The kicker, particularly in industries with a network effect such as any "IP" industry or industries with high capital investment.
---
Where interoperability information is protected as a trade secret, there
may be a lot of truth in the saying that the information is valuable because
it is secret, rather than being secret because it is valuable --
Neelie Kroes
If too many mods forget how and why the system works, it can break down.
Follow the money. A lot of astroturfers and their sock puppets are now mod'ing up/down for advertising purposes. It's quite common for example to see +5 zero content posts saying how wonderful some product is within minutes of a new story. Clearly intended to direct the conversation. They've probably got slashdot accounts to get an early view and mod points. It is less common with non-product based stories but you still see valid posts mod'ed as trolls because they conflict with some company or organization's commercial propaganda. Different company's do it differently. For example, while Apple seems to have a lot of astroturfers they don't seem to manipulate the mod system, just try to drown out alternative points of view. The RIAA/MPAA (ie. media sentry) on the other hand used to mod up/down all the time though they don't do it so much now because the numbers are against them. I also suspect slashdot itself is also mod'ing to quickly suppress trolls and spam, and to create controversy promoting discussion.
---
Advertising pays for nothing. Who do you think pays marketer's salaries? You do via higher cost products.
I believe you are just giving an excuse to justify behavior you know to be wrong.
Ignoring artificial scarcity? Nothing necessarily wrong with that. He's just demonstrated that what we have now is a price fixing distribution cartel and not a free market where the marginal cost reflects true costs not artificially inflated ones.
---
Where interoperability information is protected as a trade secret, there
may be a lot of truth in the saying that the information is valuable because
it is secret, rather than being secret because it is valuable --
Neelie Kroes
and you need a reasonably high end system to do HD.
And that's not even considering true 3D. HD images are 1920*1080 = 2 million pixels. Stereo 3D HD is 2*1920*1080 = 4 million pixels. True 3D HD would be something like 2000*2000*2000 = 8 trillion pixels, more than 3 orders of magnitude greater.
---
Government and democracy needs ISO 9000-style continuous quality improvement.
Its not like he was trying to defraud the city or personally gain from this
How do you know that? He was deliberately making the equipment config completely inaccessible, not just read-only, to anybody except himself. That is suspicious. He was hiding something, maybe router configs sniffing city traffic.
the process he used on boot was delete the saved config
That is highly suspect. No responsible or even anal admin would do that. And this on top of him having a previous criminal conviction.
Odds are he was up to no good, probably configured the routers to sniff city traffic for fun and profit and didn't want that malicious config accessible but the city couldn't prove it so he got done with the lesser charge.
---
The USA is <5% of the world's population. It is statistically insignificant.
He didn't refuse to just give his "password" but to give any access at all to the core routers, removed any way of password retrieval without doing a full system reset, and would not provide the configurations to these routers.
On top of that, there were emails and witnesses that made it appear that Childs was doing this all to make it such that only HE had access.
I find that highly suspect. No responsible admin would do that. Plus his suspicious behavior when they tried to audit him.
Given Childs early criminal record I wonder whether he configured those routers to sniff city net traffic and sell/use the resulting info but the city couldn't prove it so they went for the lesser charge?
---
Open source software is everything that closed source software is. Plus the source is available.
There is nothing trollish about the above post, merely an ugly truth that certain scammers don't want widely known. They are making huge amounts of money selling what is little more than placebos and some of that money is being spent to manipulate the perception of their "products".
---
Don't be fooled, slashdot is not immune, like most social networking sites it is full of lying astroturfers dishonestly pretending to be objective third parties rather than paid company propaganda.
My copy of your words is mine. Whether you think you should be able to control what I say, one person's "rights" trumping the free speech right of billions, is the issue.
---
Ownership, by definition, is the right to control something. Any ethical (not legal) argument based on "because they own it" is bogus.
Scanning a potentially compromised system from inside that potentially compromised system is snake oil and it's no surprise that most anti-virus "products" don't catch a whole swathe of different viruses, trojans and root kits. Such anti-virus products are little better than placebos.
It's about time there was a class action lawsuit to bring them to justice.
At a minimum they should be booting from known good media (e.g. CDROM) and cryptographically signed
tripwire style verification of files. Anything less is just wishful thinking. BIOSes should be physically write protected also and motherboard makers who don't do this share some of the blame. M$ also for deliberately not providing bootable known good media with every OS copy sold and treating non-cryptographically signed software installation as if it is some sort of daily event. Ironic that bootable Linux based CDROM's may be the best way to fix the Windows virus epidemic.
tl;dr - Running anti-virus? You've probably been had.
