"I've heard complaints here for years about the length of Microsoft EULAs, but GPLv3 is getting up there in length, too."
Those are quite different beasts. If you want to compare, you should compare the length of a license allowing you to modify and distribute Microsoft software. If they exist at all, I'd suspect they'd tend to be quite a bit longer...
The MS EULA is for _using_ the software. GPL software has more or less no restrictions on that, and the GPL does not apply at all until you wish to do something otherwise explicitly disallowed by copyright.
"And seeing as how the developer(or producer) is the one that selects the license, I don't see this as an easy sell."
You're missing the fact that the developers selecting the license are not the same developers that get limited by the license.
The original developer putting something under the GPL essentially makes a protected donation to the community in question, with the explicit intention of preventing free riders (or they'd put their code under BSD or similar license). That the GPL v3 strengthens the anti-free rider provisions is entirely within the interests of those developers, even tho it may annoy (altho it shouldnt surprise) those who are currently intentionally abusing loopholes in version 2.
"That is why you have to pay royalties to stage a play."
Not when the copyright expires. And since there is no transfer of property going on at the expiration point, it becomes obvious that the owner of the particular book also owns the contents of the particular book, and is merely restricted in his property rights during the lifetime of the copyright.
Not quite. You do own the music in question, as far as you are the owner to any particular physical media they are incarnated on. The title is to the media. The legal construct of copyright is quite separate to the ownership of the incarnations, and the title to the copyright quite separate from them too. Despite the wishes of some lobbyists.
The simplest evidence of this is the border condition when the copyright of a certain work you own lapses. When it lapses, the restrictions on what you could do with that piece of your property are gone. Suddenly you can copy it, sell it, charge for showing it, control access to your copy of it, etc. Yet you dont suddenly 'recieve' the property, there is no eminent domain done, etc, and it becomes obvious that you always did own the contents.
Copyright is not a property right. It's a monopoly right to control the reproduction of a particular piece of property. The finished copies are the full property of whoever purchases and possesses them, and the limitations of copyright are restrictions to what the owner can do with that property, not an exception to their ownership.
So to answer the original question; you dont need to prove anything. If you own the physical media containing the incarnation in question, then you own the incarnation. Any legal issues arise from the particular method by which you obtained the copy in question.
"Patents should exist where they are needed to allow companies to make healthy profits on risky ideas."
Unfortunately, protection from competition breeds expenses, encourages waste and creates inefficient uncompetetive organizations.
"in industries where we expect a high level of expense to ensure quality (such as pharmaceuticals)"
Pharmaceuticals are a perfect example; they waste 80% of their income outside research. They spend more than twice as much on marketing and administration as they do on R&D. The protection breeds the expense which makes the protection necessary for the protected business model.
"However, if a company is willing to do R&D with the promise of a 200% payback"
Then offer them a 200% payback. Outright. Instead of a patent creating a monopoly, let it be worth a 200% ROI for the patent holder if it gets used in products to a certain amount within the next five (or ten, or thirty) years. Paid by the patent office, financed through ordinary state financing rather than a hidden economic tax in the incarnation of monopoly pricing. You get rid of the customer/inventor conflict relationship, small inventors get paid even if some big company rips them off, etc.
Economic incentives for R&D can take many forms. State protected monopolies has to be about the most inefficient and economically damaging model conceivable.
"No, but since everyone in my family makes their livings in the production of one form or another of things that can (and do) get ripped off, it's a very familiar topic."
Perhaps you should consider lobbying for alternate methods of compensation that lets you get paid anyway.
There have been various suggestions ranging from direct payments to authors for every incarnation of a copy actually sold (ie, bypassing the entire publishing structure and levying a point-of-sale fee instead), to pure taxation and payment per copy schemes. All of which would get a far higher percentage of the money spent on creative content to the actual authors.
Consider how much money the *AA's claim is being lost to illicit copying, compared to how much money is actually spent on, and intended for arts that _never reaches the artists_.
"With first to file, I would have to file for a patent."
This is a common mistake. You dont have to patent with first to file, you just need to publish it. Once it's been published, it's unpatentable as prior art, both by you yourself or anyone else.
"Patents are as needed now as they were 200 years ago."
You mean they're needed to protect merchants from competition and generate more indirect revenue and control for the crown?
Patents didnt start out as incentives for innovation; they started out as plain old monopolies, handed out by the crown to favoured merchants.
