> It actually filters on the MAIL FROM envelope address
I know.
> You can still put any FROM: header or REPLY_TO: > header that you want inside the email.
Theoretically. But most email clients use the same address in the header "From:" and in the envelope (SMTP "MAIL FROM:"). Actually the address in the "MAIL FROM:" is a kind of return address, used by SMTP to return an error message if needed. It doesn't have to be related from where the mail is "sent from" (and cannot be in some cases). SMTP has HELO/EHLO commands to identify a sending server, and this is the server whose identity should be verified. There is no such thing as an email address "from where an email was sent". Email addresses only designate locations where email is received. In many cases the user doesn't have control on the sending server, and wouldn't know what "address" to use in the "envelope From". In fact the sender would not want an address in the "sending domain" to be listed as the envelope from address if the sender doesn't have a mailbox monitored in that domain. It can happen for instance when an ISP grabs all outgoing port 25 packets and redirects them through its mail server, or when a mobile user is connected from a new location.
> a few other domains that have been forged and > rejected according to their SPF records: > > 1628 amazon.com > 222 gmail.com > 175 redhat.com > 129 lists.sourceforge.net > 17 sourceforge.net
222 messages with Gmail return addresses blocked by apache.org based on SPF records published by Gmail? How many of these were legitimate gmail users that were blocked?
I don't see how Gmail can publish SPF records that do not allow the whole internet (which would result in no rejected messages). How do they know what SMTP servers their users are sending from? Gmail doesn't provide SMTP service to its users (except thru the web interface that is quite limited). Gmail's publishing any kind of SPF record that does not allow sending from anywhere would break the way some people use it (sending using other services, receiving replies with Gmail). Gmail's TOS doesn't forbid using a Gmail return address on email sent from elsewhere.
It is reasonable for amazon.com or redhat.com to limit the list of servers that can send email with return addresses in their domains, as these domains are used to send email only by these organizations' employees. But an email service provider that serves customers and doesn't publicise any restrictions on the use of return adresses shouldn't employ SPF without making it clear that only their SMTP servers can used to send when a gmail return address is used.
Correction: (to When innovation becomes routine...
on
Microsoft Patents sudo
·
· Score: 1
> This is the source of thing programmers do routinely
correction: This is the sort of thing programmers do routinely
(who invented "cut and paste" editing? is it patented?;-D )
> just solving the non-obviousness problem... are not real solutions
They ARE partial solutions. One of the main problems here is that things patented that are supposedly innovative are considered by others routine. Each piece of software written might contain hundreds or thousands of lines of code that are really innovative in terms of nineteenth century industrial revolution standards, when just putting together a few things to make them do something was innovation. This is the source of thing programmers do routinely (there is nothing new in software that Turing hasn't already proved possible in 1936).
I said "one of" the main problems. The other one is not just a problem of the patent system, but is recuring in many other areas: it is the cost of using the legal system, that is supposed to give equal service to all. The way things work is that when the law doesn't fit the needs or the wishes of the people, it is changed, either peacfully by legislation, or violently (E.G. as in 1776). Anyway, long before that, patents and copyright will go the way of speed limits...
> why do we have to slap 20+ years > of protection (read: prohibition) on it?
Don't forget: publicly funded protection.
Actually I do have a gadget with lights controled by software. It's called a "screen". If you don't think about these as lights, then think about those really big ones in the streets. Probably someone already did this lighting control already in the sixties, or perhaps in the fifties.
Come to think about it, the same thing is done with office buildings: software conrols the light in offices at night-time, creating text and pictures of light usinf office windows. Another one I know of was an arra of lights that people could light up by sending SMS to a certain number (each SMS lighting one lamp and also contributing to charity, until the whole picture is lit).
> It is not copyright law which grants and > defines and restricts fair use. It is > fair use which rescues copyright law from > being struck down as unconstitutional
More than being constitutional, copyright law is not natural. The way things has been during the past few millenia of human civilizations is that ideas were freely spreading. That's the natural way for our species to do things. Copyright and other "Intelectual property" laws were introduced very recently in human history and their purpose is not to grant rights to owners of "property", but rather to restrict rights. Their ONLY purpose was to allow the use some relatively expensive new technologies to be used profitably. Now that there are alternative ways to to do the same, does the public need the same kind of restrictions?
The first thing to do when teaching young people about "Intelectual Property" is to show how the terminology is misleading: "Intelectual Property" is not property. In the natural way ideas are free. Public interest leads to defining some restrictions, and these restrictions should be minimal and should be periodically revised to fit the times. There is a natural way to keep an idea from being copied: keep it secret. The ONLY good reason to restrict the public from freely distributing ideas is to discourage the keeping of secrets. I don't think that the RIAA or the MPAA or the BSA members would keep their stuff secret if copyright and other IP laws were to disappear. They would just find the right tools to ensure they make some profit from what they distribute. Keeping it secret won't make them any profits.
There is no such thing as being granted the right to copy. This right exists naturally. The law only restricts it to benefit some people, and if the technology or the way things are done changes, the public should reassess things and change the laws accordingly.
Do we really need the law to protect mediocre creations sold to the millions through aggressive marketing when we have technology that can be used to create and distribute content almost freely?
One case for IP laws is that it is designed to protect the ability of creators to benefit from the effort put into creation. At least in the case of the RIAA and the MPAA it seems that the protection is more to the multimillions they pour into marketing, and not into creation. Does the public really have an interest in protecting their investment in marketing? A similar argument applies to patent protection that is more and more applied to protect companies' investment in IP lawyers searching for existing technology that can be registered with the patent office, rather than in creating new technology.
