The thing that puts you on the IP propaganda boat is that you believe in IP. It doesn't matter how far the reach goes, you at least believe there should still be an IP system, but reformed (like many others do).
Well, I must say, you've made my day. I've been accused of a lot of things, but one charge I never expected to have leveled at me was that of being an intellectual property propagandist.
Of course, you then go on to say
Copyright on the other hand needs to be reformed, but not eliminated. The very core of copyright should protect only two things, plagiarism (lying of any and all sorts) and direct profiteering off of anothers work without consent.
So I guess you must support IP too. Careful you don't get your feet wet as you get on the boat now:)
Incidentally, you might want to avoid the terms "IP" and "intellectual property". As Stallman pointed out, it has the effect of conflating a number of distinct legal concepts, each of which works differently and under different circumstances. This in turn tends to cloud the issue, which leads to absurdities like the notion that acceptance of the need for a reformed copyright system implies support for the whole "IP" bundle.
Moreover, the term "intellectual property" implies acceptance of the Big Lie of the pro-patent lobby - that ideas should be regarded as property. I hope you'll agree with me that this is a Bad Thing.
Now why do you suppose Norway are doing this? Misguided open source envangelism? Just to piss Bill Gates off? Maybe to get their nation plugged on slashdot?
My guess is they're doing this so as not to force its citizens to buy expensive proprietary software soley in order to communicate with their government electronically.
I don't suppose that using OO.o to read the occasional.doc from a less enlightened foreign government is going to cause any great conflict of interest to them.
In which I wouldn't necessarily disagree with you. Certainly the entire system is overdue for reform.
So I'm really curious what it was I said that put me on the "IP Propaganda Boat" in your book. I chose to restrict my commentary to the area I understand best, and one where debate is most urgently needed. Does that make a shill for some shadowy "intellectual property" cartel?
I've always thought that sort of "if you're not with us you're against us" attitude was rather self defeating, myself.
careful now, without copyrights you wouldnt be able to force someone to release code taken from an opens ource license
heh... but I'm not arguing against copyrights. Was that not clear? I'm arguing against software patents.
My point was that copyrights provide sufficent protection for software, proprietory or otherwise, and in doing so rebder software patents unnecessary. And since patents fail to achive their purpose when applied to software, and since they are not necessary in order to protect software, it therefore follows that we should not have them for software.
Copyright on the other hand is a good thing, although we could safely cut the duration back a bit. Rather a lot, in fact.
Software has two parts: design and coding. Patents protect the design, copyright protects the coding. Quite often one person will do both jobs, but not necessarily.
And the algorithm is the design? You can argue with as much justification that the source coide is the design and that the executable is the product. Algorithms under this scheme would belong to the realm of mathematics and as such be subject to neither patent nor copyright.
Copyrights would not help create new algorithms and to the extent that it would, there would be less incentive to document them.
You think software will evolve faster if we have widespread software patents? I can't imagine how the field could develop faster it has so far, personally.
You want to use the algorithm we developed? Well, we can't profit otherwise, so you only get our binary implementation. (which can be copyrighted) Not good enough? Shop someplace else.
Whoa, you're giving your binary inplementation away for free? No? Then you can profit.
If I devise some great new compression method, should I get no reward? If someone else takes that technique and implements it, is that worth nothing?
What do you mean by "devise" here? If by devise you mean writing the words "method and aparatus for scrunching stuf up, really reeeallly small" on a patent form, then no, I don't think you do deserve a reward.
If on the other hand you use devise to mean "actually make the the thing work" then, yes, I feel you might reasonably expect some means to profit on that. Happily the mechanisms of copyright and NDAs will serve for you to market your innovation. Patents are not required.
And since they are not required, we should not permit them. Ideas belong to everyone. We should only grant even monopolies where there is a clear benefit to the commonality.
Are there not increments in science and technology (hardware too)?
Increments in theory perhaps. But if I patent a pipe connector, then there's not a lot of room for increment, surely? I can make it larger or smaller, or of different substances, I might even paint it different colours. The design is still pretty much the same. To make something that isn't covered by the patent you'd need to make it work a different way, and that'd be fairly obvious.
At least that's how I think it should work.
You almost jumped off the IP propaganda boat, but just didn't quite make it.
Charmed, I'm sure.
It is not the scientists, inventors, researchers, authors etc. that are pushing governments and organizations around the world for even stronger IP laws. There are expections, but that is a deeper issue on the corruption that IP creates.
I think you missed out a step in your argument.
Are you saying that all patents (and not just software ones) are bad? Or is your point that the harm stems from a patent system that is institutionally corrupt?
Well, I would say that if you design a chip, then you patent the hardware aspect but not the software. Furthermore, if the only novelty of your chip is in the software, say it's a EEPROM with code burned into it, then it's not patentable, because that's software.
But in any case, even if the mechanics of your chip are unique beyond debate, the algorithm is not. If someone simulates your chip in software, well that's an acceptable alternative implementation and software is not subject to patents.
This all as it would be if-I-ruled-the-world, obviously. This what I think would be fair.
