With a chemical sensor, it could monitor water supplies for contamination or other toxins; with a camera it could be a spy or an explorer; with a net or a boom, it could skim contaminants off the top of water...
Walking on water lets it do these things? It's a pretty cool accomplishment for sure, but I don't see how it's any more useful than other things that just simply float.
Hah. What I want are that guys balls. In a jar. On my desk.
In other words, you didn't read the article
on
Is IP Property?
·
· Score: 1
The author explains in great detail how real property and intellectual property are not the same thing and are treated very differently by the law.
For example, restrictions on actual property focus on prohibiting negative effects on others, and almost never on restricting the benefits to others. You can charge rent for occupying land, but you can't charge your neighbors for walking by your house and smelling the flowers, or because your nice new paint job makes their houses more valuable. Those types of non-consumptive benefits are free and always have been. Intellectual property law, by contrast, is devoted almost entirely to tracking down people who get some benefit from something proprietary without paying, even if they consume nothing. Cases against infringers are based on the idea that their actions interfere with a flow of money to the rights holder. This is entirely a tort view, not a property view.
For another thing, people are responsible for controlling their own property and are liable for damages caused by it. But if an invention turns out to be harmful it's the manufacturers and sellers who get sued, never the patent holders who claim to "own" the technology. Which way do they want it?
What the article actually says...
on
Is IP Property?
·
· Score: 1
As usual, most of the comments here either concern the wording of the post or come out of thin air. Take the time to read the article. It explains various reasons why treating ideas "just like property" is wrong, and goes far beyond the usual rant that ideas are intangible.
For one thing, laws that regulate real property tend to focus on reducing negative effects on others, but never to restrict benefits to others. Building codes tend to promote public safety and prohibit things that would reduce property values in the neighborhood, but they never regulate positive benefits -- people with beautiful gardens and newly painted houses can't demand money from neighbors whose property values rise. For another thing, property owners are liable for damages inflicted by their property. But if products cause harm it's the manufacturers and sellers who are held responsible, never the patent holders who claim to "own" the technology. Which way do they want it?
The author believes (and cites various works that suggest) that intellectual property laws should interfere with the free market only to an extent that allows creators and inventors to recover their costs. After that point it's up to them to conduct their business in a profitable way, just like everybody else. Here's a great quote:
"The proper focus is on the intellectual property owner, not the accused infringer. The question is whether an extension of intellectual property rights is necessary to permit intellectual property owners to cover their average fixed costs. If so, it is probably a good idea. If not, it is not necessary, and the likelihood that it will impose costs on competition or future innovation should incline us to oppose it. Whether an accused infringer obtained a benefit without paying for it bears only indirectly on that question."
The Sony Bono Copyright Extension Act, he points out, was bad because it provided no incentive whatsoever for the creation of new works, and made the use of a huge body of existing material much more difficult.
He also touches on a point I've been harping on for a long time myself, which is that property and theft are familiar concepts that carry a lot of cultural baggage. Rights holders tend to hijack these social concepts. For example, the RIAA loves to play the part of the little old lady chasing a purse snatcher, or the enraged homeowner walking in on a thief carrying away the family TV. It's hard not to sympathize with the rights holders, but that sympathy is undeserved because rights and property are not the same thing.
For me the really interesting part was where the author makes an analogy suggests between intellectual property protection and social welfare programs. Both are government interference with the free market system to benefit a private party. Both are motivated by benefits to the overall public good, rather than out of generosity to the individual. Protecting copyrights and patents is important because ultimately everyone benefits, rather than because fundamental principles of ownership are at stake.
One problem with this analogy is that the public pays directly for welfare through taxes, whereas intellectual property protection affects only those who want to buy protected works. [I disagree with this point, because in fact the public does pay directly for the enforcement of IP laws. When the FBI raids the home of a P2P file sharer, that's your tax dollars at work.] But, the author quickly adds, living in a modern society without paying for creative works and inventions would be nearly impossible, so in practice we all pay. In any case, the analogy between IP protection and a welfare program seems more realistic to me than equating IP with real property.
