ideas. Besides which, the standards for electrical outlets slightly pre-date the electronics revolution.
By your argument, the electronics filling our homes these days wouldn't have been created because the electrical outlets fed the wrong type of power !
lol
Just go back to the Tesla (AC) vs Edison (DC) battle in the early days.
Power losses in a transmission system are equal to the current multiplied by resistance of the wire. To deliver 120W at 120V AC means 1 amp. If the resistance in the wire is R, the loss of power is 1*R or R. To deliver 120W at 12VDC means you have to have 10 amps of current. For the same resistance of R, the power loss is now 10*R. It's 10 times larger.
Over a short wire, R is small. But for the wires in your house, it can be a lot. 18-ga wire has a resistance of about 0.006 Ohms per foot. It's easy to have 100 feet of wire between the fusebox and the socket in your house. That's 0.6 Ohms. At 1 amp, 120VAC that means the voltage drop is 0.6V. You've lose 0.5% of your power you tried to deliver. At 10 amp, 12VDC that means the voltage drop is 6V. That means you lost HALF the power you tried to transmit to the socket.
Does this sound like good change?
And all wall-warts are not horrible inefficient. I have a large collection of switching-mode wall-warts. These can easily be 70% efficient.
I think going to DC could be good. We'd get rid of countless rectifiers. Although I'm not sure that it would save any power, since you have to rectify either way. But you would save on material costs at least.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
...often convey meanings or philosophies exactly opposite of those actually espoused by the organisation?
The Initiative for Software Choice is backed by Microsoft.
It is indeed. Also note that they are strong proponents of software patents (which are totally inappropriate--the solution to any problems with software IP should be addressed with copyright reform) and have lobbied for the retention of Microsoft formats as standards in government. Apparently merely the ability of non-MS employees to see the specs without paying a boatload of money for the privlege is as open as any of us deserve.
The issue is really being badly distorted. No government in the world has brought forward legislation to shut closed source applications out of competition--the closest any policy comes to that ANYWHERE is to simply require that at least one open source alternative be included in a bid/selection process. State legislation mandating the use of officially open-standard file formats makes no mention of open source at all. Microsoft, Corel, Sun or any other corporation is still welcome to provide software to governments under such a policy. All it requires is that import and export filters be available to support proper file format standards. This INCREASES choice and makes industry competition MORE open and fair. One would think that an organisation named "initiative for SOFTWARE CHOICE" would embrace such a policy.
Instead, this supposedly "capitalist-friendly" advocate of "choice" is fighting hard to preserve strong IP laws and shut out open standards. This is neither democratic NOR capitalist. Ms. Wyne and her compatriots at the ISC are really against choice and are essentailly promoting communist/socialist ideas: they advocate the protection and promotion of business models that perpetually rely on protectionist government legislation, and attempt to block legislation that threatens the position of protected monopolies by exposing them to genuine competition.
Really, it isn't like the government is forcing Microsoft to hand over all the specs to Office file formats so the govenrnment can use taxpayer dollars to develop compatible software to distribute to every citizen for $0. THAT would be "communist" or "pre-Boston-tea-party". I'd like to know what MS is so afraid of. With their resources it would be trivial for MS to make OpenDocument filters for its Office applications. Are they so insecure about their products that they need special legislative conditions to assure their market position? I happen to think that apps like MS Word and PowerPoint are great in terms of features and usability that can compete on their own merits without lock-in. Yes the competition would be more challenging if it were more easily made compatible, but is there something wrong with Microsoft that they cannot survive without 80 percent of the price of their software being profit margin and even higher percentages in market share?
The "Initiative for Software Choice" indeed...the choice of software vendors to lock-in users as they please perhaps. It is certainly not about true choice.
First off, how does open source as an option interfere with these stated goals?
* Procure software on its merits, not through categorical preferences
Specifically disallows considering merits like "built in state", "open formats", "ability to customize" etc... which are key advantages of open source.
* Promote broad availability of government funded research
Disallows contributions to GPL based open sourced projects
* Promote interoperability through platform-neutral standards
Nothing here. In practice though these standards committes are often "pay to play".
* Maintain a choice of strong intellectual property protections
DRM can be used for lockout.
The author is right about what this trend implies for IP rights in general, but she's wrong that it will harm the world by removing the so-called incentives of traditional IP law. The story that really needs telling here is how copyright got started: it wasn't some starry-eyed union of writers and artists demanding "protection" for their works. It was a publishing industry initiative aimed at preserving a censorship-era monopoly on the use of the printing press. Copyright was invented to subsidize distributors, not creators, and now that distribution costs are going to zero (thanks to the Internet), copyright is becoming increasingly hard to justify.
