The whole 'intellectual property rights' name is deliberate propaganda and fairly recent. In other languages the concept is more commonly called 'immaterial rights' or 'intellectual rights', thus avoiding the whole intellectual debacle that comes from confusing a monopoly right with a property right.
"but why should you be able to dictate at what price"
As a general rule, we've found that a competetive market is superior in generating wealth than protected markets. In a free competetive market, neither party gets to dictate the price.
I can buy a hammer from Peter, if we cant agree on a price I can buy a hammer from Joe, and afford a couple of nails too. With intellectual monopoly rights, Peter can prevent Joe from selling me a cheaper hammer, and I can only get the hammer but no nails, leading to less total value as a whole existing within the economy (as Peters less efficient hammer production consumes the surplus input).
"If they want to overcharge, it's their problem."
If they want to overcharge _in a free market_ it's their problem. If they want to overcharge and they have a legal monopoly, then it's _everyones_ problem, as that actually means the economy as a whole _looses wealth_. For the long term effects of monopolies on an economy, compare communist state production, etc. And then try to imagine approximately how much richer we'd all be if we didnt have the lodestone of IP around our necks, but instead encouraged immaterial development through non-monopolistic financing methods.
Right. You do realize there's nothing stopping those corporates from registering the patents in the US and doing the research in cheaper countries? The idea that the west has an 'innovation edge' these days is, frankly, mostly a comfort blanket, and strong 'IP' support doesnt protect jobs, it merely increases prices for the local market. Which in turn kills jobs.
Saying those countries should introduce their own monopolies because the US cant compete would be like the former Soviet union demanding the west nationalize their factories to ensure fair competition.
Somehow I dont think that would have been a terribly bright idea.
"...and thus, I am still morally entitled to pirate music!"
Of course, the difference is that Kenneth Cole arent about to get Sears outlawed. Or there'd probably be a whole lot of people feeling morally entitled to buy Sears shirts.
The onus lies on the monopoly protector to come up with the ethical rationale as to why those who would buy the Sears shirt but not the Kenneth Cole shirt should go without shirts.
"The flow chart keeps changing along with the market."
As long as there are government mandated monopolies in a market the market will be suboptimized and it will fail to accomodate consumer demand.
The pricing of monopoly protected goods isnt set as a function of cost to produce, it's set as a function of what the market can bear.
Basically, there are a number of variables that will affect price, for example; disposable income spendable on music goes up? Price goes up. Easier access? Price goes up (the 'cost' in time, money and efford of going to the store goes away from the total the consumer is willing to pay). You can buy music per track? Price goes up. (Total spending remains at the same level, but on fewer tracks instead).
With monopoly pricing there is only one variable that keeps prices down. It's when enough people no longer buy the product in question (ie, boycotts or piracy) to offset the revenue gain from price increases.
Otherwise you'll just see a constant revenue maximization and concurrent spending/waste increase (spending grows to accomodate revenue through increases in, for example, marketing).
This situation is a good example why free markets are much better than protected monopolies. Decades of protection from competition has resulted in a situation where the RIAA corps cannot turn a profit on million dollar revenues on a product that could be produced for less than the cost of a used car. Protecting producers from competition to encourage 'investment' only results in the 'investments' costing that much more. You get the same work done, except you're paying much, much, more.
"wasn't/isn't as stable as the standard IBM alternative."
Frankly, I'd agree with the GP. Both AIX and Linux are stable as rocks. Until you start playing around with 'special' and 'cool' system designs like global filesystems or exceedingly complex HA clusters, in which case I've seen both go up in flames.
As long as you have a reasonably competent vendor who cares, it's simply a question of eyeballs. If the configuration you're trying to run has been tested and debugged, well, then you're in luck. If you end up being the lab rat, well, how many pieces of software do you know that were free of major bugs the first time they were run...
While the listeners subjective experience as well as random external noise may certainly be part of the artistic interpretation of the piece, I seriously doubt they'd be considered part of the copyrightable work. Which is just yet another indication of the fallacies of copyright.
