America's image as bringers of freedom, fighters against tyranny, and lighthouse of the world for democracy was right at the end of WW2.
Just so long as you did not live in the country whose freedom the world actually went to war to defend in the first place:
Poland.
America as the "Bringer of Freedom" who stood up to tyranny and kicked its ass in WWII is the biggest fucking con job in history. The older I get, the smarter Patton looks.
(2) having the patient swallow it. How, exactly, do you foresee trade secret being useful in this context?
How exactly do you plan to patent that?
>>Patents were invented to create a temporary monopoly on making "stuff."
>Wrong. Take a look at the first clause of our patent law, circa 1952:
"35 USC 101. Whoever invents or discovers any new and useful process, machine, manufacture, or composition of matter, or any new and useful improvement thereof, may obtain a patent therefor, subject to the conditions and requirements of this title."
But by your words, it must be a "working model" of the nuclear weapon. A non-working model wouldn't suffice. Your words, not mine.
A small nuclear weapon would not be a working model of a nuclear weapon. It would be a nuclear weapon. A model is not the device, it is an analog of the device.
Cancer drugs are not, and never have been, trade secret territory.
You did not specify a cancer drug. You specified a process for using it. I specified that the drug itself would be submitable. It is physical, not logical.
Cancer drugs are not, and never have been, trade secret territory.
You must not have heard of the Chemical Abstracts Service, which lists 24 million abstracts for chemistry-related inventions
I'm a physicist, but I've been known to have the odd chat with members of the chemistry dept. and know a number of industrial chemists. Lexan sent my cousins to college.
Lexan is a thing. Techniques are not, although the tools to impliment those techniques are things and are legitimately patentable if they are unique invention in and of themselves.
How badly would the field of chemistry be damaged if chemical engineers had to lock away their inventions as trade secrets, instead of just publishing and patenting them?
How much more advanced would it be if it were open to free academic inquiry and publication? The question can be posed either way.
The best research is not done out of love of money, it is done out of love of curiosity. Money is, of course, needed to capitalize the research, but we once had a reasonably tolerable method for dealing with that.
Industry funded academic research by making tax deductable donations to nonprofit research facilities, and got the results "for free." This, of course, only advanced science, which left them free to turn their engineers loose of making tangable, and thus patentable, products from that science.
Science and engineering are not the same thing. One is abstract. The other isn't. One is about ideas. The other is about "stuff."
Ideas can be published once and everyone has it. "Stuff" needs to made, distributed and can be sold for a profit. Patents were invented to create a temporary monopoly on making "stuff."
Ideas were not left out in the cold. They have their own means of seeking monopoly protection. We call it "copyright." The formula for the stuff is a very different thing than the stuff itself. One is abstract. The other is not.
Between the two you have the bases covered. Copyrights for protection of desemination of knowledge, patents for the protection of making things.
Anything which does not fall under the legal protection of one of these two, for whatever reason, does not deserve a grant of monopoly powers. Rights are reserved to the people.
The modern patent system was devised to deal with a very particular problem. Take the varnish used by Stradivari on his violins. Because there was no legal protection for the formula in order the maintain a competitive commercial advantage he had to keep it secret.
And when he died, so did the formula.
Inventions were being made at a tremendous rate because there was good money to be had by having a monopoly on an invention, even without government protection. But these inventions were all being lost to humanity, because they were being closely held.
So a very straightforward deal was devised:
"Look, Strad old bean, you've got the world by the balls right now, but one industrial spy and it's all over for you; and you never know when that spy is going to get you. If you'll agree to publish your formula we'll agree to lend the weight of the government to beat up anybody who uses it without your permission, but only for 20 years.
Thing is you will then also know exactly when the monopoly will run out and can plan your exit strategy. A defined period of security in exchange for giving up the idea."
"Now then, we're going to make this even easier on you. The default is going to remain the natural status. Your invention has no protection other than what you can give it if that's what you want. The system is opt in, it's not being forced on you by law. It's a contract between you and the people of the nation. They give up the short term right to discover and use your formula in exchange for your giving it to them in a reasonable amount of time."
You can see that its entire point is enrichment of the public domain with inventions usable by all; and also that those things which are inherently published or embodied in a publicly obvious process (like putting toys out in your business so the kiddies don't bother you while you're doing business) simply don't fit the contract with the public. The public gets no quid pro quo for granting the monopoly.
