RTFA, this apparently doesn't work so well when there are too many patent holders. What happens when there are 3 who each want 50%?
They are being unrealistically greedy, and negotiation will probably follow because it is almost certainly in their interests to accept a realistic level of royalties rather than making no money at all.
If there are three existing suppliers who would truly be undermined sufficiently in their own markets to make it unrealistic for them to accept lower royalties, then that's just too bad: patent protection does grant a temporary monopoly, and that was the deal when those other three suppliers all brought their products to market in the first place. You can't just assume that they would all have produced the same products and distributed them at the same prices in the absence of that protection, such that preventing the distribution of the new invention is a net loss.
Basically, as long as patents are awarded in the spirit they were originally intended, market forces will normally do the rest.
And it gets integrated into an existing product lineup at a price chosen to not impact sales of other parts of that lineup, rather than standing on its own and possibly disrupting the industry to the benefit of the general public.
If the new work has sufficient disruptive value, this will not happen, because the market's perception of the value of products incorporating the extra invention will be different to what it was before. If this quiet incorporation scenario is what happens, the pretty much implies that the new work did not have sufficient disruptive value to upset the market. I don't see any problem here.
Which holds everything back by a couple decades, making everyone worse off.
That isn't necessarily true. For one thing, you are assuming that not sharing the new invention was a loss, yet if the work had significant value to the market, it is unlikely that no-one would have been willing to make an offer for the rights. For another thing, this doesn't prevent the market from taking advantage of other inventions that are already being marketed under patent protections, which of course might not have been available to the market if those patent protections were not available as well. That is, after all, the motivation for offering patent protection in the first place.
Cute, but economically naive. Your mechanism imposes taxes in advance of anyone receiving any actual income, so everyone will just declare a value of $0 on all works initially. It imposes the risk for successfully selling a work on anyone willing to defend the rights to a work, potentially before they have time to establish what realistic price for that work would be acceptable to the market. It removes a lot of competition between publishers, since anyone buying rights would potentially wind up double-paying only to see the work in the public domain so everyone could distribute it anyway, while anyone paying to have the work released into the public domain is just giving up money that their competitors are not for no commercial advantage. Basically, your model is completely broken.
The current system already achieves all the benefits of your system anyway: businesses pay taxes on profits, and the more of a copyright work they sell, the more tax they pay. Moreover, if anyone thinks the source code for Windows should be in the public domain, they can make Microsoft an offer to buy the rights for it. If it's a credible offer relative to the potential profits Microsoft expects to make, I'm sure they will take it. Right now, the market values Microsoft at around $257 billion, so if you assume roughly half their profits come from Windows, an offer around the $200 billion mark might be attractive enough for investors to take it.
In which case, he will need to either compensate the patent holders for using the protected inventions he is building on, sell the rights to his idea to a larger group that can take advantage of it, or wait until the existing protections expire. If the new idea is worth a lot, the first is usually what happens. If it's worth a bit, the second is usually what happens. If it's not really worth much, the third is what happens. If the idea was worth enough that the inventor kept the patents himself and licensed work in from others, then he will also be in a position to be compensated or buy additional rights later when other people come up with ideas building further on this starting point. This is exactly how the system is supposed to work, and as long as patents are only awarded for genuinely original and valuable ideas, cross-licensing as part of the agreements is a natural consequence and results in both parties being able to bring better products to market. The problems only start when defensive vapour-patents get awarded, and that has nothing to do with cross-licensing as such.
I think that happened around the time they started giving patents out for things that weren't actually significantly inventions at all, and allowing write-ups of the claims that were so hopelessly generic that they did not (as originally intended) provide a means for others to reproduce a significant invention when the durationg of protection expired. The duration of protection is itself arguably too long in some fields as well, but that's not the biggest problem IMHO. Patents as originally conceived are a reasonable proposal for incentivising the sharing of new inventions, but the practice is now so far from the principle that the whole system is beyond hope. Let's hope the recent sparks of common sense in the US and Europe result in doing something about this.
I'd prefer not to stoop to their level, but you don't win against a bully by fighting fair.
On the contrary, usually that is exactly how you beat a bully. Most bullies win precisely because the people they are bullying consider themselves constrained in ways the bullies do not. Release those constraints to put the participants on an equal footing, and most bullies lose very quickly.
