I finally set my filter to hide unmoderated posts by ACs because the signal to noise ratio was just so awful. I know I'm exploiting others who have to mod the ACs up, but apparently they have more time than I do.;-)
Something I would like to see in/. is an option to disable anonymous replies to a post. I have no problem with people preserving their anonymity for personal security or any other valid reason, but it is often abused on this board as a shield for rudeness (or, obviously, trolling). I don't like the fact that when I post I open myself to braindead inflammatory retorts from people who just want to be jerks and don't have to be exposed as such. At least when I'm being an idiot, I have the courtesy to identify the source!
Of course I didn't mean that anyone had a natural right to earn a living producing unwanted goods. I was referencing, as you infer, the empowerment of congress to grant, for a limited time, etc upon which all (forgive me) IP law is founded. As far as I can tell, there's no natural right to "earn a living" doing anything indicated in the Constitution, but I'm not an expert, just some poor shmuck who's livelihood has depended for some years on the stipulation that intangible thoughts expressed can be converted into a paycheck.
creating an unnatural, artifical right for the purpose of promoting creation of useful works
Much of the law of the land is built upon these "unnatural" rights and "legal fictions", and I'll hazard to guess we'd have a hard time getting through much of our daily business without them.
Sure, the Congress could decide that music, plays, movies, software, et al are suddenly not "useful works" and just dismiss the whole concept of protecting expression as akin to property. What the hell! Wrecking whole sectors of the economy will be good for us in the long run right? Our law will be cleansed of all its fictions and we will have a pure society based on simple principles of fairness and basic human rights. Legal fiction or idealist fantasy, your call. I know there are guys sitting in their Montana gnome huts with their assault rifles that think this way, and I can respect their consistency. I get the impression from reading his other posts that the poster instructing the musicians to "get over it" is not in a gnome hole, however. He sounds to me like another whining twit with a hard drive full of P2P-acquired MP3s who thinks that he deserves to freely enjoy the works of creative people just because technology makes it possible. I don't buy the argument that P2P-trading is destroying the music industry, but it's not hard to see that if nobody pays for music, then a lot of music will not get made. Funny, it seems to me that people are not filling up their hard disks with the local folkies who give it away (oh, those noble souls!) but are pillaging the content of the very labels they rail against for producing pablum and denying our rights. What a load of full on rubbish...
This notion that copyright is just some fraud perpetrated against the public interest by greedy corporations is sputtering nonsense. It's understandable how people come to that conclusion, because of the dreadful recent history (at least since the Audio Home Recording Act of 1992, that's when I perked up and started paying attention) of law in this area. Nonetheless, claiming that a series of missteps by the Congress are reason to destroy the protections of creative works is dangerous and short-sighted. As I mentioned above, entire industries are built upon this protection and every step further into the future makes us more, not less, dependent on those industries as our primary economic base. To be sure, we need to be modernizing the copyright law, starting with making the terms shorter and guaranteeing that consumers' fair use rights are honored, but we do not serve that end by denying control of works from their creators.
Yep. I've recently licensed all of my recordings under an attribution, noncommercial cc license. If you peruse some of the other threads spawned from my reply, you'll see I have similar disdain for DMCA and recent abuses of copyright law. If anything, the exponential curve of technology, and the disposable nature of much of our modern creative works, makes it more sensible that terms should be shortened rather than lengthened.
I can't agree, though, that the first poster's intent was so innocent or insightful. That post was a belligerent, ignorant, vitriolic outburst about a topic the person either does not understand or has no respect for. His post was completely dismissive of any protections for musicians (and I assumed other creative people, though maybe he just hates musicians, who can say), taking a stance that just because we could all now wantonly duplicate their work, that it suddenly was without value.
Just because I don't cite the full chapter and verse in every post, which would get rather redundant, don't pedant off on me like I don't know what the Constitution or title 17 says. I know far more about it than I ever gave a damn to because this issue has come to plague my life at every turn. As a software engineer, musician, Internet user and mediaphile it affects me every day, and I see consumer rights suffering much more than those of the corporate copyright owners and their congressional hos currently pulling the law out of all proportion.
Nonetheless, I am not ready to throw away all protections, wisely provided for by the Constitution and the US Code, to creative works because it is now easy to copy and disseminate them. The argument that it is easy to break the law makes the law irrelevant is ridiculous, and I will continue to assert that whenever it is necessary...