The problem with software patents, is that companies like microsoft patent one tiny part of a huge system, and then the only way to make software that's compatable with is by violating the patent.
Plus there is the fact that the work required to file a patent is trivial compared to the work required to implement the idea; there is the fact that multiple overlapping patents can make any development economically unrealistic by anyone who isn't a large corporation with a large patent portfolio; the fact that they can be, and are being used in an anti-competetive manner, and the further fact that using them in this manner is directly opposed to the intention of patent law in the first place, since patents were designed with the intention of fostering innvation, not limitng it to a few large corporations.
It's a complex subject, and software patents are wrong for many reasons and on many levels.
On the other hand, something like a new and innovative video compression codec should be patentable, IMO
Why? You can make money on your idea by implementing it and protecting it with NDAs, licence agreements and copyright. There is no need for the patent to make money. The only thing patents bring to the table is to stop anyone inventing a similar but different codec and competing with your product. Is that what you want? Remember, you're more likely to be the guy banned from competing than the one doing the banning.
And even if you get the patent, it probably costs more than you can afford to defend it, or to challenge a rival patent if there is corporate money backing it up.
The idea that patents are for the protection of the little guy is a myth, I'm afraid.
1. What do you suppose patents are for?
Well, that's a very complicated answer, but lets assume that they are there for some reason, in terms of physical objects and devices.
I probably should have said "software patents" there. Nevertheless, how about: to reward innovation; to repay the expense of developing inventions and to encourage the publication of schematics so that the knowledge of inventions should not be lost on the death of the inventor?
Doesn't seem overly complicated to me. Am I missing something?
Incidentally, while I'm quite happy to discuss this with you, the questions there were addressed to ome Roscoe P. Coltrane, who stated as a fact that software patents worked and worked well. Now I can't see how software patents can possibly be considered to work well, given their supposed purpose of encouraging innovation, so I wondered what Roscoe thought they did, given that he thought they did it so well.
I'm not opposed to hardware patents, so I'll accept your assumption as it applies to hardware. But if you intend to argue that software patents work well, I'm going to want a bit more than "let's assume":)
3. What perculiar property do you feel pertains to computational methods that distinguish them from any other creative work?
Well, whats the diffrence between designing a new kind of valve or something and any other type of creative work?
Lots of ways to approach that one, but I'll stick to the most important one: software manipulates symbols. It has no concrete inputs or outputs. Software is a symbol stream that manipulates other symbols. As such it belongs purely to the realm of abstraction, of ideas and concepts. And ideas are not and never have been patentable.
Now if you have an answer that's better than "why not?" I'd like to hear it.
4. What is it about software that justifes protection both under copyright and under patent?
What is it about physical devices that justifes protection both under copyright and under patent?
You're begging the question again. "Why should software be treated the same as hardware" is (IMHO) an excelle
first off, copyright regulates the right to copy (hence the name), so it's another issue altogether.
Question: what do you suppose to be the purpose of software patents? You say in an earlier post that software patents work well. May I ask to what purpose?
The conventional answer would be that patents serve to reward an inventor for his hard work. By granting a limited monopoly on the application of the inventors' work, he or she is guaranteed a chance to profit from his work.
Oddly enough, copyright also affords a limited monopoly as a reward for hard work, this time over the the expression of an idea or concept.
Both of these mechanism exist to reward creators by granting them a degree of control over their creation.
So in what manner do you see these as being separate issues? Both mechanism serve the same purpose, copyright already applies to software and has worked well enough to make a certain Mr. Gates rich beyond description. So since copyright does the job, and since it seems to work, it would say that the issue of copyright might just have some relevance after all.
Feel free to correct my logic if you find it lacking.
suppose I spend a lot of time and money developing some computing method that drastically reduce, say, the number of transistors in a CPU and its power consumption: why wouldn't I be able to patent my software method
Well, for a start, you just described a hardware innovation. Fewer transistors in a CPU == hardware, QED. No one is claiming that hardware should not be patentable.
But complex, innovative, revolutionary methods can arguably be patentable to foster research and allow inventors to live off their inventions
Except that all software innovation is an incremental approach. Programs build on onther programs - this is well known and has been understood for decades. Granting patents on software will slow innovation, not speed it. It will slow it because no one will work to inprove your idea. Add enough software patents and no one will do any work, since anyone can get sued for any one of a number of patents, possibly undeclared. Don't take my word for it, the afore mentioned Mr. Gates said so in writing, years ago.
Of course, these days Mr. Gate's company has enough patents that they can cross licence them with IBM and the half dozen or so companies with a big enough portfolio to play. Everyone else better get a job with the big software companies though. And forget about open source coding. You may won the copyright, but they'll never let you use the code.
A piece of software isn't a story. It's a computational method. More like a recipe.
Which is significant, why, precisely?
Can a recipe be patented? "Method and aparatus for making a really tasty lamb stew," perhaps?
What is the fundamental property of a recipe, or a computational method for that matter, that means it should be entitled to a twofold grant of monopoly? Especially since the mechanism that requires the least work, the patent, is the one with the strongest protection.
