The unfortunate thing is that people (and I mean usually smart people too) already think that Bill Gates is "the guy who brought us the computer." I was having this exact conversation with one who posed the question "Who was the most influencial person of the last century?" He answered his own question with "Bill Gates, he was the one who connected the world!"
I protested, and thought about the question over Christmas dinner. Afterwords, I gave him my answer. "If you want to talk about 'connecting the world' Bill Gates isn't your man. You should be talking about Jon Postal, who authored most of the specifications for the internet." The response... "Bill Gates is the one who brought it to the masses." (The Christmas gathering ended shortly thereafter -- a bit earlier than usual.)
Thinking about it a bit more, a better answer might have been Tim Berners Lee for WWW or, to counter "...the one who brought it to the masses...," I could have responded with Marc Andresen, main author of Mosaic and Netscape, which is what really fueled the internet explosion.
So, It seems that the history of the future has already been rewritten, and Bill Gates invented it all.
I think the point is that in some ways dynamic linking could be considered to be similar to citing anothers work in a new book you are writing. An essay on "Wuthering Heights" might just be uncomprehensible if the reader had never read "Wuthering Heights". **
One could use small fair-use quotations, but that may not be sufficient to discuss the twists in plot that occur over several chapters, etc. and therefore one simply cites "pp120-150", effectivly creating a dynamic link into the book. The citation may even be larger than the entire text of the essay but the essay isn't a derivative work of the book. Dependant, yes; derivative, no.
**(a better example might be "an essay on victorian romance", which happens to use "Wuthering Heights" as a major reference. This avoids the question of when an essay becomes a condensation or "Cliff Notes" for the book.)
Disclaimer: I've never read "Wuthering Heights.";-)
I hope somebody can find some prior art on this. I just (quickly) read the claims and body of the patent and it sounds very much like
the techniques that have been described here previously.
Unfortunatly, the Patent was issued in Dec 2000; the first time I heard this idea was the Paul Graham implementation in the last few
months.
So, if this is all old hat to anyone out there, please do everyone a favor and find that prior art and let everyone know, so that, in 5 years
when MS trys to enforce this patent, there is a defense.
------
I accidently posted this as an AC (score:0) so I am reposting it, but in the mean time another AC post claims to have some prior art. According to that AC This article (fixed link) may be helpful, I couldn't read it myself as the Full Text requires ACM membership. Perhaps somebody with access could take a look, and review it's potential applicability as prior art. (ie. Does it explicitly mention using baysian techniques to filter spam?)
Even the equation editor
in Word, while helpful, isn't the ideal solution in my opinion.
I will probably be shot for praising a MS product, but MS Word used to have an excellent method for entering equations. Then MS came out with equation editor (which sucks) and ditched the good thing they had.
This was way back in MS Word for macintosh circa 1990. IIRC one would type command-\ and it would use an inline encoding to build the equation. So a square root 2 would be typed command-\ r 2 command-\. It produced beautiful results, worked well inline or by itself, was scalable, editable, didn't require one's hands to leave the keyboard, etc.
The only problem is that it required one to RTFM (or at least RTFHelp-Menu) and remember "obscure" character commands like r=root, i=integral, etc.
I guess it depends on whether the courts would view "the internet" as a new medium, separate from dial-up services using a computer. For many people, there is little difference (AOL is a prime example of this).
After reading the above post I finally 'get' what the AC was saying -- the embedded device will be distributing the kernal which is GPLed. However, IIRC, this is allowed by the GPL as long as the source is also available for the Kernal.
Furthermore, as I understand the original question the driver in question could/would be loaded as a module. As such the appropriate kernal hooks would be added (and therefore need to be distributed) but until some rc.d script runs insmod the main code of the driver is definatly not part of the kernal and therefore could be kept binary only. Insmod then attaches the module to the waiting hooks, but the main module seems (IMHO) to still be a separate entity interacting with the Kernal.
