Shared strategic interests, money, and nuclear weapons.
To the first point -- the Nixon adminstration saw benefits to detente with Beijing. Better China talking with the US than China talking with the USSR, anyway.
In the present day, they still share an interest in keeping the Korean peninsula from going -completely- bonkers, because if it did, they'd be flooded with vast numbers of Korean refugees. And in this case, they have a huge potential to be helpful because North Korea is heavily dependent on Chinese economic assistance; should they turn off their energy aid, for instance, Pyongyang would definitely notice.
There are other potential avenues for cooperation, such as a mutual opposition to Islamic militants. The Chinese have a slight issue with Islamic separatists in Xinjiang, if memory serves. If they were in communication with a broader movement, then the two governments might be able to help each other here.
To the second point, China's lower cost of labor and potentially huge market makes it an interesting place for investments, reduced somewhat by the higher corruption. Cheaper manufacturing means that the US dollar can essentially go further. And as has been noted by assorted pundits -- we send dollars and receive actual goods or services. It's not in China's interest to cut off trade, either; they've got enough potential problems with labor unrest and so forth to do so.
And as for nuclear weapons, China -is- a nuclear power, estimated to have at least twenty nuclear-capable land-based ICBMs with sufficient range to hit parts of the United States, if memory serves. The US does not have a feasible way of stopping them; nor does China have a feasible way of stopping a theoretical US nuclear strike (whether it be first or retalliatory). Pragmatists on both sides might suggest that it's a bit late for a full-up military confrontation. Instead, we can push for trade liberalization and hope that their government is gradually undermined by their population's increasing desire for a higher standard of living, including perhaps political liberalization.
Also helpful, their leadership appears to be more pragmatic and self-serving than ideological or insane. It's easier to find room for agreement with leaders who aren't convinced of their own perfection or a need for extreme isolation or what-have-you.
Hmmmmm. I wonder; isn't there a pretty heavy market in the relatively unregulated market of "supplements" and so forth? I don't think they're allowed to make specific claims about, say, curing diseases, lest they get treated as actual drugs, but that doesn't seem to stop people from buying gingseng and echinacea (sp?) and so forth.
The marketing would largely be word-of-mouth, perhaps supplemented by low-end cable and specific publications. If you're going to market random herbs or animal parts involved in Chinese folk medicine, for instance, a local vendor might consider putting an ad in a local Chinese-language newspaper and otherwise targeting the local Chinese immigrant community hoping to find customers who've kept with those customs. Perhaps one would also target the New Agers who readily turn to any and all forms of alternative medicine, although many would likely be a bit squeamish over the use of bears' gall bladders and so forth; and those other Westerners who've found Western medicine lacking for whatever reason. There's many who pay attention to more than just the latest ad blitz from Pfizer or whoever.
As a side note, I might suggest that there seems to be some audience for medical marijuana, even though it's not massively marketed or even legal (according to the Feds, anyway, and Federal jurisdiction over this hasn't been struck down AFAIK).
But you *can't* patent "using willow bark to make a pill for headache".
Claims have to include methods, not just applications. That means that the specific process of turning the bark into a pill must be spelled out to the degree that somebody can actually implement it. A different process will not infringe even if it shares the same objective.
The good thing about natural medicines is that they do not have side effects.
That's a hell of an assertion to make.
I could suggest quite a variety of completely natural substances that would have remarkably deleterious effects when taken (in)appropriately. From plants, there's interesting chemicals in foxglove, belladonna, many mushrooms such as cheerfully named "Angel of Death", bitter almonds... And if we expand it to animals, their are numerous animals making quite effective poisons and venoms. Sea snakes, monarch caterpillars, pit vipers...
If memory serves, efficacy is important -- the methods have to work for the stated application. That's really the one reason why you're not supposed to be able to patent impossibilities such as a perpetual-motion machine.