Sending IP in US, Spamvertised sites elsewhere
on
Spam's U.S. Roots
·
· Score: 1
I often look at the headers analysis produced by SpamCop before reporting spam, and very often I see spam that is sent (relayed) from US source (probably almost always infected PCs) with spamvertized websites in Korea or China. The Spam is of course English and intended for a North American audience.
We really need a vampire botnet, not just sites
on
Spam's U.S. Roots
·
· Score: 1
hundreds of thousands of trojans constantly usinf spammers' bandwidth would be much more effective in crushing spammers than a few "vampire sites".
Another thing that crossed my mind in the past thinking about open relays, and now about botnets of trojans relaying spam, is that once their addresses are known, perhaps a good way to reduce their capacity (thus lowering the amount of spam they send) is to send them dummy email for them to relay to each other...
>... if there isn't a viable replacement for Microsoft's software, > but that isn't really the case anymore.
Really? I downloaded Open Office (my language version) several months ago, hoping that it would let me work with MS Office files I get from my employer. It can open them, but they are mostly garbled, and certainly not something I can use. I even tried to save as RTF from MS Word XP and then open in Open Office, and the RTF file looked garbled in Open Office. Perhaps it's MS's fault, but it really doesn;t matter whose fault it is when I need work done and practically everyone else is using MS Office. The only use I got from Open Office so far is in creating PDF files incorporating several scanned pages, and Open Office never handled the screen display of these documents correctly (the saved PDF's were OK, though). So I can use it in a way, but it is not something a secretary with no technical knowledge could have used. (not to mention that Open Office is crushing a lot, much more than any other program I use.
I really like OSS, but I don't see that it's ready for use by the general public! At least from my experience I cannot recommend software such as Open Office to anyone that is not technically inclined and has a lot of experience in computers.
Voluntary participation is both good and bad
on
Linux vs. Windows
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· Score: 1
> The other thing that makes this work is the > fact that it is voluntary... The code is > written... by people who wish to write...
Probably one reason that GNU/Linux desktop versions suited for non-technical types took so long to arrive (did they really arrive?) is that it was not something any hacker really wanted to do, or felt the need to do. Whan the development model is that volunteers write whatever they think is useful' the result would be focused at the needs of developers, and not anyone else.
My provider gave me absolutely no info about what info I can get access to and how, and still gives absolutely no info on how to use the WAP browser on my phone. It has extensive online documentation for all the other stuff (phoning, voicemail, SMS, SMS to lists of recipients), but when it comes to WAP it's only some very short uninteligible technical instructions about proxy settings (without providing the info to put in, just a translation of manufacturer instructions, it seems) and that's about it.
A couple of years ago, when I planned to upgrade my former 3yr+ cellphone, I tried to learn from my provider what I get from their "internet enabled" phones (no one I knew used their cell phones for anything related to internet except using it as a modem with a laptop where landline was not available). The only thing a representative could tell me is that "it is not the internet you know. It's a different kind of internet", and she couldn't tell me any more info. Eventually I just took one of the cheapest deals without taking any "internet considerations" (the free hands free+instalation in car was a consideration). That very cheap phone (Samsung SGH R-220 GSM dualband, known around here as Samsung 514) has some WAP capabilities. I tried it in the first month when I got something like 60 free minutes, and didn't get to anything useful. The WAP browser button took me to a page full of links to the provider's promoted info (horoscope and other useless stuff) and scrolling several pages down brought me to a place to enter a full URL, or search. THe searches didn;t give anything useful. I had no URL I knew of to use, except for my email provider's experimental WAP gateway (wap.fastmail.fm) and then I couldn't figure out how to enter some of the characters in the password: the method used by the browser to produce characters was different from the one used by the phone (phonebook+SMS) and was undocumented, of course. Eventually I went through the trouble of creating a separate email account with a letters only password, and filtering rules to forward a copy of each message that is not to big and satisfies some more criteria (such as being sent to some particular addresses and not others) and could use wap to login to that account and see the messages. However many messages required several cellphone screens just to read the subject line, and many required manually decoding "quoted-printable" or "base64" encodings to really read the subject lines. It took about 5 minutes just get to the login page, login to the account and see some subject lines, so it was not worth the trouble (might be worth the trouble if I expected something very important, but then, I could ask to be notified by phone, and if it is something that cannot be transferred bu phone conversation, then it is probably not readable on a cellphone screen).
I can see good use for wap, but not with cellphone providers making it hard to get outside thair own portal to the real internet.
"Triple damages" were probably not meant for "software patents".
The legislators that created patent laws were probably thinking about machines composed of a relatively small number of components, and wanted to make sure no one can use a patented invention as a major components in a new creation. It was probably meant against intentional inclusion of a component that is patented, and they probably thought that a person working in a certain field would not be able to claim she "wasn't aware" of a component being patented because it would usually be common knowledge to all experts in the same field that it is a major new innovation.
What they certainly coiuld not forsee is creations involving thousands and sometimes perhaps millions of tiny components, that each may be patented, and that know one expert can know even about a fraction of them.
In the "industrial revolution" era the number of patents, the number of inventions, and the number of components in each invention made it improbable that an inventor would accidentally infringe. In software the number of components (instructions/modules) and the number of patents makes "accidental infrigement" much more probable, perhaps even impossible to avoid.
A few years ago when I was in an organization that started using secureID, I just forwarded all my email out, so I can access it from outside.