---
"I know that most men, including those at ease with problems of the greatest complexity, can seldom accept even the simplest and most obvious truth if it be such as would oblige them to admit the falsity of conclusions which they have delighted in explaining to colleagues, which they have proudly taught to others, and which they have woven, thread by thread, into the fabric of their lives." --Leo Tolstoy
Then you are being deliberately dishonest. You know full well almost all product stories are being spammed at the editors by marketing parasites until one gets through, not ordinary readers. Apple is one of the worst.
---
You're a fool if you think advertising or insurance pays for anything at all.
Sure, that's an extreme example, but you get the idea.
There are standard techniques for dealing with such things. e.g. ramp up the compiler warnings and see what they're complaining about or replace a type with a deliberate dud to see where it's used and inspect it. It's not magic or hard, it just requires routine developer expertise. Usually in modular code the side effects of new code (e.g. device driver) are minimal, even more so for a beginner engaged in an introductory project. The large kernel code can actually be a benefit in that it provides enormous numbers of examples to learn from with some examples likely to be very close to what you want to do.
It is true that there are many developers who think they're expert but aren't that would find this impossible (see dailywtffor many examples) however nobody wants those people anywhere near the kernel code. Or any code for that matter.
And people like you completely ignore the fact that artificial scarcity is just that. Artificial. Blocking billions of people from using an idea or text, giving massive cultural enrichment, so that one (1) person can have additional profit.
People have been sharing since the dawn of time and will continue to do so. It's only human and no amount of hand waving by people like you is going to change that simple fact.
---
"I know that most men, including those at ease with problems of the greatest complexity, can seldom accept even the simplest and most obvious truth if it be such as would oblige them to admit the falsity of conclusions which they have delighted in explaining to colleagues, which they have proudly taught to others, and which they have woven, thread by thread, into the fabric of their lives." --Leo Tolstoy
Most companies in my industry would refuse to pay for innovation.
They will if it gives them some short term advantage, even if it's eventually going to be copied. Businesses do this every day.
tldr: software patents can and do vastly encourage innovation in several competitive and useful industries.
What you're saying is the improvement in your industry only comes in sufficiently large quanta so that businesses won't engage in incremental improvements to get short term improvement until they're copied. I strongly doubt that that is true.
---
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.
Software patents are necessary to allow small businesses to compete with the large corporations
The same handwaving propaganda that first appeared on slashdot several years ago and is repeated on a weekly basis. Why are you pretending you didn't know that?
Patents are just a tool. They are used by large corporations as well as small businesses. They in no way change the balance of power between the two.
In regard, again, to free software, it does seem more and more like the comparison of communism versus capitalism. Surely, there is some innovation in free software, but much of that originates from commercial entities looking to upsell other products.
The same handwaving propaganda that first appeared on slashdot several years ago and is repeated on a weekly basis. Why are you pretending you didn't know that?
Open source, which includes academic research, is highly innovative. Your pretence that it isn't is laughable. The internet itself is just one example amongst many.
Please, lift your game. Your arguments for patents are puerile. Until you can give quantitative and solid scientific evidence for why government should engage in this massive and extremely costly interference in the citizen's business in any particular area (billions of people are blocked from using an idea so that one person can get additional profit) you should go back to school before you say anything more.
---
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.
Anything else is a contradiction so that you can have your cake and eating it too
Ignoring artificial scarcity is not a contradiction except in your fevered imagination.
---
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$/RIAA abuse.
the majority of folks who complain about copyright construct elaborate arguments in order to obfuscate the fact that they want to be able to obtain and utilize other peoples' creative outputs whenever they want,
The majority of folks who push copyright construct elaborate arguments in order to rationalize artificial scarcity and a massive broken window fallacy. Please stop living in your dreamworld. Copyright as it currently implemented is a creation of the mind and as such there is infinite number of possible alternatives. Apparently simple minded people who persist in pretending that copyright as it is currently implemented is the One True Way (tm) and the only possibility are either intellectually impoverished or dishonest. That's part of the reason why people like you have enemies here.
Blocking the free speech rights of billions of people so that a comparatively small number of people can have increased benefit is historically mostly a recent aberration. People have been sharing since the dawn of time and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future.