Of course, if it did work, that could leave the door open to recording, for example, a jet engine, publishing them on a CD and then suing the airlines for copyright infringement. And, hey, why not try it and call the lawsuit itself avant-garde art?
On a more varied work, certainly. As the moment in this case encompasses the full contents of the work, a case could be made against it.
On the other hand, it's even easier to argue that the work in question does not reach the 'work' height required for actual copyright any more than a space or a blank paper.
"the idea is that providing free counsel to anyone who wants it would increase litigation in an already litigious society."
On the other hand, if it's dumped on the taxpayers bill and the actual cost becomes visible, maybe there'd be a stronger political pressure to deal with the various reasons for the litigiousness.
"The downside to that is that it means you are truly voting for a party rather than for a person"
There are proportional representation systems that allow you to vote for specific people. For example, the parties can print a suggested order in which the candidates will get their seats, and the voters can cross out specific candidates they dont like or just leave the one they do like.
Two party systems are just one party away from a one party state.
A transition to IPv6 isnt a massive overhaul. At worst it's a software upgrade and an implementation project; the end result of which would be a significant drop in router processing requirements, ie, _cheaper_ hardware.
"The whole tiered internet system is (surprise!) purely motivated by the money to be made,"
Rent-seeking is purely motivated by the money to be made. Highway robbery is purely motivated by the money to be made.
This does not mean either is socially or economically desireable.
"maybe they'll have the monetary incentive to upgrade the network"
They have a monetary incentive to upgrade the network. They either do it or their customers choose someone else. That's called competition.
Allowing them to further extort money from the consumers and others while keeping the _same_ infrastructure just makes them more profitable and reduces competetive pressure. Get a whole new revenue stream without lifting a finger? Sounds great, who cares about a few defecting customers then, after all, it's not like they have that many options in most places.
"Are you saying that wealthy people use more highways, police, fire services, etc. then poor people?"
Considering that a fair amount of the services protect investments by the wealthy, protect the wealthy from the vagaries of social upheavals and provide protection of the owners from foreign incursions, that would be an entirely reasonable view to take.
Compare with previous aristocratic and feudal societies; the upper classes could protect themselves by keeping armed forces, but it more or less always eventually ended up with either outsiders or insiders in their armed forces eventually realizing that the rich were fewer and they could beat them up (or send them to gulag, or chop their heads off, as it were) and take their money.
The benefits to the poorest may be large in monetary value compared to what they pay, but the more intanglible value of not constantly worrying about wether your liutenant or brother is going to stab you in the back, wether the workers are going to band together and execute you, etc, is worth quite a lot. Not to mention the amount of money you save by not being engaged in a constant arms race with your neighbours.
"If ideas aren't property, how can knowledge be valuable?"
Wealth in a society as a whole is the lack of scarcity. 'IP' is monpoly rights; the artificial restriction of duplication, which creates artificial scarcity; ie, the fundamental essense of IP is diametrically opposite to the idea of economic growth.
"If ideas aren't property, how can knowledge be valuable?"
If air isnt property, how can air be valuable?
Non-scarce items have no (as in approaching zero) cost, but they can still be valuable. The problem with adding a monopoly right on them is that the cost of transaction management quickly becomes the highest cost involved. We could put rights on the oxygen produced by plants you own, then add accountants, breath measuring devices on every person, etc, employ hundreds of thousands if not millions of people in the 'air industry'.
Do you truly think that the wealth of the nation would increase from that(even though the GDP might show an increase)? Instead of having people productively involved in creating scarce items, thus decreasing total scarcity, ie, increasing total wealth, we'd waste all those resources trying to account for a fundamentally non-scarce resource.
Intellectual 'property' is no less insane.
The fundamental problem isnt solved by creating monopolies; that merely compounds it and wastes far more resources than it dedicates to the stated goal. The end result is a society far poorer than it would be, if it used a more optimized system.
