The best example: A drug company comes up with a drug to CURE cancer and AIDS, patents it and places $1'000'000 royalties on each pill! Are you free to chose life if you need to be cured of terminal illness? You overdramatize. Are you free to steal bread if you are dying from starvation? We either recognize personal ownership of prooperty or we don't. If we don't, we give free hand to thieves.
What about the parts of the code that only get called to handle freaky coincidences? Code that processes structured data is one thing. Code that handles real-world data (mm games) are quite another.
NDA is not as effective it only protects against 2nd party disclosure. If the 2nd party discloses to a 3rd party (or publishes in the open), there is no recourse against 3rd parties. So information ends up getting guarded very carefullly against any but the most necessary disclosure. Patents are supposed to make flow of information free (as in speech).
2008 Improvements over 1958, but few breakthroughs. No major new power sources. Energy costs up during this period, for the first time in 200 years. No major new form of transportation. No major improvement in space launch technology. Some progress in biotech but no major life extension. Much progress in electronics and computers. Ha? Internet is more than a major breakthrough since 1958. It's a new human accomplishment.... breakthrough only tell us about the world accomplishments are things we manage to build. Scotland is already testing a wave-energy plant. That's a new source of energy. Wind generators produce almost no noise nowadays so they have become suitable for areas closer to cities. If you don't think bypass surgery is a life extension from 1958, they you don't realize that most men died from heart attacks that weren't even diagnosed. Not to mention that cancer survival rate is above 60% today (vs 0% in 1958). Energy cost is flat when measured in real money. Dollar just happens to lose its value. When pared to gold, energy costs are flat. Segway is a major breakthrough in short-range transportation. It just isn't legal in Manhattan, so it won't take off. Cell phones and navigation systems also come to mind. You are just depressed because there hasn't been much new while the chimp has been running the country. Well, as soon as the dollar collapses and the socialist institutions go bankrupt, the pace of innovation will speed up.
It's wierd. I went to the Game Developer Conference today and sat in 5 lectures a day for 3 days, and each lecture seemed to disclose methods and algorithms more than any software patent I'd ever read.
So? "Less" ideas is not the same as "no" ideas. And no one argues that the current patent system is not broken (and is, therefore, often sidestepped).
Roughly translated your argument sounds like this: "In other news, someone got shot today while a man caught a bank robber all on his own (without help from the police). So the criminal justice system doesn't prevent violent crime. Let's get rid of it." Just because a solution exists which provides some (even large) benefit, doesn't mean that it is an optimal solution. The argument is what would make the system better or worse -- not whether the current system is perfect.
I generally default to assuming I just havn't seen enough, so pray tell can you point me to a patent which is very specific - one that I could take and roll my own if I was interested in paying royalties? Well, the funny part is that you are probably right. They are a very small fraction of the patents granted on software -- most are too trivial. I insist that it is because we have business-method patents and no math patents. But it's a whole other argument, and I've gone through it on slashdot enough times.
http://www.google.com/search?q=site:slashdot.org+math+patents should do it.
Without patents, the result will be predictable: most people will keep their algorithms a closely guarded secret. So what? If it's secret, I can't use it, and if it's patented I can't use it. If it's secret, you can't use it. If it's patented you can't use it unless you and the patent holder come to a mutually satisfactory agreement. Having no chance to use something and having a chance to use something provided that you pay for it are two very different scenarios. The second allows for free (as in speech) flow of information (even though it's not free as in beer). You may argue that you don't want to pay for it, but someone might. So the outcome will be that ideas will be more spread and more profitable. I don't see why anyone would insist on the former alternative (less speech and less value in true innovation).
Code is code. It runs on a known hardware and has a fixed set of rules for execution. Binary or not, the logic is crackable.
I suppose with proper tools and 15 years of experience, you can figure out how to decompile stripped code. Although, I can't quite think of how it would do it... maybe by having a tool that runs the code and decompiles it as it runs? Otherwise, you can't tell the different between data and instructions, so... well, I don't know. I'll take your word for it. Although games are not a good example. All you need from them is small snippets of data that allow you to change their crucial behavior (more resources, faster movement, etc.). It's not quite the same as figuring out an algorithm.
