I gotta agree with you there kickabear. This is the same argument that people make for not touching up old music. The old analog recordings gave older music a tone, warth, and quality that a lot of nodern digital recordings don't have. A lot of musicians still love the old tube amplifiers for the same reason. True music afficianados listen to Jimi Hendrix in non-remastered form.
That's what I did. I was a programmer for 6 1/2 years before realizing that I was going to be stuck in a mid level management position in my thirties. No company is ever going to let a programmer run it. (unless that programmer started the company). I realized I needed an advanced degree, and it was a tossup between an MBA and a law degree. Well, schools are pretty much just printing up MBAs, and that degree never seems to teach anypone much except buzzwords anyway. So it was off to law school for me.
And out of about 1,000 students at my school, maybe 10 even qualify to sit for the patent bar, as you have to have a technical or engineering degree. When I get out of law school, I'll be ablt ot do aeverything any other lawyer (except an admiralty lawyer) can do, and about.1% can do my job.
It's not the lawyers that are causing IP legal problems, it's companies. Very few actually innovate, and as tech gets more and more advanced, the cost associated with researching new treach goes up exponentially. If companies can't make money off of the product of their research, why do it? So a lot of companies are patenting incremental improvements to their work.
Besides if things are fucked up, do you work from the inside, or troll on/. about how no one's doing anything about all the IP lawyers?
Actually, the method itself is patentable int he current patent rules. Regarding my example you cite on solar cells,
1) reordering a process is to inventive, as there are no new inventive steps. Your opinion on that one is correct.
2)Applying them in a different context is a different use for the solar cells, which is not the subject of the solar cell produciton method patent.
3) If the process requires a new machine, you can patent that. The problem is, you did all the work to come up with and perfect a new method for making the solar cells. If someone can get around the patent on the machine, they can still use your method if you can't patent method. That's because your patent would only be on the machine, and not the process or product.
4) The 'thing' you speak of that would be patentable is the actual method.
5) Good ideas are not patentable. The term used is 'reducing the invention to pratice'. YOu may have a great idea, but until you figure out how to get the idea to work, yo do not have anything patentable. Once you get the idea to work, it's no longer an idea, it's an invention, whether it is a method or a physical object.
or they could just sell it through a chinese ditributor. Like they sell their software through American distributors here in the U.S. Ever buy software directly from MS? Doesn't happen very often.
Well, I think your posting here could be claimed as "keeeping up with current technology trends".
My understanding is that examiners' effective work performance is essentially rated by the number of apps and OAs that they crank through. If that's the case, is seems a shame as some applications certainly require more stringent scrutiny.
And don't you think that learning the art on the job kind of keeps examiners from discovering what other experienced praticioners in the field would think of as commonplace?
See any good perpetual motion machines come through lately?
Out of curiosity 1) did you have any professional experience in the field you examine before going to work at the USPTO. 2) Do you find that a large portion of the lower level examiners, or a large portion of the examiners actually doing front line examination speak English on a highly fluent level? Maybe I have the wrong impression.
By the way, shouldn't you be looking for prior art on some obvious patents instead of posting on/.? I keed, I keed.
Law is a professional degree, so you need an undergrad degree as well as a law degree to be a lawyer. To be a patent attorney, you need a techinical undergrad degree as well as a law degree. Therefore, lawyers are more likely to be better educated than examiners. Most of the examiners get their jobs straight out of undergrad, and have little practical experience.
BUt you have to be able to understand English well in order to really understand what these patents cover. Like the difference between the phrases "one of " and "one of a group of". I may have given the wrong impression, stating that the examiners have english as a second language. What I meant to convery was that their English is limited, and therefore wily lawyers can get things past them. I would point to the recent Australian patent on the wheel as an example.
The USPTO didn't officially start granting software patents until 1996. As we all know, software patents were getting granted before that. The trick? Just claim a mthod for doing something that can be run on a computer. It's a smarter way to file anyway, because it prevents people from getting around a pure software patent by implementing something solely in hardware, or even manually.
As for doing away with all method patents, most patents have some method attached to them. Patent holders generally don't create that many new physical devices. (And most of those get design patents, not utility patents). Most of the new inventions are processes. The United States is no longer a manufacturing powerhouse, we don't make that many tangible goods, we create ideas. Doing away with method patents would also create a disincentive for people to improve how things are made. Got a cheaper way to make solar cells? If you can't patent the method, you just keep it secret. If it were patented, people could use the idea after 20 years, when the patent expires. With no patent, the idea may never get into the public domain.