So:
What do you suppose patents are for?
What do think patents are for, if you think they work so well? What is their purpose?
What perculiar property do you feel pertains to computational methods that distinguish them from any other creative work?
What is it about software that justifes protection both under copyright and under patent?
I'd really like to know how you answer these questions. You express your opinions with impressive force, but until you back them up with something of substance, opinions are all you have.
They aren't, "conducting an experiment". The draft was submitted as "experimental".
Oh, well, silly me then.
They aren't "sidestepping" the standards process. An "experimental" designation is part of The Internet Standards Process, but is not on the standards track.
Useful link, thank you. Everything is now much clearer. Apart from the use of the word "approved" in the OP, anyway.
It's funny though. Since MS are presumably not going to make Sender-ID FOSS friendly, the factors that blocked adoption of Sender-ID aren't going to go away. I wonder why they didn't release this as "Historic". It would have made their position clearer. Wouldn't it?
Which still doesn't really explain why they're conducting the experiment.
Unless MS have pressured them into it, so they can get a crack at declaring Sender-ID as the de facto standard and thereby sidestepping the standards process, of course. That might explain it.
However, I'm convinced it should be legal.
Legal or not, I think it's inevitable. The planet is getting to small to sustain these aritifical barriers to trade.
Yep. If there's one constant in this whole debate, it's that anything that benefits customers is "unfair" to the corporations, but anything that benefits the corporations to the detriment of the customers is "jsut good business".
Just think of the backlash these people are building up...
heheh... more likely to be english language DVDs with malay subtitles. Probably even be able to turn off the subtitles.
And if not the malay ones, I bet there'd be plenty of markets where that'd be true. It just costs too much to get every film dubbed into every language on the planet.
Or you could look at it in another way and say that the fact that it is not a physical thing is the crucial distinction that makes all the difference, and that therefore the farmer cannot be hurt.
1) Change the way we feel about this.
I don't think the way we feel about things is going to change. I don't know if you're old enough to remember the great tape fuss in the 80s. Basically tapes desks started coming out with two casette slots and everyone started copying tapes, mixing their own compilations, trading tapes to friends... sound familiar any of this?
Of course, the labels did their nuts and deprived loads of starving artists of their share of the profits by spending those pofits on a massive ad campaign that "HOME TAPING IS KILLING MUSIC". The news showed regulat footage of police busting pirate tape operations where guys were using comercial rigs to mass produce tapes for resale... and pirate tapes were bad bad BAD!
... and yet everyone carried on taping, and somehow we still have a music industry. The quality of the music has declined a bit perhaps, but that's probably just me turning into an old codger.
Anyway, the point there is that there was a massive co-ordinated attempt to change the way people felt about this same issue twenty years ago, and it achieved absolutely nothing. I can't see modern attepts having ant more success.
2) Lower the prices
no argument there.
3) Don't make it so easy to access the cropfields
That's been tried too. Back in the tape era they tried to stop the two cassette rigs from being made, tried to make them play-only (and oddly, no one bought these crippled items, a lesson some electronics giants should take to heart today), and eventually they phased out tapes and vinyl in favour of the read only non-recordable CD. Which just meant that eveyone taped their CDs and gave the tapes to their friends. Now of course we can make new CDs. They tried digital encryption... but you probably know how well that works.
I would also add
4) Reduce the copyright period to something sane once again
5) repair the damage done to the concept of "fair use"
At the end of the day, the important thing to reaise is that the record labels are largely charging for the cost of distributing the music. It takes money and overhead to keep a production line printing CDs, covers, cases, warehouse them, transport them to the stores. All that costs money. The labels have been grossly over charging for this service and using control of the distribution channel to exercise control over the artists.
The trouble is that now that same distribution network is unnecessary. Consequently the organisations that grew up to facilitate that distribution are doomed, for exectly the same reason that you did't find very many blacksmiths after the advent of the automobile.
That's the tragedy of it all really; the record labels started out as the good guys. They were facilitators, the people who made it all happen. Then they turned parasitical and started gouging both ends of the supply chain and interfering unreasonably with production. Now their monopoly on distribution has been blown wide open, and they're resoirting to ever more draconian measures to prop up their business.
They're like King Canute, standing before the incoming tide and yelling "stop!". And like Canute, they're going to get soaked.
Veering off tack a little, it's interesting to consider what would happen if DVDs were sold at realistic prices in Malaysia. I could imagine malay market DVDs being sold back to the Europe and the US and drastically undermining the prices there.
I suppose that was what the area code was supposed to prevent.
All of a sudden, I get the feeling that the implications of the term "global market" have yet to sink in for some of the big boys...
When every vagrant takes their "fair share" from the outer ring of a crop field, the crop gets smaller and smaller until the farmer and his family starve.
That's a lovely metaphor. It's also (IMHO) somewhat flawed.
First of all, what's the grain supposed to represent? If it's music, or software, or copyrighted materials, then the "vagrants" don't actually take anything. It's still there after they pass on by.