Like you said,
float InvSqrt (float x){ float xhalf = 0.5f*x; int i = *(int*)&x; i = 0x5f3759df - (i>>1); x = *(float*)&i; x = x*(1.5f - xhalf*x*x); return x; }
took a while to figure out even after the code was available. So truly innovative stuff (the kind that's worth patenting) is probably outside of the reach of most disassembly and analysis. I am thinking more like routing algorithms. And (**d forbid!) some navigational systems... anything in which the math is harder than the rest of the code. But even sidestepping that, there algorithms to do things which are faily complicated in themselves, so...
Btw, the code is crucial because, as you pointed, out it lets calculate <x,y>/|y| with simple multiplication... thus avoiding both square root (fairly expensive) and division.
If you can't sell your own creation for a particular price, then it isn't worth that amount, no matter how much you think it is. Getting special laws passed to have your own business model enforced by the government doesn't count as free market, no matter how much you pretend it does. Although you were very polite about it and your post was well-written, the contents of your response was incorrect in almost every way.
First, tone down the rhetoric. I can reply by saying that "your response misses points (a),(b),(c), etc". Or I can simply state my argument. Ad hominems do nothing by validate the opposing view point.
Having said that, I didn't say that I wanted to sell my creation for a particular price. I simply said that I would want to be able to say no when a particular price is offered. Without IP, I would have no such ability. I don't want laws that would enforce my business model. I want laws that enforce my right to refuse the use of my ideas (no matter how much others need or want them). That is, if I agree to make my ideas public. If I don't publish them, then I don't have any right to claim them as my own. That's precisely how patents are supposed to work.
There is no such thing as a "marketplace of ideas".
But there is. Many original ideas never become known because there it is more profitable to keep them secret. Any idea (any thing, actually) that can be made profitable can be sold. So the exchange of ideas for common unit of exchange (ie, money) does take place. That's the market of ideas.
Setting up artificial control of the flow of ideas through government enforcement for the purpose of "encouraging" innovation IS, by definition, using government enforcement to manipulate free market dynamics for the purpose of a social goal.
That's not what patents do. Again, you have to release all the details in order to patent something. So this system doesn't control the flow of ideas. If it worked as intended, then (in addition to the effect of creating a more equitable market... beer) it would have the side effect of increasing the flow of ideas by making ideas more free(as in speech)ly exchanged. As it stands right now, it discourages the flow of ideas by making it too expensive for engineers (software and otherwise) to read through granted patents (because too many trivial patents are granted and knowingly violating a patent increases damages in any potential law suit).
As far as patents are concerned, if I come up with an idea independently (which happens a lot), why should I be forced to pay someone because they happened to file something similar with the Patent Office a little earlier?
Because that's the only way to verify that the idea is, in fact, innovative. If someone thought of it before you did, what you did was, by definition, not innovative (it was not new at the time you "discovered" it). As a matter of fact, you can't really claim to have discovered it. A more proper way to say it would be that you re-discovered it or stumbled on an idea which someone already had.
By the way, if what you stumble on is similar, then it is not the same. So it does not violate the patent. You can patent your idea and (in a world as hypothetical as the one in which everyone maximizes their marginal utility) the Patent Office would correctly decide if your idea is one of the 3: the same as the "similar" idea (but perhaps stated differently), different from that idea, incorporates that idea. If it incorporates the "similar" idea, then you would have the ability to negotiate your price for further innovation, too.
As I stated at the beginning, in a free market, a product or service is only worth what people are willing to pay you for it.
This is not true. If you come to my home and offer $25 for my car, I don't have to accept your offer. The free market price is the price a
Why did Bill Gates become fabulously wealthy? Because he produces a great product? I think not.
Because he produces (and markets) an ok product that he can reproduce for pennies and sell for hundreds of dollars each. And he has managed to lock people into using his products.
Not really true. That practice is true of all software. He became fabulously wealthy because of the Communist institution known as the Stock Market. I am not going for any irony here.
