I don't see any difference between patenting a physical machine and a computer model of a machine if they follow identical rules and required the same amount of thought and work to produce.
When all you've got is a hammer, everything seems like a nail. Grow up please. There are wide areas of technology and life that, by historical accident, are not protected by patents or copyright. And they get along just fine.
In exchange for investing in such a thing, there should be the potential to protect your investment from copycats without resorting to keeping it a secret.
Why? If it advances the state of the art by allowing it to be copied, or reverse engineered, then it makes perfect sense to not interfere by creating artificial scarcity, bureaucratic overhead and legal risk.
I don't see any difference between patenting a physical machine and a computer model of a machine if they follow identical rules and required the same amount of thought and work to produce.
That's because all you've got is a hammer. Try to extend your thinking processes and stop pretending that always being able to patent any any arbitrary thing, obvious or otherwise, will advance the state of that particular art.
Why should a machine be patentable and an software algorithm not be?
I invest a lot of money in starting a new hardware store in a growing town. Nobody's ever done it in that town before so it's not obvious. Why shouldn't I be able to get a patent on this marvellous new idea and stop any competition?
Please, start actually thinking about what patents are instead of treating them as some sort of religion. The patent system is a mess, based on extremely shakey and arbitrary foundations, with a laughable justification. At a bare minimum they should have large scale scientific, objective evidence for patents in any particular area advancing the state of that particular art/area. Instead they engage in large scale BS trying to empire build. I would've said it's a case of "when all you've got is hammer everything looks like a nail" but it's too blatant for that. Arseholes.
Until the PTO can actually objectively tell whether two shades of the color orange are the same or different, let alone whether two ideas are the same or different, they have no business interfering in millions of people's lives. Low rent bureaucrats trying to act as a gatekeeper on all of technology.
Some numbers. On TV watching alone americans are averaging 153 hours/month. About 5 hours/day. Say an hour a day of that is advertising though it's probably more. Average hourly wage is about $20/hour. Total US population is about 300 million. So 300 million hours, the equivalent of 6 billion dollars, is being wasted on TV advertising every day in the US alone (100 billion hours/year).
And that's not even including product placement, junk mail, web, billboard, shop and newspaper advertising. Advertising costs us as a society a staggering amount.
---
The majority of modern marketing is nothing more than an arms race to get mind share. Everybody loses except the parasitic marketing "industry".
have always seemed intrusive [sic] and sometimes downright useful.
The whole point of an ad is to gain attention. Unless you take subliminal advertising seriously an unobtrusive ad is a non-functioning ad. It is a non-sustainable business model.
And useful? You have got to be kidding. Anybody who bases any purchasing decision at all based on unsolicited advertising is a fool.
---
The majority of modern marketing is nothing more than an arms race to get mind share. Everybody loses except the parasitic marketing "industry".
Even on Slashdot, I would guess the vast majority of visitors are running stock browser configs and never wade into these "below your threshold" discussion about how terrible ads are.
Adblock plus, one adblocker on one web browser, is used daily by about 11 million people. Doesn't negate your point but it's not in the noise either.
---
The majority of modern marketing is nothing more than an arms race to get mind share. Everybody loses except the parasitic marketing "industry".
The entire point of an unsolicited ad is to grab a person's attention. If it doesn't do that then it's not working. And a person's attention is valuable to them.
If an ad "pays" for the attention in some way (e.g. entertaining or actual useful information and not spam) then it might be okay but almost no advertising does that.
---
The majority of modern marketing is nothing more than an arms race to get mind share. Everybody loses except the parasitic marketing "industry".
Some ads can be informative and can remind you of an issue you needed to solve last week and still have not.
That is a minute fraction of all unsolicited ad's. The cost benefit is not even remotely there.
There is a very real cognitive cost associated with every single unsolicited, unneeded, unwanted ad. And that cost over time adds up to a huge loss.
The entire marketing industry is in denial about that. A real shame that so many trillions of hours of people's lives and attention are being wasted on such dross.
---
An unobtrusive ad is a non-functional ad. It is a non-sustainable business model.
No, same problem. In that post he's also trying to imply that because you can [legally] do something then you should do something while pretending there are no reasons at all not to.
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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.
For all your pomp about dishonesty, you are doing a pretty good job of poorly reading "there's no reason you can't charge" as if it says "there's no reason you shouldn't charge".
Thank you, an actual honest response. Yes, a very literal reading would be as you say however given the context he/she was trying to imply a lot more without explicitly saying it (as advertising/marketing lowlifes frequently do, trying to deceive the reader while avoiding a actual, legal commitment) and I called him on it. The fact that he didn't respond honestly says a lot about him.
