The number of copies is irrelevant: the photographer puts in exactly as much effort whether you want one copy or a million. Assuming there's more than one photographer in your area, competition will push the price down to something reasonable for the amount of time and training required of the photographer.
Reverse engineering of file formats is legal. It is a very difficult process, particularly for highly complex binary file formats like Word and so forth. The reason why.doc compatibility sucks has nothing to do with "the State".
That process would be a lot easier if you could reverse engineer the software that writes those files, rather than looking at the files themselves as mysterious binary artifacts. Although I don't agree with all the anarchist "anti-State" rhetoric, I do think copyright is largely to blame for the opacity of these file formats.
The parent's point is that the competition for the patented drug are other drugs in its class and other drugs used to treat the same diseases/symptoms. Think Prilosec, Nexium, Protonix, Zantac, Petpo
Right. That's an irrelevant point, though. When I mentioned "people who can't afford some patented treatment because the lack of competition", the competition that would enable them to afford a certain drug is competition to produce that drug, not a different, less effective one.
And in fifteen years, the expensive meds are the cheap ones.
Then the people fifteen years in the future will benefit; yay for them. Unfortunately, there are people suffering today who are hurt, not helped, by these policies.
Universities aren't the only ones who get patents based on gvt. money. Take a look at small business and student loans/grants. These are both heavily subsidized, but we don't expect anyone who uses these programs to give away anything they produce as a result of these funds.
Well, perhaps we should. I don't want businesses patenting the things that my taxes paid them to develop either. If they're going to lock it away, they can pay for it themselves.
There already is access. The problem is that your tax dollars would then be subsidizing generic pharmaceutical companies in these developing countries and the grey market used to sell them back to developed counries.
...which benefits people here by giving them access to cheaper imported drugs. Sounds good so far.
Since they have lost licensing fees, Universities would need to supplement their incocme in some other way (ie increase tuition).
That sounds fair. Right now, tuition at our universities is being subsidized by everyone in the world who uses a drug that's patented by one of those universities. If that goes away and tuition rises, then we'll be paying a bit more, but it's not as if those other countries owe us tuition subsidies.
Uh, how many drugs are on the market without ANY competition?
There is no competition for the production of a patented drug; that's the whole purpose of patents.
Most drugs compete with cheap medications - but people aren't satisfied with the cheap meds because the more expensive ones work better.
Indeed. So, as I was saying, the GP's assertion that "Everyone benefits, believe it or not" is wrong, because the people who can't afford the more effective treatments don't benefit; in fact, when the high prices enabled by patents are the reason they can't afford them, just the opposite happens.
But, would the more expensive meds exist if it weren't for the drug industry that developed them?
When their development was funded by tax money? Probably, yes. The money is there for someone to do the research; it doesn't really matter who.
Uh, most drug company R&D isn't government subsidized. University R&D is a different story, and I'd tend to agree with your point there.
Good thing this story is specifically about university R&D, then.
In any case, as I've suggested elsewhere there is a simple solution. Just have the NIH start a drug development program in competition with industry, and see how it works. No need to have price fixing, or abolish patents.
What's being suggested here is neither price fixing nor the abolishment of patents. The suggestion, as laid out in the article summary, is for "universities to adopt licensing policies that would facilitate access to all university-derived medicines in developing countries".
I have a significant problem with this idea (that drug I pay to have created are forced to be sold cheaper somewhere else).
But apparently you don't mind that the drugs you pay to have created are patented by someone else, huh? They take our money, use it to do research, and then keep the results for themselves. You and I and the rest of the taxpayers are getting screwed.
I do know that profits on patents held by universities alows them to retain the best talent, and therefore continue innovative and ground-breaking work. Everyone benefits, believe it or not.
Except, of course, for the people who can't afford some patented treatment because the lack of competition is keeping the price out of their reach. But who cares about them, right?
Remember the saying 'A liberal is a Conservative who has yet to be mugged'...
