Now, please let me know what is wrong with receiving an offer of employment at another firm for a better salary?
Nothing wrong in the general sense. However if the new employer is building (*cough* cloning) your successful product and is involved in mass hiring of your team, you'd be reasonably pissed and send emails like that. The gist of it is, these employees have detailed knowledge about inner secrets of various products and Apple is trying to prevent IP drain to its competitors. As long as they don't transfer proprietary tech to Apple's competitor, Apple should have no reason to complain. But it's also very likely that Palm hired these employees to extract info they had absorbed while at Apple.
Jobs is the reason I have never owned nor ever will own an Apple product. Evil man.
It's one thing to quit the Apple job because the employee applied to Palm for a job and got a better salary. It's quite another if recruiters from Palm are actively poaching their competitors' employees. So Jobs' stance was somewhat reasonable. On the other hand, the employees deserve better pay because there was more demand for them.
Jobs did not approve of the poaching. Quitting and joining Palm on their own initiative is ok.
It is not just a matter of our employees deciding they want to join Palm. They are being actively recruited using knowledge supplied by Jon Rubenstein...
The commercial publishers add value by facilitating the review process by competent people. Unless they can replicate that "for free", this thing will fizzle out.
Reviewing, editing and formatting articles is important, but nowhere as significant as coming up with the concept of the paper and writing it. Could you explain why publishers have not shared a percentage of their profits (say 10%-25%) with the authors of the articles all these decades?
Authors of novels get paid, so why not scientific paper writers?
Instead of free, why don't they charge $1 for a perpetual subscription to these sites and papers? I bet $1 per subscriber will cover 50-90% costs of publishing, web hosting, peer reviews etc, and don't have to mooch off too much taxpayers money, most of whom won't ever read such papers.
I would say that St. Jobs must be rotating furiously in his grave by now, but I think the fact that this "innovation" is yet another example of Apple patenting stuff that already exists is probably enough to ease his restless spirit...
Current styluses are passive (like your finger) and therefore require a fat tip to register on the display. Apple's active (generates electric field) stylus is an improvement so the tip can be much narrower than passive styluses making it more accurate for things like sketching on a touchscreen.
Any improvement of existing technology can be patented, so this patent is valid and Apple can sue Samsung if they copycat this stylus.
The "argument" is not "pointless". Ones and zeros have almost no value. They are reproducible, infinitely, for free. But, you want to charge me a dollar just to use one particular combination of ones and zeros?
But what about the right of the creator to profit from creating that particular set of ones and zeros? That's why patents and copyrights exist.
That $200-$1500 CPU you purchase is composed of worthless sand, metal and plastic. It's those ones and zeros (design and manufacturing) that give it value. Same goes for cars: who would pay $25k to $100k for a few hundred pounds of rubber, plastic and metal? It's the design (ones and zeros) that give it that value.
Patents are definitely not evil. You will have considerably less innovation without patents -- no one wants to work for free.
The $1 billion fine over two not-so-innovative claims is simply ridiculous and extremely greedy. It should be a few million, at most. How do they calculate these fines? Does the jury know anything about the patent system, the hard disk subsystem or this particular patent?
I am sick of hearing about patent lawsuits. It is sad that the industry can't work together to create unique products and actually innovate instead of stagnating one another.
Even the groklaw article does not mention why the pinch+zoom patent was invalidated. But suppose it had been a valid patent, Apple did the right thing suing copycat Samsung.
Without patent protection, there would be little incentive for companies to come up with new, innovative products and features as anything new would be copied by copycat competitors. Why should Apple design products to fill Samsung's coffers and compete only based on manufacturing and marketing. Patents mean companies also compete based on design of their products, not just implementation.
How is one supposed to decide if a patent is stupid or ingenious? The decision is quite subjective in most cases. I fear such a anti-stupid patent committee can be used by vested interests to reject valid/clever patents as stupid.
I saw this yesterday, and was shocked. This is effectively stealing all users' photos that have been uploaded thus far, and a pretty sleazy thing to do even for new users.
These are still crappy photos, nothing to fret much about. But I imagine the same thing will happen 5 or 10 years after cloud computing/storage takes off. The cloud storage provider will use your data in ways you don't like and that will be hidden in the fine print. People should be wary and suspicious of all cloud storage providers abusing your privacy.
Imagine a world where humans driving automobiles is illegal. Human error causes many deaths and accidents. By political mandate, the government and automakers will bring out self-driving cars. People can only be passengers. That will suck the fun out of driving.
Similarly, robots will perform other tasks that people find pleasurable/profitable. Where do we draw the line? Once machines can see, think, reason, move and manipulate controls, human beings can easily be replaced.
