* 1787 - US Constitution Article I, Section 8: The Congress shall have Power... To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.
* 1790 - The Patent Act of 1790 was the first federal patent statute of the United States. It was titled "An Act to promote the Progress of Useful Arts."
The article seems to explain what is [not] happening, not why...It's called the influence of money on politics.
Or perhaps, the senate wants to prevent the US from turning into a 2nd or 3rd world country? The so-called patent reform treats even valid patents as troll patents, putting a lot of financial pressure on inventors, by making it difficult for inventors to sue infringers. In case of a trial loss, the inventor has to pay the infringer's legal costs, according to the new law. This disincentivizes inventors to patent inventions, resulting in lower product revenue, which in turn reduces GDP of the US, substantially.
The patent system is the bedrock of the U.S. economy. The future of the U.S. economy and our nation's ability to compete successfully in an increasingly competitive global economy is dependent on Congress fostering a strong patent system that incentivizes innovators to invent. Amending the law as this bill does shortchanges the future of our economy for an unbalanced policy. The stakes are far too high not to get the balance right.
We cannot support changes to the patent system that substantially weaken all patents. We oppose the legislation that we understand Members are being asked to agree to today and ask that you not support it.
Why is "first to publish" such a race? If a creation is truly novel, then prior art or simultaneous publication should be an amazingly improbable newsworthy coincidence.
Sometimes highly innovative things can be envisioned by multiple individuals at the same time. 2 or 3 divided by 7 billion is still highly improbable.
Entrepreneurs don't want the trouble of having to compete. They want to buy a piece of the market, and sue anyone who dares to compete. Running a company and keeping up to date with progress is too troublesome.
That's inaccurate. Entrepreneurs don't want to do free R&D for their competitors. When a product succeeds in the market, inevitably, competitors will sprout up to gain a pie of the product's market share. The competitors will try to clone the successful product and well, if the product's innovative parts are not protected by patents, the clone will be created and will destroy or weaken the innovator, financially.
In effect, it is cheaper (both in terms of brain power and financial power) to copy a successful product than create it yourself, which is cheating (because you're profiting from someone else's work without compensation). The patent system exists to prevent cheaters from winning.
Entrepreneurs don't want the trouble of having to compete.
I would argue it's the competitors who don't want to compete fairly that want patents removed. They want access to other people's work without paying a dime.
For example, start with a 2 year contract, then a 3 year extension, then a 5 year extension, then max out at 7 year extensions. This makes teachers hard to fire on a whim without making it impossible to get rid of those whose performance becomes unsatisfactory.
This is still the same as removing tenure, but better than the current fire at will system. So, a salary bump will be needed.
Tenure should have been given based on passing strenuous tests (maybe including accurate/non-biased feedback from students) over a long duration (5 to 7 years). They should make it hard for mediocre teachers to get tenure. There's no reason spread the current abusive, employer-friendly, fire-at-will system to the teaching profession
Teachers are underpaid, but tenure balances the equation by guaranteeing salary for a longer duration. So if tenure is going to be removed, better increase teachers' salary by 15% to 30%.
An alternative is to give tenure only after a longer waiting period of 5 to 7 years. That's enough time to weed out the bad teachers.
No, because the owner was denied use of the car while it was gone.
Fine, the thief can take it when you're sleeping and return it before you wake up. Your car is now a public taxi when you're not using it. Is that fair, and are you okay with that?
The point being, there are many intangible products and services (like movies, trains, restaurants and copyrighted products) you pay for where you don't get a physical product for your money. The service provider is completely within his rights to charge you for benefiting from his intangible service.
The only difference is you can't copy those intangible products/services for free, therefore you don't steal/copy them. But once you figure out how to copy those products/services, piracy begins, and a small segment of the population will start using that service for free.
As it happens, you are wearing a red shirt. But it's a total non-sequitur. "Why do you care about my shirt?"
What does copyright infringement have to do with the color of shirts?
So it's okay to carjack a car as long as you return it the same condition it was taken, and fill gas to the level it was before the carjacking?
Is it also okay to watch a movie in the theater without paying for tickets, because according to you, nothing was lost by the theater when you watched their movie for free?