Finally, the author points out that it's not a good idea to base our treatment of IP on any analogy. Analogies always come with caveats... IP is like property except... IP is like torts except... The caveats get forgotten over time, and the analogies are applied too strictly. The
The idea that copyright infringement takes food out of musicians' mouths is another of the recording industry's big lies. Musicians under record contracts generally get NOTHING from CD sales. The way contracts are written all expenses of manufacturing, advertising, distribution, etc, etc, are taken out of the musician's share of the profits, usually leaving ZERO. What musicians get out of having a recording contract is exposure which gets them better paying gigs. They get the same exposure whether you buy a CD, copy it from a friend, hear it on the radio or find it lying on the street.
Janis Ian, who has been making records since the 1970s, has a very informative essay about file sharing and the mechanics of being a recording artist.
"I can be sitting in the bathroom with my Sidekick, and I'll be reading e-mail."
Thanks Mark, that's just a little more information than I needed.
Why not capture his speech?
on
Ballmer on Linux
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Ballmer wondered aloud why the content of his speech was not being captured and translated automatically, while also being synchronized with real-time video and a copy of his Microsoft PowerPoint presentation.
Mostly they probably didn't think of doing it, which I assume is your point. But even if they did think of it, I doubt that Microsoft declared your speech to be public domain or handed out written authorizations to reproduce it. In today's IP-obsessed, everything-is-copyrighted legal climate, which Microsoft has done a lot to nurture, the risk of infringement is probably a good deterrent against using these nifty technologies to record and reproduce anyone's output, other than from public employees and political candidates.
The smug superiority of slashdot posts like this is really annoying.
That's an easy one.
Not really. The article doesn't say what grounds the MST3K folks think they have for suing Mr. Sinus. The claim is trademark infringement, but that's pretty broad. It looks to me (a non-lawyer) like Mr. Sinus has made tangible efforts to respect the MST3K trademark. Not only did they request a license of some sort, but when it was refused they changed their name. "Mr. Sinus" is a lot closer to "Mr. Science" than to "Mystery Science Theater."
Anyway, a trademark protects a name or symbol. It's not a patent on a particular way of doing things, such as 3 guys making wisecracks in front of a movie. You don't see Jay Leno and Dave Letterman suing each other over their virtually identical formats, nor do the hundreds of DJs calling their radio shows the "morning zoo" or the "drive at five." Infringement claims like this are far from simple and obvious.
Now, can we get back to feeling sorry for people that steal music please?
Nobody "steals" music because nobody "owns" music. There are only copyright "holders" who have temporary, specific rights that expire whenever the government says so. They own nothing. Their only claim is that they suffer losses due to infringement, which may or may not be true in different cases.
The distinction between infringement and theft is important, because "theft" is an age-old concept with a lot of cultural baggage. Everyone can identify with the little old lady chasing down a purse snatcher, or the enraged homeowner catching a junkie trying to carry off the tv set. Copyright infringement is nowhere near as clear cut. It may be illegal, but equating it with theft gives the people one side of the whole "Intellectual Property" issue a PR advantage they don't deserve.
I think the point of the article is that radio is like a chat room, whereas physical matter is more like a message board.
Although the author makes a good case for the unlikelihood of extraterrestrials picking up a radio signal, he doesn't explain how a rock carrying a chemical message is any more likely to reach a planet and survive to hit the ground.
The key is that unlike radio waves, a rock that successfully does reach a planet is in a good position to wait there for intelligent beings to evolve to pick it up and discover its message. For radio to reach those same aliens, they must have the technology to receive the signal and must be paying attention the moment the signal passes by, or they miss it forever.
And that's why we no longer live in a Representative Democracy. We live in an Oligarchy. Our so-called representatives represent the interests of the wealthy people and organizations who give them the money to convince us to vote for them. We are peasants. Karl Marx or someone called religion the opiate of the masses. Nowadays it's consumer goods. We are peasants with cell phones and cable TV.
It's all about scheduling. Shatner and Nimoy both probably have much tighter calendars than the rest of the group. I doubt that anybody foresaw that this would be Doohan's final public appearance until just recently. The mere fact that the entire cast of the original series (minus the late DeForest Kelly) would assemble for one event is a tribute to their genuine feelings for Doohan.
