I think that rather than owning an idea, one should have commercial rights to the idea - that is, you don't have the right to prevent me from using your idea in my software, but you can expect royalties if I make a profit off your idea.
These concepts already exist to a large extent in current IP laws. The use of patented technologies in research and development actiivity without giving rise to infringement has always been part of patent law. Fair use of copyrighted materials for a variety of activities such as teaching, criticism and satire is also in place.
The threat is that laws like the DCMA will erode these rights.
Inventors should be rewarded for their work. So we cannot abandon the system of giving a reward for inventions. Instead I think we should change the reward from a monopoly to a tax break for related profits for the patent holder.
I've got two objections to this approach:
1. It does not solve the complaint about market interference by government. While you don't have an 'evil monopoly' any more, you still have distortion of the free market by government interference.
2. The tax break does not protect the inventor from being ripped off by a larger company that has a very strong financial position. Such a company through market power could easily expropriate an invention, leaving the actual inventor's commercial endeavor without any profits at all. The only way that he could benefit in such a circumstance would be to try to sell his patent rights to the large company, and hope that the tax benefits to said company would make it attractive enough to get compensation. This basically boils down to forced licensing to large companies, and is not what I think would lead to fair compensation of inventors.
It seems to me that the rapid pace of the advance of technology is in itself a cap on the lifetime of a patent, and the duration, instead of being shortened need not be capped at all. After all, if we don't have mice in a few years, a one click shopping patent will be irrelavent, so who cares about the duration of a patent. Ditto on any similar relatively minor innovation.
On the other hand, a really worthwhile innovation that really opens a whole new field is likely to be valuable for a long period of time, and is also not likely to realize it's true value for many years. Perhaps the current 20 year life of a patent doesn't offer enough incentive to companies to invest in the really risky, hard, costly and fundamental work that is necesary to come up with revolutionary technologies.
Finally I fired him and went back to my original search.
I find this sort of story absolutely mind-numbing. Why is it that organizations just don't see the possibility of training or otherwise developing people in the skills they need?
You could reduce the ambient thermal energy by cooling, however every time you turned off your computer the disk drive would warm up and you would lose all your data. Not a very practical solution.
Do you guys even bother to read the articles that you are referring to? THIS IS NOT A STANDARD PATENT!!!. It's a new system installed in Australia to register innovations. It is accompanied by no review process, and provides no monopoly rights to the registrants. In addition the article goes on to explain that this is actually a fraudulent filing, punishable under law because the filer falsely claimed he was the inventor.
You guys are the WORST journalists on the net. This stuff makes Matt Drudge look good, for crying out loud.
A new GUI with nifty features is NOT a trivial undertaking. After all, how long have people been trying to do this for UNIX? Decades. Did any of them match OS X? Nope.
NO PLANS TO PORT OS X TO x86 HARDWARE!
Actually Darwin, the UNIX bit of OS X does run on x86.
That's the theory, but there are many patents on purely mathematical transformations.
Wrong. The patent is on the application, not the transformation. I can sit down and use the LZW method by pencil and paper and avoid the patent completely.
Slashdot scores a 10 again on its lack of knowledge on patent law.
From
http://www.contractedge.com/PatentTradeLaw.asp
Abstract ideas and mental conceptions are not patentable. Discoveries of scientific principles, laws of nature, and natural phenomena are not patentable (although applications of such discoveries are). Mathematical algorithms that have not been reduced to some type of practical application have been held to be unpatentable. However, a claim to a system or method that recites a mathematical algorithm and produces "a useful, concrete and tangible result" may be patentable. State Street Bank & Trust Co. v. Signature Financial Group, 149 F3d 1368 (Fed Cir 1998), cert. denied, 525 US 1093 (1999). The software process involved in the State Street Bank case was used by a computer system to recompute the share prices of a pool of mutual funds after each day's trading activities ended, taking into account the day's gains and losses and expenses attributable to each mutual fund. The final share prices were the "useful, concrete, and tangible result."
I think that the human factor is much more important than the choice of OS. Anyone can put up an insecure box. A secure box takes vigilance to keep it secure.
If I was an insurance company what I would want to know is what the maintenance procedures for a site were, and see documentation that they were being followed.
The point about the technical competence and turnover rates is crucial given these issues - a shop that has low training and high turnover is just not going to have the adherence to proper maintenance methods that a shop with low turnover and skilled employees.
