It's virtually certain that the creator will be screwed and the large company will profit.
Telling me that performing an operation on a patient will kill the patient would not dissuade me from performing it if the patient were already dead. That is to say, strong copyright and patent protection have not prevented the large companies from screwing the little guy, so it's not a valid reason to maintain the status quo. It is a well known fact that the only people who can count on making a profit from most publishing are the publishers themselves. Maybe big wheels like Stephen King can afford to walk away from publishers who refuse to allow them to retain copyright, but most authors that fit the description "little guy" wind up having to give all rights to the publisher. How many recording artists and authors have been screwed by their publishers? It is clear that copyright is not protecting *them*.
In the software world, distribution and mass production costs have now been brought to virtually nothing. The same could be said of e-publishing of copyright material. The large companies to which you refer would probably not touch anything in the public domain anyway, because they would know that they couldn't prevent other large companies from competing with them. GPL'd materials will be avoided by most large companies for the same reason and also because of the redistribution clauses in the GPL. Even where these factors do not prevent the large companies from trying to crush the little guy, many customers would make the decision to buy from more ethically clean sources, because Barnes and Noble and the GNU web page are just about equally accessible from the web.
Besides, according to those who wrote the Copyright Laws, the reason for those laws is *not* to protect anyone, but to benefit *society* by encouraging people to add to the public domain by giving them exclusive rights to publish *for a limited time*. Disney and other major copyright holders are being quite successful at removing the time limits; it is widely acknowledged that nothing published by a major outlet today will *ever* enter the public domain. Add to that that the technological protections being put in (DVD-CSS, DOI, etc.), together with the DMCA, have made it illegal to access copyright material without the publisher's permission, even after (or if) it has passed into the public domain. In this setting, copyright holders are no longer obligated to compensate society for the exclusive right to publish, and so are basically getting a free ride.
As for the issues of paying the bills while producing public domain and GPL work, maybe it is true that those who believe that intellectual property *should* be free have to make compromises to the current legal environment in which it is not. Releasing as much of your work into the public domain as you can afford to is for many a way of giving back to society. The same motivation leads many ISPs whose businesses are largely based on Open Source software to encourage their sysadmins to GPL the tools they develop.
In closing, I'm not calling you or people who believe as you do morons or hypocrites, or corporate shills, or any of the other things I might like to in a fit of emotion, but instead attempting to reason with you. If you do not understand why I believe the way I do, I will try to explain, but please refrain in any reply from this unseemly name-calling.
Of course most real radicals enjoy eating and having shelter. Putting patentable ideas into the public domain, or GPL'ing them, doesn't prevent the creator from making money by being first to sell products based on them or by creating better products based on those ideas than others can make.
Many Open Source developers are students and professors, it is true. But there are others: Linus Torvalds has a day job and still finds time to direct kernel development, the KDE team is largely made up of people who work for TrollTech, and there are many many sysadmins who Open Source tools they have created to help themselves in their jobs. Furthermore, we can assume that there are *some* developers who have made themselves independently wealthy through their own hard work and can therefore afford to code for free. If I am lucky enough to find myself in such a position, that is what I hope to do.
You are mistaken when you imply that those who don't believe in the ownership of ideas are themselves incapable of making a valuable creative contribution. If you believe in "Intellectual Property", that's your business, but it doesn't give you the right to denigrate the work of those who believe differently than you. There is not *yet* a law that states that all intellectual activity must be undertaken in service of the profit motive.
I happen to be a producer of "intellectual property" who thinks that the creative work of myself and others should be free. There are many intellectual workers who have sufficient humility to know that their best ideas are discoveries and not creations.
Does this mean that I will not seek patent protection for my ideas? No, because the fact is that, without such protection, some unscrupulous person may deprive me of my rights to use the thoughts in my own head. However, my reluctant willingness to pay protection to the patent lawyers does not change the fact of my non-belief in "intellectual property", nor does it change the fact that I would be extremely reluctant to prosecute someone for infringing on my IP.
