For a complete and thorough account of what corporatism is and how it affects liberal democracies please see The Unconscious Civilization by John Ralston Saul.
Non-obviousness is the wrong criteria for patents
on
Instant Access Memory
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· Score: 2
Note that the stuff described above has all been fairly straightforward evolution of the hardware and software technology. The revolutionary part has been its effect on us all.
I think you are right to question the revolutionary nature of individual technologies. Nature doesn't move in quantum leaps, only in a continuum, and by nature I mean to include human artifice. It follows that patents should not be granted on the grounds of non-obviousness because every invention, regardless of its complexity, will owe a large debt to the past.
A better solution might be to extend the notion of usefulness in judging patentability by placing a large burden on applicant to show that his or her invention benefits human existence in some fairly significant way. This may still suffer from some vagueness, but at least it promises some payback for granting exclusive rights to work that incorporates the benefits of past discoveries without due compensation.
Stereotyping is just a statistician's way of talking about human nature. I think Katz just saying that a general trend in user demographics might lead to changes in content. Because even if one dismisses stereotypes as superficial, marketing people tailor content to the perceived stereotype audience member.
Well, if what you want happens to coincide with what the largest demographic group online wants, you may not see any imbalance. Or if you do, you're happier that way.
I'm not suggesting we have our eyes clamped open and forced to watch 300 episodes of Sisters or something. Just that there's more to life than computers, business, and pornography.
Why should "progress" be more important than the needs of people (which the GPL was intended to promote and defend)? Sometimes in order to protect the commons from being enclosed, we have to make some sacrifices. The proprietary developer has the freedom to choose from many non-GPL'd proprietary commercial libraries and link against those instead. Given the developers freedom to choose another option, it seems like a small sacrifice in terms of progress, whereas compromising Free Software causes harm to the credibility of a much larger corpus of work.
Even Slashdot's editorial staff has defamed Mr. Gates by the icon for Microsoft stories, which seeks to portray him as an alien out to convert everybody to his collective.
That's not libelous, it's satire. There's a big difference. Being able to make fun of people, especially the rich and powerful is a fundamental part of any reasonable concept of free speech.
But obviously you aren't: you are not interested in stopping slander, but only when it is convenient and goes against your pro-Open Source, liberal, anti-Microsoft agenda.
Warning: The following sentence contains gratuitous satire. Severe choking hazard for small minds. It's way past time for your medication.
The storing function has to do with creating the synaptic links that encode a memory. It involves moving info into short term memory and then into long term (aka permanent) memory.
When you talk about synaptic links, are you talking about actual ganglion growth? It seems like that would be too slow a process to account for a normally functioning human memory.
On the other hand, if you are only talking about electro-chemical impulses like acetylcholene transfer at synapses or something like that, how can you differentiate memory access from memory storage based on the observable physical phenomena? Storing is an electro-chemical impulse. So is retrieving. What makes them different? Is it a question of where they occur? The intensity of the impulse? The duration or cycle of the impulse? I imagine that one would record some observations of the above type in cases where the victim (err subject) was reporting to be storing information in memory and other observations in cases where the subject was recalling or retrieving stored information. Then you could compare the two sets of observations and determine what characteristics correlate to storage activity and which correlated to retrieval. These observations give you an interesting way to label or identify future occurrences of what the subject previously reported as storing or retrieving. However, this observation only tells you THAT something occurred; it is not an explanation of the process by which the impulses 'appear' to the subject as storing and retrieving memories.
Did you even read my post, or are you willfully misunderstanding it? I'm starting to think that this is a pure troll. I specifically said that that wealth is not an end in itself, just a means to an end.
I went back and re-read your original post and you never literally said "wealth is not an end in itself" but I'll accept that you meant to say it or perhaps you feel it was implied in other things you said.
Exactly the opposite. The whole reason for my lengthy definition 'utility' as distinct from 'wealth' was precisely to separate the concept of 'value' from 'auction price' and illustrate the interaction between the two and how the abolition of IP laws would affect both.
Right, yes I see that now. I was jumping to conclusions a bit.
