It relates because the business of software patents is very close to this. Patent litigation in the software sector is much higher than in any other sector and much of that litigation is speculative and funded by exactly the kind of VC TFA is talking about.
"Copywriting" indeed... I should have caught that.
So Tetris are using copyright law, like Apple did in their look and feel lawsuit (which they lost as you surely know), rather than patent law, which is what firms would probably use today.
"Copywriting the game rules, the board design, the card designs, the packaging, maybe a design patent on the board, possibly a utility patent on the game, perhaps a trademark. (Monopoly was an example of a successful game patent)."
I'd assume the game patent expires after 20 years, but can be green-fielded by making changes ever decade or so.
Are you saying the open source version was taken down for not implementing DRM restrictions, in other words for having missing functionality?
I do understand the point about anti-circumvention but does this extend to obliging that clean re-implementations implement the same restrictions as closed ones?
One would think there is a difference between a tool used to circumvent copyright, and a tool that fails to enforce the copyright rules.
For example, if a DVD player fails to implement a region code, is that culpable under the DMCA? Or if a FOSS PDF reader does not have the code that checks for unprintable documents, a DMCA violation?
I'm trying to get my head around this. If a specification demands certain restrictions, and those are not implemented, then the implementations can be taken down under the DMCA...
So if I make a DRM file system and someone implements a simple compatible version but fails to make the DRM work properly, this is illegal. Thus, anyone opening a MS-Office document with a product that does not respect the DRM rules in there is a criminal.
Games (and video games) are explicitly protected by a special kind of design patent. This is what protects the rules and pieces of Monopoly, Scrabble, Risk, and so on. Their look and feel are protected by trademark, and their specific designs by copyright.
Tetris is likewise protected by design patents, trademarks, and copyright.
However only the copyright aspect can fall under the Digital Millenium Copyright Act.
Large parts of the UK fought and bled for the right to not be part of England.
It is true that Tony Blair's Labour government was largely run by Scots, and that they seem to be implementing a spy state in England but not in Scotland.
However, the rumours that the Stazification of England is a Gaelic plot to prevent the sassanachs from ever again invading the Fair and Bonnie Lands of Burns are silly and I won't dignify them with repetition.
Yes, offending people deliberately is trolling. However, this is a necessary freedom. Here is a short article that explains part of why.
Artists have often played this role in society. Societies that do not allow "offensive" art rapidly become victim to constrictive social controls. If you ban hardcore porn, it is easy to ban softcore porn, then light erotica, then pictures of nudes, then naked thighs, and finally the naked face.
Trolls play the important role of forcing the debate on what is tolerated, what is not, and how to keep the offensive stuff out of view, while allowing it to happen. Slashdot is better because it has a moderation system, which exists mainly because of trolls.
What we've learned, over the years, is that the moderate majority is very good in detecting and punishing trolls by down-ranking them in various ways. Look at Digg and you'll see this in action. Offensive stuff is there, but it's marginalized by common consent, not by top-down authority. And this is right.
Finally, the freedom to offend is the freedom to defend. This means: the greatest threat to our freedom is tyranny, and the best weapon against that is freedom to communicate. Obviously a communication that opposes a tyranny will be deemed "offensive".
So I consider trolling to be important as a kind of political statement, equivalent to certain forms of deliberately offensive art.
No, I'm not trolling. I'm quoting 4chan when people complain about offensive (and I mean *really offensive) content.
This is the Conflict. Between those who value freedom even to be insanely offensive, and those who think freedom must be measured by some authority.
Napster thought that real world laws did not apply to them... remember what happened. For a while, it was explosively popular, then the court cases started, and the business was crushed.
But today what Napster was offering is 1000x more available.
Games authors will push the boundaries, every boundary, until they feel resistance, and when there is resistance, there will be a fight. And in every fight the Digital Majority will eventually win. There is just no way a conventional industrial intelligence can beat a digital one.
The freedom to offend is the same as the freedom to defend.
I had this idea ages ago: computer blocks, which could plug together. Storage, processors, media, PSUs, batteries, interfaces... just bricks that you stack together using some universal power-and-data bus connector on each plug (imagine Lego blocks about eight inches long).
- a community of engineers - a bunch of lawyers and accounts - a group of shareholders
and more. I think the value of this story is not to show that the engineers are bad people. It's to show that the lawyers and accountants have a lot of power and could abuse that.
It probably goes without saying that Red Hat engineers are generally really smart and ethical people - you don't work for an open source company otherwise.
A lot of technology firms have tensions between the patent lawyers and engineers. IBM, Nokia, Sony, Microsoft, Red Hat, Sun, SAP... the only firms that don't have this tension are firms that do not file software patents at all.
