I believe that they even have multiple projects going on for the same thing and one gets picked and the others get scrapped.
That's an old IBM strategy and, if you can do it right, it actually makes sense when you are at the top of the industry. Firstly, there's always the problem that your developers don't feel the fear of competition on the back of their necks and so don't strive to be the best. If you know you only have a one in three chance of your project going through then you will never have that situation. Secondly, most software development fails. Despite what some "software engineering" people tell you it is nothing like building bridges and small almost random aesthetic decisions early in the development process can completely change the long term logic of your architecture and so how easy it is to use. Developing things three times and independently theoretically means that you have three times the chance to get it right. I think in Microsoft's case this falls down for two reasons. Firstly, it seems that they don't actually cancel all but one project; the office group chooses their own and the OS group also chooses their own. Secondly, the common company culture likely means that all three development efforts come up with similar designs with similar problems.
You should try Fedora, imo it's a lot better than Ubuntu/Debian. And it's backed by Red Hat, which is a lot larger and older than Canonical.
Horses for courses. I love Fedora, but you don't get long term support. Don't forget CentOS which is also an RPM based free distro.
Actually, CentOS/Fedora and RHEL together make quite a nice solution since they have many similarities and you can just switch between them according to the particular needs of a particular application.
I get where you are coming from, and our tax advisers, I'm sure, say much the same as you do. However, years of work in "multinationals" has lead me to a fine understanding that the system works in our (the multi-nationals) favour.
For example, what if you do all of your R&D in South Dakota, then pack up and ship all your product from North Dakota, but California sales reps account for 95% of your revenue? Where did you "earn money" that you "pay a percentage to the government" ?
barring your legal minimum margin (mostly zero), "wherever the tax rate is lowest". I mean that wasn't even difficult. If you want an encore, I can even answer the "when we write this contract, should the profit be in licenses, services or capital expenditure" question.
Generally speaking, there's always some grey, but there are pretty clear areas where most of the money is being made in one area but the tax is being paid elsewhere. When that's happening, the tax authorities of both places should be fixing the system. If the multinationals feel that they have to take advantage of loopholes which allow this at least they should be stating very clearly and openly what they are doing and why so that those people are under pressure to fix. When they do it secretly (as is standard now) their officers should end up being arrested.
That's very simple to answer. Try not paying taxes in a serious way and whichever one turns up with the most weapons will answer the question for you.
C'mon that's an answer which all box fitting people ("conservative", "libertarian", "liberal" or "anarcho-capitalist" or whatever) should be able to agree on.
The tax system should be pretty simple. Whenever you earn money you pay a percentage to the government. The reason it is so complex almost everywhere is precisely because companies like Microsoft lobby to get little exceptions. Look at the percentage mentioned in this article. 1Billion in 143Billion? You try to find a civilised place (where anybody sane wants to live; I'm looking at you Bridge to Nowhere Land) where you can pay 0.6% tax.
Why do you think Nevada has such strange taxes? Because they want to attract companies like Microsoft who only do anything at all there because of this. Large amounts of the "intellectual property" "economy" are basically a tax dodge to shift earnings from places where people do work to offshore companies which own trademarks. Again; who's lobbying for "intellectual property" protection and why?
One of Nokia's problems with selling phones is that their interface hasn't been updated enough. Apple has many patents on the iphone interface and has threatened people who might want to use them. Most likely, if Nokia had access to Apple's patented technology, which is the most likely outcome of such a lawsuit, then they would be able to sell more phones.
Seeing all the replies here, I am left wondering why people hate patents so much.
I think that it's because your description is quite idealistic and doesn't work in real life. Patent lawsuits require huge amounts of capital and so are simply not available to the average small doctor inventor. This means that only big companies can use patents and the small inventor is left at the bottom of a delivery chain which gives him nothing. Secondly patents are mostly nullified in cross licensing agreements. Each of the main players in an industry will agree with the others to royalty free or fixed royalty use of each other's patents. Any new player has to come in and negotiate from a much weaker stance, ending up paying much more. Patents end up re-inforcing the power of big compaies.
there are other issues also: patent lawyers are continually trying to push patents where they don't belong (e.g. software or living organisms) and end up coming across as seriously evil.
