Re:Remember this past Democratic Primary?
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The 5% is a compromise, based on the fact that it is already codified into our laws: if you get 5% of the "popular vote" in one election, you get federal matching funds in the next.
That sucks. It's way the heck easier to subdivide money than it is to subdivide time in debates. 15% sounds like a good criteria to me--if in four years you can't get more than 15% of people to care about you, maybe you aren't worth further attention.
On the other hand, if everyone is so hung up on the difference between federal matching fund rules and debate eligibility, why not TRULY bring both of them in sync--lower debate eligibility to 5% but offer MATCHING TIME--the more popular candidates should receive more time than 5% also-rans.
Not fair? Do you think politics works anything like baseball?
No, I think a debate is similar enough to baseball games--or contests in general--to make my analogy valid. Think of the season up until the debates as the baseball season, and the debates themselves as the world series.
No one except your straw man is arguing for lowering the bar *that* low.
Well, everyone keeps saying 5%. That's pretty freaking low--a theoretical maximum of 20 candidates. So what they're saying is even LOWER than my straw man. Which wasn't really a straw man--it's not like the Democratic primary debates (or the 1996 Republican primary debates) were imaginary.
And if a candidate comes roaring out from the wee digits in the polls after the debates... isn't that a glorious thing? How is that in any way unfair?
It's not unfair that you roar out to the front, what's unfair is that you only had single digits and you expected equal debate time with other candidates running 30, 40, or 50 or 60 percent.
It sounds like you want a much more complicated, time consuming debate--which is cool, but if that's the case, it sounds to me like all the more reason we need to exclude single-digit candidates.
Of course, hiring enough decent teachers costs money - and a lot of idiots seem to think that there is _no_ connection between paying taxes & a decent educational system. Either that, or they figure that it's a waste of _their_ money to paying to educate other peoples' kids
It's even harder than this, though. Hiring more quality teachers requires no just money, but consistent money. Occasionally some state or another has gone on a hiring binge in a desperate attempt to lower classroom size--but it never works out, because the supply of teachers can't keep pace with a radical spike in the number of teachers--so the state ends up hiring whoever-the-hell, and surprise, surprise, the results are terrible. Now maybe if they would raise hiring rates and keep them high long enough to train new teachers that would work, but alas, consistency is not a hobgoblin feared by democracies.
Remember this past Democratic Primary?
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· Score: 2, Insightful
This is an awful idea. Doesn't anyone remember the Democratic debates we just suffered through? They'd have ten people up there--half of which were clearly just up there for publicity (all the ones who didn't have Senator, Governor, or General in front of their name were just shameless attention grabbers with no hope of winning) and you'd only hear about five minutes each from the candidates who were serious about running. It was a complete waste of their energy and the viewer's time. I'm sorry, but in a country of 270 million people, there is simply no possible way to hear from every single idiot who wants to be president. Debates are not supposed to be excuses to get your name out or for radicals to "send a message" to the establishment--it's how we pick the leader of the United States of America.
While Kerry is certainly infinitely better than Bush, I think a lot of Democrats are starting to rethink their belief that he was the most electable candidate in the pack--and no wonder, they only listened to him talk for five minutes, with a soundbite or two on the evening news every day.
Sure, I hate the two party system--but that hatred does not extend to two-person debates. I mean, they don't invite every single baseball team to the World Series, do they? It's not fair to rely on the debates at the end of the election season to boost yourself out of single-digit territory.
It's trivial to take any mistake any political figure has made, find some similar mistake made in the past, and complain that the figure in question has forgotten it. The problem is that the lessons of history are always contradictory--when you hear someone say "never again", do they mean Bush and Vietnam, or Bush's opponents and the appeasement of Hitler? For any action you want to advocate we take, you'll always be able to find some historical comparison that favors your action.
This is not to say that all history is bunk and all positions are equally defendable--but it IS to say that evaluating modern positions in historical context is subjective--as in Bayesian probability. And subjective implies biased.
And bias is completely taboo in schools--as soon as you admit to bias, then one side or the other is suing the crap out of your school board. And with good reason--it's not exceptable for our schools to act as propaganda mills for children.
