Part of the problem is that the law of supply and demand also comes into effect in a different way when you have piracy.
With lots of piracy, demand goes way down, that is, demand to buy the product from the owner.
So what happens if at the same time, you see a drop in demand due to the crappiness of the product, and also due to a change in viewing habits? It is empirically nearly impossible to determine what the real cause of the drop in demand is.
This is basically the combination of factors we see now. In order to determine the real effect of piracy, we'd have to keep the other factors constant, and that's impossible.
Another less obvious problem is that the easy availability of the option to pirate alters the consumer's cost-benefit analysis. Before it was easy to pirate movies, people would look at the price, think about the value of having the movie versus not having it, and often decide to get the movie because they'd rather have it than not have it, even if they thought it wasn't quite worth the price.
Now, they often consider the value of having the legitimate movie versus the value of having a pirated version, versus having none and maintaining their sense of personal integrity. The last costs the most. The second costs the least, and the first is probably in the middle somewhere. In this calculus, piracy often wins out, but as I noted at the beginning, the reasons are going to be unclear....
The point that many economists miss is that I don't care if society as a whole is better off if it's because China made shitloads of money and I lost a bit less than they gained.
I don't want Kaldor-Hicks trades. I want pareto-superior trades or no trade at all.
One of my problems with paying for broadband (although I do have it) is that I can almost always just stop by a coffee shop nearby and d/l whatever I need, and surf, etc., for free. Or at least, for the cost of a cup of coffee I was going to buy anyway.
The problem is that cafe wireless always craps out at inopportune times, and is not open at all odd hours of the day, e.g. when I need to get some work done late at night (although there is one downtown in D.C. usually open 'til 5am).
So I pay 50/mo just to have the assurance I'll have access to the net when I need it. Which kinda sucks.
Korea was in much the same situation, giving 'tribute' to China. They were effectively under Chinese control. But you don't see them arguing Korea should be part of China.
Why? Because it's too late; it's not politically feasible anymore.
If NTP wins, they get damages based on RIM's past infringement. Although RIM can prevent another suit by using a workaround, they can't get out of their past infringement.
Let me just note for the record here, that you are completely wrong. To be more specific, this may be how you WISH the patent system works, but it most definitely is NOT how it has worked for over 200 years.
Copyright is all about protecting particular expressions of ideas. Patent law is all about actually protecting ideas.
You can't obtain a copyright in, for instance, the idea of a certain plot, or a certain genre of song, or any other such 'idea.' Copyrighted works must be fixed, and must be a particular expression of such ideas, for instance a particular story which uses a plot, or a particular song which may belong to a genre or pattern...
Patents are most emphatically not about protecting such particular expressions, or particular devices, as you state. Patents are about protecting the IDEA of the invention, and they always have been. Your example of the method of waking someone up with cold water could be a patentable invention, if it had never been done before, and was not obvious based on what had come before...
The particular devices are just what people don't want to patent; nor would it be useful to do so, since inventions are not like books - inventions can be used in millions of different forms, and still serve their purpose perfectly. The devices that embody inventions could be so varied that protection for only a particular one would be basically useless.
This is why the claims of a patent are not supposed to be limited by the embodiments described in the written description portion of the patent, except in special cases. The claims determine the invention, not the particular embodiments that the inventor describes in the specification.
For example, if I claim a chair, by claiming something like a sitting surface with at least 3 legs, etc., I am the inventor of THE CHAIR. It's an idea, not a particular type or style of chair. It's a completely new sort of thing. I will describe a couple of different ways to make chairs in the specification of the patent, to show how it could be accomplished, but these are not what is covered by the patent. What is covered by the patent is anything encompassed by the language of the claim.
Real estate investors often just sit on paper. Stock, bond, futures, etc., traders just sit on paper.
What function do they serve? They increase the efficiency of the market, and many other things as well.
It's much more efficient for a company to license their accidental inventions to others than to sit on them as trade secrets forever, because they don't know what to do with them.... It's much more efficient for them to sell the patents to a small holding company that will license them, for the same reason.
It's also much more efficient for a small inventor to sell his patent, or license it to someone who has the capacity to use it, rather than forget about it, or try to start his own company from scratch....
NTP wasn't just "sitting" on their patents. They were actively contacting companies and trying to license their patents to people who might want to use them, as far as I can tell.
Not being in the biological sciences, I have a question then for those who are.
Does this mean that our kids should play in the dirt (and occasionally eat a bit), to develop immunity, or that they shouldn't, because antibiotics may not help them if they get sick from it?