That said, all the good intentions in the world won't buy you controlled long-term studies of sufficient quality to reduce the odds of later getting roundly smacked by an army of lawyers when it turns out that your attempted treatment slightly but reliably increases the chance of suffering a stroke or aneurysm.
Of course, we could do away with the FDA and health regs and say "caveat emptor", but we saw what happened before with all the bogus snake-oils, right?
Saying "it's in their blood" is a cop-out; motives do not grant means, and in some cases the means are bloody hard to get without very significant resources.
It seems to be that if the method of transforming some herbal-based traditional remedy into a more standard medication with, say, controlled dosages and purity standards and all that -- if the specifics of this method happen to be non-obvious and new, that this process would still be patentable.
It wouldn't be useful for stopping people from using the underlying traditional remedy, but it'd be useful for stopping competing concerns from doing their own packaging and distribution (at least using that specific method).
The more you constrain your allegedly random process, such as by insisting that it produce output without "patterns" -- whatever those are -- the less random it actually is.
To put it in more concrete terms, which is more random -- a coin which flips 50-50 heads/tails with no other constraints whatsoever, or a coin which flips 50-50 but will never, say, flip 100 heads in a row, and will never exactly alternate, and will never produce the bit sequence corresponding to the ASCII encoding of the text of Rissanen's first paper on MML, and... ?
What the OP might want to look into is the notion of uncompressability, and perhaps Kolmogorov complexity. Of course, the latter is incomputable, but that's life.
Expensive ink cartridges -is- the major reason why printers can be cheap. There's no real equivalent to software, unless you're expecting to be able to gouge them for support, or pushing them into also buying related premium services from you. And even if Apple wanted to do the latter, there's no shortage of image hosting / printing sites right now.
One might also wonder -- is there a bit of psychology involved? Will people automatically dismiss it as a rival to Photoshop if it were vastly cheaper?
AOL does have some efforts aimed at delivering video content. As broadband grows and the company sees a need to shift to depending more on advertising revenue as well as premium services, it would not be entirely surprising if they did try to leverage the content library.
There's more to accessibility than the exact language. Languages, after all, change over time. In addition, centuries-old literature may contain centuries-old cultural references that may today be rather obscure. It may be a bit much to expect today's readers to be fully aware of who the movers and shakers were in Florentine society circa the time of Dante Aligheri, say, and when that author refers to personages who may have been prominent in -his- era we today may be lost without ample footnotes and other annotations. When Shakespeare uses idioms that have since fallen out of use, the same applies -- and one can reasonably argue that Middle English wordplay is not exactly the main point of studying Shakespeare compared to the broader themes.
"Crime and Punishment", if memory serves, is much easier in terms of names to track than "Anna Karenina" -- where there are formal names, the patronomics, and some Westernized nicknames in addition to the assorted family relationships that might be used to refer to the characters. I don't remember off-hand whether aristocratic titles were also used, but it wouldn't surprise me too much. Time to break out the index cards and draw family trees...
The conjunction of simple things can indeed be patentable, and should be -- the combination in fact can be novel. Saltpeter, nitre, and charcoal are all quite common, but have interesting results when properly combined.
If, in fact, Amazon -was- the first entity to conceive such a system for accepting orders, estimating a reasonable lag time, and then soliciting reviews -- given that "electronic catalogs" were not THAT unusual in 2000 -- that may in fact suggest that it was a novel idea indeed.
Even now, there are many, many vendors which do NOT accept product reviews in any form, let alone actively solicit it specifically from people who have bought the product and only after they've had time to form their ideas about it. Given that this targeting is much more reasonable than how many review sites allow (such as posting as many reviews as they like without any reason to believe that they have used any of the covered product or service, ever), there's a definite added value here. Futhermore, done well, it may help reduce the self-selection bias such as products getting reviewed first in waves by fanboys already predisposed to worshipping the offering and to promoting it to the online world at large.
People sometimes submit reviews for products before they're even in production, for crying out loud, just on the basis of specs gleaned from previews of pre-production models. That's worthless. Reviews from actual customers are more likely to be meaningful.
