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Why IP Laws Are Blocking Innovation
DrJimbo passes along this quote from Groklaw:
"The White House is asking us to give them ideas on what is blocking innovation in America. I thought I'd give them an honest answer. Here it is: Current intellectual property laws are blocking innovation. President Obama just set a goal of wireless access for everyone in the US, saying it will spark innovation. But that's only true if people are allowed to actually do innovative things once they are online. You have to choose. You can prop up old business models with overbearing intellectual property laws that hit innovators on the head whenever they stick their heads up from the ground; or you can have innovation. You can't have both. And right now, the balance is away from innovation."
No IP was a contributing factor.
proud caffeine whore
Patents. Bloody software patents, and fat cats using patents to bludgeon little guys. IIRC, the intention was pretty much the opposite - patents were supposed to be a way to put the law on the side of the little guy. Where did it all go wrong?
As for copyright - no more damn extensions. Indeed, ratchet back.
Of course, without strong ip laws there's no reason to innovate. Any suggestions? Clearly this debate belongs on a larger basis than the 1D, "stronger - weaker". How about a policy of "use it or lose it?"
The original goal of copyrights and patents was to reward people for creating things that benefit all of us, not to create huge corporations that prevent people from creating things that benefit all of us.
It has become disgustingly easy to patent something that really should not be patentable. One result of the fast and loose IP laws is an entirely new method of profit for enterprise: using the court system as a means of revenue (i.e. sue for profit.) In the end, the IP laws have become the United States undoing because how can we be technological innovators and leaders if the would-be inventor is scared off by some superfluous patent over something ridiculous.
examine western european history in the 300 years in between 300 AD and 600 AD. you will see that the feudalization of economy and politics in that period closely resembles the feudalization of economy, and now intellectual sphere in our modern times.
a concept is like a bridge. once you give the ownership of the bridge to someone, that someone has the control of that bridge, can use it to do anything, toll anyone, deny access to anyone. and buy more bridges. eventually, most of the bridges get concentrated in the hands of minority, which then end up controlling the social, political and economical aspects of life through their power. its the inevitable result of inheritance-supported, unlimited ownership.
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Yes, I am aware of the irony of making the above comment on the internet.
If I were God, wouldn't I protect my churches from acts of me?
You fail to patent, or file slowly? That's okay! We will patent for you, and then sue you for violating our patent!
As I understand first to file, prior art published outside a patent application can still invalidate a patent or application. It makes a difference only when two inventors have pending applications on the same thing (e.g. AG Bell and Elisha Gray).
Why is it OK to block innovation and commerce with environmental laws, racial preference laws, licensing laws, union preference laws, unreasonable liability laws, international trade laws, and thousands upon thousands of regulations?
Who said that's OK?
And it's worth noting that those regulations have resulted in a huge amount of business moving out of those highly-regulated nations to places like China which couldn't care less about them.
I am a web developer by day, and am a software developer by night. I make software so that I can sell it. One of my biggest worries is that I will make a really great piece of software, start selling it, then some big company filled with lawyers starts suing me because it run in Windows, and according to some messed up, obscure patent, I can't do that. I understand that they would not touch me right now since, let's face it, none of you have heard of me (as with the rest of the world). I am not banking hardcore. It is possible that one single program I write will though. That is a very high possibility. I try to program safe and not go too insane with the software I make and sell. If I go insane and make something incredible, these sleazy, douchbag lawyers will want a piece of my pie even though they had nothing to do with it, so they sue me. You should not be allowed to simply buy up a patent. You should be required to have a working model of what the patent is for. If you have a software patent for software that does not exist and you have no proof it exists, why are you allowed to own it? You have nothing to do with the software outside of a small piece of paper saying it. You have no programmers on payroll. You have no engineers on payroll. You are not paying or contracting anybody to make these innovations, you simply own them to say you do. I think it should be revamped to make these people show proof of concept at the very minimum in order to own a patent. Unfortunately, for people like me who make just as much selling software on the side as I do at my normal job (and it is not a small amount, it is just not big either), it is only a matter of time before the "I can retire now" software gets sold off, and then I get sued for some software patent from a company that has nothing to do with software outside of having a piece of paper saying they can. Proof of concept, or you lose it.
If these patent trolls started losing patents for no proof of concept, that would up the innovation then and there as other big companies would be bringing in people to make a proof of concept so they could own the patent. A 2 for 1 deal and it is super simple. Innovation gets sparked, and patent trolls get smacked in the face. And all we do is force the patent trolls to show proof of concept of every single patent they own.
The world is how you make it
Yeah, the good old days, when you needed a the support of the Church or a wealthy patron to make a living as an artist.
Thanks but no thanks.
Stephan Kinsella, an IP lawyer, has written an essay basically demolishing the philosophical and empirical reasons for supporting IP:
http://mises.org/books/against.pdf
Highly recommended reading!
Yep. Remember what happened the last time the President used the internet to ask the people what they wanted? The most popular response, by a long shot, was marijuana reform. The President came out and laughed, as if tens of thousands of people in jail were some sort of joke. I don't expect patent reform to be taken any more seriously.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
The thesis "Current IP law stifles innovation" is a good one, however I don't agree with the examples provided in the paper. I think a more persuasive argument would have used company vs company lawsuits are are going crazy right now (between the like of Apple, RIM, and Sony) and the hoops that things like the GPL has to jump through to placate Novell selling out to M$ amongst other attacks on open source software. Comparing the situation to the aircraft industry pre-WWI and using other examples of stifled innovation would have given our current situation more context as well. /sighs
Anyway, I just think the sheer amount of licensing boondoggles and lawyers required to build any kind of useful tech device these days is completely out of control, and I don't know if the paper made that clear (it didn't to me anyway).
Proof of concept, or you lose it.
Perhaps the original inventor had a working model, but a nonpracticing entity bought the patent from the inventor's employer when the inventor's employer went bankrupt.
Besides, a working model requirement wouldn't clear up, say, the video codec situation. Any of the companies holding patents in MPEG-LA's AVC pool probably has the expertise to write its own AVC encoder and decoder.
I tried to read the link. It was long and rambling. Using Napster as your starting point for a discussion will immediately turn off your target audience. Go back to your unabomber shack you wingnut.
The DMCA. A law that made reverse engineering illegal. As though anyone ever built a better mousetrap without tearing someone else's apart first. Oh well the Chinese have no such illusions.
you needed a the support of the Church or a wealthy patron to make a living as an artist.
How is that different from today, where the wealthy patron is a mainstream publisher? Try to do it yourself and risk getting sued for plagiarism.
All those votes were probably from me. I just got really high and forgot that I'd already voted.
Sorry about that.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
I can hear it now, him chuckling away as he glibly dismisses the entire issue.
Wireless access for everyone will spark innovation? There's someone in a cabin in the woods in Montana ready to build the next Google. If only she had broadband?
Wireless access for everyone will enable residents of rural communities to share videos of their cats with the world. That's it.
Have gnu, will travel.
Probably because people who say that are full of it. With the possible exception of international trade law you're completely wrong on all counts. Nice hedging on "unreasonable liability laws" it's bad form to use a phrase like that without any hint as to the actual meaning.
The issue is that those things don't bar innovation, in fact most of those things you list are powerful tools of innovation. Imagine how much innovation would have happened if you looked at all the innovations that have been contributed by various minority groups. Sure most of that would've come about eventually, but it would've taken a longer time, sometimes diversity is invaluable when trying to innovate.
Current intellectual property laws are blocking innovation.
To be absolutely clear, 'intellectual property' as a term comprises copyright, patents, and which other things that have actual laws and legal definitions? The quote comes from groklaw, but for those not in the know, it might help to be unambiguous about it
In the "good old days" artists needed a patron not because there was no IP law but because most artists' audience was incredibly small by today's standards. The Church and the aristocracy were about the only ones to commission artworks or have their buildings elaborately decorated. Not because everyone else got their art fix from ThePirateHorsecourier but because everyone else was too busy working their arse off to feed themselves or bashing in skulls. Given the circumstances I would still consider that era a prosperous time for the arts. I agree with GP's point that the ability to freely use whatever you got your hands on and create something new from it was a very good thing, and I would like to extend this to say it contributed considerably to the wealth of cultural legacy that has serves artists up until this very day as a solid foundation to build upon and a rich repertoire to draw inspiration from.
Rudolf Hess edited Mein Kampf. He was the very first grammar nazi.
Firstly, many people are against all those, so that's not an argument for IP laws.
Secondly, even those who aren't may say that innovation is only one factor and that the benefit of those regulations outweigh that factor, while the benefits of IP laws don't.
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Assuming you think there's anything to libertarianism. I certainly think libertarians have started from a flawed position, and their logic goes off the rails because of their bad starting point.
No IP was a contributing factor.
I don't know what you people are talking about. There is considerable innovation in America today. The US is the leader in CDOs, derivatives, tax avoidance, and is always coming up with new and innovative schemes to part working people from their money.
No lack of innovation there, it's just misdirected.
Politicians need money to win the next election. Corporations have the money to give. Doesn't take a rocket scientist to see the connection and obvious solution to the problem, remove the need for money.
1) Pass a constitutional amendment that states that money does not equal speech.
2) Give all the candidates equal and free access to the public airwaves. If the cable, satellite and TV companies don't like it revoke their license. Someone else will gladly take it over.
3) Let the US Government printing office provide print materials for mailing their fliers, signs,...
4) Post office provides free, or paid by the treasury (new election tax) services.
