The music oligopoly actually owes far more to the terrestrial radio oligopoly (and thus the FCC) than it owes to copyright. I don't mean that the oligopoly doesn't benefit from copyright - it does - but the key lies in the comparison to indie musicians and labels. Indie musicians and labels benefit from copyright just about as much as the music oligopoly, but they don't benefit at all from the terrestrial radio oligopoly that never plays their music.
This isn't a breakthrough. Much of the technology for tracking objects in this way has been out for about a decade. See this Wikipedia article for one technique for doing this:
You're probably correct. But the practical core of the thesis is still true: DRM still doesn't actually decrease the ability of pirates to pirate games, so the people who pirate games will pirate the same with or without DRM. And despite its ineffectiveness and the negative press, game publishers still fork money over for DRM schemes, making their bottom line actually looks worse for their trouble.
Either these game publishers are total idiots, or else DRM isn't really about piracy after all.
My point was that it doesn't do any good for the unique key to be different for each financial organization, because the key is supposed to uniquely specify the individual customer in a way that works across all financial organizations. The industry as a whole has to be able to specify the individual in order to keep track of the risk associated with that individual (e.g., credit checks). SSNs are used because they're convenient, and that's because the government issues SSNs with the intention of uniqueness per individual.
Forbidding the collection of SSNs isn't really the answer. The banking industry will just devise some other unique key that people will need to provide so that credit checks and such can be run, and then that key will become the center of risk.
The real answer is to make this information worthless by requiring banks to actually follow up and ensure that a new credit line requestor is the person they claim to be before opening the new credit line. Currently, the banks do everything they can to prevent themselves from eating the loss, but they don't do much to prevent the loss in the first place. They push as much as possible onto merchants and individual consumers. It's worth more to them to open instant credit lines virtually anonymously than to eat the occasional loss, and until that changes, the rest of us will continue to suffer from financial predation by third-world organized criminals.
Dollars to donuts says that SCEA's ridiculous discovery campaign (under the pretense of a jurisdictional dispute) either already turned up less than they'd hoped or was starting to draw enough opposition from the subpoena targets to make this an extremely expensive battle that could never possibly achieve their desired result.
I took another quick look at the NC JOLT article, and it actually does discuss what they call "RCE practice". Mea culpa. What I don't get is why they acknowledge its existence but then ignore it when discussing conflicting pressures between quality review and production.
In response to your citation of the WaPo and NC JOLT articles, you're misreading the purpose of the production system. Our performance is based on work product, but this includes first action rejections, allowances, abandonments, writing answers to appeal briefs, and RCEs (which are follow-ons to final rejections).
The NC JOLT article explains this in pretty good detail, but it is outdated. The count system was adjusted a while back. Before the adjustment, we received 1 count for first actions on the merits (i.e., rejections or allowances but not restrictions), and we received 1 count for disposals (abandonments, allowances, answers to appeal briefs, or RCEs; an RCE is when the application has been finally rejected, and the applicant pays us for another go-around). We got 0 counts for final rejections and for any non-final rejections aside from a first action. After the disposal from an RCE, we would get another count for the subsequent "first" action and another for the subsequent disposal, which could be another RCE if it hadn't made its way to allowance or wasn't abandoned.
After the change, we get 1.25 counts for a first action on the merits; 0.25 for an "intermediate" action, i.e., an action that closes prosecution, usually a final rejection; and 0.5 for a disposal (as above; if there was no intermediate action, then we get the 0.25 at the time the 0.5 for the disposal is awarded). After the first RCE on a case, the subsequent "first" action receives 1 count, and after the second (or third, etc.) RCE, the subsequent "first" action gets 0.75 counts, with the corresponding intermediate and disposal counts being the same.
Note that there is no specific quota on allowances.