My philosophical question is, is it a good idea to develop technology so much as to make ourselves obsolete?
The idea that one can patent or copyright an idea is silly.
No, it simply rewards and protects the livelihood of the people who create copyrighted works and sell it to the public for a tiny fraction of the creation cost. It is meant to reward people who actually created the work or idea and not someone else who has deep pockets and workers to clone a given idea.
Patents protect the concept of how something can be done -- not just the implementation, like copyright.
Why is it absurd to get paid for creating something valuable? You're highly naive.
Imagine if someone had copyrighted words. You wouldnt be able to talk.
And that's why individual words are not copyrighted. But sentences containing these words are correctly copyrighted to allow authors to protect their work.
Humans are copying machine by definition
Exactly why patents exist -- to prevent competitors from copying a valuable idea.
Commercially speaking, it is very much like land. Both have a high net value attached to it. Both can be rented out or leased for a profit. Except IP and other copyrighted material can only be rented out for a limited period.
Land ownership was introduced to mitigate "the tragedy of the commons" - i.e. for common good.
Common good is all good as long as it does not encroach on the good of the individual. Thanks to land ownership, people live separately in their own houses with their family, isolated and insulated from unfriendly common people.
With IP we have the opposite phenomenon - making it public IS the common good.
You bet it's good for the consumers -- they pay less or nothing. The creators of the IP get shafted off their rightly earned profits. This discourages creators from investing more time and money into creating more goods.
Infinite copyright would be culturally robbing the nation and the world.
Yeah, because spending 10-50 dollars a month on books or other copyrighted media is too much a burden for the common man and will send him to the poor house.
There's a strawman argument if I ever saw one - cars and houses, unlike copyrights, are tangible assets that cannot be copied or redistributed. You're comparing apples to staplers here - the two have no relation whatsoever.
You couldn't be more wrong if you think a car and a book have no similarities:
A car needs a blueprint of sorts that is created designers and engineers based on requirements given by their boss. Similarly, the overall subject or plot of a book, table of contents etc, has to be designed by the author before writing a book.
Then the car designers create a very detailed design of every part on a computer and do some simulation to test it. The book's author types out various chapters on a computer and passes it on the editor for checking.
The car's design is finally prototyped and tested in the real world. The book is approved by the editor and other publisher staff
The car's design (1s and 0s stored on a computer) is sent to manufacturing plant where those bits are converted into a tangible production car. Similarly, the book contents (1s and 0s stored on a computer) is sent to a printing press and a tangible book is created.
The main difference between a car and a book is the car requires more tangible raw materials and higher manufacturing cost than a book. So, except for the last manufacturing stage, both books and cars are kinda similar. When 3D printers evolve to the next level, you will be able to print your own car.
You can own land properties indefinitely.
No, you can't - someday, you'll die.
Well, what I mean is, the land won't become public property upon death of the owner. It will be transferred to the owner's children, grand children, great grand children and so on, until it is finally sold for a nice profit. Whereas, with creative property, the govt and the public seize it after a few decades.
Consumers would simply wait five years so they can get the work for free. A tiny portion of the public with disposable income would pay for the new work within the five year period. The market for copyrighted works would collapse because creators and publishers would not be able to pay their bills anymore. The authors would start compensating for the reduced profit by reducing the time and quality of their works.
In other words, the copyright system would be destroyed, the creators, publishers and consumers of the copyrighted works would suffer.
you'd have much more easier time creating new music, new interpretations.
We don't want that, thank you. Many are tired of crappy art derived from the original source.
If you agree with that, then you wouldn't mind if your car and house became public property after 12 years of ownership protection.
Why does no one pose the opposite question: why can't copyright be infinite years? You can own land properties indefinitely. A writer authors a book -- why can't he control its rights indefinitely? Why does the law force creative/intellectual property into the public domain after a certain number of years?
I agree that patents should expire after 20 years, otherwise they will halt progress of other innovations that depend on them, but copyrights are different. Having infinite copyright won't impede progress of competitors.
The EU court's ruling is unbelievable absurd, almost criminal (although supporters of open source and other freeloaders will disagree).
In this upside down ruling, the most creative parts of the language, the language's syntax and the API declarations are not protected by copyright while the least creative parts (i.e. can be implemented by a new college grad), implementation of the API are protected.
Any decent programmer can implement APIs, but it takes highly experienced, skilled and creative people like James Gosling, Guido van Rossum, etc to design languages and APIs. We know what happens when unskilled, uncreative people design languages. You get poorly designed, uncreative abominations like PHP, Perl etc.
