any database that will silently alter data you're inserting into a table if it doesn't fit the specified constraints instead of returning an error is unusable for serious work.
This has been fixed for nearly a year:
Added STRICT_TRANS_TABLES, STRICT_ALL_TABLES, NO_ZERO_IN_DATE, NO_ZERO_DATE, ERROR_FOR_DIVISION_BY_ZERO, and TRADITIONAL SQL modes. The TRADITIONAL mode is shorthand for all the preceding modes. When using mode TRADITIONAL, MySQL generates an error if you try to insert a wrong value in a column. It does not adjust the value to the closest possible legal value.
(MySQL changelog from December 04)
If you want to complain about MySQL's inadequacies, please find a current inadequacy, not an out-of-date one.
It isn't anyone's business what software a particular company chooses to use, be it Open Source or Commercial.
Yes it is. If I do business with a company in a way that will require an exchange of data, I need to be able to understand the data formats that will be used. This means one of two situations must occur:
* The data format used is a proprietary format. In this case, we both need to be using identical software. * The data format used is an open standard. In this case, the software used is irrelevant, at least as long as the standard is followed adequately by both parties.
Now, in the former case, it matters to me very much whether or not the software in question is open source or commercial, largely because I don't want to have to pay for it. If I do have to pay for it, I'm likely to take my business elsewhere.
If they try to add "3m1n3m", "adona-may", or "brit. sraeps" to the list, they're breaking an encryption scheme and that's illegal for them !!!
Err... no. It's only illegal if the encryption scheme in question is used to provide unauthorised copying of a copyrighted work. None of these schemes are.
Then why can't I run one cygwin program with the dll in its own directory when I already have a cygwin program (like sshd) running, and I get an error that says it's the wrong DLL version?
I believe cygwin uses named segments of shared memory to coordinate stuff. I suspect it's the DLL objecting to the fact that you have two different versions of it running concurrently -- the second to start probably checks a version number on the shared memory page and aborts if it is incorrect.
How much time would upgrading SuSE8 to SuSE9 have taken?
My experience is about 6 hours for the upgrade, plus another 3 or 4 to check everything still works afterwards. My experience of compiling my own glibc suggests that this will take about twice as much work.
Downtime can cost a lot of money, this would have been a pressure on the admins.
Any real company employing the kind of solutions described (which included so-called "best of breed" commercial applications) would certainly have a staging server to use, and could then swap the staging server for the live one in order to deploy. This would result in no more than a minute's downtime if done correctly. It's possible to do it with zero downtime.
And isn't that kinda the point of the study?
I think by insisting they stick with SuSE8 and use applications on it that blatantly aren't compatible with it they skewed the results. I know if I'd had all of the other requirements given, I'd have done a complete upgrade.
Yeah, good point. It kind of implies that it's possible to objectively assess how good a system is at solving a class of problems. In this case, their "best of breed" software wasn't really very good at all, because while selecting it they failed to take account of the fact that it wouldn't run correctly on the OS version they were planning on installing it on. How good a piece of software is depends on many factors, too many to be able to describe any software as "best".
What commercial apps on Linux did he use, exactly?
See Appendix 5.
During the experimental trials, 3rd party best-of-breed components were chose to satisfy the needs of the solution. [...] The specific 3rd party vendors are not disclosed because the focus of the study is the methodology and not a specific component.
The commercial apps in question, though, had dependencies on (1) a very recent version of MySQL, and (2) a more recent version of glibc than is included in the version of SuSE in use. These two dependencies were the root cause of almost all the problems described in this paper.
This is utter bollocks. See my analysis of the report in this comment.
They broke RPM by hand compiling glibc, not the other way around. It says so quite explicitly. They hand compiled glibc because they were asked to install (without upgrading to SuSE 9) an application that wasn't compatible with the version in SuSE 8.
If you actually read the report, you'd see that GLIBC was all mucked up because SUSE's YAST was broken. And on top of that, part of the study was to see what the administrators would do. Part of the confusion for the sysadmins was WHERE to get the sources when the standard RPM manager broke. It's not clear where they should have gotten GLIBC, and that was part of the test.
OK, I've found and read the report now, and this is just bollocks. From the report:
In the Linux case, the component required an upgrade of the MySQL database component from version 3.23 to version 4.1. Upgrading MySQL means going outside of the supported OS configuration and obtaining the new version from the package distribution site. [...] [T]he search component required a newer version of the GLIBC package than the one shipped with SLES 8. There are many ways to resolve such a dependency including trying to get the two versions to co-exist, upgrading the existing version, etc. Upgrading GLIBC directly (a route two administrators took), quickly leads to a cascading sea of dependency failures as other packages on the system that rely on the older version fail. One such failure came in the RPM package installer which left no direct route to reinstall the old version of the GLIBC library.
