I read stories of copied websites everyday, and usually they are a damn sight more interesting. Why is this on Slashdot? The only thing remotely remarkable about this whole story, is that the software maker did not start civil and instigate criminal procedures. For all he knows, people are still selling his software. And we all know what great customer service criminals give, and how well that will reflect on his name.
Ah, OK, you see, you can prove anything with facts.
So, now you have identified the people who think the US government should focus on catching spammers rather than filesharers, why don't you go ask them your question. Seems to me, they're the only ones who can answer it.
" Here is a good reason: I create the intellectual property"
It's not property.
"spending my time, money and effort. I should be able to do whatever I please with it"
No. You should not be allowed to bother me with it. Yours must be the uggliest website of 2004. I should not have been exposed to it. But since I have been exposed to it, I think that entitles me to one or two things.
Your works are yours until you publish them. Then they become public property. If you don't like those rules, I suggest you move to some planet where they care about what you like.
"and have it enforced in any legal manner I see fit."
Have what "enforced"?
You are making so little sense, that I suggest you ingest some of that intellectual property you're going on about. Perhaps you'll learn something.
"I should also be able to have it protected"
Surely you mean you should have your interests protected? Protecting a work can only be done by allowing as many people as possible to run with it. Information wants to be free. So far you seem to be arguing against that, so your application of the word "protect" in this case seems unfortunate.
"and since I am the tiny guy working out of my garage and do not have the money to do the research or enforce such a law - I ask that the government help protect me from the big mean people who would steal my work"
It's not stealing. Stealing means you cannot use it anymore.
"because they are too inconsiderate to respect my hard work."
There's no law that obliges anyone to respect another person's hard work. If ever such a law was passed, the makers should be taken out back and shot. And their newts too.
This is a free country--if you want to work hard, that is your prerogative. If you do not want to work at all, that's your choice too. If you push the products of your work onto my lawn, those products becomes mine.
Copyrights are a form of welfare--and although I am not opposed to them in principle, their current application causes more problems than they are worth.
No, he doesn't. For one thing, people generally do not moan that government should look the other way when they are copying cds. He is setting up an argument that he can refute, even if nobody ever uses that argument.
Second, he is asking "why is it". Who could ever answer that? Can the OP look into people's heads? Can I?
"If this was true, I would join you, but I don't think it is true. Patents have served a major part in driving technolgy forward for hundreds of years. Why do you suddenly think it won't work any more?"
I am not convinced that patents have been a greater contributing factor in driven technology forward than in slowing technology down. Also, I am always a bit surprised when people use community driven websites, built using PHP and mySQL, served by Apache over the internet to make their point. You are using all these open technologies to tell me that closed technologies are good... I find that a bit ironic. Surely, you do not really believe that these technologies would allow you to express yourself so well, or perhaps even better, if software patents had been here earlier?
"They have no incentive to try to develop it because you have removed that incentive. HOw do you know how many such improvements you have lost? I surely do not know either, but I can see historical evidence that providing the incentive for improvement pays off to society in the end."
I can see historical evidence that not everybody needs the same incentives, and I can see historical evidence where monopolies atrophied and killed markets.
"Patents are ther to encourage disclosure of improvements to the world."
The other day I was talking to my cousin. He is a salesperson for a company that supplies building materials. He told me with great pride that they had developed a unique method of creating stiff boards using glue and waste materials; those boards supposedly are much more environmental friendly than all direct competitors. Because development took them a great deal of time, of course they patented the invention. I said: "That's great. The license fees must bring in a fortune!" He replied: "License fees? Are you nuts? We're keeping this baby to ourselves!" I asked: "So, how is this going to help the environment again?"
My cousin changed the subject.
Patents are monopolies, and as monopolies they are competition killers. They are specifically not meant to encourage disclosure of the invention. Only proponents of more or stronger patents use this argument.
In the end, when law makers are facing the choice of introducing the law, they must ask themselves: will this law do more good than harm? If they are not absolutely sure, they must reject the law. In the case of software patents, what little proof there is seems to point to more harm.
