Hell, capitalism isn't even prepared to deal with something like this. Asking a market analyst what happens when the cost of production reaches zero and is available everywhere is like asking a physicist what happens inside a black hole - neither one has the foggiest fucking idea
That's not really correct. The cost of copying ideas has always been pretty much zero, so the situation you describe is not something new that arose with the internet. It arose the first time someone put a lot of effort to invent something, and someone else copied the inventor's idea. All that's new now is that this ease of copying is becoming more widespread, spreading beyond just ideas to realizations of ideas (e.g., to performances of music).
Furthermore, it's long been known what attributes are necessary for a free market to work, in the sense of producing optimal allocation of goods and resources (optimal in the sense economists mean when they say something is optimal). Economists know exactly what happens to a free market when the cost of production approaches or reaches zero. You no longer get optimal resource allocation.
And it has long been known how you can fix that. There are two general ways. The first is to take the market out of the picture. Some entity, most likely the government, would fund the production of new works, and anyone would be free to copy them. The advantage of this is that consumers get the goods for their marginal cost (zero or near zero). The disadvantage is that the government decides what works get produced.
The second way is to artificially give things like music and movies the attributes necessary to make them work like more tangible goods in the free market. Essentially you make intellectual works act like property as far as the law is concerned (hence the name "intellectual property"). The disadvantage of this approach is that consumers pay more than the marginal cost of production for the works. The advantage is that the free market determines what works get produced.
What the internet does is makes it easy for a large number of people to cheat. The intellectual property approach is based on the idea that we would rather have the free market deal with deciding what gets products than have some government Department of Music deciding what artists get funding, and so we've agreed that we are going to pretend that songs are like loaves of bread. Sure, there were always some people who would cheat, but they were isolated and small scale. If you cheated on a large scale, you got caught and sued.
With the internet, the cheating can happen on a massive scale, with most people having a negligible chance of getting caught. Most people are fundamentally not honest--that's why it makes the news if someone loses a large amount of cash and the finder returns it, for instance. If most people were honest, the news would be when a lost item is not returned intact, rather than the other way around. The internet is like a giant always available lost wallet.
The point is they advertise this as standards demo, not Safari demo
"The demos below show how the latest version of Apple’s Safari web browser, new Macs, and new Apple mobile devices all support the capabilities of HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript". It's advertised specifically as a Safari demo.
You've completely missed the point. Apple's page is to show how Safari implements the proposed standards. Viewing the page in other browsers doesn't demonstrate how Safari implements them. Apple's message is two fold. First, there are these standards coming up that they think are important and useful. Second, here's how they are going to work in Safari.
EDT isn't even in the top five when it comes to plaintiff odds for winning. We've been over this before so I'm not going to repeat the reasons both plaintiffs and defendants like EDT.
I just checked my Comcast usage. I practically live on the internet. Here's my usage:
15 GB so far this month.
17 GB for April
22 GB for March
15 GB for February
On the list of things I'm going to spend the effort to care about, people who have trouble with a 250 GB cap is far enough down the list I'm afraid I'll never get around to it.
There's nothing inherently dangerous about it, but there's also no particular reason to believe its good for us or that it is NOT dangerous. Science knows a lot about individual nutrients and what parts of our life processes they participate in, but they don't know a lot of the low level details. A good example of this is nutritional supplements. Scientists determine that nutrient X in, say, carrots acts as an antioxidant in the carrot, and then they determine, say, that people who eat carrots get the same antioxidant benefits.
Then the supplement makers jump in, and make X supplements. People take them instead of eating the carrots. Eventually, scientists study the effects of the supplements, and find that X taken by supplement doesn't seem to provide the same effects it does when it is taken in carrots. For some values of X, they've even found that it actually harms--that antioxidant may turn out to be a pro-oxidant.
Why? Maybe there's something else in carrots that has to be present to make X work as an antioxidant. Maybe X gets altered during digestion when taken as a supplement, but when taken in a carrot there's something that protects it. Maybe the supplements are too easy to digest, and X is one of those things that is good at a certain level, but harmful at a higher level.
