I'm not sure how Google managed to launch their book search without putting 'we are committing wholesale copyright infringement and are liable for statutory fines of several billion dollars' in their SEC filings. If the Authors' Guild had pressed for the full statutory fines for wilful infringement, which go up to $150k/work, then Google would be bankrupt.
If that were true, there would be no settlement.
As it turns out, there was a large concern that Google would win the case.
Google's argument is that libraries are perfectly within their rights to host their collections online, and that's a service that Google is willing to provide to them.
The publisher argument goes along the lines of: libraries are fine as long as they require the burden of seeking them out. As soon as they are easy to use, there should be no fair use doctrine employed.
I don't envy publishers trying to sort this out, and figure out how they're relevant in the age of Internet communications, but you have to admit that there's a much higher chance than just the litigation risk that the above argument wouldn't fly and Google would have won.
I think the basic idea is a good one, but it just needs to be non-Google-specific.
Absolutely. There's no way that the publishers can justify not cutting other business looking to do a Google Books like system the very same terms. No one has really tried to do that yet, though, so Microsoft is having a hey day accusing Google of somehow preventing publishers from doing so in the future.
Interestingly, Microsoft could have simply spun up their old book-scanning project and demanded the same terms as Google is getting from publishers. The problem is that Microsoft doesn't want to be in that industry. That's why they got out. They do, however, NEED to score some points against Google in the media, and that's exactly what they're doing.
It's good if you want to read books for free, bad if you're a copyright holder who just saw your rights usurped.
A library is good if you want to read books for free, bad if you're a copyright holder who just saw your rights usurped.
These things are equivalent. Google sought to make this point, and the publishers apparently were concerned enough that they would win that a settlement was sought. The terms of the settlement are very valuable to publishers, opening up a new source of revenue for them.
Will publishers then turn around and screw authors out of any of the benefit? Almost certainly, but to blame Google for publishers having treated authors like dirt for the past 50 years+ is rather an odd stance to take.
How the Hell Google got this past the courts, I have no idea.
Taken in a vacuum, there is no problem with this deal. The problem only arises should publishers refuse in future to cut the same deal with others, at which point the publishers open themselves up to FTC/DoJ involvement, lawsuits or both. Google has no part in that, and the Google settlement remains a perfectly reasonable deal.
Well, there is that, but on the other hand they are absolutely spot on, the article is the best summary I've seen of the problems with the Google book deal. I dislike Microsoft, and I use Google all the time, but this deal really is a bad one.
No, they're entirely wrong. This argument has been repeated so many times (and it's really interesting to see Microsoft actually saying this now, as opposed to having others say it for them) that people are buying it. Let's make a comparison:
I sell you an ice cream cone for 5 cents. Someone else goes running all over the neighborhood yelling about how there's no way that I will sell everyone else an ice cream cone for 5 cents, and therefore your ice cream cone must be taken away.
Are the flaws in that logic obvious now?
1) Google's getting a good deal (well, not really, but a better deal than publishers have been willing to cut in the past). There's no problem there.
2) Microsoft and Microsoft-shills have been pushing the idea for a month or so now that no one else will get this deal in the future. This *is* a problem.
3) The correct way to deal with that problem, should it arise, is for the organizations looking to get in on the same deal Google has to sue the publishers.
Note that Google has no part in this. It's obvious that such a deal can't be made with only one organization, but of course, Microsoft doesn't want Google's book deal or they'd be going after publishers. This is just an opportunity for Microsoft to grab some headlines by calling Google an anti-competitive monster (when you're the thing that lurks in the dark, I imagine you expect everyone else to be just as bad).
This doesn't seem weird to me at all. I mean, if we can use our excrement for fuel for some form of power, why not use other things from our body that we generally don't have a use for?? Sounds more like a logical step, to me.
By that logic, I should expect every part of my body to be equally useful in terms of power-generation potential. In reality, that's simply not true. I hope that this guy really has discovered a use for human hair (and presumably that of some animals) in cheap production of energy, but assuming that there's a good chance this won't be reproducible is a fairly reasonable stance to take given the history of newly "discovered" forms of energy production.
Which is fairly dangerous in the UK, since it's a crime to not reveal your encryption keys when presented with a warrant. Should you lose your keys you can go to jail for innocently saying that you can't decrypt the message!