There is sort of a hope out there that most voters will remain above the fray, but in practice this is a misplaced hope most of the time.
most of the time the people sent to the standards are paid specifically to get what are called "fundamental patents" into the standard. That is where you have patented one particular way to do something (we do remember patents are about methods, not objectives) and you manage to get the standard to say that it will be done in the way your patent says it will be done.
this is basically a fun drinking game. You sit there for hours stoney faced saying "no" all day for the first day and explaining deep technical reasons why your competition's patent won't work in this sitation. Then in the evening you go out and get seriously drunk. Whilst drunk you start trading off what things each person really wants to get in to the standard. Then the next day, those who can still remember what was said get their way with the standard and only serious and proper persuasive arguments combined with good blackmail drinking photos are allowed to change the agreements of the previous night on pain of ostracism.
In telecomms standards this isn't even particularly immoral since the companies playing are all big boys who can take it. In the example before us we have Apple; about 9 on a scale of 1 to 10 for "intellectual property" evil and Nokia (about 7 or 9 but with a tendancy towards 10). Remember Apple is the company which inspired the League for Programming freedom. In fact Apple is arguably worse than Microsoft (has done more in practice; but doesn't go in for unsubtle bully boy threats) and is only clearly less Evil than Qualcomm (rates 15 on our earlier scale of 1 to 10).
Whilst I'm definitely anti software patent, and strongly believe in controlling the influence of other patents, this is a lawsuit happening to a company that really really had it coming to them.
The chip vendor should be paying the licensing, not the company that uses the chips.
If the chip vendor is in a country where patents don't apply, selling to a place where they aren't enforced, why should they? It's Apple doing the importing.
This isn't about the patents. This is about Nokia seeing their lucrative smart phone market get a serious bite taken out of it and digging through their patent portfolio to try to find a way to stifle competition.
More likely it's about Apple refusing to license their multi-touch patents (have you noticed that no other phone has the pinch gesture; now you know why). Nokia is saying "we can play that too.."
I'm still skeptical that Sequoia or Deibold are purposefully trying to manipulate elections.
Sequoi and Deibold are corporations; abstract concepts which can't actually do anything. Most likely some specific people in each company are manipulating the votes whilst the rest know nothing.
... gives an inventor the right to exclude others from his invention. This is directly analogous to property law,
It should be noted that whilst exclusion has traditionally been included in lists of properties of property this was actually incorrect. Exclusion is not accepted for most of Scandinavian private land; rights of way are included in traditional civil law; easements are standard almost everywhere and the "right to roam" is a standard in all civilised countries. None of these in any way influence the right to hold land as "property". Exclusion is a right commonly associated with property but not inherent in it.
We're not talking about theft - copyright and patent infringement shouldn't be compared to theft. However, they should be compared to trespass: we're talking about someone walking through your house or across your lawn, against your wishes. Nothing is taken, but you've still had your property rights violated.
In both of the cases you are discussing, the important thing violated is not your property rights, but your privacy rights (approximately US 4th amendment rights). There are certainly some (many) areas which implement this through draconian exclusion including all designated private land, however that's not true in many other places. Apart from that I think your point is perfectly acceptable, just in no way specific to property and the trespass analogy is not needed and no better than e.g. an analogy to breach of privacy or to, for example, breach of employment law.
[..] Similarly, they can't exercise their right to free speech with my copyrighted software against my wishes (first sale doctrine aside).
Absolutely they can. It's not even going to be controversial once you think about it. However, the cases are rather limited and definitely don't permit copying whole programs. What are they? Well, basically the free speech right over other people's copyright is known (in the US) as "fair use". The case would be where I want to quote your software to show how you do something bad is clear. I can't quote the whole of it, but I can definitely show the part of a function where you do the thing that I want to talk about.
