The problem is that this type of overthinking goes on too much in IT, without consideration for the exigencies of their daily jobs. What if the doctor that has to 'sign off' is gone or unreachable? Things change! Paper systems had the FLEXIBILITY to be adapted to changing circumstances.
Any workable system has to be UNDER-designed. It should start with a simple scanning of paper records for electronic sharing, together with a system to make sure new papers are scanned. For many applications, that would probably be way better than having any 'data model' at all. The developers cannot and will never be able to predict the variety of data and instructions and random information that a doctor should put into a patient's record. The system needs to be open-ended and lack a rigid structure that ties the hands of the actual practitioners.
For example, in the described system, he said that allergies had to be associated with specific causes, which is limiting and may not be true. He said that drugs had to be separately chosen and were limited to a specific list! This is ridiculous. New drugs appear all the time. Who knows what sort of drug a random doctor may prescribe? Docs need the flexibility to write anything at all into the record, and find it again when they check it.
They probably also need the ability to quickly jot something down for the record and take off to deal with someone else who's dying. We have the answer - it's PAPER. If you want to have a tablet on every bed, fine, splurge, but you should have a paper chart or at least a pad as well in case of loss of power or network connectivity.
Wow, you're right! A hard drive is exactly the same thing as paper, human memory is exactly the same as semiconductor RAM, and a computer processor's actions are exactly the same as those of a human playing a piano... In fact, let's just agree that 'paper' is a synonym for 'hard drive', 'human memory' is a synonym for 'computer RAM', etc.
There couldn't possibly be any legally cognizable differences between people and computers/software.
Capitalism and freedom are, in large part, about the twin interrelated benefits of (1) allowing people to do things they like to do and are good at, and (2) the increased efficiency and productiveness that results therefrom.
Who knows whether the discrepancy is because women prefer other fields, whether they are slightly less likely to be good at certain hard sciences, some other factors, or a mixture of all these? Certainly, many people shy away from acknowledging physical and mental differences between men and women, but there clearly are differences.
In any case, if the difference is not primarily due to discrimination, large inefficiencies would result from equalizing the numbers. People would either be less productive, less happy, or both.
Negative prejudicial behavior against very capable women in hard sciences would be a problem, but there are statistical means of determining whether such a problem still exists and to what extent. That is where the focus should be if people are worried about discrimination. The numbers, however, should be allowed to remain wherever they are based on people's free choices of their profession.
Well, I have to call BS on the anti-whiteboarders. A good coder can think out some code and write it on a whiteboard. I'm not saying you don't erase or correct anything, but railing against it is just admitting your limitations, and I don't think most good coders would balk at this.
People have been coding on boards and interviewing in that fashion for years and years.
The argument presented rests on the false assumption that people googling things do so in proportion to their interests or activities in general.
That's not true. For example, people can get porn on the web immediately. People cannot get apple pie on the web immediately. So people would probably sit down to google porn more often than googling apple pie.
By the same rationale, people are probably unlikely to google 'breathing', although they breathe a lot more than they watch porn.
It's because they're smart people who hate being under the authority and control of less intelligent people. They then rationalize the idea that such authority is unnecessary, because they themselves, and possibly their peers in a technical or academic job are smart enough to peacefully share everything they have, and motivated enough to do some interesting things without being whipped.
Unfortunately, the view doesn't work except in a very smart, homogeneous environment. And even then, who wants to grow food or catch criminals?
Although your comments about open offices may be true (it may be a problem with colleagues), I offer my thoughts:
I was a software developer and now an IP lawyer doing patent law stuff. I quickly discovered that dictating vastly increased my productivity. Most people in software have no idea what a boon to productivity this could be, or they'd be dictating specs and pseudocode and notes all the time. I actually think that software developers should seriously think about dictating pseudocode and handing it off to newbies for implementation details. Obviously, it's more directly applicable to the types of work a lawyer does though.
In any case, because the turn-around for transcription in our firm can be a half-day to a day, I got this software to try out. It is actually amazingly good. You can tweak the settings for special spellings or acronyms, and can train special words for odd names, etc. When I don't have time to have our word processing department transcribe something, I use this, and the accuracy is very very good.
One thing most people who don't usually do dictation may not realize is that you don't get the efficiency boost unless you really just look away from the screen and dictate a good chunk, then go back for editing when done. The best is to dictate an entire document without worrying about any corrections, then come back and review it the next day for errors. With Dragon though, it's probably better to do a few paragraphs, then go back and check. If you constantly let minor corrections interrupt you, you don't get the benefit of the increased speed.