If the grain represents money, then who is the farmer? If the farmer represents musicians, say, then all the grain gets taken by the farmer's absentee landlord who promises to give him part the profit, after he's taken what he needs. The record labels don't actually add any value, they just control the distribution channel so as to create an artificial scarcety and thereby inflate their profits.
There's another persistent historical meme for your collection:
Hatred of absentee landlords. Not without reason, either; they make temendous profits from the hard work of lots of other people, and yet the workers scarcely see a penny of the value they create, and when their useful working life is done, they're left with nothing.
Really I am not missing the point. Using our current model, or any model - the people who own the site's want to charge.
Which people, precisely? Which site? There's a lot of quality content out there that is supplied free of profit motive. Some of it because the webmasters want to perform a public service; some of it because running a website is their hobby and they enjoy it. Sometimes it's because the webmaster would have cheerfully killed to get published in some way, that the web provivdes a legal, nonviolent avenue of self expression. Even if you take the Ayn Rand view and say that all these people are getting some sort of benefit from waht they do, the motive is not profit.
Once upon a time, all the web was thus. Commercialisation has not
necessarily improved it.
They may not want to charge the end user by demanding cash, but they will charge by demanding you view their advertisements and in return you get unfettered access.
Which is true enough, but only if we assuming they do want to charge. This
is not universally true. My own site, way overdue for an overhaul
though it may be has not a single advert on it, nor do I expect it to
yeild revenue.
That is a fair trade.
Is it? Adverts waste my time. Not placid static silent banner ads, perhaps. But the popups, and the flash animations, and the floaters, and every other foul distraction doubleclick and their ilk ever devised. They all waste my time.
Now my time is worth money. There comes a point where the value of time they
waste exceeds the value of the information gained. At this point the trade ceases to be fair by any measure.
To make matters worse, I have no way to judge the intensity of advertising
before I visit a site. In fact, if the advertiser has embedded frames
on the client page, the intensity of those ads may change from week
to week unpredictably and without notice. This makes it impossible to
make an informed descision about wether or not to visit a site in the
first place. At least for a subscription site, you know in advance what
resources will be consumed. Assuming the subscription site doesn't decide
to boost its profit margins by advertising anyway, that is...
So I can't tell how much of my time will be wasted before I visit a site. Too much and my visit costs me money. Factor in the time and money consumed by
removing malware uploaded by ad frames and you will see that
paid-by-advertising sites are not necessarily "free" and can often be very
expensive.
I don't call that "fair".
Why would you prefer a site that you have to pay for....imagine if 80% of the websites on the net were pay only.
I think you're jumping the gun a bit. For a start, you assume
that there is an either/or realtionship between paid-by-advertising and subscription. That's a
false dichotomy. I can think of a couple of sites that
fund themselves, at least partly, by donation. And for small sites free, as
in neither-adverts-nor-subscription, is still an option. The problem only starts with
the bandwith charges for high volume sites, and we've discussed that already.
I prefer the ad method - i just hate those obtrusive, annoying, violent ads (one pop-up i can deal with...non-ending pops are a different story)
That's a valid viewpoint, up to a point.
However, it's a lot harder to write blockers that block all popups
after the first one, and since I don't hear any commitment from doubleclick
to play even remotely nice, it's reasonable to assume they'll carry on abusing
their position. So saying "one is ok" is functionally equivalent to saying
"oh hell, pop 'em as much as you like".
I also think that, based upon what you've said so far, your tolerance level is
a lot higher than mine. If I'm not going to block an advert, it has to
be silent, still, unoffensice, unobtrusive, and must neither attempt to deceive,
nor to abuse my computer. Popups are always unaccpetable.
Err.. so anyway.. Cookies didn't slow down your computer.
Not at boot time, granted. However, suppose on the the first web page you access, half a hundred cookies get read by half a hundred overloaded servers. And then they all get written back again.
And suppose that you have to wait for all this before the page will start to render. And let's suppose one or two of those servers are down, and you have to wait for the timeout before you can get started.
Now imagine that happening on every new page you access. Add in a few multi megabyte javascript files that have nothing to do with your browsing experience, but which must be loaded before the page will render.
So basically all of these worthless agruements about what would happen "if everyone started using filters etc" are just that, worthless. It isn't ever going to happen so why do people feel the need to bring it up year after year?
FUD? Astroturfing? trying to establish a pretext that there is a need for draconian new legislation to make ad blocking illegal?
It can't be because anyone thinks it's likely yo happen, so I'd guess it has to be about trying to protect failing revenue streams.
Look at all the adverts! Forget your irrelevant "content"; pay attention only to the advertisments. Or we'll take your internet away. Then you'll be sorry!
Oh thats true, but you have to ask whether its actually what you really want? It will lead to several things. Innovation in ways to get advertising on you screen (something we don't want, since most of these innovations are worse than the stock standard banner ad), or generating income through merchandising.
Oh come on!
Do you seriously believe that development of ad delivery technologies will stop if we just stop ad blocking? Or that it could get any worse than it was circa 2001 without adblock software? Without making the net unusable, that is?