5) Forbid any candidate to spend a cent on their election.
FINI.
... are too easy to game by way of ignorance and overwhelming the staffs ability to approve them. Not to mention lobbying, bribes and kickbacks. People just do not have the skills to properly assess patents/copyright, I mean come on amazon's 1 click patent and others relating checkout? I mean seriously.
They will just be abused endlessly, they should be junked. What really needs to be innovated is the business model, laws that grant legal monopolies would merely force innovation on the business model end, instead of through the legal system. The idea that there are no solutions or "there would be no incentive" suffers from a complete lack of imagination on the part of the critic.
Well done! Anarchist principles incorporated into a philosophy of intellectual property. I did not expect that. (btw, I'm not being sarcastic.)
Plagiarism is a lot harder to prove than you think. And, if you sue somebody for that and lose, you're probably going to end up on the wrong side of another lawsuit, and end up paying out big bucks in damages.
Good, inexpensive web hosting
The people I want to hear most from are not the IP intellectual discussions about moot points of IP policy, but from actual patent holders who have innovative technologies that have been blocked from innovating by the patent system.
I used to be against most forms of US IP, but now in a position where I may be able to actually capitalise on some of my own IP, I find the system much more friendly than I thought. While I still find my own knowledge lacking, here are the two things I wish were reformed:
-A patent does not give freedom to operate, it only gives the right to exclude. For example if you patent A, and then I patent B, but B is a subset or derivative of A, I can't actually bring B to market because A blocks me, but the holder of A can't do it either because B blocks it. This ends up stifling innovation. To correct this problem requires an entire re-think of the rights given to patent holders.
Second, patent holders get the standard term to block others, regardless whether the holder intends to or ever does bring the innovation to the market. I wish we had a system that gave 22 years of protection, but only if the holder uses the patent within 2 years of granting (with an appeals process that allows extensions if reasonable work is still being done on it). Essentially, eliminate defensive patent library weapons of mass destruction.
-Ryan
AUWYHSTOT (Acronyms are Useless When You Have to Spell Them Out Too)
http://ksd5.techaos.com/index.php/The_Surprising_History_of_Copyright_and_The_Promise_of_a_Post-Copyright_World
Yes because this stuff is not patented!
Nearly all industry in the US seem to be either intellectual property or service oriented. Manufacture and agriculture are critically diminished and everything it getting outsourced and sent overseas. What we have left is IP which, as we know thanks to the secret ACTA negotiations, IP has become a matter of national security.
But Obama doesn't want to know the truth. He is in the pockets of those who want to keep their arsenal of intellectual property... and arsenals they are as we see an increase in IP's use as a weapon against other companies. It's as if they know something is about to change and they are trying to cash in on their IP while it still has some value.
Here's an interesting link:
"Why Obama's 98% Wireless Goal Is Empty Rhetoric"
http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/Why-Obamas-98-Wireless-Goal-Is-Empty-Rhetoric-112429
- "It seems rather important to note that according to the government's own data, we already technically achieved 98% third generation high speed wireless coverage last year."
Information wants to be expensive AND wants to be free. So you have Value vs. Cheap distribution fighting each other.
It has always been about bread and circuses, for the majority. The rest are either running the game, or have interests that lie outside the game.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
I assume you are referring to games.
I would agree that current IP laws go too far. That said, how would you make money if they were eliminated altogether? Donations from users? If your game became even marginally successful, a company like Nintendo or Microsoft could just port it and sell it for their consoles, which you would still be locked out of, without paying you a cent.
It's also worth noting that your argument does not apply equally to other artistic fields. Music, for example, can be and is produced outside of the major label system. I would argue that most of the better music of the last couple decades has been produced independently.
TFA is built on the premise that crime would pay if there weren't patents on the crime methods.
Napster? Really?
Napster wasn't hit with a patent suit for its method of stealing music. It was busted up because it was stealing music.
I couldn't read the rest after it started with that. Someone tell me if it redeemed itself.
How can I innovate if I can't copy and sell the ideas of others?!
Napster wasn't hit with a patent suit for its method of stealing music. It was busted up because it was stealing music.
If you're going to be anal about terms you should make sure you aren't playing fast and loose with them yourself. Napster didn't *steal* anything.
Patents != Copyright, however IP covers both Patents and Copyright.
People in cars cause accidents....accidents in cars cause people
If you enable people to make illegal copies of their copyright material, and to find more people to make illegal copies from, and you make money from it, how is that not stealing?
The prosecutor can be more distinctive about the term he wants to use, but since the money you collected belongs to the copyright holders, it doesn't matter that you invented the machine that made you that money.
And my point stands. The idea that stifling crime is stifling innovation therefore it shouldn't be a crime is a canard.
Imagine a world where cooking wasn't covered by IP law you'd never be able to set up your own restaurant!
Why would a chef ever come up with a new recipe?
Surely if he came up with a good one then McDonalds would just steal it and include it in their own chain and lock that chef out.
As soon as you came up with a good idea, theme or dish someone would just swoop in , copy your ideas and push you out of business.
Nobody would ever even try!
We'd all be stuck without anything good to eat!
Well, there's no reasoning with pure authoritarianism. If the law is the law because it's the law, and breaking the law is bad because it's against the law, the law is always right, tautologically. Any sane individual (and most insane ones!) will realize that there are just and unjust laws. People imprisoned for possession of marijuana are victims of a repressive regime. There is absolutely no reason why that should happen, the punishment should fit the crime.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Well, I see the laces on someone's jack-boots are just a bit too tight...
My crystal ball, my Magic 8-ball, and my Steve Jackson Tarot deck all agree that the USA has deliberately shackled innovation for the last 10 years. I don't know why. But the signs are unmistakable, even for those who can't sense the aether.
There was no question what would happen when the US Patent Office was changed to fee based financing. The flood of junk patents, and their suppressing effects on innovation are a surprise to no-one. In the intervening years, there has been ample opportunity to revert.
Similarly, for years we have encouraged monopolies and cartels that we know will suppress innovation.
The demotivating effect of the H1B Visa program can't be a surprise to anybody. Chaining the technological elite into lives of indentured servitude has always suppressed innovation.
So, the current course of technological stagnation is a deliberate choice.
The US won't change pathways until we unmake this choice.
Miles
as if tens of thousands of people in jail
But they feed the 'prison-industrial complex'!
Quote: "Correctional officials see danger in prison overcrowding. Others see opportunity. The nearly two million Americans behind bars—the majority of them nonviolent offenders—mean jobs for depressed regions and windfalls for profiteers"
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1998/12/the-prison-industrial-complex/4669/
Take note of the year!
CC.
TaijiQuan (Huang, 5 loosenings)
... but the article is less about "reform" and more about gutting Intellectual Property. The author isn't for, say, a 20-year or a 10-year copyright, but is against copyright at all.
Please show where the article suggests we do away with copyright law. You can't because it doesn't. PJ is a big fan of the GPL and she knows very well that the GPL only works because of copyright law.
If you disagree with what she says, fine, that is your prerogative, but why do you just make up crap like this?
We don't see the world as it is, we see it as we are.
-- Anais Nin
How can the summary (and presumably article too) say that you can't have both [innovation and prop up old business models], but then talks about a balance between the two? A balance would be somewhere in between, allowing for *both*...
Oh well.
Is this a rhetorical question?
The most recent example is the fact that in 1990, Encyclopedia Britannica reached $650 million in revenue in a single year*. Now, wikipedia in 2010 is struggling to get $12 million in donations.
The problem here is that you are judging the success of copyright law by the revenue of the industry it affects. Copyright law isn't meant to provide revenue - it's meant to create innovation. You should be comparing the Encyclopedia Britannica and Wikipedia on the completeness and accuracy of their work. The revenue of the Britannica actually counts against them - it's an additional cost that society pays in return for getting a good encyclopedia, compared to the Wikipedia model.
If you enable people to make illegal copies of their copyright material, and to find more people to make illegal copies from, and you make money from it, how is that not stealing?
Napster was no more stealing than the person who wrote the first FTP client and server was stealing.
How about increase education spending? People are more likely to come up with innovative technologies if they have a better understanding of existent technologies and ways that they could be improved. It isn't rocket surgery.
IP = Internet Protocol and Intellectual Property rights as copyright, patents, and trademarks for corporate control of creativity and innovation are the biggest block to innovation.
Open Idea Protection (OIP) for the artist, scientist, engineer... is needed.
1. The artist, scientist, engineer... that is the driving intellect should have exclusive and lifelong rights to their creations and innovations irrespective of any corporate/government investments. Allow artist, scientist, engineer... to contract out rights (to others/businesses) exclusive rights for a limited period of a decade or less for production or manufacture of a product/object, never allow a business/government/religious... institution to own the rights to anything intellectual. So, the artist, scientist, engineer... is always paid for their creations and innovations.
2. Provide by law that any non-production or non-manufacture use of a item/information/product/object... is always legal and allowed for furthering research, design, development... curiosity in study/improving upon all creations or innovations.
3. Arbitration by expert peer review to determine the added value and division of proceeds when an item/information/product/object... is used for production, manufacture, and commercial/economic exploitation.
4. Why, because only humans (artist, scientist, engineer...) are in fact intellectual. Institutions have explicit/written financial/governance processes/policy, but absolutely no intellectual capability. IOW: You don't create you don't own. Copyright, patents, and trademarks are should protect the artist, scientist, engineer... not the brainless/amoral institutions.