---
It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work. It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons. Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
But they will do so within their circle of friends, not via these massive torrent sites with thousands of other people.
Look up six degrees of separation. Those "massive torrent sites" (they're not that massive actually) probably don't make much difference to piracy rates in the medium to long term; they're simply more visible.
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 abuse.
If you invent some new construction material or method that has some improvement over what already exists and that an average architect or engineer would never come up with, then sure, I'd be fine with you getting a patent for it.
You misunderstand. The "claims" of this idea/invention are:
It's a hardware store.
It's in this particular town.
Nobody has combined these two elements before. It's clearly not obvious because there is no prior art.
I'm well aware that this particular idea probably wouldn't/couldn't get a patent because of some arbitrary rule. Why? It's a new creation just like any other and should get patent protection just like any new idea.
Sorry, but this one would be horrible even for BadAnalogyGuy.
It is not horrible and goes to the core of the arbitrariness of the patent system. Bureaucrats are arbitrarily deciding certain ideas should be awarded patents and certain ideas shouldn't with basically only handwaving for justification as to what is [not] patented.
Unfortunately your comment is all too typical of the superficial thinking of patent proponents who tend to avoid thinking about what an invention or an idea is and instead get lost in the patent legal system tarpit. The intellectual basis of the patent system is just awful and given that trillions of dollars ride on it it'd be really nice if the entrenched interests put some minimal effort into putting it on a much firmer intellectual footing, for fairness if for no other reason.
---
Every new patent is a new law; another opportunity for a lawyer to make money at the expense of the wider community.
If I invent a new physical device -- an array of levers and cogs to build something, or a new chemical process to manufacture something -- I can patent it.
I start a new hardware store in a growing town. It's a physical construction that nobody has done in that town before. Why can't I patent that idea and stop other people starting a competing hardware store when they see it's a success? Think carefully about your answer.
Personally, I am thoroughly sick of people who automatically assume that patents, a massive government interference in citizens minding their own business, will encourage innovation in every area of human endeavour when it's quite clear they don't. If they're going to argue for this government interference then they should at least have some scientific evidence that it is a net positive in any particular area. Not the usual childish handwaving about how an inventor won't invent without patents (history shows this is nonsense) and that patents have no harmful effect on society and the free exchange of ideas (also nonsense).
Conversely, there do seem to be advatages to keeping software patents.
A patent stops billions of people from using an idea that's probably going to be independently re-invented many times so that one (1) person can have additional incentive to invent something. Explain to me why this is a net positive? Particularly for software industry where the entry cost is so low? Keep in mind I'm well aware of patent proponents usual handwaving excuses.
Your example is just sad. The vast majority of inventors will never get that break and in addition they'll be held back by the patent portfolios of large companies. Patents are just a tool, large companies have more of them and patents in no way change the balance of power between corporations and individuals.
The software patent system may be in need of repair, but is it really worth throwing the baby out with the bathwater?
There is no baby. Your automatic assumption there must be without evidence is telling.
In addition to the above the patent system is based on very shaky intellectual foundations. They can't even objectively decide whether two shades of the color orange are the same or different, let alone whether two ideas are the same or different, a far more complex question and at the heart of deciding whether something is new.
---
Every new patent is a new law; another opportunity for a lawyer to make money at the expense of the wider community.
but don't get it twisted and think you deserve the content.
And you shouldn't get it twisted into thinking they don't deserve the content.
Fanatics like you just can't seem to cope with the concept that blocking the free speech rights of 6,800,000,000+ people so that one (1) person can get additional profit might be an exceedingly dubious idea.
Ideas are not physical property. Never were, never will be. They're different and need different handling. Copyright-as-it-is-currently-implemented is a construction of the mind and is only one of an infinite number of possibilities. Entrenched interests who persist in claiming that current copyright law is the only possibility are a major problem in itself.
---
Ownership, by definition, is the right to control something. Any ethical (not legal) argument based on "because they own it" is bogus.
Slashdot Mirror
trillion
billion
only the lack of barriers against competition.
The kicker, particularly in industries with a network effect such as any "IP" industry or industries with high capital investment.
---
Where interoperability information is protected as a trade secret, there may be a lot of truth in the saying that the information is valuable because it is secret, rather than being secret because it is valuable -- Neelie Kroes
If too many mods forget how and why the system works, it can break down.