They'll do it anyway. And in addition to the crap we already have to put up with.
Unless of course you know of some innovation that will allow small entertaining sites to make some money without acting like the movie business.
So if I know of a way to let small sites make money that'll make the new advertising methods magically harmless? Sorry, but you're presenting a different argument as if it followed logically from the previous one here.
But to address your point, small sites can make money through advertising. The death of doubleclick doesn't mean the death of online advertising. In fact, if the rest of the ad houses take a lesson and stop being needlessly annoying, it may only be the death of doubleclick. I'd call that a result.
More importantly, small sites aren't the problem. Small sites are reasonably cheap to run, and a lot of small webmasters operate out of the free webspace which many ISPs bundle with the connection. The problem is for large websites, where the bandwidth charges increase faster than the revenue from advertising.
And for that, the technologies do already exists. proxy servers for one, distributed architechtures for another. Bit torrent springs is the obvious one - but I've read about podcasting using torrent ideas, and certainly we could apply that to web page distribution. And then there are always mirrors and autoforwarding; those are well understood...
So I don't see permitting advertising as holding back the next wave of dirty tricks, I don't see a problem for small sites, and there are ready made technologies to handle the bandwidth problem for large sites just waiting for the impetus needed to drive adoption.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, I must say, you've made my day. I've been accused of a lot of things, but one charge I never expected to have leveled at me was that of being an intellectual property propagandist.
Of course, you then go on to say
Copyright on the other hand needs to be reformed, but not eliminated. The very core of copyright should protect only two things, plagiarism (lying of any and all sorts) and direct profiteering off of anothers work without consent.
So I guess you must support IP too. Careful you don't get your feet wet as you get on the boat now :)
Incidentally, you might want to avoid the terms "IP" and "intellectual property". As Stallman pointed out, it has the effect of conflating a number of distinct legal concepts, each of which works differently and under different circumstances. This in turn tends to cloud the issue, which leads to absurdities like the notion that acceptance of the need for a reformed copyright system implies support for the whole "IP" bundle.
Moreover, the term "intellectual property" implies acceptance of the Big Lie of the pro-patent lobby - that ideas should be regarded as property. I hope you'll agree with me that this is a Bad Thing.
My guess is they're doing this so as not to force its citizens to buy expensive proprietary software soley in order to communicate with their government electronically.
I don't suppose that using OO.o to read the occasional .doc from a less enlightened foreign government is going to cause any great conflict of interest to them.
So I'm really curious what it was I said that put me on the "IP Propaganda Boat" in your book. I chose to restrict my commentary to the area I understand best, and one where debate is most urgently needed. Does that make a shill for some shadowy "intellectual property" cartel?
I've always thought that sort of "if you're not with us you're against us" attitude was rather self defeating, myself.
heh... but I'm not arguing against copyrights. Was that not clear? I'm arguing against software patents.
My point was that copyrights provide sufficent protection for software, proprietory or otherwise, and in doing so rebder software patents unnecessary. And since patents fail to achive their purpose when applied to software, and since they are not necessary in order to protect software, it therefore follows that we should not have them for software.
Copyright on the other hand is a good thing, although we could safely cut the duration back a bit. Rather a lot, in fact.
And the algorithm is the design? You can argue with as much justification that the source coide is the design and that the executable is the product. Algorithms under this scheme would belong to the realm of mathematics and as such be subject to neither patent nor copyright.
Copyrights would not help create new algorithms and to the extent that it would, there would be less incentive to document them.
You think software will evolve faster if we have widespread software patents? I can't imagine how the field could develop faster it has so far, personally.
You want to use the algorithm we developed? Well, we can't profit otherwise, so you only get our binary implementation. (which can be copyrighted) Not good enough? Shop someplace else.
Whoa, you're giving your binary inplementation away for free? No? Then you can profit.
If I devise some great new compression method, should I get no reward? If someone else takes that technique and implements it, is that worth nothing?
What do you mean by "devise" here? If by devise you mean writing the words "method and aparatus for scrunching stuf up, really reeeallly small" on a patent form, then no, I don't think you do deserve a reward.
If on the other hand you use devise to mean "actually make the the thing work" then, yes, I feel you might reasonably expect some means to profit on that. Happily the mechanisms of copyright and NDAs will serve for you to market your innovation. Patents are not required.
And since they are not required, we should not permit them. Ideas belong to everyone. We should only grant even monopolies where there is a clear benefit to the commonality.
Increments in theory perhaps. But if I patent a pipe connector, then there's not a lot of room for increment, surely? I can make it larger or smaller, or of different substances, I might even paint it different colours. The design is still pretty much the same. To make something that isn't covered by the patent you'd need to make it work a different way, and that'd be fairly obvious.
At least that's how I think it should work.
You almost jumped off the IP propaganda boat, but just didn't quite make it.
Charmed, I'm sure.
It is not the scientists, inventors, researchers, authors etc. that are pushing governments and organizations around the world for even stronger IP laws. There are expections, but that is a deeper issue on the corruption that IP creates.
