Just because movie revenues are up this month, this does not prove that file sharing has (or will in the future have) no detrimental effect on the industry...
Downloading a movie off the internet is not theft, it's copyright infringement.
It's not denying a corporation profits that is the issue. You can do that by abstaining from buying the product. The issue is getting the product *even though* you haven't paid.
Showing a movie to your friends is covered by copyright law -- small groups are ok, but the bigger it gets, the more it becomes like a public performance, and you have to pay royalties for that. It's just a line-drawing problem.
Waiting for a movie to transition to dvd is beside the point -- that's just paying the cost in a different way, plus it's not a violation of copyright law. In that case, you're exercising your rights properly as a consumer.
Borrowing books from the library is a public good that we've decided is great enough to carve an exception into copyright law for. It's therefore legal. But we haven't created this exception for file trading of commercial movies.
You can tape songs off the radio for personal use within the copyright law.
Drinking at home certainly has nothing to do with anything we're talking about here.
I really don't know how you manage to mix up things as different as (legitimately refusing to buy something), and (refusing to buy something but getting the product for free).
Just thought it bore pointing out, receipts minus costs are not "profit" as you say at one point, but "gross" as you say at another point.
The difference goes to paying everyone, and investing in future ventures. Most businesses, even movie studios, in the end only make an average return on investment to their stockholders.
This shows how fucking blind you are to reality. Jeez, man. Think! I said 'immigrants' because they can't speak fucking English!
How well do you think they can communicate with my grandmother, who's from Cape Cod and only ever been to Scotland in her whole life? Not well, I can tell you. It seriously pisses me off when you suggest that there's no objective difference between an immigrant in an extremely sensitive position such as a hospital, and a native English speaker.
That's bullshit. She could never get things across to the nurses she had. I don't care how much you pull the wool over your eyes, there is a difference.
This is reality, man. Not some fucking liberal paradise. I have nothing against people because of their race or where they came from. I have something against a system that puts people in a position they shouldn't be in for practical, objective reasons.
The fundamental point is that copyright is meant to protect the exact wording of a work. There is a fudge factor, but this is the essential idea. So completely insignificant changes to code are probably still protected by copyright.
But what patents do is allow you to protect a method of doing something, for instance, implemented in a variety of ways. These methods could be implemented in a variety of ways to attempt to avoid the protection, but patents are meant to protect all variations that implement essentially the same elements as are in the claims.
You could use different 3rd party libraries to fulfill certain functions of an invention, but if you use them to perform the same functions, and put them together in the same way, you're still going to infringe a patent on that invention. In that case, the code is completely different, but serves the same function at a much higher level. This couldn't be covered by copyright.
IIRC, they were shot down pretty hard by the AMA or some other such organization when this was suggested. It was just a stunt to get publicity in their fight against malpractice suits.
I've got to tell you though, there are two sides to this story. People like to be sympathetic with doctors, because there's an assumption they're helping people. They seem to assume all those 'injured' people who are the lawyers' clients must be faking it or gunning for money for something that wasn't the docs' fault.
The fact is that sometimes the plaintiffs are scum, sometimes it's hard to tell who's scum, and sometimes, ofttimes, the doctors are committing some serious malpractice and deserve to have their hats handed to them.
How important is debugging and peer review in software development? Think about that and then consider how often doctors make diagnoses and prescriptions without peer review. How often they leave things to immigrant nurses and don't check back until they've given the patient twice the amount of a drug they should have. This happened to my grandmother! My relative's mother was in a hospital and was mistreated and died. Clearly a preventable case, imho, but they just didn't have the processes they needed to handle people properly there.
Until doctors stop bitching and start developing better processes and review mechanisms, I am all for the plaintiffs' lawyers.
I am not a lawyer, merely a law student. Don't rely on my statements as legal advice.
My understanding is that you may include source in a patent specification now, but it's optional. With the current PTO system, including source with each patent would be wasteful. (They're almost always submitted on _paper_.) Not to mention, the examiner wouldn't really be able to review it thoroughly. It's possible that in the future, with a better electronic patenting system, this could be more feasible.
