The TLD system is a joke at this point. It's probably misused more than it's used properly. Corps buy up their trademarks under the.org TLD even though those couldn't infringe because they are non-profit. They also tend to buy up the.net domains as well. Of the TLDs we have, only.edu is usually used properly. The rest are basically fair game for anyone.
Not to mention there are still plenty of other platforms out there besides Linux. Then there's also the point that reverse engineering for compatibility is allowed. It doesn't say that it's only allowed to produce a proprietary program though. There's no legitimate reason why we shouldn't have an open-source DVD player.
Yeah, that's true, but stealing IP in the form of music isn't the answer, it only screws the promotions people while the execs pull down their millions. Go after the execs, not the promotions people and the accountants.
I don't know of any way to go after the execs. We just do what we need to do to get the music. Now, like many people, I want to support the artists I like. That's why I still buy cds even though they're expensive as hell. I just make sure that the cd is worth buying before I allow myself to be screwed over by the record company in order to support the artist. I do this by downloading the music and listening to it so I can decide whether it's worth buying or not. I don't see why I should have to make an uninformed decision when I go to buy a cd. I think many people do the same thing, which is why the record industry's profits are still increasing each year.
Yeah, I agree, but apparently, they never know when the single is gonna go huge...so they sign everyone and then they're stuck selling everybody shitty muzak.
Right, which people are tired of getting stuck with. Which is why they like to download the music first and listen to it before they plunk down 15 bucks for the cd.
but for the most part I buy USED CDs. Heard of em?
Sure, but I'm talking about new cds, as in not previously owned. Used cds aren't really relevant to the discussion. We're talking about retail sales of new cds. That's the biggest part of the business. Hell, if the record companies had gotten their way before, you wouldn't be able to buy used cds.
It is stealing. You're acquiring IP you don't have the license for. It's theft, whether or not the RecCos got cash for it or not.
How can it be theft if nobody is losing anything? It's copyright infringement, not theft. Theft requires somebody to actually lose something, and I have seen no evidence that the record companies or artists are losing anything. On the other hand, the FTC did come up with evidence that consumers have been ripped off to the tune of $480 million by the record companies. So who are the real thieves?
Think of it this way. They stole our money, which caused this sort of thing to happen. Had they not committed their crime, there would be no problem. You can complain about our lack of morals or whatever, but the fact is that they decided to play dirty, they chose this game.
No, the FTC concluded that the record industry can't withhold advertising money from stores that offer their CD's at less than the recommended price.
Umm.. that's considered price-fixing. The record industry is setting a price and telling the retailers that they aren't allowed to sell a cd for less than that price, or they will face consequences (such as loss of ad money, or a refusal to deal with that particular store again). When you get the five largest record companies all doing this, you get an antitrust violation due to the harm they are doing to consumers and the market. This is what the FTC said:
"The Commission has unanimously found reason to believe that the arrangements entered into by the five largest distributors of prerecorded music violate the antitrust laws in two respects. First, when considered together, the arrangements constitute practices that facilitate horizontal collusion among the distributors, in violation of Section 5 of the Federal Trade Commission Act. Second, when viewed individually, each distributor's arrangement constitutes an unreasonable vertical restraint of trade under the rule of reason.
So, the record industry was engaged in illegal actions that cost the consumers of their products as much as $480 million dollars over the last 3 years. That's right. They stole from us. They have no intention of returning that money. Then they go and try to complain that people are stealing from them when their decision to overcharge people probably played a big part in the creation of things like Napster. If people could get cds cheap, they wouldn't bother with napster anyway. And that's not even considering that many people actually buy the music that they get from Napster and elsewhere. I've bought quite a bit of music after listening to the MP3s. This probably explains why the record industry has continued to see increased profits despite Napster and other methods of obtaining MP3s for free.
As much piracy? No. But there would still be plenty of it.
Maybe, but I doubt it would be any worse than what you get with vhs tapes or cassette tapes. Once the prices came down on these, people didn't bother to copy them. They were cheap enough to buy that it didn't make sense to bother with copying.
