The lyrics are probably a separately copyrighted work, so copying the lyrics is actually copying the whole work.
Even if considered as part of the song, the lyrics are not a "small part".
There's a _chance_ it's fair use, but most likely not. Copying a whole poem or book this way is the same thing. The fact that they're lyrics doesn't change the issue.
This is not quite true. A substance that exists in a usable form in nature is not patentable. Likewise, methods to extract substances from plants, or extracted substances that are known and used, are also not patentable.
But improvements such as extracting and refining a substance from a plant, so that it's usable in a pure form, as opposed to a mixture or an adulterated form as found in the plant, IS patentable. In general, this is the sort of thing that companies are doing. (There are also cases where there is no documentation or way to show 'traditional knowledge', such that invalid patents end up being granted...)
Even if the plants and their known uses are publicly disclosed, that doesn't preclude someone from experimenting with the plant, and extracting and purifying substances from the plant. Such improvements would be patentable even though the traditional uses are known, because they are an improvement over the traditional uses or substances. So this database won't prevent such patents.
I support IP rights in traditional knowledge and natural resources, because there is real value in those things that our companies are exploiting. Granting such rights to developing countries would give them great incentives to protect these biological resources that are so critical to chemical and drug development.
Unfortunately, this sort of disclosure just cuts against the goal of actually compensating developing countries for such things. If they are convinced to give them away for free, rather than fight for recognized international IP rights in them, they will never get anything for them, and critical biological resources will continue to be overused.
I don't think the problem is that they're losing cases they ought to be winning, but rather that they're taking (too many?) cases that they are going to lose.
The ACLU has the same problem. Maybe they want to be seen as filers of frivolous baseless suits, but to many of us, many of the suits both groups pursue seem to have this flavor - pie in the sky...
If they just took a few less unrealistic positions, I think they'd convince a lot more people that they're trying to do the right thing rather than just the 'left' thing.;)
Within reason, I don't disagree. But your comment doesn't negate anything I said either.
We shouldn't discount the opinions of experts just because they have an interest in their field. Saying doctors don't always consider economics sufficiently doesn't mean their opinion is not valuable, well-reasoned, or better-informed than mine.
Everyone should be wary of anti-intellectual and anti-expert sentiment. This was the sort of thing that ran rampant during the cultural revolution in China, wherein experts were all thought to be solely self-interested and otherwise worthless, which of course was extreme and untrue.
Interesting comment. I think, though, that in real life you're not calling with static built-in types like '5'. You're calling with results of other operations or variables, so it doesn't really have to be a problem...
You just disallow the types that don't work. Maybe you have to construct some objects that seem like a lot of overhead sometimes, but you can end up with a natural syntax...
Filings would drop to zero and no one would ever try to assert their patents. You would basically, with that one change, destroy a large chunk of the value in our economy.
Not to mention the fact that these would basically be massive punitive damages awarded against many completely innocent patentees, and therefore possibly unconstitutional, and at least extremely unfair. A patentee can't always predict how a court is going to rule.
why can't you just overload the comma operator, build up the arguments into a single datatype, and pass it to the indexing function? This kind of stuff is done a lot for fast matrix multiplication and similar things.
Hm. I can understand this from an emotional perspective, but not from an economic one...
Eolas long ago lost any chance of being a browser player. I haven't researched it thoroughly, but I hear it's just a small company. Any such company would be out of their mind, IMHO, to forgo the opportunity to cheaply license a patent to be used by MS in a billion billion ActiveX controls.
As for MS, this may say something to the small guy considering an attempt at enforcing his patent against MS, but what does it say to MS's investors and consumers??
Precisely that "when we lose a patent suit, we'll simply change everything to work around it, and you will have to eat the costs, even though we've got mega-cash to license anything in the world we have a fancy for..."
Yeah. I often think about the fact that the average person goes through our modern life now harangued by a cacophony of sounds at every moment. Radio in the car, TV at home, iPods, games, people, etc.
I often go weeks at a time silent in the car, because there's no other place I can get away from the noise. I have an iPod, but often don't use it for long stretches, because it causes reverberations (automatic replaying) in my head for days.
But it's fun when you give up trying to be something you're not.
Begin the conversation with whatever you're thinking about.
I start many conversations like "hey, so what do you think will be the economic effect of the cut-off of gaza and the wall in the west bank?" Or "hey, did you know that there will soon be bionic hands with proper sensors tied into the nervous system such that people will be able to sense all sorts of variables through the artificial hands?"...