But there's another reason not to do this. Software is copyrightable and patentable for a reason. The code itself may be protected by copyright, but a patent is for something else entirely. It's for the innovative methods, processes, combinations, etc, the inventor has implemented in code. It covers not just that exact code, but also other methods of implementing the same invention. This means, for instance, that someone can't just reimplement it in a different language and use it freely.
So source code is only relevant to a patent to the extent it demonstrates a reduction to practice of the invention, and some other things. It's the _claims_, i.e. the 'code' of the patent, that are really what's being patented. When you patent an engine, you're not patenting that actual engine implementation. You're patenting an innovation, and saying "here, check out this engine, which exemplifies my invention and proves that it works." So the code would be useful to coders who want to understand the ideas better, but might also mislead people into taking the code as the patent rather than the claims. A requirement for patenting at present is that one of ordinary skill in the art (not an expert) could practice the invention by reading the patent.
Ummm. Sure, HR people are crap a lot of times, but everywhere I've worked they've done technical interviews, and when I've interviewed people for programming jobs, I've done technical interviews.
Whenever I had any input, basically we used HR to tell us whether the person was kosher in general, and our own determinations as to whether they were competent...
"Patent Troll (PAT.unt trohl) n. A member of slashdot who reads the first sentence of a new patent, and who then attempts to be first to post that software patents are evil, and this patent proves it. Some of the species seem to believe, ironically, that these contributions are novel. --adj."
Actually, he (his estate) would be able to get lost wages, because he is considered to have lost his earning potential for the rest of his life... You'd have to pay (if found liable) an amount equivalent to what he'd make in the rest of his life, discounted to present value...
Opening up the opportunity to submit prior art more easily might be a good idea. There may be problems with that approach, but I'm not sure what they would be right now.
As for your other suggestions, for the most part, they are already the law. Simply using an established widget in a new way is not patentable, unless it's novel and nonobvious.
Do you know that almost every single patent application is rejected the first time? Most of them are rejected a number of times. Then the applicants attempt to distinguish their inventions from the prior art found, or draft their claims more narrowly, in order to get the patent issued. So there aren't that many cases where no prior art is found...
At any rate, I thought you guys would be interested in what the Patent Commissioner had to say at a talk he gave last week for the DC Bar.
He mentioned quite a few things, but most interesting was that since, I think it was April this year, ALL applications coming into the PTO are immediately scanned, and everything is done electronically from then on. New papers to go into the file are also scanned when they come in and added to the database. There is one office left that's being phased out of the paper files, but they're apparently on schedule.
There was an incredible amount if inefficiency when these files were being passed around between different buildings to different examiners, and someone had to find the file to insert new correspondence.
They are also working on improving access to most of the file over the web, and developing a new system for electronic filing. (They have one now that apparently is horrible -- I don't know much about it other than that everyone hates it and it's not helpful.)
The other main issue he discussed was the fee bill pending before the Senate. It was passed by the House, and will likely be passed in the Senate now. This will end fee diversion from PTO revenues to other government programs, a major step in the right direction for them. It's been a long haul getting this bill through, since it's obviously not high on the agenda vis-a-vis terrorism, but they seem to have succeeded. This bill contains a compromise requiring any unused fees to be rebated to applicants rather than spent by the PTO, but they don't expect to leave anything around to rebate if they can help it.
I think these changes, and others, are really going in the right direction. The problem, as with all things in the government, is that it's very slow. I'm definitely encouraged by the way things are going though.
True, and further I'd point out that unless they _think_ you're a pushover, they're not going to want to sue someone who clearly attempted in good faith to avoid their patent. They REALLY don't want to go to the expense of litigation and lose, and neither do their lawyers...
Of course, I've heard of many times when lawyers have advised their clients not to sue, and they pushed the lawyer into suing anyway. These situations don't tend to make the judges happy...