Don't forget the corollary, "A conservative is a liberal who has yet to fall on hard times."
Of course you can. What law would you be breaking by taking a newspaper--a physical object--off the stand for free and then selling it to someone else for 25 cents?
It's not even about ownership. You can't "own" a number. It's about the government granting you veto power, for a limited time and in limited circumstances, over other people's speech.
It's three words, actually, and I'd like to see you or anyone else explain how the APSL still fits the Open Source Definition with these changes in place. Particularly, this part:
6. No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor
The license must not restrict anyone from making use of the program in a specific field of endeavor. For example, it may not restrict the program from being used in a business, or from being used for genetic research.
Good luck coming up with a definition of "field of endeavor" that includes genetic research, excludes portability, and won't get you laughed off of this site.
Am I really the only liberal that was disgusted that Americans actually voted for the Democrats as their progressive party?! Lame. Seriously lame.
You misspelled "realistic". See, we live in a two-party system, thanks to Duverger's law. Voting for a third party is more likely to hurt your interests than help them, unless you can convince a plurality to vote with you, and so far the Greens and Libertarians have failed to do that. The alternative is to vote for a major party and work within it to shape it into the party you want.
They destroyed an aspirin factory using cruise missiles to distract people from the fact that th president was LYING UNDER OATH TO THE SUPREME COURT. That should be considered treason for a president.
You mean when he was lying about sex? Personally, I'd say the past six years' worth of lies on far more important subjects are much closer to treason, even though they weren't under oath.
Why can't Americans start voting for a pair of rational parties; Green vs Libertarian would make for a great election, don't you think?
That will basically never happen unless one or both of the major parties implodes, or the Greens and Libertarians launch a massively successful advertising campaign, or we adopt a voting system that allows people to vote their true preferences without accidentally electing the greater evil instead of the lesser one. So far, most people just don't think those parties are superior enough to risk spoiling an election. Don't blame the voters, blame the system first and those parties second.
Irrelevant. This change still means the APSL no longer fits the Open Source Definition, because it discriminates against developers whose "field of endeavor" is running OS X on non-Apple hardware. Running OS X on other hardware isn't necessarily a copyright violation, and even in those cases when it is, that doesn't mean Apple is exempt from the OSI's requirements.
That's like the insanity here in America of assuming it's pitiful that so many people don't get healthcare insurance.
The only way that could not be pitiful is if all those people with no insurance had some other way to pay for health care, or if they never got sick. Considering that neither of those are the case, what kind of sociopath would think it's fine for so few to be able to afford medical care?
What I'm really saying is if a person isn't prepared to get off their arse and make sure they have permission to use an open access point, they shouldn't feel entitled to use it. Considering they're both unauthorized use of other people's network resources, I see no real difference between leeching wireless and spamming...except that spammers are "them" and people who want free WiFi are "us".
So, before you connect to a web site, do you "get off your arse" and phone up the webmaster, asking for authorization to use his network resources? After all, if setting up an open access point isn't a sign that you're letting people connect to it, then neither is setting up an open web server - right?
how does your inability to determine your neighbour's intentions via technical means change the situation, considering the agreement to share the access point is between you and it's owner, not you and the machinery?
Er.. the machinery acts on behalf of its owner. It doesn't take part in the agreement itself, but it does stand as evidence of an implied agreement, just like a guard outside a door who says "Come in!" (presumably on the owner's behalf) or even a sign (presumably put there by the owner). The building's owner is actually who grants permission to enter, not the guard or the sign, but you can reasonably expect that the guard and sign reflect the owner's wishes.
They make reasonably nice computers. Their commercials are amusing and simply make claims that are functional, like a Mac will talk to your digital camera when a Windows PC won't without first installing a driver (often true not just of Macs but, for example, Linux as well).
Problem is, a lot of those claims are exaggerated or simply false.
