As long as a review is factual it's terrible. If readers can't make up their own minds, it's not the reviewer's problem.
One man's fact is another man's opinion. This regulation does not affect the content of posts at all, just mandates disclosure of affiliation. Disclosure is not hard and is often implicitly given by context anyway. If such disclosure materially affects the reader's interpretation of a web post then that post was deliberately attempting to deceive and they get no sympathy from me. Deception, lying in other words, is not okay whatever some people might like to think. That's been true in non-net advertising for a long time and I for one am glad to see the net being bought up to similar standards.
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Marketing talk is not just cheap, it has negative value. Free speech can be compromised just as much by too much noise as too little signal.
You don't think it's ridiculous that if a company gives me a pen, I have to disclose that any time I say anything positive about that company ever?
Not particularly. I doubt that would be covered though. See FTC regulation. They have to be strict about it to give scammers less wiggle room.
Or you don't think that I'd have to do that?
You have to either not accept payments/gifts/benefits, disclose the relationship or not do reviews/comments about a company. Your choice. Not onerous except for those intending to deceive.
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Marketing talk is not just cheap, it has negative value. Free speech can be compromised just as much by too much noise as too little signal.
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Marketing talk is not just cheap, it has negative value. Free speech can be compromised just as much by too much noise as too little signal.
Fraudulently misrepresenting yourself is not and should not be protected speech. You can still say whatever you like as long as the association is clear, either by context or by an explicit warning.
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An unobtrusive ad is a non-functional ad. It is a non-sustainable business model.
I can't believe they're doing this. I don't care if a review is paid or not.
It's not just reviews. It's any paid endorsement. It's great. They've only got the resources to go after the very clear cut cases but even so this is hopefully going to have a chilling effect on all forms of astroturfing in the US. About time too, astroturfing lowlifes have had a free ride for too long.
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Astroturfing "marketers" are liars, fraudulently misrepresenting company propaganda as objective third party opinion. Anonymous commercial speech should be illegal.
This is great news. It makes quite clear that all forms of endorsement where somebody pretends to be a third party for financial gain are out.
Won't stop all of it of course, particularly internationally, but at least now astroturfers in the US are on notice that their "harmless" activities are going to cost them. Couldn't happen to a nicer bunch of people.
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Anonymous company communication is unethical and can and should be highly illegal. Company legal structures require accountability.
Don't know if it's illegal or not but it should be. They are misrepresenting the site as presenting all reviews, not just ones that they approve. That's fraud with material financial consequences.
Given that Mechanist.tm wasn't aware of this they probably are misrepresenting the reviews.
If they made clear that the site is not representative of all customer reviews then there should be no legal problem though it's still shady and I for one would be shopping elsewhere.
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The majority of modern marketing is nothing more than an arms race to get mind share. Everybody loses except the parasitic marketing "industry".
There have been maybe 10 people that have ever run for congress that have anything resembling common sense..
Don't make that mistake, it's only common sense by your definition.
These are successful people but presumably with very different methods and goals from yours. Amongst many other things they fake lowest common denominator intelligence to get lowest common denominator votes. It works, most congresscritters get voted back repeatedly which is apparently what they want.
But let's be honest here. The site has to pay for itself somehow.
Yes, lets be honest. "Advertising supported" just means you're paying twice over, once in time to watch/avoid the ad and twice in the increased price of the product to pay for the ad.
Advertising on the web is just an horrendously inefficient micropayment system that hides the true cost of a site from the user while stealing their time and attention for nothing in return.
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The majority of modern marketing is nothing more than an arms race to get mind share. Everybody loses except the parasitic marketing "industry".
I'd go further and say consumers actually DO want this (i.e. the benefits it provides) - but just won't admit it.
"Targeting" means that 2 ads in 10,000 is "useful" instead of 1 ad in 10,000. "Targeting" is a scam, just one way marketers try to rationalize their pathetic, parasitic existence.
No, copies of his original work are still available. There is no particular reason why somebody's estate should control those copies more than anybody else.
