And when the value of patents falls more will just keep secrets, just like they did before patents were issued.
And that's bad how? Just because they try to keep secrets doesn't mean that they will actually manage to do so successfully. If they could, they would be idiots to seek patents. The argument that patents reduce trade secrets is an obvious joke. The decent rationalization is that it spurs on R&D funding, although that doesn't seem to hold up to scrutiny either.
I've asked this on this site many times. How do you make a Stradivarius? Losing knowledge like that is a cost of _not_ having patents.
You are assuming that the luthier would have ever disclosed this knowledge for a patent, when there's no evidence that he would have. It's also assuming that his patent would disclose the entire secret, instead of just the elements that would be easy to figure out and copy, such as the combination of woods used, without the juicy details that we still haven't reverse engineered.
Governments do pay for a lot of the research, the company chips in a pittance, gets the patent and gives a nominal royalty to the university that developed the technology. Even if a private company completely did all of the research, the patent they hold is agreement between themselves and the governments of nations that have agreed to give them patents for a temporary legal monopoly in exchange for having done the research and disclosure. Nations that have not agreed to give them patents have made no such agreement, and in no way need to be charitable to that particular corporation.
You can 'widely deploy' terminator genes, but you just need a few fertile seeds to spread to undermine that. Seeds that don't reproduce are an evolutionary dead end.
Also, If they could reliably keep something secret for longer than 20 years in a certain instance, they wouldn't seek a patent on it, and right now, seeking patents is entirely voluntary.
While I'm sure this process would be useful by itself, I wonder if the same or similar techniques could be used for purifying other materials. For example, maybe new levels of purity in various fuels.
It's more likely to play out like this:
The Simpsons summarized it well back in 1998 when they had Bill Gates say "Oh, I didn't get rich by writing a lot of checks!"
This only adresses trolls, though. If you are enough of a success to threaten an incumbent market leader, they could go after your company with their patent warchest.
I agree that really good innovation doesn't pop out of a vacuum. It comes from ideas from many different people crossbreeding and evolving into better ideas. Restricting the ability of ideas to 'have sex' through legal restrictions slows their evolutionary process.
Also, Tivo's not a really good example. First of all, much of the underlying technology already existed, and it appears that ReplayTV developed very similar technology concurrent. We had digital video and methods of converting analog to digital and digital to analog in realtime, we had programmable VCRs. By virtue of using a hard drive instead of tape, they escaped a lot of the drawbacks of VCRs. Furthermore, Tivo entered a market that is quite hostile to competition. They had to work with both copyright holders and cable and satellite providers, both of whom are quick to stab anyone in the back for control or a quick buck.
The point is that this is very fishy business that suggests that Jobs basically bribed the head of the transplant committee with a house in order to get a transplant that he shouldn't have gotten.
Winning these cases is PR that says, we are the leaders in smartphone technology, we are the innovators.
No, it's PR that says, we are fucking douchebags, we hate competition. Apple has a few parties that eat that up, but that's about it. That crowd tends to take most anything Apple does as good news, though.
Again, the word you are looking for is cronyism. Subsidies are contrary to capitalism. Capitalism would have let the banks burn. Just because many supporters of cronyism call themselves 'capitalists' doesn't mean that it is actually capitalism.
There doesn't even have to be any direct profit potential. Public domain works give potential competitors cheap building blocks, which would allow competition to spring up and hurt their profitability. Thus, Disney benefits even from locking up orphaned works that they had nothing to do with.
You are saying that within industries the patent system affects, having patents is important, not that the patent system itself is important.
1) Funding -- many investors (angel and VC) won't fund projects that don't have patents (submitted or otherwise).
A major component of that is that patents are useful for countersuits. If you don't have patents, you may be sued. However, if nobody has patents, then that is not an issue
2) Competitive edge -- A big name company could see what you're doing, take the idea and invest huge resources to make it faster than you could. Then you're done.
However, the big name companies would not be as big without a massive patent portfolio. Patents generally lead to relative consolidation of an industry, so they are solving a problem created by the patent system.
In return he gets a monopoly yes, but it is limited in time, and he even has to pay to maintain the monopoly so it doesn't exist any longer than necessary.
No, it simply ceases to exist if the value to the patent holder is less than the maintenance fees at 3.5, 7.5, or 11.5 years.
The monopoly is also limited to a territory (country), so you are 100% free to do it anywhere else without paying a dime.
Except for the fact that you can get a patent in other countries as well, so long as you apply.
That is promoting innovation, not stifling it.
