One, it was Justice Breyer who wrote a very eloquent dissenting (minority) opinion in the Eldred case. A sample from his dissent:
[I]t is difficult to accept the conflicting rationale that the publishers advance, namely that extension, rather than limitation, of the grant will, by rewarding publishers with a form of monopoly, promote, rather than retard, the dissemination of works already in existence. Indeed, given these considerations, this rationale seems constitutionally perverse-unable, constitutionally speaking, to justify the blanket extension here at issue.
Second point, it is not at all unusual for the members of the bench to raise questions that would seem to the layman as a personal predisposition. Breyer appears to "play his hand" by asking whether software patents are even viable, but in fact, he may personally quite agree with the concept or at least have no interest in visiting that legal question with his final opinion. You can't really listen to a Supreme Court Justice's probing questions and distinguish what is direct and what is merely socratic. They are shaking the trees to see what unexpected concepts fall out, so as to craft a more finessed ruling that has the least amount of unintended consequences.
Found a weakness in the HIV Virus, eh? Was this study funded by the NSF Foundation? Will it be published in the journal, Journal of Medicine? Or will the NSTA Association have anything to do with it? Australia's ARC Research Council may be involved, also.
Can't wait to cut'n'paste this reply into the next Slashdot dupe on this story, too!
((I was the first charter member of the Committee to Stamp Out and Eradicate Superfluous Redundancies Group.))
In the last story, California wanted to be a bland featureless part of the Federation letting someone else manage the citizen identification issues. Now in this story, California wants to retain full sovereignty over taxation. I know there's more than one person, and therefore more than one opinion on the whole statehood thing here, but come on, fellas.
I'm sure some RMS-types will think I'm a loony anti-FL/OSS crusader or something, but I've always been leery of the idea of signing my legal rights away to someone else who purports to have the rights of the users at heart. I say that in italics because it means that I would not only be saying that I think morally that the rights of the users are more important than the rights of the developers, but I would be stating this in legally binding fashion. I do not want to sign away the rights to code I've written, even if I could then claim to be one of my own code's "users." It just seems backwards to me.
Now that tinfoil hats have become fashionable, I also wonder what such a signatory agent would do with code I've written and signed to them, if they were in some sort of financial or legal pressure. I don't want to be like the proverbial naive grandma who entrusts her fortune to a foxy conservator in sheep's clothing.
If I want to allow everyone rights on my code, I'll do so myself. It's far more intellectually honest, in my opinion, to disavow copyrights altogether or to go with a license that allows everyone rights (not just GNU heads). Use it in business, use it in military, use it in a video game, I don't want to limit your options in any way.
Yeah, it COULD revolutionize the whole world as we know it and make the Jetsons' lifestyle seem antiquated, OR...
A toy company puts out a few gimmick Pokemon-tied concept toys long after the end of the Pokemon marketing age, and nobody buys them. Despite the technological benefits of using the power components, the company management gets a sour taste of market performance and buries the whole thing under ten feet of peat and recycles them as firelighters. The technology is not used by other companies for a couple of extra decades because of the patents and other intellectual property entanglements. It is finally redeemed and used in an inadequately-explained Elvis-Presley-tied concept doohickey comes out in 2040 and sells from a Hammacher Schlemmer catalogue for $20K but only if ordered from the seat pocket from LEO during a Virgin Galactic flight.
My EE is very fuzzy nowadays, but 65 volts AC root-mean-squared would indicate a higher voltage peak-to-peak. But not as high as 139 volts peak-to-peak. I get 65*2*sqrt(2)=91, but forget if that's even the right way to calculate it. Maybe the 139 volts is a high-water-mark sort of non-repeatable measurement?
It's just like the twenty or so folks who have "put in their name to start an exploratory committee to determine the chances of success in an election bid to become the next President of the United States..."
I would imagine it's because a HUGE population out there just doesn't understand or care what a "default page" is, how to change it, or that someone (or some kitty'n'virus download executable) left their computer with such a page as the default. They know they want to "look it up on the Googles" so they get to it by typing google in the "slot" or "address bar" that's right there in the middle of the screen every time they launch "the Internet."
I have to say, with all the legal loops that you have to hop to work with corporate lawyers just to get a patent to the submission stage, that this is not just a simple mistake.
In other words, I definitely heard "And I would've gotten away with it, if it weren't for these meddling kids!" running through my head. Zoinks!
