Thanks for the vote of confidence. It occurred to me that I might have been over-optimistic in assuming that the "public policy" referred to the Progress Clause, though. (I'm worried that maybe it makes too much sense to be true.) Could it be referring simply to the intent of the copyright law itself? The scenario described in Lasercomb sounds to me like "misuse" even by that standard, with no need to appeal to the Constitution.
A worse thought: could the Lasercomb argument be applied against, say, the GPL (which also uses the value of the copyrighted material as the carrot to persuade you to agree to terms outside the normal scope of copyright law)? Dunno, but I still prefer my original interpretation, and would love to see it applied to patents too.
Carey's ocean-liner/seagull analogy is nice, but what really caught my eye was this bit in the Groklaw article about the test for "copyright misuse":
Lasercomb America, Inc. v. Reynolds
The Fourth Circuit was the first to explicitly recognize a copyright misuse defense, Lasercomb America Inc. v. Reynolds, 911 F.2d 970 (4th Cir. 1990), though the Supreme Court previously acknowledged the possible existence of the defense. See Morton Salt Co. v. G. S. Suppiger, 314 U.S. 488, 494 (1942). Lasercomb brought an action against defendant Holiday Steel, alleging that Holiday Steel copied its die-making software and sold it under a different name. Lasercomb, 911 F.2d at 971-2. On appeal, Holiday Steel did not dispute copying Lasercomb's software, but argued that Lasercomb misused its copyright by including a broad non-compete clause in its standard licensing agreement. Id. at 972. Lasercomb's agreement forbade a licensee from developing any kind of computer assisted die-making software. Id. at 973. The court held that Lasercomb's licensing agreement attempted to control any expression by Holiday Steel of the underlying idea embodied in Lasercomb's software. Id. at 979. Because the idea was outside the scope of the copyright monopoly, the court found that Lasercomb's licensing agreement constituted copyright misuse. Id. Lasercomb devised the following test for copyright misuse. The critical question is not whether an antitrust violation occurred, but "whether the copyright is being used in a manner violative of the public policy embodied in the grant of a copyright."
I assume "the public policy embodied in the grant of a copyright" would be referring to the Progress Clause ("To Promote the Progress of Science and the useful Arts") of the Constitution. We rant about this principle all the time here on Slashdot, but I think this is the first time I've seen it expressed in a judicial context, i.e., a sign that "The System" actually remembers that the entire purpose and justification of Copyright (and all "Intellectual Property") is to Promote Progress, and that any use of an IP right that can be shown instead to Hinder Progress is Unconstitutional. Is there any similar doctrine of "patent misuse", or could this argument be used to justify establishing it?
When it comes down to it, at some level, you're gonna have to trust someone. Might as well be the entity at the bottom - that'd be Intel, at the hardware level.
Along the same lines, I guess somebody should post this -- lest all the 5+-digit-UID kiddies grow up thinking they can trust their C compilers.
It's something that real climatologists are considering... but they're certainly not of the opinion that it will suddenly and dramatically flip the global warming to global cooling... unless you consider a decade or two fast.
Dunno 'bout you, but as someone who hopes to live for more than another two decades, I most certainly do consider that "fast". Some people even have kids, and care about their prospects, as well as their own.
That said, the idea that it would happen literally overnight, as in the movie version, is nothing short of idiotic.
the Tenderloin is a district in San Francisco (and perhaps other cities) with, shall we say, a somewhat seedy reputation.
Just to further clarify: It's the area where most of the hookers wear size 13 shoes. To pass along a very important safety tip I learned from a retired SFPD cop: "When in doubt, check the feet." (Easier to spot than the Adam's apple.)
Which there are plenty of slowly expiring in vats of frozen nitrogen at fertility clinics around the world.
Hate to break it to you, but those people consider your blastocyst to be a living breathing baby. [...] Most of them don't mind harvesting 'stem cells' from any source that still results in a born baby (umbilical cords, for example).
