This links to a website in which a private guy touts his own research. There are a few references to publications by others but the alleged "discoverer" doesn't seem to have published any articles. If this was legit he'd have plenty of paper in Nature, Science, PRL, Phys Rev A etc. Can't the editors exercise a modicum of common sense?
You seem to think that Intel was the only party who paid for the research. Who do you think paid to build the building? Who pays for the electricity costs? Who pays most fo the guy's salary?
Intel gave this guy some research money. They could (and should) have insisted to at least partial rights to the fruits of the research. But if they didn't then the loss is theirs.
Patents last for 17 years; product cycles in software are about 3. In other words, software ideas (even with complete source code) are usually worth zero after 17 years. In fact, almost all software ideas have the following characteristics:
They are directly useful to the inventor, in the software he writes.
The idea improves a small component in a large system. No product will turn specifically on the feature improved by this idea.
The product containing the new idea also contains many more ideas, most of them due to people other than the inventor.
Taken together, these mean that there is no need for software patents at all: people would invent software ideas all the time, even without patent protection (they did so for decades in the past), and they would benefit from them monetarily. Moreover, disclosing your software idea "for free" doesn't lose you much (this idea is not what makes your product unique) and gains you a lot -- it gains you all the ideas that everybody else discloses. The incentive to keep software ideas secret is so low that there is simply no need for patents to force disclosure.
Could you imagine teaching a course by saying "Everyone bring in some kind of physics textbook"?
Actually, the syllabus for my course basically says that, except "physics" should be replaced with "abstract algebra". You see, all these textbooks cover the same material in slightly different ways. Students should use the one they like, not the one the professor happens to like. For physics the situation is the same: the syllabus should say "everyone bring a basic quantum mechanics textbook" or "everybody brings a thermodynamics textbook" or "everyone bring an advanced electromagnetism textbook". Most topics in each fields are standard and covered in all the textbooks; if a small part of the course is about a special topic that's only covered by one book, the students can use the reserve copy in the library -- there's no need for all of them to buy the book.
Seems to me that anything - books, medical procedures and devices, pharmaceuticals, etc. - belong to the public and we should not have to pay for them...
Whoa -- not so fast. The government usually pays for fundamental research, and when it does the public should be able to freely use the fruits of the research. This means the right to read the research papers, see the data, and use any resulting inventions (i.e. practice resulting patents). However, getting from the fundamental research to the actual product usually requires more investment that is not government-funded -- and unless we make it possible for the people who put up the capital for this stage to profit they will not invest.
For a hypothetical, assume that NIH-funded doctors discover that a particular plant extract improves survival rates from heart disease. They should have to make their research article freely available to the public (probably after a year's delay allowing research journals to profit -- this is to fund the refereeing system). They should also have to make their data available to the public so we can check the results. Note however, that knowing that the extract is useful is not the same as having a life-saving drug. Someone has to come up with an industrial process to manufacture the drug, establish appropriate dosages and safety levels and so on. Every drug company (they are members of the public too!) should be able to now use this publicly available knowledge to try make a drug. If they succeed we should give them patent protection for a while so they can recover the investment in their part of the work. Other drug companies should be able to use the public knowledge too, as long as they invent new drugs.
Assign reading based on a specific book rather than based on the material to be learned.
Assign problems by reference to the book so the student can't know what the homework problems are without a copy of the book.
I consciously try to avoid these problems in my courses, but that is far from typical, and not always possible. Assigning problems directly out of textbooks is the the main facilitator for "edition creep": the publishers keep publishing new editions where they simply adjust the problems. Students could learn the material fine from the old edition, but they must have the newest edition in order to solve the correct "problem 7 on page 53".
If the public pays for the writing of the textbook, the textbook should be released under a free license. This doesn't preclude the author selling copies.
If the author pays for the writing of the textbook, the author should get a monopoly on the printing of the textbook to recoup his investment.