Please fire these clowns in the EU court who passed this ruling. They're a threat to innovation in programming languages by denying copyright protection to programming languages and their APIs.
Without copyright protection it will be impossible to fund and profit from programming languages, as they will be ripped off by any competitor.
Also, proprietary software having to compete with open source is simply part of the market, if someone else can produce a cheaper and superior product than you, then your business model is failing and you will have to resort to underhanded tactics to prop it up.
Free, slave labor product vs proprietary is not considered competitive by any means. It is considered anti-competitive in the business world and there are laws against such a practice, but since Linux is not owned by any company, there is no chance of getting sued for dumping low-cost product into the marketplace.
The only thing that Microsoft cares about is profit.
Do you breathe air, or eat food? That's profit, and there's nothing wrong with it. Working for profit is better than being some brainwashed OSS slave programmer who is not making money himself and is also destroying income source of fellow programmers.
Free online lectures - teachers obsolete (IMO, online videos are better than a real classroom because you don't have to waste time taking notes and you can rewind and replay the lectures until you completely understand the material).
Free software - programmers obsolete
Patents abolished - no profit in inventing stuff
Copyrights abolished - no payment for authors, musicians, programmers
In the future, unless you're doing some type of creative work, any robot, machine or technology can replace what you're doing. And since the powers that be want to destroy intellectual property, nobody will own anything. This is why the the teachers should assert copyright on those videos and demand a royalty for use of those videos. With web videos on the rise, their careers are in jeopardy. Instead of 30-40 years of secure employment with salaries paid from tuition, they will now receive a one-time payment for creating the video. After that, they'll have to flip burgers.
Meanwhile, you're going to write other stuff, because you're good at what you do, aren't you? If not, fuck off and stack shelves for a living, like me.
So you're jealous of authors who make 100 times more than you (never mind the thousands who literally starve). And you want them to bring them down to your level (when you can't succeed, make your competitors fail) -- a low-skill wage slave who will probably have to work the rest of his life just to survive. When they invented positions for wage-slaves like you, they decided to pay you just enough so you could survive with a job, but low enough that if you were to quit, you would die of starvation within a few months or years.
Your idea of progress is to transform financially independent, successful people into wasting time, energy and talent doing menial tasks? When the hell did making money become a crime?!
Here's the justification why authors are paid 10s, 100s or 1000s of times more than fixed-wage workers: their earnings are proportional to the number of people that buy their book and inversely proportional to the number of authors writing on the same subject. A stack shelver only satisfies a fixed number of people per week -- hence the fixed wage. It's all about supply and demand: you get paid $8/hr because there are billions of people on the planet that can stack shelves, but there are only a few hundreds that can write a good book on a given subject.
So page turning animation has plenty of prior art. And there is nothing innovative about using a touch gesture to turn a page on a touch device. So where is the non-obviousness required for a proper patent?
I think $4-5 for a single copy of sheet music is ridiculously over-priced.
It's called supply and demand. The supplier is free to charge whatever price yields the highest profit. If you, the consumer, find the price too high, don't buy, move along. You don't have the right to dictate the price.
The cost of the sheet music shouldn't be five times (!) the price of the song itself. That feels like gouging. Which it is.
That's retarded; the number of people purchasing sheet music is drastically lower compared to the number of people purchasing the song. Therefore, the sheet music has to be higher to make a decent profit.
Slashdot Mirror
Now, please let me know what is wrong with receiving an offer of employment at another firm for a better salary?
Nothing wrong in the general sense. However if the new employer is building (*cough* cloning) your successful product and is involved in mass hiring of your team, you'd be reasonably pissed and send emails like that. The gist of it is, these employees have detailed knowledge about inner secrets of various products and Apple is trying to prevent IP drain to its competitors. As long as they don't transfer proprietary tech to Apple's competitor, Apple should have no reason to complain. But it's also very likely that Palm hired these employees to extract info they had absorbed while at Apple.
Jobs is the reason I have never owned nor ever will own an Apple product. Evil man.
It's one thing to quit the Apple job because the employee applied to Palm for a job and got a better salary. It's quite another if recruiters from Palm are actively poaching their competitors' employees. So Jobs' stance was somewhat reasonable. On the other hand, the employees deserve better pay because there was more demand for them.
Jobs did not approve of the poaching. Quitting and joining Palm on their own initiative is ok.
It is not just a matter of our employees deciding they want to join Palm. They are being actively recruited using knowledge supplied by Jon Rubenstein...
The commercial publishers add value by facilitating the review process by competent people. Unless they can replicate that "for free", this thing will fizzle out.
