There are tons of drugs that are prescribed for reasons other than what they were invented for.
For instance, Propecia was originally a prostate medication. It blocks the uptake of testosterone in certain tissues. The effect they wanted was that the prostate would shrink. It also makes one's dick shrink and it stops hair from falling out (eunuchs don't go bald, by the way -- one way to think about Propecia is that it chemically castrates the man who is taking it). One of these side effects was worth a lot of money.
There's a lot of tetracycline that gets prescribed in this country for zits.
There was one drug I remember reading about that was intended to treat some kind of frivolous Western medical problem, didn't do so well at that, but turned out to work really well on a particular tropical disease. The drug company gave the remaining stock to Doctors Without Borders, but didn't make any more of the drug because there was no profit in it.
Robert Chesebrough, the inventor/discoverer, wasa wack guy. It gets even better:
The best use of Vaseline® has to be by Mr. Chesebrough, himself. He believed that a person should eat a spoonful every day for good health.
He lived to ninety-six years of age and never missed that delicious spoonful every morning.
Vaseline is about as harmless as mineral oil. Eating a spoonful of vaseline every morning would keep him regular and otherwise be harmless assuming he didn't inhale any of it and monitored his fat-soluable vitamin intake. Now, gasoline would cause him some real problems if he had a spoonful of that every morning.
Is there actually a good reason why laws should be so complex they cannot be understood.
Have you ever called a plumber, or taken your car to a mechanic? Why do you think that lawyers are not necessary?
I think if you studied history, you would find that the legal systems which used ersatz non-lawyers (like the innkeepers in Edo Japan) were so primitive they could be fairly said not to be legal systems at all.
On the other hand, if you looked to France and Germany, they together spent more than a hundred years trying to make a science of the law in the 19th century. Obviously their legal systems are today still better than that of the U.S., yet they require a lawyer to know the law as well. In fact, once you've reduced the law to rules, like they have, you need a lawyer who has all the rules memorized to tell you the rule so you can apply the facts and figure out who's right and wrong. In the U.S. broke/baroque system, there's rarely a clearcut answer whenever two people have a dispute. You need a lawyer for a completely different reason in the U.S.: he has the experience to weigh the facts and predict what will happen and has the learning and resources to look up how judges have ruled in the past on cases with similar facts.
Also, if you want a simple legal system, you'd have to accept things that happen all the time in other countries, like people making millions of dollars a year but paying less income tax than their secretaries. The U.S. may have the most convoluted tax code in the world, but one thing is for sure: everybody pays their fair share.
I'm assuming you haven't thought about this, and you're just griping that your college roommate went to law school and is making twice as much as you, even though he works 70 hour weeks, is a stranger to his family, and hates his job. I'm always mystified why Americans dislike lawyers when they're the ones who keep hiring them! Lawyers don't crawl out of husks. If Americans had a national health care system, they wouldn't need to sue each other for slipping on a banana peel, and if they regulated business dealings they wouldn't need to get a lawyer involved every time someone writes their signature.
It's going to be hard for Japan to fix that system.
They must be doing something right if this is the first major accident, eh?
Clearly it would be nice to make sure this doesn't happen again, but in rational countries, when something bad happens, they don't just throw the whole thing out the window and start over again, or worse, receive wisdom from armchair experts, like "Only hire U.S. citizen baggage screeners."
I'm not really sure what you mean by congested - if you're talking about right now, that's because this week is the longest national holiday of the year. Almost any train I've been on in Japan is less crowded than the New York subways. For the long-haul trains I have never had a problem showing up and taking a seat, and I've never had a problem getting to work on time on the local trains.
To the extent there is a problem, in Japan they're actually doing something to fix it. They built two new subways lines just in the last five years or so! (Oedo and Namboku) The newer lines are built for expansion as well - they'll run longer subway trains when there's demand. How long has the 2nd Avenue line been on the board in New York? 70 years?
And it also describes all of the area between New-York and Washington too, where there is already rail service...
And you don't care about density; you don't care if the land between city A and city B is filled to the brim with people (like New-York_Boston) or empty like a desert (like Los-Angeles_Las-Vegas), because, be it in Japan, Europe or in the US, high-speed trains don't stop when they go between cities A and B.