The lateral forces on the tires and bottom chassis will be the same as before, but the body, its engine and occupants will be tilted (banked) so as to give slightly higher max speed than a non-tilted car.
His sort is the reason society is so far away from accepting the idea of abandoning intellectual property,
As if there are only a handful of people who don't care about intellectual property. Millions would happily do copyright infringement if there were no adverse consequences.
Being replaced by robots is not as bad as enhancing humans humans with robotic tech. Think about it. Now, NSA, and many other secret organizations, can spy on humans 24/7 -- everything you say, do, see etc. can be captured and sent to the mother ship. So, no thanks, to this techonology -- it's worse than being replaced by robots.
If the engineers are accountable for all the technical work on the car, shouldn't they get the lion's share of the profits? You can't have it both ways. Here's another way of looking at it.
Engineers --> product design --> company/management --> car --> customer
The engineers sold their design to the company for small salaries. The design now belongs to the company (and not it's engineers) according to the "work for hire" contract signed by the engineers. Therefore when the company sold the car to the customer, its profit and liability rests with owner of the design (the company) and not the engineers who designed it.
Does the engineer make most of the profits (bucks) for each car sold? No. Therefore, management should stop playing the "taking credit for product success" and "blaming the lower level employees for product failure" game.
Well, no one would start companies then. If they did, the customer would be charged with ridiculous markups (compared to current prices) to pay the high company insurance premiums.
They could add laws such that "criminal behavior" would result in "piercing the limited liability veil." But this is also problematic as a few rotten apples in the company could destroy the company, and the lives and careers of the rest of the employees. So the solution is not clear.
But in the meantime, there should at least be big payoffs to the victims (much larger than current payoffs) that would form a deterrence to companies being negligent. If speeding tickets were only $10 and they would not get on your driving record, there would be a lot of speeding.
You have the freedom to listen/watch it as many times you want. Why do you think you deserve more for a lousy $15? It seems your freedoms are being violated here.
Explain how you can own something that cost $100 million to make by paying $15.
Very easily. By having copies of the data on equipment that you own. How much money it took to arrange the data is irrelevant, as those are costs they chose to incur upon themselves.
You don't own the data, you only have copy of it -- there's a big difference between owning and having access to something. Just because you sit in a car does not mean you own it, although you have access to it.
According to your rules of possession, since you have access to the source code of your company's product, would it be completely okay for you to share that code with someone for a fee, or copy it to a Internet repository for free?
So the creators have a right to make only $15 from a $100 million expense? People like you are the very reason copyright exists in the first place,
Sadly, copyright uses censorship as an enforcement method and restricts private property rights,
Wrong, censorship means access is so restricted that it's very difficult for anyone to obtain the movie. When you can buy it at any store, it's not censored. Stop redefining words.
You pirates keep coming up with the lamest and flimsiest excuses by twisting the meaning of commonly used words for things they were not intended for -- free speech, ownership of property, censorship.
Whatever it is stored on is your own property. You generally use your own property to transmit the information, as well. Other people use their own property to receive the information. It's all quite voluntary, and this would be the natural state of things if it were not for censorship and anti-private property laws.
It's your own property with a lot of restrictions -- one of the main ones being no redistribution. If don't agree with the restrictions, don't buy it, no one is forcing you. Only the copyright holder can sell to multiple people to recoup his cost and get extra for profit.
Explain how you can own something that cost $100 million to make by paying $15. This is like a renter paying $1000/mo. for a $250K house and claiming its his own house since he paid for it. Just like the renter can't sell the house he's renting, you can't redistribute copyrighted files.
the sellers would suffer financially from loss of income.
There is a difference between not gaining and losing.
In this case, they are strongly related.
No, the physical property is cheap plastic costing between 10 and 50 cents. The IP containing files stored on that are the reason it costs $10.
That's irrelevant.
No, you're a weasel. There are only three parts of any store bought $14.99 DVD: a case ($1 or $2 tops), 10 cent disc, files that form the movie. You're paying over $10 for the files.
Because, as we've seen, copyright enforcement leads to censorship and the loss of real private property rights. Censorship is the biggest issue for me; I find it 100% intolerable.
