Magnetic treatment of water? Change the physio-chemical characteristics of natural water? That's a load of horsesh*t - sorry, I take that back - horsesh*t is healthier for the soil than this kind of crap.
In which case, I'd choose no government intervention. Granted, it may allow for such ridiculous patents as the Amazon ones, but it's better than a company not being able to protect their IP at all.
I don't quite understand your reasoning here - if you don't want government intervention, then why do you think it's better for the government to protect business method "patents"? If you don't want government intervention, then you should be in favor of letting companies coming up with & executing business methods because it will make them money, not because the government will guarantee them some profit by coming up with the idea.
If you really want a quick response to a DDoS, then what you've got to do is collect that real-time network traffic data, display it like a video game, then wire in the router controls to some joysticks & buttons & hire a large group of teenage video game addicts to "get a high score" (score being determined by how well "good" traffic gets through and "bad" traffic is suppressed). Pay them according to their score.
I can guarantee that you will never be able to put together an automated solution with such adaptability, reaction time & pattern recognition abilities. And society will have finally figured out how those video gamers can contribute something useful.
There's plenty of stories out on the net about people's personal experiences with Scientology "brainwashing". They start out slow, with simple stuff with that people don't find very controversial.
A lot of their early programs resemble therapy sessions, where people babble about their lives & the host provides a sympathetic ear. In this manner, they build up a lot of trust & loyalty, as well as compiling information about individuals that they can use to manipulate (or in some cases, threaten) later on.
As people ascend to various "levels", they are gradually introduced to additional "secrets" (with the CoS extracting increasing levels of money at each level). They are encouraged to think in particular ways, all couched in psychobabble & increasingly spiritual references, to try and increase their emotional dependence on the CoS's teachings & reduce any critical thought.
People who still have some capacity for rational thought are usually weeded out at pretty low levels, and are left only with the impression that the programs were a little hokey. The people who go on would generally be described as vulnerable, or "cult-bait".
What's REALLY horrible is the self-reinforcing way that this process works - as people ascend in levels, they are encouraged to spend more time with other fellow "clears" (on of their term for a person who has been mentally trained to think "correctly"), and to either recruit or avoid disturbing non-clears. As their thought processes get weird, rational people naturally start avoiding them, so they are isolated both by the CoS & the society around them.
Of course, the fundamental reason that all of this works is because it's incremental - each step in the conversion is a very small change in thought which can be easily rationalized from any motivated person who is trying to reach a goal of "personal serenity" (pretty much what every religion/cult is offering). It all breaks down if the final teachings, the really far-out stuff about aliens from the destroyed-planet-turned-asteroid-belt, are available right up front for people to peruse w/o having been had their thoughts properly "guided & trained".
That's why the CoS emphasizes total control of this information, 'cause if it's easy for people to read that stuff before going to through the process, any CoS member would be laughed out of the room everytime they tried to recruit someone (whereupon the CoS wouldn't last too long...).
I think these are pretty standard thought-modification tactics, used by all sorts of cults, religions, political parties, governments, etc.
On the assumption that you're being serious (probably wrong), the last thing that the so-called "Church of Scientology" wants is for anyone to have unrestricted access to their "sacred texts". There's no way their scam would work if their average recruit was exposed to that stuff before the CoS had a chance to properly brainwash them. They've got to slowly "introduce" them to these bizarre concepts (sucking money like the parasites they are), to make sure they can diffuse any tendencies toward critical thought.
A fully asynchronous design requires lots of ready signals, or some very careful time-of-flight constraints. Aside from the fact that the current popular logic-synthesis tools don't provide neatly packaged solutions for this kind of design, if you don't implement this stuff in an intelligent manner, you can easily create a design which completely destroys any advantage over a synchronous design in speed, power, reliability and/or area.
On the other hand, one more advantage that I haven't seen mentioned about asynchronous design is modularity - most synchronous designs can only be verified for correctness in the context of the global clock signal, whereas if you've verified the correctness of an asynchronous module, you can plug it in wherever its functionality fits, without having to adjust all the stuff around it.
When you think about it, however, you will note that synchronous design is actually just a SUBSET of asynchronous design - the clock signals are just a way of indicating a "data ready" condition to the next bunch of logic gates. Careful logic designers who hold this viewpoint can design hybrid synchronous/asynchronous designs, where the overall design is actually a bunch of smaller synchronous designs, where each block of synchronous logic receives a "clock" which is actually a data ready signal for the logic block as a whole.
I'm thinking more of the "duct tape"-type of imaginative engineering - with possibly references to previous episodes starting with stuff like "You remember that emergency weld I made around Centaur Antares III? It didn't hold."
