Inventions of all kinds occurred before the patent system was created.
And most of the inventors got squat for all that effort. Do we know who invented the wheel, or bow and arrow?
Additionally, we currently have a free software movement devoid of profit motive
That's debatable. Free software usually clones popular, successful proprietary software. So, by creating a free software clone, the users of the clone enjoy the same benefits of the proprietary software without paying anything. In essence, they enjoy the same benefits as people pirating the proprietary software, except cloning using open source is legal.
Because if the can't, then they likely won't bother investing the time, energy and money needed to create the new compression algorithm. There's nothing for them except some temporary fame for being published in some scientific paper. As a result, humanity will have have to use the less efficient compression algorithm it already uses.
If I invent a machine with 100 switches, and I have designed what each of those switches do, I should be able to patent this machine.
Exactly, at a very low level of abstraction, software is a bunch of simple operations and switches (things that decide which simple operations to execute and which to avoid). At this level, software resembles a very simple machine, which is patentable, as you have stated. Software is not math, in that, it does invent new concepts of mathematics. Rather, software just uses existing mathematical methods, to build machines, same as every other field of engineering does.
Electrical engineering is chock full of math, but that does not mean an electronic invention is unpatentable, because it is math.Electronic inventions are not math, they just use (apply) math. The same goes for software inventions.
Use a language that does bounds checking automatically. Its not the 1970s any more.
Suppose your program accesses millions of array elements in performance sensitive areas. Bounds checking would slow down your code by a factor of 2 or more and therefore should be optional (but not non-existent, like in C).
According to this article, lawyers take more or less 25% of the total award. So the lawyers make $81 million, whereas the plaintiffs make $324M x 0.75 / 64,000 = $3800 each, roughly.
Copyright infringement is not "IP theft", since no one's losing anything.
But if you take a bus or train ride without paying for a ticket, you can get fined hundreds of dollars even though the owners of the bus/train are not losing anything by some occasional freeloader -- same as an IP pirate.
Also, try looking it another way: a man enters a grocery store and shoplifts a $1 candy bar. The man gained something without spending anything, which is theft, just like a pirate, who gained enjoyment from his pirated movie/song without paying anything to the owners of the content, so that also is theft.
So, it's theft if someone gains benefits of a paid product/service without paying, regardless of what it costs the owner to create it or whether he lost nothing by some unauthorized user. That's the correct definition.
$10,000 to 20,000 per employee per year of collusion + lawyer expenses + fines. The collusion began in 2005 and the class action suit was filed in 2011 -- 7 years of abuse. So the settlement should be at least:
7 x 10,000 x 64,000 = $4.48 billion to $9 billion.
First, you aren't stealing any resources from the owner of the music or intellectual property.
You are reducing potential profit by pirating -- pirating in mass quantities has the same effect as stealing.
There is no analogy to the resources put into making a car.
If it's okay to pay nothing to duplicate intellectual property in a movie or a song, then it must be okay to pay nothing to duplicate intellectual property in a car. After all,
car IP (design/engineering) + car raw materials + car manufacturing = car
I just don't want to pay for the car IP.
The owner doesn't lose CDs, bits, etc by the act of pirating their property.
Ahh, but the CDs cost nothing compared to the final price. And you benefited from a commercial product without benefiting its owner. That's considered theft.
That would be good, because it's not stealing, it's copyright infringement. That's why we call it copyright infringement, because unauthorized copying infriges on the copyright owner's right to restrict who can make copies of the copyrighted work.
LOL, and why does the owner want to restrict who can make copies? Because he/she wants to get paid if someone gains access to a copy his work. Unauthorized copying means, the copier very likely won't pay for his copy -- same as stealing, but not according to you and your word games.
That would be good, because it's not stealing, it's copyright infringement.
Whether I call it copying without permission or you call it copyright infringement (which, by the way, is far worse than stealing, because it is stealing and optionally redistributing), it does not matter. In any case, you pay $0 for a digital product where the owner of the product is selling it for a price greater than $0. So you get something for nothing, which is usually a crime when related to commercial products.
And my original post was about paying $0 for intellectual property, not what term you call that: theft or copyright infringement.
Therefore it is okay and legal to pay $0 for intellectual property.
No more than murder not being called "life theft" makes it legal to murder someone.