This is like debating with a child. It's not your property. You paid $10 to $50 for a movie dvd that cost between $50 million and $500 million to create. Again, you don't own the movie, just one copy of it for your personal (and family) use only. If you distribute it to others, the sellers would suffer financially from loss of income. If you like sticking it to people who give you stuff, you're just a selfish person.
Interesting how you make such statements about someone you don't know. I'm a software developer, and I wouldn't make money if I didn't create anything of value. Do you just want it to be true? "You're not a 'creator'!" is either a logical fallacy or just an irrelevancy, depending on what was meant.
I'm betting your software gets used in-house only at your company, which probably does not rely on software copyrights for generating revenue.
LOL, you should walk into walmart, take one of their DVDs and pay them a dollar for the physical DVD but not for the files inside, (since intellectual property is worthless according to you), and if they demand the retail price
That's physical property.
No, the physical property is cheap plastic costing between 10 and 50 cents. The IP containing files stored on that are the reason it costs $10.
It is not "completely wrong"; you have a monopoly over something very specific, but that doesn't mean it's not a monopoly.
So why are you complaining then? Since it's very specific, you can work around it easily. It's like having a monopoly over fingerprints, very easily avoided, you just need to submit a different set of fingerprints from the author of copyrighted works. But I guess you can't because you're not talented and have no skill, or money required to create anything of value.
I will hereby refer to all copyright proponents as child molesters. For dramatic effect, of course.
LOL, you should walk into walmart, take one of their DVDs and pay them a dollar for the physical DVD but not for the files inside, (since intellectual property is worthless according to you), and if they demand the retail price, call them child molesters and rapists.
"Immutability has a slightly different meaning for arrays, however. You are still not allowed to perform any action that has the potential to change the size of an immutable array, but you are allowed to set a new value for an existing index in the array. This enables Swiftâ(TM)s Array type to provide optimal performance for array operations when the size of an array is fixed."
Maybe the reference to the array is immutable, but its contents are mutable. What's the syntax for immutable reference and immutable contents?
Just two languages? I see Java, C#, Python, ocaml, Pascal, Ada, etc. They've cherry picked a lot of syntax and semantics from a number of languages. I don't see much Javascript in there except for the 'var' declaration.
Copyright infringement is not legally considered stealing.
Sure, it is: article, fbi. It's almost like shoplifting but at a higher level. The only difference between a physical and intangible product is the duplication cost, which should not make one product payable and the other free. If you derive benefit from someone's work, whether it's tangible or intangible, you have to pay their selling price, otherwise it's stealing. I will admit that piracy has some benefit: it forces manufacturers to lower their prices in some cases, and prevents price gouging.
You seem to think that people should be handed little monopolies for their specific ideas, while I disagree.
The only thing that protects ideas are patents, not copyrights, and even patents don't technically protect ideas: they only protect apparatus or method for an invention. Using words like monopolies is completely wrong in the context of copyrights. I may have a copyright on a book that contains a sentence: The black grasshopper bounced around the lawn. Well, you infringe my copyright if you copy that book, and that sentence, word for word. But you can get around the copyright by rephrasing that sentence as: The lawn was filled with hopping grasshoppers. See, there's no monopoly of ideas, and that's how movies copy little ideas from other movies or books.
Slashdot Mirror
Umm, what centuries are you referring to?
* 1776 - US Declaration of Independence
* 1787 - US Constitution Article I, Section 8: The Congress shall have Power ... To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.
* 1790 - The Patent Act of 1790 was the first federal patent statute of the United States. It was titled "An Act to promote the Progress of Useful Arts."
Link
Or perhaps, the senate wants to prevent the US from turning into a 2nd or 3rd world country? The so-called patent reform treats even valid patents as troll patents, putting a lot of financial pressure on inventors, by making it difficult for inventors to sue infringers. In case of a trial loss, the inventor has to pay the infringer's legal costs, according to the new law. This disincentivizes inventors to patent inventions, resulting in lower product revenue, which in turn reduces GDP of the US, substantially.
In this washington post article, this letter explains it better:
Sometimes highly innovative things can be envisioned by multiple individuals at the same time. 2 or 3 divided by 7 billion is still highly improbable.
