For the first six months, first-to-invent wins the patent, but from that point, they (or anybody else) only get to invalidate the patent.
And that only if their invention came more than six months before the filed patent.
Result: greater stability of investment (especially after the first six months), no ridiculous patenting of ideas that have been in the wild for a while, and first-to-invent is still kept as a principle.
It seems to me that this would satisfy most legitimate interests.
What you're saying is both contrary to Intelligent Design and to Statism.
How can you get anyone on the right, or the left to agree with you?;o)
The overarching assumption of our time is that all change is the product of, and requires intent; if the intent is not in man, it must be God's. In our post-Christian [European] era, that which is not the product of the 'will' of a corporation must be that of a state entity, or else explicitly goodwill of a collection of individuals.
Natural selection is not part of such thinking. Emergent behaviour is perceived as the result of as-yet-unseen forces.
The power of FOSS is the is delivers results beyond that of the intents of the participants. The commoditisation of software spreads technology further afield. The availability of soure code does wonders for software development everywhere. By increasing the availability of resources everywhere, so must more can be down, so that the comparable harm to 'incentives' becomes a joke.
Yet the 'outcome requires intent' mentality means that the world moves steadily toward ever-stronger intellectual property regimes, and that the opposition, insofar as it comes from politicians is hopelessly idealistic, since they fail to grasp why FOSS is so very pragmatic.
Would you care to explain what theft has taken place? If crimes such as identity fraud and copyright infringment are not actually theft, I don't see how you can call this theft.
Is you'd read your Proudhon, you'd know the answer to that;o)
The reason that it's different from the above examples is that it denies people use of the 'IP', whereas copyright infringment or 'identity theft' doesn't, but rather does the converse.
Whether it's actually theft is another matter, but it is different.
To a great extent this issue reminds me of the observations made of those more and less likely to believe in the supernatural. Sceptics are likely to miss pattern that exists, and believers are likely to invent non-existent pattern (or so we believe). To spot counter-cultural pattern, then, is also to be more likely to invent pattern that isn't there.
The trouble being that there are many conclusions that the informed or observant can make that differ from "common sense", and the brain being what it is, we don't necessarily know the steps of how to get there. This doesn't make us wrong... or right; our perception is different.
I'll pick an example that generates more heat than light on slashdot: how do illegal downloads effect aggregate sales of music and movies? The common man is sure that IP infringement must lead to reduced sales, yet many slashdotters believe this not to be the case, and a few even believe the opposite.
What is the truth? The form of the question can affect the outcome. For example: restrict your study to (relatively poor) students, and you get the "common sense" result. Aggregate sales using a detailed and sophisticated economic analysis, and you get no effect. But maybe our intellect is misleading us: if we get goods for free, although it might shift our spending onto other music and movies, are we perhaps less motivated to work in the first place? with this larger frame of reference, it appears that the intelligent individual has quite possibly picked a convenient intermediate-sized frame of reference, when a frame of reference that was larger still would (perhaps) reveal 'theft' from the economy as a whole. This is a bit of a conconcted 'counter-example', though: our greed is such that we're likely to keep working to own more, regardless of how much we have.
What about software patents? Most of us here (myself included) are anti. Assuming (for the moment) that the 'anti' stance is right, why then do so many lawyers believe the converse? I doubt that it's wholly because of their self-interest (although that might bias them); it's because of a particular view of the business of business, of the value and importance of contract and of property, and of incentives and defined rights that meld, to the lawerly mind, with morality, and the natural way of things. To break with this, brings them to presuppose harm, and their experience with the concrete (case by case), rather than the systemic effects reinforces this way of thinking. Is the abstract argument really wrong? That it's harm to think of examples of avenues that will be impeded (they haven't been thought of yet!) doesn't make them any less real. Here, then, the emphasis upon concreteness is itself misleading.