Furthermore, the concept that because a free software organization is political, all of their actions, whether they be copyright infringement, patent infringement, trademark infringement, trespass, assault, vandalizing property, etc. are all "protected" political speech is just silly. Is everything a politician says political speech, because he's a politician? What if he's just ordering take-out pizza? No. The speech itself must contain political content. Mere use of someone's copyrighted work is not, in itself, political.
right; but that's not what I was talking about. The question is; if the free software foundation releases software as a form of political speech; is that protected? In particular, if they release something like DeCSS in order to show people how to bypass content protection, that's something that could quite reasonably be argued as political.
If a free software organisation releases software containing a patented algorithm in order to inform people how to use that patented algorithm, that is quite likely to be political speech.
In the particular case of software patents (which are evil; hardware patents I suspect are not a bad idea as long as the time limits are shorter than now; e.g. five years for computer technology)
[..] As for the five year limit, that'd be fine... if you could guarantee that these patents were examined within, say, 6 months, instead of the current 2-3 year wait.
100% agreed. All first decisions on the legal system should be quick. Probably the US should think about adopting something like the German legal system.
[..] Patents of any type are most certainly constitutional - they'
"A Fall guy is someone who has been tricked by another person and used by them so that the other person could get something decietfully" (Collins Cobuild)
"Betrayed confederate" (guilty scapegoat); here one criminal (willingly or unwillingly) is arrested and sacrificed, while the rest of the criminals go free. [implies the same as 4, sometimes 3]
Apple, MS and all the other big tech companies thought that they would use patents to lock out the rest of the world leaving only them to innovate at their glacial pace. They entered into an unholy alliance with the "IP" Lawyer types. Now the IP lawyers have got most of what they want but the (at least US, but also to a large degree European) tech companies are being bled dry. The only ones who will do well are those protected by the Chinese govt. The tech companies got in with a bunch of criminals trying to fix the market and ended up as the "fall guys" when the lawyers betrayed them.
You know well, that you are speaking a different language than me and so any debate would be stupid. When you say "intellectual property exists" you mean that there are legal instruments which give specific rights to specific people over specific ideas. When I say "intellectual property doesn't exist" I'm certainly not claiming that copyright and patent law doesn't exist; just that neither are property laws. I see that these rights as different from "property" in that a) "property" is something that you have forever b) property is about "things"; that is to say actual matter. You see that since these rights are assigned to specific people they are "owned" and so are like "property".
The key thing which has to be explained in any case is that the work in very different ways from "property" and that it's misleading and to compare them to property. You can see this very clearly in the "fair use" or "fair dealing" exceptions that are present in most legal systems. You can also see that in the way that "intellectual property" losses (e.g. due to unlicensed copying) are hypothetical where as property losses (e.g. due to theft) are always based on real values
Now; when it comes to legal defences; there are very specific things that this understanding brings us. Firstly, if the organisation being sued is a Free software organisation, then the software package clearly is at least partly political speech. A US court might allow restrictions on that but would have to ignore vast parts of the constitution. Microsoft software, on the other hand is clearly at best commercial speech. A clever company might find a way to benefit from the use of free software for patented activities and gain some protection from unreasonable patent suits.
In the particular case of software patents (which are evil; hardware patents I suspect are not a bad idea as long as the time limits are shorter than now; e.g. five years for computer technology) there are real reasons to think that whilst "intellectual property" (your definition) may exist in general the "intellectual property" that we see before us in a particular court case does not exist. A company like Microsoft, which has sued about patents will always find it's own arguments used against it if it tries to point this out. "How can you claim software patents are unconstitutional if just last week you sued TomTom using one?" On the other hand, a company which has always opposed software patents will likely be push that argument much more strongly.
