This arguably isn't generally the case. In most countries of western/northern Europe, for example, and with a few exceptions such as Italy, there are statutory bans on political advertising, and political parties are typically granted limited, free airtime. As a result, the ability of money to corrupt the democratic process is severely curtailed.
A few campaign finance laws are hardly even relevant when it comes to the political influence that money can buy. It doesn't even have to be overt influence; here in the USA, all of the news media is owned by a few large companies built on FCC granted monopolies. They may not endorse specific political candidates, but they sure do define what a "mainstream candidate" is and they simply provide no favorable coverage for anyone who supports policies that hurt them financially.
Another trick that's used in the USA, that really falls in the "outright corruption" category is the way that pro-corporate government bureaucrats tend to leave for cushy corporate executive jobs shortly thereafter. When there are only three companies in an industry that a bureaucrat regulates, it's hard to say they can't work for any of them - that's the field they're experienced in, after all - but the possibility produces a massive conflict of interest.
You are so focused on the big corps, that you've lost sight of the small inventors, writers, entrepreneurs who use the patent system to make sure that they are not trampled by the big guys. Without IP law, what would prevent the big guys from stealing your work and profiting of it as your own? I have a problem with that.
Again, the simple fact that an inventor likes the power that a patent gives them is irrelevant to the public policy decision. In order to convince me that patents were a good idea, you'd need to show that the beneficial effects of patents measurably outweighed the detrimental effects. As far as I can tell, the measurable benefits are mostly a scenario that doesn't work (small inventor uses patents to bully large corporation - in reality, the large corporation makes patent counterclaims).
As for your anecdotes about inventor friends, I'll have to counter with my own anecdote: I am personally an inventor, with an active patent application as we speak. That fact might help me make some small amount of money, but I'd still much rather be inventing in a world where I don't have to worry about other people's patents on every little thing rather than a world where I get a patent.
This presupposes a political system based on wealth rather than on democracy.
I'm entirely willing to presuppose that money can (and does) influence democratic political systems.
In any case, a free market does not necessarily imply competition. Some markets are natural monopolies, for example.
A free market *absolutely* implies free market entry. A "natural monopoly" refers to the case where a potential competitor won't enter the market because it'd be a bad deal economically, not the case when they don't enter the market because the government forbids it.
I think you're confusing the text about "your" patents and the text about "other people's patents that you have a patent license for".
For "your" patents, read the last sentence of section 10 again. It's not talking about copyright holders. When you convey GPLed software, you give up the right to sue the downstream recipients for *any* patent infringement related to the use, modification, or redistribution of the software. It almost looks like you could argue that that includes suits related to *new functionality* added by third parties, but I'm not sure about that.
There is also text that prevents people from redistributing GPLv3 software if they have a patent license from a third party that they can't pass on, but that's a different issue.
You know what's sad? It's not a contest, he's not challenging you, he's telling you as a user what he needs.
In that case, what he's saying he needs is Photoshop - which he already has. This isn't even the normal "can't switch to Linux because GIMP isn't Photoshop" discussion - the original poster has even said he's happy using Windows.
The GIMP has made different design decisions than Photoshop, and the fact that Photoshop users like Photoshop better isn't even interesting anymore.
Without Trademarks, there would be nothing stopping me from opening up the Disney Pornography store.
That's nice. I haven't heard anyone argue against Trademarks in a while. In fact, it seems that trademarks are a good idea simply because impersonating someone else is fraudulent.
Now, the completely unrelated issue of patents is less obvious.
Patents (...) allow creators to make a living. If I invest time and money into an invention, I want to profit from it. I don't want someone else taking my ideas and ruining any chance I have of making money and getting a decent return on my investment.
That's nice. I want a pony. As far as I can tell, what I want is more reasonable than what you want - giving me a pony wouldn't drastically warp the economy in favor of large corporate monopolists.
The argument for patents is based on a social tradeoff, the story being something like this: "If we grant an inventor a short-term monopoly on their invention, that will encourage other inventors to invent useful things". The problem is that this policy has a number of unintended side effects, some of which have drastically larger economic impacts than the incentive to invent - negative economic impacts.