And so the only option left is for schools to focus on objective yet useless facts--memorizing sequences of names, dates, places. Useless everywhere in the world outside game shows.
The solution is for schools to refrain from teaching history, but to begin teaching history research. History education should be dominated by students researching assigned topics on their own and drawing their own conclusions. Teachers should teach what happened, but how to find out what happened.
I also think history is extremely different from foreign language, music, or math, in that there is no critical need to teach history while minds are still growing. If anything, we become more receptive to reading about history as we grow older. The same is probably true for reading literature--though possibly not writing literature. And while I'm ranting, I think a summary knowledge of statistics--especially differentiating between correlation and causation--is the "need to know" area of knowledge most lacking in our schools. Very rarely do students receive education in this area, but it would probably benefit students even more than history, economics, and civics combined.
But while I do agree there are some "need to know" things, I think what the schools fail to realize is that if you teach me something, but in the process cause me to hate learning about that something, then chances are I'm going to forget it or at least not pursue it any further. In retrospect, I *DO* wish that I'd studied more history and literature, things that I was not interested in during my youth. But it's not because I know more now than I did back then--it's because schools worked extremely hard to pound any desire to learn about those things out of me. I love reading, and I love reading history and fiction--but I hate memorizing dates.
As others say, it's not just schools that are to blame--it's a consumerist culture that throws us into peer groups that discourage learning. I think the effect of our peers is greater than the effect of our teachers on our education--let me ask you, when you were a kid whose opinion did you value more?
It's an open question whether software is a natural monopoly. It does have the high fixed costs (programming) and low marginal costs (CD burning) that we associate with natural monopolies like utility companies. But on the other hand software products tend to compete on feature sets rather than price--and rarely does a product offer a superset of their competitor's features. Especially when some of these features are tradeoffs with other features (like mysql's speed vs. postgresql's feature set) . And other features are sociological rather than technical--a foreign government might be more trusting of OSS or domestically produced software than of a foreign corporation's software.
A prohibition of patents for publically funded research sounds like a good idea, but wouldn't the NIH probably have to pay way more than $700 million to make Taxol develop the drug if Taxol could not patent it?
My Mozilla has that but I have to right click on the desktop to get display properties, settings, display resolution, move the slider to the left, BEHOLD! And no bilinear filtering bluriness!;)
Even though Microsoft has become dominant, really the Internet is a lot more friendly to non-IE browsers than it was a couple of years ago. Very rarely do I come across a Mozilla incompatible page.
Now, the story will likely change very drastically once Longhorn hits us with.NET, Avalon, and XAML. You may know these technologies as Java, Quartz, and XUL--the innovation is not the technology, but the fact that they will all be comibined--and in a browser with 90% market share. Unless Mono works out as well as it hopes, we may end up with a huge increase in the portion of web accessible only to Internet Explorer.
At some point we might realize that software is a natural monopoly just like utilities, and may need to be regulated as such--or at least the main competitor (open source) will need subsidy.
Maybe undecideable is just the wrong word. If you take all number theory knowledge of human civilization--or all civilizations in our physical universe--and create an axiomatic proof system encompassing all of that, there are certainly going to be a lot of true statements that are not provable in that system, right? P!=NP and the Riemann hypothesis could be such statements, I suppose.
Proving that P!=NP is unprovable would be proving that it is true. Any algorithm that does NP work in P time is a proof that P=NP. If you prove that no such proof exists, then you've proven that P!=NP. I suppose its possible that P!=NP is unprovable--but you cannot prove that it is unprovable. I think.
He doesn't "reveal" that he uses Firefox either. Nowhere in the article does it state such.
This whimsical exaggeration actually obscures a more subtle point--yeah, he said in the article that he updated Firefox, which implies that he uses it--but to say "he uses Firefox" suggests that uses it as his primary browser, when in reality he's probably just checking on what the competition is doing. But, even if you were trolling as others accuse you of, you were right about the 10 year time line--"secure" is a term somewhat relative to your competion--chances are, Windows, Linux, and Mac will still have security problems 10 years from now, though perhaps fewer of them.