The new site copyrightmyths.org is devoted to telling the real history of copyright, and to exploring alternatives to information monopolies. It also explodes some publishing industry myths, such as the idea that copyright is somehow about protecting authors from plagiarism (it's not). The site is managed by the Drupal CRM, so those who'd like to get involved in contributing content can do so easily. Naturally, everything on the site is under open copyright.
http://www.red-bean.com/kfogel
As if I or any other pleb on this planet has I.P. rights.
I.P. rights are currently the right of the well off.
It's either $80,000 to patent an invention, or it's similar amounts to defend my copyright.
These dudes are kidding themselves if the average joe is worried about 'losing their rights'.
EMail: 0110001101100010010000000110001101110010 0110000101111010011011100110000101110010 0010111001100011011011110110
In essence, they claim that if we standardize on something like OpenOffice, then *all* we will use for public documents will be OpenOffice. There won't be competition for that standard, essentially, and so the standard will wither without competition to drive it forward. You need competition to bring new products to market that don't work on established lines of reasoning, and they don't feel that there will be enough incentive for that creative thought without protecting IP.
The flaws are twofold. One standard for open documents is coming forward now, but that doesn't mean that it will be the only one. Assuming the current status quo will be how it will be forever is guaranteed to be a wrong guess. The second flaw is that humans get motivated by lots of things, not just profit. Taking the guaranteed profit of protected IP out will just change the type of people bringing new products to market - the products will still keep coming. You won't see suits, but inventors themselves, and many of them doing it for professional recognition more than the cash.
I'll tolerate anything except intolerance.
I'd mod that funny if I could. :-) But to the point, I didn't say it was good or bad; just that the claim "weak IP destroys competition and wealth creation" is demonstrably false.
There's an article out there on the web that lists the major corporations we have today who got their start by ignoring other people's patents.
The bitter lessons of a veteran coder: http://bitterprogrammer.blogspot.com
From the article:
It reflects the currently fashionable idea that confiscatory government policy must be used to even the score (whatever that means), thrusting highly demanded, privately risked IP out of the hands of legitimate property owners and into the hands of other, favored actors to further "develop" it.
That statement is quite misleading. The Massachussets controversy she is obviously referring to has nothing to do with taking IP (here: file formats) away from the owner. It is about preferring such formats that are willingly shared by the owner, because they offer better avalability in the long run. A subtle but important difference.
C - the footgun of programming languages
running 60Hz 120V AC (or whatever your local standard is) through our walls is rather suboptimal
yeah its a bit on the low side, 240V means lower losses higher voltages would mean lower losses still but may be considered too dangerous for domestic stuff.
if we could supply 12V DC to our equipment instead of having an AC/DC converter inside every box, we could obtain significant savings in equipment costs, reductions in power usage (those wall warts are horribly inefficient!), and improvements in reliability.
12V would just encourage use of linear regulators to go from 12V to 5V (normal logic voltage) with thier associated high loss (over 50% loss!).
plus volt drop would be an issue for any large loads at such a low voltage. 2.5mm wire has a resistance of 0.009ohms per meter, you need to double that as you have a positive and a negative wire so thats 0.018 ohms/meter so at 10A over 10m you would be dropping 1.8V. Thats a LOT on a 12V system!
yes many wall warts suck (though i think idiots with ammeters and voltmeters and no understanding of power factor give them a worse name than they deserve). yes if you have a number of peices of equipment that need low power and the same DC voltage then it makes sense to put them on one big PSU, not it DOESN'T make sense to go pushing 12V dc round entire builings.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
This is a terrible article that completely confuses several concepts. The open format policy has nothing to do with undermining IP rights. Microsoft still has the rights to everything it deserves. That doesn't require other people, or the government, to purchase that IP. Also, she is oblivious to the distinction between open source and public domain.
Finally, if she is so opposed to open interchange formats, she should not have published her article in html, or in English, which happens to be an open source language. Wouldn't it be better to have a Microsoft-owned language for people like her to write in?
The strongest argument in favor of copyright protection is the GPL.
Without copyright, you wouldn't need the GPL. Sure, companies could keep their source secret, but you could "pirate" their software for nothing. You could hack it and sell it if you wanted, if anyone would pay for it. Without copyright, who would pay for MS software? And without revenue, how could proprietary software keep pace with Free software?
Without copyrights, you can get all the DVDs and music you want for free, too, as long as someone is still making movies or writing music. People would probably still pay for live shows. As for movie theaters, well, those are on the way out anyway since LCD and DLP projectors have become better and cheaper. There will still be people who like to act and perform whether or not they are getting paid. People will still make movies but salaries will be lower and there won't be residuals. Basically it will become like plumbing -- there are still plumbers even though they don't get paid every time you flush.
I think Venezuela did that earlier this year.
*sigh*
to clear up what I said: I think Venezuela did pass legislation to shut closed source apps out of competition earlier this year.
