Due to the effects of the "dot-com crisis". Given that the demise of the dot-coms is partly due to the failure of non-exclusive services to provide a viable business model, one wonders whether the non-exclusivity of GPL'd software won't be too difficult for Sun's PHB to factor into their forecasts.
Whatever happens business-wise, I think Sun is making a good choice. Let's hope it's also a business decision.
what they patented is the enormous effort that those companies expended in
discovering a secret that I could never have discovered on my own.
I think patents have more to do with non-obviousness than with hard work or dollars of investment. The investment is just a side-effect of state-sanctioned monopolies. The effort required in not considered. I could have a flash of intuition in which I come up with a brilliant new patentable device. My research investment was zero (or quite small, at least) and yet my invention still qualifies as patentable. Non-obviousness is becoming more difficult for inexpert (or even well-trained) bureacrats to correctly determine. That's why it seems to me that intellectual property protection is nearing the end of its useful life. It was useful and effective when mail travelled by horse, but today it does more to benefit lawyers than the public.
If there hadn't been a chance for serious financial gain, the sequencing would have taken years longer.
I'm no expert, but wasn't the issue more one of logistics and methodology rather than just brute financing? Celera, if I remember correctly, claimed that they could sequence genes more inexpensively than the NIH. The money was already there. The method that Celera used could have been implemented without the help of venture capital.
Would you have set the whole process back that far just so you didn't have to worry about some licensing fee?
I think the original post was raising ethical concerns rather than financial ones. I imagine that even with gene therapy, one can only charge what the market will bear. So the cost of "renting" genes to patients would have to be within reason. It's not the money that worries people, I think. We all assume that we have to spend money to live. Most people would be more upset that a corporation or a government could own parts of their bodies.
Can you see where that same rejection of capitalism would have utterly crippled the advancements of the
computer industry over the past 30 years?
I don't see
How this person's post is a criticism of capitalism
How you arrive at the conclusion that an ideological rejection of capitalism could affect the computer industry. Business is business. Capitalism is just an idea
Computer innovation could (and did) take place in communist countries as well as in capitalist ones. People's minds are filled with wonder and imaginative ideas no matter what political philosophy they espouse.
Without those computer advancements, we wouldn't have been ready to undertake the sequencing of genomes
for decades. Can you see how these advances build upon each other, and if a system like capitalism can help us
to build faster, it's probably a good thing?
Advances can only build upon each other if people are reasonably free of constraints preventing them from utilising existing technology. Some may argue (I'm one who will) that patents have as much negative as positive impact in terms of stimulating new development based on existing material.
Secondly, you assume that building more and faster, regardless of the direction, is something desirable. Many people would disagree with you, including me. I'm not against technological progress, but it is irresponsible of us as human beings to offer wildly advantageous conditions to producers (aka patents) at a time when caution is demanded. Sure, if you offer a free gold bar to everyone who does some research lots of people will do research, but is that the wisest way to marshal the resources of a civilized society? Not everyone would agree that it is.
your
neighbors would jump in and copy your idea and make money off of it, and you will go under because you spent your
time and money innovating
I won't go under unless I depend upon intellectual property rights in order to make a living. As long as my neighbors don't use the power of the State to stop me from selling my own invention, they can do anything they want with it. My only reason for inventing, in this case (arguably a limited one), was to help myself, my family or my community. You're twisting my hypothetical case so that it includes the effects of intellectual property protection even though, by construction, the scenario has none. If those who "take" my idea don't have a State-enforced monopoly, they don't have an unfair advantage over me, nor do I have an unfair advantage over them.
An economist might argue that intellectual property laws add to the consumer surplus by making more and better choices available in the market. This is partly true. But the notion of a consumer surplus is quite theoretical and inexact. In order to claim that a consumer surplus exists in a given market, on must show that the *value* to the purchaser exceeds the *price* paid to the producer. Whenever producers can raise their prices without driving customers away, the difference between the "dollars" of benefit derived by the buyer and the price paid to the producer shrinks. That means the artificially high prices imposed by intellectual property laws eat up some of the benefits which technology provides.
Furthermore, by granting property rights in information, the State ensures that low-efficiency producers of intellectual capital will have an easier time surviving, while the efficient producers will have a smaller share of the market than they would have otherwise.
Without innovation, everyone would have already consumed everything they need, except
stuff like food and fuel
Innovation would happen with or without intellectual property racketeering. Inventions would find their way into the market one way or another. Don't you have faith in man's desire to create? Most of the scientists I've met (a skewed sample, to be sure) think of science the way mountain climbers think of mountains. They just *need* to discover stuff. Curiosity is a much better incentive for innovation than property rights.
Property rights seem useful once something's already there, as in the case of a plot of land or a purchased vehicle. Claiming to hold residual property rights in segments of the human genome is a bit like landing on a planet and claiming it for humanity. We know nothing about it, so saying we own it isn't saying very much at all.
I could claim to be the first person to have passed through a certain part of the universe (as a passenger on Earth, I would have been the first Earthling to pass through *some* part of the universe) but I'd be a bit grandiose if I said I had discoverer's rights to anything.
Although this last analogy is "out-there", it demonstrates my point that applying the concept of ownership to objects without well-defined boundaries is confusing and inflammatory, not to mention being a category error.
I am saying the gov't should spend my money as I see fit. Or, even better, that I should spend my money as I see fit. taxation is theft. To steal my money and then spend it on what I do not support is even worse.
If I accept your claim that taxation is a necessary evil, I might still argue that spending the money wisely must include spending it on activities which I don't consider worthwhile. If, for instance, you pay $2000 per year in property tax, someone has to decide how to spend that money. If you alone could decide what to do with it, services such as sewage, water, roads, police, courts, legislators' salaries could never be dependably included in an annual budget. You might this year decide that you don't want any of your money to go to roads. Everyone else might decide to do the same. If that were the case, the maintenance of public roads would be subject to the whims of individual taxpayers.
