I think he meant it in the sense of "to be stigmatised by something". From my dictionary:
(usu. be stigmatized) describe or regard as worthy of disgrace or great disapproval : the institution was stigmatized as a last resort for the destitute.
I think what the GP was trying to say is that being concerned about the environment does not necessarily have anything to do with tree hugging or fluffy animals. If you are not religious and do not believe in a grand scheme or inherent purpose of it all, then the Earth and everything else are simply a bunch of atoms combined with chemical reactions.
Sure, our actions may destroy this planet as we know it much sooner than would otherwise be the case, but the universe won't cease to exist because of this. And the planet may just start more or less anew in a couple of millions of years. It's like if there once was intelligent life on Mars and that somehow eradicated itself. Sure, it's too bad we can't communicate now with those little green men, but compared to the size and possibilities of the entire universe, it's nothing of a real significance.
If you look at it from a purely rational point, the only reason to care for the environment is to ascertain the continued existence of the human race (and the other species that currently live here, but that's the same as everything is interconnected). Because in the larger view of the entire universe, it just does not matter what we do or don't do. Even if our choices now would at one time or another affect the outcome an event with large consequences in the future, it still doesn't really matter: in the world of vacuum, atoms and chemical reactions there is no "wrong" and "right" or "what should have happened".
Of course, most humans do have a sense of moral responsibility and fortunately do not think about their life and interactions with others in such fatalistic terms (I don't either, for that matter). But in the end I think that moral responsibility is simply something which is part of our survival capabilities. Without enough of it, Darwinism will simply make us extinct because we lack essential qualities to survive.
So people who do not care for the environment because they don't feel any moral responsibility for it, could maybe simply see it as the only way to survive. The only downside may be that things are not (yet) going downhill fast enough for them to realise this, and by the time it does it may be too late for that. And most will probably think they can't do anything about it anyway (although that's incredibly naive and shortsighted, but then again that's fully in line with the rest of their way of thinking).
P2P traffic (except possibly P2P ip telephony) won't be logged. Regarding internet traffic, mainly email and ip telephony will be logged (along with who got which ip address from when till when).
Well, apart from the fact that they are one of the 5 countries which operate Echelon... Don't know though whether they only use it to spy on us Europeans, or also to spy on their own citizens.
I used our overview of all tabled amendments, available here. It's easy to see which amendments were rejected and accepted: everything marked as EPP/PSE was accepted, the rest was rejected. The +/- on that page were our recommendations.
This Directive aims to harmonise the provisions of the Member States concerning obligations on the providers of publicly available electronic communications services or of a public communications network with respect to the retention of certain data which are generated or processed by them, in order to ensure that the data are available for the purpose of the investigation, detection and prosecution of serious crime, as defined by each Member State in its national law.
So nothing specified, and each member state on its own can decide what a "serious crime" is.
Except if they're on iTMS via cdbaby, in which case they get 91% of what cdbaby gets from Apple (don't remember how much that is, but IIRC Apple only takes about 10 cents per song or so).
I've read the installer of the software on the audio cd autostarts under Windows, and that even if you answer "no" to the question whether you want to install that software, it still installs something (though not as much as when you tell it to proceed).
until recently it was entirely clear to the law. Things could have owners and ideas could not.
This is baloney. It's been quite a while since the constitution was written, and right there in Article 1 section 8 clause 8 is the statement by the framers that is the basis for our patent system. Ideas could be owned in 1789, and long before that as well, as England also had a patent system.
Patents (originally) were/are not monopolies on ideas, but on inventions. Those are not quite the same. And originally, all such "inventions" were limited to the physical world. It is only fairly recently that patent offices and courts have started extending what can be protected by patent to the immaterial world.
Even with the latest reform, the USPTO is still paying lip service to the original principle, by demanding a "Concrete, and Tangible Result". Of course, in practice it doesn't exclude much anymore (of course you always want to monopolise real-world actions in the end, and every innovation in the abstract can be applied to the real world if that includes things like "provide a commercial benefit").
And the main problem with these extensions are that they are not based on economic needs, but simply pushed by a small in-crowd who stand to gain from them.
