It's easy to be cynical and think that the RIAA's offer was just a trap, but what if it were genuine?
If it was genuine, then it must have been unbelievably badly thought-through.
A reasonably smart lawyer, instructed by a client who genuinely wants to make a straightforward deal, should not have difficulty finding a way to draft a fairly simple document with enforceable and useful promises by the alleged copier for not copying, and for amnesty by the RIAA coupled with assurance that the RIAA is acting as agent for the relevant copyright owners. There is certainly no need to play around with the mischief of inducing incriminating admissions.
Well, was it a DDoS attack? I remember seeing some posts a little while back, from folks who said they had been surprised to find the SCO web-site apparently offline. I don't fully understand about network traffic and routing technicalities, but the posters seemed to be writing that some other web-sites (seemingly related to SCO's by using parts of the same traffic channels) were still accessible, and that this indicated that SCO was not being overloaded. They said SCO had apparently taken its site offline. Also, elsewhere there was a quote from SCO apparently referring to an updating process. So is there any truth to SCO's assertion that their site was DDos'd?
A demand to sign a notarized admission of guilt is just _not_ an amnesty (literally -- a forgetting). Is there no limit to the way in which these people will twist words so that they are not saying what they appear to be saying?
I'm distressed by this court's decision. For example, if I were to post an entire album by $BAND along with a critique, everyone would agree that this was copyright infringement.
It's a good decision. The point raised by your hypothetical situation is entirely different than the one that was decided just now. IMO it's a very good thing that at least in the Netherlands, the courts seem now to limit the ability of copyright holders to use legal procedures to hook in people who at the very least are not primary copyright-infringers. The decision limits the scope for IP holders to abuse their IP rights by treating them as tools to intimidate people from doing lawful things.
What seems a great pity is that some of the results of reported litigation have seemed linked to whether the defendant's activities are intrinsically sympathetic, not so much whether they breach the core purpose of the IP laws. The result is for example that litigation prospects for filesharing/ searching software can apparently be damaged by linking this activity -- fairly or unfairly -- with activities that Judge Joe Public finds generally unsympathetic.
In this kind of environment, these Scientology cases actually look like good news for parties representing freedom. The Scientology parties are such unattractive litigants, that their attempts to use IP rights as pretexts to bolster their unsavoury activities are likely to produce decisions in favour of freedom that limit the abuse of IP rights.
If Europe really wants to become more independent from US influence, avoiding a US-style patent regime would be a wise choice.
Unfortunately, Europe is entirely capable of creating its own gaffes, as well as grafting them on top of US-originating ideas. Currently, in the EU/EPO system, it seems that in practice there is an unwillingness to come out and explain clearly where the boundary lies between 'technical' (patentable) and non-technical (literary? aesthetic?) (non-patentable). It will leave the door open to future weird decisions in the software field.
I have actually seen peoples machines where the automatic updates have installed, and *every* time they boot it notifies them: "You have new updates to install" and they completely ignore it. Every boot.
Sigh. Too bad they don't have a patch for human stupidity.
It's not always stupidity, it's more like crying 'wolf', that's why folks ignore it. Well, there are some reasons not to update with everything that MS calls a critical update. The thing is, 'MS update' seems to lump in the real critical security updates with plenty other things not so desirable. For example, a new version of MPlayer with extra digital restrictions, or SP3 for W2K that at one time looked as if it might be classed as spyware (SP4 seems to have ironed that one out). AFAIK you can't set MS windows update to restrict its notices to real security updates and nothing else.
A legal test of the GPL is a good thing no matter how it turns out.
This interesting thought is being currently put to the test in another and less formal way, in Germany. Legal expert Prof Spindler (link to Infoworld report) recently provided a legal opinion (in German - very long) saying that GPL is invalid in Germany (mainly it seems because of excessive disclaimers of liability).
Spindler provided this opinion for VSI, a lobby group for closed source. It might conceivably be suspected that the legal objections could have been inadvertently exaggerated, or simple possible fixes overlooked. If the objections are confirmed as legally solid by independent opinion, maybe their effect could be taken away by relatively brief or simple amendment to GPL, e.g. making a specific saving for overriding statute/case law if a lack of saving for that law would otherwise invalidate the applicability of the GPL. (But I don't know enough about German law to make any more specific suggestions).