This is not an impossible scenario. It may be possible for the government to allow citizens to direct their tax contributions. It would just make for unreliable government. What would happen if there were suddendly no inspectors to inspect meat sold at grocery stores? Store owners could keep meat on the shelves as long as they pleased. Allowing someone's child to die of Hamburger Disease is not conducive to a healthy economy.
Public infrastructure is what makes an economy possible. A healthy economy should be able to pay for the infrastructure which it needs in order to run. Otherwise, the negative side effects will wind make it impossible to conduct business at all. If someone doesn't pay for the road, no one will be able to deliver merchandise effectively. If the police can't effectively deter crime, no one will be able to work or live without fear. Without all the services and structures which we take for granted, the economy would suffer. This is not an argument for Big Government, it's an argument for Right Sized, efficient government. I'm not an opponent of individualism or a supporter of communism, since I can easily see that the government could not exist without the financial and moral support of the governed. That means the freedom for individuals to pursue economic goals is essential to the survival of modern liberal democratic states.
In short, I am saying that the relationship between public and private institutions is one of interdependence, not independence.
That means they aren't going to
product, and you won't get the drug.
Yeah, uh, 'product' wasn't a verb last I heard.
If you want to accept blackmail as a form of public work, then sure, I agree. Me, I'd rather work with someone who wants to help rather than someone who threatens me that they won't.
Are you suggesting that research be moved out of the commercial sector and into the universities, and for the
benefits of that research to be shared by all?
Not all research, just the stuff that's open-ended and really hard to make money at. Private industry is "more efficient" because it does all the applied research where there is often a specific market objective being studied. The Human Genome project was like that. Celera was right to say that the private sector could do that more efficiently than a university. It was all a mechanical process. Once the methodology had been put in place the publicly funded part of the human genome project would probably have best been left to someone with a manufacturer's skills, not those of a scientist. Now the ownership of the gene fragments is another story altogether...
That's fine, but if you want to do that and keep the existing rate of
tech progress, then where is the money going to come from?
Where does it usually come from? Taxes. There's nothing wrong with taxpayers footing the bill for valuable work that isn't immediately profitable. A lot of pure science falls into this category and that's what technology needs to continue advancing. What would applied science apply if not new scientific discoveries?
I am angry whenever I learn that my tax money is
spent on things that don't benefit me.
I wonder how people can live in a civilized world and think of it as if they live in a vacuum. I'm no fan of porkbarreling or nepotism, but tax dollars *have* to support *some* things that don't benefit you directly. Are you mad that the government builds and maintains parks? You may not go to the park often. There are many parks you will never visit. By your lights, that money will have been wasted. Are you really saying that the government should spend the money on you and you alone?
What you are probably trying to say is that sometimes governments make bad spending decisions. Of course that's true. But to use that as an excuse for greed and selfishness is disrespectful to your fellow citizens.
It doesn't matter what society wants or needs, as much as it matters that each individual gets a fair deal.
I doesn't matter what society needs until it comes to things like the environment and public works. Then people need to act together in order to be effective. Without the collective and coordinated effort of many participants, most of what we value in society would be gone. Such basic social organizing principles as the division of labour require cooperation to achieve mutual benefit. You can't do everything for yourself and still have time left over to post comments to/.!
the reason that we care about drug companies--and any other company performing research--is that we, as a
society, need said drugs.
This may sound like a stupid question, but how do you know we need "said drugs" even before they've been discovered? You want to write a blank cheque for these guys without even considering whether the product in question is needed. What kind of priorities are you setting, or are you setting any at all? It seems you would rather have someone take responsibility for your well-being. This is the classic case of 'orphaned' drugs for which the market isn't large enough to justify the cost of clinical trials. On the one hand, intellectual property apologists want to believe that patents, trademarks and copyright promote public good, but when presented with clear examples which show the money-grubbing side of intellectual property ownership, apologists backpedal and say "Hey, they have a natural right to those inventions. So what if some inventions don't serve any real human need?"
But, as anyone who's taken a decent economics
course cna tell you, private research generally yields much better results than public research.
Saying that is probably what got the economics prof her job. I took an economics course and it seems to me that the jury's still out on whether the state protection racket produces better results than universities. Call that one a draw. Most of the time, private industry uses the publicly funded research as a basis for further inquiry. The information flow used to be from universities to private industry, but cutbacks have probably done a lot to reverse the flow. When you say private research is better than university research, you could mean one of two things: On the one hand, you might be saying that private research is better because the profit motive makes it better. I don't agree with that claim, but at least it has some substance. On the other hand, you might be saying that while you don't understand the mechanism of their success, you believe there might be statistical evidence to show that historically, private companies do produce better research more efficiently than Universities. I really doubt whether you could amass statistics to support that claim, but even if statistics showed that business has the edge over publicly funded research, that would still be like comparing apples and oranges. You can't measure research success or progress financially. Long periods may pass in which no worthwhile results are discovered. This is another point on which intellectual property apologists appear to have a double standard. When I point out that Pfizer had revenue of 5.5 billion dollars in Q3, they reply "Oh, but research costs a lot of money and lots of drugs never even make it to market!" Yet when they look at university research (when they aren't too busy plundering it) all they can see is waste and inefficiency. Well no bloody wonder! How can you come in on budget and on schedule when you're exploring the unknown? Doesn't that strike you as an unreasonably high standard? In fact the drug companies have been blathering about how much it costs to do clinical trials etc., for so long that people have forgotten that universities have the same troubles. They just don't spend billions on public relations TV advertising campaigns like their private sector counterparts do.
Yeah, right. Patents exist to line the pockets of lawyers and corporations.
If you couldn't patent something, then you would put hard work into making
something, and then everyone in the world could just take your idea as soon as it hit the market and duplicate it
and make money off of your hard work.
So what? There's lots of stuff I work hard on that I don't get a guaranteed return on. That's life. Sometimes people take advantage of you. If it really bothers you, then just keep your brilliant invention a secret and no one will steal it.
So, if there were no patents, then everyone would just wait around for
everyone else to invent something so they could take the idea and exploit it for their own gain.