Unaccountable leaders are masters, and unrepresented people are slaves. How do US and EU fare?
Maybe IP is just yet another tool that large, established concerns can use to raise entry barriers for new competitors.
Coincidentally, I just read an article today -- Rethinking IP -- that suggests doing away with the concept of IP, entirely:
"We must start by taking a close look at the traditional libertarian assumption that IP is, in fact, a legitimate type of property right. And it turns out that advocates of the free market have made a mistake all along. Patent and copyright, to take the two worst manifestations of IP, are nothing but state monopolies that violate property rights. IP is antithetical to capitalism and the free market."
Pi Ran Out
If you enable people to make illegal copies of their copyright material, and to find more people to make illegal copies from, and you make money from it, how is that not stealing?
You cannot 'steal' a digital bit. It simply exists and is copied or erased. But you cannot 'take' or 'steal' it in any way.
Napster is a bad example but for a different reason. Napster was busted for violating the copyrights of the music they were allowing to be traded.
How about Guitar Hero being killed because the copyright holders of the songs demanded ridiculous amounts when the game amounts to free advertising for them? They are certainly in the rights to do so, but it doesn't mean that 'innovation' isn't being stifled by it.
Patents are the bigger problem. Specifically software patents, but patents in general too. That Tivo can be sued because someone patented a completely vague idea without actually building their idea hurts everybody. Vonage also got sued over really technical things that Verizon (I think) purchased patents for and then sued Vonage. Worse, 'Patent Trolls' - companies that literally don't make anything purchase lots of patents solely for the purpose of suing companies who actually create things - *that* stifles innovation significantly.
I'm not advocating illegal sharing of copyrighted works. I am advocating that the current mindset of today's 'media' companies is very short sighted and backwards. Digital copies, instead of being a 'product' like a CD, are now the 'advertising' they should be using to drive people to buy things that aren't available in infinite supply. (This is not saying that because it's illegally available they should just give up).
Digital copies can be made in infinite numbers at just about zero cost. Say I'm selling apples and one day, someone comes and, without taking any apples, creates an apple tree next to my apple stand. Now apples are available for free right next to me. The value of my apples is lowered. I have not lost anything, nor been deprived of anything. There are simply more apples on the market and that causes value to go down. An infinite supply of apples puts the 'value' of any one apple at zero. I can complain that free apples exist - this is what 'media' is doing today. Or I can shift to having people come to my cart to by my 'worm free' apples. Instead of selling apples, I'm now providing a service of quality apples. I can certainly take apples from the tree too, I just spend time verifying they are worm free; that's the 'value' I am providing.
For the music industry, the 'value' is in live performances and merchandising. You simply can't produce a live performance infinitely, it can only be done at the concert with those musicians for a finite set of people.
But unfortunately we have billions of dollars fighting this basic fact of the digital world. Best description I've heard "Trying to make digital bits not copyable is like trying to make water not wet".
People in cars cause accidents....accidents in cars cause people
There's NO WAY they are going to liberalize patents in the slightest-- get real, Big Pharma patents forcing sick consumers to subsidise drug R&D & massive profits, is too big of a piece of what bought us this crappy government.
Are you an American citizen? If so you are subject to more than 40,000 pages of local, state, and Federal law. You may rest assured you've broken more than one of those laws today, probably before you finished your breakfast. You just haven't been caught.
Sometimes the problem is the law. That's the case with the War on (Some) Drugs.
I wish I hadn't blown all my mod points to increase the visibility of a couple titty jokes. You should have got one.
Even the jokes need their patrons.
Nobody would ever even try! We'd all be stuck without anything good to eat!
Yeah! We'd be stuck in a world where McDonalds served Lamb Tajinewith candied Tomatoes, Parmentier de canard confit en cocotte, and Galette Feuilleté with Candied Fruits for dessert. Oh, the horror!
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
Assuming you think there's anything to libertarianism. I certainly think libertarians have started from a flawed position, and their logic goes off the rails because of their bad starting point.
And what do you think that flawed position is?
I think libertarianism starts from the belief that people are inherently selfish and that rather than try to outright fight human nature - a war that has been and apparently will be fought and lost countless times - we should channel it for the best possible good. But maybe I don't understand the basis of libertarianism, so perhaps you could explain it to me.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
Yes because this stuff is not patented!
Tax strategies are and have been patentable for awhile. I wrote a paper that discusses them but it is a bit outdated now. There is a strong movement against them but I don't really see Congress doing anything in the near future.
I assume you are referring to games.
A lot of times I am, given my reputation for whining about the lack of deployed home theater PCs in comments to articles about PC vs. console, but this time I'm talking about music. Accidental plagiarism is copyright infringement. See Bright Tunes Music v. Harrisongs Music: George Harrison got sued and lost for having copied half of a Chiffons song into a song on his solo debut album. Is there a set of best practices to prevent accidental plagiarism when writing and recording a song, or a way to avoid being bankrupted by damages once accidental plagiarism is discovered?
If your game became even marginally successful, a company like Nintendo or Microsoft could just port it and sell it for their consoles
This already happens. Microsoft looked at Nintendo's Pokemon and Animal Crossing, took some from column A and some from column B, and released Viva Pinata. Even Animal Crossing itself appears to draw heavily from the works of A. A. Milne and Lego's Fabuland. See Follow The Leader and Dueling Games. But then it's legal to copy general concepts (Capcom v. Data East) as long as you don't copy the appearance of identifiable characters more than necessary for the genre (Atari v. Philips).
We know what we want changed, but what do you think Obama will say? The cynic in me says he's probably going to blame it on the Chinese or something. "We have great ideas, but they keep stealing them away. So we don't have ideas anymore. Bad Dog!" Any competent lobbyist can turn this drive for innovation into a tool to push their agenda.
Starbucks, Harbuckle of Breath.
The number one issue for reduced innovation is all of the regulations. When companies spend billions on accountants and lawyers practicing non-market strategies, they have less money to spend and care less about innovation.
I once took an excursion to Reddit, and later HN. Unlimited up/down voting sucks when dealing with a hive-mind.
When pirates harm a creator's profitability, then pirates are undermining innovation.
That statement assumes a great deal that is not true. It is terribly loaded. Competition harms a business' profitability. Should we therefore ban competition? Of course not! We recognize that competition (within limits-- don't want rival businesses murdering each other's employees) is what made the West great. But lately there's been confusion on this point, a tendency to ascribe our success to capitalism rather than competition. In the 19th century robber barons showed us that capitalism alone isn't sufficient, for the most profitable thing they could do, as many of them shrewdly saw, was eliminate all the competition. And that's not only the competition from rival producers, but employers as well, so that workers will have little choice but to take employment at the only company in town, at a very low pay rate of course. Therefore we now have some protections from all this in the form of labor and antitrust laws.
But creating monopolies is what current IP law does. You write as if the only way to profit from an innovation is to grant the innovator a monopoly on it. Then you scream about evil pirates whenever anyone intentionally or inadvertently infringes. And how they're undermining the system, and will ruin it if they aren't stopped! Well, the system is already dead. It just looks alive in the same way a zombie looks alive. Consider that piracy is unstoppable. Our attempts to quash it are ludicrous. Even if the Internet was shut down and we gave up the immense value it has brought us all, piracy would still be unstoppable. Why cannot we just pay the innovators? And stop wasting all this effort on futile enforcement and DRM that at best serves only to enrich IP lawyers? And at worst causes almost all innovation to grind to a halt? I'll hit back with another loaded statement: Do you want the West to fall behind China? All because anything other than patents and copyrights somehow isn't fair enough, and the poor starving innovators and artists might not get their due? But you see, the current system fails miserably at getting them their due now. And we know the "starving artists" line is a joke, what with the industry's long history of ripping off artists worse than pirates ever allegedly did, and so prevalent is it that we have this term, "Hollywood Accounting".
But don't be mislead into thinking that cleaning up the corruption will make the current system work well. Even if there was no unfair bargaining, and the patent office massively tightened up the standards, and terms were drastically shortened, even then, the system would still do a poor job. And that's because of a fundamental difficulty, stated so well in the very term "Intellectual Property". It tries to treat the intangible as "property" that can be held, sold, and traded like material goods. It almost totally fails to account for the biggest difference, that ideas are infinitely copyable, by simply declaring that by legislative fiat, copying is not allowed without permission! It treats ideas like they are mining claims. And so we have thousands of people out there staking and trying to defend claims. Too easy to spend more time fighting over claims than innovating, and many of our businesses have been doing that. And the disease has spread into our universities. It's worse than mining claims because at least boundaries of mining claims can be clearly established. Ideas cannot be so neatly bounded, and so it's never easy to decide when claim jumping has occurred.
Your comparison of Encyclopedia Britannica with Wikipedia is too simplistic. You overlook that Wikipedia's expenses are way, way lower. Wikipedia does not pay contributors, and does not pay all the expenses associated with paper editions, things like printing and distribution. Wikipedia is a HUGE win for the public. More information than Britannica can ever hope to cram into a paper edition, at a fraction of the cos
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"
Firstly, many people are against all those
Zero Slashdot editors are against all of those.
Secondly, even those who aren't may say that innovation is only one factor and that the benefit of those regulations outweigh that factor, while the benefits of IP laws don't.
I don't see anyone saying that. I see favoring innovation today at the expense of IP today and blocking innovation tomorrow because XYZ issue is my issue and innovation is only good when it's at someone else's expense, never when it challenges my favored position.