And there is a complete other branch of law to deal with the monopoly protection of publications, because this branch of law inherently intrudes on the rights of free speech.
And there's the true division. Patents are about physical things, because a monopoly on physical things does not intrude on speech and in many ways can even be seen to extend it. Copyright limits speech.
Patents are about tangibles, copyrights are about abstracts; and never the twain shall intersect, lest we end up with the way things are now with patents being granted on using a laser pointer to exercise your cat.
And of course the bulk of all ideas, both those tangibly embodiable and those that are purely abstract are inherently reserved to the people. Government enforced monopolies are supposed to be granted only in those exceptional cases where the the people inherently benefit from it.
Because the monopoly is a contract with the people. Quid pro quo.
I have never been in a dirty rich persons home (at least the bathroom).
That's because even a rich person has to use the bathroom. Rich people, I mean really rich people, often aren't even exactly sure where their kitchen is, and it's often workmanly dirty.
Clean kitchens with lots of shiney things in it are a hallmark of the middle classes.
Exactly. This is about bathroom sanitizing, not cleaning.
Won't do a damned thing about dirt on the floor or mineral buildup in the shower/toilet; and these are the time consuming aspects of cleaning the bathroom.
You can already mist antibacterials in a few seconds.
And Lewis Thomas has made a few cogent remarks about the current mania over the bacterial boogeyman in his NEJM column. Read Lives of a Cell for the reprints.
What "working physical model" do you expect someone to submit for a process of treating cancer by using a particular drug?
None.
Or for a complex chemical engineering technique. ..
None.
or a process (and composition!) of uranium enrichment. ..
None.
or a nuclear weapon
That one's pretty easy. I think, perhaps, you are confusing model with identity.
or a process of identifying particularly useful genes
None.
all incompatible (hopefully) with the idea of a "working physical model."
Exactly, because they are all (excluding the nuclear weapon) logical contructs, not physical constructs. Traditionally trade secret territory, not patent territory.
That's completely wrong. The subject of any patent, and the core protected aspect, is an inventive and novel concept.
For which a working physical model can be submitted.
F=ma cannot be patented because it is a "pure" idea. If I tell it to you you walk away with the novel concept in its entirety and can likewise transmit to another.
A circuit board may have have a novel concept behind it, but it is the board that is patented. Something I can actually steal and physically copy. I am not allowed to steal or make a copy of it, but I can talk about it all I want. In fact, to obtain a patent in the first place I must publish everything anyone needs to know to talk about it and there are no overt restrictions on such speech unless I sign some sort of NDA.
The plans for the board, which are just much the novel concept as the board itself is, are covered by copyright, not patent, because they are a publication, not the actual device.
Only the device is traditionally covered by patent, and algorithms have only obtained patent protection by claiming that when implimented by a computer they are part of the device.
The problem with software patents is that the the line between ideas and implimentations has been blurred.
Actually, I don't like the fence analogy either and it wasn't 'exactly' the model Jefferson used.
The true test is whether the research can be transmitted by speech/print.
k=1/2mv^2, E=mc^2, "Now is the winter of our discontent. ..," as opposed to, say, a cotton gin.
If you can recite the research than it falls under those laws intended to protect speech, not things. As you say, ideas as opposed to implimentations.
It is, unfortunately, computers that have blurred the line between the two with the decision that since the physical device impliments the idea that it is somehow itself the device.
This is the sort of bullcrap we get when people cannot differentiate between the physical and logical levels. At its extreme I have seen plans for a piece of furniture that has no patent protection on it try to apply EULA copyright restrictions to your ablility to impliment the plans and claim a license fee for every instance of the furniture you build.
Oh, yeah, and a website whose legal page actually begins with "By viewing you agree to these policies . .." which include a claimed restriction on reverse engineering their nonpatentable products.
The original and valid purpose of a patent is to enable people who make investments in research to be compensated for the risk they take.
Well, no, not exactly. People already made investments in research and were commercially compensated for it before patents.
The original and valid purpose of a patent is to force them to reveal their research to the public in order to gain government protection of it.
Whether or not a fence goes around the concept patented is utterly irrelevent.
Actually, this is exactly the test applied by the founder of the American patent system and its first examiner; Thomas Jefferson. For things which you can't put a fence around there is copyright.
