Patents protect things that cannot be protected through trade secret.
Sorry, I don't buy this at all. Why do you feel this is so?
I thought I made it clear in my post. Sorry, sometimes I mumble...
My point was that you can't protect every type of invention by keeping its "formula" a secret. Using my razor example, assuming the innovation is in plainly observable gross structure and not some chemical/molecular fabrication technique, anyone with the resources to do so can duplicate my model just by looking at it. This is not so if the means of producing the artifact are a secret recipe or process that can be hidden away (as a trade secret) in the manufacturing plant.
I agree that the current system is hopelessly slanted in favor of wealthy litigants. Going back to my original post, I think the solution is to fix this sorry state of affairs, not to eliminate patents. Certainly there are classes of patents that are highly dubious (business models comes first to mind) and might deserve to be dispensed with, but basic patent protection for truly novel ideas seems to me a pretty valuable thing for society to have.
As for a ruthless PTO, wouldn't it be nice if the government paid those inspectors a salary commensurate with the private R&D and patent litigation sectors? A lot of these problems would disappear overnight.
You certainly make sound points. As usual, I am shamed for my failure to thickly enough pack the disclaimers in my terse comments.
Having been accussed of spin (tacitly for the gun lobby, of which I am not a member) I need to respond at least a little.
Securing firearms is the complete and sole responsibility of the owner of those firearms.
Based on what I've heard so far, they were reasonably secured. Is it the gun owner's job to carry the key with him every minute? Barring that, securing a cabinet against an 18 year old is not easy. Because of the security measures taken and the age of the defendant, I don't think we can compare this to, for example, the recent Florida case where an eighth-grader stole the handgun from a shoebox in his grandfather's house and shot his teacher.
Are you implying that being shot by a thirty year old bullet pack would somehow be less injurious than a new round?
Of course not, and this is the point I feel most regretful about failing to disclaim. All I meant was that "2000 rounds of ammunition" has a hyperbole to it that is meant to sell headlines, and lends an emotional distortion to the actual reality. Ask any Joe on the street to imagine "2000 rounds of ammunition" and I expect you will conjure pictures of olive drab boxes and bandaleros, a distinctly different image than the more accurate cigar box full of eraser-sized bullets.
Nobody thinks he should be charged with conspiracy to commit assault, they think he should be charged with criminal negligence.
At what point, then, do we trust our adult children to behave like adults? What level of security will satisfy this litigious urge to spread the blame to everyone within reach?
I'm not a gun nut, but I believe in individual responsibility, and the defendant's age most definitely does make a difference in this case. What if it had been the wife who dug out the key, opened the cabinet, and started shooting? Would dad still be responsible then?
I have to call this post out on blatant proof texting.
A few facts omitted or misrepresented above:
* The weapons were locked in a closet * The majority of the (whoo scary) 2000 rounds of ammunition were a few 500 boxes of ancient target rounds. * The "kid" was 18, a legal adult.
Blaming the parent without knowing the full facts is just as idiotic as blaming video games.
Bah! The bargain that society makes is "Hey, show us your secret ideas (trade secrets) and we will make sure no one else can use it for seventeen years."
Since when are patents and trade secrets analogous? So far as I know, the recipe for Coca Cola isn't safe from duplication because it's patented (the patent would have expired long ago, correcct?) but because it's kept secret by contractual obligation with all to whom it is dispensed.
Patents protect things that cannot be protected through trade secret. Many patented devices could be easily duplicated using the original as a model.On which, you said:
Now, if everyone can already see how your gadget works, why should the market hinder competition?
Do you mean why should the government hinder competition? Barring external interference, the market never hinders competition, does it?
I can think of one reason: because wealth leads to accumulation of wealth in the case where it isn't checked, and we have decided as a society that that is not a good thing.
If I were to come up with an absolutely brilliant razor blade design today -- one that would revolutionize shaving and every stubbly guy in American would want -- and could not protect it with a patent, then as soon as I prototyped and released the design, Gillette could come along and duplicate it and run me out of business by virtue of their existing fabrication and distribution infrastructure, and ability to under cut me on price. Why should they be able to use their existing market to destroy my potential one?