Take digital cameras, for example. My Kodak mounts as a USB storage device when I plug it into my Windows XP machine, so even without installing a driver, I can copy the photos off using the same interface I'd use to copy files from a CD or floppy. When I plug it into my Powerbook G4, I have to go start "Image Capture" by hand, because it doesn't mount as a drive (or provide any confirmation that I've plugged in a camera). I've seen this same complaint about a few other brands too.
Other examples: making home movies, playing videos and music, printing photo albums. Windows can do these things, sometimes with software that's included (Windows Movie Maker) and sometimes with third-party software (which you might not get by default, but at the same time you don't have to pay for it if you don't want to). The commercials, however, give the impression that PCs just can't do these tasks.
The reality is that the GOP has only limitted expanding rights of gays, which is very different than taking them away.
No, it really isn't very different, because the point is that the GOP aims to prevent gays from enjoying the same rights as straight people. Whether you start from a position of inequality and work to maintain it, or start from a position of equality and work to take it away, you end up in the same place.
I am not claiming that nobody would get paid at all in the absence of IP, just that they would get underpaid compared to a reasonable system of IP.
Such a system is only "reasonable" if you consider funding these industries more important than preserving the rights to speak freely and share experiences, which are necessarily restricted by copyright. One might say just as well that they're currently overpaid compared to a free market.
The problem with this philosophy is it assumes everyone's interests are the same, that there is one "best" candidate and if you aren't informed enough to know who he is, you should stay home and let the informed people vote for him. (Or, rather, it assumes that the pool of uninformed voters has the same overall interests as the pool of informed voters.)
But that isn't necessarily true. Suppose uninformed voters tend to have some characteristic that separates them from the general population. For the sake of argument, let's say uninformed voters tend to be younger and poorer than informed voters. Clearly, younger and poorer people will have a different set of interests than older and wealthier people, and policies that benefit one group might harm the other. A young, poor, uninformed voter who decides to stay home and let someone more informed make the decision for him may be handing his vote over to a policy that will harm him, whereas even if he went to the polls himself and just picked a candidate randomly, he might have a better chance of casting it for someone whose interests are more closely aligned with his own.
What the hell is a "minor attracted adult", if not a pedophile?
Someone who's attracted to teenagers, probably: in Canada, the age of consent is 14, so most teenagers can legally have sex with adults. The term "pedophile" typically refers to those who are attracted to pre-pubescent children, not adolescents.
Arguably? When you rely on fair use, you need to have a plan to defend yourself in case you get sued. Please provide an example of a detailed rationale that would justify a finding of fair use in all major English-speaking countries.
Um, no. I'm not a lawyer and this is not a courtroom. My point is that such an action may conceivably be fair use, and that iMovie and Final Cut Pro don't know whether it is or not, just as the rest of us don't know whether it is or not until it's argued in court. A DRM scheme that presumes any questionable use is illegal, and therefore prevents it, is an inconvenience.
And no, fair use doesn't guarantee convenience
No one said it did. In fact, by admitting that this use is inconvenient, you're backing up TheRaven64's point, which is that iTunes's DRM presents an inconvenience to users.
Probably not. That's part of the inconvenience he was talking about, of course: why should he have to go through contract negotiations for a home movie, which presumably is not going to be distributed widely or for money? It's arguably fair use, but if it isn't, then any blanket licensing scheme should include these rights as well.
Let say there are some fab owners who all make money from chips. New chips would increase consumer demand and so would be could for their business, but who foots the cost? If all the owners club together to pay some designers for a new chip design then nobody wins. Everyone pays the bill, everyone gets the increase in sales. What if everyone but one owner decided to club together to pay the designers? Now one company has an advantage because they don't pay the development costs but can make the chips anyway.