The cool thing about the carrot is that the eater doesn't have to know anything about X or possible other things that are necessary to work with it to get the antioxidant effect. All the eater has to know is that humans have been eating carrots as part of proven healthy cuisines for a long time, and so if you eat that same way, choosing foods that are reasonably close to their "natural" state (as opposed to having been highly processed to the point that we've changed the chemistry), you'll do fine.
I'm an evolutionist, not a creationist, so I am going to eat the foods I evolved to eat, not the foods someone is trying to create for me.
That would be $200 for each copy that was downloaded actually.
Statutory damages are per work infringed, not per copy of the infringed work.
One of the points of statutory damages is that it is available as an alternative to having to figure out how many infringing copies are involved.
And since Apple has demonstrably aware of the licensing issues for years, and since the App store is so closely controlled by Apple with nothing being posted there before they perform an extensive review, they cannot plausibly rebutt the allegation that they either knew or should have known their obligations.
What evidence is there that Apple was aware of the licensing issue?
The copyright owner of a GPL work can place it on the Apple store with no problem, so there is no reason for Apple
to believe that a GPL work on the Apple store per se violates someone's copyright.
A particular developer put up GPL code that he did not own and did not have permission to distribute via the App store, and Apple removed it as soon as they were notified.
Oh bullshit. This can be easily solved with a link in the program. I don't know what all the fucking ceremony is about
How can a link solve the problem? Maybe you should actually RTFA, and then you'd know what all the "fucking ceremony" is about. (Hint: it has nothing whatsoever to do with the availability of source code).
When you purchase a disc at Best Buy you are not agreeing to limit your use of that disc. When you purchase something at the iTunes store you "sign" an agreement restricting you from doing many things. That is the issue. The GPL requires that you give permissions and NOT restrict the user (well, only restrict them in ways detailed by the GPL).
If Best Buy made you sign a contract stating that you would not do XYZ to the software on the disc, they would be in violation of the GPL as well.
Your Best Buy analysis is flawed, because you failed to consider the effects of the first sale doctrine.
Assuming Best Buy is not copying the discs, but rather is just receiving discs from a distributor and selling them as-is, this distribution falls under the first sale doctrine, and so Best Buy does not need permission of the copyright holder.
Since they don't need permission for this distribution, the terms under which GPL allows redistribution are completely irrelevant to Best Buy, and they can impose any contractual limits on the sale that they wish.
First sale does not apply to online distribution, because the online distributor is not just passing through copies received from an upstream, but is itself making copies for distribution, and hence needs permission from the copyright owner.
Indeed, they have already taken the app down because it is a GPL violation. There are other GPL apps on the store though that are in compliance, with the source available via developer website linked within the app - it's not a fundamental incompatibility with the app store, it seems to be a developer issue.
No, according the FSF, it is a fundamental incompatibility, and has nothing to do with source availability. In the FSF's view, no GPL code can be distributed via the Apple store. Read the page at fsf.org that was cited in the submission.
To use the App store as an end user, you have to agree to terms and conditions that state you will not redistribute anything you download from the App store. That is what is in conflict with the GPL. When an entity distributes GPL software in a way that requires them to have permission of the copyright holder, and they are using GPL to obtain that permission, they are not allowed to place any additional restrictions on what the user can do with that software.
Since getting an app via the App store involves Apple making a copy, Apple has to have permission of the copyright owner. (This is what distinguishes this from, say, a retail store selling boxed copies of GPL software and putting additional conditions on the sale--they would not need the copyright owner's permission since they would be covered by the first sale doctrine, so GPL would be irrelevant to them).
They are still on the hook for infringement already committed - or at least could be, if the copyright holders want to pursue it.
What is there to pursue? Plaintiff can ask for an injunction to stop continuing infringement, but that's pointless since Apple has already stopped the infringement.
Plaintiff can ask for impoundment of the alleged infringing items.
