FYI, a normal pirate is one who knows pirating is wrong but does it anyway to enjoy the fruits of other people's labor without having to pay for it. A shameless pirate, on the other hand, thinks he has a moral, ethical and legal right to pirate stuff. Even scummier than the shameless pirate, is the counterfeiter -- he makes copies of copyrighted work and sells them for profit.
I've already paid my little share of the.01 % of the sticker price that goes to "creation costs"
If the DVD costs $30, the creation cost is only $300,000? I don't think that enough to even pay for the extras (actors) in the movie.
Rather, the goal of GPL appears to be to use copyright to protect its assets while destroying the market for profit-based copyrighted works -- evil-genius scheme, if true.
It is a tool, to preserve the freedom of being able to modify and distribute the modified versions of the code.
Could you rephrase this statement, using ability instead of freedom, since freedom implies that the end-user of the software is in some way entitled to modify and distribute it. You are entitled to modify only that which you rightfully own. For example, I'm unable to modify the GPL license since I don't own it. The end-users of software most certainly don't have the right to modify the software since they did not design, implement or test it. But the right to modify can be offered as a privilege, as is the case in many real world cases.
Copyright infringement is that, copyright infringement and *not theft*.
This specious argument has been bandied around by shameless pirates for a long time and it's simply not true. For example, if 90% of users of an application are pirates, the software creator has probably not earned enough from the 10% buyers to cover the cost of creating the software, in which case, it is theft. Did you stupid pirates think for one second that the retail price involves more than just the manufacturing cost?
In fact, retail price of software = manufacturing cost + distribution cost + creation cost + profit.
Here, creation cost involves time and money (eg: programmer salaries) spent in creating the software. And the software publisher has to recover this cost before it can make a profit. Without copyright, there is no way to recover the cost as hardly anybody is willing to pay for something that is free. The end result of removing copyright will be that nobody will bother creating good software.
Ha ha, IBM is teh evil, but isn't this exactly what open source does as well? It distributes knowledge/skills/techniques of the 1337, embedded within various OSS programs, to a bunch of wannabes and n00bs. Now even idiot programmers can compete with the smart ones, which is great for mediocre, great for the OSS consumers, but reduces the salaries of the good programmers.
It's imperative that such "knowledge leeching" techniques be banned from the workplace. Let's say the expert (expert in engineering, but clueless idiot in business) transfers knowledge of a technique that saves the company $10million/yr but only gets paid $50 (his hourly wage) for his genius. How is this not abuse?
The law dares to command you to not abuse the book. If the book costs $200,000 to $1 million to publish (adding up author royalties, and other publishing and marketing costs), the $20 pittance you paid does not give you the right to reproduce and sell it or give it away for free.
Yes. IRC pushes messages to clients that are subscribed to the channel.
In which case IRC would be considered prior art, rendering the patent invalid. It's another case of reinventing the wheel.
Nagle's algorithm, which is part of almost all TCP/IP stacks, aggregates multiple messages from the IRC server into a single packet in order to reduce overhead.
But Nagle's algorithm does not aggregate messages from multiple clients. The aggregation is done by the IRC server.
The patent sounds exactly like IRC, except does the the IRC server push the aggregated message to all the clients as the patent covers, or do the clients pull the aggregated message from the server (which is what IRC clients probably do)?
Other than pushing the aggregated message + creating an aggregate message based on messages within a time interval, I don't see much innovation over the concepts of IRC, e-mail, or general client/server aggregate on server/disperse to clients algorithms. But then again, I'm no lawyer.
According to the Background of the Invention section of the patent, the state-of-the-art when the patent was submitted was non-aggregate messaging, meaning, if 10 PCs were playing a LAN game, each PC would send 9 messages to the other clients to recreate the shared world resulting in 9 messages * 10 PCs = 900 messages, making it bandwidth intensive and slow. The patent uses a central server to aggregate the messages; the number of messages is reduced to 10 client messages + 1 aggregate message = 11 messages.
Reading dozens of pages of legal patent-speak is not easy, but the main gist of the patent 5,822,523 is in claim 1 (paraphrased into english):
A bunch of game clients send messages to a game server
The game server collects these messages for a fixed period of time and aggregates all these messages into a big, aggregated message.
