the attorneys just attempt to represent the businessmen in the best fashion possible
Sorry, but being paid doesn't absolve lawyers of any ethical responsibility.
Lawyers love to claim this but it's simply not true. Just because a client sets a direction doesn't mean the attorneys aren't actually doing it.
And without the client wanting to bring the case in the first place, there wouldn't even be any litigation.
And without the attorney wanting to bring the case in the first place, there wouldn't even be any litigation.
I am tired of attorneys trying to rationalize their bad behavior. Lawyering is a tool and like all tools it can be used for both good and evil.
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It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work. It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons. Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA/PTO abuse.
the fraction of technological societies that get off-planet
You are implicitly assuming every society is the same. Societies, even single societies, are not monoliths. They are complex cauldrons with many different competing interests with many different directions happening all at the same time.
Lotus eaters? Sure but they'll be plenty of "social groups" (for want of a better term) that will think that it's a sin against god (or equivalent) and go in another direction. Civilization limiting aggression? Sure but they'll be many groups/civilizations that get second chances or happen to be powerful because of accidents of technology and compete to go in another direction.
And the thing is, all it takes is a single civilization, in the billions of stars out there, to go interstellar, and geometric progression tells us that the universe will be infested with them in short order.
I suspect life on earth is probably the result of one such alien civilization (due to active, intelligent panspermia) however we haven't grown up enough to communicate with them yet.
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Marketing talk is not just cheap, it can have negative value. Free speech can be compromised just as much by too much noise as too little signal.
but I also can't see why the evidence of other civilizations wouldn't be obvious.
Personally, I think it is obvious. The multitude of strange astronomical phenomena that scientists can't explain? Advanced alien civilizations at work and war.
The reason we're seeing no communication is that we're not smart enough to understand their communications and we're not interesting enough to communicate with directly (yet).
I only hope they don't decide to step on us e.g. to build a fusion reactor based on our sun or to collect our planetary system for the building material or who knows what else. With panspermia maybe we're the children of one such civilization.
They need to come up with a reliable way to fix this, make absolutely sure it actually fixes the problem, and then make sure the patch doesn't cause crashes on any of the OS variants out there.
All of which would take less than 24 hours if they actually gave a shit. The shills will say otherwise but they're lying as usual.
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There is no such thing as selling DRM'ed hardware/software. Everything DRM'ed is actually rented.
Yes, but if software patents did not exist, Microsoft would be powerless to act against these companies.
And if M$ chose not to act on the patent there would be minimal harm. You haven't negated my argument.
The fact that the software patent attack is possible means that Microsoft, which is publicly traded and beholden to shareholders, almost has no choice BUT to act, even if the act itself is unsavory. To do otherwise would be for the CEO to be sued and perhaps dismissed.
CEO's, particularly CEO's of highly profitable companies like M$, have huge latitude on how they can act. M$ and it's CEO chose to take advantage of an ethically dubious law and as such are ethically responsible. To repeat myself profit does not trump ethics.
So I blame the software patents construct itself.
I blame both. Both broken patent law and unethical companies together are causing the harm. Neither alone causes the harm the two together cause.
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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.
If anything, rather than proving that Microsoft is some sort of terrible evil, this proves that SOFTWARE PATENTS are a terrible evil.
No, it proves that both software patents and M$ are evil. Both are necessary prerequisites for the harm to occur.
This is like the lawyers who wash their hands of responsibility because "they were only doing what they were told to". Sorry, but being paid doesn't magically absolve a person or company of ethical responsibility.
Trading tapes with a few friends is a little different than trading tapes with a thousands of people.
Not particularly. Once you've got people sharing more copies than one per person it's only a question of time. And not much extra time at that due to geometric growth in numbers of copies. A significant problem with the music distribution and creation industries is widespread math ignorance except where it pertains to financial statements.
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Like software, intellectual property law is a product of the mind, and can be anything we want it to be. Let's get it right.
One of the strongest justifications for patent protection is when you create something that becomes ridiculously obvious once you create it.
This idiotic meme needs to die. People are perfectly capable of assessing whether an idea is obvious or not after the fact. Having more information available doesn't mystically make people stupid.
