Republicans own the government right now. You'd have to be a damn *idiot* to side with the underdog when you're about to try pushing through a seriously dicey move that could piss off a lot of Americans.
That's only for bogus patents, where it's immediately obvious that the patent can be thrown out (things like patents on hyperlinks...urgh). Microsoft, whatever other flaws they may have, is not (again, from what I've seen, and that's only five or so) a particularly egregious offender in the "bogus patents" department. They fund a very large amount of research, and they pick up patents from it. That's all there is, really.
Nobody knows exactly what will happen if we keep the patent system either. But we do see the patent system at the center of a great deal of harm.
I wouldn't go that far. Sure, it has drawbacks, but as I pointed out, there's also a hell of a lot of research funded in the United States. It's hard to say that, as a whole, it's a negative. It may well be true, but it's hard to legitimately make a quantitative statement as to its badness.
And we also see that people do in fact innovate even when they do not gain temporary monopolies from patents.
Sure -- but people also innovate with monopolies as well. Saying that something is not entirely devoid of benefit doesn't necessarily make it a good thing, either.
We do have plenty of economic theory that supports the idea that monopoly is bad.
Mmmmfff. This is true, but I'm also thinking that there's economic theory to support almost anything. There were a lot of people sure that a government-controlled economy would be far more effective and efficient, and how the Soviets had things made.
The US has an economy that is especially capitalist, i.e., non-socialist, not state run. Our medicine, for example, is more private than European medicine. That's one area where we excel in innovation.
Oh, that's silly. You took a single point that's a particular sticking issue and using it to represent the whole. A pro-patent person would say something equally silly going the other way -- that the Europeans completely missed the boat on the Internet -- didn't develop much of the tech in it at all, and that's one area where the lack of corporate research produced major failures. [shrug] You can't take a microscopic approach to something that's about as macroscopic as it gets.
The second sentence is true, but it is not evidence for the first sentence. Just because tainted food didn't kill you, doesn't mean that it was good for you. It only means that the harm it caused didn't reach the point of killing you.
Of course not...but during that time, many countries have had economies that *have* collapsed. The US has been extremely strong. One major difference is that the US has traditionally provided very strong IP rights relative to the rest of the world. That may or may not be responsible, but when you sit down and try to figure out exactly why the US has done so well for itself, it's also a factor that's difficult to ignore.
A patent attorney would be an interested party. But the attorney would be conceding too much., because the burden of proof really always is on the shoulders of the person advocating government intervention.
That's an unfounded assertion. That was the feeling of the Founding Fathers, perhaps, but that doesn't make it inherently right, unless you're simply trying to prove correctness WRT the Constitution's spirit. Frankly, the minimal intervention approach decidedly failed initially (when the federal government couldn't get any of the states to put up money to run the basic federal legislature). It's since then been increasingly ignored. Just saying that something was in the spirit of the Constitution isn't enough to sell it to me -- I want to know that it's actually benificial. The Founding Fathers were some bright guys, but they also weren't infallible, and they may not have necessarily made the best calls.
There's a good reason for social structures that arise out of society. For example, human speech and writing. But when the state creates something out of nothing, for example patents and copyright, then there is much less reason to expect it to be a good thing.
That's kind of a hazy line to me. The idea of property at all, not just IP, is hardly natural to a bunch of cavemen, IMHO. The meat and the hottie goes to whoever can slug the others harder. I'd say that the whole concept of "natural" structures is flawed, unless you have a rigorous definition that's a lot more compelling than a
Speaking of which, drivethroughs have been hacked. Who wants to bet a couple of drunk grad students whip up something (RFID is pretty damn easy to forge) that sends the waiters scurrying all over?
Just buy Civ 2. You now know that Civ 2 won't stop working next kernel release when HZ goes up or God knows what breaks. Stuff can be fixed. Not many Linux games like that.
I shall refer back to moderation fiascos in the past. I shall point out that clearly the Slashcode moderating system is quite broken, and that the dictatorial abuses of those like Jamie are sending Slashdot down the tubes. I shall refer interested parties to kuro5hin for a freer and more open forum system. I will fail to close my link to kuro5hin, and the entire second half of my post will be a link to kuro5hin.
No. Still has many of the same benefits as SoulSeek (finding similar songs on servers with songs you like). Fire up the powerful lopster, refresh your server list from Napigator's server, and go!
Whether or not SCO UNIX sucks or not has no actual bearing on their lawsuit.
However, pointing out SCO UNIX sucking has become a guaranteed way to get Slashdot to link to your article, where you can do fun and silly things like promote BSD as being more "scalable" than Linux and bash Red Hat for being "insecure".