The selling process is controled by the label.
This is true, and not only do the record companies control the sales, they usually own the music as well as part of their contract with the artist.
But when you try to make a statement about how the music industry is greedy and charge too much, and then go and show your own greed by stealing someone else's intellectual property, the only statement you make is about you own hypocrisy.
The industry stole from us, and then complains about us stealing from them. They're being just as hypocritical. Not only that, but they haven't shown that Napster has done any monetary harm, whereas the FTC has shown monetary harm to consumers. I doubt that Napster has had any significant affect on the industry other than being a threat to their control over the distribution of music.
The band themselves don't have ANY control over the prices of the individual CDs their records company distributes to a vast number of retailers.
And as near as anyone can tell, the bands haven't been affected by Napster at all. Unless you can show me some real evidence to the contrary.
but that's not gonna work if we want professional musicians (better than amateurs, I'm almost positive on this one) then we need to pay them for their work.
While I certainly agree that musicians deserve to be able to sell their work and make money from it, I think the current system does a terrible job of achieving this goal. It overcharges the consumer and underpays the artists. You can only expect people to go along with a moronic system for so long. If nothing is done about it, they'll do something about it themselves.
The record industry spends millions on hyping up bands that may never make it.
Maybe they need to stop the hype and just let their music stand on its own.
But the more they pushed, the more they got some underexposed bands out there
Once again... forget about "pushing" bands on us... just let the music get out there and let people buy what they want.
Listen to the radio instead until prices come down.
You haven't bought a cd lately have you? Prices don't go down. When an album debuts, that's the lowest price you're gonna see it hit, ever. They only go up from there. I was browsing through a music store last week. Looked at some older Queenryche cds. They cost 17 bucks now while their newest one was selling for 13. It was the same with all the others. It was the same when I looked at Best Buy and Wal-Mart too, the prices just go up.
Just because the FTC says that music is too expensive doesn't give you the right to go into Tower Records and walk out with their singles section.
No, it doesn't. Tower paid for that cd and is trying to sell it to people. Taking that would be wrong because you then they would not have it anymore and could not sell it.
So don't go stealing it on Napster either
That's a different matter. Downloading music on Napster isn't necessarily stealing. Nor have I seen any indication that artists are being deprived of money or are making any less money because of Napster. I tried Napster briefly, but didn't like it all that much. It was kind of a pain to get anything that I wanted. It's probably improved a lot since then, but I haven't tried it again. That said, I still download a lot of MP3s. Most I get from MP3.com or artists' websites, but some I get from other people, just so I can listen to the songs and decide whether I want to buy the cd or not. Now, according to the RIAA, I'm stealing from artists by downloading those MP3s from my friends. According to me, I'm not depriving them of any legitimate earnings. I don't keep MP3s that I don't like, and I buy the cds if I like the songs. Who's being harmed?
I'm not alone in my practices either. I know many people who do the very same thing. I'd bet that the majority of people on Napster do this as well, which would explain why the record industry hasn't seen a drop in profits, and has, in fact, seen an increase.
The RIAA isn't after people to defend the artists, they are after people to defend their control over the industry. They control the distribution of music in this country and many others. Anything that challenges that control will be attacked by them. Even if it increases profits, if they can't control it, it will have to go.
Copyright isn't really the issue. Extortion is more to the point. They have something we want, and they're going to make us pay through the nose for it. Why? Not because the market determined a fair price, but because the biggest corporations got together and decided that they needed to set some limits on the pricing in order to make sure they make more money, and keep making that money. This happens to be illegal. Did they care that they were ripping us off? Nope, and they'll never have to reimburse us either. So, tell me again why we should care when we rip off the record labels?
