Well, first, those companies only innovated either because they needed to, or because they had enough capital to blow on fundamental research. The real question is risk vs. reward for them. without patents, you have to have a huge amount of capital to overcome the risk/reward calculus.
and just because people want more (types of) aids drugs doesn't mean they would be made if there were no way to recover the costs.
It seems like most of this would be solved by enforcing compulsory licensing for most patents. This would compensate the inventor and simultaneously allow new developments based on the patented technology and more competition.
As for the cost, you only pay it if it's worth it to you...
Second of all, all property is a myth. Marriage is a myth. Adoption is a myth. Corporations are a myth. Futures trading is a myth. But they are all useful and we still have all of them.
You argue against a legal entity merely because it is a legal entity. This doesn't really stand.
You then state that IP is a restriction on free thought and development. Sure. So what? Avoiding plagiarism is a restriction on free thought and development, but I still do it. I still use citations and attribute quotes, even though I'd rather not. I still can't use someone else's dialog in my novel, even if it would fit perfectly, unless I have their permission. Why do we consider this moral but not the other?
Coders (including myself) have been spoiled by their assumption of freedom to use others' work. No other field of intellectual creativity I know of allows this.
Price caps on gasoline in the '70s are a good example of the people asking for and getting something they wanted, which was much worse for them in the end than the alternative.
This happened because they didn't understand the effects of a price cap on the economy. They didn't gain any value; in fact, they lost a good amount of value, the so-called "dead weight loss."
Did you ever consider the possibility that the non-industry people know much less about the subject matter, and therefore may be wrong in some of their assumptions?
If you want to focus only on short-term issues and ignore the economic effects of your actions, by all means abolish drug patents.
If you've studied economics you know what would happen -- pretty soon there would be no new aids drugs. Would you study biotech if there weren't any money in it? You might want to, but it's not always practical to do what you _want_ to do rather than what makes money.
But inventors used to get screwed all the time. Now they only get screwed sometimes.
Look up famous scientists and inventors throughout history, and find out how poor they were. Only the ones who were independently wealthy and doing it as a hobby were well-off.
Do you want a world wherein software developers are as impoverished as artists used to be?
Theoretically, a watermark could survive even analog copying. It is part of the music.
The missing step here is the step of watermarking the music with random codes (think one-time pad) correlating the song with the purchaser in the record company database.
This could conceivably make the watermark almost indetectable, and allow the company to trace the song back to you.
There would be one car. Everyone would have a copy of it. Only well-off car geeks would ever put any effort into improving it. If they did, everyone would copy that new car.
Here's a question -- what would happen if Windows were free all of a sudden...;)
Well, you're right about that. Everyone would try to hack the stuff... But if it were in the processors, there wouldn't be too much anyone could do except develop their own processors...
I think that we have to implement DRM, but we have to do it in an intelligent way, implementing hard-coded limits on file protections, so the works are automatically available to the public when the time limit is up, or when the author fails to re-register for his protections... Something like that...
OR, it could be that there is no easy way to enforce the laws as they currently stand.
If everyone were forced to buy every bit of music they ever got their hands on, because every computer that existed, and every peripheral, contained DRM support, would the people rebel? Would there be rioting in the streets? I don't think so. They just do it because it's easy. If it weren't so easy, they wouldn't do it. They'd buy the stuff and wish they had more money to buy more...
If it were easy to steal from stores, eventually, everyone would just start taking what they wanted. If those people got together and made a law to allow wholesale theft of clothing, it wouldn't really be in their best interests.
Similarly, we don't know that it would be in our best interests to allow file trading to continue unrestricted. It might in fact be a bad decision for a lot of reasons...
Re:How about World Class Trade Negotiation Leverag
on
Steal This Idea
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· Score: 1
First, I'm not a moron, so I know there are a million other factors involved; I was just making a small point in a few words.