Incidentally, one night in Seattle I was at a play which Nimoy attended (the hilarious musical parody Star Drek, which Paramount's lawyers subsequently slapped out of existence). Nimoy entered the theater very discreetly with a few friends as the house lights were going down, so they could get to their seats without people noticing him and disrupting the performance. Because of his schedule he had to leave during the intermission, but he took time to stop backstage and say hello to the cast. Pretty classy in every respect if you ask me. The theater manager came out and explained all this after Nimoy was safely away. We could still hear the cast going nuts backstage.
In point of fact, the United States is NOT a representative democracy, it's an oligarchy pretending to be a representative democracy. I don't care what your civics book says. Our elected representatives represent the interests of sponsors who pay for their advertising, and our elections measure how well that money is spent. The general public doesn't get enough information to make meaningful decisions, and most don't even know who their representatives are. But even if they did, American citizens (er, I mean "consumers") have about as much real political power as student council in high school.
that we actually live in a direct democracy instead of a representative one
I'd settle for representative democracy if we still had it, but we live in an oligarchy. Elected representatives represent the interests of the people who give them the money to convince the public to vote for them.
For me the most frightening aspect of this whole thing is its absence from major news outlets. Go ahead and Google for "diebold e-voting machines" or words to that effect. Down on page 4 of the results you will find some old articles on CBS and MSNBC and others. Site searches pull up nothing about the hack. My guess is that the "real" news organizations think Bev Harris, who is behind blackboxvoting.org, is a crackpot. But given that this is a HUGE story if it is true, I would expect them at least to ask their own questions and address it one way or another, rather than just ignoring it.
Face it folks, Clerks wasn't all that great. The fact that there are people who identify with the drudgery of working at a dead-end job doesn't make Kevin Smith a good filmmaker, and standing around on the sidewalk smoking for 90 minutes isn't acting.
Slashdot Mirror
We had to do that too, after our last sysadmin quit.
and carry my light saber. Nothing scares me anymore, except the voices.
Like me, you are the exact target audience for this film. I don't think you're going to be disappointed.
Word has it that the Columbine students' whole motivation was to get mentioned by Jon Katz.
The commercials overemphasize her role. She is actually only in it for about 15 minutes. Don't let it drive you away.
With a chemical sensor, it could monitor water supplies for contamination or other toxins; with a camera it could be a spy or an explorer; with a net or a boom, it could skim contaminants off the top of water...
Walking on water lets it do these things? It's a pretty cool accomplishment for sure, but I don't see how it's any more useful than other things that just simply float.
Hah. What I want are that guys balls.
In a jar.
On my desk.
The author explains in great detail how real property and intellectual property are not the same thing and are treated very differently by the law.
For example, restrictions on actual property focus on prohibiting negative effects on others, and almost never on restricting the benefits to others. You can charge rent for occupying land, but you can't charge your neighbors for walking by your house and smelling the flowers, or because your nice new paint job makes their houses more valuable. Those types of non-consumptive benefits are free and always have been. Intellectual property law, by contrast, is devoted almost entirely to tracking down people who get some benefit from something proprietary without paying, even if they consume nothing. Cases against infringers are based on the idea that their actions interfere with a flow of money to the rights holder. This is entirely a tort view, not a property view.
For another thing, people are responsible for controlling their own property and are liable for damages caused by it. But if an invention turns out to be harmful it's the manufacturers and sellers who get sued, never the patent holders who claim to "own" the technology. Which way do they want it?
As usual, most of the comments here either concern the wording of the post or come out of thin air. Take the time to read the article. It explains various reasons why treating ideas "just like property" is wrong, and goes far beyond the usual rant that ideas are intangible.
... IP is like property except... IP is like torts except... The caveats get forgotten over time, and the analogies are applied too strictly. The
For one thing, laws that regulate real property tend to focus on reducing negative effects on others, but never to restrict benefits to others. Building codes tend to promote public safety and prohibit things that would reduce property values in the neighborhood, but they never regulate positive benefits -- people with beautiful gardens and newly painted houses can't demand money from neighbors whose property values rise. For another thing, property owners are liable for damages inflicted by their property. But if products cause harm it's the manufacturers and sellers who are held responsible, never the patent holders who claim to "own" the technology. Which way do they want it?
