I think I jumped on the original poster too quickly for saying he didn't mind DRM, and then listing several limitations imposed by DRM which he wouldn't suffer under copyright law. Being able to pick your own singles may be enough of an offsetting advantage to make DRM a net win for some consumers.
I think you're being too glib about this. Patents aren't at issue here because the game is so old. So forgot Tetris and the ilk.
We know that there's a clear infringement of trademark. So forget that the dumbass called it eScrabble, he was an idiot for doing that. You actually said that the "Scrabble" name was an issue of copyright, which I think suggests you are not totally familiar with the issues yourself.
Copyright is an issue, but how much it protects is a delicate question. Copying the names of the streets of Monopoly is one thing; they can easily be renamed and have the same game mechanics. You made the error of analogy. If it is easier to argue one than another, then it's because there is a difference and we should not swallow the analogy. That is, analogies are like lampposts: for illumination, not support. (There's some metahumor in that last sentence.)
The point values of Scrabble are what the game is based on. The patents have expired, so the same game should be in the public domain now, although making duplicates of the gaming set would be an infringement of copyright. Therefore, it should be allowed to make another gaming set which supports the same game mechanics. (It would be like "clean-room engineering" the Compaq BIOS.)
That's my intuition from the patent side. I think there are copyright cases supporting the Monopoly knockoffs who did rename the streets. So, unless I see some better arguments, I think the case is far from clear-cut but probably not worth litigating. It was a free site after all.
My knowledge of the copyright side of the fence is limited but I recall several cases involving Monopoly knock-offs (the names were changed, but all of the mechanics were the same) and the 9th Circuit found in favor of the clones.
There are broad legal principles at work, and you may even be correct, but I'd be more convinced if you discussed more concrete cases. Merely referring to "expressive elements" makes it sound like you're arguing John Cage's side of 4'33". I'm more interested in the truth than a hand-wavy legal memo for Hasbro.
Below, I also see people saying that a recipe can be copyrighted. Well, obviously, but that's a terrible example because recipes are the canonical explanation of what a method patent is. People are running away and mixing the notions of patent, copyright, and sweat-of-the-brow. It's best not to be too glib about this.
I think the case is rather delicate, to be honest, except for the trademark issue, unless someone can point me to an on-point case to the contrary. I think the Monopoly cases favor the individual here.
Wow. Other people have responded already, but honestly I wonder what kind of experience you had which made you so bitter, since you seem to have no experience with lawyers at all.
Large firms charge a lot per hour, which is why their clients are big companies. They're not necessarily better lawyers than ones in smaller offices (in many instances, they're not) but they have the scale and the resources to handle the big transactions and lawsuits big companies get involved in.
Smaller law firms charge barely more on a per-hour basis than a plumber or mechanic or contract programmer and a lot less than a doctor. They have to pay their secretaries, their health insurance, their office rent, and other non-billable costs, too, you know.
The fetish with HLS, SLS, and Yale is a little weird, too. Experience counts for a lot in law, and the marginal differences in intelligence between lawyers counts for little most of the time. The "best" lawyers are successful because they're loquacious and good at hanging out with rich people and very hard-working. You don't need that for a simple employment law issue.
IP lawyers aren't god's gift, either. No smarter, but perhaps a little squirrelier from not having a liberal arts background.
I fail to see how burning stacks of uncompressed-yet-lossy CDs is an improvement over just buying the CDs from Amazon.com in the first place, or how getting around DRM shows that DRM isn't a problem.
I wasn't saying that DRM can't be avoided. The original poster said that the DRM didn't prevent him from doing what he wanted to do.
Obviously, you can avoid the DRM by burning to stacks of CDs in uncompressed format, reripping, using some complex combination of Linux software, etc. But if you keep the DRM, that means using iTunes and the iPod.
I didn't explain myself very well. Once Apple goes out of business, I have to buy a new MP3 player to keep buying digital music online, right? So should I carry two MP3 players in my pocket or buy my music all over again?
I think your Photoshop argument is a little specious, too. Businesses expect to pay a certain amount each each in IT upgrades and support. As a home user the only software I've purchased is Office.
You don't think that being prohibited from sharing a song with a family member is a problem? Isn't that the quintessential "fair use"?
Or what happens when your Mac breaks? I can still listen to the Queensryche CDs I bought in junior high (if I wanted to). At the time I had a brand-new Sony DiscMan that took four double-A batteries, lasted a couple hours, had awful sound, and cost about $130 new. My family's computer was a CompuAdd 286.