This kind of thing may be a test of how the GPL can adapt in practice, given the large bodies of code that have been GPL'd under the existing version.
Awesome. Maybe after the trial Red Hat and SCO can rub both of their one-dollar bills together and split on a Big Mac.
Agreed. And it may be worse than that too. It's not a good idea to bring a lawsuit on a point of principle, without really needing to. Among other reasons, if some procedural glitch happens (or you run out of cash) and the suit aborts, then it can look as if you lost the point of principle -- without really needing to. Also, it's the plaintiff that has to prove his case -- which is the reason for the old adage that the position of defendant is stronger.
Also, in the British Museum version you can enlarge the pages enough so you can actually read them.
That's an important point if it is actually intended to make the thing available to view online. I had a look at the UT Gutenberg bible online version. I couldn't see much of the detail (for example on the bookplate on the inside front cover) -- not enough to decipher it on my 1024x768 17" screen anyway.
Not necessarily true. Windows does have to be in the first partition of the first hard drive, or else it will bitch, but Grub can map out the partitions and drives in such a way that Windows "thinks" it's the first partition of the first hard drive.
I agree that laptop setup can be a pig and the warnings about what happens when you use the 'restore' disks are sometimes not clear enough.
Grub is great IMO, also PQ Partitionmagic/ DriveImage. Grub handles more bios peculiarities (as I find) than PQ or lilo, and the grub boot configuration can be changed on the fly without need to reinstall grub itself (either one-time/each-time from the boot screen, or permanently by changing a config text). Grub has a well-written manual too. I've been able to boot W2k from either hda1 (hd0,0) or hdb1 (hd1,0) with Grub (W2K seems to want to be on 1st partition on its hdisk: W9x less fussy, can be on any primary partition).
A difficulty with threads like this one is that the discussion is almost bound to be general, but tiny little nitpicky specific things cure or ruin a setup. Good luck!
It's worth pointing out that no-one (except a court) is really in a position to 'decree' what the LGPL clause 6 means if it really is a close call on more than one interpretation. If it turns out to be ambiguous or contentious, the best move could be to debate a clarification and campaign for the adoption of that instead.
Well first of all I'd admit that if there's no 'signature' of similarity, between the characteristics of a violent game and some later violent event, then of course we are not talking about evidence of copying there.
I'd also agree that it's irrelevant when any proportion of people imprisoned for crime tell that they do some activity that is also done by a lot of law-abiding people.
Otoh, I see no need for the proof you demand of some percentage of the population (50%?!) converted to violence from any cause before there is reason to believe that the cause has operated and can operate again. I think you are demanding exactly an unusual level of evidence. I'd say it is some evidence of copying when even a single person uses characteristic features like some model of violence.
There were examples of copycat violence using the odd characteristics of the film 'Clockwork Orange'. More recently, a popular TV soap had a dramatic episode of attempted suicide closely followed by a surge of real attempted suicides with similar features that made local hospital staff complain to the soap producers for the strain they had put on already-heavy-loaded hospital services. (IMO they were not speculating wildly without evidence about an unproven cause, they were using their common sense.)
When book, film, TV soap, and in other examples, real violence reported on news, have all made models for temporally-linked copied violence, it sounds improbable and in need of evidence to claim that video/computer games are somehow different and will be exempt.
But in a given case evidence may or may not be there. If the 'Warriors of Freedom' show an independent source for their name that's believable, and there's no evidence they knew of the game of the same name, then I'd say those facts did not amount to evidence of copying from the game in that case. But if they did see the game, the similarity of names would begin to look to me like evidence supporting with at any rate some probability that they were motivated to copy and did copy in that case. How is that unreasonable?
You've made a good argument how violence in movies or video games could create more violent people. The thing you haven't shown at all is that this theory is correct. Persuasive arguments are very easy to make.......Until one of us shows actual evidence that the theory is correct it's all just a pissing contest.....