The key is that as the creator, you were free to make that choice. On the other hand, what if you desperately needed money to pay medical expenses for a family member and after your discovery someone came to you and gave you a pat on the back and took the result of five years of your life's work and gave it away.
Yes, under those circumstances I would be upset, but the negative aspects of the scenario -- my harm at having been denied the chance to make money -- would only have occurred if there were intellectual property laws which allowed someone else to maintain a monopoly or near monopoly on the ideas in question.
Since I was trying to imagine, in my little thought experiment, a world in which there were no such laws, no one under those conditions could profit (very much) from stealing the mere idea from me. They would still be on equal footing with me with regard to the ability to make money. I could go out and sell my services to people who wanted fusion reactors set up in their living rooms or on top the the tele or coffee table. The 'thieves' would have to do just as much work as me in order to make money.
Therefore, as I imagine it, such a world would no longer view ideas as property and therefore sharing them would not be viewed as a harm.
You would be right to contend that under such a system, I would be denied some or most of the fruits of my labour. But under my view, the idea itself should never have been counted as the fruits of my labour, and so the loss of ownership of that thing doesn't count as lost enjoyment. Obviously, knowing that I wouldn't have exclusive rights to the results of my research would alter the decision I make as to how best to allocate resources. I probably wouldn't have devoted 5 years of full time effort to research, but that doesn't mean that I wouldn't have done any. But the output of my research would be greater because I wouldn't have to divert resources to legal proceedings such as patent litigation (which can cost upwards of a million dollars, I am told). Also, the results of other research would be available much more inexpensively.
If the amount of effort and time I expend is the justification for granting residual property rights in information, then the laws that we have now are misdirected because they grant protected status to accidental discoveries as well as those that are the result of years of research. Copyright will protect the output of my random word haiku generator as forcefully and for just as long as it protects your magnum opus "The Critique of Pure Raisins".
The current law also doesn't attempt to apportion your royalty rights according to the exact amount of information that you contributed to the protected work. I am not talking about jointly produced intellectual artifacts like movies or essay collections. I mean that if you write a blues song, how much did you contribute and how much of what you wrote was borrowed material?
The "fruits of my labour" argument is the strongest of the arguments for maintaining intellectual property rights, in my view. And yet it is not without its weaknesses. There are many objects in which I invest labour but which I don't automatically receive residual property rights. If I come upon a piece of land and till it, that in itself does not give me any property rights. Raising children involves a great deal of labour but it does not give one any property rights in one's children.
If you want to see an analysis of the economics and political theory behind information flows, you should read James Boyle's "Shamans, Software, and Spleens".
One of the interesting things that Boyle points out is that the intellectual property regime we have now tends to reward those who fit our romantic idea of "The Genius" or "Auteur". The current system has a tendency to devalue the sources of material for creative work, as well as the effort required by audiences to understand and appreciate works of "Genius".
We're a few hundred years overdue for a major supernova in our neck of the galaxy. IIRC a supernova wipes out everything within 100LY or so. Apparently there are a few candidates close enough to the Solar System to worry about.
And then there's that asteroid that supposed to hit us in 2010 or something. Ahh... what the hell. Just enjoy it while it lasts, right?
Any particular IP good has some utility to some people, but if it is ubiquitous it is not tradeable and so does not contribute anything to overall wealth.
Why does something have to be tradeable in order to contribute to wealth? I object to your limited view of what counts as wealth. Suppose for instance I discovered a way of getting low-temperature fusion to work. How can it be that distributing this information is harming the economy in any way? All it does is provide stimulus to local markets where each individual builds their own fusion reactor. Everyone benefits, no one suffers, and I haven't lost anything except the ability to trade my idea. But why should I care? If I have enough to keep me fed, clothed and housed, why should I feel wounded by having shared something? You will say, and quite rightly, "But you missed the opportunity to earn some money by making your idea artificially scarce!" to which I would reply that I don't regret the loss.
For example, imagine that you somehow gave every person on Earth a digital copy of 'The Matrix'. Those people that had an appropriate playback device and that wanted to watch it would certainly feel that the overall utility of their belongings had increased. The other 99% of the world would look at you with a mixture of confusion and pity. Not only is their utility not increased, but neither is their wealth since you've made 'The Matrix' worthless for trading purposes.