Indeed. Everyone who might contribute has to weigh the cost of their contribution against the possibility that the innovation will happen anyway without their help. If I need to pay the chip designer $1000 to produce a technology that'll eventually be worth $1 million to me, then as long as there's a greater than 1:1000 chance that the technology will be produced anyway, I should wait for it to happen. However, the more fab owners who also decide to wait, the lower the chances are that the chip will be designed, which flips the odds around and makes it profitable for me to pay the chip designer myself.
So in your example, who would want to pay the talent? It wouldn't be in their interest unless they could restrict the use of the invention.
Sure it would. Just because someone else might also be able to make $1 million but without the initial investment, gaining an "advantage" over me, that doesn't mean I'd turn down the opportunity to make $999,000 in profit by paying the designer myself. I don't need to restrict the use of the invention for that to be in my interest.
For artistic works, the people who pay the talent would largely be the consumers, I suspect, simply because there isn't much room for anyone else to have a financial interest in creation when music, movies, books, and photos can all be distributed electronically for free, straight from the producer to the consumer. For works like sculpture that have to be manufactured and distributed physically, there's an opportunity for distributors to make money, so they should be willing to pay sculptors for new designs.
We actually have a perfectly viable form of IP socialism right now. It's called the patent system.
BTW, the system I've been advocating is quite the opposite of "socialism" - it's more like "IP libertarianism". Copyright is government intervention; abandoning copyright would simply mean the government stops handing out and enforcing monopolies on information.
If you want to write a book about a little boy who goes to wizarding school, goright ahead. Just don't name your little boy Harry Potter and call the School Hogwart's.
Another poster has already pointed out that I was referring to speech--expression--not simply ideas.
But let me address this. First, (as a different poster pointed out) you're likely to get sued anyway if your book is similar enough to Harry Potter. Second, the character of a young wizard called Harry Potter is an idea which is expressed through the prose in the book, so if copyright really is only about protecting expression, as so many copyright advocates claim, there shouldn't be any problem writing your own book about a young wizard called Harry Potter. But of course, there is. If you write your own Harry Potter book, even without lifting any prose from Rowling's work, you may still be violating copyright: you've created an unauthorized derivative work even though you haven't copied any expression, only ideas.
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The number of copies is irrelevant: the photographer puts in exactly as much effort whether you want one copy or a million. Assuming there's more than one photographer in your area, competition will push the price down to something reasonable for the amount of time and training required of the photographer.
That process would be a lot easier if you could reverse engineer the software that writes those files, rather than looking at the files themselves as mysterious binary artifacts. Although I don't agree with all the anarchist "anti-State" rhetoric, I do think copyright is largely to blame for the opacity of these file formats.
Right. That's an irrelevant point, though. When I mentioned "people who can't afford some patented treatment because the lack of competition", the competition that would enable them to afford a certain drug is competition to produce that drug, not a different, less effective one.
Then the people fifteen years in the future will benefit; yay for them. Unfortunately, there are people suffering today who are hurt, not helped, by these policies.
Well, perhaps we should. I don't want businesses patenting the things that my taxes paid them to develop either. If they're going to lock it away, they can pay for it themselves.
That sounds fair. Right now, tuition at our universities is being subsidized by everyone in the world who uses a drug that's patented by one of those universities. If that goes away and tuition rises, then we'll be paying a bit more, but it's not as if those other countries owe us tuition subsidies.
There is no competition for the production of a patented drug; that's the whole purpose of patents.
Indeed. So, as I was saying, the GP's assertion that "Everyone benefits, believe it or not" is wrong, because the people who can't afford the more effective treatments don't benefit; in fact, when the high prices enabled by patents are the reason they can't afford them, just the opposite happens.
When their development was funded by tax money? Probably, yes. The money is there for someone to do the research; it doesn't really matter who.
Good thing this story is specifically about university R&D, then.
What's being suggested here is neither price fixing nor the abolishment of patents. The suggestion, as laid out in the article summary, is for "universities to adopt licensing policies that would facilitate access to all university-derived medicines in developing countries".