I own it therefore I get to decide what happens to it is a meaningless tautology. Ownership by definition is the right to control. The more interesting question is who owns it?
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Creating simple artificial scarcity with copyright and patents on things that can be copied billions of times at minimal cost is a fundamentally stupid economic idea.
And, what about murder? Oh, Tom Clancy wrote a great book, that I want to publish? Pay the mob to knock him off, and it's free game.
This silliness keeps coming up. It's wrong because:
There's no strong financial incentive. He's dead, anybody can copy/publish it. Are you really going to murder somebody so you can read something legally instead of pirating it?
There are many present day situations where somebody can derive benefit from murder (e.g. inheritance, business competition). Why on earth should this be treated any differently?
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Creating simple artificial scarcity with copyright and patents on things that can be copied billions of times at minimal cost is a fundamentally stupid economic idea.
Yep. I'd say they're also trying for "we're amateurs at parties so that must mean we're professionals at business" thing going and a "we don't waste money on unprofessional eye candy like apple" also. They've always tried to look like a conservative, professional business that has stupid office parties just like every other business.
They also don't want people to notice that this single company is costing the world USD60,000,000,000+ per year for about a dozen programs mostly written decades ago with the most difficult bits, the device drivers, being written by third parties.
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Tax payer funded courses to teach proprietary software product use are an illegal company subsidy.
While I agree that you can't ignore the morality of your decisions, the corporate structure makes it far too easy to push the moral decisions off on the most desperate employees of the corporation.
I agree with this completely and the other poster's comment about it being a complex situation. Corporate law is in need of major reform and insulates certain people way too much from the consequences of their actions. e.g. Shareholders being able to turn a blind eye to director actions ("clean hands") should not be possible because directors are agents employed by the shareholders. The shareholder voted for the director and are morally responsible for the directors actions to an extent. Depends on how much the director lies to the shareholders, how much the director follows the direction of the shareholder, how much the shareholder turns a blind eye etc. Moral responsibility doesn't just simply "disappear".
All actions have consequences, including moral consequences, and while I might agree it is sometimes necessary for somebody to act immorally from some perspective to "survive" (as you put it) in the third world this is simply not true in the first world. They might have to take a pay cut to act morally but morality trumps income level and it has little to do with survival.
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Ownership, by definition, is the right to control something. Any ethical (not legal) argument based on "because they own it" is bogus.
When you're dealing with a soulless entity called "the corporation" the language of morality has no place.
A corporation is simply a group of people working together. The moral actions of the people participating are the moral actions of the corporation and vice versa.
Some people like to say that having a corporation means having no moral responsibility but they're sociopaths. There is no moral get-out-of-jail free card.
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Anonymous company communication is unethical and can and should be highly illegal. Company legal structures require accountability.
You seem to have severely misunderstood the purpose of these machines.
And you appeared to have severely understood the purpose of an education. It's not trade school or massively subsidizing foreign monopolies but exposing students to a variety of possibilities and giving them a start for a life other than being a corporate whore.
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Anonymous company communication is unethical and can and should be highly illegal. Company legal structures require accountability.
Marketer parasites just love it when uninformed consumers make decisions based on incomplete information with the only information available being marketing propaganda and not other consumer opinions. Ignore marketers completely. They're just trying to manipulate you.
Purchase is only one market signal. Consumer opinion is another.
Complain to high heaven. Again and again. Whenever you feel like it. It is almost your duty in a free society to express your opinion, positive or negative. Whatever the propaganda merchants might try to tell you.
It tanks a product? Good. Maybe next time they'll try selling a quality product that self-sells by word of mouth instead of attempting to market camouflaged drivel like a lot of consumer junk today.
BTW, ignore the astroturfer propaganda here about "the price being reasonable". No price is universally "reasonable" or "unreasonable".
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I own it therefore I get to decide what happens to it is a meaningless tautology. Ownership by definition is the right to control. The more interesting question is who owns it?