It's surprising how often sceptics about the link between portrayals of violence and the actuality of copycat violence often shelter behind demands for unusual levels of evidence. In ordinary life, people tend to judge that when there is a striking similarity between the individual characteristics of what first of all one person does in public or shows to the public, and then what other people do shortly afterwards, it _is_ evidence of copying -- absent something that would reasonably account for the similarity even if the activities were independently conceived. What else is fashion?
Copycat violence has been well known at least for a couple of hundred years -- an early example followed Goethe's book 'Sufferings of Werther' that was followed for a time by a wave of similar-pattern romantic pistol suicides among disappointed young men. There are many much more recent examples where striking similarity between the characteristics of the prototype or image, and then of the violence that followed after it, make the inference of copying overwhelmingly probable.
The way that many people nevertheless resist accepting that this kind of copying is a fact indicates that there is something specifically causing that resistance -- and in some cases I suspect the cause of that resistance is probably $$$$.
I wouldn't abolish them altogether, but they should be restricted to physical devices that must be built from components. Not chemicals, not software, and most certainly not business methods!!
The view expressed in the parent post (partly) tallies with older understandings of what the patent (and copyright) clause in the US Constitution meant, where it talks about promoting the progress of useful arts. 'Useful arts' were understood to mean anything about how to make useful things. Processes, as a patentable category, were then understood to mean processes for making useful things or doing something to them for practical purposes. The parent poster goes further than many, in wanting to exclude chemicals too, after all they are manufactured products of a different kind, and making them is clearly one of the useful arts, but business methods have hardly been considered inventions till now.
The Federal appeal courts come very close to taking over lawmaking roles that belong to legislators, when they interpret words in the patent act (such as 'process') in isolation from their context and history. They (in this example) inflate the word to cover some unheard-of category, never previously considered to amount to an invention.
Interestingly, one of the early extensions of patent law going specifically beyond 'useful arts' or 'manufactures' occurred in the former Soviet Union, where the law allowed patents for [business] 'rationalization proposals'. I wonder (perhaps too flippantly, considering the seriously repressive results of this sort of legal development) if the US judges realize that they are following a communist example?:)
About a hundred years ago, an official committee of enquiry into patent law wrote that "the grant of invalid patents is a serious evil insomuch as it tends to the restraint of trade". They meant that honest business people were being harassed and intimidated by the owners of patents that never should have been issued because they were not substantially new. In earlier times, it used to be decided that it was not substantially new just to do something that had already been done, but now to do it in any mechanical way -- the broad idea of mechanising was common currency. IMO it would also be better to consider the broad idea of adapting some existing thing for software, or for the internet, as common currency. Current law surely is not going far enough to protect the business community in the right to do things that should remain open for public use.
... ATI was a good manufacturer that supported its customers. Once way back in the 80s I asked them about bios updates for what was then their last-but-one video card (EGAwonder?) stuck in my IBM-PC/XT (it's still in there and works!). They sent me a new BIOS chip gratis, only asked for the old one to be mailed back to them, which I did. That impressed me with their level of support. And I haven't had trouble with my current ATI cards (ok I'm still well behind the latest, still using Mach64 in a couple of PII machines). But the unhelp for Linux makes it look as if the ATI ethos has changed at core, or has it? Maybe someone could work out with them a way to overcome whatever the obstacles are?
if these two Germans are not under the NDA they should just post the code. If it was lifted from BSD, the original author should be able to identify their own work.
He wrote that they were shown 46 pages under legal supervision -- but didn't mention that they were allowed to take them away, and I doubt they were. I assume he does not have a copy of the code to post.
Maybe if there is some way to collect an informal archive about unjustified attempts to claim enforcement of copyrights [...]
Would that be the Chilling Effects Clearinghouse?
Well I'm not sure that it is there. What I can't find in 'Chilling Effects' is any info about whether and how the recipients of threats of legal action, or cease-and-desist letters, etc, managed to repulse the threats that they received.
That's what I was suggesting would be useful.
Re:Here's your answer ...
on
Copyright Defeats?