If a person steals a car; then definitely they are to blame. However, if another person makes a law banning car locks and insisting that everybody else (remember the military-industrial complex doesn't pay for use of patents) has to leave their keys in the car then that person has even more responsibility. There are always going to be some "bad" people somewhere in the world and under the present system almost anyone anywhere can take advantage of East Texas to do cheap and unreasonable patent trolling.
Seems to me that asking for a trial by jury may very well backfire on them.
Most likely not. Juries are not likely to be very technically apt. It's almost certain that they will ask "have you ever used ethernet" during jury selection and avoid those people who know that they have.
After that everyone will realise why it's called "intellectual property" by the fraudsters who run our legal systems. The way it's presented the patent makes this patent someone's possession. The jury just thinks "I wouldn't like it if someone took my car away from me; they should be going to prison and not just paying a fine". The compensation ends up massive.
The problem is that all these companies have set themselves up as fall guys since they all have legal departments which spout off about "respecting intellectual property". They can't even use the argument that there is no such thing because their own press releases would be used against them.
finally; blaming the patent troll is a bit stupid. They are an inevitable part of a system which tries to treat ideas like property. There are two groups available here to blame. Those that set the laws take most of the blame and the IEEE where 3COM was a member at the time the standard was set should take the rest. Organisations involved in standardisation should be required to defend the free use of a standard with all their patents.
I'm a great believer in joking about almost anything. However, often the joke says something about the person who's making it. In this case the joke is old and tired (so it says the person is pretty boring and staid). At the same time, the way it's made makes it pretty clear that the joke is made by a person who is responsible for the situation (US citizens could try to press for improvement) knows what it is (terrible) and plans to do nothing about it. Think about the influence this has on people from the outside. Claims that prison incidents in Iraq were one off accidents ring pretty hollow to any Iraqi who sees that Americans really don't care about their own prisoners.
So; there's nothing wrong with a good joke about anything, but a bad joke is a bad joke and sometimes unforgivable.
No what's funny is that a nation which is already joking about his prison rape before he's even been found guilty runs around the world trying to impose their view of human rights on everyone else.
Note that they seem to have added this information (addendum 10/16/09) after my comment; before there was nothing saying that it was "available for copying with no restrictions". All I can say is thanks. That was nice.
someone is going to say legal blahblah necessary blahblah.
No; I'm going to say that some / most trademarks are useful (like Linux(R)). If the Linux(R) trademark gets diluted and became a common term for operating system that would make me sad (on the other hand I don't see that Windows has the right to exist - it's pretty clear they only escaped from the Lindows case by paying their way out). In the case of Linux(R) I don't see that it causes any problems to anyone. IF, by reminding people that Linux(R) is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds God kills a kitten then He is entirely responsible for His own actions.
(Linux is a trademark of Linus Torvalds - other terms used in this posting may or may not be trademarks of their respective owners or not. Killing kittens is BAD(TM).)
. In the technical, mathematical sense, of course there is
You say
Of course there's a chance to win. There's also more than one chance to lose.
RTFA Troll does not write his posts for you to fail to read in detail. To deserve a response student must study. Do not to repeat points already covered.
(read in Mr. Miyagi voice after at least two large glasses of cheap but good Portugese wine)
High rollers; may have indefinite funds; certainly as large as the Casino. The problem is the same at all levels. There are people losing millions, but it doesn't matter because it's just pocket change to them.
If I walk into a place with 100 grand and walk out with 110 grand, I won ten grand.
sure sure; just as long as we ignore the other 600grand you already dumped into the place in your previous visits. It's all a matter of sanity^W definitions. Feel free to stick to your definition of "win" and I'll stick to mine. Than you.
Slashdot Mirror
I believe that they even have multiple projects going on for the same thing and one gets picked and the others get scrapped.