I think you missed out a step in your argument. Are you saying that all patents (and not just software ones) are bad? Or is your point that the harm stems from a patent system that is institutionally corrupt?
But in any case, even if the mechanics of your chip are unique beyond debate, the algorithm is not. If someone simulates your chip in software, well that's an acceptable alternative implementation and software is not subject to patents.
This all as it would be if-I-ruled-the-world, obviously. This what I think would be fair.
Thank you.
Plus there is the fact that the work required to file a patent is trivial compared to the work required to implement the idea; there is the fact that multiple overlapping patents can make any development economically unrealistic by anyone who isn't a large corporation with a large patent portfolio; the fact that they can be, and are being used in an anti-competetive manner, and the further fact that using them in this manner is directly opposed to the intention of patent law in the first place, since patents were designed with the intention of fostering innvation, not limitng it to a few large corporations.
It's a complex subject, and software patents are wrong for many reasons and on many levels.
Why? You can make money on your idea by implementing it and protecting it with NDAs, licence agreements and copyright. There is no need for the patent to make money. The only thing patents bring to the table is to stop anyone inventing a similar but different codec and competing with your product. Is that what you want? Remember, you're more likely to be the guy banned from competing than the one doing the banning.
And even if you get the patent, it probably costs more than you can afford to defend it, or to challenge a rival patent if there is corporate money backing it up. The idea that patents are for the protection of the little guy is a myth, I'm afraid.
I probably should have said "software patents" there. Nevertheless, how about: to reward innovation; to repay the expense of developing inventions and to encourage the publication of schematics so that the knowledge of inventions should not be lost on the death of the inventor?
Doesn't seem overly complicated to me. Am I missing something?
Incidentally, while I'm quite happy to discuss this with you, the questions there were addressed to ome Roscoe P. Coltrane, who stated as a fact that software patents worked and worked well. Now I can't see how software patents can possibly be considered to work well, given their supposed purpose of encouraging innovation, so I wondered what Roscoe thought they did, given that he thought they did it so well.
I'm not opposed to hardware patents, so I'll accept your assumption as it applies to hardware. But if you intend to argue that software patents work well, I'm going to want a bit more than "let's assume" :)
Lots of ways to approach that one, but I'll stick to the most important one: software manipulates symbols. It has no concrete inputs or outputs. Software is a symbol stream that manipulates other symbols. As such it belongs purely to the realm of abstraction, of ideas and concepts. And ideas are not and never have been patentable.
Now if you have an answer that's better than "why not?" I'd like to hear it.
You're begging the question again. "Why should software be treated the same as hardware" is (IMHO) an excelle
Question: what do you suppose to be the purpose of software patents? You say in an earlier post that software patents work well. May I ask to what purpose?
The conventional answer would be that patents serve to reward an inventor for his hard work. By granting a limited monopoly on the application of the inventors' work, he or she is guaranteed a chance to profit from his work. Oddly enough, copyright also affords a limited monopoly as a reward for hard work, this time over the the expression of an idea or concept.
Both of these mechanism exist to reward creators by granting them a degree of control over their creation.
So in what manner do you see these as being separate issues? Both mechanism serve the same purpose, copyright already applies to software and has worked well enough to make a certain Mr. Gates rich beyond description. So since copyright does the job, and since it seems to work, it would say that the issue of copyright might just have some relevance after all.
Feel free to correct my logic if you find it lacking.
suppose I spend a lot of time and money developing some computing method that drastically reduce, say, the number of transistors in a CPU and its power consumption: why wouldn't I be able to patent my software method
Well, for a start, you just described a hardware innovation. Fewer transistors in a CPU == hardware, QED. No one is claiming that hardware should not be patentable.
But complex, innovative, revolutionary methods can arguably be patentable to foster research and allow inventors to live off their inventions
Except that all software innovation is an incremental approach. Programs build on onther programs - this is well known and has been understood for decades. Granting patents on software will slow innovation, not speed it. It will slow it because no one will work to inprove your idea. Add enough software patents and no one will do any work, since anyone can get sued for any one of a number of patents, possibly undeclared. Don't take my word for it, the afore mentioned Mr. Gates said so in writing, years ago.
Of course, these days Mr. Gate's company has enough patents that they can cross licence them with IBM and the half dozen or so companies with a big enough portfolio to play. Everyone else better get a job with the big software companies though. And forget about open source coding. You may won the copyright, but they'll never let you use the code.
A piece of software isn't a story. It's a computational method. More like a recipe.
Which is significant, why, precisely?
Can a recipe be patented? "Method and aparatus for making a really tasty lamb stew," perhaps? What is the fundamental property of a recipe, or a computational method for that matter, that means it should be entitled to a twofold grant of monopoly? Especially since the mechanism that requires the least work, the patent, is the one with the strongest protection.
So:
- What do you suppose patents are for?
- What do think patents are for, if you think they work so well? What is their purpose?
- What perculiar property do you feel pertains to computational methods that distinguish them from any other creative work?
- What is it about software that justifes protection both under copyright and under patent?
