That's how it worked around WWII. Now it's the European Union that writes most of the recent treaties that relate to IP (at least for countries that seem to matter now). If you file an international patent application under the Patent Cooperation Treaty, you get to file it using size "A4" paper, not the "letter" size used in the U.S. The regulations are published in English, French, Spanish and German (if memory serves). The U.S. ain't the industrial powerhouse of the world like it used to be...
My point was that when you "buy" the software, you don't "own" it. You typically own a single copy of it and licensed rights necessary to use that single copy.
What happened to the days when we used to talk about software licenses around here? Have all of the open source people gone? I didn't think I'd have to explain so many times...
You can buy another game that runs on your preferred platform that plays with swords, armies, battles and territories (or whatever that game looks like). If you can't, then you can find the same game on another platform. If that's not possible, then you can get a knockoff of the game within 2-6 months of the original game's release. If that's not possible, then you can write your own game that plays the same way.
Same thing for videos. Can't get your desired movie with lots of action or romance having star A produced by X? Wait 6 months and you'll be able to get the same thing having essentially the same plot having star B produced by Y.
You're walking into the supermarket, seeing a particular watermelon, not liking the price it's offered for, and whining that you can't have it for what you want. Pick out another watermelon. Go to another supermarket.
Oh, really? Well the makers of vacuum cleaner bags, automotive oil filters, and a whole host of other parts that only work in one manufacturer's equipment would disagree. If you don't like having to buy parts or data from specialized sources, then stop buying the equipment or subscriptions that require that. That is how you exercise your part in the "real free market".
Mr. Anonymous:
You're very practiced at belittlement, with no apparent practical skill to explain your views. You've made your credentials known here quite well. I am satisfied with your answer...
When you buy software, you buy the single copy and the right to use that copy (as in install it on one computer, typically). You don't buy the copyrights to the software itself.
If that's your situation, then it's because you don't own the house free and clear. For most of the content you receive, you don't own it. You don't even own the content when you buy a copy of it. If you don't like the deal you're getting, go somewhere else. (That's under something called the "free market".)
You don't seem to understand the concepts. Ideas cannot exist outside of a person's mind. Expressions of ideas can, and sometimes those expressions can be copyrighted. The performance of a series of steps can be patented, if they are novel, non-obvious and fall under "statutory subject matter", but no one can prohibit the transference of a description of those steps. IP has never been about what's in a person's mind, hence IP is not about ideas as Prof. Levine suggests.
You are correct that common people do not understand many legal subjects. That doesn't mean we should all adopt a common understanding.
Social contracts (as everyone should already know) are not enforceable in court. Speaking of them is just a veiled attempt at placing the rest of us under your version of morality.
"Intellectual Property" is not propaganda to the legal community. Patents have existed since before the U.S. Constitution was signed, and copyrights and trademark rights have been around longer than you or I have been breathing. You and your associates, however, may be trying to make "intellectual property" a term of derision for your propoganda. Your audience is, as you implicitly admit, people who do not understand the concepts.
If you haven't yet figured it out, you are speaking to a Doctor of Law, registered to practice before the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, and practicing law in the subject for many years. I assure you: I understand the concepts far better than you or the Doctor of Economics that you claim for your support. Now, what exactly are your credentials?
And what if Fox's agreement with Dish doesn't permit for re-broadcasting between boxes in a subscriber's equipment, and requires Dish to maintain control over its subscribers to have a license to Fox's copyrighted material? Then Dish would be in breach of the license with Fox, giving Fox cause to sue.
I don't know what the situation really is between Fox and Dish, but I assure you that your subscriber agreement with Dish does not control whether Fox has standing to sue.
Given the timing that this lawsuit was filed (right after the Aereo decision), I think Fox's lawyers have this very well thought out.
If everything you say is correct, then Fox may not win anything. But, Mr. Anonymous, I don't see anything persuasive in your recitation of alleged facts. I'm not eager to bet on your horse...
That article was authored (or co-authored) by Prof. Levine, who is a well-known economist. In my view (as an attorney) it is badly thought out and written:
It starts out in the first paragraph claiming that IP covers "ideas". That's just ridiculous. IP has never excluded anyone from thinking, for Pete's sake! That article marches along, criticizing the fictitious "intellectual property" created in someone's imagination and is not persuasive.