I suppose that no one would have produced the Matrix unless they were assured that they could have legal protection against copying, so in that sense, the Matrix would be worthless if it were copyable but only because it never would have been produced in the first place.
But so what? Someone who really wants to make a movie will do it on their own money and on their own time. Wealth isn't about generating crap so that you can charge people for it (by the way, I really liked the Matrix, but that doesn't mean it's not crap). If there were no movies people would tell fantastic stories or write folk songs or play in garage bands. I'd much rather have that than your idea of mass-produced corporate sausage casings.
If I decrease wealth by increasing someone else's utility, then I am happier with less wealth than with more. What's wrong with that?
You are limiting the value of anything to the price it will fetch at auction. That is not a thing's value, that is just it's price. If you view wealth as a sum of prices, and you seek wealth as an end for your society, then it makes sense to organize information as you say. But I don't agree with your definition of wealth, and if I did I wouldn't want to make that my ultimate goal.
The math isn't a tool in the comprehension process, the math is the comprehension.
But the math is really meaningless unless you can connect it with common sense english explanations. Math for the sake of math is great, but it won't be a satisfying account of Artificial Intelligence unless it actually allows you to say something about artificial intelligence.
Ugghh!! I hate it when the formatting gets trashed
And science has to work in the real world. Religion doesn't.
Don't be so smug about what you think the real world is. Religion is as much about the real world as science. Different aspects of the world certainly, but real nevertheless.
Thus science is self correcting. Religion is not.
Religion is actually self-correcting, too, if you think about it. It just moves more slowly.
Neither [science nor religion] are perfect. Science recognizes this. Religion does not.
I would argue that most religions have a much more profound acceptance of human fallibility than science. Science doesn't have the notion of Original Sin, for instance. That's why books like Kuhn's 'The Structure of Scientific Revolutions' are such shocking revelations to practising scientists. They are so convinced of the "absoluteness" of their work that they fail to see the historicism, enculturation, bias, prejudice, and arbitrariness of their theories. In fact, Science as an institution is founded on the belief that man is perfectible. The science proponents say "Whatever is wrong must have a cause and we can find that cause and prevent the wrong from happening". Communism shares the scientific mindset that the root of evil can be excised from reality and destroyed. I'll take the humility of the religious man over the hubris of the scientist. That said, I appreciate the great things that science has been able to accomplish. It's just not as deep in its understanding of human nature as the religious (Judeo-Christian or any other) view.
And science has to work in the real world. Religion doesn't. Don't be so smug about what you think the real world is. Religion is as much about the real world as science. Different aspects of the world certainly, but real nevertheless. Thus science is self correcting. Religion is not. Religion is actually self-correcting, too, if you think about it. It just moves more slowly. Neither [science nor religion] are perfect. Science recognizes this. Religion does not. I would argue that most religions have a much more profound acceptance of human fallibility than science. Science doesn't have the notion of Original Sin, for instance. That's why books like Kuhn's 'The Structure of Scientific Revolutions' are such shocking revelations to practising scientists. They are so convinced of the "absoluteness" of their work that they fail to see the historicism, enculturation, bias, prejudice, and arbitrariness of their theories. In fact, Science as an institution is founded on the belief that man is perfectible. The science proponents say "Whatever is wrong must have a cause and we can find that cause and prevent the wrong from happening". Communism shares the scientific mindset that the root of evil can be excised from reality and destroyed. I'll take the humility of the religious man over the hubris of the scientist. That said, I appreciate the great things that science has been able to accomplish. It's just not as deep in its understanding of human nature as the religious (Judeo-Christian or any other) view.
What exactly is the difference between the "storing" function of human memory and the "accessing" function. These things are inseparable, are they not? When I am trying to memorize something, but I haven't quite got it, am I storing data or accessing it?
Calling computer chips "memory" is just a bad metaphor. No point in making hard arguments based on it.