In any case, I would argue that the NC JOLT article misses the fact that first actions after RCE are usually much easier than actual first actions. Usually the full claim set isn't amended with an RCE, but instead, primarily the independent claims are amended. If the claims can still be rejected, then frequently, the next rejection involves a lot of copy/paste from the previous one. So, an examiner making proper rejections can get a lot of easy counts by continuing to reject the claims and getting RCEs, if the applicant refuses to sufficiently amend the claims or abandon.
"Approving something when in doubt and letting the courts figure it out" is one outsider's interpretation of some statistics on allowance rate. But ultimately, if we can't formulate a proper rejection for the claims, then we're supposed to allow the application, and the applicant gets a patent. Having a gut feeling that something shouldn't be allowable isn't enough to reject a claim, so given that we have a (very) limited time to find some way to reject the claims, sometimes we do have to call off the search, issue the patent, and (if the patent gets asserted) let the courts take a crack at it. If you think we missed something, and you have prior art evidence to back it up, you can file for a re-exam.
Which might mean something, if the patent office actually cared about prior art. They don't
Actually, we care a lot more about prior art than most Slashdotters do, because we actually have to read the stuff, at which point we find out that the prior art (at least, the prior art we have access to) doesn't have sufficient detail to reject the claims we're examining.
On Slashdot, you can just read the abstract and say, "WTF! That's obvious!" but in the real world, we have to follow the law.
It wouldn't be binding, but it would likely be more persuasive. Ninth Circuit might not ultimately go along with it, but they'd almost certainly consider it.
Amazon now has the benefit of CNN et al. v. CSC Holdings, aka the Cablevision Remote DVR Lawsuit, where the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in Cablevision's favor and specified that, in part, the specific actions of the remote user instructing the remote DVR to record and play back the copyrighted material served to exclude Cablevision from liability. SCOTUS refused to hear an appeal on this, so other circuits might be inclined to agree with the 2nd Circuit.
There are probably some differences here (not knowing about the specific functionality of Cloud Player, I won't speculate), so it'll be interesting to see how far Amazon can push the envelope.
Call it a planned failure mode, call it a meltdown, call it an alien invasion, call it the zombie apocalypse. The point is whether people are safe or not. If you're standing in the reactor water, then yeah, kiss your sweet ass goodbye, but so far, the external environmental impact from the situation has been minor.
"Meltdown" merely describes what could happen to the nuclear fuel if left uncooled. Everyone hopes it doesn't happen, but in case it does, it's what you do to mitigate the hazards that counts. Unfortunately, people have been programmed by the media (in support of the eyeball-grabbing controversy between nuclear power advocates and tree-huggers) to equate "meltdown" with "holy fucking shit", regardless of the additional safety precautions that have been taken, and regardless of the actual environmental impact.
Okay, so the interviewer lauds Star Trek IV as "the most successful of the TOS features on several levels." I don't get it, and I never have. Maybe someone else can explain it to me?
Sure, it was amusing, with the colorful metaphors and the nuclear wessels and the nerve pinch on the bus and "hello computer" and all that. But it didn't seem like a strong story to me: the premise of aliens killing us because we let the whales die was one of the worst gratuitous insertions of present-day political issues into any Star Trek medium (second, perhaps, only to Riker getting busy with that androgynous alien that one time); the whole redemption of Kirk for his court-martial offense under the sham pretense of demoting him to the job he really wanted seemed like a Voyager-worthy push of the magic reset button solving everyone's problems during the last five minutes of the episode; and without an Enterprise, it didn't feel much like Star Trek.
So what was it that validated this movie for some folks? Maybe I just need a new perspective.
You say that "almost every part of the patent has prior art". That's already an admission of non-anticipation, and very close to an admission of non-obviousness. You most definitely can patent a multi-line patent based off of only one or two changes. The differences between the claimed invention and the prior art merely have to be non-obvious. The law says nothing about the changes not appearing to be tiny.
Just because you twiddle one or two features of a patented product and get a patent yourself doesn't give you unfettered rights to sell your modified product, if it still infringes on the patent you looked at to start with. What it does grant you is a right to exclude other people from making or using what's covered by your patent. So, if you add some minor feature to an iPhone and get a patent on it, you can't just go out and start making your iPhone-Plus or whatever, unless you get a license from Apple for their iPhone patents. But if Apple adds your additional minor feature to their iPhone, you could sue them.