Not to mention the fact that money is an idea, equitable servitudes are ideas, usufructs are ideas, loans are ideas, contracts are ideas, and, now this will really blow your mind --
options on options...
I think you're extending the term "idea" beyond the context in which the author used it. That's easy of course, since "idea" has no legal definition and can be interpreted quite broadly. My interpretation of the article is that the author used idea in a more abstract sense, as in "the idea of using money instead of property", "the idea of lending money" etc.
In this world, size is no protection. It just makes you a more succulent target for enemy lawyers.
I would just like to point out that both sides have lawyers -- this makes it sound like lawyers are the enemy. In fact, lawyers are just the guys that help their clients get what they deserve under the law.
But in general society is better off when less lawyers are needed. After all, (and please don't take this personally) all money that goes into lawyers is money which cannot be invested in useful things (like R&D). It's an overhead cost. And by creating more "rights" you automatically increase the number of lawsuits, license agreements etc.
I'm not saying that a world without rights or lawyers would be ideal, but on the other hand extending rights and adding more rights does increase the overhead and at a certain point starts reducing the overall "justice" and "efficiency" of the system.
People with more money have always been able to hire better lawyers in our legal system, and that problem has nothing to do with intellectual property.
It is an argument to balance the situations in which you may need a lawyer though.
The system is supposed to work this way. It incentivizes companies to research and patent things as fast as they can, pushing the limits of technology, and then disclosing them to the public.
That's the theory, but in practice it doesn't always work that way. Witness e.g. Machlup already saying in the fifties:
If one does not know whether a system "as a whole" (in contrast to certain features of it) is good or bad, the safest "policy conclusion" is to "muddl
It isn't correct to assume that 91/250/EEC implicitly forbids reverse engineering when the conditions of Article 6 are not met.
I meant it implies the rightholder can forbid reverse engineering. And afaik most EULA's do forbid that (although then you of course get in the discussion of the enforceability of EULA's). E.g. Microsoft's WinXP EULA:
5. LIMITATION ON REVERSE ENGINEERING, DECOMPILATION, AND DISASSEMBLY. You may not reverse engineer, decompile, or disassemble the Product, except and only to the extent that it is expressly permitted by applicable law notwithstanding this limitation.
The legal effect of this is that EU member states are not allowed to pass local laws that requires the authorization of the rightholder in the situation described in Article 6.
But as far as I see, it does not prevent rightholders from forbidding reverse engineering in other cases.
Of course the computer programs Directive (91/250/EEC) states reverse engineering for the purpose of making software interoperable as being explicitly allowed.
But I know of no EU laws (or case law) forbidding reverse engineering of software, and I ought to know.
The 91/250/EEC directive states that under certain conditions, a copyright holder cannot forbid reverse engineering. This implies that if those conditions are not met, the copyright holder can forbid it. And article 6.2 says:
2.The provisions of paragraph 1 shall not permit the information obtained through its application:
(a) to be used for goals other than to achieve the interoperability of the independently created computer program;
(b) to be given to others, except when necessary for the interoperability of the independently created computer program; or
(c) to be used for the development, production or marketing of a computer program substantially similar in its expression, or for any other act which infringes copyright.
So maybe you can reverse engineer it if you do nothing at all with the information you gained that way afterwards (not even give it to others), but that's about it.
In 2002, when the EU commission proposed the software patent directive, they wrote: "The proposal therefore reflects concerns that if 'isolated' computer programs could be patented, this would blur the distinction between the scope of copyright and patent protection, and that if enforced, patents including such claims could be used to prevent "reverse engineering" and other activities considered legitimate in respect of computer programs already protected under copyright law."
That was also in relation to interoperability. The reason is that the interoperability exception of copyright law is rendered powerless in the presence of software patents (unless you have a specific exception for interoperability in there as well). After all, even if you manage to reverse engineer the program and create a compatible implementation (legal under copyright law), the software patent will most probably still apply to your independent implementation.
