Sure, there's not likely to be competition under a patent-based production. So what?
Without competition producers have little incentive to control prices.
Lacking patents entirely, there wouldn't be production of the new product at all, because the risk of losing money is high and returns are low.
People were inventing products long before patents were created.
I think you overestimate the natural advantage of being first to market. It won't much matter that you were first, if your competitors can match you on quality and beat you on price. And a deep understanding of a product isn't necessary to the copying company. They only need to understand the science enough to reproduce it. Sure, they probably won't be able to produce any new, next step in that line of technology.. but they won't need to do that either. They'll wait for someone else to do it, and copy that product too.
If your competitors can beat you on price while matching your quality then your company is not being run very efficiently and if a deep understanding of the science behind the product is not necessary to produce it then the product is most likely not worthy of a patent in the first place.
There's no competition there. The free riding companies have fewer costs, so they sell their product cheaper. The innovating company, at this point, can choose to either match the lower price and accept their development costs as losses or maintain their higher price and probably go out of business.
But you have to admit, there is no competition when the government grants a monopoly preventing it, right? Also there are a couple of things that you seem to be ignoring and that is that the innovating company has a natural advantage over future competitors by being first to market and having a deeper understanding of its products.
I work at a biotech company - we won't do stuff that won't make us money. We have to pay our salaries. If we do something that we DON'T have patent coverage on, our competition will just copy it at no cost to them... oh yeah - we will have spent A LOT of money to do the development. If we can't get an exclusive license, then for the most part we won't touch it. It WONT make financial sense to do so.
So essentially what you are saying is the your company can not make a profit if it does not have a legal monopoly on the products that it sells. Whatever happened to making things better, faster, and cheaper to get a leg up on the competition?
It's amazing, just a quick online form and they get a huge chunk of money I earned. I'm so glad the federal government decided to branch off into the free insurance business at my expense.
It's not "free" insurance, the vast majority of those affected paid taxes too.
They are only a reality in the US and a couple of other countries.
Rather than fight impotently against the ideal, we ought to harness that protection to further the open-source cause.
Though we Americans have proven to impotent in fighting software patents, Europeans are still duking it out and for most Asians their not an issue at all. If our government continues to hamper its programmers freedoms the open source cause will continue elsewhere unrestricted.
Copyright law may have been fair when its length was fourteen years and there were real costs involved in publishing and distributing works. The law today is unjust.
The last truly inovative audio chipset was the Aureal au88x0 series, and what happened to them? Creative sucked them up and did nothing with their technology; even their "top end" Audigy 2 doesn't do positional 3D audio.
As far as the consumer is concerned, audio technology is at a plateu and it's good enough for what they're using it for. The only thing that changes in the audio hardware world are the damn hardware programatic interfaces; there are more audio chipsets than modern video cards and NIC's combined.
The real problem is the disparity between those who call themselves "audiophiles" and normal users. Seriously, if 99% of users can't tell the difference between a $10 card and a $10,000 then the $10 card will always win. If the "audiophile" can tell the difference then let him pay $10,000 for a difference that doesn't mean a thing to me.
Actually, it's to publicly break them en masse, so that the jails will get too crowded so that people CAN'T be jailed. However to do that you need high numbers of people willing to do that. In the past people have been able to achieve the high numbers necessary because people WERE willing to go to jail, because the cause was something they strongly believed in.
I doubt you'll ever be able to get enough p2p users to do it, as most use it anonymously. In that case, they aren't activists. They're criminals
Well first I'd argue that people are breaking these silly laws "en masse". Just look at the documents provided by the RIAA and the MPAA. After reading those don't you sense that they feel the only way to stop infringers is to force non-copyright infringers to justify the use of copyrighted material?
As for criminal? Drinking a beer during prohibition was a criminal act, but who really gave a damn when drinking beer was considered a natural thing to do?
The RIAA really fucked themselves when they decided it was more important to control what people hear than distribute what people want to hear. How could they have been so blind as to miss such possibilities as "listen to it free here" but go "here to get the real thing and all the extras?" phenonma that was surely possibly? I really was hoping the movie industry wouldn't have been so short sighted but they seem to have fallen into the record industries trap.