I look around and see more innovation occurring than at any other time in history. The sheer number of things occurring is mind boggling. Anyone who can't see the innovation is too narrowly focused.
How is it stealing?
For the US, the law says copyright is enforced at the federal level only - if violation is stealing, then the states are being prevented from prosecuting thefts that happen within their borders.
Theft doesn't end with aging of the stolen goods. There's no interpretation of theft laws that says it's OK to steal antiques because the protection expires after X number of years, for example. If CV is theft, then copyright can never expire. That would take a constitutional amendment to make it possible.
Theft has limits on civil suits for punitive damages based on the actual value of goods. Statutory damages for some kinds of theft, but limited actual damages for stealing other things of the same price? That sounds like a major violation of equal justice under law. doesn't it? I'm not saying that there aren't some such legal anomalies in theft law now, i.e. grand theft auto laws,, but we should be careful of legal interpretations that would create more of them. After all, past anomalies included the various death penalty for horse theft statutes
Copyright violations are not always criminal, even now. What the hell is non criminal theft?
Copyright law is all in one federal title, and ALL criminal law was originally kept carefully in a different Title. That sure sounds like such luminaries as Jefferson, Madison, John Hay and others didn't think the constitution should establish any link at all between copyright violation and theft, and went out of their way to make sure the original US federal code didn't draw such a link.
I stress, ALL the founding fathers, ALL the early supreme court justices, ALL both houses of congress for literally the first 200 years of US history as a separate nation thought this was the right way to treat it. This wasn't some area where many prominent legalists disagreed seriously and the law gradually became so cluttered with compromises that it eventually shifted, but, like the court decision recognising corporate personhood, making any forms of copyright violation criminal at all was the sudden, major break with just about everything prior to that point. In fact, there was much less precedent for the shift than for such major changes as the overturning of the Dred Scott decision or the adoption of Miranda rights, where several precedents that broke with tradition did actually exist to be reinterpreted, and there was strong support by some faction for such reinterpretation.
Who is John Cabal?
So you're saying that the guy who was equally qualified and lost out because his skin color wasn't "diverse" is, on average, less innovative than the fellow with the "diverse" skin color? Can you prove that, or is it just your particular prejudice?
There is only one way in which our current IP protection laws are flawed: They allow companies to patent and copyright things and concepts and mothball them....This is wrong. If you want to change that aspect, say introduce a "use it or lose it" clause (and apply it to EVERYONE, including the US government) then fine. Meaning that you'd have a max of 3 years after being issued a patent or copyright to bring it to market before you'd lose exclusive rights to utilize said patented or copyrighted IP. Otherwise I see nothing wrong with the idea that if I think it up, I should have exclusive rights to produce it. But if I don't produce it, but rather sit on the patent and sue people...then I need to be treated like the douche I am acting like, and have the patent snatched....Done
-Oz
Well that is the hint at the real problem, being better at innovation than the rest of the world. Sorry Mr President but, brown skinned, slanted eyed people, slavs etc.are not all born stupid and most of them do not celebrate ignorant redneck thinking from the gut. Innovation is a competition with IP laws, the rest of the world caught up (excluding those that were already there) and as such reality means, the numbers have pushed the US from the lead, apart from of course financial chicanery, the military industrial complex and the whole mass media lobbyist propaganda machine.
The biggest problem with the US right now can quite simply be detailed in one statement 'Greed Is God' the solution is just as simple, make it illegal to tell lies to generate a profit and that would be across the board but, especially mass media and, politicians.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
I'm not implying that you are a fascist or totalitarian thug. I'm directly accusing you of it based on immediately obvious observations. Your willingness to do violence to random third parties for consuming substances you dislike in private is clearest, but the real clincher is the law-worshipping mentality evident in your original post: you regard law as defining ethics, and identify yourself with its enforcers. It's the classic authoritarian submission trait identified by Theodor Adorno.
This is, of course, a complementary to the authoritarian aggression trait: you assuage your psychological insecurities by identifying with established power, and express your sadistic tendencies vicariously through its violent enforcement, which is why you find criticism of that structure so threatening. Really, people like you are the slime of humanity; merely pathetic when encountered singly in a context like this, but lethally dangerous in sufficient numbers.
Oh, and for the record: I'm more of an LSD sort of girl.
I was interested when the article mentioned "overbearing intellectual property laws" and "reform", but the article is less about "reform" and more about gutting Intellectual Property.
The non-profit Library of America publishes handome hardcover editions of the best in American writing.
Most of these books are the product of the modern copyright era. The authors, men and wormen, white and black, who found it possible to make a living as full time professional writers.
This is something quite new:
In 1842 there was still no international copyright law, a condition that was stunting American letters and depriving authors on both sides of the Atlantic of a living. Britain was willing to recognize the copyright of foreign writerrs ----but only if their countries reciprocated.
This American publishers adamantly refused to do. Instead, they competed in bribing English pressmen to get early sheets of British books. The sheets were rushed by boat over to the United States, where the jolly pirates churned out cheap editions in a matter of hours.
But it was not only British authors they were robbing. Few publishers were willing to pay American authors for books when they could purloin better-known British ones for free. Herman Melville was hurt by the lack of an international copyright, and such eminent American authors as Emerson, Longfellow, and Hawthorne had to pay publishers an advance, rather than vice versa, in order to have their books produced. The early giants of American literature had to scramble for work at customhouses and in other government jobs, and Edgar Allan Poe, according to his biographer Sidney P. Moss, had to raise advance money for one collection of poems by soliciting 75 cents a head from his fellow West Point classmates, to whom he then dedicated the book.
Copy Wrong
"Here's something wonderfully innovative that OtherOS on a Playstation made possible before Sony shut it down: The USâ(TM) Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) recently unveiled a supercomputer made out of 1,760 PlayStation 3 consoles" (I'm pretty sure the US Air Force can work out something with Sony)
The HPC cluster doesn't need a firmware upgrade.
What it needs is a subsidy from Sony's retail customers.
2,000 loss-leader consoles taken out of retail distribution channels. 2,000 consoles which won't return a dime in video game and Blu-Ray disk sales, PSN, PlayStation Home and other revenue streams.
You don't need to eat meat or drink anything other than water. Lets outlaw coffee, cigarettes, alcohol, tea, the consumption of meat...
No one would be deprived of something they need like ACTUAL nutritional sustenance or water. They have no self-control, no self-discipline, and no personal responsibility and I have no doubt that you are one of them. They are victims of themselves, not society. If it is against the law and you don't need it, there is absolutely no excuse for having it or doing it.
A bullet may have your name on it but splash damage is addressed "To whom it may concern."
Copyright law isn't meant to provide revenue - it's meant to create innovation.
Well, sort of. Innovation is a second-order side effect of copyright. It is indeed the ultimate goal, but copyright law itself does not create innovation directly. (Goverment funding of organizations and individuals to produce public-domain innovations and new ideas *directly* would accomplish that.) Rather, copyright provides exclusive distribution rights for IP to a private entity. The first-order side effect of exclusive distribution rights is that someone can make money distributing it. The second-order side effect is that given the opportunity to make money, people will bother to do it in the first place, which is your ultimate goal of creating innovation.
The revenue of the Britannica actually counts against them - it's an additional cost that society pays in return for getting a good encyclopedia, compared to the Wikipedia model.
Britannica funded encyclopedia creation directly via revenue, by paying subject experts and editors for their time, and paying distributors and printers to produce the physical object. Wikipedia funds encyclopedia creation via donations of time from subject experts and editors, there is no physical object to make, and it funds distribution (i.e. hosting, bandwidth) via donations of money. Where do these subject experts, editors, and others get time or money to donate? Why, they have day jobs that give them money to buy food, housing, clothing, health care, etc. All Wikipedia has done is offload the funding for encyclopedia creation to these other companies that employ Wikipedia's experts, editors, and donators in other job functions.
Why do you think this is a superior means of funding encyclopedia creation? Well, obviously because it doesn't cost you, the encyclopedia consumer, any money, whereas the Britannica model did cost you something. But sustainable? When food, housing, clothing, and health care are free, then maybe.
Do you consider marijuana to be more harmful than the legal drugs alcohol and tobacco, or is your problem with its users purely that they use it in violation of the law?
Do you consider those who use medical marijuana to have all the negative qualities you listed for marijuana users? Do you oppose the legalization of marijuana for recreational use?
I can somewhat understand your position if it's based *entirely* on universal respect for the rule of law, but if it's a prejudice against marijuana in general, I can only theorize that you were mistreated by hippy parents.
Impressive response.
I'm not anti-social, I'm anti-idiot.
Say my adult friend suffers from chronic anxiety. Occasional panic attacks. It's hurting his marriage. He tries yoga and meditation. No go. He visits the Doc for a physical, nothing is found wrong. He visits the shrink, only to have pills pushed in his face. He takes the first batch of prescription pharmaceuticals, which have seriously debilitating side-effects. He's trying fight the sandman at work, even though he had a full night's sleep, and he's afraid to drive; the second batch are worse yet, in the sense that it puts him into a metal fog and for some inexplicable reason, also makes his anus incredibly itchy.
He remembers his college days, how a little toke of MJ calmed him down before tests. He finds some people who know other people, and long story made short, he self-medicates. The MJ has none of the unpleasant side effects, and more importantly, he doesn't feel like his heart is constantly going to explode. This happened before the current medical MJ trend, mind you. He now functions at work, and again has a happy marriage. Even now, despite the will of the people in his state, it's still illegal at the federal level. If he's caught with it, he's potentially in a world of hurt.