What happens when Apple goes out of business? Sony is still is business, but CompuAdd went belly-up ages ago. Apple's market share has been shrinking since the mid-1980s (and I say that as someone typing this on a PowerBook).
Assuming you don't have a BMW/w iPod adapter, can you listen to your CDs in your car without burning them in uncompressed, WAV format? What happens when you decide you want to move to Linux? Or what if you decide you'd rather have an MP3 player with a built-in radio?
These days, you can't even stream unencrypted songs to other computers in your household with iTunes. How do you know that Apple won't take away more rights in the future?
What if the artist decides he doesn't want his album distributed (e.g. Beach Boys' original Smile, Prince's Black Album), but you want other people to hear it?
A software patent on an application that is suffiently innovative, non trivial and non obvious is no better or worse than a patent on a physical invention, it's just that in the world of software patents, the patent examiners seem to have no clue and assume that anything someone has done with a computer must be worthy of patenting.
Hey there, there are lots more problems unique to software patents. There's no reason to knock people down based on your own ignorance. Here's a few others:
The length of the patent is too long for the pace of technology
The benefits of software are largely based on network externalities, which are of course impeded by patent monopolies. That's not the case with say a new razor by Gillette
Software has no inherent cost/price, so by imposing licensing fees you might conceivably wipe out Linux, etc. A new kind of toothbrush will always be sold for money which can be used to pay royalties
There is no way to tell what's been patented (as opposed to chemical and DNA patents where there are searchable databases). Even patent owners themselves (e.g. Forgent) don't know what's in their patents! The marking requirement, which ordinarily goes a tiny way towards solving this problem, is almost universally ignored in the software industry
Having many, many players in the software industry drives up transaction costs. Although semiconductor patents are economically similar, there are many fewer semiconductor firms which makes licensing more tractable (although I don't believe its desirable there, either)
Software patents do not disclose underlying implementations, making the claims broad and vague without contributing benefits to society. That there is a legal distinction, not just an economic one
And the biggest one: There is simply no empirical evidence that patents cause innovation in the software industry. (There is actually quite a bit to the contrary.) If there's no economic benefit, then what's the point? The patent act was never titled "A Full Employment Act for Shysters"!
There's a lot more. This kind of thing has been discussed in the economic and legal literature for decades.
OS X's preview app loads PDF's up as fast as the Notepad app loads up text files in Windows.
Yeah, but then you have Safari rabbit droppings all over the desktop which have to be deleted manually, it's a pain in the ass to resize the Preview window to make the text legible every time, not to mention scrolling through the text or finding anything. Also, I think the kid in the Preview icon is butt-ugly, to be honest. I don't like having to stare at his mug both on the task-bar and miniaturized in the rabbit dropping icons.
There simply is no reason to use PDF for this sort of thing.
This the logical flaw of circular reasoning. You say, whenever you buy something computer related, it is likely already obsolete and will be replaced with the next shiny thing in a couple of months. In fact this very problem is avoided by knowing when new products are coming out.
Your other comment, Buy what you need for the job you need it for is something of a strawman. You are putting words into people's mouths when you say there is a "need." Most people don't work at NASA, where X is needed now at whatever the cost. By anticipating price moves and product changes, people can weigh the cost of delay against the benefits of reduced prices or new machines.
You might want to read that more carefully. Those words "holding any Office of Profit or Trust under them" weren't put down to use up the extra ink in the pen.
You don't know what you are talking about. The Jaguar used funny math to get the "64-bit" number. Everybody knows that a 64-bit blitter does not a 64-bit system make, and so the only people to bring it up (like you) do so to build strawmen. The CPU of the Jaguar was a Motorola 68000.
The page you link to, by making this analogy, shows that its author doesn't know jack about shit, either.
The Nintendo 64 had an R4300i CPU. It was fully 64-bit. It addressed 64 bits (40 physical), the same as high-end SGI workstations. It had 64-bit integer registers and 64-bit floating point registers. The system had a 500MB/sec bus to the Rambus memory. There is only one "32-bit" part about the R4300i, and that was the system interface. But the memory connected to the RCP, not the CPU (and the RCP, obviously, had heavy bandwidth requirements of its own to do the graphics rendering and sound), and so it would have been wasteful to run the same wide bus between the CPU and RCP.