Rubbish. People invent what they need *because* they need it. If I've got a good idea, you can be damn sure I'm not going to sit around and wait until someone else comes up with something similar. I have to eat and clothe myself. If my invention makes that easier for me and my family, what do I care if my neighbor uses my idea?
(I learned about patents in my Economics class
-- see, education really does work!)
I'm not sure if you're serious or joking or playing dumb. Education only works because someone shares their knowledge. Patents (and copyright and trademarks) just get in the way of sharing.
Glaxo spend over 66% of their 4,595 millions of pounds in quarterly revenues on research and development.
They don't deserve state-sanctioned monopoly status just because they spent a lot of money. Some people spend a lot of money trying to start businesses that eventually fail, but I don't see anyone rushing to make things easier for them. Corporations have more than enough legal protection. They can declare bankruptcy leaving thousands of workers unpaid while the directors and executives walk away with millions. They can break laws (in some jurisdictions) without culpability for corporate board members. What else do they need to ensure their survival? I thought free-market economics was about the survival of the fittest. If you really look at it, it's just as bad as the ancien regime. Just the powerful doing favours for each other.
Don't families deserve to be protected as much as ideas? The state doesn't guarantee that my children will generate a return, nor does it enforce my residual rights in them after I have finished parenting. Here is my demand: I put lots of hard work and resources into raising my children, therefore the state should ensure that they have guaranteed employability when they graduate from high school. This is an absurd demand, as I'm sure you will admit. And yet aren't intellectual property owners whining for just this kind of guarantee?
Intellectual property protection was never included in the Rights of Man, nor does the Canadian Charter of Rights ensure Intellectual Property rights (The Canadian Charter doesn't even guarantee *property* rights). The US constitution added provisional support for intellectual property protection merely as a means to promote a public good, not as an essential right.
Even if one allows the moral argument that a certain level of intellectual property is required to protect human dignity (in cases of outright plagiarism, or personation perhaps), such a requirement could be met at a threshold far below current conventions. We are experiencing the equivalent of a land-grab. Even leaving moral questions aside, there is probably a practical case to be made that intellectual property rights of all kinds merely stifle creativity. They make us afraid to imitate, and everyone knows that people learn by imitating. We can't explore the landscape for fear of trespassing.
If you look at the broader purpose of intellectual property laws, it becomes quite evident that granting property rights is just one way amongst many to stimulate creative work. It's not the only way and it's not necessarily the best way. Property rights are supposed to benefit commerce and profit-taking. Does the profit motive provide enough bang for the intellectual property dollar? Some types of human activities are more commerce-friendly than others. Sales, manufacturing, wholesaling, shipping, agriculture, mining, forestry and other old economy businesses can be conducted more-or-less profitably without interference from the state. The ownership of ideas is meant to encourage commercial involvement in scientific research and artistic expression. Do the goals of profitability conflict with those of pure or applied research? Can artists create most effectively when they respond to market pressures or is there something else at work? These are the questions which ought to guide intellectual property legislators.
Research is a crapshoot, like you said, most of the drugs never reach clinical trials. So why then should we entrust critical research to companies who have no incentive to pursue the truth, but are only driven by the bottom line? Is this really the best way to promote understanding of the world around us? If we give up on pure research and satisfy ourselves with applied science, how far will knowledge advance? And without the advances in pure science, applied science would be starved for innovation.
Universities were supposed to provide shelter from market influences and mob mentality so that some people could free their minds and study the world for the sake of knowledge in the pursuit of Truth. The soul of democracy has now been dismantled. To fill the void that was left, patents, trademarks, and copyright have been extended and strengthened. Corporations have now been entrusted with the task of putting aside market pressures to deliver research which will benefit humanity.
the technology will exist also to clone
you a body to place your head on, and you're good to go.
Does that mean they have to cut the head off another body in order to sew mine on? I don't think that's very nice. Maybe a robotic body would be just as good.
quit your bitching and take your money to a bank that supports what you want. that's your right and the key to your
power over them.
Canada's banks have a problem which inhibits their responsiveness to retail customers. They have been ramping up their foreign operations so that they can "compete globally". The domestic market is very small by comparison. What this means to Canadian banking customers is that the banks have less and less incentive to cater to the domestic customer. They basically don't care about Canadians very much. Also, because banks are so heavily regulated in Canada, the major banks face very limited competition. They can be as rude and ignorant as they want (and they often are) without fear of customers deserting them en masse.
Banks also have worked long and hard to develop features that make switching providers very inconvenient. I am right now trying to switch from Bank of Montreal to a Credit Union, but since my pay is automatically deposited, loan payments and other monthly expenditures are automatically withdrawn from my account, etc. I'm going to have a very hard time moving from one to the other.
In circumstances where private interests (the interests of bank owners) conflict with public interests (a stable banking system is essential to commerce) and free-market substitution of services is not practical, people should consider whether the benefits provided by (necessarily limited) competition really outweigh the costs of vendor lock-in. We really ought to think about nationalizing banks in Canada and making them into one large crown corporation like the post office. Since there isn't ever going to be real competition in the Canadian banking industry anyways, why should we suffer with no control over our fate?
This patent shall encompass time, events, processes, and decay. This is a process by which things happen or *in* which they happen, or the marking of their occurrence by sentient beings. Calendars, pendulums, and other derivative event-based record-keeping systems fall under the purview of this application.
There are three (3) sections of the Time device (hereinafter referred to by the abbreviation t).
Section 1: The Past
This is step is a pre-requisite for attaining successful completion of the next two steps. In order to produce The Past, candidate processes must maintain uninterrupted existence for a period t > 0. If there are discontinuities in the existential manifold, the process must be restarted. Our research has shown that there are commercially viable and environmentally sound methods for eliminating such discontinuities.
Section 2: The Present
Once The Past has been successfully rendered, there follows a time interval e < m where m is the smallest measurable unit of t. This time period is what is known as the Present, or abbreviated P.
The Present provides a convenient and lightweight event matrix, and it is causally isolated from both the Past and the Future. Any permeation of the causal membrane by event-particles destroys the integrity of the process.