Who can argue that he doesn't need it, to be a happy, functional human? It's just easier to make it legal, to those who want it. The people who want it already have it, anyway! The stigma and the black market interest will go away, to the people who want it because they're told they can't have it, at the least. The violent gangs will go away, because the profit will go away. That's what we call hitting five birds with one stone, son. Prohibition never works.
Constitutional rights may be respected, repealed, or modified; but they must never be ignored.
"You should have got one."
They usually come in pairs.
http://www.rootstrikers.org/
On the flip side, one could argue that if people constantly protested every stupid and pointless law by breaking them, it would result in enough people breaking laws that arereasonable to cause problems for society.
More to the point, if civil disobedience were common, its effectiveness would diminish, just as the effectiveness of street protests in the U.S. has diminished significantly.
For those reasons, such actions should be reserved exclusively for laws that are particularly bad---those that inherently result in injustice for a significant percentage of the population over something they cannot control, etc.---as opposed to laws that are merely dumb (marijuana control laws).
Also, one could also argue that the people who have committed civil disobedience have contributed just as much to the problems caused by drug control laws as the laws themselves. Were people not breaking the laws left and right, the drug cartels would not have funding, and none of this would be an issue.
In short, legal or illegal; pick one. Anybody who blames that choice (either way) for any significant societal problems is just blowing smoke.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
I think you're dead wrong about that. Most people do not get enough protein in their diets as it is, and you're talking about going further in that direction?
It's remarkably hard to actually be healthy on a meat-free diet, assuming you include fish in that ban. In theory, it is possible, but the vast majority of people who consume no meat are in relatively poor health, consuming way too little protein, and way too much starch and fructose.
In America, it's particularly bad because we eat low-fat meat and drink 1% or 2% milk instead of whole milk or cream, forgetting that it's the fat that makes you feel full and helps prevent overconsumption. We eat more fruits and vegetables, forgetting that fruits are mostly sugar (and many are very heavy in fructose in particular), and that most of the more popular vegetables that we consume are mostly starch. And the result is that we have an obesity epidemic.
Take away meat---the one major source of protein that most people consume---and you would create a health epidemic the likes of which the world has not seen since the plague.
Banning pot is more like banning starchy vegetables. Sure, you'll make a lot of people mad when they can't buy French fries, but at least you're improving health instead of diminishing it.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
It's a bit sad, considering the amount of energy spent on Slashdot discussing IP and innovation, that a sweeping and incorrect generalization like "No IP protection in the Baroque" that is still considered "Insightful." You would have hoped that people would have spent a fraction of the time writing and ranting instead reading.
There were of course considerable legal efforts used to keep smart people in place and harvest their output. This was an era when monopoly rights were routinely granted to restrict competition and the wealthy were obsessively worried about secret knowledge.
If you were, say, a glassblower in Venice, it would be impossible to take that knowledge and use it elsewhere within Venice; risky to use it outside Venetian control; and downright fatal if you did use it outside Venice and then returned home. By comparison, a patent lawsuit where most of the time you split the profits is downright encouraging.
In the arts, Handel basically had to defect from Hannover to compose in England.
This is not to over-dramaticize; states were weaker and their understanding of what could be considered a "valuable innovation" much more limited. I don't know how you could reasonably compare "IP" restrictions and say one era was better or worse; they were just very different. It would depend what you were trying to do.
I'm afraid my own opinion is fairly bland--clearly IP laws hurt innovation and clearly IP laws help innovation. (I could give personal examples of both--projects killed because an invention was patented but not developed by a competitor; projects not considered because you couldn't establish exclusivity and thus saw no path for ROI.) They have different effects in different industries. The proper balance between freedom, basic fairness and innovation is tricky.
I'm going to buck the trend here and say it's NOT patents and copyrights and IP laws that are blocking innovation. No, it's a little more of a direct cause: An unproductive workforce that expects to get paid just for showing up with a degree.
There are a lot of people out there in the professional world, in technical professions, in engineering, in project management, etc. who can talk and talk but can't or won't deliver results. A lot of people full of degrees and education and smooth talk but no actual practical skill or work ethic. All hat and no cowboy as some say. I interview people all the time who bill themselves as hard-core in-the-weeds technical people, but when you actually dig and ask probing questions you find it's all superficial and the person actually isn't really capable of providing much value. For example:
Me: So, you write C++ software and work at XYZ corp, great! We're looking for C++ talent. Tell me about a project that you worked on! ...
Candidate: Well, we developed software that did ABC...
Me: We? No, what exactly did YOU do?
Candidate: Well, I worked on a major sub-component of the software...
Me: OK, so what are some of the algorithms and/or data structures you used while writing the code?
Candidate: Um, well I didn't use much of that. I provided analysis and resolution of major defects...
Me: So you fixed bugs. That's cool. What are some of the common C++ mistakes you have identified?
Candidate: Uhh, I didn't really get deep into the code. I basically facilitated the analysis.
Me: Oh, so you talked to the engineers and wrote bug reports?
Candidate: Well, no, but I ENABLED them to deliver their results by...
Me:
It sounds like the "So what exactly do you do, Bob?" segment in Office Space, but these people are everywhere, and not all of them are interviewing. Many are in nice comfortable do-nothing jobs in corporate division 23 department B in high tech companies everywhere. These people are dragging down our companies and our country and need to go away.
This country has a major talent gap. You guys all deride the government when they talk about the huge shortage of technical talent but it's absolutely true. We have a shit-ton of people with "Engineer" on their diploma. We have a lot of people who claim to be technical but simply sit in meetings and "enable" others who are actually doing the work. We have a very, very small number of actual implementors who know their stuff and can actually innovate.
I don't know what the solution to the problem is, but think I see the symptoms all around me every day.
Yes, and when you longer have a job. I will create one just for you. There is nothing more rewarding than creating good paying jobs.
We win together or suffer without.
Sorry for the missed punctuation and the tone of my comment. It was not intended. You sounded like a hipster. I don't judge in my kitchen. I am a chef. Their are standards. I don't tolerate anything "less than great" unless the person wants to learn more.
We win together or suffer without.
Banning pot is more like banning starchy vegetables. Sure, you'll make a lot of people mad when they can't buy French fries, but at least you're improving health instead of diminishing it.
It's like protecting people from themselves (while allowing criminals who likely do worse things to be funded through the illegal selling of drugs, of course) and putting people who wouldn't hurt a fly in jail. So, when are those cigarette and alcohol bans going take place? Most forms of entertainment cause people to be lazy. Those should be banned, too. We don't need them, after all.
Filthy, filthy copyrapists!
On the flip side, one could argue that if people constantly protested every stupid and pointless law by breaking them, it would result in enough people breaking laws that arereasonable to cause problems for society.
Then it wouldn't really be civil disobedience, now would it (at least not in the eyes of the majority)? Every unjust law should eventually be challenged.
More to the point, if civil disobedience were common, its effectiveness would diminish, just as the effectiveness of street protests in the U.S. has diminished significantly.
How so? People would still see that unjust laws are being challenged all the same.
Were people not breaking the laws left and right, the drug cartels would not have funding, and none of this would be an issue.
And marijuana would still be illegal all the while they try to make claims that since no one breaks the law, that must mean they agree with it.
Filthy, filthy copyrapists!
Please don't let these people make you afraid to share your ideas with the world. Please. If you have a great idea for a new recumbant bicycle, let the world know. Build it yourself, and share it with your friends. Worry about money later. Make the world a better place with your inventions and let the stupid scumbag litigators litigate themselves. At worst, your idea is making money for some pompous prick. At worst, your idea is making life easier for people.
"Cease and Desist" letter is now coming.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
Banning pot is more like banning starchy vegetables. Sure, you'll make a lot of people mad when they can't buy French fries, but at least you're improving health instead of diminishing it.
Well for one I like how you stated by saying in your previous posts about the government letting people eat what they want, then say that you agree with them limiting what I can and cannot eat. Now I expect you to say you want booze, cigarettes, and caffeine banned you you are just a hypocritical bias P.O.S.
People who are imprisoned for possession of marijuana are victims of their own lack of self-control and hubris
So every time you do something that shows a lack of self control I should severely punish you, good to know. Also, hubris, really now. Are you trying to should like a douche?
and you don't need it
Except there are people who do need it,because it is also a medicine, and a damn good one too. So maybe you should try and become knowledgeable on a subject before talking out your ass, or at the very least come up with a logical argument for your stupid position. Maybe you should stay of the internet and out of a voting booth until you get that part down.
The Egyptians sure seem distracted ;-)
"The ability to delude yourself may be an important survival tool" - Jane Wagner -
I was about to respond with pretty much the same thing, but you summed it up succinctly.
I like my pot, I like my LSD, I don't like people telling me what I can and can't put into my body.
I love how the same idiots cry foul about nanny states, but won't let you consume a plant (btw, I'm a big fan of eating & vaporising cannabis, such a better high).
The belief that we are inherently selfish and nothing else
There's your problem - your entire argument is a strawman. I never said the "and nothing else" part. Of course humans are altruistic - but much of it is just long-view selfishness - especially "civilization." Please come back to the discussion when you have an insight that isn't based on putting words in my mouth. kaithxbye
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
Your whole post is one big whine. Take a break, big boy... go write your Congressman, or something.