How about good old fashioned legwork? It *is* possible to make sure that the metadata is consistent with the facts, but that involves doing actual research and verification such as academics have been doing for hundreds of years.
Read the text from the last link in the Slashdot blurb. That's Google's response (and the original complaint's author's responses inline). In it, Google clearly lays out each of the errors cited (some as batches) and what sorts of errors they stem from. However, the really telling part is the numbers. They have over a trillion metadata records for hundreds of millions of books. In those trillions of records, they claim to have millions of errors. Think about that for a second....
For a database that hasn't even been officially launched, that's an astounding thing. If true, it's far, far better than anyone would have guessed it would be at this stage.
Google's also pointed out that they're working hard on this, and that they're mostly succeeding as a result of filtering out bogus input from a number of external sources. We'll be finding errors in Google's metadata forever. There's no way around that (it's simply a problem of diminishing returns), but on the whole, there is no other database like this, and I would expect that the majority of those that do exist and are smaller have similar error rates.
I hate to be so cynical, but there was a huge uptick in negative articles on Slashdot about Google as soon as Microsoft started their anti-Google PR effort in DC. Now I see at least one anti-Google article on Slashdot every day. Is Slashdot falling for an extensive trolling effort from MS?
I don't care if it was effective or not, if the intent was there, its illegal.
The intent to do WHAT? You're claiming false advertising. What I'm saying is that, ignoring how horribly weak your claim is, false advertising does not equal securities fraud. You would have to demonstrate an attempt to manipulate stock price, and there really wasn't. Now, if this had been a major uptick in the order of magnitude of apps customers AND apps was a major revenue source then you might have a leg to stand on.
Actually, even then there's the problem of intent. Did anyone at Google unexpectedly sell? Was there any collusion with an external entity?
What you're suggesting as a standard for fraud would land every public company in court every day of the year over securities fraud. Now, you might feel that's in line with actual violations of the law, but the Federal Courts System doesn't actually favor your perspective.
Also, you are signing your messages "Booth was a patriot," which tends to make me think you troll for the sake of it, rather than actually formulating any kind of coherent point.
If Google used this 'news' to help their stock prices or increase sales, id call it fraud. And they might too.
1) You're assuming that Google had any idea. They got an agreement from DC that they could use them in advertising (I'm fairly certain, since no one trumpets a customer without such an agreement) that that's it. They don't get to tell DC how to use it.
2) There's nothing false in saying you made a large sale when you did. Your claim of fraud is similar to claiming fraud when Ford touts a giant sale of a fleet of cars to the military when the military is just putting them into bunkers and never driving them.
3) Do you really think an apps sale to DC affected Google's stock price? I dare you to find a blip on their chart.
maybe, just maybe, DC civil servants have a good reason for not using Google aps.
Well, I don't think they're going either way... and that could be the problem. Right now, they're paying a lot of money for two solutions. Granted the Google solution is cheaper, but both are costing the taxpayers money. Hopefully they'll be making a decision soon and not continuing to cost the taxpayers for indecisiveness....
By that measure, The telephone would not have been patented, and I will take great exception to anyone who makes the claim that the patent system wasn't designed to protect such inventions.
Whether or not the given invention will be featured on a future edition of Schoolhouse Rock is not the point.
Way to strawman...?
The legal justification for patents is the improvement of the state of the art, not the "protection of inventions".
You're conflating justification and method. Protecting inventions is how we fulfill the requirements of said justification.
That is, we protect the patent-holder's ability to make money from their invention and in return they have incentive to make the invention's workings public. Heinlein spent some time twiddling with the idea of inventions that shouldn't be patented in his story about Shipstones. Good stuff, by the way. If all you do is grant patents to inventions that can't be reproduced, then no one is ever going to apply because there's never an up-side.
If you allow EVERYTHING to be patented, then you have a different problem, where innovation is roadblocked by trivial patents.
There's a middle ground, it turns out. Reforming the review process is really all that NEEDS to happen (though dealing with patent durations and new industries would help a lot).
To be fair, TFA (Nature) wasn't much better. It never actually broaches the topic of molecular vs. particle monopoles which is kind of central to anyone not in the know understanding that this isn't the big deal everyone's been talking about for the last decade+
Every other story about Google this week has been filled with responses about how evil they are, but we fall down on this one?!