That is meaningless in this case.
Plaintiff can ask for actual damages and for the infringer's profits from the infringement.
Actual damages are zero.
Apple's profits from Gnu Go are very likely also zero.
In fact, if it was a free app, they probably lost money on it.
That leaves statutory damages.
Since it is likely that Apple was not aware of the infringement, the judge is likely
to award the minimum possible statutory damages, which is $200.
The court could also award attorney fees, but I think that would be unlikely for a frivolous copyright suit like this would be.
Who the heck was in charge of the OSI when all these stupid licenses were being approved?
If the license meets their "Open Source" definition, then they have to approve it if they want to maintain any credibility.
This is no different than the way the FSF lists many licenses on their list of Free Software licenses that they tell you that you should not use. The licenses meet their definition of "Free Software" so they have to include them or they lose credibility.
The problem is principle, even if I use totally clean-room reverse-engineering without even taking one look at their patents, I still am guilty of patent violations, how?
That's how patents are supposed to work. They'd be kind of pointless if they didn't work that way.
GPL doesn't require distributing things that are part of the major components of the operating system, and it includes compilers as major components of the operating system. Without details on exactly what is lacking, we can't rule out that everything that is missing falls under that.
The submitter didn't say that the scripts that control the build are missing. He said they don't provide a build environment. If I distribute GPL code that I build with Visual Studio, I don't have to distribute Visual Studio. I just have to distribute the project file (or whatever it is nowadays--haven't don't Windows in a long time).
It sounds like both companies are distributing embedded software for a hardware device. It's quite possible that the things they aren't distributing are part of some third-party expensive development environment, that they are using off the shelf. If that's the case, there's no GPL violation, as long as they distribute everything the submitter would need to build and install the software if he were to go obtain from that third party the development environment.
When I said "it includes patents from most tech countries in the civilized world", I mean patents issued
by that patent offices of most tech countries in the civilized world.
Here are many of the countries that have issued patents covering H.264:
Australia, Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Canada, China, Czech Republic, Denmark,
Finland, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Hungary, India, Ireland, Italy, Japan,
Liechtenstein, Mexico, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Singapore, Slovenia, South Korea,
Spain, Sweden, Taiwan, The Netherlands, UK
The notion that software patents are rare outside the US is just a myth. Even if a country nominally does not allow software patents, they usually allow patents on methods of accomplishing specific tasks, and those patents are not invalid against software.
Let us hope that Monday SCOTUS rules that software patents are void in RE Bilski
If that was going to be the ruling, it would have been out long ago. Here's an interesting article discussing the unusually long time its taken for them to rule, and what that might mean.
Re:For the patent FUDsters sure to follow....
on
H.264 and VP8 Compared
·
· Score: 2, Informative
So you are in no way more protected by using the restricted H.264 license than you are by using the open VP8 license in the US. In most of the civilized world there's no such thing as software patents, so the only issue is which one of these is technically best
Have you looked at the H.264 patent list? It includes patents from most tech countries in the civilized world.
Only really in America...oh, and Germany as of recently. Damnit, I thought we'd kept those silly "software patent" ideas on the other side of the Atlantic
H.264 is covered by patents in the US, Canada, Germany, France, Great Britain, Japan, Korea, Australia, Mexico, Singapore, China, Finland, Italy, Sweden, and a whole bunch more that I'm not going to type because my pizza has arrived. For all practical purposes, H.264 is covered by patents pretty much everywhere in the 1st world.
So here we go slashdotters: What is the best innovation Microsoft has brought to us...
The "brought to us" part is the hard part. Plenty of important innovation has happened at Microsoft, but they aren't that good at turning it into products.
For example, Microsoft researchers developed a kind of help system that observed what a user did, and learned their use patterns, and was able to recognize when they were having trouble with something and offer suggestions. It worked very well, mostly only interrupting with suggestions when you were in genuine need of help.
