Perhaps the State Department should follow the DoD's lead and develop a First Person Negociator game.
I can just see it now. You get to sit on your arse for hours at a time listening to mental North Koreans saying things like "This seating arrangement is tantamount to a declaration of war!" or whiny Europeans endlessly complaining about how the US never asks them first when they want to start bombing places like North Korea.
Play that game for a few hours and you will start to see the merits of violence.
Care to explain this? Democracy is government by the people. When people behave as a mob there is no governing going on, and certainly nothing that looks like a system that is set up to allow every member of society to play a part in any governing that does happen. Mob "rule" is not even a type of democracy, let alone the purest type.
In a government there is always a minority of people who do not consent to the rules, and a minority of rules to which people do not consent.
True enough, but you are looking in the wrong place for the consent of the governed. It is not consent to every action taken by government or law passed, but consent to the constitution (i.e. the system by which government determines what will be done) that matters. In any democracy it is usually easy to find people who disagree with particular government actions, but usually hard to find people who actually want to overthrow the government.
As long as all *reasonable* people in a society do not want to overthrow the government, you have the consent of the governed. Now in principle it is possible to get this without having a democracy (that is without having a system in which the people actually play a role in governing) but it doesn't happen very often or very reliably.
The last time the US went to Iraq, we conferred no benefits on them. None. There was no rebuilding and no aid. Just bombings which killed many, followed by sanctions which starved many more.
This is not entirely true. Northern Iraq, which was effectively occupied, has enjoyed considerable benefits. Anyway if your point is just that the US should have gone all the way to Bagdad the last time around then I am right with you.
What the Germans and the French find offensive is that the US feels it can make these decisions alone--
Which would explain why France and Germany both anounced thier own final decisions *before* the second meeting of the security council that they were so insistent on setting up? People may well fear that the US will act unilaterally but, so far on this issue, the US has not. France and Germany on the other hand have made it clear that they will not support any resolution to go to war (France even threatend a veto) - which is unilateral action - and a departure from the process that they agreed to in the first resolution.
Re:Creators the Democracy?
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Tuxedo Park
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Most US foreign policy from 1945 to 1990 revolved around the defense of Western Europe, and as I noted earlier, most of the democracies in Western Europe were either created by or re-established as a result of US military action.
So now explain to me how the whole of Western Europe is just a big scheme by the US to exploit natural resources and cheap labour. What resources? What cheap labour?
Marxist explanations (i.e. the kind of explanation you just tried to give) don't even fit the facts very well for 19th century imperialist powers, let alone the US in the 20th century.
Oh, and in case you forgot the pre-WWII German democracy was also created by Allied military action.
What is it about a democracy, US-style, as opposed to any alternative form of government, that is so holy that anything that stands in the way of its creation must be sheer evil to be stamped out?
I am a godless heathen, so I do not literally think that that there is anything holy about democracy, but I do think that there is something deeply right about "government of the people, by the people, and the people". If you want to know why then you could read Locke, or you could just spend a little time trying to think of anything which could make a government legitimate apart from the consent of the governed.
Granted, there are evils that do need to be disposed of, but they do not include disagreeing with the US. Creating a democratic state must necessarily allow for the possibility that the people of that state may not like what you're doing, and you've just given them the power to do something about it.
No argument here - my point was just that the Germans and the French seem to *like* their own democratic regimes and it strikes me as somewhat hypocritical that they are now so violently opposed to the idea of the US confering the same benefits on other nations.
Re:Creators the Democracy?
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Tuxedo Park
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· Score: 2, Insightful
As someone else has already pointed out there are quite a few countries where the US played a vital role in creating democratic regimes.
In some countries the US literally manufactured democracy from whole cloth, right down to writing new constitutions for them (Germany, Japan, and a few more, maybe including Afganistan, although the verdict isn't in yet).
In some countries the US restored democracy after invading and ousting foreign powers, or domestic dictatorships (Belgium, the Netherlands, France, Grenada, Panama, and many others).
In some countries the US took indirect military action to establish democracy (Nicaragua for example).
