The provisions in the Constitution were written to address the problems the colonies were having with trade secrets. The colonies, and then what became the USA, was forced to go back to Britain for all sorts of machines and goods because no one could easily produce them here.
New England became a manufacturing center for hundreds of years because its residents became good at "reinventing the wheel", or "reverse engineering", the kinds of things that the USA acuses the far east at doing.
To foster the process of duplicating Britain's and Europe's manufacturing technology here, the patent system was created. For a short period of time you got exclusive rights AS LONG AS YOU TOLD EVERYONE YOUR SECRET AS SOON AS YOU THOUGHT IT UP.
Copyright was given similar status as part of a program to ensure that ideas flowed freely - the best way to protect your ideas was to publish them, rather than just "speak" them.
At no time was it intended to create a welfare program where you could work for a week or year and then live off that for the rest of your life. The idea was that you could think up something and tell the world and benefit from that just as much as working cutting down a tree and selling it or raising and butchering a cow.
In one regard, your exclusive rights to an idea should be no longer than it took you to produce it. If you watched an event and wrote up an article on it, then your exclusive copyright should be a day. But a couple hundred years ago, what was required was observing, writing, setting the type, running the press, shipping the copies around the world, and so on, so the process of making money from a new event might take a year. Books took even more time.
As the issues were complex, Congress was given the job of figuring out the tradeoffs.
The situation today is the opposite of what it was several hundred years ago. The intellectual giants and the influential politians are saying "secrecy is good", "exclusivity is good", "restriction in the flow of ideas is good", "prevention of reverse engineering is good", "unfettered innovation and creativity is EVIL".
I'd like just one explanation of how extending patents or copyrights will make you more creative than you are?
I'd like one explanation of why you think that you should have the right to restrict the free flow of ideas for an indefinite period of time?
If you can convince me that it takes so much work to write something that it will take you decades to make the money back, then you have to explain how it is that people write things with absolutely no expectation of getting any monetary value from it, and why you are so unique that you deserve special treatment so that we might be blessed with your special ideas?
I find it interesting that almost everyone prefers a communist solution to the email problem: no one pays anything so that the resources get allocated to those with the best connections and who are most able to exploit the system.
Of course, the idea that no one pays is completely false - everyone pays.
The reality of communism and market economies is that there are the privileged and the deprived. What is at issue is how well off the society as a whole is.
The current system is analogous to everyone contracting to have a mail box, or set of mail boxes. The people providing the mail boxes are required to give anyone who asks as much paper as they demand. Now the spammers drive around stuffing any and all mail boxes, along with individuals, and USPS, UPS, Fedex, etc. end up delivering it simply because they have no way to get rid of the spam.
Of course, this isn't the way the physical mail system works: if you don't pay the postage, the mail is either discarded or returned to you. And you don't pay to get mail, you pay to send it.
I think that it is possible to improve on the physical world mail system by making it clear to the recepient what class each piece of mail is.
Charge for 1st class email, with a network of authenticated mail relays (MTAs) moving this 1st class mail. The governance required to implement such a system of MTAs is exactly the same as is required to build the Internet. (You can't connect to the Internet without some peering relationship - if there is a way to do this, let me know so I can connect for free.)
I'd also suggest additional classes email, perhaps 2nd and 3rd class mail.
The current system of 3rd or 9th class mail can stay in place with mail service being "free" with delivery being subject to arbitrary and unspecified rules. (Eg., put 4 dollar signs in the message and it gets discarded, whether its spam or a personal message.)
Existing mail programs (MUA) generally support fetching mail from multiple mailboxes, so you can setup to fetch from your 1st class, 2nd class, and 9th class mailboxes and immediately distinguish between them.
There are a lot of problems to solve to implement such a system, but the biggest obstacle is to get over the "free email" illusion that many believe exists.
There are many who think that it was/is terrible that connecting to the Internet now costs money, as if it were free to connect to the Internet at some point in the past. Most people have gotten over charging for Internet access, now its time to get over charging for email.
Copying music is legally wrong. It is probably morally and ethically wrong.
The same was said about helping slaves escape and hiding Jews.
If you look at the events of the times when the concepts around copyright and patents were developed for incorporation into the Constitution, you will learn that the Framer's intent was that copyrights and patents be very limited. Patents were intended to provide full and open disclosure of ideas immediately (open source) instead of them being kept secret (as in trade secrets). Copyrights were intended to restrict the ability to rapidly copy written works, which at the time was on the order of weeks, down from months and years, to support the author-publishers of the times and keep them publishing.
