"However, you cannot build and sustain capital investment if you cannot provide a return on said investment. "
We've done extremely well so far! Are you saying 85% profit margins for MS are not enough incentive to develop software?
Your argument is fine if you develop something that would take 20 years to recoup your costs, but no version of software will be around in 4 years time , let alone 20 years time, so by reality it must be possible to recoup your costs in a much shorter space of time with software.
Software has a relatively low cost to develop, low capital investment, high profit margin (85%+ in the case of MS) and short shelf life. In addition since there is no need to disclose the algorithm to sell the software, you have a perfect protection mechanism for your magic algo if it truely represents something new. DON'T TELL ANYONE HOW IT WORKS!
"you will never build anything beyond a sub-poverty society." Again, we've done extremely well so far, software is developing much faster than Pharma, Transport and even PC hardware!
"company is in its revenue and ability to pay the wages of 800 people"
Not at all! The market (Europe) provides the revenue!! As long as Europe is not poor their will be capital to tap that revenue/market. The people sacked will have a leg up over new people in the new company, so they will have a commercial advantage.
In other words, MS exits Europe, someone else hires their staff and makes the next product themselves. MS loses that market because it would have to take a step back and relearn the lost skills.
I'm paying for this subscription, but what happens if new bands come out I like and those bands aren't carried by Napster?
Do they expect me to pay for another subscription?
Or will this be like cable, where it starts with all the good stuff on 10 channels, then they add on extra 'channels'. You can keep the same 10 channels, or pay extra to get the new 20 channels..... Except the good stuff is now spread across 30 channels instead of 10, so your service continues to degrade unless you pay ever more.
"The Council of Ministers is made up of the elected governments of the member states, so is democratic."
Its 1 step away, those are *appointed* ministers from an *elected* government.
"The Commission is a second-tier democratic institution" Third tier, you don't vote for the Commission members, the ministers choose those, the ministers are chosen by their parties, you elect the parties.
But you vote *directly* for the representative in EU Parliament.
It was quite sensible to strengthen the parliament as a counter to the Commission with the Co-decision process. If the first major test of co-decision results in Commission walking all over Parliament then Parliament needs to be strengthened.
Originally the commission called the shots and Parliament just monitored them.
Then the commission grew too strong and the countries objected, so a co-decision process was created to bring more democracy into the EU.
The Parliament and Commission are supposed to agree a compromise under the co-decision process.
The Council of ministers can bypass this (which they did thanks to Brinkhorst telling porkies).
JURI has concluded that Commission are misleading Parliament and the wording they want DOES make software patentable. Commission still claims it does not.
Commissions response to Parliaments request to restart in a more honest transparent way seems to be a diplomatic "FUCK YOU".
Its no longer about patents its about accountability, democracy and the Commission walking all over the co-decision process.
If the Commission can walk all over the Parliament like this then the Parliament has to be strengthened. It is the only democractic part of the EU.
"Are you nuts? They have the trademark over the name. Period. In all uses."
Not at all, that seems to be a common misconception!
Apple (Jobs) owns the trademark in computers, but Apple (beatles) own the trademark in records. Even then there may be several owners of the trademark since different markets can have different owners.
The trademark protection is only for the market they are in and only for the product the mark covers.
I agree with the rest of your post though, Google still have to deliver the best result possible regardless of who they are pissed at.
This ruling takes that principle further, the adverts weren't *using* the trademark, they were simply positioned *next* to search results that included the trademark. Thats 2 steps removed!
It does represent a shift in the law here, if it continues what next? Will Vuitton want only Vuitton official websites listed on the search term?
Isn't it funny, the CD was approximately the same as a record with 40-70 minutes of music, the attention span of a human in the 1980s. Past that and nobody listened to the record the whole way through.
Now we can save 200 hours of video but have 5 minute attemtion spans because of all the distractions, TV etc..
Maybe they should have given up more obscure search phrases. "louis vuiton" don't have trademark rights over that name, they have it over that name in the context of bags, fashion, perfume.
e.g. louis vuiton demands a block on use of their trademark, Google offers "louis vuiton bags", "louis vuiton fashion", "louis vuiton perfume" which more closely defines what their trademark actually covers.
When I search louis vuiton, am I looking for the brand the person or shops that stock louis vuiton brands? In other words the name alone isn't the trademark, it is the trademark in a context.
"IE didn't win the browser war as much as Netscape lost the browser war."
You forget Window 95 second edition had Internet Explorer 3 bundled in with it (in addition to being bundled with Office etc.). So there was no purpose in Netscape throwing money against the browser development because everyone would already get IE.
