The Evoluent looks good, but it's still only usable in one single position as far as I can tell from the write-up. Even though this is a better and more natural position than regular mice, I'd rather use a mouse that promotes changes in posture, like this one: http://www.perific.com/products/
Nah, I more or less skipped 2000. I hung on to NT4 until just a year or so before XP came out and then switched fairly quickly. 2k felt too much like a 1.0 to me, XP was the 1.1. Now, Vista is like the bad sequel - a late but still rushed 2.0. No thanks.
My main problem now is deciding between Gentoo (that I run on all my servers) or Ubuntu for my desktops.
Well, the sarcasm tags are missing from the entire patent system and see where that got us. Just because you would be able to figure it out doesn't mean any J Random idiot could.
Science stagnating at a time when IP rights are stronger than ever? How can that be? I thought lots of patents on everything would virtually guarantee a scientific advantage! You mean to tell me that all those patent lawyers have been LYING?
A camera with a well resolved center section but lousy edge resolution except for movement is one of the last things we want. And yet someone keeps buying Lensbabies.:-)
He's talking about whole parts of the region, not about only the villages being targetted. Looking at the images it's pretty clear he actually meant region in the context of the visible area. Besides, "parts of" can be arbitrarily sized, not to mention "region".
I just had an idea. It sounds great, which probably means it's awful. Ideas are dirt cheap. No wait, I take that back. People pay good money for dirt, in the right place, like a landfill.
Patent inventions are so miniscule these days that they really shouldn't be active more than a couple of years anyway, but this allows the "little man" the flexibility he needs to compete with the big companies. That's the easiest way to "fix" most of what's wrong with the patent system, yes. However, it also takes away the incentive to patent stuff in the first place. If you are going to pay upwards of a million Euros (average real cost of a patent in the EU, including attorney fees, future litigation and so on) for a patent, you really want it to last. That's why applicants have come up with so many creative ways to extend their patents.
Also, make patents non-transferable. You can't suddenly say "I didn't invent that, he did, go pay him." You can license your patent to someone (exclusively if you feel the need to do so) and let him do something with it, but the ability to innovate should not be taken away. A better way might be to introduce compulsary licensing. It has problems and loopholes of it's own, though. It depends a bit on what problem you are trying to solve.
Personally, I see so little gain from the system and so many costs - both open and hidden ones - that we might as well scrap the whole idea.
Coupled with statistics on what kind of patents are being granted these days, it just doesn't look like they work like intended. The lone inventor is a myth, big corporations use patent licenses to create cartels (there's a book called Information Feudalism by professors Peter Drahos and John Braithwaite, I highly recommend it - they interviewed about 50 people involved in the making of TRIPs) and inventors like James Watt and Håkan Lans go nuts trying to protect their patents instead of actually innovating.
Of course I don't propose to solve all the problems with the current system. That will most likely be the work of a large group of people specializing in that particular field. Well, so far they have just managed to make it worse. After all, this group of people would be the very same patent attorneys whose jobs depend on making more and more things patentable.
"In 1982, Congress created a special Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) for all patent cases. The CAFC capped off this trend toward broader patent protection by ruling in 1998 that methods of doing business are patentable. Patent claims for computer software and methods of doing business inundated the USPTO, and there were few records of prior inventions in these two areas against which to check new claims for novelty. Specious patents were awarded in droves. Far from retreating, the USPTO saw a bureaucratic upside to this surge in patent applications. The USPTO realized that the fees from granting and maintaining patents created that rarest of American institutions--a government profit center. In fact, the USPTO started openly advocating that its performance be measured by the amount that it contributed to the public coffers." http://members.forbes.com/asap/2002/0624/044_2.htm l
a means to provide for a limited monopoly will overall lead to greater innovation. Really? Do you actually have any studies to support that claim?