What you say may be true in a strictly logical sense (there's no stopping to bail water into the steam engine these days) but high speed trains most certainly do stop along routes. The Tokaido route shinkansen makes 34 stops after leaving Tokyo station, including several in the Tokyo metropolitan area.
Some trains go faster and skip certain stations, but the fact of the matter is that you need to run a lot of trains to pay for that infrastructure and you run a lot more trains by not running non-stop trains from New York to Boston. Don't you think people in Rhode Island or Connecticut should have a stop??
I haven't lived in Chicago, but is that really true? Isn't there public transit in Chicago? If someone were there for a business meeting or to see family (and not drive around the city sight-seeing), would it really be necessary to rent a car?
In Tokyo I can be on a Shinkansen 15 minutes after walking out my front door - including the time to walk to the local train station, ride to Tokyo station, buy a ticket, and walk onto the train. The trains run so often that this is practical, but it wouldn't change anything if I had to time my departure to catch the train.
For Minneapolis-Chicago, it would all depend on the frequency of service, but my experience with Amtrak in the Northeast was similar and not that much slower.
Anyway I think it's a little disingenuous to dismiss the person you responded to. He pointed out the security and baggage nonsense that airlines put people through wastes hours on either end, and you responded by saying you have to leave your house on time and drive to the train station. Isn't that true of an airport as well, and aren't airports way out in the countryside? The train stations I know of are right in the middle of the cities.
That's right - the trains are about twice as heavy as comparable trains from advanced countries. Anyone who knows anything about high-speed trains knows that's a really stupid thing to do. A great portion of the engineering efforts of the Shinkansen are to make the trains as light as possible. Even the seats are designed to save weight.
Safety is a red herring -- the derailment in Osaka was the only major accident in Japan's railway system for more than four decades (and that was a local train, not a shinkansen). How many planes have crashed in that timeframe?
From what I understand, the weight was increased due to meddling from government bureaucrats. The problem as I see it isn't that poor decisions were made, because that would imply that a review of procedure would allow for good decisions and nice trains in the future.
The problem is that from top to bottom there are very few competent people at DOT/Amtrak, and there is no support in Congress for high-speed rail. You need both competence and money, and simply speaking we're not going to see either one here in my lifetime. Maybe we will if oil costs double or triple, but not before then. It's like asking when we'll see world-beating supercomputers coming out of the former Soviet Union. Only when the world changes.
You've clearly never read the C++ standard, where one design goal guides all of the C++ specification: "you don't pay for what you don't use".
Haven't used C++ in a while, but don't all C++ programs "pay for" RTTI and exceptions whether they use them or not? Older compilers gave the option of turning off support for those two things because it made programs which didn't use them run faster and take up less space. Maybe modern compilers implement them in a cost-free manner.
I think the Embedded C++ standard leaves out one or both of them for the same reason.
You can disregard the notice. The notice is there because most of the time lawyers send e-mail to (drum roll, please!)... other lawyers. There are rules (varying by jurisdiction) concerning when lawyers can use documents that come from the other side. The particular issue here is whether attorney-client privilege is waived by accidental disclosure.
Yes, this is stupid, but it's by no means the worst manifestation of America's fucked up legal system.
That's a good article cite, thanks. It's extremely difficult to find published first-hand accounts of IBM licensing practices. I was familiar with the Heckel article, but it's rather out of date. The last IBM contract I had the opportunity to read suggests that IBM doesn't anymore do the same two-group licensing rate system that Heckel describes; now they hold back some for strategic reasons.
You're just playing word games. If we're using "theft" in a legal sense, we clearly mean common-law larceny or perhaps an extension to embezzlement. But we definitely mean some kind of physical object has been taken. You can't go to prison for "stealing" someone's heart, just like you can't go to prison for "stealing" the plot of another book.
I'm impressed with the grandparent's citation of Dowling v. U.S. I'd never seen that case before. 473 U.S. 207
Dude, you don't understand trademarks very well. If you look at say the corporate charter filings at the Sec. of State for California you will see dozens of companies with very similar names no matter what you put in. Multiply that by 50 states, then across the world. All of them might be entitled to a particular domain name. A trademark doesn't mean that you own a sequence of letters.
Rather than having convoluted and arbitrary names, it's better to have domain names which map to the company which is most relevant to the consumer. Someone in Belgium can easily remember company.be, likewise company.co.jp in Japan. There are very few worldwide companies like Amazon and General Motors, and even they like to customize their web sites for the local markets. Amazon.co.jp is a totally different web site than Amazon.co.uk.