Another example: minimum wages. I believe that one of my own JEs illustrates this well. I don't think that I (arguing for a minimum) argued at my best, and Red Warrior applied some experience, but neither of us "won", I feel. However, one thing's for sure; most of the pro-free-market intellectuals ignore the 'monopsony' effect of deliberately cartelising the labour force, so that the first level of abstraction is misleading as to the degree of the effect on unemployment. To some extent, then, here the 'simple' reaction that it redistributes wealth the the relatively poor has a lot of truth to it. The intellectual's love of pristine, perfect, simple systems can and does mislead. My stance might itself be flawed. The intellectual's stance often comes from a deeper analysis or intuition, and they could easily be at a loss to explain it. From this difficulty, it's difficult to decide which way is the truth. Not all difficulty is denial.
In short, property is a positive right: reinforced exclusivity. I agree that Anarcho-Capitalists tend to lean upon natural law, but natural law doesn't tell you what one is, but rather (should it be a valid mode of analysis), what it should be. Ronald Coase wrote about this; brief analysis: property exists where the investment gains outweigh the costs of exclusivity (the thing in question cannot be readily put to its best use).
I have to say that hidden within your response is the attitude that I'm talking about (although you're not as extreme as those that I seek to criticise): if you can force a route via which contracts have to be signed, that does not mean that the contracts should be enforceable. Consider EULAs and reverse-engineering.
Frequently, EULAs will prevent people from being able to provide competition, especially if (say) every school provides use of standard tools, where the user has to agree to the EULA to learn to use the tools. They do this while learning to program. Luckily, we're in a position now where there are other routes, but bear with me: if this is the only route, then the only route by which competition can arise is through illegality. Someone provides rudimentary tools and circulates them via "pirate networks". Only once someone's development is exclusively using such tools can a legal alternative arise. Depending upon the sate of property law, learning on such illegally-derived tools might itself be illegal, of course, so it might take three 'generations' to escape the yoke.
Even if it 'only' takes two generations, the EULA has not delivered a good investment:exclusivity_cost ratio. The ratio might even be negative: facing no competition, little new investment is made into the product.
There are plenty of other examples (the most obvious one is 'voluntary' slavery), but signing contracts is not a good sole criterion.
Bram's really handed them a gift: if I ran a torrent site, I would not want it listed!
More recently sites like Suprnova and BTefnet, who provide no copyrighted content but do provide information on where to get it in the form of trackers, have been subject to successful legal action.
The sites are that have been sued have been a lot easier to take down: usually they've solicited for torrents and seeders, which means that there is clearly demonstratable intent: "aiding and abetting" in UK law. Bram's intent is more clearly to provide information upon what exists in the world; he's likey to be protected, but copyright infringers aren't the only ones who'll find it useful.
Any code written specifically by Nokia for the Linux Kernel needs to be unencumbered for the sake of those producing derived works, but the GPL does not restrict outsiders from random acts of (partial) generousity. It does mean that if you take code from the kernel for another purpose, you may find yourself outside the scope of Nokia's licence.
This is a step in the right direction, but the real goal is the elimination of software patents. The European parliament is likely to vote for this, but national governments are likely to ignore this to varying degrees.
An appropriate parliamentary vote is likely to make it easier for the next generation of politicians to reverse some of the modern propertarian extremism, but for the present generation, ever-stronger property rights are "common sense", regardless of economic analyses that say the converse.
Those politicians wishing to mandate the buying of American goods would probably be in favour of selling China these things, so it's not about having a lesser boycott to achieve worthy political ends.
If the dollar value drops, then surely each investment is better value than it was before. Investors might divest because of the threat of devaluation, but devaluation itself will bring new investment, indeed more, since now US investments will form too small a part of their portfolio, looking to future risk.
Besides, if they do divest of their dollar holdings, where do the dollars go?
This ruling must have side-effects. The easiest way for the US to meet its '50% local' requirements is to fit any custom machines with expensive software, for example. The first casualty will be free software.
This is not just bad for free software, but this is a clarifying special case of why this requirement is in practice a subsidy. Things will be bought that are not required to do the job.
In addition, it should be remembered that US dollars flow back to where they can be used as legal tender. Ie: the US. Buying goods from abroad initiates the whole process of trade. But then economic and scientific illiteracy are patriotic: Americans live in a post-rational culture AFAICT.