Okay, so Gates hired dozens if not hundreds of developers in the 80s and early 90s who were very familiar with the value of the Internet, yet they missed the bandwagon in incorporating TCP/IP features and protocols until it was already commonplace in the market? And all the while, Gates was smugly declaring that he didn't own a television set and had completely disconnected from the Joe Sixpack culture of sponging in front of a boob tube like the rest of America. Yet, somehow he feels he's adequately informed to see the way that the television culture will shift to an Internet culture in a given timeframe? The only reason that this sounds at all plausible is because Apple and Sony and TiVo and Google and other companies already have been working in that direction. Welcome to the 2000s, Bill.
That just makes my point even moreso: the pricetag on your Apple iPod includes paying USPTO folks to sit around and rubber-stamp patent applications that may or may not be novel, and the pricetag on your non-Apple device also pays for licenses to allow the non-Apple device to play Quicktime media. You're charged more in either case.
I completely agree 100% with all that you said. I also know that it would never happen.
Companies that are at the size and scale that allows them to say, in a condescending voice, "we're the world's largest X" in the span of a simple phone conversation, are completely incapable of the approach that you gave.
Personal, manual, coordinated investigation for a case involving 0.001% of your business? No frickin' way. There's probably 50 such cases every day, if not every hour. The order of the day is to pull the plug first, get whined and bitched at, and even publically slagged later. Manual labor costs barely justify a "consumer relations" person to smooth over the bruised egos of an irate domain-holder once in a while. The chances of upsetting a C|Net reporter on each one of these little cases is so low that they can almost ignore the downside of being consumer-unfriendly.
Roughly speaking, this transition, from big successful company to huge mean company, is about when they start using the term 'consumer' instead of 'customer.' The term 'consumer' is there to highlight the situation where they have customers on both sides, and there's a conflict of interest in helping the little customer (B2C) when a big customer (B2B) complains.
Since very few patents ever do get challenged, we are probably all saving money with the USPTO the way it is.
If you count just the tax dollars that fund the salaries of the USPTO, perhaps you're right.
If you count the list prices paid by end-users of products containing "inventions" that were well understood to many manufacturers, but patented into an artificial monopoly anyway, I seriously doubt it. We all pay more for everyday products of all sorts, thanks to the patent license fees held by companies who neither invent nor produce items.
I would guess that much of the fix is simply being a bit more self-aware in terms of ranking. If a page mentions 'google' 'googlebomb' and a short phrase in quotes, especially in close proximity, then there are two reasonable responses. One, weigh the page that claims a googlebomb a bit higher than other neutral mentions of that phrase, and two, reduce the weight of the phrase itself so it has a smaller effect when combined with other search terms. Extra points for a page that mentions multiple googlebombs at once.
Now, if google becomes more and more self-aware, we'll have to start hiding any neural network research and encrypt the torrents of Arnie Schwarzenegger movies.
Some old friends of mine in Seattle went through this a number of times, until they just decided to start their own "label" of board games. Their gimmick was to produce great new games that used pieces you probably already have from other board games. They don't ship dice, don't ship tokens, don't ship player pawns, don't need much in the way of special cards. They ship a board and an instruction sheet. (I think you CAN buy a higher-priced complete set from them, if you're expecting to play on a mountaintop in Timbuktu or some parts of Arkansas.)
The point here isn't to give them a free ad, they might not even be around anymore, though they were making an okay business of it last I heard. The point is that they tried a number of approaches and found one that worked for them: self-publishing. Stick to it, get the game out in the hands of a lot of players, and if it's worth anything, it will catch on. Then you can aim to get bought out by the likes of Milton Bradley in a few years.
Conversely, I would say it IS Sony's fault. Maybe not the PS3 team's fault directly, but as a major commercial content label, Sony Corporation was clearly a part of the definition of HDMI in the first place. This is just reaping what they sow: they can't make products that consistently grant users valid access when they make technological barriers against what they see as "invalid" access.
I think the question raises an interesting point: spams *behave* differently on the network than most legitimate emails. It may not be a perfect discriminator, but it sure might be a corroborative scoring aid. This reminded me of the controversy when Slashdot started using text compressibility as a metric for "lameness." I was a disbeliever, and still have my reservations about it, but as a part of the overall toolbox for filtering lameness, the technique seems to have value.
Give up the fight, man, the word "pirate" in this usage is hundreds of years old.
There was very little trust in the print medium when it was first developed--it was seen as unstable and subject to piracy and fraudulent copying. Authenticity was hard to guarantee: indeed, the term "piracy" was first used by John Fell, Bishop of Oxford, circa 1675, to describe certain pernicious practices of early printers and booksellers. A "pirate" was someone who participated in the "unauthorized reprinting of a title recognized to belong to someone else." "Stationers" eventually emerged as the trusted practitioners who were placed in charge of various aspects of publishing--practices we would now recognize as printing, publishing, editing, and bookselling. Stationers worked out the conventional practices of making books, and thus made printing a viable economic enterprise with the elaborate complexity of producing a book eventually invisible to all but the practitioners in the trade.