So the test involved installing on SuSE 8 two applications that (effectively) required SuSE 9. Rather than upgrade to SuSE 9, the test mechanism required the operators to hack their systems to make this work. Some of them did this by taking the ill-advised step of compiling their own glibc; doing this broke the vendor supplied version of 'rpm', leaving them unable to undo their changes. Others did it by partially upgrading their system to SuSE 9 by installing SuSE 9 rpms over their SuSE 8 equivalents.
The Windows equivalent test worked fine because the equivalent applications that the Windows operators were required to install were intended for use with the version of Windows they had installed.
Basically, the test wasn't fair. If SuSE-9 dependent applications were to be used, then SuSE 9 should have been used as the basis of the test. If SuSE 8 had to be tested, then equivalent applications that functioned on SuSE 8 should have been found (chances are, slightly older versions of the same 2 apps would have functioned fine).
So, no, glibc wasn't "mucked up because SUSE's YAST was broken". The operators broke YAST by trying to install a glibc upgrade in order to use an application that wasn't compatible with the system they were running. The test was unrealistic; they weren't given the option of upgrading the system properly. They were told, "make this application run on this system." It's not surprising that some of them failed.
Funny, I've been using SuSE for about 5 years now, and have never had to hand compile glibc[1]. I wonder what exactly they needed to do that required this.
[1] -- OK, I *have* compiled my own glibc in the past, but this was in order to run an experimental system that supported both 2.0 and 2.2 kernels, which wasn't an option SuSE supported at the time.
It's not clear where they should have gotten GLIBC, and that was part of the test
Personally, I'd have taken the version from my installation CDs and reinstalled all patches short of the one that caused the problem, then waited for the problem to be resolved before installing further patches.
Also worth noting: I've been running SuSE systems here since 6.1 was the current version, and I've never seen YAST (or YOU) break glibc. I don't know what they did wrong to cause it to break, but I bet it was something pretty nonstandard.
Meanwhile, on NT, you can't even delete a file that is in use. You just can't do it! You can't rename it to move it out of the way either, like you [generally] could in DOS and Win9x. Finally, in the case of shared libraries, even if you could, Windows only allows a single instance of a DLL to exist, and the instances are identified with names.
The former problem was fixed in Windows XP, although applications need to be modified to open files with the FILE_SHARE_DELETE flag. This is now done for executing applications, for instance, so you will find that on XP you can delete a running program or DLLs it references.
The latter hasn't been a problem in NT, ever. Windows 3 used to identify DLLs only by filename. I'm not sure whether 9x inherited this behaviour or not, I don't believe it did. Certainly under NT they are identified by complete pathname, and you can have totally different DLLs with the same name, even open by the same application simultaneously if you wish.
OK, you get a throwaway account, find the next number, and prime factorise it. But what's to prevent someone else popping in there in the meantime?
Nothing. But a quick top-of-the-head calculation based on my estimate of when I signed up for my account suggests that the average time between slashdot account creations is about 4 minutes, so as long as you aren't doing it at peak time (which is probably early evening eastern US, at a rough guess) you should be fine.
1. If you make something that is not origynal, it is not yours. 2. If you make a superficial alteration in something you did not create, it is not yours.
True. But everything on the lists I quote could easily be original. Most of them could be non-superficial alterations of other things. Yet you do not automatically have rights to these things.
3. I do not insist that copyright grants any such rights. To the contrary, I insist that copyright only recognizes existing rights.
I know. That is what I insist. The rights did not exist before copyright became law, except as part of what society general grants to those who create -- recognition of what they create, and a right to prevent other people claiming creation of it (i.e., plagiarism, which is something entirely different).
5. You have danced aroind the periphery, failing to address my core argument: That absent a prior arrangement, it is impossible for you to own, or claim rights to, an original wotk of my creation.
Fine. However, absent a prior arrangement, it is impossible for you to prevent me from making a copy of a work of your creation. Morally, as long as I do not try to either claim it as my own creation, or pass it off as being your original work, there is nothing wrong with this either, because absent prior arrangement there is no reason for you to expect that I wouldn't. This is how people have behaved since the dawn of humanity -- they see somebody else making something to a particular design and then copy that design. It's part of what makes us unique, this ability to learn from each other. Sometimes intellectual property gets in the way of that natural fact.
