It is very nice to see Crichton on the offensive about this issue, and hopefully he and Research in Motion (RIM) will be able to trigger some more response and reform in the patent office.
RIM is an evil company, in court and out, and they got what they deserved. Michael Crichton has about as much authority on the topic of patent law as he does on the topic of global warming: he's a moron who writes bad novels.
If this is all we have in our arsenal against patent abuse, we're totally, thoroughly screwed.
greed, but he also holds it against MIT that he had to go to Hahvahd (from which he didn't even graduate). He knows he couldn't handle MIT.
Gates is an evil person. But a technical dummy he ain't. He wrote a BASIC for the 6502 so good that Jobs and Wozniak used it instead of rolling their own. MIT would be a piece of cake for this guy.
Let's be more exact here. Lao Tzu was almost certainly a made-up mythical character invented in order to codify a set of mystical sayings into the Lao Tzu (Tao Te Ching). He was positioned to be the "elder contemporary" of Confucius so that the teachings he represented could be argued as superior to Confucianism.
what was the last good thing that came out of exclusive control of something?
Er, rural electrification?
Long-distance telephone calls?
Community sewage?
Mail?
Sometimes monopolies occur because it's not economically feasible or not a social good to have competition if that competition results in a race to the bottom. At least at the outset.
Your quote sounds very much like someone who's taken neither a civics nor microeconomics course. No wonder/. modded you insightful!:-)
You've not read the patents, have you? They were original and significant, and I am not aware of any relevant prior art. USPTO invalidated them largely because RIM paid congressmen a boatload of money to pressure the crap out of USPTO to do so.
They had no product.
They did originally. They sold 'em at tradeshows.
RIM was winning in court.
RIM was losing big time in court. The judge was at the stage of awarding NTP 3x punative damages. He was likely going to rule against RIM anyway even though USPTO had invalidated the patents.
Worked so hard to run its competitors out of the market with lawsuits that The Register nicknamed it "Lawsuits in Motion"
Ignored all entreaties from NTP for a year, forcing NTP to eventually sue them.
Lied in court so often that they received three-times punative damages just for their court conduct alone, plus attorneys' fees.
Gave Congress free Blackberries as a tactic to get them hooked, then
(Successfully) Lobbied Congressmen to put big-time pressure on the USPTO to invalidate NTP's patents while the court case was ongoing (can you say "cut off their air supply"?), regardless of their actual validity. In the US, if you're doing something illegal, you can always get the law changed if you have enough money. Even if you're a foreign company.
Tried to push through a congressional resolution that shutting down the Blackberry network would be a "threat to national security" because of the free Blackberries they'd hooked the feds on.
(Successfully) Lobbied the Canadian government to weigh in as if this were a matter of international concern.
Purposely delayed resolution until after NTP's original inventor died.
This company deserves to go straight to hell. $612 million is a rap on the knuckles.
Sounds great to me. So it's fine if I go pick up a copy of Linux, extend it some, and distribute it as feijaiOS, no source, no attribution, right? I'm not stealing, I'm just duplicating. I think I need to inform some vendors that this just fine because Mr. "eyeye" said it was.
But I am stealing. I'm stealing his right to specify who gets to use copies of his licensed work. I'm stealing his copyright and his license rights.
The RX-8 isn't any more efficient than the rotary used in later generation RX-7's... it's a non-turbo powered 13B rotary engine.
Come again? The RX-8 uses the RENESIS engine. The whole point of the RENESIS project was to make a rotary engine that was rather more fuel-efficient and cleaner than the RX-7's. And they were successful. Or were you using "efficient" in some non-engineer car-enthusiast way?
Theres not a lot of room in the RX8 for a spaer tank, its a small coupe, and the gas tank size is already too small for its thirst.
Er...
The RX-8 has four doors and (unlike other sports cars) real back seats. This isn't exactly the definition of a coupe.
The RX-8 is hardly small. Have you actually been in one? Are you possibly mistaking it for the MX-8 Miata?
The RX-8 has a 16 gallon tank. That's bigger than my Protege sedan and my Accord.
The RX-8 uses a rotary engine. In other words, a tiny engine. There's actually a fair amount of room for additional tank space.
So, to sum up: not small, not actually a coupe, not a small gas tank, and not crowded tank-wise. Not quite, but very close to the 100% Incorrect on Slashdot ideal. Plus crappy spelling and grammar to boot! Good job!
As I recall, while the term "robber baron[1]" is intended to be pejorative, there is no conclusive evidence that the actions of such individuals, where otherwise legal, caused temporary or lasting harm to the economies in which they worked.