To go back to the book analogy, IMHO the driver would be like selling a book with a custom dust cover. (Assuming redristubuting the basic book underneath is legal, which in this case is allowed by the GPL)
This is kinda like the argument of whether IE is "part" of windows 98. I think the sentiment of the courts was that since IE could be removed, despite what MS said, it was a separate product.
Disclaimer: I can't claim any authority about this, this is just my read of things.
Unfortunatly the filing date is March 16, 1994, so you would have to find prior art to that date.
This patent app was also a continuation to several older applications, some as early as 1984. I am not sure if you have to show prior art to those application dates or not.
Of course, the company cannot really accept patches from anonymous open-source hackers, because it ruins the vanilla code.
I believe that is why the FSF suggests that code submissions be required to assign rights to the original project author or to the public domain. Thus, even with the submitted patches, the code would remain vanilla with respect to the original author -- the author is still free to modify licencing on future versions without contacting anyone else.
However, be advised that once you release your code as GPL, any derivitives of the code must be GPL (even if you wrote it, AFAIK and IANAL).
I don't think that is correct. I seem to recall some project or other moving away from GPL at a version change. If the author retains copyright to the work as a whole, which the FSF suggests to do, the author can change from GPL2 to GPL3 or to BSD, etc.
What happens is that the earlier version (and anyone's mods to that version) remain under the GPL, but any derivitives of the later version would be under the new licence.
I think this falls under the same philosophy in which PERL is released under both BSD and GPL, take your pick.
Ok, how does one use civil disobedience to protest a victimless "crime" that doesn't happen to affect oneself directly?
(as the previous sentence is rather incomprehensible let me give an example)
I don't smoke pot (or tobacco) and I don't really want to either. However, I have some simpathy for the statement that smoking pot is a victimless crime and should be legal. Same for prostitution; I am happily married, and have no need for the service, but I don't feel that it should be illegal. (regulated perhaps, but not illegal)
In these cases how does one properly practice civil disobediance?
Umm... Unfortuately copyright now is valid for 75 years after the death of the author. Therefore, if God copyrighted silence, the copyright would still be valid.
Hmm... If this became standard, I wonder how long it would take for a spammer to make a system that would OCR the image and respond appropriatly.
My guess is that the only reason it is working now is that it is uncommon/non-standard. The great advantage of standardization is its downfall in this case; standardization enables machine-comprehension.
But unless you intend to force involvement of some central authority to verify that such identification isn't forged or simply made up you haven't gained anything.
And if you do force people to use said central authority I think you have lost even more.
I think the original poster's point would be to make commercial e-mail illegal unless properly tagged. That way an untagged spam could be handed over to the FBI and treated like wire-fraud or something.
Big problem would be prosecuting the spammer. Either they would all move overseas or the court would be so backlogged as to become ineffective.
While in many respects I agree that "There oughta be a Law" against spam, there are some problems with that approach. Not the least is that generally a social solution is much better (or at least has less side effects) than any law that a government will enact.
Laws have the distinct problem of either going too far (false positive) or being too weak and thereby legitimizing the spam that would manage to work through the loopholes. Taken to the extreme that seems to commonly occur in the US legal system, I can envision spammers suing ISPs for blacklisting their "legit per US act ####" spam.
I would much rather statistical methods such as are being discussed. This combined with "whitelist" methods seem to work very well by all accounts.
The third solution for Epson (that nobody seems to have mentioned) would be to negotiate a private license with the project which released the GPLd code.
This would allow Epson to release their product as "closed source" and would provide funding to the original project.
The GPL (as I understand it) doesn't require that the only licence that the software be available under be the GPL. IIRC, Perl is released under both the GPL and BSD, the choice is up to the user which licence he wants to follow.
I wasn't questioning your analogy. If you read the sentence before and after the one you quoted, you will see that I agree with you; the PTO has its head up its ass with respect to software patents.
I was trying to respond to your question why things don't seem to work the the same for physical objects as for software. My conclusion was that the PTO needs to get a clue or two about the state of the "software arts."
