Re:Decrease length of time copyright applies
on
Fair IP Laws?
·
· Score: 2
Because the assumption is that if I write a book, I'm using that money to support myself and family if I have one. If I should die prematurely, that work can still support my family.
So can a life insurance policy. Also such a policy isn't restricted just to people who write books, etc.
Re:Patents and copyrights
on
Fair IP Laws?
·
· Score: 2
1. A patent application must be made on something completely unique. It must not "extend" an existing technique.
Using a new technology to do something which has been done before, would tend to fall into the latter catagory. Which would cover the vast majority of "use a computer to do X" type applications.
Loser pays - in civil litigation the party with deep pockets can either intimidate or bankrupt it's opponents. This stacks the deck and leads to abuses that are chronicled weekly on Slashdot. Changing the law to require the loser to pay all legal (of both sides) and court costs would level the playing field and elminate much of what is essentially legal extortion.
You'd also need some safeguard against deliberatly ramping up costs. Maybe something like the costs for legal expenses would be either the actual cost or that of using an "average priced" lawyer. Anything done by a lawyer which did not absolutly need to be done by a lawyer would be simply ignored
The purpose of intellectual property laws in the US is simple. An inventor/creator is given for a limited period of time a monopoly over his/her creation. The time limits are meant to be long enough for the person to recoup costs of creation and make a profit off of it thereby encouraging people to create.
It's more to give the creator first refusal on any (there may be none or insufficient to cover any costs) money resulting from their work, as an incentive to continue producting.
The authors life + X years system also encourages an intellectual nobility in that the children and possibly grandchildren will continue to benefit from the invention of a parent thereby having no incentive to create. The most you could justify is something along the lines of authors life or 30 years, whichever is longer. That way you avoid a situation in which the primary wage earner dies unexpectedly and thereby leaves his/her family out in the cold.
Why should copyright be a state sponsored pension/life insurance scheme?
Amend the Constitution to say that Congress shall not pass any law containing an amendment. This is how the majority of our pork and shady dealings come about, and it's time for it to stop. There's no reason to attach an amendment giving $500,000 to Topeka for studying the mating habits of the purple-nosed shrew to a law covering federal highway funds. This kind of thing happens all the time, and it's often how bad copyright and patent laws get through - 11th hour additions to bills that have absolutely no relation.
Actually this describes a "rider" rather than an "ammendment". An ammendment in the context of the example would be something like speed limits (for these roads exculsivly). Of course someone could always argue that the mating habits of the purple-nosed shrew matter in the context of what happens if you build a road over their habitat.
You can be damned sure competitors would love to participate in voting. Voting against all patents supplied by their competitors.
Why should information on who submitted the patent appear on the published version? Unless these entities had very good records of their own outstanding patent applications they might even wind up with "friendly fire".
I disagree. And I think a seasoned examiner (if you can find one, that is) would too. If we had a pre-grant publication for comment, people who do not want a patent to issue for specious reasons will abuse the system to bog down the application.
Can this be worst than a system bogged down with patent applications for questionable reasons? No doubt there are plenty of specious reasons for people wanting a patent issued. The default most certainly should be no patent issued...
The concept of publication of applications for public comment before issuance is great. In reality, however, it is not practicable. The Patent Office is exteemely backlogged. In certain fields (e.g., software, TV, telecommunications), applications do not get an innitial examination until 4 years after they are filed. From that point forward, if everything goes well, an application will probably take about 1 year to issue. Becuase of the backlog, examiners only get to spend between 8-16 hours per application, soup-to-nuts. If you require them to review comments from thousands of people after an application is published. the time needed for a patent to issue is likely to double.
Is this actually a problem? If there are lots of submissions on a certain application then maybe it should be rejected. The purpose of a patent office isn't simply to rubber stamp applications... There is also the problem that currently a patent could pass as being "innovative" simply because the examiner dosn't understand it. Even that the whole thing is actually a piece of fiction, so nothing gets found in a prior art search, but anyone "skilled in the art" wouldn't even bother to look.
Front Page news year 2003, "New IP laws arrive, world celebrates".
Front Page news year 2004 "Pandemic of economically motivated assassinations involving inventors"
Front Page news year 2005: "First programme on new TV network, corporate execution of all RIAA and MPAA members."
Headline News: Bootlegger Murders Artist To Gain Publishing Rights
In that case just ensure that they cannot publish from their jail cell.