Of course you are right that they also installed many dictators, and once or twice even took action that looked a lot like overthrowing democratic governments (the most obvious example is Chile where they had a hand in overturning a Socialist government that was actually elected). But even looking at those countries is instructive - all (at least all the one's you mentioned and I can think of) countries where the US got the government they wanted are now democracies (Nationalist China, S Korea, the Filipines, Chile, and so on). In the places where they failed to get the dictator that they wanted, dictatorship still prevails (Communist China, N Korea, Vietnam, Cuba, etc). Which suggests that the the US really was trying to pick the lesser evils.
Anyway, it is not hard to find democracies that have "Made in USA" stamped on them, even if there are (or were) many dictatorships with the same label.
These days two years late equates to about a year and a half after the war is over.
Actually it doesn't bother me that non-US nations would rather not be involved in US wars (their choice), but it does bother me when democracies that were created by US military action stand in the way when the US wants to create another democracy or two.
From the article it appears that the IP claims are based on copyrights rather than patents. If that is the case then the IP will probably never expire (see the postings on Eldred vs Ashcroft) and in any case will not expire for many decades (most likely 95 years from the date that the copyrighted code was first writen).
On the other hand copyrights protect only the code itself, and not the ideas or methods that the code embodies. So in principle someone could write new code that does exactly the same thing as the old code, so long as they show that they made no use of the old code when producing the new code. This is actually a lot harder than it sounds.
There are lots of uses for cloning, which seldom get metioned in the press because they are borring. Stories about cloning pets, and people, are more exciting, but are really just a sideshow in the cloning business.
The big advantage in clonning animals is that (1) you get exactly the genetic makeup that you wanted, and (2) you get an animal (or plant, or whatever) that is much more similar to its "parent" that anything that would result from sexual reproduction.
Examples of uses that rely on (1) include, the manufacture of tissue and organs for transplant, the manufacture of animals (etc) for testing purposes, and the resurection of recently extinct species.
In some ways (2) is even more important. Selective breeding (i.e. what farmers etc have done for thousands of years to produce our current selection of domesticated species) partly aims at producing breeds that are more useful, but also aims at producing populations that are highly uniform (diversity is good sometimes, but as most industries have discovered there are advantages to having standardised parts and products). Cloning promises to allow breeders to keep the very best genetic combinations that selective breeding produces, and to allow for highly uniform populations.
Take a look through some of the publications that specialise in science (like New Scientist, or Scientific American) if you want to find out what cloning might be good for. Avoid regular news publication. Even the goods ones tend to focus on the uses that pose social policy problems rather than the uses that are economically important.
Most military hardware (at least the stuff produced by the US, Europe, and Russia) is already built to withstand EMPs. No one will ever use a weapon like this to knock planes out of the sky, or stop tanks in their tracks.
What it can be used for is for frying radar systems that are switched on, and for frying passive tracking systems that are switched on. For obvious reasons these cannot be shielded against EMPs (ok - if it's not obvious then reason is that a radar system must be sensitive to electromagnetic radiation in order to work).
Why is this a big deal? Several reasons:
(1) Ground based anti-aircraft systems have become very small, mobile, and relatively cheap. (2) Iraq has taken to placing such systems right next to things that the US does not want to blow up (hospitals, schools, chemical weapons facilities, etc). (3) Even stealth aircraft are not entirely invisible to radar. Yes they can slip through a traditional perimiter radar network (i.e. the kind of line of radars that many nations have watching their borders), but they cannot remain undetected if they have to fly right over a radar system, as they would have to do if there is a radar system either at or near to their target.
So now the US has a method of blinding anti-aircraft defenses without destroying the stuff around them. Given US methods of conducting war (i.e. heavy reliance on air power), and the obvious synergy between stealth and EMP technology, these weapons are a big deal, and I might add there is no obvious or easy way of defending against them.
"Segway didn't help themselves by hiring very expensive lobbyists," he said. "I think that backfired on them, too."
New Hampshire-based Segway hired lobbying firms but has made no contributions to any public officials or candidates, said Matt Dailida, the company's director of state government affairs.
Actually I'm pretty sure that the military won't care. Devices for jamming radio signals have been in use on the battlefield for a long time, so they already have equipment that is designed to beat or track jamming devices.
People with moderate views about intellectual property could take a leaf out of the playbook of more radical groups like the FSF and Creative Commons. Why not come up with a license that encodes reasonable intellectual property claims?
For example, instead of delivering work immediately into the public domain (as the GPL effectively does) or keeping it perpetually out of the public domain (as a standard copyright effictively does) such a license could deliver works into the public domain after say 20 years, or whatever.