Either is fine by me. If the public opts for the discount by paying up-front, they shouldn't be forced to also pay via the instalment plan.
Part of the problem, I think, is the fact that the RIAA are abusing the copyright bargain, while the BSA are not. In most places copyright (quite properly) is not a "moral right". It is a voluntary concession on the side of the general public in order to encourage authors to publish, for the public's benefit. The public clearly wishes to be able to privately share music, create new mixes and share these too. Would this discourage the production of music? since nearly all musicians make their money from live performances with the recordings basically serving as advertizing, the answer is no. Thus changing the terms of the bargain (allowing for free private non-commercial dealing in at least some kinds of works) is the right things to do. Moreover, the public seems to treat commercial and non-commercial use of copyrighted works differently; copyright law basically assumes that infringement will only happen on a large commercial scale (hence you can get statutory damages of $150K per work infringed without proving actual damages [this requires proving "wilful infringement" which seems easy in practice).
The BSA thus follows the model the public likes. In fact, they like some level of private copying: they recognize that not every illegal copy equals a lost sale, and would rather entrench their products (especially Microsoft with their OS monopoly) with customers who would otherwise not pay for them. Just like college students with "illegal" copies of professional software suites on their home computers will in the future buy this expensive software once they have a job (that's the software they are used to, after all), I'm sure that many college students will buy music CDs once they have the income to do so. Until then giving them "free samples" is the way to go.
They can easily enforce their policy by physically throwing you out of the stadium. It might be legal too: the fine print on the ticket will say that by using it to enter the building you agree to the policy. In fact, they may have a good case for trespass against you if you violate the policy: their house -- their rules.
I doubt they'll successfully sue anyone for damages, but the threat of stadium security throwing you out is bad enough.
Patents are only granted on "inventions" and one essential ingredient of invention is novelty. In 1996 Blackboard released software with certain capabilities; it is thus impossible for them to have invented these ideas in 1999. According to the court, by 1999 the ideas claimed in the patent were already known to everyone, and weren't novel. Blackboard was trying to claim that the new patent had additional capabilities (that is, novel ideas) but the court rejected that argument.
Well, I'm saying that the Court might say it is patentable. Similar "business method" patents have been allowed. Personally, I think algorithms (a) should not be patentable and (b) are not patentable under current law, even when the patent says "what we invented is the combination of an algorithm and a general-purpose computer, where the general-purpose computer runs the algorithm". Not being on the CAFC, however, my opinions on what is patentable under current law don't really count.
This is clearly an attempt to patent laws of nature and mental processes -- they claim to have patented the correlation of metabolite levels with toxicity, and the "business method" of thinking about adjusting the dosage of a class of drugs based on a particular kind of test result. Hopefully this will be thrown out. I wonder, however, what the court would say had the patent been for a specific algorithm for changing the dosage, implemented as a computer program. I suspect the "pure mental process" would suddenly become a patentable machine.
I would ask why we care that Wikipedia didn't print the current location and status of a reporter when it is neither germain to the rest of the information about him nor of particular immediate interest.
You seem to miss the point: this isn't about my right to "know". This is about the way Wikipedia works. The Wikimedia foundation is normally not in the business of writing an encyclopaedia. They are in the business of managing a large number of free-lance contributors who actually write the articles. When the NYT management decides not to write about something, they send all employees a memo. They don't mind the employees knowing what it's all about -- it should just stay out of the paper. Obviously Wikimedia couldn't send a memo "please don't report on this person's kidnapping". Instead, they actively edited the article to reflect their editorial judgement. This is unusual exactly because they don't normally edit the articles. They arrange for hosting, write the software, determine project-wide editorial policies and resolve disputes. But they don't actually write encyclopaedia entries. Wikipedia would never have gotten off the group if these people were the ones to write the articles, and today the project will grind to a halt if Wikimedia staff has to personally police various articles which concern various ongoing emergencies.