"Actually, the authors of many empirical studies point out that patents do not play anything like a dominant role among the various mechanisms by which returns from innovation are captured. Indeed, for most firms trade secrets, know-how, lead time to markets, continuing technological innovation, licensing, name recognition, service capabilities and the use of complementary marketing and manufacturing capabilities are often deemed more effective than patent protection. In the end, in virtually all branches of industry, the absence of patent protection would have had little or no impact on the innovative efforts of a majority of firms (Mazzoleni and Nelson, 1998; Cohen et al., 2000)." http://www.quebecoislibre.org/000902-3.htm
You listed 4 companies, 3 of which are production companies working in fields that will have little to no patents. Say again? First off, they were quite a bit more research-heavy when founded and many decades afterwards. In spite of this, Novartis is a leading drug manufacturer, spending over 5.3 billion dollars in 2006 on R&D and the Philips group spent 1.6 billion Euros. Either can hardly be described as only being "manufacturing" companies, both today hold thousands of patents.
I'd love to see some links to those patent lawyer studies. http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=237799&cid=194 36519
"Within the past five or six years, economists in particular have started to question the USPTO's practices, finding little correlation, if any, between patent proliferation and invention. Economists have identified many situations in which patents actually retard the introduction of new products. " http://members.forbes.com/asap/2002/0624/044.html
Basalla, G., The Evolution of Technology, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press,1988. Canadian Intellectual Property Office, A Guide to Patents, Ottawa, Publications Centre Communications Branch, Industry Canada, 1994. Carter, H.D., If You Want to Invent, New York, The Vanguard Press, 1939. Cohen, W., R.R. Nelson and J. P. Walsh, Protecting their Intellectual Assets: Appropriability Conditions and Why U.S. Manufacturing Firms Patent (or Not), Working Paper 7552, Cambridge, National Bureau of Economic Research (available at http://www.nber.org/papers/w7552), 2000. De Gregori, T.R., A Theory of Technology: Continuity and Change in Human Development, Ames, Iowa State University Press, 1985. Desrochers, P., De l'influence d'une ville diversifiée sur la combinaison de techniques: Typologie et analyse de processus, Ph.D. dissertation (Geography), Université de Montréal, 2000. Hounshell, D., From the American System to Mass Production, 1800-1932, Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984. Kinsella, N.S., Is Intellectual Property Legitimate? , Paper presented at the Austrian Scholars Conference 6, Auburn, Alabama, March 25, 2000. Mazzolini, R. and R.R. Nelson, The Benefits and Costs of Strong Patent Protection: A Contribution to the Current Debate , Research Policy 27 (3), p. 273-284, 1998. Petroski, H., The Evolution of Useful Thing, New York, Random House, 1992. Rosegger, G., The Economics of Production and Innovation: An Industrial Perspective, Oxford, Pergamon Press, 1986. Scherer, F.M., Comment on R.E. Evenson International Invention: Implications for Technology Market Analysis , In Zvi Griliches, ed. R&D, Patents, and Productivity, Chicago, University of Chicago and National Bureau of Economic Research, p. 123-126, 1987.
I hope the EU sticks to its guns on software patents. . . . we still no have software patents, don't we? If by "no" you mean in the range of 30-40 000 of them, sure, we have no software patents in the EU.
http://www.nosoftwarepatents.com/en/m/untruths/mot her.html
What's apparently hard to understand is that you are indeed stating a purely hypothetical situation, basically unrelated to the real world. That is not how it works. It's how it is supposed to work, though, so I can understand your confusion, especially since a lot of patent attorneys pay a lot of money to maintain that mythos.
First of all, there's enough examples of things being invented simultaneously by several different inventors to make the basic premise of the patent system suspicious from a fairness standpoint. Should first-to-file or first-to-invent be applied (the US and EU use differing principles here)? What of Company C that's an hour late, after having spent 5 million researching the design and manufacture of said widgets? Your message to them is "Go out of business, you late 'tards!".
How about the reason for the patents in the first place, the disclosure of the invention? This is, after all, the reason why the society gives the inventor his monopoly, in exchange for full disclosure. Have you tried reading a patent lately? They are filled with fluffy gibberish, on purpose, so a) any foreign inventors from, say China or another country with less than stellar reputation in the patent respect field can't just rip it off and b) so they can be interpreted as broadly as possible, to be used as ammunition in any possible upcoming disputes (here's a timely example: http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/06/08/12 11203 There's plenty more where that came from).
So basically, the society gives out a useless monopoly in exchange for getting slower innovation and richer attorneys. Doesn't sound like a good deal to me.
The patent process needs to be revamped to prevent the abuse that's taking place today Sounds great, in theory. But how do you propose to make this happen, without introducing too large barriers to enter, too short duration of patents or too expensive/slow patent verification processes?