In my opinion, pretty much none of the long TLDs are worth having; all they do is cause artificial pressure on artificially scarce real estate. Perhaps a few like.org or.int are - international organizations like the Red Cross and Amnesty International don't really have a presence in any one country. But it's lunacy to have that.org TLD open for any Tom Dick or Harry's vanity site.
Maybe if.com had used registration restrictions like.co.jp it wouldn't be so polluted. But given worldwide differences in corporate law, it would make just as much sense to not have.com in the first place, to let each country manage its own TLD, like I already said.
t's called a poor man's copyright, but you need to mail a copy to yourself via the us postal service and make sure to leave the letter unopened. This basically will establish ownership through the date of the postmark.
Not so fast. There's very little probative value to a self-addressed envelope. To see this, mail an unsealed envelope to yourself. Now under this "poor man's copyright" you could backdate any document you wish. Judges already know this and they're not going to believe you when you say that you really did mail the document five years ago.
Someone else mentioned printing an MD5 checksum in the newspaper. In theory that works, but no judge is going to understand one-way hashes and a confused judge is not going to rule in your favor. Plus, running ads in the paper isn't free and seems like a huge hassle to me. It makes just as much sense to pay the $30 and register it properly.
$30 is a totally negligible cost compared to studio time, etc. Just do it the right way. Better yet, just forget about it - if $30 is too much, you'll never afford litigation expenses.
Let's just put it this way: If you mention that Americans see orthodontia or plastic surgery as lucrative professions to go into, British people will laugh at you.
Americans have an even more positive outlook on straightened, bleached teeth as they do on silicone-implanted boobs. The difference is that parents have their kids' teeth done, and childhood plastic surgery is not recommended. Also there are a good number of Americans who find plastic surgery distasteful, but almost universally they see nothing wrong with orthodontia.
One benign explanation may be that in America children don't drink coffee, tea, or other tooth-staining foods.
Clearly this "law student" has never worked at a firm involved in litigation. He's going to need a lot of luck getting that paper published.
Abuse of American electronic discovery rules is getting worse every year. Defragment your disk? That's a sanction. Copy files from an old computer to a new one? That's a sanction.
Seriously, the legal rules need to realize that asking for documents not normally accessible is extremely expensive and opens up possibilities for extortion. ("Looks like it will cost you three million dollars to restore and examine these tapes... Why don't we just settle the case for two?") Everything the Microsoft attorney said is true.
The judges know this, the attorneys know this, the companies know this. The submitter needs to get out in the real world and get his head out of his ass. There's not even an ideological basis for thinking the way he does. It's not like poor people benefit from these rules (who Democrats like to protect) or self-made rich people (who Republicans like to protect).
Why do you respect lawyers less than doctors, or accountants, or...? If you tried to take out somebody's spleen by looking in an anatomy book, but the patient died, would you moan that the medical system is corrupt because it doesn't make room for the common man?
In a lot of respects, sure, the American legal system is needlessly baroque, but that wasn't the case here. The problem here wasn't that on-point precedent was buried in one volume of a legal reporter among thousands. Everything you need to write patents is in the Manual of Patent Examining Procedure. That's the very same book patent lawyers / agents keep on their desk. It's available online for free at the Goverment Printing Office web site.
There's this American pathology where the people with no legal knowledge think they're capable of practicing law as well as any lawyer. I'm totally mystified where it comes from. Maybe it's from watching too much TV, or maybe it's from a belief that they're really smarter than all those lawyers out there. I'd like to see those people take the LSAT (which is all logical reasoning, no law) and apply to Harvard Law or Columbia and see whether they get in.
As far as writing patents pro se, it can be done. There are good self-help books out there. The problem is that a patent by itself doesn't make money: you either have to sue somebody or license it, both of which require money and/or an on-going presence in the industry. If you've got the money to do that there's no reason not to hire a lawyer to do a good job on the patent application in the first place. After all, the cost of getting a patent is almost non-existent compared to the sums of money at stake, not to mention that the lawyer's hourly costs are about on par with what the PTO itself charges when you count application fees, maintenance fees, etc. It's really a false economy to try to write one's own patent applications.