That's inaccurate. Entrepreneurs don't want to do free R&D for their competitors. When a product succeeds in the market, inevitably, competitors will sprout up to gain a pie of the product's market share. The competitors will try to clone the successful product and well, if the product's innovative parts are not protected by patents, the clone will be created and will destroy or weaken the innovator, financially.
In effect, it is cheaper (both in terms of brain power and financial power) to copy a successful product than create it yourself, which is cheating (because you're profiting from someone else's work without compensation). The patent system exists to prevent cheaters from winning.
I would argue it's the competitors who don't want to compete fairly that want patents removed. They want access to other people's work without paying a dime.
This is still the same as removing tenure, but better than the current fire at will system. So, a salary bump will be needed.
Tenure should have been given based on passing strenuous tests (maybe including accurate/non-biased feedback from students) over a long duration (5 to 7 years). They should make it hard for mediocre teachers to get tenure. There's no reason spread the current abusive, employer-friendly, fire-at-will system to the teaching profession
It's not stealing, Europe should receive taxes for Apple goods sold in Europe. It's just that tax laws have not been updated to handle globalization.
Of course you agree (the whole anti-IP crowd is here). But only some of those patents are stupid, the rest are worthy of patent protection.
Teachers are underpaid, but tenure balances the equation by guaranteeing salary for a longer duration. So if tenure is going to be removed, better increase teachers' salary by 15% to 30%.
An alternative is to give tenure only after a longer waiting period of 5 to 7 years. That's enough time to weed out the bad teachers.
Any idiot criminal can evade this system. He'll just bring a mask hidden on him, enter a crowded bathroom, put on the mask, steal money and leave.
This is just PR crap for a big brother system that will track where everyone is at any given time in public.
Fine, the thief can take it when you're sleeping and return it before you wake up. Your car is now a public taxi when you're not using it. Is that fair, and are you okay with that?
The point being, there are many intangible products and services (like movies, trains, restaurants and copyrighted products) you pay for where you don't get a physical product for your money. The service provider is completely within his rights to charge you for benefiting from his intangible service.
The only difference is you can't copy those intangible products/services for free, therefore you don't steal/copy them. But once you figure out how to copy those products/services, piracy begins, and a small segment of the population will start using that service for free.
What does copyright infringement have to do with the color of shirts?
So it's okay to carjack a car as long as you return it the same condition it was taken, and fill gas to the level it was before the carjacking?
Is it also okay to watch a movie in the theater without paying for tickets, because according to you, nothing was lost by the theater when you watched their movie for free?
They (the propagandists) are trying to shift the blame from Snowden to Russia.
The lateral forces on the tires and bottom chassis will be the same as before, but the body, its engine and occupants will be tilted (banked) so as to give slightly higher max speed than a non-tilted car.
As if there are only a handful of people who don't care about intellectual property. Millions would happily do copyright infringement if there were no adverse consequences.
Many will like the comfort but others will like that they can take corners faster. According to the math in this calculator:
* 1/4 mile radius curve, with 7 degree banking results in a max speed of 114 mph
* Same curve with only 1 degree banking results in a max speed of 101 mph.
So, banking does increase max speed in a curve, but Mercedes does not mention that to prevent speeding.
Being replaced by robots is not as bad as enhancing humans humans with robotic tech. Think about it. Now, NSA, and many other secret organizations, can spy on humans 24/7 -- everything you say, do, see etc. can be captured and sent to the mother ship. So, no thanks, to this techonology -- it's worse than being replaced by robots.
If the engineers are accountable for all the technical work on the car, shouldn't they get the lion's share of the profits? You can't have it both ways. Here's another way of looking at it.
The engineers sold their design to the company for small salaries. The design now belongs to the company (and not it's engineers) according to the "work for hire" contract signed by the engineers. Therefore when the company sold the car to the customer, its profit and liability rests with owner of the design (the company) and not the engineers who designed it.
Does the engineer make most of the profits (bucks) for each car sold? No. Therefore, management should stop playing the "taking credit for product success" and "blaming the lower level employees for product failure" game.
Well, no one would start companies then. If they did, the customer would be charged with ridiculous markups (compared to current prices) to pay the high company insurance premiums.