Are you really so dim that you can't extrapolate the basics of the Constitution to the bodies of law derived from and tested against it, or are you just trolling me?
The Constitution says congress may pass laws to protect the rights of authors, which has long been interpreted to mean more than people who put words on paper but rather creators of any expressive work, to control redistribution of their works. This is how those authors make money or not according to (1) their own choice of what to do with their works and (2) whether or not a profitable market exists for those works.
The original poster's claim that people are not guaranteed a right to make money is disingenuous. It's implict message is that technology has made it easy to infringe copyright and we should now therefore dismiss with those protections and any economy created by it. It has fuck all, as you would say, whether or not anyone makes money because when people infringe copyrights they are denying the creators a right to control their work, a right created by law extending from an explicit charge in the Constitution.
You are right about one thing, though. Some people are morons. It is proven every day on this board and I thank you for the wonderful example...
And I find myself agreeing/disagreeing with aborchers again:) I think we'll find we end up agreeing forcefully...
Always a pleasure, doc.
Your comments on legal fictions draws out something I was thinking about, struggling with, ultimately failed to put into words and abandoned. You did so very effectively. Thanks for that. It seems to me that most of the law beyond the fundamentals (the US Code as opposed to the Constitution, the Leviticus as opposed to the Tablets) amounts to a set of fictions of one type or another that server good purposes for their time and context. Just recognizing them as fictions doesn't invalidate them as HeghmoH implied, though . He has a point that they need to be rethought (I have never defended the current state of "IP" laws, only the principles in which they are founded) but I don't extend that to all creative works shall be free because it's easy to copy them...
To make a few policy statements of my own in response to yours:
I'm in favor of technology and peer-to-peer networks, particularly Freenet.
Absolutely. They are critical to the evolution of human thought and communication. In the hands of honest people, there is no greater tool.
I think that the Internet, and ubiquitous communication, and with it ubiquitous self-education as this technology flows into the hands of the Third World, will do more to improve the general lot of mankind than most social programs of the 20th century.
ACK again. If you want to see me show my other face to the IP cartels, watch me go when they try to create policies that limit this growth.
Part of the reason I get so fired up about illicit filesharing and feel compelled to defend copyright is that I see abuses of the system being used to crack down on the technology rather than the offender. Creating a perception that the Internet is a haven for lawbreakers does a great disservice to its potential.
Here I have to note the difference between lawbreakers in the sense of "P2P Pirates" and lawbreakers as say, dissidents in repressive countries. I do not buy the argument that ripping and sharing the latest Brittney Spears is an act of civil disobedience.
I'm opposed to breaking laws, including those protecting copyrights. I've sold my music before for profit, and would like to do so again. However, I'm not opposed to changing laws.
Seems to be a common theme here that people who have actually worked in the creative sphere have a little more toleration for the existence of copyright, no?;-)
I think it's high time for us to re-evaluate copyright laws to make them more citizen-friendly, acknowledging the reality that making hundreds of millions of file-sharers into felons is not the correct approach.
Hell yes! Ask me if I think the terms of patents and copyrights should be shortened to synch up with our progressively disposable society. Again, do not conflate my defense of the principles of copyright protection with recent trends in law, which are an abomination!
I pride myself on trying to find a reasonable center on most issues. I don't think this makes me a moral relativist, but it does mean I tend to get beat up by both extremes for not being on their side.
Beating up others is what the extremes do best. It distracts from the fact that their own arguments are usually ridiculous.
I know that I tend to ramble. But half the fun of Slashdot is getting reamed for using "it's" instead of "its" or choosing a poor metaphor.
I've implanted at least one grammatical error and one typo in this post for precisely that reason!
Your statement is somewhat contradictory, as you first say that they don't have a right to make a living from something if nobody wants to buy it, then you imply that they do.
There is no contradiction. You aren't entitled to make a living, you are guaranteed a right to control, within certain limitatons, the reproduction of your creative works. By virtue of this protection, artists (to use a generic for all creators of intangible works) are guaranteed that they will be the primary beneficiaries (assuming they don't sell their rights to a record label or the like) of their work's reproduction.