We need a bat-signal for the Public Patent Foundation and the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Looks like I know where this year's charitable donations are going.
You can submit the prior art yourself. Just send soemthing in in writing to the USPTO, showing where, the prior art is written down. The art gets include in the Patent's file wrapper. If it's really good prior art, you can ask the Patent Commisioner to re-examine the file, which he may do for free. If he delicnes to re-examine for free, you can send in a check (I think its $7000) to get the re-examination done.
Streamlining the courts is exactly why the Federal Circuit was created. The idea was to hear cases on specialized fields not seen very often by regular circuits. Mostly they do maritime and patent law. Patent cases can end up in state courts, or regular federal courts, but tat usualy happens when the underlying issue is something other than a patent.
And don't forget the jury trial. Do you think that anyone wants Ma and Pa Kettle deciding whether Pfizer is infringing on Merck's patent? (I know this is why there are Markman hearings, but you can still have a jury determine factual infringement.)
The reason patent litigation is expensive is because so much is riding on it. For example, look at Eolas v Microsoft. half a billion dollars? rately do we see cases with that kind of money tied to them. Even class action lawsuits don't generaly get that high.
As a side note, patent law practitioners carry the most expensive malpractice insurnace on the planet because of the associated costs. Screw up, and you may cost someone billions.
I've used M-Cam, it works great. THe problem is, it only searches the patent database.
One thing to note, the people examining patents are not attorneys. All you need is a techinical degree, like chemistry, physics, or engineering. You need only qualify to sit for the patent agents exam. I don't even think you actually have to take the patent agents exam to be an axaminer, and if you're an examiner for 5 years, you can waive the exam to become a registered patent agent. As an aside, the USPTO is recruiting at my law school for patent examiners, and I don't think anyone can afford to pay back $100K+ of law school loans on what the government pays (around $35K i believe).
The problem is that you get a lot of people who have english as a second language that go into government service because you don't have to be particularly qualified or competent, you just have to pass a civil service exam. Most examiners leave the PTO after a few years to make bigger money prosecuting (filing) applications.
Having dealt with the USPTO, the biggest problem is that PTO examiners generally only examine the US patent database. They don't realy search online for more prior art. Additionally, even if there is something that eveyone in the field knows about, but nothing is written down, the examiner probably can't point to it and say it's prior art. That's the reason so many software patents get granted. As a former programmer, I know I may comment my code, discuss my solutions on message boards, but rarely did I write a book or post a webpage on a clever hack. There's no paper trail.
The United States used to be the country aothers looked to for patentability. If a patent had been granted in the United States, then it was pretty certain that other countries would grant the same patent with little examination. Now, the U.S. has been slipping, and Europe and Japan do a much more thorough examination.
The power to grant patents and coipyrights is in the Constitution. One of the big coyright laws was passed in 1909, long before the RIAA. the las wasn't updates until 1976, and then again in the 90s as the sonny bono copyright extension act.
Jack Valenti of the MPAA has been quoted as saying that copyurights should last forever less a day. The united states lagged behind Europe for many years on the length of coyright term. The '76 act was created to bringthe U.S. in line with the Berne convention, where copyright terms in the U.S. were extended to match that of Europe. The '76 act was the act that made copyright term life +70 years, where it had previously been 56 years.
If these guys are writing the laws, they're not very good at it.
Granted, most of the latest revisions are pro- *AA, but they aren't driving the legislation like most people assume.
If you compare patent law to copyright law, you see that patent law has a specific provision preventing contributory infringement, and copyright does not. Incidentally, this is one of the reasons that the Supreme Court found that Sony's Betamax player did not contributorily infringe. You can be sure that the *AAs would just love to have contributory infringement in a statute.
THe RIAA is just push the boundaries of the law more than any other group. This is probably becausehte nature of the infringement is public, that is, by members of the public.
And while the laws have changed, that is natural regarding any legal concept. The definitions, however ahve largely remained the same. an 1884 case regarding copyright infringment of a photograph of Oscar Wilde is still being taught in law school. (Burrow-Giles Lithographic Co. v. Sarony, 111 U.S. 53).
