Neither Picard nor Bill.G have a product featuring a touchscreen. Microsoft's 2002 tablet needed a stylus, like Palm Pilot. Pre iphone/ipad tablets were specialized PDAs for a very niche market. Smartphones, OTOH, are full blown computers having a huge spectrum of apps.
Believe it ir not, people do want to live in a nice and quiet neighborhood thats off the main road... Because its off the main road.
Good point. While the road in front of your house is public property, it's also not a freeway or a main road. Have the city legislators install speed bumps making for uncomfortable travel if dozens of cars simultaneously want to use the road.
Alternatively, have the city legislators pass laws forbidding Waze to route more than X number of cars during a given time period through that road. So, say no more than 20 cars/hour for some street through Waze.
Bash is a poorly designed language, compared to Python. Bash was great a few decades ago, but it is no match to Python's expressiveness and massive libraries.
But bash is the de facto interface for Unix. When there's bug in the Windows UI, do you call it a bug in the Windows GDI or Windows UI? No, you call it a Windows bug.
People hate on copyrights and patents. But here's a prime example of what happens when you don't protect your work from would-be competitors like Massimo and open-source your work -- you end up getting zero credit and zero profit. You're just a unheard of nobody that helped someone else get rich.
Private pilots can't carry passengers for compensation - with a few, narrowly defined exceptions. These are on the written exam and part of the oral exam given on their checkride. Private pilots are NOT required to have insurance.
Yet somehow, drivers with non-commercial licenses can drive passengers for profit via Uber? Isn't there a big skill difference between commercial and private car license drivers? Why does Uber get to get away with it?
Isn't the internet essentially about middlemen (as software)?/. is a middleman between me and you. Amazon is a middleman between product manufacturers and consumers. Isn't youtube a middleman between video content producers and video watchers?
It's quite funny that in most cases the end producers make between 0% and 20% and the middleman makes 80% or more.
why hasn't Microsoft locked down VBA and macros so that macros in an Office document file cant do anything dangerous.
My guess would be (a) the high cost of redesigning the macro subsystem and (b) users bitching and moaning when new macro language breaks their old scripts -- it would be Y2K all over again.
The Java API is not the protected asset, the specific implementation of it is.
You're very mistaken here. APIs are copyrightable according to a previous judgement from the appeals court. The trial was whether Google's use of those APIs was fair use or not. After all, you can legally quote a few paragraphs from a copyrighted book you are reviewing, under fair use law. This judge is totally wrong if he thinks a competing product/clone constitutes fair use (in which universe?).
And yet, every car on the market today has a steering wheel, a pedal to slow down and a pedal to speed up.
And there are numerous design decisions made in designing the steering wheel and brake pedal and they vary among manufacturers. You're confusing high level (patentable) function with low-level copyrightable designs.
Both java.io.* classes and C's stdio.h specify the interfaces to access files (high level function == file access), yet they have completely different designs (low-level copyrightable design). When Google created Android, API protection was assumed to not exist and therefore Google copied the entire API assuming there would be no problems. Well, if APIs are now copyrightable, so they must pay a licensing fee.
float foo (int bar);// my copyrighted interface.. Then..
float bunny (int wabbit);// you attempt to do useful work
bunny() may be doing something very different from foo(). bunny() infringes on foo() only if you have a patent on all single-int-argument functions that returns a float. That's right, without a patent, bunny() does not infringe on foo() unless there are a lot of semantic similarities in the spec description of each function.
If they intend to legally protect interfaces, they should come up with laws that are a blend of copyright and patent. I don't think copyright in it's pure form can protect interfaces that can be subtly changed to avoid copyright infringement.
On another topic, does Google's victory mean, anyone can create a J2ME clone like Android without paying any licensing fees to Oracle? I don't understand how you can use a competitor's protected assets (Java APIs here) to create a competing commercial product and claim fair use. It would be like allowing Ford to hack into Toyota's computers, steal their car designs and manufacture based on those designs, legally.