Reading your post before reading the article left me ill prepared for the reasoned and cogent arguments Stallman actually put forth in the interview.
But you're so cute when you missuse the term "nazi", applying it to someone who wants to relax governement controls of people's behavior, so you've got that going for you.
When I was a kid, Westinghouse was REFRIDGERATORS!
That's what it was to you, but Westinghouse was always power generation. It's the rock the company is built on. Who do you think Nicola Tesla went to work for after he had his falling out with Edison? The Tesla/Westinghouse combo is what brought us our entire modern system of power generation and transmission after a bitter fight with Edison-Mazda/GE.
As evidence of how bitter the fight was the electric chair emerged as a side effect of it.
This is all local history to me. Westinghouse was born here, Edison and Tesla lived here and at one time 90% of the power generation equipment in the world was made only a few blocks from my home.
. ..if the prices rise quickly on such an essential commodity, things might change relatively fast.
Like, because the production of solar cells is inherently energy intensive their cost is going to rise proportionate the rise in oil prices.
The essential problem is that it's always going to be easier and cheaper in the short run to use stored energy than it is to live on a budget of incoming energy.
I have limited understanding of the fabrication process of the solar panels, so it would be hard to say whether or not mother nature profits from this scenario.
At least you are perspicacious enough to understand this is an issue. That alone puts you well ahead of the field. Beware of marketing claims and do your homework before you buy.
Slashdot Mirror
"orbit" is when you're on a ballistic trajectory that doesn't intersect the earth.
Or, to rephrase slightly, orbit is when you throw yourself at the ground and miss.
KFG
. . . ketchup, honey, oil, red wine or blood simply run off the nano-surface. . .
And onto the bathroom floor.
KFG
America's image as bringers of freedom, fighters against tyranny, and lighthouse of the world for democracy was right at the end of WW2.
Just so long as you did not live in the country whose freedom the world actually went to war to defend in the first place:
Poland.
America as the "Bringer of Freedom" who stood up to tyranny and kicked its ass in WWII is the biggest fucking con job in history. The older I get, the smarter Patton looks.
KFG
Many objects, including your hypothetical piece of furniture, have both patentable and copyrightable aspects.
You left out the fact that it might also have trademark protection.
KFG
(2) having the patient swallow it. How, exactly, do you foresee trade secret being useful in this context?
How exactly do you plan to patent that?
>>Patents were invented to create a temporary monopoly on making "stuff."
>Wrong. Take a look at the first clause of our patent law, circa 1952:
"35 USC 101. Whoever invents or discovers any new and useful process, machine, manufacture, or composition of matter, or any new and useful improvement thereof, may obtain a patent therefor, subject to the conditions and requirements of this title."
Patents were not invented in 1952.
KFG
Please point me to the patent for a functional nuclear weapon.
KFG
But by your words, it must be a "working model" of the nuclear weapon. A non-working model wouldn't suffice. Your words, not mine.
A small nuclear weapon would not be a working model of a nuclear weapon. It would be a nuclear weapon. A model is not the device, it is an analog of the device.
Cancer drugs are not, and never have been, trade secret territory.
You did not specify a cancer drug. You specified a process for using it. I specified that the drug itself would be submitable. It is physical, not logical.
Cancer drugs are not, and never have been, trade secret territory.
You must not have heard of the Chemical Abstracts Service, which lists 24 million abstracts for chemistry-related inventions
I'm a physicist, but I've been known to have the odd chat with members of the chemistry dept. and know a number of industrial chemists. Lexan sent my cousins to college.
Lexan is a thing. Techniques are not, although the tools to impliment those techniques are things and are legitimately patentable if they are unique invention in and of themselves.
How badly would the field of chemistry be damaged if chemical engineers had to lock away their inventions as trade secrets, instead of just publishing and patenting them?
How much more advanced would it be if it were open to free academic inquiry and publication? The question can be posed either way.
The best research is not done out of love of money, it is done out of love of curiosity. Money is, of course, needed to capitalize the research, but we once had a reasonably tolerable method for dealing with that.
Industry funded academic research by making tax deductable donations to nonprofit research facilities, and got the results "for free." This, of course, only advanced science, which left them free to turn their engineers loose of making tangable, and thus patentable, products from that science.
Science and engineering are not the same thing. One is abstract. The other isn't. One is about ideas. The other is about "stuff."