Re:The concept of intellectual property has got to
on
Fair IP Laws?
·
· Score: 2
And how about electronic books. They never go out of print.
It can quite easily. If it's on a physical media and that is no longer produced then it is "out of print". If it's available for download and then ceases to be then it is "out of print".
No, what is needed are manadory license fees, so that you first get 20 years of copyrigth. But then you need to prolong it every 5 years and have to pay a small fee. This continues until until the maximum time 70 years have expored.
Altertativly you have a fee which rises expontially for each renewel. No need for a sex maximum here too, simply how much the work is actually worth, this may enable the likes of blockbuster movies to stay in copyright 10-20 years longer...
That way many items will fall into public domain after 20 years.
For some kind of works a 5-10 year initial term might well make more sense.
Re:The concept of intellectual property has got to
on
Fair IP Laws?
·
· Score: 2
Again, I would like to see copyright tied to publication. As long as a book, record, etc. remains in print, it should be copywritten for 20 years. If it goes out of print, its copyright should expire within 5 years.
Probably with the criteria that if it goes out of print then the clock is reset to 5 years. Which if more than 5 years has elapsed since publication immediatly places it in the public domain.
Re:The concept of intellectual property has got to
on
Fair IP Laws?
·
· Score: 2
I'm dead set against screwing over an author, (of books, etc) however. These guys aren't so creative when they get older, and really need to be able to generate the income.
Why should authors be any kind of special case? What stops them paying into a pension fund, like everyone else? Rather than trying to fiddle copyright to act as a pension. It's rather ageist to assume that an 80 year old is less capable of being creative than a 20 year old too...
Re:The concept of intellectual property has got to
on
Fair IP Laws?
·
· Score: 2
A book, a music score, a song -- these are all things that will have value after their protection is gone.
At least in theory it would. It isn't unknown for recently published books to go out of print soon after publication. With copyright the length it is right now it's quite possible for the last copy of a book to have ceased to exist decades before copyright expires.
By the time the copyright expires on software, it is, quite literally _worthless_.
There are two types of "worthless" first would be of no value what so ever, second type would be something which is worthless whilst still copyright, but of some possible value in the public domain. Creative works are typically built up on previous works.
Re:The concept of intellectual property has got to
on
Fair IP Laws?
·
· Score: 2
In the first place, it was created to protect individuals against corporations.
Not even remotly right. Copyright went through several iterations before it was even intended to acknowlage authors. The idea of corporations having the staus of "legal people" came even later... In theory most modern copyright laws empower the author. In practice the vast majority of copyrights are held by publishers. The simplist kind of fix would be to only allow copyrights to be licenced rather than assigned.
Anyone who is even remotely interested in thinking about how much bandwidth in Australia "should" cost really needs to understand that there is no such thing as a T-1 in Australia.
Doubt you'd find many T1's anywhere outside of North America. Sicne most of the world's telecoms is more likely to use 2M than 1.5M primary rate.
What you are really doing is taking a US-centric view of the Internet, and applying it to other parts of the world -- And anyone who lives outside US territory will be able to tell you that that's just nonsense.
Not only do the technical details of telephone switching systems differ. ISPs in the US tend not to have to pay for international connectivity.
"Computers, including many running Windows operating systems, are used throughout the United States Department of Defense and by the armed forces of the United States in Afghanistan and elsewhere."
This tells the "bad guys" where to concentrate their efforts to introduce an exploit.
"The protocol, which is part of Message Queuing, contains a coding mistake that would threaten the security of enterprise systems using it if it were disclosed, Allchin said."
Assuming the black hats don't know about it anyway. Even if they don't they now have a good clue as to where to look. Unless "Message Queuing" is misinformation.
Most "malicious hackers" don't browse through source code, they just use exploits discovered by others.
Those are the so called "script kiddies". Those who find the original exploits are far likely to look at the binary. Especially with something like Windows where you have a binary monoculture. So once you discover an explot which works you can be quite sure it will work everywhere. Explots are against object code, not source code, a change it compiler options could easily mean that either an explit won't work or it will simply crash the target rather than circumventing security.
I would suspect that if M$ source code was opened up there would be a deluge of exploits within the first few months and then slowly taper off as the "easy holes" are plugged. This is true of nearly all open source software after its initial release.