The biggest problem with all the debates about "Intellectual Property" is that it doesn't exist. The concept of Property has been around longer than civilization itself, ever since the first ape picked up a stick and thought, "This is mine." Copyrights and patents are just modern laws. They aren't even rights really. They're restrictions on what people always used to be able to do before the laws were made. For centuries minstrels learned and repeated each other's songs. Storytellers repeated stories, etc. It's what we used to call "culture," before somebody concocted the notion that we should treat ideas like property and fight over them like we fight over property.
Arguing about IP in the context of how we treat property gives an undeserved advantage to the proponents of greater and broader rights enforcement. IP reform isn't about stealing, socialism, or the demise of innovation. It's about giving conscious thought to the cost of enforcing rights vs the benefit of granting them.
What most people forget is that the whole idea of intellectual property is supposed to have balance. Yeah, you as an IP holder get certain legal protections and you can club other people over the head with them, but the catch was that you didn't get to do it forever. 7 years, and then it's open season, so you'd better move quick AND be working on the next big idea.
Yes, you can go on a rampage when you get the quad damage.... but it doesn't last forever, and it's not supposed to.
Unfortunately, people who run big companies don't like that whole risk thing. Wouldn't it be nice if quad damage lasted for the entire match instead of just 30 seconds? So, let's push to get the laws changed.
And that's how we go from the heyday of IP 100 years ago to the absolute mess we're in right now. That's how you go from Edison and crew slaving away in a workshop to find the right material to make a lightbulb to where RIAA sues grandmothers and twelve year olds, and people can sell an idea for a website for millions of dollars without having to write any real code.
I say we keep IP law, but we move it back to the manly be-quick-or-be-deaded days of yesteryear. With big payoffs and the potential for a small company to go big time, I think you'll start seeing 1) an increased interest in science as more people see it as their path to big screen TVs and sports car, and 2) cheaper goods as companies are forced to keep shipping product that consumers might want but really don't need (same principle behind the fact that you can get a blazing fast PC today for under $500). With a shorter shelf life, there'll be less incentive for the big companies to buy up patents and sit on them until they can figure out just how high they can price it.
Competition is good, and governmental structures (like IP law) need to foster it, not hamstring it.
From the ZDNet Article:
Software Choice, (on the other hand), will try to convince legislators that open standards and open source don't necessarily go together. "It is important that government policy recognize that open standards--which are available to any software developers--are not synonymous with, and do not require, open source software either for their adoption or utility," Software Choice stated.
Also, their own policy:
Voluntary, industry-led standard setting is the most effective way to develop platform-neutral and market-based standards. When these standards are open and available to all through reasonable and non-discriminatory licensing they help developers to create products that can interoperate with each other.
Sorry to state the obvious, but they can't possibly seem to have a problem with Open (document) Standards; an yet somehow they do. God help the "value" economy!
Vinod.
OK, this person is coming from a Microsoft-backed shilling outfit, and she's framing the issues the same way a right-winger or extremist Libertarian would, and thus, she's not even on this planet in terms of rationality.
Reality: Decreeing open standards *is* a free-market-oriented approach. What the MS-backed org wants in place of this is Microsoft's continued monopoly, the monopoly-oriented approach. I choose a free market. It's a time-honored tradition for government to level the playing field to produce rich competition. What Massachusetts is doing is nothing new, and is a clear benefit to the people of Massachusetts and beyond.
Reality: It's definitely the currently fasionable idea for government to deploy confiscatory policy, but what we have actually seen are pro-corporate policies (and inaction) that have been working in favor of monopolies and many big corporate interests for at least a generation. That government has not been ensuring a level playing field has led to increasing corporate confiscation of national wealth that could be better used, let's say, to ensure most human beings received adequate health care.
More reality: Massachusetts is not taking IP away from anyone and handing it to anyone. It's merely saying that government agencies will use an array of software products not constrained by IP issues, and that open standards will be implemented so that a wider array of products (open source or not) can be considered in purchase decisions.
Massachusetts is making changes to create a more competitive, freer market, and this reactionary, dim-bulb, MS shill has the gall to attack it. She needs to go ahead and come out as "pro-monopoly" and "pro-monopoly-confiscation-of-national-wealth" and be done with it. Because that is exactly her position.
Steve Magruder, Metro Foodist
Microsoft can either adapt to the demand, or let their competitors do it. Whatever. It turns out that some of their competitors also happen to be FREE -- that is, they offer superior features (open data format by default) for less money. So Microsoft either needs to try to make their products catch up, or they need to resort to their classic tactic of trying to keep market forces being allowed to assert themselves.