The "SecureID" system would lock me out any time some software automatically retried login with the wrong password (usually because the 60 seconds limit was crossed and the password changed) and then I had to wait for the next time I am at the office to reenable it.
(Therer was nothing that needed this kind of security in my stuff. Employing this kind of security measure organization-wide instead of in the few places it was needed was a mistake IMO. When you need to protect something you put it in a safe, you don't build a fortress around you!)
Isn't the the registration of my name at birth in the proper name registry enough for legaly using it for identification?
Is it possible to register my domain name as a trademark for the purpose of "personal network presence"? How much would it cost? Where would I register? I believe that the domain name registry for the popular tld's are operated in the US, so I would have to register in the US, and also in any other country that might be associated to me (such as: where I live, Where I am a citizen, where I do business, where I host my domain, where I host my email, DNS, etc.)
Perhaps resellers of domain name registry services should bundle in (at least as a "paid for" extra option) the registration of the domain as a "personal id trademark". I wonder how much it would cost. (Would namecheap.com have to rename to nameexpensive.com;-) ) Perhaps a more sensible deal would be insurance that would pay for legal defense in case of trademark claims on a personal id.
Or perhaps there should be a legal mechanism for people to trademark their names for personal identification that is separate from the commercial trademarking system. People do have different needs, and people do share the same name. So there should be a mechanism that would allow people to protect the use of their personal name for identification without preventing others using the same name (i.e., protecting an individual from personal name being taken away - in this case Katie Jones has the right to use the name Katie, had the right to register the domain name katie.com that was available as a means to identify herself in the internet, and should be able to be protected by law from others trying to deny her this right to use her name, or from others abusing her network-presence-id).
It's not about copyright to the title
on
The Saga of Katie.com
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
The publisher response about Katie Jones not registering katie.com as a trademark only claims that this means she cannot force them to stop using the name. Not that they can stop her using that name.
But even if they are legally allowed to use the name as the title of a book, it doesn't mean that they are not liable for the damages caused by this, even if it wasn't used maliciously. IMO heir neglegance in failing to predict and avoid the consequenes of mass producing books with references to an existing personal domain is enough to make them liable. It's not that they discovered that the name they used happened to also be someone's domain name. It was published AS A DOMAIN NAME, thus they had the responsibility to check in advance if they can use it and to consider the impact of using the name.
As the website says now, it was forced to remove all commercial contents. It was owned by Uzi Nissan in relation to his local computer business since the early days of the internet.
Nissan Motors didn't get it, but the guy lost use of his domain. It's a pity that the detail of the case were removed from the site. The guy even showed a copy of a receipt fro the 70's he issued using the Nissan name to Datsun (former name of Nissan).
The katie.com case is not exactly the same. The name was chosen deliberately to refer to a domain name without assessing the damage it would do to the domain name owner (such as having to pay for dealing with the traffic and pay for the bandwidth). It's not that they happen to have the same trademark (which is allowed for different businesses). In this case the author of the book deliberately chose this title without checking about the domain name, and without considering the impact of chosing to use the existing domain name' or perhaps worse: choosing to ignore the consequences. I think in this case they should pay katie.com to compensate for the trouble.
> you patent a technology that the > competitor wants to use or is using
How can you do that? If it is already used by your competitor then you cannot patent it. Or perhaps you can. You tell the patent registrar it's your original invention and it is new. Would that be lying? Perhaps not. It's just not telling the truth! Even if you only try to patent something that your competitor "wants to use", it is not exactly your original invention. If your competitor "wants to use" something, then your competitor is already aware of that "something", so it is not something entirely new.
> No where in the strategy is their > a need to lie about knowing anything
Yes, assuming both players cooperate and settle out of court. But there is an assumption that in a worst case you can always tell the court you didn't know. You say that bith players have to settle. But if the other player hasn't used one of the technologies that were "counter-patented" then there's no reason for that player to settle. And then in court the company that decided to infringe has to either tell the court it had prior knowledge, or lie.
Anyway, the fact that corporations register patents not because they discovered some innovative way to do something, but because they are in the business of collecting weapons to use for threatening their competitors shows how broken the patent system has become.
Leonardo Da Vinci didn't have to patent his inventions, since in his time there were not enough inventors around that could "steal" his ideas before he used them. On the contrary, other people copying his inventions would only benefit him at that time. Later (industrial revolution) there were more technically capable people around, and the risk of someone else taking your market before you can profit from your invention became real. So society had an interest in temporarily limiting the freedom of others to use the same idea. It was meant so that society can benefit from real innovations. But since the early industrial revolution a lot has changed, and the number of technically able individuals is much greater now. So perhaps this system is not suitable any more. It certainly needs to be modified.
Superficially it seems right that a person should be able to benefit from her original ideas. But the patent system does this by not allowing anyone else to benefit from their original ideas. A hundred years ago perhaps it was quite rare that someone would have the same invention independently before a patented invention becomes common knowledge. But now it seems that lots of these patented "inventions" never become common knowledge, since they are not that significant or innovative, and on the other hand, are very likely to be independently reinvented by a lot of different people in a short time frame. And "counter-patenting" is just the practice of looking at what people are currently trying to solve, and patenting as much of the straightforward solutions to these problems as possible before others do. It's an abuse of the patent system. What's really happening here, is that the richer players are really not acting by the rules, they say something like: "we're rich enough not to honor patents. We are rich enough to buy ourselves a lot of patents. With the other strong players in this game of not honoring patents we'll play by are own mob rules, and we'll squash anyone else". The only way for those not strong enough to play this game to survive is using quantity. If everyone stops honoring patents, tehn some might have to pay a price in court, but the majority will win. That's the rationale behind revolutions and behind wars. When you see you are going to lose, you make a war, have some casualties, but the majority wins (or not. Doesn't matter if otherwise you lose).