I'm a huge Firefox and Mozilla fan, but I agree the blurb submitted to slashdot was somewhat of a misrepresentation, though in it's defense it may have been intended as a joke.
"We're just not going to listen to what you tell us to do. Go ahead, arrest all of us- you'll run out of jails before we run out of protestors."
Err...right, but the American model usually adds lots of concealment, secrecy, trickery, and violence to the mix, to further inconvenience the arresting officer. I never met the man, but I don't get the feeling Gandhi would reger to police officers as pigs.
Unless you want to claim that bootleggers were following the Gandhi model. (oh ho, now who is the one who gets the quadruple question mark of disbelief????;) ) Prohibition seems like the closest historical analog to the current *AA situation.
Gandhi's struggle against the British was heroic, successful, admirable, and extremely inspiring, but pragmatically America's struggle against the British worked just as well--remember the Boston Tea Party? How the colonists dressed up as Indians to conceal their identity? How they destroyed British property and concealed that destruction? The Gandhi model is not the only model for social change. We Americans tend to prefer the Prohibition era "You pigs can't arrest us all!" method.
I confess to being woefully ignorant of American law (I'm American), but I don't think you can get a court appointed attorney for civil suits, like these RIAA cases.
I'm vastly more ignorant of Canadian healthcare, but I was under the impression that when they say "socialized medicine" up there, they aren't pussy-footing around like John Kerry--the fees a doctor can charge are set by the goverment. So "socialized law" would mean all lawyers charge the same rates and serve all clients equally, I suppose. It's a nice idea, and the grandparent is correct that it makes vastly more sense than socialized medicine (though I think socialized medicine itself makes a lot of sense relative to the current double-digit-inflation American system). You could even make a pretty good libertarian (not anarchist) case for it.
But it breaks down, because the government itself is a party to lawsuits frequently. There's a serious conflict of interest in giving the government that much power over the lawyers who may be called upon to challenge the government.
On the other hand, the status quo seems completely unworkable as well. Forget whatever views of intellectual property you have--here we have huge corporate interests setting their full legal weight against regular individuals, not just to stop them from doing something, but to make an example of them. That's, well, totally fucked.
Not at all, it's a corralary. The first example shows what could happen if an inventor were forced to defend every incurson. The second shows how by not haveing to defend every incursion the inventor can restrict his fights to the ones that matter without risk of losing the patent.
Exactly, they're corralaries for my point of view--either the patents are worthless because they can't be enforced against large corporations, or they're worthless because they can ONLY be enforced on large corporations.
In any event, it's completely moot, because under a "defend it or lose it" system, you could still just give permission to whoever you wanted--but you would have to do so explicitly, on paper. I'm not saying you should be forced to sue in court over it--that's a position that makes no logical sense unless we also combine it with some sort of mandatory patent licensing scheme (which might also be a good idea).
If it can be proven that you knew someone was violating your patent, but chose to neither give notice of your permission to use your patent (perhaps for a limited period of time until you decide you can afford to sue) or insist that the violator cease their activity, then you ought to lose the patent, because you DO have a bad motivation--you want to have a submarine patent. You shouldn't have to sue every violator, but you SHOULD have to make the decision whether or not to sue immediately.
Small businesses create 13-14 times as many patents per employee as large ones, and those patents are twice as likely to be cited in other patents.
A useless statistic--who cares how many are created per employee? Further, I wonder if this statistic is inflated by the existence of lawyer driven patent extorters--Eolas is no garage inventor.
Perhaps the fees are affordable, but the enforcement is so difficult that the $10,000 isn't worth paying unless you have teams of lawyers to defend yourself.
As for not being enforced, that's where the current system is very effective. Since the inventor doesn't have to sue everybody who violates his rights to mantain his patent, he can choose to only go after companies with enough money to make a prosecution profitable.
We should note that this is a reversal from your previous complaint: "I wouldn't want to be the person to tell an inventor that he just lost the right to 5 years worth of work because he lacked the money to immediately sue the large company who simply copied his published patent."
Besides, if you really don't want to sue them in an enforcement-required regime, you could always just mail them short-term licensing for your patent and consider it enforced, so your whole argument here is based on a false premise. Garage inventor submarine patents are just as immoral as major corporation submarine patents.