(Unfortunately, as tends to happen in discussions about CPT, there is actually very little evidence of anything.)
"What if I came by your home one night took you car to joy-ride in it and then returned it a week later."
My car is not available for public use, not even if people push coins through the radiator. It is not being advertised as being available for public use. I am not 'stealing' public space by parking 1700 cars all over town.
Anyway, a lot of human behaviour is not regulated, or vaguely so. This is A Good Thing, but undoubtedly also an affront to the likes of you, who would like clear, black and white lines for every conceivable situation. I happen to believe that the likes of you are also the most likely to commit the crimes you suspect others of. You will get what you wish for.
"So why is it that it's beneficial for innovation and the economy to issue a patent on the apple sorter, but not the database sorter? If you want to argue that all patents are bad for innovation and the economy, fine, but almost all countries disagree and have patent laws."
All countries have _limited_ patent laws. Patents rarely last for ever, for instance, and rarely apply to every type of 'invention'. These limitations are not inherent to the nature of patents, but rather are a result of the law.
Patents are a type of industry regulation. The sort of patents a country should allow depends on the benefits for society. Generally, modern capitalist societies see innovation as an important benefit; they see innovation mainly as the result of healthy markets, and see competition mainly as a measure of healthy markets.
The little we know about software patents seems to suggest that they are abundantly used for stark anti-competitive, anti-innovation behaviour. That is why at this point in time, our western, capitalist societies should reject software patents.
For the EU, the situation is even clearer. The EU is a net importer of patent and copyright licenses. The companies waiting in the wings for software patents to happen are predominantly American and Asian. Software patents in the EU would mean that gobs and gobs of our money should be given away.
Furthermore, an apple-sorting machine is not trivial to make. A data-sorting program is trivial to make.
And yes, I am for the abolishment of all patents. They were introduced in a time when inventing something meant building it. A huge investment of time and materials were required--you know the sort of thing: inventing a better lightbulb (scroll down to incandescent lamps for the English text). Nowadays, however, inventions more and more acquire a software-like nature; development and testing can take place in virtual environments, often cutting down on investments. This means that the patent on the modern-day apple-sorting machine comes cheaper, and can also be used for anti-competitive behaviour, which seems reason enough for me to shut that whole racket down.
The chairman considered this item to be a formality, and thus it could be dealt with by ministers who knew nothing about the subject. All they had to do was vote how they had been told to vote.
To the contrary, the Western governments have taken the first important (and only) step towards eliminating terrorism. They have taken a word, 'terrorism', and applied it to almost everything. That has devalued the meaning of the word immensely. As soon as 'terrorism' has become as meaningless as 'anarchism' or 'witchcraft', the government will have effectively eliminated 'terrorism'.
(Of course, they won't stop the odd loon carrying a bomb or poison, but then again I doubt they want to; random explosions keep the populace docile.)
Well, they had witches in the eighteenth century, anarchists in the first half of the twentieth, I guess it was just time for a new label that governments could use willy-nilly to keep the population scared.
"The U.S. has lower unemployment than nearly every European country, except the Netherlands. Of course, it's easy to keep women employed there, if you know what I mean."
To hell with employement figures, we're sending your sisters back!
Because the channel may not stay secure, yet you may want to keep using it, as setting up a new 100% secure channel is too much trouble.
This is why the German military could succesfully use the Enigma cipher machine for publicly transmitted messages for years on end; as long as the key was not available, the messages could not be deciphered.
Or to put it in other words: you use a secret, secure, but vulnerable channel to set up a public, secure, unvulnerable channel. When the government outlaws the latter, you hide your messages as noise in patterns. When the other side discovers your key, the other side switches to keeping that fact a secret, in order to find out as much about you as possible. In order to find out whether you have been compromised, you send bogus messages from time, to see if they are acted upon. The other side knows this. This is where any number of people involved are getting severe headaches trying to outsmart eachother. If headaches were lethal, evolution would do its good work a damn sight quicker.