And it's that -- bundling, anticompetitive licensing terms/prices, etc -- not IP itself, that people (perhaps using government force, perhaps not) need to defend themselves against.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
I think Mass. are specifying (in their procurement contract) that all of their citizens need to be able to read the state documents without paying anyone any license fees. It's quite a reasonable request. If a vendor wants to satisfy the request with a royalty-bearing format, the vendor should include the royalty charge in the quote to the State of Mass. This is how publishers like SpringerVerlag work; you can pay them one amount to distribute your work under a royalty-bearing copyright, or a higher amount to distribute your work under a no-royalty copyright. Mass. will make up their mind when all the bids which meet their specifications are in.
So true mwfolsom, so true.
/.ers are so easily fooled. Stop acting like a spoiled little kid, quit trying to get rid of your competition and actually improve your products and lower your prices.
As OpenSource alternatives to commercial software becomes available (eg. OpenOffice, GIMP, FireFox) it will make the commercial software makers work harder to improve their proprietary versions.
OSS is getting very popular because its free. Lets face it, our economy sucks right now. We are in the throws of a Depression, whether you choose to call it that or not doesn't change the fact of what it is. People are turning to FREE software that does nearly almsot as good a job as the commercial stuff because it saves them money. Now, IE may be free (you get a copy with every copy of Windows) but FireFox is free too and safer to use because its not vulnerable to "most" of the security attacks that are possible with IE.
What effect will this have? That's a good question. In a perfect world when OSS gets more popular commercial programs should start getting better and cheaper. In the world we live in companies like MS start crying and whining to the government and try to find sneaky ways to discredit competitors (if they can't buy them out)...like the whole embarassing SCO/Linux Comedy or how MS reacted like a spoiled kid over the Mass. ODF Document Standard decision. There will be instances where we'll see commercial software improve and get cheaper, but we'll also see more blogs like these that try to paint a picture in the minds of others that OSS is evil and dangerous to our economy. What they don't know though is that most of us know who's pulling the strings when it comes to these things. Nice try Mr. Balmer but we're not buying it. We
Michael "TheZorch" Haney
thezorch@gmail.com
http://thezorch.googlepages.com/home
Bzzzzt. E for effort, but there are several problems with your post. First, you messed up on the power formula. Second, home wiring is typically much lower than 18 gauge. That tiny little cord running to your lamp is stranded 18 gauge. The stuff in the wall is usually 10 or 12 gauge solid copper. Third, your voltage drop calculations are incorrect because they do not compute a voltage divider. Fourth, converting DC to DC is more expensive than converting AC to DC (unless you're willing to accept massive power losses, which end up being more expensive than the materials over their lifetime).
Here are the correct voltage/current/resistance/power formulas:10 Gauge wire is 0.9989 Ohms/1000 ft. Let's be generous and assume you have 100' of 10 Gauge wire in your house. That's 0.1 Ohm. "Lamp cord" is 18 Gauge, which is about 6.92 Ohms/1000 ft (note: solid 18 gauge is about 6.385 Ohms/1000 ft, but lamp cord is stranded). A 20' cord gives you about 0.1384 Ohms.
You'll be adding these wires in series, so let's be "unfair" and round to 0.25 Ohm. If you have purely resistive (*) 120W appliance at 120V, then it has a resistance of 120V^2/120W = 120 Ohms. If you have a 120W appliance at 12V (**), then it has a resistance of 12V^2/120W = 1.2 Ohms.
(*) = Most "real world" AC loads are somewhat inductive (i.e. they have complex impedance, not just a purely real resistance).
(**) = Most "real world" DC loads have voltage regulation circuits that fail to operate below a required threshold.
Computations:
In summary, a 120VAC source into a "120W" load via 0.25Ohms of wiring is dropped to 119.75W, with 0.25W being lost in the wire and 119.5W being delivered at 119.75V. However, a 12VDC source into a "120W" load via 0.25Ohms of wiring is dropped to only 99W, with and 17W being lost in the wire and only 82W being delivered to the load at 9.9V.
But this is not a problem with AC vs DC. If we reversed the voltages (12VAC and 120VDC), we'd see the opposite results.
The real reason for using AC is that you can modify the voltage of an AC source with little loss by using a transformer (***). However, to lower a DC voltage without heavy losses, you have to do something like: convert it to square wave AC with a transistor, run it through a high bandwidth tranformer and then filter it back to DC with a large capacitor (and usually a zener diode).
(***) = Transformers also provide electrical isolation. If you short out one side of a transformer, the other side is unaffected.
In conclusion: Low voltage sucks for power transmission, and it's easier to modify AC voltage than DC. Furthermore, a quick google shows that the impedance of the human body increases with frequency; thus, AC is "safer" than DC at any given given voltage.
The concepts of IP and original intents are all well and fine, but like all things man creates, he can and does distort for personal unfair gain.
The original terms of copyright were for a much shorter term than they are today. Patents were originally for physical inventions, after they are proven to work.
The problem lies in the distortion of these concepts in application and to address this it's important to address the incentive behind creating such distortion.