So what. The world doesn't owe me a living, right? Absolutely correct, but we have decided as a society that we get more benefit in the long run from encouraging and protecting the entrepenuereal and creative spirit than we do from economic Darwinism.
I'll be first in line to take pot shots at the current failings of the USPTO, fantastical patents on obvious or predictive technologies, and the like, but I've still not heard any reasonable justification for the abolition of patents. But maybe my own view is the one that's irrational. Maybe I just consider a world co-owned between Wal-Mart, General Electric, and Microsoft an undesirable outcome....
It's not entirely clear to me that the poster you cited is actually advocating abolition of such protections, but predicting their radical transformation in the near future. If they are transformed as described, it will be reactionary, just as I complained.
The posts I see seem to be mostly of the form "the system is open to abuse, so the system should be disposed of" without any commentary on what negative economic and cultural repercussions there might be.
Can you give me an actual argument for abolishing patents? If you would advocate the same for copyrights, please comment on those as well.
Abolish patents. It's a wonder few bring up this possibility.
Abolition of patents is a simple-minded, reactionary solution, and if you think it hasn't been brought up plenty of times, you apparently haven't been reading this board for long.
Patents serve a valuable purpose to spur development through economic incentives while ensuring ultimate constributions to the public domain. That they've been abused and overextended is not a reason to throw them away. I agree we need massive changes in how patents are granted, but I've yet to hear a single compelling argument for their abolition that wasn't tinged with drool...
I don't buy it. I have an MS in computer science and I can barely keep up with the jargon. Unless you are obsessed with hardware, it is nigh unto impossible to keep all the new technology terms straight.
While it is true that learning the common term "byte" and the magnitude prefixes kilo-, mega-, giga-, terra-, etc will help the general public get a grasp of basic concepts like the memory capacity of a device, I don't think general education is up to the task of keeping people informed of the full spectrum of computer jargon. Part of the problem is the rate of advance of technology. New technologies must have new names to differentiate them, but unless you're deeply involved in the tech itself, it is unreasonable to expect to be able to keep up with the constant barrage of new nomenclature.
What will solve the "problem" is a consistent set of metrics for expressing performance of devices and industry adaptation of those metrics as their primary marketing vector. As long as we have to rely on euphemistic hybrids of technology and marketing lingo (which we will probably always will because if the public actually understood the difference between one technology and the next in easily quantifiable terms they would be less likely to buy that expensive upgrade), there is no hope for the general public to keep up any more than they can be expected to keep up with, say, the pharmaceutical industry.
Having more than a passing interest in phrase origins, my eye was drawn to your comment:
"The jig is up!"
no...
"The *gig* is up."
Did you get this backward? Your comment below the cited section seems to say it is supposed to be "jig", which is correct. See the dictionary.com entry for jig.
It's obvious and scientifically verified that those who play video games are far more likely than their non-gaming piers to avoid social interaction, do poorly in school, resort to violent behavior, and lead unhealthy lifestyles (leading to problems like obesity and depression later in life).
Perhaps you will respond with data for some of this scientific verification of which you speak. Otherwise, I'll have to assume you're either a troll or just clueless...
What I'm wondering is how our society continues to function if these assertions are true, given that a huge percentage of it are now regular or semi-regular gamers.
BTW, much as I'm loathed to pick on people for poor spelling, I just can't resist pointing out that I've never observed a pier playing a game. Most of the time they just hold up boardwalks.;-)
A chained else-if structure is equivalent to a switch.
Funny you should point that out: a chained else-if structure without a terminal else is equivalent to a switch without a default which is notoriously vulnerable to the same sort of logic errors.
if you can use the simpler structure without duplicating code, then you should
While I agree with that principle, the whole issue of good form (which I won't argue can be inefficient and cumbersome) is that following it slavishly can prevent the coding patterns that lead to hard-to-find bugs. It protects us from our own worst tendencies, one of which is assuming when we write the code that we know exactly what we mean it to do.:-) Optimization is a valuable step to be sure, but optimizing too soon is a route to buggy code.