I also was trying to point out why bad "basic" patents are much more dangerous than bad "improvement" patents (which you can often manage to work around).
there
are multiple types of patented egg beaters (electric with a handle, electric upright, hand-cranked, etc.) Though they all
achieve the same end goal, beating an egg, the different implementations are considered different inventions.... I can buy 1000 differnt models of cars, why can't I buy 1000 different models of IM responder if each has its own advantages and disadvantages, efficiency, interface, and style.
There are both "basic" patents and "improvement" patents. The egg-beaters are "improvements" on the concept of an egg-beater (which probably was already prior art). Even if you now applied and were granted a patent on "IM bots which send replies in multiple colors" (or whatever) you still couldn't distrubute your patented bot wothout licencing the "basic" IM bot patent.
Perhaps a simpler example would be imagine that I just patented the concept of a stool, or rather "a device for sitting above the ground" and you later tried to patent a chair ("stool with back support"). Because I hold the basic patent on a sitting device, you can't make your chairs without licensing my basic patent. On the other hand I can't put a back on my stools without getting a license from you for your improvment. Or we could trade licensing and both make chairs.
Part of the problem with software patents is that the PTO is granting patents that are overly broad. Back to your egg-beater... the PTO wouldn't let you patent "a device to beat eggs" because of prior art. They might allow "a device to beat eggs using pressurized gas" for example. The first patent is overly broad, and has prior art, the second, more specific, idea could be new however. But as regards software, the PTO apparently doesn't have the background, technology is moving too fast, or the PTO is saying "let the courts sort it out later". Take yor pick, there is probably some of all three going on.
Very true... Heck, even the title of the patent which was awarded to me doesn't really properly describe what I was trying to patent, but my previous employer's patent lawyers insisted on calling my invention a "valve housing" (or rather the lack of a housing), when the actual invention was a method of assembling a flux frame. I even argued with them about it, but they wouldn't change it.
Now if you were pointing to a Microsoft web site, which was publicly releasing just the kernal for public use, this might be considered a valid retort.
In this case you are pointing to a (probably) illegal dissemination of some of Microsoft's software.
And before you go and find some MS help pages with update of these three files, remember that MS wraps their updates with a EULA specifing that it is illegal to download the files unless you have a legal copy of the complete system. No such requirement with Redhat, etc.
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I protested, and thought about the question over Christmas dinner. Afterwords, I gave him my answer. "If you want to talk about 'connecting the world' Bill Gates isn't your man. You should be talking about Jon Postal, who authored most of the specifications for the internet." The response... "Bill Gates is the one who brought it to the masses." (The Christmas gathering ended shortly thereafter -- a bit earlier than usual.)
Thinking about it a bit more, a better answer might have been Tim Berners Lee for WWW or, to counter "...the one who brought it to the masses...," I could have responded with Marc Andresen, main author of Mosaic and Netscape, which is what really fueled the internet explosion.
So, It seems that the history of the future has already been rewritten, and Bill Gates invented it all.
I think the point is that in some ways dynamic linking could be considered to be similar to citing anothers work in a new book you are writing. An essay on "Wuthering Heights" might just be uncomprehensible if the reader had never read "Wuthering Heights". **
;-)
One could use small fair-use quotations, but that may not be sufficient to discuss the twists in plot that occur over several chapters, etc. and therefore one simply cites "pp120-150", effectivly creating a dynamic link into the book. The citation may even be larger than the entire text of the essay but the essay isn't a derivative work of the book. Dependant, yes; derivative, no.
**(a better example might be "an essay on victorian romance", which happens to use "Wuthering Heights" as a major reference. This avoids the question of when an essay becomes a condensation or "Cliff Notes" for the book.)
Disclaimer: I've never read "Wuthering Heights."
Unfortunatly, the Patent was issued in Dec 2000; the first time I heard this idea was the Paul Graham implementation in the last few months.
So, if this is all old hat to anyone out there, please do everyone a favor and find that prior art and let everyone know, so that, in 5 years when MS trys to enforce this patent, there is a defense.