There's this mystique about patents, but really they're no different than any other industrial tool. They're not magic. Trying to make money off a single patent is usually like trying to make money off of a truck full of rubber hoses.
If I had $350, I sure wouldn't have deliberately wasted it on a patent application that I knew was invalid, but I guess different strokes for different folks.
I didn't mean to come across as hostile, all I meant by the "patent" bit is that my legal work over the past few years has largely been on the patent side, with limited exposure to copyright.
I'm not sure why you're upset at me about the trademark issue. I'm not defending the guy, in fact I called him both an idiot twice in the same sentence for it.
You keep saying it's a verbatim copy, but what you are talking about is a grid and a sack of letters with numbers on them. If the game were "go," finding expressive elements would be only slightly more difficult! My mind boggles thinking what kinds of things would constitute copyright infringement of a sack of letters.
The term "expressive element" is an elastic one, but does it go so far to find that applying the same 26-element vector of point values to a computer game constitutes copyright infringement? That looks awfully more like the realm of "ideas" than "expression," and even if it is an expressive element I think there's a lot of room for the fact-finder to say that it isn't the same in both.
I agree that it wasn't prudent, but that doesn't necessarily mean it was copyright infringement. I'm assuming he didn't do anything completely stupid like scan in the user manual.
There are probably other facts unfavorable to the individual since he apparently made no effort to hide the connection to the Hasbro product, but again that just goes to the fact-finding.
That's new to me. I was actually referring to 20th century translations, like these. There are a few reasons for copyrighting Bible translations: to earn money, either for scholarship (translation of dead languages isn't cheap, especially when multiple source documents have to be compared) or general church use, or as in the case of the ASV to prevent other people from making changes to what the translators believed was the most accurate rendition of historical texts. (Ironically, the ASV is most well-known for using the made-up word "Jehovah" everywhere - this was the main thing changed back when the translators revisited the work...)
I should add that everything in this message is from what I learned from googling the one paqe I linked above.
I would respect the right of the artist to make that choice. Musicians are not second-class citizens whose rights we should violate at will.
I was referring to a copying which, for the sake of argument, would be deemed within the scope of fair use. (E.g. giving a "bootleg" of an otherwise unavailable album to one friend.) In the U.S. artists do not have "moral rights"; you may be speaking of the law of certain other countries. So I'm not sure whether they would apply to this scenario.
What's interesting about digital rights is that the full impact of the law has come to individual consumers. Generally speaking, people don't need to worry about de minimis violations of the law. For instance, if you buy a software package from an overseas company, you are buying a license, right? It turns out that under international tax law, cross-border licenses, royalties, and dividends are subject to "withholding," which is a tax you would pay to your government on behalf of the supplier.
I once asked an international tax attorney if anyone ever mailed in a $5 check for buying a copy of Windows from an overseas vendor. He just laughed.
Now people are conscious of their individual actions. In the past, whether dubbing a tape was fair use (it probably was) or not, the idea that someone should refrain from dubbing an otherwise unavailable tape in their boombox to give to a friend because it would violate the rights of the artist would be ludicrous.
Today people don't need to worry about such things because the DRM doesn't let them, but boy are they conscious of it.
I didn't make myself clear, sorry. I didn't mean to say that DRM is bad because you can't share music with all family members. It would be inconvenient to send tape dubs to distant family in Ireland, while with computers it is possible to send songs by e-mail. So while DRM might prohibit something probably allowed under copyright law (making a single copy of part of the work and giving it to a friend), in practice it wasn't an issue before.
What I meant to say is that DRM prohibits usage scenarios we used to take for granted. There's a reason old boomboxes always had two tape decks.
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For instance, Propecia was originally a prostate medication. It blocks the uptake of testosterone in certain tissues. The effect they wanted was that the prostate would shrink. It also makes one's dick shrink and it stops hair from falling out (eunuchs don't go bald, by the way -- one way to think about Propecia is that it chemically castrates the man who is taking it). One of these side effects was worth a lot of money.
There's a lot of tetracycline that gets prescribed in this country for zits.
There was one drug I remember reading about that was intended to treat some kind of frivolous Western medical problem, didn't do so well at that, but turned out to work really well on a particular tropical disease. The drug company gave the remaining stock to Doctors Without Borders, but didn't make any more of the drug because there was no profit in it.