When this moved from the lab to the product people, the marketing people loved it, but complained that it didn't show up enough. They wanted to advertise this great feature, but if the typical user only actually saw it do something once a week or so, that would suck (from the salesman's point of view). So marketing forced the people implementing to turn the thresholds way down, and make it pop up a lot, with often inane suggestions. And that's how Clippy went from being perhaps the most sophisticated automated assistant in the world when it was in the lab, to perhaps the most annoying automated pest in the world when it ended up in products.
Another good example is statistical spam filtering. Microsoft internally had one of the earliest, and best, spam handling systems. They also were the first (in a partnership with outside researchers at, I think, Stanford) the first to publish academic papers on Bayesian filtering. But it was others who picked up on this and wrote articles for the non-academic crowd that made outside programmers aware of these techniques, and so few realize Microsoft was one of the pioneers here.
Their spam filtering actually went far beyond just filtering for spam. At one time they had a system internally that could look at your incoming mail, analyze it, figure out what it was about, and rank the importance of it. This was tied in with other systems, such as the web cam on your computer and the microphone on your computer. The web cam could watch you, and the microphone listen to what was going on in your office. If it say and heard that you were meeting with others, it could see who they were, and hear what you are talking about, analyze that and figure out its importance, and decide if the mail you just received can wait or is important enough to interrupt you.
Aside from one or two articles in the press that mentioned this system as part of stories profiling research at MS, I've not heard anything about it since. It apparently never made it to any kind of product development stage. Someday, someone else will do it all the way through to product (Google's a good candidate), and no one will remember that Microsoft had it first.
Think of it as sort of a mechanical equivalent of a transistor or a triode, where a small signal on the base or grid controls a large current between the other terminals on the device. You've got that control axle, which you can turn with a small amount of energy, and that controls the power transfer through the transmission.
Slashdot Mirror
Hell, capitalism isn't even prepared to deal with something like this. Asking a market analyst what happens when the cost of production reaches zero and is available everywhere is like asking a physicist what happens inside a black hole - neither one has the foggiest fucking idea
That's not really correct. The cost of copying ideas has always been pretty much zero, so the situation you describe is not something new that arose with the internet. It arose the first time someone put a lot of effort to invent something, and someone else copied the inventor's idea. All that's new now is that this ease of copying is becoming more widespread, spreading beyond just ideas to realizations of ideas (e.g., to performances of music).
Furthermore, it's long been known what attributes are necessary for a free market to work, in the sense of producing optimal allocation of goods and resources (optimal in the sense economists mean when they say something is optimal). Economists know exactly what happens to a free market when the cost of production approaches or reaches zero. You no longer get optimal resource allocation.
And it has long been known how you can fix that. There are two general ways. The first is to take the market out of the picture. Some entity, most likely the government, would fund the production of new works, and anyone would be free to copy them. The advantage of this is that consumers get the goods for their marginal cost (zero or near zero). The disadvantage is that the government decides what works get produced.
The second way is to artificially give things like music and movies the attributes necessary to make them work like more tangible goods in the free market. Essentially you make intellectual works act like property as far as the law is concerned (hence the name "intellectual property"). The disadvantage of this approach is that consumers pay more than the marginal cost of production for the works. The advantage is that the free market determines what works get produced.
What the internet does is makes it easy for a large number of people to cheat. The intellectual property approach is based on the idea that we would rather have the free market deal with deciding what gets products than have some government Department of Music deciding what artists get funding, and so we've agreed that we are going to pretend that songs are like loaves of bread. Sure, there were always some people who would cheat, but they were isolated and small scale. If you cheated on a large scale, you got caught and sued.
With the internet, the cheating can happen on a massive scale, with most people having a negligible chance of getting caught. Most people are fundamentally not honest--that's why it makes the news if someone loses a large amount of cash and the finder returns it, for instance. If most people were honest, the news would be when a lost item is not returned intact, rather than the other way around. The internet is like a giant always available lost wallet.