---
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.
For those reading: The above rambling post may be an astroturfer trying to rationalize his/her sad existence. Probably he's posting anonymously because he/she prefers not to say "I'm not an astroturfer" under their username. While quoting me it doesn't actually address any of the points I've made (e.g. "no reason" in the original post when he knows full well there are many reasons) while also trying to baffle the reader with BS.
---
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.
Good response AC. Go read Bit's other posts, a few are coherent but most lack arguements and many are full of insults like 'astroturfer.
Oh goody, a troll. Get a life - if this is your idea of entertainment you need one.
---
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.
judging by your sig maybe you think i'm paid or something - if you know somewhere i can get paid for pointing out the obvious like i am, sign me up!
Not explicitly stating you are not an astroturfer and trying to distract. Dishonest.
but seriously, are you suggesting if i come up with a protocol for transfering data between x and y, i shouldn't be able to charge people to use it?
Pretending there are no reasons why this is a bad idea. Dishonest.
---
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.
there's no reason you can't charge a license for a protocol,
Bullshit. There are many reasons why charging a license for a protocol is bad. The fact that you are dishonestly pretending there are no reasons is telling.
---
Don't be fooled, slashdot is not immune, like most social networiking sites it is full of lying astroturfers dishonestly pretending to be objective third parties rather than paid company propaganda.
When you are convinced that no one could possibly disagree with your pet cause and that anyone who claims to disagree is an astroturfer, you've lost the plot.
If you think that astroturfers are not very active in these forums then I've got some prime Florida real estate to sell you. The fact that you pretend they don't exist, ignore my "probably" qualifier and create a straw man is telling.
I have no particular thing here other than making sure that people are aware of the lying POS that astroturfers are. Too many naive people here take them at face value and don't realize just how dishonest, manipulative and active marketers/advertisers are these days.
They're not. Probably astroturfers trying to manipulate public opinion. Ignore them, they're lying POS.
---
Astroturfing "marketers" are liars, fraudulently misrepresenting company propaganda as objective third party opinion. Anonymous commercial speech should be illegal.
It sure is a doubled edged sword, but there is allot of success stories also, patents is a mechanism to keep competition "fair".
Allowing one person to legally block 6,800,000,000+ others from doing something is hardly "fair". With that many people in the world independent reinvention is the rule not the exception and any patent system that doesn't take that into account is intrinsically unfair.
Without patents, it would be even easier for medium/large/mega cooperation to prey on small companies inventions,
This fiction needs to die.
Patents are nothing but a legal tool that can be used by any party, large or small. They in no way change the balance of power. Large companies just lock out smaller ones with patent portfolios.
---
"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
Grow up child. Pretty much everybody on the planet shares. Your pretense that they don't and your scummy attempt to associate it with something nasty and unrelated is just sad.
---
Modern marketing - a great substitute for a quality product.
I don't think it's dishonest to conflate legal rights with ethical and moral rights.
It's completely dishonest and most often used by arsehats/sociopaths trying to justify some piece of anti-social behavior that happens to be legal.
The two are one and the same. you have no ethical and moral rights that are not codified as legal rights.
Ever heard somebody say about a law "That's not right."? That's them making the distinction. Other examples include slavery and race laws that most people today would regard as immoral/unethical.
Another way to put it is to say we need a higher level framework to measure against when implementing new laws or removing old laws. A meta-law if you like. That's called ethics/morality.
---
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.
Your countries are often at fault themselves. For example, many European nations insist on translating US programs into the local language. There are also many regulations, agreements, taxes, tariffs, guilds, copyright limitations, licensing fees, performance fees, etc. that effectively end up necessitate negotiating separate agreements with every country.
All you're demonstrating is that the music/video distribution industry, as distinct from the music/video production industry, is a dinosaur. None of this applies to a private citizen importing from overseas or viewing a foreign website like hulu.
The real reason they don't actually give the customer what they want is that there are too many pigs at the trough, sorry, middlemen, who would kick up an almighty stink if their gravy train disappeared. The music/video distribution industry is horrendously inefficient because of all those pigs taking their cut for doing nothing that couldn't be done by a simple website.
---
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.
Also, why is this under "Your Rights Online?" Nobody has a right to illegally download copyrighted materials.
Some astroturfers like to consistently and dishonestly conflate legal rights with ethical and moral rights, not to mention the meta-questions of whether legal rights (really, privileges in this case) should be assigned at all. It is not at all clear that one (1) person should be able to block what potentially billions of people could do, particularly when in the vast majority of cases it's a victimless "crime" (in fact it enriches society) that harms no one (they weren't going to buy it anyway). "Your Rights Online" is a good category to put related articles.