Reviewing, editing and formatting articles is important, but nowhere as significant as coming up with the concept of the paper and writing it. Could you explain why publishers have not shared a percentage of their profits (say 10%-25%) with the authors of the articles all these decades?
Authors of novels get paid, so why not scientific paper writers?
Instead of free, why don't they charge $1 for a perpetual subscription to these sites and papers? I bet $1 per subscriber will cover 50-90% costs of publishing, web hosting, peer reviews etc, and don't have to mooch off too much taxpayers money, most of whom won't ever read such papers.
I would say that St. Jobs must be rotating furiously in his grave by now, but I think the fact that this "innovation" is yet another example of Apple patenting stuff that already exists is probably enough to ease his restless spirit...
Current styluses are passive (like your finger) and therefore require a fat tip to register on the display. Apple's active (generates electric field) stylus is an improvement so the tip can be much narrower than passive styluses making it more accurate for things like sketching on a touchscreen.
Any improvement of existing technology can be patented, so this patent is valid and Apple can sue Samsung if they copycat this stylus.
The "argument" is not "pointless". Ones and zeros have almost no value. They are reproducible, infinitely, for free. But, you want to charge me a dollar just to use one particular combination of ones and zeros?
But what about the right of the creator to profit from creating that particular set of ones and zeros? That's why patents and copyrights exist.
That $200-$1500 CPU you purchase is composed of worthless sand, metal and plastic. It's those ones and zeros (design and manufacturing) that give it value. Same goes for cars: who would pay $25k to $100k for a few hundred pounds of rubber, plastic and metal? It's the design (ones and zeros) that give it that value.
Patents are definitely not evil. You will have considerably less innovation without patents -- no one wants to work for free.
The $1 billion fine over two not-so-innovative claims is simply ridiculous and extremely greedy. It should be a few million, at most. How do they calculate these fines? Does the jury know anything about the patent system, the hard disk subsystem or this particular patent?
I clicked "Reply to This" for your post. But I don't see a "Quote Parent" link anywhere near "Preview".
I am sick of hearing about patent lawsuits. It is sad that the industry can't work together to create unique products and actually innovate instead of stagnating one another.
Even the groklaw article does not mention why the pinch+zoom patent was invalidated. But suppose it had been a valid patent, Apple did the right thing suing copycat Samsung.
Without patent protection, there would be little incentive for companies to come up with new, innovative products and features as anything new would be copied by copycat competitors. Why should Apple design products to fill Samsung's coffers and compete only based on manufacturing and marketing. Patents mean companies also compete based on design of their products, not just implementation.
How is one supposed to decide if a patent is stupid or ingenious? The decision is quite subjective in most cases. I fear such a anti-stupid patent committee can be used by vested interests to reject valid/clever patents as stupid.
I saw this yesterday, and was shocked. This is effectively stealing all users' photos that have been uploaded thus far, and a pretty sleazy thing to do even for new users.
These are still crappy photos, nothing to fret much about. But I imagine the same thing will happen 5 or 10 years after cloud computing/storage takes off. The cloud storage provider will use your data in ways you don't like and that will be hidden in the fine print. People should be wary and suspicious of all cloud storage providers abusing your privacy.
So why don't these madmen randomly attack police stations and monster truck rallies?
Maybe they aren't mad, just pretending.
Similarly, robots will perform other tasks that people find pleasurable/profitable. Where do we draw the line? Once machines can see, think, reason, move and manipulate controls, human beings can easily be replaced.
My philosophical question is, is it a good idea to develop technology so much as to make ourselves obsolete?
No, it simply rewards and protects the livelihood of the people who create copyrighted works and sell it to the public for a tiny fraction of the creation cost. It is meant to reward people who actually created the work or idea and not someone else who has deep pockets and workers to clone a given idea. Patents protect the concept of how something can be done -- not just the implementation, like copyright. Why is it absurd to get paid for creating something valuable? You're highly naive.
And that's why individual words are not copyrighted. But sentences containing these words are correctly copyrighted to allow authors to protect their work.
Exactly why patents exist -- to prevent competitors from copying a valuable idea.
Commercially speaking, it is very much like land. Both have a high net value attached to it. Both can be rented out or leased for a profit. Except IP and other copyrighted material can only be rented out for a limited period.
Common good is all good as long as it does not encroach on the good of the individual. Thanks to land ownership, people live separately in their own houses with their family, isolated and insulated from unfriendly common people.
You bet it's good for the consumers -- they pay less or nothing. The creators of the IP get shafted off their rightly earned profits. This discourages creators from investing more time and money into creating more goods.
Yeah, because spending 10-50 dollars a month on books or other copyrighted media is too much a burden for the common man and will send him to the poor house.