The author believes (and cites various works that suggest) that intellectual property laws should interfere with the free market only to an extent that allows creators and inventors to recover their costs. After that point it's up to them to conduct their business in a profitable way, just like everybody else. Here's a great quote:
"The proper focus is on the intellectual property owner, not the accused infringer. The question is whether an extension of intellectual property rights is necessary to permit intellectual property owners to cover their average fixed costs. If so, it is probably a good idea. If not, it is not necessary, and the likelihood that it will impose costs on competition or future innovation should incline us to oppose it. Whether an accused infringer obtained a benefit without paying for it bears only indirectly on that question."
The Sony Bono Copyright Extension Act, he points out, was bad because it provided no incentive whatsoever for the creation of new works, and made the use of a huge body of existing material much more difficult.
He also touches on a point I've been harping on for a long time myself, which is that property and theft are familiar concepts that carry a lot of cultural baggage. Rights holders tend to hijack these social concepts. For example, the RIAA loves to play the part of the little old lady chasing a purse snatcher, or the enraged homeowner walking in on a thief carrying away the family TV. It's hard not to sympathize with the rights holders, but that sympathy is undeserved because rights and property are not the same thing.
For me the really interesting part was where the author makes an analogy suggests between intellectual property protection and social welfare programs. Both are government interference with the free market system to benefit a private party. Both are motivated by benefits to the overall public good, rather than out of generosity to the individual. Protecting copyrights and patents is important because ultimately everyone benefits, rather than because fundamental principles of ownership are at stake.
One problem with this analogy is that the public pays directly for welfare through taxes, whereas intellectual property protection affects only those who want to buy protected works. [I disagree with this point, because in fact the public does pay directly for the enforcement of IP laws. When the FBI raids the home of a P2P file sharer, that's your tax dollars at work.] But, the author quickly adds, living in a modern society without paying for creative works and inventions would be nearly impossible, so in practice we all pay. In any case, the analogy between IP protection and a welfare program seems more realistic to me than equating IP with real property.
Finally, the author points out that it's not a good idea to base our treatment of IP on any analogy. Analogies always come with caveats
The idea that copyright infringement takes food out of musicians' mouths is another of the recording industry's big lies. Musicians under record contracts generally get NOTHING from CD sales. The way contracts are written all expenses of manufacturing, advertising, distribution, etc, etc, are taken out of the musician's share of the profits, usually leaving ZERO. What musicians get out of having a recording contract is exposure which gets them better paying gigs. They get the same exposure whether you buy a CD, copy it from a friend, hear it on the radio or find it lying on the street.
Janis Ian, who has been making records since the 1970s, has a very informative essay about file sharing and the mechanics of being a recording artist.
"I can be sitting in the bathroom with my Sidekick, and I'll be reading e-mail."
Thanks Mark, that's just a little more information than I needed.
Ballmer wondered aloud why the content of his speech was not being captured and translated automatically, while also being synchronized with real-time video and a copy of his Microsoft PowerPoint presentation.
Mostly they probably didn't think of doing it, which I assume is your point. But even if they did think of it, I doubt that Microsoft declared your speech to be public domain or handed out written authorizations to reproduce it. In today's IP-obsessed, everything-is-copyrighted legal climate, which Microsoft has done a lot to nurture, the risk of infringement is probably a good deterrent against using these nifty technologies to record and reproduce anyone's output, other than from public employees and political candidates.
The smug superiority of slashdot posts like this is really annoying.
That's an easy one.
Not really. The article doesn't say what grounds the MST3K folks think they have for suing Mr. Sinus. The claim is trademark infringement, but that's pretty broad. It looks to me (a non-lawyer) like Mr. Sinus has made tangible efforts to respect the MST3K trademark. Not only did they request a license of some sort, but when it was refused they changed their name. "Mr. Sinus" is a lot closer to "Mr. Science" than to "Mystery Science Theater."
Anyway, a trademark protects a name or symbol. It's not a patent on a particular way of doing things, such as 3 guys making wisecracks in front of a movie. You don't see Jay Leno and Dave Letterman suing each other over their virtually identical formats, nor do the hundreds of DJs calling their radio shows the "morning zoo" or the "drive at five." Infringement claims like this are far from simple and obvious.