They could add laws such that "criminal behavior" would result in "piercing the limited liability veil." But this is also problematic as a few rotten apples in the company could destroy the company, and the lives and careers of the rest of the employees. So the solution is not clear.
But in the meantime, there should at least be big payoffs to the victims (much larger than current payoffs) that would form a deterrence to companies being negligent. If speeding tickets were only $10 and they would not get on your driving record, there would be a lot of speeding.
You have the freedom to listen/watch it as many times you want. Why do you think you deserve more for a lousy $15? It seems your freedoms are being violated here.
You don't own the data, you only have copy of it -- there's a big difference between owning and having access to something. Just because you sit in a car does not mean you own it, although you have access to it.
According to your rules of possession, since you have access to the source code of your company's product, would it be completely okay for you to share that code with someone for a fee, or copy it to a Internet repository for free?
So the creators have a right to make only $15 from a $100 million expense? People like you are the very reason copyright exists in the first place,
Wrong, censorship means access is so restricted that it's very difficult for anyone to obtain the movie. When you can buy it at any store, it's not censored. Stop redefining words.
You pirates keep coming up with the lamest and flimsiest excuses by twisting the meaning of commonly used words for things they were not intended for -- free speech, ownership of property, censorship.
It's your own property with a lot of restrictions -- one of the main ones being no redistribution. If don't agree with the restrictions, don't buy it, no one is forcing you. Only the copyright holder can sell to multiple people to recoup his cost and get extra for profit.
Explain how you can own something that cost $100 million to make by paying $15. This is like a renter paying $1000/mo. for a $250K house and claiming its his own house since he paid for it. Just like the renter can't sell the house he's renting, you can't redistribute copyrighted files.
In this case, they are strongly related.
No, you're a weasel. There are only three parts of any store bought $14.99 DVD: a case ($1 or $2 tops), 10 cent disc, files that form the movie. You're paying over $10 for the files.
This is like debating with a child. It's not your property. You paid $10 to $50 for a movie dvd that cost between $50 million and $500 million to create. Again, you don't own the movie, just one copy of it for your personal (and family) use only. If you distribute it to others, the sellers would suffer financially from loss of income. If you like sticking it to people who give you stuff, you're just a selfish person.
I'm betting your software gets used in-house only at your company, which probably does not rely on software copyrights for generating revenue.
No, the physical property is cheap plastic costing between 10 and 50 cents. The IP containing files stored on that are the reason it costs $10.
So why are you complaining then? Since it's very specific, you can work around it easily. It's like having a monopoly over fingerprints, very easily avoided, you just need to submit a different set of fingerprints from the author of copyrighted works. But I guess you can't because you're not talented and have no skill, or money required to create anything of value.
LOL, you should walk into walmart, take one of their DVDs and pay them a dollar for the physical DVD but not for the files inside, (since intellectual property is worthless according to you), and if they demand the retail price, call them child molesters and rapists.
Maybe the reference to the array is immutable, but its contents are mutable. What's the syntax for immutable reference and immutable contents?
Just two languages? I see Java, C#, Python, ocaml, Pascal, Ada, etc. They've cherry picked a lot of syntax and semantics from a number of languages. I don't see much Javascript in there except for the 'var' declaration.
Sure, it is: article, fbi. It's almost like shoplifting but at a higher level. The only difference between a physical and intangible product is the duplication cost, which should not make one product payable and the other free. If you derive benefit from someone's work, whether it's tangible or intangible, you have to pay their selling price, otherwise it's stealing. I will admit that piracy has some benefit: it forces manufacturers to lower their prices in some cases, and prevents price gouging.
The only thing that protects ideas are patents, not copyrights, and even patents don't technically protect ideas: they only protect apparatus or method for an invention. Using words like monopolies is completely wrong in the context of copyrights. I may have a copyright on a book that contains a sentence: The black grasshopper bounced around the lawn. Well, you infringe my copyright if you copy that book, and that sentence, word for word. But you can get around the copyright by rephrasing that sentence as: The lawn was filled with hopping grasshoppers. See, there's no monopoly of ideas, and that's how movies copy little ideas from other movies or books.