I'm no physics expert, but won't there always be tidal forces that you could use to differentiate those cases - even ignoring the various observations you could make to see acceleration due to gravity?
You're completely missing / ignoring the first mover advantage thing.
In a world with no patents, if I invent something non-trivial and contract a major manufacturer to produce it (exclusively, under NDA) - the various scenarios where some big company comes in "steals my idea, and outproduces me" are insignificant. If they want to compete, they'll have to spend the same amount of time tooling up as I did - likely months for a non-trivial product. That gives me months of market exclusivity - that should be enough to establish myself. Even once their production comes online, there's no reason they should be able to outproduce the top manufacturer I contracted - if they can, I can expand production under my (established) brand in response.
Yes, there's a window for industrial espionage in this story. There's the same window in patent applications, and if you screw up that one they get the patent for your invention and you're fucked. I'd rather lose a month of lead time because someone violated an NDA than the right to produce my own invention for 20 years.
And this does nothing to stop me from taking your device, going to my own factory and replicating it at a rate you cannot compete with then underselling you out of business there.
What makes you think that your factory is better at producing the product than the manufacturer I hired? If I hired "Lou's Machining and Flower Shop" and they can't produce fast enough or at a decent price, it damn well is my fault that I lost out. If I can't produce fast enough to meet market demand then other suppliers will enter the market to take up the slack - patents stop that, and that's not a good thing for buyers.
I'm betting that if it is good enough to attrack banks and other large investors, It is good enough to get large companies to act on.
Right. Which leaves you with first mover advantage and the budget nessisary to take advantage of it. If investors don't see the merit, competitors probably won't either. If competitors do, investors probably will too.
A great invention along with hard work should be as profitable as winning the lottery.
This is just as foolish as the belief that "if my bad makes good music we'll become millionaires by selling CDs". It happens to just enough people that you can point out an example of it, but it's not common enough that it's worth warping the economy to preserve. With patents it's especially bad - the sort of patent that people actually make a bunch of money from are things like the pet rock. I'll trade the opportunity to make millions by inventing something stupid for the ability to build stuff without worrying about the patent minefield any day.
You know, Because the small guy has disappeared and it is up to the mega corps still in business to implement these improvements.
Based on hardware and manufacturing costs, I could be selling a music player that competed with the iPod today. I'm a moderately-poor college student, but I could order the components I'd need from a company like Freescale Semiconductor - maybe get laptop hard drives from Newegg. This isn't a hard engineering problem - I could produce something really nice at a compeditive price. If it were legal for me to sell it, I could probably get a nice little business going. But - I don't dare risk it because of patents. Decoding MP3s is illegal. Who knows what music player patents Apple / Creative / SanDisk / Microsoft might have. Rather than giving the little guy power, patents just keep him out of the market entirely.
Agreeing on a standard doctype specification (at the very least) resolves many of these sorts of issues.
Well... except for the fact that it makes storing flat text files impossible. And it requires programmers to handle character sets everywhere (which history shows doesn't happen). After having to deal with a bunch of these character set issues, I have to say that assuming a UTF8 default is a lot more likely to actually work than trying to get character set specified everywhere.
There's an argument for UTF16 - it reduces the storage size of Chinese, Japanese, Korean, etc text by a third. A character set like Shift_JIS just isn't a very good deal - foreign letters do occur, and it's useful to be able to represent them in text.
No business venture is a sure thing. Just because you start a business doesn't mean you have some innate right to get a shit load of money regardless of any bad business choices you might make.
The important thing to remember is that in a world with no patents, contract law still exists - including non-disclosure agreements. In this hypothetical world with no patents, when you invent some new gadget you go to one or more manufacturers to get them to produce your product. You make them sign a non-disclosure agreement for the discussion, and you make damn sure that they sign an exclusivity agreement saying that they're only going to produce the product for you. If you've chosen your manufacturer correctly and manage to keep lid on your plans, you then have an enormous first mover advantage because anyone else needs to catch up with you on manufacturing.
It's an unfortunate fact that a capitalist system does favor people with more resources. If your invention is really the best thing since sliced bread, you'll have to compete with the top players. On the other hand, if your invention is really that good, you can probably get a good chunk of investment from banks so you can exploit your first mover advantage. More relevantly, most inventions aren't obviously the coolest thing ever and sluggish large companies won't recognize the significance of your new product until you've established a market presence.