1. Damages are not considered criminal punishment.
2. The RIAA doesn't want to go to court because they'll probably lose a jury trial for being a-holes.
3. It'd cost so much to litigate that it wouldn;t be worth it, as there is no guarantee that they would win attorney's fees. And even if they did get a huge judgement, if there's no money, there's no way to collect. You can't go to jail for debt.
4. I assume you mean substantive due process. Most likely there wouldn;t be a procedural due process problem. There's no guarantee of substantive due process in a civil case, as another citizen cannot violate the constitution with respect to another citizen. You may notice that most of the clauses and amendments start with "Congress shall make no law...". If you mean that the punishment is too harsh for the crime, the Supreme Court has very often said that Congress can set fines almost as high as it likes. Additionally, The Surpeme COurt has been hearing copyright infringment suits for some time now. If the penalties were too draconian, they would not have upheld them.
That's great if your site is only visited by geeks
on
Web Designer's Reference
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Grannell firmly advocates designing for standards compliance, usability, accessibility, and last and least, visual design.
If people keep using HTML, browers will continue to support it. Designing for standards compliance is great, but a crappy website that loads on any standards compiant browser is a lot less useful than a beautiful, usable website that loads on the major brosers like Firefox, IE, Opera and Safari.
Ever heard someone complain about an ugly website that's hard to navigate? we've all done it.
Ever heard anyone complain that standard HTML didn't look the same on all broswers? Not too often I bet.
And standards compliance is great, but with 1) IE having a 90% market share, and 2) IE not being standards compliant, doesn't that mean that most internet users aren't using a standards compliant browser?
While you can get punitive damages in a civil case, punitive damages aren't generally awarded in copyright cases. They're statutory, set by statute at between $500 and $20000.
because it's against the law. If someone steals you car, you don't just get the car back, hopefully someone goes to jail.
Cuban needs to talk to his lawyer, get his misinformation straightened out. There's a carrot and a stick for registering copyrights. The stick is: if you register your copyright, 70 years after you die, it goes into the public domain. the carrot is that you get a semi-monopoly during the copyright term. Part of that monopoly is getting statutory damages. That's not actual damages, or the money lost, it's damages set by statute. I believe statutory damages are currently between $500 and $20,000 per violation.
It does seem like Yahoo may be bringing prices into the mainstream range. Can the record companies finally have gotten their shit together? I mean $60 for a year of all-you-can-eat music? Less than half the price of XM or Sirius, and $60 doesn't go very far on iTunes.
What does this have to do with the Constitution? I assume you mean the First Amendment, which starts out "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech..."
It's HP's site. They get to do whatever they want with it.
It's not an argument against evolution. I don't think that we're close to being finished evolving. In 20 million years we probalby won't need sleep, as under evolution, sleep is though to be a mechanism to keep humans out of trouble during times they are at a disadvantage, i.e. nighttime. And as for protective shells, few mammals or large creatures have such a shell, so we have probably evolved away from them. (I know that armadillos have shells, and turtles are not mammals.) And humans don't need to be precognitive. We just need to consider the longer view.
Humans don't need to be a perfect species, they just don't seem to be very intellegently designed. And if God made us so wonderful and fearful, it seems like a cruel joke, or a bad experiment. (besides, if God is all-knowing, etc, doesn't he know how things will turn out? And why would a supreme being need to create such an imperfect creature to worship him? The ego on that guy.)
That if humans are the product of intelligent design, that we were designed by something with a crappy intellegence.
1) Humans are far too shortsighted (philosophically that is). Man can't keep from screwing up his own planet. Look a tthe self destriuctive behaviors that humans undertake in groups and singly every day. Anyone who has been stuck trying to make a left turn in Queens can see that humans rarely take the long view. (everyone pulls all the way into the intersection, blocking people trying to turn left in front of them. When both sides of the road do this, no one can turn left.) Most people are trying to maximize their short term progress at the expense of long term goals.
2) The human body is far too fragile for what we use it for. Humans are essentially big bags of soft tissue suppoorted by fragile endoskeletons. If we were designed from an intellegent standpoint, why are some major organs not protected by the rib cage? We can live without intestines and kidneys, but not without a appendix? Why are our joints and bones so prone to stress and breakage? Why do we need sleep? Seems like an easy way to get eaten by a predator, and impinges on the time we could be using to amass food, procreate, and play HL2.