"It's not a question of courage, it would just be a futile fight IMO."
For which side? Take a look at current state of the art assymetric warfare and then imagine sharing a border the length of Canadas with 3 million insurgents. Not to mention the number of disenfranchised Americans that would probably want to play their own game in the chaos.
Large parts of both countries would be reduced to 2 hours electricity per day, bottled water from the red cross and foodpacks before such a conflict was over. Not to mention checkpoints at every block, questioning _everyone_ as ethnic discrimination would get quite a lot harder. And of course, people with family on both sides of the border would probably soon get detained and put in internment camps as a precaution.
I mean really. Ick.
On the bright side, the oil would last longer as there'd barely be a road you could drive on, nor any jobs or shops to drive to anyway.
Unless it's protected by intellectual monopoly legislation. Then you get to count it until the monopoly expires.
Really tho, Industry Minister Maxime Bernier and Canadian Heritage Minister Bev Oda should take a good hard look at how multiple hundreds of millions of dollars transferred out of the Canadian economy, and consequently the loss of a fair number of jobs, would serve Canadian industry or Canadian cultural workers.
How about the same that are doing it today? Tack a sales tax on drugs and use it to finance R we're _already_ paying for it through medical insurance or socialized medical systems.
Adam Smiths invisible hand is utterly crippled with monopolies. Which is why they're not considered a useful part of a free market economy.
"Under your system"
You file for a patent, if it's granted, you will automatically get paid from the R&D funds as the patent in question gets used.
There are various versions of systems possible, but it all comes down to this: We already pay for the research. We're doing it indirectly for monopoly rights, but we're _still paying_. And we're not getting our money's worth. We're getting less than 20% of the research we could get from a more efficient system.
"Just out of curiosity, what's your source for that figure?"
From the pharmaceuticals public figures. The breakdown for most of them is something around (generously rounded off) 40% production/cost of sales, 40% marketing and administration, 20% R&D. Some spend as much in dividends as they do in R&D.
Pharma cloners often manage to produce their sales at less than a tenth of the (end consumer) price, suggesting endemic inefficiencies within the production/marketing/administration parts, and clearly indicating that they're not necessary for the successful production and sales of the medicines in question.
The conclusion that can be drawn is that we could get the same R&D for a fifth of the price and the production of medicines at a tenth, by simply paying for the R&D and letting the cloners produce in a competetive marketplace. Or five times the R&D that we're getting now.
"I think the proper way to handle this in the future is for prosecutors to be threatened with disbarment and cops be demoted or outright fired"
Beyond the wrecked lives, this has apparently _killed_ 39 people. That's in the same league as the July 7 London bombings. I dont think disbarment or firing is enough, this should be tried as criminal negligence, reckless endangerment, and voluntary manslaughter. In any case where career has been a motivation rather than emotionally impaired judgement, I'd say outright murder charges would be appropriate.
"Police are stunned to learn that people who look at child porn might use stolen credit card information to pay for it."
Take a look at the article; it's even worse, a whole lot of the supposed transactions werent even that, they were scams set up by the webmasters themselves to cash in on credit-card fraud. Apparently the police didnt even check enough to notice that a whole lot of the cc transactions were more or less batch registrations run from the same IP adresses to scam the payment service.
"There would be limited insentive for anyone to invent anything new."
Not granting exclusive monopoly rights does not mean not paying for the research. The damaging monopoly aspects of patents, such as litigation warfare, overincentive for marketing, reduced competetive pressure for efficiency and slowed down dissemination of new products in the market can be removed while we could still very well pay the actual innovators as their products get used.
"But regardless of anything else they invent things that extend and improve our lives, don't they deserve to make money from it?"
Of the money society is currently spending on pharmaceuticals, less than 20% gets used for R&D. This means we could get _FIVE TIMES_ as much research for the money we're spending today. Ask the people who could have been cured if those 80% werent wasted on marketing and inefficiency what the pharmas deserve. Can you even imagine what kind of extensions and improvement we'd have today if we'd had that kind of research levels the last thirty years?