This meme is mainly just a rationalization by those who prefer to replace thinking with soundbites.
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Like software, intellectual property law is a product of the mind, and can be anything we want it to be. Let's get it right.
No he wasn't. The telephone is a classic example of "an invention whose time has come".
There were dozens, if not hundreds of persons and groups at the time all over the world trying to improve the telegraph, including trying to transmit audio, to make recordings and to create automated switching fabrics. Many knew the importance of those things. Bell was lucky to be first, nothing more. Read his biography. He spent the rest of his life, and considerable wealth, both litigating and trying to create the next big thing. He succeeded in the litigation but not in creating the next big thing. He was no genius or particular innovator. In addition his main interest was in assisting the deaf, the telephone was a sideline.
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Like software, intellectual property law is a product of the mind, and can be anything we want it to be. Let's get it right.
Don't you find it hypocritical that this thread like most threads do nothing but trash lawyers. But what profession do they automatically run to when they are pissed off over a specific subject and THEIR reading of the law?
The hypocrisy is people like you who can't cope with the fact that tools can be used for both good and evil. The law is nothing but a tool, a very abstract tool but a tool nonetheless. You'd use a gun if somebody attacked your family with a gun, right?
People often trash lawyers because of hypocritical lawyer behavior. Lawyers frequently claim they do what they do only because their clients tells them to and that they have no responsibility. Nonsense, as the lawyers themselves say "the responsibility is joint and several". Being paid doesn't magically absolve such lawyers of responsibility.
I have high respect for lawyers like Lawrence Lessig. I do not agree with everything he says but he is fighting a good fight. However, the bottom feeding scum suckers supporting artificial scarcity and the victimization of the less fortunate in society who are costing society nothing are in another category altogether.
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Like software, intellectual property law is a product of the mind, and can be anything we want it to be. Let's get it right.
To prove that the problem is the stated one. Otherwise it's just an excuse to get what you want.
No, it's just a sensible reaction to a broken law to balance out all the times when it wasn't broken.
Not completely. The public still gains from the works that are produced with the expectation of copyright.
Not when the work is priced such that there is no significant net value to the public, just the creators and middlemen/parasites. Given the extremely low cost of entertainment these days (e.g. slashdot is more entertaining than most movies for many) that is more likely than not.
You could refuse to buy or support any copyrighted work and put your support behind works with open source licenses. It would have the same effect of collapsing the system.
No, he said refuse to obey unethical laws. Nothing to do with collapsing the system. Quite apart from the entire artificial scarcity silliness.
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Like software, intellectual property law is a product of the mind, and can be anything we want it to be. Let's get it right.
Not all of the above applies to your post, but I see a lot of posts that (accidentally or purposely) jump to false conclusions in every discussion about copyright.
You're dealing with RIAA shills and socket puppets. They deliberately endlessly repeat the same old simplistic propaganda and deliberately ignore and/or misconstrue the much more sophisticated understanding that most slashdotters have after several years of debating this topic. Basically, these shills are paid by the obvious entrenched interests to wear people down.
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Like software, intellectual property law is a product of the mind, and can be anything we want it to be. Let's get it right.
One thing to keep in mind is that the researchers who use these things, when they get more power, generally are able to make pretty amazing new discoveries.
Actually, the vast majority of researchers using these things are using antique software packages and would get much better bang-for-buck by spending some of the money on decent programmers instead to make the software run much more efficiently on slightly less performant hardware.
Most researchers using supercomputers, such as physicists, chemists and biologists are older, politically connected types who are good at getting the money for such things but aren't really up on what is [not] possible in software. They get the hardware because they can, not because they really understand the cost/benefit trade-offs, and because they are only human and bragging rights matter.
There are of course exceptions to this general rule (e.g. weather forecasting perhaps) but it is mostly true.
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Are you one of those programmers who expect their users to be mind readers? Think about how your code is going to be used step-by-step!
You are confusing the law with reality. In reality, that patent was not valid and that's the point the GP was making. The fact that lawyers and the PTO are fond of redefining reality is a major problem in itself.
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Like software, intellectual property law is a product of the mind, and can be anything we want it to be. Let's get it right.