It could well take longer. Since there is a difference between code which was designed from the start to be open source and quite likely very well patched code which no-one ever expected to see the light of day.
So the obvious question arises, is Linux/BSD (and any other software that has source available) more exposed to "serious" attacks. By "serious" I mean being launched by somebody who knew enough to be able to look at the source and find security flaws, vs a script kiddie who takes a virus toolkit and modifies the virus name and subject line. Theoretcially, it should be more vunerable than a picece of closed source software that was written with a similar level of "quality".
It is perfectly possible for someone to attack the binary. They don't need the source to do that. Also every single Windows machine is likely to be running the exact same binary.
Microsoft never made the statement that "this product is bug free, and has no security concerns whatsoever".
They more often claim that they don't guarentee that it will do anything.
The statement is, and always has been "we fix what we know about, if it wont break too much other stuff".
"If we happen to agree that it is broken..."
Incidentally, within some egregious time window (10 years ?) they fix it for free.
For military applications 10 years is just getting started. For applications related to government then 10 years just dosn't cut it.
Thats the tradeoff the government willfully made when it wanted to use an off the shelf operating system, instead of doing it in house or submitting bids for a custom contract. (software that requires an ongoing support contract for security issues or _any_ issue at all)
If they do it with a software company in their own country then the chances of getting a decent product at the end are remote. Software companies just don't operate in the long term. Dealing with a foriegn software company is effectivly high treason.
What you're asking for would be something like an A1 system under the old pre-Common Criteria scheme... i.e. a provably correct system.
WHich you have even less chance of getting with a COTS approach.
have you thought this through? What about interoperability? Modularity? If you worked like this, pretty much all NON software companys would end up doing everything in house, which is of course, not what they are in the business of doing.
Most companies are not in the building business, nor are they in the pumbing business, nor telecoms, nor electricians, etc. All these cases involve assembling components which are highly modular and interoperable. Why should software be treated differently from any other infrastructure? A
There is a reason microsoft exists.
Problem is that Microsoft produces a "one size fits all" type entity. Then expects you to both bend your business to fit the way their software works and to upgrade to their time schedule.
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Because the assumption is that if I write a book, I'm using that money to support myself and family if I have one. If I should die prematurely, that work can still support my family.
So can a life insurance policy. Also such a policy isn't restricted just to people who write books, etc.
1. A patent application must be made on something completely unique. It must not "extend" an existing technique.
Using a new technology to do something which has been done before, would tend to fall into the latter catagory. Which would cover the vast majority of "use a computer to do X" type applications.
Loser pays - in civil litigation the party with deep pockets can either intimidate or bankrupt it's opponents. This stacks the deck and leads to abuses that are chronicled weekly on Slashdot. Changing the law to require the loser to pay all legal (of both sides) and court costs would level the playing field and elminate much of what is essentially legal extortion.
You'd also need some safeguard against deliberatly ramping up costs. Maybe something like the costs for legal expenses would be either the actual cost or that of using an "average priced" lawyer. Anything done by a lawyer which did not absolutly need to be done by a lawyer would be simply ignored
The purpose of intellectual property laws in the US is simple. An inventor/creator is given for a limited period of time a monopoly over his/her creation. The time limits are meant to be long enough for the person to recoup costs of creation and make a profit off of it thereby encouraging people to create.
It's more to give the creator first refusal on any (there may be none or insufficient to cover any costs) money resulting from their work, as an incentive to continue producting.
The authors life + X years system also encourages an intellectual nobility in that the children and possibly grandchildren will continue to benefit from the invention of a parent thereby having no incentive to create. The most you could justify is something along the lines of authors life or 30 years, whichever is longer. That way you avoid a situation in which the primary wage earner dies unexpectedly and thereby leaves his/her family out in the cold.
Why should copyright be a state sponsored pension/life insurance scheme?
Amend the Constitution to say that Congress shall not pass any law containing an amendment. This is how the majority of our pork and shady dealings come about, and it's time for it to stop. There's no reason to attach an amendment giving $500,000 to Topeka for studying the mating habits of the purple-nosed shrew to a law covering federal highway funds. This kind of thing happens all the time, and it's often how bad copyright and patent laws get through - 11th hour additions to bills that have absolutely no relation.