This sounds very similar too... elevated light rail transit, which we KNOW how to build now.
Except, it costs a lot of money and real estate to elevate the track. Instead, you save a ton of money and real estate by elevating just the bus/train and keeping the train track at road level.
The term rent is incorrect, because it implies the purchaser will lose access to the book after a certain period (rental period) of time. The correct term would be licensing. The privacy issues can be solved with the reseller (usually the publisher) hiding your identity from the new buyer.
Either way, ebooks are cheaper so don't you already save money even if you don't resell?
Perhaps crowdfunding sites should ban corps that exceed a certain market cap, say $100 million, from participating. Crowdfunding should be limited to small companies trying to bootstrap.
Uh, no. Not if they open-sourced it, which they did. You can't steal what is freely given.
Wrong, Sun hoped you could develop your software on cheap Wintel machines, but run it everywhere, specifically on expensive Sun hardware. Only a moron company spends tens of millions for no ROI.
Apple gives away OS X upgrades for free. Of course, you need a much more powerful machine (costing many thousands of dollars) than what you have to run the new OS. Rinse and repeat the same strategy with iPhone/iOS.
You're a complete moron if you don't understand why you can't play the song you bought for $1, in your movie theater. The $1 pricing is only for personal use, and perhaps family. If you want to entertain more people with that song you need to pay a sum proportional to the number of people that are listening -- the licensing fee.
Are you claiming that since Google used the headers Oracle has lost the ability to use them?
If this is the lame excuse you give for Google using the APIs, then any one can pretty much copy and use any digital content without paying a cent because the original content is not lost by piracy. This is the pirate's excuse for his crimes.
Oracle/Sun created Java to make money. If Google made money using Java, then they owe Oracle some of the money, don't you think?
BTW, steal has many definitions:
2. to appropriate (ideas, credit, words, etc.) without right or acknowledgment.
It doesn't matter what the case is about, if there is a finding that APIs are copyrightable, then we are all screwed.
That's like saying, books are copyrighted, so if you read them, an army of lawyers will descend upon you to sue you, demanding massive licensing "book-reading" fees. LOOL.
That's the future -- if you want multiple implementations of certain APIs, they should either be an open standard, or the corp that owns them should license them to multiple different vendors.
I have repeated this a f**ing billion times that HTTP is not owned by any corp... it's an open standard... and so I don't have pay any licensing fee to reimplement it in my product. So stop repeating same annoying lies every other post.
And how did this interface description come into existence? Did computer software generate it? No. Did an "interface description" fairy write it? No. A designer had to do the work. Out of hundreds of possibilities, the API designer had to select the right one, thereby requiring creative skills.
Sorry, but your phone book analogy is downright wrong and possibly, dishonest. A robot could visit every house in the city, knock on the door and obtain the name, address and telephone number needed to populate the phone book. Therefore, phone book creation == mechanical task == non-creative task. But there's no robot that will write the interface description (API) of a function.
an API is a catalogue, a list of facts, the programming equivalent to a phone book.
Funny, there's only one phone book for any given city. However, for any given problem domain, there are dozens of different API sets, each concentrating on certain aspects and ignoring others -- similar to what designers do while designing something. So much about your theory about "a list of facts."
Populating a phone book with its content is a tedious, simple, boring job. However designing APIs is a difficult endeavor, requiring highly skilled architects. Even tiny defects in the design have a great impact for years or decades to come. Implementing these APIs is often done by programmers of much lower skill than the architects. And you fools still claim the implementation is of greater importance than the API?
Not really. Software companies will all close shop in the U.S. and move their operations to countries where APIs are legally declared not copyrightable.
What a whole lotta FUD. If you create a product by recreating a competitors' API (that is, you provide an alternate implementation to a competitors' API), you could get sued. How many companies create APIs that are used by the public? An extremely tiny portion.
There is no risk in using an API provided by a vendor (e.g., creating a Java program that uses the standard Java API).