What is the advantage? Intellectual property released under such a license would have almost the same economic value as intellectual property that is not released under such a license (as many have noted the vast majority of copyrighted works make all of their proffits within a short period of time after release) which means that authors would not lose much, if anything by releasing under such a license. Why is that such a good thing? Because if they have little to lose then it ought to be very easy to presure them into doing it.
As far as I could tell the majority had the weight of precedent on their side, although they completely passed up the chance to actually say anything about what the "limited time" clause means (which is most definitely their job). Anyway I think these points have been made by others already. I just wanted to point out one glimmer of good news that shows through in all of this.
The court rejected the argument that an extention of copyright terms would violate 1st Amendment rights, and they gave a pretty good argument for doing so (briefly, if a copyright does not restrain free speach now, then it will not restrain free speech just by sticking around a bit longer). However (and this is the good bit) they explicitly said that copyright legislation is subject to 1st Amendment restraints, and strongly suggested that fair use rights are required in order meet these constraints. This is increadibly good news, and bodes well for future rulings over the DMCA.
Why do all the lawyers insist on creating new versions of every law and crime just because they happen to occur in the "digital" realm?
Probably for the same reason that you just invented new versions of trespass, breaking-and-entering, and destruction of private property. If you look at the existing laws covering those three crimes then it is pretty obvious that none of them could be applied to cybercrimes as they stand. Let's take them one at a time:
Trespass: Typically your body has to be on another person's property. Seldom happens with cybercrimes.
Breaking-and-entering: Ditto, and there has to be some actual breaking involved.
Destruction of property: With cybercrimes it is usually unclear what property has been destroyed, if any. Usually the hardware is not damaged. What about the information stored on the hardware? Well even if you can establish some kind of property right in the information, intellectual property law does not usually have any provison for dealing with the destruction of such property.
My point is just that existing laws do not cover the kinds of actions involved in cybercrimes. Perhaps we can extend existing laws to cover such crimes, and perhaps we can even do it in the way that you suggested, but if we did we would still be comming up with new versions of each type of crime. There really is no way to avoid that.
As a general rule you can only use leathal force if you believe your life is in danger. If someone breaks into your home then it is usually pretty easy to persuade a jury that you were in fear for your life. If someone cracks your security then I think it would be pretty hard.
I don't know much about NAFTA but if I remember rightly the kind of problem you are talking about is the result of a clause that requires compensation for government "takings" (costs that result when legislation limits the ability of a property owner to profit from his or her property).
This kind of problem could not be an issue in the case we are talking about because the question being dealt with is the question of whether there is any property in the first place. No patent means no property means no possibility of takings.
You are right about the position that the court took. The court claimed that current Canadian law does not support this type of patent (because it doesn't qualify as an invention) which effectively puts the ball back in parliament's court (they can change the law if they want to).
However, it is worth noting that it was the Cannadian government (or at least the Commissioner of Patents) that rejected the patent in the first place, and it is also worth noting that the current (left wing) Canadan government is unlikely to pass legislation that would support such patents. Given these two factors it looks like this court decision is going to determine Cnada's position on the matter for some time to come.
I think that does make it less likely that patents of this sort will get the sort of widespread support required for inclusion in an international treaty.
One of the key features of existing international treaties over intellectual property is the idea of "national treatment". Roughly speaking the idea is that nations have to treat non-nationals the same as nationals. For example, if Candian law grants Candian authors a copyright in their works for life + 50 years, then Candian law should grant the same sort of copyright, for the same term, to non-Candian authors. So national treatment is a pretty weak requirement - it allows nations to have any sort of intellectual property law they like, so long as that law does not discriminate between nationals and non-nationals.
As far as the national treatement requirement goes, the only constraint on Candian law in this case is that, if Canadian courts reject such patent claims made by US citizens/corportations, then they must reject similar claims made by Canadian citizens/corportations.
In addition to the national treatment requirement, treaties have also tried to establish certain standards concerning the nature and terms of intellectual property rights, but these IP standards do not get down to the details of what can or cannot be patented. In general these IP standards have been designed to avoid all the really difficult questions about intellectual property, and they tend to be weakly enforced in any case.
So, as far as these additional IP standards go, it is highly unlikely that this Candian court ruling will conflict with any of them.