Yes, but I think there is a better way than simply leaving our markets completely open and losing 100% of our manufacturing know-how.
We should use reasonable tariffs and subsidies as ways to at least partially offset our massive trade deficit with China and maintain _some_ knowledge of their core industries in this country. At least that way, when things calm down in 50 years, we won't all have to go to China in order to learn how the hell to do those things again.
The problem is not one of the pure principle of 'free markets'... It's a matter of intensity and duration. If we allow China to completely destroy vast industries here that take many years to develop knowledge and expertise in, we will be big losers.
Everyone agrees that _excessive_ complexity is a bad thing, but in some cases, complexity is good. You wouldn't argue that all software should be simple enough for the ordinary person to understand the _code_ would you?
Writing a patent is like coding in many ways. You need to figure out how to describe the important features of an invention with the proper scope, and how to describe the important connections between the elements of the invention. It is not easy for most ordinary people to do something like that. Even engineers have a hard time until they become experienced in what sort of thinking is required.
Bud, IMHO you are sorely mistaken about almost everything you're saying.
First, you're confusing 'advanced' with some utopian ideal in your head. Advanced is a relative term.
Second, you're confusing an advanced society with highly intelligent and ethical individuals. The first requires complex law for coordination and for many functions.
Groups of highly intelligent and ethical individuals can get by with _fewer_ laws or rules, because they are more capable and willing to work things out between themselves. However, they would still do well to have default rules to avoid the cost of all that negotiation in certain cases. As previously noted by another poster, there are also societal protocols which require clear definitions to function properly.
Western common law is the most amazingly intelligent system of law ever to have been developed, and you would, I think, be very glad and enriched to study it a bit more, because it's not what you think it is. It's basically an amazing system of machine learning which derives its rules from very intelligently filtered sources. It has developed slowly over more than a thousand years now, by an evolutionary process very similar to those we use in the evolutionary algorithms of AI. In particular, it is highly practical and necessary because it (referring to common law rather than statutory law) requires actual cases of conflict before changing or complicating its rules.
If you look into it, I think you will also agree that advancement of a society requires increasingly complex law, just as advanced features of software require increasingly complex code, adding layers of abstraction and paradigms that were originally unnecessary, but are required to handle the increasing complexity.
Experts are always retained for patent litigation. Often they're professors of CS or another related area.
Also, _patent_ attorneys are attorneys with engineering degrees, so they are not the same as the average trial lawyer. This is one reason it pays to have patent attorneys do your litigation, instead of, or at least in conjunction with, other litigation counsel.
You said: "you get the same healthcare as everyone else, regardless of how much you pay."
This is exactly the problem the parent is talking about. The inspiring and awesome thing about capitalism is that people can be free to choose what they buy, and that their freedom of choice leads to progress and betterment for the whole society.
If I want to have a high level of service, and I want to spend more on that rather than buy a huge TV, I should have the right to do so. I should not be forced to pay for other peoples' personal care, unless it's related to general public health. This does not include, for example, care for individuals who are unfortunate enough to get cancer. This is a _personal_ problem that they and their families should be responsible for.
I have no problem with paying taxes for things that we all need collectively, such as national defense. But for things that we need or want individually, a free but properly regulated market is always the best way to provide them, because services will be cheaper, people will have access congruent to their need (supply and demand), no rationing will be necessary, and waste will be eliminated. But the most important benefit is that *people will get what they want*. If they can't afford what they want, they can at least get what they can afford, and try to afford more.
Re:Do you also own a cat with a diamond collar?
on
Failing Our Geniuses
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· Score: 1
I have to note that my situation was the same as well, to a large degree. To this day, I have a problem doing anything not self-directed, because I developed such a hatred for even attempting to do any assignment given me from above. When I was, rarely, left to choose my own course, I developed a fear of actually doing so, as teachers would not like the radical directions I took.
For example, I wrote a long research paper about theoretical physics for English class in junior high. I wrote a paper on daoism in 5th grade, which was interesting, and one on the Iran-Iraq wars in 6th grade, which was also somewhat interesting. But even at that time, I needed help to reach my full potential, which I didn't get. What I really needed was for someone to help me understand how to keep track of academic research for a real paper, rather than keeping it all in my head and shuffling between 10 or 20 books with tons of papers stuffed in them for bookmarks.