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Consumer successes against overblown claims may easily go unreported.
This may be a legal situation where an imbalance of reportage is regrettably built in.
If a copyright owner takes action and sees it through, there is an actual legal result that can easily get reported. But if a consumer resists an unjustified threat then the case may be dropped before anything appreciable has happened in legal terms and the position can easily go without report.
Maybe if there is some way to collect an informal archive about unjustified attempts to claim enforcement of copyrights, the results could be of use to consumer and public-interest organisations. It might also help when there are attempts to design sensible reform proposals to limit the imbalances in this area of law.
I'm not sure I want to stress-test my hd! (Confession-time -- I only back up data from hd's at long intervals.)
But what makes a fragile hd fail? Is it ordinary wear and tear? I never had a hd go bad on me through ordinary wear and tear. The only one that went bad at all had been plugged in and out of several boxes often. The (flimsy?) joint between the disk's pcb and IDE connector developed conductor cracks.
Does the OS that runs off a hd have any influence on wear-rate and failure?
My impression is it could do. DOS & DOS applications used to sound quiet/moderate in hd usage. Win 9x sounded busier/noisier. I just started using Linux Debian -- and it sounds a lot quieter than W9x. But I also gave a try to Win2k, and it was very noisy. A Win2k just up fresh from install procedure without incident, repeatedly spent a while thrashing its disk every time it booted up, and gave an impression it was trying to grind the platter to powder. Various kinds of cleanup didn't help. I'd be worried about keeping something like that on my new 40GB hd.
I mean... SCO claimed code theft and they will have to prove it... DUH!
It's more than that. In Germany, intimidating your competitors with unfounded threats to harm their business can amount to unfair competition and again in Germany there's a law against that. The threatener can himself become liable. IMO it's the kind of law we could use in other countries too....
Nobody is throwing money at the US patent office. The US government has even been using it as a revenue source for years now, diverting some of the fee income from patent applicants to other government projects. So the patent office is not even allowed to keep and spend on its own operations all the patent fees it receives. The rule has been cuts in costly operations, and a number of commentators blame the current brief and cursory examination of patent applications partly on this factor.
Szilard, BTW, tried to keep the concept of a chain reaction secret by assigning the patent to the British Admiralty.
It would have been by official order, not necessarily by Szilard's own decision. At that time, there was legal process for patent applications that had security implications. It involved compulsory assignment to the Admiralty or War Office followed by continuing secrecy of the patent. Later on, that legal process was replaced by a different system of secrecy orders but no compulsory assignment. Secrecy can still be imposed for patent applications on inventions with defense sensitivity.
Even if they can't verify all of the information that they put in, what they could do is record whether/how a data item has any verification status (or even possibly, falsification status).
It surprises me how often databases of information that it is vital to check for accuracy/truth/reliability just don't have any content that indicates how far, if at all, any of the main data content has actually been checked (and by whom and against what comparator). Ideally there should be an audit trail for where the data came from and who entered/checked it. Better than nothing would be some kind of indicator that this data item is either unchecked (by anybody other than the person who added it), or else has been checked as either ok, or doubtful, or not ok (and when, and who checked it).
The situation in the Middle-East/Palestine/Israel is increadably complicated... and it is really difficult to determine who is "in the right" (both sides are being assholes).
Hear, hear.
how to read/understand math ...
on
Imagining Numbers
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Given that much of the business of creative mathematicians amounts to inventing new patterns of provable relations between objects and properties, probably there are more ways to understand math than there are branches of math --
Spatial models just happen to appeal to me -- and the posts here indicate that is probably pretty common. Many of us just live with the convenience of that (and with its limitations, because many math concepts are hard to geometrize). But it's not the only way, and a few folks seem to find other and non-spatial thought patterns more natural.
In the end, the advice to look over the whole of some new math thing before diving into the detail sounds good, and probably that is because it actively encourages trying to pick out the kinds of relationships and features that the individual reader finds intuitive or meaningful. Those things, whatever they are for the individual reader, will not only stick best in the mind, but also they may in turn provoke further thought and maybe new invention.