It would be. No one is going to invest in companies that they could be held personally liable for its actions.
Why not? Risk just doesn't simply disappear. All you're doing is simply transferring the risk to others, mainly the customers and suppliers in this case. They become responsible for the shareholder's inattention. By insulating the shareholders from such risk you are distorting the market and that is a bad thing.
Having shareholder's keep closer tabs on company officers would be a very good thing. As it is now you have too many sociopaths using other people's money to control and manipulate. Responsibility should be, precisely, on the individuals who may gain advantage or disadvantage. A minor shareholder has minor advantage/disadvantage so they have minor responsibility. They do have some responsibility however.
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I love the free market zealots who think monopoly is a good thing.
For example, if you consider author's right to be natural - and a lot of societies do
Actually, no societies do.
Small groups of authors and middlemen like to consider copy restriction a "right", and most society's do have the natural right to "credit where credit is due", but sharing has been going on since the dawn of time and the vast majority of people continue to copy, particularly for close friends, whenever it is useful or convenient. Most people understand instinctively that artificial scarcity is a stupid concept.
In other words you are trying to spin the fairly common natural credit ethical "right" into the very uncommon natural copying restriction "right". That is simply wrong. Didn't your parents teach you to share?
It is true that the legal, not natural, copy restriction right is common however that's mainly due to centuries of lobbying by a minority of parasitic middlemen, not authors and not the general community.
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Like software, intellectual property law is a product of the mind, and can be anything we want it to be. Let's get it right.
Actually, it's the Supreme Court's definition of obvious: KSR v. Teleflex.
As usual the Supreme Court is codifying existing practice, in this case the PTO bureaucracy's self-serving asshattery.
The PTO and the patent mafia in general are very fond of blaming others for their own failings.
It is physically impossible for a PTO bureaucrat to validly assess all of technology to see whether an idea is "new" or not, or obvious to an expert in the field (patent bureaucrats pretend to be generalists), and the fact that they claim with a straight face that they can is all the evidence needed to know that they are bad faith actors not to be trusted.
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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.
Very admirable. But somehow the high morals of everyone on slashdot doesn't mesh with what I see in the real world.
You have a parochial view of the real world.
Let me be clear: I don't have a problem with breaking DRM because you want to listen/watch something on another device. That's fine
Good
(and mostly legal these days).
Not in the real world since such technical fixes usually cannot be done by most people and cannot be advertised and distributed freely.
My problem is EVERYONE who pirates seems to say this same thing: I would never have paid for this!
No, "EVERYBODY" is just your distorted view of the world. For the majority of pirates, time rich and money poor people, it's true however.
And yet they keep what they downloaded and keep listening/watching it.
Which is not in the slightest incompatible with the previous statement.
No one I know at least ever paid for any song once they had downloaded it for free.
Some do but the majority simply pay for other media when the opportunity arises. People have fixed entertainment budgets but use piracy to get better bang for their buck at no cost to anyone. A perfectly reasonable thing to do.
Sorry, but that is copyright infringement and morally wrong to me at least.
I'd suggest you expand your horizons.
The problem with your viewpoint is your automatic assumptions about the ownership of creative works and the automatic assumption that artificial scarcity is the only way to reward creators.
Ownership by definition is the right to control. Any ethical, not legal, argument based on "because they own it" is bogus.
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Copyright rewards distributors (copiers) far more than creators.
Just remember, before you say, OMFG THAT'S OBVIOUS, you have to find references that teach all of those limitations, and if you have to use more than one reference, you have to have a rationale for combining those references.
Oh, the patent mafia get to set the rules to suit themselves? Funny that.
This "patent" is obvious. No matter how people like you try to spin it.
The PTO's self-serving definition of obvious is laughably bad.
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The patent system. The whole edifice is based on handwaving.
1. Licensing. Our drivers include licensed code from at least two other companies - code that implements algorithms seen as proprietary and valuable by those companies. We don't have the right to publish that code, and couldn't conceivably convince them to do so.
So don't publish it then, it's not your responsibility in any case. People will either reverse engineer it or code replacements.