Now, I'm not an IP lawyer, but I do pay attention when IP lawyers talk, and I get thoroughly annoyed when people believe the article summaries and ignore the readily accessible primary documents.
Despite what Slashdot groupthink might have you believe, it is not relevant whether their is similar art *now*. It IS relevant as to whether there was similar art before the patent was filed -- which is years before the patent is ever granted. Furthermore, objectives are NOT patented; methods are. Thus, unlike what the summary might have you believe, Amazon has not patented a generic method for getting product reviews.
Amazon, for instance, obtained US Patent 6,963,848. This was granted on November 8, 2005. It was *filed* March 2, 2000. PriceGrabber only started grabbing reviews in May of that year, and that by partnering with ConsumerReview.COM -- which may or may not have used methods specified in the patent. Amazon's VERY FIRST CLAIM, for instance, specifies that the covered system must do the receiving of the order AND the later solicitation of a review AFTER a reasonable period of time to allow for an initial experience. Unless ConsumerReview or PriceGrabber itself TAKES THE ORDERS, they would not appear to constitute prior art that would invalidate the first claim.
In fact, ALL TWENTY-EIGHT CLAIMS have this stipulation -- that the system itself takes the order for which a review occurs. Does Epinions take the order, or merely send you to someone else? Does NexTag? Does PriceGrabber? Did you read the freaking patent AT ALL?
Go vomit at your own laziness, and at the Moderator that would declare you Insightful.
It's the content creator, or whomever else holds the rights. This usually isn't the government.
** If memory serves, there has been at least one case in which a local government group copyrighted a code of regulations and prevented the free redistribution thereof. This does strike me as extremely perverse, but more of an abuse by government workers than a flaw in the concept of copyrights, since it's far more of a problem to switch governments than it is to choose a different book to read or movie to watch.
Regarding firearms marketing, that sort of suit has been tried before. It's not really a great idea to market small, inexpensive handguns as fingerprint-resistant, for instance; juries might readily consider that a direct appeal to the criminal market for obvious reasons.
With regards to TiVO, time-shifting and space-shifting that do NOT involve shifting to other people, or the bypassing of digital access protection methods, still tend to be safe. Showing a program to your friends in a non-commercial and private setting will be considered fair use. Don't bother claiming that everybody on millions-wide file sharing network is your friend, however; do that and you're doing a public performance, which is one knock against you in the 'is this fair use' question.
It can actually become a criminal issue under NETA, if memory serves -- but you have to exceed fairly high total-value thresholds within a certain time period.
It's not an asymmetrical situation. You don't want to buy? Fine. It's just as silly for you to claim the right to completely set the parameters of the transaction, however, just as much as you reject the idea of being forced to buy at $20 or so.
You're allowed to reject the vendor's terms -- just as much as he's allowed to reject yours. If you're not both happy, then there's no deal; you part with all your money, but no rights to his content other than what's legally allowed outside of any deal. That's fair.
He may have a valid point, however, about the government playing a large and not necessarily fair role. Capitalism to a large degree depends on even-handed enforcement of certain rules, such as prohibitions on outright fraud and sanctions for breaches of contract. In addition, the greater the government is directly involved as a buyer or seller and the more unified it is, the less you might trust its ability to objectively investigate possible malfeasances when you consider conflicts of interest and assorted entanglements.
Beijing tacitly acknowledges this through the occasional high-profile crackdown, and the occasional extreme severity such as sentencing a former governor to death.
It's a reasonable concern if you're thinking about a large capital investment that you can't simply take with you if local officials decide to squeeze you after you're committed -- perhaps demanding direct bribes, or using governmental powers against you if you don't throw business to somebody, or so forth. Granted, it's probably not nearly as foolhardy as trying to run a high-profile independent media network in Putin's Russia...
Well, yes. If you have an application which is necessary to the development of other applications, then a patent on the prior will block the latter. Assuming, of course, that the former patent is recognized... and you'd have to ask a patent attorney about whether there's any reciprocity between national patent offices.