Technology has done good things, but look at how unequally its benefits have been shared. Life expectancy is much lower in the developing world than in the G7. Supporting research is great, but it seems like we want to get maximum pleasure out of our inventions before our neighbor has enough to eat. The industrialized world reminds me of a mob of fat, greedy people going for second or third helpings at the buffet while they elbow the emaciated weaklings out of the way.
Slashdot Mirror
For a complete and thorough account of what corporatism is and how it affects liberal democracies please see The Unconscious Civilization by John Ralston Saul.
I think you are right to question the revolutionary nature of individual technologies. Nature doesn't move in quantum leaps, only in a continuum, and by nature I mean to include human artifice. It follows that patents should not be granted on the grounds of non-obviousness because every invention, regardless of its complexity, will owe a large debt to the past.
A better solution might be to extend the notion of usefulness in judging patentability by placing a large burden on applicant to show that his or her invention benefits human existence in some fairly significant way. This may still suffer from some vagueness, but at least it promises some payback for granting exclusive rights to work that incorporates the benefits of past discoveries without due compensation.
There's nothing earth shaking about that.
And here you are reading the posts. Can you be anymore hypocritical?
Well, if what you want happens to coincide with what the largest demographic group online wants, you may not see any imbalance. Or if you do, you're happier that way.
I'm not suggesting we have our eyes clamped open and forced to watch 300 episodes of Sisters or something. Just that there's more to life than computers, business, and pornography.
I had a laugh when I decided to check out this site.
Not quite what I expected. :-)
Maybe this will correct some of the imbalance in net content.
Why should "progress" be more important than the needs of people (which the GPL was intended to promote and defend)? Sometimes in order to protect the commons from being enclosed, we have to make some sacrifices. The proprietary developer has the freedom to choose from many non-GPL'd proprietary commercial libraries and link against those instead. Given the developers freedom to choose another option, it seems like a small sacrifice in terms of progress, whereas compromising Free Software causes harm to the credibility of a much larger corpus of work.
Star Trek: The Golden Years
Starring George Burns, Art Carney, Jack Lemmon, and Walter Matthau
I think they could squeeze a couple of seasons out of it.
That's not libelous, it's satire. There's a big difference. Being able to make fun of people, especially the rich and powerful is a fundamental part of any reasonable concept of free speech.
But obviously you aren't: you are not interested in stopping slander, but only when it is convenient and goes against your pro-Open Source, liberal, anti-Microsoft agenda.
Warning: The following sentence contains gratuitous satire. Severe choking hazard for small minds.
It's way past time for your medication.
See? That didn't hurt you did it?
Why don't you check out what's in your own closet before you try to expose someone else's.
A time-honoured truism comes to mind:
Absolute power corrupts absolutely
When you talk about synaptic links, are you talking about actual ganglion growth? It seems like that would be too slow a process to account for a normally functioning human memory.
On the other hand, if you are only talking about electro-chemical impulses like acetylcholene transfer at synapses or something like that, how can you differentiate memory access from memory storage based on the observable physical phenomena? Storing is an electro-chemical impulse. So is retrieving. What makes them different? Is it a question of where they occur? The intensity of the impulse? The duration or cycle of the impulse? I imagine that one would record some observations of the above type in cases where the victim (err subject) was reporting to be storing information in memory and other observations in cases where the subject was recalling or retrieving stored information. Then you could compare the two sets of observations and determine what characteristics correlate to storage activity and which correlated to retrieval. These observations give you an interesting way to label or identify future occurrences of what the subject previously reported as storing or retrieving. However, this observation only tells you THAT something occurred; it is not an explanation of the process by which the impulses 'appear' to the subject as storing and retrieving memories.
I went back and re-read your original post and you never literally said "wealth is not an end in itself" but I'll accept that you meant to say it or perhaps you feel it was implied in other things you said.
Exactly the opposite. The whole reason for my lengthy definition 'utility' as distinct from 'wealth' was precisely to separate the concept of 'value' from 'auction price' and illustrate the interaction between the two and how the abolition of IP laws would affect both.
Right, yes I see that now. I was jumping to conclusions a bit.
The key is that as the creator, you were free to make that choice. On the other hand, what if you desperately needed money to pay medical expenses for a family member and after your discovery someone came to you and gave you a pat on the back and took the result of five years of your life's work and gave it away.