By continuously exchanging copyrighted material via the internet, copyright law will not end. If we ant to get rid of copyright law, we should petition the goverments, protest (with your money by not spending it on the apparently for you, or in your opinion, to expensive materials), start a political party against copyrights, etc..
You are wrong. The best way to get rid of unjust laws is to have everyone break them so they become unenforceable.
For some time now, I have been saying that MySQL is a lock-in scheme. It became obvious when MySQL switched from the LGPL license to the dual GPL + proprietary licenses. This does nothing to promote Open Source, rather, it forces proprietary developers to use MySQL under the proprietary license.
Another product that uses the GPL + proprietary lock-in licensing scheme is Qt, by Trolltech. They also use their GPL'd edition as a loss-leader, in order to promote sales of the proprietary edition of Qt.
Let me see if I get this right. If you use these libraries to develop free software you pay no money. If you use them develop proprietory software you pay money. In other words, you make money they make money, if you make no money they make no money. So what exactly is the problem again?
Nothing has fallen into the public domain for almost a half century before I was born.
That is amazing isn't it? Back in the days when it took years to publish and distribute a work artists were given fourteen years of protection. Today, despite near instantaneous communication, they are protected for a hundred years or better. It's no wonder that so many people don't give a damn about sharing copyrighted works.
People are born where they are born. If you've watched much of the coverage most of those left behind are poor and black. As a matter of fact more than a few of those interviewed said they couldn't even afford a tank of gas to get out, let alone the price of lodging and food.
Way to tell something half-assed. Even if the money was there a year ago(or even 2) the type of construction neccessary to stop this kind of flooding wouldn't be done for another couple of years. Think logically and not politically.
Political, schomitcal. What we're talking about here is foresight and planning which are qualities severly lacking in our government today. Do you want to know what the cause of all the looting that is taking place there right now? It's anger. Those people were left there with no way to get out and no way to get help.
I'm pretty sick of this "somebody do something" nonsense. The government has "failed you?" What the fuck should the government have done? And bear in mind before you answer that I'm expecting you to have at least a basic working knowledge of the Constitution of the United States and a grasp of the principles of federalism before you say something stupid like "Bush should have built bigger levies."
What Bush should've done was to undo the tax cuts he gave as the federal defecit grew instead of cutting funding for projects such as maintaining the levees.
Wanna be mad at somebody? Be mad at God for sending the monster hurricane in the first place. Being mad at this nebulous thing called "the government" because it didn't do, I don't know, something is just plain stupid.
Right, like these monster hurricanes have never happened before. If a government doesn't serve it's people it serves no purpose at all.
"..In early 2004, as the cost of the conflict in Iraq soared, President Bush proposed spending less than 20 percent of what the Corps said was needed for Lake Pontchartrain, according to a Feb. 16, 2004, article, in New Orleans CityBusiness.
On June 8, 2004, Walter Maestri, emergency management chief for Jefferson Parish, Louisiana; told the Times-Picayune: "It appears that the money has been moved in the president's budget to handle homeland security and the war in Iraq, and I suppose that's the price we pay. Nobody locally is happy that the levees can't be finished, and we are doing everything we can to make the case that this is a security issue for us."
Also that June, with the 2004 hurricane season starting, the Corps' project manager Al Naomi went before a local agency, the East Jefferson Levee Authority, and essentially begged for $2 million for urgent work that Washington was now unable to pay for...."
Guess it's okay though, people still have those tax cuts he gave them.
You can duplicate marijuana by growing it, the same as any other plant. Still, people do buy it because it's a hell of a lot easier than getting their "fix" by growing it. The same goes for their "intellectual property" fix. People want it so they are going to get it.
Oh yes. Mob rules eh. Are you looting in New Orleans now by any chance? Suppose shooting and eating little girls became fashionable tomorrow? That would make it a-ok huh?
Yes, mob rules when the mob refuses to be ruled. If the majority of people refuse to obey a law despite attempts by the government to enforce it then the law is in fact ineffective. I think some sort of compromise will eventually be reached, not unlike the compromise with marijuana.
The laws should not be aligned with the will of the people, and in fact the founding fathers did a decent job of making sure it didn't happen. If laws exactly follow the will of the people, things quickly deteriorate into the minority being oppressed by the majority.
But that is just the way it is. Drinking was illegal during Prohibition but people still drank and pot is illegal today but people still get high. When there aren't enough people to support a law that law is nothing but ink on a page.