There are so many Asians because their parents give them a limited choice of 'successful' careers to choose from, and they go along. It's a cultural thing - subsuming one's desires out of respect for one's parents or family... It screws with their heads a lot of the time though, especially for 2nd or 3rd generations. It's also about the respect given to those with high levels of education in Asian cultures.
After they become sufficiently Americanized, many of these people stop forcing their kids to to be doctors, lawyers, or engineers. The general American population is more interested in doing something that at least somewhat appeals to them, and can also make them some money.
But they generally don't choose a career just because of the prestige or money, which many Asian families DO do.
First, that was not a sarcastic 'yeah, sure'. What I meant was 'whatever...'. You may be right, but it doesn't really change things.
I basically agree with you. I don't want tons of sex in these films. But if people are getting all worried about the fact that this guy has a bulge, well, something's amiss.
We don't bind womens' breasts in the movies, do we?
I agree completely. I would also note that in recent years, due to all the PC stuff going around, males in general seem to be afraid to assert their masculinity.
There have been some books in the last few years attempting to buck the trend, about raising boys and not denying or disparaging their masculinity.
People who have come to believe that everything about the nature of men is wrong need to be contraverted. Violence and aggression can be very good things when disciplined and used for the right ends. Toughness and will to overcome weakness and weak urges can make one a strong and powerful leader. And these traits are not bad in and of themselves. In fact, they're necessary to the proper functioning of our social institutions.
Yeah, sure. But even if you're right, this is the sort of crap that happens all the time. People run away from a statue, or have to have it covered with a sheet on TV, because it has a penis...
It's just stupid, and people shouldn't put up with it.
Women prance around almost naked in both TV and movies all the time. Nipples and boobs stand out way more than any guy's package.
But we can't see even an indirect indication of male genitals? What's the problem? Afraid it's going to come get you? Afraid of the revelation that men actually have penises?
I am not a big supporter of the sexualization of our media - I think it's a race to the bottom, in terms of the quality of content. But neither am I a supporter of some kind of willful blindness or disgust at the natural figure of men.
Here's the fundamental problem: Why is the male figure labeled as obscene, while the female figure is exalted?
Maybe it's all just because men always want to see female sexuality, but women are squeamish about seeing male sexuality.
But when it comes to art, or even a simple bulge, do we really have to pretend that penises don't exist just to make the public 'feel ok'? What is this thing between my legs then, which must be perpetually denied and hidden from view? Some kind of leprous growth?
Do we really want our sons to think their natural bulge is something to be ashamed of???
I say that it's demeaning and insulting to men to censor a natural bulge covered by clothing (even moderately tight clothing).
I'm still a law student so this is not legal advice - do not rely on this as such.
Your explanation may mislead people a bit here.
No applicant, once their application is filed, can add new matter to the application and retain the same filing date. But they can add claims that are completely 'enabled' by the initially filed disclosure.
That is, if the initially filed patent basically described the matter involved in a new claim the applicant wants to add (later during the prosecution), they can add the new claim. If the new claim contains new matter that was not described initially, it cannot be added.
So, for example, if your initial specification describes a chair having a plurality of legs of any hard shapeable material such as x, y, or z, but later during prosecution you notice that your competitor is working on a chair made of p, then you can probably add a claim explicitly covering p, since your specification broadly described any hard shapeable material. Now, if p was soft, you could not add a claim containing p. That would be new matter not enabled by the specification.
So you can still do this now, and it is not considered bad at all, but what you can't do is keep your patent in prosecution for years, solely with the intent to let someone build up a business and then sue them. This is considered "prosecution laches" and would render your patent unenforceable. As the grandparent noted, you also only get 20 years from FILING, so the longer you prosecute, the shorter your patent term is.
Well, it would depend on how long the war lasted, wouldn't it? We would have our military technology only so long as we didn't need their manufacturing. At this point, we could still rely on Japan for much of it, but eventually, China may make everything we need for a war but the men.
One interesting possibility to consider is that the relentless quest for quality in Japan and now Shanghai is sometimes not based on sound economics. In other words, a lot of the high-quality construction and services are money-losing propositions.
However, it is possible that some of this pays off by drawing people to the cities, and drawing in more investment, on a larger scale... I don't know, but I doubt it in the end. Japan was hit hard by their inefficiencies in this area.
But modern economies are so productive, it seems they can sometimes handle huge waste, disaster, or inefficiency and keep on chugging. Every country seems to have something like this going on, whether it's the military in the U.S., construction in Japan, or social services in Europe...
I am not naive about my own government in that respect - in fact, my comment is motivated by my hope that the U.S. be just as savvy as any other nation against which we are forced to compete in the world...