Once a fixed time interval has elapsed, the game server transmits the big, aggregated message back to all the clients. The clients then use this aggregated message to display the same shared environment on all machines
Seems obvious to me now, but it may have not been obvious in 1996. If you can prove Doom follows the same steps (isn't the source code available?), then there's prior art to invalidate it.
Well, don't blame copyright law or the songwriters holding the copyright, because it's stupid ASCAP's fault. Without copyright, your new entertainment will mostly consist of listening to a fat guy lip-syncing "Numa, Numa", because the songwriters will have long quit their profession once it becomes open source(aka free beer).
There's still something that knows you went past point x at time y
There are already a lot of video cameras at intersections now, instead of the usual red-light camera that triggers only when you run a red light. The video cameras are always ON and keep track (via image processing of license plates) of all cars passing through an intersection. So they already can know that car X was at point Y, at time Z. How is this not a massive invasion of privacy? What level of privacy must be invaded before the sheep stop taking it placidly, and fight back for freedom?
I absolutely hate DRM -- it creates problems for legitimate users and does virtually nothing to stop piracy.
That's not even the worst part of DRM. DRM is about spying on users, collecting their application usage data, and uploading that to the company server. Why the hell should anyone pay $60 to be spied upon? Is violating privacy so cheap? There must be at least a dozen ways to avoid/reduce piracy without violating user privacy and not using this DRM crap.
On a related note, as the number of independent countries are growing fewer as time goes by, are we headed towards a one-world government where one country gobbles up the rest? If a certain group of humans are trying to effect this change, why is not possible that a bunch of supernatural entities are behind this galaxy gobbling, or is just physics?
1. Stupid patents piss off techies
2. Techies grow to despise corporate-produced software
Well, those stupid patents were invented by other techies, not PHBs, so stop banding all techies as patent-hating.
3. Techies motivated to make open-source variants to take sales away from evil corporations
LOL, so the evil corporation invents new stuff, but are somehow the villains. And the stupid open source copycats, who copy the technology of these evil corps, and bankrupt several small companies, are the true saviors of humanity. Copying successful technology is child's play compared to inventing it, designing it and selling it in the first time around. Any half-decent programmer can copy a product once he understands all the specs and how the product works.
Re:I Hate All Programming Languages
on
Coders At Work
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· Score: 3, Insightful
A truly compositional programming environment should be based strictly on a hierarchical tree.
How would you handle loops or complicated algorithms with many conditional paths in such a language? Languages are designed to solve practical problems, not to just to look pretty.
- No more than 7 years on a patent. No extensions. No exceptions.
That will only work for toy inventions. It takes 3 to 5 years to simply build a 1.0 product. By the time the product is out the door, you have only 2 to 4 years to make any profit.
No patenting of algorithms
Say goodbye to a lot of software inventions. Why should other fields of technology enjoy patent protection, but not software?
Patents to be awarded to individuals only, not companies
Or at least 10% of the returns of a patent must go the inventor. That's a whole lot better than the $1,000 to $3,000 inventors make today.
I find farting funny and sometimes even liberating, but I don't fart for a living. Do I claim "without fart taxes, the farter is just a slave, working for free to provide farts to others but receiving nothing in return"?
So you're comparing farting to inventor's work? what an ungrateful retard for spitting on those who have helped you. Several key inventions, like the steam engine, electricity, airplanes, cars, electronic transistors have launched entire industries that have provided jobs and other material benefits to millions of people for over a century. Without these inventions, these jobs wouldn't exist, these industries would not exist, and you and your parents, even the govt., would probably be poorer. Nobody is asking for a handout, just what is rightfully, and justly owed.
At which point he's put in at least as much effort as you did (reverse engineering is hard).
Does that mean bank robbers deserve the money if they can penetrate the 20-inch vault door of a bank? Because penetrating that door is hard.
Is this a serious question, or are you just trolling?
Of course, I'm serious. Your statement insinuates the reverse engineering person somehow has legal rights to the work of others just because reverse engineering the invention is hard. That's like saying robbing banks is okay because breaking through vault doors is hard.