A major problem, I believe, for gifted kids, appears when they reach more complex material, not material that's hard to understand, but material that requires organization outside one's head, or _planning_ a schedule. I think lots of us get into doing things last minute because we can. At CMU I wrote an entire basic unix-style OS and shell in less than 3 days, because I could, because I spent most of my time wracked with angst about the stupid economy and the perennial problem of income vs. what-you-love, and because no one ever taught me that non-stupid people actually do plan things and use systems for organizing sometimes.
It reminds me of the piano lessons I had for a couple of years as a kid. I never really learned how to sight-read music, because I could memorize the song as my teacher demonstrated it, and play it back sufficiently just from that and a couple of cues from glancing at the score when I was stuck. I did this so I would never have to practice at home, and because I hated the music I was supposed to be learning. I think the only way I would have learned to read music would have been if I were forced to learn a crazily complex piece without ever having heard it first.
Many things suck. I empathize with all of you. We must strive to get by in a world full of stupid shit, and to not lose that spark that animates us to voraciously learn and love it, while doing so...
Don't kid yourself. We all like to have certain brands we can rely on. How would you feel about it if a Chinese company started marketing their database as MySQL, or their browser as Firefox, all crappy and full of bugs, violating the GPL with no compunctions whatsoever...? Not to mention things like milk or food or drugs...
There's no reason to cheat like this but greed and, more importantly, dishonesty. Everyone has the potential to be successful in a capitalist system. All that trademark law asks is that everyone be honest about who they are and where their goods come from - not ride on the shirttails of others... It just provides some fair rules for the game that benefit everyone who wants to play.
In fact, trademark law is one of the fairest, most utterly reasonable and correct areas of law, period. Anyone who can't play by these simple rules deserves, at the very least, a heaping of disdain.
Of course, you're right. But how hard would it be for them not to give Eve the key? All they have to do is have a box for content that has encrypted connections to output devices, where all devices basically self-destruct when tampered with. No one could break it.
I agree that ethics and law are overlapping but never equivalent spheres. I'm only positing a small part of this, that is, that when a legitimate law grants rights to people, like copyright, or freedom of speech, and they exercise those rights in line with the law, that's not unethical in and of itself.
If they use that right to betray a promise to a friend, for example, that would be unethical but still legal. But the RIAA, as far as I can tell, isn't really doing that, but rather, trying to get at the people who are infringing its members' copyrights. If they use unethical methods in the process (lying, etc.), that's a different story. But warning letters and settlement proposals are not, in and of themselves, unethical.
1) Yes, I'm discussing the situation where a plaintiff does have a copyright. If it doesn't, and it's not an honest mistake, then that would be fraudulent.
2) I discussed this in an earlier response, but I do think the law is legitimate. I don't think it's always the best approach though.
3) Yes, this was a bit of hyperbole, but if you don't think the law is legitimate, you should work to either change the system or the law.
4) If changing the law is not possible, you're in one of two situations I can think of, off the top of my head. (1) If you're in the majority, you're pretty screwed. Try to change the underlying system, or try civil disobedience or a revolution if you care enough. (2) Others in your society disagree with you, and you lose out fair and square to them.
My main point is that I don't blame the RIAA for doing what it's doing, just as I don't really blame a teenager for being horny. Even if there are problems here, I think the problems are in the disconnect between copyright law and the practical realities of enforcement, rather than in the actions of the copyright holders.
Well, there are a couple of ways to look at that. There is a big power differential between those with money and those without, and that's not going away anytime soon. I tend to see the problems you're talking about as a problem of this monetary differential, because if the defendants could easily pay their legal costs, this would be a non-issue.
This could be fixed, though, by adopting the loser-pays rule of Britain, which I think I agree with. Or, at least, have a loser-pays rule when the loser is the plaintiff. In the U.S., the rule is that each side pays its costs, except when one side doesn't play fairly (to simplify a bit).
Generally, the courts should be hard on a party that sues without a reasonable good-faith belief that their suit has merit. They should be subject to sanctions.
The other problem in this respect is our system of "notice pleading", which requires very little to no evidence before filing a suit. We use the discovery process to develop evidence. This is fairly new, as before the 20s or 30s (I forget exactly when), a plaintiff was generally required to have much more evidence to support their claims at filing. I think these changes have gone too far, and although discovery is great for some reasons, the bar should be somewhat higher at the initial pleadings.