Moving the goalposts, eh? In a discussion about antitrust laws, you claimed that the only important question is "did the government create this monopoly". I asked: why would the government's involvement make a bit of difference? Your answer: to start defending, for some crazy reason, robber barons. As if that was the discussion at hand. Then this one:
I looked around for evidence of economic trouble resulting from monopolies in Hong Kong. I didn't find anything.
Man, it's goalpost-moving day. You stated that monopolies can only exist (for long) in a non-free market. Which is 100% unadulterated malarky, but whatever. My response: here's the closest thing the world has to a free market, and behold: long-existing monopolies! Your response: oh, yes, but they don't hurt anything.
What the hell? Who cares whether they do or not?
And I think that anyone arrogant enough to think that they can "fix" the outcome of the market (which is nothing more or less than the result of collective decision-making by all six billion inhabitants of this planet) is a danger to society.
Now onto creating a strawman I guess. Who is this arrogant person you're tarring and feathering? Certainly I said nothing like that.
IMHO, you revealed an almost abject ignorance about how the free market works, by assuming that the free market == a commodities market, when that's only a theoretical possibility in a non-physical world. IMHO, it's a common piece of BS that reveals libertarians' lack of economics experience. I called you on it. Your result is to... attack someone who's not in discussion?
This kind of rhetorical ducking and weaving is not interesting to me any more. I'm done.
Call me highly skeptical. Helen Fisher is a physical anthropologist. As in population geneticists, primatologists, and paleoanthropologists. This is a far cry from being an expert in studying the "circuitry" that underlies love. In her book, she hooked up with some doctors from SUNY to use MRI brain scanning to "look at what love looks like", but the book is really mostly just anthropology. In truth, we have no idea what the circuitry of love is (yet), but we have long understood the effect of endorphins (caused by chocolate, heroin, running fast, and love) on the human brain and their relationship to one another. Thus her claim is both simultaneously old hat and inexpert.
The danger for Apple is that Apple refuses (so far as I know) to license FairPlay to a full-fledged music player not under Apple's control. Witness the degree of feature-breaking they did to Motorola's phone.
It's not that the iPod only accepts music from the iTunes Music Store: that's simply false -- it accepts MP3 files also, so that argument won't hold water.
It's that the iTunes Music Store only will only provide music for the iPod. That's something you can hang your antitrust hat on.
The only question of any real importance is "Did the government create this monopoly?"
Why is that even relevant? Antitrust laws weren't created because of government-formed monopolies. They were formed because of the robber barons.
Only in a non-free market can an inefficient monopoly remain prominent.
The most laisez-faire market in the world, so far as I know, is (or was) Hong Kong. And it had some real whoppers of monopolies. I think your claim holds no water at all. Not every free market is a commodities market. Some goods are by their very nature restricted to certain locations in time, space, and relationship to other goods. The market is, in mathematical parlance, a local optimization mechanism. There are often local optima in which it gets caught, preventing it from escaping and finding the global optimum without some external force to help out.
In my opinion, people who think that the market has one pretty commodities-style global optimum are the same ones who took Econ 101 and then thought they knew it all and never bothered to take Econ 201.
For a more thorough analysis of this fact, see Chapter 10 of Man, Economy, & State by Murray N. Rothbard.
Mmmm, a knownothing libertarian diatribe in its purest form. Tasty.
That's not exactly true. You can have a company that is not yet a monopoly attempting to become a monopoly by using "monopolistic" practices (as in those tending to form a monopoly).... And that's illegal.
Really? Under what law?
It's perfectly legal.
And once again, a practice isn't "monopolistic" unless it's performed by a monopoly.
Well, what if you are practicing something that will eventually lead to a monopoly? Such behavior would be illegal way before the company became a monopoly.
This too is utterly false.
It is not illegal to be a monopoly. It is not illegal to make certain market-protective actions, even if they result in you becoming a monopoly. It is illegal to make those actions after you're a monopoly. Not before, not way before. After.
Apple's actions are only illegal if Apple has a legal monopoly on this market and Apple's actions are deemed to be in the set of actions monopolies may not perform. Both things must be true for this to be anything at all, pure and simple.
Slashdot Mirror
Specifically, the Office of Management and Budget gives the outlay estimate at $2,472,205,000,000. The Debt Clock reads $8,351,239,051,664 as of this posting.
RIM is an evil company, in court and out, and they got what they deserved. Michael Crichton has about as much authority on the topic of patent law as he does on the topic of global warming: he's a moron who writes bad novels.
If this is all we have in our arsenal against patent abuse, we're totally, thoroughly screwed.
Er, rural electrification?
Long-distance telephone calls?
Community sewage?
Mail?