It even goes so far as to equate IP with contracts. Contracts originate between two or more parties. Patents, trademarks and copyrights are grants from the government that don't need anyone's permission to create. A contract in a song or other creative work would not be possible if there were not first a property right to convey between the contracting parties: you wouldn't have anyone creating anything beyond back-yard entertainment and technology without IP.
If Prof. Levine and his co-author Michele Boldrin want to criticize how IP is being used from an economic standpoint, I'm fine with that. They should have first, however, discussed this with someone who is a legal expert in the field they wished to be a critic of.
"Intellectual Property" is no more a term of propoganda than are other legal terms such as "perjury" or "sub-lease". It's a term that the legal community has adopted to represent a frequently-discussed subject. Give me a friggin break!
When thinking of property, people often confuse the "thing" with the right to exclusively use the thing.
If I own a piece of land or a "chattle" like a pocketwatch, then my ownership in the "property" gives me the right to keep everyone else from "trespassing" or taking it in an act of theft. Property doesn't actually give the owner the right to use the thing: in two examples, I can't build a mine or a dam next to the public highway, and I can't carry a loaded gun that I own into a courthouse.
Intellectual property is the right to exclude others from using things that are not physical. For patents, the owner gets to keep others from using an invention (without a license). For trademarks, the owner gets to exclude others from using the mark with goods or services other than his. For copyrights, the owner gets to keep others from copying his "work of authorship", hence it is a "copy"-"right". Like physical property, the owner of intellectual property gets to have his right enforced in the courts.
I don't claim to be fully educated as to the taxes involved with distributing Fox's material, but I would think that it includes taxes related to infrastructure (fees for having fiber under the public street) and income taxes. We all pay for the court system with our taxes, including the media sources.
The price of any mode of media distribution should reflect fair market value. If you think you're paying to much for something, then go get its equivalent somewhere else for less...
Is Dish paying Fox for a general license to rebroadcast, or is it a specific license limited to certain circumstances? I'll bet it's the latter. Fox gets to say how its content will be distributed, much like you get to say who gets to pick which apples from an orchard that you own.
Legally, that's a long way from being banned. There will most likely be some content provider that permits DVRs (even if it's PBS), so DVRs will probably not be going away. The content providers are probably not going to sue individuals: too expensive for too little return. That leaves the content providers suing the bigger players (retransmitters like Dish), which is what we're seeing now.
The answer to your question is not simple. Most industrialized countries have treaties with each other that permit legal actions to be taken under any applicable jurisdiction. Even the jurisdiction of a single country can be broad: usually U.S. jurisdiction goes to any person or entity "doing business" on U.S. soil or by any infrastructure located on U.S. soil. European countries will enforce U.S. copyrights, and the U.S. will enforce european copyrights.
Can a U.S. court order a Canadian company to discontinue offering gambling over the Internet? It depends upon the treaties it has with the U.S.
I don't remember whether or not Dish has subscribed to receive the Fox material: if memory serves, they were redistributing it much the same way as Aereo (as in assuming the Fox material to be broadcasted content). If Dish does not have a subscription for the Fox material, then it doesn't matter what the subscription agreement between you and Dish contains.
Redistribution without an agreement with Fox is now, as of the Aereo decision, copyright infringement and subject to damages.
Actually, copyrights are well understood to be "intellectual" property, and I assure you (as an IP attorney) that copyrights can be owned, assigned (sold) and licensed (rented).
This is not legal advice, but it seems pretty clear:
A subscriber/owner of copyrighted material has the right to time-shift their viewing and to make (backup) copies, but they don't have the right to give a copy to a non-subscriber/owner of the material. What Aereo was doing diminishes the ability of the copyright holder to control how the copyrighted material is marketed/copied. Here we have Fox (copyright holder) controlling how its material is distributed/copied. Dish is not just a "medium", they are redistributing the material and diminishing the market of Fox.
Fox will probably win this out of trial, and they'll probably be collecting a lot of money from Dish in past royalties due.