Promoting and stifling innovations are terms whose meaning is relative. Patents promote innovation if the social benefits of disclosure and R&D funding outweigh the social costs of a legal monopoly, and stifle innovation is the costs are higher. You have in no way addressed that issue, and the costs and benefits would vary greatly from industry to industry, patent to patent, and even vary depending upon the patent holder. The given saw example appears to be the result of a patent holder being an idiot, and idiotic patent holders hold up the system even more. There are also entities that buy up patents for the sake of extortion of companies practicing in a certain field.
The concept that IF there is money to be made from an original idea, or work, then the author should be entitled to some of that money, is valid. And, I think it reasonable that such a law should apply for a decade, maybe a bit more. Possibly even 20 or 25 years.
That's not the concept at all. The concept is that, to the extent that society realizes a net benefit from granting authors limited monopolies, copyright is beneficial to society, and is thus a permissable curb on our freedoms. However, that depends upon a certain iteration of copyright giving that kind of benefit, when there isn't good evidence to support that notion, and there is evidence to the contrary.
Unless of course you think that patents are a fundamentally flawed idea. To develop a system that would encourage innovation, you would need to have a strong grasp on psychology, economics, game theory, and a number of other fields to understand the complexities of the various effects such a system would have. We are probably at least decades away from even hoping to be able to create such a system, and the patent system as we pretty much know it today predated anything remotely modern in those fields. Hell, the true 'original spirit' of letters patent was to collect tax revenue without a visible tax, and the origins of the modern patent system were in limiting those clearly harmful monopolies to a subset that was less clearly harmful. That was a good decision, but they should have continued in that direction and eventually rid ourselves of those monopolies entirely.
The only way to get a country into 16Tn debt is by capitalism.
Capitalism can't get a country into national debt by definition. National debt is the result of the government spending more money than it has. Capitalism is about private ownership of goods and the means of production. What you are objecting to is cronyism. I agree that cronyism need to be kicked to the curb and then beaten senseless, but confusing it with capitalism only leads to further cronyism.
Congress was criticized for not being tech savvy, but from a lot of the comments we got it became clear that the people who were calling us did not understand the bill any better than we did.
Those are two separate areas of understanding. Understanding technology and understanding a particular bill don't necessarily translate, particularly when said bill is 78 pages of legalese in it's final form, and was subject to a number of amendments and changes.
There's this thing called 'mob rule', and its not always right.
She seems to be confused as to the reason why mob rule is not always right. It's not right when it allows the majority to oppress a minority. Not allowing the majority to be oppressed by a minority is not mob rule.
You are talking about the ethics of people copying without paying or without permission. There is obviously nothing unethical about that. Copying is vital to human advancement and survival, so it's ridiculous to call it unethical.
I don't think you comprehend the change that's going on. The way things are changing is that we are no longer in an environment that can support giants. Absent a drastic change in the future, nobody will be as popular as the Beatles, the Stones, or Elvis were at the peak of their popularity. Instead, more and more will shift into what is currently the 'long tail' portion.
Slashdot Mirror
Governments and charities, who are probably footing the lion's share of the bill already.
And that's bad how? Just because they try to keep secrets doesn't mean that they will actually manage to do so successfully. If they could, they would be idiots to seek patents. The argument that patents reduce trade secrets is an obvious joke. The decent rationalization is that it spurs on R&D funding, although that doesn't seem to hold up to scrutiny either.
You are assuming that the luthier would have ever disclosed this knowledge for a patent, when there's no evidence that he would have. It's also assuming that his patent would disclose the entire secret, instead of just the elements that would be easy to figure out and copy, such as the combination of woods used, without the juicy details that we still haven't reverse engineered.
Oh, look, it's one of those idiots that goes on about that "fruits of labor" drivel.
They will be if they don't do enough to 'respect IP.' That's the purpose of the Special 301 report.
Governments do pay for a lot of the research, the company chips in a pittance, gets the patent and gives a nominal royalty to the university that developed the technology. Even if a private company completely did all of the research, the patent they hold is agreement between themselves and the governments of nations that have agreed to give them patents for a temporary legal monopoly in exchange for having done the research and disclosure. Nations that have not agreed to give them patents have made no such agreement, and in no way need to be charitable to that particular corporation.
You can 'widely deploy' terminator genes, but you just need a few fertile seeds to spread to undermine that. Seeds that don't reproduce are an evolutionary dead end.
Also, If they could reliably keep something secret for longer than 20 years in a certain instance, they wouldn't seek a patent on it, and right now, seeking patents is entirely voluntary.
I believe Torvalds said that he likes Ubuntu (although he prefers Fedora for work purposes), as did ESR.
Increasing the standard of living is an effective way of reducing population growth, so it would actually result in less blacks.
While I'm sure this process would be useful by itself, I wonder if the same or similar techniques could be used for purifying other materials. For example, maybe new levels of purity in various fuels.