You get one of two responses. Most people I know either find it interesting and talk about it, or laugh at the seeming non-sequitur, or just say no and the conversation goes nowhere. If you hit option number 3, you weren't going to have a good time anyway.:)
Your opinion is one thing, your arguments another.
You may have the opinion that IP is a horrible thing -- that's fine, although I disagree with it. But your arguments about property are wrong in the sense that they go against every definition used in the law for hundreds of years.
From Black's Law Dictionary, 8th Ed.:
property... 2. Any external thing over which the rights of possession, use, and enjoyment are exercised.
Continuing in Black's...
"In its widest sense, property includes all a person's legal rights, of whatever description. A man's property is all that is his in law. . . . [or more narrowly] his proprietary as opposed to his personal rights. . . . In a third application, . . . the term includes not even all proprietary rights, but only those which are both proprietary and in rem. The law of property is the law of proprietary rights in rem, the law of proprietary rights in personam being distinguished from it as the law of obligations. According to this usage a freehold or leasehold estate in land, or a patent or copyright, is property; but a debt or the benefit of a contract is not. (emphasis added) . . .
-- John Salmond, Jurisprudence 423-24 (Glanville L. Williams ed., 10th ed. 1947)
There are thus many senses of 'property' that are correct. Property is a 'bundle of rights', and may be divided by limitations of time, space, or type of use.
What I'm saying is that the grant of the patent right is a "right to exclude for 20 years". If the government reduces it by trying to cut off 2 years from that right, they're going to have to compensate it as a taking. But the right expires in 20 years because it only had a natural life of 20 years from inception.
At any rate, you are wrong in your limited conception of what 'property' can be.
Here is what the Supreme Court has said:
Patents, however, have long been considered a species of property. See Brown v. Duchesne, 60 U.S. 183, 19 HOW 183, 197, 15 L. Ed. 595 (1857) ("For, by the laws of the United States, the rights of a party under a patent are his private property"); cf., Consolidated Fruit-Jar Co. v. Wright, 94 U.S. 92, 96, 24 L. Ed. 68 (1877) ("A patent for an invention is as much property as a patent for land"). As such, they are surely included within the "property" of which no person may be deprived by a State without due process of law. (emphasis added.)
Fla. Prepaid Postsecondary Educ. Expense Bd. v. College Sav. Bank, 527 U.S. 627, 642 (1999).
Note the cases cited from the mid-1800's.
The argument between Madison and Jefferson doesn't prove anything about the "Framers" in general; only about Jefferson's skepticism about monopolies. Jefferson came around anyway, and was in fact the first director of the patent office, IIRC... They never said it wasn't property either. They just wanted to make sure the property right was limited.
You have a choice: You can persist in an incorrect view that's never going to be accepted by any lawyer or judge or representative to government with an understanding of history, or you can accept the fact that IP is property, and argue that it shouldn't be that way. The first puts you in the category of those who say the income tax is unconstitutional -- crackpots. You choose.
It's not that it isn't property - it is property - it's just that the property right is limited to 20 years.
The definition of the property simply includes a time limitation.
This is like a life estate in real property - a life estate is the title to some real property until you die. This is a true property right, but it's limited in duration.
Actually, most of contract law was created by the courts as common law. And it's only the legislatures or the courts that can change the law on contracts, not the executive branch...
These are really interesting questions that have not been fully resolved as of yet. My quick answers below are just off the top of my head -- any real answers to these questions would take the form of a law review article...
Regarding your first question regarding human DNA, the Constitution prohibits involuntary servitude. If the Supreme Court were to decide the case where a child born to a mother who had gene therapy also ended up with patented genes, the court could strike it down as involuntary servitude or some such thing.
If, however, you were the one that underwent gene therapy, voluntarily, you probably could be liable for infringement if you stopped payment or refused to pay for your license to the genes.
I would bet that congress would get involved at this point, though, and try to hash out some more specific rules about this sort of thing.
Regarding your second question, there was a case where a farmer was found liable for using patented seed that blew onto his land from a neighbor's land and grew there. However, IIRC, he knew what was going on and intentionally did nothing about it so he could gain the advantage of the patented seed... I do not know what would happen if he had taken reasonable measures to keep patented plants out, but here are a couple of possibilities:
1. He destroys his crops, then sues his neighbor to recover damages for the contamination. 2. He pays licensing fees, then sues his neighbor to recover damages. 3. The court finds some other rationale for him to avoid paying...
In any case, courts would not be happy about patentees or neighbors imposing the costs of the patent on an unwilling party through their negligence...
Regarding takings of property, the expiration of a patent is not a taking because the right that is granted is limited to 20 years from inception. The government is taking nothing away when the patent expires, because no right was granted that extends beyond 20 years.