Democracy isn't Freedom. Inalienable Rights are. Democracy is only a precondition for Inalienability of Rights
Inalienable Rights aren't freedom either. I'll give you that democracy isn't freedom, though. Consider the right to property. If you're libertarian, you'll need a stronger example: consider the right to intellectual property, such as to patent a new piece of software. Here, where the cost-benefit analysis comes out negative, it becomes clear that the freedom to code is in opposition to the right to property. Freedom is about unrestricted use of one's limbs, speech, and mind.
Naturally, we find property so useful in building society that it is nearly universally granted as a right, at least in the case of exclusive resources. This begins to make sense when you consider freedom as including future plans, so that having a known body of exclusive resources to hand becomes an important part of it, but we do not make property out of air, which although plentiful, is also exclusive (although we do create tradeable pollution permits) because the transaction cost is greater than the gain in investment.
Similar tradeoffs occur elsewhere. Rights are actually restictions upon other's freedoms, and far from being inalienable, are the result of long evolution, yielding an approximately utilitarian result, resulting in very roughly "the greatest freedom of the greatest number".
I'll agree with you that government, all too often, moves us away from this optimum, though.
In case you haven't been on Slashdot much, there's been a good deal of articles recently about ID; the grandparent is funny because of the 'leitmotif' quality, and because what he appears to be trying to say, sotto voice, is intrinsically hirarious to the sceptic, of which Slashdot is well-populated.
After reading your blog, it occurred to me that Promusicae is probably breaking the law in committing extortion or blackmail. I think that for them to be accused essentially of racketeering would be extremely interesting indeed.
What you're not accounting for is those torrents that haven't been posted because the legitimate distributer of material had nowhere to put up a tracker. Certainly, one can always pay money for a permanent host and find somewhere, but someone with an account that is free with their broadband connection is that bit less likely to publish. With this change, when fully seeded, they can turn off their home machine.
So I suspect that you're wrong. By making publishing easier still, more will be able to put stuff up on their site that they couldn't before. True, most people lacking in resources will in this context be pirates, so the proportion of illegal use will go up, but that is a side-effect of enabling your average Joe to publish where they couldn't before, meaning that the quantity of legitimate use will also go up.
As many have said in the article, and indeed in Dan Crevier's blog, this is ridiculously obvious, and is in addition the natural way to solve the problem in an OO system.
I don't know how you solve this problem more generically with the steady growth of doctrinare propertarianism in politics throughout the world, especially since property, to many, appears as "common sense", without the more sophisticated, economist's understanding of what property is, and means.
The battle to promote educated opinion is a difficult one indeed, requiring a honing of arguing skills so that the informed opinion can be presented as common sense over the prejudiced one.
I think that he was looking for something more like my response to the parent.
iRate and TiVo are really the same idea, so let me suggest Penny Black. Sorry. Hashcash, Instead.
Note that Hashcash was first, but that Penny Black 'looks' more like innovation because of the marketing presentation. Hashcash, due to its straightforward presentation, appears as a mere technical fix. And this is how most Open Source invention and innovation is hidden, IMO.
Slashdot Mirror
"Troll, +1" is a rating that I'd like to give, sometimes.
Unfortunately, "Troll, -1" is the only option available :-(
And that only if their invention came more than six months before the filed patent.
Result: greater stability of investment (especially after the first six months), no ridiculous patenting of ideas that have been in the wild for a while, and first-to-invent is still kept as a principle.
It seems to me that this would satisfy most legitimate interests.
http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=200505202 05027290
More poor research on Rob Enderle's part.
s/soure/source/
s/down/done/
How can you get anyone on the right, or the left to agree with you? ;o)
The overarching assumption of our time is that all change is the product of, and requires intent; if the intent is not in man, it must be God's. In our post-Christian [European] era, that which is not the product of the 'will' of a corporation must be that of a state entity, or else explicitly goodwill of a collection of individuals.
Natural selection is not part of such thinking. Emergent behaviour is perceived as the result of as-yet-unseen forces.
The power of FOSS is the is delivers results beyond that of the intents of the participants. The commoditisation of software spreads technology further afield. The availability of soure code does wonders for software development everywhere. By increasing the availability of resources everywhere, so must more can be down, so that the comparable harm to 'incentives' becomes a joke.
