There were foreign works that had failed to meet formal requirements for copyright protection in the U.S., or that came out of countries with no copyright treaty that reached the U.S. (the Soviet Union, for example). Those works were in the public domain in the U.S., even though they were still copyrighted in their home countries. They were restored in the 1994 Uruguay Round Agreements Act.
[Extra Credit: Explain how taking works out of the public domain promotes the progress of science and useful arts---particularly when the whole underlying theory is to encourage people to create stuff so that it can eventually pass into the public domain.]
Some software patents actually do append the full source code to the application. There are cases where I encourage clients to do this because it actually strengthens the patent. As a rule, I try to squeeze every detail I possibly can out of my clients, because missing details can be fatal to a patent, and sometimes you don't know until years later what the important details are. But on the other hand, a well-designed flow chart can usually disclose a novel method more effectively than a big source code dump. And as long as you adequately describe how to practice your invention, you've sufficiently dedicated it to the public at the expiration of your patent term.
My experience isn't that software patents are bad per se. I've written quite a few myself. I am more disturbed by plaintiffs who get a relatively narrow patent on a niche method and then decide, "I NOW OWN TEH INTERNETS!" Unfortunately, there are lawsuits like that, and they're the ones that get lots of bad press, and they taint the public image of the entire process. Being "on the front line" of patents, I have my share of criticisms, but it is not nearly as out of control as the Slashdot culture seems to think.
The fact that I disagree with a law does not mean that upholding that law or advising a client how to benefit from the law is unethical. If I have a client with a copyrighted work and the DMCA provides the most generous protection of that work, I will advise him how to use the DMCA for its intended purpose. To fail in doing that would be a gross breach of my professional responsibility. I also owe duties to my firm, and it would be unethical for me to breach those responsibilities by turning away clients because I personally believe copyright law could be improved.
I will not take on a client who asks me to do something unethical or illegal. I don't care how much money is on the table. I will (and I do) take on clients whose interests are not necessarily aligned with my personal preferences for what the law theoretically should be. If you consider that unethical, then your definition of "ethical" is very different from mine (and most peoples', as far as I've seen). Which is fine with me. Believe what you want.
It's one of those things that prove to me the "strict constitutionalists" are full of it. They're for strong IP law most of the time, but the constitutional purpose of copyright and patents was explicitly limited and was explicitly not put in place to make companies rich but to encourage inventors and artists by letting them profit off of their work for a *limited* amount of time.
I consider myself a strict constitutionalist (or a "textualist" if you want to nitpick). I am in favor of strong IP (and I ought to be---I'm an IP lawyer). In fact, the patent system has stayed pretty true to its constitutional footings. I have plenty of policy complaints about some of the details, but overall it does exactly what it's supposed to: grant a strong, limited-time monopoly to inventors.
Copyrights, on the other hand, are totally out of control. Life of the author +70 years is both too long and (in my opinion) too indefinite to meet the Constitution's "limited times" requirement. And if we're being realistic, there's no way Walt Disney is ever going to let Mickey Mouse go out of copyright. They want a perpetual term, and they will pay whomever they need to pay to make it happen. And revoking works from the public domain? Seriously? And DMCA? And I could go on. Copyright has been tainted by the worst excesses of the lobbying culture.
(These views, of course, are simply my own. If I represent a client whose interests lie in defending the existing copyright regime, I will stand up and extoll the virtues of the existing regime. Now cue the trolling about how unethical it is to advocate for my clients' interests instead of standing up and talking about my personal preferences...)
I'm sorry. Can you point out where exactly you are forced to use the GPL to license your software?
Depends---are we talking about the real world, or Richard Stallman's Free Software Utopia? Because if it was up to him, he would force all software to be GPL. Just ask him.
Probably only slightly easier than beating nethack.
I can consistently beat Nethack without dying, and have done so many times. My infallible strategy involves a minor tweak to one line of the source code, in the grand tradition of Captain James T. Kirk.
This rejection means nothing. Something like 90% of first office actions are rejections. That's just how the USPTO does business, and it's how they've done business for a long time. Even a "final" rejection isn't final. It just means you have to pay more money to keep arguing with the examiner. And you can keep doing that for as long as you're willing to continue paying the fee to go "one more round."