So Netscape concentrated on their server suite. Then MS bundled a webserver with Windows Server Processional and crippled the socket library on the normal version to stop it being used as a platform for Netscape's server.
Netscape didn't make a mistake, Microsoft broke anti-trust bundling laws.
Yes, it includes a *plurality* of views. Not just one screen, two screens, but N screens. Total genius, only a Communist would object to a patent like that./sarcasm
"For example, electronic companies want to keep the same type of patent coverage for the next generation of their products (with more embedded code) as they are used to having. And what's wrong with that?"
A hardware idea simply re-implemented in software is not a new idea and not patentable.
A pure software algo is a mathematical discovery and not patentable. You cannot patent mathematics.
I think you misunderstood what the EU parliament did, the wording rules out pure data processing patents. It does not rule out software as part of an invention.
So electronics manufacturers can still patent their widgets because the software is part of the new widget.
The other change was to beef up the 'technical' requirement, to prevent business process patents disguised as software patents. e.g. electronic shopping lists, one click ordering, assigning rating numbers to how powerful a computer is in order to decide if games will run or not...
Who could argue that that isn't a good thing!?
The right to refuse + doctrine of first sale
on
The Basics of EULAs
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Nice summary, but contracts also requires the right to refuse and store sales are covered by doctrine of first sale. IANAL, however I have consulted one on this very issue.
Right to refuse: If you're put in a position where a contract is offered but no option to refuse is given, or the refusal includes a penalty the contract is not enforceable. THEY MUST BE FREELY ENTERED INTO.
So for example you buy a product, you get it home and it has some nasty POS EULA associates with it.
You can: accept the nasty POS EULA. Or: Return at your own expense and time, and maybe even have to pay a restocking fee. I.e. you pay a penalty.
The other point is the doctrine of first sale. When you sign up to an online gamer, you have not at that point bought the product, so are not protected by dofs. When you walk into a shop and buy it you are, the extract terms are foisted on you after.
"Why reinitiate the debate, when you've already won?"
I think you forgot what this was all originally about. The EU was supposed to put together a directive to harmonise the different patent systems. This was necessary and useful!
It wasn't supposed to be about making software patents legal by changing member states patent law. That was the influence of lobbyists.
"If I'm overflowing a stack buffer, I'll just write the address of system() over EIP"
A software stack check will already catch that. (a random number stuck under the stack frame, checked before returning. You could overflow the buffer, but you can't know what random number to write because it changes each time -> failed exploit.)
IBM did some work to put a similar feature into GCC:
" trivial, however undermines the element of FUD which wins the submitter such karm.."
Did you read the claims? The abstract is spot on. If you think the abstract or title is mislead, why are you attacking the submitter and not the abstract or title?
"Further, these patents will come under extreme attack if they are used in court."
Attacked by lawyers and adjudicated by judges. Neither of those has any technical grouding in software. Once these patents are judged in court, its a dice roll.
"When these patents are used against someone, he would be a complete idiot to not first question whether the patents can be invalidated in court."
Again, the court is not technical, it is a dice roll. Your side does eBanking and could face hefty royalties a catastrophic block on business, plus legal fees. His side faces only legal fees at most. Now roll the dice, but you'll find its weighted.
"This is how the patent system works"
No the patent office is supposed to filter this crap for obviousness, prior art and technical invention.
"a thorough search for prior art will cost over $100,000 and the USPTO cannot afford to give those out for $2000."
Its the USPTO's job to do that and since when has it cost $100,000? Thats a couple of man years work,a ridiculous figure pulled from the air.
Slashdot Mirror
"However, you cannot build and sustain capital investment if you cannot provide a return on said investment. "
We've done extremely well so far!
Are you saying 85% profit margins for MS are not enough incentive to develop software?
Your argument is fine if you develop something that would take 20 years to recoup your costs, but no version of software will be around in 4 years time , let alone 20 years time, so by reality it must be possible to recoup your costs in a much shorter space of time with software.
Software has a relatively low cost to develop, low capital investment, high profit margin (85%+ in the case of MS) and short shelf life.
In addition since there is no need to disclose the algorithm to sell the software, you have a perfect protection mechanism for your magic algo if it truely represents something new. DON'T TELL ANYONE HOW IT WORKS!
"you will never build anything beyond a sub-poverty society."
Again, we've done extremely well so far, software is developing much faster than Pharma, Transport and even PC hardware!