Most Americans are not willing to pay the full price for a phone. As long as the networks have people hooked on subsidized phones, the phones will be feature locked down.
Phones don't have to be locked down in order to be contract-subsidized. If a carrier can get someone to sign a two year contract with a $175 termination fee, they should have no problem putting $150 or so towards the cost of the phone. Hell, they should have no problem handing out a $150 cash signing bonus.
And from an economic view.. auctions are very efficient.
That's only true if you're dealing with goods in a free market - which isn't the case here. Instead, this is auctioning off government granted monopolies in a situation where corporations with existing government granted monopolies are allowed to bid.
Once government granted monopolies are involved, you're well away from "economically efficient" (or even "free market").
That could be true, but there's also a very good argument that - given the current population density and the inverse square law - the RF resources are enough for everyone to just use it without excessive interference.
A portion of the money gained from the auction of the previous UHF/VFH space will be used for vouchers for consumers to buy conversion devices for their TVs.
Wait a second... you think it's reasonable to auction off a monopoly on a valuable public resource to one group of companies, and then to justify it by committing to spending a chunk of the profits to subsidize another related group of companies.
How about this: Subsidies and government granted monopolies are terrible for both the free market and for overall social welfare. Let's do neither.
The "GNU" part of the program's name isn't there for no reason, it's there because the GIMP was developed to run on the GNU System. That means that the primary platform it's targeting today is GNU/Linux with the Gnome desktop.
What am I supposed to do, switch to Linux to make GIMP a little better? Yea, sure.
If your primary goal is to run GIMP on your computer, that's exactly what you should do. Unless you've found some purpose for an OS other than running the apps you use...
That's where your wrong. You are only screwed by monopolists if you buy their product. Judging from what you are asserting those products would be iPods, mobile phones(and services?), and I'm guessing Operating Systems?
No. You are screwed by monopolists because they *BREAK THE FREE MARKET*. As long as they continue to wield economically significant market power, they will acquire a ton of economic power that can then be translated into political power. At that point, you no longer have a free market *or* a free society - and that's a hell of a lot more important than what you pay for some gadget.
While I agree monopoly is bad, there is only one way to fight them as a private citizen with limited resources: DON'T BUY THEIR SHIT. Those products are luxury items, THAT YOU DO NOT NEED TO LIVE.
This is utterly irrelevant. The question isn't "are you starving because the monopoly exists" - you obviously aren't. But, nobody's starving in Singapore either - that doesn't mean that people there enjoy the level of freedom that they could enjoy in a society structured to allow it.
In short, this is actually going to help increase the prevalence of Linux on off-the-shelf PC's (and it already exists on a certain percentage of PC's off-the-shelf). In short, now everyone that wants a PC for a pirated copy of WIndows has to buy one with Linux on it first.
Manufacturers who install Linux just to meet pre-installation requirements generally provide systems that A.) are too poorly configured to be usable and B.) are not supported. This just makes Linux look bad. A lot of the machines pre-loaded with "Lindows" in the United States were like this for a while - the manufacturers sold machines with Linspire pre-installed, but networking didn't work and if you called tech support they'd ask what version of Windows you were running.
and on an off note, I really would like it to improve things cause my linux experience (wine * 3, azureus, md5summing/sorting/awking 500 meg files, multiple times in a row) tends to be exceedingly jerky, slow, and can be brought to its knees relatively easily.
Do you have enough RAM? That sounds more like thrashing than any kind of CPU scheduling issue.
You may not impose any further restrictions on the exercise of the rights granted or affirmed under this License. For example, you may not impose a license fee, royalty, or other charge for exercise of rights granted under this License, and you may not initiate litigation (including a cross-claim or counterclaim in a lawsuit) alleging that any patent claim is infringed by making, using, selling, offering for sale, or importing the Program or any portion of it.
This is pretty clear. It says that you can't sue anyone for patent infringement for using the software you redistribute. This clause doesn't restrict itself to any specific patents, it just prohibits patent suits that would effect the software you distribute (and derivative works) altogether.