2. Competitive advantage. We have several competitors in our market. The specs that Marketing puts on our datasheets might be optimistic in some scenarios. If we open-sourced our drivers, our competitors could easily demonstrate that to potential customers - if their drivers were closed, we would not have the equivalent opportunity to prove that their liars were worse than our liars.
Performance is performance. Having the source doesn't change that. In the long term liars, whether yours or theirs, are going to be outed eventually regardless.
3. Support. If we publish source, we will end up fielding all kinds of questions from all kinds of people about all kinds of aspects of our product. Even if we simply answer "Go away" to all those queries, there's a lot of time spent reading and replying (or simply ignoring) them. Considering that we sell our products to OEMs for a few dollars, there just isn't any margin for end user support.
Oh, nonsense. Set up an archived mailing list, send occasional email messages detailing the situation (a good opportunity for marketing), and otherwise forget about it. Users will help themselves as best they can.
4. Security. Say what you will about "security through obscurity", it still has a huge following in the corporate world. Publishing all your source code provides all kinds of opportunities for the scoundrels of the world to take advantage, from the PHB point of view.
And identical opportunities for white hats also. There are far more white hats than black hats.
5. Financial. There is no business case to be made to disclose this proprietary information. If I'm not going to make money from something, why should I spend the time/effort to open source it, and perhaps give away information that my competitor could use?
WHy should others help you when you won't help them? Long term customer good will, bug fixes and general openness are not a good thing? I thought we lived in a free and open society where people try to help each other get ahead and improve. Win-win for everybody. Being small minded is usually not a good long term strategy in a civil society.
In Broadcom's case, there are probably others also - for example, publishing source for a Wireless card could allow operating the RF section beyond regulatory limits - transmitting/receiving out of band, transmitting with too much power, etc.
This is a well known problem. Put a warning and disclaimer in the relevant source code (you've done that anyway, right?) and otherwise forget about it. The people doing the modification are the one's responsible.
This could jeopardize certification (such as FCC certification in the US) or subject the company to unwanted regulatory scrutiny.
And it could also encourage certification as they see the openness and lack of deceptiveness with which the company operates. It's a wash.
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Testing is not a substitute for writing good code.
Grow up. Ownership, by definition, is the right to control something. Any ethical, not legal, argument based on "because they own it" is bogus.
The more interesting question is who owns it?
Oh, and if you're a lying RIAA/MPAA shill yet again fraudulently pretending perpetual ignorance of the complexities of "intellectual property"? FOAD you lying toad.
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It's not piracy, it's sharing. Didn't your parents teach you to share?
Maybe in case of trivial innovation but in case of difficult and expensive innovation it will reward the copier and punish the innovator.
No punishment involved, just additional value to society. Copying increases net value because things don't have to be reinvented.
The innovator still has first mover advantage and there are very few software advances, if any, that are of a sufficiently large quantum to justify any reward larger than that. Software is soft and it changes gradually. No protection is needed for big investments in big advancement because there aren't any. There are big investments in developing big software packages but that's not the same thing and is covered by copyright in any case.
Patents are a complex issue and I'm not necessarily in favor of the system as it is but it is funny to read all the naive posts here from people who fail to see both sides of equation.
Both sides? The onus is on every patent proponent, not patent opponent, to justify at every step this massive interference in the citizen's business by the government. The default position that patents have value in every possible technical area is bogus.
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It's valuable because it's standard, not standard because it is valuable.
A matter of personal preference I guess. UAC has it's own problems such as apparently not caching credentials, at least in vista. Gnome remembers privilege escalation. e.g. clicking the above icon twice will only ask for a password the first time.
My ideal security model would be for user accounts to have an attribute that specifies how experienced a user is and adjusts the user interface and system privilege management accordingly. With a full capability system like SELinux. Such security models do conflict badly with the KISS principle though.
Slashdot Mirror
the attorneys just attempt to represent the businessmen in the best fashion possible
Sorry, but being paid doesn't absolve lawyers of any ethical responsibility.
Lawyers love to claim this but it's simply not true. Just because a client sets a direction doesn't mean the attorneys aren't actually doing it.
And without the client wanting to bring the case in the first place, there wouldn't even be any litigation.