Communism is based on the idea that the society would function better if the people owned the means of production rather than few individuals. Well, public stock ownership attempts to ensure that "the people" can pick and choose stocks safely by putting all kinds of public oversight (mandatory disclosure and audit) over the "publicly" traded companies.
Yet, this still does not prevent the "public" (people who don't know what the hell they are doing) from buying these means of production at prices far exceeding their value. This allows people who own large portions of these companies to spend wealth which does not exist (but only looks like it exists) in exchange for work. These are called "stock options". People who master the art of paying for highly skilled labor with worthless papers (eg, MS stock trading at PE 100 in the 90's) get wealthy because they master the art of fooling the people into thinking that they get paid with shares of essential means of production while, in reality, they get much smaller portion of those means of production than their work is worth.
I am not sure what he was saying, but I'll bite your bait. As much as I dislike MS (for the right reason -- repackaging IP and calling it "innovation", allowing marketing to set their deadlines instead of concentrating on quality of the software they produce, intentionally pissing on standards to maintain OS monopoly, generally not playing well with others), they did not exploit Africa. They don't owe anything to Africa. You can make the argument that some of the people who work for them do (and I will disagree with those arguments, but will not go into details even if you invite me to -- not here), but MS as an entity never exploited Africa. So any argument that they must make some sort of amends by allowing Africa to use their property (intellectual or otherwise) for free are based on nothing but an attempt to get a free lunch by appealing to guilt. It is dishonest. Dishonesty is not excused by maltreatment (perceived or actual) that occurred or didn't occur in the past. And dishonesty is disgusting. It must be exposed and it must not be allowed to steer the conversation.
No, the fundamental problem with all forms of "intellectual property" is that they attempt to perform a form of social engineering (encouraging innovation) through the violation of free market principles.
It's not a free market if you can't negotiate the price at which you wish to sell your own creations.
It's no more social engineering than keeping people from coming to your house and sleeping in your living room because you are not using it. Social engineering is any attempt to pro-actively change behavior. Preventing behavior which is undesirable is not social engineering -- it is protection. Ie, encouraging you to work by beating you on the day you don't work is social engineering while encouraging you to work by not paying you on the days you don't work is not social engineering.
Encouraging people to innovate by making sure they retain the right to sell what they create at the price they manage to get on a market place of ideas is not social engineering. While it is regrettable that the patent system degenerated into what it has, it is mostly due to (i)the complete break down of the courts and (ii) business patents. I still insist that if mathematicians were allowed to patent what they created, math would be much more readable and far more advanced today (and I am a mathematician -- just look at the structure of most of my arguments: "if...,then...":) ).
(using government enforcement to reduce competition in the marketplace) That's why the "limited time" part of the patent system is so important. Monopolies are not harmful when they are guaranteed to expire. They do allow inventors time to both evangelize their idea (some ideas need a lot of explaining) and get some financial benefit out of them. I am sure we both can come up with examples of how this is not what the actual patent system does today. That's an argument that the legal system is broken -- not that the patent system as such has no useful purpose.
Encouraging innovation by restricting the spread & use of information seems highly counterintuitive to me. Patents don't do that. You have to publish all the details to get a patent. You are thinking of trade secrets. Those emerge precisely when the patent system breaks down.
And then a clever hacker will reverse engineer the algorithm and leak it to the world. Short of DMCA-type problems (which is an entirely different mess), there's nothing the companies can do since there are no more software patents, and if the prevalence of cracks show anything, it's that any program can be reverse-engineered. Umm, patents are supposed to exist for a limited time... intellectual property is property, but it's not the same as tangible property because of extremely low cost of reproduction. If you strip the executable and obfuscate your logic enough, no one will reverse engineer it.... not fast anyway. Most cases of "hacking" are instances of people leaving essential information virtually in plain sight. If someone takes 10 years to reverse engineer your code, then you accomplished with obfuscation what the patent system tried to accomplish with law.
and I want you to watch as I fuck your sister, you mealy-mouthed faggot. Guess neither of us are going to get what we want, are we? You make me fucking sick, you all do. Fuck off before I slap you in the mouth. Ask your doctor to decrease the dose.