I'm talking about intent in the legal sense. The crime you are charged with and ultimately your punishment are often linked to intent (i.e. did you commit the crime on purpose, or was it an accident?). Intent in this sense does not take into account what you were thinking at the time, although those things can be examined to determine whether or not you intended to commit the crime. The goal is to determine, yes or no, whether you intended to commit the crime. Once intent is established, the case can proceed and you can be charged with the proper crime and receive the proper punishment. Your punishment should not be linked to your beliefs or your thoughts at the time, it should be determined impartially, based on the crime you committed. Any attempts to determine the beliefs of the accused, can never be more than speculation, even if you are able to convince a jury with that speculation. Speculation as to a person's reasons for committing a crime should not be used to determine the specific crime or punishment of the accused.
Yeah. Hate crime legislation is just an attempt at criminalizing thoughts. It shouldn't matter what you were thinking when you killed someone. What matters is whether you killed them or not and whether you intended to kill them or not.
contrary to popular belief, the internet provides just the sort of environment which in which such laws are relatively easy to enforce.
I've read pretty much everything by Lessig that I've been able to get my hands on. What you say here was made very clear to me by his book, Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace. Which is probably why I, and many others here, have said repeatedly that IP law is very broken now and needs some serious fixing before it does more serious damage. But, as you say, big money speaks a lot louder than we do.
Ok, so all the kids that go out and buy their games are supposed to have a lawyer read over the agreement first? Simply because the contract isn't meant to be understood by anyone but a lawyer?
How could Apogee take away someone's rights by simply not mentioning them? Should they have to list every right I have in their agreements? No. The point is that Apogee is trying to regulate the use of various trademarks and whatnot in a way that they should not be allowed to do legally. However, UCITA would make their agreement binding unless parts of UCITA are overturned in court.
Why would the companies sell them at or below the current market price? They know that they have more customers than they do bananas, so they know that they can get more from their existing customers.
Selling at market price means they would make as much as they would by sending the bananas to market. If you figure in other costs for distribution and whatnot, they might make more money by selling the bananas for a bit less than market price and unloading the whole bunch at once.
Translate it into the right to kill at will. How much would a rich person have to pay to get that right? The answer is: everything they have, and more.
Not likely. It depends on what you mean by "the right to kill at will." If you mean getting the government to recognize a right to kill, then yeah, that probably wouldn't work. There are other ways to go about it though, if you have the cash, that amount to basically the same thing. You can have people killed without being held accountable.
All they have to do is stay bought. And that's my point -- that a fixed amount of money is sufficient to buy a legislator to put the political fix on a market. And that's necessary because markets dynamically adjust their prices to counteract any fixing anyone tries.
I still don't think it has anything to do with markets. I'm not even sure exactly what you're saying here. Are you saying there is a market for political favors? Are you saying that since 10% of the people control 80%+ of the money that politicians take that into consideration and somehow balance things out by charging a wealthy person vastly more money in return for a favor than the politician would charge a poorer person? What exactly are you saying?
"We pay for these servers, we pay for this bandwidth, it is our property which we allow you to use under the following conditions."
Isn't this the argument that AOL used when Microsoft kept trying to get it's Messenger to communicate with AOL's Instant Messenger servers? AOL kept changing things so that Messenger wouldn't work with it, and Microsoft kept trying to make it work anyway. I lost track of that little pissing match... how did it end?
That's pretty idiotic. If a rich person wanted to buy all the bananas, he would be smart enough to negotiate with the companies to purchase them all at or below the current market price. One could only presume that he would buy these bananas for some purpose, probably to resell them for more money. Still, a pretty lame example.
Contrast this with the political process, whereby a bought legislator stays bought. A legislator who accepted someone's money in return for favors, and didn't provide those favors because someone from the opposite position paid more would soon find that they got no money from anyone.
A bought legislator doesn't have to accept money from both sides on an issue. It's a thieves game. They just have to play by their own set of rules.
When I said it would be "no more complex," I was talking about internal PTO procedures that will be guiding the examiners. I think it could be made significantly less complex for those who are seeking patents.
Markets have nothing to do with it. The fact is that 10% of the population controls.. what.. 80%? 90%? of the wealth. Therefore they have 80 or 90% of the control if they "vote with their dollars."