In fact, the reverse engineering itself may not be (legally) possible in the presence of software patents: even though copyright cannot be used to forbid running and analysing a program to figure out how it works (because of the earlier mentioned directive), if a software patent applies to it than a patent license could still be used to forbid running the program for the purpose of reverse engineering it.
You forget the effect of copright in scenario two. Somebody else cannot simply steal your software, so they have to reverse engineer it and create their own software with your idea.
At least in Europe, even reverse engineering is forbidden by copyright law, except for the purpose of making software interoperable with another product.
Scenario one: I'm writing software. I come up with a brilliant idea and put it in my software. When I release it, someone pops up with a patent and says I have to pay royalties.
Scenario two: I'm writing software. I come up with a brilliant idea and put it in my software. When I release it, someone else steals my idea for their own software and releases a competing product.
You can't "steal" something which is no one's property. As of yet, even WIPO and WTO do not recognise "ideas" as someone's property.
Both of these scenarios are clearly wrong, but no patent plan thus far has dealt with any way to prevent both cases. Overuse of software patents creates the first scenario, while lack of software patents creates the second.
The second scenario is not wrong at all. It's the foundation of free competition in the free market economy. Patents are government-mandated monopolies/interference which disturb the free market, and only if their overall effects are positive (i.e., the reduction in competition is more than compensated by an increase in innovation and other benefits to society), then you should apply them.
Your "brilliant thinkers" rant is quite amusing.
Concerning your simple solution to all the problems with (software) patents: people have been saying for decades already that all problems with the patent system can be solved by just doing this or that (better application of novelty/non-obviousness requirements, more funding of patent offices, better training of patent examiners, patent pools,...).
The fact is however that today, things are as bad as ever. And that's not just my opinion, but that of Dr David Martin, CEO of M-CAM, a company specialised in establishing the value of patents and technology transfers.
Until that whole mess is sorted out, the patent system is costing the software economy millions and millions of dollars in patent application fees, costs of setting up licensing deals, fighting lawsuits (have a look at the last slide) etc.
So I suggest you with your brilliant mind first work out the economic model and studies that shows that with your adjustments the patent system is in fact overall beneficial (as opposed to the current situation), then get it turned into a law in the US, that we see whether it in fact works in practice and that only then we start with the legalisation of software patents in Europe under the same regime.
Until then, I prefer not to have that whole administrative and juridical burden imposed on the European software market. And I don't see why people shouldn't argue for removing the burden in the US as well.
Even so, you have to give attribution that you use the library, and provide that library's source and object files on demand.
The latter only to people who legitimately got hold of the binary, and not to anyone else (though you can't stop anyone who legitimately got hold of the source code to redistribute it, of course).
I wonder if someone has made a request to the software firm that wrote the software originally? Because the code is statically linked, they will of course have to make their entire software source available - if I understand this right.
Not necessarily. They have to stop infringing on the copyright of the authors of the LGPL'd library. This can be done by releasing all source code, by dynamically linking against the library or by using another library. In a court, the authors of the library can also ask for damages to compensate them for the infringement (like the RIAA also can ask for damages when suing someone for copyright infringement).
A judge could in theory of course mandate that all source code be released, but that's unlikely. The "virality" of the GPL and LGPL are often overstated. It's true that if you use GPL code in a program which is distributed, the entire program should be released under a GPL compatible license.
It is however not true that if you don't do this, you can automatically be forced to release all that source code. The only thing you can be sure of is that the infringing party can be forced to stop infringing. How exactly this happens is another matter.
They're not stealing code, they're infringing on the author's copyrights by not respecting the license under which the code is be distributed (in exactly the same way people who "share" Sony/BMG music via p2p etc infringe on Sony/BMG's and the the artists' copyrights).
Slashdot always has numerous comments regarding not being able to get dates. Perhaps all those comments are referring to are a nerd's inability to get into a fulfilling long term relationship. But, my guess is that they're all talking about sex.
Probably, yes. But I doubt they'd be happy that long if all they can get is sex, it would probably just start over with "I can't get a relationship". Not for everyone, of course, some people may even value their complete independence over any kind of bonding (even if not as strict as in a traditional marriage), but I don't think this is true for most people (or even for most nerds complaining about their inability to find a date).