I'd really like to know how you answer these questions. You express your opinions with impressive force, but until you back them up with something of substance, opinions are all you have.Fair enough. Thanks for the explanation.
Oh, well, silly me then.
They aren't "sidestepping" the standards process. An "experimental" designation is part of The Internet Standards Process, but is not on the standards track.
Useful link, thank you. Everything is now much clearer. Apart from the use of the word "approved" in the OP, anyway.
It's funny though. Since MS are presumably not going to make Sender-ID FOSS friendly, the factors that blocked adoption of Sender-ID aren't going to go away. I wonder why they didn't release this as "Historic". It would have made their position clearer. Wouldn't it?
Unless MS have pressured them into it, so they can get a crack at declaring Sender-ID as the de facto standard and thereby sidestepping the standards process, of course. That might explain it.
However, I'm convinced it should be legal. Legal or not, I think it's inevitable. The planet is getting to small to sustain these aritifical barriers to trade.
Just think of the backlash these people are building up...
And if not the malay ones, I bet there'd be plenty of markets where that'd be true. It just costs too much to get every film dubbed into every language on the planet.
The covers? I reckon I could like with that :D
1) Change the way we feel about this.
I don't think the way we feel about things is going to change. I don't know if you're old enough to remember the great tape fuss in the 80s. Basically tapes desks started coming out with two casette slots and everyone started copying tapes, mixing their own compilations, trading tapes to friends... sound familiar any of this?
Of course, the labels did their nuts and deprived loads of starving artists of their share of the profits by spending those pofits on a massive ad campaign that "HOME TAPING IS KILLING MUSIC". The news showed regulat footage of police busting pirate tape operations where guys were using comercial rigs to mass produce tapes for resale... and pirate tapes were bad bad BAD!
Anyway, the point there is that there was a massive co-ordinated attempt to change the way people felt about this same issue twenty years ago, and it achieved absolutely nothing. I can't see modern attepts having ant more success.
2) Lower the prices
no argument there.
3) Don't make it so easy to access the cropfields
That's been tried too. Back in the tape era they tried to stop the two cassette rigs from being made, tried to make them play-only (and oddly, no one bought these crippled items, a lesson some electronics giants should take to heart today), and eventually they phased out tapes and vinyl in favour of the read only non-recordable CD. Which just meant that eveyone taped their CDs and gave the tapes to their friends. Now of course we can make new CDs. They tried digital encryption... but you probably know how well that works.
I would also add
4) Reduce the copyright period to something sane once again
5) repair the damage done to the concept of "fair use"
At the end of the day, the important thing to reaise is that the record labels are largely charging for the cost of distributing the music. It takes money and overhead to keep a production line printing CDs, covers, cases, warehouse them, transport them to the stores. All that costs money. The labels have been grossly over charging for this service and using control of the distribution channel to exercise control over the artists.
The trouble is that now that same distribution network is unnecessary. Consequently the organisations that grew up to facilitate that distribution are doomed, for exectly the same reason that you did't find very many blacksmiths after the advent of the automobile.
That's the tragedy of it all really; the record labels started out as the good guys. They were facilitators, the people who made it all happen. Then they turned parasitical and started gouging both ends of the supply chain and interfering unreasonably with production. Now their monopoly on distribution has been blown wide open, and they're resoirting to ever more draconian measures to prop up their business.
They're like King Canute, standing before the incoming tide and yelling "stop!". And like Canute, they're going to get soaked.
All of a sudden, I get the feeling that the implications of the term "global market" have yet to sink in for some of the big boys...
Oh, but isn't "piracy" such a lovely broad term? you can prove almost anything with it.
Let's look at your argument.
- Terrorist organisations often support themselves through links to organised crime
- Organised crime often sells pirate DVDs
- Selling priate DVDs is often referred to as "piracy"
- Copying your mate's DVD is often referred to as "piracy"
- Therefore copying your mates DVD buys guns for the paramilitaries.
- Case proven, your honour, take 'em away!
This is one of the reasons that the term "piracy" is less than helpful in this sort of debate..That's a lovely metaphor. It's also (IMHO) somewhat flawed.
First of all, what's the grain supposed to represent? If it's music, or software, or copyrighted materials, then the "vagrants" don't actually take anything. It's still there after they pass on by.
If the grain represents money, then who is the farmer? If the farmer represents musicians, say, then all the grain gets taken by the farmer's absentee landlord who promises to give him part the profit, after he's taken what he needs. The record labels don't actually add any value, they just control the distribution channel so as to create an artificial scarcety and thereby inflate their profits.
There's another persistent historical meme for your collection: Hatred of absentee landlords. Not without reason, either; they make temendous profits from the hard work of lots of other people, and yet the workers scarcely see a penny of the value they create, and when their useful working life is done, they're left with nothing.
Which people, precisely? Which site? There's a lot of quality content out there that is supplied free of profit motive. Some of it because the webmasters want to perform a public service; some of it because running a website is their hobby and they enjoy it. Sometimes it's because the webmaster would have cheerfully killed to get published in some way, that the web provivdes a legal, nonviolent avenue of self expression. Even if you take the Ayn Rand view and say that all these people are getting some sort of benefit from waht they do, the motive is not profit.