Insisting that people who are truly innovative should do so for free is communist. But hey, if you don't think there is a lot of that going around here, look, gp is already modded troll. I really don't think all the trashing of Seagate here is justified... it is more of a knee-jerk venting at everyone else getting buisiness-method patents that's causing this. I mean, c'mon, it's entirely possible that they have their own error-correction mechanisms involved in communicating with the bus. Why should they give it away? They had to pay people to develop them.
Since we're now getting companies suing to prevent advances in the useful arts using powers granted through patent legislation, can we now find that contemporary patent law is a violation of both the letter and spirit of the Constitution? They are not threatening to sue to prevent advances. They are threatening to sue those who would commercialize on advances documented in their patents without paying them the royalties on those patents. Without patents all hardware would be commoditized. And that would mean the lowest quality players (the cut-throats) would always be the standard setters. Don't confuse business-method patents with patents on actual engineering innovations.
What are the odds that their patent simply contains the phrase: "A mechanism for storing or recreating data created on a computer for later retrieval." Not as high as the odds that they have actual bona fide innovations patented. Or are you making an argument that there has been no advances in how hard drives communicate with the bus? Perhaps your contention is that those advances were obvious? It's one thing to shill against business-method patents, but it's quite another to shriek at people just because they refuse to be communist.
lol. you are funny. If you think Israel does anything that any country wouldn't do to protect its citizens, you are one of the following 3: high, antisemitic, uninformed. Maybe 2 of those. Or maybe even Mel Gibson If you think there is a country that would commit as little violence as Israel has to protect its citizens in response to the level of warfare waged against them, please, name the country.
Umm... not to boost your ego too much, but if that seemed intuitive, you might consider reading ahead in your text books and looking at what else seems intuitive. If you manage to run your intuition through 3 var calculus, go for point set topology next. This "intuition" you speak of might be more of a gift than you realize. If you get through topology on your own, mention it to a professor who is known to be good at explaining things (those are usually the ones who actually understand and LIKE to explain things). He'll tell you what's next. You might have the ability to naturally translate between geometrical and symbolic view. Believe me, it's not common. And things you can learn to do with it are pretty cool.
Slashdot Mirror
What about the parts of the code that only get called to handle freaky coincidences? Code that processes structured data is one thing. Code that handles real-world data (mm games) are quite another.
NDA is not as effective it only protects against 2nd party disclosure. If the 2nd party discloses to a 3rd party (or publishes in the open), there is no recourse against 3rd parties. So information ends up getting guarded very carefullly against any but the most necessary disclosure. Patents are supposed to make flow of information free (as in speech).
So? "Less" ideas is not the same as "no" ideas. And no one argues that the current patent system is not broken (and is, therefore, often sidestepped).
Roughly translated your argument sounds like this: "In other news, someone got shot today while a man caught a bank robber all on his own (without help from the police). So the criminal justice system doesn't prevent violent crime. Let's get rid of it." Just because a solution exists which provides some (even large) benefit, doesn't mean that it is an optimal solution. The argument is what would make the system better or worse -- not whether the current system is perfect.
I generally default to assuming I just havn't seen enough, so pray tell can you point me to a patent which is very specific - one that I could take and roll my own if I was interested in paying royalties? Well, the funny part is that you are probably right. They are a very small fraction of the patents granted on software -- most are too trivial. I insist that it is because we have business-method patents and no math patents. But it's a whole other argument, and I've gone through it on slashdot enough times. http://www.google.com/search?q=site:slashdot.org+math+patents should do it.I suppose with proper tools and 15 years of experience, you can figure out how to decompile stripped code. Although, I can't quite think of how it would do it... maybe by having a tool that runs the code and decompiles it as it runs? Otherwise, you can't tell the different between data and instructions, so... well, I don't know. I'll take your word for it. Although games are not a good example. All you need from them is small snippets of data that allow you to change their crucial behavior (more resources, faster movement, etc.). It's not quite the same as figuring out an algorithm.
Like you said,
took a while to figure out even after the code was available. So truly innovative stuff (the kind that's worth patenting) is probably outside of the reach of most disassembly and analysis. I am thinking more like routing algorithms. And (**d forbid!) some navigational systems... anything in which the math is harder than the rest of the code. But even sidestepping that, there algorithms to do things which are faily complicated in themselves, so...