Let's not play with words, then. Copyright infringement is "IP theft," by definition, with worse-than-theft penalties if you redistribute it to others. Copyright infringement leads to loss of revenue to the content owner, therefore it is a form of theft.
So, according to you, copyright infringement is a lesser crime than theft, or is not a crime at all? Either way, without using the word theft, according to you and your buddy, not paying for IP is okay, since the owner is not being deprived anything he originally had.
Indeed, according to the World Customs Organization, more than $600 billion in pirated and counterfeited goods will flood the world market in 2005. Making sure that your publicationâ(TM)s property is not among these counterfeit goods is critical.... In order to protect yourself from IP theft, itâ(TM)s important to know the basics about your rights. For writers, editors and publishers, this means taking a look at the basics of copyright: what it is, what it protects, and how to secure it.... Copyright is a form of protection provided by U.S. law to the authors of "original works of authorship" fixed in any tangible medium of expression....
If the copyright owner prevails in an infringement claim, the available remedies include preliminary and permanent injunctions (court orders to stop current or prevent future infringements), impounding, and destroying the infringing articles.
Digital object and physical objects are different so stop conflating them through analogies.
This is quite possibly the worst cop out I've heard from piracy supporters. Before music was digitized on CDs, you had to purchase/borrow vinyl records or cassettes to listen to music. Making copies (pirating) of these analog mediums was very lossy, so copying was not worth it because of the huge loss of audio quality. However, once music was digitized on CDs (and later MP3), copies were perfect, with no loss of music quality in the copy.
Similarly, almost all products can be digitized and the design can be fed into a 3D printer of some sort to create the final product just like digital music bits + duplication machine + 10 cent plastic disc = $10 music CD. Car bodies, interiors, engines, transmissions etc. are all derived from digital designs (CAD + simulation) so yes, a car design is very much digital like a music CD / video blu-ray. And like music CDs, just about any product can be digitized.
The only thing more shocking is that you actually believe it's logically sound.
It is, unless you prove it to be unsound. Just saying "it is logically unsound," doesn't make it so.
When someone copies a movie or song, they are not denying the owner use, so it isn't stealing
Suppose copying and using intellectual property is not stealing. Therefore it is okay and legal to pay $0 for intellectual property. Then you should be able to walk into an auto dealership and take possession of a new car for say, $5,000, where the actual retail price is $25,000. This should be legal because the physical raw materials used to build the car cost only $1,000 to $2,000 and the remainder is spent on machinery and labor required to process and form the raw materials into a car.
Since you've paid for the labor + machinery rent + raw materials of the car and since IP price = $0, you've legally paid the duplication cost of the car. And legally, the car manufacturer should give you the car for that price. This analogy can be applied to all physical goods you purchase at a store.
So, please tell us where we can buy all goods for duplication cost only, without considering any kind of design and invention costs? If you can't find such a place, that means all goods carry an IP premium and therefore people who create IP are fully within their rights to charge what they charge right now.
All issues that can be dealt with by either the manufacturer, or an auto mechanic.
But dealer mechanics are more reliable than general auto mechanics. Suppose you live somewhere where there is no Tesla maintenance shop, how do you get your car serviced then?
Tesla may decide it is not cost-effective to have more than X maintenance shops in a given city. So if you live far away from them, you get no coverage without a lot of travel. With dealerships, there is bound to be one close to you.
When you cut down the number of competitors for auto maintenance to one company, your service quality and cost are likely to suffer.
The artists should call Google's bluff and refuse to sign. Once the music videos are removed, the signal-to-noise ratio of youtube videos will become lower as visitors will be forced to watch stupid videos, like selfie monologues. It's a lose-lose situation.
0.0001 BTC is 5 cents in today's market (1 BTC = $568) which is quite cheap for a transaction.
Suppose the buyer also does not want the risk of BTC fluctuations, so he purchases BTC just before buying from the online store. But the cost to convert USD to $100 worth of BTC and then reconverting the BTC to USD seems both inefficient and expensive because there is usually a spread (or difference in buying and selling prices of a commodity). So after all the fees and conversions, the buyer may have spend $101 or $103 for transaction, which is not much cheaper than a credit card transaction.
When you pay a merchant with Bitcoin they can choose to have it INSTANTLY converted to cash or save a portion of the Bitcoin payment.