Actually, I think you're wrong and overmoderated. I've been trying freepatentsonline.com and it is pretty neat.
Negative points: adverts, and these go away when you sign in.
Positive points: extensive search functions (e.g. search on all different fields), ability to save searches, ability to download search results as spreadsheets (not figured out how yet).
Of course you can read the patent without ads on the USPTO site. But the hard part is searching patents.
Maybe you want to actually try the site before making blanket statements about "all free patent sites being pure spam". I think Google patent search is also pretty neat, and it's free.
Ah, but if you can prove free will exists, then you can prove evil people will go to hell!
Seriously, this whole free will debate is pointless. Every manifestation of so-called "free will" can be adequately explained by assuming that our human brains can convincingly imitate free will (to other human brains). And that is a much simpler proposition that looking for free will in the fabric of the cosmos (what religious balderdash!).
I pretend to have free will, you believe me, and we're both happy.
What this shows is that firms which take patents are more likely to be involved in patent lawsuits. So the whole "we took defensive patents, now see how we need them" becomes a self-justifying circle.
If your s/invention/patent/ is not 1: s/Novel/freshly written/ 2: s/Inventive/written in complex lawyer language/ 3: s/Industrially applicable/says "machine" a few times/
I'm sure that Red Hat would love to see patents that are safe for Linux, and unsafe on other platforms. Note that AMQP implementations run on Linux but also on Solaris, AIX, Windows, QNX, and OpenVMS.
OIN is not the answer to a bad patent that squats beside an open standard. There is no answer except to withdraw that patent application and stop using software patents for anti-competitive purposes.
Red Hat have particularly much to lose by seeking aggressive software patents. I'm surprised they did this.
Kind of makes sense. A friend of mine was complaining that her son spent all his free time gaming, and I told her: "he's learning the user interface of the 21st century".
So how long until video games start to offer virtual Linux consoles so I can compile and start an in-game web server to serve those in-game browsers?
I did not call for no government role in the market. In fact government intervention is IMO an essential aspect of keeping a free market free. At the least, government must defend freedom of trade & communication, competition, the rule of law, and the equality of all. However, note that a government is just people, and when you give people the power to intervene in a market, they will do so for economic, thus personal, reasons. Your post assumes an incorruptible government composed of people who act for selfless reasons. I've never seen any such thing, ever in history.
As soon as you allow the state to intervene in the market, except as a neutral referee of the rules of fair play, you invite corruption.
However I can't prove that it's not possible for some state, somewhere, to intervene benignly. Presumably you have an example to demonstrate this?
If you cannot provide an example of a benign and successful intervention in a free market - that is, of the state reducing general freedom, with socially beneficial results - while I can provide hundreds of examples of the opposite, then your claim that such a situation might exist is like claiming that unicorns might exist, and therefore must.
Read my post again. A free market is not the Wild Wild West. Unions, labor laws, and environmental laws are about stopping the powerful from escaping the rules. In a free market, for example, an individual has the option to withdraw his/her labor. Big businesses try to remove this options. Unions put it back.
At the same time, unions can work against a free market, when they get too powerful and themselves try to escape the rules (like competition).
Yes, DARPA invested in TCP/IP very early on because it was a lot cheaper and better than buying proprietary networks for military use. Does not mean the Internet was funded by grants and loans and subsidies, any more than Linux is funded by grants today.
Every time I read "grant", "advanced research", and "tax incentive", I see "gift", "white elephant", and "sleaze".
Yes, it's good to spend collective funds on roads, bridges, art, maybe even public fiber, insurance, and banking. But anything the market can do, it should. And I mean a free market, not that fake crony capitalism championed by Bush. In a free market, with proper authority to stop the powerful from escaping the rules, every company is free to compete without barriers. Every subsidy, cheap loan, and grant is a distortion of that market unless it goes to areas that cannot make a profit.
If you read that web server script you'll see it's exactly as I described, an application built out of existing pieces: nc, sed, head, ls. Try doing this on any other OS, and it becomes obvious why the Unix metaphor is still so popular after something like 30 years.
The amazing thing here is not that we can write web servers in shell scripts. It's that we're still using software tools that were designed and were mature before many of us here were born.
Slashdot Mirror
It relates because the business of software patents is very close to this. Patent litigation in the software sector is much higher than in any other sector and much of that litigation is speculative and funded by exactly the kind of VC TFA is talking about.
"Copywriting" indeed... I should have caught that.