Once upon a time, all the web was thus. Commercialisation has not necessarily improved it.
They may not want to charge the end user by demanding cash, but they will charge by demanding you view their advertisements and in return you get unfettered access.
Which is true enough, but only if we assuming they do want to charge. This is not universally true. My own site, way overdue for an overhaul though it may be has not a single advert on it, nor do I expect it to yeild revenue.
That is a fair trade.
Is it? Adverts waste my time. Not placid static silent banner ads, perhaps. But the popups, and the flash animations, and the floaters, and every other foul distraction doubleclick and their ilk ever devised. They all waste my time.
Now my time is worth money. There comes a point where the value of time they waste exceeds the value of the information gained. At this point the trade ceases to be fair by any measure.
To make matters worse, I have no way to judge the intensity of advertising before I visit a site. In fact, if the advertiser has embedded frames on the client page, the intensity of those ads may change from week to week unpredictably and without notice. This makes it impossible to make an informed descision about wether or not to visit a site in the first place. At least for a subscription site, you know in advance what resources will be consumed. Assuming the subscription site doesn't decide to boost its profit margins by advertising anyway, that is...
So I can't tell how much of my time will be wasted before I visit a site. Too much and my visit costs me money. Factor in the time and money consumed by removing malware uploaded by ad frames and you will see that paid-by-advertising sites are not necessarily "free" and can often be very expensive.
I don't call that "fair".
Why would you prefer a site that you have to pay for....imagine if 80% of the websites on the net were pay only.
I think you're jumping the gun a bit. For a start, you assume that there is an either/or realtionship between paid-by-advertising and subscription. That's a false dichotomy. I can think of a couple of sites that fund themselves, at least partly, by donation. And for small sites free, as in neither-adverts-nor-subscription, is still an option. The problem only starts with the bandwith charges for high volume sites, and we've discussed that already.
I prefer the ad method - i just hate those obtrusive, annoying, violent ads (one pop-up i can deal with...non-ending pops are a different story)
That's a valid viewpoint, up to a point.
However, it's a lot harder to write blockers that block all popups after the first one, and since I don't hear any commitment from doubleclick to play even remotely nice, it's reasonable to assume they'll carry on abusing their position. So saying "one is ok" is functionally equivalent to saying "oh hell, pop 'em as much as you like".
I also think that, based upon what you've said so far, your tolerance level is a lot higher than mine. If I'm not going to block an advert, it has to be silent, still, unoffensice, unobtrusive, and must neither attempt to deceive, nor to abuse my computer. Popups are always unaccpetable.
Don't fall for the
Not at boot time, granted. However, suppose on the the first web page you access, half a hundred cookies get read by half a hundred overloaded servers. And then they all get written back again.
And suppose that you have to wait for all this before the page will start to render. And let's suppose one or two of those servers are down, and you have to wait for the timeout before you can get started.
Now imagine that happening on every new page you access. Add in a few multi megabyte javascript files that have nothing to do with your browsing experience, but which must be loaded before the page will render.
It gets slo-o-o-o-o-w. Even on broadband.
I think that's what the guy was getting at.
Beautifuly expressed! Bravo!
FUD? Astroturfing? trying to establish a pretext that there is a need for draconian new legislation to make ad blocking illegal?
It can't be because anyone thinks it's likely yo happen, so I'd guess it has to be about trying to protect failing revenue streams.
Look at all the adverts! Forget your irrelevant "content"; pay attention only to the advertisments. Or we'll take your internet away. Then you'll be sorry!
Oh come on!
Do you seriously believe that development of ad delivery technologies will stop if we just stop ad blocking? Or that it could get any worse than it was circa 2001 without adblock software? Without making the net unusable, that is?
They'll do it anyway. And in addition to the crap we already have to put up with.
Unless of course you know of some innovation that will allow small entertaining sites to make some money without acting like the movie business. So if I know of a way to let small sites make money that'll make the new advertising methods magically harmless? Sorry, but you're presenting a different argument as if it followed logically from the previous one here.
But to address your point, small sites can make money through advertising. The death of doubleclick doesn't mean the death of online advertising. In fact, if the rest of the ad houses take a lesson and stop being needlessly annoying, it may only be the death of doubleclick. I'd call that a result.
More importantly, small sites aren't the problem. Small sites are reasonably cheap to run, and a lot of small webmasters operate out of the free webspace which many ISPs bundle with the connection. The problem is for large websites, where the bandwidth charges increase faster than the revenue from advertising.
And for that, the technologies do already exists. proxy servers for one, distributed architechtures for another. Bit torrent springs is the obvious one - but I've read about podcasting using torrent ideas, and certainly we could apply that to web page distribution. And then there are always mirrors and autoforwarding; those are well understood...
So I don't see permitting advertising as holding back the next wave of dirty tricks, I don't see a problem for small sites, and there are ready made technologies to handle the bandwidth problem for large sites just waiting for the impetus needed to drive adoption.
Really, I can't see the problem.