Both copyright and patents are based upon the "can not mentality" You cannot use without approval.... Of course patents don't give teh inventor or patent holder the right to produce what they have a patent for, as a bomb may be patented but it doesn't give the inventor the right to produce it.
There is a place for common sense in all of this. But the otherwise "can not" mentality is suppressing to an ever increasing rate of advancement.
Nobody today can come up with an original idea that doesn't have a basis on what others before them have done.
It is a human quality, right and duty to build upon what others before us have done.... it is the quality that allows us to stand out and above other life forms, such as plant, animal, etc..
We have teh ability to think in terms of high level abstraction, and not only that but we build whole societies and world systems on such abstractions.
There is less and less room for the "can not" mentality as technology advances at an ever increasing rate and the world gets more person to person intouch with each other from around teh world (exposing the deceptions of war mongers and their propoganda of things like "russia is evil"...where everyday people, by far, make up the majority past 99% of the 6 billion population)...
"Can Not" mentality is becomming more for those who can only be more then others by suppressing others..
As a species, we have the abstract ability, the knowledge from its use to further alter natural resources to our benefit, and the man power to certainly be working towards a time where the devided and unbalanced (lacking genuine self check) economic systems are going to show their age and deteriation to where we need to go on teh next stepping stone of human advancement.
And of course there will be those in opposition to change... like the music industry..... But open source software is showing us all how to do it, how to conmtribute to a benefit we all can share in, use and contribution.
The original point of IP rights was to provide incentive to be creative and inventive, so as to benefit society as a whole. But during a time of sparceness of human and natural reaources, including communication.
As that sparceness vanishes, the mode and method of advancement only naturally changes. How well we adapt in a timely manner determines who will be leading the world in its natural human evolution...
I did a search for the "Initiative for Software Choice" and found this.
m ?story_id=2054746
http://www.economist.com/business/displayStory.cf
It mentions the Initiative is backed by Microsoft.
So if the Economist could work it out, why could CNet not work it out, to the point of getting one of the Initiatives to write an article on something they would clearly have a biased opinion on.
Either CNet is biased, or they let one fall through the cracks. Either way, we should _all_ let them know it's been spotted.
Here's there contact page:
http://news.com.com/2040-1096-0.html
Give some of the editors an email. I'm sure an email slashdotting will make them see the light of day.
No, there definitely is a logical outcome: blood.
Our peaceful society is bult on sufficent resources to grant pretty much everyone most of what they need, as well as the reasonable effectiveness on non-violent revolutions. Once the powerful restrict the capasity for non-violent revolutions sufficently, it will be only the plentiful resources preventing bloodshed. Peak oil anyone? China will function far more effectively than western nations under serious resource constraints, BTW.
Anyway, I'm not actually sure just how much the non-violent revolutions have been restricted in our society. This article was written to scare IP & stock owners into giving the author money. Strong IP laws benifit the lawyers much more than even the largest non-media companies. Such companies might bail out if the IP boat starts seriously sinking.
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
Intellectual Ability should replace the concept of Intellectual Property. IP law blindly assumes that creativity is limited and there is nothing that count be wanted from the creator after the product of their creativity is available. Today that isn't true at all. Often IP isn't as valuable as the minds that created it. The change from putting value on creations to putting value on creators is a major economic change and such changes are always a little painful but for the good of all. The industrial revolution was a painful economic change but I doubt many would say it hurt the world economy in the long term. Doubtless people who produced their products and couldn't adapt to the changes went out of business during the industrial revolution. So it will be with the intelligence revolution.
As a tax payer I don't want my government paying for any IP to be produced that isn't available free of cost to the tax payer. That means research, software, and all other IP not of a sensitive (for national security) nature. If we're spending millions of dollars on software then we should be spending it on something that everyone can use freely.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
> It reflects the currently fashionable idea that confiscatory government
> policy must be used to even the score (whatever that means), thrusting
> highly demanded, privately risked IP out of the hands of legitimate
> property owners and into the hands of other, favored actors to further
> "develop" it.
the author has fallen into the memetic trap intended by those who coined the misleading phrase "intellectual property". there is no such thing as "intellectual property", there are only a set of limited monopoly rights - limited in both term and in scope. to lump patent rights and copyrights and trademarks under the false label "intellectual property" is deliberately deceptive. they are not property, in the sense that real-estate or a bicycle or a car is property. they are just a set of short-term monopoly rights associated with a particular invention, an original artistic expression, or a brand name in commerce.
these three things aren't even remotely *similar*, let alone close enough to be grouped under the same misleading name of "IP". it does, however, suit the patent & copyright industries if they can convince people to think of their limited-term monopoly rights in terms of "property" rather than government granted rights....that leads to all sorts of beneficial intuitions and assumptions about the nature of what is being debated.
so, please stop using the false term "intellectual property" - every time you do so, you're buying in to their bogus argument and shooting yourself in the foot.