"company is in its revenue and ability to pay the wages of 800 people"
Not at all! The market (Europe) provides the revenue!! As long as Europe is not poor their will be capital to tap that revenue/market. The people sacked will have a leg up over new people in the new company, so they will have a commercial advantage.
In other words, MS exits Europe, someone else hires their staff and makes the next product themselves. MS loses that market because it would have to take a step back and relearn the lost skills.
No problem, if they sack experienced developers and move to the USA, those developers will go work for someone else and make another European company!
The value in that company isn't in the existing products, its in the knowledge of the people to make next generation products.
They just want less competition in Europe.
Even simpler than that, Alice is Mallory from the MPAA.
There's a lot of BS claims of copyright. Look here:
h tm l
http://www.acclaimimages.com/search_terms/nasa.
Click on the picture of the earth:
"Image © Allred Images,
This image is only available as a print. No reproduction is allowed. No licensing is available. "
In reality that picture is from NASA and NASA specifically claim no copyright, since its for public use.
So its a BS copyright claim not much different from this.
I'm paying for this subscription, but what happens if new bands come out I like and those bands aren't carried by Napster?
Do they expect me to pay for another subscription?
Or will this be like cable, where it starts with all the good stuff on 10 channels, then they add on extra 'channels'. You can keep the same 10 channels, or pay extra to get the new 20 channels.....
Except the good stuff is now spread across 30 channels instead of 10, so your service continues to degrade unless you pay ever more.
XP has an optimization that arranges your disk for the programs you use most.
Firefox starts up nearly instantly on my machine, Internet Explorer takes 5-10 seconds to start. Its *very* noticably slower.
This is because I use only Firefox and not Internet Explorer. (Credit to MS for the feature).
If he thinks Internet Explorer is faster then he isn't a Firefox user, the defaults in XP favour Internet Explorer.
"The Council of Ministers is made up of the elected governments of the member states, so is democratic."
Its 1 step away, those are *appointed* ministers from an *elected* government.
"The Commission is a second-tier democratic institution"
Third tier, you don't vote for the Commission members, the ministers choose those, the ministers are chosen by their parties, you elect the parties.
But you vote *directly* for the representative in EU Parliament.
It was quite sensible to strengthen the parliament as a counter to the Commission with the Co-decision process. If the first major test of co-decision results in Commission walking all over Parliament then Parliament needs to be strengthened.
Originally the commission called the shots and Parliament just monitored them.
Then the commission grew too strong and the countries objected, so a co-decision process was created to bring more democracy into the EU.
The Parliament and Commission are supposed to agree a compromise under the co-decision process.
The Council of ministers can bypass this (which they did thanks to Brinkhorst telling porkies).
JURI has concluded that Commission are misleading Parliament and the wording they want DOES make software patentable. Commission still claims it does not.
Commissions response to Parliaments request to restart in a more honest transparent way seems to be a diplomatic "FUCK YOU".
Its no longer about patents its about accountability, democracy and the Commission walking all over the co-decision process.
If the Commission can walk all over the Parliament like this then the Parliament has to be strengthened. It is the only democractic part of the EU.
What exactly is the purpose of the frame site ciribank.co.uk?
You can see his point though, if the drivers for the Network card don't work, no amount of pandering to the PHB will undo that bad decision.
" 60 secomds of high resolution holographic porn!"
So from foreplay to cumshot, 60 seconds *IS* enough!
I'll tell my wife next time she complains!... Yes darling, an Anonymous Coward on Slashdot said its OK.
"Are you nuts? They have the trademark over the name. Period. In all uses."
Not at all, that seems to be a common misconception!
Apple (Jobs) owns the trademark in computers, but Apple (beatles) own the trademark in records. Even then there may be several owners of the trademark since different markets can have different owners.
The trademark protection is only for the market they are in and only for the product the mark covers.
I agree with the rest of your post though, Google still have to deliver the best result possible regardless of who they are pissed at.
Absolutely true about Europe, but....
This ruling takes that principle further, the adverts weren't *using* the trademark, they were simply positioned *next* to search results that included the trademark. Thats 2 steps removed!
It does represent a shift in the law here, if it continues what next? Will Vuitton want only Vuitton official websites listed on the search term?
Isn't it funny, the CD was approximately the same as a record with 40-70 minutes of music, the attention span of a human in the 1980s. Past that and nobody listened to the record the whole way through.
Now we can save 200 hours of video but have 5 minute attemtion spans because of all the distractions, TV etc..
Ironic isn't it?
I wonder what they plan to record on that disc.