It seems to me that Slashdot has been consistently posting stories that misrepresent the facts in the case in order to attract postings to it's site.
This story - Google now owns your post - in actuality no such thing - Google actually is only taking a license to use your post, and the recent story on the TIVO patents both grossly distort the true situation.
The major misrepresentations seems to consistently involve intellectual property issues, which we know that editors have a strong bias against.
It is time for the Slashdot editorial staff to wake up and present their readership with a more factual repesentation of these issues. They are not serving their readership or their cause with these stories.
It's called an MPEG video server, and they've been around for years in professional broadcast circles
If you read the claims, you will see that the Tivo includes stuff like receiving broadcast TV as part of the claim. This excludes MPEG video servers as prior art.
I wish Slashdot would spend a little time in vetting the accuracy of it's stories.
Here's a clue: The title of a Patent is NOT the same thing as what the patent covers or claims.
In Slashdot's posting we have:
Here's one of them - recording one program while watching another.
What the patent really claims (which is far more limited and justifiable) is this:
What is claimed is:
1. A process for the simultaneous storage and play back of multimedia data, comprising the steps of:
accepting television (TV) broadcast signals, wherein said TV signals are based on a multitude of standards, including, but not limited to, National Television Standards Committee (NTSC) broadcast, PAL broadcast, satellite transmission, DSS, DBS, or ATSC;
tuning said TV signals to a specific program;
providing at least one Input Section, wherein said Input Section converts said specific program to an Moving Pictures Experts Group (MPEG) formatted stream for internal transfer and manipulation;
providing a Media Switch, wherein said Media Switch parses said MPEG stream, said MPEG stream is separated into its video and audio components;
storing said video and audio components on a storage device;
providing at least one Output Section, wherein said Output Section extracts said video and audio components from said storage device;
wherein said Output Section assembles said video and audio components into an MPEG stream;
wherein said Output Section sends said MPEG stream to a decoder;
wherein said decoder converts said MPEG stream into TV output signals;
wherein said decoder delivers said TV output signals to a TV receiver; and
accepting control commands from a user, wherein said control commands are sent through the system and affect the flow of said MPEG stream.
We are eventually going to reach a point where we cannot store any more data per unit area of disk, and we are also going to reach the stage where reading these units of data will be unfeasibly slow using magnetic heads attached to a moving arm. This time is likely to come sooner rather than later, and the problem needs to be addressed.
Well, as you increase storage density on rotating media, your sequential read speed also increases.
Haven't we had enough of these sorts of stories fer chrissakes. If I went into biz selling a cola drink in red cans named Cokester how long do you think I'd be around? At least Etoy had some justification to it. This one is pathetic.
It reminds me of the old MASH series where Hawkeye goes beserk when served liver and fish for the n100th time in a row, and incites a riot with the refrain "We want something else!"
I agree people waste too much time on TV. But blaming shortcomings of current society just on TV is not all that insightful in my view.
The point is that TV is not necessary to a rich and meaningful life. I have some friends who live today without TV, DVDs and all the other assorted electronic gimcrackery that corporations have enticed me into buying. I haven't noticed they are the worse for it.
One of the most thought provoking photgraphs I ever saw was a picture of the interior of Albert Einstein's house when he was living in Princeton NJ. The picture showed a bookcase, desk with papers and open books, and a piano.
There were no electronics in view.
It seems to me that in the overall scheme of things the encryption of digital television signals is not exactly important. If you personally are put out by this, I think that you should take a step back and think about what is important. I can guarantee that in the long run cheap mass entertainment and the materialism that it engenders is a dead end. What really is important is your humanity, spiritualism and your personal relationships. Real quality of life does not come out of Hollywood.
Slashdot Mirror
I think that rather than owning an idea, one should have commercial rights to the idea - that is, you don't have the right to prevent me from using your idea in my software, but you can expect royalties if I make a profit off your idea.
These concepts already exist to a large extent in current IP laws. The use of patented technologies in research and development actiivity without giving rise to infringement has always been part of patent law. Fair use of copyrighted materials for a variety of activities such as teaching, criticism and satire is also in place.
The threat is that laws like the DCMA will erode these rights.
Inventors should be rewarded for their work. So we cannot abandon the system of giving a reward for inventions. Instead I think we should change the reward from a monopoly to a tax break for related profits for the patent holder.
I've got two objections to this approach:
1. It does not solve the complaint about market interference by government. While you don't have an 'evil monopoly' any more, you still have distortion of the free market by government interference.