IIRC, if the former patent is only valid in one country, one could do the research in a second country -- and then even file patents based on said research anywhere, so long as you don't actually perform the originally patented process where it's valid. Anybody using your derivative process (assuming it involves the first, and isn't merely something like a superior alternative) in the first country would need permission from both of you.
No; that'd be immediately invalidated by prior art. However, there may be novel uses of it that/are/ worth patenting -- e.g. if it is useful in new therapeutic methods, or for growing organs in vats.
"While this does not quite boil down to [the patent holders] owning our genes... these rights exclude us from using our genes for those purposes that are covered in the patent," she said.
It's the application of the gene that's patented, not the gene itself.
In this case, it's probably forced. Why would anybody join their network if it were simply the tiniest (by far) of the closed, non-interoperable IM networks, with also the fewest features of any current network-provided client?
And since they're starting with no audience, there's no way in hell it'd make business sense for any other closed IM network to offer interoperability in exchange for merely Google Talk's minimal user base. They'd have to offer something else to make this happen.
It makes sense for Yahoo! and MSN, because they both get something out of it, and because it's significant enough to make AOL a bit twitchy. It doesn't make sense for Yahoo!, MSN, or AOL to open up any of their networks to an upstart with no members for pretty much no gain, any more than Google would let some tiny new search engine get access to everything gained by Google's crawler in exchange for reciprocity from said tiny new search engine.
Go ask some Central Americans about the US support of the right-wing death squads during the 80's. Or ask some Afghans about their opinions of the US's abandonment of Afhganistan to a loose mujahadeen coalition which degenerated into a civil war. Or, hell, the natives -- their few descendants anyway -- about US tactics. Or the European pacifist, no-nuke left (the USSR's 'useful idiots') during the debates over the placement of American nuclear missiles in Western Europe at the height of the Cold War. Or the Germans and Japanese, prior to the Second World War -- or the rest of Europe, between the invasions of 1938 and the US -finally- being forced to openly join in due to December 7, 1941. Weren't Americans regarded as weaklings to be despised, lacking martial spirit and who could be defeated readily?
The Soviets respected American nuclear missiles and the difficulty of eliminating them with a first strike. I don't think they would have openly regarded the capitalist lackey pig-dogs and their bourgeousie slaves as having any moral authority. China, arguably, still doesn't -- but they respect our dollars and our nuclear missiles, so that while they criticize our human rights record they're unlikely to close the country's economic borders and refuse American trade. Khruschev seemed to be willing to gamble that Kennedy lacked the spine to stop the USSR from putting nuclear missiles in Cuba.
And if you call pre-Bush US a paragon of moral virtue, sooner or later somebody's going to bring up the lag time of the abolition of slavery, and the long delay until full legal equality. Oh, and we've been considered pawns of the Zionists since, what, helping out a bit with diplomatic pressure in the Yom Kippur war? And of course we've also been pawns of the multinats, pushing much-hated GM foods and globalization, for years.
Henry Kissinger ring a bell? Some people consider him a war criminal. If memory serves, somebody tried to file charges in a minor European state that claims jurisdiction over all of humanity.
One could go on and on. You're being silly if you think that other countries didn't have -- or manufacture -- reasons to freely criticize the country on assorted alleged moral violations until recently.
Slashdot Mirror
Shared strategic interests, money, and nuclear weapons.
To the first point -- the Nixon adminstration saw benefits to detente with Beijing. Better China talking with the US than China talking with the USSR, anyway.
In the present day, they still share an interest in keeping the Korean peninsula from going -completely- bonkers, because if it did, they'd be flooded with vast numbers of Korean refugees. And in this case, they have a huge potential to be helpful because North Korea is heavily dependent on Chinese economic assistance; should they turn off their energy aid, for instance, Pyongyang would definitely notice.