3) Humans don't get along with each other very well. The species seems dedicated to proving the superiority one small group or another. Sounds like survival of the fittest to me. A more intellegent design would be to have less murderous instinct, more sense of community.
I grew up in the south, and some of the things I heard coming from the religious nuts mouths was unbelievable. I once heard a church youth group minister give a talk about how Satan had planted all the fossils all over the world. His goal was to cause man to question the existence of God.
As sad as this is, these are the people who get elected to office because they pander to people who, as an earlier comment pointed out, are afraid to say "we don't know how man was created, it's easier to believe that someone is out there taking care of us".
As Bill Maher put it, God is an imaginary friend for grownups.
I just started as web master for my law school's website, and we're having a similar problem.
We can't get any help from our hosting provider, so I figured I'd go somewhere else. (The former webmaster was using frontpage to post stuff and doesn't have a valid control panel login. We're looking at adding some PHP and a bulletin/discussion board. I don't think we've been billed for hosting for a couple of months)
The problem is a couple of uears ago, someone registered the domain for 5 years. The person who registered it is long gone, and I can't get ahold of them to change the DNS entries.
I've thought of transferring the domain registration also, does anyone have any suggestions about how well this would work?
THe patent office doesn't accept Food as proof of prior art. There must be something published describing how the special PB&J is made. The patent tradeoff is telling people how you made/did something inventive for a 20 year monopoly.
Because he only did it once. If he'd had sex with 1.2 billion minors, should he still only get 5 years. Let's not forget that, most likely, each spam is a crime, not one crime for spamming. And drug crimes, for instance take into account the amount and intent of the offending material. 1/2 an ounce of marijuana? a ticket or a month or two in jail. 200 pounds of weed? Buh Bye.
It doesn't always make sense, because if someone were to rob a bank for $10mil, it would not nearly be as serious as robbing 10mil banks for $1 each.
But that's the way the legislature drafted the law. It'll be interesting to see if the Appeals court will uphold this. But don't forget, we always have the option of voting with out feet. Helllllloooooo Canada.
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I gotta agree with you there kickabear. This is the same argument that people make for not touching up old music. The old analog recordings gave older music a tone, warth, and quality that a lot of nodern digital recordings don't have. A lot of musicians still love the old tube amplifiers for the same reason. True music afficianados listen to Jimi Hendrix in non-remastered form.
That's what I did. I was a programmer for 6 1/2 years before realizing that I was going to be stuck in a mid level management position in my thirties. No company is ever going to let a programmer run it. (unless that programmer started the company). I realized I needed an advanced degree, and it was a tossup between an MBA and a law degree. Well, schools are pretty much just printing up MBAs, and that degree never seems to teach anypone much except buzzwords anyway. So it was off to law school for me.
.1% can do my job.
/. about how no one's doing anything about all the IP lawyers?
And out of about 1,000 students at my school, maybe 10 even qualify to sit for the patent bar, as you have to have a technical or engineering degree. When I get out of law school, I'll be ablt ot do aeverything any other lawyer (except an admiralty lawyer) can do, and about
It's not the lawyers that are causing IP legal problems, it's companies. Very few actually innovate, and as tech gets more and more advanced, the cost associated with researching new treach goes up exponentially. If companies can't make money off of the product of their research, why do it? So a lot of companies are patenting incremental improvements to their work.
Besides if things are fucked up, do you work from the inside, or troll on
Actually, the method itself is patentable int he current patent rules. Regarding my example you cite on solar cells,
1) reordering a process is to inventive, as there are no new inventive steps. Your opinion on that one is correct.
2)Applying them in a different context is a different use for the solar cells, which is not the subject of the solar cell produciton method patent.
3) If the process requires a new machine, you can patent that. The problem is, you did all the work to come up with and perfect a new method for making the solar cells. If someone can get around the patent on the machine, they can still use your method if you can't patent method. That's because your patent would only be on the machine, and not the process or product.
4) The 'thing' you speak of that would be patentable is the actual method.
5) Good ideas are not patentable. The term used is 'reducing the invention to pratice'. YOu may have a great idea, but until you figure out how to get the idea to work, yo do not have anything patentable. Once you get the idea to work, it's no longer an idea, it's an invention, whether it is a method or a physical object.
or they could just sell it through a chinese ditributor. Like they sell their software through American distributors here in the U.S. Ever buy software directly from MS? Doesn't happen very often.