There's no such thing as "counter-patent". What exactly our they "counter-patenting"? Something that's already in someone else's work? Something that's not in that work?
What they are really doing is searching for existing patents, finding them, and then planning a strategy of pretending not to have known in advance. The other patents they register has nothing to do with knowingly infringing someone else's patent. They're just a strategy of planning to shoot around if caught!
And it shows exactly what's wrong with the way the patent system currently works: patents are registered not to allow the inventor time to make some money from her investment, but rather to be able to threaten with legal fees.
Programming involves solving thousands of little problems. Every step in a procedure is a solution to one little problem. Almost all seem straightforward or trivial to the programmer. Some require more thought (and most, when solved, seem straightforward, as in "this is so obvious, what was I thinking?")
I don't think it is really possible to do a real "patent search" on software, since every line of code might be something that someone else thought is "innovative". Actually every single step in a program is "innovative", and deciding which ones are "more innovative" than others is very subjective: when the solution to a problem involves combining many little ideas, then each person trying to combine them would have problems with a (possibly quite random) subset of them. To that person the solution of that subset would seem non-trivial, while it would seem trivial to someone else who got stuck on a different subset.
Also, how do you find what patent each of your lines of code might infringe? In practice you'd have to compare each of thousands of lines of code to each of thousands of seemingly unrelated patents. Keyword searches would probably miss most of the relevant patents. One would have to guess what might have made each of one's trivial solutions untrivial to others to guess the right keywords to find relevant patents.
Theoretically software patents are not different than "traditional" patents. The difference is in the numbers: an engineer designing a machine doesn't worry about the "technology" of using a certain number of screws of a particular shape to connect two elements of a particular size is patented. Nor does an engineer needs to worry about a patent for the technology of "including a switch to activate a certain functionality". For some reason a programmer does need to worry about such things as actually including a control in the user interface or how two components that have to communicate with each other do communicate, or whether the "idea" that those two particular components might communicate information has been patented. So a programmer has thousands and possibly millions of ways of unknowingly infringing.
For avoiding patent infringement, a programmer has to do a copmplete patent search after every minute or two of programming. Who's to know if the trivial solution you just thought of wasn't already patented by someone "not as smart as you" that thought it was not trivial?
I don't think that it's really about "prior art". It's more about the nature of things being composed of thousands of tiny components, each component separately patentable, and different people ranking "triviality" differently, based on the way they approached the problem.
It's not much different from the spam problem, where any single message is harmless, but combined together they become a problem. Or terrorism, that statistically is threatening almost nobody, and is much less lethal than things like traffic accidents, smoking, obesity, but once amplified by mass media, becomes a real threat.
In software patents, it's the large number of simple components that builds software, and the inability of software authors to guess which of their trivial solutions was untrivial to someone else in the past! It amplifies the effort needed to avoid patent infringement to the point that it becomes impossible to avoid.
I think in many different problems that arose in modern society, the problems arise from a single effect of "amplification" that arises from the nature of things such as "mass media", "mass production", "universality" (as in a "universal turing machine"), "global village" etc.
> Now a memory map maps from your virtual memory address, > to your physical memory address.
> Now you get 10 points for guessing what a reverse memory map is...
Oh, so it's OK to have a table with two columns for vitual and physical memory addresses, but you may only sort it by the "virtual" field, because sorting by the "physical" field is patented? No! It's OK! you just have to license the technology!
>...when we did a patent search, we turned up > several patents we potentially might be > infringing...
That means that the basic strategy, if sued, is to lie and say "we didn't know". That's possible with "closed source" if you are careful enough not to leave evidence that you knew about possible patent infringements, nor leave evidence that your company normaly does check for possible infringements on every product.
Open source doesn't have the option of "covering traces": everything discussed is in the public domain. So lying in court is not an option. No wonder some closed source producers think open source is a broken business model. It doesn't have the most important component of doing business: lying!
> For example, Let's say I went down and bought > a new Chevy truck so I could haul my turnips to market. >... Can Ford sue me for hauling my turnips in > a truck that violates their patents?
If they patented the "business method" of "hauling my turnips in a truck" then they might have a case...;-)
Insurance is just a way of coordinating funds: one user cannot afford the legal defense. But collecting fees from many users allows the insurer to defend them collectively. Car insurers don't base their business model on the assumption that one car would be involved in an accident (or would be stolen, or burn...). Their business model is based on statistics: a certain percent of the clients would file claims. The same with the patent infringements that might be present in LINUX or any other kind of software: There is a certain number of possible infringements. There is an expected cost of defending them (including a certain percentage of lost or negociated settlements) and an expected income from clients of the insurer. The fees charged are expected to cover the expected costs of claims plus profit.
> You (99.9% chance) visited a "copycat" website > that actually copied Wikipedia, > not the other way around.
Actually I was visiting an official government body site describing its structure/functionality, and some paragraphs were identical to paragraph in the Wikipedia article describing it. It was not the whole article, and not the introductory paragraph, so it looked like someone decided that the Wiki page needs more detailed description and added some details by copying several paragraphs from the official site. (of course there is always the possibility that a government body decided it needes a website, and why work hard if the contents is already available for copying?)