This is a very run-of-the-mill rejection. The court will probably just ignore it. Until the patent is for-real-finally rejected by the patent office (meaning it's been more than six months since the examiner issued an office action and Apple hasn't responded), the patent is strongly presumed to be valid.
This ends the educational portion of today's episode of Slashdot. We now return you to your regularly-scheduled trolling, flame-baiting, karma-whoring, and Microsoft-bashing.
I'm still confused about why he wants to give his photo frame a SecondLife. Isn't SL just a desolate wasteland of porn and spam now? Or has it made some kind of big comeback I wasn't aware of?
what they mean is that it overall offers reasonable performance on slightly older hardware, and that they finally figured out that they could dump the Fisher Price interface and make it look and work like Win2K with a service pack, which is pretty much what it was, and they were okay with that because that's all they really wanted.
If, on the other hand, it had been banned for being pseudo intellectual literary codswallop, I'd have understood completely.
Yes, yes, yes, James Joyce is painful to read because at some point in his young adulthood he got the idea that deliberately failing to communicate clearly was the same thing as being smart. He then spent the rest of his live deliberately failing to communicate clearly, and thinking he was smarter than everybody else because nobody could figure out what his sophomoric babbling was all about. (English teachers don't know what he was on about, either. They just pretend to. Also, I haven't ruled out the theory that he built a time machine and wrote all his stuff while doing LSD in a hippie commune in the 60s.)
James Joyce should not be banned. He should be ignored. Read Mark Twain instead. He always said exactly what he thought, and he did so with charming wit and irreverence.
Yeah, it's not that special. I went through these same thought experiments and worked the math as an electrical engineering undergrad. And I've never even smoked weed. Really, the interesting question is what are the implications of comlpex energy? Do you phase shift? Makes for some fun science fiction, but not much practical use.
Which means that if you have a computer and an internet connection, you have the right to use them to say what you want. It does not mean the government is required to provide them for you. The fact that we are even having this discussion reveals that Slashdot is full of people who are enitrely out of touch with reality.
The occasional dinner that came in a box that you shove in the oven for an hour would probably be fine
Um, 19 (I don't know, '64 maybe?) called. They want their "easy dinner" model back. Now excuse me while I shove a chemical-based foodlike substance in the microwave for three minutes or so.
Ten years or so ago I read a book called "Darwinia" by Robert Charles Wilson, though to say exactly what it has to do with this topic is kind of a spoiler.
Some money-grubbing conservatives may get scared otherwise. Some ancient money-making schemes may stop to work. That is completely unacceptable. I strongly suggest we all move back into caves.
Um, you realize that it's primarily the Democrats the entertainment industry has in their pockets, don't you? I mean, sure, there are plenty of corrupt Republicans kowtowing to their corporate overlords, but don't let your blind partisan hatred lead you to believe your guys are a bunch of virtuous heroes.
Happens all the time. Your forgot to turn off the "Professsional Stuntman" option. For some reason they have that box checked by default. You might also want to double check the settings for "Knight-Rider Style Turbo Boost" and "Assume I Have Access to Airwolf."
or waiting another week to get it because the container ship was wind powered
I am interested in this new-fangled "wind" shipping you are championing. How would the ship capture the wind power and convert it to momentum? I'm thinking you could have huge sheets of canvas that could pick up wind pretty easily, but I'm stymied where you go from there. Funnel it into some kind of huge turbine or something? Maybe we'll have the technology for this in 10 to 20 years, but I'm not convinced we have it today. And when we get the technology, doesn't that mean that the ship will be at the mercy of the winds? What will happen if the wind stops? You could have a ship sitting in the middle of the ocean for days, "becalmed" to coin a term, with no way of making forward progress. And what if the Somali pirates got their hands on this cutting-edge technology? Ships could be vulnerable to attack on the high seas. You would almost have to arm the ships with some kind of heavy weaponry to fend off hostiles. Also, what are you going to do about scurvy?
Slashdot Mirror
I was quoting the parent. But yes, "strict constructionist" is the correct phrasing.
There were foreign works that had failed to meet formal requirements for copyright protection in the U.S., or that came out of countries with no copyright treaty that reached the U.S. (the Soviet Union, for example). Those works were in the public domain in the U.S., even though they were still copyrighted in their home countries. They were restored in the 1994 Uruguay Round Agreements Act.