The best use of Vaseline® has to be by Mr. Chesebrough, himself. He believed that a person should eat a spoonful every day for good health. He lived to ninety-six years of age and never missed that delicious spoonful every morning.
Vaseline is about as harmless as mineral oil. Eating a spoonful of vaseline every morning would keep him regular and otherwise be harmless assuming he didn't inhale any of it and monitored his fat-soluable vitamin intake. Now, gasoline would cause him some real problems if he had a spoonful of that every morning.
Have you ever called a plumber, or taken your car to a mechanic? Why do you think that lawyers are not necessary?
I think if you studied history, you would find that the legal systems which used ersatz non-lawyers (like the innkeepers in Edo Japan) were so primitive they could be fairly said not to be legal systems at all.
On the other hand, if you looked to France and Germany, they together spent more than a hundred years trying to make a science of the law in the 19th century. Obviously their legal systems are today still better than that of the U.S., yet they require a lawyer to know the law as well. In fact, once you've reduced the law to rules, like they have, you need a lawyer who has all the rules memorized to tell you the rule so you can apply the facts and figure out who's right and wrong. In the U.S. broke/baroque system, there's rarely a clearcut answer whenever two people have a dispute. You need a lawyer for a completely different reason in the U.S.: he has the experience to weigh the facts and predict what will happen and has the learning and resources to look up how judges have ruled in the past on cases with similar facts.
Also, if you want a simple legal system, you'd have to accept things that happen all the time in other countries, like people making millions of dollars a year but paying less income tax than their secretaries. The U.S. may have the most convoluted tax code in the world, but one thing is for sure: everybody pays their fair share.
I'm assuming you haven't thought about this, and you're just griping that your college roommate went to law school and is making twice as much as you, even though he works 70 hour weeks, is a stranger to his family, and hates his job. I'm always mystified why Americans dislike lawyers when they're the ones who keep hiring them! Lawyers don't crawl out of husks. If Americans had a national health care system, they wouldn't need to sue each other for slipping on a banana peel, and if they regulated business dealings they wouldn't need to get a lawyer involved every time someone writes their signature.
CSM's been having major revenue problems for years. I hope it doesn't fold up.
They must be doing something right if this is the first major accident, eh?
Clearly it would be nice to make sure this doesn't happen again, but in rational countries, when something bad happens, they don't just throw the whole thing out the window and start over again, or worse, receive wisdom from armchair experts, like "Only hire U.S. citizen baggage screeners."
I'm not really sure what you mean by congested - if you're talking about right now, that's because this week is the longest national holiday of the year. Almost any train I've been on in Japan is less crowded than the New York subways. For the long-haul trains I have never had a problem showing up and taking a seat, and I've never had a problem getting to work on time on the local trains.
To the extent there is a problem, in Japan they're actually doing something to fix it. They built two new subways lines just in the last five years or so! (Oedo and Namboku) The newer lines are built for expansion as well - they'll run longer subway trains when there's demand. How long has the 2nd Avenue line been on the board in New York? 70 years?
What you say may be true in a strictly logical sense (there's no stopping to bail water into the steam engine these days) but high speed trains most certainly do stop along routes. The Tokaido route shinkansen makes 34 stops after leaving Tokyo station, including several in the Tokyo metropolitan area.
Some trains go faster and skip certain stations, but the fact of the matter is that you need to run a lot of trains to pay for that infrastructure and you run a lot more trains by not running non-stop trains from New York to Boston. Don't you think people in Rhode Island or Connecticut should have a stop??
In Tokyo I can be on a Shinkansen 15 minutes after walking out my front door - including the time to walk to the local train station, ride to Tokyo station, buy a ticket, and walk onto the train. The trains run so often that this is practical, but it wouldn't change anything if I had to time my departure to catch the train.
For Minneapolis-Chicago, it would all depend on the frequency of service, but my experience with Amtrak in the Northeast was similar and not that much slower.
Anyway I think it's a little disingenuous to dismiss the person you responded to. He pointed out the security and baggage nonsense that airlines put people through wastes hours on either end, and you responded by saying you have to leave your house on time and drive to the train station. Isn't that true of an airport as well, and aren't airports way out in the countryside? The train stations I know of are right in the middle of the cities.
Safety is a red herring -- the derailment in Osaka was the only major accident in Japan's railway system for more than four decades (and that was a local train, not a shinkansen). How many planes have crashed in that timeframe?