"None of the above" would just cause another election. Eventually someone would be elected.
Exactly. And the elections would continue until there is a candidate that enough people actually want to vote for.
So what you're trying to say is that the existing clearcut rules that everyone is subjected to equally should be replaced with the impossible to quantify "informed judgement", and that everyone who tries to patent anything should be placed at the mercy of an examiner who has absolute power to reject their patent for any reason.
No, I'm saying that that's basically the way it is now. The problem is that the PTO has financial incentives to grant as many patents as possible and reject as few as possible. This leads them to perform inadequate prior art searches. It leads them to ignore the whole part about not granting patents on inventions that are "obvious" to an expert in the field. It leads them to reward some examiners for granting more patents than other examiners. Basically the current system is set up completely wrong. They have incentives that are completely backwards.
We could set the system up where the examiners still make the final judgement (which they do now), but where they don't have the same incentives they have now, and they have to follow different guidelines for the examinations than they do now. I'm not talking about making it more complex necessarily, I'm talking about changing the current system to another that is probably no more complex than the current one, but that doesn't bias the process by making the PTO depend on revenue generated by the number of patents it grants, and where examiners have no incentive to grant patents that they wouldn't grant if they went by stricter guidelines for searches and "obviousness."
What you say isn't necessarily true; Buckminster Fuller maintained that with our current resources and technology, everyone on earth could potentially enjoy the standard of living which only the wealthiest enjoy now.
But obviously everybody does not have that standard of living. What does that comment have to do with reality?
I don't really see how inflation is in any way relevant to patent law, but you brought it up.
It was relevant to my point that many people cannot afford any legal representation, and most people cannot afford good legal representation. Nor do their jobs and families leave them with the kind of time it takes to learn these things, nor do most people receive the kind of education it would take to really understand the law. Then consider that they probably won't even know what area of law they need to learn about until it's too late.
Back to the original subject, the laws in place in the patent system are in place for a reason. It takes a complicated system to regulate something as complex as ideas.
Not the way Mr. Dickinson runs the place. Anything that doesn't get voided during a quick prior art search gets patented. Anything that does seem to have prior art gets rewritten and patented.
One doesn't necessarily need to be a lawyer to be familiar (or even competent) with patent law
No, but you do have to have the time (which usually means having money since money can be traded for time, and vice versa) and educational background to allow to you learn it, just as you would need those two things to learn any area of the law.
Someone will always find a way to abuse the system, and complex rules will have to be drawn up to prevent those abuses.
We've already seen that the patent system is laughably easy to abuse. The current director is a buffoon that wants to patent anything and everything possible, which is no wonder considering that's how the patent office makes its money (another ridiculous idea that some moron came up with in order to cut spending, without much consideration for the consequences).
The patent system does not have to be complex to be effective. The current system is extremely subjective, so changing some guidelines and still giving examiners the ability to use their informed judgement could only be an improvement. The trick is to take away incentives to do shoddy work, and lay down some guidelines to make sure that investigations are thorough and sensible. Such a system may have some internal complexities that will be dealt with by the examiners and other PTO employees, but would not be complex for those who are seeking a patent.
as eBay most likely is doing this to avoid complications from MS.
Which is why we should make sure they see complications because they are doing this. Corporations don't base their decisions on morality. They base them on risk and potential profits or loss. We just need to show them that their profits could suffer if they simply cave in to Microsoft's demands. That is what it takes to change their decision. They have to see the effect on their bottom line. The problem is organizing a large enough boycott to actually affect their bottom line.
Somebody had to start every religion at some point in time. Why should only the really old one's be protected? Just because they were invented a long time ago? Hardly a good or fair reason.
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The TLD system is a joke at this point. It's probably misused more than it's used properly. Corps buy up their trademarks under the .org TLD even though those couldn't infringe because they are non-profit. They also tend to buy up the .net domains as well. Of the TLDs we have, only .edu is usually used properly. The rest are basically fair game for anyone.