"There is more to the patent system than abuse"
Yes, there's also inefficiency, corruption, market failures, duplicated effort, slowed development, etc. Take a look at former communist run factories at approximately how streamlined industry becomes when it's protected from competition.
Or on the sad state of affairs in the West. Not paying for Vista makes the Chinese employees that much more competetive, while western economies carry the burden of paying through the nose for defective intellectual monopoly regimes.
"It's all about what a reasonable man might consider an invitation."
How would you invite someone to share your wifi? Personally I'd broadcast an SSID and turn off encryption...
The prevalence of free wireless networks these days suggest that there's a whole lot of people who have no problem at all with sharing their wifi. Personally I'd have absolutely no problem with someone using my wifi. Are they, and am I, unreasonable? Is friendly neighbourly behaviour, letting someone deprived use something that costs me nothing extra, now considered unreasonable?
"You are allowed to use common sense when it comes to the law."
Apparently that was not used by the court in this case. Or it was populated by people who'd sue for costs after pissing on someone to put out a fire, and utterly unaware of the millions of charitable people around the earth.
"But the whole point of patents is to encourage innovation"
Actually, the whole point of patents was to indirectly tax the population by handing out monopolies to friends of the crown. The later rationalizations have proven of dubious veracity and value.
"Why would anybody bother coming up with new ideas if anybody else could just copy them the next day?"
Why would anyone make a hammer if anybody else could just copy it the next day? Why would anyone invent a wheel? Why would anyone build better houses? Why would anyone bother writing code if anyone could copy it the next day? Yet we find both hammers and immense amounts of free software.
Innovation happens regardless of protection; it's done to scratch an itch, to solve a problem, to do things better than the competition. Competition and communication is what drives it, monopolies and legal issues merely slow it down.
The only real mitigation for the damage patents do to the economy is disclosure, and the only situation in which the disclosure aspect has more value than the damage cause is when nobody would have managed to reverse-engineer and distribute the knowledge in the time the patent takes to lapse. Doubt those situations even exist anymore.
If you want to 'encourage innovation', then fine, do it within ordinary government budget procedures. _PAY_ the inventors for their patents as they get used. Demand performance measurements; show some _proof_ that the resources are used appropriately. Quit handing out monpolies with their dubious value and economically damaging aspects, as well as their negative effects on development. Hand out a check instead. The patent system costs huge amounts and makes the economy less competetive as it is (in everything from higher costs of products to high medical costs); switching it over to a tax/benefits scheme costs nothing to the economy as a whole and merely has the benefit of making someone actually accountable for the true costs of the system.
Ah, but you forgot the very important Dramatic Factor. This is calculated by combining various factors like skin color, location, wealth, age, media connections, etc. Then you multiply the number of deaths with the dramatic factor, and get the actual importance of an event.
Seriously tho. Sometimes I feel like the only thing that'd actually change anything would be to legislate death equivalence reporting, eg, for every word a newspaper or news broadcast wants to present around a specific type of death they also have to publish a statistically correlating number of words about other types of deaths. Maybe if every '20 dead in virginia shooting' or 'x dead in terrorist attacks' article were accompanied by a phonebook of motor vehicle deaths and a shelf worth of reporting on cancer deaths we could get a financial focus on dealing with the more common problems first.
Dont worry, the main purpose of automating the US military forces is to ensure that the ruling class will be able to command and control the arms themselves, thus bypassing those pesky generals and other military staff who's mostly been in the way in the recent adventures.
Soldiers might object when given unreasonable targets, but machines arent going to argue when the executive wants to begin interning the legislative and judicial branch.
Eventually the some future set of jokers in the white house are going to figure out that looting the locals is both easier and more rewarding.
Unfortunately, by then, I cant see who's going to help liberate the American people.
Slashdot Mirror
The whole 'intellectual property rights' name is deliberate propaganda and fairly recent. In other languages the concept is more commonly called 'immaterial rights' or 'intellectual rights', thus avoiding the whole intellectual debacle that comes from confusing a monopoly right with a property right.