But apparently you don't mind that the drugs you pay to have created are patented by someone else, huh? They take our money, use it to do research, and then keep the results for themselves. You and I and the rest of the taxpayers are getting screwed.
Except, of course, for the people who can't afford some patented treatment because the lack of competition is keeping the price out of their reach. But who cares about them, right?
Don't forget the corollary, "A conservative is a liberal who has yet to fall on hard times."
Of course you can. What law would you be breaking by taking a newspaper--a physical object--off the stand for free and then selling it to someone else for 25 cents?
It's not even about ownership. You can't "own" a number. It's about the government granting you veto power, for a limited time and in limited circumstances, over other people's speech.
Good luck coming up with a definition of "field of endeavor" that includes genetic research, excludes portability, and won't get you laughed off of this site.
You misspelled "realistic". See, we live in a two-party system, thanks to Duverger's law. Voting for a third party is more likely to hurt your interests than help them, unless you can convince a plurality to vote with you, and so far the Greens and Libertarians have failed to do that. The alternative is to vote for a major party and work within it to shape it into the party you want.
You mean when he was lying about sex? Personally, I'd say the past six years' worth of lies on far more important subjects are much closer to treason, even though they weren't under oath.
That will basically never happen unless one or both of the major parties implodes, or the Greens and Libertarians launch a massively successful advertising campaign, or we adopt a voting system that allows people to vote their true preferences without accidentally electing the greater evil instead of the lesser one. So far, most people just don't think those parties are superior enough to risk spoiling an election. Don't blame the voters, blame the system first and those parties second.
Irrelevant. This change still means the APSL no longer fits the Open Source Definition, because it discriminates against developers whose "field of endeavor" is running OS X on non-Apple hardware. Running OS X on other hardware isn't necessarily a copyright violation, and even in those cases when it is, that doesn't mean Apple is exempt from the OSI's requirements.
The only way that could not be pitiful is if all those people with no insurance had some other way to pay for health care, or if they never got sick. Considering that neither of those are the case, what kind of sociopath would think it's fine for so few to be able to afford medical care?
Myanmar, China, Belarus, Iran, Tunisia, Cuba, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Turkmenistan, Vietnam, North Korea, Syria, and Uzbekistan.
So, before you connect to a web site, do you "get off your arse" and phone up the webmaster, asking for authorization to use his network resources? After all, if setting up an open access point isn't a sign that you're letting people connect to it, then neither is setting up an open web server - right?
Er.. the machinery acts on behalf of its owner. It doesn't take part in the agreement itself, but it does stand as evidence of an implied agreement, just like a guard outside a door who says "Come in!" (presumably on the owner's behalf) or even a sign (presumably put there by the owner). The building's owner is actually who grants permission to enter, not the guard or the sign, but you can reasonably expect that the guard and sign reflect the owner's wishes.
Problem is, a lot of those claims are exaggerated or simply false.
Take digital cameras, for example. My Kodak mounts as a USB storage device when I plug it into my Windows XP machine, so even without installing a driver, I can copy the photos off using the same interface I'd use to copy files from a CD or floppy. When I plug it into my Powerbook G4, I have to go start "Image Capture" by hand, because it doesn't mount as a drive (or provide any confirmation that I've plugged in a camera). I've seen this same complaint about a few other brands too.
Other examples: making home movies, playing videos and music, printing photo albums. Windows can do these things, sometimes with software that's included (Windows Movie Maker) and sometimes with third-party software (which you might not get by default, but at the same time you don't have to pay for it if you don't want to). The commercials, however, give the impression that PCs just can't do these tasks.
No, it really isn't very different, because the point is that the GOP aims to prevent gays from enjoying the same rights as straight people. Whether you start from a position of inequality and work to maintain it, or start from a position of equality and work to take it away, you end up in the same place.
Such a system is only "reasonable" if you consider funding these industries more important than preserving the rights to speak freely and share experiences, which are necessarily restricted by copyright. One might say just as well that they're currently overpaid compared to a free market.