The point is they advertise this as standards demo, not Safari demo
"The demos below show how the latest version of Apple’s Safari web browser, new Macs, and new Apple mobile devices all support the capabilities of HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript". It's advertised specifically as a Safari demo.
You've completely missed the point. Apple's page is to show how Safari implements the proposed standards. Viewing the page in other browsers doesn't demonstrate how Safari implements them. Apple's message is two fold. First, there are these standards coming up that they think are important and useful. Second, here's how they are going to work in Safari.
EDT isn't even in the top five when it comes to plaintiff odds for winning. We've been over this before so I'm not going to repeat the reasons both plaintiffs and defendants like EDT.
I just checked my Comcast usage. I practically live on the internet. Here's my usage:
15 GB so far this month.
17 GB for April
22 GB for March
15 GB for February
On the list of things I'm going to spend the effort to care about, people who have trouble with a 250 GB cap is far enough down the list I'm afraid I'll never get around to it.
There's nothing inherently dangerous about it, but there's also no particular reason to believe its good for us or that it is NOT dangerous. Science knows a lot about individual nutrients and what parts of our life processes they participate in, but they don't know a lot of the low level details. A good example of this is nutritional supplements. Scientists determine that nutrient X in, say, carrots acts as an antioxidant in the carrot, and then they determine, say, that people who eat carrots get the same antioxidant benefits.
Then the supplement makers jump in, and make X supplements. People take them instead of eating the carrots. Eventually, scientists study the effects of the supplements, and find that X taken by supplement doesn't seem to provide the same effects it does when it is taken in carrots. For some values of X, they've even found that it actually harms--that antioxidant may turn out to be a pro-oxidant.
Why? Maybe there's something else in carrots that has to be present to make X work as an antioxidant. Maybe X gets altered during digestion when taken as a supplement, but when taken in a carrot there's something that protects it. Maybe the supplements are too easy to digest, and X is one of those things that is good at a certain level, but harmful at a higher level.
The cool thing about the carrot is that the eater doesn't have to know anything about X or possible other things that are necessary to work with it to get the antioxidant effect. All the eater has to know is that humans have been eating carrots as part of proven healthy cuisines for a long time, and so if you eat that same way, choosing foods that are reasonably close to their "natural" state (as opposed to having been highly processed to the point that we've changed the chemistry), you'll do fine.
I'm an evolutionist, not a creationist, so I am going to eat the foods I evolved to eat, not the foods someone is trying to create for me.
That would be $200 for each copy that was downloaded actually.
Statutory damages are per work infringed, not per copy of the infringed work. One of the points of statutory damages is that it is available as an alternative to having to figure out how many infringing copies are involved.
And since Apple has demonstrably aware of the licensing issues for years, and since the App store is so closely controlled by Apple with nothing being posted there before they perform an extensive review, they cannot plausibly rebutt the allegation that they either knew or should have known their obligations.
What evidence is there that Apple was aware of the licensing issue? The copyright owner of a GPL work can place it on the Apple store with no problem, so there is no reason for Apple to believe that a GPL work on the Apple store per se violates someone's copyright. A particular developer put up GPL code that he did not own and did not have permission to distribute via the App store, and Apple removed it as soon as they were notified.
Oh bullshit. This can be easily solved with a link in the program. I don't know what all the fucking ceremony is about
How can a link solve the problem? Maybe you should actually RTFA, and then you'd know what all the "fucking ceremony" is about. (Hint: it has nothing whatsoever to do with the availability of source code).
When you purchase a disc at Best Buy you are not agreeing to limit your use of that disc. When you purchase something at the iTunes store you "sign" an agreement restricting you from doing many things. That is the issue. The GPL requires that you give permissions and NOT restrict the user (well, only restrict them in ways detailed by the GPL).
If Best Buy made you sign a contract stating that you would not do XYZ to the software on the disc, they would be in violation of the GPL as well.
Your Best Buy analysis is flawed, because you failed to consider the effects of the first sale doctrine.