Slashdot Mirror
It's easy to be cynical and think that the RIAA's offer was just a trap, but what if it were genuine?
If it was genuine, then it must have been unbelievably badly thought-through.
A reasonably smart lawyer, instructed by a client who genuinely wants to make a straightforward deal, should not have difficulty finding a way to draft a fairly simple document with enforceable and useful promises by the alleged copier for not copying, and for amnesty by the RIAA coupled with assurance that the RIAA is acting as agent for the relevant copyright owners. There is certainly no need to play around with the mischief of inducing incriminating admissions.
"No one can tolerate DDoS attacks"
Well, was it a DDoS attack? I remember seeing some posts a little while back, from folks who said they had been surprised to find the SCO web-site apparently offline. I don't fully understand about network traffic and routing technicalities, but the posters seemed to be writing that some other web-sites (seemingly related to SCO's by using parts of the same traffic channels) were still accessible, and that this indicated that SCO was not being overloaded. They said SCO had apparently taken its site offline. Also, elsewhere there was a quote from SCO apparently referring to an updating process. So is there any truth to SCO's assertion that their site was DDos'd?
A demand to sign a notarized admission of guilt is just _not_ an amnesty (literally -- a forgetting). Is there no limit to the way in which these people will twist words so that they are not saying what they appear to be saying?
I'm distressed by this court's decision. For example, if I were to post an entire album by $BAND along with a critique, everyone would agree that this was copyright infringement.
It's a good decision. The point raised by your hypothetical situation is entirely different than the one that was decided just now. IMO it's a very good thing that at least in the Netherlands, the courts seem now to limit the ability of copyright holders to use legal procedures to hook in people who at the very least are not primary copyright-infringers. The decision limits the scope for IP holders to abuse their IP rights by treating them as tools to intimidate people from doing lawful things.
What seems a great pity is that some of the results of reported litigation have seemed linked to whether the defendant's activities are intrinsically sympathetic, not so much whether they breach the core purpose of the IP laws. The result is for example that litigation prospects for filesharing/ searching software can apparently be damaged by linking this activity -- fairly or unfairly -- with activities that Judge Joe Public finds generally unsympathetic.
In this kind of environment, these Scientology cases actually look like good news for parties representing freedom. The Scientology parties are such unattractive litigants, that their attempts to use IP rights as pretexts to bolster their unsavoury activities are likely to produce decisions in favour of freedom that limit the abuse of IP rights.
If Europe really wants to become more independent from US influence, avoiding a US-style patent regime would be a wise choice.
Unfortunately, Europe is entirely capable of creating its own gaffes, as well as grafting them on top of US-originating ideas. Currently, in the EU/EPO system, it seems that in practice there is an unwillingness to come out and explain clearly where the boundary lies between 'technical' (patentable) and non-technical (literary? aesthetic?) (non-patentable). It will leave the door open to future weird decisions in the software field.
I have actually seen peoples machines where the automatic updates have installed, and *every* time they boot it notifies them: "You have new updates to install" and they completely ignore it. Every boot.
Sigh. Too bad they don't have a patch for human stupidity.
It's not always stupidity, it's more like crying 'wolf', that's why folks ignore it. Well, there are some reasons not to update with everything that MS calls a critical update. The thing is, 'MS update' seems to lump in the real critical security updates with plenty other things not so desirable. For example, a new version of MPlayer with extra digital restrictions, or SP3 for W2K that at one time looked as if it might be classed as spyware (SP4 seems to have ironed that one out). AFAIK you can't set MS windows update to restrict its notices to real security updates and nothing else.
A legal test of the GPL is a good thing no matter how it turns out.
This interesting thought is being currently put to the test in another and less formal way, in Germany. Legal expert Prof Spindler (link to Infoworld report) recently provided a legal opinion (in German - very long) saying that GPL is invalid in Germany (mainly it seems because of excessive disclaimers of liability).