"but why should you be able to dictate at what price"
As a general rule, we've found that a competetive market is superior in generating wealth than protected markets. In a free competetive market, neither party gets to dictate the price.
I can buy a hammer from Peter, if we cant agree on a price I can buy a hammer from Joe, and afford a couple of nails too. With intellectual monopoly rights, Peter can prevent Joe from selling me a cheaper hammer, and I can only get the hammer but no nails, leading to less total value as a whole existing within the economy (as Peters less efficient hammer production consumes the surplus input).
"If they want to overcharge, it's their problem."
If they want to overcharge _in a free market_ it's their problem. If they want to overcharge and they have a legal monopoly, then it's _everyones_ problem, as that actually means the economy as a whole _looses wealth_. For the long term effects of monopolies on an economy, compare communist state production, etc. And then try to imagine approximately how much richer we'd all be if we didnt have the lodestone of IP around our necks, but instead encouraged immaterial development through non-monopolistic financing methods.
"The only edge the US has is innovation."
Right. You do realize there's nothing stopping those corporates from registering the patents in the US and doing the research in cheaper countries? The idea that the west has an 'innovation edge' these days is, frankly, mostly a comfort blanket, and strong 'IP' support doesnt protect jobs, it merely increases prices for the local market. Which in turn kills jobs.
Saying those countries should introduce their own monopolies because the US cant compete would be like the former Soviet union demanding the west nationalize their factories to ensure fair competition.
Somehow I dont think that would have been a terribly bright idea.
The 'IP' monopoly systems have to go.
"...and thus, I am still morally entitled to pirate music!"
Of course, the difference is that Kenneth Cole arent about to get Sears outlawed. Or there'd probably be a whole lot of people feeling morally entitled to buy Sears shirts.
The onus lies on the monopoly protector to come up with the ethical rationale as to why those who would buy the Sears shirt but not the Kenneth Cole shirt should go without shirts.
"The flow chart keeps changing along with the market."
As long as there are government mandated monopolies in a market the market will be suboptimized and it will fail to accomodate consumer demand.
"would result in the end product being cheaper"
The pricing of monopoly protected goods isnt set as a function of cost to produce, it's set as a function of what the market can bear.
Basically, there are a number of variables that will affect price, for example; disposable income spendable on music goes up? Price goes up. Easier access? Price goes up (the 'cost' in time, money and efford of going to the store goes away from the total the consumer is willing to pay). You can buy music per track? Price goes up. (Total spending remains at the same level, but on fewer tracks instead).
With monopoly pricing there is only one variable that keeps prices down. It's when enough people no longer buy the product in question (ie, boycotts or piracy) to offset the revenue gain from price increases.
Otherwise you'll just see a constant revenue maximization and concurrent spending/waste increase (spending grows to accomodate revenue through increases in, for example, marketing).
This situation is a good example why free markets are much better than protected monopolies. Decades of protection from competition has resulted in a situation where the RIAA corps cannot turn a profit on million dollar revenues on a product that could be produced for less than the cost of a used car. Protecting producers from competition to encourage 'investment' only results in the 'investments' costing that much more. You get the same work done, except you're paying much, much, more.
"wasn't/isn't as stable as the standard IBM alternative."
Frankly, I'd agree with the GP. Both AIX and Linux are stable as rocks. Until you start playing around with 'special' and 'cool' system designs like global filesystems or exceedingly complex HA clusters, in which case I've seen both go up in flames.
As long as you have a reasonably competent vendor who cares, it's simply a question of eyeballs. If the configuration you're trying to run has been tested and debugged, well, then you're in luck. If you end up being the lab rat, well, how many pieces of software do you know that were free of major bugs the first time they were run...
While the listeners subjective experience as well as random external noise may certainly be part of the artistic interpretation of the piece, I seriously doubt they'd be considered part of the copyrightable work. Which is just yet another indication of the fallacies of copyright.