Yes, under those circumstances I would be upset, but the negative aspects of the scenario -- my harm at having been denied the chance to make money -- would only have occurred if there were intellectual property laws which allowed someone else to maintain a monopoly or near monopoly on the ideas in question.
Since I was trying to imagine, in my little thought experiment, a world in which there were no such laws, no one under those conditions could profit (very much) from stealing the mere idea from me. They would still be on equal footing with me with regard to the ability to make money. I could go out and sell my services to people who wanted fusion reactors set up in their living rooms or on top the the tele or coffee table. The 'thieves' would have to do just as much work as me in order to make money.
Therefore, as I imagine it, such a world would no longer view ideas as property and therefore sharing them would not be viewed as a harm.
You would be right to contend that under such a system, I would be denied some or most of the fruits of my labour. But under my view, the idea itself should never have been counted as the fruits of my labour, and so the loss of ownership of that thing doesn't count as lost enjoyment. Obviously, knowing that I wouldn't have exclusive rights to the results of my research would alter the decision I make as to how best to allocate resources. I probably wouldn't have devoted 5 years of full time effort to research, but that doesn't mean that I wouldn't have done any. But the output of my research would be greater because I wouldn't have to divert resources to legal proceedings such as patent litigation (which can cost upwards of a million dollars, I am told). Also, the results of other research would be available much more inexpensively.
If the amount of effort and time I expend is the justification for granting residual property rights in information, then the laws that we have now are misdirected because they grant protected status to accidental discoveries as well as those that are the result of years of research. Copyright will protect the output of my random word haiku generator as forcefully and for just as long as it protects your magnum opus "The Critique of Pure Raisins".
The current law also doesn't attempt to apportion your royalty rights according to the exact amount of information that you contributed to the protected work. I am not talking about jointly produced intellectual artifacts like movies or essay collections. I mean that if you write a blues song, how much did you contribute and how much of what you wrote was borrowed material?
The "fruits of my labour" argument is the strongest of the arguments for maintaining intellectual property rights, in my view. And yet it is not without its weaknesses. There are many objects in which I invest labour but which I don't automatically receive residual property rights. If I come upon a piece of land and till it, that in itself does not give me any property rights. Raising children involves a great deal of labour but it does not give one any property rights in one's children.
If you want to see an analysis of the economics and political theory behind information flows, you should read James Boyle's "Shamans, Software, and Spleens".
One of the interesting things that Boyle points out is that the intellectual property regime we have now tends to reward those who fit our romantic idea of "The Genius" or "Auteur". The current system has a tendency to devalue the sources of material for creative work, as well as the effort required by audiences to understand and appreciate works of "Genius".
But bring shatterproof goggles, gas masks, and chemical resistant disposable outerwear.
Quaff a few pints, get sprayed with mace, get shot at by rubber bullets. Should be a real gas!
Special guests: The IMF and the World Bank
And then there's that asteroid that supposed to hit us in 2010 or something. Ahh ... what the hell. Just enjoy it while it lasts, right?
Moderators: Where are you? This should be on your radar screens!!
Thanks in advance
Why does something have to be tradeable in order to contribute to wealth? I object to your limited view of what counts as wealth. Suppose for instance I discovered a way of getting low-temperature fusion to work. How can it be that distributing this information is harming the economy in any way? All it does is provide stimulus to local markets where each individual builds their own fusion reactor. Everyone benefits, no one suffers, and I haven't lost anything except the ability to trade my idea. But why should I care? If I have enough to keep me fed, clothed and housed, why should I feel wounded by having shared something? You will say, and quite rightly, "But you missed the opportunity to earn some money by making your idea artificially scarce!" to which I would reply that I don't regret the loss.
For example, imagine that you somehow gave every person on Earth a digital copy of 'The Matrix'. Those people that had an appropriate playback device and that wanted to watch it would certainly feel that the overall utility of their belongings had increased. The other 99% of the world would look at you with a mixture of confusion and pity. Not only is their utility not increased, but neither is their wealth since you've made 'The Matrix' worthless for trading purposes.