Okay, I'm not saying you missed the point of the GP post -- I understand that you're just speaking for "those people". So would you mind answering one more argument on behalf of "them"? It's something that I've never heard an embryonic-stem-cell opponent answer, and I'm dying to hear what "they" would say. Here it is (worded in second person):
Did you miss the part about the "vats of frozen nitrogen at fertility clinics"? I mean, it's not like scientists are driving around poor neighborhoods, picking up pregnant teenaged girls, and persuading them to have abortions by offering to buy their embryos. No! Nobody would support that! These are the excess embryos created at fertility clinics in the course of in-vitro fertilization. Now, I understand that a right-to-life purist might still consider those excess embryos to be human babies, but in that case, you'd have to oppose IVF treatments every bit as vehemently as abortion.
Funny, I don't recall ever hearing of anti-abortionists picketing (or bombing) those clinics. So, is IVF okay or not? If it's not, then why aren't you opposing it to the same degree as abortion? Or if it is, then WTF is wrong with embryonic stem cells?
Heh. Yes, I suppose I should have specified that by "you", I was referring to a normal citizen, operating within the law. That was, after all, the context of the post to which I replied --- but then again, I'm not sure why any of us would assume that such restrictions would apply to a corporation. Except... that was the whole point of this article, wasn't it?
It's like protecting your home. I can set up alarms and locks, I can buy a gun. I -can't- tie a gun to a trap and set it up to kill a criminal who breaks in.
Indeed. You also can't go on an indiscriminate shooting spree in a nearby poor neighborhood, reasoning that you're just protecting your home by killing the "potential burglars" who otherwise might, at some time in the future, have tried to rob you.
I think that's a closer analogy to what Sony did: damaging all their customers' computers on the premise that some of them might have attempted to copy the CDs.
although Feynman eventually did manage to get $1 for the idea of a nuclear submarine...
Heh. Though of course, while you could call that story an example of an inventor being screwed out of his IP rights by the government, I'd say it's more an example of patents being granted frivolously.
As I recall, the way he told it was that, after the Manhattan Project was done, Feynman was asked if he could think of any other (i.e., non-bomb) applications for atomic energy. He replied by listing, off the top of his head, a bunch of "things that use energy". He later found that he'd been granted, for each $X in his list, a patent on "an atomic-powered $X".
Kinda puts "1-click shopping" to shame, huh? In a way, it's heartening -- at least the USPTO's willingness to grant patents on vague ideas, without even requiring them to have been implemented first, is nothing new.
If it has two or more last names, as opposed to, say, one first name and one last name, that's a good hint that it is in fact not a human being, but an entity known as a "law firm". So "it" is indeed the correct pronoun by which to refer to it.
Wow. And I used to think C was frightening when I discovered the fun you can have with a program that takes command-line arguments when you start making recursive calls to main().
Tell that to my grandmother who doesn't even know how to select text in a text box or push the backspace key.
I'm guessing she doesn't know how to write an entire web browser from scratch either. Fortunately, she doesn't need to, because there are other people who do have those skills and can do it for her.
Those same people could also go a bit further and pre-configure the browser to install itself in a (reasonably) secure setup. I don't mean just the application itself; I'm talking about making all those system-configuration tasks you mentioned happen automatically as part of the install process.
I'm pretty sure the Rio500 mp3 player that I bought in... um... 1998? 1999?...had a very similar hierarchical menu interface. If I can find it and if it still works, I can check.
the earth will be fine, now and long after humans are wiped from the planet.
I agree completely. We couldn't wipe out life on earth if we dedicated all our efforts to it. It's that last part that I'm worried about.
Exactly -- the ecosystem as a whole is in much less danger than humanity specifically. Plus, a slogan like "Save the Planet" is no way to market a political message. The problem with appealing to a voter's sense of altruism is that you're assuming he has one; appealing to his sense of self-interest is a much safer bet. That's why, to be both more scientifically accurate and more politically effective, the slogan should be changed to:
BWAHAHAHA! You actually PAY for the watered-down soda and stale popcorn? Sheesh, my girlfriend and I usually hit the local grocer/wallmart/meijer, put some bin candy in a bag, buy water/soda, and sneak it into the theater.