From what I understand, the weight was increased due to meddling from government bureaucrats. The problem as I see it isn't that poor decisions were made, because that would imply that a review of procedure would allow for good decisions and nice trains in the future.
The problem is that from top to bottom there are very few competent people at DOT/Amtrak, and there is no support in Congress for high-speed rail. You need both competence and money, and simply speaking we're not going to see either one here in my lifetime. Maybe we will if oil costs double or triple, but not before then. It's like asking when we'll see world-beating supercomputers coming out of the former Soviet Union. Only when the world changes.
Haven't used C++ in a while, but don't all C++ programs "pay for" RTTI and exceptions whether they use them or not? Older compilers gave the option of turning off support for those two things because it made programs which didn't use them run faster and take up less space. Maybe modern compilers implement them in a cost-free manner.
I think the Embedded C++ standard leaves out one or both of them for the same reason.
Yes, this is stupid, but it's by no means the worst manifestation of America's fucked up legal system.
That's a good article cite, thanks. It's extremely difficult to find published first-hand accounts of IBM licensing practices. I was familiar with the Heckel article, but it's rather out of date. The last IBM contract I had the opportunity to read suggests that IBM doesn't anymore do the same two-group licensing rate system that Heckel describes; now they hold back some for strategic reasons.
I'm impressed with the grandparent's citation of Dowling v. U.S. I'd never seen that case before. 473 U.S. 207
Dude, you don't understand trademarks very well. If you look at say the corporate charter filings at the Sec. of State for California you will see dozens of companies with very similar names no matter what you put in. Multiply that by 50 states, then across the world. All of them might be entitled to a particular domain name. A trademark doesn't mean that you own a sequence of letters.
.org or .int are - international organizations like the Red Cross and Amnesty International don't really have a presence in any one country. But it's lunacy to have that .org TLD open for any Tom Dick or Harry's vanity site.
.com had used registration restrictions like .co.jp it wouldn't be so polluted. But given worldwide differences in corporate law, it would make just as much sense to not have .com in the first place, to let each country manage its own TLD, like I already said.
Rather than having convoluted and arbitrary names, it's better to have domain names which map to the company which is most relevant to the consumer. Someone in Belgium can easily remember company.be, likewise company.co.jp in Japan. There are very few worldwide companies like Amazon and General Motors, and even they like to customize their web sites for the local markets. Amazon.co.jp is a totally different web site than Amazon.co.uk.
In my opinion, pretty much none of the long TLDs are worth having; all they do is cause artificial pressure on artificially scarce real estate. Perhaps a few like
Maybe if
Not so fast. There's very little probative value to a self-addressed envelope. To see this, mail an unsealed envelope to yourself. Now under this "poor man's copyright" you could backdate any document you wish. Judges already know this and they're not going to believe you when you say that you really did mail the document five years ago.
Someone else mentioned printing an MD5 checksum in the newspaper. In theory that works, but no judge is going to understand one-way hashes and a confused judge is not going to rule in your favor. Plus, running ads in the paper isn't free and seems like a huge hassle to me. It makes just as much sense to pay the $30 and register it properly.
$30 is a totally negligible cost compared to studio time, etc. Just do it the right way. Better yet, just forget about it - if $30 is too much, you'll never afford litigation expenses.
Americans have an even more positive outlook on straightened, bleached teeth as they do on silicone-implanted boobs. The difference is that parents have their kids' teeth done, and childhood plastic surgery is not recommended. Also there are a good number of Americans who find plastic surgery distasteful, but almost universally they see nothing wrong with orthodontia.
One benign explanation may be that in America children don't drink coffee, tea, or other tooth-staining foods.
Abuse of American electronic discovery rules is getting worse every year. Defragment your disk? That's a sanction. Copy files from an old computer to a new one? That's a sanction.
Seriously, the legal rules need to realize that asking for documents not normally accessible is extremely expensive and opens up possibilities for extortion. ("Looks like it will cost you three million dollars to restore and examine these tapes... Why don't we just settle the case for two?") Everything the Microsoft attorney said is true.
The judges know this, the attorneys know this, the companies know this. The submitter needs to get out in the real world and get his head out of his ass. There's not even an ideological basis for thinking the way he does. It's not like poor people benefit from these rules (who Democrats like to protect) or self-made rich people (who Republicans like to protect).