Morally and ethically, I would claim that copyrights and patents should be limited to as short a time as possible and that the compensation should be restricted to the creators of these works and ideas.
Bascially, if anyone is should be paid for copies of Mickey Mouse cartoons, it should be Walt Disney himself, not his estate or anyone or anything else, because the Constitutional intent is to ensure that Walt Disney is able to continue to create. Until such time as Walt comes back to life and starts creating again, I see no moral and ethical problem not paying to copy his works.
That it is illegal to copy Walt's work is another matter, and I suggest that the circumstances leading to this situation are the result of questionable moral and ethical acts. Patents and copyright laws today are clearly going well beyond the Constitutional intent of promoting the free exchange of ideas balanced with the compensation of the individuals who create the ideas.
These laws are legal theft of property without benefit to the People.
marvel was already in the works before the HpaQ merger, and it would really make little sense to take a chip all the way to fab w/o at least running SOME of them to try and recoup some cost.
Actually, its the "revenge of the old time deccies" - Jesse Lipcon, et al, managed to sell EV7 to the Feds on a contract with sizable penalties for failing to deliver. HP can't afford to not deliver Marvel because they would end up being blacklisted on future contracts.
[Jesse resigned soon after.]
The latest version of Oracle database was submitted for release just before the past holiday and it includes a higher percentage of the Oracle software package than has been release for some time.
Don't know the status of Oracle RDB but that is also continuing to be developed with increasing interoperability with other Oracle software. The Oracle RDB engineers continue to have close contact with active customers.
Oracle is still driven by the profit motive and it knows that the only way to keep the dollars coming in from those VMS customers is to deliver updated product and services to them. Something that DEC, Compaq, and HP have largely ignored and its been reflected in their horrid bottom lines.
"That way I seem to avoid the semi-annual crash/replace/rebuild ritual."
Back in the days when disk drives cost $1 a kilobyte, drives were less reliable, but expectation was that data be more protected. So the systems were designed so that data could be protected by the design of the hardware, software, and operating procedures.
That you have to deal with a drive failure by doing a rebuild is merely an indication that you don't use software that allows for easy backup and recovery of ALL the data on your system.
I figure that if you can't recover in an hour from the building, containing your system that has all the data, burning down completely, then you view the data as disposable.
And the cost should be no higher than the cost of an identical disk drive.
But I'm an industry dinasaur who kept dozens of "hard drives" in his office and at home.
Slashdot Mirror
The provisions in the Constitution were written to address the problems the colonies were having with trade secrets. The colonies, and then what became the USA, was forced to go back to Britain for all sorts of machines and goods because no one could easily produce them here.
New England became a manufacturing center for hundreds of years because its residents became good at "reinventing the wheel", or "reverse engineering", the kinds of things that the USA acuses the far east at doing.
To foster the process of duplicating Britain's and Europe's manufacturing technology here, the patent system was created. For a short period of time you got exclusive rights AS LONG AS YOU TOLD EVERYONE YOUR SECRET AS SOON AS YOU THOUGHT IT UP.
Copyright was given similar status as part of a program to ensure that ideas flowed freely - the best way to protect your ideas was to publish them, rather than just "speak" them.
At no time was it intended to create a welfare program where you could work for a week or year and then live off that for the rest of your life. The idea was that you could think up something and tell the world and benefit from that just as much as working cutting down a tree and selling it or raising and butchering a cow.
In one regard, your exclusive rights to an idea should be no longer than it took you to produce it. If you watched an event and wrote up an article on it, then your exclusive copyright should be a day. But a couple hundred years ago, what was required was observing, writing, setting the type, running the press, shipping the copies around the world, and so on, so the process of making money from a new event might take a year. Books took even more time.
As the issues were complex, Congress was given the job of figuring out the tradeoffs.
The situation today is the opposite of what it was several hundred years ago. The intellectual giants and the influential politians are saying "secrecy is good", "exclusivity is good", "restriction in the flow of ideas is good", "prevention of reverse engineering is good", "unfettered innovation and creativity is EVIL".
I'd like just one explanation of how extending patents or copyrights will make you more creative than you are?
I'd like one explanation of why you think that you should have the right to restrict the free flow of ideas for an indefinite period of time?
If you can convince me that it takes so much work to write something that it will take you decades to make the money back, then you have to explain how it is that people write things with absolutely no expectation of getting any monetary value from it, and why you are so unique that you deserve special treatment so that we might be blessed with your special ideas?