Sorry to get pedantic, but char* buffers are not error prone. Programmers are prone to make errors when using them. Lack of maturity (so to speak) in the language and bad programmer form are not the same. Bad form is bad form in C or Java. That one lacks array bounds checking that the other provides is irrelevant. Languages that protect the programmer from errors may make bad form less likely to result in a failure, but failing to employ best practices in code design can still lead to hard-to-detect logic bombs.
In this case, the bad form in using early returns is that using them leads one to not look at the whole routine as a cohesive whole where all the antecedents and consequents are correctly considered and accounted for. It's similar to why:
if (a) {... } else if (b) {... }
is bad form compared to
if (a) {... } else {
if (b) {...
} }
From tracing point of view, they are indistinguishable. They may even compile to the same set of instructions. The second, however, shows a level of diligence on the part of the engineer that all the possible routes are considered and there is no dangling consequent.
Disclaimer: The real reasons why these things are bad form are practically impossible to convey in an example that doesn't make use of real code. i.e. it's the "..." bit that provides the opportunity for the bad-form constructs to leak bugs.
One other thing occured to me. Is *somebuf protected by a synchronization mechanism? If not, it is possible that another process/thread may have altered it, ergo it is entirely possible that *somebuf could become NULL during a context switch between the first and second line of your code sample.
It's been a long time since I did C programming, so be gentle if I'm missing something critical about pointer access...
int some_func(char *somebuf) {
if (somebuf == NULL) return ERROR;
somebuf[0] = 'a';
return OK; }
Will generate a warning with splint saying "pointer may be null" despite the fact it cannot be.
By way of disclaimer, let me say I've never used splint, but could it be that the bad-form early return is confusing it? Does it report the same error on
int some_func(char *somebuf) {
int result= ERROR;
if (somebuf != NULL) {
somebuf[0] = 'a';
result= OK;
}
return result; }
Re:And who can forget...
on
Random Humor
·
· Score: 1
You're thinking of Thomas Edison. Tesla was born in 1856, 66 years after Franklin's death.
I should have realized I'd be advised by a large number of actual and armchair patent attorneys about the scope limitations of patents, and sincerely regret not posting the entirity (albeit small) of my knowledge of the law as disclaimer...
My point was that we should give Hormel a break, considering their relative good humor compared to what many corporations would have done in similar circumstances.
RTA. They are opposing an attempt to trademark a name containing their registered trademark. Considering the typically litigious nature of other companies and Hormel's relative tolerance of the use of the generic term "spam", I hardly think they should be cast as the bad guy for opposing someone else trademarking a name containing theirs.
Congress critters don't care about letters, they care about getting reelected.
And if everyone who made statements like that wrote letters and voted, we wouldn't have these representatives. How hard is it to grasp that corporations and PACs don't vote, citizens do? Congress leverages corporate money into campaigns to draw the attention of a voting minority. If a fraction of the disillusioned would stand up and be counted, the system would change dramatically in a single election cycle.
Disclaimer: I do not presume that Master Bait is apathetic or politically disengaged. How would I know? I only note that I have heard this song many times from people who are apparently much more interested in complaining about the system than changing it.
Chuckle, yeah. I think I got a bit carried away. My last several discussions were with people who had, ahhhh... less common-knowledge/agreement:)
Perhaps we could take this somewhere. I've seen these terse little lifestyle "codes" that people use to communicate things about themselves in shorthand. It would be neat if one could construct a survey/test system that could be updated regularly with new questions about topics of community interest. Users could fill it out as often as they like to revise opinions/knowledge. That way people couldn't just place a token in their code (after all, you can't trust people to honestly evalute their own expertise!:-)), but the code would be generated for them based on their survey/test responses.
I think the entire concept of politics sort of repulsive to the programmer mental set.