This is not legal advice. I'm not a lawyer yet, merely a lowly law student.
You're gonna deal with lost wages anyway.
If you have to hurt someone, the smart thing to do is just not to leave them a vegetable. Loss of enjoyment of life is a big liability. If they're dead, they don't get loss of enjoyment, usually, and they'll only get pain and suffering for the actual pain they suffered before death.
If they survive, and can't do things they could before, and are in pain, you're looking at a lot of loss of enjoyment and pain and suffering damages. Either way, they'll probably have lost wages, unless the harm is minimal enough that they can still perform their normal job...
Since the absolute gun ban in the mid 90's in Britain, the burglary rate has shot up. Go check it out.
Many states in the U.S. have liberalized their concealed carry laws over the last 10 years or so, resulting in a significant decrease in crime in those states. Studies have shown about 1/3 less violent crime on average in such states.
Of people who get concealed carry permits, usually less than 1% later commit offenses. These people are usually well-educated and law-abiding citizens. The criminals also have guns though, even though, of course, it's illegal.
the problem is that obviously the excessively normal people like the journalist(s) who wrote this article have never been on IRC until they go looking for a story about something 'exotic'..
well-policed could mean two things. it could mean cracking down on warezers. that would be a good thing, imho. but it could also mean cracking down on the animal porn, fetish crap, hack/phreak talk in general, obscenity, etc. that would be horrible, and a violation of free speech.
BTW, contracts (which is what that is) are unilaterally voidable by anyone when made prior to the day before their 18th birthday.
Regarding Java. I cringed when I heard CMU started teaching the data structures classes in Java. C++ is definitely the way to go for anything non-functional (for which you have lisp/sml). Every other iterative language is a piece of cake once you master C++... Come on. No memory management? How are you going to do low-level design without memory management... argh. You have to learn to do everything to get a decent education.
Yes, publicly funded research gives the most 'bang for the buck', but the government can't predict everything...
I think the key is to have a balance between publicly funded _basic_research_ into things we know we'll need to research, and patent and other ip protections for innovators and productizers to come up with the rest.
The USSR had awesome basic research, but that was only part of a complete breakfast...;)
The problem, obviously, is a surfeit of democracy. When you ask all the parents what they want, it's easy work and straight A's for their kids.
The schools have to have enough of a backbone to say they don't give a crap about individual kids failing, if it's because they don't measure up. What they care about is producing a majority of educated kids.
We're talking about ownership of intellectual property... If you can't have any sort of property rights in ideas, you can't have an economy based on ideas, only on tangentially related physical products.
Think about where we're going. Almost everything is going to be ideas soon. If they can't be owned, or controlled by the creator, noboby's going to create except for charity and fun. That's not enough to get the job done. I certainly would not want to live in a world where the ONLY apps were hobby software projects.
Stop for a moment to think about the fact that the U.S. is the greatest creator of IP in the world by far.
A writes a grogram. You copy it. You wouldn't have bought it, but now you have it. I know you copied it. Why am I going to pay anything? I'm going to either copy it, or try to get it from you for cheaper. Simple as that.
Copying has the effect of reducing what people are willing to pay for it. This reduces the number of people that buy it. This directly harms the creator.
What will happen is that first, every product will be able to be created from software that runs a nanotech assembler.
Next, companies will eventually realize that they can't develop any of these products unless they can make money, so they'll build a strict contracting system into the assemblers. They will refuse to copy their software onto your assembler unless it has the requisite protections.
So basically, you won't be able to get the code unless you agree to their terms, and those terms will be implemented in the hardware. The code will be developed in modules, such that no one team has access to the entire design. The code will be built onto a hardware module (e.g. dongle) that actively checks the target system it's plugged into to determine whether the proper protections are implemented (digital signatures, etc.) If you try to open it, it'll self-destruct.
The result will be that anyone who refuses to agree to the terms of the creator just won't get the product. Unless a free organization develops it independently.