I'm not a lawyer yet, just a law student. This is not legal advice...
I must say, this is one of the worst articles on IP I've ever seen. Whoever thinks it's 'excellent' is just hankering for some anti-establishment echo-room action rather than reality. I don't think I have time to cover them all, but here are just a few.
until recently it was entirely clear to the law. Things could have owners and ideas could not.
This is baloney. It's been quite a while since the constitution was written, and right there in Article 1 section 8 clause 8 is the statement by the framers that is the basis for our patent system. Ideas could be owned in 1789, and long before that as well, as England also had a patent system.
Not to mention the fact that money is an idea, equitable servitudes are ideas, usufructs are ideas, loans are ideas, contracts are ideas, and, now this will really blow your mind --
options on options...
well, you get the idea.
Even facts about the world can, in some cases, become the property of commercial companies. It was the promise of gaining patents on the human genome...
Facts about the world, laws of nature, or abstract mathematical statements or equations, cannot be patented.
Gene sequences may seem to be getting close to that line, but you can only patent a gene sequence that you can extract and replicate; it's analogous to extracting and purifying a chemical compound from a naturally occurring mixture of substances, in effect making available a new substance that no one could put to practical use before.
Laboratory animals have already been patented, starting with the OncoMouse, an animal whose genome has been manipulated to ensure that it develops cancer.
An animal that's human-engineered is certainly not a 'fact of nature' -- it never existed before someone made it. It's a result of engineering just as much as an electric circuit or a toaster. It's just alive.
It is certainly true that the governments, the peoples and the industries of poor countries have fewer drugs than they might otherwise have because of international patent law.
This is one of those completely unsubstantiated statements. I tend to think that many of the drugs that the developing world uses were developed at least partially due to the patent system. At any rate, what's really clear is that they ALL come from the U.S. and Europe.
In this world, size is no protection. It just makes you a more succulent target for enemy lawyers.
I would just like to point out that both sides have lawyers -- this makes it sound like lawyers are the enemy. In fact, lawyers are just the guys that help their clients get what they deserve under the law.
People with more money have always been able to hire better lawyers in our legal system, and that problem has nothing to do with intellectual property.
Big pharmaceuticals must patent everything, if only to be certain the competition does not do it first.
The system is supposed to work this way. It incentivizes companies to research and patent things as fast as they can, pushing the limits of technology, and then disclosing them to the public. Otherwise, they might do less research, and might keep their research secret, thereby keeping it from the rest of us much longer than the 20 year life of patents... Sometimes reverse engineering is possible, but sometimes it's not.
when I make a copy of your program, you still have the original, which works just as well as it ever did. Equally, when you make a copy and sell it to me, it has cost you nothing, so why should you charge me for it as if it were a limited resource?
How about so I can pay my programmers? How about so I can invest i
Slashdot Mirror
I would suggest:
probably -> prolly
probable -> prol
probability -> prolity
The lyrics are probably a separately copyrighted work, so copying the lyrics is actually copying the whole work.
Even if considered as part of the song, the lyrics are not a "small part".
There's a _chance_ it's fair use, but most likely not. Copying a whole poem or book this way is the same thing. The fact that they're lyrics doesn't change the issue.
If it adds them to some mp3 metadata, it has to copy them. That's copyright infringement if the lyrics are copyrighted.
You mean fewer and fewer people. 'Less' is for collectives like 'stuff'.
This is not quite true. A substance that exists in a usable form in nature is not patentable. Likewise, methods to extract substances from plants, or extracted substances that are known and used, are also not patentable.
But improvements such as extracting and refining a substance from a plant, so that it's usable in a pure form, as opposed to a mixture or an adulterated form as found in the plant, IS patentable. In general, this is the sort of thing that companies are doing. (There are also cases where there is no documentation or way to show 'traditional knowledge', such that invalid patents end up being granted...)
Even if the plants and their known uses are publicly disclosed, that doesn't preclude someone from experimenting with the plant, and extracting and purifying substances from the plant. Such improvements would be patentable even though the traditional uses are known, because they are an improvement over the traditional uses or substances. So this database won't prevent such patents.
I support IP rights in traditional knowledge and natural resources, because there is real value in those things that our companies are exploiting. Granting such rights to developing countries would give them great incentives to protect these biological resources that are so critical to chemical and drug development.
Unfortunately, this sort of disclosure just cuts against the goal of actually compensating developing countries for such things. If they are convinced to give them away for free, rather than fight for recognized international IP rights in them, they will never get anything for them, and critical biological resources will continue to be overused.