Ideas can be published once and everyone has it. "Stuff" needs to made, distributed and can be sold for a profit. Patents were invented to create a temporary monopoly on making "stuff."
Ideas were not left out in the cold. They have their own means of seeking monopoly protection. We call it "copyright." The formula for the stuff is a very different thing than the stuff itself. One is abstract. The other is not.
Between the two you have the bases covered. Copyrights for protection of desemination of knowledge, patents for the protection of making things.
Anything which does not fall under the legal protection of one of these two, for whatever reason, does not deserve a grant of monopoly powers. Rights are reserved to the people.
KFG
The modern patent system was devised to deal with a very particular problem. Take the varnish used by Stradivari on his violins. Because there was no legal protection for the formula in order the maintain a competitive commercial advantage he had to keep it secret.
And when he died, so did the formula.
Inventions were being made at a tremendous rate because there was good money to be had by having a monopoly on an invention, even without government protection. But these inventions were all being lost to humanity, because they were being closely held.
So a very straightforward deal was devised:
"Look, Strad old bean, you've got the world by the balls right now, but one industrial spy and it's all over for you; and you never know when that spy is going to get you. If you'll agree to publish your formula we'll agree to lend the weight of the government to beat up anybody who uses it without your permission, but only for 20 years.
Thing is you will then also know exactly when the monopoly will run out and can plan your exit strategy. A defined period of security in exchange for giving up the idea."
"Now then, we're going to make this even easier on you. The default is going to remain the natural status. Your invention has no protection other than what you can give it if that's what you want. The system is opt in, it's not being forced on you by law. It's a contract between you and the people of the nation. They give up the short term right to discover and use your formula in exchange for your giving it to them in a reasonable amount of time."
You can see that its entire point is enrichment of the public domain with inventions usable by all; and also that those things which are inherently published or embodied in a publicly obvious process (like putting toys out in your business so the kiddies don't bother you while you're doing business) simply don't fit the contract with the public. The public gets no quid pro quo for granting the monopoly.
And there is a complete other branch of law to deal with the monopoly protection of publications, because this branch of law inherently intrudes on the rights of free speech.
And there's the true division. Patents are about physical things, because a monopoly on physical things does not intrude on speech and in many ways can even be seen to extend it. Copyright limits speech.
Patents are about tangibles, copyrights are about abstracts; and never the twain shall intersect, lest we end up with the way things are now with patents being granted on using a laser pointer to exercise your cat.
And of course the bulk of all ideas, both those tangibly embodiable and those that are purely abstract are inherently reserved to the people. Government enforced monopolies are supposed to be granted only in those exceptional cases where the the people inherently benefit from it.
Because the monopoly is a contract with the people. Quid pro quo.
KFG
I have never been in a dirty rich persons home (at least the bathroom).
That's because even a rich person has to use the bathroom. Rich people, I mean really rich people, often aren't even exactly sure where their kitchen is, and it's often workmanly dirty.
Clean kitchens with lots of shiney things in it are a hallmark of the middle classes.
KFG
Actually, the ones I'm thinking of are in A Long Line of Cells. Read 'em both. Read 'em all. You'll be happy you did.
KFG
Exactly. This is about bathroom sanitizing, not cleaning.
Won't do a damned thing about dirt on the floor or mineral buildup in the shower/toilet; and these are the time consuming aspects of cleaning the bathroom.
You can already mist antibacterials in a few seconds.
And Lewis Thomas has made a few cogent remarks about the current mania over the bacterial boogeyman in his NEJM column. Read Lives of a Cell for the reprints.
KFG
What "working physical model" do you expect someone to submit for a process of treating cancer by using a particular drug?
.
.
None.
Or for a complex chemical engineering technique. .
None.
or a process (and composition!) of uranium enrichment. .
None.
or a nuclear weapon
That one's pretty easy. I think, perhaps, you are confusing model with identity.
or a process of identifying particularly useful genes
None.
all incompatible (hopefully) with the idea of a "working physical model."
Exactly, because they are all (excluding the nuclear weapon) logical contructs, not physical constructs. Traditionally trade secret territory, not patent territory.
KFG
AIDS cure or no AIDS cure, you still have to have a willing partner...
Or a Louisville Slugger.
KFG
How on earth did the grandparent get modded insightful when it is just plain false??
Democracy.