Yet the 'outcome requires intent' mentality means that the world moves steadily toward ever-stronger intellectual property regimes, and that the opposition, insofar as it comes from politicians is hopelessly idealistic, since they fail to grasp why FOSS is so very pragmatic.
Bug in my above post.
The reason that it's different from the above examples is that it denies people use of the 'IP', whereas copyright infringment or 'identity theft' doesn't, but rather does the converse.
Whether it's actually theft is another matter, but it is different.
I'm not saying that we should, but this kind of logic show a lack of an understanding of cause and effect. Such people are dangerous to have in power.
To a great extent this issue reminds me of the observations made of those more and less likely to believe in the supernatural. Sceptics are likely to miss pattern that exists, and believers are likely to invent non-existent pattern (or so we believe). To spot counter-cultural pattern, then, is also to be more likely to invent pattern that isn't there.
The trouble being that there are many conclusions that the informed or observant can make that differ from "common sense", and the brain being what it is, we don't necessarily know the steps of how to get there. This doesn't make us wrong... or right; our perception is different.
I'll pick an example that generates more heat than light on slashdot: how do illegal downloads effect aggregate sales of music and movies? The common man is sure that IP infringement must lead to reduced sales, yet many slashdotters believe this not to be the case, and a few even believe the opposite.
What is the truth? The form of the question can affect the outcome. For example: restrict your study to (relatively poor) students, and you get the "common sense" result. Aggregate sales using a detailed and sophisticated economic analysis, and you get no effect. But maybe our intellect is misleading us: if we get goods for free, although it might shift our spending onto other music and movies, are we perhaps less motivated to work in the first place? with this larger frame of reference, it appears that the intelligent individual has quite possibly picked a convenient intermediate-sized frame of reference, when a frame of reference that was larger still would (perhaps) reveal 'theft' from the economy as a whole. This is a bit of a conconcted 'counter-example', though: our greed is such that we're likely to keep working to own more, regardless of how much we have.
What about software patents? Most of us here (myself included) are anti. Assuming (for the moment) that the 'anti' stance is right, why then do so many lawyers believe the converse? I doubt that it's wholly because of their self-interest (although that might bias them); it's because of a particular view of the business of business, of the value and importance of contract and of property, and of incentives and defined rights that meld, to the lawerly mind, with morality, and the natural way of things. To break with this, brings them to presuppose harm, and their experience with the concrete (case by case), rather than the systemic effects reinforces this way of thinking. Is the abstract argument really wrong? That it's harm to think of examples of avenues that will be impeded (they haven't been thought of yet!) doesn't make them any less real. Here, then, the emphasis upon concreteness is itself misleading.
Another example: minimum wages. I believe that one of my own JEs illustrates this well. I don't think that I (arguing for a minimum) argued at my best, and Red Warrior applied some experience, but neither of us "won", I feel. However, one thing's for sure; most of the pro-free-market intellectuals ignore the 'monopsony' effect of deliberately cartelising the labour force, so that the first level of abstraction is misleading as to the degree of the effect on unemployment. To some extent, then, here the 'simple' reaction that it redistributes wealth the the relatively poor has a lot of truth to it. The intellectual's love of pristine, perfect, simple systems can and does mislead. My stance might itself be flawed. The intellectual's stance often comes from a deeper analysis or intuition, and they could easily be at a loss to explain it. From this difficulty, it's difficult to decide which way is the truth. Not all difficulty is denial.
In short, property is a positive right: reinforced exclusivity. I agree that Anarcho-Capitalists tend to lean upon natural law, but natural law doesn't tell you what one is, but rather (should it be a valid mode of analysis), what it should be. Ronald Coase wrote about this; brief analysis: property exists where the investment gains outweigh the costs of exclusivity (the thing in question cannot be readily put to its best use).
I have to say that hidden within your response is the attitude that I'm talking about (although you're not as extreme as those that I seek to criticise): if you can force a route via which contracts have to be signed, that does not mean that the contracts should be enforceable. Consider EULAs and reverse-engineering.