So Tetris are using copyright law, like Apple did in their look and feel lawsuit (which they lost as you surely know), rather than patent law, which is what firms would probably use today.
Here is a comment that maybe explains better:
"Copywriting the game rules, the board design, the card designs, the packaging, maybe a design patent on the board, possibly a utility patent on the game, perhaps a trademark. (Monopoly was an example of a successful game patent)."
I'd assume the game patent expires after 20 years, but can be green-fielded by making changes ever decade or so.
Are you saying the open source version was taken down for not implementing DRM restrictions, in other words for having missing functionality?
I do understand the point about anti-circumvention but does this extend to obliging that clean re-implementations implement the same restrictions as closed ones?
One would think there is a difference between a tool used to circumvent copyright, and a tool that fails to enforce the copyright rules.
For example, if a DVD player fails to implement a region code, is that culpable under the DMCA? Or if a FOSS PDF reader does not have the code that checks for unprintable documents, a DMCA violation?
I'm trying to get my head around this. If a specification demands certain restrictions, and those are not implemented, then the implementations can be taken down under the DMCA...
So if I make a DRM file system and someone implements a simple compatible version but fails to make the DRM work properly, this is illegal. Thus, anyone opening a MS-Office document with a product that does not respect the DRM rules in there is a criminal.
Games (and video games) are explicitly protected by a special kind of design patent. This is what protects the rules and pieces of Monopoly, Scrabble, Risk, and so on. Their look and feel are protected by trademark, and their specific designs by copyright.
Tetris is likewise protected by design patents, trademarks, and copyright.
However only the copyright aspect can fall under the Digital Millenium Copyright Act.
How can a copyright law be used to take down a protocol implementation? What copyrights were infringed? This would normally fall under patent law.
Large parts of the UK fought and bled for the right to not be part of England.
It is true that Tony Blair's Labour government was largely run by Scots, and that they seem to be implementing a spy state in England but not in Scotland.
However, the rumours that the Stazification of England is a Gaelic plot to prevent the sassanachs from ever again invading the Fair and Bonnie Lands of Burns are silly and I won't dignify them with repetition.
Yes, offending people deliberately is trolling. However, this is a necessary freedom. Here is a short article that explains part of why.
Artists have often played this role in society. Societies that do not allow "offensive" art rapidly become victim to constrictive social controls. If you ban hardcore porn, it is easy to ban softcore porn, then light erotica, then pictures of nudes, then naked thighs, and finally the naked face.
Trolls play the important role of forcing the debate on what is tolerated, what is not, and how to keep the offensive stuff out of view, while allowing it to happen. Slashdot is better because it has a moderation system, which exists mainly because of trolls.
What we've learned, over the years, is that the moderate majority is very good in detecting and punishing trolls by down-ranking them in various ways. Look at Digg and you'll see this in action. Offensive stuff is there, but it's marginalized by common consent, not by top-down authority. And this is right.
Finally, the freedom to offend is the freedom to defend. This means: the greatest threat to our freedom is tyranny, and the best weapon against that is freedom to communicate. Obviously a communication that opposes a tyranny will be deemed "offensive".
So I consider trolling to be important as a kind of political statement, equivalent to certain forms of deliberately offensive art.
No, I'm not trolling. I'm quoting 4chan when people complain about offensive (and I mean *really offensive) content.
This is the Conflict. Between those who value freedom even to be insanely offensive, and those who think freedom must be measured by some authority.
Napster thought that real world laws did not apply to them... remember what happened. For a while, it was explosively popular, then the court cases started, and the business was crushed.
But today what Napster was offering is 1000x more available.
Games authors will push the boundaries, every boundary, until they feel resistance, and when there is resistance, there will be a fight. And in every fight the Digital Majority will eventually win. There is just no way a conventional industrial intelligence can beat a digital one.
The freedom to offend is the same as the freedom to defend.
I had this idea ages ago: computer blocks, which could plug together. Storage, processors, media, PSUs, batteries, interfaces... just bricks that you stack together using some universal power-and-data bus connector on each plug (imagine Lego blocks about eight inches long).
An exercise in cartel economics: compare the costs of SMS traffic vs. email traffic and explain the differences. :-)
Uhm, so anyone who is against software patents is by definition a copyright-infringing teenager?
Red Hat is not one thing. It is:
- a community of engineers
- a bunch of lawyers and accounts
- a group of shareholders
and more. I think the value of this story is not to show that the engineers are bad people. It's to show that the lawyers and accountants have a lot of power and could abuse that.
It probably goes without saying that Red Hat engineers are generally really smart and ethical people - you don't work for an open source company otherwise.