This is slashdot. People who post here take just about any stance you can imagine. Unless you're replying to one of them, it's a non-sequiteur to just assume such a stance.
2. The original post, esspecially the headline, not necessarily the article it referenced.
The original post's headline is "The Guardian On Intellectual Property", which doesn't give any indication at all as to the stance they take. The text of it doesn't even come close to suggesting ignoring/aboloshing IP rules.
3. You still haven't effectively countered my core argument: What I make, I own, not you.
Why would I want to counter that argument? Why would you claim ownership of a copy I make of something that you made. I clearly own it, as I made it.
Basically the UK can't hope to compare with the US Geeks [...] equally the literature is a little less "hard-core", hence things like the superb Terry Pratchett books get a high rating.
Huh? The UK produces just about all of the geekiest literature, IMO. Look at any book by Ian Stewart & Jack Cohen, for example. Iain M. Banks' novels (or, for that matter, Iain Banks -- they may not be SF, but they're still geeky). Charles Stross. Ken McLeod. Dave Langford. These people produce a large proportion of the best, hardest, geekiest science fiction today.
What does the US have to compare? Greg Bear? Cory Doctorow? Please.;)
Re:First Prime Factorization Post
on
Top 20 Geek Novels
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
What's *really* geeky is that your username is a factorization of your uid. The only geekier thing would have been to wait until the next UID was prime. You'd have only had to wait until 900139!
The examples you cite are instances of things that are either unoriginal, i.e., not created, or that cannot be published, i.e. "not fixeed in a tangible form of expression".
Those objections only cover two of the bullet points I listed. What about these?
Titles, names, short phrases, and slogans; familiar symbols or designs; mere variations of typographic ornamentation, lettering, or coloring; mere listings of ingredients or contents
Ideas, procedures, methods, systems, processes, concepts, principles, discoveries, or devices, as distinguished from a description, explanation, or illustration
Legally speaking, you do *not* have rights in any of these the moment you create them, as your post insisted that you do, as only copyright could grant you such rights, but it does not.
What copyright law does do is codify protection that a society gives to an original work's creator. That protection, as well as society's rights in the matter, all flow from the fundamental and natural fact that a work's creator owns and holds al rights to his work when he creates. In simplistic terms, if I make something, I own it. You can't own it unless ownership is transferred from me. You have no rights regarding anything I make unless those rights are transferred from me. Copyright law is the legal fframework by which those transfers are made.
Sorry, I disagree. There is no "fundamental and natural fact that a work's creator owns and holds all rights to his work." If there were, it wouldn't have taken thousands of years beyond the creation of the first legal system until one recognised this, with reference to intellectual property. We only think this way because it is the way society has conditioned us. Why does society do this? Because copyright is useful to society, as it enables concepts to be treated as any other product of a capitalist society. If we weren't capitalists, the idea of controlling rights to our ideas would likely seem strange and abhorrent to us.
In this world view, copyright law is not a legal framework for transferring these rights, it is the very principle from which these rights arise.
However, the existence of those abuses does not in any way justify taking a stance that asserts IP does not exist.
Who's taking that stance? I'm not, and neither is the author of the article. We both just feel that some modifications to the laws are necessary to ensure abuses like these don't continue to happen.
I don't accept you alteration of my analogy. The original post blamed the alleged problems caused by IP for the illegal and/or unethical activity of many people surrounding IP.
Did it? I don't see that. Can you point me to any mention, even, of such illegal/unethical activity in the article? Did you even read the same article as me?
Err... I did. It mentions the links in one short paragraph, the rest is talking about reviews. I'd say the reviews were definitely the main thrust of the article, and these were certainly the subject of the quoted correspondence between Thompson & amazon.
The whole tags thing is experimental anyway, I doubt many people are using them. I suspect many more people are reading the reviews, which are much more likely to negatively affect Thompson's sales.
All information is unfree at the moment of creation.
That's not true, either. Some information is subject to copyright from the moment it is created.
Several categories of material are generally not eligible for federal copyright protection. These include among others:
*
Works that have not been fixed in a tangible form of expression (for example, choreographic works that have not been notated or recorded, or improvisational speeches or performances that have not been written or recorded)
*
Titles, names, short phrases, and slogans; familiar symbols or designs; mere variations of typographic ornamentation, lettering, or coloring; mere listings of ingredients or contents
*
Ideas, procedures, methods, systems, processes, concepts, principles, discoveries, or devices, as distinguished from a description, explanation, or illustration
*
Works consisting entirely of information that is common property and containing no original authorship (for example: standard calendars, height and weight charts, tape measures and rulers, and lists or tables taken from public documents or other common sources)
The issue isn't "problems being caused by the concept of 'intellectual property'". That's tantamount to declaring the problem of theft is due to the concept of ownership.