This applies almost universally, whether you're talking about the kid who gets beaten up at school because the teachers always tell him not to fight back, or the RIAA cases against song swappers where one side has to pay silly legal fees just to get their day in court while the other side pays no legal fees if it gets settled out of court.
However, you're right that the results of the "loss calculations" for works never produced because of copyright would be just as valid as the RIAA's, which is to say not at all.
I make singleplayer PC games. Can you explain to me how abandoning copyright makes me better off?
Well, obviously they'll be great marketing tools for all those millionaires who want to commission more single-player games.
No, wait, that's wrong. You're in the wrong market! Yeah, that's it. You should be making multiplayer games. You could provide a subscription to a server that hosts the games, and hope that no-one else will reverse engineer your code in ten minutes and then provide a different server more cheaply.
Oh, wait, people already do that sort of thing. I guess you'll just have to ship every game you sell only with a contract that states that the person receiving it won't copy and distribute it further, so that you can afford to sell it at a price many individual customers would be willing to pay and the sum of all the small payments would provide you a worthwhile profit. Yeah, that might work. If only I could think of a name for reserving the right to copy something... Nope, I got nothing, sorry.
Would you consider it reasonable to have to keep your curtains closed all the time, if some weird-looking person was standing around outside your home every night trying to look through your windows?
Or would you call the police under those circumstances?
Any systematic mass surveillance by a single group is something to at least be concerned about. Assuming that the biggest threat to privacy in human history (Google) will never cause any ill effects is, to be blunt, naive. Most human cultures naturally value privacy, even if a few individuals in those cultures don't care, and there are plenty of good reasons we have evolved that way. The fact that in recent years technology has reached the point where mass surveillance, storage and searching have become realistically possible does not mean such an activity is harmless.
Wow, you must really have a grudge about something they did to you in the past to write all of that.
When we flew with them, we landed at the advertised airport (which happened to be nearer to our destination than the big city alternative, which is why we chose it). There was a restriction on luggage weight of course, but in fact two of the three people in our party were slightly over it and they let it slide. The staff were perfectly polite and professional throughout. It would have been nice to have allocated seating and skip the occasional advertising announcements on the flight, but it's not like we didn't expect those things when we made the booking.
Just because it says something in the fine print on a ticket, that doesn't give it any standing in law. When someone took your money, they made a commitment. They don't get to unilaterally change the rules afterwards.
However, if you look at the scope of the copyright as well, the parent poster is far more in the right than you are.
But if you look at the scope of copyright as well, you wouldn't have the post I criticised, which explicitly referred to the increases in the term of copyright.
What should be covered by copyright (and patents, and trademarks, and...) is a different discussion. Certainly it has changed over time. In some cases, that might just be because you're applying the same principle in new contexts that didn't exist when the relevant laws were first conceived. In other cases, it's a power grab, or an unfortunate misjudgement that created an overly broad precedent. These are all worthy points of discussion, but they are different to the term extensions.
I don't necessarily disagree with any of that. But even if you considered only 5 years to be a reasonable period for exploitation of a work by its creator, you would still find the majority of the material that is swapped illegally on-line today was under copyright.
The "everything I want should be free" crowd like to complain about copyright extensions, but the fact is that for the most part they don't even respect copyrights for material released yesterday, or that won't be released until tomorrow for that matter. They just want to have things other people worked to create without having to give any compensation in return. This used to be called "greed" or "not living up to your side of the bargain". Bitching about copyright extension laws is just an irrelevant smokescreen that they use to cover up this lack of basic ethics.
The problem with that argument is that it means each generation will probably never benefit at all from the copyright bargain on works released during their lifetimes: they give monopoly rights to others, but never get anything back themselves in return. That doesn't sound like much of a fair deal to me.
I've never understood why we can't have a simple system that basically says once you've got a legitimate copy of something yourself, you can use it however you like, but you can't distribute copies to others during the copyright period, and that copyright period should be set long enough to allow for reasonable exploitation by the people who created and distributed the original content but no longer; a few years rather than a few decades strikes me as fair in most cases. Don't let copyright holders use artificial hackery like DRM and the DMCA to extend their powers, and don't subsequently change the law to extend copyright terms beyond that basic level. Throw greedy infringers who don't want to pay up like everyone else in jail like any other criminal.