"More likely than not, anyone with nefarious purposes in mind has more important things to worry about than asking a/s/l. He'll likely just answer "no.""
Oh yeah, nice way to act unsuspicious, saying no to a bit of virtual tail.
Anyway, I think the game was intended to smoke out the FBI agents, not the terrorists.
"If you need a secret channel to set up a secret channel, you still ain't got nothing."
This is why espionage is such a nerve-wrecking business. Spies trust no-one; everybody could be a mole. At one point, they probably stop trusting themselves.
At one point in the chain, you have to trust someone.
"If the cities and townships involved were concerned about it, they could most easily pass legislation to deal with it effectively since the company doing it is well known. They apparently haven't."
And if DB doesn't want unlocked bikes to be taken home for months in a row, they would work out a system by which this would be impossible. Apparently they haven't.
Calling someone a thief who is not a thief is a crime, at least in my neck of the woods. Since I do not have the time to play cop, I expect all you indignant thief-callers to go the police station and report yourselves.
"If you "borrow" the bike you are effectively preventing a possible usage by a paying customer."
If I rent the bike, I am also preventing a possible usage by another paying customer. As a matter of fact, there are dozens of ways I may prevent possible usage. The reason it is not a clear-cut case of stealing, is because DB made the bikes available so that they could be used. The general public has no contract with DB stating which uses are valid and which are not.
Some ten or twenty years ago, supermarkets over here had a huge problem with trolleys being taken home and being used there for whatever purposes. When is taking home stealing? Who decides that?
Slashdot Mirror
I read stories of copied websites everyday, and usually they are a damn sight more interesting. Why is this on Slashdot? The only thing remotely remarkable about this whole story, is that the software maker did not start civil and instigate criminal procedures. For all he knows, people are still selling his software. And we all know what great customer service criminals give, and how well that will reflect on his name.
"Some truth", is that the same sort of thing as "a little bit pregnant"?
Ah, OK, you see, you can prove anything with facts.
So, now you have identified the people who think the US government should focus on catching spammers rather than filesharers, why don't you go ask them your question. Seems to me, they're the only ones who can answer it.
"Maybe you shouldn't have given up our right to bear arms..."
So, when is the last time you shot a cop? Ask David Koresh what the right to bear arms means in America. Oops! He dead you smart-ass mo-fo!
" Here is a good reason: I create the intellectual property"
It's not property.
"spending my time, money and effort. I should be able to do whatever I please with it"
No. You should not be allowed to bother me with it. Yours must be the uggliest website of 2004. I should not have been exposed to it. But since I have been exposed to it, I think that entitles me to one or two things.
Your works are yours until you publish them. Then they become public property. If you don't like those rules, I suggest you move to some planet where they care about what you like.
"and have it enforced in any legal manner I see fit."
Have what "enforced"?
You are making so little sense, that I suggest you ingest some of that intellectual property you're going on about. Perhaps you'll learn something.
"I should also be able to have it protected"
Surely you mean you should have your interests protected? Protecting a work can only be done by allowing as many people as possible to run with it. Information wants to be free. So far you seem to be arguing against that, so your application of the word "protect" in this case seems unfortunate.
"and since I am the tiny guy working out of my garage and do not have the money to do the research or enforce such a law - I ask that the government help protect me from the big mean people who would steal my work"
It's not stealing. Stealing means you cannot use it anymore.
"because they are too inconsiderate to respect my hard work."
There's no law that obliges anyone to respect another person's hard work. If ever such a law was passed, the makers should be taken out back and shot. And their newts too.
This is a free country--if you want to work hard, that is your prerogative. If you do not want to work at all, that's your choice too. If you push the products of your work onto my lawn, those products becomes mine.
Copyrights are a form of welfare--and although I am not opposed to them in principle, their current application causes more problems than they are worth.
"Troll or not, he makes a point."
No, he doesn't. For one thing, people generally do not moan that government should look the other way when they are copying cds. He is setting up an argument that he can refute, even if nobody ever uses that argument.
Second, he is asking "why is it". Who could ever answer that? Can the OP look into people's heads? Can I?