Damnit, I wish they'd come up with a storyline which DOESN'T involve a Federation crew, but still in the Star Trek universe. Something where the crew isn't all the "best of the best", and always going around preaching goody-goody stuff.
Maybe a trader-of-ill-repute (read: smuggler) operating on the fringes of Federation space, in a ship which is constantly in need of repairs and/or imaginative engineering, and where the basic goal is survival first, money second - and the great lengths they go for the second will often result in desperate moves to do the first.
They could have a female Klingon "captain", who has a tendency to get drunk, with the resultant havoc:)
So, the big-bad corporations are going to lock up the cable & satellite market.
Well, are there any TECHNICAL solutions around this problem? Something which can be implemented in a distributed fashion, so that each individual doesn't have to pay too much, but where the whole solution can "route around" the control of these monopolies?
The producers of this content were funded by wealthy patrons like the De Medicis and the Vatican, painting portaits occasionally for them, or doing the ceiling of the Sistine chapel, for instance. Without that patronage, these artists, or content providers, would not have been able to create these masterpieces in their spare time while earning a living from other means.
I think you're greatly underestimating two things about modern times:
Our standard of living is MUCH higher than it was in the Renaissance. We can afford to work only 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, making enough money not only keep our families fed, but to have some left over for hobbies. Greatly different from the typical hand-to-mouth existence back then. And plenty of time/resources for motivated individuals to create impressive works of art.
The technology we have available can make individuals infinitely more productive than the artists back in those times. The same amount of effort that it took an artist & his studio (including assistants) to create a huge mural now results in a "movie", which hundreds of thousands of individual "pictures" instead of just one big one. Not only that, but with a high enough demand, new products will be developed which will leverage the productivity of the artist - and will be targeted within the price range of the artist.
There WILL be patronage - like you said, in the absence of copyright, that's one of the main methods that artists used to get enough resources to do big masterpieces. In our day and age, that will involve the patronage of large organizations such as corporations as well as rich individuals. (Much in the same way that they sponsor sports events & charity - all in the name of being a good "public" citizen.)
You'll note that unlike today's "intellectual property"-focused legislative environment, however, that those sponsors & artists did not create those works with the expectation that they'd be able to make money hand-over-fist by charging people to view/listen to the work (except for maybe a season of performances). The sponsors did it for public relations & to show off their wealth, the artists were performing a service based on the demand of their sponsors.
For those artists who made their living by creating art (like playwrights), they were REQUIRED by the marketplace to be continually creating new work - they couldn't just ride on the success of a one-hit wonder, because if it became popular, it would start popping up in various forms all over the place w/o making the originator any money. So they had to keep creating new stuff to keep their audience happy, unlike today's environment where the owner of the copyright (often a corporation) can expect to force people to pay for that piece of "intellectual property" far beyond its initial lifetime - a lifetime greatly extended, not by popular support, but by legislation.
Content is very similar to any other commodity: labor added to raw material produces a good. The labor is not free.
You're partially wrong - your personal labor is free, although finite. Its OTHER people's goods & services which you have to pay for, and that's not art - that's just the normal market. Many interesting techniques & technologies have come from people w/limited means trying to make do, not from people who had unlimited resources.
Just because a song or a movie is somewhat less tangible than a brick or a monitor does not make it less real or less valuable.
Sure it does. The monetary value of a song or movie is defined by what people are willing to pay to hear or see it. If you're talking about some abstract "artistic value", then why are you asking me to pay money for it? (And why are you expecting me to assign the same "artistic value" as you do?)
In the absence of intellectual property laws, and given the availability of insignificant distribution costs, people aren't going to be willing to pay a whole lot. (On the other hand, something popular is quite likely to reach a whole lot more people than it would have previously.)
Just because the ARTIST thinks it's worth a lot doesn't mean that it is.
With today's technology, there is NO "real" reason why those things have monetary value - the only reason people have to pay for them is because the laws say they do.
Why don't content providers deserve compensation?
And I repeat - why do they? Because of hard work? If I worked 14 hours a day shoveling tons of shit, that would be hard work. Would I "deserve" lots of money? Or would I get just what somebody else was willing to pay me?
The only argument which has any basis in reality (not some fuzzy concept of "artistic worth") for "intellectual property" is that by providing SOME protection for ideas in various forms, you benefit the overall society. But since this is an ARTIFICIAL distinction, it is up to the proponents of intellectual property to show WHY a society should adopt such rules. And it is within the rights of a society to change or abolish those rules if it feels that they are doing more harm than good to the society as a whole - whether or not the people who are currently benefiting from those rules have somehow started thinking they are "rights" instead.