Slashdot Mirror
I guess I have to make this explicit for you:
Just because movie revenues are up this month, this does not prove that file sharing has (or will in the future have) no detrimental effect on the industry...
Forest cover increased by 15% this month, the greatest increase recorded in 100 years. This proves that fears over global deforestation are unfounded.
Downloading a movie off the internet is not theft, it's copyright infringement.
It's not denying a corporation profits that is the issue. You can do that by abstaining from buying the product. The issue is getting the product *even though* you haven't paid.
Showing a movie to your friends is covered by copyright law -- small groups are ok, but the bigger it gets, the more it becomes like a public performance, and you have to pay royalties for that. It's just a line-drawing problem.
Waiting for a movie to transition to dvd is beside the point -- that's just paying the cost in a different way, plus it's not a violation of copyright law. In that case, you're exercising your rights properly as a consumer.
Borrowing books from the library is a public good that we've decided is great enough to carve an exception into copyright law for. It's therefore legal. But we haven't created this exception for file trading of commercial movies.
You can tape songs off the radio for personal use within the copyright law.
Drinking at home certainly has nothing to do with anything we're talking about here.
I really don't know how you manage to mix up things as different as (legitimately refusing to buy something), and (refusing to buy something but getting the product for free).
Just thought it bore pointing out, receipts minus costs are not "profit" as you say at one point, but "gross" as you say at another point.
The difference goes to paying everyone, and investing in future ventures. Most businesses, even movie studios, in the end only make an average return on investment to their stockholders.
This shows how fucking blind you are to reality. Jeez, man. Think! I said 'immigrants' because they can't speak fucking English!
How well do you think they can communicate with my grandmother, who's from Cape Cod and only ever been to Scotland in her whole life? Not well, I can tell you. It seriously pisses me off when you suggest that there's no objective difference between an immigrant in an extremely sensitive position such as a hospital, and a native English speaker.
That's bullshit. She could never get things across to the nurses she had. I don't care how much you pull the wool over your eyes, there is a difference.
This is reality, man. Not some fucking liberal paradise. I have nothing against people because of their race or where they came from. I have something against a system that puts people in a position they shouldn't be in for practical, objective reasons.
The fundamental point is that copyright is meant to protect the exact wording of a work. There is a fudge factor, but this is the essential idea. So completely insignificant changes to code are probably still protected by copyright.
But what patents do is allow you to protect a method of doing something, for instance, implemented in a variety of ways. These methods could be implemented in a variety of ways to attempt to avoid the protection, but patents are meant to protect all variations that implement essentially the same elements as are in the claims.
You could use different 3rd party libraries to fulfill certain functions of an invention, but if you use them to perform the same functions, and put them together in the same way, you're still going to infringe a patent on that invention. In that case, the code is completely different, but serves the same function at a much higher level. This couldn't be covered by copyright.
IIRC, they were shot down pretty hard by the AMA or some other such organization when this was suggested. It was just a stunt to get publicity in their fight against malpractice suits. I've got to tell you though, there are two sides to this story. People like to be sympathetic with doctors, because there's an assumption they're helping people. They seem to assume all those 'injured' people who are the lawyers' clients must be faking it or gunning for money for something that wasn't the docs' fault. The fact is that sometimes the plaintiffs are scum, sometimes it's hard to tell who's scum, and sometimes, ofttimes, the doctors are committing some serious malpractice and deserve to have their hats handed to them. How important is debugging and peer review in software development? Think about that and then consider how often doctors make diagnoses and prescriptions without peer review. How often they leave things to immigrant nurses and don't check back until they've given the patient twice the amount of a drug they should have. This happened to my grandmother! My relative's mother was in a hospital and was mistreated and died. Clearly a preventable case, imho, but they just didn't have the processes they needed to handle people properly there. Until doctors stop bitching and start developing better processes and review mechanisms, I am all for the plaintiffs' lawyers.
I am not a lawyer, merely a law student. Don't rely on my statements as legal advice.