If you're really worried about storing incriminating evidence on a device, stenography might be a good way to hide it. It's been around a long, long time and exists in many forms. Information encrypted through a key looks like random data. Information existing in the low bits of color values in a video looks like a video (with a little noise). I'd be surprised if there weren't stenographic apps already out there for smart phones (I'll let y'all look). Policeman are graduates of the police academy: very few of them have a software engineering degree!
Judge: "And why, exactly, did you search this man's phone?"
Policeman: "Well, we found this dirty phone in an extended search on the ground a few hundred feet where we arrested Mr. Jones. We searched it to learn who it belonged to."
Judge: "And where did you find the incriminating information?"
Policeman: "Well, we turned the phone over to our investigative crimes unit. They ran the 'strings' command on all the information on the phone and gave us a printout. When we looked through the printout, we found there was more information on the phone than Mr. Jones name and address. That's when we discovered that Mr. Jones was a criminal."
Judge: "Okay, it's admissible. The police didn't intend to violate anyone's privacy."
The Supreme Court has such a respectful view of local police and courts...
All this judge did was say the defendant did not do what this patent covered, as defined by the claim.
It does not invalidate software patents. It does not declare the plaintiff to be a "patent troll". It does not declare this patent to be invalid.
Whoever submitted this story must be desperate: like throwing a handful of party snaps into the air at a gun show...
"What's more, commuter benefits encourage people to walk, bike, rideshare and take transit to work. This helps relieve traffic congestion and improve air quality, making our cities and regions better places to live."
SF gets a subsidy from the feds, SF doesn't have to provide so much parking because they promote walking, biking, ridesharing, etc.
It seems to me that this black market is a result of inadequate planning. SF would rather point their finger at people smarter than they are...
What it cannot do is (1) regulate the conduct of persons outside of its bounds who want information about those parking spaces,
I would love to see the business plan you would write that is based on facilitating the selling of physical access to a fixed location where neither the seller nor the buyer are actually in the jurisdiction of the municipality that governs that space. It would seem that if the seller is not in the space at the time of the auction he has no control over who is there, and if the buyer is not there to use it it has no value to him. I imagine you could find a few people who would be dishonest enough to try auctioning something they don't control, and stupid enough to bid on something they aren't capable of using, but not enough to make a profit from it.
I don't need to write your business plan. All I need to do to challenge this ordinance is show that it is illegal. It is the job of the city council of SF to find a legal solution.
How is the city going to detect illegal activity, when it can't snoop on wireless traffic without a warrant?
Of course the only way to detect this activity is to sniff wireless packets.
That's called "wiretapping", and it's illegal to do without a search warrant. To get a warrant, the police would have to show probable cause that a crime is being committed over that channel. Since they won't be able to do either, the ordinance is unenforceable.
Third, the city is the cause of this market in the first place.
Yes, by implementing public parking they are the proximal cause of people abusing the public parking system. The trivial solution is to simply remove all public parking.
No, the city of SF has caused this black market by advertising that they have sufficient streets and parking spaces, and then not providing that to the public. The real "trivial" solution is for the city to tell the real truth, and tell people that they can expect to wait X minutes on the average for a space. Then people would travel somewhere else. Problem solved.
Fourth, their city council is stupid for doing so: they are dissuading people from coming into their city
Really? There are businesses in the big city near here that I would never bother visiting if I knew that the only way to get a parking space was by winning an auction from a scalper. Would you be happy to come to an area and start looking for a space to park, just to find that half the people parked there are only there because they are waiting for the winning bidders in their auction to show up and have no other interest in parking there? No, honestly, I don't care if you would like it or not, I know I would not.
The city has a vested interest in keeping public parking available to the public and not allowing others to convert it into a private system. It would be inarguably against the law for someone to put barracades on the entrances to a city parking facility and charge people $5 to enter. This is not much different.
No, the city has a vested interest in providing the infrastructure needed to support travel and business within its boundaries. It doesn't matter whether that infrastructure is public or private. No one using this software is putting barricades up or otherwise impeding the access to any parking space: they're just announcing that they're about to leave one that they've legally occupied. I'm sorry that you can't see the difference.
What SF should do is find lawful solutions to their problems, not to use their city attorney to threaten others obeying the law into doing what the city officials want.