Section 3: The Future
A brief curing process will generate effluent known as the Future. This segment, segment F of Time t, can be readily identified by its informational opacity. All intervals in the interval set F are generated by the sum of the series P(n) where n is the age of the Universe in nanoseconds. A cursory calculation will show that any given discrete event-particle will have a probability approaching 0 for any segment of F.
For the nth time...M$ are not being punished for *having* a monopoly, they are being punished for *abusing* a
monopoly. It's just like one company owning the rail network, and charging $1000 per trip. And then trying to
damage the road system so cars couldn't drive on them.
Abusing a monopoly hurts consumers, which is why infrastructure elements like power grids, highways, railways, banks, and other institutions that allow trade and commerce to thrive, should *never* be privately owned. There's lots of other places where commerce and competition provide real consumer benefit without putting people (and the economy) at the mercy of stock markets.
Straight forward factual evidence can show whether or not a corporation is abusing its monopoly, but making them stop abusing it is something much more difficult. In a case like Microsoft's, it may never be possible to stop them without causing injustice (by short-circuiting due process) or economic harm (by hurting Microsoft's shareholders).
On my computers, I can run any number of operating systems, so I fail to see how this can be said to be a natural
environment for a monopoly.
Your sample is too small. Your results are skewed in favour of experienced computer users.
According to what you're saying, the planned economy of the Communist countries is the best, most efficient
economic system Well, we all know what happened to them.
I'm not arguing in favour of a centrally planned economy. Just saying that some parts of it are better managed centrally. More efficient, less duplication. Imagine having 70 different companies vying for your sewer business. The cost of switching providers and the inefficiency of having 70 sets of pipes is ludicrous. The same could be said for many other areas of infrastructure, where the cost of finding a substitute works against any price reductions that competition might bring. This is the famous "barriers to entry" argument about competing operating systems. You ought to know that.
You sound like you're one of the cardboard "right wing" hosts of some CNN news program. You're saying "Oooh -- communist bad, capitalist good" without responding to what I said. I could just respond exactly in kind -- "You're saying that Capitalism is good. Everybody knows that's wrong." Nice try though.
Face it, monopolies are more efficient at providing infrastructure like operating systems and telecommunications. Why punish them for it? It's hard enough to make a profit as an infrastructure provider -- look at the airlines, railways and shipping companies. In order to be profitable, they have to be vast conglomerates. Hardly what one would call an entrepreneurial environment.
We should shit or get off the pot here, folks. Either we accept the fact that monopolies are good for consumers and leave them be, or we nationalize them and get it over with. This twiddling around and bullshit is a waste of time -- someone's got to stand up and say the emperor has no clothes on. Anyone who thinks competition is going to make all the boo-boos better is dumber than a sack of wet diapers.
Consensus makes interoperability possible and monopolies are the most economically efficient way to achieve consensus. The only question is who will own the monopoly. Will the monopoly serve the needs of many or the needs of just a few?
The pursuit of Microsoft by the DOJ is as much an attempt to rescue the tattered legend of the American Entrepreneur as it is to enforce the rule of law.
but there's something to be said for using reason and persuasion instead of drowning out
your opponent and denying them freedom of movement and assembly. IMHO, using coercion to silence unpopular
speech is wrong whether it's perpetrated by governments, corporations, or angry mobs of Seattle
Non-Anarchists.
John Stuart Mill said that "Despotism is a legitimate mode of government in dealing with barbarians, provided the end be their improvement." As you say, the same rules hold for government as for the protesters. When governments ignore rational arguments and behave like barbarians, citizens with differing views must resort to despotic measures. Many people felt that the WTO and other meta-governments have descended into barbarism by
Promoting international free trade at the expense of environmental protection
Promoting international free trade at the expense of workers' safety
Failing to answer these charges in open debate
The protests in Seattle were necessary because rational political discourse had failed to bring about any changes in the way the WTO carried on its business. In so far as they ignore reason, so far shall protesters treat them as barbarians.
Hey! You're the guy who buys bullshit wholesale, we can see that. But that doesn't give you the right to dump it
here.
Yes, I admit that I've been sucked into a world where people care about things other than money. It's my peculiar weakness to believe that Good is better than Evil. Honestly, I don't know what came over me. You waved the smelling salts under my nose, and now I see how foolish I was.
You can't talk about Rights in the same breath as you're calling Goodness and Justice bullshit. I don't care how cynical and relativist you are. You wouldn't have any rights at all if someone hadn't shed their blood for you. Were they just pompous and self-important? Are you glib about the people that died for your freedom? What do you value? What is important to you? Don't just say something is bullshit without saying what the Truth is. What's your side of the story, eh? Riding on everyone else's coattails while you snicker at their struggle. How many times did your mommy and daddy bail you out? How many times did you let somebody else do your work for you?
In short, the only South Africans this hurts are the software retailers. When a continent as bad off as Africa can
purchase American goods like Windows 98 for pennies on the dollar, I have a hard time sympathizing with the
wealthy corporations who are trying to get tough on piracy.
Even in North America, the software industry's claims that every pirated copy reduces sales by the MSRP is stretching the truth. In Africa, it's got to be close to an outright lie.
The glamourous Silicon Valley lifestyle is being sustained by the self-satisfied complacency that intellectual property protection affords. They call us pirates for copying their work, but they don't realize how much they depend upon racketeering for their good fortune. We vastly overvalue knowledge workers in the same way we overvalue sports figures. The money that accrues to those undeserving recipients is stripped from sectors of the economy which should be more profitable, such as agriculture.
The economic importance of information-widgets becomes clear when you imagine Disney airlifting 2,000,000 Fantasia video cassettes to Eritrea. No one would care. Why then do we place so much value on these things?
This is not intended to be a rhetorical questions. I really wonder what makes people think that artists and authors and inventors and programmers are so much more valuable to society than farmers or plumbers or auto workers.
Ah, such absurdly eloquent cynicism. Money is nothing at all. Every relationship is about Goodness and Justice. Advertisers have to fool you into believing that a product will make you Good in order to convince you to part with your hard-earned money. People care about being Good but sometimes they are misguided. Sometimes they don't understand what they want.
