Even more offtopic, as far as I can tell, Google doesn't index signatures on Slashdot. For example: searching for my sig... despite a number of +5 posts with that sig, the only place you can find it is when someone actually commented on it.
So if you're looking to Google bomb, put your link inside a fake sig line:
How exactly does a 2 person company have the know how and resources to reverse engineer this hypothetical scanner and contract it to an off-shore manufacturer?
Maybe the breakthrough is in some new kind of effect obtained by combining some off-the-shelf components in a certain way. Don't focus on the exact numbers, rather on the idea that another company has a low barrier of entry into the market and can leverage off of another company's expensive unprotected research. It's just hypothetical, so work with it.:)
In truth, any non-trivial invention, such as your hypothetical scanner, will require a non-trivial effort to reverse engineer and manufacture abroad. You would have a clash of titans in enforcing the patent rights for said scanner.
If you've been following the discussion, you'd realize that this hypothetical situation assumes the original "Screw patents" idea -- namely, that patents are a bad thing and that they shouldn't exist. My analogy used this assumption to show an undesireable situation which could arise from such a lack of market protection.
How exactly does a 2 person company have the know how and resources to reverse engineer this hypothetical scanner and contract it to an off-shore manufacturer?
Maybe the breakthrough is in some new kind of effect obtained by combining some off-the-shelf components in a certain way. Don't focus on the exact numbers, rather on the idea that another company has a low barrier of entry into the market and can leverage off of another company's expensive unprotected research. It's just hypothetical, so work with it.:)
In truth, any non-trivial invention, such as your hypothetical scanner, will require a non-trivial effort to reverse engineer and manufacture abroad. You would have a clash of titans in enforcing the patent rights for said scanner.
If you've been following the discussion, you'd realize that this hypothetical situation assumes the original "Screw patents" idea -- namely, that patents are a bad thing and that they shouldn't exist. My analogy used this assumption to show an undesireable situation which could arise from such a lack of market protection.
Well, I'd still think that even in a no patent universe you wouldn't see very much altruism there either. Unless you somehow were to model the assumption of universal altruism, but then we'd probably have no wars, no hunger, equity for everybody...:)
It'd be an interesting simulation though. Assume no market protection, realistic development and other costs, randomly occurring breakthroughs and failures, and every company seeking to maximize their shareholders ROI. Use genetic algorithms/programming and/or simulated annealing to model a behavior for each company and let them loose. See which strategy survives. Sounds like fun.
More marketing? Nah... just give Wal-Mart and Costco a call. "So Company A is selling you their name-brand XYZ drug? I can sell it to you at half their cost, and it's the exact same thing." Let Wal-Mart and Costco do all the selling (or prescription filling)... they're pretty good at it.
For drugs, you could argue on the ethics of whether simple chains of hydrocarbons should be patentable. Certainly there's a case for reading a DNA strand and attempting to patent what you found... that's rather absurd. But developing that hydrocarbon structure from scratch with no hints from nature and finding a useful benefit from it isn't quite the same.
I agree with you that research would still be conducted without patents. But because the reward is less in a patent-free environment, companies will take less risks. Altruism from investors is in short supplies these days.
Perhaps complex physical devices aren't the best example. I thought my numbers weren't all that unrealistic... though I admit that your first point about adding on marketing, etc. costs is valid. However, my intent was that company B wouldn't have to do quite as much marketing because the market would already be aware of the technology from company A. Plus opportunistic companies aren't concerned with funding future R&D from their profits. So while my numbers were probably low in that department, on the whole it's still at least realistic.
A better example might be prescription drugs. It takes hundreds of millions of dollars to do the R&D, market trials, get FDC approval, and all the other things involved with bringing a new potentially unsafe drug to market. Once all that money's been spent, they end up with a chemical which has certain properties. Often times, the synthesizing of the chemical is the most trivial part. Using a well-known example, Viagra is just sildenafil citrate and clone companies aren't having any problems cloning it. Without patents, who's going to do the expensive part of researching the product and bringing it to market if anybody can set up shop at a chemical factory and pump out the chemical by the truckload?
The US legal system isn't so good. If it worked as it should then companies would not be scared into declaring that 'coffee is hot' or 'cape does not enable wearer to fly' in order to avoid getting sued. If the legal system worked then cases based on things that obvious wouldn't even be brought up.