Obviously, finding a fulfilling relationship isn't easy for anyone whether they're a nerd or not.
100% agreed.
However, no matter what you're looking for, you can never go wrong with complements. As Homer Simpson put it, when it comes to complements, women are ravenous monsters always wanting more, more more!
<Al Pacino voice>
Vanity, my favourite sin.
</Al Pacino voice>
Most, if not all, people need social achievements to survive, to be able to live with themselves. I know I've tried without and just focussing on work/programming/"creating" when it seemed I didn't really fit in with and that didn't work out that well. And for most people, survival comes before intellectual achievements. I'd say it's even a prerogative:)
I think you're mixing "social achievements" with "blending in with the masses" or "liking or faking to like what everyone else does". Learning social skills does not mean that you learn to be friendly to everyone, that you do the same as everyone or that you fit in perfectly.
For me, it means you learn to function in society without either looking down on yourself ("why don't I like sitting in a pub every night having a beer and talking with lots of people, I must be so anti-social") or without placing yourself on a pedestal ("look at the plebs sitting in their pubs wasting their time and money with bullcrap, I'm above that"). To be happy with who you are for what you are, not for what other people are or aren't.
So I think it's more a state of mind as opposed to particular abilities ("socialising in a pub", "chitchatting",...) or reached "social achievements" ("lots of friends", marriage,...). And that state makes you overall more productive on the intellectual level as well, because you spend much less time wresting with yourself.
I realise this is all pretty abstract and can be easily dismissed as armchair philosophizing, but it works for me.
Sounds like a great start for a very fulfilling and mutually beneficial relation. Unless you're into women who are completely dependent on you, or if you just want a quick date for sex, of course.
Okay, "provisional application." I was wrong to call it a "provisional patent."
But I don't see how this changes anything.
What it changes is that this patent application therefore cannot (yet) be used as a sign to show how broken the USPTO or US Patent System is. Everyone can get a patent application published on pretty much anything, as long as the formal requirements are fulfilled.
The No Software Patents site says that copyright should cover everything that patents cover, and elsewhere that patents are used as guns against small software developers. Um, and copyrights AREN'T used this way?
No. Copyright does not hold in case of independent development, while patents do hold. You cannot "amass a portfolio of copyrights" which then allows you to crush competition which wrote all code themselves. Someone else's patents on the other hand still apply even if you developed something entirely on your own.
C'mon. If patents disappeared tomorrow, the lawyers would find a way of crushing you with copyrights, and you'd have a No Software Copyrights! movement in a minute.
Software copyright existed before software patents. The companies behind the nosoftwarepatents.com campaign earn their money thanks to the copyright they have on their code. I don't see why they would want to abolish copyright. The people behind the nososftwarepatents.com campaign did not originally wage a "nocopyright" campaign and then just switched to patents because it's more contemporary. Please find another strawman.
The problem is not with the protection of ideas, but with the execution of that protection in the business world.
Can you please cite some scientific research which backs up that claim? Here's my collection of research which indicates the contrary.
Maybe 20 years is an inappropriate length for a patent in software; maybe two years would be better. Perhaps patent and copyright duration should be scaled based on the industry, or adjusted based on the commercialization/profit of the IP holder.
The patent system inherently has a huge inherent overhead cost: filing applications, performing prior art research to avoid infringement, licensing deals, lawsuits,... This is not about babies and bath water, but about determining whether it's all worth the trouble. It's not like the software sector needs software patents to function well, and there are an awful lot of indications software patents don't help increasing efficiency.
Proponents of software patents have been claiming for years the whole system can be fixed by just making a few adjustments, but no one has been able to actually argue in economic terms that this is in fact true. And then there's still these pesky details such as the WTO TRIPs treaty, which requires a minimum duration of 17 years for all patents you grant.
There are other ways of dealing with this besides chucking the whole system.
We're not chucking anything, we're preventing the codification of the American system in Europe.