From another perspective, the value of money is dependent upon political stability and mutual trust amongst the members of a society. It's value is a measure of the faith we have in our collective future. If I select one brand over another, it is because I have faith in consistent quality. I trust that regulatory agencies will make a reasonable effort to ensure that I will not die of food poisoning when I eat a hamburger at McDonald's. The actual cost of the hamburger pales in comparison with the value of the stable political and economic substrate which makes the transaction possible.
Money quickly becomes unimportant if the streets are full of vigilantes killing each other. What could you spend money on? Why would you care about comparison shopping for operating systems? This is the situation African countries are in. There is human and political chaos at every level of society.
Being cynical doesn't help anyone restore the balance between Love, Power, and Justice that keeps families and countries from falling apart. Making blunt (as in not sharp) remarks about people's motives prevents us from seeing that even in chaos, people's sense of Goodness and Justice survives. You're making things worse for them and you're showing how fully you have succumbed to despair.
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Their stock ownership is probably the easiest thing to regulate, so it's not likely that they're benefitting from stock purchases or sales. More likely, they get favours in return or they are guaranteed a job in industry if they go along with the ruse.
Slashdot Mirror
Whatever happens business-wise, I think Sun is making a good choice. Let's hope it's also a business decision.
I think patents have more to do with non-obviousness than with hard work or dollars of investment. The investment is just a side-effect of state-sanctioned monopolies. The effort required in not considered. I could have a flash of intuition in which I come up with a brilliant new patentable device. My research investment was zero (or quite small, at least) and yet my invention still qualifies as patentable. Non-obviousness is becoming more difficult for inexpert (or even well-trained) bureacrats to correctly determine. That's why it seems to me that intellectual property protection is nearing the end of its useful life. It was useful and effective when mail travelled by horse, but today it does more to benefit lawyers than the public.
If there hadn't been a chance for serious financial gain, the sequencing would have taken years longer.
I'm no expert, but wasn't the issue more one of logistics and methodology rather than just brute financing? Celera, if I remember correctly, claimed that they could sequence genes more inexpensively than the NIH. The money was already there. The method that Celera used could have been implemented without the help of venture capital.
Would you have set the whole process back that far just so you didn't have to worry about some licensing fee?
I think the original post was raising ethical concerns rather than financial ones. I imagine that even with gene therapy, one can only charge what the market will bear. So the cost of "renting" genes to patients would have to be within reason. It's not the money that worries people, I think. We all assume that we have to spend money to live. Most people would be more upset that a corporation or a government could own parts of their bodies.
Can you see where that same rejection of capitalism would have utterly crippled the advancements of the computer industry over the past 30 years?
I don't see
- How this person's post is a criticism of capitalism
- How you arrive at the conclusion that an ideological rejection of capitalism could affect the computer industry. Business is business. Capitalism is just an idea
Computer innovation could (and did) take place in communist countries as well as in capitalist ones. People's minds are filled with wonder and imaginative ideas no matter what political philosophy they espouse.Without those computer advancements, we wouldn't have been ready to undertake the sequencing of genomes for decades. Can you see how these advances build upon each other, and if a system like capitalism can help us to build faster, it's probably a good thing?
Advances can only build upon each other if people are reasonably free of constraints preventing them from utilising existing technology. Some may argue (I'm one who will) that patents have as much negative as positive impact in terms of stimulating new development based on existing material.
Secondly, you assume that building more and faster, regardless of the direction, is something desirable. Many people would disagree with you, including me. I'm not against technological progress, but it is irresponsible of us as human beings to offer wildly advantageous conditions to producers (aka patents) at a time when caution is demanded. Sure, if you offer a free gold bar to everyone who does some research lots of people will do research, but is that the wisest way to marshal the resources of a civilized society? Not everyone would agree that it is.
It's in your cells. RTFM!
I won't go under unless I depend upon intellectual property rights in order to make a living. As long as my neighbors don't use the power of the State to stop me from selling my own invention, they can do anything they want with it. My only reason for inventing, in this case (arguably a limited one), was to help myself, my family or my community. You're twisting my hypothetical case so that it includes the effects of intellectual property protection even though, by construction, the scenario has none. If those who "take" my idea don't have a State-enforced monopoly, they don't have an unfair advantage over me, nor do I have an unfair advantage over them.
An economist might argue that intellectual property laws add to the consumer surplus by making more and better choices available in the market. This is partly true. But the notion of a consumer surplus is quite theoretical and inexact. In order to claim that a consumer surplus exists in a given market, on must show that the *value* to the purchaser exceeds the *price* paid to the producer. Whenever producers can raise their prices without driving customers away, the difference between the "dollars" of benefit derived by the buyer and the price paid to the producer shrinks. That means the artificially high prices imposed by intellectual property laws eat up some of the benefits which technology provides.
Furthermore, by granting property rights in information, the State ensures that low-efficiency producers of intellectual capital will have an easier time surviving, while the efficient producers will have a smaller share of the market than they would have otherwise.
Innovation would happen with or without intellectual property racketeering. Inventions would find their way into the market one way or another. Don't you have faith in man's desire to create? Most of the scientists I've met (a skewed sample, to be sure) think of science the way mountain climbers think of mountains. They just *need* to discover stuff. Curiosity is a much better incentive for innovation than property rights.
Property rights seem useful once something's already there, as in the case of a plot of land or a purchased vehicle. Claiming to hold residual property rights in segments of the human genome is a bit like landing on a planet and claiming it for humanity. We know nothing about it, so saying we own it isn't saying very much at all.
I could claim to be the first person to have passed through a certain part of the universe (as a passenger on Earth, I would have been the first Earthling to pass through *some* part of the universe) but I'd be a bit grandiose if I said I had discoverer's rights to anything.
Although this last analogy is "out-there", it demonstrates my point that applying the concept of ownership to objects without well-defined boundaries is confusing and inflammatory, not to mention being a category error.
The economy is fuelled by consumption. Period.