Of course, because we have this engineer's view of the world where things either work or not based on whether they are consistent with fundamental laws. Unfortunately for all, human behavior (particularly human group behavior) does not appear to follow such predictable laws, and that is how we end up with remedies that are worse than the diseases. For example, I tried repeatedly to get it through to Mr. Wexler that it was impossible, as the thankfully dead Berman P2PPPA Bill mandated, to interfere with a P2P network without impacting QoS for users of a shared segment not involved in the P2P exchange. I never could get this concept across to a person accustomed to thinking that if congress passed a law then these stubborn engineers would just have to make the network work that way...
England currently has video cameras on almost every public street in London. If you travel there, you are *always* under surveillance. It hasn't caught on in the US yet, but it's just a matter of time before it does.
They're slowly softening us up.
It's starting with traffic intersections. Most of the major intersections I drive through every day now have cameras installed for photographing red light runners.
Less obvious are all the cameras belonging to private businesses. These are not run by a central authority, but their recordings are immediately siezed in the course of any investigation by law enforcement.
Argh... I wish there were some signature code that could be attached to posts to get all the common-knowledge/agreement out of the way up front. It's not your fault, but between your time spent writing and mine spent reading on the basic legal facts about copyright, your post could have been about 25% of its size. Alas, maybe someone else will get some benefit from browsing it...
Anyway, do get back on track...
I'm a software engineer as well, and software patents are terrible for exactly the reasons you state, so we can leave that alone. Trademarks benefit the public, but also the business because protections against dilution of trademark ensures a monopoly of sorts on brand identity. As you stated, this is a side effect.
Still, there are some sticky issues with copyrights and technology making their infringement trivial:
The purpose of copyright is indeed to protect and promote the public domain. One of the ways it's promoted is by incentivizing creators to produce their work. Incentivizing means making it economically beneficial in most cases. Industries, as you say, have no inherent right to profit, but modern industries who deal exclusively in IP (e.g. music, movies and software) will thrive only if their products are paid for. This is why I argued they were deserving of strong protection during the period covered by copyright (which has lately been ridiculously extended, if anything the intervals should be shortening to compensate for exponential progress of technology). When P2P makes it possible for one person to buy a copy of music/movie/software and cascade it exponentially to others, then that threatens the incentive for creators and by extension the public domain. I think it's right and correct that RIAA is finally prosecuting the people violating their copyrights, rather than mucking up the legislature and clogging the courts with cases against technology providers.
I agree that copyright is lately being manipulated against the public industry as a protection racket for the copyright industries. I have expended considerable energy writing to my senators and representative on this topic (see my journal for copies of recent letters) and hopefully with a sensible backlash from the public, we can stem this tide.
Your observation that most music would still get made is spot on. Most music never gets heard by anything more than a tiny audience because a tiny pigopoly controls the production and distribution. Most musicians do it for the love of the process, and are lucky to break even.
So, when you were becoming a programmer, did you ever think this much of your time would be spent thinking about the law???
Slashdot Mirror
I thought I made it clear in my post. Sorry, sometimes I mumble...
My point was that you can't protect every type of invention by keeping its "formula" a secret. Using my razor example, assuming the innovation is in plainly observable gross structure and not some chemical/molecular fabrication technique, anyone with the resources to do so can duplicate my model just by looking at it. This is not so if the means of producing the artifact are a secret recipe or process that can be hidden away (as a trade secret) in the manufacturing plant.
I agree that the current system is hopelessly slanted in favor of wealthy litigants. Going back to my original post, I think the solution is to fix this sorry state of affairs, not to eliminate patents. Certainly there are classes of patents that are highly dubious (business models comes first to mind) and might deserve to be dispensed with, but basic patent protection for truly novel ideas seems to me a pretty valuable thing for society to have.
As for a ruthless PTO, wouldn't it be nice if the government paid those inspectors a salary commensurate with the private R&D and patent litigation sectors? A lot of these problems would disappear overnight.
Or a chainsaw, or a hammer, or a steak knife.
This is the kind of paternalistic pandering that makes me ashamed to be a liberal...
Having been accussed of spin (tacitly for the gun lobby, of which I am not a member) I need to respond at least a little.