There are other potential avenues for cooperation, such as a mutual opposition to Islamic militants. The Chinese have a slight issue with Islamic separatists in Xinjiang, if memory serves. If they were in communication with a broader movement, then the two governments might be able to help each other here.
To the second point, China's lower cost of labor and potentially huge market makes it an interesting place for investments, reduced somewhat by the higher corruption. Cheaper manufacturing means that the US dollar can essentially go further. And as has been noted by assorted pundits -- we send dollars and receive actual goods or services. It's not in China's interest to cut off trade, either; they've got enough potential problems with labor unrest and so forth to do so.
And as for nuclear weapons, China -is- a nuclear power, estimated to have at least twenty nuclear-capable land-based ICBMs with sufficient range to hit parts of the United States, if memory serves. The US does not have a feasible way of stopping them; nor does China have a feasible way of stopping a theoretical US nuclear strike (whether it be first or retalliatory). Pragmatists on both sides might suggest that it's a bit late for a full-up military confrontation. Instead, we can push for trade liberalization and hope that their government is gradually undermined by their population's increasing desire for a higher standard of living, including perhaps political liberalization.
Also helpful, their leadership appears to be more pragmatic and self-serving than ideological or insane. It's easier to find room for agreement with leaders who aren't convinced of their own perfection or a need for extreme isolation or what-have-you.
Ohohoho.
.com smackdown? The day-trading fad? Startups spending too much money on Superbowl ads and fancy office chairs?
Because the stock market is run by people who vote with their money, and therefore by people who try to make the most informed decisions they can.
It's not "run" by anybody, except in the sense that exchanges provide a platform and certain rules such as those regarding circuit breakers.
Remember the
Hmmmmm. I wonder; isn't there a pretty heavy market in the relatively unregulated market of "supplements" and so forth? I don't think they're allowed to make specific claims about, say, curing diseases, lest they get treated as actual drugs, but that doesn't seem to stop people from buying gingseng and echinacea (sp?) and so forth.
The marketing would largely be word-of-mouth, perhaps supplemented by low-end cable and specific publications. If you're going to market random herbs or animal parts involved in Chinese folk medicine, for instance, a local vendor might consider putting an ad in a local Chinese-language newspaper and otherwise targeting the local Chinese immigrant community hoping to find customers who've kept with those customs. Perhaps one would also target the New Agers who readily turn to any and all forms of alternative medicine, although many would likely be a bit squeamish over the use of bears' gall bladders and so forth; and those other Westerners who've found Western medicine lacking for whatever reason. There's many who pay attention to more than just the latest ad blitz from Pfizer or whoever.
As a side note, I might suggest that there seems to be some audience for medical marijuana, even though it's not massively marketed or even legal (according to the Feds, anyway, and Federal jurisdiction over this hasn't been struck down AFAIK).
But you *can't* patent "using willow bark to make a pill for headache".
Claims have to include methods, not just applications. That means that the specific process of turning the bark into a pill must be spelled out to the degree that somebody can actually implement it. A different process will not infringe even if it shares the same objective.
The good thing about natural medicines is that they do not have side effects.
That's a hell of an assertion to make.
I could suggest quite a variety of completely natural substances that would have remarkably deleterious effects when taken (in)appropriately. From plants, there's interesting chemicals in foxglove, belladonna, many mushrooms such as cheerfully named "Angel of Death", bitter almonds... And if we expand it to animals, their are numerous animals making quite effective poisons and venoms. Sea snakes, monarch caterpillars, pit vipers...
If memory serves, efficacy is important -- the methods have to work for the stated application. That's really the one reason why you're not supposed to be able to patent impossibilities such as a perpetual-motion machine.
In certain areas, perhaps.
That said, all the good intentions in the world won't buy you controlled long-term studies of sufficient quality to reduce the odds of later getting roundly smacked by an army of lawyers when it turns out that your attempted treatment slightly but reliably increases the chance of suffering a stroke or aneurysm.