Not to mention there are still plenty of other platforms out there besides Linux. Then there's also the point that reverse engineering for compatibility is allowed. It doesn't say that it's only allowed to produce a proprietary program though. There's no legitimate reason why we shouldn't have an open-source DVD player.
Yeah, that's true, but stealing IP in the form of music isn't the answer, it only screws the promotions people while the execs pull down their millions. Go after the execs, not the promotions people and the accountants.
I don't know of any way to go after the execs. We just do what we need to do to get the music. Now, like many people, I want to support the artists I like. That's why I still buy cds even though they're expensive as hell. I just make sure that the cd is worth buying before I allow myself to be screwed over by the record company in order to support the artist. I do this by downloading the music and listening to it so I can decide whether it's worth buying or not. I don't see why I should have to make an uninformed decision when I go to buy a cd. I think many people do the same thing, which is why the record industry's profits are still increasing each year.
Yeah, I agree, but apparently, they never know when the single is gonna go huge...so they sign everyone and then they're stuck selling everybody shitty muzak.
Right, which people are tired of getting stuck with. Which is why they like to download the music first and listen to it before they plunk down 15 bucks for the cd.
but for the most part I buy USED CDs. Heard of em?
Sure, but I'm talking about new cds, as in not previously owned. Used cds aren't really relevant to the discussion. We're talking about retail sales of new cds. That's the biggest part of the business. Hell, if the record companies had gotten their way before, you wouldn't be able to buy used cds.
It is stealing. You're acquiring IP you don't have the license for. It's theft, whether or not the RecCos got cash for it or not.
How can it be theft if nobody is losing anything? It's copyright infringement, not theft. Theft requires somebody to actually lose something, and I have seen no evidence that the record companies or artists are losing anything. On the other hand, the FTC did come up with evidence that consumers have been ripped off to the tune of $480 million by the record companies. So who are the real thieves?
Think of it this way. They stole our money, which caused this sort of thing to happen. Had they not committed their crime, there would be no problem. You can complain about our lack of morals or whatever, but the fact is that they decided to play dirty, they chose this game.
No, the FTC concluded that the record industry can't withhold advertising money from stores that offer their CD's at less than the recommended price.
Umm.. that's considered price-fixing. The record industry is setting a price and telling the retailers that they aren't allowed to sell a cd for less than that price, or they will face consequences (such as loss of ad money, or a refusal to deal with that particular store again). When you get the five largest record companies all doing this, you get an antitrust violation due to the harm they are doing to consumers and the market. This is what the FTC said:
"The Commission has unanimously found reason to believe that the arrangements entered into by the five largest distributors of prerecorded music violate the antitrust laws in two respects. First, when considered together, the arrangements constitute practices that facilitate horizontal collusion among the distributors, in violation of Section 5 of the Federal Trade Commission Act. Second, when viewed individually, each distributor's arrangement constitutes an unreasonable vertical restraint of trade under the rule of reason.
So, the record industry was engaged in illegal actions that cost the consumers of their products as much as $480 million dollars over the last 3 years. That's right. They stole from us. They have no intention of returning that money. Then they go and try to complain that people are stealing from them when their decision to overcharge people probably played a big part in the creation of things like Napster. If people could get cds cheap, they wouldn't bother with napster anyway. And that's not even considering that many people actually buy the music that they get from Napster and elsewhere. I've bought quite a bit of music after listening to the MP3s. This probably explains why the record industry has continued to see increased profits despite Napster and other methods of obtaining MP3s for free.
As much piracy? No. But there would still be plenty of it.
Maybe, but I doubt it would be any worse than what you get with vhs tapes or cassette tapes. Once the prices came down on these, people didn't bother to copy them. They were cheap enough to buy that it didn't make sense to bother with copying.
The selling process is controled by the label.
This is true, and not only do the record companies control the sales, they usually own the music as well as part of their contract with the artist.
But when you try to make a statement about how the music industry is greedy and charge too much, and then go and show your own greed by stealing someone else's intellectual property, the only statement you make is about you own hypocrisy.