Based on what I've heard so far, they were reasonably secured. Is it the gun owner's job to carry the key with him every minute? Barring that, securing a cabinet against an 18 year old is not easy. Because of the security measures taken and the age of the defendant, I don't think we can compare this to, for example, the recent Florida case where an eighth-grader stole the handgun from a shoebox in his grandfather's house and shot his teacher.
Of course not, and this is the point I feel most regretful about failing to disclaim. All I meant was that "2000 rounds of ammunition" has a hyperbole to it that is meant to sell headlines, and lends an emotional distortion to the actual reality. Ask any Joe on the street to imagine "2000 rounds of ammunition" and I expect you will conjure pictures of olive drab boxes and bandaleros, a distinctly different image than the more accurate cigar box full of eraser-sized bullets.
At what point, then, do we trust our adult children to behave like adults? What level of security will satisfy this litigious urge to spread the blame to everyone within reach?
I'm not a gun nut, but I believe in individual responsibility, and the defendant's age most definitely does make a difference in this case. What if it had been the wife who dug out the key, opened the cabinet, and started shooting? Would dad still be responsible then?
I have to call this post out on blatant proof texting.
A few facts omitted or misrepresented above:
* The weapons were locked in a closet
* The majority of the (whoo scary) 2000 rounds of ammunition were a few 500 boxes of ancient target rounds.
* The "kid" was 18, a legal adult.
Blaming the parent without knowing the full facts is just as idiotic as blaming video games.
Since when are patents and trade secrets analogous? So far as I know, the recipe for Coca Cola isn't safe from duplication because it's patented (the patent would have expired long ago, correcct?) but because it's kept secret by contractual obligation with all to whom it is dispensed.
Patents protect things that cannot be protected through trade secret. Many patented devices could be easily duplicated using the original as a model.On which, you said:
Do you mean why should the government hinder competition? Barring external interference, the market never hinders competition, does it?
I can think of one reason: because wealth leads to accumulation of wealth in the case where it isn't checked, and we have decided as a society that that is not a good thing.
If I were to come up with an absolutely brilliant razor blade design today -- one that would revolutionize shaving and every stubbly guy in American would want -- and could not protect it with a patent, then as soon as I prototyped and released the design, Gillette could come along and duplicate it and run me out of business by virtue of their existing fabrication and distribution infrastructure, and ability to under cut me on price. Why should they be able to use their existing market to destroy my potential one?
So what. The world doesn't owe me a living, right? Absolutely correct, but we have decided as a society that we get more benefit in the long run from encouraging and protecting the entrepenuereal and creative spirit than we do from economic Darwinism.
I'll be first in line to take pot shots at the current failings of the USPTO, fantastical patents on obvious or predictive technologies, and the like, but I've still not heard any reasonable justification for the abolition of patents. But maybe my own view is the one that's irrational. Maybe I just consider a world co-owned between Wal-Mart, General Electric, and Microsoft an undesirable outcome....
It's not entirely clear to me that the poster you cited is actually advocating abolition of such protections, but predicting their radical transformation in the near future. If they are transformed as described, it will be reactionary, just as I complained.
The posts I see seem to be mostly of the form "the system is open to abuse, so the system should be disposed of" without any commentary on what negative economic and cultural repercussions there might be.
Can you give me an actual argument for abolishing patents? If you would advocate the same for copyrights, please comment on those as well.
Sorry, but you'll have to pay me a royalty because I have a patent on hitting someoone via Web discussion boards.
Abolition of patents is a simple-minded, reactionary solution, and if you think it hasn't been brought up plenty of times, you apparently haven't been reading this board for long.
Patents serve a valuable purpose to spur development through economic incentives while ensuring ultimate constributions to the public domain. That they've been abused and overextended is not a reason to throw them away. I agree we need massive changes in how patents are granted, but I've yet to hear a single compelling argument for their abolition that wasn't tinged with drool...
I don't buy it. I have an MS in computer science and I can barely keep up with the jargon. Unless you are obsessed with hardware, it is nigh unto impossible to keep all the new technology terms straight.