Perhaps a restatement of earlier notes, a patent does not have to be "significantly" new or different, only non-obviously so.
And finally, for all your windbaggery, you haven't formulated an actual argument indicating specific prior art that renders all of the patent claims obvious, so you're pretty much just drawing conclusions without evidence. And that most definitely doesn't result in invalidation.
Right, that's why you live in a country where the government actually works for the people most of the time, instead of a fascist country like the USA where all the government cares about is keeping their corporate benefactors happy.
Government: Would you like a job, or would you like a nice park near your apartment? Desperate underemployed US citizen: Nature is for vacations. Give me that job!
See, this shows how the US has things figured out. If we have a catastrophic natural disaster in the US, we won't run into this problem, because we were smart enough to make sure that we don't manufacture anything here.
If the recording industry obtains a judgment in their favor in this case, then everyone who has ever shared music via Limewire is off the hook. Since Limewire's users aren't joined to the case, the RIAA can't also sue those users after getting a judgment against Limewire, because they would be double dipping.
Never mind that obtaining these sorts of damages (or anything even approaching their actual damages, for that matter, never mind the statutory damages) is a ridiculous proposition. If the RIAA wants the masses to still be liable, then they should join the masses to this lawsuit. Then they could get what Limewire is worth, and still take the rest out on the remaining defendants.
Slashdot Mirror
The music oligopoly actually owes far more to the terrestrial radio oligopoly (and thus the FCC) than it owes to copyright. I don't mean that the oligopoly doesn't benefit from copyright - it does - but the key lies in the comparison to indie musicians and labels. Indie musicians and labels benefit from copyright just about as much as the music oligopoly, but they don't benefit at all from the terrestrial radio oligopoly that never plays their music.
This isn't a breakthrough. Much of the technology for tracking objects in this way has been out for about a decade. See this Wikipedia article for one technique for doing this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scale-invariant_feature_transform
Even still, I've gotten a lot more spam (not even phishing, just regular craptastic spam) on my e-mail accounts that were affected by this breach.
You're probably correct. But the practical core of the thesis is still true: DRM still doesn't actually decrease the ability of pirates to pirate games, so the people who pirate games will pirate the same with or without DRM. And despite its ineffectiveness and the negative press, game publishers still fork money over for DRM schemes, making their bottom line actually looks worse for their trouble.
Either these game publishers are total idiots, or else DRM isn't really about piracy after all.
My point was that it doesn't do any good for the unique key to be different for each financial organization, because the key is supposed to uniquely specify the individual customer in a way that works across all financial organizations. The industry as a whole has to be able to specify the individual in order to keep track of the risk associated with that individual (e.g., credit checks). SSNs are used because they're convenient, and that's because the government issues SSNs with the intention of uniqueness per individual.
Forbidding the collection of SSNs isn't really the answer. The banking industry will just devise some other unique key that people will need to provide so that credit checks and such can be run, and then that key will become the center of risk.
The real answer is to make this information worthless by requiring banks to actually follow up and ensure that a new credit line requestor is the person they claim to be before opening the new credit line. Currently, the banks do everything they can to prevent themselves from eating the loss, but they don't do much to prevent the loss in the first place. They push as much as possible onto merchants and individual consumers. It's worth more to them to open instant credit lines virtually anonymously than to eat the occasional loss, and until that changes, the rest of us will continue to suffer from financial predation by third-world organized criminals.
Dollars to donuts says that SCEA's ridiculous discovery campaign (under the pretense of a jurisdictional dispute) either already turned up less than they'd hoped or was starting to draw enough opposition from the subpoena targets to make this an extremely expensive battle that could never possibly achieve their desired result.
Dammit, I pointed my pedantometer at your post and it exploded.