The purpose of patents (and copyright) is to promote innovation. They are not natural rights like life, liberty, etc.
Government and business want innovation to gain more power and wealth. The consuming public wants innovation to improve their life, by making certain tasks easier or more convenient. But where do government, big business, or consuming public get off thinking they have a natural right to these innovations, to get them for free? All patents do is ensure the inventor, the person giving the benefits, is adequately compensated for his work, that's all. Without patents, the inventor is just a slave, working for free to improve the life of others, but receiving nothing in return.
Patent attorney here. Yes, software patents shouldn't be there. Patents are there to stop people from sitting on their ideas. Stopping people from sitting on their ideas helps society, because it give society more knowledge.
I'm not sure if you're an attorney if you don't understand the basics of why patents exist. Patents cost time and money and unless the inventor gets rewarded fairly, he won't expend effort. Only the trolls sit on their ideas. And just because there are some patent trolls, does not mean every inventor is a patent troll. Patents are expensive to obtain and maintain, and most people who have one use it protect a product from competitors.
However, for software there is no need for this mechanism.
Wrong, inventions within in a successful software product will be copied within a few days without this protection.
There is no shortage of innovation because of lack of progress.
Innovation doesn't happen by itself, people have to spend time and money on it. And patents ensure they get paid for their efforts.
If one person doesn't think of it, another one will.
Are you sure? Another person might not think up the same thing. That's why patents exist in the first place. I don't think you're an attorney at all if you can't understand that.
Copyrights are not enough. If X is the new innovative piece of code within a program, a competitor can buy the program, fire up a debugger, and look at the disassembled code for X.
At this point he's infringing copyright just as much as when he'd making unlicensed copies.
No, he's not. The output of his reverse engineering will be the abstract method that can be covered by a patent, but not by copyright. For example, after looking at the disassembly for X, and performing more analysis using a debugger, he figures out the steps to perform X are:
1) send Z message to component Y
2) perform calculation C on message response
3)...
There are hundreds of different ways to implement the above steps in source code. So he can easily avoid copyright infringement. Patents protect the steps listed above, not how it's implemented, and therefore stop leeches from profiting from other people's work.
Then there are cases where the code is not that hard, and you can copy the idea by just looking at the end product. Therefore having patents is necessary.
Well, no. It's only necessary if the competition stemming from this imitation kills the market rather than stimulate it. In general, more competition is better.
Right, but competition usually means performing to equal or exceed your competitor. If you simply sit by and wait, then copy (steal) something innovative created by your competitor, that's not performing at all. It's just leeching off someone else's work to profit yourself. Soon inventors will get tired of getting taken advantage of, and only pursue inventions that take little time and money. That way, if someone copies their ideas, the loss won't be much. But society, as a general, will suffer more because many good inventions take more time and money, and those won't be created without sufficient protection.
The problem with patents today is that patents are being granted for trivial and obvious things that could be easily re-invented by a few undergraduate students.
Exactly, instead of throwing the baby with the bathwater, there should be a mechanism to disallow these trivial patents -- the patent writer must write in plain English what the innovative part about the patent is, instead of the hard-to-understand patent lingo used today.
And there should be some categorization so that if your invention is related to databases, or GUIs, that should be easily found by some programmer or inventor working in that area, avoid patent infringement. Eg: patent X is in category GUI -> dialog boxes.
Slashdot Mirror
If the DVD costs $30, the creation cost is only $300,000? I don't think that enough to even pay for the extras (actors) in the movie.
Rather, the goal of GPL appears to be to use copyright to protect its assets while destroying the market for profit-based copyrighted works -- evil-genius scheme, if true.
Could you rephrase this statement, using ability instead of freedom, since freedom implies that the end-user of the software is in some way entitled to modify and distribute it. You are entitled to modify only that which you rightfully own. For example, I'm unable to modify the GPL license since I don't own it. The end-users of software most certainly don't have the right to modify the software since they did not design, implement or test it. But the right to modify can be offered as a privilege, as is the case in many real world cases.