Spindler provided this opinion for VSI, a lobby group for closed source. It might conceivably be suspected that the legal objections could have been inadvertently exaggerated, or simple possible fixes overlooked. If the objections are confirmed as legally solid by independent opinion, maybe their effect could be taken away by relatively brief or simple amendment to GPL, e.g. making a specific saving for overriding statute/case law if a lack of saving for that law would otherwise invalidate the applicability of the GPL. (But I don't know enough about German law to make any more specific suggestions).
This kind of thing may be a test of how the GPL can adapt in practice, given the large bodies of code that have been GPL'd under the existing version.
Awesome. Maybe after the trial Red Hat and SCO can rub both of their one-dollar bills together and split on a Big Mac.
Agreed. And it may be worse than that too. It's not a good idea to bring a lawsuit on a point of principle, without really needing to. Among other reasons, if some procedural glitch happens (or you run out of cash) and the suit aborts, then it can look as if you lost the point of principle -- without really needing to. Also, it's the plaintiff that has to prove his case -- which is the reason for the old adage that the position of defendant is stronger.
Also, in the British Museum version you can enlarge the pages enough so you can actually read them.
That's an important point if it is actually intended to make the thing available to view online. I had a look at the UT Gutenberg bible online version. I couldn't see much of the detail (for example on the bookplate on the inside front cover) -- not enough to decipher it on my 1024x768 17" screen anyway.
Not necessarily true. Windows does have to be in the first partition of the first hard drive, or else it will bitch, but Grub can map out the partitions and drives in such a way that Windows "thinks" it's the first partition of the first hard drive.
I agree that laptop setup can be a pig and the warnings about what happens when you use the 'restore' disks are sometimes not clear enough.
Grub is great IMO, also PQ Partitionmagic/ DriveImage. Grub handles more bios peculiarities (as I find) than PQ or lilo, and the grub boot configuration can be changed on the fly without need to reinstall grub itself (either one-time/each-time from the boot screen, or permanently by changing a config text). Grub has a well-written manual too. I've been able to boot W2k from either hda1 (hd0,0) or hdb1 (hd1,0) with Grub (W2K seems to want to be on 1st partition on its hdisk: W9x less fussy, can be on any primary partition).
A difficulty with threads like this one is that the discussion is almost bound to be general, but tiny little nitpicky specific things cure or ruin a setup.
Good luck!
It's worth pointing out that no-one (except a court) is really in a position to 'decree' what the LGPL clause 6 means if it really is a close call on more than one interpretation. If it turns out to be ambiguous or contentious, the best move could be to debate a clarification and campaign for the adoption of that instead.
Well first of all I'd admit that if there's no 'signature' of similarity, between the characteristics of a violent game and some later violent event, then of course we are not talking about evidence of copying there.
I'd also agree that it's irrelevant when any proportion of people imprisoned for crime tell that they do some activity that is also done by a lot of law-abiding people.
Otoh, I see no need for the proof you demand of some percentage of the population (50%?!) converted to violence from any cause before there is reason to believe that the cause has operated and can operate again. I think you are demanding exactly an unusual level of evidence. I'd say it is some evidence of copying when even a single person uses characteristic features like some model of violence.
There were examples of copycat violence using the odd characteristics of the film 'Clockwork Orange'. More recently, a popular TV soap had a dramatic episode of attempted suicide closely followed by a surge of real attempted suicides with similar features that made local hospital staff complain to the soap producers for the strain they had put on already-heavy-loaded hospital services. (IMO they were not speculating wildly without evidence about an unproven cause, they were using their common sense.)
When book, film, TV soap, and in other examples, real violence reported on news, have all made models for temporally-linked copied violence, it sounds improbable and in need of evidence to claim that video/computer games are somehow different and will be exempt.
But in a given case evidence may or may not be there. If the 'Warriors of Freedom' show an independent source for their name that's believable, and there's no evidence they knew of the game of the same name, then I'd say those facts did not amount to evidence of copying from the game in that case. But if they did see the game, the similarity of names would begin to look to me like evidence supporting with at any rate some probability that they were motivated to copy and did copy in that case. How is that unreasonable?
You've made a good argument how violence in movies or video games could create more violent people. The thing you haven't shown at all is that this theory is correct. Persuasive arguments are very easy to make. ......Until one of us shows actual evidence that the theory is correct it's all just a pissing contest .....