Slashdot Mirror
> It actually filters on the MAIL FROM envelope address
I know.
> You can still put any FROM: header or REPLY_TO:
> header that you want inside the email.
Theoretically. But most email clients use the same address in the header "From:" and in the envelope (SMTP "MAIL FROM:"). Actually the address in the "MAIL FROM:" is a kind of return address, used by SMTP to return an error message if needed. It doesn't have to be related from where the mail is "sent from" (and cannot be in some cases). SMTP has HELO/EHLO commands to identify a sending server, and this is the server whose identity should be verified. There is no such thing as an email address "from where an email was sent". Email addresses only designate locations where email is received. In many cases the user doesn't have control on the sending server, and wouldn't know what "address" to use in the "envelope From". In fact the sender would not want an address in the "sending domain" to be listed as the envelope from address if the sender doesn't have a mailbox monitored in that domain. It can happen for instance when an ISP grabs all outgoing port 25 packets and redirects them through its mail server, or when a mobile user is connected from a new location.
> a few other domains that have been forged and
> rejected according to their SPF records:
>
> 1628 amazon.com
> 222 gmail.com
> 175 redhat.com
> 129 lists.sourceforge.net
> 17 sourceforge.net
222 messages with Gmail return addresses blocked by apache.org based on SPF records published by Gmail? How many of these were legitimate gmail users that were blocked?
I don't see how Gmail can publish SPF records that do not allow the whole internet (which would result in no rejected messages). How do they know what SMTP servers their users are sending from? Gmail doesn't provide SMTP service to its users (except thru the web interface that is quite limited). Gmail's publishing any kind of SPF record that does not allow sending from anywhere would break the way some people use it (sending using other services, receiving replies with Gmail). Gmail's TOS doesn't forbid using a Gmail return address on email sent from elsewhere.
It is reasonable for amazon.com or redhat.com to limit the list of servers that can send email with return addresses in their domains, as these domains are used to send email only by these organizations' employees. But an email service provider that serves customers and doesn't publicise any restrictions on the use of return adresses shouldn't employ SPF without making it clear that only their SMTP servers can used to send when a gmail return address is used.
> This is the source of thing programmers do routinely
;-D )
correction:
This is the sort of thing programmers do routinely
(who invented "cut and paste" editing? is it patented?
> just solving the non-obviousness problem ... are not real solutions
They ARE partial solutions. One of the main problems here is that things patented that are supposedly innovative are considered by others routine. Each piece of software written might contain hundreds or thousands of lines of code that are really innovative in terms of nineteenth century industrial revolution standards, when just putting together a few things to make them do something was innovation. This is the source of thing programmers do routinely (there is nothing new in software that Turing hasn't already proved possible in 1936).
I said "one of" the main problems. The other one is not just a problem of the patent system, but is recuring in many other areas: it is the cost of using the legal system, that is supposed to give equal service to all. The way things work is that when the law doesn't fit the needs or the wishes of the people, it is changed, either peacfully by legislation, or violently (E.G. as in 1776). Anyway, long before that, patents and copyright will go the way of speed limits...
> why do we have to slap 20+ years
> of protection (read: prohibition) on it?
Don't forget: publicly funded protection.
Actually I do have a gadget with lights controled by software. It's called a "screen". If you don't think about these as lights, then think about those really big ones in the streets. Probably someone already did this lighting control already in the sixties, or perhaps in the fifties.
Come to think about it, the same thing is done with office buildings: software conrols the light in offices at night-time, creating text and pictures of light usinf office windows. Another one I know of was an arra of lights that people could light up by sending SMS to a certain number (each SMS lighting one lamp and also contributing to charity, until the whole picture is lit).
> It is not copyright law which grants and
> defines and restricts fair use. It is
> fair use which rescues copyright law from
> being struck down as unconstitutional
More than being constitutional, copyright law is not natural. The way things has been during the past few millenia of human civilizations is that ideas were freely spreading. That's the natural way for our species to do things. Copyright and other "Intelectual property" laws were introduced very recently in human history and their purpose is not to grant rights to owners of "property", but rather to restrict rights. Their ONLY purpose was to allow the use some relatively expensive new technologies to be used profitably. Now that there are alternative ways to to do the same, does the public need the same kind of restrictions?
The first thing to do when teaching young people about "Intelectual Property" is to show how the terminology is misleading: "Intelectual Property" is not property. In the natural way ideas are free. Public interest leads to defining some restrictions, and these restrictions should be minimal and should be periodically revised to fit the times. There is a natural way to keep an idea from being copied: keep it secret. The ONLY good reason to restrict the public from freely distributing ideas is to discourage the keeping of secrets. I don't think that the RIAA or the MPAA or the BSA members would keep their stuff secret if copyright and other IP laws were to disappear. They would just find the right tools to ensure they make some profit from what they distribute. Keeping it secret won't make them any profits.
There is no such thing as being granted the right to copy. This right exists naturally. The law only restricts it to benefit some people, and if the technology or the way things are done changes, the public should reassess things and change the laws accordingly.
Do we really need the law to protect mediocre creations sold to the millions through aggressive marketing when we have technology that can be used to create and distribute content almost freely?
One case for IP laws is that it is designed to protect the ability of creators to benefit from the effort put into creation. At least in the case of the RIAA and the MPAA it seems that the protection is more to the multimillions they pour into marketing, and not into creation. Does the public really have an interest in protecting their investment in marketing? A similar argument applies to patent protection that is more and more applied to protect companies' investment in IP lawyers searching for existing technology that can be registered with the patent office, rather than in creating new technology.