Right, but this is just another chink in the argument that "we can't let you work on a mac because we still need x86 to do "
Oh, come *on*. This is mindless Apple fanaticism. I didn't say anything about replacing Macs with x86 boxes. My entire argument was simple -- (a) there are a lot of very cheap old x86 boxes floating around and (b) they make good terminal emulators. The old 286 or what have you is competing against the VT220 in this case, not the Mac. Surely you don't have a problem with replacing ancient DEC hardware with ancient HP hardware?
Well...true. But nobody knows exactly what would happen if we threw out the patent system.
We do know that it seems pretty likely that transitioning back and forth would be expensive, since there are a lot of institutions that come to depend on the structure of IP, and tearing them up produces a lot of overhead. So we don't want to do something and then want to take it back.
We know that patents work, at least reasonably well. They've been around for a long time, and the US hasn't collapsed. Regardless of whether it's actually the primary contributing factor, the US is a world leader in research, and it's a pretty plausible argument to make that the patent system is a big contributor. That research helps make it a world economic leader, so this is not a trivial issue.
So, yes, it's a matter of uncertainty. The argument I brought up is one that pro-status-quo-patent folks like to bring up -- that research would decline, and some important discoveries might not be made. But that doesn't make it fundamentally wrong -- it's just one of the more compelling pro-patent considerations. A patent attorney would probably look at you and say that arguments that the world would be better without patents are equally unfounded.
So why was it inserted into the discussion, which was mostly not FUD but actually informative?
Uh, thanks.:-)
It is the de rigueur "I am not a crackpot" afterthought, the one step back from the precipice of an overturning fundamental assumptions.
Now that, I think, is a little unfair. Yes, humans tend to be a little cautious about new ideas, and throwing out existing structures. But that's also because most ideas that uproot fundamental ideas *are* flawed -- there's a reason most existing ideas and social structures are in place. Sure, it's also important not to totally close yourself off to new ideas, but if you simply wildly plunged into each new idea that came up, you simply wouldn't be able to function in life.
You'll also notice that I qualified this, as an opinion. "I'm not sure that...". It's the responsibility of someone advocating a new idea to also mention and address potential drawbacks. I didn't really intend to advocate one view or another, but my earlier discussion tended to sound anti-patent. I wanted to bring up potential issues that might come up with taking the next step, of throwing out patents. I was simply trying to be objective. I wasn't interested (at least in this post) of taking an advocacy position.
i strongly suspect that quite a few patents would be declared invalid in a trial.
You cannot simply declare patents invalid as an aside in a case. They must be specifically challenged, which means that a lot of lawyer fees have to be spent for each patent. Plus, getting one declared invalid doesn't in and of itself give you any money.
So it costs a couple thousand to get each patent, and at least ten times that to get each declared invalid. You do the math.
Furthermore, while MS will probably have some BS patents, they will also have a lot that will fit the US legal definition of being a legitimate patent.
I disagree...I honestly think that, given the scope of what MS controls, Linux would probably infringe on a few. These wouldn't be stupid obviously-has-prior-art things either. Normally, in a situation like that, the patent holder would just settle for a nice chunk of change, but MS wants Linux dead. ESR apparently thinks along the same lines...
I don't agree that SCO was MS's lapdog. SCO is just another troubled tech company. As a matter of fact, they really have surprisingly few connections to MS for a tech company. I do think that the IP war from Microsoft will definitely intensify.
SCO's claims were wildly different than what MS would do (and MS can't possibly do a worse job than SCO, with wild, emotional, contradicting claims coming from their CEO constantly). SCOs were on license issues, and I believe some folks hinted that copyright and/or trademark issues might play a role. Linux almost certainly doesn't have Windows code, and it's doubtful that MS would run around attacking individuals that might have signed MS agreements at some point in time forbidding them to work on similar products. No, it's a pretty safe bet that an MS IP attack on Linux would be on patents.
SCO hasn't gone anywhere in court. They've just gotten a lot of media attention.
I am bitchy, highly critical, and get easily upset when things don't work right.
Heh. You ever seen the scene in Sneakers, where the main female character is describing the sort of person that the toy engineer would be interested in, and the whole team is just looking at her?
Okay, change that to "available in a declassified environment".:-)
Also, I believe the claims from the GCHQ researchers were rather more along the lines of DH's work than RSA's.
But arguigng a single point like this is really missing my point -- there is work that is in corporate interest that will not produce government research grants. Actually, RSA isn't a great choice, because it has some military application, and hence could theoretically have gotten a DoD grant. Take research on entertainment-related areas, if you want something that's less likely to otherwise get funded.