You hate the system, fine. I'm not exactly fond of the way things like this are going right now either. If you want it to be different, file sharing copyright content will not make things better, it will just get your ass sued. Start voting with your dollars.
But that goes against human nature. Take pot for example. Despite the fact that it is illegal millions of people smoke it and millions more don't care that they do. Oh sure the government will arrest a few people now and then but that doesn't change anything. People are going to do what people want to do and when enough of them want to do the same thing there isn't any act of Congress that's going to stop them.
Yes, it'd be much easier if files were named for easy identification, something like "Star Wars Episode 3.avi", instead of some random name.
Oh wait...
I've seen stuff like sw3-atotc.rar that claim to be a movie named "Star Wars Episode Three" while perusing binary groups and such, but anyone can claim their files contain one thing when in fact they contain another. Plus, believe it or not, their are people who have never even heard of the movie and download it just to see what a "Star Wars" is!
The fact is the only way to find out if a file's distribution is illegal is to download it and look at it's contents.
So yes, there is a difference a copy is created in one of the cases, while not in the other.
Yes, I understand they are making a copy. That stil doesn't answer the question as to how a person can determine whether downloading a particular file is legal or not without seeing what data that file contains.
Suppose, for example, someone posts a torrent or multipart rar named "aliens" and another person who is interested in UFOs comes across it while researching extraterrastials. Since the topic is close to his heart he decides to download and view it only to discover that instead of videos of little green men he has "stolen" a movie that stars Sigourney Weaver.
Now, are you going to tell us that this guy should be punished? People are going to inadvertantly violate copyright law constantly on the internet, there's no way around it unless the sharing of everything is made illegal. The whole idea of prosecuting people for downloading is ridiculous.
Slashdot Mirror
Sure, there's not likely to be competition under a patent-based production. So what?
Without competition producers have little incentive to control prices.
Lacking patents entirely, there wouldn't be production of the new product at all, because the risk of losing money is high and returns are low.
People were inventing products long before patents were created.
I think you overestimate the natural advantage of being first to market. It won't much matter that you were first, if your competitors can match you on quality and beat you on price. And a deep understanding of a product isn't necessary to the copying company. They only need to understand the science enough to reproduce it. Sure, they probably won't be able to produce any new, next step in that line of technology.. but they won't need to do that either. They'll wait for someone else to do it, and copy that product too.
If your competitors can beat you on price while matching your quality then your company is not being run very efficiently and if a deep understanding of the science behind the product is not necessary to produce it then the product is most likely not worthy of a patent in the first place.
There's no competition there. The free riding companies have fewer costs, so they sell their product cheaper. The innovating company, at this point, can choose to either match the lower price and accept their development costs as losses or maintain their higher price and probably go out of business.
But you have to admit, there is no competition when the government grants a monopoly preventing it, right? Also there are a couple of things that you seem to be ignoring and that is that the innovating company has a natural advantage over future competitors by being first to market and having a deeper understanding of its products.
I work at a biotech company - we won't do stuff that won't make us money. We have to pay our salaries. If we do something that we DON'T have patent coverage on, our competition will just copy it at no cost to them... oh yeah - we will have spent A LOT of money to do the development. If we can't get an exclusive license, then for the most part we won't touch it. It WONT make financial sense to do so.
So essentially what you are saying is the your company can not make a profit if it does not have a legal monopoly on the products that it sells. Whatever happened to making things better, faster, and cheaper to get a leg up on the competition?
It's amazing, just a quick online form and they get a huge chunk of money I earned. I'm so glad the federal government decided to branch off into the free insurance business at my expense.
It's not "free" insurance, the vast majority of those affected paid taxes too.
Software patents are a reality.
They are only a reality in the US and a couple of other countries.
Rather than fight impotently against the ideal, we ought to harness that protection to further the open-source cause.
Though we Americans have proven to impotent in fighting software patents, Europeans are still duking it out and for most Asians their not an issue at all. If our government continues to hamper its programmers freedoms the open source cause will continue elsewhere unrestricted.
Sorry, copyright law is not unjust. It's fair
Copyright law may have been fair when its length was fourteen years and there were real costs involved in publishing and distributing works. The law today is unjust.