I often look at the headers analysis produced by SpamCop before reporting spam, and very often I see spam that is sent (relayed) from US source (probably almost always infected PCs) with spamvertized websites in Korea or China. The Spam is of course English and intended for a North American audience.
hundreds of thousands of trojans constantly usinf spammers' bandwidth would be much more effective in crushing spammers than a few "vampire sites".
Another thing that crossed my mind in the past thinking about open relays, and now about botnets of trojans relaying spam, is that once their addresses are known, perhaps a good way to reduce their capacity (thus lowering the amount of spam they send) is to send them dummy email for them to relay to each other...
> ... if there isn't a viable replacement for Microsoft's software,
> but that isn't really the case anymore.
Really?
I downloaded Open Office (my language version) several months ago, hoping that it would let me work with MS Office files I get from my employer. It can open them, but they are mostly garbled, and certainly not something I can use. I even tried to save as RTF from MS Word XP and then open in Open Office, and the RTF file looked garbled in Open Office. Perhaps it's MS's fault, but it really doesn;t matter whose fault it is when I need work done and practically everyone else is using MS Office. The only use I got from Open Office so far is in creating PDF files incorporating several scanned pages, and Open Office never handled the screen display of these documents correctly (the saved PDF's were OK, though). So I can use it in a way, but it is not something a secretary with no technical knowledge could have used. (not to mention that Open Office is crushing a lot, much more than any other program I use.
I really like OSS, but I don't see that it's ready for use by the general public! At least from my experience I cannot recommend software such as Open Office to anyone that is not technically inclined and has a lot of experience in computers.
> The other thing that makes this work is the ... The code is ... by people who wish to write ...
> fact that it is voluntary
> written
Probably one reason that GNU/Linux desktop versions suited for non-technical types took so long to arrive (did they really arrive?) is that it was not something any hacker really wanted to do, or felt the need to do. Whan the development model is that volunteers write whatever they think is useful' the result would be focused at the needs of developers, and not anyone else.
My provider gave me absolutely no info about what info I can get access to and how, and still gives absolutely no info on how to use the WAP browser on my phone. It has extensive online documentation for all the other stuff (phoning, voicemail, SMS, SMS to lists of recipients), but when it comes to WAP it's only some very short uninteligible technical instructions about proxy settings (without providing the info to put in, just a translation of manufacturer instructions, it seems) and that's about it.
A couple of years ago, when I planned to upgrade my former 3yr+ cellphone, I tried to learn from my provider what I get from their "internet enabled" phones (no one I knew used their cell phones for anything related to internet except using it as a modem with a laptop where landline was not available). The only thing a representative could tell me is that "it is not the internet you know. It's a different kind of internet", and she couldn't tell me any more info. Eventually I just took one of the cheapest deals without taking any "internet considerations" (the free hands free+instalation in car was a consideration). That very cheap phone (Samsung SGH R-220 GSM dualband, known around here as Samsung 514) has some WAP capabilities. I tried it in the first month when I got something like 60 free minutes, and didn't get to anything useful. The WAP browser button took me to a page full of links to the provider's promoted info (horoscope and other useless stuff) and scrolling several pages down brought me to a place to enter a full URL, or search. THe searches didn;t give anything useful. I had no URL I knew of to use, except for my email provider's experimental WAP gateway (wap.fastmail.fm) and then I couldn't figure out how to enter some of the characters in the password: the method used by the browser to produce characters was different from the one used by the phone (phonebook+SMS) and was undocumented, of course. Eventually I went through the trouble of creating a separate email account with a letters only password, and filtering rules to forward a copy of each message that is not to big and satisfies some more criteria (such as being sent to some particular addresses and not others) and could use wap to login to that account and see the messages. However many messages required several cellphone screens just to read the subject line, and many required manually decoding "quoted-printable" or "base64" encodings to really read the subject lines. It took about 5 minutes just get to the login page, login to the account and see some subject lines, so it was not worth the trouble (might be worth the trouble if I expected something very important, but then, I could ask to be notified by phone, and if it is something that cannot be transferred bu phone conversation, then it is probably not readable on a cellphone screen).
I can see good use for wap, but not with cellphone providers making it hard to get outside thair own portal to the real internet.
"Triple damages" were probably not meant for "software patents".
The legislators that created patent laws were probably thinking about machines composed of a relatively small number of components, and wanted to make sure no one can use a patented invention as a major components in a new creation. It was probably meant against intentional inclusion of a component that is patented, and they probably thought that a person working in a certain field would not be able to claim she "wasn't aware" of a component being patented because it would usually be common knowledge to all experts in the same field that it is a major new innovation.
What they certainly coiuld not forsee is creations involving thousands and sometimes perhaps millions of tiny components, that each may be patented, and that know one expert can know even about a fraction of them.
In the "industrial revolution" era the number of patents, the number of inventions, and the number of components in each invention made it improbable that an inventor would accidentally infringe. In software the number of components (instructions/modules) and the number of patents makes "accidental infrigement" much more probable, perhaps even impossible to avoid.
A few years ago when I was in an organization that started using secureID, I just forwarded all my email out, so I can access it from outside.
The "SecureID" system would lock me out any time some software automatically retried login with the wrong password (usually because the 60 seconds limit was crossed and the password changed) and then I had to wait for the next time I am at the office to reenable it.