I would disagree, as long as the law is legitimate. If you think that passing laws the way congress does lends them legitimacy, because it allows representation, then it is at least unlikely to be immoral to simply use the rights you're granted under those laws in the way they were intended to be used.
If you think that the system of government, or of legislation, is not legitimate in that sense, then I would agree with you.
What happened to all those engineer-type people who used to hang out on slashdot? They tend to be more rational than this bunch I see.
Let's think about this logically.
RIAA has a right to sue anyone they think has committed copyright infringement against one of their members. This is because there is a _law_ that was passed by _congress_ supported by the _constitution_ that gives them this right. Unless you completely reject our system of government, you can't argue that a company is evil for suing someone who violates their rights in this manner.
If you disagree with the law, then the _logical_ thing would be to argue for or work towards a change to the law, not to vilify the company for asserting their legitimate rights under current law.
So if they can rightfully sue, they can certainly rightfully warn someone they're going to sue, and offer a cheaper alternative settlement agreement.
In fact, it's a lot nicer than just suing and making an example of someone. In any case, the courts routinely emphasize how great it is for parties to settle out of court, or use arbitration rather than the courts, because it saves everyone time and money, and reduces the load on the judicial system.
All I see on here and places like boing boing is this train of logic: I'm not a big company, I'm a hacker. I feel for other hackers. We all like hanging out and file trading on the net. It's fun. Therefore it sucks that people are getting sued for it. Therefore, those guys are bastards. Furthermore, what they are doing must be evil/immoral/illegal somehow. Or at least, they should just stop it 'cause it sucks. Plus, they can't stop us, nyah nyah.
Morality is legislated all the time. There are laws against murder, which exist because it's considered immoral. There are laws against fornication, obscenity, etc. It's nothing new.
This is ridiculous. The bill doesn't make anything easier to abuse.
First to file means "first _inventor_ to file." The _only_ difference is to make interferences go away. Patents would still be invalid if the applicant didn't invent the invention, or there were invalidating prior art, as you say.
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The problem is that this type of overthinking goes on too much in IT, without consideration for the exigencies of their daily jobs. What if the doctor that has to 'sign off' is gone or unreachable? Things change! Paper systems had the FLEXIBILITY to be adapted to changing circumstances.
Any workable system has to be UNDER-designed. It should start with a simple scanning of paper records for electronic sharing, together with a system to make sure new papers are scanned. For many applications, that would probably be way better than having any 'data model' at all. The developers cannot and will never be able to predict the variety of data and instructions and random information that a doctor should put into a patient's record. The system needs to be open-ended and lack a rigid structure that ties the hands of the actual practitioners.
For example, in the described system, he said that allergies had to be associated with specific causes, which is limiting and may not be true. He said that drugs had to be separately chosen and were limited to a specific list! This is ridiculous. New drugs appear all the time. Who knows what sort of drug a random doctor may prescribe? Docs need the flexibility to write anything at all into the record, and find it again when they check it.
They probably also need the ability to quickly jot something down for the record and take off to deal with someone else who's dying. We have the answer - it's PAPER. If you want to have a tablet on every bed, fine, splurge, but you should have a paper chart or at least a pad as well in case of loss of power or network connectivity.
Wow, you're right! A hard drive is exactly the same thing as paper, human memory is exactly the same as semiconductor RAM, and a computer processor's actions are exactly the same as those of a human playing a piano... In fact, let's just agree that 'paper' is a synonym for 'hard drive', 'human memory' is a synonym for 'computer RAM', etc.
There couldn't possibly be any legally cognizable differences between people and computers/software.
No Kidding.
Anyone remember "the pursuit of happiness?"
Capitalism and freedom are, in large part, about the twin interrelated benefits of (1) allowing people to do things they like to do and are good at, and (2) the increased efficiency and productiveness that results therefrom.
Who knows whether the discrepancy is because women prefer other fields, whether they are slightly less likely to be good at certain hard sciences, some other factors, or a mixture of all these? Certainly, many people shy away from acknowledging physical and mental differences between men and women, but there clearly are differences.
In any case, if the difference is not primarily due to discrimination, large inefficiencies would result from equalizing the numbers. People would either be less productive, less happy, or both.