The RCP was another 64-bit processor, also a customized MIPS chip.
It is true that the R4300i had a 32-bit compatibility mode which was often used in games, but that is irrelevant. Most people run 32-bit software on their Athlon 64, too.
On theft, the common-law definition required that a criminal deprive the owner of his property. Since non-profit copyright infringement does not deprive the owner of his property (or even of the owner an opportunity to make an additional sale in many cases), it is not theft. It is copyright infringement. You are wrong, sir. The parent did not even mention "theft"; why did you bring it up?
On piracy, you are correct to some degree, but you should not be so blithe. Your source does not give the context of the original usages. If you look at the Oxford English Dictionary (presumably what your resource was based on), you see that early broadcasting "pirates" were either out for profit or were a nuisance to licensed operators. This does not apply to the case of file sharing.
Second, regarding your use of piracy to refer to the appropriation of another's work, the use categorically referred to appropriation for profit, both for copyright and patent. Again, please look at the historical usages in the OED, since you are so keen on justifying modern use with usages from several hundred years ago.
Third, to the extent the usage of "pirate" is accurate, you know quite well why people object to the use of the term. The word, being loaded, colors public debate. We all agree that the factories in China stamping out counterfeit DVDs are run by "pirates" in the sense of the word you prefer. There is at least some semblance to buccaneers who stole, raped, killed, and pillaged.
The word "alleged copyright infringer" is perfectly accurate to refer to 70-year-old blue-haired ladies being sued by the RIAA. By using the word "pirate," there is a transparent attempt to slant public opinion in a certain way. If you don't think that's true, why don't you think "infringer" is an adequate synonym?
I see the confusion. Where you say "IP," you mean it to include traditional notions of copyright and patent which were (mostly) provided as economic incentives, stretching back for centuries.
The word "property" is rather loaded. Blackstone's statement that the rights go from the heavens above to the center of the earth is just about how most Americans view property. Take the number of people who think it is right to shoot trespassers, for instance.
If you read legal articles from a few decades ago, you'll see that there was quite a bit that scholars viewed outside the ambit of patent and copyright. Judge Rich (the author of the modern patent act in the 1940s) gave an example of a diaper service being obviously unpatentable. But he later, when he was over 90 years old became a strong proponent of patenting just about everything. (He never explained his change.) Certainly today economists don't believe that everything needs to be patented or copyrighted, and even a freshman economics class will tell you that there are significant deadweight costs to expanding a monopoly. Time to market and human capital are both very effective to carving out viable businesses. Even newspapers made a perfectly good living a hundred years ago when they could not copyright their words!
My point was that if you believe that making an honest living depends on "intellectual property," as distinct from traditional notions of copyright, patent, and so on, you are focusing on giving statutory rights to groups where there, almost by definition, is no economic justification. By claiming that inventors and authors (defined very broadly e.g. to include diaper washers) have intellectual property rights in their work, you are claiming that there is no limit to what they should have. There is simply no way to support your claim that an honest living depends on living in these interstices of economics.
The problem is that copyright, patent, etc. laws aren't static, and in the past few decades they have changed to favor the interests of certain groups at the expense of the public at large. The greater problem is that the rhetorical framework has also changed. The RIAA, for example, talks about "stealing from artists," rather than what the extent of a statutory monopoly should be to promote the common good. (This was what appellate Judge Noonan said at the Grokster oral argument.)
"Intellectual property" is trotted out to combine the pre-existing and distinct notions of patent, copyright, trade secret, etc. and shift the rhetorical debate from economic incentives benefiting society to the entitlements of the originator.
So your snide insinuation that making an honest living depends on "intellectual property" is circular at best.
Are you sure the average payout is $1m and the average commission is 40%? Those both seem quite high from what I heard a few years ago in bankruptcy class. I suspect by "having worked in this space," you mean SEO and not asbestos litigation.
The true numbers, as I understand them, is that the average claim for asbestos is maybe $10k-$20k, which is not high at all for someone who was given lung cancer. The commissions on filing claims are low, too, because it is very mechanical, but they're not zero because the law firm fronts all the costs (even for would-be plaintiffs who turn out not to have a viable claim) and the lawyers, secretaries, and paralegals need to make a modest living too.