People who like to draw and make music will draw and make music no matter who's listening. People who think their content is good will try and expose other people to it. If enough people think the content is good, they'll organize a way so that they can ALL look/listen to it.
What YOU'RE asking is, "if they are not compensated, how can they make any money at it?" - which is not the same question. I contest your assumption that there will be no "good art" if artists do not receive significant sums of money for their work.
The first part of the encrypted message is a simple validation check.
The problem with this, is that the moment you put in a validation check, you violate the whole reason that a OTP is provably secure: that an eavesdropper can't tell whether they decrypted your message, or just happened to stumble across a key which generated some other kind of message.
For a true OTP system, there shouldn't be any kind of formal, automatible validation check.
Ummm...it's only exploitation if the musician, author, or programmer is FORCED to make their music, writing, code available to the exploiter(s). In the situation you're talking about, they don't have to if they don't want to.
So I repeat my question: why do content producers have to make some sort of compensation?
Being able to operate a user's machine remotely is nice, and can help a lot, but one really important setup I'd like to have is a camera & microphone setup over their shoulder so that I can see what they're doing (including monitor, keyboard & mouse, and any other hardware setup) when the problem occurs! I've spent hours poking around on somebody's machine trying to figure out why it's doing something, only to find out that they're doing some kind of obscure key & mouse dance to make the problem occur - something I'd never guess by myself in a million years.
This probably isn't going to be practical until videophones & the necessary infrastructure is ubiquitous, however. (The little cameras ON the computer aren't necessarily much help, since those are often the first to go or the culprits when something is screwing up...)
If you have a suggestion how that issue can be improved, I'd love to hear it.
If the goal of the patent office were to make patents accessible to the public (not just the paying public), then part of their function should be to analyze, categorize & provide a means of pattern-matching everything they're processing. (It would have probably made their lives easier if they didn't have such an assembly line method for granting new patents.)
Since there's a snowball's chance in hell of getting Congress to cough up the cash for that kind of service, private industry has come up with a solution with the for-pay databases & search services you're referring to, making "patent services" pretty much available to those who have the resources to access them.
You: "No, because the non-US patents aren't even filed for until after the US patent is granted."
Me: "Bulls***. Non-US patents pending are often published before the US patent grants. Here's an example."
You: "Yeah, but you can't see US patents pending, can you? So there!"
Perhaps I should have made it clear that I was referring to the particular strategy of keeping the details of the patent obscure as long as possible, by filing in the US first, then using the surprise factor as an aid in patent litigation. Obviously, entities who are filing patents in countries which have non-secret patent pending processes are not following this strategy (although I suspect foreign patents would still be effective "surprises" for those organizations who don't think it is worth looking outside the US borders - until they try to become international).
I suppose this might be more of an issue with regards to software patents; since those are allowed only in the US, people don't apply for software patents anywhere else.
True, software patents are a big issue. Should you be able to patent the description of a information process just by adding "Make a machine which does this"?
Software patents also raise the issue of the "lifetime" of an idea. The amount of time that it takes somebody to have a good chance to exploit a good idea is probably quite different depending on the complexity of the idea & what field it's related to). But all patents get the 17(20?) year treatment. Perhaps this is one aspect of patents which is too simplified for societal good.
From your earlier post I thought you were complaining about the way patents are enforced. Would it be more accurate to say that you are displeased with the way patents are applied for and granted (in which case I agree with you to some extent) and not with the way that patents (if they're good patents in the first place) are enforced?
Given a "good" patent (which can cause a world of argument in itself:), that's a good statement. I don't have any fundamental objection to the basic concept of patents - I think that kind of thing WOULD provide a healthy, steady source of ideas which society can exploit for the general good. I don't think the current implementation is doing this, however, and feel that there are strong forces from those who have a great deal invested in the current implementation to keep it from changing.
Simply untrue. Once you file a patent application in one country, you have a one-year grace period to file in any other country--after that your first patent application counts as prior art in the other countries you would seek to get a patent in!
All right, you have up to a year to keep things secret, which isn't too bad when it takes between a year to two years for the US patent office to grant a patent. I'm using the typical time period that the company I am working for gets its patents granted - probably could be a bit faster if you've got people who know how to work the system really well. Chances are, it isn't exposed at all before you can get the patent.
Not that it really matters, since you can word things so that it doesn't show up on a prior art search looking for particular keywords, or is buried in the middle of so many other similar crap patents with such obtuse language that somebody could see the claims 3 times without twigging to the fact that they've got a match.
Oh please. Here is one it took me about 15 seconds to find.