No patent protection has a few major effects:
It gets rid of the "A great invention is like winning the lottery" myth.
It increases supply of new technology to the market by not letting people exclude competitors from production.
It increases the rate of innovation by allowing incremental improvements faster. With patents, each minor innovation has to wait 20 years before it can be produced.
It prevents the large players from excluding all new entrants to the market with patent cross licensing.
I fill your order, keep one for myself and then decide to make and sell them on my own behalve.
If a manufacturer actually did this, they'd get a horrible reputation for being untrustworthy. If this practice were socially acceptable, it would be prevented by production contracts.
As for the case where someone else supplies the product independently, that's just the natural economic situation where demand increases to meet supply. And no, an inventor isn't "naturally entitled" to a government granted monopoly.
For someone who's planning to install Linux, "fuck off and die" is much more accurate. There are manufacturers who actually support that, but Microsoft is working very hard to prevent it.
If you want to play XBox360 games then getting an XBox360 is a perfectly reasonable plan - at least if you're willing to accept a DRM encumbered mess that is explicitly designed to restrict its owner.
But... if you want a Linux box, you'd be much better off giving your money to one of the many manufacturers that hasn't told you to fuck off and die.
Government granted monopolies are questionable in general - they warp the free market. It's possible that patents are a good economic tweak and it's worth making an exception for them, but I'm unaware of any economic analysis that shows that to be the case.
It's also possible that patents are strictly a bad plan, as is argued here. I'm not 100% sure that he's right, but his argument is no less convincing than any argument I've heard in support of patents. At this point, I'm 100% convinced that patents definitely need to be examined as an economic proposition rather than simply accepted based on the "common wisdom" that they're a good idea.
You're playing word lawyer here. Making some work available by lending the work is not the same as making it available by giving out copies.
Someone's playing lawyer here, and it's not me. When a computer is involved, "making available" inherently results in copies being made. It makes a hell of a lot more sense for the law to be changed to reflect reality than to try to warp reality to reflect an outdated law.
Breaking it as a form of protest isn't valid, IHMO and in the opinion of many others.
That's absurd. If people were historically unwilling to protest unjust laws by breaking them, the world would be a pretty ugly place.
As far as libraries? So what? I buy my own books.
Die in a fire.
That's not a troll, that's the legitimate and appropriate response to your statement.
Presumably patents have worked in the past otherwise they wouldn't be so universally accepted so you'd have to show why they have apparently stopped working.
You seem to misunderstand how laws get made. There are people who make a shit-ton of money off of patents and could care less what effect they have on research & development.
Guessing that patents work because they exist is foolish. There are good arguments that patents are a bad idea - at this point it's time for an economic analysis rather than arbitrary assumptions.
You simply store all of your text as UTF8, and assume that all text you get from anyone else is UTF8 unless someone tells you otherwise. It's not like people are going to be using EBCDIC. UTF8 is reasonably standard at this point - if you see a text file, it's a safe assumption that it's UTF8.
PC's have traditionally been hot, noisy battleships. So there is some value to a machine that was built with the living room in mind.
You're seriously paranoid. Low-noise, small form factor PCs are a well established market. Some of them are explicitly designed for the "living room" role. In fact, some of them are quieter and less "obnoxious" than an XBox 360. Sure, it'll take an hour or so of reading review sites to find the best products, but that's way easier than trying to crack the DRM and install Linux some random game console.
You've got the price of an XBox360 to work with here. The case doesn't have to be $30. Similarly, it doesn't have to have a top brand kilowatt power supply either - MicroATX cases generally come with decent 200 Watt supplies - that's all you need if you're not going to be using a high end video card and 18 hard drives.
"Ugly" is a personal preference thing, but I don't think these are bad:
They all get discontinued as soon as they would be dirtcheap.
That's true, but that price is way lower than an XBox 360.
I explicitly mentioned the Via-C7, which is great for very low power applications. A C7 based system is cheaper than an XBox 360, but it's reasonably expensive compared to a low end Intel or AMD system that consumes more power.
Go to NewEgg, build a MicroATX system based on this: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82 E16819104245. Use cheap components - don't get tricked by stuff like "DDR 400 RAM only costs $3 more than DDR 333", your goal is cheap not "bang for buck".
There are a ton of choices for small form factor PC cases. Shop around a bit, and find one that isn't ugly.
So, you end up wasting money on parts that are bigger or more powerful than you may need.