Follow the money. A lot of astroturfers and their sock puppets are now mod'ing up/down for advertising purposes. It's quite common for example to see +5 zero content posts saying how wonderful some product is within minutes of a new story. Clearly intended to direct the conversation. They've probably got slashdot accounts to get an early view and mod points. It is less common with non-product based stories but you still see valid posts mod'ed as trolls because they conflict with some company or organization's commercial propaganda. Different company's do it differently. For example, while Apple seems to have a lot of astroturfers they don't seem to manipulate the mod system, just try to drown out alternative points of view. The RIAA/MPAA (ie. media sentry) on the other hand used to mod up/down all the time though they don't do it so much now because the numbers are against them. I also suspect slashdot itself is also mod'ing to quickly suppress trolls and spam, and to create controversy promoting discussion.
---
Advertising pays for nothing. Who do you think pays marketer's salaries? You do via higher cost products.
I believe you are just giving an excuse to justify behavior you know to be wrong.
Ignoring artificial scarcity? Nothing necessarily wrong with that. He's just demonstrated that what we have now is a price fixing distribution cartel and not a free market where the marginal cost reflects true costs not artificially inflated ones.
---
Where interoperability information is protected as a trade secret, there may be a lot of truth in the saying that the information is valuable because it is secret, rather than being secret because it is valuable -- Neelie Kroes
and you need a reasonably high end system to do HD.
And that's not even considering true 3D. HD images are 1920*1080 = 2 million pixels. Stereo 3D HD is 2*1920*1080 = 4 million pixels. True 3D HD would be something like 2000*2000*2000 = 8 trillion pixels, more than 3 orders of magnitude greater.
---
Government and democracy needs ISO 9000-style continuous quality improvement.
Its not like he was trying to defraud the city or personally gain from this
How do you know that? He was deliberately making the equipment config completely inaccessible, not just read-only, to anybody except himself. That is suspicious. He was hiding something, maybe router configs sniffing city traffic.
---
Living the American DRM.
the process he used on boot was delete the saved config
That is highly suspect. No responsible or even anal admin would do that. And this on top of him having a previous criminal conviction.
Odds are he was up to no good, probably configured the routers to sniff city traffic for fun and profit and didn't want that malicious config accessible but the city couldn't prove it so he got done with the lesser charge.
---
The USA is <5% of the world's population. It is statistically insignificant.
He didn't refuse to just give his "password" but to give any access at all to the core routers, removed any way of password retrieval without doing a full system reset, and would not provide the configurations to these routers.
On top of that, there were emails and witnesses that made it appear that Childs was doing this all to make it such that only HE had access.
I find that highly suspect. No responsible admin would do that. Plus his suspicious behavior when they tried to audit him.
Given Childs early criminal record I wonder whether he configured those routers to sniff city net traffic and sell/use the resulting info but the city couldn't prove it so they went for the lesser charge?
---
Open source software is everything that closed source software is. Plus the source is available.
There is nothing trollish about the above post, merely an ugly truth that certain scammers don't want widely known. They are making huge amounts of money selling what is little more than placebos and some of that money is being spent to manipulate the perception of their "products".
---
Don't be fooled, slashdot is not immune, like most social networking sites it is full of lying astroturfers dishonestly pretending to be objective third parties rather than paid company propaganda.
Just how much money is MPEG-LA making on their patent pool? How much are they spending on bad mouthing OGG to preserve/increase their income?
Treat any criticism of proprietary product competitors with a very large grain of salt.
Particularly against free competitors since it's legally safer as they often don't have the legal resources to fight half-truths and innuendo.
Good to see Monty's refutation.
---
Anonymous company communication is unethical and can and should be highly illegal. Company legal structures require accountability.
but do it in your own words, not mine
My copy of your words is mine. Whether you think you should be able to control what I say, one person's "rights" trumping the free speech right of billions, is the issue.
---
Ownership, by definition, is the right to control something. Any ethical (not legal) argument based on "because they own it" is bogus.
F-Prot, Command, etc are all very good products
No they're not. They're fraudulent.
Scanning a potentially compromised system from inside that potentially compromised system is snake oil and it's no surprise that most anti-virus "products" don't catch a whole swathe of different viruses, trojans and root kits. Such anti-virus products are little better than placebos.
It's about time there was a class action lawsuit to bring them to justice.