While I think it is nice to be compensated for my work, I can't just proceed from there on purely economic and non-philosophical grounds to a belief in something which doesn't exist. I think there are many in the Open Source community who feel this way; in fact, I think this belief is a large part of the philosophical foundation of the Open Source community.
All that having been said, I think it is probably true that many of the people exclaiming "Information wants to be free!" simply want to get movies, music, etc. for free for less lofty reasons. However, just because selfish and immature cynics exist doesn't mean that real radicals don't.
I find this comment kind of funny. Experience doing Windows tech support over pcAnywhere connections has taught me that using the Windows Run dialog (which is basically a command line) is a great deal faster than mousing around with the file manager. If you know the full text of the commands you want to use and can type worth a damn, the Run dialog can save you hundreds of mouse clicks a day. That seems easier to me, so, I guess you can lump Windows in with the rest of the GUIs that blow. Even Apple will be offering similar functionality in OSX, so you may be forced to use a GUI that blows. Of course, you could always just throw away your keyboard; that would make the command line very difficult to use indeed.
I have *not* read any postings suggesting that filters be outlawed. The problem most slashdotters have with this is that filtering software is being *mandated*. It's a massive windfall for the makers of these shoddy products, and a tragedy for students everywhere. If you want to install filtering software at your house, I don't think anybody here (unless your own kids are on slashdot, in which case, it's probably too late) will have a problem with that. OTOH, most slashdotters don't think the idiots writing this crap deserve the gift being given them by our legislature.
How about, "This is how you can break the school's rules and get the information you need for that report you're doing on breast cancer/free speech/filtering software." Is that better?
The esskyoowell pronunciation is sufficiently widespread at this point that I think you may just have to live with it. Besides, SQL stands for something, right? Users of the esskyoowell pronunciation are probably more interested in being understood than being correct. In addition, what is to stop someone from producing a product called Sequel and thereby confusing matters further? If you and the rest of the ISO committee had really thought the pronunciation so important, you should have released a pronunciation key, or perhaps a recording of yourself saying, "This is self-congratulatory committee member, and I pronounce SQL 'seekwell'."
I suspect that, if pushed, you will define this "absolute" morality to which you refer as very similar to the morality of modern western civilization. I guess that would be a simple coincidence. I would bet money that a hundred years ago you would have defined this "absolute" morality differently (Don't bother trying to take me up on this unless you've got a time machine and a neuralyzer). Just as one example, not much more than a hundred years ago, it was accepted as fact by many that anyone other than an adult white male didn't have the necessary mental tools to responsibly determine their own fate.
In the end, it really doesn't matter if there is an "absolute" morality; our ability to perceive such a thing is so incredibly limited as to produce virtual relativism. That is to say, how do you know which morality-spewing know-it-all is spewing the one true morality?
Re:Price-Performance of "iCubes" and other Macs
on
X On OSX Now Free
·
· Score: 1
You have exceeded your licensed usage of the word "futz" and words derived therefrom. Please refrain from using these terms until you have arranged for more licenses.
The trend in legislation is plain to see: whoever has greater potential financial gains at stake will win any dispute. If no clear financial gain can be argued, then whoever already has more money will win. Look at the example of Corinthians.com. An American citizen with an interest Paul's Letter to the Corinthians registered this domain years ago, and has been serving up content related to this book of the New Testament on the site. A Brazilian soccer team, the Corinthians (go figure) decided they wanted to have Corinthians.com in addition to Corinthians.com.br. So they petitioned to have the domain name ripped from the current owner. They won. I think all of the sh*t about "good faith" only applies until a corporation with lots of money shows up asking for the domain name. At that point, the bidding opens up, whether or not someone already owns the domain name.
I think the time has come for an alternative to the DNS system, so that those of us who don't want to participate in the corporatization of the web can just "move away". Then we can all just laugh at NSI and their customers as they traffic in domain names that noone will ever use.
I did not say that no changes or updates would have been made; I said that the "modern version" of Photoshop would not have been created. It may be that *some* newer version of Photoshop would have been created, but the feature-rich (and expensive to develop) "modern version" of Photoshop would have been unnecessary without the pressure of competition. Instead of the incredibly powerful image editing tool we have now, we would instead have a tool only powerful enough to maintain profitability in the face of the (very real) factors you mention. Surely you don't mean to suggest that lack of competition fosters innovation?