If I accept your claim that taxation is a necessary evil, I might still argue that spending the money wisely must include spending it on activities which I don't consider worthwhile. If, for instance, you pay $2000 per year in property tax, someone has to decide how to spend that money. If you alone could decide what to do with it, services such as sewage, water, roads, police, courts, legislators' salaries could never be dependably included in an annual budget. You might this year decide that you don't want any of your money to go to roads. Everyone else might decide to do the same. If that were the case, the maintenance of public roads would be subject to the whims of individual taxpayers.
This is not an impossible scenario. It may be possible for the government to allow citizens to direct their tax contributions. It would just make for unreliable government. What would happen if there were suddendly no inspectors to inspect meat sold at grocery stores? Store owners could keep meat on the shelves as long as they pleased. Allowing someone's child to die of Hamburger Disease is not conducive to a healthy economy.
Public infrastructure is what makes an economy possible. A healthy economy should be able to pay for the infrastructure which it needs in order to run. Otherwise, the negative side effects will wind make it impossible to conduct business at all. If someone doesn't pay for the road, no one will be able to deliver merchandise effectively. If the police can't effectively deter crime, no one will be able to work or live without fear. Without all the services and structures which we take for granted, the economy would suffer. This is not an argument for Big Government, it's an argument for Right Sized, efficient government. I'm not an opponent of individualism or a supporter of communism, since I can easily see that the government could not exist without the financial and moral support of the governed. That means the freedom for individuals to pursue economic goals is essential to the survival of modern liberal democratic states.
In short, I am saying that the relationship between public and private institutions is one of interdependence, not independence.
Yeah, uh, 'product' wasn't a verb last I heard.
If you want to accept blackmail as a form of public work, then sure, I agree. Me, I'd rather work with someone who wants to help rather than someone who threatens me that they won't.
Are you suggesting that research be moved out of the commercial sector and into the universities, and for the benefits of that research to be shared by all?
Not all research, just the stuff that's open-ended and really hard to make money at. Private industry is "more efficient" because it does all the applied research where there is often a specific market objective being studied. The Human Genome project was like that. Celera was right to say that the private sector could do that more efficiently than a university. It was all a mechanical process. Once the methodology had been put in place the publicly funded part of the human genome project would probably have best been left to someone with a manufacturer's skills, not those of a scientist. Now the ownership of the gene fragments is another story altogether...
That's fine, but if you want to do that and keep the existing rate of tech progress, then where is the money going to come from?
Where does it usually come from? Taxes. There's nothing wrong with taxpayers footing the bill for valuable work that isn't immediately profitable. A lot of pure science falls into this category and that's what technology needs to continue advancing. What would applied science apply if not new scientific discoveries?
I wonder how people can live in a civilized world and think of it as if they live in a vacuum. I'm no fan of porkbarreling or nepotism, but tax dollars *have* to support *some* things that don't benefit you directly. Are you mad that the government builds and maintains parks? You may not go to the park often. There are many parks you will never visit. By your lights, that money will have been wasted. Are you really saying that the government should spend the money on you and you alone?
What you are probably trying to say is that sometimes governments make bad spending decisions. Of course that's true. But to use that as an excuse for greed and selfishness is disrespectful to your fellow citizens.
It doesn't matter what society wants or needs, as much as it matters that each individual gets a fair deal.
I doesn't matter what society needs until it comes to things like the environment and public works. Then people need to act together in order to be effective. Without the collective and coordinated effort of many participants, most of what we value in society would be gone. Such basic social organizing principles as the division of labour require cooperation to achieve mutual benefit. You can't do everything for yourself and still have time left over to post comments to /.!
This may sound like a stupid question, but how do you know we need "said drugs" even before they've been discovered? You want to write a blank cheque for these guys without even considering whether the product in question is needed. What kind of priorities are you setting, or are you setting any at all? It seems you would rather have someone take responsibility for your well-being. This is the classic case of 'orphaned' drugs for which the market isn't large enough to justify the cost of clinical trials. On the one hand, intellectual property apologists want to believe that patents, trademarks and copyright promote public good, but when presented with clear examples which show the money-grubbing side of intellectual property ownership, apologists backpedal and say "Hey, they have a natural right to those inventions. So what if some inventions don't serve any real human need?"
But, as anyone who's taken a decent economics course cna tell you, private research generally yields much better results than public research.
Saying that is probably what got the economics prof her job. I took an economics course and it seems to me that the jury's still out on whether the state protection racket produces better results than universities. Call that one a draw. Most of the time, private industry uses the publicly funded research as a basis for further inquiry. The information flow used to be from universities to private industry, but cutbacks have probably done a lot to reverse the flow. When you say private research is better than university research, you could mean one of two things: On the one hand, you might be saying that private research is better because the profit motive makes it better. I don't agree with that claim, but at least it has some substance. On the other hand, you might be saying that while you don't understand the mechanism of their success, you believe there might be statistical evidence to show that historically, private companies do produce better research more efficiently than Universities. I really doubt whether you could amass statistics to support that claim, but even if statistics showed that business has the edge over publicly funded research, that would still be like comparing apples and oranges. You can't measure research success or progress financially. Long periods may pass in which no worthwhile results are discovered. This is another point on which intellectual property apologists appear to have a double standard. When I point out that Pfizer had revenue of 5.5 billion dollars in Q3, they reply "Oh, but research costs a lot of money and lots of drugs never even make it to market!" Yet when they look at university research (when they aren't too busy plundering it) all they can see is waste and inefficiency. Well no bloody wonder! How can you come in on budget and on schedule when you're exploring the unknown? Doesn't that strike you as an unreasonably high standard? In fact the drug companies have been blathering about how much it costs to do clinical trials etc., for so long that people have forgotten that universities have the same troubles. They just don't spend billions on public relations TV advertising campaigns like their private sector counterparts do.
Yeah, right. Patents exist to line the pockets of lawyers and corporations.
If you couldn't patent something, then you would put hard work into making something, and then everyone in the world could just take your idea as soon as it hit the market and duplicate it and make money off of your hard work.