I find it interesting that almost everyone prefers a communist solution to the email problem: no one pays anything so that the resources get allocated to those with the best connections and who are most able to exploit the system.
Of course, the idea that no one pays is completely false - everyone pays.
The reality of communism and market economies is that there are the privileged and the deprived. What is at issue is how well off the society as a whole is.
The current system is analogous to everyone contracting to have a mail box, or set of mail boxes. The people providing the mail boxes are required to give anyone who asks as much paper as they demand. Now the spammers drive around stuffing any and all mail boxes, along with individuals, and USPS, UPS, Fedex, etc. end up delivering it simply because they have no way to get rid of the spam.
Of course, this isn't the way the physical mail system works: if you don't pay the postage, the mail is either discarded or returned to you. And you don't pay to get mail, you pay to send it.
I think that it is possible to improve on the physical world mail system by making it clear to the recepient what class each piece of mail is.
Charge for 1st class email, with a network of authenticated mail relays (MTAs) moving this 1st class mail. The governance required to implement such a system of MTAs is exactly the same as is required to build the Internet. (You can't connect to the Internet without some peering relationship - if there is a way to do this, let me know so I can connect for free.)
I'd also suggest additional classes email, perhaps 2nd and 3rd class mail.
The current system of 3rd or 9th class mail can stay in place with mail service being "free" with delivery being subject to arbitrary and unspecified rules. (Eg., put 4 dollar signs in the message and it gets discarded, whether its spam or a personal message.)
Existing mail programs (MUA) generally support fetching mail from multiple mailboxes, so you can setup to fetch from your 1st class, 2nd class, and 9th class mailboxes and immediately distinguish between them.
There are a lot of problems to solve to implement such a system, but the biggest obstacle is to get over the "free email" illusion that many believe exists.
There are many who think that it was/is terrible that connecting to the Internet now costs money, as if it were free to connect to the Internet at some point in the past. Most people have gotten over charging for Internet access, now its time to get over charging for email.
The same was said about helping slaves escape and hiding Jews.
If you look at the events of the times when the concepts around copyright and patents were developed for incorporation into the Constitution, you will learn that the Framer's intent was that copyrights and patents be very limited. Patents were intended to provide full and open disclosure of ideas immediately (open source) instead of them being kept secret (as in trade secrets). Copyrights were intended to restrict the ability to rapidly copy written works, which at the time was on the order of weeks, down from months and years, to support the author-publishers of the times and keep them publishing.
Morally and ethically, I would claim that copyrights and patents should be limited to as short a time as possible and that the compensation should be restricted to the creators of these works and ideas.
Bascially, if anyone is should be paid for copies of Mickey Mouse cartoons, it should be Walt Disney himself, not his estate or anyone or anything else, because the Constitutional intent is to ensure that Walt Disney is able to continue to create. Until such time as Walt comes back to life and starts creating again, I see no moral and ethical problem not paying to copy his works.
That it is illegal to copy Walt's work is another matter, and I suggest that the circumstances leading to this situation are the result of questionable moral and ethical acts. Patents and copyright laws today are clearly going well beyond the Constitutional intent of promoting the free exchange of ideas balanced with the compensation of the individuals who create the ideas.
These laws are legal theft of property without benefit to the People.
The latest version of Oracle database was submitted for release just before the past holiday and it includes a higher percentage of the Oracle software package than has been release for some time. Don't know the status of Oracle RDB but that is also continuing to be developed with increasing interoperability with other Oracle software. The Oracle RDB engineers continue to have close contact with active customers. Oracle is still driven by the profit motive and it knows that the only way to keep the dollars coming in from those VMS customers is to deliver updated product and services to them. Something that DEC, Compaq, and HP have largely ignored and its been reflected in their horrid bottom lines.
"That way I seem to avoid the semi-annual crash/replace/rebuild ritual." Back in the days when disk drives cost $1 a kilobyte, drives were less reliable, but expectation was that data be more protected. So the systems were designed so that data could be protected by the design of the hardware, software, and operating procedures. That you have to deal with a drive failure by doing a rebuild is merely an indication that you don't use software that allows for easy backup and recovery of ALL the data on your system. I figure that if you can't recover in an hour from the building, containing your system that has all the data, burning down completely, then you view the data as disposable. And the cost should be no higher than the cost of an identical disk drive. But I'm an industry dinasaur who kept dozens of "hard drives" in his office and at home.