The last truly inovative audio chipset was the Aureal au88x0 series, and what happened to them? Creative sucked them up and did nothing with their technology; even their "top end" Audigy 2 doesn't do positional 3D audio.
As far as the consumer is concerned, audio technology is at a plateu and it's good enough for what they're using it for. The only thing that changes in the audio hardware world are the damn hardware programatic interfaces; there are more audio chipsets than modern video cards and NIC's combined.
The real problem is the disparity between those who call themselves "audiophiles" and normal users. Seriously, if 99% of users can't tell the difference between a $10 card and a $10,000 then the $10 card will always win. If the "audiophile" can tell the difference then let him pay $10,000 for a difference that doesn't mean a thing to me.
Actually, it's to publicly break them en masse, so that the jails will get too crowded so that people CAN'T be jailed. However to do that you need high numbers of people willing to do that. In the past people have been able to achieve the high numbers necessary because people WERE willing to go to jail, because the cause was something they strongly believed in.
I doubt you'll ever be able to get enough p2p users to do it, as most use it anonymously. In that case, they aren't activists. They're
criminals
Well first I'd argue that people are breaking these silly laws "en masse". Just look at the documents provided by the RIAA and the MPAA. After reading those don't you sense that they feel the only way to stop infringers is to force non-copyright infringers to justify the use of copyrighted material?
As for criminal? Drinking a beer during prohibition was a criminal act, but who really gave a damn when drinking beer was considered a natural thing to do?
The RIAA really fucked themselves when they decided it was more important to control what people hear than distribute what people want to hear. How could they have been so blind as to miss such possibilities as "listen to it free here" but go "here to get the real thing and all the extras?" phenonma that was surely possibly? I really was hoping the movie industry wouldn't have been so short sighted but they seem to have fallen into the record industries trap.
By continuously exchanging copyrighted material via the internet, copyright law will not end. If we ant to get rid of copyright law, we should petition the goverments, protest (with your money by not spending it on the apparently for you, or in your opinion, to expensive materials), start a political party against copyrights, etc..
You are wrong. The best way to get rid of unjust laws is to have everyone break them so they become unenforceable.
And thus you effectively lose the freedom of chosing your license for your code.
You only have to worry about that if your software itself is restrictive. The GPL is perfectly compatible with any code that may be freely shared.
For some time now, I have been saying that MySQL is a lock-in scheme. It became obvious when MySQL switched from the LGPL license to the dual GPL + proprietary licenses. This does nothing to promote Open Source, rather, it forces proprietary developers to use MySQL under the proprietary license.
Another product that uses the GPL + proprietary lock-in licensing scheme is Qt, by Trolltech. They also use their GPL'd edition as a loss-leader, in order to promote sales of the proprietary edition of Qt.
Let me see if I get this right. If you use these libraries to develop free software you pay no money. If you use them develop proprietory software you pay money. In other words, you make money they make money, if you make no money they make no money. So what exactly is the problem again?
Nothing has fallen into the public domain for almost a half century before I was born.
That is amazing isn't it? Back in the days when it took years to publish and distribute a work artists were given fourteen years of protection. Today, despite near instantaneous communication, they are protected for a hundred years or better. It's no wonder that so many people don't give a damn about sharing copyrighted works.
People are born where they are born. If you've watched much of the coverage most of those left behind are poor and black. As a matter of fact more than a few of those interviewed said they couldn't even afford a tank of gas to get out, let alone the price of lodging and food.
Way to tell something half-assed. Even if the money was there a year ago(or even 2) the type of construction neccessary to stop this kind of flooding wouldn't be done for another couple of years. Think logically and not politically.
Political, schomitcal. What we're talking about here is foresight and planning which are qualities severly lacking in our government today. Do you want to know what the cause of all the looting that is taking place there right now? It's anger. Those people were left there with no way to get out and no way to get help.
I'm pretty sick of this "somebody do something" nonsense. The government has "failed you?" What the fuck should the government have done? And bear in mind before you answer that I'm expecting you to have at least a basic working knowledge of the Constitution of the United States and a grasp of the principles of federalism before you say something stupid like "Bush should have built bigger levies."
What Bush should've done was to undo the tax cuts he gave as the federal defecit grew instead of cutting funding for projects such as maintaining the levees.