While it is true that learning the common term "byte" and the magnitude prefixes kilo-, mega-, giga-, terra-, etc will help the general public get a grasp of basic concepts like the memory capacity of a device, I don't think general education is up to the task of keeping people informed of the full spectrum of computer jargon. Part of the problem is the rate of advance of technology. New technologies must have new names to differentiate them, but unless you're deeply involved in the tech itself, it is unreasonable to expect to be able to keep up with the constant barrage of new nomenclature.
What will solve the "problem" is a consistent set of metrics for expressing performance of devices and industry adaptation of those metrics as their primary marketing vector. As long as we have to rely on euphemistic hybrids of technology and marketing lingo (which we will probably always will because if the public actually understood the difference between one technology and the next in easily quantifiable terms they would be less likely to buy that expensive upgrade), there is no hope for the general public to keep up any more than they can be expected to keep up with, say, the pharmaceutical industry.
Did you get this backward? Your comment below the cited section seems to say it is supposed to be "jig", which is correct. See the dictionary.com entry for jig.
Perhaps you will respond with data for some of this scientific verification of which you speak. Otherwise, I'll have to assume you're either a troll or just clueless...
What I'm wondering is how our society continues to function if these assertions are true, given that a huge percentage of it are now regular or semi-regular gamers.
BTW, much as I'm loathed to pick on people for poor spelling, I just can't resist pointing out that I've never observed a pier playing a game. Most of the time they just hold up boardwalks.
Funny you should point that out: a chained else-if structure without a terminal else is equivalent to a switch without a default which is notoriously vulnerable to the same sort of logic errors.
While I agree with that principle, the whole issue of good form (which I won't argue can be inefficient and cumbersome) is that following it slavishly can prevent the coding patterns that lead to hard-to-find bugs. It protects us from our own worst tendencies, one of which is assuming when we write the code that we know exactly what we mean it to do.
Sorry to get pedantic, but char* buffers are not error prone. Programmers are prone to make errors when using them. Lack of maturity (so to speak) in the language and bad programmer form are not the same. Bad form is bad form in C or Java. That one lacks array bounds checking that the other provides is irrelevant. Languages that protect the programmer from errors may make bad form less likely to result in a failure, but failing to employ best practices in code design can still lead to hard-to-detect logic bombs.
... ...
... ...
In this case, the bad form in using early returns is that using them leads one to not look at the whole routine as a cohesive whole where all the antecedents and consequents are correctly considered and accounted for. It's similar to why:
if (a) {
}
else if (b) {
}
is bad form compared to
if (a) {
}
else {
if (b) {
}
}
From tracing point of view, they are indistinguishable. They may even compile to the same set of instructions. The second, however, shows a level of diligence on the part of the engineer that all the possible routes are considered and there is no dangling consequent.
Disclaimer: The real reasons why these things are bad form are practically impossible to convey in an example that doesn't make use of real code. i.e. it's the "..." bit that provides the opportunity for the bad-form constructs to leak bugs.
Thanks for the reality slap. Years of LISP and Java have made me weak and flabby.
One other thing occured to me. Is *somebuf protected by a synchronization mechanism? If not, it is possible that another process/thread may have altered it, ergo it is entirely possible that *somebuf could become NULL during a context switch between the first and second line of your code sample.
It's been a long time since I did C programming, so be gentle if I'm missing something critical about pointer access...
By way of disclaimer, let me say I've never used splint, but could it be that the bad-form early return is confusing it? Does it report the same error on
int some_func(char *somebuf)
{
int result= ERROR;
if (somebuf != NULL) {
somebuf[0] = 'a';
result= OK;
}
return result;
}
You're thinking of Thomas Edison. Tesla was born in 1856, 66 years after Franklin's death.
I also feel sorry for you for making the following statement:
because of the barrage of responses you will receive pedantically explaining to you that trademarks and copyrights are not property rights.
I should have realized I'd be advised by a large number of actual and armchair patent attorneys about the scope limitations of patents, and sincerely regret not posting the entirity (albeit small) of my knowledge of the law as disclaimer...
My point was that we should give Hormel a break, considering their relative good humor compared to what many corporations would have done in similar circumstances.