Similar to how those countries that have the words "Democratic Republic" or something to that effect in their names, usually aren't.
I want to play Free Market with a drowning Libertarian.
To give the metaphor a bit more clarity, The British government declared that the American people would only be able to use one proprietary format of tea when they wanted to drink any and the people of Massachusets said that they didn't want that, they wanted and open standard of tea which they could buy from and sell to anyone they liked.
So in the boston tea party, Massachusets forcibly rejected a closed economic system in favor of a more open one, and in this case the Massachusets is, perhaps not quite so forcibly, rejecting a closed standard in favor of an open one.
Lady, this is not a rejection of the Boston Tea Party, this is the bloody Boston Tea Party writ in modern terms. Nice to see that at least a few people in the US still believe in what the founding fathers stood for as opposed to simply following word for word their writings which were created before half of what we use in a given day was even possible.
shes right and wrong. open source standerds will kill off ip and it needs to be done away with. and compatation whont die but change. insteed of five same products compeating to be the #1 sell it will be 1 open source with everyone compeating to make it better.
Using a document format that anyone, anywhere can implement in their product, and compete solely on the playing field of software quality, hurts competition.
(The fact that some people are insane enough to buy this bullshit is frightening)
I don't typically respond to AC's but this one is so wrong, I'd hate to see people get the wrong impression. The U.S. Constitution most certainly enumerates teh rights to intellectual property though it does not call it this specifically. Article I, section 8 states quite clearly, "To promote the Progress of Science and the useful Arts, by securing for limited Time to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries".
Also, the only mention of life and liberty in the U.S. Constitution is in the Fifth Amendment and it refers to criminal cases whereby no person shall not "...be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law." Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness makes an appearance in the Declaration of Independence but this document does not bear any legal weight nor is it the foundation for our legal system though the U.S. Constitution does borrow from it in some places.
If you really want to better understand the U.S. Constitution, but don't want to become a lawyer to do so, I highly recommend reading America's Constitution - A Biography by Akhil Reed Amar.
The fact that the author of the artical in question is the head of the proprietary software monopoly's propaganda organization has seemed to escape notice here. Does'nt it dawn on people? Are all we slashdotters moronic sleepwalkers who only play a poor imitation of software and hardware literacy? The idea that consuming monopoly software products to the exclusion of better alternatives being a 'proper choice' is a dangerous travesty of illogic. It is a lie arrogantly foisted on a gullible public by the whining Miss Wyne. The prospering of 'intellectual property is akin to a real world example of gambling casinos sucking the life out of cities populated by gambling addiction susceptible people. One only needs look at Atlantic City, New Jersey and drive around the place for an afternoon to see the great tragedy that has befallen this once fine city that inspired, ironically, the game: "Monopoly". In the game, taking a 'walk on the boardwalk meant losing the game to your avaricious little sister. In real life, doing the same thing will probably get you killed. The streets of the town are littered with trash, wrecked cars, run down houses; and aimlessly wandering people with the barrenness of their hopes shadowed in the thousand mile stares of their hooded eyes sunken into their heads from hunger. Few businesses are in what is left of the main streets, and. The proliferation of empty lots from old 'insurance fires' and empty stores has to be seen to be believed. The only island of prosperity in all of this is the casino district. That is like going through the looking glass. Full parking lots and crowds of working class people crowding into betting areas with scantily clad locals jumping to please every whim of the customers like they were desparate to keep at least this job. They are! Casinos are now the only job in this town for 15 miles from the center of this economic neutron bomb. Some may say that nobody made all the workers of the town spend all their money at the casinos. These same will have fatuous contempt for the businesses in the town that failed because all their customers stopped shopping there as they had spent all their money in the casinos......'market forces'. These same monopolists were probably there when the debates were conducted locally as surely they must have been that resulted in later enabling laws allowing the operation of these casinos, and then as now the same arrogant empty phrases of 'market forces' and 'consumer choice' was mouthed from soul-less faces. And are the winners of this appreciative of their now impoverished benefactors? Not at all! The winners act
like victors in a war who have the devine right to loot the properties and exploit the population like slaves. The workers in the casinos surely act like slaves. Worse than slaves. When a slave became aged, the masters had to care for them. Not so the casinos. And so it is with the software industry. The smiling face of the monopoly would have us all marching to the consuming drum of one and only one small cabal of malefactors of great wealth.
And so much for Miss Whyne's paid for prostitution to corporate monopoly love. She had been paid well to come up with a tortured piece of illogic meant to persuade reasonable people to abandon real freedom of choice to have, own, and use software that they can really USE and modify as they see fit. She would have us all become mere consumers of a finished product, and only one finished product as it is being aggressively and predatorily 'marketed' in institutionally coercive terms by an evil monopoly that seeks world domination of all the world's salable ideas and unitary legal control of all uses of the same. That is not 'choice'. That is corporate fascism as espoused and practiced by the holders and pullers of Miss 'Whyne's strings.