One thing kind of disconcerting about my Powerbook G4 1.2(something) is that it hangs on the "Apple Logo" screen for what seems like forever (more than 30 seconds).
Hold down cmd-v right after pushing the power-on button until you get a console-like screen. Then you can see what's actually happening during most of those 30 seconds.
If the actual content specified by the torrents is junk data and not the actual content, I'm not sure how copyright applies. Surely copyright applies to the actual content of a work, and not a mere label attached to non-content?
Indeed, that's why I said 'Maybe "they can sue based on "intent to violate copyright" or so' and explicitly said 'you did not violate any copyright downloading that stuff'. And the "maybe" was meant to indicate that I don't know whether "intent to violate copyright" is illegal (like "intent to kill someone" is illegal, but that's of course in a whole other ballpark).
Slashdot Mirror
Indeed. Some people should maybe Google a bit for corporate responsibility.
I think what the GP was trying to say is that being concerned about the environment does not necessarily have anything to do with tree hugging or fluffy animals. If you are not religious and do not believe in a grand scheme or inherent purpose of it all, then the Earth and everything else are simply a bunch of atoms combined with chemical reactions.
Sure, our actions may destroy this planet as we know it much sooner than would otherwise be the case, but the universe won't cease to exist because of this. And the planet may just start more or less anew in a couple of millions of years. It's like if there once was intelligent life on Mars and that somehow eradicated itself. Sure, it's too bad we can't communicate now with those little green men, but compared to the size and possibilities of the entire universe, it's nothing of a real significance.
If you look at it from a purely rational point, the only reason to care for the environment is to ascertain the continued existence of the human race (and the other species that currently live here, but that's the same as everything is interconnected). Because in the larger view of the entire universe, it just does not matter what we do or don't do. Even if our choices now would at one time or another affect the outcome an event with large consequences in the future, it still doesn't really matter: in the world of vacuum, atoms and chemical reactions there is no "wrong" and "right" or "what should have happened".
Of course, most humans do have a sense of moral responsibility and fortunately do not think about their life and interactions with others in such fatalistic terms (I don't either, for that matter). But in the end I think that moral responsibility is simply something which is part of our survival capabilities. Without enough of it, Darwinism will simply make us extinct because we lack essential qualities to survive.
So people who do not care for the environment because they don't feel any moral responsibility for it, could maybe simply see it as the only way to survive. The only downside may be that things are not (yet) going downhill fast enough for them to realise this, and by the time it does it may be too late for that. And most will probably think they can't do anything about it anyway (although that's incredibly naive and shortsighted, but then again that's fully in line with the rest of their way of thinking).
It's the literal translation into English of the Dutch (and most probably not just Dutch) word for polar bear.
P2P traffic (except possibly P2P ip telephony) won't be logged. Regarding internet traffic, mainly email and ip telephony will be logged (along with who got which ip address from when till when).
I used our overview of all tabled amendments, available here. It's easy to see which amendments were rejected and accepted: everything marked as EPP/PSE was accepted, the rest was rejected. The +/- on that page were our recommendations.
Except if they're on iTMS via cdbaby, in which case they get 91% of what cdbaby gets from Apple (don't remember how much that is, but IIRC Apple only takes about 10 cents per song or so).
I've read the installer of the software on the audio cd autostarts under Windows, and that even if you answer "no" to the question whether you want to install that software, it still installs something (though not as much as when you tell it to proceed).
Patents (originally) were/are not monopolies on ideas, but on inventions. Those are not quite the same. And originally, all such "inventions" were limited to the physical world. It is only fairly recently that patent offices and courts have started extending what can be protected by patent to the immaterial world.
Even with the latest reform, the USPTO is still paying lip service to the original principle, by demanding a "Concrete, and Tangible Result". Of course, in practice it doesn't exclude much anymore (of course you always want to monopolise real-world actions in the end, and every innovation in the abstract can be applied to the real world if that includes things like "provide a commercial benefit").
And the main problem with these extensions are that they are not based on economic needs, but simply pushed by a small in-crowd who stand to gain from them.