You literally get to have your cake and eat it, too? And the icing is Mac on Linux? Sounds a little, uh, crunchy and plasticky...
Does the cake come in a cellophane wrapper inside the box, or do they give you a coupon for redemption at a local bakery?
I'm pretty sure the program manager is still being shipped with Windows. You can use that if you like.
He's right.
In a lot of respects, sure, the American legal system is needlessly baroque, but that wasn't the case here. The problem here wasn't that on-point precedent was buried in one volume of a legal reporter among thousands. Everything you need to write patents is in the Manual of Patent Examining Procedure. That's the very same book patent lawyers / agents keep on their desk. It's available online for free at the Goverment Printing Office web site.
There's this American pathology where the people with no legal knowledge think they're capable of practicing law as well as any lawyer. I'm totally mystified where it comes from. Maybe it's from watching too much TV, or maybe it's from a belief that they're really smarter than all those lawyers out there. I'd like to see those people take the LSAT (which is all logical reasoning, no law) and apply to Harvard Law or Columbia and see whether they get in.
As far as writing patents pro se, it can be done. There are good self-help books out there. The problem is that a patent by itself doesn't make money: you either have to sue somebody or license it, both of which require money and/or an on-going presence in the industry. If you've got the money to do that there's no reason not to hire a lawyer to do a good job on the patent application in the first place. After all, the cost of getting a patent is almost non-existent compared to the sums of money at stake, not to mention that the lawyer's hourly costs are about on par with what the PTO itself charges when you count application fees, maintenance fees, etc. It's really a false economy to try to write one's own patent applications.
There's this mystique about patents, but really they're no different than any other industrial tool. They're not magic. Trying to make money off a single patent is usually like trying to make money off of a truck full of rubber hoses.
If I had $350, I sure wouldn't have deliberately wasted it on a patent application that I knew was invalid, but I guess different strokes for different folks.
I'm not sure why you're upset at me about the trademark issue. I'm not defending the guy, in fact I called him both an idiot twice in the same sentence for it.
You keep saying it's a verbatim copy, but what you are talking about is a grid and a sack of letters with numbers on them. If the game were "go," finding expressive elements would be only slightly more difficult! My mind boggles thinking what kinds of things would constitute copyright infringement of a sack of letters.
The term "expressive element" is an elastic one, but does it go so far to find that applying the same 26-element vector of point values to a computer game constitutes copyright infringement? That looks awfully more like the realm of "ideas" than "expression," and even if it is an expressive element I think there's a lot of room for the fact-finder to say that it isn't the same in both.
I agree that it wasn't prudent, but that doesn't necessarily mean it was copyright infringement. I'm assuming he didn't do anything completely stupid like scan in the user manual.
There are probably other facts unfavorable to the individual since he apparently made no effort to hide the connection to the Hasbro product, but again that just goes to the fact-finding.
I should add that everything in this message is from what I learned from googling the one paqe I linked above.
My comment was intended to give context so my comment would make sense.
I would respect the right of the artist to make that choice. Musicians are not second-class citizens whose rights we should violate at will.
I was referring to a copying which, for the sake of argument, would be deemed within the scope of fair use. (E.g. giving a "bootleg" of an otherwise unavailable album to one friend.) In the U.S. artists do not have "moral rights"; you may be speaking of the law of certain other countries. So I'm not sure whether they would apply to this scenario.
What's interesting about digital rights is that the full impact of the law has come to individual consumers. Generally speaking, people don't need to worry about de minimis violations of the law. For instance, if you buy a software package from an overseas company, you are buying a license, right? It turns out that under international tax law, cross-border licenses, royalties, and dividends are subject to "withholding," which is a tax you would pay to your government on behalf of the supplier.
I once asked an international tax attorney if anyone ever mailed in a $5 check for buying a copy of Windows from an overseas vendor. He just laughed.
Now people are conscious of their individual actions. In the past, whether dubbing a tape was fair use (it probably was) or not, the idea that someone should refrain from dubbing an otherwise unavailable tape in their boombox to give to a friend because it would violate the rights of the artist would be ludicrous.
Today people don't need to worry about such things because the DRM doesn't let them, but boy are they conscious of it.
What I meant to say is that DRM prohibits usage scenarios we used to take for granted. There's a reason old boomboxes always had two tape decks.