My understanding is that you may include source in a patent specification now, but it's optional. With the current PTO system, including source with each patent would be wasteful. (They're almost always submitted on _paper_.) Not to mention, the examiner wouldn't really be able to review it thoroughly. It's possible that in the future, with a better electronic patenting system, this could be more feasible.
But there's another reason not to do this. Software is copyrightable and patentable for a reason. The code itself may be protected by copyright, but a patent is for something else entirely. It's for the innovative methods, processes, combinations, etc, the inventor has implemented in code. It covers not just that exact code, but also other methods of implementing the same invention. This means, for instance, that someone can't just reimplement it in a different language and use it freely.
So source code is only relevant to a patent to the extent it demonstrates a reduction to practice of the invention, and some other things. It's the _claims_, i.e. the 'code' of the patent, that are really what's being patented. When you patent an engine, you're not patenting that actual engine implementation. You're patenting an innovation, and saying "here, check out this engine, which exemplifies my invention and proves that it works." So the code would be useful to coders who want to understand the ideas better, but might also mislead people into taking the code as the patent rather than the claims. A requirement for patenting at present is that one of ordinary skill in the art (not an expert) could practice the invention by reading the patent.
Ummm. Sure, HR people are crap a lot of times, but everywhere I've worked they've done technical interviews, and when I've interviewed people for programming jobs, I've done technical interviews.
Whenever I had any input, basically we used HR to tell us whether the person was kosher in general, and our own determinations as to whether they were competent...
Alternate definition:
"Patent Troll (PAT.unt trohl) n. A member of slashdot who reads the first sentence of a new patent, and who then attempts to be first to post that software patents are evil, and this patent proves it. Some of the species seem to believe, ironically, that these contributions are novel. --adj."
Actually, he (his estate) would be able to get lost wages, because he is considered to have lost his earning potential for the rest of his life... You'd have to pay (if found liable) an amount equivalent to what he'd make in the rest of his life, discounted to present value...
But anyway, see here, at footnote 4 near the bottom, referencing this bbc article...
Opening up the opportunity to submit prior art more easily might be a good idea. There may be problems with that approach, but I'm not sure what they would be right now.
As for your other suggestions, for the most part, they are already the law. Simply using an established widget in a new way is not patentable, unless it's novel and nonobvious.
Do you know that almost every single patent application is rejected the first time? Most of them are rejected a number of times. Then the applicants attempt to distinguish their inventions from the prior art found, or draft their claims more narrowly, in order to get the patent issued. So there aren't that many cases where no prior art is found...
At any rate, I thought you guys would be interested in what the Patent Commissioner had to say at a talk he gave last week for the DC Bar.
He mentioned quite a few things, but most interesting was that since, I think it was April this year, ALL applications coming into the PTO are immediately scanned, and everything is done electronically from then on. New papers to go into the file are also scanned when they come in and added to the database. There is one office left that's being phased out of the paper files, but they're apparently on schedule.
There was an incredible amount if inefficiency when these files were being passed around between different buildings to different examiners, and someone had to find the file to insert new correspondence.
They are also working on improving access to most of the file over the web, and developing a new system for electronic filing. (They have one now that apparently is horrible -- I don't know much about it other than that everyone hates it and it's not helpful.)
The other main issue he discussed was the fee bill pending before the Senate. It was passed by the House, and will likely be passed in the Senate now. This will end fee diversion from PTO revenues to other government programs, a major step in the right direction for them. It's been a long haul getting this bill through, since it's obviously not high on the agenda vis-a-vis terrorism, but they seem to have succeeded. This bill contains a compromise requiring any unused fees to be rebated to applicants rather than spent by the PTO, but they don't expect to leave anything around to rebate if they can help it.
I think these changes, and others, are really going in the right direction. The problem, as with all things in the government, is that it's very slow. I'm definitely encouraged by the way things are going though.