That's an old IBM strategy and, if you can do it right, it actually makes sense when you are at the top of the industry. Firstly, there's always the problem that your developers don't feel the fear of competition on the back of their necks and so don't strive to be the best. If you know you only have a one in three chance of your project going through then you will never have that situation. Secondly, most software development fails. Despite what some "software engineering" people tell you it is nothing like building bridges and small almost random aesthetic decisions early in the development process can completely change the long term logic of your architecture and so how easy it is to use. Developing things three times and independently theoretically means that you have three times the chance to get it right. I think in Microsoft's case this falls down for two reasons. Firstly, it seems that they don't actually cancel all but one project; the office group chooses their own and the OS group also chooses their own. Secondly, the common company culture likely means that all three development efforts come up with similar designs with similar problems.
You should try Fedora, imo it's a lot better than Ubuntu/Debian. And it's backed by Red Hat, which is a lot larger and older than Canonical.
Horses for courses. I love Fedora, but you don't get long term support. Don't forget CentOS which is also an RPM based free distro.
Actually, CentOS/Fedora and RHEL together make quite a nice solution since they have many similarities and you can just switch between them according to the particular needs of a particular application.
I get where you are coming from, and our tax advisers, I'm sure, say much the same as you do. However, years of work in "multinationals" has lead me to a fine understanding that the system works in our (the multi-nationals) favour.
For example, what if you do all of your R&D in South Dakota, then pack up and ship all your product from North Dakota, but California sales reps account for 95% of your revenue? Where did you "earn money" that you "pay a percentage to the government" ?
barring your legal minimum margin (mostly zero), "wherever the tax rate is lowest". I mean that wasn't even difficult. If you want an encore, I can even answer the "when we write this contract, should the profit be in licenses, services or capital expenditure" question.
Generally speaking, there's always some grey, but there are pretty clear areas where most of the money is being made in one area but the tax is being paid elsewhere. When that's happening, the tax authorities of both places should be fixing the system. If the multinationals feel that they have to take advantage of loopholes which allow this at least they should be stating very clearly and openly what they are doing and why so that those people are under pressure to fix. When they do it secretly (as is standard now) their officers should end up being arrested.
That's very simple to answer. Try not paying taxes in a serious way and whichever one turns up with the most weapons will answer the question for you.
C'mon that's an answer which all box fitting people ("conservative", "libertarian", "liberal" or "anarcho-capitalist" or whatever) should be able to agree on.
The tax system should be pretty simple. Whenever you earn money you pay a percentage to the government. The reason it is so complex almost everywhere is precisely because companies like Microsoft lobby to get little exceptions. Look at the percentage mentioned in this article. 1Billion in 143Billion? You try to find a civilised place (where anybody sane wants to live; I'm looking at you Bridge to Nowhere Land) where you can pay 0.6% tax.
Why do you think Nevada has such strange taxes? Because they want to attract companies like Microsoft who only do anything at all there because of this. Large amounts of the "intellectual property" "economy" are basically a tax dodge to shift earnings from places where people do work to offshore companies which own trademarks. Again; who's lobbying for "intellectual property" protection and why?
One of Nokia's problems with selling phones is that their interface hasn't been updated enough. Apple has many patents on the iphone interface and has threatened people who might want to use them. Most likely, if Nokia had access to Apple's patented technology, which is the most likely outcome of such a lawsuit, then they would be able to sell more phones.
Interesting. Do you know if they paid up for a license? Here's a link about Apple patents that a bit of googling found.
Seeing all the replies here, I am left wondering why people hate patents so much.
I think that it's because your description is quite idealistic and doesn't work in real life. Patent lawsuits require huge amounts of capital and so are simply not available to the average small doctor inventor. This means that only big companies can use patents and the small inventor is left at the bottom of a delivery chain which gives him nothing. Secondly patents are mostly nullified in cross licensing agreements. Each of the main players in an industry will agree with the others to royalty free or fixed royalty use of each other's patents. Any new player has to come in and negotiate from a much weaker stance, ending up paying much more. Patents end up re-inforcing the power of big compaies.
there are other issues also: patent lawyers are continually trying to push patents where they don't belong (e.g. software or living organisms) and end up coming across as seriously evil.