Read the interview. "Abbie Sommer: Good question. The demo issue is a perfect example of how we are trying to help prevent the games from getting put onto P2P networks before or on the day of release."
So, no, if the determined experts manage to upload it to usenet or p2p networks, then by their own admission they have failed.
The transaction costs aren't relevant to the existence of a maxima, only its location.
Exactly. And the location of this maxima is "no enforcement at all."
The output of the "maximized efficiency" is decreased by the existence of enforcement mechanisms, but it's still the maximum output.
Incorrect, the cost of enforcement mechanisms mean that a different set of rules with fewer enforcement costs could and probably do produce the new maximum output.
By your logic, legal systems to prevent murder are doomed to failure, too, because lawyers and cops cost too much.
This is only true if the costs of lawyers and cops really do cost too much--you have to actually go out into the real world and find that out for yourself.
It makes a good argument that this is so because the problem that copyright solves -- the disparity between cost of creation and cost of distribution for creative works -- is an economic problem at the core.
But it never provides a resolution for this problem, because no resolution--even in theory--is possible. Allowing works widest distribution causes least incentive to produce (according to autistic economics), and there's no way around that in theory. In practice, it looks even worse. The paper fails from an economic point of view because it ignores transaction costs with completely change the location of maxima, which invalidates the points that it makes.
Actually, it's a moderately good idea. An incredibly good idea would be to eliminate software patents.
Patents on the other hand automatically expire after 20 years. There's no need to have a "defend it or lose it" because they're going to lose it anyway. Be patient.
The problem is that any given product uses a whole bunch of technologies intertwined. So you could have a situation where you have to wait until a technology expires, then a new patent on a related technology is released and you have to wait 20 more years, and in the worst case you end up reducing the amount of progress of civilization by 20 fold or more. This is especially true in software.
I wouldn't want to be the person to tell an inventor that he just lost the right to 5 years worth of work because he lacked the money to immediately sue the large company who simply copied his published patent.
Look me up. I'll tell that guy. You go tell all the American (and Austrialian?) programmers why it's going to become impossible to write software in a few years unless the system is seriously changed.
Patents, even legitimate ones, are basically just tools for large corporations anyway. Garage inventors can't afford the fees anyway--and what good is the patent if they aren't going to be able to enforce it? Whether he or she lets the corporations get away with it, or loses the patent for lack of enforcement, the patent gets copied anyway. Your argument is self defeating.
Why would it not be practical for a business with a patent to list everyone to whome they've given permission to use the patent? There would be no 'theoretically' about it--someone should have to provide documented proof that Eolas and Microsoft had such a deal in that case.
This totally fails to take into account transaction costs of the legal system and other copyright protections. You can create a legal system that always rules infavor of maximized efficiency--the goal of this paper--but only if you ignore the costs of that system. In reality, the costs of legal representation outweigh the both the value and cost of the vast majority of creative work transactions. If I write a book, and someone sues me for taking ideas from their book, the value of both our books is probably dwarfed by the salaries of the lawyers required to defend our claims. All this talk of "perfect price discrimination" is in economic fantasy land--a world of perfect information and costless legal systems. Indeed, one might wonder if the government economists have a vested interest in ignoring the costs of legal compliance.
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That sucks. It's way the heck easier to subdivide money than it is to subdivide time in debates. 15% sounds like a good criteria to me--if in four years you can't get more than 15% of people to care about you, maybe you aren't worth further attention.
On the other hand, if everyone is so hung up on the difference between federal matching fund rules and debate eligibility, why not TRULY bring both of them in sync--lower debate eligibility to 5% but offer MATCHING TIME--the more popular candidates should receive more time than 5% also-rans.
No, I think a debate is similar enough to baseball games--or contests in general--to make my analogy valid. Think of the season up until the debates as the baseball season, and the debates themselves as the world series.
No one except your straw man is arguing for lowering the bar *that* low.
Well, everyone keeps saying 5%. That's pretty freaking low--a theoretical maximum of 20 candidates. So what they're saying is even LOWER than my straw man. Which wasn't really a straw man--it's not like the Democratic primary debates (or the 1996 Republican primary debates) were imaginary.