The patent license text in section 11 is similar - it doesn't talk about licensing specific patents, it talks about giving a blanket patent license for the use of the software you have distributed. If you "convey" GPLv3 software, you can't later use patents to restrict that software, nor can you demand patent royalties for the use of that software.
Books are simply not a good analogy component here, because books are physical objects - neither book stores or book store customers do anything that requires a copyright license when a legally-published book is sold at retail. A GPL style copyright license couldn't apply to a book sale at all, because copyright wouldn't be violated in the absence of any license.
Software licensing is a radically different issue. Every time Novel distributes a copy of SuSE Linux, they need a copyright license for every software package on that CD. If GPLv3 is the only license available (which it will be for GPLv3 software), then that copying act is covered by GPLv3.
The GPL is a CONTRACT and contract law under the UCC is the same for both.
False. Most commercial software licenses try to be contracts, but the GPL is a simple copyright license. No one has to agree to the GPL, they are simply assumed to have accepted the license it offers rather than be liable for copyright infringement if they perform any action allowed by the GPL but normally prohibited by copyright law. This process isn't related to contract law at all.
He's the copyright holder, so he can distribute his binaries however he wants to. If you care about acting legally, it's your responsibility to track down the license before you use, copy, modify, or redistribute the program.
Further, they would have to have knowledge that what was conveyed was infringing.
Why? As I understand it, whenever you distribute software under the GPLv3 you pass with it the following "I grant all downstream recipients a patent license for any patents that I have now or may have in the future that the software I am distributing implements, applicable to this software and all derivative works".
Then why did they stop distributing the vouchers so quickly? They paid quite a bit of money to Novel to get them; it seems to me they would keep distributing them if they weren't afraid of GPLv3.
This is no different than saying that a grocery store may choose to give me a free box of cereal in exchange for a 35 cent coupon. That store's choice does not in any way compel Kellogg's to give me more free Froot Loops.
That sort of logic was my first thought, but copyright law has nothing to do with physical property law - and intuition about physical objects won't necessarily help you understand copyright (in fact, it rarely will). A number of actions infringe copyright if performed on a copyrighted work without a license: Copying, modification, and distribution are the obvious ones - but assisting someone else in performing a potentially infringing action can also be infringement (if it wasn't, bittorrent trackers with hollywood movies would be perfectly legal).
I'm not a lawyer, so I can't be sure, but the FSF lawyers seem convinced and Microsoft twitched damn fast to stop distributing the vouchers.
In shory, GPLv3 can say anything it wants, but it falls under copyright law, and if I don't copy, I can't infringe.
If that were true, then a bittorrent tracker like The Pirate Bay would be obviously legal here in the USA. Such a tracker isn't legal because of a concept called contributory infringement - if you enable someone to infringe copyright, then you are also infringing copyright (unless you have some sort of copyright license). This appears to be the basis for the "vouchers are conveying" claim.
And to this point, I'm wondering if MS cannot claim ownership of the program because of the aledged IP violations. I mean it the program wouldn't have worked or been effective without their claimed IP, then it would seem like it would be their work making the program. But I guess that is a question for another time.
And this is why the term "Intellectual Property" is much more confusing than it is helpful.
Looking at it this way is much more likely to produce an accurate understanding of the legality: People don't own software. They may hold a copyright on a piece of software, they may have a patent on a method implemented in a piece of software, they may even have a trademark on the name of the software. These are separate and unrelated government granted monopolies - under no circumstance does having one of them mean that you have a right to the others.
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A few campaign finance laws are hardly even relevant when it comes to the political influence that money can buy. It doesn't even have to be overt influence; here in the USA, all of the news media is owned by a few large companies built on FCC granted monopolies. They may not endorse specific political candidates, but they sure do define what a "mainstream candidate" is and they simply provide no favorable coverage for anyone who supports policies that hurt them financially.
Another trick that's used in the USA, that really falls in the "outright corruption" category is the way that pro-corporate government bureaucrats tend to leave for cushy corporate executive jobs shortly thereafter. When there are only three companies in an industry that a bureaucrat regulates, it's hard to say they can't work for any of them - that's the field they're experienced in, after all - but the possibility produces a massive conflict of interest.