Why would someone not developing GSM silicon have to pay to license patents on GSM silicon?
Err. Because they bought from a company which didn't pay a for a license? Next please.
There is sort of a hope out there that most voters will remain above the fray, but in practice this is a misplaced hope most of the time.
most of the time the people sent to the standards are paid specifically to get what are called "fundamental patents" into the standard. That is where you have patented one particular way to do something (we do remember patents are about methods, not objectives) and you manage to get the standard to say that it will be done in the way your patent says it will be done.
this is basically a fun drinking game. You sit there for hours stoney faced saying "no" all day for the first day and explaining deep technical reasons why your competition's patent won't work in this sitation. Then in the evening you go out and get seriously drunk. Whilst drunk you start trading off what things each person really wants to get in to the standard. Then the next day, those who can still remember what was said get their way with the standard and only serious and proper persuasive arguments combined with good blackmail drinking photos are allowed to change the agreements of the previous night on pain of ostracism.
In telecomms standards this isn't even particularly immoral since the companies playing are all big boys who can take it. In the example before us we have Apple; about 9 on a scale of 1 to 10 for "intellectual property" evil and Nokia (about 7 or 9 but with a tendancy towards 10). Remember Apple is the company which inspired the League for Programming freedom. In fact Apple is arguably worse than Microsoft (has done more in practice; but doesn't go in for unsubtle bully boy threats) and is only clearly less Evil than Qualcomm (rates 15 on our earlier scale of 1 to 10).
Whilst I'm definitely anti software patent, and strongly believe in controlling the influence of other patents, this is a lawsuit happening to a company that really really had it coming to them.
The chip vendor should be paying the licensing, not the company that uses the chips.
If the chip vendor is in a country where patents don't apply, selling to a place where they aren't enforced, why should they? It's Apple doing the importing.
This isn't about the patents. This is about Nokia seeing their lucrative smart phone market get a serious bite taken out of it and digging through their patent portfolio to try to find a way to stifle competition.
More likely it's about Apple refusing to license their multi-touch patents (have you noticed that no other phone has the pinch gesture; now you know why). Nokia is saying "we can play that too.."
Do they really expect to be able to review all 80,000 + iPhone apps, 10,000+ Android apps,
You just wait till I tell them about the javascript apps embedded in many web pages.
I'm still skeptical that Sequoia or Deibold are purposefully trying to manipulate elections.
Sequoi and Deibold are corporations; abstract concepts which can't actually do anything. Most likely some specific people in each company are manipulating the votes whilst the rest know nothing.
... gives an inventor the right to exclude others from his invention. This is directly analogous to property law,
It should be noted that whilst exclusion has traditionally been included in lists of properties of property this was actually incorrect. Exclusion is not accepted for most of Scandinavian private land; rights of way are included in traditional civil law; easements are standard almost everywhere and the "right to roam" is a standard in all civilised countries. None of these in any way influence the right to hold land as "property". Exclusion is a right commonly associated with property but not inherent in it.
We're not talking about theft - copyright and patent infringement shouldn't be compared to theft. However, they should be compared to trespass: we're talking about someone walking through your house or across your lawn, against your wishes. Nothing is taken, but you've still had your property rights violated.
In both of the cases you are discussing, the important thing violated is not your property rights, but your privacy rights (approximately US 4th amendment rights). There are certainly some (many) areas which implement this through draconian exclusion including all designated private land, however that's not true in many other places. Apart from that I think your point is perfectly acceptable, just in no way specific to property and the trespass analogy is not needed and no better than e.g. an analogy to breach of privacy or to, for example, breach of employment law.
[..] Similarly, they can't exercise their right to free speech with my copyrighted software against my wishes (first sale doctrine aside).