A lot of technology firms have tensions between the patent lawyers and engineers. IBM, Nokia, Sony, Microsoft, Red Hat, Sun, SAP... the only firms that don't have this tension are firms that do not file software patents at all.
Actually, I think you're wrong and overmoderated. I've been trying freepatentsonline.com and it is pretty neat.
Negative points: adverts, and these go away when you sign in.
Positive points: extensive search functions (e.g. search on all different fields), ability to save searches, ability to download search results as spreadsheets (not figured out how yet).
Of course you can read the patent without ads on the USPTO site. But the hard part is searching patents.
Maybe you want to actually try the site before making blanket statements about "all free patent sites being pure spam". I think Google patent search is also pretty neat, and it's free.
And the USPTO site is also free.
Ah, but if you can prove free will exists, then you can prove evil people will go to hell!
Seriously, this whole free will debate is pointless. Every manifestation of so-called "free will" can be adequately explained by assuming that our human brains can convincingly imitate free will (to other human brains). And that is a much simpler proposition that looking for free will in the fabric of the cosmos (what religious balderdash!).
I pretend to have free will, you believe me, and we're both happy.
Too lazy to post the link?
http://yro.slashdot.org/firehose.pl?op=view&id=3828063&art_pos=7
ftfy
What this shows is that firms which take patents are more likely to be involved in patent lawsuits. So the whole "we took defensive patents, now see how we need them" becomes a self-justifying circle.
Translating the patent jargon for you:
If your s/invention/patent/ is not
1: s/Novel/freshly written/
2: s/Inventive/written in complex lawyer language/
3: s/Industrially applicable/says "machine" a few times/
it will simply not be granted
ftfy.
I'm sure that Red Hat would love to see patents that are safe for Linux, and unsafe on other platforms. Note that AMQP implementations run on Linux but also on Solaris, AIX, Windows, QNX, and OpenVMS.
OIN is not the answer to a bad patent that squats beside an open standard. There is no answer except to withdraw that patent application and stop using software patents for anti-competitive purposes.
Red Hat have particularly much to lose by seeking aggressive software patents. I'm surprised they did this.
Kind of makes sense. A friend of mine was complaining that her son spent all his free time gaming, and I told her: "he's learning the user interface of the 21st century".
So how long until video games start to offer virtual Linux consoles so I can compile and start an in-game web server to serve those in-game browsers?
I did not call for no government role in the market. In fact government intervention is IMO an essential aspect of keeping a free market free. At the least, government must defend freedom of trade & communication, competition, the rule of law, and the equality of all. However, note that a government is just people, and when you give people the power to intervene in a market, they will do so for economic, thus personal, reasons. Your post assumes an incorruptible government composed of people who act for selfless reasons. I've never seen any such thing, ever in history.
As soon as you allow the state to intervene in the market, except as a neutral referee of the rules of fair play, you invite corruption.
However I can't prove that it's not possible for some state, somewhere, to intervene benignly. Presumably you have an example to demonstrate this?
If you cannot provide an example of a benign and successful intervention in a free market - that is, of the state reducing general freedom, with socially beneficial results - while I can provide hundreds of examples of the opposite, then your claim that such a situation might exist is like claiming that unicorns might exist, and therefore must.
Read my post again. A free market is not the Wild Wild West. Unions, labor laws, and environmental laws are about stopping the powerful from escaping the rules. In a free market, for example, an individual has the option to withdraw his/her labor. Big businesses try to remove this options. Unions put it back.
At the same time, unions can work against a free market, when they get too powerful and themselves try to escape the rules (like competition).
Yes, DARPA invested in TCP/IP very early on because it was a lot cheaper and better than buying proprietary networks for military use. Does not mean the Internet was funded by grants and loans and subsidies, any more than Linux is funded by grants today.
Every time I read "grant", "advanced research", and "tax incentive", I see "gift", "white elephant", and "sleaze".
Yes, it's good to spend collective funds on roads, bridges, art, maybe even public fiber, insurance, and banking. But anything the market can do, it should. And I mean a free market, not that fake crony capitalism championed by Bush. In a free market, with proper authority to stop the powerful from escaping the rules, every company is free to compete without barriers. Every subsidy, cheap loan, and grant is a distortion of that market unless it goes to areas that cannot make a profit.
If you read that web server script you'll see it's exactly as I described, an application built out of existing pieces: nc, sed, head, ls. Try doing this on any other OS, and it becomes obvious why the Unix metaphor is still so popular after something like 30 years.
The amazing thing here is not that we can write web servers in shell scripts. It's that we're still using software tools that were designed and were mature before many of us here were born.