The most popular response may have been marijuana reform, but that doesn't mean that the reform is popular. California, which tends to be pretty forward thinking and marijuana friendly, put it to a vote and it failed. I'm fully convinced that it was partly due to voter apathy (the 2010 midterm elections skewed toward an older demographic than we saw in 2008), but it went down pretty convincingly.
I'd be willing to be that it's even less popular on a national level.
FWIW, I happily voted for legalization. I'm all for people being able to decide what they put into their bodies, but I primarily feel it should be legal for fiscal reasons...the decreased prison spending and the increased tax revenues from taxing legalized sales would have all but eliminated our budget deficit.
"Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos!"
In that order? Man, you are literally doing some weird shit!
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
As far as the law is concerned there's no such thing as plagiarism.
You'd have more chance suing someone for pulling funny faces behind your back.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Yep. Remember what happened the last time the President used the internet to ask the people what they wanted? The most popular response, by a long shot, was marijuana reform. The President came out and laughed, as if tens of thousands of people in jail were some sort of joke. I don't expect patent reform to be taken any more seriously.
The public doesn't get anything by just asking, it has to demand, challenge, confront and shove the government into change and out of their free-tax-and-campaign-money-is-comfortable zone. Weapons are not helpful, it's about vigorous persistent strength in numbers and lack of respect for illegitimate authority.
If we want to change IP laws, we have to break them in public in large numbers, demand change, and make a public issue, not do it hidden in private and anonymously as if selling drugs. Setup a p2p in Union Sqare with 1000 laptops and copy lots of DVD and give them away, and call the press.
Letter writing campaigns help influence but won't do it alone. China is ignoring the IP laws and doing very well.
Build your own energy sources from scratch. http://otherpower.com/
I'm all for people being able to decide what they put into their bodies
Yes, me too, I'd favor legalizing everything. However, people doing it must also face the personal and social consequences. If someone becomes a nuisance as a crackhead out of free choice I don't see why he deserves to get lots of help from everyone once he becomes a mess, becoming a burden to the public, family and community.
Build your own energy sources from scratch. http://otherpower.com/
Say it once. Say it twice. Say it many times, until they ask "what the hell ? WHO is repeating this ?"
The Wise adapts himself to the world. The Fool adapts the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the Fool.
40,000 pages? Is that all?
The Danish laws and rules regulating unemployment insurance funds alone is 22,408 A4 pages.
I think it's not necessary to get radical one way or the other. A reduction in the number of years that IP becomes public and some other options I believe would serve everyone's interest. If an inventor or writer can't earn something on his work after a decade or two, doesn't make an effort to sell or donate or license his ideas, and he's invented the equivalent of the cure to cancer or electricity, well, some mechanism is needed for people to get the right to use it. The need to be fairly compensated for one's creations is one thing, to be protected at the cost of social benefits of the ideas, but a state-protected right to make millions off it for a hundred years, while the idea may be badly needed by society for lesser costs, is something quite different. Financial ambition is not the only motivator for human beings as well. Plenty of people always create things for their own pleasure, or as a hobby, curiosity, need for improvement, to express their capacity, and other reasons. It's ridiculous to assert than human intellectual activity and creativity began when intellectual property law was created.
Build your own energy sources from scratch. http://otherpower.com/
Ah, but would that be 50% in favor of legalization and 50% wanting to introduce the death penalty?
If so then the fairest option is to do nothing and piss everyone off equally.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Great. My LEAST favourite period of music.
The difference is, coffee/cigarettes/alcohol/tea/meat aren't illegal.
You can argue all day about whether pot should be legal or not but the fact remains that pot smokers have no excuse for acting all surprised when police start getting out their handcuffs.
No sig today...
Jackboots are like cowboy boots but without the high heel, or to put it another way, leather wellie.
They don't have laces.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
I like the way you think...
The main problem with this is that the majority of new IP comes definitly not from the US. China is catching up, and fast. Why? Because their inventors are not fearing C&D letters while creating new IP. Innovation was "standing on a giant's shoulders while building something new", in the US that giant keeps you from climbing on his shoulders. In China, they sedated that giant so it can't fight back, then when you're on his shoulders you simply trample him into the ground.
I have no exit for this bad analogy, so I close here.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
It's essentially the same today. Except that the patron has been replaced by corporations, and their means of "support" are a lot more nefarious. They don't pay you to work for them. Instead they wait for you to invent, then pull a patent out of their ass that you are violating and force you to fork it over. The only thing that changed is how it works.
It was:
1. Get hired by wealthy patron.
2. Write a piece of art for him.
It is now:
1. Invent your ass off.
2. Corporation checks if it can extort your invention from you.
3. If not, corporation hires you for pebbles and snatches away the invention.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
No, it certainly didn't start with it, but we're now facing the end of it because of the IP law system.
Going out and inventing or building something out of the interest, curiosity or "because I can" and then noticing how people love it and wanting to sell it to them (or, hell, handing it out for free) could soon find you at the unfriendly end of an IP lawsuit because some patent troll holds some obscure patent to something that he thinks applies to your creation.
Can you handle the strain of a lengthy patent law battle? Remember, no legal insurance on this planet (at least none that I'd know of) will cover this because of the absolute uncertainty how it ends. Can you finance a legal battle that can well take years?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
So what if artists needed patrons. They found they and produced great work. It proves things can work that way.
The last time alcohol was banned it simply became more expensive. Gangs propped up to feed it since for the majority of people the only way to get clean water was to drink alcohol.
I am all for banning alcohol, but as a society we are heavily addicted to it. do you really want to see 200 million people going through withdrawl by banning it again?
Cigarettes are if not effectively banned effectively shunned. They cost 100 times what they are worth, yet people still smoke because they have no self control, no self will, and no motivation to learn otherwise.
a huge majority of the population don't have the self control needed to quit an addicted substance. Some 30% of the population will abuse their substance of choice regularly. Do you really want roads full of crack heads? Do you want to die because a stoner's reaction was so slowed down that he didn't actually press the break and plowed through an intersection?
Those who do drugs in anyform may be members of society but they really aren't fully functional members. Just look at Charlie Sheen. he doesn't think he has a problem, even though he was getting ready to do several 8 balls of coke and was on a three day bender with hookers. 90% of American's thinks that's a good thing. Apparently you do too.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
This is simply more of Obama's rhetorical slight-of-hand.
The Executive branch doesn't make the law. It may choose what laws to enforce and in the process do Hollywood's bidding, but that's another issue.
The Executive can propose legislation (think PATRIOT act), but how often is s such legislation enacted?
I don't like to say this, but consider the Tea Party caucus in the House as our friends on this issue. They just succeeded in handing stinging defeats to House leadership. We ought to try and make the case that is the subject of this /. article to that caucus and its allies. Politics is education; this didactic moment will soon pass. It's only a matter of time before they are entirely co-opted by "External Forces".
As far as the law is concerned there's no such thing as plagiarism.
As far as my comment is concerned, "plagiarism" means copyright infringement without attribution.
If you enable people to make illegal copies of their copyright material, and to find more people to make illegal copies from, and you make money from it, how is that not stealing?
Infringement of copyright is not stealing because the U.S. copyright statute does not use the word "steal" or "theft" to describe it, except in the (nonbinding) title of the No Electronic Theft Act. It's far closer to trespass than to theft.
Plagiarism is a lot harder to prove than you think.
People have been successfully sued over cribbing nine notes; that's how much George Harrison copied from "He's So Fine" into "My Sweet Lord". Now a "note" is a duration of a pitch (rhythm) and the interval to the next pitch (melody). Assume notes can be long or short, and on average there are six pitches that sound musical following this one. Each note would then have 12 possibilities, and eight distinct notes would have 12^8 = 430 million possibilities. (The last note is not distinct because it doesn't have a duration or a following pitch.) If everyone on this planet were to write a song with an 8-note hook, on average 16 people would write the same thing.
If [infringement of copyright] is theft, then copyright can never expire. That would take a constitutional amendment to make it possible.
It doesn't take a change to Article I section 8 of the Constitution. It just takes periodic legislative extensions to the term, which is finite at any point in time and therefore constitutional. Eldred v. Ashcroft.
What the hell is non criminal theft?
It's not an exact analogy, but consider a theft where the thief pays restitution for the stolen goods and gets sentenced to probation.
Whose are standards?
Like your spelling? ;-)
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
If YOU claim for prior art, then only YOU are excepted from paying license fees.
This is true if prior art that anticipates the claim is kept secret; it's called "prior user rights" in some jurisdictions. But if prior art that anticipates the claim is published, then the claim is not novel and is therefore not valid in a patent.
If a company is actively licensing their patent portfolio and allowing them to be used by other companies, they're using the patents. If, OTOH, they're just sitting on their patents and waiting for a chance to sue somebody for infringement (i.e., acting like a patent troll) they're not making use of the patents
That doesn't distinguish much. Alleged patent trolls such as Intellectual Ventures already list inventions that they appear to offer for licensing. How would you define "effort to use the patent either directly or by licensing" to exclude this?
American's, as a rule, worship the law. It is a kind of national religion, regarded as sacrosanct, absolute and infallible.... but also as something which can be changed virtually at will under its own rules. A code to live life and run society by, but also one which can be used to impose will, shape behaviour and mould society. A kind of mix of Enlightenment thinking and Chinese Legalism.
The ultimate product of this mindset is the state of California, where voters routinely alter their written constitution to lower their taxes, raise their public expenditures and increase the size of chicken coops. There's very little reason involved in these decisions, which are instead driven by a blindâ"almost religiousâ"faith that once enshrined in law, these mandated changes somehow become reality.