However, the fact that Canadian courts have now taken up a position against this sort of patent makes it less likely that this sort of patent will ever make it into the IP standards established by *future* international treaties.
On the flip side, when you live in a crowd of several million, no one really notices what you are doing. Big cities typically offer much more freedom than small towns, where everyone knows what you are up to, and cares about it.
Note that this was a summary judgement - i.e. the matter will never go to trial. The judge agreed with you that the claims by BT had no merit at all, and tossed them out.
That is about as quick and efficient as the legal process gets.
Of course lots of people think that there ought to be a higher barrier to claiming a patent in the first place - but in that case I suspect we would be complaining about how only corporations with deep pockets are in a position to file patents.
Read the decision PDF more carefully. The judge did understand what a "server" is (well enough anyway) and he did not find against BT because their claims were slightly too narrow but because they covered something entirely different.
With respect to the "remote terminals" connected to a "central computer" part of the judgement he allowed that having a bunch of "hub and spoke" networks that were connected in some way would infringe, but also noted (correctly) that the internet is nothing at all like this. Any "remote terminal" can retrieve information from any server, so no server qualifies as a "central computer" with respect to any group of "remote terminals".
Centralized strorage was a crucial part of the BT patent. Decentralized strorage is the defining characteristic of the internet. There is no way to read the BT patent broadly enough that it includes the internet without also including prior art.
BTW - there is no reason why the BT patent should be thrown out. They have a right to hold a patent over the technology that they developed. They do not have a right to claim everything that looks vaguely like the technology that they developed. The judge correctly found that their patent does cover something, it just doesn't cover the internet.
Finest quality astroturf I have seen for a while. Almost looks like the real thing.
If you think this is an unreasonable acusation then read the message I am replying to. He assumes that there is FUD flying when someone just says that a Wondows system wouldn't stay up.
Lots of people have pointed out that CGI is not showing any sign of replacing actors, in main roles, any time soon. But they missed the other aspect of the story.
CGI is already being used in place of sets, locations, crowd scenes, etc, that are too expensive to physically create. Expensive CGI is already at the point where it is hard to see any difference between CGI and a physical set. When cheap CGI gets to this point then pretty much all acting will take place in front of a blue screen, and all but the cheapest and most readily available sets will be virtual.
If we can dispense with sets, and filming on location, and extras, then that is a big slice of the Holywood economy.
Re:Killing people is as American as apple pie.
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Linux Games WIth Guns
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· Score: 1
There are some countries that have killed many times that number of people, in the last 50 years, within their own borders. You don't even have to start looking at the wars they have fought elsewhere.
In fact it is pretty amazing that the US has managed to fight so many wars, in so many places, and has only killed around 3,000,000 people (and most of those in one war - Vietnam). I think it gives some indication of how hard the US tries to avoid killing civillians.
If you take a look at the major wars of the 20th Century, that the US became involved in, it is also hard to find any that the US either started or even joined from the start. Most of these wars had been going for years before the US became involved. I think this gives some indication of how reluctant the US has been to get involved in wars.
Consider all of the biggest non-war killing sprees of the 20th century. They are really spread around pretty evenly. You can find them in Western Europe (the holocaust), eastern Europe (various efforts by Lenin and Stalin), Asia (the great leap forward, the cultural revolution, Cambodia), Africa (Biafra, Rawanda), Asia Minor (Armenia), and the list goes on. What is striking about this list is that none of them took place in the Americas, and the US had nothing to do with any of them.
Maybe. Of course the protection schemes will be broken, resulting in both ripping tools, and unprotected versions of digital media, becoming available. The tools will certainly be illegal in the US, but not in most other countries.
So what will the result in the US be? If people want to use the tools, in spite of their illegality, then they will need a Free OS. Would people be willing to break the law in order to copy digital media? Past experience suggests that quite a few people would be willing.
In any case the digital media itself will become availble in unprotected form, and it is not even clear that it would be illegal to obtain an unprotected copy of of something you have paid for already. In the US it is illegal to circumvent copy protection measures, but if someone in another country does the circumventing, and then suplies you with a copy that you have a fair use right to posess, then as far as I can tell, no one has broken the law.
MS has two options here. They can make it impossible to play such unprotected files, in which case people will start looking for an OS which can play them (my original argument), or MS can ignore the problem and thus reduce Paladium to so much hot air.