Good points. This suggests a solution.
Just block anyone from commenting until they've used up their mod points. They can then comment as usual, on any thread they want.
I don't think the problem is that they're losing cases they ought to be winning, but rather that they're taking (too many?) cases that they are going to lose.
The ACLU has the same problem. Maybe they want to be seen as filers of frivolous baseless suits, but to many of us, many of the suits both groups pursue seem to have this flavor - pie in the sky...
If they just took a few less unrealistic positions, I think they'd convince a lot more people that they're trying to do the right thing rather than just the 'left' thing.
Within reason, I don't disagree. But your comment doesn't negate anything I said either.
We shouldn't discount the opinions of experts just because they have an interest in their field. Saying doctors don't always consider economics sufficiently doesn't mean their opinion is not valuable, well-reasoned, or better-informed than mine.
Everyone should be wary of anti-intellectual and anti-expert sentiment. This was the sort of thing that ran rampant during the cultural revolution in China, wherein experts were all thought to be solely self-interested and otherwise worthless, which of course was extreme and untrue.
This is where C++ gets fun.
Interesting comment. I think, though, that in real life you're not calling with static built-in types like '5'. You're calling with results of other operations or variables, so it doesn't really have to be a problem...
You just disallow the types that don't work. Maybe you have to construct some objects that seem like a lot of overhead sometimes, but you can end up with a natural syntax...
For many years their profits have been siphoned off by other areas of government, and not allowed to go back into improving the patent office.
This is supposed to change soon, since a law was recently passed to stop the practice of fee diversion.
I hate to tell you, but that's a horrendous idea.
Filings would drop to zero and no one would ever try to assert their patents. You would basically, with that one change, destroy a large chunk of the value in our economy.
Not to mention the fact that these would basically be massive punitive damages awarded against many completely innocent patentees, and therefore possibly unconstitutional, and at least extremely unfair. A patentee can't always predict how a court is going to rule.
Although this is certainly relevant to consider, don't just discount people because of their interest in a subject.
The people who work in a field usually have much more education in it, and much more time to devote to thinking about it.
why can't you just overload the comma operator, build up the arguments into a single datatype, and pass it to the indexing function? This kind of stuff is done a lot for fast matrix multiplication and similar things.
Hm. I can understand this from an emotional perspective, but not from an economic one...
Eolas long ago lost any chance of being a browser player. I haven't researched it thoroughly, but I hear it's just a small company. Any such company would be out of their mind, IMHO, to forgo the opportunity to cheaply license a patent to be used by MS in a billion billion ActiveX controls.
As for MS, this may say something to the small guy considering an attempt at enforcing his patent against MS, but what does it say to MS's investors and consumers??
Precisely that "when we lose a patent suit, we'll simply change everything to work around it, and you will have to eat the costs, even though we've got mega-cash to license anything in the world we have a fancy for..."
MS must be holding a really bad grudge at this point to go through all this trouble rather than licensing the patent.
Yeah. I often think about the fact that the average person goes through our modern life now harangued by a cacophony of sounds at every moment. Radio in the car, TV at home, iPods, games, people, etc.
I often go weeks at a time silent in the car, because there's no other place I can get away from the noise. I have an iPod, but often don't use it for long stretches, because it causes reverberations (automatic replaying) in my head for days.
But it's fun when you give up trying to be something you're not.
:)
Begin the conversation with whatever you're thinking about.
I start many conversations like "hey, so what do you think will be the economic effect of the cut-off of gaza and the wall in the west bank?" Or "hey, did you know that there will soon be bionic hands with proper sensors tied into the nervous system such that people will be able to sense all sorts of variables through the artificial hands?"...
You get one of two responses. Most people I know either find it interesting and talk about it, or laugh at the seeming non-sequitur, or just say no and the conversation goes nowhere. If you hit option number 3, you weren't going to have a good time anyway.
As the famous classical chinese saying goes,
Zhizhe bu yan, yanzhe bu zhi.
Those with knowledge don't speak; those who speak don't know.
Dude. It's not the truth just because you say it is.
Why don't you address some of the content of my previous post if you still think you're correct?
You may have the opinion that IP is a horrible thing -- that's fine, although I disagree with it. But your arguments about property are wrong in the sense that they go against every definition used in the law for hundreds of years.
From Black's Law Dictionary, 8th Ed.:
Continuing in Black's... There are thus many senses of 'property' that are correct. Property is a 'bundle of rights', and may be divided by limitations of time, space, or type of use.What I'm saying is that the grant of the patent right is a "right to exclude for 20 years". If the government reduces it by trying to cut off 2 years from that right, they're going to have to compensate it as a taking. But the right expires in 20 years because it only had a natural life of 20 years from inception.