What about something like: " is bad. [Remove it!] [Do Nothing]" with a big frown image on "Do Nothing", and a big smile image on "Remove it!"?
That's been designed for young child, not a typical computer user. It is asking the user to make a decision but provides no useful information to base that decision on. " is bad" is useless, the user is smart enough to know that question would not have been asked unless there was a possibility that it was not bad.
Of course. The user has no information to make an informed decision so of course it's going to be random. Since the majority of prompts provide no useful information that becomes a habit.
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DRM breaks ownership, the basis of capitalism and the free market.
Because it was tried. And it was discovered that users don't read.
No. It was discovered that badly written dialogs using jargon and concepts that the average computer user has no hope of understanding were being ignored.
Software is soft, it can be anything we want it to be but many poor programmers (not to mention certain astroturfers) prefer to point the finger at users instead. Most of the time it's incompetent programmers guiding the user into making bad choices, not the user's fault at all. I've lost count of the number of times I've been asked to help solve a computer problem and ended up having to apologize for some stupid dialog or icon that actually caused the problem in the first place.
Incompetent programmers program as if users are perfect and never make mistakes (while simultaneously claiming they are "professionals" and it's the user that's always at fault), that computers are at the center of users' lives, that users really like spending hours reading idiotic instructions for arcane, unnecessary procedures and that users have the jargon and knowledge of a multi-year computer course. Not to mention users expected to be time travelers because they should've known the instructions were coming after the point where they were needed. The dailywtf has some funny ones (including comments from unintentionally funny incompetents) however that just scratches the surface.
It's called designing software for your target audience. Some programmers should try doing it sometime. I'm tired of mediocre programmers with an inflated view of their own competence trying to blame others for their failings.
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Open source software is everything that closed source software is. Plus the source is available.
As someone who used to commute via bike, I say it's pretty freaky having a hybrid come whooshing by, even if it's in a different lane. Almost as bad as a city bus, which has it's engine in the back so you don't hear it until the bus is practically on top of you. A little audible warning would be nice. It doesn't need to sound like a Harley to be effective.
May be better for you to start using a rear view mirror. Just like trucks, cars, motorbikes and mopeds. Or a rear view camera if you want to be high tech. Perhaps with an education campaign. It's crazy to deliberately make noise when cities are already too loud as it is. Particularly in traffic jams or late at night. I'm really looking forward to the day when cities have minimal air pollution and minimal sound pollution.
You're absolutely right. All of those legal scholars, judges, lawyers, etc. who have studied and written about patent law in depth don't understand simple concepts like Venn diagrams. You are clearly the only one who has ever put any real thought into this.
Fallacy: Appeal to Authority. They may know about law. They know almost nothing about invention, ideas, linguistics and the creative process. Your automatic assumption that they do is telling. You are making the common error of assuming patent law expertise has any relationship to the real world other than by assertion.
Or not. You know how people complain that patents (and legislation, for that matter) isn't written in plain English?
Of course. A pity that patents are supposed to allow people in the field, not lawyers, to understand the idea. That's the entire point of publishing a patent. Or not.
That's because "plain English" is notoriously vague and nuanced.
And so is legal English in the realm of ideas. Ideas cover the entire realm of human existence. Legal English gets no get-out-of-jail-free card to redefine the entire English language or redefine all of existence.
Your examples - two shades of orange, a file system vs. database, using a car vs. using a vehicle - expose this flaw.
For both English and legal English.
Is a file system different from a database? It depends how you define the two terms.
And what is regarded as the important abstract concept, the idea, referred to by the word label "file system" or "database". Something that the patent office likes to conveniently ignore.
Is using a car different than using a helicopter? Yes, even though they're both vehicles.
Is using a car different from using another car? Yes, even though they're both cars. There are always differences. The question is whether the differences are handwaving or important.
Is light at 590nm different than light at 635nm? They're both orange...
There are always differences. The question is whether the differences are handwaving or important.