Infringement cases are increasing because of the continual copyright term extensions.
Sure they are. That's why if you look at the torrents, they're full of people trading Mickey Mouse cartoons that were only yanked away from the public domain by Disney's latest lobbying efforts. P2P is dominated by pop songs from the 1950s, and all those cracked game sites are full of Tetris and Pacman.
Does it even occur to you before you spout the kind of knee-jerk crap quoted above that that overwhelming majority of copyright infringement going on on-line today is ripping off material released so recently that even the original copyright terms would easily have covered it (assuming it has even been released to the public yet at all)? Or that copyright infringement might be increasing because we now have a high-speed communications medium connecting most of the first world that can copy and redistribute copyright material near instantaneously and with negligible cost?
It's tragic that posts like the parent get modded (+5, Insightful). It's obviously not even true, at least on any remotely significant scale. (+5, I Want Everything For Free Groupthink) is more like it.
Cancelling the bookings may piss of some users, but it makes their point.
Not accepting new bookings is entirely up to them, of course.
However, cancelling existing bookings that have already been agreed is unethical. I can't see how it's not illegal on several counts, too: if money has changed hands, then a contract exists, and I wouldn't want to rely on any weasel words saying "we can arbitrarily cancel our side of the bargain without notice" holding up when disgruntled ex-customers start bringing legal actions to recover the cost of wasted hotel reservations, onward flights and the like. Even if the customers go after the third party booking sites that they personally have contracts with, those sites in turn are presumably going to hit Ryanair to recover the damages.
We don't have class action lawsuits over here. Ryanair would, however, potentially wind up the victims of an OFT investigation if they did anything on this scale that wasn't 110% above board. Ask the banks how that's working out for them right now, and you'll see what it could do to small fry like Ryanair.
In any case, this sounds so unutterably stupid that either there's been a fundamental misunderstanding and all these comments are misreporting the situation, or you've got to question whether O'Leary has much of a future there...
Of course you'd want to fly Ryanair! And during today's flight, we'd like to tell you about a great offer that we're running with our trusted partners, ScrewYouOutOfYourMoney.com...
I think all of my cards have switched to Mastercard now, but at least one of them was a Visa credit card until fairly recently. I came across this "Verified by Visa" thing out of the blue one day, having had no prior warning from either my card company or the merchant that I should expect it.
So I did what any smart person does when a web browser surprisingly pops up a window they've never seen before and asks for their confidential information: I left the site immediately, cancelled that card and reset all my security details, and shopped elsewhere using a different payment method in the meantime. Both Visa and the merchant in question lost out on that one.
Indeed if a contract in anyway disables you from working in the future it should not be accepted as legal.
I don't think it's quite as simple as that. For example, allowing contracts to specify that an employee who leaves one company may not then divulge that company's confidential information and trade secrets to the ex-employee's new employer is perfectly reasonable.
But in that case, it's not a prohibition against working for a former competitor, it's a prohibition on abusing privileged access. If that prohibition prevents an ex-employee from taking certain jobs with ex-competitors, that's just too bad, but there are plenty of other jobs they could do instead (including working with ex-competitors in ways that do not represent a breach of confidence).
Yes, give or take your colourful wording, that is exactly what most of them will do. Given the moderation of my GP post, it seems the truth hurts around here, but the bottom line is that most VCs will get plenty of offers worth considering. They're not going to risk compromising their ability to exploit one of those offers because of some conflict of interest before they even know what they're getting in return.
Sure, but your chances of getting any VC or similar to even look at an NDA, much less sign one, are approximately the same as those of the Sun going supernova tomorrow.
But the point is, DRM doesn't stop piracy. It simply doesn't. DRM doesn't do anything to piracy at all.
I used to make that argument, until I realised it was fundamentally flawed. DRM doesn't stop all copyright infringement. For example, it probably doesn't stop infringment by either professional pirates in foreign countries or geeks who know how to use BitTorrent. But DRM almost certainly does stop some copyright infringement, by casual swappers, and it may well delay the rest by long enough to make a difference to sales.
Slashdot Mirror
RTFA, this apparently doesn't work so well when there are too many patent holders. What happens when there are 3 who each want 50%?