Of course, we could do away with the FDA and health regs and say "caveat emptor", but we saw what happened before with all the bogus snake-oils, right?
Saying "it's in their blood" is a cop-out; motives do not grant means, and in some cases the means are bloody hard to get without very significant resources.
It seems to be that if the method of transforming some herbal-based traditional remedy into a more standard medication with, say, controlled dosages and purity standards and all that -- if the specifics of this method happen to be non-obvious and new, that this process would still be patentable.
It wouldn't be useful for stopping people from using the underlying traditional remedy, but it'd be useful for stopping competing concerns from doing their own packaging and distribution (at least using that specific method).
Not really.
The more you constrain your allegedly random process, such as by insisting that it produce output without "patterns" -- whatever those are -- the less random it actually is.
To put it in more concrete terms, which is more random -- a coin which flips 50-50 heads/tails with no other constraints whatsoever, or a coin which flips 50-50 but will never, say, flip 100 heads in a row, and will never exactly alternate, and will never produce the bit sequence corresponding to the ASCII encoding of the text of Rissanen's first paper on MML, and... ?
What the OP might want to look into is the notion of uncompressability, and perhaps Kolmogorov complexity. Of course, the latter is incomputable, but that's life.
Expensive ink cartridges -is- the major reason why printers can be cheap. There's no real equivalent to software, unless you're expecting to be able to gouge them for support, or pushing them into also buying related premium services from you. And even if Apple wanted to do the latter, there's no shortage of image hosting / printing sites right now.
One might also wonder -- is there a bit of psychology involved? Will people automatically dismiss it as a rival to Photoshop if it were vastly cheaper?
AOL does have some efforts aimed at delivering video content. As broadband grows and the company sees a need to shift to depending more on advertising revenue as well as premium services, it would not be entirely surprising if they did try to leverage the content library.
http://www.aol.com/video/
http://search.singingfish.com/sfw/home.jsp
You'd be right, however, in that the company is organized into separate business units -- which do not necessarily see eye-to-eye on everything.
There's more to accessibility than the exact language. Languages, after all, change over time. In addition, centuries-old literature may contain centuries-old cultural references that may today be rather obscure. It may be a bit much to expect today's readers to be fully aware of who the movers and shakers were in Florentine society circa the time of Dante Aligheri, say, and when that author refers to personages who may have been prominent in -his- era we today may be lost without ample footnotes and other annotations. When Shakespeare uses idioms that have since fallen out of use, the same applies -- and one can reasonably argue that Middle English wordplay is not exactly the main point of studying Shakespeare compared to the broader themes.
"Crime and Punishment", if memory serves, is much easier in terms of names to track than "Anna Karenina" -- where there are formal names, the patronomics, and some Westernized nicknames in addition to the assorted family relationships that might be used to refer to the characters. I don't remember off-hand whether aristocratic titles were also used, but it wouldn't surprise me too much. Time to break out the index cards and draw family trees...
The conjunction of simple things can indeed be patentable, and should be -- the combination in fact can be novel. Saltpeter, nitre, and charcoal are all quite common, but have interesting results when properly combined.
If, in fact, Amazon -was- the first entity to conceive such a system for accepting orders, estimating a reasonable lag time, and then soliciting reviews -- given that "electronic catalogs" were not THAT unusual in 2000 -- that may in fact suggest that it was a novel idea indeed.
Even now, there are many, many vendors which do NOT accept product reviews in any form, let alone actively solicit it specifically from people who have bought the product and only after they've had time to form their ideas about it. Given that this targeting is much more reasonable than how many review sites allow (such as posting as many reviews as they like without any reason to believe that they have used any of the covered product or service, ever), there's a definite added value here. Futhermore, done well, it may help reduce the self-selection bias such as products getting reviewed first in waves by fanboys already predisposed to worshipping the offering and to promoting it to the online world at large.
People sometimes submit reviews for products before they're even in production, for crying out loud, just on the basis of specs gleaned from previews of pre-production models. That's worthless. Reviews from actual customers are more likely to be meaningful.