And without the attorney wanting to bring the case in the first place, there wouldn't even be any litigation.
I am tired of attorneys trying to rationalize their bad behavior. Lawyering is a tool and like all tools it can be used for both good and evil.
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It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work.
It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons.
Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA/PTO abuse.
That AC is me (bit01). Slashcode messed up.
the fraction of technological societies that get off-planet
You are implicitly assuming every society is the same. Societies, even single societies, are not monoliths. They are complex cauldrons with many different competing interests with many different directions happening all at the same time.
Lotus eaters? Sure but they'll be plenty of "social groups" (for want of a better term) that will think that it's a sin against god (or equivalent) and go in another direction. Civilization limiting aggression? Sure but they'll be many groups/civilizations that get second chances or happen to be powerful because of accidents of technology and compete to go in another direction.
And the thing is, all it takes is a single civilization, in the billions of stars out there, to go interstellar, and geometric progression tells us that the universe will be infested with them in short order.
I suspect life on earth is probably the result of one such alien civilization (due to active, intelligent panspermia) however we haven't grown up enough to communicate with them yet.
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Marketing talk is not just cheap, it can have negative value. Free speech can be compromised just as much by too much noise as too little signal.
but I also can't see why the evidence of other civilizations wouldn't be obvious.
Personally, I think it is obvious. The multitude of strange astronomical phenomena that scientists can't explain? Advanced alien civilizations at work and war.
The reason we're seeing no communication is that we're not smart enough to understand their communications and we're not interesting enough to communicate with directly (yet).
I only hope they don't decide to step on us e.g. to build a fusion reactor based on our sun or to collect our planetary system for the building material or who knows what else. With panspermia maybe we're the children of one such civilization.
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You communist! Breathing shared air!
They need to come up with a reliable way to fix this, make absolutely sure it actually fixes the problem, and then make sure the patch doesn't cause crashes on any of the OS variants out there.
All of which would take less than 24 hours if they actually gave a shit. The shills will say otherwise but they're lying as usual.
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There is no such thing as selling DRM'ed hardware/software. Everything DRM'ed is actually rented.
Yes, but if software patents did not exist, Microsoft would be powerless to act against these companies.
And if M$ chose not to act on the patent there would be minimal harm. You haven't negated my argument.
The fact that the software patent attack is possible means that Microsoft, which is publicly traded and beholden to shareholders, almost has no choice BUT to act, even if the act itself is unsavory. To do otherwise would be for the CEO to be sued and perhaps dismissed.
CEO's, particularly CEO's of highly profitable companies like M$, have huge latitude on how they can act. M$ and it's CEO chose to take advantage of an ethically dubious law and as such are ethically responsible. To repeat myself profit does not trump ethics.
So I blame the software patents construct itself.
I blame both. Both broken patent law and unethical companies together are causing the harm. Neither alone causes the harm the two together cause.
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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.
If anything, rather than proving that Microsoft is some sort of terrible evil, this proves that SOFTWARE PATENTS are a terrible evil.
No, it proves that both software patents and M$ are evil. Both are necessary prerequisites for the harm to occur.
This is like the lawyers who wash their hands of responsibility because "they were only doing what they were told to". Sorry, but being paid doesn't magically absolve a person or company of ethical responsibility.
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I want a free and open market. Do you?
Trading tapes with a few friends is a little different than trading tapes with a thousands of people.
Not particularly. Once you've got people sharing more copies than one per person it's only a question of time. And not much extra time at that due to geometric growth in numbers of copies. A significant problem with the music distribution and creation industries is widespread math ignorance except where it pertains to financial statements.
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Like software, intellectual property law is a product of the mind, and can be anything we want it to be. Let's get it right.
One of the strongest justifications for patent protection is when you create something that becomes ridiculously obvious once you create it.
This idiotic meme needs to die. People are perfectly capable of assessing whether an idea is obvious or not after the fact. Having more information available doesn't mystically make people stupid.
This meme is mainly just a rationalization by those who prefer to replace thinking with soundbites.
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Like software, intellectual property law is a product of the mind, and can be anything we want it to be. Let's get it right.