He is just trolling, and you know it.
" Why is it that when governments enforce copyright laws, people piss and moan about the other more important things they should be focusing on"
Have you got examples of people doing this? Or are you just setting up a straw-man?
"Yes, there would be joe-jobs, but our legal system is quite capable of dealing with that sort of thing."
One of the items that the Dutch spammer who received the biggest fine was fined for, was a joe-job.
So, does cleaning the toilets at the Rochester Institute of Technology pay well these days?
"If this was true, I would join you, but I don't think it is true. Patents have served a major part in driving technolgy forward for hundreds of years. Why do you suddenly think it won't work any more?"
I am not convinced that patents have been a greater contributing factor in driven technology forward than in slowing technology down. Also, I am always a bit surprised when people use community driven websites, built using PHP and mySQL, served by Apache over the internet to make their point. You are using all these open technologies to tell me that closed technologies are good... I find that a bit ironic. Surely, you do not really believe that these technologies would allow you to express yourself so well, or perhaps even better, if software patents had been here earlier?
"They have no incentive to try to develop it because you have removed that incentive. HOw do you know how many such improvements you have lost? I surely do not know either, but I can see historical evidence that providing the incentive for improvement pays off to society in the end."
I can see historical evidence that not everybody needs the same incentives, and I can see historical evidence where monopolies atrophied and killed markets.
"Patents are ther to encourage disclosure of improvements to the world."
The other day I was talking to my cousin. He is a salesperson for a company that supplies building materials. He told me with great pride that they had developed a unique method of creating stiff boards using glue and waste materials; those boards supposedly are much more environmental friendly than all direct competitors. Because development took them a great deal of time, of course they patented the invention. I said: "That's great. The license fees must bring in a fortune!" He replied: "License fees? Are you nuts? We're keeping this baby to ourselves!" I asked: "So, how is this going to help the environment again?"
My cousin changed the subject.
Patents are monopolies, and as monopolies they are competition killers. They are specifically not meant to encourage disclosure of the invention. Only proponents of more or stronger patents use this argument.
In the end, when law makers are facing the choice of introducing the law, they must ask themselves: will this law do more good than harm? If they are not absolutely sure, they must reject the law. In the case of software patents, what little proof there is seems to point to more harm.
(Unfortunately, as tends to happen in discussions about CPT, there is actually very little evidence of anything.)
Where are the e-ink picture frames?
"What if I came by your home one night took you car to joy-ride in it and then returned it a week later."
My car is not available for public use, not even if people push coins through the radiator. It is not being advertised as being available for public use. I am not 'stealing' public space by parking 1700 cars all over town.
Anyway, a lot of human behaviour is not regulated, or vaguely so. This is A Good Thing, but undoubtedly also an affront to the likes of you, who would like clear, black and white lines for every conceivable situation. I happen to believe that the likes of you are also the most likely to commit the crimes you suspect others of. You will get what you wish for.
"So why is it that it's beneficial for innovation and the economy to issue a patent on the apple sorter, but not the database sorter? If you want to argue that all patents are bad for innovation and the economy, fine, but almost all countries disagree and have patent laws."
All countries have _limited_ patent laws. Patents rarely last for ever, for instance, and rarely apply to every type of 'invention'. These limitations are not inherent to the nature of patents, but rather are a result of the law.
Patents are a type of industry regulation. The sort of patents a country should allow depends on the benefits for society. Generally, modern capitalist societies see innovation as an important benefit; they see innovation mainly as the result of healthy markets, and see competition mainly as a measure of healthy markets.
The little we know about software patents seems to suggest that they are abundantly used for stark anti-competitive, anti-innovation behaviour. That is why at this point in time, our western, capitalist societies should reject software patents.
For the EU, the situation is even clearer. The EU is a net importer of patent and copyright licenses. The companies waiting in the wings for software patents to happen are predominantly American and Asian. Software patents in the EU would mean that gobs and gobs of our money should be given away.
Furthermore, an apple-sorting machine is not trivial to make. A data-sorting program is trivial to make.