It's surprising how often sceptics about the link between portrayals of violence and the actuality of copycat violence often shelter behind demands for unusual levels of evidence. In ordinary life, people tend to judge that when there is a striking similarity between the individual characteristics of what first of all one person does in public or shows to the public, and then what other people do shortly afterwards, it _is_ evidence of copying -- absent something that would reasonably account for the similarity even if the activities were independently conceived. What else is fashion?
Copycat violence has been well known at least for a couple of hundred years -- an early example followed Goethe's book 'Sufferings of Werther' that was followed for a time by a wave of similar-pattern romantic pistol suicides among disappointed young men. There are many much more recent examples where striking similarity between the characteristics of the prototype or image, and then of the violence that followed after it, make the inference of copying overwhelmingly probable.
The way that many people nevertheless resist accepting that this kind of copying is a fact indicates that there is something specifically causing that resistance -- and in some cases I suspect the cause of that resistance is probably $$$$.
I wouldn't abolish them altogether, but they should be restricted to physical devices that must be built from components. Not chemicals, not software, and most certainly not business methods!!
:)
The view expressed in the parent post (partly) tallies with older understandings of what the patent (and copyright) clause in the US Constitution meant, where it talks about promoting the progress of useful arts. 'Useful arts' were understood to mean anything about how to make useful things. Processes, as a patentable category, were then understood to mean processes for making useful things or doing something to them for practical purposes. The parent poster goes further than many, in wanting to exclude chemicals too, after all they are manufactured products of a different kind, and making them is clearly one of the useful arts, but business methods have hardly been considered inventions till now.
The Federal appeal courts come very close to taking over lawmaking roles that belong to legislators, when they interpret words in the patent act (such as 'process') in isolation from their context and history. They (in this example) inflate the word to cover some unheard-of category, never previously considered to amount to an invention.
Interestingly, one of the early extensions of patent law going specifically beyond 'useful arts' or 'manufactures' occurred in the former Soviet Union, where the law allowed patents for [business] 'rationalization proposals'. I wonder (perhaps too flippantly, considering the seriously repressive results of this sort of legal development) if the US judges realize that they are following a communist example?
About a hundred years ago, an official committee of enquiry into patent law wrote that "the grant of invalid patents is a serious evil insomuch as it tends to the restraint of trade". They meant that honest business people were being harassed and intimidated by the owners of patents that never should have been issued because they were not substantially new. In earlier times, it used to be decided that it was not substantially new just to do something that had already been done, but now to do it in any mechanical way -- the broad idea of mechanising was common currency. IMO it would also be better to consider the broad idea of adapting some existing thing for software, or for the internet, as common currency. Current law surely is not going far enough to protect the business community in the right to do things that should remain open for public use.
... ATI was a good manufacturer that supported its customers. Once way back in the 80s I asked them about bios updates for what was then their last-but-one video card (EGAwonder?) stuck in my IBM-PC/XT (it's still in there and works!). They sent me a new BIOS chip gratis, only asked for the old one to be mailed back to them, which I did. That impressed me with their level of support. And I haven't had trouble with my current ATI cards (ok I'm still well behind the latest, still using Mach64 in a couple of PII machines). But the unhelp for Linux makes it look as if the ATI ethos has changed at core, or has it? Maybe someone could work out with them a way to overcome whatever the obstacles are?
if these two Germans are not under the NDA they should just post the code. If it was lifted from BSD, the original author should be able to identify their own work.
He wrote that they were shown 46 pages under legal supervision -- but didn't mention that they were allowed to take them away, and I doubt they were. I assume he does not have a copy of the code to post.
Maybe if there is some way to collect an informal archive about unjustified attempts to claim enforcement of copyrights [...]
Would that be the Chilling Effects Clearinghouse?
Well I'm not sure that it is there. What I can't find in 'Chilling Effects' is any info about whether and how the recipients of threats of legal action, or cease-and-desist letters, etc, managed to repulse the threats that they received.
That's what I was suggesting would be useful.