Only if the problem you're talking about is piracy. The problem that Mr Brown is talking about in his article is the stifling of innovation due to the issue of overly broad patents on subjects that shouldn't be patentable, along with the gradual death of fair use of copyright works due to DRM protections that do not allow for fair use and are legally enforced. To extend an analogy into the world of real property, it would be like saying "the reason why people have a problem getting to the town square is because the land owners who own all of the land around the town aren't letting them through any more."
The solution to both problems, incidentally, is the same: state-enforced areas of common property and rights of way that anybody can use in order to get to places where they need to go. No individual person should be permitted to completely control the property around any important place[1]. Fair use is an attempt at such a law for intellectual property, but does seem to fall short a little from what is required. Other points that need addressing include patents that prevent any solution to a particular problem, not just the one used by the patenter.
[1] - There's an interesting problem with UK law at the moment. Over the years, many properties have been built to which the only access is across common land. This is not normally a problem as common land is, generally, exactly that: land that is available for use by all people. However, the laws of property can be rather arcane, and some common land is actually officially owned by the Lord of the Manor that it is contained within. Such titles are frequently available for purchase, frequently for fairly small sums of money, and a number of people have purchased them in order to claim rent from those who must cross the common land to get to their homes. AFAIK, this situation has not been resolved, but you can be sure that it will eventually be resolved in favour of the home owners. Any property rights these Lords may have is secondary to those of people who require access to the land for their legitimate interests.
they have patented a specific, lab-created, genetic variation thereof. This doesn't occur naturally, and it certainly required a lot of research. The knowledge of how to complete this procedure, or even a list of the exact genetic changes should be patentable.
I agree with you. What should not be patentable, however, is the result of the natural process that occurrs when such a mouse mates with another such mouse -- i.e. new mice of a similar specification.
While I don't think this specific patent has been used in this way, I am aware that Monsanto have been able to enforce some of the genetically-engineered crop patents like this, suing farmers for using second generation seeds.
If those farmers had been doing gene splicing to produce those GM crops, then I'd back Monsantos rights in the process to do that. They didn't. They just used the seeds they had left over from the last year's harvest to plant the next year's, the same as farmers have done all over the world for thousands of years. That kind of process should not be affected by patents. But, unfortunately, it is.
This is baloney. It's been quite a while since the constitution was written, and right there in Article 1 section 8 clause 8 is the statement by the framers that is the basis for our patent system. Ideas could be owned in 1789, and long before that as well, as England also had a patent system.
Considering that the legal system in question is founded on the British and Germanic systems of the dark ages, that's pretty recent, in comparitive terms. The concept of property dates back many thousands of years, intellectual property a few hundred.
Facts about the world, laws of nature, or abstract mathematical statements or equations, cannot be patented.
That's the original intent of patent law, yes. However, if you look at the case law, you'll see that the courts have taken it well beyond these foundations, and have allowed patents to stand in these areas. Patents on naturally occurring genes and biochemicals, for example, have been repeatedly held to be valid.
An animal that's human-engineered is certainly not a 'fact of nature' -- it never existed before someone made it. It's a result of engineering just as much as an electric circuit or a toaster. It's just alive.
The first such animal isn't. Any of its offspring, however, are.
I tend to think that many of the drugs that the developing world uses were developed at least partially due to the patent system.
That's your thoughts on the matter. I, for one, expect that people would still be willing to pay the same money for pharmaceuticals if they weren't patented, but the companies would be spending less money on patent administration -- which means more money and more time on research. In fact, they'd probably find the only way to keep their profits up is to spend more on innovation, just to keep ahead of the product clone companies that would spring up around them. It wouldn't be good for the current big names, but I'm sure it would be good for the rest of us.
The system is supposed to work this way. It incentivizes companies to research and patent things as fast as they can, pushing the limits of technology, and then disclosing them to the public. Otherwise, they might do less research, and might keep their research secret, thereby keeping it from the rest of us much longer than the 20 year life of patents... Sometimes reverse engineering is possible, but sometimes it's not.
The world of pharmaceuticals doesn't work like that. In order to get clearance to supply a drug, it must undergo extensive study. There is no way that a drug that hadn't been adequately described could go on the market. And outside of biotech, there are very few things that can't be reverse engineered.
