I spend several hundred pounds per year on tickets for live gigs. I don't spend anything like that on CDs, but I generally only go to gigs where I've already listed to a recording and decide I like the artist in question.
That's where the money is for musicians, to take an example. Even if the show was performed by robots, it isn't something you can copy easily, so that is always going to be a source of income for artists.
Or more likely, their local software companies would make more money selling alternatives. And those cheap alternatives would end up on the store shelves in Europe and USA.
If you steal from a grocery store, you deprive them of the groceries they paid for.
Pirating is more like buying from a different grocery store, or growing the food in your garden. That way you deprive them of the sale, but they still have the groceries to sell to someone else.
I'd rather do a full update of the whole system when I'm ready for it than have Adobe Reader insisting on updating itself and rebooting the system when I want view a pdf on a website.
Firstly, the requirements for a smartphone and for a media centre PC are so different that a common base distro probably isn't going to work for either.
For starters, typing apt-get install smartphone-system on a numeric keypad is going to be a pain, and having support for numeric keypad typing is unnecessary bloat on a media centre system.
Also, I don't see how having a single centralised distro is going to help innovation. Getting your ideas implemented would depend on either getting onto the Debian packaging committee or persuading someone on it to go with your idea. It is much better if you can just get on and do it yourself.
Having different distros, even in the same market segment means that different distros can try out different ideas, and people can decide which one is best for them. I personally prefer Mandriva's urpmi system to apt-get. Other people have different opinions. At the moment, everyone is happy, because they can use which ever one they want.
Depends. There are plenty of patents involved in a standard PC. Intel has more than a few patents for example. The stripped down computer could get patents for the same sort of reasons that a full sized computer gets them.
They would at best be put back in the position they would have been in had the USPTO refused their application in the first place. I don't think that means you get your application fee back. It certainly doesn't mean you get your patent attorney fees back, and that is by far the biggest part of the cost of applying for a patent.
What I'm interested in is the position where people have been paying royalties for a patent that is subsequently declared invalid.
If there is already an established method of copying and pasting genes across, and I believe there is, then copying and pasting the night vision gene would be "obvious".
But if you invent some sort of treatment for someone who has the Colour Blindness gene, using your research of the differences between the colour blind gene and the normal gene, that treatment might be patentable, provided it isn't obvious.
Political activism can work. It did in Europe. Campaign contributions are all very well, but if you want to be re-elected, you do need to give your voters at least some of what they want.
If you can do something with a standard PC and software, you aren't going to want to produce custom made hardware to do the same task. If you can't, then whatever peripheral you have to attach to your PC is potentially patentable.
Telecoms cartels have nothing to do with patents. They arise because of either spectrum licences in the case of wireless communications, or the fact that you can't put new cables down without government permission, and even if you do get that, it is prohibitively expensive to do so.
You disclose your address, and the merchant checks that it matches what your credit card co has on file. That is one of the ways they check it isn't a fraudulent transaction.
Also, the first four digits of the card tell you which bank issued it. For example 4929 is Barclays Bank in the UK.
Which is a US military base. In Britain, if we sell goods to a US military base located in Britain, it is considered an export to the US for tax purposes.
I don't think you would have broken any German laws by downloading a 41bit browser. And I don't think you would have broken the US export laws if you downloaded your 41bit browser from a country other than the US. For example one of the Russian plugins that were available for Netscape at the time, or where an American company printed out the source code, mailed it to Europe and had it scanned in and re-compiled.
There are two important points there. It is only for the purpose of promoting the progress of science and useful arts, and it is questionable whether software patents do that, and it is for limited times. Patents are for limited times, but copyrights effectively are not.
That is certainly the case in England. Note that Scotland is a completely different country as far as legal systems are concerned. Northern Ireland is also a different country, but their legal system is fairly similar to England's.
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I spend several hundred pounds per year on tickets for live gigs. I don't spend anything like that on CDs, but I generally only go to gigs where I've already listed to a recording and decide I like the artist in question.
That's where the money is for musicians, to take an example. Even if the show was performed by robots, it isn't something you can copy easily, so that is always going to be a source of income for artists.
Or more likely, their local software companies would make more money selling alternatives. And those cheap alternatives would end up on the store shelves in Europe and USA.