They are being unrealistically greedy, and negotiation will probably follow because it is almost certainly in their interests to accept a realistic level of royalties rather than making no money at all.
If there are three existing suppliers who would truly be undermined sufficiently in their own markets to make it unrealistic for them to accept lower royalties, then that's just too bad: patent protection does grant a temporary monopoly, and that was the deal when those other three suppliers all brought their products to market in the first place. You can't just assume that they would all have produced the same products and distributed them at the same prices in the absence of that protection, such that preventing the distribution of the new invention is a net loss.
Basically, as long as patents are awarded in the spirit they were originally intended, market forces will normally do the rest.
And it gets integrated into an existing product lineup at a price chosen to not impact sales of other parts of that lineup, rather than standing on its own and possibly disrupting the industry to the benefit of the general public.
If the new work has sufficient disruptive value, this will not happen, because the market's perception of the value of products incorporating the extra invention will be different to what it was before. If this quiet incorporation scenario is what happens, the pretty much implies that the new work did not have sufficient disruptive value to upset the market. I don't see any problem here.
Which holds everything back by a couple decades, making everyone worse off.
That isn't necessarily true. For one thing, you are assuming that not sharing the new invention was a loss, yet if the work had significant value to the market, it is unlikely that no-one would have been willing to make an offer for the rights. For another thing, this doesn't prevent the market from taking advantage of other inventions that are already being marketed under patent protections, which of course might not have been available to the market if those patent protections were not available as well. That is, after all, the motivation for offering patent protection in the first place.
Cute, but economically naive. Your mechanism imposes taxes in advance of anyone receiving any actual income, so everyone will just declare a value of $0 on all works initially. It imposes the risk for successfully selling a work on anyone willing to defend the rights to a work, potentially before they have time to establish what realistic price for that work would be acceptable to the market. It removes a lot of competition between publishers, since anyone buying rights would potentially wind up double-paying only to see the work in the public domain so everyone could distribute it anyway, while anyone paying to have the work released into the public domain is just giving up money that their competitors are not for no commercial advantage. Basically, your model is completely broken.
The current system already achieves all the benefits of your system anyway: businesses pay taxes on profits, and the more of a copyright work they sell, the more tax they pay. Moreover, if anyone thinks the source code for Windows should be in the public domain, they can make Microsoft an offer to buy the rights for it. If it's a credible offer relative to the potential profits Microsoft expects to make, I'm sure they will take it. Right now, the market values Microsoft at around $257 billion, so if you assume roughly half their profits come from Windows, an offer around the $200 billion mark might be attractive enough for investors to take it.
In which case, he will need to either compensate the patent holders for using the protected inventions he is building on, sell the rights to his idea to a larger group that can take advantage of it, or wait until the existing protections expire. If the new idea is worth a lot, the first is usually what happens. If it's worth a bit, the second is usually what happens. If it's not really worth much, the third is what happens. If the idea was worth enough that the inventor kept the patents himself and licensed work in from others, then he will also be in a position to be compensated or buy additional rights later when other people come up with ideas building further on this starting point. This is exactly how the system is supposed to work, and as long as patents are only awarded for genuinely original and valuable ideas, cross-licensing as part of the agreements is a natural consequence and results in both parties being able to bring better products to market. The problems only start when defensive vapour-patents get awarded, and that has nothing to do with cross-licensing as such.
I think that happened around the time they started giving patents out for things that weren't actually significantly inventions at all, and allowing write-ups of the claims that were so hopelessly generic that they did not (as originally intended) provide a means for others to reproduce a significant invention when the durationg of protection expired. The duration of protection is itself arguably too long in some fields as well, but that's not the biggest problem IMHO. Patents as originally conceived are a reasonable proposal for incentivising the sharing of new inventions, but the practice is now so far from the principle that the whole system is beyond hope. Let's hope the recent sparks of common sense in the US and Europe result in doing something about this.
I'd prefer not to stoop to their level, but you don't win against a bully by fighting fair.
On the contrary, usually that is exactly how you beat a bully. Most bullies win precisely because the people they are bullying consider themselves constrained in ways the bullies do not. Release those constraints to put the participants on an equal footing, and most bullies lose very quickly.