As evidenced by the idiotic patents being granted in my area of expertise - software - they have not solved that problem. All they've done is grandfathered in naive and primitive law from centuries ago and said, by assertion and not by evidence, "this is true" when it isn't.
You say that GP's example of using IRC to arrange the delivery of baked goods shouldn't be valid because "it's a particular instance of the use of IRC which is a general purpose communication medium". You missed his entire point - he wasn't claiming IRC, he was claiming a method of delivering goods. Does IRC deliver baked goods? Then IRC being a 'general purpose communication medium' is irrelevant.
Actually, you've missed the point. "he was claiming a method of delivering goods" is another way of saying "a specific instance of use of a general purpose communication medium". It's simply a word change on an existing idea.
IRC is a general purpose communication medium that can be used to do anything, including delivering baked goods. That property is inherent to IRC. A particular instance of it's application should not be patentable because the general principle is prior art. Whatever the patent lawyers might like to assert. I use the word "assert" deliberately because it is a large part of the problem - the patent office trying to define their own, self-serving reality, with almost no object standards in the realm of ideas.
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The patent system. The whole edifice is based on handwaving.
Slashdot Mirror
As long as a review is factual it's terrible. If readers can't make up their own minds, it's not the reviewer's problem.
One man's fact is another man's opinion. This regulation does not affect the content of posts at all, just mandates disclosure of affiliation. Disclosure is not hard and is often implicitly given by context anyway. If such disclosure materially affects the reader's interpretation of a web post then that post was deliberately attempting to deceive and they get no sympathy from me. Deception, lying in other words, is not okay whatever some people might like to think. That's been true in non-net advertising for a long time and I for one am glad to see the net being bought up to similar standards.
---
Marketing talk is not just cheap, it has negative value. Free speech can be compromised just as much by too much noise as too little signal.
You don't think it's ridiculous that if a company gives me a pen, I have to disclose that any time I say anything positive about that company ever?
Not particularly. I doubt that would be covered though. See FTC regulation. They have to be strict about it to give scammers less wiggle room.
Or you don't think that I'd have to do that?
You have to either not accept payments/gifts/benefits, disclose the relationship or not do reviews/comments about a company. Your choice. Not onerous except for those intending to deceive.
---
Marketing talk is not just cheap, it has negative value. Free speech can be compromised just as much by too much noise as too little signal.
---
Marketing talk is not just cheap, it has negative value. Free speech can be compromised just as much by too much noise as too little signal.
they're completely ridiculous and onerous.
They're only ridiculous and onerous to people who have a habit of lying.
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Anonymous company communication is unethical and can and should be highly illegal. Company legal structures require accountability.
what should be protected speech.
Fraudulently misrepresenting yourself is not and should not be protected speech. You can still say whatever you like as long as the association is clear, either by context or by an explicit warning.
---
An unobtrusive ad is a non-functional ad. It is a non-sustainable business model.
I can't believe they're doing this. I don't care if a review is paid or not.
It's not just reviews. It's any paid endorsement. It's great. They've only got the resources to go after the very clear cut cases but even so this is hopefully going to have a chilling effect on all forms of astroturfing in the US. About time too, astroturfing lowlifes have had a free ride for too long.
---
Astroturfing "marketers" are liars, fraudulently misrepresenting company propaganda as objective third party opinion. Anonymous commercial speech should be illegal.
What's considered a blog? Is a twitter message included? What about facebook status updates? Affiliate links?
All of them.
This is great news. It makes quite clear that all forms of endorsement where somebody pretends to be a third party for financial gain are out.
Won't stop all of it of course, particularly internationally, but at least now astroturfers in the US are on notice that their "harmless" activities are going to cost them. Couldn't happen to a nicer bunch of people.
---
Anonymous company communication is unethical and can and should be highly illegal. Company legal structures require accountability.
Why is this illegal?
Don't know if it's illegal or not but it should be. They are misrepresenting the site as presenting all reviews, not just ones that they approve. That's fraud with material financial consequences.