This specious argument has been bandied around by shameless pirates for a long time and it's simply not true. For example, if 90% of users of an application are pirates, the software creator has probably not earned enough from the 10% buyers to cover the cost of creating the software, in which case, it is theft. Did you stupid pirates think for one second that the retail price involves more than just the manufacturing cost?
In fact, retail price of software = manufacturing cost + distribution cost + creation cost + profit.
Here, creation cost involves time and money (eg: programmer salaries) spent in creating the software. And the software publisher has to recover this cost before it can make a profit. Without copyright, there is no way to recover the cost as hardly anybody is willing to pay for something that is free. The end result of removing copyright will be that nobody will bother creating good software.
Ha ha, IBM is teh evil, but isn't this exactly what open source does as well? It distributes knowledge/skills/techniques of the 1337, embedded within various OSS programs, to a bunch of wannabes and n00bs. Now even idiot programmers can compete with the smart ones, which is great for mediocre, great for the OSS consumers, but reduces the salaries of the good programmers.
It's imperative that such "knowledge leeching" techniques be banned from the workplace. Let's say the expert (expert in engineering, but clueless idiot in business) transfers knowledge of a technique that saves the company $10million/yr but only gets paid $50 (his hourly wage) for his genius. How is this not abuse?
The law dares to command you to not abuse the book. If the book costs $200,000 to $1 million to publish (adding up author royalties, and other publishing and marketing costs), the $20 pittance you paid does not give you the right to reproduce and sell it or give it away for free.
In which case IRC would be considered prior art, rendering the patent invalid. It's another case of reinventing the wheel.
But Nagle's algorithm does not aggregate messages from multiple clients. The aggregation is done by the IRC server.
The patent sounds exactly like IRC, except does the the IRC server push the aggregated message to all the clients as the patent covers, or do the clients pull the aggregated message from the server (which is what IRC clients probably do)?
Other than pushing the aggregated message + creating an aggregate message based on messages within a time interval, I don't see much innovation over the concepts of IRC, e-mail, or general client/server aggregate on server/disperse to clients algorithms. But then again, I'm no lawyer.
According to the Background of the Invention section of the patent, the state-of-the-art when the patent was submitted was non-aggregate messaging, meaning, if 10 PCs were playing a LAN game, each PC would send 9 messages to the other clients to recreate the shared world resulting in 9 messages * 10 PCs = 900 messages, making it bandwidth intensive and slow. The patent uses a central server to aggregate the messages; the number of messages is reduced to 10 client messages + 1 aggregate message = 11 messages.
Seems obvious to me now, but it may have not been obvious in 1996. If you can prove Doom follows the same steps (isn't the source code available?), then there's prior art to invalidate it.
Well, don't blame copyright law or the songwriters holding the copyright, because it's stupid ASCAP's fault. Without copyright, your new entertainment will mostly consist of listening to a fat guy lip-syncing "Numa, Numa", because the songwriters will have long quit their profession once it becomes open source(aka free beer).
But, but, how will they dominate and rule the world if they can't watch over every man, woman, child and mouse?
There are already a lot of video cameras at intersections now, instead of the usual red-light camera that triggers only when you run a red light. The video cameras are always ON and keep track (via image processing of license plates) of all cars passing through an intersection. So they already can know that car X was at point Y, at time Z. How is this not a massive invasion of privacy? What level of privacy must be invaded before the sheep stop taking it placidly, and fight back for freedom?
That's not even the worst part of DRM. DRM is about spying on users, collecting their application usage data, and uploading that to the company server. Why the hell should anyone pay $60 to be spied upon? Is violating privacy so cheap? There must be at least a dozen ways to avoid/reduce piracy without violating user privacy and not using this DRM crap.
Yes, why do you think cows are domesticated? Because humans have been sucking at their teats for centuries (or millennia).
As much as they fairly deserve. Or do we need some socialist gestapo rationing revenue of artists?
On a related note, as the number of independent countries are growing fewer as time goes by, are we headed towards a one-world government where one country gobbles up the rest? If a certain group of humans are trying to effect this change, why is not possible that a bunch of supernatural entities are behind this galaxy gobbling, or is just physics?