The industry stole from us, and then complains about us stealing from them. They're being just as hypocritical. Not only that, but they haven't shown that Napster has done any monetary harm, whereas the FTC has shown monetary harm to consumers. I doubt that Napster has had any significant affect on the industry other than being a threat to their control over the distribution of music.
The band themselves don't have ANY control over the prices of the individual CDs their records company distributes to a vast number of retailers.
And as near as anyone can tell, the bands haven't been affected by Napster at all. Unless you can show me some real evidence to the contrary.
but that's not gonna work if we want professional musicians (better than amateurs, I'm almost positive on this one) then we need to pay them for their work.
While I certainly agree that musicians deserve to be able to sell their work and make money from it, I think the current system does a terrible job of achieving this goal. It overcharges the consumer and underpays the artists. You can only expect people to go along with a moronic system for so long. If nothing is done about it, they'll do something about it themselves.
The record industry spends millions on hyping up bands that may never make it.
Maybe they need to stop the hype and just let their music stand on its own.
But the more they pushed, the more they got some underexposed bands out there
Once again... forget about "pushing" bands on us... just let the music get out there and let people buy what they want.
Listen to the radio instead until prices come down.
You haven't bought a cd lately have you? Prices don't go down. When an album debuts, that's the lowest price you're gonna see it hit, ever. They only go up from there. I was browsing through a music store last week. Looked at some older Queenryche cds. They cost 17 bucks now while their newest one was selling for 13. It was the same with all the others. It was the same when I looked at Best Buy and Wal-Mart too, the prices just go up.
Just because the FTC says that music is too expensive doesn't give you the right to go into Tower Records and walk out with their singles section.
No, it doesn't. Tower paid for that cd and is trying to sell it to people. Taking that would be wrong because you then they would not have it anymore and could not sell it.
So don't go stealing it on Napster either
That's a different matter. Downloading music on Napster isn't necessarily stealing. Nor have I seen any indication that artists are being deprived of money or are making any less money because of Napster. I tried Napster briefly, but didn't like it all that much. It was kind of a pain to get anything that I wanted. It's probably improved a lot since then, but I haven't tried it again. That said, I still download a lot of MP3s. Most I get from MP3.com or artists' websites, but some I get from other people, just so I can listen to the songs and decide whether I want to buy the cd or not. Now, according to the RIAA, I'm stealing from artists by downloading those MP3s from my friends. According to me, I'm not depriving them of any legitimate earnings. I don't keep MP3s that I don't like, and I buy the cds if I like the songs. Who's being harmed?
I'm not alone in my practices either. I know many people who do the very same thing. I'd bet that the majority of people on Napster do this as well, which would explain why the record industry hasn't seen a drop in profits, and has, in fact, seen an increase.
The RIAA isn't after people to defend the artists, they are after people to defend their control over the industry. They control the distribution of music in this country and many others. Anything that challenges that control will be attacked by them. Even if it increases profits, if they can't control it, it will have to go.
Copyright isn't really the issue. Extortion is more to the point. They have something we want, and they're going to make us pay through the nose for it. Why? Not because the market determined a fair price, but because the biggest corporations got together and decided that they needed to set some limits on the pricing in order to make sure they make more money, and keep making that money. This happens to be illegal. Did they care that they were ripping us off? Nope, and they'll never have to reimburse us either. So, tell me again why we should care when we rip off the record labels?
Here's some info if you'd care to inform yourself: http://www.ftc.gov/opa/2000/05/cdpres.htm .
I'm talking about intent in the legal sense. The crime you are charged with and ultimately your punishment are often linked to intent (i.e. did you commit the crime on purpose, or was it an accident?). Intent in this sense does not take into account what you were thinking at the time, although those things can be examined to determine whether or not you intended to commit the crime. The goal is to determine, yes or no, whether you intended to commit the crime. Once intent is established, the case can proceed and you can be charged with the proper crime and receive the proper punishment. Your punishment should not be linked to your beliefs or your thoughts at the time, it should be determined impartially, based on the crime you committed. Any attempts to determine the beliefs of the accused, can never be more than speculation, even if you are able to convince a jury with that speculation. Speculation as to a person's reasons for committing a crime should not be used to determine the specific crime or punishment of the accused.