---
It's not piracy, it's sharing. Didn't your parents teach you to share?
Hmmm, yet another unnecessary, incompatible, redundant archive format requiring yet more tools and libraries to deal with.
What's wrong with putting whatever flavor of binary you want in a tar.gz archive, zip archive or folder and have the system smart enough to pick the right one (using the existing, standard file id's and tools) when you execute the archive or folder? Yes, I realize the system needs to map pages while executing but for archives that is trivially dealt with by extracting before executing.
The amount of fuzzy, shallow, magical thinking that happens with software is just amazing. Please, if you insist on recreating the wheel at least have the good sense to think about what you are doing and stop assuming that giving something a new name necessitates creating an entire new software infrastructure that will unnecessarily create complexity and problems for large numbers of people.
---
For the copyright bargain to be valid all DRM'ed works should lose copyright.
And they know that, so please, finger off the panic button.
You are way overoptimistic. What will happen in every new media is what has already happened to pretty much every old media ever made, whether it be TV, DVD's, internet, cinema, magazines or blank walls - over time ad-load will increase until the net benefit to the consumer is just marginally above zero, thus maximizing profit while keeping the bum on the seat but giving the consumer almost nothing. Piracy may help a little but will be largely controlled in the mass market by DRM and law.
Marketing parasites attempt to saturate every single medium (they're always looking for "untainted" media to improve their "effectiveness" e.g. mobile phones and computer games are currently being poisoned) so that there is no alternative for the consumer other than to become a hermit. Total market failure. There should be a law.
---
The majority of modern marketing is nothing more than an arms race to get mind share. Everybody loses except the parasitic marketing "industry".
Slashdot Mirror
I don't see any difference between patenting a physical machine and a computer model of a machine if they follow identical rules and required the same amount of thought and work to produce.
When all you've got is a hammer, everything seems like a nail. Grow up please. There are wide areas of technology and life that, by historical accident, are not protected by patents or copyright. And they get along just fine.
In exchange for investing in such a thing, there should be the potential to protect your investment from copycats without resorting to keeping it a secret.
Why? If it advances the state of the art by allowing it to be copied, or reverse engineered, then it makes perfect sense to not interfere by creating artificial scarcity, bureaucratic overhead and legal risk.
I don't see any difference between patenting a physical machine and a computer model of a machine if they follow identical rules and required the same amount of thought and work to produce.
That's because all you've got is a hammer. Try to extend your thinking processes and stop pretending that always being able to patent any any arbitrary thing, obvious or otherwise, will advance the state of that particular art.
---
Has the least patentable unit reached zero yet?
Why should a machine be patentable and an software algorithm not be?
I invest a lot of money in starting a new hardware store in a growing town. Nobody's ever done it in that town before so it's not obvious. Why shouldn't I be able to get a patent on this marvellous new idea and stop any competition?
Please, start actually thinking about what patents are instead of treating them as some sort of religion. The patent system is a mess, based on extremely shakey and arbitrary foundations, with a laughable justification. At a bare minimum they should have large scale scientific, objective evidence for patents in any particular area advancing the state of that particular art/area. Instead they engage in large scale BS trying to empire build. I would've said it's a case of "when all you've got is hammer everything looks like a nail" but it's too blatant for that. Arseholes.
Until the PTO can actually objectively tell whether two shades of the color orange are the same or different, let alone whether two ideas are the same or different, they have no business interfering in millions of people's lives. Low rent bureaucrats trying to act as a gatekeeper on all of technology.
---
Has the least patentable unit reached zero yet?
It would literally put a price on the copyright holders head.
No it wouldn't
More like total fabrication.
A fake. That's false advertising, financial fraud against millions of people because people make purchasing decisions based on videos like this.
So, who's going to jail?
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DRM is the #1 cause of software failure today.
3.29 minutes per day.
Some numbers. On TV watching alone americans are averaging 153 hours/month. About 5 hours/day. Say an hour a day of that is advertising though it's probably more. Average hourly wage is about $20/hour. Total US population is about 300 million. So 300 million hours, the equivalent of 6 billion dollars, is being wasted on TV advertising every day in the US alone (100 billion hours/year).
And that's not even including product placement, junk mail, web, billboard, shop and newspaper advertising. Advertising costs us as a society a staggering amount.
---
The majority of modern marketing is nothing more than an arms race to get mind share. Everybody loses except the parasitic marketing "industry".