I think the legal system works just fine. It's all the stupid people that end up going through the legal system that are the problem.
That's all well and good for internet inventions where somebody slaps a cookie and a database together and you suddenly have 1-Click payments. But what about in the real world where companies can spend billions building a better "mousetrap" as it were? Have a team of 50 people doing R&D, with an average cost of a conservative $200,000 per year for each employee to cover salaries, benefits, overhead, materials, etc... and suddenly you've spend $10M for one year of R&D. If you're developing something really high-tech, you might put 5 years into it. So it's a $50M R&D bill at the end.
But that's okay, you've gone and built some new technology... maybe a better medical scanner or something. You expect to be able to sell 1,000 of these scanners to high-end facilities in a 10 year period, and each one costs you $25,000 in materials and engineering costs. Factoring in your R&D cost, each scanner had $50,000 worth of R&D invested into it. So you need to charge $75,000 just to break even and make no profit. So factoring in profit as well as marketing, insurance, and legal fees, etc. you'll likely charge maybe $200,000 for each one.
Along comes some other company with only 2 employees, they purchase your scanner, reverse engineer it, send it to China and have a couple thousand manufactured costing them $25,000 each. Subsequently, they release it into the market for only $50,000 because they didn't have to invest the additional $50,000 per unit in a major R&D program. Too bad the company investing in all that R&D couldn't protect their invention from copycats.
For trivial e-mousetraps, yeah... the Ayn Rand compete-at-all-costs-and-screw-government-interfer ence approach would serve you well I guess. But for any non-trivial mousetraps, patents protect those who invest the time and money into developing them.
So do you agree with some geographical indication proponents who hold that governments should make terms such as CHEDDAR and PARMESAN no longer generic, in effect granting trademarks to cheese makers in towns of the UK and Italy respectively? And what about FRENCH'S(tm) mustard?
I don't agree with that as both cheddar and parmesan today, in the minds of most consumers, refer to the type of cheese regardless of where it was manufactured. French's mustard isn't an issue as it's not indicative of a place. "Parisian Mustard" or "France's Mustard" would be different. Champagne is a bit of an oddball as I don't think most people know it refers to a region of France, though certainly vintners would know.
Some areas are a bit gray as the intent is to protect the names of areas from being genericized with clone products not originating from those regions. For example, should Camembert, France be afforded such protection? Or Brie? Or many other food names derived from locations? I don't know what, if any, objective tests a court would apply to determine whether a geographical name has become generic enough that protection no longer makes sense.
I disagree with such broadness, but I do find value in having trademark protection in the first place. The trick is distinguishing the good from the bad protection and, if someone suing for burning themselves because the coffee's hot is any indication, the courts don't always rule in favor of common sense. And surely there's enough precedent set in my collection of Mad Magazines to cover just about any type of satire.:)
Sure, so your files can be stolen. And? One of the benefits of this could be that it's then possible to identify people who are hosting your songs on P2P networks and you can send the RIAA after them. Much like a serial number on an expensive camera can be traced to the thief, now the identifier can also be traced to the thief. Just tell them "Hey, I'm John Doe and my iPod was stolen... if you see files on Kazaa with my name on them, please go after the person at the IP address who's hosting those files." Who knows... you might even get your iPod back.
Well of course I'm comparing apples and oranges. Comparing an MP3 file to an MP3 file would be rather meaningless, now wouldn't it? The analogy I made is that having a fingerprint on an MP3 file is there to catch any potential illegal activity without infringing your fair use rights. Fingerprints on a bullet or casing can also be used to catch any potential illegal activity without infringing your rights to shoot a gun.
It's incredibly disingenuous of you to infer that I'm suggesting that your CD collection has killed someone. But thanks for the lesson, dad.
In addition to the points raised by others, the easiest way to avoid the referrer issue is to have their HTML page load up in a 1 pixel frame. That way, it's their referrer header for the images and, because the frame is only 1 pixel wide/tall, the user can't see the content anyway.
They were for the pirate demonstration, thanks! The only complaint I have is that the formatting of the links is bloody awful. A suggestion: instead of listing "http://.... can be found at http://... ; http://... can be found at http://..." etc. it would be great just to reproduce the article submission as-is and replace the original links with your mirror links. That way nobody will have to decipher which links correspond to what original links.