Slashdot Mirror
Perhaps the State Department should follow the DoD's lead and develop a First Person Negociator game.
I can just see it now. You get to sit on your arse for hours at a time listening to mental North Koreans saying things like "This seating arrangement is tantamount to a declaration of war!" or whiny Europeans endlessly complaining about how the US never asks them first when they want to start bombing places like North Korea.
Play that game for a few hours and you will start to see the merits of violence.
All I'm saying is, give war a chance.
The purest form of democracy is mob rule.
Care to explain this? Democracy is government by the people. When people behave as a mob there is no governing going on, and certainly nothing that looks like a system that is set up to allow every member of society to play a part in any governing that does happen. Mob "rule" is not even a type of democracy, let alone the purest type.
In a government there is always a minority of people who do not consent to the rules, and a minority of rules to which people do not consent.
True enough, but you are looking in the wrong place for the consent of the governed. It is not consent to every action taken by government or law passed, but consent to the constitution (i.e. the system by which government determines what will be done) that matters. In any democracy it is usually easy to find people who disagree with particular government actions, but usually hard to find people who actually want to overthrow the government.
As long as all *reasonable* people in a society do not want to overthrow the government, you have the consent of the governed. Now in principle it is possible to get this without having a democracy (that is without having a system in which the people actually play a role in governing) but it doesn't happen very often or very reliably.
The last time the US went to Iraq, we conferred no benefits on them. None. There was no rebuilding and no aid. Just bombings which killed many, followed by sanctions which starved many more.
This is not entirely true. Northern Iraq, which was effectively occupied, has enjoyed considerable benefits. Anyway if your point is just that the US should have gone all the way to Bagdad the last time around then I am right with you.
What the Germans and the French find offensive is that the US feels it can make these decisions alone--
Which would explain why France and Germany both anounced thier own final decisions *before* the second meeting of the security council that they were so insistent on setting up? People may well fear that the US will act unilaterally but, so far on this issue, the US has not. France and Germany on the other hand have made it clear that they will not support any resolution to go to war (France even threatend a veto) - which is unilateral action - and a departure from the process that they agreed to in the first resolution.
Most US foreign policy from 1945 to 1990 revolved around the defense of Western Europe, and as I noted earlier, most of the democracies in Western Europe were either created by or re-established as a result of US military action.
So now explain to me how the whole of Western Europe is just a big scheme by the US to exploit natural resources and cheap labour. What resources? What cheap labour?
Marxist explanations (i.e. the kind of explanation you just tried to give) don't even fit the facts very well for 19th century imperialist powers, let alone the US in the 20th century.
Oh, and in case you forgot the pre-WWII German democracy was also created by Allied military action.
What is it about a democracy, US-style, as opposed to any alternative form of government, that is so holy that anything that stands in the way of its creation must be sheer evil to be stamped out?
I am a godless heathen, so I do not literally think that that there is anything holy about democracy, but I do think that there is something deeply right about "government of the people, by the people, and the people". If you want to know why then you could read Locke, or you could just spend a little time trying to think of anything which could make a government legitimate apart from the consent of the governed.
Granted, there are evils that do need to be disposed of, but they do not include disagreeing with the US. Creating a democratic state must necessarily allow for the possibility that the people of that state may not like what you're doing, and you've just given them the power to do something about it.
No argument here - my point was just that the Germans and the French seem to *like* their own democratic regimes and it strikes me as somewhat hypocritical that they are now so violently opposed to the idea of the US confering the same benefits on other nations.
As someone else has already pointed out there are quite a few countries where the US played a vital role in creating democratic regimes.
In some countries the US literally manufactured democracy from whole cloth, right down to writing new constitutions for them (Germany, Japan, and a few more, maybe including Afganistan, although the verdict isn't in yet).
In some countries the US restored democracy after invading and ousting foreign powers, or domestic dictatorships (Belgium, the Netherlands, France, Grenada, Panama, and many others).
In some countries the US took indirect military action to establish democracy (Nicaragua for example).
Of course you are right that they also installed many dictators, and once or twice even took action that looked a lot like overthrowing democratic governments (the most obvious example is Chile where they had a hand in overturning a Socialist government that was actually elected). But even looking at those countries is instructive - all (at least all the one's you mentioned and I can think of) countries where the US got the government they wanted are now democracies (Nationalist China, S Korea, the Filipines, Chile, and so on). In the places where they failed to get the dictator that they wanted, dictatorship still prevails (Communist China, N Korea, Vietnam, Cuba, etc). Which suggests that the the US really was trying to pick the lesser evils.