This applies almost universally, whether you're talking about the kid who gets beaten up at school because the teachers always tell him not to fight back, or the RIAA cases against song swappers where one side has to pay silly legal fees just to get their day in court while the other side pays no legal fees if it gets settled out of court.
However, you're right that the results of the "loss calculations" for works never produced because of copyright would be just as valid as the RIAA's, which is to say not at all.
I make singleplayer PC games. Can you explain to me how abandoning copyright makes me better off?
Well, obviously they'll be great marketing tools for all those millionaires who want to commission more single-player games.
No, wait, that's wrong. You're in the wrong market! Yeah, that's it. You should be making multiplayer games. You could provide a subscription to a server that hosts the games, and hope that no-one else will reverse engineer your code in ten minutes and then provide a different server more cheaply.
Oh, wait, people already do that sort of thing. I guess you'll just have to ship every game you sell only with a contract that states that the person receiving it won't copy and distribute it further, so that you can afford to sell it at a price many individual customers would be willing to pay and the sum of all the small payments would provide you a worthwhile profit. Yeah, that might work. If only I could think of a name for reserving the right to copy something... Nope, I got nothing, sorry.
Would you consider it reasonable to have to keep your curtains closed all the time, if some weird-looking person was standing around outside your home every night trying to look through your windows?
Or would you call the police under those circumstances?
I bet I know what most people would do.
Any systematic mass surveillance by a single group is something to at least be concerned about. Assuming that the biggest threat to privacy in human history (Google) will never cause any ill effects is, to be blunt, naive. Most human cultures naturally value privacy, even if a few individuals in those cultures don't care, and there are plenty of good reasons we have evolved that way. The fact that in recent years technology has reached the point where mass surveillance, storage and searching have become realistically possible does not mean such an activity is harmless.
I don't know, but the Airport name is hardly Ryanair's fault, is it? Every airline describes them the same way.
Wow, you must really have a grudge about something they did to you in the past to write all of that.
When we flew with them, we landed at the advertised airport (which happened to be nearer to our destination than the big city alternative, which is why we chose it). There was a restriction on luggage weight of course, but in fact two of the three people in our party were slightly over it and they let it slide. The staff were perfectly polite and professional throughout. It would have been nice to have allocated seating and skip the occasional advertising announcements on the flight, but it's not like we didn't expect those things when we made the booking.
Just because it says something in the fine print on a ticket, that doesn't give it any standing in law. When someone took your money, they made a commitment. They don't get to unilaterally change the rules afterwards.
However, if you look at the scope of the copyright as well, the parent poster is far more in the right than you are.
But if you look at the scope of copyright as well, you wouldn't have the post I criticised, which explicitly referred to the increases in the term of copyright.
What should be covered by copyright (and patents, and trademarks, and...) is a different discussion. Certainly it has changed over time. In some cases, that might just be because you're applying the same principle in new contexts that didn't exist when the relevant laws were first conceived. In other cases, it's a power grab, or an unfortunate misjudgement that created an overly broad precedent. These are all worthy points of discussion, but they are different to the term extensions.
I don't necessarily disagree with any of that. But even if you considered only 5 years to be a reasonable period for exploitation of a work by its creator, you would still find the majority of the material that is swapped illegally on-line today was under copyright.
The "everything I want should be free" crowd like to complain about copyright extensions, but the fact is that for the most part they don't even respect copyrights for material released yesterday, or that won't be released until tomorrow for that matter. They just want to have things other people worked to create without having to give any compensation in return. This used to be called "greed" or "not living up to your side of the bargain". Bitching about copyright extension laws is just an irrelevant smokescreen that they use to cover up this lack of basic ethics.
The problem with that argument is that it means each generation will probably never benefit at all from the copyright bargain on works released during their lifetimes: they give monopoly rights to others, but never get anything back themselves in return. That doesn't sound like much of a fair deal to me.
I've never understood why we can't have a simple system that basically says once you've got a legitimate copy of something yourself, you can use it however you like, but you can't distribute copies to others during the copyright period, and that copyright period should be set long enough to allow for reasonable exploitation by the people who created and distributed the original content but no longer; a few years rather than a few decades strikes me as fair in most cases. Don't let copyright holders use artificial hackery like DRM and the DMCA to extend their powers, and don't subsequently change the law to extend copyright terms beyond that basic level. Throw greedy infringers who don't want to pay up like everyone else in jail like any other criminal.