Slashdot Mirror
That's how it worked around WWII. Now it's the European Union that writes most of the recent treaties that relate to IP (at least for countries that seem to matter now). If you file an international patent application under the Patent Cooperation Treaty, you get to file it using size "A4" paper, not the "letter" size used in the U.S. The regulations are published in English, French, Spanish and German (if memory serves). The U.S. ain't the industrial powerhouse of the world like it used to be...
My point was that when you "buy" the software, you don't "own" it. You typically own a single copy of it and licensed rights necessary to use that single copy.
What happened to the days when we used to talk about software licenses around here? Have all of the open source people gone? I didn't think I'd have to explain so many times...
You can buy another game that runs on your preferred platform that plays with swords, armies, battles and territories (or whatever that game looks like). If you can't, then you can find the same game on another platform. If that's not possible, then you can get a knockoff of the game within 2-6 months of the original game's release. If that's not possible, then you can write your own game that plays the same way.
Same thing for videos. Can't get your desired movie with lots of action or romance having star A produced by X? Wait 6 months and you'll be able to get the same thing having essentially the same plot having star B produced by Y.
You're walking into the supermarket, seeing a particular watermelon, not liking the price it's offered for, and whining that you can't have it for what you want. Pick out another watermelon. Go to another supermarket.
All free market examples. Got it?
Oh, really? Well the makers of vacuum cleaner bags, automotive oil filters, and a whole host of other parts that only work in one manufacturer's equipment would disagree. If you don't like having to buy parts or data from specialized sources, then stop buying the equipment or subscriptions that require that. That is how you exercise your part in the "real free market".
Mr. Anonymous: You're very practiced at belittlement, with no apparent practical skill to explain your views. You've made your credentials known here quite well. I am satisfied with your answer...
When you buy software, you buy the single copy and the right to use that copy (as in install it on one computer, typically). You don't buy the copyrights to the software itself.
If that's your situation, then it's because you don't own the house free and clear. For most of the content you receive, you don't own it. You don't even own the content when you buy a copy of it. If you don't like the deal you're getting, go somewhere else. (That's under something called the "free market".)
Anonymous:
You don't seem to understand the concepts. Ideas cannot exist outside of a person's mind. Expressions of ideas can, and sometimes those expressions can be copyrighted. The performance of a series of steps can be patented, if they are novel, non-obvious and fall under "statutory subject matter", but no one can prohibit the transference of a description of those steps. IP has never been about what's in a person's mind, hence IP is not about ideas as Prof. Levine suggests.
You are correct that common people do not understand many legal subjects. That doesn't mean we should all adopt a common understanding.
Social contracts (as everyone should already know) are not enforceable in court. Speaking of them is just a veiled attempt at placing the rest of us under your version of morality.
"Intellectual Property" is not propaganda to the legal community. Patents have existed since before the U.S. Constitution was signed, and copyrights and trademark rights have been around longer than you or I have been breathing. You and your associates, however, may be trying to make "intellectual property" a term of derision for your propoganda. Your audience is, as you implicitly admit, people who do not understand the concepts.
If you haven't yet figured it out, you are speaking to a Doctor of Law, registered to practice before the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, and practicing law in the subject for many years. I assure you: I understand the concepts far better than you or the Doctor of Economics that you claim for your support. Now, what exactly are your credentials?
And what if Fox's agreement with Dish doesn't permit for re-broadcasting between boxes in a subscriber's equipment, and requires Dish to maintain control over its subscribers to have a license to Fox's copyrighted material? Then Dish would be in breach of the license with Fox, giving Fox cause to sue.
I don't know what the situation really is between Fox and Dish, but I assure you that your subscriber agreement with Dish does not control whether Fox has standing to sue.
Given the timing that this lawsuit was filed (right after the Aereo decision), I think Fox's lawyers have this very well thought out.
If everything you say is correct, then Fox may not win anything. But, Mr. Anonymous, I don't see anything persuasive in your recitation of alleged facts. I'm not eager to bet on your horse...
That article was authored (or co-authored) by Prof. Levine, who is a well-known economist. In my view (as an attorney) it is badly thought out and written:
It starts out in the first paragraph claiming that IP covers "ideas". That's just ridiculous. IP has never excluded anyone from thinking, for Pete's sake! That article marches along, criticizing the fictitious "intellectual property" created in someone's imagination and is not persuasive.