The English by contrast understand the law. True they also obey it, but they understand that laws are not infallible, but are ultimately subject to interpretation by a court. Many Americans are liable to get offended by this notion, and decry "activist" judges. The English meanwhile are often reluctant to even make new laws when they can just rely on the precedent of court decisions.
The Irish meanwhile, do not really have laws so much as customs.
Basically, the Rule of Law is not a clearcut a thing as theorists would make it sound. Different nations treat their laws quite differently, and devils of all kinds are in the details.
May the Maths Be with you!
I am all for banning alcohol
Seriously? I'm not. I don't like nanny states very much.
do you really want to see 200 million people going through withdrawl by banning it again?
I don't see drug users doing that, either.
a huge majority of the population don't have the self control needed to quit an addicted substance.
Too bad for them, then. I don't want to waste time, resources, and money attempting to save people who are essentially only hurting themselves (and occasionally, due to their own actions, others).
Do you really want roads full of crack heads?
Making something legal won't cause everyone to abuse it. Just like everyone isn't constantly drunk (not even a majority), everyone likely wouldn't be constantly abusing crack.
Do you want to die because a stoner's reaction was so slowed down that he didn't actually press the break and plowed through an intersection?
I've never heard of a car accident caused specifically by marijuana. However, there is a solution for this: don't allow people to drive while under the influence (just like we do with alcohol). Sure, some people will still do it, but that's simply the best solution.
Those who do drugs in anyform may be members of society but they really aren't fully functional members.
Wow. That is quite the stereotypical statement. I guess that means that my hard working family members who use marijuana aren't fully functional, despite paying their bills and taxes and receiving no sort of government funding, huh? No, someone can use drugs but still be considered a fully functional member of society. Enough with the assumptions and generalizations.
Just look at Charlie Sheen.
One example isn't going to prove that everyone who uses drugs isn't a fully functional member of society. It's going to take... everyone who uses drugs.
90% of American's thinks that's a good thing. Apparently you do too.
Straw man argument. I never said anything of the sort. I just said that we shouldn't be wasting time, money, and resources attempting (and failing) to stop people from hurting themselves (they will do that no matter what) whilst also helping fund criminals.
Filthy, filthy copyrapists!
Zero Slashdot editors are against all of those.
Oh, I thought you were talking about the guy who actually wrote the article.
I don't see anyone saying that. I see favoring innovation today at the expense of IP today and blocking innovation tomorrow because XYZ issue is my issue and innovation is only good when it's at someone else's expense, never when it challenges my favored position.
No, the difference is that, unlike all the other regulations you cited, the whole purpose of IP laws is to foster innovation.
So, if IP laws are in fact blocking it, why should they exist?
If you said that environment laws were damaging the environment, or that racial preference laws were promoting racism, the analogy would be valid.
Again, IP laws' only purpose is to foster innovation, and they're having the opposite effect.
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As I recall the former president ordered the internet shut off in Egypt. ;)
Your point is well made. Perhaps TV and the internet only work as distractions after a certain level of comfort and complacency are achieved.
If I were God, wouldn't I protect my churches from acts of me?
It seems to me it all comes back to the pesky problem of whether a corporation is a person, with the same rights as a person. To me, the anser is an obvious no, but for some people, the answer is yes, and I have yet to figure out why.
But it seems to me, giving corporations personhood is key to what a lot of people are saying here, particularly the poster who pointed out that issuing patents to corporations and not people is a problem. However the Supreme Court has declared that corporations are people. So now what?
Uh, really?
First of all, your link just shows that altruism has an inherently selfish biological basis. Altruism is beneficial, therefore it is in our self interest to pursue it. Social structures that Libertarians love like capitalistic free markets embody this. "It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we can expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest."
Secondly, people being inherently selfish doesn't preclude altruistic behavior. It simply means that most "altruism" is really self-interested and real altruism is much rarer than selfish behavior and self-interested altruism.
Thirdly, what's wrong with building a system from a defensive position? Wouldn't a system designed for selfish people filled with altruistic people work out just fine? Any inequities in the system could be easily handled through charity and other altruistic practices. The same can't be said the other way around...an altruism-based system would fall apart in no time if filled with highly self-interested people...maybe even just a handful of them, as they'd be able to abuse everyone else's altruism.
Fourthly, if altruism is such a strong force...then why don't most people living in developed countries give a rat's ass about poverty, starvation, and disease outside of their own country? I have a "bleeding heart" friend who was suggesting we distribute the wealth in the US so that the poor can have a decent standard of living, but when I suggested that we should go further and distribute it worldwide he did not like that idea...I guess $10,500 a year isn't enough for him. Oh well, out of sight out of mind, amirite? Which is exactly the problem...we don't benefit personally from this kind of charity as we don't interact with the starving children in third world gutters, so most people are not interested in it beyond what it can do to make them look good to those around them...
Lastly, your comment about "rebuilding your world-view" is arrogant, condescending, and wholly premature. It seems to me that it will just put off others from listening to you seriously, dismissing you as a troll. Plus, your argument about altruism is weakened by the inclusion of childish jabs at your opponent that are just there to make you feel smarter than them.
http://mises.org/daily/3682
OP, you suggested MY IDEA to the Obama Administration. Expect to hear from my lawyers PRESENTLY.
but have you considered the following argument: shut up.
Except you can't create an apple tree out of thin air like that. You have to grow it from seed, water it, look after it for years until it produces fruit. There is a natural, physical constraint in that case.
The difference in effort between that and clicking a mouse button is why your analogy is retarded.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
You do know that you're replying to two different people, right? I wrote the paragraph you're replying to here.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
It is among vegetarians, and doubly so among vegans.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Food recipes aren't covered by ip law (except for trade secret) as far as I can tell. The specific written recipe can be copyrighted. The name of the dish can be trademarked. Possibly some new, completely unique way of processing food could be patented. Aside from that, however, if you can find out how to make it without violating trade secret provisions, you can make it and serve it all you want.
Maybe you were being facetious and I deserve a big whoosh.
All you've done is link to things you think describe my viewpoint but you've done jackshit to show that what you've linked to is wrong - calling it "astrology" is not in anyway meaningful -- nor have you have done jackshit to counter my original point that harnessing the human impulse for self-interested action is a reasonable basis for an economic system.
In fact, all that you have done is assume an absolutist belief on my part and then hand-wave that real life isn't absolutist. Gee whiz boy, I already knew that. But it isn't about absolutism, its about dealing with the common case.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
I totally challenge " and clearly IP laws help innovation". Consider UBUNTU, APACHE. And copyright breaches don't seem to alter the quality of music and movies published (although those last 2 are open to argument I guess). Artists and Inventors will do what they do 'cos that's what they do.
So maybe performance artists will have to go back to performing live to make a living. And just give recordings away free as promotion material.
In technology an innovation that is great will be copied. But because of the difficulties of properly copying complex things, that is easier said than done. Buyers would probably get better results buying from the innovator, who will always have the latest ideas included, so long as he wasn't charging exhorbitantly (Like apples).
I am not advocating immediate, wholesale abandonment of the status quo. I would like to see the time that a patent "lives" shortened. Once upon a time, the first ten years of a patent life were used to tool up for production. Today production cycle is much shorter, and the market much larger, so lots of money can still be made, even if patent life were to be decimated every year till it's down to about 6 months.
That's a good point.
FWIW: Environmental laws often do harm the environment in many ways. Most recently and obviously, they create incentives for producers to shut down relatively clean, efficient factories and other operations in the US and then replace those operations with polluting facilities in China and elsewhere.
And racial preference laws definitely lead to race-based conflict. Any non-race-neutral law, regulation, or policy does.
That wasn't Davev2.0's argument though, his argument was one of MORALITY. That pot was immoral and pot smokers "have no self-control, no self-discipline, and no personal responsibility" not because of the pot itself but because of pot being illegal right now. Fundamentally his argument boils down to a personal attack on pot smokers and inherently relies on the assumption that the law is a perfect and infallible judge of morality. As he said: "If it is against the law and you don't need it, there is absolutely no excuse for having it or doing it."
The counter-argument to this is that we could just as easily outlaw other things without any real decent justification such as coffee or eating meat and then anyone who drank coffee or ate meat would fall into the class of people he includes pot smokers in.
The flaw here is that just because it IS illegal does not mean it's wrong, or that it SHOULD be illegal. Should the dope fiends act all surprised when they get in legal trouble? No, they're breaking the f#@%ing law, they should expect legal consequences. But that doesn't mean that they don't have a right to be outraged over the ridiculously excessive nature of those consequences, or disagree with the illegality of their actions entirely.
A bullet may have your name on it but splash damage is addressed "To whom it may concern."
I do not oppose legalization of marijuana. I oppose knowingly breaking the law then whining about getting punished for breaking the law. I am against shithead claiming smoking pot in their mom's basement is some kind of protest against marijuana laws and will somehow change those laws.
Try changing the law. Oh, wait, I forgot you are too busy doing drugs to do anything else including vote.
They aren't. I was just pointing out that the suggestion that all Americans consume too much protein isn't entirely correct.
Either way, the point I was trying to make originally wasn't that Americans consume too little protein in terms of bulk numbers, but rather as a percentage of calories in their diet. Americans on average take in about 15% of their total calories from protein. The Dietary Guidelines for Americans recommends 10-35% from protein. Thus, the average American could double the percentage of calories that he or she takes in from protein, and still be within the recommended range.