Making a living from creative works requires that the right to copy them is retained. You don't have to make a living from creative work, you may give it away for free if you choose to do so, but as the creator you are given the right to make that choice. When someone else copies and redistributes your work without your permission, then they are violating that right and, likely, any opportunity you might have to profit from your work.
Let's say The Really Shitty Garage Band releases a homebrew CD and tries to sell it for $20/copy. Noone likes it and noone buys it and The Really Shitty Garage Band does not make a living from it. The Really Awesome Garage Band releases a homebrew CD and sells it for $5/copy. People love it and The Really Awesome Garage Band makes a decent living from their music. A perceived value in the creative work has created a market, and the creators have profited from it. Good for them. What copyrights do is ensure that if you produce something people want, that you will be compensated for it if that is what you desire and they think it is valuable enough to pay for. If one person buys the CD and releases it on the Internet without the band's permission, then that person has undermined the bands market, and potentially destroyed their opportunity to make the greenbacks that will finance their future work.
What is so unfathomable here? The Constitution's authors recognized that creative works are vital to society and promoting them by guaranteeing benefits to their creators to encourage their work benefits all of society in the long run. Now, the copyright industry is getting way out of line with their attempts to perpetuate eternal copyrights, because that undoes the social benefit of a vital public domain, but that is another topic altogether...
I can't believe this got modded insightful. It looks like a troll to me. Nonetheless, I'll bite.
There is no fundamental right to be able to earn a living by making music.
In the US there is. It's in the Constitution.
Unlike physical property, "intellectual" property is a total fiction of law. If technology makes that fiction untenable, perhaps it should be rethought.
No, it's not. It's an unfortunate and political renomenclature for what is collectively known as copyrights and patents, which as I mentioned above are provided for in the Constitution. To be sure, there are people who are looking to redefine the terms so that intellectual works are protected as strongly as physical property, and they're at odds with the Constitution and will ultimately fail if the system works, but your assertion that there is no right to make a living from creative works is on its face wrong as a point of law. People are not entitled to make a living producing things that other people don't want to buy (e.g. vacuum tubes) but they are entitled to a limited (in time and in terms) monopoly on their creative works.
Technology that makes it possible to duplicate and distribute those works cheaply does not invalidate that protection, it just makes breaking copyright laws easier. I'm generally not one for making the kind of specious analogies employed by the RIAA, but I think in this case your extremist position warrants one: Machine guns make it easier to kill people, does that mean the law against murder is obsolete? The idea that technology erases accountability to the law is absurd.
Carrying on out of genuine interest in the conversation, not just to maintain argument momentum...
if the legal system were fair, then the patent system would assist the small player. But it isn't
Spot on. The patent system is broken and the legal system is broken. What are the choices? Work to repair the system or give up? Just like spurious patents, we should be doing everything we can to ensure that the legal system favors justice and the law above the pocket depth of the litigants. As bad as it is, the protections of justice are better than what we would have in their absence: unregulated power winning every time.
Guess the last ounce of my naive optimism that society can be salvaged just hasn't been beaten out yet. Keep hammering...:-)
Was getting together with a guy from the cold line (I was a dishwasher) and walking out of a Mexican restaurant after telling the manager we were going in search of the perfect taco...
Skipping commercials in an automated fashion has NOTHING to do with copyrights
Why would you assume I thought it did? I was responding to a point about the "sharing" feature, as clearly indicated by the section of the post I quoted.
If you set up your site before Amazon, then that's prior art and it should easily invalidate the patent. I stand by my assertion that the reasons patents are a mess is because we have inspectors carelessly granting patents to vague or obvious ideas, and not because people can get patents for ideas without developing the products themselves.
If you think the system is so broken we'd be better off without it, consider that as bad as it is, patents still protect the little guy moreso than the megacorps. If it weren't for patent protection, then entrepenuereal inventors would have no chance of making anything of their ideas because it could be copied and commodified by those with the most on-hand resources. The Wal-marts and the GEs would soon own everything by virtue of the existing capital and infrastructure they could devote to competing anyone else out of business.