...to reschedule the Skyrim release date. It'll be a disaster going up against the sheer awesome firepower of Minecraft!
Back in my day, we couldn't even participate in massive racist troll wars in the comments section, because there was no comments section.
Also, our version of rickrolling was to call someone on the phone and get them to change the channel to VH1.
Also, that flood that wiped out humanity is the reason why none of us are here today.
I took another quick look at the NC JOLT article, and it actually does discuss what they call "RCE practice". Mea culpa. What I don't get is why they acknowledge its existence but then ignore it when discussing conflicting pressures between quality review and production.
In response to your citation of the WaPo and NC JOLT articles, you're misreading the purpose of the production system. Our performance is based on work product, but this includes first action rejections, allowances, abandonments, writing answers to appeal briefs, and RCEs (which are follow-ons to final rejections).
The NC JOLT article explains this in pretty good detail, but it is outdated. The count system was adjusted a while back. Before the adjustment, we received 1 count for first actions on the merits (i.e., rejections or allowances but not restrictions), and we received 1 count for disposals (abandonments, allowances, answers to appeal briefs, or RCEs; an RCE is when the application has been finally rejected, and the applicant pays us for another go-around). We got 0 counts for final rejections and for any non-final rejections aside from a first action. After the disposal from an RCE, we would get another count for the subsequent "first" action and another for the subsequent disposal, which could be another RCE if it hadn't made its way to allowance or wasn't abandoned.
After the change, we get 1.25 counts for a first action on the merits; 0.25 for an "intermediate" action, i.e., an action that closes prosecution, usually a final rejection; and 0.5 for a disposal (as above; if there was no intermediate action, then we get the 0.25 at the time the 0.5 for the disposal is awarded). After the first RCE on a case, the subsequent "first" action receives 1 count, and after the second (or third, etc.) RCE, the subsequent "first" action gets 0.75 counts, with the corresponding intermediate and disposal counts being the same.
Note that there is no specific quota on allowances.
In any case, I would argue that the NC JOLT article misses the fact that first actions after RCE are usually much easier than actual first actions. Usually the full claim set isn't amended with an RCE, but instead, primarily the independent claims are amended. If the claims can still be rejected, then frequently, the next rejection involves a lot of copy/paste from the previous one. So, an examiner making proper rejections can get a lot of easy counts by continuing to reject the claims and getting RCEs, if the applicant refuses to sufficiently amend the claims or abandon.
"Approving something when in doubt and letting the courts figure it out" is one outsider's interpretation of some statistics on allowance rate. But ultimately, if we can't formulate a proper rejection for the claims, then we're supposed to allow the application, and the applicant gets a patent. Having a gut feeling that something shouldn't be allowable isn't enough to reject a claim, so given that we have a (very) limited time to find some way to reject the claims, sometimes we do have to call off the search, issue the patent, and (if the patent gets asserted) let the courts take a crack at it. If you think we missed something, and you have prior art evidence to back it up, you can file for a re-exam.
Which might mean something, if the patent office actually cared about prior art. They don't
Actually, we care a lot more about prior art than most Slashdotters do, because we actually have to read the stuff, at which point we find out that the prior art (at least, the prior art we have access to) doesn't have sufficient detail to reject the claims we're examining.
On Slashdot, you can just read the abstract and say, "WTF! That's obvious!" but in the real world, we have to follow the law.
It wouldn't be binding, but it would likely be more persuasive. Ninth Circuit might not ultimately go along with it, but they'd almost certainly consider it.
Amazon now has the benefit of CNN et al. v. CSC Holdings, aka the Cablevision Remote DVR Lawsuit, where the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in Cablevision's favor and specified that, in part, the specific actions of the remote user instructing the remote DVR to record and play back the copyrighted material served to exclude Cablevision from liability. SCOTUS refused to hear an appeal on this, so other circuits might be inclined to agree with the 2nd Circuit.
There are probably some differences here (not knowing about the specific functionality of Cloud Player, I won't speculate), so it'll be interesting to see how far Amazon can push the envelope.