Absolutely they can. It's not even going to be controversial once you think about it. However, the cases are rather limited and definitely don't permit copying whole programs. What are they? Well, basically the free speech right over other people's copyright is known (in the US) as "fair use". The case would be where I want to quote your software to show how you do something bad is clear. I can't quote the whole of it, but I can definitely show the part of a function where you do the thing that I want to talk about.
Furthermore, the concept that because a free software organization is political, all of their actions, whether they be copyright infringement, patent infringement, trademark infringement, trespass, assault, vandalizing property, etc. are all "protected" political speech is just silly. Is everything a politician says political speech, because he's a politician? What if he's just ordering take-out pizza? No. The speech itself must contain political content. Mere use of someone's copyrighted work is not, in itself, political.
right; but that's not what I was talking about. The question is; if the free software foundation releases software as a form of political speech; is that protected? In particular, if they release something like DeCSS in order to show people how to bypass content protection, that's something that could quite reasonably be argued as political.
If a free software organisation releases software containing a patented algorithm in order to inform people how to use that patented algorithm, that is quite likely to be political speech.
In the particular case of software patents (which are evil; hardware patents I suspect are not a bad idea as long as the time limits are shorter than now; e.g. five years for computer technology)
[..] As for the five year limit, that'd be fine... if you could guarantee that these patents were examined within, say, 6 months, instead of the current 2-3 year wait.
100% agreed. All first decisions on the legal system should be quick. Probably the US should think about adopting something like the German legal system.
[..] Patents of any type are most certainly constitutional - they'
"A Fall guy is someone who has been tricked by another person and used by them so that the other person could get something decietfully" (Collins Cobuild)
"Betrayed confederate" (guilty scapegoat); here one criminal (willingly or unwillingly) is arrested and sacrificed, while the rest of the criminals go free. [implies the same as 4, sometimes 3]
Apple, MS and all the other big tech companies thought that they would use patents to lock out the rest of the world leaving only them to innovate at their glacial pace. They entered into an unholy alliance with the "IP" Lawyer types. Now the IP lawyers have got most of what they want but the (at least US, but also to a large degree European) tech companies are being bled dry. The only ones who will do well are those protected by the Chinese govt. The tech companies got in with a bunch of criminals trying to fix the market and ended up as the "fall guys" when the lawyers betrayed them.
Seem reasonable?
You know well, that you are speaking a different language than me and so any debate would be stupid. When you say "intellectual property exists" you mean that there are legal instruments which give specific rights to specific people over specific ideas. When I say "intellectual property doesn't exist" I'm certainly not claiming that copyright and patent law doesn't exist; just that neither are property laws. I see that these rights as different from "property" in that a) "property" is something that you have forever b) property is about "things"; that is to say actual matter. You see that since these rights are assigned to specific people they are "owned" and so are like "property".
The key thing which has to be explained in any case is that the work in very different ways from "property" and that it's misleading and to compare them to property. You can see this very clearly in the "fair use" or "fair dealing" exceptions that are present in most legal systems. You can also see that in the way that "intellectual property" losses (e.g. due to unlicensed copying) are hypothetical where as property losses (e.g. due to theft) are always based on real values
Now; when it comes to legal defences; there are very specific things that this understanding brings us. Firstly, if the organisation being sued is a Free software organisation, then the software package clearly is at least partly political speech. A US court might allow restrictions on that but would have to ignore vast parts of the constitution. Microsoft software, on the other hand is clearly at best commercial speech. A clever company might find a way to benefit from the use of free software for patented activities and gain some protection from unreasonable patent suits.
In the particular case of software patents (which are evil; hardware patents I suspect are not a bad idea as long as the time limits are shorter than now; e.g. five years for computer technology) there are real reasons to think that whilst "intellectual property" (your definition) may exist in general the "intellectual property" that we see before us in a particular court case does not exist. A company like Microsoft, which has sued about patents will always find it's own arguments used against it if it tries to point this out. "How can you claim software patents are unconstitutional if just last week you sued TomTom using one?" On the other hand, a company which has always opposed software patents will likely be push that argument much more strongly.