So maybe a 1 KB of HTML vs. usually 10 to 20 KB of images, and that's for each image. You could easily add a 1 pixel frame which loads up dozens of images from the scam sites.
I read the original post as a presentation of the logical inconsistencies contained within that reply they quoted, demonstrating how what was claimed to be the "typical attitude" of P2P sharers is self-contradictory. The morality of it all is another long philosophical discussion.
No, of course it's not in the same league. I'm playing devil's advocate here, seeing where it goes. However, both are currently illegal to different degrees. What does it matter to anyone that their name is effectively fingerprinted to an MP3 file? If they comply with the licensing terms they agreed to when they purchased it, what's the issue? It's not a privacy thing because someone already has a record of selling that MP3 to them. So why the big fuss?
Of course it's a side effect of having a round which spins and therefore flies straighter, but the fact that this is effectively fingerprinting has absolutely no consequences to you. Unless, of course, you choose to do something illegal with your gun.
You could encourage weapons manufacturers to develop technology where this fingerprinting is statistically indistinguishable from one gun to the next to avoid any privacy or identification issues.
Having your name stamped onto an MP3 file has no consequences to you either. Copy it to your iPod... burn it to a CD... make a tape recording... put it on your other computers... it doesn't matter. Unless, of course, you choose to violate the licensing terms you agreed to when you purchased it.
I think the idea is that I can do whatever I want with the things I own. When I buy a CD, I own it. I have every right to share it on a P2P network if I so choose.
Sure, and when I buy bricks I have every right to build a six foot thick solid brick wall around your car. They're my bricks and mortar, I own them. I have every right to build walls around your car if I so choose.
But the huge thing about P2P filesharing is that it's so damn convenient. You can't throw away this convenience and expect everything else to stay the same.
I'd argue that you're ignoring the benefits. First, you don't have to search for music and hopefully get a good copy that isn't distorted, an RIAA messed up remix, or some kid renaming the file to fool others into downloading it. Additionally, not everyone is on high-speed and this makes popping into the music store on the way home from work VERY convenient as you don't have to wait for 600MB of downloads. Also it's a social thing. If the concept behind P2P is sharing music experiences, what better way to do that than in person where you can listen to music with other people and talk about great songs you've discovered, all while relaxing in a comfy chair and sipping a cappuccino?
Interesting example, considering I hardly ever have to visit the library now I have the Internet as an information source - a far more convenient information source.
The internet is great for looking up facts, but it's hardly a definitive source for much of anything in depth. You won't find the latest Tom Clancy novel online and, even if you did find it, it wouldn't exactly make for convenient bedtime reading.
Firstly, I'm not arguing one way or the other as to the effectiveness of sharing. Secondly, the "control" isn't the bit that makes it work. The convenience is. Once you take away the convenience, no matter how much control you place in the experiment, it is doomed to failure.
The control isn't supposed to make it work. The control is supposed to eliminate all other factors so that all you're analyzing is the "sharing is advertising" question.
NetFlix seems to be thriving despite the inconvenience of having to wait for your movies in the mail. It might be easier to drive to the local video place and rent the DVD, but because it offers other benefits, people are willing to put up with the hassle of dealing with the postal service. I see no reason why it wouldn't be similar.
I didn't read the article (surprise!) but this sounds fairly reasonable. Attach a unique ID to an MP3 file that says "John Doe" purchased it. As long as John Doe uses it responsibly, he can take advantage of all kinds of fair use, record it to other media, etc. that he could with an unprotected MP3 file.
This is like arguing against certain types of guns because the FBI can do ballistics analysis on the spent casing and wear patterns of the round in order to match the bullet lodged in the dead victim with the one that came from your gun. Shouldn't people be arguing for guns which don't leave any traceable patterns? Or do people realize that as long as they use their guns responsibly, who cares if the bullet and casing have certain patterns which can identify the particular gun?
Slashdot Mirror
Even more offtopic, as far as I can tell, Google doesn't index signatures on Slashdot. For example: searching for my sig ... despite a number of +5 posts with that sig, the only place you can find it is when someone actually commented on it.
So if you're looking to Google bomb, put your link inside a fake sig line:
--
Acid Metal band, Ahymsa
Crap.. preview is my friend.