Frequently, EULAs will prevent people from being able to provide competition, especially if (say) every school provides use of standard tools, where the user has to agree to the EULA to learn to use the tools. They do this while learning to program. Luckily, we're in a position now where there are other routes, but bear with me: if this is the only route, then the only route by which competition can arise is through illegality. Someone provides rudimentary tools and circulates them via "pirate networks". Only once someone's development is exclusively using such tools can a legal alternative arise. Depending upon the sate of property law, learning on such illegally-derived tools might itself be illegal, of course, so it might take three 'generations' to escape the yoke.
Even if it 'only' takes two generations, the EULA has not delivered a good investment:exclusivity_cost ratio. The ratio might even be negative: facing no competition, little new investment is made into the product.
There are plenty of other examples (the most obvious one is 'voluntary' slavery), but signing contracts is not a good sole criterion.
Bram's really handed them a gift: if I ran a torrent site, I would not want it listed!
The sites are that have been sued have been a lot easier to take down: usually they've solicited for torrents and seeders, which means that there is clearly demonstratable intent: "aiding and abetting" in UK law. Bram's intent is more clearly to provide information upon what exists in the world; he's likey to be protected, but copyright infringers aren't the only ones who'll find it useful.This is a step in the right direction, but the real goal is the elimination of software patents. The European parliament is likely to vote for this, but national governments are likely to ignore this to varying degrees.
An appropriate parliamentary vote is likely to make it easier for the next generation of politicians to reverse some of the modern propertarian extremism, but for the present generation, ever-stronger property rights are "common sense", regardless of economic analyses that say the converse.
Those politicians wishing to mandate the buying of American goods would probably be in favour of selling China these things, so it's not about having a lesser boycott to achieve worthy political ends.
Besides, if they do divest of their dollar holdings, where do the dollars go?
But someone does. They exchanged the dollars for yuan. What happens to those dollars now?
This is not just bad for free software, but this is a clarifying special case of why this requirement is in practice a subsidy. Things will be bought that are not required to do the job.
In addition, it should be remembered that US dollars flow back to where they can be used as legal tender. Ie: the US. Buying goods from abroad initiates the whole process of trade. But then economic and scientific illiteracy are patriotic: Americans live in a post-rational culture AFAICT.
Naturally, we find property so useful in building society that it is nearly universally granted as a right, at least in the case of exclusive resources. This begins to make sense when you consider freedom as including future plans, so that having a known body of exclusive resources to hand becomes an important part of it, but we do not make property out of air, which although plentiful, is also exclusive (although we do create tradeable pollution permits) because the transaction cost is greater than the gain in investment.
Similar tradeoffs occur elsewhere. Rights are actually restictions upon other's freedoms, and far from being inalienable, are the result of long evolution, yielding an approximately utilitarian result, resulting in very roughly "the greatest freedom of the greatest number".
I'll agree with you that government, all too often, moves us away from this optimum, though.
In case you haven't been on Slashdot much, there's been a good deal of articles recently about ID; the grandparent is funny because of the 'leitmotif' quality, and because what he appears to be trying to say, sotto voice, is intrinsically hirarious to the sceptic, of which Slashdot is well-populated.
As an aside, I think that underestimation of the power of evolution is part of the reason that software patents are so readily granted.
I hope that he does.
I expect that it's the same in Spain.
So I suspect that you're wrong. By making publishing easier still, more will be able to put stuff up on their site that they couldn't before. True, most people lacking in resources will in this context be pirates, so the proportion of illegal use will go up, but that is a side-effect of enabling your average Joe to publish where they couldn't before, meaning that the quantity of legitimate use will also go up.
I don't know how you solve this problem more generically with the steady growth of doctrinare propertarianism in politics throughout the world, especially since property, to many, appears as "common sense", without the more sophisticated, economist's understanding of what property is, and means.
The battle to promote educated opinion is a difficult one indeed, requiring a honing of arguing skills so that the informed opinion can be presented as common sense over the prejudiced one.
I think, personally, that the root of the problem is deeper than patents.
iRate and TiVo are really the same idea, so let me suggest Penny Black. Sorry. Hashcash, Instead.
Note that Hashcash was first, but that Penny Black 'looks' more like innovation because of the marketing presentation. Hashcash, due to its straightforward presentation, appears as a mere technical fix. And this is how most Open Source invention and innovation is hidden, IMO.