And yes, I am for the abolishment of all patents. They were introduced in a time when inventing something meant building it. A huge investment of time and materials were required--you know the sort of thing: inventing a better lightbulb (scroll down to incandescent lamps for the English text).
Nowadays, however, inventions more and more acquire a software-like nature; development and testing can take place in virtual environments, often cutting down on investments. This means that the patent on the modern-day apple-sorting machine comes cheaper, and can also be used for anti-competitive behaviour, which seems reason enough for me to shut that whole racket down.
The chairman considered this item to be a formality, and thus it could be dealt with by ministers who knew nothing about the subject. All they had to do was vote how they had been told to vote.
The dogs are barking, yet the camels are silently walking the desert. Nudge nudge, wink wink.
To the contrary, the Western governments have taken the first important (and only) step towards eliminating terrorism. They have taken a word, 'terrorism', and applied it to almost everything. That has devalued the meaning of the word immensely. As soon as 'terrorism' has become as meaningless as 'anarchism' or 'witchcraft', the government will have effectively eliminated 'terrorism'.
(Of course, they won't stop the odd loon carrying a bomb or poison, but then again I doubt they want to; random explosions keep the populace docile.)
That's not spam, that's terrorists communicating.
(Somehow I'd like to sell this idea to governments.)
Well, they had witches in the eighteenth century, anarchists in the first half of the twentieth, I guess it was just time for a new label that governments could use willy-nilly to keep the population scared.
"The U.S. has lower unemployment than nearly every European country, except the Netherlands. Of course, it's easy to keep women employed there, if you know what I mean."
To hell with employement figures, we're sending your sisters back!
There are countries where this is already happening. These are the sort of countries the US like to denounce as being communist.
Because the channel may not stay secure, yet you may want to keep using it, as setting up a new 100% secure channel is too much trouble.
This is why the German military could succesfully use the Enigma cipher machine for publicly transmitted messages for years on end; as long as the key was not available, the messages could not be deciphered.
Or to put it in other words: you use a secret, secure, but vulnerable channel to set up a public, secure, unvulnerable channel. When the government outlaws the latter, you hide your messages as noise in patterns. When the other side discovers your key, the other side switches to keeping that fact a secret, in order to find out as much about you as possible. In order to find out whether you have been compromised, you send bogus messages from time, to see if they are acted upon. The other side knows this. This is where any number of people involved are getting severe headaches trying to outsmart eachother. If headaches were lethal, evolution would do its good work a damn sight quicker.
"More likely than not, anyone with nefarious purposes in mind has more important things to worry about than asking a/s/l. He'll likely just answer "no.""
Oh yeah, nice way to act unsuspicious, saying no to a bit of virtual tail.
Anyway, I think the game was intended to smoke out the FBI agents, not the terrorists.
"If you need a secret channel to set up a secret channel, you still ain't got nothing."
This is why espionage is such a nerve-wrecking business. Spies trust no-one; everybody could be a mole. At one point, they probably stop trusting themselves.
At one point in the chain, you have to trust someone.
"If the cities and townships involved were concerned about it, they could most easily pass legislation to deal with it effectively since the company doing it is well known. They apparently haven't."
And if DB doesn't want unlocked bikes to be taken home for months in a row, they would work out a system by which this would be impossible. Apparently they haven't.
Calling someone a thief who is not a thief is a crime, at least in my neck of the woods. Since I do not have the time to play cop, I expect all you indignant thief-callers to go the police station and report yourselves.
"If you "borrow" the bike you are effectively preventing a possible usage by a paying customer."
If I rent the bike, I am also preventing a possible usage by another paying customer. As a matter of fact, there are dozens of ways I may prevent possible usage. The reason it is not a clear-cut case of stealing, is because DB made the bikes available so that they could be used. The general public has no contract with DB stating which uses are valid and which are not.
Some ten or twenty years ago, supermarkets over here had a huge problem with trolleys being taken home and being used there for whatever purposes. When is taking home stealing? Who decides that?