Again: this isn't about our right to know. This is about Wikimedia putting an effort to help this particular person, where it's clear that they cannot help everyone equally situated. It may be wise to adpot a project-wide policy: "no mention of kidnappings while they are ongoing" and leave the actual implementations to the editors and admins. It would be foolish to rely on Foundation staff to try to implement such a policy alone.
If Rohde became a cause celebre, the people holding him might be tempted to do a Daniel Pearl style execution for the publicity.
That may very well be the case -- but your rationale is not specific to kidnapped journalists. The real question here, which should be addressed to both Wikipedia and the New York Times is: why censor news regarding this particular kidnapping, when your general policy is the exact opposite, of detailed reporting on every kidnapping case you hear about?
I find the news of Mr. Wales officially participating in the cover-up quite disturbing. Wikimedia foundation simply does not have the resources to police Wikipedia in this way for all alleged victims of crime. Thus, why were Wikipedia resources spent on this particular case?
Not having a way of "identifying a person uniquely" means that people can choose their own identity. For law-abiding citizens this is not a bad thing. I'm sure India has private ways for establishing identity similar to the ones that existed in the west for a while -- checkbooks come to mind.
For the provision of government benefits, it should be enough for people to register at the government office. For private transactions, most cases involve people with bank accounts, so they have other ways to prove their identity.
The easiest way is using the "keywords" META tag which I'm sure is used by most explicit sites to self-identify.
The problem of determining the semantic content of a site (not to speak of interpreting images) is hard, but "Safe searches" of various kinds have been around for a long time so I'm sure there's been some progress on the text processing side. I doubt computer vision has reached the stage when it's easy to identify a nude.
Offering bounties is a great approach to finding bugs in your code. The crackers are taking quite a legal risk, however -- what if the owner of the computer decided that they "exceeded the hacking authorization"?
"Al-jabr" is one of laws for manipulating algebraic expressions. The man was named Al-Khawarizi, and from his name we derive a different word -- "Algorithm".
The BBC specifically is funded by taxing UK citizens who own TV sets. It thus makes sense for them to restrict some offering to the UK -- just to the paying customers, as it were.
Hulu and such are funded by ads. The only reason they are US-only is the way distribution rights for movies are subdivided by the rights-holders (the movie studios). In other words, the "domestic" (US) and "international" (non-US) rights are usually sold separately. In particular, Hulu only has a license to stream to people in the US, but it is entirely due to the wishes of the movie studios and not because Hulu couldn't get paying (i.e. ad-watching) customers outside the US.
Netflix can send physical DVDs anywhere in the world they want (they own the physical DVD after all). Whether streaming the movie requires a license or not is complicated, but as long as it does the studios will control that too. If Netflix is showing you a film based on a physical DVD they own then they probably don't need an extra license.
If Mr. Oppenheimer has been the RIAA's attorney (meaning agent only) then there has to have been someone at the RIAA giving him directions and telling him what to do. Basically the RIAA is trying to hold both ends of the stick: when you ask the RIAA: "who's the person who can speak for the corporation about this litigation", they say it's Mr. Oppenheimer. When you then say "Ok, can I ask Mr. Oppenheimer some questions?" they say: no, he's actually our lawyer so he can't tell you anything.
Say the RIAA sues someone. This means they gathered evidence etc. But the RIAA is not an actual human, just a "legal person". So some human employee of the RIAA must be able to testify to things like "we told our investigators to look for X" or "this is how much money we lost due to this alleged infringement". The RIAA is trying to claim that the employee who knows all this stuff is at the same time the RIAA's lawyer, so he only knows this stuff as their attorney and can't testify to it. It's a clever way to avoid having to present their case.
If I sue you, I can't hide my claims against you on the theory that my thoughts about these claims are part of my legal representation. This is the case even if I'm a lawyer. The RIAA is trying to do just that by employing a lawyer intermediary between the RIAA itself and the legal team representing them: First, the RIAA generates "evidence". Then the RIAA gives the evidence to the intermediary lawyer, and also charges him with making all the decisions for the corporation. Finally, the intermediary becomes the "client" for the actual legal team. This way the real client is shielded from discovery: all their contributions to the lawsuit were done through their "client-attorney" relationship with the intermediary. It's a thing of beauty, but I suspect it's not legal.