It even goes so far as to equate IP with contracts. Contracts originate between two or more parties. Patents, trademarks and copyrights are grants from the government that don't need anyone's permission to create. A contract in a song or other creative work would not be possible if there were not first a property right to convey between the contracting parties: you wouldn't have anyone creating anything beyond back-yard entertainment and technology without IP.
If Prof. Levine and his co-author Michele Boldrin want to criticize how IP is being used from an economic standpoint, I'm fine with that. They should have first, however, discussed this with someone who is a legal expert in the field they wished to be a critic of.
"Intellectual Property" is no more a term of propoganda than are other legal terms such as "perjury" or "sub-lease". It's a term that the legal community has adopted to represent a frequently-discussed subject. Give me a friggin break!
When thinking of property, people often confuse the "thing" with the right to exclusively use the thing.
If I own a piece of land or a "chattle" like a pocketwatch, then my ownership in the "property" gives me the right to keep everyone else from "trespassing" or taking it in an act of theft. Property doesn't actually give the owner the right to use the thing: in two examples, I can't build a mine or a dam next to the public highway, and I can't carry a loaded gun that I own into a courthouse.
Intellectual property is the right to exclude others from using things that are not physical. For patents, the owner gets to keep others from using an invention (without a license). For trademarks, the owner gets to exclude others from using the mark with goods or services other than his. For copyrights, the owner gets to keep others from copying his "work of authorship", hence it is a "copy"-"right". Like physical property, the owner of intellectual property gets to have his right enforced in the courts.
I don't claim to be fully educated as to the taxes involved with distributing Fox's material, but I would think that it includes taxes related to infrastructure (fees for having fiber under the public street) and income taxes. We all pay for the court system with our taxes, including the media sources.
The price of any mode of media distribution should reflect fair market value. If you think you're paying to much for something, then go get its equivalent somewhere else for less...
Is Dish paying Fox for a general license to rebroadcast, or is it a specific license limited to certain circumstances? I'll bet it's the latter. Fox gets to say how its content will be distributed, much like you get to say who gets to pick which apples from an orchard that you own.
Legally, that's a long way from being banned. There will most likely be some content provider that permits DVRs (even if it's PBS), so DVRs will probably not be going away. The content providers are probably not going to sue individuals: too expensive for too little return. That leaves the content providers suing the bigger players (retransmitters like Dish), which is what we're seeing now.
The answer to your question is not simple. Most industrialized countries have treaties with each other that permit legal actions to be taken under any applicable jurisdiction. Even the jurisdiction of a single country can be broad: usually U.S. jurisdiction goes to any person or entity "doing business" on U.S. soil or by any infrastructure located on U.S. soil. European countries will enforce U.S. copyrights, and the U.S. will enforce european copyrights.
Can a U.S. court order a Canadian company to discontinue offering gambling over the Internet? It depends upon the treaties it has with the U.S.
I don't remember whether or not Dish has subscribed to receive the Fox material: if memory serves, they were redistributing it much the same way as Aereo (as in assuming the Fox material to be broadcasted content). If Dish does not have a subscription for the Fox material, then it doesn't matter what the subscription agreement between you and Dish contains.
Redistribution without an agreement with Fox is now, as of the Aereo decision, copyright infringement and subject to damages.
Hey: I'm just giving you my view on the law as it stands today. If you think it should be changed, write your congressman...
Actually, copyrights are well understood to be "intellectual" property, and I assure you (as an IP attorney) that copyrights can be owned, assigned (sold) and licensed (rented).
This is not legal advice, but it seems pretty clear:
A subscriber/owner of copyrighted material has the right to time-shift their viewing and to make (backup) copies, but they don't have the right to give a copy to a non-subscriber/owner of the material. What Aereo was doing diminishes the ability of the copyright holder to control how the copyrighted material is marketed/copied. Here we have Fox (copyright holder) controlling how its material is distributed/copied. Dish is not just a "medium", they are redistributing the material and diminishing the market of Fox.
Fox will probably win this out of trial, and they'll probably be collecting a lot of money from Dish in past royalties due.
That should have been "steganography". Sorry about that...