The author of the article works for the Initiative for Software Choice. Or Yet Another Microsoft-Funded 'Independent' Body (TM). Check the list of members.
This article is just crap. It's Microsoft-funded FUD and another attempt to scare people away from the Massachusetts initiative.
Ignore it and call it for what it is.
Why would anyone want to use a text editor that is not vi?
cheap labor conservatives - they want to keep you hungry enough to be thankful for minimum wage.
Agreed, rights exist inspite of government, not because of it.
Dude, I'm with you, except for this.
Our "rights" exist only within the framework of what we can and cannot legally do. Our "rights" are only what the government proscribes-- this is in spite of, not because of, the Declaration of Independence, and the Constitution of the United States of America.
The ability to perform an action is inate-- that is, we can perform any action we choose, even killing another human. However, the actions that are allowed under law are much more limited. There is no natural right to any specific action, and what is considered a right today (say, the ability to say that our current President is a fucking lying war criminal) may be unlawful tomorrow, and is no longer a "right."
Rights are granted by the policies and practices of the government, as secured by the citizens. If we are going to be fucking "free," we had better secure those rights.
Anyway, I like the way you think. I just don't think we've been given any "rights," nor are we guaranteed the ability to practice those "rights." Liberty is secured, not given; freedom is not a gift, but obtained through personal sacrifice of many.
At least, that's my opinion. It goes without saying (though I shall), I could be wrong.
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
"Thus far, the IP community in America and Europe all seem to have collectively yawned."
There's an IP community?!
"failure by the EU Parliament this summer to pass patent legislation"
which wasn't from lack of trying by the lobbyists. Rather, it was probably thanks to the many proposed amendments and a possible change of heart on the side of the corporate lobbyists to rather see the legislation die than put up with the amendments.
_V_
Let's see... where have open standards met with wild success...
- The PC. Without industry standards that are accepted by everyone, your PC would still cost $5000, and be made by IBM or some other massive company that decides for you which operating system, software, and programming language you're allowed to use. IBM tried to control this market with proprietary hardware and an iron fist, and failed miserably. The MCI bus nailed shut that coffin pretty well.
- The Internet. Without industry standards that are accepted by everyone, noone would be able to communicate between their high-priced online services that serve mostly to herd cattle^Wpeople to even more high-priced subscription services. Because after all, anyone who has enough money to afford one of those $5000 computers is clearly loaded.
- The telephone system. Without industry standards that were enforced by the government, your phone would still be available in three colours: black, black, and black.
- The power grid. Without standard shaped plugs, you'd be forced to choose which appliance conforms to what your power grid wants, rather than whatever appliance you like. And worse, there'd probably be plenty of competition around too.
- Money.
Standards enable millions of business to exist, and enrich the choices available on the market. Not just for consumers, but for industry, commerce, and government too.
"No problem. I have the capacity to do infinite work so long as you don't mind that my quality approaches zero."-Dilbert
You don't have 10 gauge in your house for sockets. That's used for 20A circuits. Most outlet circuits are 12 gauge. 14 gauge is even legal for 15A outlet circuits, but no one seems to use it.
It's not easier to modify AC voltage than DC. It was true in Tesla's day, it isn't true anymore. To do so at 60Hz means to need a relatively large transformer (wall-wart). DC-DC conversion using a switching transformer is more efficient for low voltages and moderate currents than AC-DC conversion. You can use a small inductor instead of a large transformer. And since the voltage regulation is in the DC-DC converter (switch mode power supply), you end up with higher efficiency than a transformer-based system, which produces a particular voltage in the secondary and then uses a linear regular to lower it to a voltage that can be maintained stably.
In other words, a switch mode power supply works as if it had a variable number of secondary windings, so that it can adjust automatically to changes in input voltages, instead of producing excess voltage and burning it off.
Additionally, I am not familiar with a regulator that uses a zener diode that you speak of. Can you explain this to me?
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
This is completely different from real property, which can actually be defended by its owner.
Owners defend their intellectual property all the time in ways identical to defending their physical property - by going to court to enforce their proprietary rights.
"Intellectual" property, however, is completely dependent on an all-powerful government entity and obtrusive laws for enforcement.
Last I checked, if someone stole your car, the protection of your rights in that thing are completely dependent on an all-powerful government entity (the district attorney and related authorities) and obtrusive laws for enforcement (the various state and local statutes making theft of an auto a felony offense punishable by fines and jail time).
So tell me, how are the two different again? I thought so.
Open source is a threat to prosperity and general well being it is claimed that..
