In this case the weakness of CSS _is_ the issue.
The Finnish law being applied here explicitly states that the copy prevention has to be effective.
Your analogy also does not make any sense.
It has an additional requirement that GPLv3 doesn't have. Maybe I'm just stupid but I don't quite see how it can be compatible since GPLv3 doesn't allow additional requirements.
Not quite, I said "enforce". Copyright certainly grants a (long) time limited monopoly but this monopoly can't be effectively enforced without a dictatorship. Otherwise most people can obtain the means to make copies themselves and knowing they are unlikely to get punished will make the decision wether to copy or not regardless of what the law says.
That can actually be used as a damn good demonstration of why he and other believers in "intellectual property" are wrong. The price of gold is determined by supply and demand. The supply is limited by the production costs per unit which can be estimated quite accurately. The same supply and demand mechanism also regulates music sales but for music the production costs approach zero as the number of copies approach infinity. Trying to artificially increase the cost of making a copy doesn't work in a somewhat democratic society, in order to enforce it you need some kind of dictatorship.
The actual store page seems to be here: http://www.inrainbows.com/Store/index3.htm
(found it by looking at the source of the front page)
This almost looks like it was intended to prove people won't pay,
my niece's pet rat would have been able to make a better working web site than that...
Ok, but why are the winds blowing along the equator and not pole to pole for instance ? I'd think the tidal lock would also take away the mechanisms that cause permanent winds in that direction.
'The term "patent trolling" is just name-calling.'
But whining about "pirates" "stealing" your "intellectual" "property" is prefectly ok huh ?
Patent trolling describes what is going on much more accurately than many other newspeak
expressions coined by "IP" "owners" the last few deacdes.
The Sanyo uses SD cards instead of compact flash.
There are no hard discs in SD format (way too small at the moment at least) and the capacity is much less. I wonder how long it will take the manufacturers to come up with the correct solution: Just stick an ordinary 2.5 inch laptop HD in the damn thing. MUCH better space/price ratio than microdrives yet still smaller than the tapes and the required mechanics in miniDV cams.
You are partly right that the reasons are not always
thoroghly explained. However, software patents are also wrong for other reasons than being trivial
or the argument you quote. Let's look at the GIF example you mentioned:
UNISYS who owned the patent on the LZW algorithm (which is used among other things to greate compressed GIFs) just sat around waiting for the GIF format to become a defacto standard on the net before they started saying they had a patent on it. From their point of view it made sense to act like that but legalized extortion is hardly a sign of a working market economy. I don't think it is fair to call someone who criticizes a system that encourages such behaviour a semi-marxist. The
fact that IBM also managed to get a patent on the same algorithm later should also tell you something about how well the system works even if you for a moment assume that all software patents are non-trivial.
"Gives the CHIPs Unit of the Department of Justice the responsibility of investigating crimes related to the theft of intellectual property"
That should be easy since there's no such thing as "intellectual property" and even even though you accept that terminology it refers to something that is almost never stolen but sometimes illegally copied.
The reason software patents aren't being abused in Finland at the moment is because although many of them have been granted by the patent office they are
not legal yet. That could change soon but some people are still trying to stop it.
In this case an abstention is almost as good since the only things that mattered was the number of "yes" votes. Unfortunately the retraction of the Dutch "yes" vote is not enough, a few more are still needed.
This, like many other stories, was submitted and rejected earlier. Some/. moderators find politics boring (especially non-US politics), and they are right.:-) However, if this isn't "Stuff that matters" I don't know what is.
Slashdot Mirror
In this case the weakness of CSS _is_ the issue. The Finnish law being applied here explicitly states that the copy prevention has to be effective. Your analogy also does not make any sense.
Ah yes, section 13, thanks AC !
It has an additional requirement that GPLv3 doesn't have. Maybe I'm just stupid but I don't quite see how it can be compatible since GPLv3 doesn't allow additional requirements.
Not quite, I said "enforce". Copyright certainly grants a (long) time limited monopoly but this monopoly can't be effectively enforced without a dictatorship. Otherwise most people can obtain the means to make copies themselves and knowing they are unlikely to get punished will make the decision wether to copy or not regardless of what the law says.
That can actually be used as a damn good demonstration of why he and other believers in "intellectual property" are wrong. The price of gold is determined by supply and demand. The supply is limited by the production costs per unit which can be estimated quite accurately. The same supply and demand mechanism also regulates music sales but for music the production costs approach zero as the number of copies approach infinity. Trying to artificially increase the cost of making a copy doesn't work in a somewhat democratic society, in order to enforce it you need some kind of dictatorship.
Nathan, is that you ?
The actual store page seems to be here: http://www.inrainbows.com/Store/index3.htm (found it by looking at the source of the front page) This almost looks like it was intended to prove people won't pay, my niece's pet rat would have been able to make a better working web site than that...
Someone compared the voting behaviour to a corruption level study done in 2006: http://www.effi.org.nyud.net/blog/kai-2007-09-05.e n.html
Ok, but why are the winds blowing along the equator and not pole to pole for instance ? I'd think the tidal lock would also take away the mechanisms that cause permanent winds in that direction.
Looking at the map it seems like the polar regions are the coolest. If that is so and the planet is tidal locked shouldn't the far side be cooler ?
The author of this article has stolen my intellectual property, I demand compensation ! ;)
'The term "patent trolling" is just name-calling.' But whining about "pirates" "stealing" your "intellectual" "property" is prefectly ok huh ? Patent trolling describes what is going on much more accurately than many other newspeak expressions coined by "IP" "owners" the last few deacdes.
The Sanyo uses SD cards instead of compact flash. There are no hard discs in SD format (way too small at the moment at least) and the capacity is much less. I wonder how long it will take the manufacturers to come up with the correct solution: Just stick an ordinary 2.5 inch laptop HD in the damn thing. MUCH better space/price ratio than microdrives yet still smaller than the tapes and the required mechanics in miniDV cams.
You are partly right that the reasons are not always thoroghly explained. However, software patents are also wrong for other reasons than being trivial or the argument you quote. Let's look at the GIF example you mentioned: UNISYS who owned the patent on the LZW algorithm (which is used among other things to greate compressed GIFs) just sat around waiting for the GIF format to become a defacto standard on the net before they started saying they had a patent on it. From their point of view it made sense to act like that but legalized extortion is hardly a sign of a working market economy. I don't think it is fair to call someone who criticizes a system that encourages such behaviour a semi-marxist. The fact that IBM also managed to get a patent on the same algorithm later should also tell you something about how well the system works even if you for a moment assume that all software patents are non-trivial.
"Gives the CHIPs Unit of the Department of Justice the responsibility of investigating crimes related to the theft of intellectual property" That should be easy since there's no such thing as "intellectual property" and even even though you accept that terminology it refers to something that is almost never stolen but sometimes illegally copied.
they lay eggs like most other fish.
The reason software patents aren't being abused in Finland at the moment is because although many of them have been granted by the patent office they are not legal yet. That could change soon but some people are still trying to stop it.
In this case an abstention is almost as good since the only things that mattered was the number of "yes" votes. Unfortunately the retraction of the Dutch "yes" vote is not enough, a few more are still needed.
This, like many other stories, was submitted and rejected earlier. Some /. moderators find politics boring (especially non-US politics), and they are right. :-) However, if this isn't "Stuff that matters" I don't know what is.