:)
How exactly does a 2 person company have the know how and resources to reverse engineer this hypothetical scanner and contract it to an off-shore manufacturer?
Maybe the breakthrough is in some new kind of effect obtained by combining some off-the-shelf components in a certain way. Don't focus on the exact numbers, rather on the idea that another company has a low barrier of entry into the market and can leverage off of another company's expensive unprotected research. It's just hypothetical, so work with it.
In truth, any non-trivial invention, such as your hypothetical scanner, will require a non-trivial effort to reverse engineer and manufacture abroad. You would have a clash of titans in enforcing the patent rights for said scanner.
If you've been following the discussion, you'd realize that this hypothetical situation assumes the original "Screw patents" idea -- namely, that patents are a bad thing and that they shouldn't exist. My analogy used this assumption to show an undesireable situation which could arise from such a lack of market protection.
How exactly does a 2 person company have the know how and resources to reverse engineer this hypothetical scanner and contract it to an off-shore manufacturer?
:)
Maybe the breakthrough is in some new kind of effect obtained by combining some off-the-shelf components in a certain way. Don't focus on the exact numbers, rather on the idea that another company has a low barrier of entry into the market and can leverage off of another company's expensive unprotected research. It's just hypothetical, so work with it.
In truth, any non-trivial invention, such as your hypothetical scanner, will require a non-trivial effort to reverse engineer and manufacture abroad. You would have a clash of titans in enforcing the patent rights for said scanner.
If you've been following the discussion, you'd realize that this hypothetical situation assumes the original "Screw patents" idea -- namely, that patents are a bad thing and that they shouldn't exist. My analogy used this assumption to show an undesireable situation which could arise from such a lack of market protection.
Well, I'd still think that even in a no patent universe you wouldn't see very much altruism there either. Unless you somehow were to model the assumption of universal altruism, but then we'd probably have no wars, no hunger, equity for everybody... :)
It'd be an interesting simulation though. Assume no market protection, realistic development and other costs, randomly occurring breakthroughs and failures, and every company seeking to maximize their shareholders ROI. Use genetic algorithms/programming and/or simulated annealing to model a behavior for each company and let them loose. See which strategy survives. Sounds like fun.
More marketing? Nah... just give Wal-Mart and Costco a call. "So Company A is selling you their name-brand XYZ drug? I can sell it to you at half their cost, and it's the exact same thing." Let Wal-Mart and Costco do all the selling (or prescription filling)... they're pretty good at it.
For drugs, you could argue on the ethics of whether simple chains of hydrocarbons should be patentable. Certainly there's a case for reading a DNA strand and attempting to patent what you found... that's rather absurd. But developing that hydrocarbon structure from scratch with no hints from nature and finding a useful benefit from it isn't quite the same.
I agree with you that research would still be conducted without patents. But because the reward is less in a patent-free environment, companies will take less risks. Altruism from investors is in short supplies these days.
Like The Hunger Site?
Perhaps complex physical devices aren't the best example. I thought my numbers weren't all that unrealistic... though I admit that your first point about adding on marketing, etc. costs is valid. However, my intent was that company B wouldn't have to do quite as much marketing because the market would already be aware of the technology from company A. Plus opportunistic companies aren't concerned with funding future R&D from their profits. So while my numbers were probably low in that department, on the whole it's still at least realistic.
A better example might be prescription drugs. It takes hundreds of millions of dollars to do the R&D, market trials, get FDC approval, and all the other things involved with bringing a new potentially unsafe drug to market. Once all that money's been spent, they end up with a chemical which has certain properties. Often times, the synthesizing of the chemical is the most trivial part. Using a well-known example, Viagra is just sildenafil citrate and clone companies aren't having any problems cloning it. Without patents, who's going to do the expensive part of researching the product and bringing it to market if anybody can set up shop at a chemical factory and pump out the chemical by the truckload?
The US legal system isn't so good. If it worked as it should then companies would not be scared into declaring that 'coffee is hot' or 'cape does not enable wearer to fly' in order to avoid getting sued. If the legal system worked then cases based on things that obvious wouldn't even be brought up.
I think the legal system works just fine. It's all the stupid people that end up going through the legal system that are the problem.