Given that Mechanist.tm wasn't aware of this they probably are misrepresenting the reviews.
If they made clear that the site is not representative of all customer reviews then there should be no legal problem though it's still shady and I for one would be shopping elsewhere.
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The majority of modern marketing is nothing more than an arms race to get mind share. Everybody loses except the parasitic marketing "industry".
Way to mistake marketing as advertising there genius. Advertising is a subset of marketing. Opinionated != Informed.
I'm well aware of the difference. Neurotic marketers who harp on this difference are doubly pathetic. My point stands.
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The majority of modern marketing is nothing more than an arms race to get mind share. Everybody loses except the parasitic marketing "industry".
There have been maybe 10 people that have ever run for congress that have anything resembling common sense..
Don't make that mistake, it's only common sense by your definition.
These are successful people but presumably with very different methods and goals from yours. Amongst many other things they fake lowest common denominator intelligence to get lowest common denominator votes. It works, most congresscritters get voted back repeatedly which is apparently what they want.
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Are you a creator or a consumer?
I'd rather see an ad for a video game than for tampons.
Why? Neither ad is of any use to you or 99.9%+ of the population. The product is irrelevant, they're all useless to you.
Of course I'd prefer not to see an ad at all, but that's irrelevant.
It's highly relevant when 99%+ prefer not to see an ad at all. There should be a law.
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The majority of modern marketing is nothing more than an arms race to get mind share. Everybody loses except the parasitic marketing "industry".
But let's be honest here. The site has to pay for itself somehow.
Yes, lets be honest. "Advertising supported" just means you're paying twice over, once in time to watch/avoid the ad and twice in the increased price of the product to pay for the ad.
Advertising on the web is just an horrendously inefficient micropayment system that hides the true cost of a site from the user while stealing their time and attention for nothing in return.
---
The majority of modern marketing is nothing more than an arms race to get mind share. Everybody loses except the parasitic marketing "industry".
I'd go further and say consumers actually DO want this (i.e. the benefits it provides) - but just won't admit it.
"Targeting" means that 2 ads in 10,000 is "useful" instead of 1 ad in 10,000. "Targeting" is a scam, just one way marketers try to rationalize their pathetic, parasitic existence.
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Marketing = information pollution.
the work is still there for years and years to go
No, copies of his original work are still available. There is no particular reason why somebody's estate should control those copies more than anybody else.
I own it therefore I get to decide what happens to it is a meaningless tautology. Ownership by definition is the right to control. The more interesting question is who owns it?
---
Creating simple artificial scarcity with copyright and patents on things that can be copied billions of times at minimal cost is a fundamentally stupid economic idea.
And, what about murder? Oh, Tom Clancy wrote a great book, that I want to publish? Pay the mob to knock him off, and it's free game.
This silliness keeps coming up. It's wrong because:
---
Creating simple artificial scarcity with copyright and patents on things that can be copied billions of times at minimal cost is a fundamentally stupid economic idea.
Yep. I'd say they're also trying for "we're amateurs at parties so that must mean we're professionals at business" thing going and a "we don't waste money on unprofessional eye candy like apple" also. They've always tried to look like a conservative, professional business that has stupid office parties just like every other business.
They also don't want people to notice that this single company is costing the world USD60,000,000,000+ per year for about a dozen programs mostly written decades ago with the most difficult bits, the device drivers, being written by third parties.
---
Tax payer funded courses to teach proprietary software product use are an illegal company subsidy.
While I agree that you can't ignore the morality of your decisions, the corporate structure makes it far too easy to push the moral decisions off on the most desperate employees of the corporation.
I agree with this completely and the other poster's comment about it being a complex situation. Corporate law is in need of major reform and insulates certain people way too much from the consequences of their actions. e.g. Shareholders being able to turn a blind eye to director actions ("clean hands") should not be possible because directors are agents employed by the shareholders. The shareholder voted for the director and are morally responsible for the directors actions to an extent. Depends on how much the director lies to the shareholders, how much the director follows the direction of the shareholder, how much the shareholder turns a blind eye etc. Moral responsibility doesn't just simply "disappear".