Again, the simple fact that an inventor likes the power that a patent gives them is irrelevant to the public policy decision. In order to convince me that patents were a good idea, you'd need to show that the beneficial effects of patents measurably outweighed the detrimental effects. As far as I can tell, the measurable benefits are mostly a scenario that doesn't work (small inventor uses patents to bully large corporation - in reality, the large corporation makes patent counterclaims).
As for your anecdotes about inventor friends, I'll have to counter with my own anecdote: I am personally an inventor, with an active patent application as we speak. That fact might help me make some small amount of money, but I'd still much rather be inventing in a world where I don't have to worry about other people's patents on every little thing rather than a world where I get a patent.
Here's the strong version of the anti-patent argument: http://fare.tunes.org/articles/patents.html
I'm entirely willing to presuppose that money can (and does) influence democratic political systems.
A free market *absolutely* implies free market entry. A "natural monopoly" refers to the case where a potential competitor won't enter the market because it'd be a bad deal economically, not the case when they don't enter the market because the government forbids it.
I think you're confusing the text about "your" patents and the text about "other people's patents that you have a patent license for".
For "your" patents, read the last sentence of section 10 again. It's not talking about copyright holders. When you convey GPLed software, you give up the right to sue the downstream recipients for *any* patent infringement related to the use, modification, or redistribution of the software. It almost looks like you could argue that that includes suits related to *new functionality* added by third parties, but I'm not sure about that.
There is also text that prevents people from redistributing GPLv3 software if they have a patent license from a third party that they can't pass on, but that's a different issue.
It makes a good fable in any case, clearly communicating the intended moral of the story.
In that case, what he's saying he needs is Photoshop - which he already has. This isn't even the normal "can't switch to Linux because GIMP isn't Photoshop" discussion - the original poster has even said he's happy using Windows.
The GIMP has made different design decisions than Photoshop, and the fact that Photoshop users like Photoshop better isn't even interesting anymore.
That's nice. I haven't heard anyone argue against Trademarks in a while. In fact, it seems that trademarks are a good idea simply because impersonating someone else is fraudulent.
Now, the completely unrelated issue of patents is less obvious.
That's nice. I want a pony. As far as I can tell, what I want is more reasonable than what you want - giving me a pony wouldn't drastically warp the economy in favor of large corporate monopolists.
The argument for patents is based on a social tradeoff, the story being something like this: "If we grant an inventor a short-term monopoly on their invention, that will encourage other inventors to invent useful things". The problem is that this policy has a number of unintended side effects, some of which have drastically larger economic impacts than the incentive to invent - negative economic impacts.
Read these for the argument in some detail:o mmons
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_antic
http://members.forbes.com/asap/2002/0624/044.html
Phones don't have to be locked down in order to be contract-subsidized. If a carrier can get someone to sign a two year contract with a $175 termination fee, they should have no problem putting $150 or so towards the cost of the phone. Hell, they should have no problem handing out a $150 cash signing bonus.
That's only true if you're dealing with goods in a free market - which isn't the case here. Instead, this is auctioning off government granted monopolies in a situation where corporations with existing government granted monopolies are allowed to bid.
Once government granted monopolies are involved, you're well away from "economically efficient" (or even "free market").
That could be true, but there's also a very good argument that - given the current population density and the inverse square law - the RF resources are enough for everyone to just use it without excessive interference.
Wait a second... you think it's reasonable to auction off a monopoly on a valuable public resource to one group of companies, and then to justify it by committing to spending a chunk of the profits to subsidize another related group of companies.
How about this: Subsidies and government granted monopolies are terrible for both the free market and for overall social welfare. Let's do neither.
The "GNU" part of the program's name isn't there for no reason, it's there because the GIMP was developed to run on the GNU System. That means that the primary platform it's targeting today is GNU/Linux with the Gnome desktop.
If your primary goal is to run GIMP on your computer, that's exactly what you should do. Unless you've found some purpose for an OS other than running the apps you use...