Now, can we get back to feeling sorry for people that steal music please?
Nobody "steals" music because nobody "owns" music. There are only copyright "holders" who have temporary, specific rights that expire whenever the government says so. They own nothing. Their only claim is that they suffer losses due to infringement, which may or may not be true in different cases.
The distinction between infringement and theft is important, because "theft" is an age-old concept with a lot of cultural baggage. Everyone can identify with the little old lady chasing down a purse snatcher, or the enraged homeowner catching a junkie trying to carry off the tv set. Copyright infringement is nowhere near as clear cut. It may be illegal, but equating it with theft gives the people one side of the whole "Intellectual Property" issue a PR advantage they don't deserve.
I think the point of the article is that radio is like a chat room, whereas physical matter is more like a message board.
Although the author makes a good case for the unlikelihood of extraterrestrials picking up a radio signal, he doesn't explain how a rock carrying a chemical message is any more likely to reach a planet and survive to hit the ground.
The key is that unlike radio waves, a rock that successfully does reach a planet is in a good position to wait there for intelligent beings to evolve to pick it up and discover its message. For radio to reach those same aliens, they must have the technology to receive the signal and must be paying attention the moment the signal passes by, or they miss it forever.
My guess is MS will whine that the name "Abi-Word" infringes on the name "Microsoft Word."
And that's why we no longer live in a Representative Democracy. We live in an Oligarchy. Our so-called representatives represent the interests of the wealthy people and organizations who give them the money to convince us to vote for them. We are peasants. Karl Marx or someone called religion the opiate of the masses. Nowadays it's consumer goods. We are peasants with cell phones and cable TV.
It's all about scheduling. Shatner and Nimoy both probably have much tighter calendars than the rest of the group. I doubt that anybody foresaw that this would be Doohan's final public appearance until just recently. The mere fact that the entire cast of the original series (minus the late DeForest Kelly) would assemble for one event is a tribute to their genuine feelings for Doohan.
Incidentally, one night in Seattle I was at a play which Nimoy attended (the hilarious musical parody Star Drek, which Paramount's lawyers subsequently slapped out of existence). Nimoy entered the theater very discreetly with a few friends as the house lights were going down, so they could get to their seats without people noticing him and disrupting the performance. Because of his schedule he had to leave during the intermission, but he took time to stop backstage and say hello to the cast. Pretty classy in every respect if you ask me. The theater manager came out and explained all this after Nimoy was safely away. We could still hear the cast going nuts backstage.
In point of fact, the United States is NOT a representative democracy, it's an oligarchy pretending to be a representative democracy. I don't care what your civics book says. Our elected representatives represent the interests of sponsors who pay for their advertising, and our elections measure how well that money is spent. The general public doesn't get enough information to make meaningful decisions, and most don't even know who their representatives are. But even if they did, American citizens (er, I mean "consumers") have about as much real political power as student council in high school.
that we actually live in a direct democracy instead of a representative one
I'd settle for representative democracy if we still had it, but we live in an oligarchy. Elected representatives represent the interests of the people who give them the money to convince the public to vote for them.
For me the most frightening aspect of this whole thing is its absence from major news outlets. Go ahead and Google for "diebold e-voting machines" or words to that effect. Down on page 4 of the results you will find some old articles on CBS and MSNBC and others. Site searches pull up nothing about the hack. My guess is that the "real" news organizations think Bev Harris, who is behind blackboxvoting.org, is a crackpot. But given that this is a HUGE story if it is true, I would expect them at least to ask their own questions and address it one way or another, rather than just ignoring it.
We just don't have permission.
So either we act like peasants and stay out of the king's forest because the king said so, or we don't.
The store doesn't sue you if you make 2 replacement glasses yourself.
Face it folks, Clerks wasn't all that great. The fact that there are people who identify with the drudgery of working at a dead-end job doesn't make Kevin Smith a good filmmaker, and standing around on the sidewalk smoking for 90 minutes isn't acting.
You can perform any quantum operation by superimposing a phase-inverted antimatter flux onto a set of photons in a submicron warp bubble.
Give a man some gum and he'll chew for a day.
Teach him how to scrape gum off things and he'll chew for a lifetime.