And if a candidate comes roaring out from the wee digits in the polls after the debates... isn't that a glorious thing? How is that in any way unfair?
It's not unfair that you roar out to the front, what's unfair is that you only had single digits and you expected equal debate time with other candidates running 30, 40, or 50 or 60 percent.
It sounds like you want a much more complicated, time consuming debate--which is cool, but if that's the case, it sounds to me like all the more reason we need to exclude single-digit candidates.
It's even harder than this, though. Hiring more quality teachers requires no just money, but consistent money. Occasionally some state or another has gone on a hiring binge in a desperate attempt to lower classroom size--but it never works out, because the supply of teachers can't keep pace with a radical spike in the number of teachers--so the state ends up hiring whoever-the-hell, and surprise, surprise, the results are terrible. Now maybe if they would raise hiring rates and keep them high long enough to train new teachers that would work, but alas, consistency is not a hobgoblin feared by democracies.
While Kerry is certainly infinitely better than Bush, I think a lot of Democrats are starting to rethink their belief that he was the most electable candidate in the pack--and no wonder, they only listened to him talk for five minutes, with a soundbite or two on the evening news every day.
Sure, I hate the two party system--but that hatred does not extend to two-person debates. I mean, they don't invite every single baseball team to the World Series, do they? It's not fair to rely on the debates at the end of the election season to boost yourself out of single-digit territory.
This is not to say that all history is bunk and all positions are equally defendable--but it IS to say that evaluating modern positions in historical context is subjective--as in Bayesian probability. And subjective implies biased.
And bias is completely taboo in schools--as soon as you admit to bias, then one side or the other is suing the crap out of your school board. And with good reason--it's not exceptable for our schools to act as propaganda mills for children.
And so the only option left is for schools to focus on objective yet useless facts--memorizing sequences of names, dates, places. Useless everywhere in the world outside game shows.
The solution is for schools to refrain from teaching history, but to begin teaching history research. History education should be dominated by students researching assigned topics on their own and drawing their own conclusions. Teachers should teach what happened, but how to find out what happened.
I also think history is extremely different from foreign language, music, or math, in that there is no critical need to teach history while minds are still growing. If anything, we become more receptive to reading about history as we grow older. The same is probably true for reading literature--though possibly not writing literature. And while I'm ranting, I think a summary knowledge of statistics--especially differentiating between correlation and causation--is the "need to know" area of knowledge most lacking in our schools. Very rarely do students receive education in this area, but it would probably benefit students even more than history, economics, and civics combined.
But while I do agree there are some "need to know" things, I think what the schools fail to realize is that if you teach me something, but in the process cause me to hate learning about that something, then chances are I'm going to forget it or at least not pursue it any further. In retrospect, I *DO* wish that I'd studied more history and literature, things that I was not interested in during my youth. But it's not because I know more now than I did back then--it's because schools worked extremely hard to pound any desire to learn about those things out of me. I love reading, and I love reading history and fiction--but I hate memorizing dates.
As others say, it's not just schools that are to blame--it's a consumerist culture that throws us into peer groups that discourage learning. I think the effect of our peers is greater than the effect of our teachers on our education--let me ask you, when you were a kid whose opinion did you value more?
It's an open question whether software is a natural monopoly. It does have the high fixed costs (programming) and low marginal costs (CD burning) that we associate with natural monopolies like utility companies. But on the other hand software products tend to compete on feature sets rather than price--and rarely does a product offer a superset of their competitor's features. Especially when some of these features are tradeoffs with other features (like mysql's speed vs. postgresql's feature set) . And other features are sociological rather than technical--a foreign government might be more trusting of OSS or domestically produced software than of a foreign corporation's software.
I think you have the "Toast It" virus.
A prohibition of patents for publically funded research sounds like a good idea, but wouldn't the NIH probably have to pay way more than $700 million to make Taxol develop the drug if Taxol could not patent it?