Please don't get the impression that I am defending these patent predators. They should be third against the wall when the revolution comes (right after Microsoft and RIAA) I just took issue with the notion that if you don't intend to build and market it yourself, you don't deserve to profit from your creative works.
that only demonstrates that the USPTO could be staffed by the crew from the local McDonald's and noone could tell the difference
That was precisely my point about rectocranial inversion at the patent office. The problem is that stupid patents are awarded, not that people can patent ideas without commiting to develop those ideas themselves.
You have some excellent points, much more lucid than those of the AC I was answering.
On the other hand, the vast majority of patents are owned by large corporations like Tyco. Precisely because the patent law allows for this sort of thing, these companies patent every brainfart their people have in order to protect it. How likely do you think it is that I, as a layman, could follow the public literature on Tyco and preemptively patent a product they were about to release? Seriously?
I agree the system would be better without litigous pudknockers engaging in patent speculation, but on the other hand, requiring honest inventors to develop their own ideas or lose them seems a high price to pay.
If I come up with the idea for some nifty new device, and can decribe it in sufficient detail to get a patent (assuming a non-rectocranially inverted patent office) then there is nothing wrong with me deciding whether to build it myself or license the idea to someone else to develop.
For example, let's say I came up with an idea to make electric trains stay firmly on the track. Why should I have to start a toy company and compete with Tyco when I could just sell or license the patent to them? They have the infrastructure and the market already, and can put the idea to good use at reasonable expense. It's a win-win-win situation for both of inventor, licensor and the market.
What's wrong with inventing something and then charging someone else to develop and market it? Think of it as being an independent R&D department.
What's wrong with the patent system is people getting patents for things that should not be patented, not that you don't have to build the item yourself to enjoy royalties from its invention.
You have an intriguing point about the lack of due diligence on the part of the cable companies. Remember it when they've implemented the broadcast flag.
As for the old Napster saw about how they were just an innocent filesharing network spoiled by bad users, the courts have ruled clearly that there is a difference between pure distributed P2P networks a'la Gnutella and centralized services like Napster. Napster was held responsible for what was on their network because they indexed it and therefore acted as a direct facilitator of the exchange, not just as a neutral technology provider. I am encouraged that the courts have had shown some good sense lately in distringuishing this difference.
and you're going to have a hard time convincing a judge that it's not a copyright violation to share shows
Because in most cases it is, perhaps?
I am an avowed enemy of the copyright cartel because of their heavy-handed tactics and their meddling with public policy and the tech industry. Nonetheless, if it weren't for people infringing their coprights, they wouldn't be wasting their time and money in these pursuits.
Every time I think about the fact that I don't have a legal DVD player for Linux or can't play my last (as in "most recent" as well as "final") major label CD purchase on my notebook computer, I want to pitch an entertainment industry copyright lawyer in the east river weighed down with the corpse of a "sharer"...
As a long time Linux system administrator, I feel that this is a sales tactic and that there really is no compelling reason for us to ever use the 'enterprise' version.
I don't think anyone has denied the possibility that their claims might be true. The criticism has been about how they have conducted themselves. If SCO wasn't run by a bunch of ligitous peckerheads, they would have announced the infringment and it would have been removed from the Linux code. However, they're more interested in flexing their FUD to either (a) extort whatever they can get from IBM et al, or (b) undermine the credibility of (non-SCO) Linux.
What this shows me is that OSS unfortunately lets jerks into the party as well as people who want to play fair and make a contribution to the community. These people better enjoy it while it lasts and hope for their big payday, cause they'll never eat lunch in this town again...
Slashdot Mirror
I finally set my filter to hide unmoderated posts by ACs because the signal to noise ratio was just so awful. I know I'm exploiting others who have to mod the ACs up, but apparently they have more time than I do.
Something I would like to see in
Much of the law of the land is built upon these "unnatural" rights and "legal fictions", and I'll hazard to guess we'd have a hard time getting through much of our daily business without them.