RTA. They are opposing an attempt to trademark a name containing their registered trademark. Considering the typically litigious nature of other companies and Hormel's relative tolerance of the use of the generic term "spam", I hardly think they should be cast as the bad guy for opposing someone else trademarking a name containing theirs.
And if everyone who made statements like that wrote letters and voted, we wouldn't have these representatives. How hard is it to grasp that corporations and PACs don't vote, citizens do? Congress leverages corporate money into campaigns to draw the attention of a voting minority. If a fraction of the disillusioned would stand up and be counted, the system would change dramatically in a single election cycle.
Disclaimer: I do not presume that Master Bait is apathetic or politically disengaged. How would I know? I only note that I have heard this song many times from people who are apparently much more interested in complaining about the system than changing it.
Perhaps we could take this somewhere. I've seen these terse little lifestyle "codes" that people use to communicate things about themselves in shorthand. It would be neat if one could construct a survey/test system that could be updated regularly with new questions about topics of community interest. Users could fill it out as often as they like to revise opinions/knowledge. That way people couldn't just place a token in their code (after all, you can't trust people to honestly evalute their own expertise!
Of course, because we have this engineer's view of the world where things either work or not based on whether they are consistent with fundamental laws. Unfortunately for all, human behavior (particularly human group behavior) does not appear to follow such predictable laws, and that is how we end up with remedies that are worse than the diseases. For example, I tried repeatedly to get it through to Mr. Wexler that it was impossible, as the thankfully dead Berman P2PPPA Bill mandated, to interfere with a P2P network without impacting QoS for users of a shared segment not involved in the P2P exchange. I never could get this concept across to a person accustomed to thinking that if congress passed a law then these stubborn engineers would just have to make the network work that way...
Yeah, I'm just trying to figure out what they're using those "American Idol" phone calls for...
They're slowly softening us up.
It's starting with traffic intersections. Most of the major intersections I drive through every day now have cameras installed for photographing red light runners.
Less obvious are all the cameras belonging to private businesses. These are not run by a central authority, but their recordings are immediately siezed in the course of any investigation by law enforcement.
Argh... I wish there were some signature code that could be attached to posts to get all the common-knowledge/agreement out of the way up front. It's not your fault, but between your time spent writing and mine spent reading on the basic legal facts about copyright, your post could have been about 25% of its size. Alas, maybe someone else will get some benefit from browsing it...
Anyway, do get back on track...
I'm a software engineer as well, and software patents are terrible for exactly the reasons you state, so we can leave that alone. Trademarks benefit the public, but also the business because protections against dilution of trademark ensures a monopoly of sorts on brand identity. As you stated, this is a side effect.
Still, there are some sticky issues with copyrights and technology making their infringement trivial:
The purpose of copyright is indeed to protect and promote the public domain. One of the ways it's promoted is by incentivizing creators to produce their work. Incentivizing means making it economically beneficial in most cases. Industries, as you say, have no inherent right to profit, but modern industries who deal exclusively in IP (e.g. music, movies and software) will thrive only if their products are paid for. This is why I argued they were deserving of strong protection during the period covered by copyright (which has lately been ridiculously extended, if anything the intervals should be shortening to compensate for exponential progress of technology). When P2P makes it possible for one person to buy a copy of music/movie/software and cascade it exponentially to others, then that threatens the incentive for creators and by extension the public domain. I think it's right and correct that RIAA is finally prosecuting the people violating their copyrights, rather than mucking up the legislature and clogging the courts with cases against technology providers.
I agree that copyright is lately being manipulated against the public industry as a protection racket for the copyright industries. I have expended considerable energy writing to my senators and representative on this topic (see my journal for copies of recent letters) and hopefully with a sensible backlash from the public, we can stem this tide.
Your observation that most music would still get made is spot on. Most music never gets heard by anything more than a tiny audience because a tiny pigopoly controls the production and distribution. Most musicians do it for the love of the process, and are lucky to break even.
So, when you were becoming a programmer, did you ever think this much of your time would be spent thinking about the law???