What I'm looking for is something almost like a MUD, but movement, mapping, combat and other annoying details handled in a roguelike way.
Oh. Well, that's actually pretty straightforward. There are a number of mud clients that handle automapping and allow you to use roguelike navigation controls. Combat's a bit tougher, but triggers can automate it, and binding a movement key to "flee" sort of works. Check out KMUD, and here's a screenshot of the mapping interface.
Or, if you want something like the original rogue, what about MAngband?
For example on my open source project I have this long boring test suite to write, each time I complete a task I work on a fun task associated with the performance of the project. You can do something similar which means you actually praise yourself through a reward for going something done.
Out of curiosity, what's the project? Far too few open source folks write test suites.
What OSS needs, then, is a large benefactor (say, IBM) to step forward and tell MS that they will not cross-license their patents unless MS agrees that OSS projects may use them as well.
A nice thought, but I don't think that MS would bite. Their primary concern right now *is* OSS, and they've spent billions of dollars over years and vast amounts of negotiating power building up for this day, when they have a serious challenger. Maybe if this agreement had been pushed through fifteen years ago, when OSS seemed like nothing but a few hobbyist projects, but surely not today. Plus, I'm fairly sure that the cross-licensing agreements are binding once in place, and I know that IBM and MS cross-license already. Apple and Microsoft have cross-licensed for years.
Even so, assume that the FSF could find a major tech patent holder willing to ignore the oligopoly benefit of its own portfolio that does not already cross-license with MS *and* MS was willing to give out such rights to all OSS projects. MS would probably still hold out because of the fact that any company could write a little LGPL module that does whatever patented process they want to pull off (and thus bypass MS's patents), and then happily write the rest of their software closed-source.
Excellent analysis of patents-as-oligopoly-protectors.
Slashdot Mirror
Republicans own the government right now. You'd have to be a damn *idiot* to side with the underdog when you're about to try pushing through a seriously dicey move that could piss off a lot of Americans.
That's only for bogus patents, where it's immediately obvious that the patent can be thrown out (things like patents on hyperlinks...urgh). Microsoft, whatever other flaws they may have, is not (again, from what I've seen, and that's only five or so) a particularly egregious offender in the "bogus patents" department. They fund a very large amount of research, and they pick up patents from it. That's all there is, really.
Nobody knows exactly what will happen if we keep the patent system either. But we do see the patent system at the center of a great deal of harm.
I wouldn't go that far. Sure, it has drawbacks, but as I pointed out, there's also a hell of a lot of research funded in the United States. It's hard to say that, as a whole, it's a negative. It may well be true, but it's hard to legitimately make a quantitative statement as to its badness.
And we also see that people do in fact innovate even when they do not gain temporary monopolies from patents.
Sure -- but people also innovate with monopolies as well. Saying that something is not entirely devoid of benefit doesn't necessarily make it a good thing, either.
We do have plenty of economic theory that supports the idea that monopoly is bad.
Mmmmfff. This is true, but I'm also thinking that there's economic theory to support almost anything. There were a lot of people sure that a government-controlled economy would be far more effective and efficient, and how the Soviets had things made.
The US has an economy that is especially capitalist, i.e., non-socialist, not state run. Our medicine, for example, is more private than European medicine. That's one area where we excel in innovation.
Oh, that's silly. You took a single point that's a particular sticking issue and using it to represent the whole. A pro-patent person would say something equally silly going the other way -- that the Europeans completely missed the boat on the Internet -- didn't develop much of the tech in it at all, and that's one area where the lack of corporate research produced major failures. [shrug] You can't take a microscopic approach to something that's about as macroscopic as it gets.
The second sentence is true, but it is not evidence for the first sentence. Just because tainted food didn't kill you, doesn't mean that it was good for you. It only means that the harm it caused didn't reach the point of killing you.
Of course not...but during that time, many countries have had economies that *have* collapsed. The US has been extremely strong. One major difference is that the US has traditionally provided very strong IP rights relative to the rest of the world. That may or may not be responsible, but when you sit down and try to figure out exactly why the US has done so well for itself, it's also a factor that's difficult to ignore.
A patent attorney would be an interested party. But the attorney would be conceding too much., because the burden of proof really always is on the shoulders of the person advocating government intervention.
That's an unfounded assertion. That was the feeling of the Founding Fathers, perhaps, but that doesn't make it inherently right, unless you're simply trying to prove correctness WRT the Constitution's spirit. Frankly, the minimal intervention approach decidedly failed initially (when the federal government couldn't get any of the states to put up money to run the basic federal legislature). It's since then been increasingly ignored. Just saying that something was in the spirit of the Constitution isn't enough to sell it to me -- I want to know that it's actually benificial. The Founding Fathers were some bright guys, but they also weren't infallible, and they may not have necessarily made the best calls.