Well, I think your posting here could be claimed as "keeeping up with current technology trends".
My understanding is that examiners' effective work performance is essentially rated by the number of apps and OAs that they crank through. If that's the case, is seems a shame as some applications certainly require more stringent scrutiny.
And don't you think that learning the art on the job kind of keeps examiners from discovering what other experienced praticioners in the field would think of as commonplace?
See any good perpetual motion machines come through lately?
Out of curiosity 1) did you have any professional experience in the field you examine before going to work at the USPTO. 2) Do you find that a large portion of the lower level examiners, or a large portion of the examiners actually doing front line examination speak English on a highly fluent level? Maybe I have the wrong impression.
/.? I keed, I keed.
By the way, shouldn't you be looking for prior art on some obvious patents instead of posting on
Law is a professional degree, so you need an undergrad degree as well as a law degree to be a lawyer. To be a patent attorney, you need a techinical undergrad degree as well as a law degree. Therefore, lawyers are more likely to be better educated than examiners. Most of the examiners get their jobs straight out of undergrad, and have little practical experience.
BUt you have to be able to understand English well in order to really understand what these patents cover. Like the difference between the phrases "one of " and "one of a group of". I may have given the wrong impression, stating that the examiners have english as a second language. What I meant to convery was that their English is limited, and therefore wily lawyers can get things past them. I would point to the recent Australian patent on the wheel as an example.
The USPTO didn't officially start granting software patents until 1996. As we all know, software patents were getting granted before that. The trick? Just claim a mthod for doing something that can be run on a computer. It's a smarter way to file anyway, because it prevents people from getting around a pure software patent by implementing something solely in hardware, or even manually.
As for doing away with all method patents, most patents have some method attached to them. Patent holders generally don't create that many new physical devices. (And most of those get design patents, not utility patents). Most of the new inventions are processes. The United States is no longer a manufacturing powerhouse, we don't make that many tangible goods, we create ideas. Doing away with method patents would also create a disincentive for people to improve how things are made. Got a cheaper way to make solar cells? If you can't patent the method, you just keep it secret. If it were patented, people could use the idea after 20 years, when the patent expires. With no patent, the idea may never get into the public domain.
We need a bat-signal for the Public Patent Foundation and the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Looks like I know where this year's charitable donations are going.
You can submit the prior art yourself. Just send soemthing in in writing to the USPTO, showing where, the prior art is written down. The art gets include in the Patent's file wrapper. If it's really good prior art, you can ask the Patent Commisioner to re-examine the file, which he may do for free. If he delicnes to re-examine for free, you can send in a check (I think its $7000) to get the re-examination done.
Problem is, MS get to have their say as well.
Some very wise observations Uruk.
Streamlining the courts is exactly why the Federal Circuit was created. The idea was to hear cases on specialized fields not seen very often by regular circuits. Mostly they do maritime and patent law. Patent cases can end up in state courts, or regular federal courts, but tat usualy happens when the underlying issue is something other than a patent.
And don't forget the jury trial. Do you think that anyone wants Ma and Pa Kettle deciding whether Pfizer is infringing on Merck's patent? (I know this is why there are Markman hearings, but you can still have a jury determine factual infringement.)
The reason patent litigation is expensive is because so much is riding on it. For example, look at Eolas v Microsoft. half a billion dollars? rately do we see cases with that kind of money tied to them. Even class action lawsuits don't generaly get that high.
As a side note, patent law practitioners carry the most expensive malpractice insurnace on the planet because of the associated costs. Screw up, and you may cost someone billions.
I've used M-Cam, it works great. THe problem is, it only searches the patent database.
One thing to note, the people examining patents are not attorneys. All you need is a techinical degree, like chemistry, physics, or engineering. You need only qualify to sit for the patent agents exam. I don't even think you actually have to take the patent agents exam to be an axaminer, and if you're an examiner for 5 years, you can waive the exam to become a registered patent agent. As an aside, the USPTO is recruiting at my law school for patent examiners, and I don't think anyone can afford to pay back $100K+ of law school loans on what the government pays (around $35K i believe).