Also, where did you get the 11M figure for ABP? I've never seen any actual numbers.
Click the link, it's a stats page.
have always seemed intrusive [sic] and sometimes downright useful.
The whole point of an ad is to gain attention. Unless you take subliminal advertising seriously an unobtrusive ad is a non-functioning ad. It is a non-sustainable business model.
And useful? You have got to be kidding. Anybody who bases any purchasing decision at all based on unsolicited advertising is a fool.
---
The majority of modern marketing is nothing more than an arms race to get mind share. Everybody loses except the parasitic marketing "industry".
Even on Slashdot, I would guess the vast majority of visitors are running stock browser configs and never wade into these "below your threshold" discussion about how terrible ads are.
Adblock plus, one adblocker on one web browser, is used daily by about 11 million people. Doesn't negate your point but it's not in the noise either.
---
The majority of modern marketing is nothing more than an arms race to get mind share. Everybody loses except the parasitic marketing "industry".
Most people are OK with Ad's on some level.
Yes, the ad's that don't work.
The entire point of an unsolicited ad is to grab a person's attention. If it doesn't do that then it's not working. And a person's attention is valuable to them.
If an ad "pays" for the attention in some way (e.g. entertaining or actual useful information and not spam) then it might be okay but almost no advertising does that.
---
The majority of modern marketing is nothing more than an arms race to get mind share. Everybody loses except the parasitic marketing "industry".
Some ads can be informative and can remind you of an issue you needed to solve last week and still have not.
That is a minute fraction of all unsolicited ad's. The cost benefit is not even remotely there.
There is a very real cognitive cost associated with every single unsolicited, unneeded, unwanted ad. And that cost over time adds up to a huge loss.
The entire marketing industry is in denial about that. A real shame that so many trillions of hours of people's lives and attention are being wasted on such dross.
---
An unobtrusive ad is a non-functional ad. It is a non-sustainable business model.
His support of clean room implementations (back here: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1476008&cid=30411612 ) suggests that my reading is the intended reading, not an over-reading.
No, same problem. In that post he's also trying to imply that because you can [legally] do something then you should do something while pretending there are no reasons at all not to.
---
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.
For all your pomp about dishonesty, you are doing a pretty good job of poorly reading "there's no reason you can't charge" as if it says "there's no reason you shouldn't charge".
Thank you, an actual honest response. Yes, a very literal reading would be as you say however given the context he/she was trying to imply a lot more without explicitly saying it (as advertising/marketing lowlifes frequently do, trying to deceive the reader while avoiding a actual, legal commitment) and I called him on it. The fact that he didn't respond honestly says a lot about him.
---
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.
For those reading: The above rambling post may be an astroturfer trying to rationalize his/her sad existence. Probably he's posting anonymously because he/she prefers not to say "I'm not an astroturfer" under their username. While quoting me it doesn't actually address any of the points I've made (e.g. "no reason" in the original post when he knows full well there are many reasons) while also trying to baffle the reader with BS.
---
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.
Good response AC. Go read Bit's other posts, a few are coherent but most lack arguements and many are full of insults like 'astroturfer.
Oh goody, a troll. Get a life - if this is your idea of entertainment you need one.
---
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.
telling in what way,
You didn't respond to my main point. Dishonest.
judging by your sig maybe you think i'm paid or something - if you know somewhere i can get paid for pointing out the obvious like i am, sign me up!
Not explicitly stating you are not an astroturfer and trying to distract. Dishonest.
but seriously, are you suggesting if i come up with a protocol for transfering data between x and y, i shouldn't be able to charge people to use it?
Pretending there are no reasons why this is a bad idea. Dishonest.
---
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.
there's no reason you can't charge a license for a protocol,
Bullshit. There are many reasons why charging a license for a protocol is bad. The fact that you are dishonestly pretending there are no reasons is telling.
---
Don't be fooled, slashdot is not immune, like most social networiking sites it is full of lying astroturfers dishonestly pretending to be objective third parties rather than paid company propaganda.
When you are convinced that no one could possibly disagree with your pet cause and that anyone who claims to disagree is an astroturfer, you've lost the plot.
If you think that astroturfers are not very active in these forums then I've got some prime Florida real estate to sell you. The fact that you pretend they don't exist, ignore my "probably" qualifier and create a straw man is telling.
I have no particular thing here other than making sure that people are aware of the lying POS that astroturfers are. Too many naive people here take them at face value and don't realize just how dishonest, manipulative and active marketers/advertisers are these days.