2. The tax break does not protect the inventor from being ripped off by a larger company that has a very strong financial position. Such a company through market power could easily expropriate an invention, leaving the actual inventor's commercial endeavor without any profits at all. The only way that he could benefit in such a circumstance would be to try to sell his patent rights to the large company, and hope that the tax benefits to said company would make it attractive enough to get compensation. This basically boils down to forced licensing to large companies, and is not what I think would lead to fair compensation of inventors.
In 14 years we won't even *have* mice.
It seems to me that the rapid pace of the advance of technology is in itself a cap on the lifetime of a patent, and the duration, instead of being shortened need not be capped at all. After all, if we don't have mice in a few years, a one click shopping patent will be irrelavent, so who cares about the duration of a patent. Ditto on any similar relatively minor innovation.
On the other hand, a really worthwhile innovation that really opens a whole new field is likely to be valuable for a long period of time, and is also not likely to realize it's true value for many years. Perhaps the current 20 year life of a patent doesn't offer enough incentive to companies to invest in the really risky, hard, costly and fundamental work that is necesary to come up with revolutionary technologies.
Finally I fired him and went back to my original search. I find this sort of story absolutely mind-numbing. Why is it that organizations just don't see the possibility of training or otherwise developing people in the skills they need?
To take it to a LAN party of course.
You could reduce the ambient thermal energy by cooling, however every time you turned off your computer the disk drive would warm up and you would lose all your data. Not a very practical solution.
pretty much all the companies that were split from Standard Oil are once again a single company.
The difference is that now there are a lot of OTHER oil companies too. Back then there was SO and then.....
Do you guys even bother to read the articles that you are referring to? THIS IS NOT A STANDARD PATENT!!!. It's a new system installed in Australia to register innovations. It is accompanied by no review process, and provides no monopoly rights to the registrants. In addition the article goes on to explain that this is actually a fraudulent filing, punishable under law because the filer falsely claimed he was the inventor.
You guys are the WORST journalists on the net. This stuff makes Matt Drudge look good, for crying out loud.
But really how much did Apple do here?
You answered the question yourself:
"and built a new GUI with some nifty features"
A new GUI with nifty features is NOT a trivial undertaking. After all, how long have people been trying to do this for UNIX? Decades. Did any of them match OS X? Nope.
NO PLANS TO PORT OS X TO x86 HARDWARE!
Actually Darwin, the UNIX bit of OS X does run on x86.
Wasn't the latest flap-doodle from Microsoft a claim that Opne Source couldn't innovate.
Tux this.
That's the theory, but there are many patents on purely mathematical transformations.
Wrong. The patent is on the application, not the transformation. I can sit down and use the LZW method by pencil and paper and avoid the patent completely.
Of course, in the US you can patent math
Slashdot scores a 10 again on its lack of knowledge on patent law.
From
http://www.contractedge.com/PatentTradeLaw.asp
Abstract ideas and mental conceptions are not patentable. Discoveries of scientific principles, laws of nature, and natural phenomena are not patentable (although applications of such discoveries are). Mathematical algorithms that have not been reduced to some type of practical application have been held to be unpatentable. However, a claim to a system or method that recites a mathematical algorithm and produces "a useful, concrete and tangible result" may be patentable. State Street Bank & Trust Co. v. Signature Financial Group, 149 F3d 1368 (Fed Cir 1998), cert. denied, 525 US 1093 (1999). The software process involved in the State Street Bank case was used by a computer system to recompute the share prices of a pool of mutual funds after each day's trading activities ended, taking into account the day's gains and losses and expenses attributable to each mutual fund. The final share prices were the "useful, concrete, and tangible result."
Get with reality, huh?
Let me see - one armed rebellion occurring BEFORE the the founding of the country wipes out 200+ years of pretty much peaceful change.
NOT.
complete with pirated utilities and computer access.
I wonder how the people whose utilities and bandwidth are getting stolen feel about this.
Such a thing could never exist in the U.S. for longer than it took to load up the tear gas grenade launchers.
It is truly amazing how people are ignorant of history. Mass non-violent action is quite common in US History going back hundreds of years.
I think that the human factor is much more important than the choice of OS. Anyone can put up an insecure box. A secure box takes vigilance to keep it secure.
If I was an insurance company what I would want to know is what the maintenance procedures for a site were, and see documentation that they were being followed.