The problem is that you get a lot of people who have english as a second language that go into government service because you don't have to be particularly qualified or competent, you just have to pass a civil service exam. Most examiners leave the PTO after a few years to make bigger money prosecuting (filing) applications.
Having dealt with the USPTO, the biggest problem is that PTO examiners generally only examine the US patent database. They don't realy search online for more prior art. Additionally, even if there is something that eveyone in the field knows about, but nothing is written down, the examiner probably can't point to it and say it's prior art. That's the reason so many software patents get granted. As a former programmer, I know I may comment my code, discuss my solutions on message boards, but rarely did I write a book or post a webpage on a clever hack. There's no paper trail.
The United States used to be the country aothers looked to for patentability. If a patent had been granted in the United States, then it was pretty certain that other countries would grant the same patent with little examination. Now, the U.S. has been slipping, and Europe and Japan do a much more thorough examination.
The power to grant patents and coipyrights is in the Constitution. One of the big coyright laws was passed in 1909, long before the RIAA. the las wasn't updates until 1976, and then again in the 90s as the sonny bono copyright extension act.
Jack Valenti of the MPAA has been quoted as saying that copyurights should last forever less a day. The united states lagged behind Europe for many years on the length of coyright term. The '76 act was created to bringthe U.S. in line with the Berne convention, where copyright terms in the U.S. were extended to match that of Europe. The '76 act was the act that made copyright term life +70 years, where it had previously been 56 years. If these guys are writing the laws, they're not very good at it.
Granted, most of the latest revisions are pro- *AA, but they aren't driving the legislation like most people assume.
If you compare patent law to copyright law, you see that patent law has a specific provision preventing contributory infringement, and copyright does not. Incidentally, this is one of the reasons that the Supreme Court found that Sony's Betamax player did not contributorily infringe. You can be sure that the *AAs would just love to have contributory infringement in a statute.
THe RIAA is just push the boundaries of the law more than any other group. This is probably becausehte nature of the infringement is public, that is, by members of the public.
And while the laws have changed, that is natural regarding any legal concept. The definitions, however ahve largely remained the same. an 1884 case regarding copyright infringment of a photograph of Oscar Wilde is still being taught in law school. (Burrow-Giles Lithographic Co. v. Sarony, 111 U.S. 53).
1. Damages are not considered criminal punishment.
...". If you mean that the punishment is too harsh for the crime, the Supreme Court has very often said that Congress can set fines almost as high as it likes. Additionally, The Surpeme COurt has been hearing copyright infringment suits for some time now. If the penalties were too draconian, they would not have upheld them.
2. The RIAA doesn't want to go to court because they'll probably lose a jury trial for being a-holes.
3. It'd cost so much to litigate that it wouldn;t be worth it, as there is no guarantee that they would win attorney's fees. And even if they did get a huge judgement, if there's no money, there's no way to collect. You can't go to jail for debt.
4. I assume you mean substantive due process. Most likely there wouldn;t be a procedural due process problem. There's no guarantee of substantive due process in a civil case, as another citizen cannot violate the constitution with respect to another citizen. You may notice that most of the clauses and amendments start with "Congress shall make no law
Grannell firmly advocates designing for standards compliance, usability, accessibility, and last and least, visual design.
If people keep using HTML, browers will continue to support it. Designing for standards compliance is great, but a crappy website that loads on any standards compiant browser is a lot less useful than a beautiful, usable website that loads on the major brosers like Firefox, IE, Opera and Safari.
Ever heard someone complain about an ugly website that's hard to navigate? we've all done it.
Ever heard anyone complain that standard HTML didn't look the same on all broswers? Not too often I bet.
And standards compliance is great, but with 1) IE having a 90% market share, and 2) IE not being standards compliant, doesn't that mean that most internet users aren't using a standards compliant browser?
While you can get punitive damages in a civil case, punitive damages aren't generally awarded in copyright cases. They're statutory, set by statute at between $500 and $20000.
because it's against the law. If someone steals you car, you don't just get the car back, hopefully someone goes to jail.
Cuban needs to talk to his lawyer, get his misinformation straightened out. There's a carrot and a stick for registering copyrights. The stick is: if you register your copyright, 70 years after you die, it goes into the public domain. the carrot is that you get a semi-monopoly during the copyright term. Part of that monopoly is getting statutory damages. That's not actual damages, or the money lost, it's damages set by statute. I believe statutory damages are currently between $500 and $20,000 per violation.