Please show me a US pending patent - oh that's right, you can't. Silly me. Kind of hard to do any prior art searches on those, isn't it? Wasn't I just talking about that?
Excuse me, but I thought that's what patents were for? I'm afraid I'm not clear on your position--are you saying all patents by definition are a bad thing, or are you arguing against the way some companies enforce their patents?
Patents are _supposed_ to encourage real, society-benefiting innovation by giving people the chance to make some money off them w/o worrying about people horning in on their action. And when the monopoly period runs out, the entire society can benefit from the innovation.
The current system seems to define innovation as minor semantic differences from existing patent descriptions, and encourages large entities to use large portfolios of these barely-differentiated "innovations" to stifle small competitors or to defend themselves from other similarly-minded large entities. They can also tie up good ideas far longer than the already-too-long 17 years (or was it 20 now?) by extending the patent with a small variation. This situation does NOT seem to be in the general society's best interests.
The granting of a patent should only be TRULY innovative, not just based on some minor semantical differences, and it should be fairly RARE. Trying to reserve every possible combination of ideas for implementing some basic concept for private individuals is not good for the public.
I wish people would remember that the end goal of patents (and intellectual property in general) is to provide long-term benefits for the society. The _short-term_ benefit is for an individual, but only because it's supposed to encourage people to think up ideas which can be used for the society. If you've got a system which _prevents_ the society as a whole (not just some of the society) from ever effectively using those ideas - well, that system needs fixing.
As an aside, I also have some issues about corporate entities, which are merely legal definitions, owning something like "intellectual" property (and being able to deny it to the individuals whose brains actually generated those ideas). But that's a whole other can of worms.
Only in the US, and anything big is not going to be patented only in the US. You don't think I search only for US patents, do you?
At least some companies get their US patents FIRST, then use those patents (and the "art" associated with the patents) as leverage to get patents in other countries (assisted by the international treaties which have been signed to allow the "prior art" in one country's patent system to invalidate a patent filed in another country's). Therefore, the pending patent is secret until granted.
And what do you propose to do about this? How is this the fault of the company with the original patent?
No, it's a fault with the patent system. It's become pretty much inaccessible except to those people who specialize in searching it, and even then you have people who specialize in searching for particular kinds of patents.
While you can argue that this kind of complexity creates new jobs (like yours, for instance), my feeling is that those kinds of jobs represent the inefficiency of the system.
Further, a prior art search costs a few thousand dollars, in the patent searcher's time and in the cost of searching for-pay, proprietary databases (which alleviate a lot of the indexing problems you cite with the free databases).
That's a few thousand PER search (and I assume you usually don't batch search for hundreds of potential patents at a time). While this is peanuts for medium to large size corporations, it adds up pretty fast for individuals & small businesses, representing a bigger chunk of their "survival" funds than for the larger organizations. Kind of like a "regressive tax" on innovation.
Last I heard, small businesses were still more important to the economic engine than even most of the largest companies. From a societal viewpoint, it seems to make more sense to make things more efficient for the small businesses rather than the larger organizations. (I am aware that most of the corporate lobbyists are not being paid to share my views.)
I thought we were discussing the alleged "predatory practices" of corporations with patents, not the difficulty of enforcing your own patents, so this is not germane to the issue. In any case, non-patent prior art will show up, as a competent prior art search (such as I would do) covers both patent and non-patent art.
I extended my thoughts slightly to the general difficulties of ensuring a good result for prior art searching. And while I congratulate you on your thoroughness for searching both patent & non-patent art, it has been made abundantly clear that many organizations applying for patents only do enough searching (usually in the patent database itself) to ensure that the Patent Office will give them the patent (i.e., implementation stated the exact same way has not already been patented), then use whatever legal resources are necessary to make the patent worth something (by intimidating others into paying license fees, or using the patent as a defense against predatory patent-abusers).
Patents are public information. It's not as if the patenting company can keep it secret, only to announce the existence of a patent when they decide to file the lawsuit.
1. Patents pending are secret. You could build an entire company based on a few ideas, only to find out when someone else's patent is granted that you have to pay them royalties which you didn't take into account before.
2. There are WAY too many patents, and not terribly well categorized & indexed, for all but the largest patent-searching organizations to be absolutely sure they've covered all the possibilities (which costs money). In other words, even if there IS a patent which you're violating, there's a good chance you'll never find it in the noise - but if you're successful, you can bet that the patent holder is going to be giving you a call.
Also falling into this category, are patents which have been made so broad, that any search based on the SPECIFIC details of an implementation are going to completely miss those claims in that patent - but the patentholder probably isn't going to miss you.