There are few indications that patents in themselves actually help innovation; correlation with innovativeness is far higher with communications and education, and the economic issue could be far more efficiently dealt with by outright paying an incentive on a per-use basis rather than handing out a monopoly, which would make both the litigousness and secondary economic effects much less troublesome.
JesseMcDonald wrote a pretty good reply on this, but as you brought up diamonds, there you have a very interesting example of value and cost abberations. Diamonds are, in fact, worth very little, their retail cost is largely due to the DeBeers monopoly/cartel price and supply manipulation. Take a look at the wikipedia article on them, and read the Epstein article from The Atlantic Online.
I wouldn't try using them as currency (the resale value is vastly lower than purchase price) and avoid any diamond investments like the plague; they're most likely scams.
"this is essential in a justification of capitalism"
The justification for free market capitalism is simply that it inherently optimizes for the maximum production of wealth within the economy (as a subjective value).
"Poverty can be alleviated"
Poverty as a concept for the economy as a whole is automatically alleviated by free market capitalism simply due to its nature of maximizing wealth.
The trouble is that as free market capitalism eventually leads to that lack of scarcity and full competition means that eventually you get zero ROI, you'll find a whole horde of investors and possessors of large accumulations of wealth trying their damn hardest to avoid competition. Thus you get monopolies, 'intellectual property', tolls, etc, etc, etc.
Yes it does. The idea of needing to recuperate up-front costs is invalid and largely based on up-front costs growing large if they are protected. Without protection, design remains incremental with very small up-front costs.
"you must assign value to the idea and its initial realization, instead of to the copy."
Flawed reasoning. There is no such must; the evolution of ideas is intrinsic to human nature; they're not a scarce resource, they're aggregated by communications and enablement, criven by the need for doing things better and faster and to lower costs, and which is something which opensource has abundantly proven.
"Ideas no longer remain free, but become something that must be paid for in full, or people can't earn a living wage."
Here you're expressing another fundamental (but too common) mistake; wages are not an end in themselves, they're merely a method for maximizing the production of scarce resources by allocating labour in needed sectors.
If the concept of people earning a living wage was fundamentally good for a free market economy, we'd forbid farming mechanization, and everyone could work 16 hours in the fields, thus getting their wages (which will buy them, well, food). But you know as well as I do that that's not desireable.
The end of scarcity means we dont _need_ wages because nothing _costs_ anything. To introduce costs merely 'because' is antithetical to an efficient free market economy, we might as well put a cost on air to employ any unemployed persons with counting other peoples breaths. Which would be pointless, as it would end up as nothing but a hidden tax on the few remaining necessary economic segments (just like intellectual property) employing people for doing unecessary work.
Yes, the end of scarcity means we'll all have to work less, as the only jobs that need to be done are those that cannot be done with robotic production. Boo. Hoo.
Of course, a whole lot of people will go that way kicking and screaming, and probably try to advocate various taxation and monopoly schemes all the way forward. All to the tune that people 'need to earn a living wage'.
Anyone can copy the carpenters furniture. Or would you claim making a chair just like one you've seen is 'stealing'?
Of course, if there were automatic furniture building machines that could copy the furniture in a few minutes, betcha you'd find people arguing that nobody will make any new furniture unless this rampant carpentry piracy is prevented, and that carpenters deserve monopoly rights to protect them from competition.
"Hopefully they will be able to sell a critical mass quantity to bring the price down"
The technology is patented, so quantity and mass production does nothing for the price, and if the product is legally enforced the price will more likely go up.
Yet another example of the current version patents being useless for actually rewarding innovation, and serving to actually slow technological adoption.
A non-adversarial system where the innovator got paid by dedicated innovation funds as a product got used, instead of being forced to extort money under threat of litigation, would avoid this kind of problem.
"Remember that company X did NOT want to release the signing keys"
What company X wants is irrelevant. If they use GPL code, they should expect to afford everyone else the same freedoms they were afforded. If they do not want to forward those freedoms, then they can damn well write their own code.
"exposing company X to VERY SERIOUS liability"
Oh, please. And if the fool opens up the machine and solders a few neat improvements, you think the company is liable?
A more likely situation is Company X goes out of business and the signing keys are lost, and the machine turns out to contain potentially dangerous, but trivially fixable bugs. Without the signing keys you've lost the freedom to fix those bugs.
Take a look at history, and how other terrorists have been successfully dealt with.