Slashdot Mirror
Another case where Microsoft used patents offensively: FAT drive formatting and Long Filename FAT extensions. http://www.dpreview.com/news/0312/03120403microsof tisfat.asp Doesn't seem so defensive here.
Paraphrasing Asimov, "--force is the last refuge of the incompetent."
Two points.
One, it was Justice Breyer who wrote a very eloquent dissenting (minority) opinion in the Eldred case. A sample from his dissent:
Second point, it is not at all unusual for the members of the bench to raise questions that would seem to the layman as a personal predisposition. Breyer appears to "play his hand" by asking whether software patents are even viable, but in fact, he may personally quite agree with the concept or at least have no interest in visiting that legal question with his final opinion. You can't really listen to a Supreme Court Justice's probing questions and distinguish what is direct and what is merely socratic. They are shaking the trees to see what unexpected concepts fall out, so as to craft a more finessed ruling that has the least amount of unintended consequences.
You must be a MacOS developer. :)
So, let's take a passenger manifest...
Found a weakness in the HIV Virus, eh? Was this study funded by the NSF Foundation? Will it be published in the journal, Journal of Medicine? Or will the NSTA Association have anything to do with it? Australia's ARC Research Council may be involved, also.
Can't wait to cut'n'paste this reply into the next Slashdot dupe on this story, too!
((I was the first charter member of the Committee to Stamp Out and Eradicate Superfluous Redundancies Group.))
In the last story, California wanted to be a bland featureless part of the Federation letting someone else manage the citizen identification issues. Now in this story, California wants to retain full sovereignty over taxation. I know there's more than one person, and therefore more than one opinion on the whole statehood thing here, but come on, fellas.
I'm sure some RMS-types will think I'm a loony anti-FL/OSS crusader or something, but I've always been leery of the idea of signing my legal rights away to someone else who purports to have the rights of the users at heart. I say that in italics because it means that I would not only be saying that I think morally that the rights of the users are more important than the rights of the developers, but I would be stating this in legally binding fashion. I do not want to sign away the rights to code I've written, even if I could then claim to be one of my own code's "users." It just seems backwards to me.
Now that tinfoil hats have become fashionable, I also wonder what such a signatory agent would do with code I've written and signed to them, if they were in some sort of financial or legal pressure. I don't want to be like the proverbial naive grandma who entrusts her fortune to a foxy conservator in sheep's clothing.
If I want to allow everyone rights on my code, I'll do so myself. It's far more intellectually honest, in my opinion, to disavow copyrights altogether or to go with a license that allows everyone rights (not just GNU heads). Use it in business, use it in military, use it in a video game, I don't want to limit your options in any way.
Yeah, it COULD revolutionize the whole world as we know it and make the Jetsons' lifestyle seem antiquated, OR...
A toy company puts out a few gimmick Pokemon-tied concept toys long after the end of the Pokemon marketing age, and nobody buys them. Despite the technological benefits of using the power components, the company management gets a sour taste of market performance and buries the whole thing under ten feet of peat and recycles them as firelighters. The technology is not used by other companies for a couple of extra decades because of the patents and other intellectual property entanglements. It is finally redeemed and used in an inadequately-explained Elvis-Presley-tied concept doohickey comes out in 2040 and sells from a Hammacher Schlemmer catalogue for $20K but only if ordered from the seat pocket from LEO during a Virgin Galactic flight.
My EE is very fuzzy nowadays, but 65 volts AC root-mean-squared would indicate a higher voltage peak-to-peak. But not as high as 139 volts peak-to-peak. I get 65*2*sqrt(2)=91, but forget if that's even the right way to calculate it. Maybe the 139 volts is a high-water-mark sort of non-repeatable measurement?
Wow, that blurb was... well...
It's just like the twenty or so folks who have "put in their name to start an exploratory committee to determine the chances of success in an election bid to become the next President of the United States..."
It's all just hot air and vapor.
Yeah, if a woman was along with all those lost men, she would have asked for directions!
> yes slownewsday, haha. dude, nannystate censorship pointless fud.
whining defectivebydesign flamebait? eff pwned windows! piracy maybe, mafiaa no.
ps-- omgponies fantasy pigpile wrong, duh. arr!
But... but... but what's wrong with Wensleydale?
I would imagine it's because a HUGE population out there just doesn't understand or care what a "default page" is, how to change it, or that someone (or some kitty'n'virus download executable) left their computer with such a page as the default. They know they want to "look it up on the Googles" so they get to it by typing google in the "slot" or "address bar" that's right there in the middle of the screen every time they launch "the Internet."