Sometimes monopolies occur because it's not economically feasible or not a social good to have competition if that competition results in a race to the bottom. At least at the outset.
Your quote sounds very much like someone who's taken neither a civics nor microeconomics course. No wonder /. modded you insightful! :-)
RIM was wise to settle.
This company deserves to go straight to hell. $612 million is a rap on the knuckles.
Tim Berners-Lee's WorldWideWeb.app long predated Enterprise Objects. It, and httpd, was written in pure NeXTSTEP. 2.x.
"Doesn't Work with Safari".
I had forgotten.
A more scientific way to make the comparison.
But I am stealing. I'm stealing his right to specify who gets to use copies of his licensed work. I'm stealing his copyright and his license rights.
That's what you're doing too.
You don't think it had anything to do with CmdrTaco not wanting to splash your username on the front page, would it?
Indeed!
In erasing it from the collective memory of the Chinese. Compare American Google with Chinese Google. Echos of 1984 indeed.
Come again? The RX-8 uses the RENESIS engine. The whole point of the RENESIS project was to make a rotary engine that was rather more fuel-efficient and cleaner than the RX-7's. And they were successful. Or were you using "efficient" in some non-engineer car-enthusiast way?
Er...
So, to sum up: not small, not actually a coupe, not a small gas tank, and not crowded tank-wise. Not quite, but very close to the 100% Incorrect on Slashdot ideal. Plus crappy spelling and grammar to boot! Good job!
Moving the goalposts, eh? In a discussion about antitrust laws, you claimed that the only important question is "did the government create this monopoly". I asked: why would the government's involvement make a bit of difference? Your answer: to start defending, for some crazy reason, robber barons. As if that was the discussion at hand. Then this one:
Man, it's goalpost-moving day. You stated that monopolies can only exist (for long) in a non-free market. Which is 100% unadulterated malarky, but whatever. My response: here's the closest thing the world has to a free market, and behold: long-existing monopolies! Your response: oh, yes, but they don't hurt anything.
What the hell? Who cares whether they do or not?
Now onto creating a strawman I guess. Who is this arrogant person you're tarring and feathering? Certainly I said nothing like that.
IMHO, you revealed an almost abject ignorance about how the free market works, by assuming that the free market == a commodities market, when that's only a theoretical possibility in a non-physical world. IMHO, it's a common piece of BS that reveals libertarians' lack of economics experience. I called you on it. Your result is to... attack someone who's not in discussion?
This kind of rhetorical ducking and weaving is not interesting to me any more. I'm done.
Call me highly skeptical. Helen Fisher is a physical anthropologist. As in population geneticists, primatologists, and paleoanthropologists. This is a far cry from being an expert in studying the "circuitry" that underlies love. In her book, she hooked up with some doctors from SUNY to use MRI brain scanning to "look at what love looks like", but the book is really mostly just anthropology. In truth, we have no idea what the circuitry of love is (yet), but we have long understood the effect of endorphins (caused by chocolate, heroin, running fast, and love) on the human brain and their relationship to one another. Thus her claim is both simultaneously old hat and inexpert.
It's not that the iPod only accepts music from the iTunes Music Store: that's simply false -- it accepts MP3 files also, so that argument won't hold water.
It's that the iTunes Music Store only will only provide music for the iPod. That's something you can hang your antitrust hat on.
Why is that even relevant? Antitrust laws weren't created because of government-formed monopolies. They were formed because of the robber barons.
The most laisez-faire market in the world, so far as I know, is (or was) Hong Kong. And it had some real whoppers of monopolies. I think your claim holds no water at all. Not every free market is a commodities market. Some goods are by their very nature restricted to certain locations in time, space, and relationship to other goods. The market is, in mathematical parlance, a local optimization mechanism. There are often local optima in which it gets caught, preventing it from escaping and finding the global optimum without some external force to help out.
In my opinion, people who think that the market has one pretty commodities-style global optimum are the same ones who took Econ 101 and then thought they knew it all and never bothered to take Econ 201.
Mmmm, a knownothing libertarian diatribe in its purest form. Tasty.Really? Under what law?
It's perfectly legal.
And once again, a practice isn't "monopolistic" unless it's performed by a monopoly.
It is not illegal to be a monopoly. It is not illegal to make certain market-protective actions, even if they result in you becoming a monopoly. It is illegal to make those actions after you're a monopoly. Not before, not way before. After.
Apple's actions are only illegal if Apple has a legal monopoly on this market and Apple's actions are deemed to be in the set of actions monopolies may not perform. Both things must be true for this to be anything at all, pure and simple.
If you're implying that "good fences make good neighbors" was coined by Frost, it definitely was not.