The best way is probably to refrain from wronging a whole lot of people, dealing with any damage within the realm of the civilian judicial system and then simply waiting, waiting, and waiting again until the last ones you really really pissed off get old and die.
Too bad the last few years have worked up a shitstorm that will take a fucking century to die down.
First you write your representative, asking them to make software unpatentable. When you get the form letter saying back telling you to get lost in five hundred words but which leaves you with a cloying sweet sensation, then you get to work, make a few dozen millions, buy a lobbying firm and spend several decades lobbying against software patents. By that time, the patents covering the technologies in question should have expired, and you can get mp3 support with Fedora.
Well, you could, except possessing a computer capable of playing mp3's will by then be considered terrorism and pressing the 'install' button with your NSA bugged mouse will get you an immediate rendering to some mideast country where they'd boil you in oil except they have none left, so instead they put you in a meatgrinder and extract your body fat to use as fuel.
Considering there were _several_ developers of the lightbulb and related ideas before Edison, then, yes, and if not him, then someone else.
"Those expenditures need protection or else there is no reason to innovate."
Oh, BS. Ideas are a dime a dozen, and inventions are created to solve actual problems. If Edison hadn't put the lightbulb into production, someone needing higher capacity lighting would have.
We've had, and will have, progress without protection since the beginning of time. Progress is driven by communications and shared knowledge; which is the former small upside of patents; protection in exchange for disclosure. With the new massivly communicative age, protection becomes less relevant for disclosure all the time. With the same problems, enough minds will create the same solutions often enough to make disclosure inevitable.
Yes, well, the pharmaceutical industry likes to repeat it a lot.
"Is this really true?"
No it isnt. The vast bulk of pharmaceutical spending is on administration, marketing and comparatively inefficient production. Not even a fifth of the average pharmcorp's spending is on R&D (take a look at their public filings some time).
That isnt to say pharmaceutical research is free, but it does mean this: we'd get _five times_ the current R&D if we paid for it outright. Or we could pay a fifth of what we're paying now and get the same amount of R&D and the same medicines. And that's being kind and assuming that R&D organizations that have been protected for a century are anywhere near market-optimum efficiency.
"First to file rather than first to invent means that all pesky open source programmers will have to worry"
It's not a problem for open source; if you've released code as open source that means it's been published, and no patent application filed on a later date could be granted covering any supposed invention in that code.
It's not first to file for a particular invention, it's first to file for a particular _previously undisclosed_ invention.
"as they just keep an eye out for what everyone else is doing"
Technically, that shouldn't work. Anything they can keep an eye out for would have to have been published, and would therefore be unpatentable under first-to-file.
"you can't be locked out of the market just because patent troll X decided to file paperwork before you did."
As long as you're publishing everything you do you cant be out-patented and locked out. Only if you're keeping your work secret and someone else files for a patent on the same thing before you do.
It mainly affects companies or individuals keeping innovations secret; in first to file, it's the first to file a previously _undisclosed_ invention who gets the patent.
For opensource it's probably slightly better, as it becomes slightly more difficult to submarine patents or futz the invention dates.
However, it doesnt affect the more real issues of overly broad claims, etc. Or the economic validity and usefullness of IP at all.
"What we need is something like a short-term copyright/patent"
We already have that. It's called the first mover advantage, and it has the huge benefit that it requires no administration or legal involvement at all.
"6-12 months would be sufficient"
The trouble, you see, is that nothing is ever sufficient. Granting protection from competition means the protected party simply becomes that much less efficient. Essentially, the theoretical reward simply gets eaten in increased costs instead; take a look at the state of the music industry, they can _fail_ to make a profit on sales of _millions of units at $15_ of an item which can be produced for cents. Take a look at the pharmaceutical industries; they're wasting twice as much on administration and marketing as they are on actual research.
If you want a system specifically tailored towards rewarding innovation, then just outright pay for it with tax money. Intellectual monopoly protections simply means your costs are hidden in higher prices while the reward is lost in economic inefficiency.
"It is up to the FSF to convince the authors that any new licences are a good idea"
Partly. Most programs under the GPL retain the GPL v.2 or later options, meaning redistributors and authors of derivative works can update the license to the newer version at their discretion. This is by design, so that the FSF can update the GPL, should loopholes appear or technology change the situation and allow code to be updated to more recent versions, _even when authors are out of touch or dead or otherwise_.