Exactly. A ruling that APIs are copyrightable would set off a legal Armageddon.
People would steal less, hopefully. And atrocities like MS ripping off Java to create.net or Google making billions off a Java clone will somehow not be repeated.
the makers of those pieces of software would hold the copyright on TCP/IP and HTTP!
How? Those protocols are public domain. They belong to no one and everyone.
Slashdot Mirror
Neither Picard nor Bill.G have a product featuring a touchscreen. Microsoft's 2002 tablet needed a stylus, like Palm Pilot. Pre iphone/ipad tablets were specialized PDAs for a very niche market. Smartphones, OTOH, are full blown computers having a huge spectrum of apps.
Good point. While the road in front of your house is public property, it's also not a freeway or a main road. Have the city legislators install speed bumps making for uncomfortable travel if dozens of cars simultaneously want to use the road.
Alternatively, have the city legislators pass laws forbidding Waze to route more than X number of cars during a given time period through that road. So, say no more than 20 cars/hour for some street through Waze.
Bash is a poorly designed language, compared to Python. Bash was great a few decades ago, but it is no match to Python's expressiveness and massive libraries.
But bash is the de facto interface for Unix. When there's bug in the Windows UI, do you call it a bug in the Windows GDI or Windows UI? No, you call it a Windows bug.
People hate on copyrights and patents. But here's a prime example of what happens when you don't protect your work from would-be competitors like Massimo and open-source your work -- you end up getting zero credit and zero profit. You're just a unheard of nobody that helped someone else get rich.
Yet somehow, drivers with non-commercial licenses can drive passengers for profit via Uber? Isn't there a big skill difference between commercial and private car license drivers? Why does Uber get to get away with it?
Isn't the internet essentially about middlemen (as software)? /. is a middleman between me and you. Amazon is a middleman between product manufacturers and consumers. Isn't youtube a middleman between video content producers and video watchers?
It's quite funny that in most cases the end producers make between 0% and 20% and the middleman makes 80% or more.
My guess would be (a) the high cost of redesigning the macro subsystem and (b) users bitching and moaning when new macro language breaks their old scripts -- it would be Y2K all over again.
You're very mistaken here. APIs are copyrightable according to a previous judgement from the appeals court. The trial was whether Google's use of those APIs was fair use or not. After all, you can legally quote a few paragraphs from a copyrighted book you are reviewing, under fair use law. This judge is totally wrong if he thinks a competing product/clone constitutes fair use (in which universe?).
And there are numerous design decisions made in designing the steering wheel and brake pedal and they vary among manufacturers. You're confusing high level (patentable) function with low-level copyrightable designs.
Both java.io.* classes and C's stdio.h specify the interfaces to access files (high level function == file access), yet they have completely different designs (low-level copyrightable design). When Google created Android, API protection was assumed to not exist and therefore Google copied the entire API assuming there would be no problems. Well, if APIs are now copyrightable, so they must pay a licensing fee.
bunny() may be doing something very different from foo(). bunny() infringes on foo() only if you have a patent on all single-int-argument functions that returns a float. That's right, without a patent, bunny() does not infringe on foo() unless there are a lot of semantic similarities in the spec description of each function.
If they intend to legally protect interfaces, they should come up with laws that are a blend of copyright and patent. I don't think copyright in it's pure form can protect interfaces that can be subtly changed to avoid copyright infringement.
On another topic, does Google's victory mean, anyone can create a J2ME clone like Android without paying any licensing fees to Oracle? I don't understand how you can use a competitor's protected assets (Java APIs here) to create a competing commercial product and claim fair use. It would be like allowing Ford to hack into Toyota's computers, steal their car designs and manufacture based on those designs, legally.
Except, it costs a lot of money and real estate to elevate the track. Instead, you save a ton of money and real estate by elevating just the bus/train and keeping the train track at road level.