Negative prejudicial behavior against very capable women in hard sciences would be a problem, but there are statistical means of determining whether such a problem still exists and to what extent. That is where the focus should be if people are worried about discrimination. The numbers, however, should be allowed to remain wherever they are based on people's free choices of their profession.
It's a miniscule threat.
Well, I have to call BS on the anti-whiteboarders. A good coder can think out some code and write it on a whiteboard. I'm not saying you don't erase or correct anything, but railing against it is just admitting your limitations, and I don't think most good coders would balk at this.
People have been coding on boards and interviewing in that fashion for years and years.
The argument presented rests on the false assumption that people googling things do so in proportion to their interests or activities in general.
That's not true. For example, people can get porn on the web immediately. People cannot get apple pie on the web immediately. So people would probably sit down to google porn more often than googling apple pie.
By the same rationale, people are probably unlikely to google 'breathing', although they breathe a lot more than they watch porn.
It's because they're smart people who hate being under the authority and control of less intelligent people. They then rationalize the idea that such authority is unnecessary, because they themselves, and possibly their peers in a technical or academic job are smart enough to peacefully share everything they have, and motivated enough to do some interesting things without being whipped.
Unfortunately, the view doesn't work except in a very smart, homogeneous environment. And even then, who wants to grow food or catch criminals?
Although your comments about open offices may be true (it may be a problem with colleagues), I offer my thoughts:
I was a software developer and now an IP lawyer doing patent law stuff. I quickly discovered that dictating vastly increased my productivity. Most people in software have no idea what a boon to productivity this could be, or they'd be dictating specs and pseudocode and notes all the time. I actually think that software developers should seriously think about dictating pseudocode and handing it off to newbies for implementation details. Obviously, it's more directly applicable to the types of work a lawyer does though.
In any case, because the turn-around for transcription in our firm can be a half-day to a day, I got this software to try out. It is actually amazingly good. You can tweak the settings for special spellings or acronyms, and can train special words for odd names, etc. When I don't have time to have our word processing department transcribe something, I use this, and the accuracy is very very good.
One thing most people who don't usually do dictation may not realize is that you don't get the efficiency boost unless you really just look away from the screen and dictate a good chunk, then go back for editing when done. The best is to dictate an entire document without worrying about any corrections, then come back and review it the next day for errors. With Dragon though, it's probably better to do a few paragraphs, then go back and check. If you constantly let minor corrections interrupt you, you don't get the benefit of the increased speed.
Yes, but I think there is a better way than simply leaving our markets completely open and losing 100% of our manufacturing know-how.
We should use reasonable tariffs and subsidies as ways to at least partially offset our massive trade deficit with China and maintain _some_ knowledge of their core industries in this country. At least that way, when things calm down in 50 years, we won't all have to go to China in order to learn how the hell to do those things again.
The problem is not one of the pure principle of 'free markets'... It's a matter of intensity and duration. If we allow China to completely destroy vast industries here that take many years to develop knowledge and expertise in, we will be big losers.
Everyone agrees that _excessive_ complexity is a bad thing, but in some cases, complexity is good. You wouldn't argue that all software should be simple enough for the ordinary person to understand the _code_ would you?
Writing a patent is like coding in many ways. You need to figure out how to describe the important features of an invention with the proper scope, and how to describe the important connections between the elements of the invention. It is not easy for most ordinary people to do something like that. Even engineers have a hard time until they become experienced in what sort of thinking is required.
Bud, IMHO you are sorely mistaken about almost everything you're saying.
First, you're confusing 'advanced' with some utopian ideal in your head. Advanced is a relative term.
Second, you're confusing an advanced society with highly intelligent and ethical individuals. The first requires complex law for coordination and for many functions.
Groups of highly intelligent and ethical individuals can get by with _fewer_ laws or rules, because they are more capable and willing to work things out between themselves. However, they would still do well to have default rules to avoid the cost of all that negotiation in certain cases. As previously noted by another poster, there are also societal protocols which require clear definitions to function properly.
Western common law is the most amazingly intelligent system of law ever to have been developed, and you would, I think, be very glad and enriched to study it a bit more, because it's not what you think it is. It's basically an amazing system of machine learning which derives its rules from very intelligently filtered sources. It has developed slowly over more than a thousand years now, by an evolutionary process very similar to those we use in the evolutionary algorithms of AI. In particular, it is highly practical and necessary because it (referring to common law rather than statutory law) requires actual cases of conflict before changing or complicating its rules.