In response to your condescending "Grow up" statement: Fsck you.
OK, now that we've made enemies of one another, time to drop some knowledge on your sorry ass. You get protection from the "chuckleheads" of the world by patenting your invention. In exchange, you make the details of your invention known and agree that others may use said invention without paying you after the term of the patent has expired.
If you *choose* to forgo patent protection in favor of trade secrets, you are not protected in any way from the chuckleheads of the world. You must instead make an effort to keep them from figuring out your invention, because you *chose* to forgo patent protection.
Trade secret protection is a gamble. If you manage to keep your invention secret, you can hold onto it indefinitely (as in the case of Coca-Cola), and you win. If your secret slips out or is discovered, you lose.
Companies playing this game are betting that their technology will be difficult to reverse engineer. What they are increasingly finding is that there are some incredibly determined, talented, and resourceful hackers out there. The techniques described in the article are intended to make things more difficult for these hackers. I would agree that these techniques are a Good Thing. What I object to is the equation of reverse engineering, which is a Good and Necessary Thing (read the numerous postings on this story having to do with the reverse engineering of the IBM PC BIOS), with theft.
Forgive my repeating myself, but this same bullsh*t misreading of the story keeps coming up on different threads, and I feel I must make some effort to balance the bs with some truth:
The story is not about patents; it is about trade secrets, which are not protected in the same way. The whole idea of obfuscating the circuitry would not be necessary if the contents were protected by patents. Since they are not protected by patent (apparently, see previous statement), making them difficult to reverse engineer increases the secrecy and therefore adds an additional measure of protection for the trade secrets contained.
The story is not about patents; it is about trade secrets, which are not protected in the same way. The whole idea of obfuscating the circuitry would not be necessary if the contents were protected by patents. Since they are not protected by patent (apparently, see previous statement), making them difficult to reverse engineer increases the secrecy and therefore adds an additional measure of protection for the trade secrets contained.
Trade secrets are not protected by the law, except when someone breaches an NDA or other contract forbidding them from revealing the secret. Legal protection for your invention is what you get for taking it to the patent office.
Take the example of the secret formula for Coca-Cola. Had they patented it, they could have prevented anyone from making a soft drink using the same recipe, no matter how they came across the recipe, for a period of twenty or so years. After that time, the recipe would be in the public domain and freely available for all to use.
Coca-cola didn't like the sound of this, so they decided to keep their formula secret. This works as long as the formula is in fact secret. Using trade secret protection allows you to keep your idea to yourself indefinitely, but the burden of protecting your secret falls on you alone, and is not shared by the legal system.
In fact, this is precisely what the article is trying to help companies with: making it difficult to discover trade secrets. If reverse engineering were illegal, as you think it is, the obfuscation of the circuitry would be unnecessary: anyone who reverse engineered a device would be breaking the law. As it is, reverse engineering is legal, and companies that want to protect their inventions using trade secrets have to consider techniques such as those described in order to keep their trade secrets truly secret.
I don't believe reverse engineering of anything is illegal, unless (1) the target being reverse engineered is (or can be defined as) a technological measure for the protection of copyrighted material and (2) the reverse engineering has purposes other than interoperability. If you find *any* evidence that reverse engineering (outside of the situations addressed by the DMCA) is illegal in the US, please post it here.
Your statement seems to be derived from a "that sounds wrong" basis and not from any legitimate source. (Of course, if you happen to be the one person who decides what is and what is not illegal, I beg your forgiveness!) It's a lot like all the people that keep saying that DigitalConvergence has a reason to complain about the theft of their "IP". No one can categorize the "IP" being stolen from DC as either (a) copyright work, (b) trademarks, or (c) patented technique. If what is being "stolen" from DC is Intellectual Property at all, it is a trade secret, and therefore not protected from reverse engineering.