The term rent is incorrect, because it implies the purchaser will lose access to the book after a certain period (rental period) of time. The correct term would be licensing. The privacy issues can be solved with the reseller (usually the publisher) hiding your identity from the new buyer.
Either way, ebooks are cheaper so don't you already save money even if you don't resell?
Maybe readers should be able to resell once or twice, but that's it. The third owner shall be the permanent owner.
Perhaps crowdfunding sites should ban corps that exceed a certain market cap, say $100 million, from participating. Crowdfunding should be limited to small companies trying to bootstrap.
Wrong, Sun hoped you could develop your software on cheap Wintel machines, but run it everywhere, specifically on expensive Sun hardware. Only a moron company spends tens of millions for no ROI.
Apple gives away OS X upgrades for free. Of course, you need a much more powerful machine (costing many thousands of dollars) than what you have to run the new OS. Rinse and repeat the same strategy with iPhone/iOS.
You're a complete moron if you don't understand why you can't play the song you bought for $1, in your movie theater. The $1 pricing is only for personal use, and perhaps family. If you want to entertain more people with that song you need to pay a sum proportional to the number of people that are listening -- the licensing fee.
If this is the lame excuse you give for Google using the APIs, then any one can pretty much copy and use any digital content without paying a cent because the original content is not lost by piracy. This is the pirate's excuse for his crimes.
Oracle/Sun created Java to make money. If Google made money using Java, then they owe Oracle some of the money, don't you think?
BTW, steal has many definitions:
2.
to appropriate (ideas, credit, words, etc.) without right or acknowledgment.
http://www.dictionary.com/brow...
Here's another definition of stealing:
profiting from other people's commercial work without paying them anything.
LOL, who made this rule? It must be the guys who enter the market after a software product is successful and start cloning the software.
As opposed to the present where you profit from stealing others' work? Sorry to burst your "utopian" bubble.
That's like saying, books are copyrighted, so if you read them, an army of lawyers will descend upon you to sue you, demanding massive licensing "book-reading" fees. LOOL.
That's the future -- if you want multiple implementations of certain APIs, they should either be an open standard, or the corp that owns them should license them to multiple different vendors.
I have repeated this a f**ing billion times that HTTP is not owned by any corp... it's an open standard... and so I don't have pay any licensing fee to reimplement it in my product. So stop repeating same annoying lies every other post.
LOL, "slashdot.org" is argument passed to the function, not the function itself:
page = http_GET("slashdot.org") // http_GET API is copyrighted, not the "slashdot.org" argument
And how did this interface description come into existence? Did computer software generate it? No. Did an "interface description" fairy write it? No. A designer had to do the work. Out of hundreds of possibilities, the API designer had to select the right one, thereby requiring creative skills.
Sorry, but your phone book analogy is downright wrong and possibly, dishonest. A robot could visit every house in the city, knock on the door and obtain the name, address and telephone number needed to populate the phone book. Therefore, phone book creation == mechanical task == non-creative task. But there's no robot that will write the interface description (API) of a function.
Funny, there's only one phone book for any given city. However, for any given problem domain, there are dozens of different API sets, each concentrating on certain aspects and ignoring others -- similar to what designers do while designing something. So much about your theory about "a list of facts."
Populating a phone book with its content is a tedious, simple, boring job. However designing APIs is a difficult endeavor, requiring highly skilled architects. Even tiny defects in the design have a great impact for years or decades to come. Implementing these APIs is often done by programmers of much lower skill than the architects. And you fools still claim the implementation is of greater importance than the API?
What a whole lotta FUD. If you create a product by recreating a competitors' API (that is, you provide an alternate implementation to a competitors' API), you could get sued. How many companies create APIs that are used by the public? An extremely tiny portion.
There is no risk in using an API provided by a vendor (e.g., creating a Java program that uses the standard Java API).
People would steal less, hopefully. And atrocities like MS ripping off Java to create .net or Google making billions off a Java clone will somehow not be repeated.
How? Those protocols are public domain. They belong to no one and everyone.