I suppose that no one would have produced the Matrix unless they were assured that they could have legal protection against copying, so in that sense, the Matrix would be worthless if it were copyable but only because it never would have been produced in the first place.
But so what? Someone who really wants to make a movie will do it on their own money and on their own time. Wealth isn't about generating crap so that you can charge people for it (by the way, I really liked the Matrix, but that doesn't mean it's not crap). If there were no movies people would tell fantastic stories or write folk songs or play in garage bands. I'd much rather have that than your idea of mass-produced corporate sausage casings.
If I decrease wealth by increasing someone else's utility, then I am happier with less wealth than with more. What's wrong with that?
You are limiting the value of anything to the price it will fetch at auction. That is not a thing's value, that is just it's price. If you view wealth as a sum of prices, and you seek wealth as an end for your society, then it makes sense to organize information as you say. But I don't agree with your definition of wealth, and if I did I wouldn't want to make that my ultimate goal.
But the math is really meaningless unless you can connect it with common sense english explanations. Math for the sake of math is great, but it won't be a satisfying account of Artificial Intelligence unless it actually allows you to say something about artificial intelligence.
And science has to work in the real world. Religion doesn't.
Don't be so smug about what you think the real world is. Religion is as much about the real world as science. Different aspects of the world certainly, but real nevertheless.
Thus science is self correcting. Religion is not.
Religion is actually self-correcting, too, if you think about it. It just moves more slowly.
Neither [science nor religion] are perfect. Science recognizes this. Religion does not.
I would argue that most religions have a much more profound acceptance of human fallibility than science. Science doesn't have the notion of Original Sin, for instance. That's why books like Kuhn's 'The Structure of Scientific Revolutions' are such shocking revelations to practising scientists. They are so convinced of the "absoluteness" of their work that they fail to see the historicism, enculturation, bias, prejudice, and arbitrariness of their theories. In fact, Science as an institution is founded on the belief that man is perfectible. The science proponents say "Whatever is wrong must have a cause and we can find that cause and prevent the wrong from happening". Communism shares the scientific mindset that the root of evil can be excised from reality and destroyed. I'll take the humility of the religious man over the hubris of the scientist. That said, I appreciate the great things that science has been able to accomplish. It's just not as deep in its understanding of human nature as the religious (Judeo-Christian or any other) view.
And science has to work in the real world. Religion doesn't. Don't be so smug about what you think the real world is. Religion is as much about the real world as science. Different aspects of the world certainly, but real nevertheless. Thus science is self correcting. Religion is not. Religion is actually self-correcting, too, if you think about it. It just moves more slowly. Neither [science nor religion] are perfect. Science recognizes this. Religion does not. I would argue that most religions have a much more profound acceptance of human fallibility than science. Science doesn't have the notion of Original Sin, for instance. That's why books like Kuhn's 'The Structure of Scientific Revolutions' are such shocking revelations to practising scientists. They are so convinced of the "absoluteness" of their work that they fail to see the historicism, enculturation, bias, prejudice, and arbitrariness of their theories. In fact, Science as an institution is founded on the belief that man is perfectible. The science proponents say "Whatever is wrong must have a cause and we can find that cause and prevent the wrong from happening". Communism shares the scientific mindset that the root of evil can be excised from reality and destroyed. I'll take the humility of the religious man over the hubris of the scientist. That said, I appreciate the great things that science has been able to accomplish. It's just not as deep in its understanding of human nature as the religious (Judeo-Christian or any other) view.
Apparently there were a couple of guys in Medieval Europe who believed in God AND felt quite rosy about killing infidels.
Calling computer chips "memory" is just a bad metaphor. No point in making hard arguments based on it.
If we did, how would we know it was lying?
Technology has done good things, but look at how unequally its benefits have been shared. Life expectancy is much lower in the developing world than in the G7. Supporting research is great, but it seems like we want to get maximum pleasure out of our inventions before our neighbor has enough to eat. The industrialized world reminds me of a mob of fat, greedy people going for second or third helpings at the buffet while they elbow the emaciated weaklings out of the way.