That's all well and good for internet inventions where somebody slaps a cookie and a database together and you suddenly have 1-Click payments. But what about in the real world where companies can spend billions building a better "mousetrap" as it were? Have a team of 50 people doing R&D, with an average cost of a conservative $200,000 per year for each employee to cover salaries, benefits, overhead, materials, etc... and suddenly you've spend $10M for one year of R&D. If you're developing something really high-tech, you might put 5 years into it. So it's a $50M R&D bill at the end.
r ence approach would serve you well I guess. But for any non-trivial mousetraps, patents protect those who invest the time and money into developing them.
But that's okay, you've gone and built some new technology... maybe a better medical scanner or something. You expect to be able to sell 1,000 of these scanners to high-end facilities in a 10 year period, and each one costs you $25,000 in materials and engineering costs. Factoring in your R&D cost, each scanner had $50,000 worth of R&D invested into it. So you need to charge $75,000 just to break even and make no profit. So factoring in profit as well as marketing, insurance, and legal fees, etc. you'll likely charge maybe $200,000 for each one.
Along comes some other company with only 2 employees, they purchase your scanner, reverse engineer it, send it to China and have a couple thousand manufactured costing them $25,000 each. Subsequently, they release it into the market for only $50,000 because they didn't have to invest the additional $50,000 per unit in a major R&D program. Too bad the company investing in all that R&D couldn't protect their invention from copycats.
For trivial e-mousetraps, yeah... the Ayn Rand compete-at-all-costs-and-screw-government-interfe
So do you agree with some geographical indication proponents who hold that governments should make terms such as CHEDDAR and PARMESAN no longer generic, in effect granting trademarks to cheese makers in towns of the UK and Italy respectively? And what about FRENCH'S(tm) mustard?
I don't agree with that as both cheddar and parmesan today, in the minds of most consumers, refer to the type of cheese regardless of where it was manufactured. French's mustard isn't an issue as it's not indicative of a place. "Parisian Mustard" or "France's Mustard" would be different. Champagne is a bit of an oddball as I don't think most people know it refers to a region of France, though certainly vintners would know.
Some areas are a bit gray as the intent is to protect the names of areas from being genericized with clone products not originating from those regions. For example, should Camembert, France be afforded such protection? Or Brie? Or many other food names derived from locations? I don't know what, if any, objective tests a court would apply to determine whether a geographical name has become generic enough that protection no longer makes sense.
Oh, also wanted to say thanks for the link. I wasn't aware of that case and will definitely read up on it.
I disagree with such broadness, but I do find value in having trademark protection in the first place. The trick is distinguishing the good from the bad protection and, if someone suing for burning themselves because the coffee's hot is any indication, the courts don't always rule in favor of common sense. And surely there's enough precedent set in my collection of Mad Magazines to cover just about any type of satire. :)
Could it be you neglected to read my other response where I realized my mistake and posted three minutes later? :)
While clearly not as cool as a Camaro, Popular Science has a bunch of other amphibious vehicles. The Terra Wind it mentions is here. Slashdot away!
Sure, so your files can be stolen. And? One of the benefits of this could be that it's then possible to identify people who are hosting your songs on P2P networks and you can send the RIAA after them. Much like a serial number on an expensive camera can be traced to the thief, now the identifier can also be traced to the thief. Just tell them "Hey, I'm John Doe and my iPod was stolen... if you see files on Kazaa with my name on them, please go after the person at the IP address who's hosting those files." Who knows... you might even get your iPod back.
Well of course I'm comparing apples and oranges. Comparing an MP3 file to an MP3 file would be rather meaningless, now wouldn't it? The analogy I made is that having a fingerprint on an MP3 file is there to catch any potential illegal activity without infringing your fair use rights. Fingerprints on a bullet or casing can also be used to catch any potential illegal activity without infringing your rights to shoot a gun.
It's incredibly disingenuous of you to infer that I'm suggesting that your CD collection has killed someone. But thanks for the lesson, dad.
In addition to the points raised by others, the easiest way to avoid the referrer issue is to have their HTML page load up in a 1 pixel frame. That way, it's their referrer header for the images and, because the frame is only 1 pixel wide/tall, the user can't see the content anyway.