The Linux kernel version of the GPL, however, does not retain that clause, rendering it stuck permanently in v2 land; and as the kernel, unlike FSF driven projects, doesnt require copyright reassignment, it would be more or less impossible to accomplish a change.
Which means that a) the linux kernel is vulnerable to changes in law and technology that may render the v2 GPL ineffective and b) what Torvalds thinks is really has little bearing on the issue.
"look at the new draft licence turns up some problems"
I see no problems. The new version closes several holes; to get affected by them you'd have to have been willfully abusing those loopholes, violating the intent and spirit of the GPL. It's not as if the FSF's views are a well kept secret, so any due diligence would have made it obvious that such loopholes would be closed down.
"he told me (something I will always remember) that free things are not good for companies"
Gee, where can I find him, I've got a whole lot of air he can buy or cease using if he feels it doesnt cost enough.
"because it is the total oposite of an economy"
He should probably go back and read a few books on economy again. The ultimate goal of free market capitalism is to encourage the most effective production of 'wealth' possible, with the endgame being the end of scarcity, when more or less everything the average person needs or wants costs close to nothing.
Of course, that is the total opposite of protectionism, where the legal system protects inefficient production from competition.
The economies of opensource are the economies of the free market. As components are perfected and reused and shared, they decrease redundant work and leads to far lower costs for the companies involved; mass-used and distributed code approaches lack of scarcity. At the same time, the costs are shifted into areas that actually do cost; support and other currently labour intensive and not easily automated tasks. The incentive becomes to provide faster better more cost effective support and customization, thus driving along the economic cycle.
"The trick is, we need access to all the same data you have."
Indeed. Take a look at David Brin's The Transparent Society for a further exposition of that. And look up Sousveillance on the wikipedia.
However, in the current situation you can pretty much assume that access to exonerating material will be scarce more often than not. CCTVs proving you were somewhere else will probably be wiped long before you even know something's afoot, mined systems will be classified, the framers will be outside monitoring, etc.
Big Brother likes to watch, but he doesnt necessarily like to be watched back.
Slashdot Mirror
"I've heard complaints here for years about the length of Microsoft EULAs, but GPLv3 is getting up there in length, too."
Those are quite different beasts. If you want to compare, you should compare the length of a license allowing you to modify and distribute Microsoft software. If they exist at all, I'd suspect they'd tend to be quite a bit longer...
The MS EULA is for _using_ the software. GPL software has more or less no restrictions on that, and the GPL does not apply at all until you wish to do something otherwise explicitly disallowed by copyright.
"And seeing as how the developer(or producer) is the one that selects the license, I don't see this as an easy sell."
You're missing the fact that the developers selecting the license are not the same developers that get limited by the license.
The original developer putting something under the GPL essentially makes a protected donation to the community in question, with the explicit intention of preventing free riders (or they'd put their code under BSD or similar license). That the GPL v3 strengthens the anti-free rider provisions is entirely within the interests of those developers, even tho it may annoy (altho it shouldnt surprise) those who are currently intentionally abusing loopholes in version 2.
"That is why you have to pay royalties to stage a play."
Not when the copyright expires. And since there is no transfer of property going on at the expiration point, it becomes obvious that the owner of the particular book also owns the contents of the particular book, and is merely restricted in his property rights during the lifetime of the copyright.
"because you don't own them."
Not quite. You do own the music in question, as far as you are the owner to any particular physical media they are incarnated on. The title is to the media. The legal construct of copyright is quite separate to the ownership of the incarnations, and the title to the copyright quite separate from them too. Despite the wishes of some lobbyists.
The simplest evidence of this is the border condition when the copyright of a certain work you own lapses. When it lapses, the restrictions on what you could do with that piece of your property are gone. Suddenly you can copy it, sell it, charge for showing it, control access to your copy of it, etc. Yet you dont suddenly 'recieve' the property, there is no eminent domain done, etc, and it becomes obvious that you always did own the contents.
Copyright is not a property right. It's a monopoly right to control the reproduction of a particular piece of property. The finished copies are the full property of whoever purchases and possesses them, and the limitations of copyright are restrictions to what the owner can do with that property, not an exception to their ownership.
So to answer the original question; you dont need to prove anything. If you own the physical media containing the incarnation in question, then you own the incarnation. Any legal issues arise from the particular method by which you obtained the copy in question.