Assuming Best Buy is not copying the discs, but rather is just receiving discs from a distributor and selling them as-is, this distribution falls under the first sale doctrine, and so Best Buy does not need permission of the copyright holder.
Since they don't need permission for this distribution, the terms under which GPL allows redistribution are completely irrelevant to Best Buy, and they can impose any contractual limits on the sale that they wish.
First sale does not apply to online distribution, because the online distributor is not just passing through copies received from an upstream, but is itself making copies for distribution, and hence needs permission from the copyright owner.
Indeed, they have already taken the app down because it is a GPL violation. There are other GPL apps on the store though that are in compliance, with the source available via developer website linked within the app - it's not a fundamental incompatibility with the app store, it seems to be a developer issue.
No, according the FSF, it is a fundamental incompatibility, and has nothing to do with source availability. In the FSF's view, no GPL code can be distributed via the Apple store. Read the page at fsf.org that was cited in the submission.
To use the App store as an end user, you have to agree to terms and conditions that state you will not redistribute anything you download from the App store. That is what is in conflict with the GPL. When an entity distributes GPL software in a way that requires them to have permission of the copyright holder, and they are using GPL to obtain that permission, they are not allowed to place any additional restrictions on what the user can do with that software.
Since getting an app via the App store involves Apple making a copy, Apple has to have permission of the copyright owner. (This is what distinguishes this from, say, a retail store selling boxed copies of GPL software and putting additional conditions on the sale--they would not need the copyright owner's permission since they would be covered by the first sale doctrine, so GPL would be irrelevant to them).
They are still on the hook for infringement already committed - or at least could be, if the copyright holders want to pursue it.
What is there to pursue? Plaintiff can ask for an injunction to stop continuing infringement, but that's pointless since Apple has already stopped the infringement.
Plaintiff can ask for impoundment of the alleged infringing items. That is meaningless in this case.
Plaintiff can ask for actual damages and for the infringer's profits from the infringement. Actual damages are zero. Apple's profits from Gnu Go are very likely also zero. In fact, if it was a free app, they probably lost money on it.
That leaves statutory damages. Since it is likely that Apple was not aware of the infringement, the judge is likely to award the minimum possible statutory damages, which is $200.
The court could also award attorney fees, but I think that would be unlikely for a frivolous copyright suit like this would be.
Net result: the FSF can sue and win $200.
The iPad proved a tablet shouldn't be a portable computer that happened to have its screen always exposed.
No, the iPad proved that a table doesn't have to be a portable computer with its screen always exposed. It doesn't prove that it shouldn't be.
Who the heck was in charge of the OSI when all these stupid licenses were being approved?
If the license meets their "Open Source" definition, then they have to approve it if they want to maintain any credibility.
This is no different than the way the FSF lists many licenses on their list of Free Software licenses that they tell you that you should not use. The licenses meet their definition of "Free Software" so they have to include them or they lose credibility.
The problem is principle, even if I use totally clean-room reverse-engineering without even taking one look at their patents, I still am guilty of patent violations, how?
That's how patents are supposed to work. They'd be kind of pointless if they didn't work that way.
GPL doesn't require distributing things that are part of the major components of the operating system, and it includes compilers as major components of the operating system. Without details on exactly what is lacking, we can't rule out that everything that is missing falls under that.
The submitter didn't say that the scripts that control the build are missing. He said they don't provide a build environment. If I distribute GPL code that I build with Visual Studio, I don't have to distribute Visual Studio. I just have to distribute the project file (or whatever it is nowadays--haven't don't Windows in a long time).
It sounds like both companies are distributing embedded software for a hardware device. It's quite possible that the things they aren't distributing are part of some third-party expensive development environment, that they are using off the shelf. If that's the case, there's no GPL violation, as long as they distribute everything the submitter would need to build and install the software if he were to go obtain from that third party the development environment.
When I said "it includes patents from most tech countries in the civilized world", I mean patents issued by that patent offices of most tech countries in the civilized world.