Or you realize that your requirements are price and power consumption and *don't* buy more expensive components that probably consume more power.
There are *a lot* of options available for this stuff. If you want to consume less power and do fast encryption, maybe a MicroITX system with a Via-C7 processor. If you want to crunch more numbers, a cheap Athlon X2 on a MicroATX board.
Sure, hacking the DRM on a video game system and installing Linux on it is a neat project - but you're definitely not saving money compared to a similar PC.
I'm not sure if a 3-core striped down PPC system with 512 megs of RAM is really that interesting. Sure, it's got one more core than any desktop PC you can get in that price range, but those cores are pretty limited. From what I hear, they don't even do out of order execution - I'd guess they're slower than even a 1.66 ghz Core 2 Duo core.
PCs are pretty cheap. The XBox360's primary claim to fame is the graphics processor. I highly doubt the XBox is a better deal than a cheap PC for any sort of non-game application.
You might think you own it, but SUPRISE, you are licensing it. You probably could have found the completely abiguous statement on that little postcard you threw away.
It's possible that our world is warped enough that that shit works for software. Having a license agreement to use a copyrighted work that you've bought a copy of at a store is absurd, but there's the outside chance that the courts have bought that bullshit and have set precedents making it legal.
There's no way it works that way for hardware. What's next? Shovels with licenses that limit them to being used only to shovel snow in March?
write it anonymously and just release it into the wild.
I absolutely agree that if our society had really degraded to the point that it was no longer safe to share information it would be possible for things like this to be posted with complete anonymity. If the world had truly become a horrible dystopian nightmare, that might even be absolutely necessary.
I like to think that we're not there yet, and that it's still safe for people to share what they know with full credit for the work they have done to obtain that knowledge. If the world has really progressed to the point where sharing simple knowledge is no longer safe, then we have a worse problem than simply being locked out of the content of some video disks.
OK, once we hack through your technobabble logic the bottom line is still that libraries lend materials and don't hand out copies.
Which means that sharing copyrighted information is legal, at least in the case of lending physical books. It also means that - as discussed in this thread - "Making Available" copyrighted material is legit. Now, it turns out that "making available" with a computer involves implicit copies. Trying to figure out what step of sharing copies is illegal is quite interesting, because it's not entirely clear.
What if they can only hand out one "copy" at a time? or that it's limited use? Not much unlike the Zune example I gave.
Warping and crippling the functionality of computer systems work in order to duplicate the commercial properties of books is absurd.
If you feel good enough about listening to/watching/reading something someone produced then payment should be made if that's the artists desire.
Just because I've enjoyed a copyrighted work does not mean that I owe someone money. This fact is generally accepted and not the least bit legally questionable - in the case of borrowing the copyrighted work from a library. I'm definitely against making book-lending libraries illegal.
Once convinced Jefferson sat down with an actuary table and calculated a patent term of 14 year with one 14 year extension possible was the optimum length they should last.
I'm pretty sure you're confusing patents and copyright. They're different.
Patents are a government granted monopoly right. There are a lot of ways to describe that, but I wouldn't use "capitalism". In a purely capitalist system, everyone would be free to compete - not constrained from competing by the government.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm no physics expert, but won't there always be tidal forces that you could use to differentiate those cases - even ignoring the various observations you could make to see acceleration due to gravity?
You're completely missing / ignoring the first mover advantage thing.
In a world with no patents, if I invent something non-trivial and contract a major manufacturer to produce it (exclusively, under NDA) - the various scenarios where some big company comes in "steals my idea, and outproduces me" are insignificant. If they want to compete, they'll have to spend the same amount of time tooling up as I did - likely months for a non-trivial product. That gives me months of market exclusivity - that should be enough to establish myself. Even once their production comes online, there's no reason they should be able to outproduce the top manufacturer I contracted - if they can, I can expand production under my (established) brand in response.
Yes, there's a window for industrial espionage in this story. There's the same window in patent applications, and if you screw up that one they get the patent for your invention and you're fucked. I'd rather lose a month of lead time because someone violated an NDA than the right to produce my own invention for 20 years.
What makes you think that your factory is better at producing the product than the manufacturer I hired? If I hired "Lou's Machining and Flower Shop" and they can't produce fast enough or at a decent price, it damn well is my fault that I lost out. If I can't produce fast enough to meet market demand then other suppliers will enter the market to take up the slack - patents stop that, and that's not a good thing for buyers.