Anyway, it is not hard to find democracies that have "Made in USA" stamped on them, even if there are (or were) many dictatorships with the same label.
These days two years late equates to about a year and a half after the war is over.
Actually it doesn't bother me that non-US nations would rather not be involved in US wars (their choice), but it does bother me when democracies that were created by US military action stand in the way when the US wants to create another democracy or two.
From the article it appears that the IP claims are based on copyrights rather than patents. If that is the case then the IP will probably never expire (see the postings on Eldred vs Ashcroft) and in any case will not expire for many decades (most likely 95 years from the date that the copyrighted code was first writen).
On the other hand copyrights protect only the code itself, and not the ideas or methods that the code embodies. So in principle someone could write new code that does exactly the same thing as the old code, so long as they show that they made no use of the old code when producing the new code. This is actually a lot harder than it sounds.
There are lots of uses for cloning, which seldom get metioned in the press because they are borring. Stories about cloning pets, and people, are more exciting, but are really just a sideshow in the cloning business.
The big advantage in clonning animals is that (1) you get exactly the genetic makeup that you wanted, and (2) you get an animal (or plant, or whatever) that is much more similar to its "parent" that anything that would result from sexual reproduction.
Examples of uses that rely on (1) include, the manufacture of tissue and organs for transplant, the manufacture of animals (etc) for testing purposes, and the resurection of recently extinct species.
In some ways (2) is even more important. Selective breeding (i.e. what farmers etc have done for thousands of years to produce our current selection of domesticated species) partly aims at producing breeds that are more useful, but also aims at producing populations that are highly uniform (diversity is good sometimes, but as most industries have discovered there are advantages to having standardised parts and products). Cloning promises to allow breeders to keep the very best genetic combinations that selective breeding produces, and to allow for highly uniform populations.
Take a look through some of the publications that specialise in science (like New Scientist, or Scientific American) if you want to find out what cloning might be good for. Avoid regular news publication. Even the goods ones tend to focus on the uses that pose social policy problems rather than the uses that are economically important.
Most military hardware (at least the stuff produced by the US, Europe, and Russia) is already built to withstand EMPs. No one will ever use a weapon like this to knock planes out of the sky, or stop tanks in their tracks.
What it can be used for is for frying radar systems that are switched on, and for frying passive tracking systems that are switched on. For obvious reasons these cannot be shielded against EMPs (ok - if it's not obvious then reason is that a radar system must be sensitive to electromagnetic radiation in order to work).
Why is this a big deal? Several reasons:
(1) Ground based anti-aircraft systems have become very small, mobile, and relatively cheap.
(2) Iraq has taken to placing such systems right next to things that the US does not want to blow up (hospitals, schools, chemical weapons facilities, etc).
(3) Even stealth aircraft are not entirely invisible to radar. Yes they can slip through a traditional perimiter radar network (i.e. the kind of line of radars that many nations have watching their borders), but they cannot remain undetected if they have to fly right over a radar system, as they would have to do if there is a radar system either at or near to their target.
So now the US has a method of blinding anti-aircraft defenses without destroying the stuff around them. Given US methods of conducting war (i.e. heavy reliance on air power), and the obvious synergy between stealth and EMP technology, these weapons are a big deal, and I might add there is no obvious or easy way of defending against them.
Two sentences that explain it all (from Salon).
"Segway didn't help themselves by hiring very expensive lobbyists," he said. "I think that backfired on them, too."
New Hampshire-based Segway hired lobbying firms but has made no contributions to any public officials or candidates, said Matt Dailida, the company's director of state government affairs.
Looks like they paid the wrong people.
Actually I'm pretty sure that the military won't care. Devices for jamming radio signals have been in use on the battlefield for a long time, so they already have equipment that is designed to beat or track jamming devices.
Law enforcement agencies probably will care.
People with moderate views about intellectual property could take a leaf out of the playbook of more radical groups like the FSF and Creative Commons. Why not come up with a license that encodes reasonable intellectual property claims?