Furthermore, the patent system isn't "supposed to work like that". Its goal is to promote innovation, not applications for patents. First invention is supposed to be adequate protection from somebody else patenting your invention. But it seems that the only way to prove first invention these days is to be the first to apply for the patent. Frankly, that's backwards.
Without the ability to charge for software, much software would not get made, such as... GAMES! Want to see all big, good games disappear? Just abolish all IP rights in software.
I think if you read this article as supporting the abolition of IP rights, you need to read it again. Particularly the last paragraph. I don't think Mr Brown supports such things any more than you do. He just wants to see a rationalisation of the system, to see it turned into something more equitable and with less legal overhead than the current one.
I really don't understand how this follows. There are huge startup costs for any new company, and getting a couple of patents won't change the cost too much. The first company into any field would have a huge advantage if it could get a patent on its business methods, and therefore would be unlikely to fail...
Slashdot Mirror
any database that will silently alter data you're inserting into a table if it doesn't fit the specified constraints instead of returning an error is unusable for serious work.
This has been fixed for nearly a year:
Added STRICT_TRANS_TABLES, STRICT_ALL_TABLES, NO_ZERO_IN_DATE, NO_ZERO_DATE, ERROR_FOR_DIVISION_BY_ZERO, and TRADITIONAL SQL modes. The TRADITIONAL mode is shorthand for all the preceding modes. When using mode TRADITIONAL, MySQL generates an error if you try to insert a wrong value in a column. It does not adjust the value to the closest possible legal value.
(MySQL changelog from December 04)
If you want to complain about MySQL's inadequacies, please find a current inadequacy, not an out-of-date one.
It isn't anyone's business what software a particular company chooses to use, be it Open Source or Commercial.
Yes it is. If I do business with a company in a way that will require an exchange of data, I need to be able to understand the data formats that will be used. This means one of two situations must occur:
* The data format used is a proprietary format. In this case, we both need to be using identical software.
* The data format used is an open standard. In this case, the software used is irrelevant, at least as long as the standard is followed adequately by both parties.
Now, in the former case, it matters to me very much whether or not the software in question is open source or commercial, largely because I don't want to have to pay for it. If I do have to pay for it, I'm likely to take my business elsewhere.
If they try to add "3m1n3m", "adona-may", or "brit. sraeps" to the list, they're breaking an encryption scheme and that's illegal for them !!!
Err... no. It's only illegal if the encryption scheme in question is used to provide unauthorised copying of a copyrighted work. None of these schemes are.
Then why can't I run one cygwin program with the dll in its own directory when I already have a cygwin program (like sshd) running, and I get an error that says it's the wrong DLL version?
I believe cygwin uses named segments of shared memory to coordinate stuff. I suspect it's the DLL objecting to the fact that you have two different versions of it running concurrently -- the second to start probably checks a version number on the shared memory page and aborts if it is incorrect.
How much time would upgrading SuSE8 to SuSE9 have taken?
My experience is about 6 hours for the upgrade, plus another 3 or 4 to check everything still works afterwards. My experience of compiling my own glibc suggests that this will take about twice as much work.
Downtime can cost a lot of money, this would have been a pressure on the admins.
Any real company employing the kind of solutions described (which included so-called "best of breed" commercial applications) would certainly have a staging server to use, and could then swap the staging server for the live one in order to deploy. This would result in no more than a minute's downtime if done correctly. It's possible to do it with zero downtime.
And isn't that kinda the point of the study?
I think by insisting they stick with SuSE8 and use applications on it that blatantly aren't compatible with it they skewed the results. I know if I'd had all of the other requirements given, I'd have done a complete upgrade.
Yeah, good point. It kind of implies that it's possible to objectively assess how good a system is at solving a class of problems. In this case, their "best of breed" software wasn't really very good at all, because while selecting it they failed to take account of the fact that it wouldn't run correctly on the OS version they were planning on installing it on. How good a piece of software is depends on many factors, too many to be able to describe any software as "best".
See Appendix 5.
The commercial apps in question, though, had dependencies on (1) a very recent version of MySQL, and (2) a more recent version of glibc than is included in the version of SuSE in use. These two dependencies were the root cause of almost all the problems described in this paper.
This is utter bollocks. See my analysis of the report in this comment.
They broke RPM by hand compiling glibc, not the other way around. It says so quite explicitly. They hand compiled glibc because they were asked to install (without upgrading to SuSE 9) an application that wasn't compatible with the version in SuSE 8.