My Mozilla has that but I have to right click on the desktop to get display properties, settings, display resolution, move the slider to the left, BEHOLD! And no bilinear filtering bluriness! ;)
Now, the story will likely change very drastically once Longhorn hits us with .NET, Avalon, and XAML. You may know these technologies as Java, Quartz, and XUL--the innovation is not the technology, but the fact that they will all be comibined--and in a browser with 90% market share. Unless Mono works out as well as it hopes, we may end up with a huge increase in the portion of web accessible only to Internet Explorer.
At some point we might realize that software is a natural monopoly just like utilities, and may need to be regulated as such--or at least the main competitor (open source) will need subsidy.
Maybe undecideable is just the wrong word. If you take all number theory knowledge of human civilization--or all civilizations in our physical universe--and create an axiomatic proof system encompassing all of that, there are certainly going to be a lot of true statements that are not provable in that system, right? P!=NP and the Riemann hypothesis could be such statements, I suppose.
Proving that P!=NP is unprovable would be proving that it is true. Any algorithm that does NP work in P time is a proof that P=NP. If you prove that no such proof exists, then you've proven that P!=NP. I suppose its possible that P!=NP is unprovable--but you cannot prove that it is unprovable. I think.
This whimsical exaggeration actually obscures a more subtle point--yeah, he said in the article that he updated Firefox, which implies that he uses it--but to say "he uses Firefox" suggests that uses it as his primary browser, when in reality he's probably just checking on what the competition is doing. But, even if you were trolling as others accuse you of, you were right about the 10 year time line--"secure" is a term somewhat relative to your competion--chances are, Windows, Linux, and Mac will still have security problems 10 years from now, though perhaps fewer of them.
I'm a huge Firefox and Mozilla fan, but I agree the blurb submitted to slashdot was somewhat of a misrepresentation, though in it's defense it may have been intended as a joke.
And the original Solaris, which was on their list, passes this test?
Err...right, but the American model usually adds lots of concealment, secrecy, trickery, and violence to the mix, to further inconvenience the arresting officer. I never met the man, but I don't get the feeling Gandhi would reger to police officers as pigs.
Unless you want to claim that bootleggers were following the Gandhi model. (oh ho, now who is the one who gets the quadruple question mark of disbelief???? ;) ) Prohibition seems like the closest historical analog to the current *AA situation.
Gandhi's struggle against the British was heroic, successful, admirable, and extremely inspiring, but pragmatically America's struggle against the British worked just as well--remember the Boston Tea Party? How the colonists dressed up as Indians to conceal their identity? How they destroyed British property and concealed that destruction? The Gandhi model is not the only model for social change. We Americans tend to prefer the Prohibition era "You pigs can't arrest us all!" method.
I'm vastly more ignorant of Canadian healthcare, but I was under the impression that when they say "socialized medicine" up there, they aren't pussy-footing around like John Kerry--the fees a doctor can charge are set by the goverment. So "socialized law" would mean all lawyers charge the same rates and serve all clients equally, I suppose. It's a nice idea, and the grandparent is correct that it makes vastly more sense than socialized medicine (though I think socialized medicine itself makes a lot of sense relative to the current double-digit-inflation American system). You could even make a pretty good libertarian (not anarchist) case for it.
But it breaks down, because the government itself is a party to lawsuits frequently. There's a serious conflict of interest in giving the government that much power over the lawyers who may be called upon to challenge the government.
On the other hand, the status quo seems completely unworkable as well. Forget whatever views of intellectual property you have--here we have huge corporate interests setting their full legal weight against regular individuals, not just to stop them from doing something, but to make an example of them. That's, well, totally fucked.
Exactly, they're corralaries for my point of view--either the patents are worthless because they can't be enforced against large corporations, or they're worthless because they can ONLY be enforced on large corporations.
In any event, it's completely moot, because under a "defend it or lose it" system, you could still just give permission to whoever you wanted--but you would have to do so explicitly, on paper. I'm not saying you should be forced to sue in court over it--that's a position that makes no logical sense unless we also combine it with some sort of mandatory patent licensing scheme (which might also be a good idea).
If it can be proven that you knew someone was violating your patent, but chose to neither give notice of your permission to use your patent (perhaps for a limited period of time until you decide you can afford to sue) or insist that the violator cease their activity, then you ought to lose the patent, because you DO have a bad motivation--you want to have a submarine patent. You shouldn't have to sue every violator, but you SHOULD have to make the decision whether or not to sue immediately.