That's not theft either. That is breach of contract, and possibly violation of minimum wage laws depending on where you live.
If you steal from a grocery store, you deprive them of the groceries they paid for.
Pirating is more like buying from a different grocery store, or growing the food in your garden. That way you deprive them of the sale, but they still have the groceries to sell to someone else.
I'd rather do a full update of the whole system when I'm ready for it than have Adobe Reader insisting on updating itself and rebooting the system when I want view a pdf on a website.
Firefox of course was one of the many forks of Seamonkey, and the one that was ultimately successful.
Or how about Fedora, or SuSE, or Slackware, or Mandriva, or Red Hat, or Gentoo, or United Linux, or ...
They do. I think the complaint from some quarters is that there is so many different groups doing it.
Firstly, the requirements for a smartphone and for a media centre PC are so different that a common base distro probably isn't going to work for either.
For starters, typing apt-get install smartphone-system on a numeric keypad is going to be a pain, and having support for numeric keypad typing is unnecessary bloat on a media centre system.
Also, I don't see how having a single centralised distro is going to help innovation. Getting your ideas implemented would depend on either getting onto the Debian packaging committee or persuading someone on it to go with your idea. It is much better if you can just get on and do it yourself.
Having different distros, even in the same market segment means that different distros can try out different ideas, and people can decide which one is best for them. I personally prefer Mandriva's urpmi system to apt-get. Other people have different opinions. At the moment, everyone is happy, because they can use which ever one they want.
20 seconds is a long time if you are switching on a video recorder or a phone.
Depends. There are plenty of patents involved in a standard PC. Intel has more than a few patents for example. The stripped down computer could get patents for the same sort of reasons that a full sized computer gets them.
They would at best be put back in the position they would have been in had the USPTO refused their application in the first place. I don't think that means you get your application fee back. It certainly doesn't mean you get your patent attorney fees back, and that is by far the biggest part of the cost of applying for a patent.
What I'm interested in is the position where people have been paying royalties for a patent that is subsequently declared invalid.
If there is already an established method of copying and pasting genes across, and I believe there is, then copying and pasting the night vision gene would be "obvious".
But if you invent some sort of treatment for someone who has the Colour Blindness gene, using your research of the differences between the colour blind gene and the normal gene, that treatment might be patentable, provided it isn't obvious.
As indeed the European Parliament did.
Political activism can work. It did in Europe. Campaign contributions are all very well, but if you want to be re-elected, you do need to give your voters at least some of what they want.
If you can do something with a standard PC and software, you aren't going to want to produce custom made hardware to do the same task. If you can't, then whatever peripheral you have to attach to your PC is potentially patentable.
Telecoms cartels have nothing to do with patents. They arise because of either spectrum licences in the case of wireless communications, or the fact that you can't put new cables down without government permission, and even if you do get that, it is prohibitively expensive to do so.
You disclose your address, and the merchant checks that it matches what your credit card co has on file. That is one of the ways they check it isn't a fraudulent transaction.
Also, the first four digits of the card tell you which bank issued it. For example 4929 is Barclays Bank in the UK.
Which is a US military base. In Britain, if we sell goods to a US military base located in Britain, it is considered an export to the US for tax purposes.
I don't think you would have broken any German laws by downloading a 41bit browser. And I don't think you would have broken the US export laws if you downloaded your 41bit browser from a country other than the US. For example one of the Russian plugins that were available for Netscape at the time, or where an American company printed out the source code, mailed it to Europe and had it scanned in and re-compiled.
There are two important points there. It is only for the purpose of promoting the progress of science and useful arts, and it is questionable whether software patents do that, and it is for limited times. Patents are for limited times, but copyrights effectively are not.
Slavery is not theft. That's why there is a different law to stop it.
And what if they have ridiculously small heads and even more ridiculously small bodies? And normal sized eyes.
Not in England. In England, the researchers just need to fail to prove that their article was correct.
People elsewhere in this thread talk about "UK law" and "British law". Neither of these things exist.
That is certainly the case in England. Note that Scotland is a completely different country as far as legal systems are concerned. Northern Ireland is also a different country, but their legal system is fairly similar to England's.