True, and further I'd point out that unless they _think_ you're a pushover, they're not going to want to sue someone who clearly attempted in good faith to avoid their patent. They REALLY don't want to go to the expense of litigation and lose, and neither do their lawyers...
Of course, I've heard of many times when lawyers have advised their clients not to sue, and they pushed the lawyer into suing anyway. These situations don't tend to make the judges happy...
This is not legal advice. I'm not a lawyer yet, merely a lowly law student.
You're gonna deal with lost wages anyway.
If you have to hurt someone, the smart thing to do is just not to leave them a vegetable. Loss of enjoyment of life is a big liability. If they're dead, they don't get loss of enjoyment, usually, and they'll only get pain and suffering for the actual pain they suffered before death.
If they survive, and can't do things they could before, and are in pain, you're looking at a lot of loss of enjoyment and pain and suffering damages. Either way, they'll probably have lost wages, unless the harm is minimal enough that they can still perform their normal job...
Since the absolute gun ban in the mid 90's in Britain, the burglary rate has shot up. Go check it out.
Many states in the U.S. have liberalized their concealed carry laws over the last 10 years or so, resulting in a significant decrease in crime in those states. Studies have shown about 1/3 less violent crime on average in such states.
Of people who get concealed carry permits, usually less than 1% later commit offenses. These people are usually well-educated and law-abiding citizens. The criminals also have guns though, even though, of course, it's illegal.
one issue -- i would argue that irc _is_ obscure. i don't think the vast majority of people (over 90%) on the net now have ever even heard of irc.
she said 500k were on irc, and there are, i'm sure now, more than 1000 times that on the net.
the problem is that obviously the excessively normal people like the journalist(s) who wrote this article have never been on IRC until they go looking for a story about something 'exotic'..
well-policed could mean two things. it could mean cracking down on warezers. that would be a good thing, imho. but it could also mean cracking down on the animal porn, fetish crap, hack/phreak talk in general, obscenity, etc. that would be horrible, and a violation of free speech.
BTW, contracts (which is what that is) are unilaterally voidable by anyone when made prior to the day before their 18th birthday.
Regarding Java. I cringed when I heard CMU started teaching the data structures classes in Java. C++ is definitely the way to go for anything non-functional (for which you have lisp/sml). Every other iterative language is a piece of cake once you master C++... Come on. No memory management? How are you going to do low-level design without memory management... argh. You have to learn to do everything to get a decent education.
Yes, publicly funded research gives the most 'bang for the buck', but the government can't predict everything...
;)
I think the key is to have a balance between publicly funded _basic_research_ into things we know we'll need to research, and patent and other ip protections for innovators and productizers to come up with the rest.
The USSR had awesome basic research, but that was only part of a complete breakfast...
The schools have to have enough of a backbone to say they don't give a crap about individual kids failing, if it's because they don't measure up. What they care about is producing a majority of educated kids.
It should be meritocratic, not democratic.
Think about where we're going. Almost everything is going to be ideas soon. If they can't be owned, or controlled by the creator, noboby's going to create except for charity and fun. That's not enough to get the job done. I certainly would not want to live in a world where the ONLY apps were hobby software projects.
Stop for a moment to think about the fact that the U.S. is the greatest creator of IP in the world by far.
Copying has the effect of reducing what people are willing to pay for it. This reduces the number of people that buy it. This directly harms the creator.
Next, companies will eventually realize that they can't develop any of these products unless they can make money, so they'll build a strict contracting system into the assemblers. They will refuse to copy their software onto your assembler unless it has the requisite protections.
So basically, you won't be able to get the code unless you agree to their terms, and those terms will be implemented in the hardware. The code will be developed in modules, such that no one team has access to the entire design. The code will be built onto a hardware module (e.g. dongle) that actively checks the target system it's plugged into to determine whether the proper protections are implemented (digital signatures, etc.) If you try to open it, it'll self-destruct.
The result will be that anyone who refuses to agree to the terms of the creator just won't get the product. Unless a free organization develops it independently.