[Extra Credit: Explain how taking works out of the public domain promotes the progress of science and useful arts---particularly when the whole underlying theory is to encourage people to create stuff so that it can eventually pass into the public domain.]
Some software patents actually do append the full source code to the application. There are cases where I encourage clients to do this because it actually strengthens the patent. As a rule, I try to squeeze every detail I possibly can out of my clients, because missing details can be fatal to a patent, and sometimes you don't know until years later what the important details are. But on the other hand, a well-designed flow chart can usually disclose a novel method more effectively than a big source code dump. And as long as you adequately describe how to practice your invention, you've sufficiently dedicated it to the public at the expiration of your patent term.
My experience isn't that software patents are bad per se. I've written quite a few myself. I am more disturbed by plaintiffs who get a relatively narrow patent on a niche method and then decide, "I NOW OWN TEH INTERNETS!" Unfortunately, there are lawsuits like that, and they're the ones that get lots of bad press, and they taint the public image of the entire process. Being "on the front line" of patents, I have my share of criticisms, but it is not nearly as out of control as the Slashdot culture seems to think.
The fact that I disagree with a law does not mean that upholding that law or advising a client how to benefit from the law is unethical. If I have a client with a copyrighted work and the DMCA provides the most generous protection of that work, I will advise him how to use the DMCA for its intended purpose. To fail in doing that would be a gross breach of my professional responsibility. I also owe duties to my firm, and it would be unethical for me to breach those responsibilities by turning away clients because I personally believe copyright law could be improved.
I will not take on a client who asks me to do something unethical or illegal. I don't care how much money is on the table. I will (and I do) take on clients whose interests are not necessarily aligned with my personal preferences for what the law theoretically should be. If you consider that unethical, then your definition of "ethical" is very different from mine (and most peoples', as far as I've seen). Which is fine with me. Believe what you want.
It's one of those things that prove to me the "strict constitutionalists" are full of it. They're for strong IP law most of the time, but the constitutional purpose of copyright and patents was explicitly limited and was explicitly not put in place to make companies rich but to encourage inventors and artists by letting them profit off of their work for a *limited* amount of time.
I consider myself a strict constitutionalist (or a "textualist" if you want to nitpick). I am in favor of strong IP (and I ought to be---I'm an IP lawyer). In fact, the patent system has stayed pretty true to its constitutional footings. I have plenty of policy complaints about some of the details, but overall it does exactly what it's supposed to: grant a strong, limited-time monopoly to inventors.
Copyrights, on the other hand, are totally out of control. Life of the author +70 years is both too long and (in my opinion) too indefinite to meet the Constitution's "limited times" requirement. And if we're being realistic, there's no way Walt Disney is ever going to let Mickey Mouse go out of copyright. They want a perpetual term, and they will pay whomever they need to pay to make it happen. And revoking works from the public domain? Seriously? And DMCA? And I could go on. Copyright has been tainted by the worst excesses of the lobbying culture.
(These views, of course, are simply my own. If I represent a client whose interests lie in defending the existing copyright regime, I will stand up and extoll the virtues of the existing regime. Now cue the trolling about how unethical it is to advocate for my clients' interests instead of standing up and talking about my personal preferences...)
I'm sorry. Can you point out where exactly you are forced to use the GPL to license your software?
Depends---are we talking about the real world, or Richard Stallman's Free Software Utopia? Because if it was up to him, he would force all software to be GPL. Just ask him.
More along the lines of:
if(hp <= 0) hp = 1;
Probably only slightly easier than beating nethack.
I can consistently beat Nethack without dying, and have done so many times. My infallible strategy involves a minor tweak to one line of the source code, in the grand tradition of Captain James T. Kirk.
Pedantic and all, but the name of your university is not copyrighted. It's too minimal. But there may be trademark issues.
Signs of life from the USPTO
This rejection means nothing. Something like 90% of first office actions are rejections. That's just how the USPTO does business, and it's how they've done business for a long time. Even a "final" rejection isn't final. It just means you have to pay more money to keep arguing with the examiner. And you can keep doing that for as long as you're willing to continue paying the fee to go "one more round."
This is a very run-of-the-mill rejection. The court will probably just ignore it. Until the patent is for-real-finally rejected by the patent office (meaning it's been more than six months since the examiner issued an office action and Apple hasn't responded), the patent is strongly presumed to be valid.