Your numbers of $1m and 40% are from when asbestos litigation would go to trial and it wasn't a simple matter of filing a claim with the trust fund, and yet even then those figures are maximums, not averages. Many got smaller verdicts or nothing. The settlements of early litigants who didn't go all the way to verdict was often below what mesothelioma patients would get today from the trust fund, maybe $5k. Showing that a disease was caused by exposure to hazardous chemicals is extremely difficult. (Look at the recent, failed, litigation against IBM for workplace chemical exposure for another example of this.) There were some very few firms that got rich from the economies of scale of asbestos suits in the 1970s and 1980s, but another way to look at it is that they provided a way to help the cancer patients at a time when there was no other option.
Putting aside the general issue of "ambulance chasers," most of whom are by no means wealthy (although every now and then some like John Edwards strike it rich), I have trouble understanding the objection to filing asbestos claims. Having mesothelioma virtually guarantees that the person got lung cancer from asbestos, end of story, with a level of proof beyond that of almost any other kind of civil litigation. (Although a few decades ago it was very hard to win the suits.)
My understanding, though, is that the trust funds have been depleted by the filing of less important claims, where the patient shows scarring of the lungs but did not develop cancer. There's been some controversy in Britain recently over whether "pleural plaques" claims should be allowed. My own view is that they should not.
Well, the original was in Intel assembly-language format. It's hard to say there's a flaw in the program when it's written the way the databooks and the oldest assemblers for the chip say it should be.
Grandparent was a little oddly written, though. The directives don't look like it would compile with any version of MASM.
And used underwear. I can save $10/pair by not padding Calvin Klein's wallet. A spritz of bleach and a quick wash cycle on "hot" and they're as good as new!
I'm actually not the original responder. I didn't mean to be snippy, sorry, I butted in during a coffee break. But if you want a real figure on how much it would cost to litigate a suit by yourself, take the $3m figure (which is accurate), and subtract the cost of one person.
Hypothetically, you might be able to do the job of one attorney, but clearly you wouldn't be able to do the job of more than one person. Attorneys at top firms routinely work in excess of 60 hour weeks. So if you assume that the person whose job you're doing is $500k (a ballpark figure for the senior partner in charge of the case), that leaves $2.5m you would need to come up with out of pocket.
Where does that money go? Patent cases involve boxes and boxes of documents, you need to pay junior attorneys to look through them for legally significant documents. Managing these documents requires teams of paralegals.
You need to pay expert witnesses, who may charge a thousand dollars an hour. (Maybe not for your benefit, we'll assume, but you need to put them on the stand, and they need to spend time preparing for their testimony.) People like Brian Kernighan (an expert witness for IBM against SCO) don't work for peanuts, and someone like my college roommate who doesn't have a reputation isn't going to convince the jury or judge even if he knows the subject cold.
Then there's legal research. Patent law is far, far more complicated than you could ever imagine, and thanks to the Federal Circuit, it's an ever-shifting quagmire. Rest assured you would need to spend many hours on Westlaw or LexisNexis, using legal databases that cost $700 an hour. (That is the value of experience; a partner at a good firm will know 90% of the relevant law already.)
This is patent litigation, after all, and that means looking through prior art. You'll pay a consultant to dig up prior art (you're the attorney, not the expert), but when he brings back a stack of 20-year-old articles, you're going to have to sit down and figure out what they mean. What if he says he found some software? You'll have to figure out how to make the software run. And although PCs are amazingly backwards-compatible, what if the software is incompatible with the 486? Or what if the software runs on the Amiga? You can waste weeks trying to get this old stuff to work. You may need to track down the software yourself, and that involves getting on the phone and calling very important people in the computer industry to see if they have anything in their attic (this actually happened with Marc Levoy defending a case against Adobe, which fortunately was defeated). Again, very important people are motivated by very big checks.
Patent cases have all kinds of stupid evidence. Like dictionaries. You'll need to find a dictionary that has a definition you want, not after a certain date. If you're defending against a Lemelson patent, that could be in the 1960s or so. Where are you going to find an unbridged dictionary from, say, 1963? (1964 or later is no good at all.)
You'll have to look through the prosecution histories of the patent, the parent patents, the continuations-in-part, etc. You ever tried reading a patent? They're goobledegook. So imagine reading all of the paperwork that went back and forth between the inventor and the patent office for a few years until the patent was issued, and imagine that the jargon was in use 20 years ago.