This is Google pushing a vector format. Vectors, people! Do you not remember vector diagrams from college physics? Imagine the horror that Google could unleash on the public with this technology! Imagine the hours upon hours of boring lectures! Just... look at the bones!
This would eliminate most of the negative aspects of patents while preserving their key redeeming feature.
People shouldn't have to waste money patenting every trivial little thing that they do in the course of their work.
I have no problem with this statement, other than "Rubbish" which carries no semantic value, here.
If 3 companies can "invent" the same thing, one of those companies should not be able to interfere with the rest for merely filing a patent.
By that measure, The telephone would not have been patented, and I will take great exception to anyone who makes the claim that the patent system wasn't designed to protect such inventions.
Patents are meant to ENCOURAGE innovation, not STIFLE it.
Quite true. However, not allowing someone to patent a revolutionary idea, even if, in retrospect it seems obvious, isn't the solution to that.
This is not 1870 anymore. We don't have 17 years to wait for patents to expire.
In some cases I think this is a valid statement. In some it's absurd. The problem is that the patent system was designed to cover one specific kind of industry (manufacturing) and today covers quite a lot more (pharma to software to manufacturing to materials to business process to services and so on).
Each has its own measure of what obsolescence means. In the drug world, for example, there's no such thing as obsolescence in the traditional sense, just a tapering off in marketability. What's more, you can just trivially modify a compound and the only hardship in re-patenting is going through FDA approval for the "new" drug. This is fundamentally broken.
In the software world, 3-10 years is the obsolescence window, so a span of 17-20 years for a patent is absurd.
In materials, obsolescence can be as fast as software or literally impossible. I've proposed an approach to copyright reform previously that I think applies with some changes to patents as well. A sliding window of renewals could be applied to patents (e.g. requiring them to be renewed every 5 years).
Along with that, yes, I agree we need stricter standards on what is patentable, but to suggest that only a handful of patents should be given out per year seems impossibly harsh, and impossible to reconcile with the original intent of the system.
Warming, schwarming. If we can't head off the next ice age, then we're royally boned. Not completely as a species, but our post-ice-age descendants will have to bootstrap themselves from wood to nuclear, since we've used up all the easily accessible fossil fuels. Sucks to be them.
At least they'll have Wikipedia and L. Ron Hubbard.;-)
Seriously, though, you're right. Ice Ages pose a threat on a scale which modern man simply cannot comprehend. Global warming may pose the threat of flooding. It may bring hardship to already water-impoverished areas. It may cause the relocation of millions in a worst-case scenario.
The coming ice age which is pretty much a given (having happened reliably over and over in Earth's past) will destroy a majority of the bio-diversity of land life. It will kill millions and relocate billions. It will render the Earth virtually unlivable for today's population densities.
If an action that we take represents a choice between failing to stave off the as-yet-uncertain outcome of continued warming and the small risk of triggering a global ice age, then there is no choice. One is a gamble that you're not committing the largest-scale act of genocide in the history of the planet. One can result in some serious hardship.
Instead of a quick example, how about you make a real argument.
There's only two possibilities:
1. we're fucked and only geo-engineering will save us 2. the problem is being vastly overblown and mere conservation will serfice.
For some reason everyone is saying that it is the first and yet also saying that geo-engineer is bad, m'kay.
Choose.
I choose not to.
Here's some additional options:
3. Warming will be disruptive, but ultimately far less so than the "sky is falling" crowd has claimed. Simply riding it out will suffice (though conservation and reduction of all manner of pollutants is never a bad thing) -- this is a softer statement of your item 2, I realize.
4. While we may be in for pain on a scale which is not yet appreciated, we don't yet have enough data to responsibly tinker with the atmosphere (the salt-sprayer idea especially bothers me, given that we're just now learning new things about how subtle changes in solar radiation affect our biosphere)
5. The What Were You Thinking principle applies: when your grandchildren look back after something goes wrong, will they ask "what were you thinking?"
Instead of exclusively considering prior art, we should give the public a chance to respond to every patent application by being given a description of the device, and have an opportunity to develop an invention to the device.