If a person steals a car; then definitely they are to blame. However, if another person makes a law banning car locks and insisting that everybody else (remember the military-industrial complex doesn't pay for use of patents) has to leave their keys in the car then that person has even more responsibility. There are always going to be some "bad" people somewhere in the world and under the present system almost anyone anywhere can take advantage of East Texas to do cheap and unreasonable patent trolling.
Seems to me that asking for a trial by jury may very well backfire on them.
Most likely not. Juries are not likely to be very technically apt. It's almost certain that they will ask "have you ever used ethernet" during jury selection and avoid those people who know that they have.
After that everyone will realise why it's called "intellectual property" by the fraudsters who run our legal systems. The way it's presented the patent makes this patent someone's possession. The jury just thinks "I wouldn't like it if someone took my car away from me; they should be going to prison and not just paying a fine". The compensation ends up massive.
The problem is that all these companies have set themselves up as fall guys since they all have legal departments which spout off about "respecting intellectual property". They can't even use the argument that there is no such thing because their own press releases would be used against them.
finally; blaming the patent troll is a bit stupid. They are an inevitable part of a system which tries to treat ideas like property. There are two groups available here to blame. Those that set the laws take most of the blame and the IEEE where 3COM was a member at the time the standard was set should take the rest. Organisations involved in standardisation should be required to defend the free use of a standard with all their patents.
I'm a great believer in joking about almost anything. However, often the joke says something about the person who's making it. In this case the joke is old and tired (so it says the person is pretty boring and staid). At the same time, the way it's made makes it pretty clear that the joke is made by a person who is responsible for the situation (US citizens could try to press for improvement) knows what it is (terrible) and plans to do nothing about it. Think about the influence this has on people from the outside. Claims that prison incidents in Iraq were one off accidents ring pretty hollow to any Iraqi who sees that Americans really don't care about their own prisoners.
So; there's nothing wrong with a good joke about anything, but a bad joke is a bad joke and sometimes unforgivable.
No what's funny is that a nation which is already joking about his prison rape before he's even been found guilty runs around the world trying to impose their view of human rights on everyone else.
Note that they seem to have added this information (addendum 10/16/09) after my comment; before there was nothing saying that it was "available for copying with no restrictions". All I can say is thanks. That was nice.
someone is going to say legal blahblah necessary blahblah.
No; I'm going to say that some / most trademarks are useful (like Linux(R)). If the Linux(R) trademark gets diluted and became a common term for operating system that would make me sad (on the other hand I don't see that Windows has the right to exist - it's pretty clear they only escaped from the Lindows case by paying their way out). In the case of Linux(R) I don't see that it causes any problems to anyone. IF, by reminding people that Linux(R) is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds God kills a kitten then He is entirely responsible for His own actions. (Linux is a trademark of Linus Torvalds - other terms used in this posting may or may not be trademarks of their respective owners or not. Killing kittens is BAD(TM).)
. In the technical, mathematical sense, of course there is
You say
Of course there's a chance to win. There's also more than one chance to lose.
RTFA Troll does not write his posts for you to fail to read in detail. To deserve a response student must study. Do not to repeat points already covered.
(read in Mr. Miyagi voice after at least two large glasses of cheap but good Portugese wine)
High rollers; may have indefinite funds; certainly as large as the Casino. The problem is the same at all levels. There are people losing millions, but it doesn't matter because it's just pocket change to them.
If I walk into a place with 100 grand and walk out with 110 grand, I won ten grand.
sure sure; just as long as we ignore the other 600grand you already dumped into the place in your previous visits. It's all a matter of sanity^W definitions. Feel free to stick to your definition of "win" and I'll stick to mine. Than you.
A major one.