A useless statistic--who cares how many are created per employee? Further, I wonder if this statistic is inflated by the existence of lawyer driven patent extorters--Eolas is no garage inventor.
Perhaps the fees are affordable, but the enforcement is so difficult that the $10,000 isn't worth paying unless you have teams of lawyers to defend yourself.
As for not being enforced, that's where the current system is very effective. Since the inventor doesn't have to sue everybody who violates his rights to mantain his patent, he can choose to only go after companies with enough money to make a prosecution profitable.
We should note that this is a reversal from your previous complaint: "I wouldn't want to be the person to tell an inventor that he just lost the right to 5 years worth of work because he lacked the money to immediately sue the large company who simply copied his published patent."
Besides, if you really don't want to sue them in an enforcement-required regime, you could always just mail them short-term licensing for your patent and consider it enforced, so your whole argument here is based on a false premise. Garage inventor submarine patents are just as immoral as major corporation submarine patents.
So, no, if the determined experts manage to upload it to usenet or p2p networks, then by their own admission they have failed.
Exactly. And the location of this maxima is "no enforcement at all."
The output of the "maximized efficiency" is decreased by the existence of enforcement mechanisms, but it's still the maximum output.
Incorrect, the cost of enforcement mechanisms mean that a different set of rules with fewer enforcement costs could and probably do produce the new maximum output.
By your logic, legal systems to prevent murder are doomed to failure, too, because lawyers and cops cost too much.
This is only true if the costs of lawyers and cops really do cost too much--you have to actually go out into the real world and find that out for yourself.
It makes a good argument that this is so because the problem that copyright solves -- the disparity between cost of creation and cost of distribution for creative works -- is an economic problem at the core.
But it never provides a resolution for this problem, because no resolution--even in theory--is possible. Allowing works widest distribution causes least incentive to produce (according to autistic economics), and there's no way around that in theory. In practice, it looks even worse. The paper fails from an economic point of view because it ignores transaction costs with completely change the location of maxima, which invalidates the points that it makes.
Actually, it's a moderately good idea. An incredibly good idea would be to eliminate software patents.
Patents on the other hand automatically expire after 20 years. There's no need to have a "defend it or lose it" because they're going to lose it anyway. Be patient.
The problem is that any given product uses a whole bunch of technologies intertwined. So you could have a situation where you have to wait until a technology expires, then a new patent on a related technology is released and you have to wait 20 more years, and in the worst case you end up reducing the amount of progress of civilization by 20 fold or more. This is especially true in software.
I wouldn't want to be the person to tell an inventor that he just lost the right to 5 years worth of work because he lacked the money to immediately sue the large company who simply copied his published patent.
Look me up. I'll tell that guy. You go tell all the American (and Austrialian?) programmers why it's going to become impossible to write software in a few years unless the system is seriously changed.
Patents, even legitimate ones, are basically just tools for large corporations anyway. Garage inventors can't afford the fees anyway--and what good is the patent if they aren't going to be able to enforce it? Whether he or she lets the corporations get away with it, or loses the patent for lack of enforcement, the patent gets copied anyway. Your argument is self defeating.
Why would it not be practical for a business with a patent to list everyone to whome they've given permission to use the patent? There would be no 'theoretically' about it--someone should have to provide documented proof that Eolas and Microsoft had such a deal in that case.
How is this worse than submarine patents?
This totally fails to take into account transaction costs of the legal system and other copyright protections. You can create a legal system that always rules infavor of maximized efficiency--the goal of this paper--but only if you ignore the costs of that system. In reality, the costs of legal representation outweigh the both the value and cost of the vast majority of creative work transactions. If I write a book, and someone sues me for taking ideas from their book, the value of both our books is probably dwarfed by the salaries of the lawyers required to defend our claims. All this talk of "perfect price discrimination" is in economic fantasy land--a world of perfect information and costless legal systems. Indeed, one might wonder if the government economists have a vested interest in ignoring the costs of legal compliance.