Patents try to solve an unsolvable problem today in that they need to be short in duration to minimize the chilling effects, but long to earn their owners cash; broad to be applicable, but narrow to avoid carpet bombing; easy to understand to be of use for others and patent examiners, but obfuscated to prevent information leakage to countries with no patent system and we need a cheap, fast AND thorough patent examination process. Ain't gonna happen.
Enough studies indicate that the only ones actually benefiting from patents in real life (outside purely hypothetical situations like the other replicant gave) are patent attorneys that I'm willing to give it a try without them. Just let the current ones expire and stop granting new ones. We already see less and less patent applications from real entrepreneurs and innovators and more and more applications from patent hoarders so this step should be a no-brainer. Patents do not work like they are supposed to. I'm unsure as to if they ever actually did. For instance, it has been suggested that they delayed the industrial revolution several decades, until James Watt's steam engine patent expired. http://66.102.9.104/search?q=cache:bSn6RfryVEgJ:ww w.micheleboldrin.com/research/aim/anew01.pdf
Hell, just look at Switzerland and the Netherlands a hundred years ago - for a period of over 50 years, neither country had a patent system and they flourished. Many large corporations were founded there at the time; Unilever, Syngenta, Philips and Nestlé.
So yes, its obvious we want to save power on wireless chips, but if you come up with some cool and unique way of doing it, then you get a patent so you can profit on your idea. And exactly how is it suddenly impossible to profit from an idea without obtaining a patent first? Whatever happened to first-to-market, brand recognition and good, old-fashioned competition?
If you need a state-protected monopoly to turn a profit, maybe your invention wasn't so damned good after all...
RAID-5 a bunch of disks. Then put LVM on top of them. When you want to start growing, put another set of RAID-5 disks in, migrate the data over and remove the old disks.
Or, if the data is semi-expendable - ie music, recorded TV shows and movies - just use ReiserFS on LVM on a JBOD. It's easy to grow and very flexible. My archive has grown from 2 x 10GB Maxtors in 1998 to 2.1TB now.
(Sorry for the bork-de-bork)
Med teknisk åtgärd avses i detta kapitel varje verkningsfull teknik, anordning eller komponent som har utformats för att vid normalt bruk hindra eller begränsa exemplarframställning eller tillgängliggörande för allmänheten av ett upphovsrättsligt skyddat verk utan samtycke från upphovsmannen eller dennes rättsinnehavare. It seems the "effective" part of the directive carried into the Swedish law, almost verbatim.
When Sweden some time later implemented the directive into their local law, a similar note was incorporated into their law text.
Yep:
Första stycket gäller inte när någon som lovligen har tillgång till ett exemplar av ett upphovsrättsligt skyddat verk, kringgår en teknisk åtgärd för att kunna se eller lyssna på verket.
That doesn't make any sense. Apple, Commodore, and Amiga software were highly pirated as well. Piracy certainly didn't help them. Apple limped through the '90s. Commodore and Amiga both died. You can't make that comparison as both Apple and Commodore's OS only worked on their own hardware. So, there was no point in pirating AmigaOS since it already came with the machine. Ergo, it was not "highly pirated" at all.
If you are going to compare with other platforms, you can compare Deluxe Paint. This was probably the most pirated software program on the Amiga - everyone and his uncle had a copy. Still, sales from this program helped propel a small-time software company named Electronic Arts to great heights. Heck, I personally bought four copies (different versions; DPaint II NTSC, DPaint II PAL, DPaint III and DPaint IV) even though it was trivially easy to bypass the copy protection.
BTW, I have bought PageStream three times - versions 2, 3 and 5. An excellent program and IMHO InDesign is just now starting to catch up to PageStream 3's featureset. PageMaker never even got close to PageStream 2...
I'd be less upset if Slashdotters showed any interest in coming up with that new paradigm. Instead, the attitude seems to be, "Hey, free music/movies/etc!". Tremendous effort is put into breaking any new copy protection (which, I concur, will be ultimately futile) and none into suggesting a new business model. We do, all the time. Except everytime we do, some copyright-hugging astroturfer comes along saying "that's not a good reason to abolish copyright!" or "not everyone can make a living off that!". Well, I have news for them - not everyone can make a living out of copyright either. We can't expect to just substitite copyright for something else - a single magic bullet for all kinds of creative works. Copyright will slowly become irrelevant and replaced by a lot of other business models all by itself as more and more people realize it's not sustainable. The main problem is what irreparable damage the distributors can do in the meantime...