Now, I'm not an IP lawyer, but I do pay attention when IP lawyers talk, and I get thoroughly annoyed when people believe the article summaries and ignore the readily accessible primary documents.
h tml/srchnum.htm&Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=HITOFF&p=1&r=1&l= 50&f=G&d=PALL&s1=6963848.WKU.&OS=PN/6963848&RS=PN/ 6963848
Despite what Slashdot groupthink might have you believe, it is not relevant whether their is similar art *now*. It IS relevant as to whether there was similar art before the patent was filed -- which is years before the patent is ever granted. Furthermore, objectives are NOT patented; methods are. Thus, unlike what the summary might have you believe, Amazon has not patented a generic method for getting product reviews.
http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?u=/neta
Amazon, for instance, obtained US Patent 6,963,848. This was granted on November 8, 2005. It was *filed* March 2, 2000. PriceGrabber only started grabbing reviews in May of that year, and that by partnering with ConsumerReview.COM -- which may or may not have used methods specified in the patent. Amazon's VERY FIRST CLAIM, for instance, specifies that the covered system must do the receiving of the order AND the later solicitation of a review AFTER a reasonable period of time to allow for an initial experience. Unless ConsumerReview or PriceGrabber itself TAKES THE ORDERS, they would not appear to constitute prior art that would invalidate the first claim.
In fact, ALL TWENTY-EIGHT CLAIMS have this stipulation -- that the system itself takes the order for which a review occurs. Does Epinions take the order, or merely send you to someone else? Does NexTag? Does PriceGrabber? Did you read the freaking patent AT ALL?
Go vomit at your own laziness, and at the Moderator that would declare you Insightful.
It's the content creator, or whomever else holds the rights. This usually isn't the government.
** If memory serves, there has been at least one case in which a local government group copyrighted a code of regulations and prevented the free redistribution thereof. This does strike me as extremely perverse, but more of an abuse by government workers than a flaw in the concept of copyrights, since it's far more of a problem to switch governments than it is to choose a different book to read or movie to watch.
Regarding firearms marketing, that sort of suit has been tried before. It's not really a great idea to market small, inexpensive handguns as fingerprint-resistant, for instance; juries might readily consider that a direct appeal to the criminal market for obvious reasons.
With regards to TiVO, time-shifting and space-shifting that do NOT involve shifting to other people, or the bypassing of digital access protection methods, still tend to be safe. Showing a program to your friends in a non-commercial and private setting will be considered fair use. Don't bother claiming that everybody on millions-wide file sharing network is your friend, however; do that and you're doing a public performance, which is one knock against you in the 'is this fair use' question.
It can actually become a criminal issue under NETA, if memory serves -- but you have to exceed fairly high total-value thresholds within a certain time period.
It's not an asymmetrical situation. You don't want to buy? Fine. It's just as silly for you to claim the right to completely set the parameters of the transaction, however, just as much as you reject the idea of being forced to buy at $20 or so.
You're allowed to reject the vendor's terms -- just as much as he's allowed to reject yours. If you're not both happy, then there's no deal; you part with all your money, but no rights to his content other than what's legally allowed outside of any deal. That's fair.
He may have a valid point, however, about the government playing a large and not necessarily fair role. Capitalism to a large degree depends on even-handed enforcement of certain rules, such as prohibitions on outright fraud and sanctions for breaches of contract. In addition, the greater the government is directly involved as a buyer or seller and the more unified it is, the less you might trust its ability to objectively investigate possible malfeasances when you consider conflicts of interest and assorted entanglements.
t ml#cpi2004m 9 _207609.html? fa=eventDetail&id=284
Beijing tacitly acknowledges this through the occasional high-profile crackdown, and the occasional extreme severity such as sentencing a former governor to death.
http://www.transparency.org/cpi/2004/cpi2004.en.h
http://www.abc.net.au/ra/news/stories/s1471412.ht
http://english.people.com.cn/200509/09/eng2005090
http://www.carnegieendowment.org/events/index.cfm
It's a reasonable concern if you're thinking about a large capital investment that you can't simply take with you if local officials decide to squeeze you after you're committed -- perhaps demanding direct bribes, or using governmental powers against you if you don't throw business to somebody, or so forth. Granted, it's probably not nearly as foolhardy as trying to run a high-profile independent media network in Putin's Russia...