Second, I agree that our legal framework is essential to maintaining the competition that allows our economy to thrive, and that some of the factors you mention do inhibit free trade.
But to know whether the PTO actually inhibits development, you must consider what would happen in its absence. Although there may be anecdotal evidence to support this claim, it's not clear to me that investors would be clamoring to develop new technologies without at least the promise of IP protection.
I think one of the most important reasons it doesn't happen is because of the issue of encapsulation.
Most source code libraries are not sufficiently encapsulated to prevent other developers mucking with them. Many have seen that the binary component approach has achieved much better encapsulation, and therefore has been more successful when it comes to code reuse.
I have to say here, that the *nix/oss community has underwhelmed me with their support for binary components. Yes, there are java beans, and yes there is CORBA, but I've never known CORBA to be successfully used much (usually just part of an overly-designed from-scratch system), and java has some limitations I can't stand, but I do think it is the right approach in general.
This is really the area where COM has led the way (as much as I'm sure you hate to hear this). Think about the way that MS continues to provide more and more functionality through COM objects (and now through.NET), which is usually available to any application or object running on the OS. The fact that the OS supports these standard objects causes people to abandon their proprietary solutions and use the MS versions.
I see this as a sort of mediation process. Everyone wants reusable objects, but noone wants to spend the extra time to implement generic interfaces that they don't need, or to even think about other people's problems. MS comes in here and provides objects that bridge the gap between these proprietary solutions, vastly reducing code bloat (since we're talking about binary components), and vastly increasing development ease and speed in some cases.
I'm sure many of you have never gotten into the nitty gritty of Windows programming, but I can tell you, binary components get reused. ActiveX controls get reused. Think about how different this is from the situation of open source libraries -- you drag and drop a browser control into your program and start displaying web pages... Load up media player behind the scenes and start playing mp3s...
I think that if the open source community really wants to promote reuse, they should begin to think like MS. Have the people putting together the distributions take the initiative to develop suites of binary components, and get a development environment that makes them easy to drop in. If this exists and I'm ignorant of it, let me know, but it seems to me that most open source development is not geared towards what I'm talking about...
If adding a small amount of any organic chemical was an unforeseen thing to do, and provided a real improvement, that should be allowed as part of the claim.
Not everything that is simple is ever tried. Those who discover a serendipitous improvement should be able to get protection for that addition.
The problem is that technological development is accelerating exponentially, while the PTO's abilities are not. They need to get on the curve by figuring out a way to process applications more automatically.
I doubt it could be done entirely automatically, but they could start to develop better electronic categorization systems for different fields and subject matter, and hone the information they need to review down to just the essentials... This might require a rethinking of the structure of the patent itself.
This is the reason we have a good economy as compared with the rest of the world. Are you more free when you have money, or when you have more consumer oriented law?
Sorry, man. It might seem like a big invincible company from the outside, but you couldn't be more wrong.
I worked in the Denver office as one of TWO main developers for all of the East-Asian builds of XPress. Denver was where all development work was done until they started trying to move it all to India, where they've had horrible problems... The first major layoffs came in 99 or so, while I was there...
None of the other offices do any development except Tokyo, where they had 1 or 2 developers, I think 1 now... all those offices were just for marketing, packaging, etc... Denver was where everything was written.
Why the hell do I have to buy a Japanese PS2 just to play a japanese game??
I should be able to play all PS2 games on one machine. If I can't, I am going to try to hack it, because I'm not spending another few hundred bucks on a 2nd console.
Argh... I can't stand reading those automatic translations. It scrambles my brain. Here's a more readable gloss by my brain...
Optowear creates "Terabyte optical disk system" capable of storing up to 1TB of data"
Optowear, at the optical industry technology conference "InterOpto '02", introduced the "Terabyte optical disk system", a technology capable of storing one terabyte on a 12cm CD-sized disk.