Sure, the Congress could decide that music, plays, movies, software, et al are suddenly not "useful works" and just dismiss the whole concept of protecting expression as akin to property. What the hell! Wrecking whole sectors of the economy will be good for us in the long run right? Our law will be cleansed of all its fictions and we will have a pure society based on simple principles of fairness and basic human rights. Legal fiction or idealist fantasy, your call. I know there are guys sitting in their Montana gnome huts with their assault rifles that think this way, and I can respect their consistency. I get the impression from reading his other posts that the poster instructing the musicians to "get over it" is not in a gnome hole, however. He sounds to me like another whining twit with a hard drive full of P2P-acquired MP3s who thinks that he deserves to freely enjoy the works of creative people just because technology makes it possible. I don't buy the argument that P2P-trading is destroying the music industry, but it's not hard to see that if nobody pays for music, then a lot of music will not get made. Funny, it seems to me that people are not filling up their hard disks with the local folkies who give it away (oh, those noble souls!) but are pillaging the content of the very labels they rail against for producing pablum and denying our rights. What a load of full on rubbish...
This notion that copyright is just some fraud perpetrated against the public interest by greedy corporations is sputtering nonsense. It's understandable how people come to that conclusion, because of the dreadful recent history (at least since the Audio Home Recording Act of 1992, that's when I perked up and started paying attention) of law in this area. Nonetheless, claiming that a series of missteps by the Congress are reason to destroy the protections of creative works is dangerous and short-sighted. As I mentioned above, entire industries are built upon this protection and every step further into the future makes us more, not less, dependent on those industries as our primary economic base. To be sure, we need to be modernizing the copyright law, starting with making the terms shorter and guaranteeing that consumers' fair use rights are honored, but we do not serve that end by denying control of works from their creators.
Um. You don't read slashdot that much, do you?
Yep. I've recently licensed all of my recordings under an attribution, noncommercial cc license. If you peruse some of the other threads spawned from my reply, you'll see I have similar disdain for DMCA and recent abuses of copyright law. If anything, the exponential curve of technology, and the disposable nature of much of our modern creative works, makes it more sensible that terms should be shortened rather than lengthened.
I can't agree, though, that the first poster's intent was so innocent or insightful. That post was a belligerent, ignorant, vitriolic outburst about a topic the person either does not understand or has no respect for. His post was completely dismissive of any protections for musicians (and I assumed other creative people, though maybe he just hates musicians, who can say), taking a stance that just because we could all now wantonly duplicate their work, that it suddenly was without value.
Just because I don't cite the full chapter and verse in every post, which would get rather redundant, don't pedant off on me like I don't know what the Constitution or title 17 says. I know far more about it than I ever gave a damn to because this issue has come to plague my life at every turn. As a software engineer, musician, Internet user and mediaphile it affects me every day, and I see consumer rights suffering much more than those of the corporate copyright owners and their congressional hos currently pulling the law out of all proportion.
Nonetheless, I am not ready to throw away all protections, wisely provided for by the Constitution and the US Code, to creative works because it is now easy to copy and disseminate them. The argument that it is easy to break the law makes the law irrelevant is ridiculous, and I will continue to assert that whenever it is necessary...
Are you really so dim that you can't extrapolate the basics of the Constitution to the bodies of law derived from and tested against it, or are you just trolling me?
The Constitution says congress may pass laws to protect the rights of authors, which has long been interpreted to mean more than people who put words on paper but rather creators of any expressive work, to control redistribution of their works. This is how those authors make money or not according to (1) their own choice of what to do with their works and (2) whether or not a profitable market exists for those works.
The original poster's claim that people are not guaranteed a right to make money is disingenuous. It's implict message is that technology has made it easy to infringe copyright and we should now therefore dismiss with those protections and any economy created by it. It has fuck all, as you would say, whether or not anyone makes money because when people infringe copyrights they are denying the creators a right to control their work, a right created by law extending from an explicit charge in the Constitution.
You are right about one thing, though. Some people are morons. It is proven every day on this board and I thank you for the wonderful example...
Always a pleasure, doc.
Your comments on legal fictions draws out something I was thinking about, struggling with, ultimately failed to put into words and abandoned. You did so very effectively. Thanks for that. It seems to me that most of the law beyond the fundamentals (the US Code as opposed to the Constitution, the Leviticus as opposed to the Tablets) amounts to a set of fictions of one type or another that server good purposes for their time and context. Just recognizing them as fictions doesn't invalidate them as HeghmoH implied, though . He has a point that they need to be rethought (I have never defended the current state of "IP" laws, only the principles in which they are founded) but I don't extend that to all creative works shall be free because it's easy to copy them...
To make a few policy statements of my own in response to yours:
Absolutely. They are critical to the evolution of human thought and communication. In the hands of honest people, there is no greater tool.