(Therer was nothing that needed this kind of security in my stuff. Employing this kind of security measure organization-wide instead of in the few places it was needed was a mistake IMO. When you need to protect something you put it in a safe, you don't build a fortress around you!)
Should we all trademark our names now?
;-) )
Isn't the the registration of my name at birth in the proper name registry enough for legaly using it for identification?
Is it possible to register my domain name as a trademark for the purpose of "personal network presence"? How much would it cost? Where would I register? I believe that the domain name registry for the popular tld's are operated in the US, so I would have to register in the US, and also in any other country that might be associated to me (such as: where I live, Where I am a citizen, where I do business, where I host my domain, where I host my email, DNS, etc.)
Perhaps resellers of domain name registry services should bundle in (at least as a "paid for" extra option) the registration of the domain as a "personal id trademark". I wonder how much it would cost. (Would namecheap.com have to rename to nameexpensive.com
Perhaps a more sensible deal would be insurance that would pay for legal defense in case of trademark claims on a personal id.
Or perhaps there should be a legal mechanism for people to trademark their names for personal identification that is separate from the commercial trademarking system. People do have different needs, and people do share the same name. So there should be a mechanism that would allow people to protect the use of their personal name for identification without preventing others using the same name (i.e., protecting an individual from personal name being taken away - in this case Katie Jones has the right to use the name Katie, had the right to register the domain name katie.com that was available as a means to identify herself in the internet, and should be able to be protected by law from others trying to deny her this right to use her name, or from others abusing her network-presence-id).
The publisher response about Katie Jones not registering katie.com as a trademark only claims that this means she cannot force them to stop using the name. Not that they can stop her using that name.
But even if they are legally allowed to use the name as the title of a book, it doesn't mean that they are not liable for the damages caused by this, even if it wasn't used maliciously. IMO heir neglegance in failing to predict and avoid the consequenes of mass producing books with references to an existing personal domain is enough to make them liable. It's not that they discovered that the name they used happened to also be someone's domain name. It was published AS A DOMAIN NAME, thus they had the responsibility to check in advance if they can use it and to consider the impact of using the name.
A better example: Nissan.com
As the website says now, it was forced to remove all commercial contents. It was owned by Uzi Nissan in relation to his local computer business since the early days of the internet.
Nissan Motors didn't get it, but the guy lost use of his domain. It's a pity that the detail of the case were removed from the site. The guy even showed a copy of a receipt fro the 70's he issued using the Nissan name to Datsun (former name of Nissan).
The katie.com case is not exactly the same. The name was chosen deliberately to refer to a domain name without assessing the damage it would do to the domain name owner (such as having to pay for dealing with the traffic and pay for the bandwidth). It's not that they happen to have the same trademark (which is allowed for different businesses). In this case the author of the book deliberately chose this title without checking about the domain name, and without considering the impact of chosing to use the existing domain name' or perhaps worse: choosing to ignore the consequences. I think in this case they should pay katie.com to compensate for the trouble.
> you patent a technology that the
> competitor wants to use or is using
How can you do that? If it is already used by your competitor then you cannot patent it. Or perhaps you can. You tell the patent registrar it's your original invention and it is new. Would that be lying? Perhaps not. It's just not telling the truth! Even if you only try to patent something that your competitor "wants to use", it is not exactly your original invention. If your competitor "wants to use" something, then your competitor is already aware of that "something", so it is not something entirely new.
> No where in the strategy is their
> a need to lie about knowing anything
Yes, assuming both players cooperate and settle out of court. But there is an assumption that in a worst case you can always tell the court you didn't know. You say that bith players have to settle. But if the other player hasn't used one of the technologies that were "counter-patented" then there's no reason for that player to settle. And then in court the company that decided to infringe has to either tell the court it had prior knowledge, or lie.
Anyway, the fact that corporations register patents not because they discovered some innovative way to do something, but because they are in the business of collecting weapons to use for threatening their competitors shows how broken the patent system has become.
Leonardo Da Vinci didn't have to patent his inventions, since in his time there were not enough inventors around that could "steal" his ideas before he used them. On the contrary, other people copying his inventions would only benefit him at that time. Later (industrial revolution) there were more technically capable people around, and the risk of someone else taking your market before you can profit from your invention became real. So society had an interest in temporarily limiting the freedom of others to use the same idea. It was meant so that society can benefit from real innovations. But since the early industrial revolution a lot has changed, and the number of technically able individuals is much greater now. So perhaps this system is not suitable any more. It certainly needs to be modified.
Superficially it seems right that a person should be able to benefit from her original ideas. But the patent system does this by not allowing anyone else to benefit from their original ideas. A hundred years ago perhaps it was quite rare that someone would have the same invention independently before a patented invention becomes common knowledge. But now it seems that lots of these patented "inventions" never become common knowledge, since they are not that significant or innovative, and on the other hand, are very likely to be independently reinvented by a lot of different people in a short time frame. And "counter-patenting" is just the practice of looking at what people are currently trying to solve, and patenting as much of the straightforward solutions to these problems as possible before others do. It's an abuse of the patent system. What's really happening here, is that the richer players are really not acting by the rules, they say something like: "we're rich enough not to honor patents. We are rich enough to buy ourselves a lot of patents. With the other strong players in this game of not honoring patents we'll play by are own mob rules, and we'll squash anyone else". The only way for those not strong enough to play this game to survive is using quantity. If everyone stops honoring patents, tehn some might have to pay a price in court, but the majority will win. That's the rationale behind revolutions and behind wars. When you see you are going to lose, you make a war, have some casualties, but the majority wins (or not. Doesn't matter if otherwise you lose).