Infringement cases are increasing because of the continual copyright term extensions.
Sure they are. That's why if you look at the torrents, they're full of people trading Mickey Mouse cartoons that were only yanked away from the public domain by Disney's latest lobbying efforts. P2P is dominated by pop songs from the 1950s, and all those cracked game sites are full of Tetris and Pacman.
Does it even occur to you before you spout the kind of knee-jerk crap quoted above that that overwhelming majority of copyright infringement going on on-line today is ripping off material released so recently that even the original copyright terms would easily have covered it (assuming it has even been released to the public yet at all)? Or that copyright infringement might be increasing because we now have a high-speed communications medium connecting most of the first world that can copy and redistribute copyright material near instantaneously and with negligible cost?
It's tragic that posts like the parent get modded (+5, Insightful). It's obviously not even true, at least on any remotely significant scale. (+5, I Want Everything For Free Groupthink) is more like it.
For the record and at the risk of feeding a troll, as someone who has actually flown Ryanair, most of the parent post is crap.
Cancelling the bookings may piss of some users, but it makes their point.
Not accepting new bookings is entirely up to them, of course.
However, cancelling existing bookings that have already been agreed is unethical. I can't see how it's not illegal on several counts, too: if money has changed hands, then a contract exists, and I wouldn't want to rely on any weasel words saying "we can arbitrarily cancel our side of the bargain without notice" holding up when disgruntled ex-customers start bringing legal actions to recover the cost of wasted hotel reservations, onward flights and the like. Even if the customers go after the third party booking sites that they personally have contracts with, those sites in turn are presumably going to hit Ryanair to recover the damages.
We don't have class action lawsuits over here. Ryanair would, however, potentially wind up the victims of an OFT investigation if they did anything on this scale that wasn't 110% above board. Ask the banks how that's working out for them right now, and you'll see what it could do to small fry like Ryanair.
In any case, this sounds so unutterably stupid that either there's been a fundamental misunderstanding and all these comments are misreporting the situation, or you've got to question whether O'Leary has much of a future there...
Of course you'd want to fly Ryanair! And during today's flight, we'd like to tell you about a great offer that we're running with our trusted partners, ScrewYouOutOfYourMoney.com...
I'm not so sure.
I think all of my cards have switched to Mastercard now, but at least one of them was a Visa credit card until fairly recently. I came across this "Verified by Visa" thing out of the blue one day, having had no prior warning from either my card company or the merchant that I should expect it.
So I did what any smart person does when a web browser surprisingly pops up a window they've never seen before and asks for their confidential information: I left the site immediately, cancelled that card and reset all my security details, and shopped elsewhere using a different payment method in the meantime. Both Visa and the merchant in question lost out on that one.
Indeed if a contract in anyway disables you from working in the future it should not be accepted as legal.
I don't think it's quite as simple as that. For example, allowing contracts to specify that an employee who leaves one company may not then divulge that company's confidential information and trade secrets to the ex-employee's new employer is perfectly reasonable.
But in that case, it's not a prohibition against working for a former competitor, it's a prohibition on abusing privileged access. If that prohibition prevents an ex-employee from taking certain jobs with ex-competitors, that's just too bad, but there are plenty of other jobs they could do instead (including working with ex-competitors in ways that do not represent a breach of confidence).
Yes, give or take your colourful wording, that is exactly what most of them will do. Given the moderation of my GP post, it seems the truth hurts around here, but the bottom line is that most VCs will get plenty of offers worth considering. They're not going to risk compromising their ability to exploit one of those offers because of some conflict of interest before they even know what they're getting in return.
Sure, but your chances of getting any VC or similar to even look at an NDA, much less sign one, are approximately the same as those of the Sun going supernova tomorrow.
But the point is, DRM doesn't stop piracy. It simply doesn't. DRM doesn't do anything to piracy at all.
I used to make that argument, until I realised it was fundamentally flawed. DRM doesn't stop all copyright infringement. For example, it probably doesn't stop infringment by either professional pirates in foreign countries or geeks who know how to use BitTorrent. But DRM almost certainly does stop some copyright infringement, by casual swappers, and it may well delay the rest by long enough to make a difference to sales.