More to the point, that's the only calorie source that's so far off towards one end of the range. Our fat intake is a little on the high side of the range, average carbs are right in the middle, but protein is way low. (Source: about.com) Further, eating more protein during weight loss results in more fat loss, less muscle loss.
So I maintain my original assertion that Americans don't get enough protein.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
You sounded legit until advocating copyright infringement (and no, don't get started on the silly, endless extensions) of a kind clearly having little to do with IP abuse; worse yet, the area most abused consists of patents, not vice versa, and as such you've conflated copyright IP and patent IP. "Little" errors like yours are the kind which the I-want-to-own-your-ideas-before-you-do-something-about-them-as-I-sit-on-my-ass-or-just-barely-do-anything-to-pretense-to-the-courts-that-I-intended-to-be-a-responsible-economic-entity,i.e. business-by-actually-creating-product, the lawyers, etcetera seize upon for their rhetoric. Good friggin' job at that.
Intelligent idiots are we. | Evil men do not understand justice.
So what if there are more than two anti-anxiety meds? They all work similarly, and can all cause dependence, and tolerance. Most are for short term use only, because increasing doses to keep getting that same level of anxiety relief is Dangerous, with a capital D, and if you knew anything about them, well, you'd know that. Marijuana? The body doesn't build tolerance to THC and related cannabinoids, and any addictive qualities are debatable.
It's highly probable that any number of well-adjusted individuals in your life have enjoyed a bit (or a lot) of MJ, and haven't turned out any worse for it. 1950's propaganda movies shown to teenagers tell us that if you have one toke, your life is going to spiral out of control into a path of raging self-destruction. Reality and modern medicine tell us otherwise. For example, show me one confirmed case of fatal marijuana overdose. It's virtually impossible for an adult to overdose on marijuana alone, unless one eats copious quantities.
You could take some of your own advice. Real men don't have some asinine compulsion to go around telling others how they need to live their lives, so long as their private affairs don't have a habit of harming other humans. Shitty life, huh? You'd wish you should be so lucky!
Constitutional rights may be respected, repealed, or modified; but they must never be ignored.
I totally challenge " and clearly IP laws help innovation". Consider UBUNTU, APACHE. And copyright breaches don't seem to alter the quality of music and movies published (although those last 2 are open to argument I guess).
Since I also said they hurt innovation, giving more example of things they've hurt is sort of supportive of half my point and irrelevant to the other half. But yes, I do agree with the suggestion that sometimes things aren't helped. Software patents specifically seem a real minefield for no apparent purpose.
Artists and Inventors will do what they do 'cos that's what they do. So maybe performance artists will have to go back to performing live to make a living. And just give recordings away free as promotion material.
The idea that "artists do what they do" is rather self serving. If you decide not to pay people for their labor, it's nice to pretend they don't care about the money. But I know artists who've quit spending time at it because they had a family to support and it became clear they weren't going to make it work as a profession. (Doesn't matter if you think that proves they weren't committed--they were producing art, and stopped, because of money.) I'm thinking mostly of people I know, but the brilliant cult SF writer John Sladek seems to have stopped his fiction output and gotten a day job near the end of his life. And some reasonably talented recording artists just don't like performing--the indie band XTC in the '80s, stopped touring because of Andy Partridge's stage fright but released a couple more good albums, and Gene Clark quit the Birds when his fear of flying got too much. Heck, the Beatles best stuff was after they stopped doing live shows. So a "no recording profits" rule would certainly cut some people out--ie, stop their innovation, even if it shifted it to others.
But really, I don't have much knowledge of the artistic 'industries' and don't have a strong opinion about how the world would change if we got fewer blockbusters and more garage bands, I don't like either much.
In technology an innovation that is great will be copied. But because of the difficulties of properly copying complex things, that is easier said than done. Buyers would probably get better results buying from the innovator, who will always have the latest ideas included, so long as he wasn't charging exhorbitantly (Like apples).
I am not advocating immediate, wholesale abandonment of the status quo. I would like to see the time that a patent "lives" shortened. Once upon a time, the first ten years of a patent life were used to tool up for production. Today production cycle is much shorter, and the market much larger, so lots of money can still be made, even if patent life were to be decimated every year till it's down to about 6 months.
Some things are easy to copy and hard to invent; in others the invention is less important than the skill to produce it. This is my whole point; there's a whole range out there in the world. In general, protections are going to be most useful when research and development costs are large or risky Picking industries where this isn't the case--like you did with consumer electronics above--don't prove any general rule, they just illustrate that there are situations where those factors don't apply and the benefits are less clear. People on Slashdot only know the one area--they often work in software, download non-mainstream music and buy smart phones--but if you actually care about the issue ignoring everything else is the intellectual equivalent of sticking your fingers in your ears.
The US government actually did an experiment to see if extra IP protection would spur development of new products in pharmaceuticals. That wasn't the point of it, but the Orphan Drug Law promised extra years of protection for diseases with small patient populations. It has been a great success, at least in terms of spurring research and getting companies to develop cures. (Predictably, sales cost while the products remain under a state-protected monopoly are quite high, so not everyone is enthusiastic overall. But that's not the point of this discussion.)
Even if you are right - and that is a pretty big if - this has no bearing on whether the law against marijuana is just.
Regarding your personal judgement of the character of said individuals, it is trite and wrong. Yes, one reason these people might have smoked marijuana was stupidity, it might have been lack of self-control - or it could be that they did not believe in following stupid laws. Maybe enjoying themselves was more important than the ridiculous politicising and puritan ideals which created the law. Maybe they were aleviating chemotherapy symptoms? Who knows...
Your claim to know the reason behind every instance of marijuana use is, to put it mildly, unconvincing.
IAIFARSIJDPOOTV - I Am In Fact A Reality Star; I Just Don't Play One On TV
Credibility increases by offering credible alternatives, which inspire people and they can implement. Pointing out problems is easy.
Build your own energy sources from scratch. http://otherpower.com/
It appears you are using "Cease and Desist letters" without proper licensing. We have patented this method for stimulating human brain cells psychologically into the production of "ligalis phobis", a chemical which induces the subject to reach into pocket and produce settlement money for various reasons. If you would like a licence continue to use our product "Cease and Desist letters", please contact sales at 800-FEAR-NOW. We are awaiting your contact, pending further notifications, in an avalanche of random threats to your well-being, intending to drive you quickly to deep psychological terror, or poverty, or preferably, both.
Build your own energy sources from scratch. http://otherpower.com/
Actually Dave that's a canine and if you could count a little higher you might notice it's in front of a bunch of molars that are built for chewing things that aren't meat. We're actually omnivores and do best on a mixed diet.
A bullet may have your name on it but splash damage is addressed "To whom it may concern."
So by your logic was the civil rights movement's breaking of the law morally wrong as well or are you playing favorites in this case because you think they aren't reaching some magical threshold of political activism despite NORML and so on.
Also you seem to have an intimate knowledge of what is and is not a good use for primate semen, would you care to share why you think I'm involved with it and how you became so familiar with the proper usage of monkey ejaculate?
A bullet may have your name on it but splash damage is addressed "To whom it may concern."
Except you can't create an apple tree out of thin air like that. You have to grow it from seed, water it, look after it for years until it produces fruit. There is a natural, physical constraint in that case.
And there used to be the same natural, physical constraint when it came to producing copies of music. Vinyl, 8-track, cassette, CD, DVD, etc. It used to be the *only* way you could get a copy of music. There was a physical component that required materials, input and money.
Now with the internet and digital music, those copies can be made at just about zero cost. Sure you could say there is electrical costs and wear and tear on hard drives and such, but those costs are so minute as to be effectively zero. And infinite copies can be made with zero physical input; i.e. no cost.
So yes the apples example exactly describes what has happened to the business of making copies of music. Do 'apples' physically match this example? of course not, but it's meant to show how a different existing situation would work in a simple example.
People in cars cause accidents....accidents in cars cause people
"The number you have dialed is not in use"
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
Freedom is a damn good reason. One which you will never understand.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
IP, as in software patents, did not give birth to software innovations either, the industry did fine before software patents were used (and still does, I believe that in most countries software patents are in fact *not* used - that's still the way at least here in Finland [and I fear the day when our legislators will accept SW patents *shudder*]).
In capitalist USA corporations control the government.
I gather that you have no problem sitting in the back of the bus, right?
He probably lives in a state where bestiality is legal.
Explain why copyrights past death
Why should I do that? Copyright is fundamentally a non-libertarian concept. Sure, some Libertarians have been fooled by the conflation of real property rights and "intellectual property" rights, but they just haven't thought about it deeply enough to notice the inherent contradiction of trying to own ideas.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
Send the check for the new keyboard by next Tuesday.
"People don't want to learn linux" hasn't been a valid excuse since '03.
So pot being illegal makes sense to you because nobody *needs* to smoke pot. Using your thoughts as our basis, we shall form a brave new world in which anything you do not expressly need is illegal. Video games, computers, all drugs (inc. caffine, alcohol, powerthirst....), television, most food....
"People don't want to learn linux" hasn't been a valid excuse since '03.
I'd just like to ask you something. Why do you recursively assert that the law is supreme because it is the law? Are you a huge fan of oppression, perpetual governance or what? I just want a solid, straight, good answer, not just brushing me off by calling me a pothead.
"People don't want to learn linux" hasn't been a valid excuse since '03.
Do you live in the US? If so, you're a criminal, since it was against the law to rebel against his Germanic majesty King George The Third.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."