Btw, the code is crucial because, as you pointed, out it lets calculate <x,y>/|y| with simple multiplication... thus avoiding both square root (fairly expensive) and division.
Aaah... The good old days. When slashdot had posts like this http://games.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=159570&cid=13367261 and not like this http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=497518&cid=22852348#
If you can't sell your own creation for a particular price, then it isn't worth that amount, no matter how much you think it is. Getting special laws passed to have your own business model enforced by the government doesn't count as free market, no matter how much you pretend it does. Although you were very polite about it and your post was well-written, the contents of your response was incorrect in almost every way.
First, tone down the rhetoric. I can reply by saying that "your response misses points (a),(b),(c), etc". Or I can simply state my argument. Ad hominems do nothing by validate the opposing view point.
Having said that, I didn't say that I wanted to sell my creation for a particular price. I simply said that I would want to be able to say no when a particular price is offered. Without IP, I would have no such ability. I don't want laws that would enforce my business model. I want laws that enforce my right to refuse the use of my ideas (no matter how much others need or want them). That is, if I agree to make my ideas public. If I don't publish them, then I don't have any right to claim them as my own. That's precisely how patents are supposed to work.
There is no such thing as a "marketplace of ideas".
But there is. Many original ideas never become known because there it is more profitable to keep them secret. Any idea (any thing, actually) that can be made profitable can be sold. So the exchange of ideas for common unit of exchange (ie, money) does take place. That's the market of ideas.
Setting up artificial control of the flow of ideas through government enforcement for the purpose of "encouraging" innovation IS, by definition, using government enforcement to manipulate free market dynamics for the purpose of a social goal.
That's not what patents do. Again, you have to release all the details in order to patent something. So this system doesn't control the flow of ideas. If it worked as intended, then (in addition to the effect of creating a more equitable market... beer) it would have the side effect of increasing the flow of ideas by making ideas more free(as in speech)ly exchanged. As it stands right now, it discourages the flow of ideas by making it too expensive for engineers (software and otherwise) to read through granted patents (because too many trivial patents are granted and knowingly violating a patent increases damages in any potential law suit).
As far as patents are concerned, if I come up with an idea independently (which happens a lot), why should I be forced to pay someone because they happened to file something similar with the Patent Office a little earlier?
Because that's the only way to verify that the idea is, in fact, innovative. If someone thought of it before you did, what you did was, by definition, not innovative (it was not new at the time you "discovered" it). As a matter of fact, you can't really claim to have discovered it. A more proper way to say it would be that you re-discovered it or stumbled on an idea which someone already had.
By the way, if what you stumble on is similar, then it is not the same. So it does not violate the patent. You can patent your idea and (in a world as hypothetical as the one in which everyone maximizes their marginal utility) the Patent Office would correctly decide if your idea is one of the 3: the same as the "similar" idea (but perhaps stated differently), different from that idea, incorporates that idea. If it incorporates the "similar" idea, then you would have the ability to negotiate your price for further innovation, too.
As I stated at the beginning, in a free market, a product or service is only worth what people are willing to pay you for it.
This is not true. If you come to my home and offer $25 for my car, I don't have to accept your offer. The free market price is the price a
Because he produces (and markets) an ok product that he can reproduce for pennies and sell for hundreds of dollars each. And he has managed to lock people into using his products.
Not really true. That practice is true of all software. He became fabulously wealthy because of the Communist institution known as the Stock Market. I am not going for any irony here.
Communism is based on the idea that the society would function better if the people owned the means of production rather than few individuals. Well, public stock ownership attempts to ensure that "the people" can pick and choose stocks safely by putting all kinds of public oversight (mandatory disclosure and audit) over the "publicly" traded companies.
Yet, this still does not prevent the "public" (people who don't know what the hell they are doing) from buying these means of production at prices far exceeding their value. This allows people who own large portions of these companies to spend wealth which does not exist (but only looks like it exists) in exchange for work. These are called "stock options". People who master the art of paying for highly skilled labor with worthless papers (eg, MS stock trading at PE 100 in the 90's) get wealthy because they master the art of fooling the people into thinking that they get paid with shares of essential means of production while, in reality, they get much smaller portion of those means of production than their work is worth.