So what? There's lots of stuff I work hard on that I don't get a guaranteed return on. That's life. Sometimes people take advantage of you. If it really bothers you, then just keep your brilliant invention a secret and no one will steal it.
So, if there were no patents, then everyone would just wait around for everyone else to invent something so they could take the idea and exploit it for their own gain.
Rubbish. People invent what they need *because* they need it. If I've got a good idea, you can be damn sure I'm not going to sit around and wait until someone else comes up with something similar. I have to eat and clothe myself. If my invention makes that easier for me and my family, what do I care if my neighbor uses my idea?
(I learned about patents in my Economics class -- see, education really does work!)
I'm not sure if you're serious or joking or playing dumb. Education only works because someone shares their knowledge. Patents (and copyright and trademarks) just get in the way of sharing.
They don't deserve state-sanctioned monopoly status just because they spent a lot of money. Some people spend a lot of money trying to start businesses that eventually fail, but I don't see anyone rushing to make things easier for them. Corporations have more than enough legal protection. They can declare bankruptcy leaving thousands of workers unpaid while the directors and executives walk away with millions. They can break laws (in some jurisdictions) without culpability for corporate board members. What else do they need to ensure their survival? I thought free-market economics was about the survival of the fittest. If you really look at it, it's just as bad as the ancien regime. Just the powerful doing favours for each other.
Don't families deserve to be protected as much as ideas? The state doesn't guarantee that my children will generate a return, nor does it enforce my residual rights in them after I have finished parenting. Here is my demand: I put lots of hard work and resources into raising my children, therefore the state should ensure that they have guaranteed employability when they graduate from high school. This is an absurd demand, as I'm sure you will admit. And yet aren't intellectual property owners whining for just this kind of guarantee?
Intellectual property protection was never included in the Rights of Man, nor does the Canadian Charter of Rights ensure Intellectual Property rights (The Canadian Charter doesn't even guarantee *property* rights). The US constitution added provisional support for intellectual property protection merely as a means to promote a public good, not as an essential right.
Even if one allows the moral argument that a certain level of intellectual property is required to protect human dignity (in cases of outright plagiarism, or personation perhaps), such a requirement could be met at a threshold far below current conventions. We are experiencing the equivalent of a land-grab. Even leaving moral questions aside, there is probably a practical case to be made that intellectual property rights of all kinds merely stifle creativity. They make us afraid to imitate, and everyone knows that people learn by imitating. We can't explore the landscape for fear of trespassing.
If you look at the broader purpose of intellectual property laws, it becomes quite evident that granting property rights is just one way amongst many to stimulate creative work. It's not the only way and it's not necessarily the best way. Property rights are supposed to benefit commerce and profit-taking. Does the profit motive provide enough bang for the intellectual property dollar? Some types of human activities are more commerce-friendly than others. Sales, manufacturing, wholesaling, shipping, agriculture, mining, forestry and other old economy businesses can be conducted more-or-less profitably without interference from the state. The ownership of ideas is meant to encourage commercial involvement in scientific research and artistic expression. Do the goals of profitability conflict with those of pure or applied research? Can artists create most effectively when they respond to market pressures or is there something else at work? These are the questions which ought to guide intellectual property legislators.
Research is a crapshoot, like you said, most of the drugs never reach clinical trials. So why then should we entrust critical research to companies who have no incentive to pursue the truth, but are only driven by the bottom line? Is this really the best way to promote understanding of the world around us? If we give up on pure research and satisfy ourselves with applied science, how far will knowledge advance? And without the advances in pure science, applied science would be starved for innovation.
Universities were supposed to provide shelter from market influences and mob mentality so that some people could free their minds and study the world for the sake of knowledge in the pursuit of Truth. The soul of democracy has now been dismantled. To fill the void that was left, patents, trademarks, and copyright have been extended and strengthened. Corporations have now been entrusted with the task of putting aside market pressures to deliver research which will benefit humanity.
Is there something wrong with this picture?
Does that mean they have to cut the head off another body in order to sew mine on? I don't think that's very nice. Maybe a robotic body would be just as good.
For myself, the other requirement is that the bank be Canadian
Chase doesn't have Canadian branches, as far as I know.
Canada's banks have a problem which inhibits their responsiveness to retail customers. They have been ramping up their foreign operations so that they can "compete globally". The domestic market is very small by comparison. What this means to Canadian banking customers is that the banks have less and less incentive to cater to the domestic customer. They basically don't care about Canadians very much. Also, because banks are so heavily regulated in Canada, the major banks face very limited competition. They can be as rude and ignorant as they want (and they often are) without fear of customers deserting them en masse.
Banks also have worked long and hard to develop features that make switching providers very inconvenient. I am right now trying to switch from Bank of Montreal to a Credit Union, but since my pay is automatically deposited, loan payments and other monthly expenditures are automatically withdrawn from my account, etc. I'm going to have a very hard time moving from one to the other.
In circumstances where private interests (the interests of bank owners) conflict with public interests (a stable banking system is essential to commerce) and free-market substitution of services is not practical, people should consider whether the benefits provided by (necessarily limited) competition really outweigh the costs of vendor lock-in. We really ought to think about nationalizing banks in Canada and making them into one large crown corporation like the post office. Since there isn't ever going to be real competition in the Canadian banking industry anyways, why should we suffer with no control over our fate?
There are three (3) sections of the Time device (hereinafter referred to by the abbreviation t).
Section 1: The Past
This is step is a pre-requisite for attaining successful completion of the next two steps. In order to produce The Past, candidate processes must maintain uninterrupted existence for a period t > 0. If there are discontinuities in the existential manifold, the process must be restarted. Our research has shown that there are commercially viable and environmentally sound methods for eliminating such discontinuities.
Section 2: The Present
Once The Past has been successfully rendered, there follows a time interval e < m where m is the smallest measurable unit of t. This time period is what is known as the Present, or abbreviated P. The Present provides a convenient and lightweight event matrix, and it is causally isolated from both the Past and the Future. Any permeation of the causal membrane by event-particles destroys the integrity of the process.