Right. Which leaves you with first mover advantage and the budget nessisary to take advantage of it. If investors don't see the merit, competitors probably won't either. If competitors do, investors probably will too.
This is just as foolish as the belief that "if my bad makes good music we'll become millionaires by selling CDs". It happens to just enough people that you can point out an example of it, but it's not common enough that it's worth warping the economy to preserve. With patents it's especially bad - the sort of patent that people actually make a bunch of money from are things like the pet rock. I'll trade the opportunity to make millions by inventing something stupid for the ability to build stuff without worrying about the patent minefield any day.
Based on hardware and manufacturing costs, I could be selling a music player that competed with the iPod today. I'm a moderately-poor college student, but I could order the components I'd need from a company like Freescale Semiconductor - maybe get laptop hard drives from Newegg. This isn't a hard engineering problem - I could produce something really nice at a compeditive price. If it were legal for me to sell it, I could probably get a nice little business going. But - I don't dare risk it because of patents. Decoding MP3s is illegal. Who knows what music player patents Apple / Creative / SanDisk / Microsoft might have. Rather than giving the little guy power, patents just keep him out of the market entirely.
Well... except for the fact that it makes storing flat text files impossible. And it requires programmers to handle character sets everywhere (which history shows doesn't happen). After having to deal with a bunch of these character set issues, I have to say that assuming a UTF8 default is a lot more likely to actually work than trying to get character set specified everywhere.
There's an argument for UTF16 - it reduces the storage size of Chinese, Japanese, Korean, etc text by a third. A character set like Shift_JIS just isn't a very good deal - foreign letters do occur, and it's useful to be able to represent them in text.
No business venture is a sure thing. Just because you start a business doesn't mean you have some innate right to get a shit load of money regardless of any bad business choices you might make.
The important thing to remember is that in a world with no patents, contract law still exists - including non-disclosure agreements. In this hypothetical world with no patents, when you invent some new gadget you go to one or more manufacturers to get them to produce your product. You make them sign a non-disclosure agreement for the discussion, and you make damn sure that they sign an exclusivity agreement saying that they're only going to produce the product for you. If you've chosen your manufacturer correctly and manage to keep lid on your plans, you then have an enormous first mover advantage because anyone else needs to catch up with you on manufacturing.
It's an unfortunate fact that a capitalist system does favor people with more resources. If your invention is really the best thing since sliced bread, you'll have to compete with the top players. On the other hand, if your invention is really that good, you can probably get a good chunk of investment from banks so you can exploit your first mover advantage. More relevantly, most inventions aren't obviously the coolest thing ever and sluggish large companies won't recognize the significance of your new product until you've established a market presence.
No patent protection has a few major effects:
No, that's not theft - that's fraud.
If a manufacturer actually did this, they'd get a horrible reputation for being untrustworthy. If this practice were socially acceptable, it would be prevented by production contracts.
As for the case where someone else supplies the product independently, that's just the natural economic situation where demand increases to meet supply. And no, an inventor isn't "naturally entitled" to a government granted monopoly.
For someone who's planning to install Linux, "fuck off and die" is much more accurate. There are manufacturers who actually support that, but Microsoft is working very hard to prevent it.
If you want to play XBox360 games then getting an XBox360 is a perfectly reasonable plan - at least if you're willing to accept a DRM encumbered mess that is explicitly designed to restrict its owner.
But... if you want a Linux box, you'd be much better off giving your money to one of the many manufacturers that hasn't told you to fuck off and die.
Government granted monopolies are questionable in general - they warp the free market. It's possible that patents are a good economic tweak and it's worth making an exception for them, but I'm unaware of any economic analysis that shows that to be the case.
It's also possible that patents are strictly a bad plan, as is argued here. I'm not 100% sure that he's right, but his argument is no less convincing than any argument I've heard in support of patents. At this point, I'm 100% convinced that patents definitely need to be examined as an economic proposition rather than simply accepted based on the "common wisdom" that they're a good idea.
Someone's playing lawyer here, and it's not me. When a computer is involved, "making available" inherently results in copies being made. It makes a hell of a lot more sense for the law to be changed to reflect reality than to try to warp reality to reflect an outdated law.
That's absurd. If people were historically unwilling to protest unjust laws by breaking them, the world would be a pretty ugly place.
Die in a fire.
That's not a troll, that's the legitimate and appropriate response to your statement.