------
I accidently posted this as an AC (score:0) so I am reposting it, but in the mean time another AC post claims to have some prior art. According to that AC This article (fixed link) may be helpful, I couldn't read it myself as the Full Text requires ACM membership. Perhaps somebody with access could take a look, and review it's potential applicability as prior art. (ie. Does it explicitly mention using baysian techniques to filter spam?)
I will probably be shot for praising a MS product, but MS Word used to have an excellent method for entering equations. Then MS came out with equation editor (which sucks) and ditched the good thing they had.
This was way back in MS Word for macintosh circa 1990. IIRC one would type command-\ and it would use an inline encoding to build the equation. So a square root 2 would be typed command-\ r 2 command-\. It produced beautiful results, worked well inline or by itself, was scalable, editable, didn't require one's hands to leave the keyboard, etc.
The only problem is that it required one to RTFM (or at least RTFHelp-Menu) and remember "obscure" character commands like r=root, i=integral, etc.
*sigh*
I guess it depends on whether the courts would view "the internet" as a new medium, separate from dial-up services using a computer. For many people, there is little difference (AOL is a prime example of this).
Furthermore, as I understand the original question the driver in question could/would be loaded as a module. As such the appropriate kernal hooks would be added (and therefore need to be distributed) but until some rc.d script runs insmod the main code of the driver is definatly not part of the kernal and therefore could be kept binary only. Insmod then attaches the module to the waiting hooks, but the main module seems (IMHO) to still be a separate entity interacting with the Kernal.
To go back to the book analogy, IMHO the driver would be like selling a book with a custom dust cover. (Assuming redristubuting the basic book underneath is legal, which in this case is allowed by the GPL)
This is kinda like the argument of whether IE is "part" of windows 98. I think the sentiment of the courts was that since IE could be removed, despite what MS said, it was a separate product.
Disclaimer: I can't claim any authority about this, this is just my read of things.
This patent app was also a continuation to several older applications, some as early as 1984. I am not sure if you have to show prior art to those application dates or not.
I believe that is why the FSF suggests that code submissions be required to assign rights to the original project author or to the public domain. Thus, even with the submitted patches, the code would remain vanilla with respect to the original author -- the author is still free to modify licencing on future versions without contacting anyone else.
I don't think that is correct. I seem to recall some project or other moving away from GPL at a version change. If the author retains copyright to the work as a whole, which the FSF suggests to do, the author can change from GPL2 to GPL3 or to BSD, etc.
What happens is that the earlier version (and anyone's mods to that version) remain under the GPL, but any derivitives of the later version would be under the new licence.
I think this falls under the same philosophy in which PERL is released under both BSD and GPL, take your pick.
Ok, how does one use civil disobedience to protest a victimless "crime" that doesn't happen to affect oneself directly?
(as the previous sentence is rather incomprehensible let me give an example)
I don't smoke pot (or tobacco) and I don't really want to either. However, I have some simpathy for the statement that smoking pot is a victimless crime and should be legal. Same for prostitution; I am happily married, and have no need for the service, but I don't feel that it should be illegal. (regulated perhaps, but not illegal)
In these cases how does one properly practice civil disobediance?
Umm... Unfortuately copyright now is valid for 75 years after the death of the author. Therefore, if God copyrighted silence, the copyright would still be valid.
Of course... but then the spammers would just start their own ISPs.
"But," you say, "the ISP upstream of the spam ISP would charge them the $.01 per e-mail."
If this were the pricing structure, you (a normal user) might wind up paying $.05, one cent to your ISP, one to the upstream provider, etc.
Hmm... If this became standard, I wonder how long it would take for a spammer to make a system that would OCR the image and respond appropriatly.
My guess is that the only reason it is working now is that it is uncommon/non-standard. The great advantage of standardization is its downfall in this case; standardization enables machine-comprehension.
But unless you intend to force involvement of some central authority to verify that such identification isn't forged or simply made up you haven't gained anything.
And if you do force people to use said central authority I think you have lost even more.
Easy. Just re-run the spam filter on your 'cleaned' mail using a ruleset generated by splitting the mail into topical vs. everything else.