At a minimum they should be booting from known good media (e.g. CDROM) and cryptographically signed tripwire style verification of files. Anything less is just wishful thinking. BIOSes should be physically write protected also and motherboard makers who don't do this share some of the blame. M$ also for deliberately not providing bootable known good media with every OS copy sold and treating non-cryptographically signed software installation as if it is some sort of daily event. Ironic that bootable Linux based CDROM's may be the best way to fix the Windows virus epidemic.
tl;dr - Running anti-virus? You've probably been had.
---
"I know that most men, including those at ease with problems of the greatest complexity, can seldom accept even the simplest and most obvious truth if it be such as would oblige them to admit the falsity of conclusions which they have delighted in explaining to colleagues, which they have proudly taught to others, and which they have woven, thread by thread, into the fabric of their lives." --Leo Tolstoy
I meant "readers", as I stated in the post.
Then you are being deliberately dishonest. You know full well almost all product stories are being spammed at the editors by marketing parasites until one gets through, not ordinary readers. Apple is one of the worst.
---
You're a fool if you think advertising or insurance pays for anything at all.
Thanks for the xdotool tip. You may want to consider zenity instead of xmessage.
---
DRM. You don't control it means you don't own it.
FTFY
---
Ownership, by definition, is the right to control something. Any ethical (not legal) argument based on "because they own it" is bogus.
Sure, that's an extreme example, but you get the idea.
There are standard techniques for dealing with such things. e.g. ramp up the compiler warnings and see what they're complaining about or replace a type with a deliberate dud to see where it's used and inspect it. It's not magic or hard, it just requires routine developer expertise. Usually in modular code the side effects of new code (e.g. device driver) are minimal, even more so for a beginner engaged in an introductory project. The large kernel code can actually be a benefit in that it provides enormous numbers of examples to learn from with some examples likely to be very close to what you want to do.
It is true that there are many developers who think they're expert but aren't that would find this impossible (see dailywtffor many examples) however nobody wants those people anywhere near the kernel code. Or any code for that matter.
---
Insisting on absolute safety is for people who don't have the balls to live in the real world.
-- Mary Shafer, risks researcher, NASA
And people like you completely ignore the fact that artificial scarcity is just that. Artificial. Blocking billions of people from using an idea or text, giving massive cultural enrichment, so that one (1) person can have additional profit.
People have been sharing since the dawn of time and will continue to do so. It's only human and no amount of hand waving by people like you is going to change that simple fact.
---
"I know that most men, including those at ease with problems of the greatest complexity, can seldom accept even the simplest and most obvious truth if it be such as would oblige them to admit the falsity of conclusions which they have delighted in explaining to colleagues, which they have proudly taught to others, and which they have woven, thread by thread, into the fabric of their lives." --Leo Tolstoy
Most companies in my industry would refuse to pay for innovation.
They will if it gives them some short term advantage, even if it's eventually going to be copied. Businesses do this every day.
tldr: software patents can and do vastly encourage innovation in several competitive and useful industries.
What you're saying is the improvement in your industry only comes in sufficiently large quanta so that businesses won't engage in incremental improvements to get short term improvement until they're copied. I strongly doubt that that is true.
---
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.
Software patents are necessary to allow small businesses to compete with the large corporations
The same handwaving propaganda that first appeared on slashdot several years ago and is repeated on a weekly basis. Why are you pretending you didn't know that?
Patents are just a tool. They are used by large corporations as well as small businesses. They in no way change the balance of power between the two.
In regard, again, to free software, it does seem more and more like the comparison of communism versus capitalism. Surely, there is some innovation in free software, but much of that originates from commercial entities looking to upsell other products.
The same handwaving propaganda that first appeared on slashdot several years ago and is repeated on a weekly basis. Why are you pretending you didn't know that?
Open source, which includes academic research, is highly innovative. Your pretence that it isn't is laughable. The internet itself is just one example amongst many.
The point?
See this and this.
Please, lift your game. Your arguments for patents are puerile. Until you can give quantitative and solid scientific evidence for why government should engage in this massive and extremely costly interference in the citizen's business in any particular area (billions of people are blocked from using an idea so that one person can get additional profit) you should go back to school before you say anything more.
---
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.
Anything else is a contradiction so that you can have your cake and eating it too
Ignoring artificial scarcity is not a contradiction except in your fevered imagination.