Slashdot Mirror
This links to a website in which a private guy touts his own research. There are a few references to publications by others but the alleged "discoverer" doesn't seem to have published any articles. If this was legit he'd have plenty of paper in Nature, Science, PRL, Phys Rev A etc. Can't the editors exercise a modicum of common sense?
I think it's obligatory to reference Asimov in any story about robo-bees.
You seem to think that Intel was the only party who paid for the research. Who do you think paid to build the building? Who pays for the electricity costs? Who pays most fo the guy's salary?
Intel gave this guy some research money. They could (and should) have insisted to at least partial rights to the fruits of the research. But if they didn't then the loss is theirs.
Patents last for 17 years; product cycles in software are about 3. In other words, software ideas (even with complete source code) are usually worth zero after 17 years. In fact, almost all software ideas have the following characteristics:
Taken together, these mean that there is no need for software patents at all: people would invent software ideas all the time, even without patent protection (they did so for decades in the past), and they would benefit from them monetarily. Moreover, disclosing your software idea "for free" doesn't lose you much (this idea is not what makes your product unique) and gains you a lot -- it gains you all the ideas that everybody else discloses. The incentive to keep software ideas secret is so low that there is simply no need for patents to force disclosure.
Actually, the syllabus for my course basically says that, except "physics" should be replaced with "abstract algebra". You see, all these textbooks cover the same material in slightly different ways. Students should use the one they like, not the one the professor happens to like. For physics the situation is the same: the syllabus should say "everyone bring a basic quantum mechanics textbook" or "everybody brings a thermodynamics textbook" or "everyone bring an advanced electromagnetism textbook". Most topics in each fields are standard and covered in all the textbooks; if a small part of the course is about a special topic that's only covered by one book, the students can use the reserve copy in the library -- there's no need for all of them to buy the book.
Whoa -- not so fast. The government usually pays for fundamental research, and when it does the public should be able to freely use the fruits of the research. This means the right to read the research papers, see the data, and use any resulting inventions (i.e. practice resulting patents). However, getting from the fundamental research to the actual product usually requires more investment that is not government-funded -- and unless we make it possible for the people who put up the capital for this stage to profit they will not invest.
For a hypothetical, assume that NIH-funded doctors discover that a particular plant extract improves survival rates from heart disease. They should have to make their research article freely available to the public (probably after a year's delay allowing research journals to profit -- this is to fund the refereeing system). They should also have to make their data available to the public so we can check the results. Note however, that knowing that the extract is useful is not the same as having a life-saving drug. Someone has to come up with an industrial process to manufacture the drug, establish appropriate dosages and safety levels and so on. Every drug company (they are members of the public too!) should be able to now use this publicly available knowledge to try make a drug. If they succeed we should give them patent protection for a while so they can recover the investment in their part of the work. Other drug companies should be able to use the public knowledge too, as long as they invent new drugs.
I consciously try to avoid these problems in my courses, but that is far from typical, and not always possible. Assigning problems directly out of textbooks is the the main facilitator for "edition creep": the publishers keep publishing new editions where they simply adjust the problems. Students could learn the material fine from the old edition, but they must have the newest edition in order to solve the correct "problem 7 on page 53".
Either is fine by me. If the public opts for the discount by paying up-front, they shouldn't be forced to also pay via the instalment plan.