Consumer successes against overblown claims may easily go unreported.
This may be a legal situation where an imbalance of reportage is regrettably built in.
If a copyright owner takes action and sees it through, there is an actual legal result that can easily get reported. But if a consumer resists an unjustified threat then the case may be dropped before anything appreciable has happened in legal terms and the position can easily go without report.
Maybe if there is some way to collect an informal archive about unjustified attempts to claim enforcement of copyrights, the results could be of use to consumer and public-interest organisations. It might also help when there are attempts to design sensible reform proposals to limit the imbalances in this area of law.
I'm looking for some stress test ...[snip]
I'm not sure I want to stress-test my hd!
(Confession-time -- I only back up data from hd's at long intervals.)
But what makes a fragile hd fail? Is it ordinary wear and tear? I never had a hd go bad on me through ordinary wear and tear. The only one that went bad at all had been plugged in and out of several boxes often. The (flimsy?) joint between the disk's pcb and IDE connector developed conductor cracks.
Does the OS that runs off a hd have any influence on wear-rate and failure?
My impression is it could do. DOS & DOS applications used to sound quiet/moderate in hd usage. Win 9x sounded busier/noisier. I just started using Linux Debian -- and it sounds a lot quieter than W9x. But I also gave a try to Win2k, and it was very noisy. A Win2k just up fresh from install procedure without incident, repeatedly spent a while thrashing its disk every time it booted up, and gave an impression it was trying to grind the platter to powder. Various kinds of cleanup didn't help. I'd be worried about keeping something like that on my new 40GB hd.
I mean... SCO claimed code theft and they will have to prove it... DUH!
....
It's more than that. In Germany, intimidating your competitors with unfounded threats to harm their business can amount to unfair competition and again in Germany there's a law against that. The threatener can himself become liable. IMO it's the kind of law we could use in other countries too
Nobody is throwing money at the US patent office. The US government has even been using it as a revenue source for years now, diverting some of the fee income from patent applicants to other government projects. So the patent office is not even allowed to keep and spend on its own operations all the patent fees it receives. The rule has been cuts in costly operations, and a number of commentators blame the current brief and cursory examination of patent applications partly on this factor.
Szilard, BTW, tried to keep the concept of a chain reaction secret by assigning the patent to the British Admiralty.
It would have been by official order, not necessarily by Szilard's own decision. At that time, there was legal process for patent applications that had security implications. It involved compulsory assignment to the Admiralty or War Office followed by continuing secrecy of the patent. Later on, that legal process was replaced by a different system of secrecy orders but no compulsory assignment. Secrecy can still be imposed for patent applications on inventions with defense sensitivity.
Even if they can't verify all of the information that they put in, what they could do is record whether/how a data item has any verification status (or even possibly, falsification status).
It surprises me how often databases of information that it is vital to check for accuracy/truth/reliability just don't have any content that indicates how far, if at all, any of the main data content has actually been checked (and by whom and against what comparator). Ideally there should be an audit trail for where the data came from and who entered/checked it. Better than nothing would be some kind of indicator that this data item is either unchecked (by anybody other than the person who added it), or else has been checked as either ok, or doubtful, or not ok (and when, and who checked it).
Terry
The situation in the Middle-East/Palestine/Israel is increadably complicated... and it is really difficult to determine who is "in the right" (both sides are being assholes).
Hear, hear.
Given that much of the business of creative mathematicians amounts to inventing new patterns of provable relations between objects and properties, probably there are more ways to understand math than there are branches of math --
Spatial models just happen to appeal to me -- and the posts here indicate that is probably pretty common. Many of us just live with the convenience of that (and with its limitations, because many math concepts are hard to geometrize). But it's not the only way, and a few folks seem to find other and non-spatial thought patterns more natural.
In the end, the advice to look over the whole of some new math thing before diving into the detail sounds good, and probably that is because it actively encourages trying to pick out the kinds of relationships and features that the individual reader finds intuitive or meaningful. Those things, whatever they are for the individual reader, will not only stick best in the mind, but also they may in turn provoke further thought and maybe new invention.
Terry