Bell was the outsider. Bell was disruptive.
No he wasn't. The telephone is a classic example of "an invention whose time has come".
There were dozens, if not hundreds of persons and groups at the time all over the world trying to improve the telegraph, including trying to transmit audio, to make recordings and to create automated switching fabrics. Many knew the importance of those things. Bell was lucky to be first, nothing more. Read his biography. He spent the rest of his life, and considerable wealth, both litigating and trying to create the next big thing. He succeeded in the litigation but not in creating the next big thing. He was no genius or particular innovator. In addition his main interest was in assisting the deaf, the telephone was a sideline.
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Like software, intellectual property law is a product of the mind, and can be anything we want it to be. Let's get it right.
Don't you find it hypocritical that this thread like most threads do nothing but trash lawyers. But what profession do they automatically run to when they are pissed off over a specific subject and THEIR reading of the law?
The hypocrisy is people like you who can't cope with the fact that tools can be used for both good and evil. The law is nothing but a tool, a very abstract tool but a tool nonetheless. You'd use a gun if somebody attacked your family with a gun, right?
People often trash lawyers because of hypocritical lawyer behavior. Lawyers frequently claim they do what they do only because their clients tells them to and that they have no responsibility. Nonsense, as the lawyers themselves say "the responsibility is joint and several". Being paid doesn't magically absolve such lawyers of responsibility.
I have high respect for lawyers like Lawrence Lessig. I do not agree with everything he says but he is fighting a good fight. However, the bottom feeding scum suckers supporting artificial scarcity and the victimization of the less fortunate in society who are costing society nothing are in another category altogether.
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Like software, intellectual property law is a product of the mind, and can be anything we want it to be. Let's get it right.
To prove that the problem is the stated one. Otherwise it's just an excuse to get what you want.
No, it's just a sensible reaction to a broken law to balance out all the times when it wasn't broken.
Not completely. The public still gains from the works that are produced with the expectation of copyright.
Not when the work is priced such that there is no significant net value to the public, just the creators and middlemen/parasites. Given the extremely low cost of entertainment these days (e.g. slashdot is more entertaining than most movies for many) that is more likely than not.
You could refuse to buy or support any copyrighted work and put your support behind works with open source licenses. It would have the same effect of collapsing the system.
No, he said refuse to obey unethical laws. Nothing to do with collapsing the system. Quite apart from the entire artificial scarcity silliness.
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Like software, intellectual property law is a product of the mind, and can be anything we want it to be. Let's get it right.
Not all of the above applies to your post, but I see a lot of posts that (accidentally or purposely) jump to false conclusions in every discussion about copyright.
You're dealing with RIAA shills and socket puppets. They deliberately endlessly repeat the same old simplistic propaganda and deliberately ignore and/or misconstrue the much more sophisticated understanding that most slashdotters have after several years of debating this topic. Basically, these shills are paid by the obvious entrenched interests to wear people down.
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Like software, intellectual property law is a product of the mind, and can be anything we want it to be. Let's get it right.
One thing to keep in mind is that the researchers who use these things, when they get more power, generally are able to make pretty amazing new discoveries.
Actually, the vast majority of researchers using these things are using antique software packages and would get much better bang-for-buck by spending some of the money on decent programmers instead to make the software run much more efficiently on slightly less performant hardware.
Most researchers using supercomputers, such as physicists, chemists and biologists are older, politically connected types who are good at getting the money for such things but aren't really up on what is [not] possible in software. They get the hardware because they can, not because they really understand the cost/benefit trade-offs, and because they are only human and bragging rights matter.
There are of course exceptions to this general rule (e.g. weather forecasting perhaps) but it is mostly true.
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Are you one of those programmers who expect their users to be mind readers? Think about how your code is going to be used step-by-step!
the patent was valid.
You are confusing the law with reality. In reality, that patent was not valid and that's the point the GP was making. The fact that lawyers and the PTO are fond of redefining reality is a major problem in itself.
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Like software, intellectual property law is a product of the mind, and can be anything we want it to be. Let's get it right.
It would be. No one is going to invest in companies that they could be held personally liable for its actions.