Cases involve more than getting up in front of a jury. You need to respond to interrogatories from the other side, etc., and it can't be a half-assed job. Every brief filed gets a brief from the other side and then another from the first side. There are motions all the time on piddly points of law that never make the news. You need to fly to depositions and pay court reporters. You need to spend time arguing on the phone with the other side, because they're not just going to roll-over and give you what you want. The costs of copying those documents is absurdly high, too, due to the rapid turnaround. You might end up hiring an IT staff
Morgan Chu successfully single-handedly defended a patent case with no patent experience while he was an associate. However, Morgan Chu had the support staff (paralegals, secretaries) of his firm, and he later went on to become chair of the same firm, Irell & Manella. I&M is arguably the best litigation firm on the West Coast, and I say that as someone who works at a different patent litigation firm.
So no, it's not impossible to successfully litigate a patent case by yourself. But you have to be a brilliant lawyer ("I've been to law school" isn't enough by miles), have an unlimited budget (discovery costs are enormous, and if you don't conduct discovery you will have no evidence), and have a first-rate support staff. And people at West Coast firms still talk about Mr. Chu's accomplishment decades after the fact.
I think it's a little condescending, actually, the way you write off the worth of the experience attorneys bring to the table. It's one thing to say that the patent system is the grit in the wheels of capitalism (I agree!), but what you're insinuating is quite another. The law and the practical problems are just a little more advanced than fighting a speeding ticket.
Slashdot Mirror
I think I jumped on the original poster too quickly for saying he didn't mind DRM, and then listing several limitations imposed by DRM which he wouldn't suffer under copyright law. Being able to pick your own singles may be enough of an offsetting advantage to make DRM a net win for some consumers.
We know that there's a clear infringement of trademark. So forget that the dumbass called it eScrabble, he was an idiot for doing that. You actually said that the "Scrabble" name was an issue of copyright, which I think suggests you are not totally familiar with the issues yourself.
Copyright is an issue, but how much it protects is a delicate question. Copying the names of the streets of Monopoly is one thing; they can easily be renamed and have the same game mechanics. You made the error of analogy. If it is easier to argue one than another, then it's because there is a difference and we should not swallow the analogy. That is, analogies are like lampposts: for illumination, not support. (There's some metahumor in that last sentence.)
The point values of Scrabble are what the game is based on. The patents have expired, so the same game should be in the public domain now, although making duplicates of the gaming set would be an infringement of copyright. Therefore, it should be allowed to make another gaming set which supports the same game mechanics. (It would be like "clean-room engineering" the Compaq BIOS.)
That's my intuition from the patent side. I think there are copyright cases supporting the Monopoly knockoffs who did rename the streets. So, unless I see some better arguments, I think the case is far from clear-cut but probably not worth litigating. It was a free site after all.
There are broad legal principles at work, and you may even be correct, but I'd be more convinced if you discussed more concrete cases. Merely referring to "expressive elements" makes it sound like you're arguing John Cage's side of 4'33". I'm more interested in the truth than a hand-wavy legal memo for Hasbro.
Below, I also see people saying that a recipe can be copyrighted. Well, obviously, but that's a terrible example because recipes are the canonical explanation of what a method patent is. People are running away and mixing the notions of patent, copyright, and sweat-of-the-brow. It's best not to be too glib about this.
I think the case is rather delicate, to be honest, except for the trademark issue, unless someone can point me to an on-point case to the contrary. I think the Monopoly cases favor the individual here.
Large firms charge a lot per hour, which is why their clients are big companies. They're not necessarily better lawyers than ones in smaller offices (in many instances, they're not) but they have the scale and the resources to handle the big transactions and lawsuits big companies get involved in.
Smaller law firms charge barely more on a per-hour basis than a plumber or mechanic or contract programmer and a lot less than a doctor. They have to pay their secretaries, their health insurance, their office rent, and other non-billable costs, too, you know.
The fetish with HLS, SLS, and Yale is a little weird, too. Experience counts for a lot in law, and the marginal differences in intelligence between lawyers counts for little most of the time. The "best" lawyers are successful because they're loquacious and good at hanging out with rich people and very hard-working. You don't need that for a simple employment law issue.
IP lawyers aren't god's gift, either. No smarter, but perhaps a little squirrelier from not having a liberal arts background.
Modern bible translations are also copyrighted. I'm not going to comment on whether christians are nutty or not.
I fail to see how burning stacks of uncompressed-yet-lossy CDs is an improvement over just buying the CDs from Amazon.com in the first place, or how getting around DRM shows that DRM isn't a problem.