I applaud your desire to see the original inventors get paid, but to outlaw reverse engineering in service of that goal would have too high a cost. Look through the comments on this story, and you will find many many many comments to the effect that Compaq's clean room reverse engineering of the IBM PC BIOS was the single most important event in the creation of the boom in personal computing. If you could turn back the clock, would you prevent them from making the PC affordable, in order to protect poor, starving IBM from evil, thieving Compaq?
Modern versions of Photoshop would never have been created if Adobe did not know for a fact that there were others out there attempting to produce a better product with similar capabilities. Imagine Adobe had patented the use of a computer for the retouching of photos. Why waste money on development when you have a monopoly? Fire the programmers and let the public complain about missing features all they want; anyone who produced a competing product could be sued out of existence.
It is the competition between the Adobes and Corels, the Intels and the AMDs, that has driven the fantastic pace of innovation these last 40 or so years. Allow every single invention bullet-proof protection from competition and you will see the pace of change slow to a crawl.
[tinfoil]And the worst part of this is, when the economy goes south because of this, the rich will just get richer. Sometimes I think they're driving the economy into the ground on purpose.[/tinfoil]
You have found what I think is the key to what's wrong with software patents. To extend your example of the Cotton Gin, the patent on the Cotton Gin described one method of removing seeds (IIRC) from raw cotton. Anyone was welcome to invent a different method of removing seeds from cotton.
Software patents don't appear to work the same way. It seems that software patents enable you to prevent anyone else from producing software that performs the same function, regardless of how it accomplishes the task in question.
It may be that we can use this to bring about either (a) a complete repeal of software patentability or (b) modifications to software patent law that allow for the development of new software techniques without the risk of litigation. In those cases where there is only one way to solve a given problem using software, we might be able to get the patents repealed by showing that the ideas patented are mathematical algorithms and hence not patentable.
Slashdot Mirror
Must...have...last...word.
It's virtually certain that the creator will be screwed and the large company will profit.
Telling me that performing an operation on a patient will kill the patient would not dissuade me from performing it if the patient were already dead. That is to say, strong copyright and patent protection have not prevented the large companies from screwing the little guy, so it's not a valid reason to maintain the status quo. It is a well known fact that the only people who can count on making a profit from most publishing are the publishers themselves. Maybe big wheels like Stephen King can afford to walk away from publishers who refuse to allow them to retain copyright, but most authors that fit the description "little guy" wind up having to give all rights to the publisher. How many recording artists and authors have been screwed by their publishers? It is clear that copyright is not protecting *them*.
In the software world, distribution and mass production costs have now been brought to virtually nothing. The same could be said of e-publishing of copyright material. The large companies to which you refer would probably not touch anything in the public domain anyway, because they would know that they couldn't prevent other large companies from competing with them. GPL'd materials will be avoided by most large companies for the same reason and also because of the redistribution clauses in the GPL. Even where these factors do not prevent the large companies from trying to crush the little guy, many customers would make the decision to buy from more ethically clean sources, because Barnes and Noble and the GNU web page are just about equally accessible from the web.
Besides, according to those who wrote the Copyright Laws, the reason for those laws is *not* to protect anyone, but to benefit *society* by encouraging people to add to the public domain by giving them exclusive rights to publish *for a limited time*. Disney and other major copyright holders are being quite successful at removing the time limits; it is widely acknowledged that nothing published by a major outlet today will *ever* enter the public domain. Add to that that the technological protections being put in (DVD-CSS, DOI, etc.), together with the DMCA, have made it illegal to access copyright material without the publisher's permission, even after (or if) it has passed into the public domain. In this setting, copyright holders are no longer obligated to compensate society for the exclusive right to publish, and so are basically getting a free ride.
As for the issues of paying the bills while producing public domain and GPL work, maybe it is true that those who believe that intellectual property *should* be free have to make compromises to the current legal environment in which it is not. Releasing as much of your work into the public domain as you can afford to is for many a way of giving back to society. The same motivation leads many ISPs whose businesses are largely based on Open Source software to encourage their sysadmins to GPL the tools they develop.