3. Prior art doesn't need to be patented - and thus will not show up until somebody needs to put the kibosh on your patent.
As a patent searcher, you should be aware of all this - it's your job to make sure there are no OBVIOUS competing patents, but I doubt you'd guarantee your boss your paycheck for the next year that you haven't missed something.
Protect the kids, no film harder than Mary Poppins is allowed.
Are you kidding? It's obvious that Mary Poppins was a meant to be a witch! No way I'd let my kids get corrupted by a piece of pagan propaganda like that!
Funny, his comments indicated to me that he felt that if it was necessary to block access to that kind of stuff for adult viewing in order to protect children, then that's what you had to do.
How about anywhere that is to small for a human to get to troubleshoot.
Given how clumsy most of the robots that _I've_ seen are, I think it would be far more likely that those little robots are going to get STUCK in those small places and then I'll go nuts having to disassemble everything to get them out again...
You mean for libel/slander(never quite remember which is which:)-type stuff? I guess that's a decision on how righteous & confrontational you feel, and how much stress do you think you can handle.:)
Certainly, for your own reputation, if you can come up with a smooth way of getting the GM & IT guys to work together, then they'll like you a lot and probably give you lots of repeat business (or referrals).
In the long term, I still wouldn't trust the GM as far as I could throw him (and I'm not that strong:) - if he was willing to stab someone in the back once, he'll be willing to do it again in the future, even if he's playing nice with you right now. The company would be better off w/o somone like him running the show.
I guess if you're clever enough, you could figure out a "smooth" way of getting rid of the GM w/o causing bad feelings w/the rest of the company - I suspect that kind of manipulation is probably beyond the resources of most consultants, esp. in the limited context of whatever job they were hired for.
As a consultant, you can have ethics or you can eat. Which one are you going to pick?
I'd find someplace else to work. A GM who's willing to screw a fellow employee like that isn't going to think twice about screwing you over at some point in the future.
Oh yeah, on the way out I'd probably tell the IT Manager & the GM's bosses (the owners) what the GM was trying to do.
Slashdot Mirror
Magnetic treatment of water? Change the physio-chemical characteristics of natural water? That's a load of horsesh*t - sorry, I take that back - horsesh*t is healthier for the soil than this kind of crap.
I don't think YOU'RE getting the point.
The GOVERNMENT is the entity responsible for protecting IP. By protecting IP, you are requiring MORE government intervention.
If you don't need to protect IP, then the government isn't involved.
Is this sinking in yet?
I don't quite understand your reasoning here - if you don't want government intervention, then why do you think it's better for the government to protect business method "patents"? If you don't want government intervention, then you should be in favor of letting companies coming up with & executing business methods because it will make them money, not because the government will guarantee them some profit by coming up with the idea.
If you really want a quick response to a DDoS, then what you've got to do is collect that real-time network traffic data, display it like a video game, then wire in the router controls to some joysticks & buttons & hire a large group of teenage video game addicts to "get a high score" (score being determined by how well "good" traffic gets through and "bad" traffic is suppressed). Pay them according to their score.
I can guarantee that you will never be able to put together an automated solution with such adaptability, reaction time & pattern recognition abilities. And society will have finally figured out how those video gamers can contribute something useful.
There's plenty of stories out on the net about people's personal experiences with Scientology "brainwashing". They start out slow, with simple stuff with that people don't find very controversial.
A lot of their early programs resemble therapy sessions, where people babble about their lives & the host provides a sympathetic ear. In this manner, they build up a lot of trust & loyalty, as well as compiling information about individuals that they can use to manipulate (or in some cases, threaten) later on.
As people ascend to various "levels", they are gradually introduced to additional "secrets" (with the CoS extracting increasing levels of money at each level). They are encouraged to think in particular ways, all couched in psychobabble & increasingly spiritual references, to try and increase their emotional dependence on the CoS's teachings & reduce any critical thought.
People who still have some capacity for rational thought are usually weeded out at pretty low levels, and are left only with the impression that the programs were a little hokey. The people who go on would generally be described as vulnerable, or "cult-bait".
What's REALLY horrible is the self-reinforcing way that this process works - as people ascend in levels, they are encouraged to spend more time with other fellow "clears" (on of their term for a person who has been mentally trained to think "correctly"), and to either recruit or avoid disturbing non-clears. As their thought processes get weird, rational people naturally start avoiding them, so they are isolated both by the CoS & the society around them.
Of course, the fundamental reason that all of this works is because it's incremental - each step in the conversion is a very small change in thought which can be easily rationalized from any motivated person who is trying to reach a goal of "personal serenity" (pretty much what every religion/cult is offering). It all breaks down if the final teachings, the really far-out stuff about aliens from the destroyed-planet-turned-asteroid-belt, are available right up front for people to peruse w/o having been had their thoughts properly "guided & trained".