If you're really worried about storing incriminating evidence on a device, stenography might be a good way to hide it. It's been around a long, long time and exists in many forms. Information encrypted through a key looks like random data. Information existing in the low bits of color values in a video looks like a video (with a little noise). I'd be surprised if there weren't stenographic apps already out there for smart phones (I'll let y'all look). Policeman are graduates of the police academy: very few of them have a software engineering degree!
Judge: "And why, exactly, did you search this man's phone?"
Policeman: "Well, we found this dirty phone in an extended search on the ground a few hundred feet where we arrested Mr. Jones. We searched it to learn who it belonged to."
Judge: "And where did you find the incriminating information?"
Policeman: "Well, we turned the phone over to our investigative crimes unit. They ran the 'strings' command on all the information on the phone and gave us a printout. When we looked through the printout, we found there was more information on the phone than Mr. Jones name and address. That's when we discovered that Mr. Jones was a criminal."
Judge: "Okay, it's admissible. The police didn't intend to violate anyone's privacy."
The Supreme Court has such a respectful view of local police and courts...
All this judge did was say the defendant did not do what this patent covered, as defined by the claim. It does not invalidate software patents. It does not declare the plaintiff to be a "patent troll". It does not declare this patent to be invalid. Whoever submitted this story must be desperate: like throwing a handful of party snaps into the air at a gun show...
Is that people have figured out a way around their "environmentally friendly" programs: http://www.sfenvironment.org/c...
"What's more, commuter benefits encourage people to walk, bike, rideshare and take transit to work. This helps relieve traffic congestion and improve air quality, making our cities and regions better places to live." SF gets a subsidy from the feds, SF doesn't have to provide so much parking because they promote walking, biking, ridesharing, etc.
It seems to me that this black market is a result of inadequate planning. SF would rather point their finger at people smarter than they are...
What it cannot do is (1) regulate the conduct of persons outside of its bounds who want information about those parking spaces,
I would love to see the business plan you would write that is based on facilitating the selling of physical access to a fixed location where neither the seller nor the buyer are actually in the jurisdiction of the municipality that governs that space. It would seem that if the seller is not in the space at the time of the auction he has no control over who is there, and if the buyer is not there to use it it has no value to him. I imagine you could find a few people who would be dishonest enough to try auctioning something they don't control, and stupid enough to bid on something they aren't capable of using, but not enough to make a profit from it.
I don't need to write your business plan. All I need to do to challenge this ordinance is show that it is illegal. It is the job of the city council of SF to find a legal solution.
How is the city going to detect illegal activity, when it can't snoop on wireless traffic without a warrant?
Of course the only way to detect this activity is to sniff wireless packets.
That's called "wiretapping", and it's illegal to do without a search warrant. To get a warrant, the police would have to show probable cause that a crime is being committed over that channel. Since they won't be able to do either, the ordinance is unenforceable.
Third, the city is the cause of this market in the first place.
Yes, by implementing public parking they are the proximal cause of people abusing the public parking system. The trivial solution is to simply remove all public parking.
No, the city of SF has caused this black market by advertising that they have sufficient streets and parking spaces, and then not providing that to the public. The real "trivial" solution is for the city to tell the real truth, and tell people that they can expect to wait X minutes on the average for a space. Then people would travel somewhere else. Problem solved.
Fourth, their city council is stupid for doing so: they are dissuading people from coming into their city
Really? There are businesses in the big city near here that I would never bother visiting if I knew that the only way to get a parking space was by winning an auction from a scalper. Would you be happy to come to an area and start looking for a space to park, just to find that half the people parked there are only there because they are waiting for the winning bidders in their auction to show up and have no other interest in parking there? No, honestly, I don't care if you would like it or not, I know I would not.
The city has a vested interest in keeping public parking available to the public and not allowing others to convert it into a private system. It would be inarguably against the law for someone to put barracades on the entrances to a city parking facility and charge people $5 to enter. This is not much different.
No, the city has a vested interest in providing the infrastructure needed to support travel and business within its boundaries. It doesn't matter whether that infrastructure is public or private. No one using this software is putting barricades up or otherwise impeding the access to any parking space: they're just announcing that they're about to leave one that they've legally occupied. I'm sorry that you can't see the difference.
What SF should do is find lawful solutions to their problems, not to use their city attorney to threaten others obeying the law into doing what the city officials want.