Obviously, you can avoid the DRM by burning to stacks of CDs in uncompressed format, reripping, using some complex combination of Linux software, etc. But if you keep the DRM, that means using iTunes and the iPod.
I think your Photoshop argument is a little specious, too. Businesses expect to pay a certain amount each each in IT upgrades and support. As a home user the only software I've purchased is Office.
Or what happens when your Mac breaks? I can still listen to the Queensryche CDs I bought in junior high (if I wanted to). At the time I had a brand-new Sony DiscMan that took four double-A batteries, lasted a couple hours, had awful sound, and cost about $130 new. My family's computer was a CompuAdd 286.
What happens when Apple goes out of business? Sony is still is business, but CompuAdd went belly-up ages ago. Apple's market share has been shrinking since the mid-1980s (and I say that as someone typing this on a PowerBook).
Assuming you don't have a BMW /w iPod adapter, can you listen to your CDs in your car without burning them in uncompressed, WAV format? What happens when you decide you want to move to Linux? Or what if you decide you'd rather have an MP3 player with a built-in radio?
These days, you can't even stream unencrypted songs to other computers in your household with iTunes. How do you know that Apple won't take away more rights in the future?
What if the artist decides he doesn't want his album distributed (e.g. Beach Boys' original Smile, Prince's Black Album), but you want other people to hear it?
Hey there, there are lots more problems unique to software patents. There's no reason to knock people down based on your own ignorance. Here's a few others:
- The length of the patent is too long for the pace of technology
- The benefits of software are largely based on network externalities, which are of course impeded by patent monopolies. That's not the case with say a new razor by Gillette
- Software has no inherent cost/price, so by imposing licensing fees you might conceivably wipe out Linux, etc. A new kind of toothbrush will always be sold for money which can be used to pay royalties
- There is no way to tell what's been patented (as opposed to chemical and DNA patents where there are searchable databases). Even patent owners themselves (e.g. Forgent) don't know what's in their patents! The marking requirement, which ordinarily goes a tiny way towards solving this problem, is almost universally ignored in the software industry
- Having many, many players in the software industry drives up transaction costs. Although semiconductor patents are economically similar, there are many fewer semiconductor firms which makes licensing more tractable (although I don't believe its desirable there, either)
- Software patents do not disclose underlying implementations, making the claims broad and vague without contributing benefits to society. That there is a legal distinction, not just an economic one
- And the biggest one: There is simply no empirical evidence that patents cause innovation in the software industry. (There is actually quite a bit to the contrary.) If there's no economic benefit, then what's the point? The patent act was never titled "A Full Employment Act for Shysters"!
There's a lot more. This kind of thing has been discussed in the economic and legal literature for decades.Your Jebediah Springfield reference is good, but neither apt nor great.
The code was of course debigulated. And as we all know, the idea of a rebigulator is so patently absurd I can't even begin to comprehend it...
Yeah, but then you have Safari rabbit droppings all over the desktop which have to be deleted manually, it's a pain in the ass to resize the Preview window to make the text legible every time, not to mention scrolling through the text or finding anything. Also, I think the kid in the Preview icon is butt-ugly, to be honest. I don't like having to stare at his mug both on the task-bar and miniaturized in the rabbit dropping icons.
There simply is no reason to use PDF for this sort of thing.
Your other comment, Buy what you need for the job you need it for is something of a strawman. You are putting words into people's mouths when you say there is a "need." Most people don't work at NASA, where X is needed now at whatever the cost. By anticipating price moves and product changes, people can weigh the cost of delay against the benefits of reduced prices or new machines.
This all seems rather obvious to me.
Well, you could see them right now on that screen if you could afford it.
You might want to read that more carefully. Those words "holding any Office of Profit or Trust under them" weren't put down to use up the extra ink in the pen.
Ah, you should be using mammals.org instead!
The page you link to, by making this analogy, shows that its author doesn't know jack about shit, either.
The Nintendo 64 had an R4300i CPU. It was fully 64-bit. It addressed 64 bits (40 physical), the same as high-end SGI workstations. It had 64-bit integer registers and 64-bit floating point registers. The system had a 500MB/sec bus to the Rambus memory. There is only one "32-bit" part about the R4300i, and that was the system interface. But the memory connected to the RCP, not the CPU (and the RCP, obviously, had heavy bandwidth requirements of its own to do the graphics rendering and sound), and so it would have been wasteful to run the same wide bus between the CPU and RCP.