Maybe they should have given up more obscure search phrases. "louis vuiton" don't have trademark rights over that name, they have it over that name in the context of bags, fashion, perfume.
e.g. louis vuiton demands a block on use of their trademark, Google offers "louis vuiton bags", "louis vuiton fashion", "louis vuiton perfume" which more closely defines what their trademark actually covers.
When I search louis vuiton, am I looking for the brand the person or shops that stock louis vuiton brands? In other words the name alone isn't the trademark, it is the trademark in a context.
"IE didn't win the browser war as much as Netscape lost the browser war."
You forget Window 95 second edition had Internet Explorer 3 bundled in with it (in addition to being bundled with Office etc.).
So there was no purpose in Netscape throwing money against the browser development because everyone would already get IE.
So Netscape concentrated on their server suite. Then MS bundled a webserver with Windows Server Processional and crippled the socket library on the normal version to stop it being used as a platform for Netscape's server.
Netscape didn't make a mistake, Microsoft broke anti-trust bundling laws.
"Or is the patent including something new?"
/sarcasm
Yes, it includes a *plurality* of views. Not just one screen, two screens, but N screens. Total genius, only a Communist would object to a patent like that.
Surely thats what democracy is about. We argued our side in the EU parliament and won.
I challenge the pro-software and pro business process patent supported to accept the result.
"For example, electronic companies want to keep the same type of patent coverage for the next generation of their products (with more embedded code) as they are used to having. And what's wrong with that?"
A hardware idea simply re-implemented in software is not a new idea and not patentable.
A pure software algo is a mathematical discovery and not patentable. You cannot patent mathematics.
I think you misunderstood what the EU parliament did, the wording rules out pure data processing patents. It does not rule out software as part of an invention.
So electronics manufacturers can still patent their widgets because the software is part of the new widget.
The other change was to beef up the 'technical' requirement, to prevent business process patents disguised as software patents. e.g. electronic shopping lists, one click ordering, assigning rating numbers to how powerful a computer is in order to decide if games will run or not...
Who could argue that that isn't a good thing!?
Nice summary, but contracts also requires the right to refuse and store sales are covered by doctrine of first sale. IANAL, however I have consulted one on this very issue.
Right to refuse:
If you're put in a position where a contract is offered but no option to refuse is given, or the refusal includes a penalty the contract is not enforceable. THEY MUST BE FREELY ENTERED INTO.
So for example you buy a product, you get it home and it has some nasty POS EULA associates with it.
You can: accept the nasty POS EULA.
Or: Return at your own expense and time, and maybe even have to pay a restocking fee. I.e. you pay a penalty.
The other point is the doctrine of first sale. When you sign up to an online gamer, you have not at that point bought the product, so are not protected by dofs.
When you walk into a shop and buy it you are, the extract terms are foisted on you after.
"Why reinitiate the debate, when you've already won?"
I think you forgot what this was all originally about. The EU was supposed to put together a directive to harmonise the different patent systems. This was necessary and useful!
It wasn't supposed to be about making software patents legal by changing member states patent law. That was the influence of lobbyists.
"If I'm overflowing a stack buffer, I'll just write the address of system() over EIP"
t y/ ssp/
A software stack check will already catch that. (a random number stuck under the stack frame, checked before returning. You could overflow the buffer, but you can't know what random number to write because it changes each time -> failed exploit.)
IBM did some work to put a similar feature into GCC:
http://www.research.ibm.com/trl/projects/securi
" trivial, however undermines the element of FUD which wins the submitter such karm.."
Did you read the claims? The abstract is spot on. If you think the abstract or title is mislead, why are you attacking the submitter and not the abstract or title?
"Further, these patents will come under extreme attack if they are used in court."
Attacked by lawyers and adjudicated by judges. Neither of those has any technical grouding in software. Once these patents are judged in court, its a dice roll.
"When these patents are used against someone, he would be a complete idiot to not first question whether the patents can be invalidated in court."
Again, the court is not technical, it is a dice roll.
Your side does eBanking and could face hefty royalties a catastrophic block on business, plus legal fees. His side faces only legal fees at most.
Now roll the dice, but you'll find its weighted.
"This is how the patent system works"
No the patent office is supposed to filter this crap for obviousness, prior art and technical invention.
"a thorough search for prior art will cost over $100,000 and the USPTO cannot afford to give those out for $2000."
Its the USPTO's job to do that and since when has it cost $100,000? Thats a couple of man years work,a ridiculous figure pulled from the air.
" Remember, there was some rule, stating that your data will always take 100.1% of your available storage space."
Yes, its called 'more' law.