Of course, if it did work, that could leave the door open to recording, for example, a jet engine, publishing them on a CD and then suing the airlines for copyright infringement. And, hey, why not try it and call the lawsuit itself avant-garde art?
On a more varied work, certainly. As the moment in this case encompasses the full contents of the work, a case could be made against it.
On the other hand, it's even easier to argue that the work in question does not reach the 'work' height required for actual copyright any more than a space or a blank paper.
"the idea is that providing free counsel to anyone who wants it would increase litigation in an already litigious society."
On the other hand, if it's dumped on the taxpayers bill and the actual cost becomes visible, maybe there'd be a stronger political pressure to deal with the various reasons for the litigiousness.
"The downside to that is that it means you are truly voting for a party rather than for a person"
There are proportional representation systems that allow you to vote for specific people. For example, the parties can print a suggested order in which the candidates will get their seats, and the voters can cross out specific candidates they dont like or just leave the one they do like.
Two party systems are just one party away from a one party state.
"as a transition to IPv6 would be."
A transition to IPv6 isnt a massive overhaul. At worst it's a software upgrade and an implementation project; the end result of which would be a significant drop in router processing requirements, ie, _cheaper_ hardware.
"The whole tiered internet system is (surprise!) purely motivated by the money to be made,"
Rent-seeking is purely motivated by the money to be made. Highway robbery is purely motivated by the money to be made.
This does not mean either is socially or economically desireable.
"maybe they'll have the monetary incentive to upgrade the network"
They have a monetary incentive to upgrade the network. They either do it or their customers choose someone else. That's called competition.
Allowing them to further extort money from the consumers and others while keeping the _same_ infrastructure just makes them more profitable and reduces competetive pressure. Get a whole new revenue stream without lifting a finger? Sounds great, who cares about a few defecting customers then, after all, it's not like they have that many options in most places.
"Are you saying that wealthy people use more highways, police, fire services, etc. then poor people?"
Considering that a fair amount of the services protect investments by the wealthy, protect the wealthy from the vagaries of social upheavals and provide protection of the owners from foreign incursions, that would be an entirely reasonable view to take.
Compare with previous aristocratic and feudal societies; the upper classes could protect themselves by keeping armed forces, but it more or less always eventually ended up with either outsiders or insiders in their armed forces eventually realizing that the rich were fewer and they could beat them up (or send them to gulag, or chop their heads off, as it were) and take their money.
The benefits to the poorest may be large in monetary value compared to what they pay, but the more intanglible value of not constantly worrying about wether your liutenant or brother is going to stab you in the back, wether the workers are going to band together and execute you, etc, is worth quite a lot. Not to mention the amount of money you save by not being engaged in a constant arms race with your neighbours.
"If ideas aren't property, how can knowledge be valuable?"
Wealth in a society as a whole is the lack of scarcity. 'IP' is monpoly rights; the artificial restriction of duplication, which creates artificial scarcity; ie, the fundamental essense of IP is diametrically opposite to the idea of economic growth.
"If ideas aren't property, how can knowledge be valuable?"
If air isnt property, how can air be valuable?
Non-scarce items have no (as in approaching zero) cost, but they can still be valuable. The problem with adding a monopoly right on them is that the cost of transaction management quickly becomes the highest cost involved. We could put rights on the oxygen produced by plants you own, then add accountants, breath measuring devices on every person, etc, employ hundreds of thousands if not millions of people in the 'air industry'.
Do you truly think that the wealth of the nation would increase from that(even though the GDP might show an increase)? Instead of having people productively involved in creating scarce items, thus decreasing total scarcity, ie, increasing total wealth, we'd waste all those resources trying to account for a fundamentally non-scarce resource.
Intellectual 'property' is no less insane.
The fundamental problem isnt solved by creating monopolies; that merely compounds it and wastes far more resources than it dedicates to the stated goal. The end result is a society far poorer than it would be, if it used a more optimized system.
