Woops - just pressed Submit instead of Preview. Here's the rest of my reply:
Just wanted to add that I agree with you completely about the idea of rights. Only in an anrchy are rights absolute (you do whatever the hell you like, but so does everyone else). In fact, the most difficult point that has to be addressed by government is that of conflict of rights. My right to free speech is limited by your right not to be slandered.
On the other hand, I believe that the present balance of rights, especially as far as freedom of knowledge and expression are concerned, is very pro-corporation and anti-community and individual. It appears that today's capitalistic society views the benefits of large corporations and individual greed as sufficiently important to outweigh the loss of freedom associated with many of these laws.
Laws should be made to create a happy sane society, not just an economically successful one.
A patent does more than just prevent you from using somebody else's invention. It also prevents you from using your own invention if somebody else came up with it independently and patented it first. Of course, by releasing details to the patented process, it often doesn't even give you the chance to think of it yourself.
I'd much rather have a company rely on obscurity to protect their inventions, and allow me to code anything I think of, safe from patents that I didn't know existed.
Of course, I'd prefer it even more if the company decided to publicise the information that it came up with (after a certain period of time, say) as this would be the optimal game-theoretic state for everyone.
Let's give them the benefit of the doubt for a moment and assume that they have a legitimate non-obvious patent claim here. Then from a practical point of view, wouldn't it be great if we could persuade them to allow use of the patent in all free (speech) software projects. It would aid their PR, and would still protect them from people like Altavista. Note that due to the very nature of patents, this would enforce a form of copyleft on any software using their patent - making the software non-free would impinge the patent licensing agreement.
I might add that this is simply a practical compromise to the situation, and not a general solution for patents. If anyone here were ever to patent anything, then I would strongly recommend them to put the patent in the intelectual public domain. Patenting, unlike copyright, takes away more that just the right to someone's work - it takes away the right to someone's thoughts. Now whether you live in RMS's communist (from community) society or ESR's anarchist one, this impinges on your basic communal/individual freedoms and is hence a Bad Thing.
Still, until we can persuade the (US) government that software patents in their present form don't work -- and many of the upcoming court cases should hopefully help us do that -- approaching the company involved seems to be the only alternative to putting our head in the sand and hoping they don't see us.
In an ideal world the server would send only essential input to the client (e.g. a sequence of 2D images) and request only actual output from it (e.g. key/mouse-strokes). All calculations would take place at the server-end. Hence all interactions would be legal, which would prevent all forms of cheating - except skill, or a client-side bot with human limitations.
Unfortunately, this is clearly impractical wrt bandwidth. So instead one ends up sending more information to clients (e.g. the present universe state) and receiving more back (e.g. a chunk of the future universe state), letting them do all the calculations in between. Malicious clients can use this for 'extra knowledge' such as seeing through walls, and 'extra power' such as rockets that don't miss.
One way of dealing with these is:
1. All information arriving from the client is audited once in a while. That is, the client is required to 'show the working' as it were and send the actual output. Of course, if no actual output would produce the client's chosen future state (or if calculating such an output is impractical) then the client is well and truly buggered.
2. Occasionally, data sent to the client is sent with misleading information. That is, chunks of the present universe state which should have no effect on the desired output (e.g. hidden characters) are replaced with whatever the server feels like. This will not prevent the client from trying to use 'extra-knowledge', but will counteract most of the benefits by providing an inconsistent environment, and will probably piss the cheat off enough for him to give up.
As a sidenote, does anyone know if someone's tried writing a client-side bot that uses just visual input? Would make a darn interesting alternative to handwriting and face recognition...
Slashdot Mirror
Woops - just pressed Submit instead of Preview. Here's the rest of my reply:
Just wanted to add that I agree with you completely about the idea of rights. Only in an anrchy are rights absolute (you do whatever the hell you like, but so does everyone else). In fact, the most difficult point that has to be addressed by government is that of conflict of rights. My right to free speech is limited by your right not to be slandered.
On the other hand, I believe that the present balance of rights, especially as far as freedom of knowledge and expression are concerned, is very pro-corporation and anti-community and individual. It appears that today's capitalistic society views the benefits of large corporations and individual greed as sufficiently important to outweigh the loss of freedom associated with many of these laws.
Laws should be made to create a happy sane society, not just an economically successful one.
A patent does more than just prevent you from using somebody else's invention. It also prevents you from using your own invention if somebody else came up with it independently and patented it first. Of course, by releasing details to the patented process, it often doesn't even give you the chance to think of it yourself.
I'd much rather have a company rely on obscurity to protect their inventions, and allow me to code anything I think of, safe from patents that I didn't know existed.
Of course, I'd prefer it even more if the company decided to publicise the information that it came up with (after a certain period of time, say) as this would be the optimal game-theoretic state for everyone.
Let's give them the benefit of the doubt for a moment and assume that they have a legitimate non-obvious patent claim here. Then from a practical point of view, wouldn't it be great if we could persuade them to allow use of the patent in all free (speech) software projects. It would aid their PR, and would still protect them from people like Altavista. Note that due to the very nature of patents, this would enforce a form of copyleft on any software using their patent - making the software non-free would impinge the patent licensing agreement.
I might add that this is simply a practical compromise to the situation, and not a general solution for patents. If anyone here were ever to patent anything, then I would strongly recommend them to put the patent in the intelectual public domain. Patenting, unlike copyright, takes away more that just the right to someone's work - it takes away the right to someone's thoughts. Now whether you live in RMS's communist (from community) society or ESR's anarchist one, this impinges on your basic communal/individual freedoms and is hence a Bad Thing.
Still, until we can persuade the (US) government that software patents in their present form don't work -- and many of the upcoming court cases should hopefully help us do that -- approaching the company involved seems to be the only alternative to putting our head in the sand and hoping they don't see us.
In an ideal world the server would send only essential input to the client (e.g. a sequence of 2D images) and request only actual output from it (e.g. key/mouse-strokes). All calculations would take place at the server-end. Hence all interactions would be legal, which would prevent all forms of cheating - except skill, or a client-side bot with human limitations.
Unfortunately, this is clearly impractical wrt bandwidth. So instead one ends up sending more information to clients (e.g. the present universe state) and receiving more back (e.g. a chunk of the future universe state), letting them do all the calculations in between. Malicious clients can use this for 'extra knowledge' such as seeing through walls, and 'extra power' such as rockets that don't miss.
One way of dealing with these is:
1. All information arriving from the client is audited once in a while. That is, the client is required to 'show the working' as it were and send the actual output. Of course, if no actual output would produce the client's chosen future state (or if calculating such an output is impractical) then the client is well and truly buggered.
2. Occasionally, data sent to the client is sent with misleading information. That is, chunks of the present universe state which should have no effect on the desired output (e.g. hidden characters) are replaced with whatever the server feels like. This will not prevent the client from trying to use 'extra-knowledge', but will counteract most of the benefits by providing an inconsistent environment, and will probably piss the cheat off enough for him to give up.
As a sidenote, does anyone know if someone's tried writing a client-side bot that uses just visual input? Would make a darn interesting alternative to handwriting and face recognition...
1. e2-e4 | c7-c5
2. g1-e2 | b8-c6
3. a2-a4 | c6-b4
4. a1-a2 | d8-a5
5. d2-d4 | b4-a2
Presto ?!