KFG
That's completely wrong. The subject of any patent, and the core protected aspect, is an inventive and novel concept.
For which a working physical model can be submitted.
F=ma cannot be patented because it is a "pure" idea. If I tell it to you you walk away with the novel concept in its entirety and can likewise transmit to another.
A circuit board may have have a novel concept behind it, but it is the board that is patented. Something I can actually steal and physically copy. I am not allowed to steal or make a copy of it, but I can talk about it all I want. In fact, to obtain a patent in the first place I must publish everything anyone needs to know to talk about it and there are no overt restrictions on such speech unless I sign some sort of NDA.
The plans for the board, which are just much the novel concept as the board itself is, are covered by copyright, not patent, because they are a publication, not the actual device.
Only the device is traditionally covered by patent, and algorithms have only obtained patent protection by claiming that when implimented by a computer they are part of the device.
KFG
The problem with software patents is that the the line between ideas and implimentations has been blurred.
.," as opposed to, say, a cotton gin.
." which include a claimed restriction on reverse engineering their nonpatentable products.
Actually, I don't like the fence analogy either and it wasn't 'exactly' the model Jefferson used.
The true test is whether the research can be transmitted by speech/print.
k=1/2mv^2, E=mc^2, "Now is the winter of our discontent. .
If you can recite the research than it falls under those laws intended to protect speech, not things. As you say, ideas as opposed to implimentations.
It is, unfortunately, computers that have blurred the line between the two with the decision that since the physical device impliments the idea that it is somehow itself the device.
This is the sort of bullcrap we get when people cannot differentiate between the physical and logical levels. At its extreme I have seen plans for a piece of furniture that has no patent protection on it try to apply EULA copyright restrictions to your ablility to impliment the plans and claim a license fee for every instance of the furniture you build.
Oh, yeah, and a website whose legal page actually begins with "By viewing you agree to these policies . .
It's gone totally crazy out there.
KFG
"Doctor, it hurts when I go like this . . ."
Now that we've got that science out of the way, can we go to the moon now?
KFG
Absolutely.
KFG
The original and valid purpose of a patent is to enable people who make investments in research to be compensated for the risk they take.
Well, no, not exactly. People already made investments in research and were commercially compensated for it before patents.
The original and valid purpose of a patent is to force them to reveal their research to the public in order to gain government protection of it.
Whether or not a fence goes around the concept patented is utterly irrelevent.
Actually, this is exactly the test applied by the founder of the American patent system and its first examiner; Thomas Jefferson. For things which you can't put a fence around there is copyright.
Patents are not ideas, they are for things.
KFG
Reading your post before reading the article left me ill prepared for the reasoned and cogent arguments Stallman actually put forth in the interview.
But you're so cute when you missuse the term "nazi", applying it to someone who wants to relax governement controls of people's behavior, so you've got that going for you.
KFG
. . .ethical nations. . .
And unicorns.
KFG
When I was a kid, Westinghouse was REFRIDGERATORS!
That's what it was to you, but Westinghouse was always power generation. It's the rock the company is built on. Who do you think Nicola Tesla went to work for after he had his falling out with Edison? The Tesla/Westinghouse combo is what brought us our entire modern system of power generation and transmission after a bitter fight with Edison-Mazda/GE.
As evidence of how bitter the fight was the electric chair emerged as a side effect of it.
This is all local history to me. Westinghouse was born here, Edison and Tesla lived here and at one time 90% of the power generation equipment in the world was made only a few blocks from my home.
KFG
. . .if the prices rise quickly on such an essential commodity, things might change relatively fast.
Like, because the production of solar cells is inherently energy intensive their cost is going to rise proportionate the rise in oil prices.
The essential problem is that it's always going to be easier and cheaper in the short run to use stored energy than it is to live on a budget of incoming energy.
KFG
I have limited understanding of the fabrication process of the solar panels, so it would be hard to say whether or not mother nature profits from this scenario.
At least you are perspicacious enough to understand this is an issue.
That alone puts you well ahead of the field. Beware of marketing claims and do your homework before you buy.
KFG
"see? Our networks can survive millions of nerf-ball hits
"Cool! Well, right then. Turns you aren't actually needed after all so we're shutting your dept. down."
You don't understand how the game is played. The DHS depends on terrorism for their funding, but; they are the terrorists.
KFG