This would break the patent system. The goal is not to reward people who solve seemingly intractable problems. The goal is to foster innovation by providing those who innovate with a lock in their inventions. Innovation is often accomplished in small steps. The paper clip was just a way of using wire to hold papers together. Given its description, you could make a paper clip, but the insight and innovation were rewarded with a patent.
When we discuss software patents, there's a new kind of problem. Software is, inherently, an expression of mathematics. Patenting math is tough to accept because you can't change the way math relates to the real world, so you're essentially patenting a piece of the known universe... which doesn't make a lot of sense.
Public key crypto is about the only thing I can see as a defense of patenting software. Here, you're patenting, not the math, but the application of the math to a specific problem domain to perform a task.
But the question is, how do you move from that to a patent system that can discern the difference and make the right call? Fundamentally, I think you need a review system which is populated by real academics and professionals or it simply can't work.
Someday, you'll have a petabyte disk in a 3.5" form-factor. At that point, you can treat it as a commodity.
As much as I want to believe this, I know that just as in the past the business will find a way to fill an array of such drives.
Being able to treat it as a commodity doesn't mean you won't have a need for arrays of them. We'll store full video of every doctor's appointment you've ever had. We'll store the annotated DNA of everyone on the planet. We'll store a feed of the entire sky 24/7 at 50x zoom in order to track events in our solar system.
Certainly there are some services that are probably already in need of multiple petabytes (I'm looking at you, Flickr and YouTube).
First of all, DIY is dead or dying. Electronic components are harder to get hold of, and information about electronics is harder to get hold of
There are more innovations that depend on locked-in technologies. That's the core of the problem. I can get any component on the Net that I need, but all too often I require a device which will only work withing authorized parameters (e.g. a Blu-Ray DVD reader).
1. 10 years ago, we all would have been thoroughly shocked to walk into a store and get a 1TB drive for our PC's for under $100.
Reductions in cost an increases in data-density aren't paradigm-changing events. I would not be shocked at all, in fact. Ten years ago you could have drawn a line along the chart and predicted the above with ease.
2. This is just a more specific form of an argument that has been made every few decades since the beginning of written history, the argument that "we have done everything".
Not at all. However, there are clearly gaps between periods of great innovation.
Conversely the "singularity" argument is one that simply stems from the natural human process of storing information in a logarithmic time-series. We throw away more detail as it becomes less relevant to us, so our history doesn't distinguish between the thousands individual improvements that immediately followed the introduction of the printing press. We simply recall that there was one innovation. Similarly, your disk drive example will simply be remembered as "simple mass electro-magnetic storage was introduced."
Here's why the argument fails. Human history as written is fixed. The future of humanity is not fixed
Moot point, and not relevant.
Innovation has slowed. Your statement doesn't contradict this.
Frankly, my first reflex is to blame the ever-increasingly cumbersome patent system, but I have nothing to back that up off hand.
Are you saying that with the more expensive system, disks never fail and nobody ever has to get up in the night?
Well... yes and no. When you've worked with high-end arrays, you learn that storage is only the beginning. NetApp and EMC provide far, far more. I was damned impressed when I first heard a presentation from NetApp about their technology, but the day that they called me up and told me that the replacement disk was in the mail and I answered, "I had a failure?"... that was the day that I understood what data reliability was all about.
Since that time (over 10 years ago), the state of the art has improved over and over again. If you're buying a petabyte of storage, it's because you have a need that breaks most basic storage models, and the average sysadmin who thinks that storage is cheap is going to go through a lot of pain learning that he's wrong.
Someday, you'll have a petabyte disk in a 3.5" form-factor. At that point, you can treat it as a commodity. Until then, there are demands placed on you when you administrate that much storage which demand a very different class of device than a Linux box with a bunch of raid cards.
As evidence of that, I submit that dozens of companies like the one in this article have existed over the years, and only a handful of them still exist. Those that still do have either exited the storage array business, or have evolved their offerings into something that costs a lot more to build and support than a pile of disks.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not sure how Google managed to launch their book search without putting 'we are committing wholesale copyright infringement and are liable for statutory fines of several billion dollars' in their SEC filings. If the Authors' Guild had pressed for the full statutory fines for wilful infringement, which go up to $150k/work, then Google would be bankrupt.