"Patents should exist where they are needed to allow companies to make healthy profits on risky ideas."
Unfortunately, protection from competition breeds expenses, encourages waste and creates inefficient uncompetetive organizations.
"in industries where we expect a high level of expense to ensure quality (such as pharmaceuticals)"
Pharmaceuticals are a perfect example; they waste 80% of their income outside research. They spend more than twice as much on marketing and administration as they do on R&D. The protection breeds the expense which makes the protection necessary for the protected business model.
"However, if a company is willing to do R&D with the promise of a 200% payback"
Then offer them a 200% payback. Outright. Instead of a patent creating a monopoly, let it be worth a 200% ROI for the patent holder if it gets used in products to a certain amount within the next five (or ten, or thirty) years. Paid by the patent office, financed through ordinary state financing rather than a hidden economic tax in the incarnation of monopoly pricing. You get rid of the customer/inventor conflict relationship, small inventors get paid even if some big company rips them off, etc.
Economic incentives for R&D can take many forms. State protected monopolies has to be about the most inefficient and economically damaging model conceivable.
"No, but since everyone in my family makes their livings in the production of one form or another of things that can (and do) get ripped off, it's a very familiar topic."
Perhaps you should consider lobbying for alternate methods of compensation that lets you get paid anyway.
There have been various suggestions ranging from direct payments to authors for every incarnation of a copy actually sold (ie, bypassing the entire publishing structure and levying a point-of-sale fee instead), to pure taxation and payment per copy schemes. All of which would get a far higher percentage of the money spent on creative content to the actual authors.
Consider how much money the *AA's claim is being lost to illicit copying, compared to how much money is actually spent on, and intended for arts that _never reaches the artists_.
"With first to file, I would have to file for a patent."
This is a common mistake. You dont have to patent with first to file, you just need to publish it. Once it's been published, it's unpatentable as prior art, both by you yourself or anyone else.
"Patents are as needed now as they were 200 years ago."
You mean they're needed to protect merchants from competition and generate more indirect revenue and control for the crown?
Patents didnt start out as incentives for innovation; they started out as plain old monopolies, handed out by the crown to favoured merchants.
There are few indications that patents in themselves actually help innovation; correlation with innovativeness is far higher with communications and education, and the economic issue could be far more efficiently dealt with by outright paying an incentive on a per-use basis rather than handing out a monopoly, which would make both the litigousness and secondary economic effects much less troublesome.
JesseMcDonald wrote a pretty good reply on this, but as you brought up diamonds, there you have a very interesting example of value and cost abberations. Diamonds are, in fact, worth very little, their retail cost is largely due to the DeBeers monopoly/cartel price and supply manipulation. Take a look at the wikipedia article on them, and read the Epstein article from The Atlantic Online.
I wouldn't try using them as currency (the resale value is vastly lower than purchase price) and avoid any diamond investments like the plague; they're most likely scams.
"this is essential in a justification of capitalism"
The justification for free market capitalism is simply that it inherently optimizes for the maximum production of wealth within the economy (as a subjective value).
"Poverty can be alleviated"
Poverty as a concept for the economy as a whole is automatically alleviated by free market capitalism simply due to its nature of maximizing wealth.
The trouble is that as free market capitalism eventually leads to that lack of scarcity and full competition means that eventually you get zero ROI, you'll find a whole horde of investors and possessors of large accumulations of wealth trying their damn hardest to avoid competition. Thus you get monopolies, 'intellectual property', tolls, etc, etc, etc.
"Your example doesn't hold with mass production."
Yes it does. The idea of needing to recuperate up-front costs is invalid and largely based on up-front costs growing large if they are protected. Without protection, design remains incremental with very small up-front costs.
"you must assign value to the idea and its initial realization, instead of to the copy."
Flawed reasoning. There is no such must; the evolution of ideas is intrinsic to human nature; they're not a scarce resource, they're aggregated by communications and enablement, criven by the need for doing things better and faster and to lower costs, and which is something which opensource has abundantly proven.
"Ideas no longer remain free, but become something that must be paid for in full, or people can't earn a living wage."
Here you're expressing another fundamental (but too common) mistake; wages are not an end in themselves, they're merely a method for maximizing the production of scarce resources by allocating labour in needed sectors.
If the concept of people earning a living wage was fundamentally good for a free market economy, we'd forbid farming mechanization, and everyone could work 16 hours in the fields, thus getting their wages (which will buy them, well, food). But you know as well as I do that that's not desireable.