Here are many of the countries that have issued patents covering H.264:
Australia, Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Canada, China, Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Hungary, India, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Liechtenstein, Mexico, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Singapore, Slovenia, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, Taiwan, The Netherlands, UK
The notion that software patents are rare outside the US is just a myth. Even if a country nominally does not allow software patents, they usually allow patents on methods of accomplishing specific tasks, and those patents are not invalid against software.
Let us hope that Monday SCOTUS rules that software patents are void in RE Bilski
If that was going to be the ruling, it would have been out long ago. Here's an interesting article discussing the unusually long time its taken for them to rule, and what that might mean.
So you are in no way more protected by using the restricted H.264 license than you are by using the open VP8 license in the US. In most of the civilized world there's no such thing as software patents, so the only issue is which one of these is technically best
Have you looked at the H.264 patent list? It includes patents from most tech countries in the civilized world.
Only really in America...oh, and Germany as of recently. Damnit, I thought we'd kept those silly "software patent" ideas on the other side of the Atlantic
H.264 is covered by patents in the US, Canada, Germany, France, Great Britain, Japan, Korea, Australia, Mexico, Singapore, China, Finland, Italy, Sweden, and a whole bunch more that I'm not going to type because my pizza has arrived. For all practical purposes, H.264 is covered by patents pretty much everywhere in the 1st world.
So here we go slashdotters: What is the best innovation Microsoft has brought to us...
The "brought to us" part is the hard part. Plenty of important innovation has happened at Microsoft, but they aren't that good at turning it into products.
For example, Microsoft researchers developed a kind of help system that observed what a user did, and learned their use patterns, and was able to recognize when they were having trouble with something and offer suggestions. It worked very well, mostly only interrupting with suggestions when you were in genuine need of help.
When this moved from the lab to the product people, the marketing people loved it, but complained that it didn't show up enough. They wanted to advertise this great feature, but if the typical user only actually saw it do something once a week or so, that would suck (from the salesman's point of view). So marketing forced the people implementing to turn the thresholds way down, and make it pop up a lot, with often inane suggestions. And that's how Clippy went from being perhaps the most sophisticated automated assistant in the world when it was in the lab, to perhaps the most annoying automated pest in the world when it ended up in products.
Another good example is statistical spam filtering. Microsoft internally had one of the earliest, and best, spam handling systems. They also were the first (in a partnership with outside researchers at, I think, Stanford) the first to publish academic papers on Bayesian filtering. But it was others who picked up on this and wrote articles for the non-academic crowd that made outside programmers aware of these techniques, and so few realize Microsoft was one of the pioneers here.
Their spam filtering actually went far beyond just filtering for spam. At one time they had a system internally that could look at your incoming mail, analyze it, figure out what it was about, and rank the importance of it. This was tied in with other systems, such as the web cam on your computer and the microphone on your computer. The web cam could watch you, and the microphone listen to what was going on in your office. If it say and heard that you were meeting with others, it could see who they were, and hear what you are talking about, analyze that and figure out its importance, and decide if the mail you just received can wait or is important enough to interrupt you.
Aside from one or two articles in the press that mentioned this system as part of stories profiling research at MS, I've not heard anything about it since. It apparently never made it to any kind of product development stage. Someday, someone else will do it all the way through to product (Google's a good candidate), and no one will remember that Microsoft had it first.
Wouldn't be better to make patents non-transferable and therefore only those who actually created them could enforce the patents?
In other words, make it so patents are only useful for large companies? Why would you want that?
When the "real world" being referred to is within the European Union the patents are unenforcable
That will come as a great surprise to the many defendants who have lost software patent suits in Europe,
East Texas courts have a reputation as a good place to pursue intellectual property suits against larger corporations
It is not actually that good.
See also this comment on a previous story.
Think of it as sort of a mechanical equivalent of a transistor or a triode, where a small signal on the base or grid controls a large current between the other terminals on the device. You've got that control axle, which you can turn with a small amount of energy, and that controls the power transfer through the transmission.