If you look into it, I think you will also agree that advancement of a society requires increasingly complex law, just as advanced features of software require increasingly complex code, adding layers of abstraction and paradigms that were originally unnecessary, but are required to handle the increasing complexity.
Experts are always retained for patent litigation. Often they're professors of CS or another related area.
Also, _patent_ attorneys are attorneys with engineering degrees, so they are not the same as the average trial lawyer. This is one reason it pays to have patent attorneys do your litigation, instead of, or at least in conjunction with, other litigation counsel.
You said: "you get the same healthcare as everyone else, regardless of how much you pay."
This is exactly the problem the parent is talking about. The inspiring and awesome thing about capitalism is that people can be free to choose what they buy, and that their freedom of choice leads to progress and betterment for the whole society.
If I want to have a high level of service, and I want to spend more on that rather than buy a huge TV, I should have the right to do so. I should not be forced to pay for other peoples' personal care, unless it's related to general public health. This does not include, for example, care for individuals who are unfortunate enough to get cancer. This is a _personal_ problem that they and their families should be responsible for.
I have no problem with paying taxes for things that we all need collectively, such as national defense. But for things that we need or want individually, a free but properly regulated market is always the best way to provide them, because services will be cheaper, people will have access congruent to their need (supply and demand), no rationing will be necessary, and waste will be eliminated. But the most important benefit is that *people will get what they want*. If they can't afford what they want, they can at least get what they can afford, and try to afford more.
I have to note that my situation was the same as well, to a large degree. To this day, I have a problem doing anything not self-directed, because I developed such a hatred for even attempting to do any assignment given me from above. When I was, rarely, left to choose my own course, I developed a fear of actually doing so, as teachers would not like the radical directions I took.
For example, I wrote a long research paper about theoretical physics for English class in junior high. I wrote a paper on daoism in 5th grade, which was interesting, and one on the Iran-Iraq wars in 6th grade, which was also somewhat interesting. But even at that time, I needed help to reach my full potential, which I didn't get. What I really needed was for someone to help me understand how to keep track of academic research for a real paper, rather than keeping it all in my head and shuffling between 10 or 20 books with tons of papers stuffed in them for bookmarks.
A major problem, I believe, for gifted kids, appears when they reach more complex material, not material that's hard to understand, but material that requires organization outside one's head, or _planning_ a schedule. I think lots of us get into doing things last minute because we can. At CMU I wrote an entire basic unix-style OS and shell in less than 3 days, because I could, because I spent most of my time wracked with angst about the stupid economy and the perennial problem of income vs. what-you-love, and because no one ever taught me that non-stupid people actually do plan things and use systems for organizing sometimes.
It reminds me of the piano lessons I had for a couple of years as a kid. I never really learned how to sight-read music, because I could memorize the song as my teacher demonstrated it, and play it back sufficiently just from that and a couple of cues from glancing at the score when I was stuck. I did this so I would never have to practice at home, and because I hated the music I was supposed to be learning. I think the only way I would have learned to read music would have been if I were forced to learn a crazily complex piece without ever having heard it first.
Many things suck. I empathize with all of you. We must strive to get by in a world full of stupid shit, and to not lose that spark that animates us to voraciously learn and love it, while doing so...
Don't kid yourself. We all like to have certain brands we can rely on. How would you feel about it if a Chinese company started marketing their database as MySQL, or their browser as Firefox, all crappy and full of bugs, violating the GPL with no compunctions whatsoever...? Not to mention things like milk or food or drugs...
There's no reason to cheat like this but greed and, more importantly, dishonesty. Everyone has the potential to be successful in a capitalist system. All that trademark law asks is that everyone be honest about who they are and where their goods come from - not ride on the shirttails of others... It just provides some fair rules for the game that benefit everyone who wants to play.
In fact, trademark law is one of the fairest, most utterly reasonable and correct areas of law, period. Anyone who can't play by these simple rules deserves, at the very least, a heaping of disdain.
No, actually the brand names _are_ worth a lot. Until people copy them and dilute the trademark by lying about where their products are from.
Of course, you're right. But how hard would it be for them not to give Eve the key? All they have to do is have a box for content that has encrypted connections to output devices, where all devices basically self-destruct when tampered with. No one could break it.
I agree that ethics and law are overlapping but never equivalent spheres. I'm only positing a small part of this, that is, that when a legitimate law grants rights to people, like copyright, or freedom of speech, and they exercise those rights in line with the law, that's not unethical in and of itself.