Consider software, for example. If every country in the world were to decide that software was not protected, how many more versions of Photoshop do you think Adobe would put out? How many would people buy? Quite a lot, actually. Do you honestly believe anyone refrains from installing a copy of Photoshop *only* because it might be illegal (in some jurisdictions, making backup copies for personal use is perfectly legal, regardless of what the EULA says)? The reason people don't install pirated copies is because they feel it is immoral or because they need the support services and updates from Adobe. Neither of which would change if copying was made legal. The risk of getting caught is miniscule and not really factored into people's decisions in any meaningful way.
And there are case studies. Take Sweden, for example. Until fairly recently, any piece of software that relied mainly on mathematical algorithms was not protected by copyright. Think accounting, spreadsheets and invoicing (games were protected due to their high level of "artistic" content). Still, people bought accounting packages, spreadsheets and invoice programs. There was no perceptible increase in sales when the law changed to include these programs.
Societal customs and selfish needs may keep people from making copies but copyright law does not.
Heck I might just try this myself. I've always wanted to write a book. So have I, but it takes too much time. Get a camera and learn photography instead.;-)
Other than that, I think you're spot on. Technology gave us copyright, technology can take it away.
If they ever institute software patents here I will continue to ignore them as a form of civil disobedience. You are aware that the EPO has already grantedtens of thousands software patents, right?
Slashdot Mirror
The Evoluent looks good, but it's still only usable in one single position as far as I can tell from the write-up. Even though this is a better and more natural position than regular mice, I'd rather use a mouse that promotes changes in posture, like this one: http://www.perific.com/products/
Nah, I more or less skipped 2000. I hung on to NT4 until just a year or so before XP came out and then switched fairly quickly. 2k felt too much like a 1.0 to me, XP was the 1.1. Now, Vista is like the bad sequel - a late but still rushed 2.0. No thanks.
My main problem now is deciding between Gentoo (that I run on all my servers) or Ubuntu for my desktops.
Just say No.
XP is the end of the line for me and Windows. We've had a long and bumpy relationship, but it's over now. Time to move on.
Well, the sarcasm tags are missing from the entire patent system and see where that got us. Just because you would be able to figure it out doesn't mean any J Random idiot could.
Science stagnating at a time when IP rights are stronger than ever? How can that be? I thought lots of patents on everything would virtually guarantee a scientific advantage! You mean to tell me that all those patent lawyers have been LYING?
I use the future bike cone as rationalization for driving really, really fast.
Personally, I see so little gain from the system and so many costs - both open and hidden ones - that we might as well scrap the whole idea.
Again, this is a pretty good starting point: http://www.quebecoislibre.org/000902-3.htm
Coupled with statistics on what kind of patents are being granted these days, it just doesn't look like they work like intended. The lone inventor is a myth, big corporations use patent licenses to create cartels (there's a book called Information Feudalism by professors Peter Drahos and John Braithwaite, I highly recommend it - they interviewed about 50 people involved in the making of TRIPs) and inventors like James Watt and Håkan Lans go nuts trying to protect their patents instead of actually innovating.
"In 1982, Congress created a special Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) for all patent cases. The CAFC capped off this trend toward broader patent protection by ruling in 1998 that methods of doing business are patentable.
Patent claims for computer software and methods of doing business inundated the USPTO, and there were few records of prior inventions in these two areas against which to check new claims for novelty. Specious patents were awarded in droves. Far from retreating, the USPTO saw a bureaucratic upside to this surge in patent applications.