For example, instead of delivering work immediately into the public domain (as the GPL effectively does) or keeping it perpetually out of the public domain (as a standard copyright effictively does) such a license could deliver works into the public domain after say 20 years, or whatever.
What is the advantage? Intellectual property released under such a license would have almost the same economic value as intellectual property that is not released under such a license (as many have noted the vast majority of copyrighted works make all of their proffits within a short period of time after release) which means that authors would not lose much, if anything by releasing under such a license. Why is that such a good thing? Because if they have little to lose then it ought to be very easy to presure them into doing it.
As far as I could tell the majority had the weight of precedent on their side, although they completely passed up the chance to actually say anything about what the "limited time" clause means (which is most definitely their job). Anyway I think these points have been made by others already. I just wanted to point out one glimmer of good news that shows through in all of this.
The court rejected the argument that an extention of copyright terms would violate 1st Amendment rights, and they gave a pretty good argument for doing so (briefly, if a copyright does not restrain free speach now, then it will not restrain free speech just by sticking around a bit longer). However (and this is the good bit) they explicitly said that copyright legislation is subject to 1st Amendment restraints, and strongly suggested that fair use rights are required in order meet these constraints. This is increadibly good news, and bodes well for future rulings over the DMCA.
Why do all the lawyers insist on creating new versions of every law and crime just because they happen to occur in the "digital" realm?
Probably for the same reason that you just invented new versions of trespass, breaking-and-entering, and destruction of private property. If you look at the existing laws covering those three crimes then it is pretty obvious that none of them could be applied to cybercrimes as they stand. Let's take them one at a time:
Trespass: Typically your body has to be on another person's property. Seldom happens with cybercrimes.
Breaking-and-entering: Ditto, and there has to be some actual breaking involved.
Destruction of property: With cybercrimes it is usually unclear what property has been destroyed, if any. Usually the hardware is not damaged. What about the information stored on the hardware? Well even if you can establish some kind of property right in the information, intellectual property law does not usually have any provison for dealing with the destruction of such property.
My point is just that existing laws do not cover the kinds of actions involved in cybercrimes. Perhaps we can extend existing laws to cover such crimes, and perhaps we can even do it in the way that you suggested, but if we did we would still be comming up with new versions of each type of crime. There really is no way to avoid that.
As a general rule you can only use leathal force if you believe your life is in danger. If someone breaks into your home then it is usually pretty easy to persuade a jury that you were in fear for your life. If someone cracks your security then I think it would be pretty hard.
I don't know much about NAFTA but if I remember rightly the kind of problem you are talking about is the result of a clause that requires compensation for government "takings" (costs that result when legislation limits the ability of a property owner to profit from his or her property).
This kind of problem could not be an issue in the case we are talking about because the question being dealt with is the question of whether there is any property in the first place. No patent means no property means no possibility of takings.
You are right about the position that the court took. The court claimed that current Canadian law does not support this type of patent (because it doesn't qualify as an invention) which effectively puts the ball back in parliament's court (they can change the law if they want to).
However, it is worth noting that it was the Cannadian government (or at least the Commissioner of Patents) that rejected the patent in the first place, and it is also worth noting that the current (left wing) Canadan government is unlikely to pass legislation that would support such patents. Given these two factors it looks like this court decision is going to determine Cnada's position on the matter for some time to come.
I think that does make it less likely that patents of this sort will get the sort of widespread support required for inclusion in an international treaty.
One of the key features of existing international treaties over intellectual property is the idea of "national treatment". Roughly speaking the idea is that nations have to treat non-nationals the same as nationals. For example, if Candian law grants Candian authors a copyright in their works for life + 50 years, then Candian law should grant the same sort of copyright, for the same term, to non-Candian authors. So national treatment is a pretty weak requirement - it allows nations to have any sort of intellectual property law they like, so long as that law does not discriminate between nationals and non-nationals.
As far as the national treatement requirement goes, the only constraint on Candian law in this case is that, if Canadian courts reject such patent claims made by US citizens/corportations, then they must reject similar claims made by Canadian citizens/corportations.
In addition to the national treatment requirement, treaties have also tried to establish certain standards concerning the nature and terms of intellectual property rights, but these IP standards do not get down to the details of what can or cannot be patented. In general these IP standards have been designed to avoid all the really difficult questions about intellectual property, and they tend to be weakly enforced in any case.