It's more likely to play out like this: The Simpsons summarized it well back in 1998 when they had Bill Gates say "Oh, I didn't get rich by writing a lot of checks!"
This only adresses trolls, though. If you are enough of a success to threaten an incumbent market leader, they could go after your company with their patent warchest.
I agree that really good innovation doesn't pop out of a vacuum. It comes from ideas from many different people crossbreeding and evolving into better ideas. Restricting the ability of ideas to 'have sex' through legal restrictions slows their evolutionary process.
Also, Tivo's not a really good example. First of all, much of the underlying technology already existed, and it appears that ReplayTV developed very similar technology concurrent. We had digital video and methods of converting analog to digital and digital to analog in realtime, we had programmable VCRs. By virtue of using a hard drive instead of tape, they escaped a lot of the drawbacks of VCRs. Furthermore, Tivo entered a market that is quite hostile to competition. They had to work with both copyright holders and cable and satellite providers, both of whom are quick to stab anyone in the back for control or a quick buck.
The point is that this is very fishy business that suggests that Jobs basically bribed the head of the transplant committee with a house in order to get a transplant that he shouldn't have gotten.
No, it's PR that says, we are fucking douchebags, we hate competition. Apple has a few parties that eat that up, but that's about it. That crowd tends to take most anything Apple does as good news, though.
Again, the word you are looking for is cronyism. Subsidies are contrary to capitalism. Capitalism would have let the banks burn. Just because many supporters of cronyism call themselves 'capitalists' doesn't mean that it is actually capitalism.
There doesn't even have to be any direct profit potential. Public domain works give potential competitors cheap building blocks, which would allow competition to spring up and hurt their profitability. Thus, Disney benefits even from locking up orphaned works that they had nothing to do with.
A major component of that is that patents are useful for countersuits. If you don't have patents, you may be sued. However, if nobody has patents, then that is not an issue
However, the big name companies would not be as big without a massive patent portfolio. Patents generally lead to relative consolidation of an industry, so they are solving a problem created by the patent system.
No, it simply ceases to exist if the value to the patent holder is less than the maintenance fees at 3.5, 7.5, or 11.5 years.
Except for the fact that you can get a patent in other countries as well, so long as you apply.
Promoting and stifling innovations are terms whose meaning is relative. Patents promote innovation if the social benefits of disclosure and R&D funding outweigh the social costs of a legal monopoly, and stifle innovation is the costs are higher. You have in no way addressed that issue, and the costs and benefits would vary greatly from industry to industry, patent to patent, and even vary depending upon the patent holder. The given saw example appears to be the result of a patent holder being an idiot, and idiotic patent holders hold up the system even more. There are also entities that buy up patents for the sake of extortion of companies practicing in a certain field.
That's not the concept at all. The concept is that, to the extent that society realizes a net benefit from granting authors limited monopolies, copyright is beneficial to society, and is thus a permissable curb on our freedoms. However, that depends upon a certain iteration of copyright giving that kind of benefit, when there isn't good evidence to support that notion, and there is evidence to the contrary.
Unless of course you think that patents are a fundamentally flawed idea. To develop a system that would encourage innovation, you would need to have a strong grasp on psychology, economics, game theory, and a number of other fields to understand the complexities of the various effects such a system would have. We are probably at least decades away from even hoping to be able to create such a system, and the patent system as we pretty much know it today predated anything remotely modern in those fields. Hell, the true 'original spirit' of letters patent was to collect tax revenue without a visible tax, and the origins of the modern patent system were in limiting those clearly harmful monopolies to a subset that was less clearly harmful. That was a good decision, but they should have continued in that direction and eventually rid ourselves of those monopolies entirely.
But could padmapper even be bound by TOS?
Capitalism can't get a country into national debt by definition. National debt is the result of the government spending more money than it has. Capitalism is about private ownership of goods and the means of production. What you are objecting to is cronyism. I agree that cronyism need to be kicked to the curb and then beaten senseless, but confusing it with capitalism only leads to further cronyism.
Those are two separate areas of understanding. Understanding technology and understanding a particular bill don't necessarily translate, particularly when said bill is 78 pages of legalese in it's final form, and was subject to a number of amendments and changes.
She seems to be confused as to the reason why mob rule is not always right. It's not right when it allows the majority to oppress a minority. Not allowing the majority to be oppressed by a minority is not mob rule.
You are talking about the ethics of people copying without paying or without permission. There is obviously nothing unethical about that. Copying is vital to human advancement and survival, so it's ridiculous to call it unethical.
I don't think you comprehend the change that's going on. The way things are changing is that we are no longer in an environment that can support giants. Absent a drastic change in the future, nobody will be as popular as the Beatles, the Stones, or Elvis were at the peak of their popularity. Instead, more and more will shift into what is currently the 'long tail' portion.