Section 3: The Future
A brief curing process will generate effluent known as the Future. This segment, segment F of Time t, can be readily identified by its informational opacity. All intervals in the interval set F are generated by the sum of the series P(n) where n is the age of the Universe in nanoseconds. A cursory calculation will show that any given discrete event-particle will have a probability approaching 0 for any segment of F.
Abusing a monopoly hurts consumers, which is why infrastructure elements like power grids, highways, railways, banks, and other institutions that allow trade and commerce to thrive, should *never* be privately owned. There's lots of other places where commerce and competition provide real consumer benefit without putting people (and the economy) at the mercy of stock markets.
Straight forward factual evidence can show whether or not a corporation is abusing its monopoly, but making them stop abusing it is something much more difficult. In a case like Microsoft's, it may never be possible to stop them without causing injustice (by short-circuiting due process) or economic harm (by hurting Microsoft's shareholders).
On my computers, I can run any number of operating systems, so I fail to see how this can be said to be a natural environment for a monopoly.
Your sample is too small. Your results are skewed in favour of experienced computer users.
I'm not arguing in favour of a centrally planned economy. Just saying that some parts of it are better managed centrally. More efficient, less duplication. Imagine having 70 different companies vying for your sewer business. The cost of switching providers and the inefficiency of having 70 sets of pipes is ludicrous. The same could be said for many other areas of infrastructure, where the cost of finding a substitute works against any price reductions that competition might bring. This is the famous "barriers to entry" argument about competing operating systems. You ought to know that.
You sound like you're one of the cardboard "right wing" hosts of some CNN news program. You're saying "Oooh -- communist bad, capitalist good" without responding to what I said. I could just respond exactly in kind -- "You're saying that Capitalism is good. Everybody knows that's wrong." Nice try though.
We should shit or get off the pot here, folks. Either we accept the fact that monopolies are good for consumers and leave them be, or we nationalize them and get it over with. This twiddling around and bullshit is a waste of time -- someone's got to stand up and say the emperor has no clothes on. Anyone who thinks competition is going to make all the boo-boos better is dumber than a sack of wet diapers.
Consensus makes interoperability possible and monopolies are the most economically efficient way to achieve consensus. The only question is who will own the monopoly. Will the monopoly serve the needs of many or the needs of just a few?
The pursuit of Microsoft by the DOJ is as much an attempt to rescue the tattered legend of the American Entrepreneur as it is to enforce the rule of law.
John Stuart Mill said that "Despotism is a legitimate mode of government in dealing with barbarians, provided the end be their improvement." As you say, the same rules hold for government as for the protesters. When governments ignore rational arguments and behave like barbarians, citizens with differing views must resort to despotic measures. Many people felt that the WTO and other meta-governments have descended into barbarism by
The protests in Seattle were necessary because rational political discourse had failed to bring about any changes in the way the WTO carried on its business. In so far as they ignore reason, so far shall protesters treat them as barbarians.
Yes, I admit that I've been sucked into a world where people care about things other than money. It's my peculiar weakness to believe that Good is better than Evil. Honestly, I don't know what came over me. You waved the smelling salts under my nose, and now I see how foolish I was.
You can't talk about Rights in the same breath as you're calling Goodness and Justice bullshit. I don't care how cynical and relativist you are. You wouldn't have any rights at all if someone hadn't shed their blood for you. Were they just pompous and self-important? Are you glib about the people that died for your freedom? What do you value? What is important to you? Don't just say something is bullshit without saying what the Truth is. What's your side of the story, eh? Riding on everyone else's coattails while you snicker at their struggle. How many times did your mommy and daddy bail you out? How many times did you let somebody else do your work for you?
I think it's past your bedtime.
Even in North America, the software industry's claims that every pirated copy reduces sales by the MSRP is stretching the truth. In Africa, it's got to be close to an outright lie.
The glamourous Silicon Valley lifestyle is being sustained by the self-satisfied complacency that intellectual property protection affords. They call us pirates for copying their work, but they don't realize how much they depend upon racketeering for their good fortune. We vastly overvalue knowledge workers in the same way we overvalue sports figures. The money that accrues to those undeserving recipients is stripped from sectors of the economy which should be more profitable, such as agriculture.
The economic importance of information-widgets becomes clear when you imagine Disney airlifting 2,000,000 Fantasia video cassettes to Eritrea. No one would care. Why then do we place so much value on these things?
This is not intended to be a rhetorical questions. I really wonder what makes people think that artists and authors and inventors and programmers are so much more valuable to society than farmers or plumbers or auto workers.
From another perspective, the value of money is dependent upon political stability and mutual trust amongst the members of a society. It's value is a measure of the faith we have in our collective future. If I select one brand over another, it is because I have faith in consistent quality. I trust that regulatory agencies will make a reasonable effort to ensure that I will not die of food poisoning when I eat a hamburger at McDonald's. The actual cost of the hamburger pales in comparison with the value of the stable political and economic substrate which makes the transaction possible.
Money quickly becomes unimportant if the streets are full of vigilantes killing each other. What could you spend money on? Why would you care about comparison shopping for operating systems? This is the situation African countries are in. There is human and political chaos at every level of society.
Being cynical doesn't help anyone restore the balance between Love, Power, and Justice that keeps families and countries from falling apart. Making blunt (as in not sharp) remarks about people's motives prevents us from seeing that even in chaos, people's sense of Goodness and Justice survives. You're making things worse for them and you're showing how fully you have succumbed to despair.
with apologies to Paul Tillich
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
September 21, 2000
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Media concentration has gone far enough. The sham of government regulation is over. MediaBusters announces the Global Media Consumer's Union -- offering bulk copying and redistribution of copyrighted content available at a fraction of the price of the original. All proceeds support local community development, anti-intellectual property lobbying, and legal defense initiatives. Sign up now at http://www.mediaconsumer.com.
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Their stock ownership is probably the easiest thing to regulate, so it's not likely that they're benefitting from stock purchases or sales. More likely, they get favours in return or they are guaranteed a job in industry if they go along with the ruse.