You couldn't be more wrong if you think a car and a book have no similarities:
The main difference between a car and a book is the car requires more tangible raw materials and higher manufacturing cost than a book. So, except for the last manufacturing stage, both books and cars are kinda similar. When 3D printers evolve to the next level, you will be able to print your own car.
Well, what I mean is, the land won't become public property upon death of the owner. It will be transferred to the owner's children, grand children, great grand children and so on, until it is finally sold for a nice profit. Whereas, with creative property, the govt and the public seize it after a few decades.
Consumers would simply wait five years so they can get the work for free. A tiny portion of the public with disposable income would pay for the new work within the five year period. The market for copyrighted works would collapse because creators and publishers would not be able to pay their bills anymore. The authors would start compensating for the reduced profit by reducing the time and quality of their works.
In other words, the copyright system would be destroyed, the creators, publishers and consumers of the copyrighted works would suffer.
We don't want that, thank you. Many are tired of crappy art derived from the original source.
Why does no one pose the opposite question: why can't copyright be infinite years? You can own land properties indefinitely. A writer authors a book -- why can't he control its rights indefinitely? Why does the law force creative/intellectual property into the public domain after a certain number of years?
I agree that patents should expire after 20 years, otherwise they will halt progress of other innovations that depend on them, but copyrights are different. Having infinite copyright won't impede progress of competitors.
In this upside down ruling, the most creative parts of the language, the language's syntax and the API declarations are not protected by copyright while the least creative parts (i.e. can be implemented by a new college grad), implementation of the API are protected.
Any decent programmer can implement APIs, but it takes highly experienced, skilled and creative people like James Gosling, Guido van Rossum, etc to design languages and APIs. We know what happens when unskilled, uncreative people design languages. You get poorly designed, uncreative abominations like PHP, Perl etc.
Please fire these clowns in the EU court who passed this ruling. They're a threat to innovation in programming languages by denying copyright protection to programming languages and their APIs.
Without copyright protection it will be impossible to fund and profit from programming languages, as they will be ripped off by any competitor.
Free, slave labor product vs proprietary is not considered competitive by any means. It is considered anti-competitive in the business world and there are laws against such a practice, but since Linux is not owned by any company, there is no chance of getting sued for dumping low-cost product into the marketplace.
Do you breathe air, or eat food? That's profit, and there's nothing wrong with it. Working for profit is better than being some brainwashed OSS slave programmer who is not making money himself and is also destroying income source of fellow programmers.
Free online lectures - teachers obsolete (IMO, online videos are better than a real classroom because you don't have to waste time taking notes and you can rewind and replay the lectures until you completely understand the material).
Free software - programmers obsolete
Patents abolished - no profit in inventing stuff
Copyrights abolished - no payment for authors, musicians, programmers
In the future, unless you're doing some type of creative work, any robot, machine or technology can replace what you're doing. And since the powers that be want to destroy intellectual property, nobody will own anything. This is why the the teachers should assert copyright on those videos and demand a royalty for use of those videos. With web videos on the rise, their careers are in jeopardy. Instead of 30-40 years of secure employment with salaries paid from tuition, they will now receive a one-time payment for creating the video. After that, they'll have to flip burgers.
So you're jealous of authors who make 100 times more than you (never mind the thousands who literally starve). And you want them to bring them down to your level (when you can't succeed, make your competitors fail) -- a low-skill wage slave who will probably have to work the rest of his life just to survive. When they invented positions for wage-slaves like you, they decided to pay you just enough so you could survive with a job, but low enough that if you were to quit, you would die of starvation within a few months or years.
Your idea of progress is to transform financially independent, successful people into wasting time, energy and talent doing menial tasks? When the hell did making money become a crime?!
Here's the justification why authors are paid 10s, 100s or 1000s of times more than fixed-wage workers: their earnings are proportional to the number of people that buy their book and inversely proportional to the number of authors writing on the same subject. A stack shelver only satisfies a fixed number of people per week -- hence the fixed wage. It's all about supply and demand: you get paid $8/hr because there are billions of people on the planet that can stack shelves, but there are only a few hundreds that can write a good book on a given subject.
So page turning animation has plenty of prior art. And there is nothing innovative about using a touch gesture to turn a page on a touch device. So where is the non-obviousness required for a proper patent?
It's called supply and demand. The supplier is free to charge whatever price yields the highest profit. If you, the consumer, find the price too high, don't buy, move along. You don't have the right to dictate the price.
That's retarded; the number of people purchasing sheet music is drastically lower compared to the number of people purchasing the song. Therefore, the sheet music has to be higher to make a decent profit.