No. You are screwed by monopolists because they *BREAK THE FREE MARKET*. As long as they continue to wield economically significant market power, they will acquire a ton of economic power that can then be translated into political power. At that point, you no longer have a free market *or* a free society - and that's a hell of a lot more important than what you pay for some gadget.
This is utterly irrelevant. The question isn't "are you starving because the monopoly exists" - you obviously aren't. But, nobody's starving in Singapore either - that doesn't mean that people there enjoy the level of freedom that they could enjoy in a society structured to allow it.
Manufacturers who install Linux just to meet pre-installation requirements generally provide systems that A.) are too poorly configured to be usable and B.) are not supported. This just makes Linux look bad. A lot of the machines pre-loaded with "Lindows" in the United States were like this for a while - the manufacturers sold machines with Linspire pre-installed, but networking didn't work and if you called tech support they'd ask what version of Windows you were running.
Do you have enough RAM? That sounds more like thrashing than any kind of CPU scheduling issue.
From the GPLv3, Section 10:
This is pretty clear. It says that you can't sue anyone for patent infringement for using the software you redistribute. This clause doesn't restrict itself to any specific patents, it just prohibits patent suits that would effect the software you distribute (and derivative works) altogether.
The patent license text in section 11 is similar - it doesn't talk about licensing specific patents, it talks about giving a blanket patent license for the use of the software you have distributed. If you "convey" GPLv3 software, you can't later use patents to restrict that software, nor can you demand patent royalties for the use of that software.
Books are simply not a good analogy component here, because books are physical objects - neither book stores or book store customers do anything that requires a copyright license when a legally-published book is sold at retail. A GPL style copyright license couldn't apply to a book sale at all, because copyright wouldn't be violated in the absence of any license.
Software licensing is a radically different issue. Every time Novel distributes a copy of SuSE Linux, they need a copyright license for every software package on that CD. If GPLv3 is the only license available (which it will be for GPLv3 software), then that copying act is covered by GPLv3.
False. Most commercial software licenses try to be contracts, but the GPL is a simple copyright license. No one has to agree to the GPL, they are simply assumed to have accepted the license it offers rather than be liable for copyright infringement if they perform any action allowed by the GPL but normally prohibited by copyright law. This process isn't related to contract law at all.
He's the copyright holder, so he can distribute his binaries however he wants to. If you care about acting legally, it's your responsibility to track down the license before you use, copy, modify, or redistribute the program.
That's true. It just annoys me when people try to extend "All DRM can be cracked" to "All ciphers can be cracked".
Why? As I understand it, whenever you distribute software under the GPLv3 you pass with it the following "I grant all downstream recipients a patent license for any patents that I have now or may have in the future that the software I am distributing implements, applicable to this software and all derivative works".
Then why did they stop distributing the vouchers so quickly? They paid quite a bit of money to Novel to get them; it seems to me they would keep distributing them if they weren't afraid of GPLv3.
That sort of logic was my first thought, but copyright law has nothing to do with physical property law - and intuition about physical objects won't necessarily help you understand copyright (in fact, it rarely will). A number of actions infringe copyright if performed on a copyrighted work without a license: Copying, modification, and distribution are the obvious ones - but assisting someone else in performing a potentially infringing action can also be infringement (if it wasn't, bittorrent trackers with hollywood movies would be perfectly legal).
I'm not a lawyer, so I can't be sure, but the FSF lawyers seem convinced and Microsoft twitched damn fast to stop distributing the vouchers.
If that were true, then a bittorrent tracker like The Pirate Bay would be obviously legal here in the USA. Such a tracker isn't legal because of a concept called contributory infringement - if you enable someone to infringe copyright, then you are also infringing copyright (unless you have some sort of copyright license). This appears to be the basis for the "vouchers are conveying" claim.
And this is why the term "Intellectual Property" is much more confusing than it is helpful.
Looking at it this way is much more likely to produce an accurate understanding of the legality: People don't own software. They may hold a copyright on a piece of software, they may have a patent on a method implemented in a piece of software, they may even have a trademark on the name of the software. These are separate and unrelated government granted monopolies - under no circumstance does having one of them mean that you have a right to the others.