I think you're extending the term "idea" beyond the context in which the author used it. That's easy of course, since "idea" has no legal definition and can be interpreted quite broadly. My interpretation of the article is that the author used idea in a more abstract sense, as in "the idea of using money instead of property", "the idea of lending money" etc.
But in general society is better off when less lawyers are needed. After all, (and please don't take this personally) all money that goes into lawyers is money which cannot be invested in useful things (like R&D). It's an overhead cost. And by creating more "rights" you automatically increase the number of lawsuits, license agreements etc.
I'm not saying that a world without rights or lawyers would be ideal, but on the other hand extending rights and adding more rights does increase the overhead and at a certain point starts reducing the overall "justice" and "efficiency" of the system.
It is an argument to balance the situations in which you may need a lawyer though.
That's the theory, but in practice it doesn't always work that way. Witness e.g. Machlup already saying in the fifties:
In fact, the reverse engineering itself may not be (legally) possible in the presence of software patents: even though copyright cannot be used to forbid running and analysing a program to figure out how it works (because of the earlier mentioned directive), if a software patent applies to it than a patent license could still be used to forbid running the program for the purpose of reverse engineering it.
Your "brilliant thinkers" rant is quite amusing.
Concerning your simple solution to all the problems with (software) patents: people have been saying for decades already that all problems with the patent system can be solved by just doing this or that (better application of novelty/non-obviousness requirements, more funding of patent offices, better training of patent examiners, patent pools, ...).
The fact is however that today, things are as bad as ever. And that's not just my opinion, but that of Dr David Martin, CEO of M-CAM, a company specialised in establishing the value of patents and technology transfers.
Until that whole mess is sorted out, the patent system is costing the software economy millions and millions of dollars in patent application fees, costs of setting up licensing deals, fighting lawsuits (have a look at the last slide) etc.
So I suggest you with your brilliant mind first work out the economic model and studies that shows that with your adjustments the patent system is in fact overall beneficial (as opposed to the current situation), then get it turned into a law in the US, that we see whether it in fact works in practice and that only then we start with the legalisation of software patents in Europe under the same regime.
Until then, I prefer not to have that whole administrative and juridical burden imposed on the European software market. And I don't see why people shouldn't argue for removing the burden in the US as well.
A judge could in theory of course mandate that all source code be released, but that's unlikely. The "virality" of the GPL and LGPL are often overstated. It's true that if you use GPL code in a program which is distributed, the entire program should be released under a GPL compatible license.
It is however not true that if you don't do this, you can automatically be forced to release all that source code. The only thing you can be sure of is that the infringing party can be forced to stop infringing. How exactly this happens is another matter.
They're not stealing code, they're infringing on the author's copyrights by not respecting the license under which the code is be distributed (in exactly the same way people who "share" Sony/BMG music via p2p etc infringe on Sony/BMG's and the the artists' copyrights).
Vanity, my favourite sin.
</Al Pacino voice>
I think you're mixing "social achievements" with "blending in with the masses" or "liking or faking to like what everyone else does". Learning social skills does not mean that you learn to be friendly to everyone, that you do the same as everyone or that you fit in perfectly.
For me, it means you learn to function in society without either looking down on yourself ("why don't I like sitting in a pub every night having a beer and talking with lots of people, I must be so anti-social") or without placing yourself on a pedestal ("look at the plebs sitting in their pubs wasting their time and money with bullcrap, I'm above that"). To be happy with who you are for what you are, not for what other people are or aren't.
So I think it's more a state of mind as opposed to particular abilities ("socialising in a pub", "chitchatting", ...) or reached "social achievements" ("lots of friends", marriage, ...). And that state makes you overall more productive on the intellectual level as well, because you spend much less time wresting with yourself.
I realise this is all pretty abstract and can be easily dismissed as armchair philosophizing, but it works for me.
Proponents of software patents have been claiming for years the whole system can be fixed by just making a few adjustments, but no one has been able to actually argue in economic terms that this is in fact true. And then there's still these pesky details such as the WTO TRIPs treaty, which requires a minimum duration of 17 years for all patents you grant.
We're not chucking anything, we're preventing the codification of the American system in Europe.