If that were true, there would be no settlement.
As it turns out, there was a large concern that Google would win the case.
Google's argument is that libraries are perfectly within their rights to host their collections online, and that's a service that Google is willing to provide to them.
The publisher argument goes along the lines of: libraries are fine as long as they require the burden of seeking them out. As soon as they are easy to use, there should be no fair use doctrine employed.
I don't envy publishers trying to sort this out, and figure out how they're relevant in the age of Internet communications, but you have to admit that there's a much higher chance than just the litigation risk that the above argument wouldn't fly and Google would have won.
I think the basic idea is a good one, but it just needs to be non-Google-specific.
Absolutely. There's no way that the publishers can justify not cutting other business looking to do a Google Books like system the very same terms. No one has really tried to do that yet, though, so Microsoft is having a hey day accusing Google of somehow preventing publishers from doing so in the future.
Interestingly, Microsoft could have simply spun up their old book-scanning project and demanded the same terms as Google is getting from publishers. The problem is that Microsoft doesn't want to be in that industry. That's why they got out. They do, however, NEED to score some points against Google in the media, and that's exactly what they're doing.
It's good if you want to read books for free, bad if you're a copyright holder who just saw your rights usurped.
A library is good if you want to read books for free, bad if you're a copyright holder who just saw your rights usurped.
These things are equivalent. Google sought to make this point, and the publishers apparently were concerned enough that they would win that a settlement was sought. The terms of the settlement are very valuable to publishers, opening up a new source of revenue for them.
Will publishers then turn around and screw authors out of any of the benefit? Almost certainly, but to blame Google for publishers having treated authors like dirt for the past 50 years+ is rather an odd stance to take.
How the Hell Google got this past the courts, I have no idea.
Taken in a vacuum, there is no problem with this deal. The problem only arises should publishers refuse in future to cut the same deal with others, at which point the publishers open themselves up to FTC/DoJ involvement, lawsuits or both. Google has no part in that, and the Google settlement remains a perfectly reasonable deal.
Well, there is that, but on the other hand they are absolutely spot on, the article is the best summary I've seen of the problems with the Google book deal. I dislike Microsoft, and I use Google all the time, but this deal really is a bad one.
No, they're entirely wrong. This argument has been repeated so many times (and it's really interesting to see Microsoft actually saying this now, as opposed to having others say it for them) that people are buying it. Let's make a comparison:
I sell you an ice cream cone for 5 cents. Someone else goes running all over the neighborhood yelling about how there's no way that I will sell everyone else an ice cream cone for 5 cents, and therefore your ice cream cone must be taken away.
Are the flaws in that logic obvious now?
1) Google's getting a good deal (well, not really, but a better deal than publishers have been willing to cut in the past). There's no problem there.
2) Microsoft and Microsoft-shills have been pushing the idea for a month or so now that no one else will get this deal in the future. This *is* a problem.
3) The correct way to deal with that problem, should it arise, is for the organizations looking to get in on the same deal Google has to sue the publishers.
Note that Google has no part in this. It's obvious that such a deal can't be made with only one organization, but of course, Microsoft doesn't want Google's book deal or they'd be going after publishers. This is just an opportunity for Microsoft to grab some headlines by calling Google an anti-competitive monster (when you're the thing that lurks in the dark, I imagine you expect everyone else to be just as bad).
From TFA:
Half a kilo of hair can be bought for only 16p in Nepal and lasts a few months, whereas a pack of batteries would cost 50p and last a few nights.
So, no it's not a hidden cost, it's just cheaper than the existing costs.
This doesn't seem weird to me at all. I mean, if we can use our excrement for fuel for some form of power, why not use other things from our body that we generally don't have a use for?? Sounds more like a logical step, to me.
By that logic, I should expect every part of my body to be equally useful in terms of power-generation potential. In reality, that's simply not true. I hope that this guy really has discovered a use for human hair (and presumably that of some animals) in cheap production of energy, but assuming that there's a good chance this won't be reproducible is a fairly reasonable stance to take given the history of newly "discovered" forms of energy production.
Maybe next time they will know to use http://www.gnupg.org/
Which is fairly dangerous in the UK, since it's a crime to not reveal your encryption keys when presented with a warrant. Should you lose your keys you can go to jail for innocently saying that you can't decrypt the message!