Well, yes. If you have an application which is necessary to the development of other applications, then a patent on the prior will block the latter. Assuming, of course, that the former patent is recognized... and you'd have to ask a patent attorney about whether there's any reciprocity between national patent offices.
IIRC, if the former patent is only valid in one country, one could do the research in a second country -- and then even file patents based on said research anywhere, so long as you don't actually perform the originally patented process where it's valid. Anybody using your derivative process (assuming it involves the first, and isn't merely something like a superior alternative) in the first country would need permission from both of you.
No; that'd be immediately invalidated by prior art. However, there may be novel uses of it that /are/ worth patenting -- e.g. if it is useful in new therapeutic methods, or for growing organs in vats.
Submitter should have read the story.
... these rights exclude us from using our genes for those purposes that are covered in the patent," she said.
"While this does not quite boil down to [the patent holders] owning our genes
It's the application of the gene that's patented, not the gene itself.
In this case, it's probably forced. Why would anybody join their network if it were simply the tiniest (by far) of the closed, non-interoperable IM networks, with also the fewest features of any current network-provided client?
And since they're starting with no audience, there's no way in hell it'd make business sense for any other closed IM network to offer interoperability in exchange for merely Google Talk's minimal user base. They'd have to offer something else to make this happen.
It makes sense for Yahoo! and MSN, because they both get something out of it, and because it's significant enough to make AOL a bit twitchy. It doesn't make sense for Yahoo!, MSN, or AOL to open up any of their networks to an upstart with no members for pretty much no gain, any more than Google would let some tiny new search engine get access to everything gained by Google's crawler in exchange for reciprocity from said tiny new search engine.
Go ask some Central Americans about the US support of the right-wing death squads during the 80's. Or ask some Afghans about their opinions of the US's abandonment of Afhganistan to a loose mujahadeen coalition which degenerated into a civil war. Or, hell, the natives -- their few descendants anyway -- about US tactics. Or the European pacifist, no-nuke left (the USSR's 'useful idiots') during the debates over the placement of American nuclear missiles in Western Europe at the height of the Cold War. Or the Germans and Japanese, prior to the Second World War -- or the rest of Europe, between the invasions of 1938 and the US -finally- being forced to openly join in due to December 7, 1941. Weren't Americans regarded as weaklings to be despised, lacking martial spirit and who could be defeated readily?
The Soviets respected American nuclear missiles and the difficulty of eliminating them with a first strike. I don't think they would have openly regarded the capitalist lackey pig-dogs and their bourgeousie slaves as having any moral authority. China, arguably, still doesn't -- but they respect our dollars and our nuclear missiles, so that while they criticize our human rights record they're unlikely to close the country's economic borders and refuse American trade. Khruschev seemed to be willing to gamble that Kennedy lacked the spine to stop the USSR from putting nuclear missiles in Cuba.
And if you call pre-Bush US a paragon of moral virtue, sooner or later somebody's going to bring up the lag time of the abolition of slavery, and the long delay until full legal equality. Oh, and we've been considered pawns of the Zionists since, what, helping out a bit with diplomatic pressure in the Yom Kippur war? And of course we've also been pawns of the multinats, pushing much-hated GM foods and globalization, for years.
Henry Kissinger ring a bell? Some people consider him a war criminal. If memory serves, somebody tried to file charges in a minor European state that claims jurisdiction over all of humanity.
One could go on and on. You're being silly if you think that other countries didn't have -- or manufacture -- reasons to freely criticize the country on assorted alleged moral violations until recently.