"It's not a question of courage, it would just be a futile fight IMO."
For which side? Take a look at current state of the art assymetric warfare and then imagine sharing a border the length of Canadas with 3 million insurgents. Not to mention the number of disenfranchised Americans that would probably want to play their own game in the chaos.
Large parts of both countries would be reduced to 2 hours electricity per day, bottled water from the red cross and foodpacks before such a conflict was over. Not to mention checkpoints at every block, questioning _everyone_ as ethnic discrimination would get quite a lot harder. And of course, people with family on both sides of the border would probably soon get detained and put in internment camps as a precaution.
I mean really. Ick.
On the bright side, the oil would last longer as there'd barely be a road you could drive on, nor any jobs or shops to drive to anyway.
Unless it's protected by intellectual monopoly legislation. Then you get to count it until the monopoly expires.
Really tho, Industry Minister Maxime Bernier and Canadian Heritage Minister Bev Oda should take a good hard look at how multiple hundreds of millions of dollars transferred out of the Canadian economy, and consequently the loss of a fair number of jobs, would serve Canadian industry or Canadian cultural workers.
"And who is paying for the research?"
How about the same that are doing it today? Tack a sales tax on drugs and use it to finance R we're _already_ paying for it through medical insurance or socialized medical systems.
Adam Smiths invisible hand is utterly crippled with monopolies. Which is why they're not considered a useful part of a free market economy.
"Under your system"
You file for a patent, if it's granted, you will automatically get paid from the R&D funds as the patent in question gets used.
There are various versions of systems possible, but it all comes down to this: We already pay for the research. We're doing it indirectly for monopoly rights, but we're _still paying_. And we're not getting our money's worth. We're getting less than 20% of the research we could get from a more efficient system.
"Just out of curiosity, what's your source for that figure?"
From the pharmaceuticals public figures. The breakdown for most of them is something around (generously rounded off) 40% production/cost of sales, 40% marketing and administration, 20% R&D. Some spend as much in dividends as they do in R&D.
Pharma cloners often manage to produce their sales at less than a tenth of the (end consumer) price, suggesting endemic inefficiencies within the production/marketing/administration parts, and clearly indicating that they're not necessary for the successful production and sales of the medicines in question.
The conclusion that can be drawn is that we could get the same R&D for a fifth of the price and the production of medicines at a tenth, by simply paying for the R&D and letting the cloners produce in a competetive marketplace. Or five times the R&D that we're getting now.
"I think the proper way to handle this in the future is for prosecutors to be threatened with disbarment and cops be demoted or outright fired"
Beyond the wrecked lives, this has apparently _killed_ 39 people. That's in the same league as the July 7 London bombings. I dont think disbarment or firing is enough, this should be tried as criminal negligence, reckless endangerment, and voluntary manslaughter. In any case where career has been a motivation rather than emotionally impaired judgement, I'd say outright murder charges would be appropriate.
"Police are stunned to learn that people who look at child porn might use stolen credit card information to pay for it."
Take a look at the article; it's even worse, a whole lot of the supposed transactions werent even that, they were scams set up by the webmasters themselves to cash in on credit-card fraud. Apparently the police didnt even check enough to notice that a whole lot of the cc transactions were more or less batch registrations run from the same IP adresses to scam the payment service.
"There would be limited insentive for anyone to invent anything new."
Not granting exclusive monopoly rights does not mean not paying for the research. The damaging monopoly aspects of patents, such as litigation warfare, overincentive for marketing, reduced competetive pressure for efficiency and slowed down dissemination of new products in the market can be removed while we could still very well pay the actual innovators as their products get used.
"But regardless of anything else they invent things that extend and improve our lives, don't they deserve to make money from it?"
Of the money society is currently spending on pharmaceuticals, less than 20% gets used for R&D. This means we could get _FIVE TIMES_ as much research for the money we're spending today. Ask the people who could have been cured if those 80% werent wasted on marketing and inefficiency what the pharmas deserve. Can you even imagine what kind of extensions and improvement we'd have today if we'd had that kind of research levels the last thirty years?