How about good old fashioned legwork? It *is* possible to make sure that the metadata is consistent with the facts, but that involves doing actual research and verification such as academics have been doing for hundreds of years.
Read the text from the last link in the Slashdot blurb. That's Google's response (and the original complaint's author's responses inline). In it, Google clearly lays out each of the errors cited (some as batches) and what sorts of errors they stem from. However, the really telling part is the numbers. They have over a trillion metadata records for hundreds of millions of books. In those trillions of records, they claim to have millions of errors. Think about that for a second....
For a database that hasn't even been officially launched, that's an astounding thing. If true, it's far, far better than anyone would have guessed it would be at this stage.
Google's also pointed out that they're working hard on this, and that they're mostly succeeding as a result of filtering out bogus input from a number of external sources. We'll be finding errors in Google's metadata forever. There's no way around that (it's simply a problem of diminishing returns), but on the whole, there is no other database like this, and I would expect that the majority of those that do exist and are smaller have similar error rates.
I hate to be so cynical, but there was a huge uptick in negative articles on Slashdot about Google as soon as Microsoft started their anti-Google PR effort in DC. Now I see at least one anti-Google article on Slashdot every day. Is Slashdot falling for an extensive trolling effort from MS?
More info available from previous Slashdot article...
I don't care if it was effective or not, if the intent was there, its illegal.
The intent to do WHAT? You're claiming false advertising. What I'm saying is that, ignoring how horribly weak your claim is, false advertising does not equal securities fraud. You would have to demonstrate an attempt to manipulate stock price, and there really wasn't. Now, if this had been a major uptick in the order of magnitude of apps customers AND apps was a major revenue source then you might have a leg to stand on.
Actually, even then there's the problem of intent. Did anyone at Google unexpectedly sell? Was there any collusion with an external entity?
What you're suggesting as a standard for fraud would land every public company in court every day of the year over securities fraud. Now, you might feel that's in line with actual violations of the law, but the Federal Courts System doesn't actually favor your perspective.
Also, you are signing your messages "Booth was a patriot," which tends to make me think you troll for the sake of it, rather than actually formulating any kind of coherent point.
If Google used this 'news' to help their stock prices or increase sales, id call it fraud. And they might too.
1) You're assuming that Google had any idea. They got an agreement from DC that they could use them in advertising (I'm fairly certain, since no one trumpets a customer without such an agreement) that that's it. They don't get to tell DC how to use it.
2) There's nothing false in saying you made a large sale when you did. Your claim of fraud is similar to claiming fraud when Ford touts a giant sale of a fleet of cars to the military when the military is just putting them into bunkers and never driving them.
3) Do you really think an apps sale to DC affected Google's stock price? I dare you to find a blip on their chart.
maybe, just maybe, DC civil servants have a good reason for not using Google aps.
Well, I don't think they're going either way... and that could be the problem. Right now, they're paying a lot of money for two solutions. Granted the Google solution is cheaper, but both are costing the taxpayers money. Hopefully they'll be making a decision soon and not continuing to cost the taxpayers for indecisiveness....
By that measure, The telephone would not have been patented, and I will take great exception to anyone who makes the claim that the patent system wasn't designed to protect such inventions.
Whether or not the given invention will be featured on a future edition of Schoolhouse Rock is not the point.
Way to strawman...?
The legal justification for patents is the improvement of the state of the art, not the "protection of inventions".
You're conflating justification and method. Protecting inventions is how we fulfill the requirements of said justification.
That is, we protect the patent-holder's ability to make money from their invention and in return they have incentive to make the invention's workings public. Heinlein spent some time twiddling with the idea of inventions that shouldn't be patented in his story about Shipstones. Good stuff, by the way. If all you do is grant patents to inventions that can't be reproduced, then no one is ever going to apply because there's never an up-side.
If you allow EVERYTHING to be patented, then you have a different problem, where innovation is roadblocked by trivial patents.
There's a middle ground, it turns out. Reforming the review process is really all that NEEDS to happen (though dealing with patent durations and new industries would help a lot).