That's why the CoS emphasizes total control of this information, 'cause if it's easy for people to read that stuff before going to through the process, any CoS member would be laughed out of the room everytime they tried to recruit someone (whereupon the CoS wouldn't last too long...).
I think these are pretty standard thought-modification tactics, used by all sorts of cults, religions, political parties, governments, etc.
On the assumption that you're being serious (probably wrong), the last thing that the so-called "Church of Scientology" wants is for anyone to have unrestricted access to their "sacred texts". There's no way their scam would work if their average recruit was exposed to that stuff before the CoS had a chance to properly brainwash them. They've got to slowly "introduce" them to these bizarre concepts (sucking money like the parasites they are), to make sure they can diffuse any tendencies toward critical thought.
A fully asynchronous design requires lots of ready signals, or some very careful time-of-flight constraints. Aside from the fact that the current popular logic-synthesis tools don't provide neatly packaged solutions for this kind of design, if you don't implement this stuff in an intelligent manner, you can easily create a design which completely destroys any advantage over a synchronous design in speed, power, reliability and/or area.
On the other hand, one more advantage that I haven't seen mentioned about asynchronous design is modularity - most synchronous designs can only be verified for correctness in the context of the global clock signal, whereas if you've verified the correctness of an asynchronous module, you can plug it in wherever its functionality fits, without having to adjust all the stuff around it.
When you think about it, however, you will note that synchronous design is actually just a SUBSET of asynchronous design - the clock signals are just a way of indicating a "data ready" condition to the next bunch of logic gates. Careful logic designers who hold this viewpoint can design hybrid synchronous/asynchronous designs, where the overall design is actually a bunch of smaller synchronous designs, where each block of synchronous logic receives a "clock" which is actually a data ready signal for the logic block as a whole.
I'm thinking more of the "duct tape"-type of imaginative engineering - with possibly references to previous episodes starting with stuff like "You remember that emergency weld I made around Centaur Antares III? It didn't hold."
Damnit, I wish they'd come up with a storyline which DOESN'T involve a Federation crew, but still in the Star Trek universe. Something where the crew isn't all the "best of the best", and always going around preaching goody-goody stuff.
:)
Maybe a trader-of-ill-repute (read: smuggler) operating on the fringes of Federation space, in a ship which is constantly in need of repairs and/or imaginative engineering, and where the basic goal is survival first, money second - and the great lengths they go for the second will often result in desperate moves to do the first.
They could have a female Klingon "captain", who has a tendency to get drunk, with the resultant havoc
So, the big-bad corporations are going to lock up the cable & satellite market.
Well, are there any TECHNICAL solutions around this problem? Something which can be implemented in a distributed fashion, so that each individual doesn't have to pay too much, but where the whole solution can "route around" the control of these monopolies?
I think you're greatly underestimating two things about modern times:
Our standard of living is MUCH higher than it was in the Renaissance. We can afford to work only 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, making enough money not only keep our families fed, but to have some left over for hobbies. Greatly different from the typical hand-to-mouth existence back then. And plenty of time/resources for motivated individuals to create impressive works of art.
The technology we have available can make individuals infinitely more productive than the artists back in those times. The same amount of effort that it took an artist & his studio (including assistants) to create a huge mural now results in a "movie", which hundreds of thousands of individual "pictures" instead of just one big one. Not only that, but with a high enough demand, new products will be developed which will leverage the productivity of the artist - and will be targeted within the price range of the artist.
There WILL be patronage - like you said, in the absence of copyright, that's one of the main methods that artists used to get enough resources to do big masterpieces. In our day and age, that will involve the patronage of large organizations such as corporations as well as rich individuals. (Much in the same way that they sponsor sports events & charity - all in the name of being a good "public" citizen.)
You'll note that unlike today's "intellectual property"-focused legislative environment, however, that those sponsors & artists did not create those works with the expectation that they'd be able to make money hand-over-fist by charging people to view/listen to the work (except for maybe a season of performances). The sponsors did it for public relations & to show off their wealth, the artists were performing a service based on the demand of their sponsors.
For those artists who made their living by creating art (like playwrights), they were REQUIRED by the marketplace to be continually creating new work - they couldn't just ride on the success of a one-hit wonder, because if it became popular, it would start popping up in various forms all over the place w/o making the originator any money. So they had to keep creating new stuff to keep their audience happy, unlike today's environment where the owner of the copyright (often a corporation) can expect to force people to pay for that piece of "intellectual property" far beyond its initial lifetime - a lifetime greatly extended, not by popular support, but by legislation.