Why not? Risk just doesn't simply disappear. All you're doing is simply transferring the risk to others, mainly the customers and suppliers in this case. They become responsible for the shareholder's inattention. By insulating the shareholders from such risk you are distorting the market and that is a bad thing.
Having shareholder's keep closer tabs on company officers would be a very good thing. As it is now you have too many sociopaths using other people's money to control and manipulate. Responsibility should be, precisely, on the individuals who may gain advantage or disadvantage. A minor shareholder has minor advantage/disadvantage so they have minor responsibility. They do have some responsibility however.
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I love the free market zealots who think monopoly is a good thing.
For example, if you consider author's right to be natural - and a lot of societies do
Actually, no societies do.
Small groups of authors and middlemen like to consider copy restriction a "right", and most society's do have the natural right to "credit where credit is due", but sharing has been going on since the dawn of time and the vast majority of people continue to copy, particularly for close friends, whenever it is useful or convenient. Most people understand instinctively that artificial scarcity is a stupid concept.
In other words you are trying to spin the fairly common natural credit ethical "right" into the very uncommon natural copying restriction "right". That is simply wrong. Didn't your parents teach you to share?
It is true that the legal, not natural, copy restriction right is common however that's mainly due to centuries of lobbying by a minority of parasitic middlemen, not authors and not the general community.
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Like software, intellectual property law is a product of the mind, and can be anything we want it to be. Let's get it right.
Actually, it's the Supreme Court's definition of obvious: KSR v. Teleflex.
As usual the Supreme Court is codifying existing practice, in this case the PTO bureaucracy's self-serving asshattery.
The PTO and the patent mafia in general are very fond of blaming others for their own failings.
It is physically impossible for a PTO bureaucrat to validly assess all of technology to see whether an idea is "new" or not, or obvious to an expert in the field (patent bureaucrats pretend to be generalists), and the fact that they claim with a straight face that they can is all the evidence needed to know that they are bad faith actors not to be trusted.
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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.
Very admirable. But somehow the high morals of everyone on slashdot doesn't mesh with what I see in the real world.
You have a parochial view of the real world.
Let me be clear: I don't have a problem with breaking DRM because you want to listen/watch something on another device. That's fine
Good
(and mostly legal these days).
Not in the real world since such technical fixes usually cannot be done by most people and cannot be advertised and distributed freely.
My problem is EVERYONE who pirates seems to say this same thing: I would never have paid for this!
No, "EVERYBODY" is just your distorted view of the world. For the majority of pirates, time rich and money poor people, it's true however.
And yet they keep what they downloaded and keep listening/watching it.
Which is not in the slightest incompatible with the previous statement.
No one I know at least ever paid for any song once they had downloaded it for free.
Some do but the majority simply pay for other media when the opportunity arises. People have fixed entertainment budgets but use piracy to get better bang for their buck at no cost to anyone. A perfectly reasonable thing to do.
Sorry, but that is copyright infringement and morally wrong to me at least.
I'd suggest you expand your horizons.
The problem with your viewpoint is your automatic assumptions about the ownership of creative works and the automatic assumption that artificial scarcity is the only way to reward creators.
Ownership by definition is the right to control. Any ethical, not legal, argument based on "because they own it" is bogus.
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Copyright rewards distributors (copiers) far more than creators.
Just remember, before you say, OMFG THAT'S OBVIOUS, you have to find references that teach all of those limitations, and if you have to use more than one reference, you have to have a rationale for combining those references.
Oh, the patent mafia get to set the rules to suit themselves? Funny that.
This "patent" is obvious. No matter how people like you try to spin it.
The PTO's self-serving definition of obvious is laughably bad.
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The patent system. The whole edifice is based on handwaving.
Your reasons seem pretty dubious to me.
1. Licensing. Our drivers include licensed code from at least two other companies - code that implements algorithms seen as proprietary and valuable by those companies. We don't have the right to publish that code, and couldn't conceivably convince them to do so.
So don't publish it then, it's not your responsibility in any case. People will either reverse engineer it or code replacements.