I am not sure what he was saying, but I'll bite your bait. As much as I dislike MS (for the right reason -- repackaging IP and calling it "innovation", allowing marketing to set their deadlines instead of concentrating on quality of the software they produce, intentionally pissing on standards to maintain OS monopoly, generally not playing well with others), they did not exploit Africa. They don't owe anything to Africa. You can make the argument that some of the people who work for them do (and I will disagree with those arguments, but will not go into details even if you invite me to -- not here), but MS as an entity never exploited Africa. So any argument that they must make some sort of amends by allowing Africa to use their property (intellectual or otherwise) for free are based on nothing but an attempt to get a free lunch by appealing to guilt. It is dishonest. Dishonesty is not excused by maltreatment (perceived or actual) that occurred or didn't occur in the past. And dishonesty is disgusting. It must be exposed and it must not be allowed to steer the conversation.
It's not a free market if you can't negotiate the price at which you wish to sell your own creations.
It's no more social engineering than keeping people from coming to your house and sleeping in your living room because you are not using it. Social engineering is any attempt to pro-actively change behavior. Preventing behavior which is undesirable is not social engineering -- it is protection. Ie, encouraging you to work by beating you on the day you don't work is social engineering while encouraging you to work by not paying you on the days you don't work is not social engineering.
Encouraging people to innovate by making sure they retain the right to sell what they create at the price they manage to get on a market place of ideas is not social engineering. While it is regrettable that the patent system degenerated into what it has, it is mostly due to (i)the complete break down of the courts and (ii) business patents. I still insist that if mathematicians were allowed to patent what they created, math would be much more readable and far more advanced today (and I am a mathematician -- just look at the structure of most of my arguments: "if...,then..." :) ).
(using government enforcement to reduce competition in the marketplace) That's why the "limited time" part of the patent system is so important. Monopolies are not harmful when they are guaranteed to expire. They do allow inventors time to both evangelize their idea (some ideas need a lot of explaining) and get some financial benefit out of them. I am sure we both can come up with examples of how this is not what the actual patent system does today. That's an argument that the legal system is broken -- not that the patent system as such has no useful purpose. Encouraging innovation by restricting the spread & use of information seems highly counterintuitive to me. Patents don't do that. You have to publish all the details to get a patent. You are thinking of trade secrets. Those emerge precisely when the patent system breaks down.You forgot one other reason people work for free -- tips. Some developers work "grants". Which are essentially tips.
a google search for "regex [your fav language goes here]"?
Insisting that people who are truly innovative should do so for free is communist. But hey, if you don't think there is a lot of that going around here, look, gp is already modded troll. I really don't think all the trashing of Seagate here is justified... it is more of a knee-jerk venting at everyone else getting buisiness-method patents that's causing this. I mean, c'mon, it's entirely possible that they have their own error-correction mechanisms involved in communicating with the bus. Why should they give it away? They had to pay people to develop them.
But then how would they advertise on slashdot that they still exist?
lol. you are funny. If you think Israel does anything that any country wouldn't do to protect its citizens, you are one of the following 3: high, antisemitic, uninformed. Maybe 2 of those. Or maybe even Mel Gibson If you think there is a country that would commit as little violence as Israel has to protect its citizens in response to the level of warfare waged against them, please, name the country.
This is slashdot -- things that matter too geeks. You must be looking for www.mtv.com -- things that matter to farm animals.
Umm... not to boost your ego too much, but if that seemed intuitive, you might consider reading ahead in your text books and looking at what else seems intuitive. If you manage to run your intuition through 3 var calculus, go for point set topology next. This "intuition" you speak of might be more of a gift than you realize. If you get through topology on your own, mention it to a professor who is known to be good at explaining things (those are usually the ones who actually understand and LIKE to explain things). He'll tell you what's next. You might have the ability to naturally translate between geometrical and symbolic view. Believe me, it's not common. And things you can learn to do with it are pretty cool.
phew... another lawyer.