The point about the technical competence and turnover rates is crucial given these issues - a shop that has low training and high turnover is just not going to have the adherence to proper maintenance methods that a shop with low turnover and skilled employees.
And by "general" you mean anecdotal.
In this arena there is no other type.
However, the original problem is that the source is open. Since the hackers can look through the code,
You would have a case if open source projects were more subject to hacks than clesed source projects.
The general evidence is that the opposite is true.
It seems to me that Slashdot has been consistently posting stories that misrepresent the facts in the case in order to attract postings to it's site.
This story - Google now owns your post - in actuality no such thing - Google actually is only taking a license to use your post, and the recent story on the TIVO patents both grossly distort the true situation.
The major misrepresentations seems to consistently involve intellectual property issues, which we know that editors have a strong bias against.
It is time for the Slashdot editorial staff to wake up and present their readership with a more factual repesentation of these issues. They are not serving their readership or their cause with these stories.
It's called an MPEG video server, and they've been around for years in professional broadcast circles
If you read the claims, you will see that the Tivo includes stuff like receiving broadcast TV as part of the claim. This excludes MPEG video servers as prior art.
I wish Slashdot would spend a little time in vetting the accuracy of it's stories.
Here's a clue: The title of a Patent is NOT the same thing as what the patent covers or claims.
In Slashdot's posting we have:
Here's one of them - recording one program while watching another.
What the patent really claims (which is far more limited and justifiable) is this:
What is claimed is:
1. A process for the simultaneous storage and play back of multimedia data, comprising the steps of:
accepting television (TV) broadcast signals, wherein said TV signals are based on a multitude of standards, including, but not limited to, National Television Standards Committee (NTSC) broadcast, PAL broadcast, satellite transmission, DSS, DBS, or ATSC;
tuning said TV signals to a specific program;
providing at least one Input Section, wherein said Input Section converts said specific program to an Moving Pictures Experts Group (MPEG) formatted stream for internal transfer and manipulation;
providing a Media Switch, wherein said Media Switch parses said MPEG stream, said MPEG stream is separated into its video and audio components;
storing said video and audio components on a storage device;
providing at least one Output Section, wherein said Output Section extracts said video and audio components from said storage device;
wherein said Output Section assembles said video and audio components into an MPEG stream;
wherein said Output Section sends said MPEG stream to a decoder;
wherein said decoder converts said MPEG stream into TV output signals;
wherein said decoder delivers said TV output signals to a TV receiver; and
accepting control commands from a user, wherein said control commands are sent through the system and affect the flow of said MPEG stream.
We are eventually going to reach a point where we cannot store any more data per unit area of disk, and we are also going to reach the stage where reading these units of data will be unfeasibly slow using magnetic heads attached to a moving arm. This time is likely to come sooner rather than later, and the problem needs to be addressed.
Well, as you increase storage density on rotating media, your sequential read speed also increases.
Haven't we had enough of these sorts of stories fer chrissakes. If I went into biz selling a cola drink in red cans named Cokester how long do you think I'd be around? At least Etoy had some justification to it. This one is pathetic.
It reminds me of the old MASH series where Hawkeye goes beserk when served liver and fish for the n100th time in a row, and incites a riot with the refrain "We want something else!"
Well Taco Leader, "We want something else!" "We want something else!" "We want something else!" "We want something else!" "We want something else!" "We want something else!" "We want something else!" "We want something else!" "We want something else!" "We want something else!" "We want something else!" "We want something else!" "We want something else!" "We want something else!" "We want something else!" "We want something else!" "We want something else!"
I agree people waste too much time on TV. But blaming shortcomings of current society just on TV is not all that insightful in my view.
The point is that TV is not necessary to a rich and meaningful life. I have some friends who live today without TV, DVDs and all the other assorted electronic gimcrackery that corporations have enticed me into buying. I haven't noticed they are the worse for it.
Copyrights applied to sheet music even in Einstein's day.
One of the most thought provoking photgraphs I ever saw was a picture of the interior of Albert Einstein's house when he was living in Princeton NJ. The picture showed a bookcase, desk with papers and open books, and a piano.
There were no electronics in view.
It seems to me that in the overall scheme of things the encryption of digital television signals is not exactly important. If you personally are put out by this, I think that you should take a step back and think about what is important. I can guarantee that in the long run cheap mass entertainment and the materialism that it engenders is a dead end. What really is important is your humanity, spiritualism and your personal relationships. Real quality of life does not come out of Hollywood.