2. Competitive advantage. We have several competitors in our market. The specs that Marketing puts on our datasheets might be optimistic in some scenarios. If we open-sourced our drivers, our competitors could easily demonstrate that to potential customers - if their drivers were closed, we would not have the equivalent opportunity to prove that their liars were worse than our liars.
Performance is performance. Having the source doesn't change that. In the long term liars, whether yours or theirs, are going to be outed eventually regardless.
3. Support. If we publish source, we will end up fielding all kinds of questions from all kinds of people about all kinds of aspects of our product. Even if we simply answer "Go away" to all those queries, there's a lot of time spent reading and replying (or simply ignoring) them. Considering that we sell our products to OEMs for a few dollars, there just isn't any margin for end user support.
Oh, nonsense. Set up an archived mailing list, send occasional email messages detailing the situation (a good opportunity for marketing), and otherwise forget about it. Users will help themselves as best they can.
4. Security. Say what you will about "security through obscurity", it still has a huge following in the corporate world. Publishing all your source code provides all kinds of opportunities for the scoundrels of the world to take advantage, from the PHB point of view.
And identical opportunities for white hats also. There are far more white hats than black hats.
5. Financial. There is no business case to be made to disclose this proprietary information. If I'm not going to make money from something, why should I spend the time/effort to open source it, and perhaps give away information that my competitor could use?
WHy should others help you when you won't help them? Long term customer good will, bug fixes and general openness are not a good thing? I thought we lived in a free and open society where people try to help each other get ahead and improve. Win-win for everybody. Being small minded is usually not a good long term strategy in a civil society.
In Broadcom's case, there are probably others also - for example, publishing source for a Wireless card could allow operating the RF section beyond regulatory limits - transmitting/receiving out of band, transmitting with too much power, etc.
This is a well known problem. Put a warning and disclaimer in the relevant source code (you've done that anyway, right?) and otherwise forget about it. The people doing the modification are the one's responsible.
This could jeopardize certification (such as FCC certification in the US) or subject the company to unwanted regulatory scrutiny.
And it could also encourage certification as they see the openness and lack of deceptiveness with which the company operates. It's a wash.
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Testing is not a substitute for writing good code.
The mistake of letting users interact with them. Users are the number one security flaw in any system.
No, this is a myth perpetuated by second-rate programmers and system administrators to cover up their own incompetence.
The number one security flaw is incompetent programmers and administrators not designing their systems for their target audience.
e.g. Putting executable content into documents by default when it is almost always not needed or wanted. It's not rocket science.
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Anonymous commercial speech = fraud
Taking something that is not your is theft.
Grow up. Ownership, by definition, is the right to control something. Any ethical, not legal, argument based on "because they own it" is bogus.
The more interesting question is who owns it?
Oh, and if you're a lying RIAA/MPAA shill yet again fraudulently pretending perpetual ignorance of the complexities of "intellectual property"? FOAD you lying toad.
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It's not piracy, it's sharing. Didn't your parents teach you to share?
Maybe in case of trivial innovation but in case of difficult and expensive innovation it will reward the copier and punish the innovator.
No punishment involved, just additional value to society. Copying increases net value because things don't have to be reinvented.
The innovator still has first mover advantage and there are very few software advances, if any, that are of a sufficiently large quantum to justify any reward larger than that. Software is soft and it changes gradually. No protection is needed for big investments in big advancement because there aren't any. There are big investments in developing big software packages but that's not the same thing and is covered by copyright in any case.
Patents are a complex issue and I'm not necessarily in favor of the system as it is but it is funny to read all the naive posts here from people who fail to see both sides of equation.
Both sides? The onus is on every patent proponent, not patent opponent, to justify at every step this massive interference in the citizen's business by the government. The default position that patents have value in every possible technical area is bogus.
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It's valuable because it's standard, not standard because it is valuable.
A matter of personal preference I guess. UAC has it's own problems such as apparently not caching credentials, at least in vista. Gnome remembers privilege escalation. e.g. clicking the above icon twice will only ask for a password the first time.
My ideal security model would be for user accounts to have an attribute that specifies how experienced a user is and adjusts the user interface and system privilege management accordingly. With a full capability system like SELinux. Such security models do conflict badly with the KISS principle though.
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Monopolies = Industrial feudalism