The end of scarcity means we dont _need_ wages because nothing _costs_ anything. To introduce costs merely 'because' is antithetical to an efficient free market economy, we might as well put a cost on air to employ any unemployed persons with counting other peoples breaths. Which would be pointless, as it would end up as nothing but a hidden tax on the few remaining necessary economic segments (just like intellectual property) employing people for doing unecessary work.
Yes, the end of scarcity means we'll all have to work less, as the only jobs that need to be done are those that cannot be done with robotic production. Boo. Hoo.
Of course, a whole lot of people will go that way kicking and screaming, and probably try to advocate various taxation and monopoly schemes all the way forward. All to the tune that people 'need to earn a living wage'.
Anyone can copy the carpenters furniture. Or would you claim making a chair just like one you've seen is 'stealing'?
Of course, if there were automatic furniture building machines that could copy the furniture in a few minutes, betcha you'd find people arguing that nobody will make any new furniture unless this rampant carpentry piracy is prevented, and that carpenters deserve monopoly rights to protect them from competition.
"Hopefully they will be able to sell a critical mass quantity to bring the price down"
The technology is patented, so quantity and mass production does nothing for the price, and if the product is legally enforced the price will more likely go up.
Yet another example of the current version patents being useless for actually rewarding innovation, and serving to actually slow technological adoption.
A non-adversarial system where the innovator got paid by dedicated innovation funds as a product got used, instead of being forced to extort money under threat of litigation, would avoid this kind of problem.
"Remember that company X did NOT want to release the signing keys"
What company X wants is irrelevant. If they use GPL code, they should expect to afford everyone else the same freedoms they were afforded. If they do not want to forward those freedoms, then they can damn well write their own code.
"exposing company X to VERY SERIOUS liability"
Oh, please. And if the fool opens up the machine and solders a few neat improvements, you think the company is liable?
A more likely situation is Company X goes out of business and the signing keys are lost, and the machine turns out to contain potentially dangerous, but trivially fixable bugs. Without the signing keys you've lost the freedom to fix those bugs.
"Okay, so what can be done about it?"
Take a look at history, and how other terrorists have been successfully dealt with.
The best way is probably to refrain from wronging a whole lot of people, dealing with any damage within the realm of the civilian judicial system and then simply waiting, waiting, and waiting again until the last ones you really really pissed off get old and die.
Too bad the last few years have worked up a shitstorm that will take a fucking century to die down.
Trouble is, mpg is a patent minefield too...
First you write your representative, asking them to make software unpatentable. When you get the form letter saying back telling you to get lost in five hundred words but which leaves you with a cloying sweet sensation, then you get to work, make a few dozen millions, buy a lobbying firm and spend several decades lobbying against software patents. By that time, the patents covering the technologies in question should have expired, and you can get mp3 support with Fedora.
Well, you could, except possessing a computer capable of playing mp3's will by then be considered terrorism and pressing the 'install' button with your NSA bugged mouse will get you an immediate rendering to some mideast country where they'd boil you in oil except they have none left, so instead they put you in a meatgrinder and extract your body fat to use as fuel.
Next question?
"Would Edison have bothered with his projects"
Considering there were _several_ developers of the lightbulb and related ideas before Edison, then, yes, and if not him, then someone else.
"Those expenditures need protection or else there is no reason to innovate."
Oh, BS. Ideas are a dime a dozen, and inventions are created to solve actual problems. If Edison hadn't put the lightbulb into production, someone needing higher capacity lighting would have.
We've had, and will have, progress without protection since the beginning of time. Progress is driven by communications and shared knowledge; which is the former small upside of patents; protection in exchange for disclosure. With the new massivly communicative age, protection becomes less relevant for disclosure all the time. With the same problems, enough minds will create the same solutions often enough to make disclosure inevitable.
"I hear this a lot."
Yes, well, the pharmaceutical industry likes to repeat it a lot.
"Is this really true?"
No it isnt. The vast bulk of pharmaceutical spending is on administration, marketing and comparatively inefficient production. Not even a fifth of the average pharmcorp's spending is on R&D (take a look at their public filings some time).
That isnt to say pharmaceutical research is free, but it does mean this: we'd get _five times_ the current R&D if we paid for it outright. Or we could pay a fifth of what we're paying now and get the same amount of R&D and the same medicines. And that's being kind and assuming that R&D organizations that have been protected for a century are anywhere near market-optimum efficiency.