You're partially wrong - your personal labor is free, although finite. Its OTHER people's goods & services which you have to pay for, and that's not art - that's just the normal market. Many interesting techniques & technologies have come from people w/limited means trying to make do, not from people who had unlimited resources.
Sure it does. The monetary value of a song or movie is defined by what people are willing to pay to hear or see it. If you're talking about some abstract "artistic value", then why are you asking me to pay money for it? (And why are you expecting me to assign the same "artistic value" as you do?)
In the absence of intellectual property laws, and given the availability of insignificant distribution costs, people aren't going to be willing to pay a whole lot. (On the other hand, something popular is quite likely to reach a whole lot more people than it would have previously.)
Just because the ARTIST thinks it's worth a lot doesn't mean that it is.
With today's technology, there is NO "real" reason why those things have monetary value - the only reason people have to pay for them is because the laws say they do.
And I repeat - why do they? Because of hard work? If I worked 14 hours a day shoveling tons of shit, that would be hard work. Would I "deserve" lots of money? Or would I get just what somebody else was willing to pay me?
The only argument which has any basis in reality (not some fuzzy concept of "artistic worth") for "intellectual property" is that by providing SOME protection for ideas in various forms, you benefit the overall society. But since this is an ARTIFICIAL distinction, it is up to the proponents of intellectual property to show WHY a society should adopt such rules. And it is within the rights of a society to change or abolish those rules if it feels that they are doing more harm than good to the society as a whole - whether or not the people who are currently benefiting from those rules have somehow started thinking they are "rights" instead.
People who like to draw and make music will draw and make music no matter who's listening. People who think their content is good will try and expose other people to it. If enough people think the content is good, they'll organize a way so that they can ALL look/listen to it.
What YOU'RE asking is, "if they are not compensated, how can they make any money at it?" - which is not the same question. I contest your assumption that there will be no "good art" if artists do not receive significant sums of money for their work.
The problem with this, is that the moment you put in a validation check, you violate the whole reason that a OTP is provably secure: that an eavesdropper can't tell whether they decrypted your message, or just happened to stumble across a key which generated some other kind of message.
For a true OTP system, there shouldn't be any kind of formal, automatible validation check.
Ummm...it's only exploitation if the musician, author, or programmer is FORCED to make their music, writing, code available to the exploiter(s). In the situation you're talking about, they don't have to if they don't want to.
So I repeat my question: why do content producers have to make some sort of compensation?
Ok, I'll bite: why?
Being able to operate a user's machine remotely is nice, and can help a lot, but one really important setup I'd like to have is a camera & microphone setup over their shoulder so that I can see what they're doing (including monitor, keyboard & mouse, and any other hardware setup) when the problem occurs! I've spent hours poking around on somebody's machine trying to figure out why it's doing something, only to find out that they're doing some kind of obscure key & mouse dance to make the problem occur - something I'd never guess by myself in a million years.
This probably isn't going to be practical until videophones & the necessary infrastructure is ubiquitous, however. (The little cameras ON the computer aren't necessarily much help, since those are often the first to go or the culprits when something is screwing up...)
All right, you have up to a year to keep things secret, which isn't too bad when it takes between a year to two years for the US patent office to grant a patent. I'm using the typical time period that the company I am working for gets its patents granted - probably could be a bit faster if you've got people who know how to work the system really well. Chances are, it isn't exposed at all before you can get the patent.
Not that it really matters, since you can word things so that it doesn't show up on a prior art search looking for particular keywords, or is buried in the middle of so many other similar crap patents with such obtuse language that somebody could see the claims 3 times without twigging to the fact that they've got a match.
Please show me a US pending patent - oh that's right, you can't. Silly me. Kind of hard to do any prior art searches on those, isn't it? Wasn't I just talking about that?
Patents are _supposed_ to encourage real, society-benefiting innovation by giving people the chance to make some money off them w/o worrying about people horning in on their action. And when the monopoly period runs out, the entire society can benefit from the innovation.
The current system seems to define innovation as minor semantic differences from existing patent descriptions, and encourages large entities to use large portfolios of these barely-differentiated "innovations" to stifle small competitors or to defend themselves from other similarly-minded large entities. They can also tie up good ideas far longer than the already-too-long 17 years (or was it 20 now?) by extending the patent with a small variation. This situation does NOT seem to be in the general society's best interests.
The granting of a patent should only be TRULY innovative, not just based on some minor semantical differences, and it should be fairly RARE. Trying to reserve every possible combination of ideas for implementing some basic concept for private individuals is not good for the public.