To be fair, TFA (Nature) wasn't much better. It never actually broaches the topic of molecular vs. particle monopoles which is kind of central to anyone not in the know understanding that this isn't the big deal everyone's been talking about for the last decade+
Every other story about Google this week has been filled with responses about how evil they are, but we fall down on this one?!
This is Google pushing a vector format. Vectors, people! Do you not remember vector diagrams from college physics? Imagine the horror that Google could unleash on the public with this technology! Imagine the hours upon hours of boring lectures! Just... look at the bones!
Rubbish.
This would eliminate most of the negative aspects of patents while preserving their key redeeming feature.
People shouldn't have to waste money patenting every trivial little
thing that they do in the course of their work.
I have no problem with this statement, other than "Rubbish" which carries no semantic value, here.
If 3 companies can "invent" the same thing, one of those companies should not be able
to interfere with the rest for merely filing a patent.
By that measure, The telephone would not have been patented, and I will take great exception to anyone who makes the claim that the patent system wasn't designed to protect such inventions.
Patents are meant to ENCOURAGE innovation, not STIFLE it.
Quite true. However, not allowing someone to patent a revolutionary idea, even if, in retrospect it seems obvious, isn't the solution to that.
This is not 1870 anymore. We don't have 17 years to wait for patents to expire.
In some cases I think this is a valid statement. In some it's absurd. The problem is that the patent system was designed to cover one specific kind of industry (manufacturing) and today covers quite a lot more (pharma to software to manufacturing to materials to business process to services and so on).
Each has its own measure of what obsolescence means. In the drug world, for example, there's no such thing as obsolescence in the traditional sense, just a tapering off in marketability. What's more, you can just trivially modify a compound and the only hardship in re-patenting is going through FDA approval for the "new" drug. This is fundamentally broken.
In the software world, 3-10 years is the obsolescence window, so a span of 17-20 years for a patent is absurd.
In materials, obsolescence can be as fast as software or literally impossible. I've proposed an approach to copyright reform previously that I think applies with some changes to patents as well. A sliding window of renewals could be applied to patents (e.g. requiring them to be renewed every 5 years).
Along with that, yes, I agree we need stricter standards on what is patentable, but to suggest that only a handful of patents should be given out per year seems impossibly harsh, and impossible to reconcile with the original intent of the system.
Actually, it wasn't. The paper clip (as we know it) was never patented.
Poor example, but a tiny section of my response. Perhaps the substance of what I said could be addressed as well?
Warming, schwarming. If we can't head off the next ice age, then we're royally boned. Not completely as a species, but our post-ice-age descendants will have to bootstrap themselves from wood to nuclear, since we've used up all the easily accessible fossil fuels. Sucks to be them.
At least they'll have Wikipedia and L. Ron Hubbard. ;-)
Seriously, though, you're right. Ice Ages pose a threat on a scale which modern man simply cannot comprehend. Global warming may pose the threat of flooding. It may bring hardship to already water-impoverished areas. It may cause the relocation of millions in a worst-case scenario.
The coming ice age which is pretty much a given (having happened reliably over and over in Earth's past) will destroy a majority of the bio-diversity of land life. It will kill millions and relocate billions. It will render the Earth virtually unlivable for today's population densities.
If an action that we take represents a choice between failing to stave off the as-yet-uncertain outcome of continued warming and the small risk of triggering a global ice age, then there is no choice. One is a gamble that you're not committing the largest-scale act of genocide in the history of the planet. One can result in some serious hardship.
Instead of a quick example, how about you make a real argument.
There's only two possibilities:
1. we're fucked and only geo-engineering will save us
2. the problem is being vastly overblown and mere conservation will serfice.
For some reason everyone is saying that it is the first and yet also saying that geo-engineer is bad, m'kay.
Choose.
I choose not to.
Here's some additional options:
3. Warming will be disruptive, but ultimately far less so than the "sky is falling" crowd has claimed. Simply riding it out will suffice (though conservation and reduction of all manner of pollutants is never a bad thing) -- this is a softer statement of your item 2, I realize.
4. While we may be in for pain on a scale which is not yet appreciated, we don't yet have enough data to responsibly tinker with the atmosphere (the salt-sprayer idea especially bothers me, given that we're just now learning new things about how subtle changes in solar radiation affect our biosphere)
5. The What Were You Thinking principle applies: when your grandchildren look back after something goes wrong, will they ask "what were you thinking?"