I think the original poster's point would be to make commercial e-mail illegal unless properly tagged. That way an untagged spam could be handed over to the FBI and treated like wire-fraud or something.
Big problem would be prosecuting the spammer. Either they would all move overseas or the court would be so backlogged as to become ineffective.
While in many respects I agree that "There oughta be a Law" against spam, there are some problems with that approach. Not the least is that generally a social solution is much better (or at least has less side effects) than any law that a government will enact.
Laws have the distinct problem of either going too far (false positive) or being too weak and thereby legitimizing the spam that would manage to work through the loopholes. Taken to the extreme that seems to commonly occur in the US legal system, I can envision spammers suing ISPs for blacklisting their "legit per US act ####" spam.
I would much rather statistical methods such as are being discussed. This combined with "whitelist" methods seem to work very well by all accounts.
The third solution for Epson (that nobody seems to have mentioned) would be to negotiate a private license with the project which released the GPLd code.
This would allow Epson to release their product as "closed source" and would provide funding to the original project.
The GPL (as I understand it) doesn't require that the only licence that the software be available under be the GPL. IIRC, Perl is released under both the GPL and BSD, the choice is up to the user which licence he wants to follow.
The story mentions the existance of a US law requiring data rentention. I have not heard of this. What are the US requirements??
I wasn't questioning your analogy. If you read the sentence before and after the one you quoted, you will see that I agree with you; the PTO has its head up its ass with respect to software patents.
I was trying to respond to your question why things don't seem to work the the same for physical objects as for software. My conclusion was that the PTO needs to get a clue or two about the state of the "software arts."
I also was trying to point out why bad "basic" patents are much more dangerous than bad "improvement" patents (which you can often manage to work around).
there are multiple types of patented egg beaters (electric with a handle, electric upright, hand-cranked, etc.) Though they all achieve the same end goal, beating an egg, the different implementations are considered different inventions. ... I can buy 1000 differnt models of cars, why can't I buy 1000 different models of IM responder if each has its own advantages and disadvantages, efficiency, interface, and style.
There are both "basic" patents and "improvement" patents. The egg-beaters are "improvements" on the concept of an egg-beater (which probably was already prior art). Even if you now applied and were granted a patent on "IM bots which send replies in multiple colors" (or whatever) you still couldn't distrubute your patented bot wothout licencing the "basic" IM bot patent.
Perhaps a simpler example would be imagine that I just patented the concept of a stool, or rather "a device for sitting above the ground" and you later tried to patent a chair ("stool with back support"). Because I hold the basic patent on a sitting device, you can't make your chairs without licensing my basic patent. On the other hand I can't put a back on my stools without getting a license from you for your improvment. Or we could trade licensing and both make chairs.
Part of the problem with software patents is that the PTO is granting patents that are overly broad. Back to your egg-beater... the PTO wouldn't let you patent "a device to beat eggs" because of prior art. They might allow "a device to beat eggs using pressurized gas" for example. The first patent is overly broad, and has prior art, the second, more specific, idea could be new however. But as regards software, the PTO apparently doesn't have the background, technology is moving too fast, or the PTO is saying "let the courts sort it out later". Take yor pick, there is probably some of all three going on.
Very true... Heck, even the title of the patent which was awarded to me doesn't really properly describe what I was trying to patent, but my previous employer's patent lawyers insisted on calling my invention a "valve housing" (or rather the lack of a housing), when the actual invention was a method of assembling a flux frame. I even argued with them about it, but they wouldn't change it.
Only if you try to make money from it
Not so... a patent holder can stop distrubution and even USE of their patented idea by third parties, even if there is no money in it.
That being said they might not come after you until your software became popular enough. One example of this is Unisys GIFs; there are many more...
Now if you were pointing to a Microsoft web site, which was publicly releasing just the kernal for public use, this might be considered a valid retort.
In this case you are pointing to a (probably) illegal dissemination of some of Microsoft's software.
And before you go and find some MS help pages with update of these three files, remember that MS wraps their updates with a EULA specifing that it is illegal to download the files unless you have a legal copy of the complete system. No such requirement with Redhat, etc.