ACK again. If you want to see me show my other face to the IP cartels, watch me go when they try to create policies that limit this growth.
Part of the reason I get so fired up about illicit filesharing and feel compelled to defend copyright is that I see abuses of the system being used to crack down on the technology rather than the offender. Creating a perception that the Internet is a haven for lawbreakers does a great disservice to its potential.
Here I have to note the difference between lawbreakers in the sense of "P2P Pirates" and lawbreakers as say, dissidents in repressive countries. I do not buy the argument that ripping and sharing the latest Brittney Spears is an act of civil disobedience.
Seems to be a common theme here that people who have actually worked in the creative sphere have a little more toleration for the existence of copyright, no?
Hell yes! Ask me if I think the terms of patents and copyrights should be shortened to synch up with our progressively disposable society. Again, do not conflate my defense of the principles of copyright protection with recent trends in law, which are an abomination!
Beating up others is what the extremes do best. It distracts from the fact that their own arguments are usually ridiculous.
I've implanted at least one grammatical error and one typo in this post for precisely that reason!
There is no contradiction. You aren't entitled to make a living, you are guaranteed a right to control, within certain limitatons, the reproduction of your creative works. By virtue of this protection, artists (to use a generic for all creators of intangible works) are guaranteed that they will be the primary beneficiaries (assuming they don't sell their rights to a record label or the like) of their work's reproduction.
Making a living from creative works requires that the right to copy them is retained. You don't have to make a living from creative work, you may give it away for free if you choose to do so, but as the creator you are given the right to make that choice. When someone else copies and redistributes your work without your permission, then they are violating that right and, likely, any opportunity you might have to profit from your work.
Let's say The Really Shitty Garage Band releases a homebrew CD and tries to sell it for $20/copy. Noone likes it and noone buys it and The Really Shitty Garage Band does not make a living from it. The Really Awesome Garage Band releases a homebrew CD and sells it for $5/copy. People love it and The Really Awesome Garage Band makes a decent living from their music. A perceived value in the creative work has created a market, and the creators have profited from it. Good for them. What copyrights do is ensure that if you produce something people want, that you will be compensated for it if that is what you desire and they think it is valuable enough to pay for. If one person buys the CD and releases it on the Internet without the band's permission, then that person has undermined the bands market, and potentially destroyed their opportunity to make the greenbacks that will finance their future work.
What is so unfathomable here? The Constitution's authors recognized that creative works are vital to society and promoting them by guaranteeing benefits to their creators to encourage their work benefits all of society in the long run. Now, the copyright industry is getting way out of line with their attempts to perpetuate eternal copyrights, because that undoes the social benefit of a vital public domain, but that is another topic altogether...
In the US there is. It's in the Constitution.
No, it's not. It's an unfortunate and political renomenclature for what is collectively known as copyrights and patents, which as I mentioned above are provided for in the Constitution. To be sure, there are people who are looking to redefine the terms so that intellectual works are protected as strongly as physical property, and they're at odds with the Constitution and will ultimately fail if the system works, but your assertion that there is no right to make a living from creative works is on its face wrong as a point of law. People are not entitled to make a living producing things that other people don't want to buy (e.g. vacuum tubes) but they are entitled to a limited (in time and in terms) monopoly on their creative works.
Technology that makes it possible to duplicate and distribute those works cheaply does not invalidate that protection, it just makes breaking copyright laws easier. I'm generally not one for making the kind of specious analogies employed by the RIAA, but I think in this case your extremist position warrants one: Machine guns make it easier to kill people, does that mean the law against murder is obsolete? The idea that technology erases accountability to the law is absurd.
Spot on. The patent system is broken and the legal system is broken. What are the choices? Work to repair the system or give up? Just like spurious patents, we should be doing everything we can to ensure that the legal system favors justice and the law above the pocket depth of the litigants. As bad as it is, the protections of justice are better than what we would have in their absence: unregulated power winning every time.
Guess the last ounce of my naive optimism that society can be salvaged just hasn't been beaten out yet. Keep hammering...
Was getting together with a guy from the cold line (I was a dishwasher) and walking out of a Mexican restaurant after telling the manager we were going in search of the perfect taco...
Why would you assume I thought it did? I was responding to a point about the "sharing" feature, as clearly indicated by the section of the post I quoted.