In closing, I'm not calling you or people who believe as you do morons or hypocrites, or corporate shills, or any of the other things I might like to in a fit of emotion, but instead attempting to reason with you. If you do not understand why I believe the way I do, I will try to explain, but please refrain in any reply from this unseemly name-calling.
Of course most real radicals enjoy eating and having shelter. Putting patentable ideas into the public domain, or GPL'ing them, doesn't prevent the creator from making money by being first to sell products based on them or by creating better products based on those ideas than others can make.
Many Open Source developers are students and professors, it is true. But there are others: Linus Torvalds has a day job and still finds time to direct kernel development, the KDE team is largely made up of people who work for TrollTech, and there are many many sysadmins who Open Source tools they have created to help themselves in their jobs. Furthermore, we can assume that there are *some* developers who have made themselves independently wealthy through their own hard work and can therefore afford to code for free. If I am lucky enough to find myself in such a position, that is what I hope to do.
You are mistaken when you imply that those who don't believe in the ownership of ideas are themselves incapable of making a valuable creative contribution. If you believe in "Intellectual Property", that's your business, but it doesn't give you the right to denigrate the work of those who believe differently than you. There is not *yet* a law that states that all intellectual activity must be undertaken in service of the profit motive.
I happen to be a producer of "intellectual property" who thinks that the creative work of myself and others should be free. There are many intellectual workers who have sufficient humility to know that their best ideas are discoveries and not creations.
Does this mean that I will not seek patent protection for my ideas? No, because the fact is that, without such protection, some unscrupulous person may deprive me of my rights to use the thoughts in my own head. However, my reluctant willingness to pay protection to the patent lawyers does not change the fact of my non-belief in "intellectual property", nor does it change the fact that I would be extremely reluctant to prosecute someone for infringing on my IP.
While I think it is nice to be compensated for my work, I can't just proceed from there on purely economic and non-philosophical grounds to a belief in something which doesn't exist. I think there are many in the Open Source community who feel this way; in fact, I think this belief is a large part of the philosophical foundation of the Open Source community.
All that having been said, I think it is probably true that many of the people exclaiming "Information wants to be free!" simply want to get movies, music, etc. for free for less lofty reasons. However, just because selfish and immature cynics exist doesn't mean that real radicals don't.
Yo mama. Couldn't help myself.
I find this comment kind of funny. Experience doing Windows tech support over pcAnywhere connections has taught me that using the Windows Run dialog (which is basically a command line) is a great deal faster than mousing around with the file manager. If you know the full text of the commands you want to use and can type worth a damn, the Run dialog can save you hundreds of mouse clicks a day. That seems easier to me, so, I guess you can lump Windows in with the rest of the GUIs that blow. Even Apple will be offering similar functionality in OSX, so you may be forced to use a GUI that blows. Of course, you could always just throw away your keyboard; that would make the command line very difficult to use indeed.
Yeah, well, what have you done for us lately;-)
Sorta reminds me of the line of luggage named for Amelia Earhart. Who thought that was a good idea?
When the import duty on that Japanese DVD player exceeds the amount you make in a year, you will change your mind about this.
I have *not* read any postings suggesting that filters be outlawed. The problem most slashdotters have with this is that filtering software is being *mandated*. It's a massive windfall for the makers of these shoddy products, and a tragedy for students everywhere. If you want to install filtering software at your house, I don't think anybody here (unless your own kids are on slashdot, in which case, it's probably too late) will have a problem with that. OTOH, most slashdotters don't think the idiots writing this crap deserve the gift being given them by our legislature.
How about, "This is how you can break the school's rules and get the information you need for that report you're doing on breast cancer/free speech/filtering software." Is that better?
The esskyoowell pronunciation is sufficiently widespread at this point that I think you may just have to live with it. Besides, SQL stands for something, right? Users of the esskyoowell pronunciation are probably more interested in being understood than being correct. In addition, what is to stop someone from producing a product called Sequel and thereby confusing matters further? If you and the rest of the ISO committee had really thought the pronunciation so important, you should have released a pronunciation key, or perhaps a recording of yourself saying, "This is self-congratulatory committee member, and I pronounce SQL 'seekwell'."