Iraq is an interesting case. I've heard that the French and Russians were taking advantage of the embargos on Iraqi oil by secretly entering agreements with the Iraqi government for oil. I haven't followed it closely, so someone may want to clarify the pre-war situation. But I think that a good chunk of the U.S. motivation for getting in there was to get the upper hand over the French/Russians in the oil market, and to also gain a very strategically located trading partner, and a foothold close to many potential future powerhouse countries such as India, Turkey, and Iran, and many natural resources...
Unfortunately, I think Europe at the moment is held back in competition more by its own people and the economic policies they support, than by external trade issues...
I have been worried for a long time about the apparent naivete of the U.S. government and military regarding the Chinese.
The Chinese government and military are extremely savvy so long as they are not blinded by their communist dogma. When it comes to trade, information, spying, and weapons technology, they understand the reality that those who play fair lose.
If you are a businessman, have no illusions that your papers and files are safe in your hotel room in China. There have been documented cases of government-sponsored spies following businessmen and bugging or entering their hotel rooms to scour their belongings for useful trade secrets and intellectual property.
We can see clearly that they are pursuing a strategy of mercantilism in trade, to our great disadvantage, thanks to the cluelessness of free-traders in Congress and the White House.
Who can doubt that the same issues exist with regard to sensitive military information? The Chinese sponsor students to come to the U.S. with the express goal sometimes of infiltrating research staffs and supplying tech info back to China. The same surely occurs with U.S. government and military employees, although the screening is more thorough.
In my opinion, the CHinese government would see hacking U.S. government or military sites as a requirement for successful international competition. Hopefully, the NSA and others like them are on top of the problem. I don't doubt, though, that they have gained access to lots of systems on the lower end of the confidentiality spectrum.
It needs to be impressed on people in government, military, and intelligence work, that the Chinese are playing one mean game of chess in everything they do vis-a-vis the U.S. Their sense of time spans centuries and millennia rather than decades. Any suspicious activity on their part needs to be treated with the greatest skepticism by our guys, rather than with apathy or giving them the benefit of the doubt...
Slashdot Mirror
Part of the problem is that the law of supply and demand also comes into effect in a different way when you have piracy.
With lots of piracy, demand goes way down, that is, demand to buy the product from the owner.
So what happens if at the same time, you see a drop in demand due to the crappiness of the product, and also due to a change in viewing habits? It is empirically nearly impossible to determine what the real cause of the drop in demand is.
This is basically the combination of factors we see now. In order to determine the real effect of piracy, we'd have to keep the other factors constant, and that's impossible.
Another less obvious problem is that the easy availability of the option to pirate alters the consumer's cost-benefit analysis. Before it was easy to pirate movies, people would look at the price, think about the value of having the movie versus not having it, and often decide to get the movie because they'd rather have it than not have it, even if they thought it wasn't quite worth the price.
Now, they often consider the value of having the legitimate movie versus the value of having a pirated version, versus having none and maintaining their sense of personal integrity. The last costs the most. The second costs the least, and the first is probably in the middle somewhere. In this calculus, piracy often wins out, but as I noted at the beginning, the reasons are going to be unclear....
The point that many economists miss is that I don't care if society as a whole is better off if it's because China made shitloads of money and I lost a bit less than they gained.
I don't want Kaldor-Hicks trades. I want pareto-superior trades or no trade at all.
99% of users don't even want to open the help. This guy's smoking some collaborative utopia crack.
One of my problems with paying for broadband (although I do have it) is that I can almost always just stop by a coffee shop nearby and d/l whatever I need, and surf, etc., for free. Or at least, for the cost of a cup of coffee I was going to buy anyway.
The problem is that cafe wireless always craps out at inopportune times, and is not open at all odd hours of the day, e.g. when I need to get some work done late at night (although there is one downtown in D.C. usually open 'til 5am).
So I pay 50/mo just to have the assurance I'll have access to the net when I need it. Which kinda sucks.
Korea was in much the same situation, giving 'tribute' to China. They were effectively under Chinese control. But you don't see them arguing Korea should be part of China.
Why? Because it's too late; it's not politically feasible anymore.
Yes, that's right, but the post implied there would be no damages if RIM lost, but then simply implemented the workaround, which would not be true.
No, no, no.
If NTP wins, they get damages based on RIM's past infringement. Although RIM can prevent another suit by using a workaround, they can't get out of their past infringement.
Let me just note for the record here, that you are completely wrong. To be more specific, this may be how you WISH the patent system works, but it most definitely is NOT how it has worked for over 200 years.
Copyright is all about protecting particular expressions of ideas. Patent law is all about actually protecting ideas.