Dang. Guess I'll have to weigh down my lawyers with spurious patent filings...
If you set up your site before Amazon, then that's prior art and it should easily invalidate the patent. I stand by my assertion that the reasons patents are a mess is because we have inspectors carelessly granting patents to vague or obvious ideas, and not because people can get patents for ideas without developing the products themselves.
If you think the system is so broken we'd be better off without it, consider that as bad as it is, patents still protect the little guy moreso than the megacorps. If it weren't for patent protection, then entrepenuereal inventors would have no chance of making anything of their ideas because it could be copied and commodified by those with the most on-hand resources. The Wal-marts and the GEs would soon own everything by virtue of the existing capital and infrastructure they could devote to competing anyone else out of business.
Please don't get the impression that I am defending these patent predators. They should be third against the wall when the revolution comes (right after Microsoft and RIAA) I just took issue with the notion that if you don't intend to build and market it yourself, you don't deserve to profit from your creative works.
That was precisely my point about rectocranial inversion at the patent office. The problem is that stupid patents are awarded, not that people can patent ideas without commiting to develop those ideas themselves.
You have some excellent points, much more lucid than those of the AC I was answering.
On the other hand, the vast majority of patents are owned by large corporations like Tyco. Precisely because the patent law allows for this sort of thing, these companies patent every brainfart their people have in order to protect it. How likely do you think it is that I, as a layman, could follow the public literature on Tyco and preemptively patent a product they were about to release? Seriously?
I agree the system would be better without litigous pudknockers engaging in patent speculation, but on the other hand, requiring honest inventors to develop their own ideas or lose them seems a high price to pay.
Again I ask: So?
If I come up with the idea for some nifty new device, and can decribe it in sufficient detail to get a patent (assuming a non-rectocranially inverted patent office) then there is nothing wrong with me deciding whether to build it myself or license the idea to someone else to develop.
For example, let's say I came up with an idea to make electric trains stay firmly on the track. Why should I have to start a toy company and compete with Tyco when I could just sell or license the patent to them? They have the infrastructure and the market already, and can put the idea to good use at reasonable expense. It's a win-win-win situation for both of inventor, licensor and the market.
What's wrong with inventing something and then charging someone else to develop and market it? Think of it as being an independent R&D department.
What's wrong with the patent system is people getting patents for things that should not be patented, not that you don't have to build the item yourself to enjoy royalties from its invention.
You have an intriguing point about the lack of due diligence on the part of the cable companies. Remember it when they've implemented the broadcast flag.
As for the old Napster saw about how they were just an innocent filesharing network spoiled by bad users, the courts have ruled clearly that there is a difference between pure distributed P2P networks a'la Gnutella and centralized services like Napster. Napster was held responsible for what was on their network because they indexed it and therefore acted as a direct facilitator of the exchange, not just as a neutral technology provider. I am encouraged that the courts have had shown some good sense lately in distringuishing this difference.
Because in most cases it is, perhaps?
I am an avowed enemy of the copyright cartel because of their heavy-handed tactics and their meddling with public policy and the tech industry. Nonetheless, if it weren't for people infringing their coprights, they wouldn't be wasting their time and money in these pursuits.
Every time I think about the fact that I don't have a legal DVD player for Linux or can't play my last (as in "most recent" as well as "final") major label CD purchase on my notebook computer, I want to pitch an entertainment industry copyright lawyer in the east river weighed down with the corpse of a "sharer"...
I wish I could have made that settlement. RIAA would have had to pay of my student loans!
I acknowledge your humor, and agree in your assessment of SCO, but:
80 lines in 5 minutes? I can only assume you are not a software engineer...
I don't think anyone has denied the possibility that their claims might be true. The criticism has been about how they have conducted themselves. If SCO wasn't run by a bunch of ligitous peckerheads, they would have announced the infringment and it would have been removed from the Linux code. However, they're more interested in flexing their FUD to either (a) extort whatever they can get from IBM et al, or (b) undermine the credibility of (non-SCO) Linux.
What this shows me is that OSS unfortunately lets jerks into the party as well as people who want to play fair and make a contribution to the community. These people better enjoy it while it lasts and hope for their big payday, cause they'll never eat lunch in this town again...