All actions have consequences, including moral consequences, and while I might agree it is sometimes necessary for somebody to act immorally from some perspective to "survive" (as you put it) in the third world this is simply not true in the first world. They might have to take a pay cut to act morally but morality trumps income level and it has little to do with survival.
---
Ownership, by definition, is the right to control something. Any ethical (not legal) argument based on "because they own it" is bogus.
When you're dealing with a soulless entity called "the corporation" the language of morality has no place.
A corporation is simply a group of people working together. The moral actions of the people participating are the moral actions of the corporation and vice versa.
Some people like to say that having a corporation means having no moral responsibility but they're sociopaths. There is no moral get-out-of-jail free card.
---
Anonymous company communication is unethical and can and should be highly illegal. Company legal structures require accountability.
You seem to have severely misunderstood the purpose of these machines.
And you appeared to have severely understood the purpose of an education. It's not trade school or massively subsidizing foreign monopolies but exposing students to a variety of possibilities and giving them a start for a life other than being a corporate whore.
---
Anonymous company communication is unethical and can and should be highly illegal. Company legal structures require accountability.
Don't even complain about it.
Marketer parasites just love it when uninformed consumers make decisions based on incomplete information with the only information available being marketing propaganda and not other consumer opinions. Ignore marketers completely. They're just trying to manipulate you.
Purchase is only one market signal. Consumer opinion is another.
Complain to high heaven. Again and again. Whenever you feel like it. It is almost your duty in a free society to express your opinion, positive or negative. Whatever the propaganda merchants might try to tell you.
It tanks a product? Good. Maybe next time they'll try selling a quality product that self-sells by word of mouth instead of attempting to market camouflaged drivel like a lot of consumer junk today.
BTW, ignore the astroturfer propaganda here about "the price being reasonable". No price is universally "reasonable" or "unreasonable".
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I own it therefore I get to decide what happens to it is a meaningless tautology. Ownership by definition is the right to control. The more interesting question is who owns it?
What about something like: " is bad. [Remove it!] [Do Nothing]" with a big frown image on "Do Nothing", and a big smile image on "Remove it!"?
That's been designed for young child, not a typical computer user. It is asking the user to make a decision but provides no useful information to base that decision on. " is bad" is useless, the user is smart enough to know that question would not have been asked unless there was a possibility that it was not bad.
I think you'd find that users would *still* randomly click. At best it might alter the distribution of random clicks slightly. Of course, ProgramName will turn out to be "Indiciso679transit.yonkeys--é" and ruin the friendliness.
Of course. The user has no information to make an informed decision so of course it's going to be random. Since the majority of prompts provide no useful information that becomes a habit.
---
DRM breaks ownership, the basis of capitalism and the free market.
Because it was tried. And it was discovered that users don't read.
No. It was discovered that badly written dialogs using jargon and concepts that the average computer user has no hope of understanding were being ignored.
Software is soft, it can be anything we want it to be but many poor programmers (not to mention certain astroturfers) prefer to point the finger at users instead. Most of the time it's incompetent programmers guiding the user into making bad choices, not the user's fault at all. I've lost count of the number of times I've been asked to help solve a computer problem and ended up having to apologize for some stupid dialog or icon that actually caused the problem in the first place.
Incompetent programmers program as if users are perfect and never make mistakes (while simultaneously claiming they are "professionals" and it's the user that's always at fault), that computers are at the center of users' lives, that users really like spending hours reading idiotic instructions for arcane, unnecessary procedures and that users have the jargon and knowledge of a multi-year computer course. Not to mention users expected to be time travelers because they should've known the instructions were coming after the point where they were needed. The dailywtf has some funny ones (including comments from unintentionally funny incompetents) however that just scratches the surface.