"First to file rather than first to invent means that all pesky open source programmers will have to worry"
It's not a problem for open source; if you've released code as open source that means it's been published, and no patent application filed on a later date could be granted covering any supposed invention in that code.
It's not first to file for a particular invention, it's first to file for a particular _previously undisclosed_ invention.
"as they just keep an eye out for what everyone else is doing"
Technically, that shouldn't work. Anything they can keep an eye out for would have to have been published, and would therefore be unpatentable under first-to-file.
"you can't be locked out of the market just because patent troll X decided to file paperwork before you did."
As long as you're publishing everything you do you cant be out-patented and locked out. Only if you're keeping your work secret and someone else files for a patent on the same thing before you do.
It mainly affects companies or individuals keeping innovations secret; in first to file, it's the first to file a previously _undisclosed_ invention who gets the patent.
For opensource it's probably slightly better, as it becomes slightly more difficult to submarine patents or futz the invention dates.
However, it doesnt affect the more real issues of overly broad claims, etc. Or the economic validity and usefullness of IP at all.
"What we need is something like a short-term copyright/patent"
We already have that. It's called the first mover advantage, and it has the huge benefit that it requires no administration or legal involvement at all.
"6-12 months would be sufficient"
The trouble, you see, is that nothing is ever sufficient. Granting protection from competition means the protected party simply becomes that much less efficient. Essentially, the theoretical reward simply gets eaten in increased costs instead; take a look at the state of the music industry, they can _fail_ to make a profit on sales of _millions of units at $15_ of an item which can be produced for cents. Take a look at the pharmaceutical industries; they're wasting twice as much on administration and marketing as they are on actual research.
If you want a system specifically tailored towards rewarding innovation, then just outright pay for it with tax money. Intellectual monopoly protections simply means your costs are hidden in higher prices while the reward is lost in economic inefficiency.
"It is up to the FSF to convince the authors that any new licences are a good idea"
Partly. Most programs under the GPL retain the GPL v.2 or later options, meaning redistributors and authors of derivative works can update the license to the newer version at their discretion. This is by design, so that the FSF can update the GPL, should loopholes appear or technology change the situation and allow code to be updated to more recent versions, _even when authors are out of touch or dead or otherwise_.
The Linux kernel version of the GPL, however, does not retain that clause, rendering it stuck permanently in v2 land; and as the kernel, unlike FSF driven projects, doesnt require copyright reassignment, it would be more or less impossible to accomplish a change.
Which means that a) the linux kernel is vulnerable to changes in law and technology that may render the v2 GPL ineffective and b) what Torvalds thinks is really has little bearing on the issue.
"look at the new draft licence turns up some problems"
I see no problems. The new version closes several holes; to get affected by them you'd have to have been willfully abusing those loopholes, violating the intent and spirit of the GPL. It's not as if the FSF's views are a well kept secret, so any due diligence would have made it obvious that such loopholes would be closed down.
"he told me (something I will always remember) that free things are not good for companies"
Gee, where can I find him, I've got a whole lot of air he can buy or cease using if he feels it doesnt cost enough.
"because it is the total oposite of an economy"
He should probably go back and read a few books on economy again. The ultimate goal of free market capitalism is to encourage the most effective production of 'wealth' possible, with the endgame being the end of scarcity, when more or less everything the average person needs or wants costs close to nothing.
Of course, that is the total opposite of protectionism, where the legal system protects inefficient production from competition.
The economies of opensource are the economies of the free market. As components are perfected and reused and shared, they decrease redundant work and leads to far lower costs for the companies involved; mass-used and distributed code approaches lack of scarcity. At the same time, the costs are shifted into areas that actually do cost; support and other currently labour intensive and not easily automated tasks. The incentive becomes to provide faster better more cost effective support and customization, thus driving along the economic cycle.
"The trick is, we need access to all the same data you have."
Indeed. Take a look at David Brin's The Transparent Society for a further exposition of that. And look up Sousveillance on the wikipedia.
However, in the current situation you can pretty much assume that access to exonerating material will be scarce more often than not. CCTVs proving you were somewhere else will probably be wiped long before you even know something's afoot, mined systems will be classified, the framers will be outside monitoring, etc.
Big Brother likes to watch, but he doesnt necessarily like to be watched back.