Instead of exclusively considering prior art, we should give the public a chance to respond to every patent application by being given a description of the device, and have an opportunity to develop an invention to the device.
This would break the patent system. The goal is not to reward people who solve seemingly intractable problems. The goal is to foster innovation by providing those who innovate with a lock in their inventions. Innovation is often accomplished in small steps. The paper clip was just a way of using wire to hold papers together. Given its description, you could make a paper clip, but the insight and innovation were rewarded with a patent.
When we discuss software patents, there's a new kind of problem. Software is, inherently, an expression of mathematics. Patenting math is tough to accept because you can't change the way math relates to the real world, so you're essentially patenting a piece of the known universe... which doesn't make a lot of sense.
Public key crypto is about the only thing I can see as a defense of patenting software. Here, you're patenting, not the math, but the application of the math to a specific problem domain to perform a task.
But the question is, how do you move from that to a patent system that can discern the difference and make the right call? Fundamentally, I think you need a review system which is populated by real academics and professionals or it simply can't work.
Someday, you'll have a petabyte disk in a 3.5" form-factor. At that point, you can treat it as a commodity.
As much as I want to believe this, I know that just as in the past the business will find a way to fill an array of such drives.
Being able to treat it as a commodity doesn't mean you won't have a need for arrays of them. We'll store full video of every doctor's appointment you've ever had. We'll store the annotated DNA of everyone on the planet. We'll store a feed of the entire sky 24/7 at 50x zoom in order to track events in our solar system.
Certainly there are some services that are probably already in need of multiple petabytes (I'm looking at you, Flickr and YouTube).
First of all, DIY is dead or dying. Electronic components are harder to get hold of, and information about electronics is harder to get hold of
There are more innovations that depend on locked-in technologies. That's the core of the problem. I can get any component on the Net that I need, but all too often I require a device which will only work withing authorized parameters (e.g. a Blu-Ray DVD reader).
1. 10 years ago, we all would have been thoroughly shocked to walk into a store and get a 1TB drive for our PC's for under $100.
Reductions in cost an increases in data-density aren't paradigm-changing events. I would not be shocked at all, in fact. Ten years ago you could have drawn a line along the chart and predicted the above with ease.
2. This is just a more specific form of an argument that has been made every few decades since the beginning of written history, the argument that "we have done everything".
Not at all. However, there are clearly gaps between periods of great innovation.
Conversely the "singularity" argument is one that simply stems from the natural human process of storing information in a logarithmic time-series. We throw away more detail as it becomes less relevant to us, so our history doesn't distinguish between the thousands individual improvements that immediately followed the introduction of the printing press. We simply recall that there was one innovation. Similarly, your disk drive example will simply be remembered as "simple mass electro-magnetic storage was introduced."
Here's why the argument fails. Human history as written is fixed. The future of humanity is not fixed
Moot point, and not relevant.
Innovation has slowed. Your statement doesn't contradict this.
Frankly, my first reflex is to blame the ever-increasingly cumbersome patent system, but I have nothing to back that up off hand.
Are you saying that with the more expensive system, disks never fail and nobody ever has to get up in the night?
Well... yes and no. When you've worked with high-end arrays, you learn that storage is only the beginning. NetApp and EMC provide far, far more. I was damned impressed when I first heard a presentation from NetApp about their technology, but the day that they called me up and told me that the replacement disk was in the mail and I answered, "I had a failure?" ... that was the day that I understood what data reliability was all about.
Since that time (over 10 years ago), the state of the art has improved over and over again. If you're buying a petabyte of storage, it's because you have a need that breaks most basic storage models, and the average sysadmin who thinks that storage is cheap is going to go through a lot of pain learning that he's wrong.
Someday, you'll have a petabyte disk in a 3.5" form-factor. At that point, you can treat it as a commodity. Until then, there are demands placed on you when you administrate that much storage which demand a very different class of device than a Linux box with a bunch of raid cards.
As evidence of that, I submit that dozens of companies like the one in this article have existed over the years, and only a handful of them still exist. Those that still do have either exited the storage array business, or have evolved their offerings into something that costs a lot more to build and support than a pile of disks.