This is a system developed by applying the research done up to now on 'hologram systems'. In previous holographic systems, miniaturization, cost, and incompatibility with DVDs and existing media were problematic. In this newly released technology, the company's proprietary "Polarized colinear hologram technology" allowed them to overcome these weaknesses.
Until now hologram technology has had to use 2 lenses to illuminate the object with the separate 'reference beam' and 'signal beam'. With polarized colinear hologram technology, only one lens is needed, allowing space and cost savings. DVD and CD compatability can be maintained as well.
They use a disk where the holographic media is sandwitched between glass plates, and where one side has a preformatted reflective layer stuck onto it. In the future, they plan to use plastic rather than glass. Also, at first they will only offer 'write once' disks, but later plan to offer rewritable ones as well.
When data is recorded, the reference beam and signal beam are shined on the reflective layer, and the reflected reference and information beams interfere in the holographic material, storing data in the interference pattern.
At reading time, only the reference beam is shone, allowing the recorded hologram to be read.
Existing DVD and CD drives use a single laser beam to read and write data, but holographic technology uses many tiny bundles of light. Also, previous systems stored data by the bit on the surface of the disks, whereas holographic recording can store whole pages of data at once in the holographic medium.
Because of this, holographic disk media, in a 500um diameter holograph, can store 30,000 bits of data. And because these holograms can be stacked on top of each other, this method is suitable for storing huge volumes of data. Also, current DVD/CD drives only transfer 1 bit at a time, whereas holographic drives transfer 30,000 bits at a time, so transfer rates are much higher, allowing rates of 100Mbps-1Gbps.
In the InterOpt conference display, an evaluation model of this system, the T-VRD, was demoed. The company believes that television studios or government bodies would be the first to bring in this technology, and will offer a 19in rack mounted version in 2003, and a miniturized consumer version for home servers and PCs in 2005.
At the conference center, CEO and Aoki Yoshio introduced himself -- "In the current communications industry, 1TB/s data rates are becoming possible. This is like sending a 2hr movie in 0.1 seconds. But, if we become able to send and recieve huge volumes of data in an instant, we need something with huge volume and speed to store that data." -- so underlining the need for the terabyte optical disk system.
"By raising the NA value of the objective lens, and shortening the laser wavelength, existing CD and DVD drives have been increasing their storage density. But this method is already seeing its limitations", he also said, emphasizing the fact that holographic drives are a totally different technology than other optical drives up to now.
So where is slashdot.kr? The one in Japan has very few posts -- one in Korea might be much more popular...
Re:I want a hyped story about corporate theft next
on
NYTimes Looks at Warez
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· Score: 1
Hmmm. So let's say that I set up a counterfeiting scheme, and begin printing my own money. I'm not hurting anyone, right? I didn't steal anything from anyone, I'm just copying something someone else made, namely the bills made by the federal government. (Similar to warez?)
I can trade these copies for other goods, with people who know they're fake, or even with people who don't... This must mean that they have some value, right? (Similar to warez?)
So I'm not depriving anyone of anything, but what happens when I distribute my copies all over the world? Think, my friends... This is what happens: Devaluation of the dollar. People will be willing to pay much less for a dollar than before.
Software is the same thing, guys. If you devalue software, people won't pay for the real thing, investments in software will fall, the value of the software companies' assets will fall.
It is not theft per se; it is really a devaluation of assets (owned by software writers) by a huge increase in the supply. If you could copy dollars like software, we'd be almost instantly screwed, and everyone knows this. Why is it such a leap from this to software companies?
Here is how I see it: Software sold for $x to n people over the years, yields a value of xn for the software. If c is the number of copies available, the true value of a copy is xn/c rather than x. As c increases above n, xn/c becomes less than x, therefore the value of the software as a whole, xn/c * n, becomes far less as well.