"There is more to the patent system than abuse"
Yes, there's also inefficiency, corruption, market failures, duplicated effort, slowed development, etc. Take a look at former communist run factories at approximately how streamlined industry becomes when it's protected from competition.
"the sad state of affairs in China."
Or on the sad state of affairs in the West. Not paying for Vista makes the Chinese employees that much more competetive, while western economies carry the burden of paying through the nose for defective intellectual monopoly regimes.
"It's all about what a reasonable man might consider an invitation."
How would you invite someone to share your wifi? Personally I'd broadcast an SSID and turn off encryption...
The prevalence of free wireless networks these days suggest that there's a whole lot of people who have no problem at all with sharing their wifi. Personally I'd have absolutely no problem with someone using my wifi. Are they, and am I, unreasonable? Is friendly neighbourly behaviour, letting someone deprived use something that costs me nothing extra, now considered unreasonable?
"You are allowed to use common sense when it comes to the law."
Apparently that was not used by the court in this case. Or it was populated by people who'd sue for costs after pissing on someone to put out a fire, and utterly unaware of the millions of charitable people around the earth.
"There really needs to be a distinction made"
No.
"But the whole point of patents is to encourage innovation"
Actually, the whole point of patents was to indirectly tax the population by handing out monopolies to friends of the crown. The later rationalizations have proven of dubious veracity and value.
"Why would anybody bother coming up with new ideas if anybody else could just copy them the next day?"
Why would anyone make a hammer if anybody else could just copy it the next day? Why would anyone invent a wheel? Why would anyone build better houses? Why would anyone bother writing code if anyone could copy it the next day? Yet we find both hammers and immense amounts of free software.
Innovation happens regardless of protection; it's done to scratch an itch, to solve a problem, to do things better than the competition. Competition and communication is what drives it, monopolies and legal issues merely slow it down.
The only real mitigation for the damage patents do to the economy is disclosure, and the only situation in which the disclosure aspect has more value than the damage cause is when nobody would have managed to reverse-engineer and distribute the knowledge in the time the patent takes to lapse. Doubt those situations even exist anymore.
If you want to 'encourage innovation', then fine, do it within ordinary government budget procedures. _PAY_ the inventors for their patents as they get used. Demand performance measurements; show some _proof_ that the resources are used appropriately. Quit handing out monpolies with their dubious value and economically damaging aspects, as well as their negative effects on development. Hand out a check instead. The patent system costs huge amounts and makes the economy less competetive as it is (in everything from higher costs of products to high medical costs); switching it over to a tax/benefits scheme costs nothing to the economy as a whole and merely has the benefit of making someone actually accountable for the true costs of the system.
Ah, but you forgot the very important Dramatic Factor. This is calculated by combining various factors like skin color, location, wealth, age, media connections, etc. Then you multiply the number of deaths with the dramatic factor, and get the actual importance of an event.
Seriously tho. Sometimes I feel like the only thing that'd actually change anything would be to legislate death equivalence reporting, eg, for every word a newspaper or news broadcast wants to present around a specific type of death they also have to publish a statistically correlating number of words about other types of deaths. Maybe if every '20 dead in virginia shooting' or 'x dead in terrorist attacks' article were accompanied by a phonebook of motor vehicle deaths and a shelf worth of reporting on cancer deaths we could get a financial focus on dealing with the more common problems first.
"don't take kindly to US forces being near them"
Dont worry, the main purpose of automating the US military forces is to ensure that the ruling class will be able to command and control the arms themselves, thus bypassing those pesky generals and other military staff who's mostly been in the way in the recent adventures.
Soldiers might object when given unreasonable targets, but machines arent going to argue when the executive wants to begin interning the legislative and judicial branch.
Eventually the some future set of jokers in the white house are going to figure out that looting the locals is both easier and more rewarding.
Unfortunately, by then, I cant see who's going to help liberate the American people.