I suspect that, if pushed, you will define this "absolute" morality to which you refer as very similar to the morality of modern western civilization. I guess that would be a simple coincidence. I would bet money that a hundred years ago you would have defined this "absolute" morality differently (Don't bother trying to take me up on this unless you've got a time machine and a neuralyzer). Just as one example, not much more than a hundred years ago, it was accepted as fact by many that anyone other than an adult white male didn't have the necessary mental tools to responsibly determine their own fate.
In the end, it really doesn't matter if there is an "absolute" morality; our ability to perceive such a thing is so incredibly limited as to produce virtual relativism. That is to say, how do you know which morality-spewing know-it-all is spewing the one true morality?
You have exceeded your licensed usage of the word "futz" and words derived therefrom. Please refrain from using these terms until you have arranged for more licenses.
Sincerely,
Licensing department, FutzCo
- Don't tattle.
- Always make fun of those different from you.
- Never say anything unless you're absolutely sure everyone else thinks the same thing.
I guess you learn something new every day.I think "Eden" may be the most clear statement of Lem's thinking on this theme. Not to be missed if you thought "Solaris" wasn't too inaccessible.
The trend in legislation is plain to see: whoever has greater potential financial gains at stake will win any dispute. If no clear financial gain can be argued, then whoever already has more money will win. Look at the example of Corinthians.com. An American citizen with an interest Paul's Letter to the Corinthians registered this domain years ago, and has been serving up content related to this book of the New Testament on the site. A Brazilian soccer team, the Corinthians (go figure) decided they wanted to have Corinthians.com in addition to Corinthians.com.br. So they petitioned to have the domain name ripped from the current owner. They won. I think all of the sh*t about "good faith" only applies until a corporation with lots of money shows up asking for the domain name. At that point, the bidding opens up, whether or not someone already owns the domain name.
I think the time has come for an alternative to the DNS system, so that those of us who don't want to participate in the corporatization of the web can just "move away". Then we can all just laugh at NSI and their customers as they traffic in domain names that noone will ever use.
I did not say that no changes or updates would have been made; I said that the "modern version" of Photoshop would not have been created. It may be that *some* newer version of Photoshop would have been created, but the feature-rich (and expensive to develop) "modern version" of Photoshop would have been unnecessary without the pressure of competition. Instead of the incredibly powerful image editing tool we have now, we would instead have a tool only powerful enough to maintain profitability in the face of the (very real) factors you mention. Surely you don't mean to suggest that lack of competition fosters innovation?
In response to your condescending "Grow up" statement: Fsck you.
OK, now that we've made enemies of one another, time to drop some knowledge on your sorry ass. You get protection from the "chuckleheads" of the world by patenting your invention. In exchange, you make the details of your invention known and agree that others may use said invention without paying you after the term of the patent has expired.
If you *choose* to forgo patent protection in favor of trade secrets, you are not protected in any way from the chuckleheads of the world. You must instead make an effort to keep them from figuring out your invention, because you *chose* to forgo patent protection.
Trade secret protection is a gamble. If you manage to keep your invention secret, you can hold onto it indefinitely (as in the case of Coca-Cola), and you win. If your secret slips out or is discovered, you lose.
Companies playing this game are betting that their technology will be difficult to reverse engineer. What they are increasingly finding is that there are some incredibly determined, talented, and resourceful hackers out there. The techniques described in the article are intended to make things more difficult for these hackers. I would agree that these techniques are a Good Thing. What I object to is the equation of reverse engineering, which is a Good and Necessary Thing (read the numerous postings on this story having to do with the reverse engineering of the IBM PC BIOS), with theft.
Forgive my repeating myself, but this same bullsh*t misreading of the story keeps coming up on different threads, and I feel I must make some effort to balance the bs with some truth:
The story is not about patents; it is about trade secrets, which are not protected in the same way. The whole idea of obfuscating the circuitry would not be necessary if the contents were protected by patents. Since they are not protected by patent (apparently, see previous statement), making them difficult to reverse engineer increases the secrecy and therefore adds an additional measure of protection for the trade secrets contained.