The USPTO realized that the fees from granting and maintaining patents created that rarest of American institutions--a government profit center. In fact, the USPTO started openly advocating that its performance be measured by the amount that it contributed to the public coffers."
http://members.forbes.com/asap/2002/0624/044_2.ht
"Actually, the authors of many empirical studies point out that patents do not play anything like a dominant role among the various mechanisms by which returns from innovation are captured. Indeed, for most firms trade secrets, know-how, lead time to markets, continuing technological innovation, licensing, name recognition, service capabilities and the use of complementary marketing and manufacturing capabilities are often deemed more effective than patent protection. In the end, in virtually all branches of industry, the absence of patent protection would have had little or no impact on the innovative efforts of a majority of firms (Mazzoleni and Nelson, 1998; Cohen et al., 2000)."
http://www.quebecoislibre.org/000902-3.htm You listed 4 companies, 3 of which are production companies working in fields that will have little to no patents. Say again? First off, they were quite a bit more research-heavy when founded and many decades afterwards. In spite of this, Novartis is a leading drug manufacturer, spending over 5.3 billion dollars in 2006 on R&D and the Philips group spent 1.6 billion Euros. Either can hardly be described as only being "manufacturing" companies, both today hold thousands of patents. I'd love to see some links to those patent lawyer studies. http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=237799&cid=19
OK, so that wasn't really fair. :-)
h o.php3 69,665969,00.htmln st.htm7 25y .cfm?story_id=5014990
Here's the executive summary: http://www.quebecoislibre.org/000902-3.htm
Some more references:
http://wiki.ffii.org/Martin041109En
http://www.mises.org/journals/jls/15_2/15_2_1.pdf
http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/05/21/business/w
http://www.guardian.co.uk/globalisation/story/0,7
http://www.dklevine.com/general/intellectual/agai
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20020805/newman20020
http://www.economist.com/printedition/displaystor
"Within the past five or six years, economists in particular have started to question the USPTO's practices, finding little correlation, if any, between patent proliferation and invention. Economists have identified many situations in which patents actually retard the introduction of new products. "
http://members.forbes.com/asap/2002/0624/044.html
Of course. Here's a starter list:
Basalla, G., The Evolution of Technology, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press,1988.
Canadian Intellectual Property Office, A Guide to Patents, Ottawa, Publications Centre Communications Branch, Industry Canada, 1994.
Carter, H.D., If You Want to Invent, New York, The Vanguard Press, 1939.
Cohen, W., R.R. Nelson and J. P. Walsh, Protecting their Intellectual Assets: Appropriability Conditions and Why U.S. Manufacturing Firms Patent (or Not), Working Paper 7552, Cambridge, National Bureau of Economic Research (available at http://www.nber.org/papers/w7552), 2000.
De Gregori, T.R., A Theory of Technology: Continuity and Change in Human Development, Ames, Iowa State University Press, 1985.
Desrochers, P., De l'influence d'une ville diversifiée sur la combinaison de techniques: Typologie et analyse de processus, Ph.D. dissertation (Geography), Université de Montréal, 2000.
Hounshell, D., From the American System to Mass Production, 1800-1932, Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984.
Kinsella, N.S., Is Intellectual Property Legitimate? , Paper presented at the Austrian Scholars Conference 6, Auburn, Alabama, March 25, 2000.
Mazzolini, R. and R.R. Nelson, The Benefits and Costs of Strong Patent Protection: A Contribution to the Current Debate , Research Policy 27 (3), p. 273-284, 1998.
Petroski, H., The Evolution of Useful Thing, New York, Random House, 1992.
Rosegger, G., The Economics of Production and Innovation: An Industrial Perspective, Oxford, Pergamon Press, 1986.
Scherer, F.M., Comment on R.E. Evenson International Invention: Implications for Technology Market Analysis , In Zvi Griliches, ed. R&D, Patents, and Productivity, Chicago, University of Chicago and National Bureau of Economic Research, p. 123-126, 1987.
Let me know when you want more.
What's apparently hard to understand is that you are indeed stating a purely hypothetical situation, basically unrelated to the real world. That is not how it works. It's how it is supposed to work, though, so I can understand your confusion, especially since a lot of patent attorneys pay a lot of money to maintain that mythos.
2 11203 There's plenty more where that came from).
First of all, there's enough examples of things being invented simultaneously by several different inventors to make the basic premise of the patent system suspicious from a fairness standpoint. Should first-to-file or first-to-invent be applied (the US and EU use differing principles here)? What of Company C that's an hour late, after having spent 5 million researching the design and manufacture of said widgets? Your message to them is "Go out of business, you late 'tards!".