Assuming the merchant instantly converts Bitcoins into cash for say, a $100 equivalent transaction, what is the difference in transaction cost when compared with a credit card? I know credit card transactions cost roughly 2%, or $2 in this case.
A buyer should have no more rights to reverse a sale than a seller.
In many cases, you don't know what you're buying on the internet until you receive it. For example, the product looks/works good on the website, but not in real life. It's hard to determine from the website info and pic that the product is good. The size could be wrong (shoes for eg).
I think this is great for online shopping, but also likely to be abused in some cases.
Carbs create instant energy (for your brain, for example). So don't eliminate all carbs, just limit them, and eliminate the bad ones, like white bread.
while whole grains may have more nutrition, they are still digested nearly as quickly as pure sugar.
Refined flour (white bread) is digested quickly, whole wheat flour is not.
It exposes the harsh reality of what could happen without software patents. Cisco could reverse engineer Juniper's software, copy that functionality into their own product, and release that product six to nine months after the release of Juniper's product, without any legal consequences.
Slashdot Mirror
And most of the inventors got squat for all that effort. Do we know who invented the wheel, or bow and arrow?
That's debatable. Free software usually clones popular, successful proprietary software. So, by creating a free software clone, the users of the clone enjoy the same benefits of the proprietary software without paying anything. In essence, they enjoy the same benefits as people pirating the proprietary software, except cloning using open source is legal.
Because if the can't, then they likely won't bother investing the time, energy and money needed to create the new compression algorithm. There's nothing for them except some temporary fame for being published in some scientific paper. As a result, humanity will have have to use the less efficient compression algorithm it already uses.
So a program that "prints recipes stored on disk onto a printer" is a theorem of what mathematical concept?
Exactly, at a very low level of abstraction, software is a bunch of simple operations and switches (things that decide which simple operations to execute and which to avoid). At this level, software resembles a very simple machine, which is patentable, as you have stated. Software is not math, in that, it does invent new concepts of mathematics. Rather, software just uses existing mathematical methods, to build machines, same as every other field of engineering does.
Electrical engineering is chock full of math, but that does not mean an electronic invention is unpatentable, because it is math.Electronic inventions are not math, they just use (apply) math. The same goes for software inventions.
Suppose your program accesses millions of array elements in performance sensitive areas. Bounds checking would slow down your code by a factor of 2 or more and therefore should be optional (but not non-existent, like in C).
According to this article, lawyers take more or less 25% of the total award. So the lawyers make $81 million, whereas the plaintiffs make $324M x 0.75 / 64,000 = $3800 each, roughly.
But if you take a bus or train ride without paying for a ticket, you can get fined hundreds of dollars even though the owners of the bus/train are not losing anything by some occasional freeloader -- same as an IP pirate.
Also, try looking it another way: a man enters a grocery store and shoplifts a $1 candy bar. The man gained something without spending anything, which is theft, just like a pirate, who gained enjoyment from his pirated movie/song without paying anything to the owners of the content, so that also is theft.
So, it's theft if someone gains benefits of a paid product/service without paying, regardless of what it costs the owner to create it or whether he lost nothing by some unauthorized user. That's the correct definition.
And why do they want to restrict copying? Don't intentionally act like an idiot.
You are reducing potential profit by pirating -- pirating in mass quantities has the same effect as stealing.
If it's okay to pay nothing to duplicate intellectual property in a movie or a song, then it must be okay to pay nothing to duplicate intellectual property in a car. After all,
I just don't want to pay for the car IP.
Ahh, but the CDs cost nothing compared to the final price. And you benefited from a commercial product without benefiting its owner. That's considered theft.
Or they are trying to push down the programmer wages from $70-120K to $50-100K?
LOL, and why does the owner want to restrict who can make copies? Because he/she wants to get paid if someone gains access to a copy his work. Unauthorized copying means, the copier very likely won't pay for his copy -- same as stealing, but not according to you and your word games.
Whether I call it copying without permission or you call it copyright infringement (which, by the way, is far worse than stealing, because it is stealing and optionally redistributing), it does not matter. In any case, you pay $0 for a digital product where the owner of the product is selling it for a price greater than $0. So you get something for nothing, which is usually a crime when related to commercial products.