I'm getting carried away...
There's no such thing as "counter-patent".
What exactly our they "counter-patenting"? Something that's already in someone else's work? Something that's not in that work?
What they are really doing is searching for existing patents, finding them, and then planning a strategy of pretending not to have known in advance. The other patents they register has nothing to do with knowingly infringing someone else's patent. They're just a strategy of planning to shoot around if caught!
And it shows exactly what's wrong with the way the patent system currently works: patents are registered not to allow the inventor time to make some money from her investment, but rather to be able to threaten with legal fees.
"Anti-isurance" is a method proposed to reduce "insurance fraud". Of course, the inventors are patenting this "business method".
d =288090
See http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_i
Programming involves solving thousands of little problems. Every step in a procedure is a solution to one little problem. Almost all seem straightforward or trivial to the programmer. Some require more thought (and most, when solved, seem straightforward, as in "this is so obvious, what was I thinking?")
I don't think it is really possible to do a real "patent search" on software, since every line of code might be something that someone else thought is "innovative". Actually every single step in a program is "innovative", and deciding which ones are "more innovative" than others is very subjective: when the solution to a problem involves combining many little ideas, then each person trying to combine them would have problems with a (possibly quite random) subset of them. To that person the solution of that subset would seem non-trivial, while it would seem trivial to someone else who got stuck on a different subset.
Also, how do you find what patent each of your lines of code might infringe? In practice you'd have to compare each of thousands of lines of code to each of thousands of seemingly unrelated patents. Keyword searches would probably miss most of the relevant patents. One would have to guess what might have made each of one's trivial solutions untrivial to others to guess the right keywords to find relevant patents.
Theoretically software patents are not different than "traditional" patents. The difference is in the numbers: an engineer designing a machine doesn't worry about the "technology" of using a certain number of screws of a particular shape to connect two elements of a particular size is patented. Nor does an engineer needs to worry about a patent for the technology of "including a switch to activate a certain functionality". For some reason a programmer does need to worry about such things as actually including a control in the user interface or how two components that have to communicate with each other do communicate, or whether the "idea" that those two particular components might communicate information has been patented. So a programmer has thousands and possibly millions of ways of unknowingly infringing.
For avoiding patent infringement, a programmer has to do a copmplete patent search after every minute or two of programming. Who's to know if the trivial solution you just thought of wasn't already patented by someone "not as smart as you" that thought it was not trivial?
I don't think that it's really about "prior art". It's more about the nature of things being composed of thousands of tiny components, each component separately patentable, and different people ranking "triviality" differently, based on the way they approached the problem.
It's not much different from the spam problem, where any single message is harmless, but combined together they become a problem. Or terrorism, that statistically is threatening almost nobody, and is much less lethal than things like traffic accidents, smoking, obesity, but once amplified by mass media, becomes a real threat.
In software patents, it's the large number of simple components that builds software, and the inability of software authors to guess which of their trivial solutions was untrivial to someone else in the past! It amplifies the effort needed to avoid patent infringement to the point that it becomes impossible to avoid.
I think in many different problems that arose in modern society, the problems arise from a single effect of "amplification" that arises from the nature of things such as "mass media", "mass production", "universality" (as in a "universal turing machine"), "global village" etc.
> Now a memory map maps from your virtual memory address,
...
> to your physical memory address.
> Now you get 10 points for guessing what a reverse memory map is
Oh, so it's OK to have a table with two columns for vitual and physical memory addresses, but you may only sort it by the "virtual" field, because sorting by the "physical" field is patented? No! It's OK! you just have to license the technology!
> ...when we did a patent search, we turned up ...
> several patents we potentially might be
> infringing
That means that the basic strategy, if sued, is to lie and say "we didn't know". That's possible with "closed source" if you are careful enough not to leave evidence that you knew about possible patent infringements, nor leave evidence that your company normaly does check for possible infringements on every product.
Open source doesn't have the option of "covering traces": everything discussed is in the public domain. So lying in court is not an option. No wonder some closed source producers think open source is a broken business model. It doesn't have the most important component of doing business: lying!
> For example, Let's say I went down and bought ... Can Ford sue me for hauling my turnips in
;-)
> a new Chevy truck so I could haul my turnips to market.
>
> a truck that violates their patents?
If they patented the "business method" of "hauling my turnips in a truck" then they might have a case...
Insurance is just a way of coordinating funds: one user cannot afford the legal defense. But collecting fees from many users allows the insurer to defend them collectively. Car insurers don't base their business model on the assumption that one car would be involved in an accident (or would be stolen, or burn...). Their business model is based on statistics: a certain percent of the clients would file claims. The same with the patent infringements that might be present in LINUX or any other kind of software: There is a certain number of possible infringements. There is an expected cost of defending them (including a certain percentage of lost or negociated settlements) and an expected income from clients of the insurer. The fees charged are expected to cover the expected costs of claims plus profit.
> You (99.9% chance) visited a "copycat" website
> that actually copied Wikipedia,
> not the other way around.
Actually I was visiting an official government body site describing its structure/functionality, and some paragraphs were identical to paragraph in the Wikipedia article describing it. It was not the whole article, and not the introductory paragraph, so it looked like someone decided that the Wiki page needs more detailed description and added some details by copying several paragraphs from the official site. (of course there is always the possibility that a government body decided it needes a website, and why work hard if the contents is already available for copying?)