The RCP was another 64-bit processor, also a customized MIPS chip.
It is true that the R4300i had a 32-bit compatibility mode which was often used in games, but that is irrelevant. Most people run 32-bit software on their Athlon 64, too.
On theft, the common-law definition required that a criminal deprive the owner of his property. Since non-profit copyright infringement does not deprive the owner of his property (or even of the owner an opportunity to make an additional sale in many cases), it is not theft. It is copyright infringement. You are wrong, sir. The parent did not even mention "theft"; why did you bring it up?
On piracy, you are correct to some degree, but you should not be so blithe. Your source does not give the context of the original usages. If you look at the Oxford English Dictionary (presumably what your resource was based on), you see that early broadcasting "pirates" were either out for profit or were a nuisance to licensed operators. This does not apply to the case of file sharing.
Second, regarding your use of piracy to refer to the appropriation of another's work, the use categorically referred to appropriation for profit, both for copyright and patent. Again, please look at the historical usages in the OED, since you are so keen on justifying modern use with usages from several hundred years ago.
Third, to the extent the usage of "pirate" is accurate, you know quite well why people object to the use of the term. The word, being loaded, colors public debate. We all agree that the factories in China stamping out counterfeit DVDs are run by "pirates" in the sense of the word you prefer. There is at least some semblance to buccaneers who stole, raped, killed, and pillaged.
The word "alleged copyright infringer" is perfectly accurate to refer to 70-year-old blue-haired ladies being sued by the RIAA. By using the word "pirate," there is a transparent attempt to slant public opinion in a certain way. If you don't think that's true, why don't you think "infringer" is an adequate synonym?
The word "property" is rather loaded. Blackstone's statement that the rights go from the heavens above to the center of the earth is just about how most Americans view property. Take the number of people who think it is right to shoot trespassers, for instance.
If you read legal articles from a few decades ago, you'll see that there was quite a bit that scholars viewed outside the ambit of patent and copyright. Judge Rich (the author of the modern patent act in the 1940s) gave an example of a diaper service being obviously unpatentable. But he later, when he was over 90 years old became a strong proponent of patenting just about everything. (He never explained his change.) Certainly today economists don't believe that everything needs to be patented or copyrighted, and even a freshman economics class will tell you that there are significant deadweight costs to expanding a monopoly. Time to market and human capital are both very effective to carving out viable businesses. Even newspapers made a perfectly good living a hundred years ago when they could not copyright their words!
My point was that if you believe that making an honest living depends on "intellectual property," as distinct from traditional notions of copyright, patent, and so on, you are focusing on giving statutory rights to groups where there, almost by definition, is no economic justification. By claiming that inventors and authors (defined very broadly e.g. to include diaper washers) have intellectual property rights in their work, you are claiming that there is no limit to what they should have. There is simply no way to support your claim that an honest living depends on living in these interstices of economics.
The problem is that copyright, patent, etc. laws aren't static, and in the past few decades they have changed to favor the interests of certain groups at the expense of the public at large. The greater problem is that the rhetorical framework has also changed. The RIAA, for example, talks about "stealing from artists," rather than what the extent of a statutory monopoly should be to promote the common good. (This was what appellate Judge Noonan said at the Grokster oral argument.)
So your snide insinuation that making an honest living depends on "intellectual property" is circular at best.
The true numbers, as I understand them, is that the average claim for asbestos is maybe $10k-$20k, which is not high at all for someone who was given lung cancer. The commissions on filing claims are low, too, because it is very mechanical, but they're not zero because the law firm fronts all the costs (even for would-be plaintiffs who turn out not to have a viable claim) and the lawyers, secretaries, and paralegals need to make a modest living too.
Your numbers of $1m and 40% are from when asbestos litigation would go to trial and it wasn't a simple matter of filing a claim with the trust fund, and yet even then those figures are maximums, not averages. Many got smaller verdicts or nothing. The settlements of early litigants who didn't go all the way to verdict was often below what mesothelioma patients would get today from the trust fund, maybe $5k. Showing that a disease was caused by exposure to hazardous chemicals is extremely difficult. (Look at the recent, failed, litigation against IBM for workplace chemical exposure for another example of this.) There were some very few firms that got rich from the economies of scale of asbestos suits in the 1970s and 1980s, but another way to look at it is that they provided a way to help the cancer patients at a time when there was no other option.