So, as far as these additional IP standards go, it is highly unlikely that this Candian court ruling will conflict with any of them.
However, the fact that Canadian courts have now taken up a position against this sort of patent makes it less likely that this sort of patent will ever make it into the IP standards established by *future* international treaties.
On the flip side, when you live in a crowd of several million, no one really notices what you are doing. Big cities typically offer much more freedom than small towns, where everyone knows what you are up to, and cares about it.
Note that this was a summary judgement - i.e. the matter will never go to trial. The judge agreed with you that the claims by BT had no merit at all, and tossed them out.
That is about as quick and efficient as the legal process gets.
Of course lots of people think that there ought to be a higher barrier to claiming a patent in the first place - but in that case I suspect we would be complaining about how only corporations with deep pockets are in a position to file patents.
Read the decision PDF more carefully. The judge did understand what a "server" is (well enough anyway) and he did not find against BT because their claims were slightly too narrow but because they covered something entirely different.
With respect to the "remote terminals" connected to a "central computer" part of the judgement he allowed that having a bunch of "hub and spoke" networks that were connected in some way would infringe, but also noted (correctly) that the internet is nothing at all like this. Any "remote terminal" can retrieve information from any server, so no server qualifies as a "central computer" with respect to any group of "remote terminals".
Centralized strorage was a crucial part of the BT patent. Decentralized strorage is the defining characteristic of the internet. There is no way to read the BT patent broadly enough that it includes the internet without also including prior art.
BTW - there is no reason why the BT patent should be thrown out. They have a right to hold a patent over the technology that they developed. They do not have a right to claim everything that looks vaguely like the technology that they developed. The judge correctly found that their patent does cover something, it just doesn't cover the internet.
Finest quality astroturf I have seen for a while. Almost looks like the real thing.
If you think this is an unreasonable acusation then read the message I am replying to. He assumes that there is FUD flying when someone just says that a Wondows system wouldn't stay up.
Lots of people have pointed out that CGI is not showing any sign of replacing actors, in main roles, any time soon. But they missed the other aspect of the story.
CGI is already being used in place of sets, locations, crowd scenes, etc, that are too expensive to physically create. Expensive CGI is already at the point where it is hard to see any difference between CGI and a physical set. When cheap CGI gets to this point then pretty much all acting will take place in front of a blue screen, and all but the cheapest and most readily available sets will be virtual.
If we can dispense with sets, and filming on location, and extras, then that is a big slice of the Holywood economy.
There are some countries that have killed many times that number of people, in the last 50 years, within their own borders. You don't even have to start looking at the wars they have fought elsewhere.
In fact it is pretty amazing that the US has managed to fight so many wars, in so many places, and has only killed around 3,000,000 people (and most of those in one war - Vietnam). I think it gives some indication of how hard the US tries to avoid killing civillians.
If you take a look at the major wars of the 20th Century, that the US became involved in, it is also hard to find any that the US either started or even joined from the start. Most of these wars had been going for years before the US became involved. I think this gives some indication of how reluctant the US has been to get involved in wars.
Consider all of the biggest non-war killing sprees of the 20th century. They are really spread around pretty evenly. You can find them in Western Europe (the holocaust), eastern Europe (various efforts by Lenin and Stalin), Asia (the great leap forward, the cultural revolution, Cambodia), Africa (Biafra, Rawanda), Asia Minor (Armenia), and the list goes on. What is striking about this list is that none of them took place in the Americas, and the US had nothing to do with any of them.
Maybe. Of course the protection schemes will be broken, resulting in both ripping tools, and unprotected versions of digital media, becoming available. The tools will certainly be illegal in the US, but not in most other countries.
So what will the result in the US be? If people want to use the tools, in spite of their illegality, then they will need a Free OS. Would people be willing to break the law in order to copy digital media? Past experience suggests that quite a few people would be willing.
In any case the digital media itself will become availble in unprotected form, and it is not even clear that it would be illegal to obtain an unprotected copy of of something you have paid for already. In the US it is illegal to circumvent copy protection measures, but if someone in another country does the circumventing, and then suplies you with a copy that you have a fair use right to posess, then as far as I can tell, no one has broken the law.
MS has two options here. They can make it impossible to play such unprotected files, in which case people will start looking for an OS which can play them (my original argument), or MS can ignore the problem and thus reduce Paladium to so much hot air.