I have to say, with all the legal loops that you have to hop to work with corporate lawyers just to get a patent to the submission stage, that this is not just a simple mistake.
In other words, I definitely heard "And I would've gotten away with it, if it weren't for these meddling kids!" running through my head. Zoinks!
Okay, so Gates hired dozens if not hundreds of developers in the 80s and early 90s who were very familiar with the value of the Internet, yet they missed the bandwagon in incorporating TCP/IP features and protocols until it was already commonplace in the market? And all the while, Gates was smugly declaring that he didn't own a television set and had completely disconnected from the Joe Sixpack culture of sponging in front of a boob tube like the rest of America. Yet, somehow he feels he's adequately informed to see the way that the television culture will shift to an Internet culture in a given timeframe? The only reason that this sounds at all plausible is because Apple and Sony and TiVo and Google and other companies already have been working in that direction. Welcome to the 2000s, Bill.
That just makes my point even moreso: the pricetag on your Apple iPod includes paying USPTO folks to sit around and rubber-stamp patent applications that may or may not be novel, and the pricetag on your non-Apple device also pays for licenses to allow the non-Apple device to play Quicktime media. You're charged more in either case.
I completely agree 100% with all that you said. I also know that it would never happen.
Companies that are at the size and scale that allows them to say, in a condescending voice, "we're the world's largest X" in the span of a simple phone conversation, are completely incapable of the approach that you gave.
Personal, manual, coordinated investigation for a case involving 0.001% of your business? No frickin' way. There's probably 50 such cases every day, if not every hour. The order of the day is to pull the plug first, get whined and bitched at, and even publically slagged later. Manual labor costs barely justify a "consumer relations" person to smooth over the bruised egos of an irate domain-holder once in a while. The chances of upsetting a C|Net reporter on each one of these little cases is so low that they can almost ignore the downside of being consumer-unfriendly.
Roughly speaking, this transition, from big successful company to huge mean company, is about when they start using the term 'consumer' instead of 'customer.' The term 'consumer' is there to highlight the situation where they have customers on both sides, and there's a conflict of interest in helping the little customer (B2C) when a big customer (B2B) complains.
If you count just the tax dollars that fund the salaries of the USPTO, perhaps you're right.
If you count the list prices paid by end-users of products containing "inventions" that were well understood to many manufacturers, but patented into an artificial monopoly anyway, I seriously doubt it. We all pay more for everyday products of all sorts, thanks to the patent license fees held by companies who neither invent nor produce items.
I would guess that much of the fix is simply being a bit more self-aware in terms of ranking. If a page mentions 'google' 'googlebomb' and a short phrase in quotes, especially in close proximity, then there are two reasonable responses. One, weigh the page that claims a googlebomb a bit higher than other neutral mentions of that phrase, and two, reduce the weight of the phrase itself so it has a smaller effect when combined with other search terms. Extra points for a page that mentions multiple googlebombs at once.
Now, if google becomes more and more self-aware, we'll have to start hiding any neural network research and encrypt the torrents of Arnie Schwarzenegger movies.
Some old friends of mine in Seattle went through this a number of times, until they just decided to start their own "label" of board games. Their gimmick was to produce great new games that used pieces you probably already have from other board games. They don't ship dice, don't ship tokens, don't ship player pawns, don't need much in the way of special cards. They ship a board and an instruction sheet. (I think you CAN buy a higher-priced complete set from them, if you're expecting to play on a mountaintop in Timbuktu or some parts of Arkansas.)
The point here isn't to give them a free ad, they might not even be around anymore, though they were making an okay business of it last I heard. The point is that they tried a number of approaches and found one that worked for them: self-publishing. Stick to it, get the game out in the hands of a lot of players, and if it's worth anything, it will catch on. Then you can aim to get bought out by the likes of Milton Bradley in a few years.
Conversely, I would say it IS Sony's fault. Maybe not the PS3 team's fault directly, but as a major commercial content label, Sony Corporation was clearly a part of the definition of HDMI in the first place. This is just reaping what they sow: they can't make products that consistently grant users valid access when they make technological barriers against what they see as "invalid" access.
I think the question raises an interesting point: spams *behave* differently on the network than most legitimate emails. It may not be a perfect discriminator, but it sure might be a corroborative scoring aid. This reminded me of the controversy when Slashdot started using text compressibility as a metric for "lameness." I was a disbeliever, and still have my reservations about it, but as a part of the overall toolbox for filtering lameness, the technique seems to have value.