To stand there would be little or few developments not protected by IP- Geostationary satellites
- Television
- Telephones
- Moving pictures
- Computers
Clearly the list goes on - but these seem to cover some of the main items the IP lobbyists themselves have built their business on. mutter... mutter...if "Faith" could be proved with facts - would it still be faith? So why does "Faith" try to present beliefs as fact? -
the general concept of "what's fair" in 99.999% of common daily interaction is obvious to most mammals.
It is those contested 0.001% of interactions for which a government (whether centralized or localized) is necessary to prevent chaos.
You give 2 units of NADH, you take 2 units of NADH. That's fair. If you're operating at the scale of 2000 units then the tolerance level is about 20 units. If you're operating at the scale of 2 million units then the tolerance level is about 2000 units.
What happens when somebody who operates at the scale of 2000 units meets somebody who operates at the scale of 2 million units, who thinks the former organism's life is just "tolerance"?
Foetuses, stem cells and so on are just potential people, but they are innocent.
Under one possible "pro-choice" rationalization, fetuses are guilty of trespassing in mother's womb, for which the punishment is execution. The special rights that U.S. government currently grants to fetuses in the third trimester are analogous to squatter's rights.
Is a mother's womb "property"? Is a work of authorship which has entered common knowledge "property"? Which suggestion is sillier?
"Subsititute the word government for capitalism in old communist rants, and you could pass a lot of them unchallenged on libertarian sites."
Hold it there, cowboy! Being a libertarian does not imply 'getting rid of governement' per sé. That would be the goal of an anarchist, not a libertarian.
No copyright means less sharing of source code
No copyright means ubiquitous trading of fully commented and documented disassemblies of proprietary computer programs.
IP will be well and alive no matter what.
She said the state embarked on an open standard open source mission. Wrong - it embarked on an open standard mission to ensure the CITIZENS could read THEIR documents for years on end without having to buy a piece of software from one company.
Open Source is all about IP and protecting it. It just enables everyone else to learn and grow from it.
That isn't why! The common wealth of massachusetts simply demanded that all office "type" software be able to open all documents the state has produced digitally irreguardless of the manufacturer of the os/software that made them. When Microsoft laughed at them , then they went to open source. The reason they went was to insure all state douments that are for the most part digitally stored are available for the long term (20 to 50 years) and that no matter how long the document is stored, that it can be accessed now or 100 years from now. Oh by the way, I point out that microsoft, just this last week, has opted to go open source with their file formats. Hmm I wonder why!?? Hmm the rumors out of california must be true :P
Does anyone know of any other states or corporations that are looking at the TCO of opensource in an office/desktop enviroment?
You can't own information. The very concept of intellectual property is antiquated. Idea's can not be owned because they fail some key elements of property.
Elements of property that do not fit information (ideas).
* Exclusivity. Property use is restricted. If I own a chair, only one person can reasonable use that chair at one time. Information is not exclusive, and is functionally infinite in usage.
* Defensible. Ownership of property means you can defend it's use from others. If I want to keep others from using my chair, I can protect the chair. The last defense being violence. Information is not defensible once it has been released.
* Physical. Property has a geographic location. A chair takes up physical space. Information does not hold a specific physical space. If released, information defies physical definition.
* Limited reproduction. It takes significant time and resources to make another chair. It takes more resources to distribute a chair. Information requires trivial resources to reproduce and distribute. Once an idea is released, it's reproducibility is nearly infinite. (A wonderful trick is convincing consumers that your information is a physical item. Put your information on a shiny media, put it in a nicely packaged box, and pretend it's property. This is called "productizing".)
The very concept of intellectual property is to give incentive for creation, but the act of limiting access to information retards intellection growth. In a capitalist system it's to your advantage to have information that your competition does not have.
An example of how such a system retards the general good of society is the "60 year light bulb". There is absolutely no reason for anyone to create a 60 year light bulb. In fact, you want to create light bulbs that only last a year or two, because you want people to continue to buy them from you. If you created a 60 year light bulb, you would go out of business within a few years. The technology to create 60 year light bulbs exist. Clearly it's in the best interests of society to have a 60 year light bulb, but in a capitalist system the information for creating such a bulb is more profitably kept from the public than used for the public good.
The retardation of long term systems is not limited to lighting. Cars are designed for short life cycles, roads a built to last one year, and electronics are designed to last two to three years. Quality and longevity are not the friend of the capitalist.
To sum up:
Information is not property.
Intellectual Property is more often used in defense of profits than for the public good.
You can't own an idea.
Intellectual Property is more likely to retard innovation than foster it.
Actually, you are forgetting about "the suck"
Source code is also protected from copying and redistribution if it contains "the suck"; source code with "the suck" is generally not reused in other projects, nor is it generally propagated by itself.
There is a lot of code out there with this form of copy protection, and I'm sure Microsoft has included "the suck" in much of their code, too (they might even have a patent there somewhere...).
-- AC