How about the reason for the patents in the first place, the disclosure of the invention? This is, after all, the reason why the society gives the inventor his monopoly, in exchange for full disclosure. Have you tried reading a patent lately? They are filled with fluffy gibberish, on purpose, so a) any foreign inventors from, say China or another country with less than stellar reputation in the patent respect field can't just rip it off and b) so they can be interpreted as broadly as possible, to be used as ammunition in any possible upcoming disputes (here's a timely example: http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/06/08/1
So basically, the society gives out a useless monopoly in exchange for getting slower innovation and richer attorneys. Doesn't sound like a good deal to me.
Patents try to solve an unsolvable problem today in that they need to be short in duration to minimize the chilling effects, but long to earn their owners cash; broad to be applicable, but narrow to avoid carpet bombing; easy to understand to be of use for others and patent examiners, but obfuscated to prevent information leakage to countries with no patent system and we need a cheap, fast AND thorough patent examination process. Ain't gonna happen.
Enough studies indicate that the only ones actually benefiting from patents in real life (outside purely hypothetical situations like the other replicant gave) are patent attorneys that I'm willing to give it a try without them. Just let the current ones expire and stop granting new ones. We already see less and less patent applications from real entrepreneurs and innovators and more and more applications from patent hoarders so this step should be a no-brainer. Patents do not work like they are supposed to. I'm unsure as to if they ever actually did. For instance, it has been suggested that they delayed the industrial revolution several decades, until James Watt's steam engine patent expired. http://66.102.9.104/search?q=cache:bSn6RfryVEgJ:w
Hell, just look at Switzerland and the Netherlands a hundred years ago - for a period of over 50 years, neither country had a patent system and they flourished. Many large corporations were founded there at the time; Unilever, Syngenta, Philips and Nestlé.
"The two countries relied for their growth not upon exclusive rights but upon high educational standards and technical ability." http://www.guardian.co.uk/globalisation/story/0,7
If you need a state-protected monopoly to turn a profit, maybe your invention wasn't so damned good after all...
RAID-5 a bunch of disks. Then put LVM on top of them. When you want to start growing, put another set of RAID-5 disks in, migrate the data over and remove the old disks. Or, if the data is semi-expendable - ie music, recorded TV shows and movies - just use ReiserFS on LVM on a JBOD. It's easy to grow and very flexible. My archive has grown from 2 x 10GB Maxtors in 1998 to 2.1TB now.
When Sweden some time later implemented the directive into their local law, a similar note was incorporated into their law text.
Yep: Första stycket gäller inte när någon som lovligen har tillgång till ett exemplar av ett upphovsrättsligt skyddat verk, kringgår en teknisk åtgärd för att kunna se eller lyssna på verket.
If you are going to compare with other platforms, you can compare Deluxe Paint. This was probably the most pirated software program on the Amiga - everyone and his uncle had a copy. Still, sales from this program helped propel a small-time software company named Electronic Arts to great heights. Heck, I personally bought four copies (different versions; DPaint II NTSC, DPaint II PAL, DPaint III and DPaint IV) even though it was trivially easy to bypass the copy protection.
BTW, I have bought PageStream three times - versions 2, 3 and 5. An excellent program and IMHO InDesign is just now starting to catch up to PageStream 3's featureset. PageMaker never even got close to PageStream 2...
Reading that thread, it does not look like driver problems, but broadcasters spuriously adding copy protection flags to their broadcasts.
Well, I have news for them - not everyone can make a living out of copyright either. We can't expect to just substitite copyright for something else - a single magic bullet for all kinds of creative works. Copyright will slowly become irrelevant and replaced by a lot of other business models all by itself as more and more people realize it's not sustainable. The main problem is what irreparable damage the distributors can do in the meantime...
And there are case studies. Take Sweden, for example. Until fairly recently, any piece of software that relied mainly on mathematical algorithms was not protected by copyright. Think accounting, spreadsheets and invoicing (games were protected due to their high level of "artistic" content). Still, people bought accounting packages, spreadsheets and invoice programs. There was no perceptible increase in sales when the law changed to include these programs.
Societal customs and selfish needs may keep people from making copies but copyright law does not.
Other than that, I think you're spot on. Technology gave us copyright, technology can take it away.
Maybe I should clarify that I did indeed see that he's been a Gallery user for years. Maybe he just haven't kept up with developments, I dunno.