I realized that shortly after I posted. Sorry.
The problem with this philosophy is it assumes everyone's interests are the same, that there is one "best" candidate and if you aren't informed enough to know who he is, you should stay home and let the informed people vote for him. (Or, rather, it assumes that the pool of uninformed voters has the same overall interests as the pool of informed voters.)
But that isn't necessarily true. Suppose uninformed voters tend to have some characteristic that separates them from the general population. For the sake of argument, let's say uninformed voters tend to be younger and poorer than informed voters. Clearly, younger and poorer people will have a different set of interests than older and wealthier people, and policies that benefit one group might harm the other. A young, poor, uninformed voter who decides to stay home and let someone more informed make the decision for him may be handing his vote over to a policy that will harm him, whereas even if he went to the polls himself and just picked a candidate randomly, he might have a better chance of casting it for someone whose interests are more closely aligned with his own.
Someone who's attracted to teenagers, probably: in Canada, the age of consent is 14, so most teenagers can legally have sex with adults. The term "pedophile" typically refers to those who are attracted to pre-pubescent children, not adolescents.
Then your point is orthogonal to his, and this has been nothing but a pointless sidetrack. HAND.
Um, no. I'm not a lawyer and this is not a courtroom. My point is that such an action may conceivably be fair use, and that iMovie and Final Cut Pro don't know whether it is or not, just as the rest of us don't know whether it is or not until it's argued in court. A DRM scheme that presumes any questionable use is illegal, and therefore prevents it, is an inconvenience.
No one said it did. In fact, by admitting that this use is inconvenient, you're backing up TheRaven64's point, which is that iTunes's DRM presents an inconvenience to users.
Probably not. That's part of the inconvenience he was talking about, of course: why should he have to go through contract negotiations for a home movie, which presumably is not going to be distributed widely or for money? It's arguably fair use, but if it isn't, then any blanket licensing scheme should include these rights as well.
Indeed. Everyone who might contribute has to weigh the cost of their contribution against the possibility that the innovation will happen anyway without their help. If I need to pay the chip designer $1000 to produce a technology that'll eventually be worth $1 million to me, then as long as there's a greater than 1:1000 chance that the technology will be produced anyway, I should wait for it to happen. However, the more fab owners who also decide to wait, the lower the chances are that the chip will be designed, which flips the odds around and makes it profitable for me to pay the chip designer myself.
Sure it would. Just because someone else might also be able to make $1 million but without the initial investment, gaining an "advantage" over me, that doesn't mean I'd turn down the opportunity to make $999,000 in profit by paying the designer myself. I don't need to restrict the use of the invention for that to be in my interest.
For artistic works, the people who pay the talent would largely be the consumers, I suspect, simply because there isn't much room for anyone else to have a financial interest in creation when music, movies, books, and photos can all be distributed electronically for free, straight from the producer to the consumer. For works like sculpture that have to be manufactured and distributed physically, there's an opportunity for distributors to make money, so they should be willing to pay sculptors for new designs.
BTW, the system I've been advocating is quite the opposite of "socialism" - it's more like "IP libertarianism". Copyright is government intervention; abandoning copyright would simply mean the government stops handing out and enforcing monopolies on information.
Another poster has already pointed out that I was referring to speech--expression--not simply ideas.
But let me address this. First, (as a different poster pointed out) you're likely to get sued anyway if your book is similar enough to Harry Potter. Second, the character of a young wizard called Harry Potter is an idea which is expressed through the prose in the book, so if copyright really is only about protecting expression, as so many copyright advocates claim, there shouldn't be any problem writing your own book about a young wizard called Harry Potter. But of course, there is. If you write your own Harry Potter book, even without lifting any prose from Rowling's work, you may still be violating copyright: you've created an unauthorized derivative work even though you haven't copied any expression, only ideas.