I'm not sure whether anyone has ever looked at things this way, but I find it very compelling.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, first, those companies only innovated either because they needed to, or because they had enough capital to blow on fundamental research. The real question is risk vs. reward for them. without patents, you have to have a huge amount of capital to overcome the risk/reward calculus.
and just because people want more (types of) aids drugs doesn't mean they would be made if there were no way to recover the costs.
It seems like most of this would be solved by enforcing compulsory licensing for most patents. This would compensate the inventor and simultaneously allow new developments based on the patented technology and more competition.
As for the cost, you only pay it if it's worth it to you...
First of all, right now you CAN own an idea.
Second of all, all property is a myth. Marriage is a myth. Adoption is a myth. Corporations are a myth. Futures trading is a myth. But they are all useful and we still have all of them.
You argue against a legal entity merely because it is a legal entity. This doesn't really stand.
You then state that IP is a restriction on free thought and development. Sure. So what? Avoiding plagiarism is a restriction on free thought and development, but I still do it. I still use citations and attribute quotes, even though I'd rather not. I still can't use someone else's dialog in my novel, even if it would fit perfectly, unless I have their permission. Why do we consider this moral but not the other?
Coders (including myself) have been spoiled by their assumption of freedom to use others' work. No other field of intellectual creativity I know of allows this.
The real question is, how many people actually have the time to spend in order to understand what was and wasn't passed?
Price caps on gasoline in the '70s are a good example of the people asking for and getting something they wanted, which was much worse for them in the end than the alternative.
This happened because they didn't understand the effects of a price cap on the economy. They didn't gain any value; in fact, they lost a good amount of value, the so-called "dead weight loss."
Did you ever consider the possibility that the non-industry people know much less about the subject matter, and therefore may be wrong in some of their assumptions?
If you want to focus only on short-term issues and ignore the economic effects of your actions, by all means abolish drug patents.
If you've studied economics you know what would happen -- pretty soon there would be no new aids drugs. Would you study biotech if there weren't any money in it? You might want to, but it's not always practical to do what you _want_ to do rather than what makes money.
But inventors used to get screwed all the time. Now they only get screwed sometimes.
Look up famous scientists and inventors throughout history, and find out how poor they were. Only the ones who were independently wealthy and doing it as a hobby were well-off.
Do you want a world wherein software developers are as impoverished as artists used to be?
It's very very simple. Just not simple to implement.
Anonymity just has to go. Everyone needs to be identifiable. That way, we could actually find the guys who commit fraud and other crimes.
Actually, the status of this trademark is still uncertain.
Theoretically, a watermark could survive even analog copying. It is part of the music.
The missing step here is the step of watermarking the music with random codes (think one-time pad) correlating the song with the purchaser in the record company database.
This could conceivably make the watermark almost indetectable, and allow the company to trace the song back to you.
Actually, this is what would happen:
;)
There would be one car. Everyone would have a copy of it. Only well-off car geeks would ever put any effort into improving it. If they did, everyone would copy that new car.
Here's a question -- what would happen if Windows were free all of a sudden...
Well, you're right about that. Everyone would try to hack the stuff... But if it were in the processors, there wouldn't be too much anyone could do except develop their own processors...
I think that we have to implement DRM, but we have to do it in an intelligent way, implementing hard-coded limits on file protections, so the works are automatically available to the public when the time limit is up, or when the author fails to re-register for his protections... Something like that...
OR, it could be that there is no easy way to enforce the laws as they currently stand.
If everyone were forced to buy every bit of music they ever got their hands on, because every computer that existed, and every peripheral, contained DRM support, would the people rebel? Would there be rioting in the streets? I don't think so. They just do it because it's easy. If it weren't so easy, they wouldn't do it. They'd buy the stuff and wish they had more money to buy more...
If it were easy to steal from stores, eventually, everyone would just start taking what they wanted. If those people got together and made a law to allow wholesale theft of clothing, it wouldn't really be in their best interests.
Similarly, we don't know that it would be in our best interests to allow file trading to continue unrestricted. It might in fact be a bad decision for a lot of reasons...