This ends the educational portion of today's episode of Slashdot. We now return you to your regularly-scheduled trolling, flame-baiting, karma-whoring, and Microsoft-bashing.
how to give these old frames a second life?
Buuuuuuuuuuuuuuurn !
I'm still confused about why he wants to give his photo frame a SecondLife. Isn't SL just a desolate wasteland of porn and spam now? Or has it made some kind of big comeback I wasn't aware of?
what they mean is that it overall offers reasonable performance on slightly older hardware, and that they finally figured out that they could dump the Fisher Price interface and make it look and work like Win2K with a service pack, which is pretty much what it was, and they were okay with that because that's all they really wanted.
FTFY and so forth.
Unless there's some native metal crapping lifeform on Mars.
Been reading Ender in Exile?
If, on the other hand, it had been banned for being pseudo intellectual literary codswallop, I'd have understood completely.
Yes, yes, yes, James Joyce is painful to read because at some point in his young adulthood he got the idea that deliberately failing to communicate clearly was the same thing as being smart. He then spent the rest of his live deliberately failing to communicate clearly, and thinking he was smarter than everybody else because nobody could figure out what his sophomoric babbling was all about. (English teachers don't know what he was on about, either. They just pretend to. Also, I haven't ruled out the theory that he built a time machine and wrote all his stuff while doing LSD in a hippie commune in the 60s.)
James Joyce should not be banned. He should be ignored. Read Mark Twain instead. He always said exactly what he thought, and he did so with charming wit and irreverence.
I see folks at the DoD have been watching Mythbusters. As well they should.
Yeah, it's not that special. I went through these same thought experiments and worked the math as an electrical engineering undergrad. And I've never even smoked weed. Really, the interesting question is what are the implications of comlpex energy? Do you phase shift? Makes for some fun science fiction, but not much practical use.
Which means that if you have a computer and an internet connection, you have the right to use them to say what you want. It does not mean the government is required to provide them for you. The fact that we are even having this discussion reveals that Slashdot is full of people who are enitrely out of touch with reality.
The occasional dinner that came in a box that you shove in the oven for an hour would probably be fine
Um, 19 (I don't know, '64 maybe?) called. They want their "easy dinner" model back. Now excuse me while I shove a chemical-based foodlike substance in the microwave for three minutes or so.
Ten years or so ago I read a book called "Darwinia" by Robert Charles Wilson, though to say exactly what it has to do with this topic is kind of a spoiler.
No, you've got it all wrong. It ends with the earth being wholly consumed by lava. See this excellent documentary
Some money-grubbing conservatives may get scared otherwise. Some ancient money-making schemes may stop to work. That is completely unacceptable. I strongly suggest we all move back into caves.
Um, you realize that it's primarily the Democrats the entertainment industry has in their pockets, don't you? I mean, sure, there are plenty of corrupt Republicans kowtowing to their corporate overlords, but don't let your blind partisan hatred lead you to believe your guys are a bunch of virtuous heroes.
And in Time Lords.
If I have a hammer I have to use it for every single task I have, otherwise what's the point of owning a hammer?
I'm a little confused. Can you restate that with a car analogy?
Happens all the time. Your forgot to turn off the "Professsional Stuntman" option. For some reason they have that box checked by default. You might also want to double check the settings for "Knight-Rider Style Turbo Boost" and "Assume I Have Access to Airwolf."
or waiting another week to get it because the container ship was wind powered
I am interested in this new-fangled "wind" shipping you are championing. How would the ship capture the wind power and convert it to momentum? I'm thinking you could have huge sheets of canvas that could pick up wind pretty easily, but I'm stymied where you go from there. Funnel it into some kind of huge turbine or something? Maybe we'll have the technology for this in 10 to 20 years, but I'm not convinced we have it today. And when we get the technology, doesn't that mean that the ship will be at the mercy of the winds? What will happen if the wind stops? You could have a ship sitting in the middle of the ocean for days, "becalmed" to coin a term, with no way of making forward progress. And what if the Somali pirates got their hands on this cutting-edge technology? Ships could be vulnerable to attack on the high seas. You would almost have to arm the ships with some kind of heavy weaponry to fend off hostiles. Also, what are you going to do about scurvy?