You seem to misunderstand how laws get made. There are people who make a shit-ton of money off of patents and could care less what effect they have on research & development.
Guessing that patents work because they exist is foolish. There are good arguments that patents are a bad idea - at this point it's time for an economic analysis rather than arbitrary assumptions.
No. You don't do any of that crap.
You simply store all of your text as UTF8, and assume that all text you get from anyone else is UTF8 unless someone tells you otherwise. It's not like people are going to be using EBCDIC. UTF8 is reasonably standard at this point - if you see a text file, it's a safe assumption that it's UTF8.
You're seriously paranoid. Low-noise, small form factor PCs are a well established market. Some of them are explicitly designed for the "living room" role. In fact, some of them are quieter and less "obnoxious" than an XBox 360. Sure, it'll take an hour or so of reading review sites to find the best products, but that's way easier than trying to crack the DRM and install Linux some random game console.
Or you could just define text as "utf8 text" and you'll largely be fine.
You've got the price of an XBox360 to work with here. The case doesn't have to be $30. Similarly, it doesn't have to have a top brand kilowatt power supply either - MicroATX cases generally come with decent 200 Watt supplies - that's all you need if you're not going to be using a high end video card and 18 hard drives.
"Ugly" is a personal preference thing, but I don't think these are bad:
That's true, but that price is way lower than an XBox 360.
I explicitly mentioned the Via-C7, which is great for very low power applications. A C7 based system is cheaper than an XBox 360, but it's reasonably expensive compared to a low end Intel or AMD system that consumes more power.
Go to NewEgg, build a MicroATX system based on this: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82 E16819104245. Use cheap components - don't get tricked by stuff like "DDR 400 RAM only costs $3 more than DDR 333", your goal is cheap not "bang for buck".
There are a ton of choices for small form factor PC cases. Shop around a bit, and find one that isn't ugly.
Or you realize that your requirements are price and power consumption and *don't* buy more expensive components that probably consume more power.
There are *a lot* of options available for this stuff. If you want to consume less power and do fast encryption, maybe a MicroITX system with a Via-C7 processor. If you want to crunch more numbers, a cheap Athlon X2 on a MicroATX board.
Sure, hacking the DRM on a video game system and installing Linux on it is a neat project - but you're definitely not saving money compared to a similar PC.
What? So you can join http://adultsheepfinder.com/?
I'm not sure if a 3-core striped down PPC system with 512 megs of RAM is really that interesting. Sure, it's got one more core than any desktop PC you can get in that price range, but those cores are pretty limited. From what I hear, they don't even do out of order execution - I'd guess they're slower than even a 1.66 ghz Core 2 Duo core.
PCs are pretty cheap. The XBox360's primary claim to fame is the graphics processor. I highly doubt the XBox is a better deal than a cheap PC for any sort of non-game application.
It's possible that our world is warped enough that that shit works for software. Having a license agreement to use a copyrighted work that you've bought a copy of at a store is absurd, but there's the outside chance that the courts have bought that bullshit and have set precedents making it legal.
There's no way it works that way for hardware. What's next? Shovels with licenses that limit them to being used only to shovel snow in March?
I absolutely agree that if our society had really degraded to the point that it was no longer safe to share information it would be possible for things like this to be posted with complete anonymity. If the world had truly become a horrible dystopian nightmare, that might even be absolutely necessary.
I like to think that we're not there yet, and that it's still safe for people to share what they know with full credit for the work they have done to obtain that knowledge. If the world has really progressed to the point where sharing simple knowledge is no longer safe, then we have a worse problem than simply being locked out of the content of some video disks.
Which means that sharing copyrighted information is legal, at least in the case of lending physical books. It also means that - as discussed in this thread - "Making Available" copyrighted material is legit. Now, it turns out that "making available" with a computer involves implicit copies. Trying to figure out what step of sharing copies is illegal is quite interesting, because it's not entirely clear.
Warping and crippling the functionality of computer systems work in order to duplicate the commercial properties of books is absurd.
Just because I've enjoyed a copyrighted work does not mean that I owe someone money. This fact is generally accepted and not the least bit legally questionable - in the case of borrowing the copyrighted work from a library. I'm definitely against making book-lending libraries illegal.
I'm pretty sure you're confusing patents and copyright. They're different.
Patents are a government granted monopoly right. There are a lot of ways to describe that, but I wouldn't use "capitalism". In a purely capitalist system, everyone would be free to compete - not constrained from competing by the government.