If they use that right to betray a promise to a friend, for example, that would be unethical but still legal. But the RIAA, as far as I can tell, isn't really doing that, but rather, trying to get at the people who are infringing its members' copyrights. If they use unethical methods in the process (lying, etc.), that's a different story. But warning letters and settlement proposals are not, in and of themselves, unethical.
1) Yes, I'm discussing the situation where a plaintiff does have a copyright. If it doesn't, and it's not an honest mistake, then that would be fraudulent.
2) I discussed this in an earlier response, but I do think the law is legitimate. I don't think it's always the best approach though.
3) Yes, this was a bit of hyperbole, but if you don't think the law is legitimate, you should work to either change the system or the law.
4) If changing the law is not possible, you're in one of two situations I can think of, off the top of my head. (1) If you're in the majority, you're pretty screwed. Try to change the underlying system, or try civil disobedience or a revolution if you care enough. (2) Others in your society disagree with you, and you lose out fair and square to them.
My main point is that I don't blame the RIAA for doing what it's doing, just as I don't really blame a teenager for being horny. Even if there are problems here, I think the problems are in the disconnect between copyright law and the practical realities of enforcement, rather than in the actions of the copyright holders.
Well, there are a couple of ways to look at that. There is a big power differential between those with money and those without, and that's not going away anytime soon. I tend to see the problems you're talking about as a problem of this monetary differential, because if the defendants could easily pay their legal costs, this would be a non-issue.
This could be fixed, though, by adopting the loser-pays rule of Britain, which I think I agree with. Or, at least, have a loser-pays rule when the loser is the plaintiff. In the U.S., the rule is that each side pays its costs, except when one side doesn't play fairly (to simplify a bit).
Generally, the courts should be hard on a party that sues without a reasonable good-faith belief that their suit has merit. They should be subject to sanctions.
The other problem in this respect is our system of "notice pleading", which requires very little to no evidence before filing a suit. We use the discovery process to develop evidence. This is fairly new, as before the 20s or 30s (I forget exactly when), a plaintiff was generally required to have much more evidence to support their claims at filing. I think these changes have gone too far, and although discovery is great for some reasons, the bar should be somewhat higher at the initial pleadings.
I would disagree, as long as the law is legitimate. If you think that passing laws the way congress does lends them legitimacy, because it allows representation, then it is at least unlikely to be immoral to simply use the rights you're granted under those laws in the way they were intended to be used.
If you think that the system of government, or of legislation, is not legitimate in that sense, then I would agree with you.
What happened to all those engineer-type people who used to hang out on slashdot? They tend to be more rational than this bunch I see.
Let's think about this logically.
RIAA has a right to sue anyone they think has committed copyright infringement against one of their members. This is because there is a _law_ that was passed by _congress_ supported by the _constitution_ that gives them this right. Unless you completely reject our system of government, you can't argue that a company is evil for suing someone who violates their rights in this manner.
If you disagree with the law, then the _logical_ thing would be to argue for or work towards a change to the law, not to vilify the company for asserting their legitimate rights under current law.
So if they can rightfully sue, they can certainly rightfully warn someone they're going to sue, and offer a cheaper alternative settlement agreement.
In fact, it's a lot nicer than just suing and making an example of someone. In any case, the courts routinely emphasize how great it is for parties to settle out of court, or use arbitration rather than the courts, because it saves everyone time and money, and reduces the load on the judicial system.
All I see on here and places like boing boing is this train of logic: I'm not a big company, I'm a hacker. I feel for other hackers. We all like hanging out and file trading on the net. It's fun. Therefore it sucks that people are getting sued for it. Therefore, those guys are bastards. Furthermore, what they are doing must be evil/immoral/illegal somehow. Or at least, they should just stop it 'cause it sucks. Plus, they can't stop us, nyah nyah.
This is purely emotional drivel.
Morality is legislated all the time. There are laws against murder, which exist because it's considered immoral. There are laws against fornication, obscenity, etc. It's nothing new.
Just FYI, they would all probably be handled in one massive case.
This is ridiculous. The bill doesn't make anything easier to abuse.
First to file means "first _inventor_ to file." The _only_ difference is to make interferences go away. Patents would still be invalid if the applicant didn't invent the invention, or there were invalidating prior art, as you say.