They were for the pirate demonstration, thanks! The only complaint I have is that the formatting of the links is bloody awful. A suggestion: instead of listing "http://.... can be found at http://... ; http://... can be found at http://..." etc. it would be great just to reproduce the article submission as-is and replace the original links with your mirror links. That way nobody will have to decipher which links correspond to what original links.
It's a great idea. While the artists against 419 scammers have to serve up the HTML, they've hijacked the images, eg:
t ;
<img src="http://www.some-419-scam-site.ng/logo.jpg"&g
So maybe a 1 KB of HTML vs. usually 10 to 20 KB of images, and that's for each image. You could easily add a 1 pixel frame which loads up dozens of images from the scam sites.
I read the original post as a presentation of the logical inconsistencies contained within that reply they quoted, demonstrating how what was claimed to be the "typical attitude" of P2P sharers is self-contradictory. The morality of it all is another long philosophical discussion.
No, of course it's not in the same league. I'm playing devil's advocate here, seeing where it goes. However, both are currently illegal to different degrees. What does it matter to anyone that their name is effectively fingerprinted to an MP3 file? If they comply with the licensing terms they agreed to when they purchased it, what's the issue? It's not a privacy thing because someone already has a record of selling that MP3 to them. So why the big fuss?
Of course it's a side effect of having a round which spins and therefore flies straighter, but the fact that this is effectively fingerprinting has absolutely no consequences to you. Unless, of course, you choose to do something illegal with your gun.
You could encourage weapons manufacturers to develop technology where this fingerprinting is statistically indistinguishable from one gun to the next to avoid any privacy or identification issues.
Having your name stamped onto an MP3 file has no consequences to you either. Copy it to your iPod... burn it to a CD... make a tape recording... put it on your other computers... it doesn't matter. Unless, of course, you choose to violate the licensing terms you agreed to when you purchased it.
I think the idea is that I can do whatever I want with the things I own. When I buy a CD, I own it. I have every right to share it on a P2P network if I so choose.
Sure, and when I buy bricks I have every right to build a six foot thick solid brick wall around your car. They're my bricks and mortar, I own them. I have every right to build walls around your car if I so choose.
But the huge thing about P2P filesharing is that it's so damn convenient. You can't throw away this convenience and expect everything else to stay the same.
I'd argue that you're ignoring the benefits. First, you don't have to search for music and hopefully get a good copy that isn't distorted, an RIAA messed up remix, or some kid renaming the file to fool others into downloading it. Additionally, not everyone is on high-speed and this makes popping into the music store on the way home from work VERY convenient as you don't have to wait for 600MB of downloads. Also it's a social thing. If the concept behind P2P is sharing music experiences, what better way to do that than in person where you can listen to music with other people and talk about great songs you've discovered, all while relaxing in a comfy chair and sipping a cappuccino?
Interesting example, considering I hardly ever have to visit the library now I have the Internet as an information source - a far more convenient information source.
The internet is great for looking up facts, but it's hardly a definitive source for much of anything in depth. You won't find the latest Tom Clancy novel online and, even if you did find it, it wouldn't exactly make for convenient bedtime reading.
Firstly, I'm not arguing one way or the other as to the effectiveness of sharing. Secondly, the "control" isn't the bit that makes it work. The convenience is. Once you take away the convenience, no matter how much control you place in the experiment, it is doomed to failure.
The control isn't supposed to make it work. The control is supposed to eliminate all other factors so that all you're analyzing is the "sharing is advertising" question.
NetFlix seems to be thriving despite the inconvenience of having to wait for your movies in the mail. It might be easier to drive to the local video place and rent the DVD, but because it offers other benefits, people are willing to put up with the hassle of dealing with the postal service. I see no reason why it wouldn't be similar.
I didn't read the article (surprise!) but this sounds fairly reasonable. Attach a unique ID to an MP3 file that says "John Doe" purchased it. As long as John Doe uses it responsibly, he can take advantage of all kinds of fair use, record it to other media, etc. that he could with an unprotected MP3 file.
This is like arguing against certain types of guns because the FBI can do ballistics analysis on the spent casing and wear patterns of the round in order to match the bullet lodged in the dead victim with the one that came from your gun. Shouldn't people be arguing for guns which don't leave any traceable patterns? Or do people realize that as long as they use their guns responsibly, who cares if the bullet and casing have certain patterns which can identify the particular gun?