There's a good reason for social structures that arise out of society. For example, human speech and writing. But when the state creates something out of nothing, for example patents and copyright, then there is much less reason to expect it to be a good thing.
That's kind of a hazy line to me. The idea of property at all, not just IP, is hardly natural to a bunch of cavemen, IMHO. The meat and the hottie goes to whoever can slug the others harder. I'd say that the whole concept of "natural" structures is flawed, unless you have a rigorous definition that's a lot more compelling than a
No more damned NYT links!
They committed real atrocities
The impact of Saddam's kids, nasty though they may be in person, is much less than that of the United States on the nation of Iraq as a whole.
Speaking of which, drivethroughs have been hacked. Who wants to bet a couple of drunk grad students whip up something (RFID is pretty damn easy to forge) that sends the waiters scurrying all over?
Just buy Civ 2. You now know that Civ 2 won't stop working next kernel release when HZ goes up or God knows what breaks. Stuff can be fixed. Not many Linux games like that.
What are you talking about? The US government intercedes on behalf of US companies all the time.
Remember when Slashdot was up in arms about the US Ambassador to Venezuela pushing Microsoft products?
Wow, I haven't laughed at a Slashdot post for a long time...
I shall refer back to moderation fiascos in the past. I shall point out that clearly the Slashcode moderating system is quite broken, and that the dictatorial abuses of those like Jamie are sending Slashdot down the tubes. I shall refer interested parties to kuro5hin for a freer and more open forum system. I will fail to close my link to kuro5hin, and the entire second half of my post will be a link to kuro5hin.
Which will force me to point out that you yourself made a minor misspelling in your own post, obviously delegitimatizing any point you had.
Erm - isn't Napster supposed to have died by now?
No. Still has many of the same benefits as SoulSeek (finding similar songs on servers with songs you like). Fire up the powerful lopster, refresh your server list from Napigator's server, and go!
Whether or not SCO UNIX sucks or not has no actual bearing on their lawsuit.
However, pointing out SCO UNIX sucking has become a guaranteed way to get Slashdot to link to your article, where you can do fun and silly things like promote BSD as being more "scalable" than Linux and bash Red Hat for being "insecure".
Actually, didn't Sir Arthur Conan Doyle do more Sherlock Holmes stories after the (not particularly good) Moriarty story, though?
And then there's the Alien series...the scriptwriters keep trying to end the series in a dramatic fashion, and the suits keep bringing it back.
Right, but this is just another chink in the argument that "we can't let you work on a mac because we still need x86 to do "
Oh, come *on*. This is mindless Apple fanaticism. I didn't say anything about replacing Macs with x86 boxes. My entire argument was simple -- (a) there are a lot of very cheap old x86 boxes floating around and (b) they make good terminal emulators. The old 286 or what have you is competing against the VT220 in this case, not the Mac. Surely you don't have a problem with replacing ancient DEC hardware with ancient HP hardware?
Well...true. But nobody knows exactly what would happen if we threw out the patent system.
:-)
We do know that it seems pretty likely that transitioning back and forth would be expensive, since there are a lot of institutions that come to depend on the structure of IP, and tearing them up produces a lot of overhead. So we don't want to do something and then want to take it back.
We know that patents work, at least reasonably well. They've been around for a long time, and the US hasn't collapsed. Regardless of whether it's actually the primary contributing factor, the US is a world leader in research, and it's a pretty plausible argument to make that the patent system is a big contributor. That research helps make it a world economic leader, so this is not a trivial issue.
So, yes, it's a matter of uncertainty. The argument I brought up is one that pro-status-quo-patent folks like to bring up -- that research would decline, and some important discoveries might not be made. But that doesn't make it fundamentally wrong -- it's just one of the more compelling pro-patent considerations. A patent attorney would probably look at you and say that arguments that the world would be better without patents are equally unfounded.
So why was it inserted into the discussion, which was mostly not FUD but actually informative?
Uh, thanks.
It is the de rigueur "I am not a crackpot" afterthought, the one step back from the precipice of an overturning fundamental assumptions.
Now that, I think, is a little unfair. Yes, humans tend to be a little cautious about new ideas, and throwing out existing structures. But that's also because most ideas that uproot fundamental ideas *are* flawed -- there's a reason most existing ideas and social structures are in place. Sure, it's also important not to totally close yourself off to new ideas, but if you simply wildly plunged into each new idea that came up, you simply wouldn't be able to function in life.