OK, I've found and read the report now, and this is just bollocks. From the report:
So the test involved installing on SuSE 8 two applications that (effectively) required SuSE 9. Rather than upgrade to SuSE 9, the test mechanism required the operators to hack their systems to make this work. Some of them did this by taking the ill-advised step of compiling their own glibc; doing this broke the vendor supplied version of 'rpm', leaving them unable to undo their changes. Others did it by partially upgrading their system to SuSE 9 by installing SuSE 9 rpms over their SuSE 8 equivalents.
The Windows equivalent test worked fine because the equivalent applications that the Windows operators were required to install were intended for use with the version of Windows they had installed.
Basically, the test wasn't fair. If SuSE-9 dependent applications were to be used, then SuSE 9 should have been used as the basis of the test. If SuSE 8 had to be tested, then equivalent applications that functioned on SuSE 8 should have been found (chances are, slightly older versions of the same 2 apps would have functioned fine).
So, no, glibc wasn't "mucked up because SUSE's YAST was broken". The operators broke YAST by trying to install a glibc upgrade in order to use an application that wasn't compatible with the system they were running. The test was unrealistic; they weren't given the option of upgrading the system properly. They were told, "make this application run on this system." It's not surprising that some of them failed.
Funny, I've been using SuSE for about 5 years now, and have never had to hand compile glibc[1]. I wonder what exactly they needed to do that required this.
[1] -- OK, I *have* compiled my own glibc in the past, but this was in order to run an experimental system that supported both 2.0 and 2.2 kernels, which wasn't an option SuSE supported at the time.
It's not clear where they should have gotten GLIBC, and that was part of the test
Personally, I'd have taken the version from my installation CDs and reinstalled all patches short of the one that caused the problem, then waited for the problem to be resolved before installing further patches.
Also worth noting: I've been running SuSE systems here since 6.1 was the current version, and I've never seen YAST (or YOU) break glibc. I don't know what they did wrong to cause it to break, but I bet it was something pretty nonstandard.
Meanwhile, on NT, you can't even delete a file that is in use. You just can't do it! You can't rename it to move it out of the way either, like you [generally] could in DOS and Win9x. Finally, in the case of shared libraries, even if you could, Windows only allows a single instance of a DLL to exist, and the instances are identified with names.
The former problem was fixed in Windows XP, although applications need to be modified to open files with the FILE_SHARE_DELETE flag. This is now done for executing applications, for instance, so you will find that on XP you can delete a running program or DLLs it references.
The latter hasn't been a problem in NT, ever. Windows 3 used to identify DLLs only by filename. I'm not sure whether 9x inherited this behaviour or not, I don't believe it did. Certainly under NT they are identified by complete pathname, and you can have totally different DLLs with the same name, even open by the same application simultaneously if you wish.
OK, you get a throwaway account, find the next number, and prime factorise it. But what's to prevent someone else popping in there in the meantime?
Nothing. But a quick top-of-the-head calculation based on my estimate of when I signed up for my account suggests that the average time between slashdot account creations is about 4 minutes, so as long as you aren't doing it at peak time (which is probably early evening eastern US, at a rough guess) you should be fine.
1. If you make something that is not origynal, it is not yours.
2. If you make a superficial alteration in something you did not create, it is not yours.
True. But everything on the lists I quote could easily be original. Most of them could be non-superficial alterations of other things. Yet you do not automatically have rights to these things.
3. I do not insist that copyright grants any such rights. To the contrary, I insist that copyright only recognizes existing rights.
I know. That is what I insist. The rights did not exist before copyright became law, except as part of what society general grants to those who create -- recognition of what they create, and a right to prevent other people claiming creation of it (i.e., plagiarism, which is something entirely different).
5. You have danced aroind the periphery, failing to address my core argument: That absent a prior arrangement, it is impossible for you to own, or claim rights to, an original wotk of my creation.
Fine. However, absent a prior arrangement, it is impossible for you to prevent me from making a copy of a work of your creation. Morally, as long as I do not try to either claim it as my own creation, or pass it off as being your original work, there is nothing wrong with this either, because absent prior arrangement there is no reason for you to expect that I wouldn't. This is how people have behaved since the dawn of humanity -- they see somebody else making something to a particular design and then copy that design. It's part of what makes us unique, this ability to learn from each other. Sometimes intellectual property gets in the way of that natural fact.
1. Many who post here take that stance.
This is slashdot. People who post here take just about any stance you can imagine. Unless you're replying to one of them, it's a non-sequiteur to just assume such a stance.