Part of the problem, I think, is the fact that the RIAA are abusing the copyright bargain, while the BSA are not. In most places copyright (quite properly) is not a "moral right". It is a voluntary concession on the side of the general public in order to encourage authors to publish, for the public's benefit. The public clearly wishes to be able to privately share music, create new mixes and share these too. Would this discourage the production of music? since nearly all musicians make their money from live performances with the recordings basically serving as advertizing, the answer is no. Thus changing the terms of the bargain (allowing for free private non-commercial dealing in at least some kinds of works) is the right things to do. Moreover, the public seems to treat commercial and non-commercial use of copyrighted works differently; copyright law basically assumes that infringement will only happen on a large commercial scale (hence you can get statutory damages of $150K per work infringed without proving actual damages [this requires proving "wilful infringement" which seems easy in practice). The BSA thus follows the model the public likes. In fact, they like some level of private copying: they recognize that not every illegal copy equals a lost sale, and would rather entrench their products (especially Microsoft with their OS monopoly) with customers who would otherwise not pay for them. Just like college students with "illegal" copies of professional software suites on their home computers will in the future buy this expensive software once they have a job (that's the software they are used to, after all), I'm sure that many college students will buy music CDs once they have the income to do so. Until then giving them "free samples" is the way to go.
They can easily enforce their policy by physically throwing you out of the stadium. It might be legal too: the fine print on the ticket will say that by using it to enter the building you agree to the policy. In fact, they may have a good case for trespass against you if you violate the policy: their house -- their rules. I doubt they'll successfully sue anyone for damages, but the threat of stadium security throwing you out is bad enough.
Patents are only granted on "inventions" and one essential ingredient of invention is novelty. In 1996 Blackboard released software with certain capabilities; it is thus impossible for them to have invented these ideas in 1999. According to the court, by 1999 the ideas claimed in the patent were already known to everyone, and weren't novel. Blackboard was trying to claim that the new patent had additional capabilities (that is, novel ideas) but the court rejected that argument.
Well, I'm saying that the Court might say it is patentable. Similar "business method" patents have been allowed. Personally, I think algorithms (a) should not be patentable and (b) are not patentable under current law, even when the patent says "what we invented is the combination of an algorithm and a general-purpose computer, where the general-purpose computer runs the algorithm". Not being on the CAFC, however, my opinions on what is patentable under current law don't really count.
This is clearly an attempt to patent laws of nature and mental processes -- they claim to have patented the correlation of metabolite levels with toxicity, and the "business method" of thinking about adjusting the dosage of a class of drugs based on a particular kind of test result. Hopefully this will be thrown out. I wonder, however, what the court would say had the patent been for a specific algorithm for changing the dosage, implemented as a computer program. I suspect the "pure mental process" would suddenly become a patentable machine.
I would ask why we care that Wikipedia didn't print the current location and status of a reporter when it is neither germain to the rest of the information about him nor of particular immediate interest.
You seem to miss the point: this isn't about my right to "know". This is about the way Wikipedia works. The Wikimedia foundation is normally not in the business of writing an encyclopaedia. They are in the business of managing a large number of free-lance contributors who actually write the articles. When the NYT management decides not to write about something, they send all employees a memo. They don't mind the employees knowing what it's all about -- it should just stay out of the paper. Obviously Wikimedia couldn't send a memo "please don't report on this person's kidnapping". Instead, they actively edited the article to reflect their editorial judgement. This is unusual exactly because they don't normally edit the articles. They arrange for hosting, write the software, determine project-wide editorial policies and resolve disputes. But they don't actually write encyclopaedia entries. Wikipedia would never have gotten off the group if these people were the ones to write the articles, and today the project will grind to a halt if Wikimedia staff has to personally police various articles which concern various ongoing emergencies.
Again: this isn't about our right to know. This is about Wikimedia putting an effort to help this particular person, where it's clear that they cannot help everyone equally situated. It may be wise to adpot a project-wide policy: "no mention of kidnappings while they are ongoing" and leave the actual implementations to the editors and admins. It would be foolish to rely on Foundation staff to try to implement such a policy alone.
If Rohde became a cause celebre, the people holding him might be tempted to do a Daniel Pearl style execution for the publicity.