And my original post was about paying $0 for intellectual property, not what term you call that: theft or copyright infringement.
Let's not play with words, then. Copyright infringement is "IP theft," by definition, with worse-than-theft penalties if you redistribute it to others.
Copyright infringement leads to loss of revenue to the content owner, therefore it is a form of theft.
So, according to you, copyright infringement is a lesser crime than theft, or is not a crime at all? Either way, without using the word theft, according to you and your buddy, not paying for IP is okay, since the owner is not being deprived anything he originally had.
Here's what the uspto has to say about it:
This is quite possibly the worst cop out I've heard from piracy supporters. Before music was digitized on CDs, you had to purchase/borrow vinyl records or cassettes to listen to music. Making copies (pirating) of these analog mediums was very lossy, so copying was not worth it because of the huge loss of audio quality. However, once music was digitized on CDs (and later MP3), copies were perfect, with no loss of music quality in the copy.
Similarly, almost all products can be digitized and the design can be fed into a 3D printer of some sort to create the final product just like digital music bits + duplication machine + 10 cent plastic disc = $10 music CD. Car bodies, interiors, engines, transmissions etc. are all derived from digital designs (CAD + simulation) so yes, a car design is very much digital like a music CD / video blu-ray. And like music CDs, just about any product can be digitized.
It is, unless you prove it to be unsound. Just saying "it is logically unsound," doesn't make it so.
Suppose copying and using intellectual property is not stealing. Therefore it is okay and legal to pay $0 for intellectual property. Then you should be able to walk into an auto dealership and take possession of a new car for say, $5,000, where the actual retail price is $25,000. This should be legal because the physical raw materials used to build the car cost only $1,000 to $2,000 and the remainder is spent on machinery and labor required to process and form the raw materials into a car.
Since you've paid for the labor + machinery rent + raw materials of the car and since IP price = $0, you've legally paid the duplication cost of the car. And legally, the car manufacturer should give you the car for that price. This analogy can be applied to all physical goods you purchase at a store.
So, please tell us where we can buy all goods for duplication cost only, without considering any kind of design and invention costs? If you can't find such a place, that means all goods carry an IP premium and therefore people who create IP are fully within their rights to charge what they charge right now.
The claims are implemented in software, so it's related to software patents.
But dealer mechanics are more reliable than general auto mechanics. Suppose you live somewhere where there is no Tesla maintenance shop, how do you get your car serviced then?
Tesla may decide it is not cost-effective to have more than X maintenance shops in a given city. So if you live far away from them, you get no coverage without a lot of travel. With dealerships, there is bound to be one close to you.
When you cut down the number of competitors for auto maintenance to one company, your service quality and cost are likely to suffer.
So, what's the proposed difference in download speeds (in MB/s) between fast lanes and normal lanes?
The artists should call Google's bluff and refuse to sign. Once the music videos are removed, the signal-to-noise ratio of youtube videos will become lower as visitors will be forced to watch stupid videos, like selfie monologues. It's a lose-lose situation.
0.0001 BTC is 5 cents in today's market (1 BTC = $568) which is quite cheap for a transaction. Suppose the buyer also does not want the risk of BTC fluctuations, so he purchases BTC just before buying from the online store. But the cost to convert USD to $100 worth of BTC and then reconverting the BTC to USD seems both inefficient and expensive because there is usually a spread (or difference in buying and selling prices of a commodity). So after all the fees and conversions, the buyer may have spend $101 or $103 for transaction, which is not much cheaper than a credit card transaction.
Assuming the merchant instantly converts Bitcoins into cash for say, a $100 equivalent transaction, what is the difference in transaction cost when compared with a credit card? I know credit card transactions cost roughly 2%, or $2 in this case.
In many cases, you don't know what you're buying on the internet until you receive it. For example, the product looks/works good on the website, but not in real life. It's hard to determine from the website info and pic that the product is good. The size could be wrong (shoes for eg).
I think this is great for online shopping, but also likely to be abused in some cases.
Refined flour (white bread) is digested quickly, whole wheat flour is not.
Is it legal? Most software has a "don't reverse engineer our software" in the EULA.
It exposes the harsh reality of what could happen without software patents. Cisco could reverse engineer Juniper's software, copy that functionality into their own product, and release that product six to nine months after the release of Juniper's product, without any legal consequences.