---
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$/RIAA abuse.
the majority of folks who complain about copyright construct elaborate arguments in order to obfuscate the fact that they want to be able to obtain and utilize other peoples' creative outputs whenever they want,
The majority of folks who push copyright construct elaborate arguments in order to rationalize artificial scarcity and a massive broken window fallacy. Please stop living in your dreamworld. Copyright as it currently implemented is a creation of the mind and as such there is infinite number of possible alternatives. Apparently simple minded people who persist in pretending that copyright as it is currently implemented is the One True Way (tm) and the only possibility are either intellectually impoverished or dishonest. That's part of the reason why people like you have enemies here.
Blocking the free speech rights of billions of people so that a comparatively small number of people can have increased benefit is historically mostly a recent aberration. People have been sharing since the dawn of time and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future.
---
It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work.
It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons.
Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
But they will do so within their circle of friends, not via these massive torrent sites with thousands of other people.
Look up six degrees of separation. Those "massive torrent sites" (they're not that massive actually) probably don't make much difference to piracy rates in the medium to long term; they're simply more visible.
With that in mind I find this quite amusing.
---
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 abuse.
If you invent some new construction material or method that has some improvement over what already exists and that an average architect or engineer would never come up with, then sure, I'd be fine with you getting a patent for it.
You misunderstand. The "claims" of this idea/invention are:
Nobody has combined these two elements before. It's clearly not obvious because there is no prior art.
I'm well aware that this particular idea probably wouldn't/couldn't get a patent because of some arbitrary rule. Why? It's a new creation just like any other and should get patent protection just like any new idea.
Sorry, but this one would be horrible even for BadAnalogyGuy.
It is not horrible and goes to the core of the arbitrariness of the patent system. Bureaucrats are arbitrarily deciding certain ideas should be awarded patents and certain ideas shouldn't with basically only handwaving for justification as to what is [not] patented.
Unfortunately your comment is all too typical of the superficial thinking of patent proponents who tend to avoid thinking about what an invention or an idea is and instead get lost in the patent legal system tarpit. The intellectual basis of the patent system is just awful and given that trillions of dollars ride on it it'd be really nice if the entrenched interests put some minimal effort into putting it on a much firmer intellectual footing, for fairness if for no other reason.
---
Every new patent is a new law; another opportunity for a lawyer to make money at the expense of the wider community.
If I invent a new physical device -- an array of levers and cogs to build something, or a new chemical process to manufacture something -- I can patent it.
I start a new hardware store in a growing town. It's a physical construction that nobody has done in that town before. Why can't I patent that idea and stop other people starting a competing hardware store when they see it's a success? Think carefully about your answer.
Personally, I am thoroughly sick of people who automatically assume that patents, a massive government interference in citizens minding their own business, will encourage innovation in every area of human endeavour when it's quite clear they don't. If they're going to argue for this government interference then they should at least have some scientific evidence that it is a net positive in any particular area. Not the usual childish handwaving about how an inventor won't invent without patents (history shows this is nonsense) and that patents have no harmful effect on society and the free exchange of ideas (also nonsense).
Conversely, there do seem to be advatages to keeping software patents.
A patent stops billions of people from using an idea that's probably going to be independently re-invented many times so that one (1) person can have additional incentive to invent something. Explain to me why this is a net positive? Particularly for software industry where the entry cost is so low? Keep in mind I'm well aware of patent proponents usual handwaving excuses.
Your example is just sad. The vast majority of inventors will never get that break and in addition they'll be held back by the patent portfolios of large companies. Patents are just a tool, large companies have more of them and patents in no way change the balance of power between corporations and individuals.
The software patent system may be in need of repair, but is it really worth throwing the baby out with the bathwater?
There is no baby. Your automatic assumption there must be without evidence is telling.
In addition to the above the patent system is based on very shaky intellectual foundations. They can't even objectively decide whether two shades of the color orange are the same or different, let alone whether two ideas are the same or different, a far more complex question and at the heart of deciding whether something is new.
---
Every new patent is a new law; another opportunity for a lawyer to make money at the expense of the wider community.
but don't get it twisted and think you deserve the content.
And you shouldn't get it twisted into thinking they don't deserve the content.
Fanatics like you just can't seem to cope with the concept that blocking the free speech rights of 6,800,000,000+ people so that one (1) person can get additional profit might be an exceedingly dubious idea.
Ideas are not physical property. Never were, never will be. They're different and need different handling. Copyright-as-it-is-currently-implemented is a construction of the mind and is only one of an infinite number of possibilities. Entrenched interests who persist in claiming that current copyright law is the only possibility are a major problem in itself.
---
Ownership, by definition, is the right to control something. Any ethical (not legal) argument based on "because they own it" is bogus.