That may very well be the case -- but your rationale is not specific to kidnapped journalists. The real question here, which should be addressed to both Wikipedia and the New York Times is: why censor news regarding this particular kidnapping, when your general policy is the exact opposite, of detailed reporting on every kidnapping case you hear about?
I find the news of Mr. Wales officially participating in the cover-up quite disturbing. Wikimedia foundation simply does not have the resources to police Wikipedia in this way for all alleged victims of crime. Thus, why were Wikipedia resources spent on this particular case?
Not having a way of "identifying a person uniquely" means that people can choose their own identity. For law-abiding citizens this is not a bad thing. I'm sure India has private ways for establishing identity similar to the ones that existed in the west for a while -- checkbooks come to mind. For the provision of government benefits, it should be enough for people to register at the government office. For private transactions, most cases involve people with bank accounts, so they have other ways to prove their identity.
The easiest way is using the "keywords" META tag which I'm sure is used by most explicit sites to self-identify. The problem of determining the semantic content of a site (not to speak of interpreting images) is hard, but "Safe searches" of various kinds have been around for a long time so I'm sure there's been some progress on the text processing side. I doubt computer vision has reached the stage when it's easy to identify a nude.
Offering bounties is a great approach to finding bugs in your code. The crackers are taking quite a legal risk, however -- what if the owner of the computer decided that they "exceeded the hacking authorization"?
"Al-jabr" is one of laws for manipulating algebraic expressions. The man was named Al-Khawarizi, and from his name we derive a different word -- "Algorithm".
The BBC specifically is funded by taxing UK citizens who own TV sets. It thus makes sense for them to restrict some offering to the UK -- just to the paying customers, as it were.
Hulu and such are funded by ads. The only reason they are US-only is the way distribution rights for movies are subdivided by the rights-holders (the movie studios). In other words, the "domestic" (US) and "international" (non-US) rights are usually sold separately. In particular, Hulu only has a license to stream to people in the US, but it is entirely due to the wishes of the movie studios and not because Hulu couldn't get paying (i.e. ad-watching) customers outside the US.
Netflix can send physical DVDs anywhere in the world they want (they own the physical DVD after all). Whether streaming the movie requires a license or not is complicated, but as long as it does the studios will control that too. If Netflix is showing you a film based on a physical DVD they own then they probably don't need an extra license.
Disclaimer: IANAL
Strike one for those who believe that not every dispute should be resolved in court, and not every resolution must involve money damages.
If Mr. Oppenheimer has been the RIAA's attorney (meaning agent only) then there has to have been someone at the RIAA giving him directions and telling him what to do. Basically the RIAA is trying to hold both ends of the stick: when you ask the RIAA: "who's the person who can speak for the corporation about this litigation", they say it's Mr. Oppenheimer. When you then say "Ok, can I ask Mr. Oppenheimer some questions?" they say: no, he's actually our lawyer so he can't tell you anything.
Say the RIAA sues someone. This means they gathered evidence etc. But the RIAA is not an actual human, just a "legal person". So some human employee of the RIAA must be able to testify to things like "we told our investigators to look for X" or "this is how much money we lost due to this alleged infringement". The RIAA is trying to claim that the employee who knows all this stuff is at the same time the RIAA's lawyer, so he only knows this stuff as their attorney and can't testify to it. It's a clever way to avoid having to present their case.
If I sue you, I can't hide my claims against you on the theory that my thoughts about these claims are part of my legal representation. This is the case even if I'm a lawyer. The RIAA is trying to do just that by employing a lawyer intermediary between the RIAA itself and the legal team representing them: First, the RIAA generates "evidence". Then the RIAA gives the evidence to the intermediary lawyer, and also charges him with making all the decisions for the corporation. Finally, the intermediary becomes the "client" for the actual legal team. This way the real client is shielded from discovery: all their contributions to the lawsuit were done through their "client-attorney" relationship with the intermediary. It's a thing of beauty, but I suspect it's not legal.
The internet is large. One out of every 5000 sites is a lot. Cut your losses and run while you can.