Yeah. Hate crime legislation is just an attempt at criminalizing thoughts. It shouldn't matter what you were thinking when you killed someone. What matters is whether you killed them or not and whether you intended to kill them or not.
It matters not how accessible the car was, it was still stolen.
Actually, if you live in Texas, leaving the car unattended with the keys in the ignition will get you slapped with a rather pricy ticket.
contrary to popular belief, the internet provides just the sort of environment which in which such laws are relatively easy to enforce.
I've read pretty much everything by Lessig that I've been able to get my hands on. What you say here was made very clear to me by his book, Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace. Which is probably why I, and many others here, have said repeatedly that IP law is very broken now and needs some serious fixing before it does more serious damage. But, as you say, big money speaks a lot louder than we do.
So your answers to my questions were "yes", and "yes", respectively? :)
Ok, so all the kids that go out and buy their games are supposed to have a lawyer read over the agreement first? Simply because the contract isn't meant to be understood by anyone but a lawyer?
How could Apogee take away someone's rights by simply not mentioning them? Should they have to list every right I have in their agreements? No. The point is that Apogee is trying to regulate the use of various trademarks and whatnot in a way that they should not be allowed to do legally. However, UCITA would make their agreement binding unless parts of UCITA are overturned in court.
Why would the companies sell them at or below the current market price? They know that they have more customers than they do bananas, so they know that they can get more from their existing customers.
Selling at market price means they would make as much as they would by sending the bananas to market. If you figure in other costs for distribution and whatnot, they might make more money by selling the bananas for a bit less than market price and unloading the whole bunch at once.
Translate it into the right to kill at will. How much would a rich person have to pay to get that right? The answer is: everything they have, and more.
Not likely. It depends on what you mean by "the right to kill at will." If you mean getting the government to recognize a right to kill, then yeah, that probably wouldn't work. There are other ways to go about it though, if you have the cash, that amount to basically the same thing. You can have people killed without being held accountable.
All they have to do is stay bought. And that's my point -- that a fixed amount of money is sufficient to buy a legislator to put the political fix on a market. And that's necessary because markets dynamically adjust their prices to counteract any fixing anyone tries.
I still don't think it has anything to do with markets. I'm not even sure exactly what you're saying here. Are you saying there is a market for political favors? Are you saying that since 10% of the people control 80%+ of the money that politicians take that into consideration and somehow balance things out by charging a wealthy person vastly more money in return for a favor than the politician would charge a poorer person? What exactly are you saying?
"We pay for these servers, we pay for this bandwidth, it is our property which we allow you to use under the following conditions."
Isn't this the argument that AOL used when Microsoft kept trying to get it's Messenger to communicate with AOL's Instant Messenger servers? AOL kept changing things so that Messenger wouldn't work with it, and Microsoft kept trying to make it work anyway. I lost track of that little pissing match... how did it end?
That's pretty idiotic. If a rich person wanted to buy all the bananas, he would be smart enough to negotiate with the companies to purchase them all at or below the current market price. One could only presume that he would buy these bananas for some purpose, probably to resell them for more money. Still, a pretty lame example.
Contrast this with the political process, whereby a bought legislator stays bought. A legislator who accepted someone's money in return for favors, and didn't provide those favors because someone from the opposite position paid more would soon find that they got no money from anyone.
A bought legislator doesn't have to accept money from both sides on an issue. It's a thieves game. They just have to play by their own set of rules.
When I said it would be "no more complex," I was talking about internal PTO procedures that will be guiding the examiners. I think it could be made significantly less complex for those who are seeking patents.
Not all markets are equally democratic.