You can't obtain a copyright in, for instance, the idea of a certain plot, or a certain genre of song, or any other such 'idea.' Copyrighted works must be fixed, and must be a particular expression of such ideas, for instance a particular story which uses a plot, or a particular song which may belong to a genre or pattern...
Patents are most emphatically not about protecting such particular expressions, or particular devices, as you state. Patents are about protecting the IDEA of the invention, and they always have been. Your example of the method of waking someone up with cold water could be a patentable invention, if it had never been done before, and was not obvious based on what had come before...
The particular devices are just what people don't want to patent; nor would it be useful to do so, since inventions are not like books - inventions can be used in millions of different forms, and still serve their purpose perfectly. The devices that embody inventions could be so varied that protection for only a particular one would be basically useless.
This is why the claims of a patent are not supposed to be limited by the embodiments described in the written description portion of the patent, except in special cases. The claims determine the invention, not the particular embodiments that the inventor describes in the specification.
For example, if I claim a chair, by claiming something like a sitting surface with at least 3 legs, etc., I am the inventor of THE CHAIR. It's an idea, not a particular type or style of chair. It's a completely new sort of thing. I will describe a couple of different ways to make chairs in the specification of the patent, to show how it could be accomplished, but these are not what is covered by the patent. What is covered by the patent is anything encompassed by the language of the claim.
Real estate investors often just sit on paper. Stock, bond, futures, etc., traders just sit on paper.
What function do they serve? They increase the efficiency of the market, and many other things as well.
It's much more efficient for a company to license their accidental inventions to others than to sit on them as trade secrets forever, because they don't know what to do with them.... It's much more efficient for them to sell the patents to a small holding company that will license them, for the same reason.
It's also much more efficient for a small inventor to sell his patent, or license it to someone who has the capacity to use it, rather than forget about it, or try to start his own company from scratch....
Um, it's done every day, and a very large portion of US GDP depends on it.
Regarding air, ever heard of pollution rights trading?
NTP wasn't just "sitting" on their patents. They were actively contacting companies and trying to license their patents to people who might want to use them, as far as I can tell.
Not being in the biological sciences, I have a question then for those who are.
Does this mean that our kids should play in the dirt (and occasionally eat a bit), to develop immunity, or that they shouldn't, because antibiotics may not help them if they get sick from it?
This is _still_ funny?
There are so many Asians because their parents give them a limited choice of 'successful' careers to choose from, and they go along. It's a cultural thing - subsuming one's desires out of respect for one's parents or family... It screws with their heads a lot of the time though, especially for 2nd or 3rd generations. It's also about the respect given to those with high levels of education in Asian cultures.
After they become sufficiently Americanized, many of these people stop forcing their kids to to be doctors, lawyers, or engineers. The general American population is more interested in doing something that at least somewhat appeals to them, and can also make them some money.
But they generally don't choose a career just because of the prestige or money, which many Asian families DO do.
Well, if it makes you happy, what's wrong with that??
First, that was not a sarcastic 'yeah, sure'. What I meant was 'whatever...'. You may be right, but it doesn't really change things.
I basically agree with you. I don't want tons of sex in these films. But if people are getting all worried about the fact that this guy has a bulge, well, something's amiss.
We don't bind womens' breasts in the movies, do we?
I agree completely. I would also note that in recent years, due to all the PC stuff going around, males in general seem to be afraid to assert their masculinity.
There have been some books in the last few years attempting to buck the trend, about raising boys and not denying or disparaging their masculinity.
People who have come to believe that everything about the nature of men is wrong need to be contraverted. Violence and aggression can be very good things when disciplined and used for the right ends. Toughness and will to overcome weakness and weak urges can make one a strong and powerful leader. And these traits are not bad in and of themselves. In fact, they're necessary to the proper functioning of our social institutions.
Yeah, sure. But even if you're right, this is the sort of crap that happens all the time. People run away from a statue, or have to have it covered with a sheet on TV, because it has a penis...
It's just stupid, and people shouldn't put up with it.
Am I the only one slightly pissed off by this?
Women prance around almost naked in both TV and movies all the time. Nipples and boobs stand out way more than any guy's package.
But we can't see even an indirect indication of male genitals? What's the problem? Afraid it's going to come get you? Afraid of the revelation that men actually have penises?
I am not a big supporter of the sexualization of our media - I think it's a race to the bottom, in terms of the quality of content. But neither am I a supporter of some kind of willful blindness or disgust at the natural figure of men.
Here's the fundamental problem: Why is the male figure labeled as obscene, while the female figure is exalted?