First, I'm not a moron, so I know there are a million other factors involved; I was just making a small point in a few words.
Second, I agree that our legal framework is essential to maintaining the competition that allows our economy to thrive, and that some of the factors you mention do inhibit free trade.
But to know whether the PTO actually inhibits development, you must consider what would happen in its absence. Although there may be anecdotal evidence to support this claim, it's not clear to me that investors would be clamoring to develop new technologies without at least the promise of IP protection.
I think one of the most important reasons it doesn't happen is because of the issue of encapsulation.
.NET), which is usually available to any application or object running on the OS. The fact that the OS supports these standard objects causes people to abandon their proprietary solutions and use the MS versions.
Most source code libraries are not sufficiently encapsulated to prevent other developers mucking with them. Many have seen that the binary component approach has achieved much better encapsulation, and therefore has been more successful when it comes to code reuse.
I have to say here, that the *nix/oss community has underwhelmed me with their support for binary components. Yes, there are java beans, and yes there is CORBA, but I've never known CORBA to be successfully used much (usually just part of an overly-designed from-scratch system), and java has some limitations I can't stand, but I do think it is the right approach in general.
This is really the area where COM has led the way (as much as I'm sure you hate to hear this). Think about the way that MS continues to provide more and more functionality through COM objects (and now through
I see this as a sort of mediation process. Everyone wants reusable objects, but noone wants to spend the extra time to implement generic interfaces that they don't need, or to even think about other people's problems. MS comes in here and provides objects that bridge the gap between these proprietary solutions, vastly reducing code bloat (since we're talking about binary components), and vastly increasing development ease and speed in some cases.
I'm sure many of you have never gotten into the nitty gritty of Windows programming, but I can tell you, binary components get reused. ActiveX controls get reused. Think about how different this is from the situation of open source libraries -- you drag and drop a browser control into your program and start displaying web pages... Load up media player behind the scenes and start playing mp3s...
I think that if the open source community really wants to promote reuse, they should begin to think like MS. Have the people putting together the distributions take the initiative to develop suites of binary components, and get a development environment that makes them easy to drop in. If this exists and I'm ignorant of it, let me know, but it seems to me that most open source development is not geared towards what I'm talking about...
If adding a small amount of any organic chemical was an unforeseen thing to do, and provided a real improvement, that should be allowed as part of the claim.
Not everything that is simple is ever tried. Those who discover a serendipitous improvement should be able to get protection for that addition.
The problem is that technological development is accelerating exponentially, while the PTO's abilities are not. They need to get on the curve by figuring out a way to process applications more automatically.
I doubt it could be done entirely automatically, but they could start to develop better electronic categorization systems for different fields and subject matter, and hone the information they need to review down to just the essentials... This might require a rethinking of the structure of the patent itself.
This is the reason we have a good economy as compared with the rest of the world. Are you more free when you have money, or when you have more consumer oriented law?
Money is Freedom.
It is in Australia, but not in the U.S.
Remember, there are a lot of people on this planet who speak English.
Sorry, man. It might seem like a big invincible company from the outside, but you couldn't be more wrong.
I worked in the Denver office as one of TWO main developers for all of the East-Asian builds of XPress. Denver was where all development work was done until they started trying to move it all to India, where they've had horrible problems... The first major layoffs came in 99 or so, while I was there...
None of the other offices do any development except Tokyo, where they had 1 or 2 developers, I think 1 now... all those offices were just for marketing, packaging, etc... Denver was where everything was written.
FOREIGN MADE GAMES!!!
Why the hell do I have to buy a Japanese PS2 just to play a japanese game??
I should be able to play all PS2 games on one machine. If I can't, I am going to try to hack it, because I'm not spending another few hundred bucks on a 2nd console.
Optowear creates "Terabyte optical disk system" capable of storing up to 1TB of data"
Optowear, at the optical industry technology conference "InterOpto '02", introduced the "Terabyte optical disk system", a technology capable of storing one terabyte on a 12cm CD-sized disk.