Markets have nothing to do with it. The fact is that 10% of the population controls.. what.. 80%? 90%? of the wealth. Therefore they have 80 or 90% of the control if they "vote with their dollars."
"None of the above" would just cause another election. Eventually someone would be elected.
Exactly. And the elections would continue until there is a candidate that enough people actually want to vote for.
So what you're trying to say is that the existing clearcut rules that everyone is subjected to equally should be replaced with the impossible to quantify "informed judgement", and that everyone who tries to patent anything should be placed at the mercy of an examiner who has absolute power to reject their patent for any reason.
No, I'm saying that that's basically the way it is now. The problem is that the PTO has financial incentives to grant as many patents as possible and reject as few as possible. This leads them to perform inadequate prior art searches. It leads them to ignore the whole part about not granting patents on inventions that are "obvious" to an expert in the field. It leads them to reward some examiners for granting more patents than other examiners. Basically the current system is set up completely wrong. They have incentives that are completely backwards.
We could set the system up where the examiners still make the final judgement (which they do now), but where they don't have the same incentives they have now, and they have to follow different guidelines for the examinations than they do now. I'm not talking about making it more complex necessarily, I'm talking about changing the current system to another that is probably no more complex than the current one, but that doesn't bias the process by making the PTO depend on revenue generated by the number of patents it grants, and where examiners have no incentive to grant patents that they wouldn't grant if they went by stricter guidelines for searches and "obviousness."
It's beautiful... *sob*
I love you man...
What you say isn't necessarily true; Buckminster Fuller maintained that with our current resources and technology, everyone on earth could potentially enjoy the standard of living which only the wealthiest enjoy now.
But obviously everybody does not have that standard of living. What does that comment have to do with reality?
I don't really see how inflation is in any way relevant to patent law, but you brought it up.
It was relevant to my point that many people cannot afford any legal representation, and most people cannot afford good legal representation. Nor do their jobs and families leave them with the kind of time it takes to learn these things, nor do most people receive the kind of education it would take to really understand the law. Then consider that they probably won't even know what area of law they need to learn about until it's too late.
Back to the original subject, the laws in place in the patent system are in place for a reason. It takes a complicated system to regulate something as complex as ideas.
Not the way Mr. Dickinson runs the place. Anything that doesn't get voided during a quick prior art search gets patented. Anything that does seem to have prior art gets rewritten and patented.
One doesn't necessarily need to be a lawyer to be familiar (or even competent) with patent law
No, but you do have to have the time (which usually means having money since money can be traded for time, and vice versa) and educational background to allow to you learn it, just as you would need those two things to learn any area of the law.
Someone will always find a way to abuse the system, and complex rules will have to be drawn up to prevent those abuses.
We've already seen that the patent system is laughably easy to abuse. The current director is a buffoon that wants to patent anything and everything possible, which is no wonder considering that's how the patent office makes its money (another ridiculous idea that some moron came up with in order to cut spending, without much consideration for the consequences).
The patent system does not have to be complex to be effective. The current system is extremely subjective, so changing some guidelines and still giving examiners the ability to use their informed judgement could only be an improvement. The trick is to take away incentives to do shoddy work, and lay down some guidelines to make sure that investigations are thorough and sensible. Such a system may have some internal complexities that will be dealt with by the examiners and other PTO employees, but would not be complex for those who are seeking a patent.
as eBay most likely is doing this to avoid complications from MS.
Which is why we should make sure they see complications because they are doing this. Corporations don't base their decisions on morality. They base them on risk and potential profits or loss. We just need to show them that their profits could suffer if they simply cave in to Microsoft's demands. That is what it takes to change their decision. They have to see the effect on their bottom line. The problem is organizing a large enough boycott to actually affect their bottom line.
bwt posted this earlier:
The Supreme Court rejected such notices in 1908. The case is BOBBS-MERRILL CO. v. STRAUS, 210 U.S. 339(1908).
Somebody had to start every religion at some point in time. Why should only the really old one's be protected? Just because they were invented a long time ago? Hardly a good or fair reason.