Maybe it's all just because men always want to see female sexuality, but women are squeamish about seeing male sexuality.
But when it comes to art, or even a simple bulge, do we really have to pretend that penises don't exist just to make the public 'feel ok'? What is this thing between my legs then, which must be perpetually denied and hidden from view? Some kind of leprous growth?
Do we really want our sons to think their natural bulge is something to be ashamed of???
I say that it's demeaning and insulting to men to censor a natural bulge covered by clothing (even moderately tight clothing).
I'm still a law student so this is not legal advice - do not rely on this as such.
Your explanation may mislead people a bit here.
No applicant, once their application is filed, can add new matter to the application and retain the same filing date. But they can add claims that are completely 'enabled' by the initially filed disclosure.
That is, if the initially filed patent basically described the matter involved in a new claim the applicant wants to add (later during the prosecution), they can add the new claim. If the new claim contains new matter that was not described initially, it cannot be added.
So, for example, if your initial specification describes a chair having a plurality of legs of any hard shapeable material such as x, y, or z, but later during prosecution you notice that your competitor is working on a chair made of p, then you can probably add a claim explicitly covering p, since your specification broadly described any hard shapeable material. Now, if p was soft, you could not add a claim containing p. That would be new matter not enabled by the specification.
So you can still do this now, and it is not considered bad at all, but what you can't do is keep your patent in prosecution for years, solely with the intent to let someone build up a business and then sue them. This is considered "prosecution laches" and would render your patent unenforceable. As the grandparent noted, you also only get 20 years from FILING, so the longer you prosecute, the shorter your patent term is.
Well, it would depend on how long the war lasted, wouldn't it? We would have our military technology only so long as we didn't need their manufacturing. At this point, we could still rely on Japan for much of it, but eventually, China may make everything we need for a war but the men.
One interesting possibility to consider is that the relentless quest for quality in Japan and now Shanghai is sometimes not based on sound economics. In other words, a lot of the high-quality construction and services are money-losing propositions.
However, it is possible that some of this pays off by drawing people to the cities, and drawing in more investment, on a larger scale... I don't know, but I doubt it in the end. Japan was hit hard by their inefficiencies in this area.
But modern economies are so productive, it seems they can sometimes handle huge waste, disaster, or inefficiency and keep on chugging. Every country seems to have something like this going on, whether it's the military in the U.S., construction in Japan, or social services in Europe...
;)
I am not naive about my own government in that respect - in fact, my comment is motivated by my hope that the U.S. be just as savvy as any other nation against which we are forced to compete in the world...
Iraq is an interesting case. I've heard that the French and Russians were taking advantage of the embargos on Iraqi oil by secretly entering agreements with the Iraqi government for oil. I haven't followed it closely, so someone may want to clarify the pre-war situation. But I think that a good chunk of the U.S. motivation for getting in there was to get the upper hand over the French/Russians in the oil market, and to also gain a very strategically located trading partner, and a foothold close to many potential future powerhouse countries such as India, Turkey, and Iran, and many natural resources...
Unfortunately, I think Europe at the moment is held back in competition more by its own people and the economic policies they support, than by external trade issues...
Mostly with respect to trade and economics, since those things are much more public.
I have been worried for a long time about the apparent naivete of the U.S. government and military regarding the Chinese.
The Chinese government and military are extremely savvy so long as they are not blinded by their communist dogma. When it comes to trade, information, spying, and weapons technology, they understand the reality that those who play fair lose.
If you are a businessman, have no illusions that your papers and files are safe in your hotel room in China. There have been documented cases of government-sponsored spies following businessmen and bugging or entering their hotel rooms to scour their belongings for useful trade secrets and intellectual property.
We can see clearly that they are pursuing a strategy of mercantilism in trade, to our great disadvantage, thanks to the cluelessness of free-traders in Congress and the White House.
Who can doubt that the same issues exist with regard to sensitive military information? The Chinese sponsor students to come to the U.S. with the express goal sometimes of infiltrating research staffs and supplying tech info back to China. The same surely occurs with U.S. government and military employees, although the screening is more thorough.
In my opinion, the CHinese government would see hacking U.S. government or military sites as a requirement for successful international competition. Hopefully, the NSA and others like them are on top of the problem. I don't doubt, though, that they have gained access to lots of systems on the lower end of the confidentiality spectrum.
It needs to be impressed on people in government, military, and intelligence work, that the Chinese are playing one mean game of chess in everything they do vis-a-vis the U.S. Their sense of time spans centuries and millennia rather than decades. Any suspicious activity on their part needs to be treated with the greatest skepticism by our guys, rather than with apathy or giving them the benefit of the doubt...