It's called designing software for your target audience. Some programmers should try doing it sometime. I'm tired of mediocre programmers with an inflated view of their own competence trying to blame others for their failings.
---
Open source software is everything that closed source software is. Plus the source is available.
Money buys one the freedom to do what makes one happy.
Less the lack of freedom and amount of unhappiness needed to get that money.
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The USA is <5% of the world's population. It is statistically insignificant.
Last I checked, miles per gallon has nothing to do with pollution
Wrong, MPG is 100% correlated with CO2 pollution. Many tons per year. Unless you've learned to sequester CO2 in your car.
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Who owns the copy?
As someone who used to commute via bike, I say it's pretty freaky having a hybrid come whooshing by, even if it's in a different lane. Almost as bad as a city bus, which has it's engine in the back so you don't hear it until the bus is practically on top of you. A little audible warning would be nice. It doesn't need to sound like a Harley to be effective.
May be better for you to start using a rear view mirror. Just like trucks, cars, motorbikes and mopeds. Or a rear view camera if you want to be high tech. Perhaps with an education campaign. It's crazy to deliberately make noise when cities are already too loud as it is. Particularly in traffic jams or late at night. I'm really looking forward to the day when cities have minimal air pollution and minimal sound pollution.
---
Insisting on absolute safety is for people who don't have the balls to live in the real world.
-- Mary Shafer, risks researcher, NASA
You're absolutely right. All of those legal scholars, judges, lawyers, etc. who have studied and written about patent law in depth don't understand simple concepts like Venn diagrams. You are clearly the only one who has ever put any real thought into this.
Fallacy: Appeal to Authority. They may know about law. They know almost nothing about invention, ideas, linguistics and the creative process. Your automatic assumption that they do is telling. You are making the common error of assuming patent law expertise has any relationship to the real world other than by assertion.
Or not. You know how people complain that patents (and legislation, for that matter) isn't written in plain English?
Of course. A pity that patents are supposed to allow people in the field, not lawyers, to understand the idea. That's the entire point of publishing a patent. Or not.
That's because "plain English" is notoriously vague and nuanced.
And so is legal English in the realm of ideas. Ideas cover the entire realm of human existence. Legal English gets no get-out-of-jail-free card to redefine the entire English language or redefine all of existence.
Your examples - two shades of orange, a file system vs. database, using a car vs. using a vehicle - expose this flaw.
For both English and legal English.
Is a file system different from a database? It depends how you define the two terms.
And what is regarded as the important abstract concept, the idea, referred to by the word label "file system" or "database". Something that the patent office likes to conveniently ignore.
Is using a car different than using a helicopter? Yes, even though they're both vehicles.
Is using a car different from using another car? Yes, even though they're both cars. There are always differences. The question is whether the differences are handwaving or important.
Is light at 590nm different than light at 635nm? They're both orange...
There are always differences. The question is whether the differences are handwaving or important.
As evidenced by the idiotic patents being granted in my area of expertise - software - they have not solved that problem. All they've done is grandfathered in naive and primitive law from centuries ago and said, by assertion and not by evidence, "this is true" when it isn't.
You say that GP's example of using IRC to arrange the delivery of baked goods shouldn't be valid because "it's a particular instance of the use of IRC which is a general purpose communication medium". You missed his entire point - he wasn't claiming IRC, he was claiming a method of delivering goods. Does IRC deliver baked goods? Then IRC being a 'general purpose communication medium' is irrelevant.
Actually, you've missed the point. "he was claiming a method of delivering goods" is another way of saying "a specific instance of use of a general purpose communication medium". It's simply a word change on an existing idea.
IRC is a general purpose communication medium that can be used to do anything, including delivering baked goods. That property is inherent to IRC. A particular instance of it's application should not be patentable because the general principle is prior art. Whatever the patent lawyers might like to assert. I use the word "assert" deliberately because it is a large part of the problem - the patent office trying to define their own, self-serving reality, with almost no object standards in the realm of ideas.
---
The patent system. The whole edifice is based on handwaving.