2. The original post, esspecially the headline, not necessarily the article it referenced.
The original post's headline is "The Guardian On Intellectual Property", which doesn't give any indication at all as to the stance they take. The text of it doesn't even come close to suggesting ignoring/aboloshing IP rules.
3. You still haven't effectively countered my core argument: What I make, I own, not you.
Why would I want to counter that argument? Why would you claim ownership of a copy I make of something that you made. I clearly own it, as I made it.
I'll see your Abbot and raise you a Stewart. Flatterland.
Basically the UK can't hope to compare with the US Geeks [...] equally the literature is a little less "hard-core", hence things like the superb Terry Pratchett books get a high rating.
;)
Huh? The UK produces just about all of the geekiest literature, IMO. Look at any book by Ian Stewart & Jack Cohen, for example. Iain M. Banks' novels (or, for that matter, Iain Banks -- they may not be SF, but they're still geeky). Charles Stross. Ken McLeod. Dave Langford. These people produce a large proportion of the best, hardest, geekiest science fiction today.
What does the US have to compare? Greg Bear? Cory Doctorow? Please.
What's *really* geeky is that your username is a factorization of your uid. The only geekier thing would have been to wait until the next UID was prime. You'd have only had to wait until 900139!
The examples you cite are instances of things that are either unoriginal, i.e., not created, or that cannot be published, i.e. "not fixeed in a tangible form of expression".
Those objections only cover two of the bullet points I listed. What about these?
Titles, names, short phrases, and slogans; familiar symbols or designs; mere variations of typographic ornamentation, lettering, or coloring; mere listings of ingredients or contents
Ideas, procedures, methods, systems, processes, concepts, principles, discoveries, or devices, as distinguished from a description, explanation, or illustration
Legally speaking, you do *not* have rights in any of these the moment you create them, as your post insisted that you do, as only copyright could grant you such rights, but it does not.
What copyright law does do is codify protection that a society gives to an original work's creator. That protection, as well as society's rights in the matter, all flow from the fundamental and natural fact that a work's creator owns and holds al rights to his work when he creates. In simplistic terms, if I make something, I own it. You can't own it unless ownership is transferred from me. You have no rights regarding anything I make unless those rights are transferred from me. Copyright law is the legal fframework by which those transfers are made.
Sorry, I disagree. There is no "fundamental and natural fact that a work's creator owns and holds all rights to his work." If there were, it wouldn't have taken thousands of years beyond the creation of the first legal system until one recognised this, with reference to intellectual property. We only think this way because it is the way society has conditioned us. Why does society do this? Because copyright is useful to society, as it enables concepts to be treated as any other product of a capitalist society. If we weren't capitalists, the idea of controlling rights to our ideas would likely seem strange and abhorrent to us.
In this world view, copyright law is not a legal framework for transferring these rights, it is the very principle from which these rights arise.
However, the existence of those abuses does not in any way justify taking a stance that asserts IP does not exist.
Who's taking that stance? I'm not, and neither is the author of the article. We both just feel that some modifications to the laws are necessary to ensure abuses like these don't continue to happen.
I don't accept you alteration of my analogy. The original post blamed the alleged problems caused by IP for the illegal and/or unethical activity of many people surrounding IP.
Did it? I don't see that. Can you point me to any mention, even, of such illegal/unethical activity in the article? Did you even read the same article as me?
Err... I did. It mentions the links in one short paragraph, the rest is talking about reviews. I'd say the reviews were definitely the main thrust of the article, and these were certainly the subject of the quoted correspondence between Thompson & amazon.
The whole tags thing is experimental anyway, I doubt many people are using them. I suspect many more people are reading the reviews, which are much more likely to negatively affect Thompson's sales.
That's not true, either. Some information is subject to copyright from the moment it is created.
Source
The issue isn't "problems being caused by the concept of 'intellectual property'". That's tantamount to declaring the problem of theft is due to the concept of ownership.
Only if the problem you're talking about is piracy. The problem that Mr Brown is talking about in his article is the stifling of innovation due to the issue of overly broad patents on subjects that shouldn't be patentable, along with the gradual death of fair use of copyright works due to DRM protections that do not allow for fair use and are legally enforced. To extend an analogy into the world of real property, it would be like saying "the reason why people have a problem getting to the town square is because the land owners who own all of the land around the town aren't letting them through any more."
The solution to both problems, incidentally, is the same: state-enforced areas of common property and rights of way that anybody can use in order to get to places where they need to go. No individual person should be permitted to completely control the property around any important place[1]. Fair use is an attempt at such a law for intellectual property, but does seem to fall short a little from what is required. Other points that need addressing include patents that prevent any solution to a particular problem, not just the one used by the patenter.