Call it a planned failure mode, call it a meltdown, call it an alien invasion, call it the zombie apocalypse. The point is whether people are safe or not. If you're standing in the reactor water, then yeah, kiss your sweet ass goodbye, but so far, the external environmental impact from the situation has been minor.
"Meltdown" merely describes what could happen to the nuclear fuel if left uncooled. Everyone hopes it doesn't happen, but in case it does, it's what you do to mitigate the hazards that counts. Unfortunately, people have been programmed by the media (in support of the eyeball-grabbing controversy between nuclear power advocates and tree-huggers) to equate "meltdown" with "holy fucking shit", regardless of the additional safety precautions that have been taken, and regardless of the actual environmental impact.
...that "King Size Homer" will get pulled in some markets, which is unfortunate because it has one of the best lines in any Simpsons episode.
I've grown 2,415 times smarter since then.
Okay, so the interviewer lauds Star Trek IV as "the most successful of the TOS features on several levels." I don't get it, and I never have. Maybe someone else can explain it to me?
Sure, it was amusing, with the colorful metaphors and the nuclear wessels and the nerve pinch on the bus and "hello computer" and all that. But it didn't seem like a strong story to me: the premise of aliens killing us because we let the whales die was one of the worst gratuitous insertions of present-day political issues into any Star Trek medium (second, perhaps, only to Riker getting busy with that androgynous alien that one time); the whole redemption of Kirk for his court-martial offense under the sham pretense of demoting him to the job he really wanted seemed like a Voyager-worthy push of the magic reset button solving everyone's problems during the last five minutes of the episode; and without an Enterprise, it didn't feel much like Star Trek.
So what was it that validated this movie for some folks? Maybe I just need a new perspective.
You say that "almost every part of the patent has prior art". That's already an admission of non-anticipation, and very close to an admission of non-obviousness. You most definitely can patent a multi-line patent based off of only one or two changes. The differences between the claimed invention and the prior art merely have to be non-obvious. The law says nothing about the changes not appearing to be tiny.
Just because you twiddle one or two features of a patented product and get a patent yourself doesn't give you unfettered rights to sell your modified product, if it still infringes on the patent you looked at to start with. What it does grant you is a right to exclude other people from making or using what's covered by your patent. So, if you add some minor feature to an iPhone and get a patent on it, you can't just go out and start making your iPhone-Plus or whatever, unless you get a license from Apple for their iPhone patents. But if Apple adds your additional minor feature to their iPhone, you could sue them.
Perhaps a restatement of earlier notes, a patent does not have to be "significantly" new or different, only non-obviously so.
And finally, for all your windbaggery, you haven't formulated an actual argument indicating specific prior art that renders all of the patent claims obvious, so you're pretty much just drawing conclusions without evidence. And that most definitely doesn't result in invalidation.
Right, that's why you live in a country where the government actually works for the people most of the time, instead of a fascist country like the USA where all the government cares about is keeping their corporate benefactors happy.
Government: Would you like a job, or would you like a nice park near your apartment?
Desperate underemployed US citizen: Nature is for vacations. Give me that job!
See, this shows how the US has things figured out. If we have a catastrophic natural disaster in the US, we won't run into this problem, because we were smart enough to make sure that we don't manufacture anything here.
If the recording industry obtains a judgment in their favor in this case, then everyone who has ever shared music via Limewire is off the hook. Since Limewire's users aren't joined to the case, the RIAA can't also sue those users after getting a judgment against Limewire, because they would be double dipping.
Never mind that obtaining these sorts of damages (or anything even approaching their actual damages, for that matter, never mind the statutory damages) is a ridiculous proposition. If the RIAA wants the masses to still be liable, then they should join the masses to this lawsuit. Then they could get what Limewire is worth, and still take the rest out on the remaining defendants.
On the other hand, your joke admits that Bush is a sympathetic soul who cares about the lives of ordinary people.