Actually this describes a "rider" rather than an "ammendment". An ammendment in the context of the example would be something like speed limits (for these roads exculsivly). Of course someone could always argue that the mating habits of the purple-nosed shrew matter in the context of what happens if you build a road over their habitat.
You can be damned sure competitors would love to participate in voting. Voting against all patents supplied by their competitors.
Why should information on who submitted the patent appear on the published version? Unless these entities had very good records of their own outstanding patent applications they might even wind up with "friendly fire".
I disagree. And I think a seasoned examiner (if you can find one, that is) would too. If we had a pre-grant publication for comment, people who do not want a patent to issue for specious reasons will abuse the system to bog down the application.
Can this be worst than a system bogged down with patent applications for questionable reasons? No doubt there are plenty of specious reasons for people wanting a patent issued.
The default most certainly should be no patent issued...
The concept of publication of applications for public comment before issuance is great. In reality, however, it is not practicable. The Patent Office is exteemely backlogged. In certain fields (e.g., software, TV, telecommunications), applications do not get an innitial examination until 4 years after they are filed. From that point forward, if everything goes well, an application will probably take about 1 year to issue. Becuase of the backlog, examiners only get to spend between 8-16 hours per application, soup-to-nuts. If you require them to review comments from thousands of people after an application is published. the time needed for a patent to issue is likely to double.
Is this actually a problem? If there are lots of submissions on a certain application then maybe it should be rejected. The purpose of a patent office isn't simply to rubber stamp applications...
There is also the problem that currently a patent could pass as being "innovative" simply because the examiner dosn't understand it. Even that the whole thing is actually a piece of fiction, so nothing gets found in a prior art search, but anyone "skilled in the art" wouldn't even bother to look.
Front Page news year 2003, "New IP laws arrive, world celebrates".
Front Page news year 2004 "Pandemic of economically motivated assassinations involving inventors"
Front Page news year 2005: "First programme on new TV network, corporate execution of all RIAA and MPAA members."
Headline News: Bootlegger Murders Artist To Gain Publishing Rights
In that case just ensure that they cannot publish from their jail cell.
And how about electronic books. They never go out of print.
It can quite easily. If it's on a physical media and that is no longer produced then it is "out of print". If it's available for download and then ceases to be then it is "out of print".
No, what is needed are manadory license fees, so that you first get 20 years of copyrigth. But then you need to prolong it every 5 years and have to pay a small fee. This continues until until the maximum time 70 years have expored.
Altertativly you have a fee which rises expontially for each renewel. No need for a sex maximum here too, simply how much the work is actually worth, this may enable the likes of blockbuster movies to stay in copyright 10-20 years longer...
That way many items will fall into public domain after 20 years.
For some kind of works a 5-10 year initial term might well make more sense.
Again, I would like to see copyright tied to publication. As long as a book, record, etc. remains in print, it should be copywritten for 20 years. If it goes out of print, its copyright should expire within 5 years.
Probably with the criteria that if it goes out of print then the clock is reset to 5 years. Which if more than 5 years has elapsed since publication immediatly places it in the public domain.
I'm dead set against screwing over an author, (of books, etc) however. These guys aren't so creative when they get older, and really need to be able to generate the income.
Why should authors be any kind of special case? What stops them paying into a pension fund, like everyone else? Rather than trying to fiddle copyright to act as a pension.
It's rather ageist to assume that an 80 year old is less capable of being creative than a 20 year old too...
A book, a music score, a song -- these are all things that will have value after their protection is gone.
At least in theory it would. It isn't unknown for recently published books to go out of print soon after publication. With copyright the length it is right now it's quite possible for the last copy of a book to have ceased to exist decades before copyright expires.
By the time the copyright expires on software, it is, quite literally _worthless_.
There are two types of "worthless" first would be of no value what so ever, second type would be something which is worthless whilst still copyright, but of some possible value in the public domain.
Creative works are typically built up on previous works.
In the first place, it was created to protect individuals against corporations.
Not even remotly right. Copyright went through several iterations before it was even intended to acknowlage authors. The idea of corporations having the staus of "legal people" came even later...
In theory most modern copyright laws empower the author. In practice the vast majority of copyrights are held by publishers. The simplist kind of fix would be to only allow copyrights to be licenced rather than assigned.
Anyone who is even remotely interested in thinking about how much bandwidth in Australia "should" cost really needs to understand that there is no such thing as a T-1 in Australia.