At any rate, you are wrong in your limited conception of what 'property' can be.
Here is what the Supreme Court has said:
Note the cases cited from the mid-1800's.The argument between Madison and Jefferson doesn't prove anything about the "Framers" in general; only about Jefferson's skepticism about monopolies. Jefferson came around anyway, and was in fact the first director of the patent office, IIRC... They never said it wasn't property either. They just wanted to make sure the property right was limited.
You have a choice: You can persist in an incorrect view that's never going to be accepted by any lawyer or judge or representative to government with an understanding of history, or you can accept the fact that IP is property, and argue that it shouldn't be that way. The first puts you in the category of those who say the income tax is unconstitutional -- crackpots. You choose.
It's not that it isn't property - it is property - it's just that the property right is limited to 20 years.
The definition of the property simply includes a time limitation.
This is like a life estate in real property - a life estate is the title to some real property until you die. This is a true property right, but it's limited in duration.
Actually, most of contract law was created by the courts as common law. And it's only the legislatures or the courts that can change the law on contracts, not the executive branch...
These are really interesting questions that have not been fully resolved as of yet. My quick answers below are just off the top of my head -- any real answers to these questions would take the form of a law review article...
Regarding your first question regarding human DNA, the Constitution prohibits involuntary servitude. If the Supreme Court were to decide the case where a child born to a mother who had gene therapy also ended up with patented genes, the court could strike it down as involuntary servitude or some such thing.
If, however, you were the one that underwent gene therapy, voluntarily, you probably could be liable for infringement if you stopped payment or refused to pay for your license to the genes.
I would bet that congress would get involved at this point, though, and try to hash out some more specific rules about this sort of thing.
Regarding your second question, there was a case where a farmer was found liable for using patented seed that blew onto his land from a neighbor's land and grew there. However, IIRC, he knew what was going on and intentionally did nothing about it so he could gain the advantage of the patented seed... I do not know what would happen if he had taken reasonable measures to keep patented plants out, but here are a couple of possibilities:
1. He destroys his crops, then sues his neighbor to recover damages for the contamination.
2. He pays licensing fees, then sues his neighbor to recover damages.
3. The court finds some other rationale for him to avoid paying...
In any case, courts would not be happy about patentees or neighbors imposing the costs of the patent on an unwilling party through their negligence...
Regarding takings of property, the expiration of a patent is not a taking because the right that is granted is limited to 20 years from inception. The government is taking nothing away when the patent expires, because no right was granted that extends beyond 20 years.
I must say, this is one of the worst articles on IP I've ever seen. Whoever thinks it's 'excellent' is just hankering for some anti-establishment echo-room action rather than reality. I don't think I have time to cover them all, but here are just a few.
This is baloney. It's been quite a while since the constitution was written, and right there in Article 1 section 8 clause 8 is the statement by the framers that is the basis for our patent system. Ideas could be owned in 1789, and long before that as well, as England also had a patent system.
Not to mention the fact that money is an idea, equitable servitudes are ideas, usufructs are ideas, loans are ideas, contracts are ideas, and, now this will really blow your mind --
options on options...
well, you get the idea.
Facts about the world, laws of nature, or abstract mathematical statements or equations, cannot be patented.
Gene sequences may seem to be getting close to that line, but you can only patent a gene sequence that you can extract and replicate; it's analogous to extracting and purifying a chemical compound from a naturally occurring mixture of substances, in effect making available a new substance that no one could put to practical use before.
An animal that's human-engineered is certainly not a 'fact of nature' -- it never existed before someone made it. It's a result of engineering just as much as an electric circuit or a toaster. It's just alive.
This is one of those completely unsubstantiated statements. I tend to think that many of the drugs that the developing world uses were developed at least partially due to the patent system. At any rate, what's really clear is that they ALL come from the U.S. and Europe.
I would just like to point out that both sides have lawyers -- this makes it sound like lawyers are the enemy. In fact, lawyers are just the guys that help their clients get what they deserve under the law.
People with more money have always been able to hire better lawyers in our legal system, and that problem has nothing to do with intellectual property.
The system is supposed to work this way. It incentivizes companies to research and patent things as fast as they can, pushing the limits of technology, and then disclosing them to the public. Otherwise, they might do less research, and might keep their research secret, thereby keeping it from the rest of us much longer than the 20 year life of patents... Sometimes reverse engineering is possible, but sometimes it's not.
How about so I can pay my programmers? How about so I can invest i