---
DRM is the #1 cause of software failure today.
I can't believe people are OK with this!
They're not. Probably astroturfers trying to manipulate public opinion. Ignore them, they're lying POS.
---
Astroturfing "marketers" are liars, fraudulently misrepresenting company propaganda as objective third party opinion. Anonymous commercial speech should be illegal.
It sure is a doubled edged sword, but there is allot of success stories also, patents is a mechanism to keep competition "fair".
Allowing one person to legally block 6,800,000,000+ others from doing something is hardly "fair". With that many people in the world independent reinvention is the rule not the exception and any patent system that doesn't take that into account is intrinsically unfair.
Without patents, it would be even easier for medium/large/mega cooperation to prey on small companies inventions,
This fiction needs to die.
Patents are nothing but a legal tool that can be used by any party, large or small. They in no way change the balance of power. Large companies just lock out smaller ones with patent portfolios.
---
"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
My world is good.
Grow up child. Pretty much everybody on the planet shares. Your pretense that they don't and your scummy attempt to associate it with something nasty and unrelated is just sad.
---
Modern marketing - a great substitute for a quality product.
I don't think it's dishonest to conflate legal rights with ethical and moral rights.
It's completely dishonest and most often used by arsehats/sociopaths trying to justify some piece of anti-social behavior that happens to be legal.
The two are one and the same. you have no ethical and moral rights that are not codified as legal rights.
Ever heard somebody say about a law "That's not right."? That's them making the distinction. Other examples include slavery and race laws that most people today would regard as immoral/unethical.
Another way to put it is to say we need a higher level framework to measure against when implementing new laws or removing old laws. A meta-law if you like. That's called ethics/morality.
---
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.
Your countries are often at fault themselves. For example, many European nations insist on translating US programs into the local language. There are also many regulations, agreements, taxes, tariffs, guilds, copyright limitations, licensing fees, performance fees, etc. that effectively end up necessitate negotiating separate agreements with every country.
All you're demonstrating is that the music/video distribution industry, as distinct from the music/video production industry, is a dinosaur. None of this applies to a private citizen importing from overseas or viewing a foreign website like hulu.
The real reason they don't actually give the customer what they want is that there are too many pigs at the trough, sorry, middlemen, who would kick up an almighty stink if their gravy train disappeared. The music/video distribution industry is horrendously inefficient because of all those pigs taking their cut for doing nothing that couldn't be done by a simple website.
---
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.
Also, why is this under "Your Rights Online?" Nobody has a right to illegally download copyrighted materials.
Some astroturfers like to consistently and dishonestly conflate legal rights with ethical and moral rights, not to mention the meta-questions of whether legal rights (really, privileges in this case) should be assigned at all. It is not at all clear that one (1) person should be able to block what potentially billions of people could do, particularly when in the vast majority of cases it's a victimless "crime" (in fact it enriches society) that harms no one (they weren't going to buy it anyway). "Your Rights Online" is a good category to put related articles.
---
It's not piracy, it's sharing. Didn't your parents teach you to share?
Hmmm, yet another unnecessary, incompatible, redundant archive format requiring yet more tools and libraries to deal with.
What's wrong with putting whatever flavor of binary you want in a tar.gz archive, zip archive or folder and have the system smart enough to pick the right one (using the existing, standard file id's and tools) when you execute the archive or folder? Yes, I realize the system needs to map pages while executing but for archives that is trivially dealt with by extracting before executing.
The amount of fuzzy, shallow, magical thinking that happens with software is just amazing. Please, if you insist on recreating the wheel at least have the good sense to think about what you are doing and stop assuming that giving something a new name necessitates creating an entire new software infrastructure that will unnecessarily create complexity and problems for large numbers of people.
---
For the copyright bargain to be valid all DRM'ed works should lose copyright.
And they know that, so please, finger off the panic button.
You are way overoptimistic. What will happen in every new media is what has already happened to pretty much every old media ever made, whether it be TV, DVD's, internet, cinema, magazines or blank walls - over time ad-load will increase until the net benefit to the consumer is just marginally above zero, thus maximizing profit while keeping the bum on the seat but giving the consumer almost nothing. Piracy may help a little but will be largely controlled in the mass market by DRM and law.
Marketing parasites attempt to saturate every single medium (they're always looking for "untainted" media to improve their "effectiveness" e.g. mobile phones and computer games are currently being poisoned) so that there is no alternative for the consumer other than to become a hermit. Total market failure. There should be a law.
---
The majority of modern marketing is nothing more than an arms race to get mind share. Everybody loses except the parasitic marketing "industry".