Better yet: if you try it, you might find that you're capable of surviving for two hours without ingesting any junk food at all.
Slashdot Mirror
Thanks for the vote of confidence. It occurred to me that I might have been over-optimistic in assuming that the "public policy" referred to the Progress Clause, though. (I'm worried that maybe it makes too much sense to be true.) Could it be referring simply to the intent of the copyright law itself? The scenario described in Lasercomb sounds to me like "misuse" even by that standard, with no need to appeal to the Constitution.
A worse thought: could the Lasercomb argument be applied against, say, the GPL (which also uses the value of the copyrighted material as the carrot to persuade you to agree to terms outside the normal scope of copyright law)? Dunno, but I still prefer my original interpretation, and would love to see it applied to patents too.
Carey's ocean-liner/seagull analogy is nice, but what really caught my eye was this bit in the Groklaw article about the test for "copyright misuse":
I assume "the public policy embodied in the grant of a copyright" would be referring to the Progress Clause ("To Promote the Progress of Science and the useful Arts") of the Constitution. We rant about this principle all the time here on Slashdot, but I think this is the first time I've seen it expressed in a judicial context, i.e., a sign that "The System" actually remembers that the entire purpose and justification of Copyright (and all "Intellectual Property") is to Promote Progress, and that any use of an IP right that can be shown instead to Hinder Progress is Unconstitutional. Is there any similar doctrine of "patent misuse", or could this argument be used to justify establishing it?
They should have used OpenBSD.
Dude. Hank is so gonna kick your ass for posting that, as soon as you leave town. Karl told me so.
When it comes down to it, at some level, you're gonna have to trust someone. Might as well be the entity at the bottom - that'd be Intel, at the hardware level.
Along the same lines, I guess somebody should post this -- lest all the 5+-digit-UID kiddies grow up thinking they can trust their C compilers.
It's something that real climatologists are considering... but they're certainly not of the opinion that it will suddenly and dramatically flip the global warming to global cooling... unless you consider a decade or two fast.
Dunno 'bout you, but as someone who hopes to live for more than another two decades, I most certainly do consider that "fast". Some people even have kids, and care about their prospects, as well as their own.
That said, the idea that it would happen literally overnight, as in the movie version, is nothing short of idiotic.
Sometimes seventeen
syllables aren't enough to
express a complete
web browsers are mighty big hammers now, but many problems still aren't nails.
Well said. But still, any variant on the hammer/nail saying requires me to invoke my own version:
the Tenderloin is a district in San Francisco (and perhaps other cities) with, shall we say, a somewhat seedy reputation.
Just to further clarify: It's the area where most of the hookers wear size 13 shoes. To pass along a very important safety tip I learned from a retired SFPD cop: "When in doubt, check the feet." (Easier to spot than the Adam's apple.)
Okay, I'm not saying you missed the point of the GP post -- I understand that you're just speaking for "those people". So would you mind answering one more argument on behalf of "them"? It's something that I've never heard an embryonic-stem-cell opponent answer, and I'm dying to hear what "they" would say. Here it is (worded in second person):
Did you miss the part about the "vats of frozen nitrogen at fertility clinics"? I mean, it's not like scientists are driving around poor neighborhoods, picking up pregnant teenaged girls, and persuading them to have abortions by offering to buy their embryos. No! Nobody would support that! These are the excess embryos created at fertility clinics in the course of in-vitro fertilization. Now, I understand that a right-to-life purist might still consider those excess embryos to be human babies, but in that case, you'd have to oppose IVF treatments every bit as vehemently as abortion.
Funny, I don't recall ever hearing of anti-abortionists picketing (or bombing) those clinics. So, is IVF okay or not? If it's not, then why aren't you opposing it to the same degree as abortion? Or if it is, then WTF is wrong with embryonic stem cells?