[1] - There's an interesting problem with UK law at the moment. Over the years, many properties have been built to which the only access is across common land. This is not normally a problem as common land is, generally, exactly that: land that is available for use by all people. However, the laws of property can be rather arcane, and some common land is actually officially owned by the Lord of the Manor that it is contained within. Such titles are frequently available for purchase, frequently for fairly small sums of money, and a number of people have purchased them in order to claim rent from those who must cross the common land to get to their homes. AFAIK, this situation has not been resolved, but you can be sure that it will eventually be resolved in favour of the home owners. Any property rights these Lords may have is secondary to those of people who require access to the land for their legitimate interests.
they have patented a specific, lab-created, genetic variation thereof. This doesn't occur naturally, and it certainly required a lot of research. The knowledge of how to complete this procedure, or even a list of the exact genetic changes should be patentable.
I agree with you. What should not be patentable, however, is the result of the natural process that occurrs when such a mouse mates with another such mouse -- i.e. new mice of a similar specification.
While I don't think this specific patent has been used in this way, I am aware that Monsanto have been able to enforce some of the genetically-engineered crop patents like this, suing farmers for using second generation seeds.
If those farmers had been doing gene splicing to produce those GM crops, then I'd back Monsantos rights in the process to do that. They didn't. They just used the seeds they had left over from the last year's harvest to plant the next year's, the same as farmers have done all over the world for thousands of years. That kind of process should not be affected by patents. But, unfortunately, it is.
This is baloney. It's been quite a while since the constitution was written, and right there in Article 1 section 8 clause 8 is the statement by the framers that is the basis for our patent system. Ideas could be owned in 1789, and long before that as well, as England also had a patent system.
... GAMES! Want to see all big, good games disappear? Just abolish all IP rights in software.
Considering that the legal system in question is founded on the British and Germanic systems of the dark ages, that's pretty recent, in comparitive terms. The concept of property dates back many thousands of years, intellectual property a few hundred.
Facts about the world, laws of nature, or abstract mathematical statements or equations, cannot be patented.
That's the original intent of patent law, yes. However, if you look at the case law, you'll see that the courts have taken it well beyond these foundations, and have allowed patents to stand in these areas. Patents on naturally occurring genes and biochemicals, for example, have been repeatedly held to be valid.
An animal that's human-engineered is certainly not a 'fact of nature' -- it never existed before someone made it. It's a result of engineering just as much as an electric circuit or a toaster. It's just alive.
The first such animal isn't. Any of its offspring, however, are.
I tend to think that many of the drugs that the developing world uses were developed at least partially due to the patent system.
That's your thoughts on the matter. I, for one, expect that people would still be willing to pay the same money for pharmaceuticals if they weren't patented, but the companies would be spending less money on patent administration -- which means more money and more time on research. In fact, they'd probably find the only way to keep their profits up is to spend more on innovation, just to keep ahead of the product clone companies that would spring up around them. It wouldn't be good for the current big names, but I'm sure it would be good for the rest of us.
The system is supposed to work this way. It incentivizes companies to research and patent things as fast as they can, pushing the limits of technology, and then disclosing them to the public. Otherwise, they might do less research, and might keep their research secret, thereby keeping it from the rest of us much longer than the 20 year life of patents... Sometimes reverse engineering is possible, but sometimes it's not.
The world of pharmaceuticals doesn't work like that. In order to get clearance to supply a drug, it must undergo extensive study. There is no way that a drug that hadn't been adequately described could go on the market. And outside of biotech, there are very few things that can't be reverse engineered.
Furthermore, the patent system isn't "supposed to work like that". Its goal is to promote innovation, not applications for patents. First invention is supposed to be adequate protection from somebody else patenting your invention. But it seems that the only way to prove first invention these days is to be the first to apply for the patent. Frankly, that's backwards.
Without the ability to charge for software, much software would not get made, such as
I think if you read this article as supporting the abolition of IP rights, you need to read it again. Particularly the last paragraph. I don't think Mr Brown supports such things any more than you do. He just wants to see a rationalisation of the system, to see it turned into something more equitable and with less legal overhead than the current one.
I really don't understand how this follows. There are huge startup costs for any new company, and getting a couple of patents won't change the cost too much. The first company into any field would have a huge advantage if it could get a patent on its business methods, and therefore would be unlikely to fail...
First companies in a new field o