Well, those stupid patents were invented by other techies, not PHBs, so stop banding all techies as patent-hating.
LOL, so the evil corporation invents new stuff, but are somehow the villains. And the stupid open source copycats, who copy the technology of these evil corps, and bankrupt several small companies, are the true saviors of humanity. Copying successful technology is child's play compared to inventing it, designing it and selling it in the first time around. Any half-decent programmer can copy a product once he understands all the specs and how the product works.
How would you handle loops or complicated algorithms with many conditional paths in such a language? Languages are designed to solve practical problems, not to just to look pretty.
That will only work for toy inventions. It takes 3 to 5 years to simply build a 1.0 product. By the time the product is out the door, you have only 2 to 4 years to make any profit.
Say goodbye to a lot of software inventions. Why should other fields of technology enjoy patent protection, but not software?
Or at least 10% of the returns of a patent must go the inventor. That's a whole lot better than the $1,000 to $3,000 inventors make today.
So you're comparing farting to inventor's work? what an ungrateful retard for spitting on those who have helped you. Several key inventions, like the steam engine, electricity, airplanes, cars, electronic transistors have launched entire industries that have provided jobs and other material benefits to millions of people for over a century. Without these inventions, these jobs wouldn't exist, these industries would not exist, and you and your parents, even the govt., would probably be poorer. Nobody is asking for a handout, just what is rightfully, and justly owed.
Of course, I'm serious. Your statement insinuates the reverse engineering person somehow has legal rights to the work of others just because reverse engineering the invention is hard. That's like saying robbing banks is okay because breaking through vault doors is hard.
Government and business want innovation to gain more power and wealth. The consuming public wants innovation to improve their life, by making certain tasks easier or more convenient. But where do government, big business, or consuming public get off thinking they have a natural right to these innovations, to get them for free? All patents do is ensure the inventor, the person giving the benefits, is adequately compensated for his work, that's all. Without patents, the inventor is just a slave, working for free to improve the life of others, but receiving nothing in return.
Does that mean bank robbers deserve the money if they can penetrate the 20-inch vault door of a bank? Because penetrating that door is hard.
I'm not sure if you're an attorney if you don't understand the basics of why patents exist. Patents cost time and money and unless the inventor gets rewarded fairly, he won't expend effort. Only the trolls sit on their ideas. And just because there are some patent trolls, does not mean every inventor is a patent troll. Patents are expensive to obtain and maintain, and most people who have one use it protect a product from competitors.
Wrong, inventions within in a successful software product will be copied within a few days without this protection.
Innovation doesn't happen by itself, people have to spend time and money on it. And patents ensure they get paid for their efforts.
Are you sure? Another person might not think up the same thing. That's why patents exist in the first place. I don't think you're an attorney at all if you can't understand that.
No, he's not. The output of his reverse engineering will be the abstract method that can be covered by a patent, but not by copyright. For example, after looking at the disassembly for X, and performing more analysis using a debugger, he figures out the steps to perform X are: ...
1) send Z message to component Y
2) perform calculation C on message response
3)
There are hundreds of different ways to implement the above steps in source code. So he can easily avoid copyright infringement. Patents protect the steps listed above, not how it's implemented, and therefore stop leeches from profiting from other people's work.
Right, but competition usually means performing to equal or exceed your competitor. If you simply sit by and wait, then copy (steal) something innovative created by your competitor, that's not performing at all. It's just leeching off someone else's work to profit yourself. Soon inventors will get tired of getting taken advantage of, and only pursue inventions that take little time and money. That way, if someone copies their ideas, the loss won't be much. But society, as a general, will suffer more because many good inventions take more time and money, and those won't be created without sufficient protection.
Exactly, instead of throwing the baby with the bathwater, there should be a mechanism to disallow these trivial patents -- the patent writer must write in plain English what the innovative part about the patent is, instead of the hard-to-understand patent lingo used today.
And there should be some categorization so that if your invention is related to databases, or GUIs, that should be easily found by some programmer or inventor working in that area, avoid patent infringement. Eg: patent X is in category GUI -> dialog boxes.