Heh. Yes, I suppose I should have specified that by "you", I was referring to a normal citizen, operating within the law. That was, after all, the context of the post to which I replied --- but then again, I'm not sure why any of us would assume that such restrictions would apply to a corporation. Except... that was the whole point of this article, wasn't it?
It's like protecting your home. I can set up alarms and locks, I can buy a gun. I -can't- tie a gun to a trap and set it up to kill a criminal who breaks in.
Indeed. You also can't go on an indiscriminate shooting spree in a nearby poor neighborhood, reasoning that you're just protecting your home by killing the "potential burglars" who otherwise might, at some time in the future, have tried to rob you.
I think that's a closer analogy to what Sony did: damaging all their customers' computers on the premise that some of them might have attempted to copy the CDs.
although Feynman eventually did manage to get $1 for the idea of a nuclear submarine...
Heh. Though of course, while you could call that story an example of an inventor being screwed out of his IP rights by the government, I'd say it's more an example of patents being granted frivolously.
As I recall, the way he told it was that, after the Manhattan Project was done, Feynman was asked if he could think of any other (i.e., non-bomb) applications for atomic energy. He replied by listing, off the top of his head, a bunch of "things that use energy". He later found that he'd been granted, for each $X in his list, a patent on "an atomic-powered $X".
Kinda puts "1-click shopping" to shame, huh? In a way, it's heartening -- at least the USPTO's willingness to grant patents on vague ideas, without even requiring them to have been implemented first, is nothing new.
"I have never, honestly, thrown a chair in my life."
-- Steve Ballmer
I just added this to my quote file, and I'd like to humbly suggest that it'd make a great QOTD for Slashdot. (Taco?)
If it has two or more last names, as opposed to, say, one first name and one last name, that's a good hint that it is in fact not a human being, but an entity known as a "law firm". So "it" is indeed the correct pronoun by which to refer to it.
Wow. And I used to think C was frightening when I discovered the fun you can have with a program that takes command-line arguments when you start making recursive calls to main().
And just what's wrong with that?
I envision such a system could be seriously robust and would possibly withstand a nuclear attack.
Wow, sounds like something that could be of great strategic military value. I wonder if the DOD would be interested in developing this idea...?
My One True Way does not have to agree with yours.
Absolutely right. Unless of course we're talking about indent/brace style. Anything other than Allman style with 4-space tabs is an abomination.
Tell that to my grandmother who doesn't even know how to select text in a text box or push the backspace key.
I'm guessing she doesn't know how to write an entire web browser from scratch either. Fortunately, she doesn't need to, because there are other people who do have those skills and can do it for her.
Those same people could also go a bit further and pre-configure the browser to install itself in a (reasonably) secure setup. I don't mean just the application itself; I'm talking about making all those system-configuration tasks you mentioned happen automatically as part of the install process.
That was great. :)
...Yeah -- they hate that.
A good joke, but he should work on his delivery. It's:
My recollection of being an undergrad was that I didn't have to take math/science courses if I didn't choose to (i.e., liberal arts student).
Yes, but what we're worrying about here is our nation's ability to educate its young people, not teach them liberal arts.
I don't think you failed not to avoid being unclear.
I'm pretty sure the Rio500 mp3 player that I bought in... um... 1998? 1999?
Exactly -- the ecosystem as a whole is in much less danger than humanity specifically. Plus, a slogan like "Save the Planet" is no way to market a political message. The problem with appealing to a voter's sense of altruism is that you're assuming he has one; appealing to his sense of self-interest is a much safer bet. That's why, to be both more scientifically accurate and more politically effective, the slogan should be changed to:
Save the Humans!
BWAHAHAHA! You actually PAY for the watered-down soda and stale popcorn? Sheesh, my girlfriend and I usually hit the local grocer/wallmart/meijer, put some bin candy in a bag, buy water/soda, and sneak it into the theater.
Better yet: if you try it, you might find that you're capable of surviving for two hours without ingesting any junk food at all.