You'll also notice that I qualified this, as an opinion. "I'm not sure that...". It's the responsibility of someone advocating a new idea to also mention and address potential drawbacks. I didn't really intend to advocate one view or another, but my earlier discussion tended to sound anti-patent. I wanted to bring up potential issues that might come up with taking the next step, of throwing out patents. I was simply trying to be objective. I wasn't interested (at least in this post) of taking an advocacy position.
i strongly suspect that quite a few patents would be declared invalid in a trial.
You cannot simply declare patents invalid as an aside in a case. They must be specifically challenged, which means that a lot of lawyer fees have to be spent for each patent. Plus, getting one declared invalid doesn't in and of itself give you any money.
So it costs a couple thousand to get each patent, and at least ten times that to get each declared invalid. You do the math.
Furthermore, while MS will probably have some BS patents, they will also have a lot that will fit the US legal definition of being a legitimate patent.
I disagree...I honestly think that, given the scope of what MS controls, Linux would probably infringe on a few. These wouldn't be stupid obviously-has-prior-art things either. Normally, in a situation like that, the patent holder would just settle for a nice chunk of change, but MS wants Linux dead. ESR apparently thinks along the same lines...
I don't agree that SCO was MS's lapdog. SCO is just another troubled tech company. As a matter of fact, they really have surprisingly few connections to MS for a tech company. I do think that the IP war from Microsoft will definitely intensify.
SCO's claims were wildly different than what MS would do (and MS can't possibly do a worse job than SCO, with wild, emotional, contradicting claims coming from their CEO constantly). SCOs were on license issues, and I believe some folks hinted that copyright and/or trademark issues might play a role. Linux almost certainly doesn't have Windows code, and it's doubtful that MS would run around attacking individuals that might have signed MS agreements at some point in time forbidding them to work on similar products. No, it's a pretty safe bet that an MS IP attack on Linux would be on patents.
SCO hasn't gone anywhere in court. They've just gotten a lot of media attention.
All the companies I mentioned do cross-license patents.
There may be some companies that simply rely on ignoring transgressions, but the ones that I've seen generally cross-license.
I am bitchy, highly critical, and get easily upset when things don't work right.
Heh. You ever seen the scene in Sneakers, where the main female character is describing the sort of person that the toy engineer would be interested in, and the whole team is just looking at her?
And how does this Holy Grail of digital cameras interact with the Second Holy Grail of digital cameras -- battery life?
Okay, change that to "available in a declassified environment". :-)
Also, I believe the claims from the GCHQ researchers were rather more along the lines of DH's work than RSA's.
But arguigng a single point like this is really missing my point -- there is work that is in corporate interest that will not produce government research grants. Actually, RSA isn't a great choice, because it has some military application, and hence could theoretically have gotten a DoD grant. Take research on entertainment-related areas, if you want something that's less likely to otherwise get funded.
What I'm looking for is something almost like a MUD, but movement, mapping, combat and other annoying details handled in a roguelike way.
Oh. Well, that's actually pretty straightforward. There are a number of mud clients that handle automapping and allow you to use roguelike navigation controls. Combat's a bit tougher, but triggers can automate it, and binding a movement key to "flee" sort of works. Check out KMUD, and here's a screenshot of the mapping interface.
Or, if you want something like the original rogue, what about MAngband?
For example on my open source project I have this long boring test suite to write,
each time I complete a task I work on a fun task associated with the performance
of the project. You can do something similar which means you actually praise
yourself through a reward for going something done.
Out of curiosity, what's the project? Far too few open source folks write test suites.
What OSS needs, then, is a large benefactor (say, IBM) to step forward and tell MS that they will not cross-license their patents unless MS agrees that OSS projects may use them as well.
A nice thought, but I don't think that MS would bite. Their primary concern right now *is* OSS, and they've spent billions of dollars over years and vast amounts of negotiating power building up for this day, when they have a serious challenger. Maybe if this agreement had been pushed through fifteen years ago, when OSS seemed like nothing but a few hobbyist projects, but surely not today. Plus, I'm fairly sure that the cross-licensing agreements are binding once in place, and I know that IBM and MS cross-license already. Apple and Microsoft have cross-licensed for years.
Even so, assume that the FSF could find a major tech patent holder willing to ignore the oligopoly benefit of its own portfolio that does not already cross-license with MS *and* MS was willing to give out such rights to all OSS projects. MS would probably still hold out because of the fact that any company could write a little LGPL module that does whatever patented process they want to pull off (and thus bypass MS's patents), and then happily write the rest of their software closed-source.
Excellent analysis of patents-as-oligopoly-protectors.
Thank you.