I wish people would remember that the end goal of patents (and intellectual property in general) is to provide long-term benefits for the society. The _short-term_ benefit is for an individual, but only because it's supposed to encourage people to think up ideas which can be used for the society. If you've got a system which _prevents_ the society as a whole (not just some of the society) from ever effectively using those ideas - well, that system needs fixing.
As an aside, I also have some issues about corporate entities, which are merely legal definitions, owning something like "intellectual" property (and being able to deny it to the individuals whose brains actually generated those ideas). But that's a whole other can of worms.
At least some companies get their US patents FIRST, then use those patents (and the "art" associated with the patents) as leverage to get patents in other countries (assisted by the international treaties which have been signed to allow the "prior art" in one country's patent system to invalidate a patent filed in another country's). Therefore, the pending patent is secret until granted.
No, it's a fault with the patent system. It's become pretty much inaccessible except to those people who specialize in searching it, and even then you have people who specialize in searching for particular kinds of patents.
While you can argue that this kind of complexity creates new jobs (like yours, for instance), my feeling is that those kinds of jobs represent the inefficiency of the system.
That's a few thousand PER search (and I assume you usually don't batch search for hundreds of potential patents at a time). While this is peanuts for medium to large size corporations, it adds up pretty fast for individuals & small businesses, representing a bigger chunk of their "survival" funds than for the larger organizations. Kind of like a "regressive tax" on innovation.
Last I heard, small businesses were still more important to the economic engine than even most of the largest companies. From a societal viewpoint, it seems to make more sense to make things more efficient for the small businesses rather than the larger organizations. (I am aware that most of the corporate lobbyists are not being paid to share my views.)
I extended my thoughts slightly to the general difficulties of ensuring a good result for prior art searching. And while I congratulate you on your thoroughness for searching both patent & non-patent art, it has been made abundantly clear that many organizations applying for patents only do enough searching (usually in the patent database itself) to ensure that the Patent Office will give them the patent (i.e., implementation stated the exact same way has not already been patented), then use whatever legal resources are necessary to make the patent worth something (by intimidating others into paying license fees, or using the patent as a defense against predatory patent-abusers).
1. Patents pending are secret. You could build an entire company based on a few ideas, only to find out when someone else's patent is granted that you have to pay them royalties which you didn't take into account before.
2. There are WAY too many patents, and not terribly well categorized & indexed, for all but the largest patent-searching organizations to be absolutely sure they've covered all the possibilities (which costs money). In other words, even if there IS a patent which you're violating, there's a good chance you'll never find it in the noise - but if you're successful, you can bet that the patent holder is going to be giving you a call.
Also falling into this category, are patents which have been made so broad, that any search based on the SPECIFIC details of an implementation are going to completely miss those claims in that patent - but the patentholder probably isn't going to miss you.
3. Prior art doesn't need to be patented - and thus will not show up until somebody needs to put the kibosh on your patent.
As a patent searcher, you should be aware of all this - it's your job to make sure there are no OBVIOUS competing patents, but I doubt you'd guarantee your boss your paycheck for the next year that you haven't missed something.
Are you kidding? It's obvious that Mary Poppins was a meant to be a witch! No way I'd let my kids get corrupted by a piece of pagan propaganda like that!
:)
Funny, his comments indicated to me that he felt that if it was necessary to block access to that kind of stuff for adult viewing in order to protect children, then that's what you had to do.
Given how clumsy most of the robots that _I've_ seen are, I think it would be far more likely that those little robots are going to get STUCK in those small places and then I'll go nuts having to disassemble everything to get them out again...
You mean for libel/slander(never quite remember which is which :)-type stuff? I guess that's a decision on how righteous & confrontational you feel, and how much stress do you think you can handle. :)
Certainly, for your own reputation, if you can come up with a smooth way of getting the GM & IT guys to work together, then they'll like you a lot and probably give you lots of repeat business (or referrals).
In the long term, I still wouldn't trust the GM as far as I could throw him (and I'm not that strong :) - if he was willing to stab someone in the back once, he'll be willing to do it again in the future, even if he's playing nice with you right now. The company would be better off w/o somone like him running the show.
I guess if you're clever enough, you could figure out a "smooth" way of getting rid of the GM w/o causing bad feelings w/the rest of the company - I suspect that kind of manipulation is probably beyond the resources of most consultants, esp. in the limited context of whatever job they were hired for.
I'd find someplace else to work. A GM who's willing to screw a fellow employee like that isn't going to think twice about screwing you over at some point in the future.
Oh yeah, on the way out I'd probably tell the IT Manager & the GM's bosses (the owners) what the GM was trying to do.