Putting aside the general issue of "ambulance chasers," most of whom are by no means wealthy (although every now and then some like John Edwards strike it rich), I have trouble understanding the objection to filing asbestos claims. Having mesothelioma virtually guarantees that the person got lung cancer from asbestos, end of story, with a level of proof beyond that of almost any other kind of civil litigation. (Although a few decades ago it was very hard to win the suits.)
My understanding, though, is that the trust funds have been depleted by the filing of less important claims, where the patient shows scarring of the lungs but did not develop cancer. There's been some controversy in Britain recently over whether "pleural plaques" claims should be allowed. My own view is that they should not.
Grandparent was a little oddly written, though. The directives don't look like it would compile with any version of MASM.
And used underwear. I can save $10/pair by not padding Calvin Klein's wallet. A spritz of bleach and a quick wash cycle on "hot" and they're as good as new!
Hypothetically, you might be able to do the job of one attorney, but clearly you wouldn't be able to do the job of more than one person. Attorneys at top firms routinely work in excess of 60 hour weeks. So if you assume that the person whose job you're doing is $500k (a ballpark figure for the senior partner in charge of the case), that leaves $2.5m you would need to come up with out of pocket.
Where does that money go? Patent cases involve boxes and boxes of documents, you need to pay junior attorneys to look through them for legally significant documents. Managing these documents requires teams of paralegals.
You need to pay expert witnesses, who may charge a thousand dollars an hour. (Maybe not for your benefit, we'll assume, but you need to put them on the stand, and they need to spend time preparing for their testimony.) People like Brian Kernighan (an expert witness for IBM against SCO) don't work for peanuts, and someone like my college roommate who doesn't have a reputation isn't going to convince the jury or judge even if he knows the subject cold.
Then there's legal research. Patent law is far, far more complicated than you could ever imagine, and thanks to the Federal Circuit, it's an ever-shifting quagmire. Rest assured you would need to spend many hours on Westlaw or LexisNexis, using legal databases that cost $700 an hour. (That is the value of experience; a partner at a good firm will know 90% of the relevant law already.)
This is patent litigation, after all, and that means looking through prior art. You'll pay a consultant to dig up prior art (you're the attorney, not the expert), but when he brings back a stack of 20-year-old articles, you're going to have to sit down and figure out what they mean. What if he says he found some software? You'll have to figure out how to make the software run. And although PCs are amazingly backwards-compatible, what if the software is incompatible with the 486? Or what if the software runs on the Amiga? You can waste weeks trying to get this old stuff to work. You may need to track down the software yourself, and that involves getting on the phone and calling very important people in the computer industry to see if they have anything in their attic (this actually happened with Marc Levoy defending a case against Adobe, which fortunately was defeated). Again, very important people are motivated by very big checks.
Patent cases have all kinds of stupid evidence. Like dictionaries. You'll need to find a dictionary that has a definition you want, not after a certain date. If you're defending against a Lemelson patent, that could be in the 1960s or so. Where are you going to find an unbridged dictionary from, say, 1963? (1964 or later is no good at all.)
You'll have to look through the prosecution histories of the patent, the parent patents, the continuations-in-part, etc. You ever tried reading a patent? They're goobledegook. So imagine reading all of the paperwork that went back and forth between the inventor and the patent office for a few years until the patent was issued, and imagine that the jargon was in use 20 years ago.
Cases involve more than getting up in front of a jury. You need to respond to interrogatories from the other side, etc., and it can't be a half-assed job. Every brief filed gets a brief from the other side and then another from the first side. There are motions all the time on piddly points of law that never make the news. You need to fly to depositions and pay court reporters. You need to spend time arguing on the phone with the other side, because they're not just going to roll-over and give you what you want. The costs of copying those documents is absurdly high, too, due to the rapid turnaround. You might end up hiring an IT staff
So no, it's not impossible to successfully litigate a patent case by yourself. But you have to be a brilliant lawyer ("I've been to law school" isn't enough by miles), have an unlimited budget (discovery costs are enormous, and if you don't conduct discovery you will have no evidence), and have a first-rate support staff. And people at West Coast firms still talk about Mr. Chu's accomplishment decades after the fact.
I think it's a little condescending, actually, the way you write off the worth of the experience attorneys bring to the table. It's one thing to say that the patent system is the grit in the wheels of capitalism (I agree!), but what you're insinuating is quite another. The law and the practical problems are just a little more advanced than fighting a speeding ticket.