Wanna be mad at somebody? Be mad at God for sending the monster hurricane in the first place. Being mad at this nebulous thing called "the government" because it didn't do, I don't know, something is just plain stupid.
Right, like these monster hurricanes have never happened before. If a government doesn't serve it's people it serves no purpose at all.
They failed even before it happened:
..."
"..In early 2004, as the cost of the conflict in Iraq soared, President Bush proposed spending less than 20 percent of what the Corps said was needed for Lake Pontchartrain, according to a Feb. 16, 2004, article, in New Orleans CityBusiness.
On June 8, 2004, Walter Maestri, emergency management chief for Jefferson Parish, Louisiana; told the Times-Picayune: "It appears that the money has been moved in the president's budget to handle homeland security and the war in Iraq, and I suppose that's the price we pay. Nobody locally is happy that the levees can't be finished, and we are doing everything we can to make the case that this is a security issue for us."
Also that June, with the 2004 hurricane season starting, the Corps' project manager Al Naomi went before a local agency, the East Jefferson Levee Authority, and essentially begged for $2 million for urgent work that Washington was now unable to pay for.
Guess it's okay though, people still have those tax cuts he gave them.
You can duplicate marijuana by growing it, the same as any other plant. Still, people do buy it because it's a hell of a lot easier than getting their "fix" by growing it. The same goes for their "intellectual property" fix. People want it so they are going to get it.
Oh yes. Mob rules eh. Are you looting in New Orleans now by any chance? Suppose shooting and eating little girls became fashionable tomorrow? That would make it a-ok huh?
Yes, mob rules when the mob refuses to be ruled. If the majority of people refuse to obey a law despite attempts by the government to enforce it then the law is in fact ineffective. I think some sort of compromise will eventually be reached, not unlike the compromise with marijuana.
Seriously, you think this is ok? It might not be stealing, but it's WRONG.
Whether something's right or wrong or legal or illegal doesn't really matter when enough people don't give a damn.
The laws should not be aligned with the will of the people, and in fact the founding fathers did a decent job of making sure it didn't happen. If laws exactly follow the will of the people, things quickly deteriorate into the minority being oppressed by the majority.
But that is just the way it is. Drinking was illegal during Prohibition but people still drank and pot is illegal today but people still get high. When there aren't enough people to support a law that law is nothing but ink on a page.
You hate the system, fine. I'm not exactly fond of the way things like this are going right now either. If you want it to be different, file sharing copyright content will not make things better, it will just get your ass sued. Start voting with your dollars.
But that goes against human nature. Take pot for example. Despite the fact that it is illegal millions of people smoke it and millions more don't care that they do. Oh sure the government will arrest a few people now and then but that doesn't change anything. People are going to do what people want to do and when enough of them want to do the same thing there isn't any act of Congress that's going to stop them.
Yes, it'd be much easier if files were named for easy identification, something like "Star Wars Episode 3.avi", instead of some random name.
Oh wait...
I've seen stuff like sw3-atotc.rar that claim to be a movie named "Star Wars Episode Three" while perusing binary groups and such, but anyone can claim their files contain one thing when in fact they contain another. Plus, believe it or not, their are people who have never even heard of the movie and download it just to see what a "Star Wars" is!
The fact is the only way to find out if a file's distribution is illegal is to download it and look at it's contents.
So yes, there is a difference a copy is created in one of the cases, while not in the other.
Yes, I understand they are making a copy. That stil doesn't answer the question as to how a person can determine whether downloading a particular file is legal or not without seeing what data that file contains.
Suppose, for example, someone posts a torrent or multipart rar named "aliens" and another person who is interested in UFOs comes across it while researching extraterrastials. Since the topic is close to his heart he decides to download and view it only to discover that instead of videos of little green men he has "stolen" a movie that stars Sigourney Weaver.
Now, are you going to tell us that this guy should be punished? People are going to inadvertantly violate copyright law constantly on the internet, there's no way around it unless the sharing of everything is made illegal. The whole idea of prosecuting people for downloading is ridiculous.
odds are that most movies are copyrighted
You won't know if a file is a movie, music, program, or pure garbage until it's downloaded, let alone if it is being distributed without permission.
You think people have a moral right to download copyrighted material? You think that making downloading films illegal isn't justified?
How can a person know if a file is copyrighted and doesn't have a license that allows free distribution until after that file is downloaded?