The story is not about patents; it is about trade secrets, which are not protected in the same way. The whole idea of obfuscating the circuitry would not be necessary if the contents were protected by patents. Since they are not protected by patent (apparently, see previous statement), making them difficult to reverse engineer increases the secrecy and therefore adds an additional measure of protection for the trade secrets contained.
Trade secrets are not protected by the law, except when someone breaches an NDA or other contract forbidding them from revealing the secret. Legal protection for your invention is what you get for taking it to the patent office.
Take the example of the secret formula for Coca-Cola. Had they patented it, they could have prevented anyone from making a soft drink using the same recipe, no matter how they came across the recipe, for a period of twenty or so years. After that time, the recipe would be in the public domain and freely available for all to use.
Coca-cola didn't like the sound of this, so they decided to keep their formula secret. This works as long as the formula is in fact secret. Using trade secret protection allows you to keep your idea to yourself indefinitely, but the burden of protecting your secret falls on you alone, and is not shared by the legal system.
In fact, this is precisely what the article is trying to help companies with: making it difficult to discover trade secrets. If reverse engineering were illegal, as you think it is, the obfuscation of the circuitry would be unnecessary: anyone who reverse engineered a device would be breaking the law. As it is, reverse engineering is legal, and companies that want to protect their inventions using trade secrets have to consider techniques such as those described in order to keep their trade secrets truly secret.
I don't believe reverse engineering of anything is illegal, unless (1) the target being reverse engineered is (or can be defined as) a technological measure for the protection of copyrighted material and (2) the reverse engineering has purposes other than interoperability. If you find *any* evidence that reverse engineering (outside of the situations addressed by the DMCA) is illegal in the US, please post it here.
Your statement seems to be derived from a "that sounds wrong" basis and not from any legitimate source. (Of course, if you happen to be the one person who decides what is and what is not illegal, I beg your forgiveness!) It's a lot like all the people that keep saying that DigitalConvergence has a reason to complain about the theft of their "IP". No one can categorize the "IP" being stolen from DC as either (a) copyright work, (b) trademarks, or (c) patented technique. If what is being "stolen" from DC is Intellectual Property at all, it is a trade secret, and therefore not protected from reverse engineering.
I applaud your desire to see the original inventors get paid, but to outlaw reverse engineering in service of that goal would have too high a cost. Look through the comments on this story, and you will find many many many comments to the effect that Compaq's clean room reverse engineering of the IBM PC BIOS was the single most important event in the creation of the boom in personal computing. If you could turn back the clock, would you prevent them from making the PC affordable, in order to protect poor, starving IBM from evil, thieving Compaq?
Modern versions of Photoshop would never have been created if Adobe did not know for a fact that there were others out there attempting to produce a better product with similar capabilities. Imagine Adobe had patented the use of a computer for the retouching of photos. Why waste money on development when you have a monopoly? Fire the programmers and let the public complain about missing features all they want; anyone who produced a competing product could be sued out of existence.
It is the competition between the Adobes and Corels, the Intels and the AMDs, that has driven the fantastic pace of innovation these last 40 or so years. Allow every single invention bullet-proof protection from competition and you will see the pace of change slow to a crawl.
[tinfoil]And the worst part of this is, when the economy goes south because of this, the rich will just get richer. Sometimes I think they're driving the economy into the ground on purpose.[/tinfoil]
You have found what I think is the key to what's wrong with software patents. To extend your example of the Cotton Gin, the patent on the Cotton Gin described one method of removing seeds (IIRC) from raw cotton. Anyone was welcome to invent a different method of removing seeds from cotton.
Software patents don't appear to work the same way. It seems that software patents enable you to prevent anyone else from producing software that performs the same function, regardless of how it accomplishes the task in question.
It may be that we can use this to bring about either (a) a complete repeal of software patentability or (b) modifications to software patent law that allow for the development of new software techniques without the risk of litigation. In those cases where there is only one way to solve a given problem using software, we might be able to get the patents repealed by showing that the ideas patented are mathematical algorithms and hence not patentable.
I'm interested to hear about these people who are not someone's children.