Doubt you'd find many T1's anywhere outside of North America. Sicne most of the world's telecoms is more likely to use 2M than 1.5M primary rate.
What you are really doing is taking a US-centric view of the Internet, and applying it to other parts of the world -- And anyone who lives outside US territory will be able to tell you that that's just nonsense.
Not only do the technical details of telephone switching systems differ. ISPs in the US tend not to have to pay for international connectivity.
A weapon system that locks up because it doesn't have the right authentication key. How cool would that be!
Maybe someone should design a system, based on Windows, which holds some bombs on a plane and then flys it over Microsoft's HQ/capital...
"Computers, including many running Windows operating systems, are used throughout the United States Department of Defense and by the armed forces of the United States in Afghanistan and elsewhere."
This tells the "bad guys" where to concentrate their efforts to introduce an exploit.
"The protocol, which is part of Message Queuing, contains a coding mistake that would threaten the security of enterprise systems using it if it were disclosed, Allchin said."
Assuming the black hats don't know about it anyway. Even if they don't they now have a good clue as to where to look. Unless "Message Queuing" is misinformation.
Most "malicious hackers" don't browse through source code, they just use exploits discovered by others.
Those are the so called "script kiddies". Those who find the original exploits are far likely to look at the binary. Especially with something like Windows where you have a binary monoculture. So once you discover an explot which works you can be quite sure it will work everywhere.
Explots are against object code, not source code, a change it compiler options could easily mean that either an explit won't work or it will simply crash the target rather than circumventing security.
I would suspect that if M$ source code was opened up there would be a deluge of exploits within the first few months and then slowly taper off as the "easy holes" are plugged. This is true of nearly all open source software after its initial release.
It could well take longer. Since there is a difference between code which was designed from the start to be open source and quite likely very well patched code which no-one ever expected to see the light of day.
So the obvious question arises, is Linux/BSD (and any other software that has source available) more exposed to "serious" attacks. By "serious" I mean being launched by somebody who knew enough to be able to look at the source and find security flaws, vs a script kiddie who takes a virus toolkit and modifies the virus name and subject line. Theoretcially, it should be more vunerable than a picece of closed source software that was written with a similar level of "quality".
It is perfectly possible for someone to attack the binary. They don't need the source to do that. Also every single Windows machine is likely to be running the exact same binary.
Microsoft never made the statement that "this product is bug free, and has no security concerns whatsoever".
They more often claim that they don't guarentee that it will do anything.
The statement is, and always has been "we fix what we know about, if it wont break too much other stuff".
"If we happen to agree that it is broken..."
Incidentally, within some egregious time window (10 years ?) they fix it for free.
For military applications 10 years is just getting started. For applications related to government then 10 years just dosn't cut it.
Thats the tradeoff the government willfully made when it wanted to use an off the shelf operating system, instead of doing it in house or submitting bids for a custom contract. (software that requires an ongoing support contract for security issues or _any_ issue at all)
If they do it with a software company in their own country then the chances of getting a decent product at the end are remote. Software companies just don't operate in the long term. Dealing with a foriegn software company is effectivly high treason.
What you're asking for would be something like an A1 system under the old pre-Common Criteria scheme... i.e. a provably correct system.
WHich you have even less chance of getting with a COTS approach.
The formula doesn't take into account the cost of bad publicity however. That's why that formula isn't really used by car manufacturers.
More that a judge found out what they were doing and imposed a fine of serveral times what it would have cost them to fix it.
have you thought this through? What about interoperability? Modularity? If you worked like this, pretty much all NON software companys would end up doing everything in house, which is of course, not what they are in the business of doing.
Most companies are not in the building business, nor are they in the pumbing business, nor telecoms, nor electricians, etc. All these cases involve assembling components which are highly modular and interoperable. Why should software be treated differently from any other infrastructure? A
There is a reason microsoft exists.
Problem is that Microsoft produces a "one size fits all" type entity. Then expects you to both bend your business to fit the way their software works and to upgrade to their time schedule.
The problem here is that M$ is proprietary, and won't release their code. Therefore, government agencies cannot verify such claims of bad code.
Not being able to see the code makes it difficult to see if the code is good. You can see if the code is bad through it's behaviour....
Also, one must agree not to disclose bugs in M$ software or face prosecution.
Governments generally cannot be prosecuted. The only action Microsoft could take would be to become a terrorist organisation.