It does seem like Yahoo may be bringing prices into the mainstream range. Can the record companies finally have gotten their shit together? I mean $60 for a year of all-you-can-eat music? Less than half the price of XM or Sirius, and $60 doesn't go very far on iTunes.
What does this have to do with the Constitution? I assume you mean the First Amendment, which starts out "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech..."
It's HP's site. They get to do whatever they want with it.
It's not an argument against evolution. I don't think that we're close to being finished evolving. In 20 million years we probalby won't need sleep, as under evolution, sleep is though to be a mechanism to keep humans out of trouble during times they are at a disadvantage, i.e. nighttime. And as for protective shells, few mammals or large creatures have such a shell, so we have probably evolved away from them. (I know that armadillos have shells, and turtles are not mammals.) And humans don't need to be precognitive. We just need to consider the longer view.
Humans don't need to be a perfect species, they just don't seem to be very intellegently designed. And if God made us so wonderful and fearful, it seems like a cruel joke, or a bad experiment. (besides, if God is all-knowing, etc, doesn't he know how things will turn out? And why would a supreme being need to create such an imperfect creature to worship him? The ego on that guy.)
That if humans are the product of intelligent design, that we were designed by something with a crappy intellegence.
1) Humans are far too shortsighted (philosophically that is). Man can't keep from screwing up his own planet. Look a tthe self destriuctive behaviors that humans undertake in groups and singly every day. Anyone who has been stuck trying to make a left turn in Queens can see that humans rarely take the long view. (everyone pulls all the way into the intersection, blocking people trying to turn left in front of them. When both sides of the road do this, no one can turn left.) Most people are trying to maximize their short term progress at the expense of long term goals.
2) The human body is far too fragile for what we use it for. Humans are essentially big bags of soft tissue suppoorted by fragile endoskeletons. If we were designed from an intellegent standpoint, why are some major organs not protected by the rib cage? We can live without intestines and kidneys, but not without a appendix? Why are our joints and bones so prone to stress and breakage? Why do we need sleep? Seems like an easy way to get eaten by a predator, and impinges on the time we could be using to amass food, procreate, and play HL2.
3) Humans don't get along with each other very well. The species seems dedicated to proving the superiority one small group or another. Sounds like survival of the fittest to me. A more intellegent design would be to have less murderous instinct, more sense of community.
I grew up in the south, and some of the things I heard coming from the religious nuts mouths was unbelievable. I once heard a church youth group minister give a talk about how Satan had planted all the fossils all over the world. His goal was to cause man to question the existence of God.
As sad as this is, these are the people who get elected to office because they pander to people who, as an earlier comment pointed out, are afraid to say "we don't know how man was created, it's easier to believe that someone is out there taking care of us".
As Bill Maher put it, God is an imaginary friend for grownups.
I just started as web master for my law school's website, and we're having a similar problem.
We can't get any help from our hosting provider, so I figured I'd go somewhere else. (The former webmaster was using frontpage to post stuff and doesn't have a valid control panel login. We're looking at adding some PHP and a bulletin/discussion board. I don't think we've been billed for hosting for a couple of months)
The problem is a couple of uears ago, someone registered the domain for 5 years. The person who registered it is long gone, and I can't get ahold of them to change the DNS entries.
I've thought of transferring the domain registration also, does anyone have any suggestions about how well this would work?
THe patent office doesn't accept Food as proof of prior art. There must be something published describing how the special PB&J is made. The patent tradeoff is telling people how you made/did something inventive for a 20 year monopoly.
Because he only did it once. If he'd had sex with 1.2 billion minors, should he still only get 5 years. Let's not forget that, most likely, each spam is a crime, not one crime for spamming. And drug crimes, for instance take into account the amount and intent of the offending material. 1/2 an ounce of marijuana? a ticket or a month or two in jail. 200 pounds of weed? Buh Bye.
It doesn't always make sense, because if someone were to rob a bank for $10mil, it would not nearly be as serious as robbing 10mil banks for $1 each.
But that's the way the legislature drafted the law. It'll be interesting to see if the Appeals court will uphold this. But don't forget, we always have the option of voting with out feet. Helllllloooooo Canada.
and the hits just keep on coming.