This is a system developed by applying the research done up to now on 'hologram systems'. In previous holographic systems, miniaturization, cost, and incompatibility with DVDs and existing media were problematic. In this newly released technology, the company's proprietary "Polarized colinear hologram technology" allowed them to overcome these weaknesses.
Until now hologram technology has had to use 2 lenses to illuminate the object with the separate 'reference beam' and 'signal beam'. With polarized colinear hologram technology, only one lens is needed, allowing space and cost savings. DVD and CD compatability can be maintained as well.
They use a disk where the holographic media is sandwitched between glass plates, and where one side has a preformatted reflective layer stuck onto it. In the future, they plan to use plastic rather than glass. Also, at first they will only offer 'write once' disks, but later plan to offer rewritable ones as well.
When data is recorded, the reference beam and signal beam are shined on the reflective layer, and the reflected reference and information beams interfere in the holographic material, storing data in the interference pattern.
At reading time, only the reference beam is shone, allowing the recorded hologram to be read.
Existing DVD and CD drives use a single laser beam to read and write data, but holographic technology uses many tiny bundles of light. Also, previous systems stored data by the bit on the surface of the disks, whereas holographic recording can store whole pages of data at once in the holographic medium.
Because of this, holographic disk media, in a 500um diameter holograph, can store 30,000 bits of data. And because these holograms can be stacked on top of each other, this method is suitable for storing huge volumes of data. Also, current DVD/CD drives only transfer 1 bit at a time, whereas holographic drives transfer 30,000 bits at a time, so transfer rates are much higher, allowing rates of 100Mbps-1Gbps.
In the InterOpt conference display, an evaluation model of this system, the T-VRD, was demoed. The company believes that television studios or government bodies would be the first to bring in this technology, and will offer a 19in rack mounted version in 2003, and a miniturized consumer version for home servers and PCs in 2005.
At the conference center, CEO and Aoki Yoshio introduced himself -- "In the current communications industry, 1TB/s data rates are becoming possible. This is like sending a 2hr movie in 0.1 seconds. But, if we become able to send and recieve huge volumes of data in an instant, we need something with huge volume and speed to store that data." -- so underlining the need for the terabyte optical disk system.
"By raising the NA value of the objective lens, and shortening the laser wavelength, existing CD and DVD drives have been increasing their storage density. But this method is already seeing its limitations", he also said, emphasizing the fact that holographic drives are a totally different technology than other optical drives up to now.
So where is slashdot.kr? The one in Japan has very few posts -- one in Korea might be much more popular...
Hmmm. So let's say that I set up a counterfeiting scheme, and begin printing my own money. I'm not hurting anyone, right? I didn't steal anything from anyone, I'm just copying something someone else made, namely the bills made by the federal government. (Similar to warez?)
I can trade these copies for other goods, with people who know they're fake, or even with people who don't... This must mean that they have some value, right? (Similar to warez?)
So I'm not depriving anyone of anything, but what happens when I distribute my copies all over the world? Think, my friends... This is what happens: Devaluation of the dollar. People will be willing to pay much less for a dollar than before.
Software is the same thing, guys. If you devalue software, people won't pay for the real thing, investments in software will fall, the value of the software companies' assets will fall.
It is not theft per se; it is really a devaluation of assets (owned by software writers) by a huge increase in the supply. If you could copy dollars like software, we'd be almost instantly screwed, and everyone knows this. Why is it such a leap from this to software companies?
Here is how I see it: Software sold for $x to n people over the years, yields a value of xn for the software. If c is the number of copies available, the true value of a copy is xn/c rather than x. As c increases above n, xn/c becomes less than x, therefore the value of the software as a whole, xn/c * n, becomes far less as well.
I'm not sure whether anyone has ever looked at things this way, but I find it very compelling.