I reiterate that you're suggesting that we mandate what he should do. [...] What about laziness in general? [...] What if I save my money instead of spend it [...]
Wow. Could you at least try to stay on topic? I was talking about how a small inventor could get his invention produced without having to transfer the patent, not laziness or investing. I'm not mandating that he do anything; he can license his patent to whomever he wants.
you can make this statement all day long and people will get patents for thing that you believe, using a common English definition, are completely obvious. To me, this is like pointing out that "power" and "mower" are spelled almost exactly the same but spelled differently - Wow how funny is that? It's an old, played out gag that obnoxiously confuses the real debate and doesn't prove a damn thing.
Hey, you're the one who brought up the legal definition of "obvious". I was perfectly happy using the common English definition, and if you don't mind, I'd like to go back to it. It's an unfortunate coincidence that the two words are spelled the same way, but it was your choice to read the wrong meaning into my words. Let's go back again to what I wrote in my original post:
Your wife and kids don't deserve the ability to shut down a useful tool used by thousands of businesses just because you filed a patent several years earlier - especially a patent on something as obvious as wireless email.
Clearly not the words of a patent attorney. Why would you think I was using the legal definition there, when we both know wireless email isn't "obvious" under the legal definition?
Why is the common English definition better than the patent system's?
Because it wouldn't allow patents on something that anyone with moderate knowledge in the field could easily think up on their own. No one needs to be encouraged with a government-enforced monopoly just to put two common concepts together, and since granting a patent to one person imposes a restriction on everyone else, it shouldn't be done when it's plainly unnecessary.
It's like granting a patent on a ham & peanut butter sandwich - anyone who knows about ham, peanut butter, and sandwiches can figure that one out, and anyone who finds himself with nothing but ham, peanut butter, and bread in the fridge will eventually figure it out. Why does the first person to put ham and peanut butter together deserve the exclusive right to do so? Why should everyone else who finds himself in that situation have to pay royalties to the first guy, who didn't do anything special except find himself in their situation a few years earlier?
I must regretfully inform you that each posting is scored separately. That is, one message with 6 uses of the word "bourgeois" followed by another message with 1 use does not add up to a single message with 7 uses.
Furthermore, the necessary number of uses for qualification is 10, not 7.
I should also like to clarify at this time that entries are not judged solely on usage of the word "bourgeois"; additional phrases such as "corporate fatcats", "proletariat", and "means of production" will improve your post's chances of winning. The requirement that the word "bourgeois" be used ten times simply means that entries with fewer than ten uses will not be accepted.
You are welcome to submit another entry before our cutoff date of February 1, 2006.
I meant, of course, that he could grant a third party the right to use his patented invention. Do you think the inventor's wife and kids would have a use for such a license? Or might such a license be more useful to, say, someone who can actually manufacture and market the product that he designed?
Please try to remember the context: you suggested he'd have to transfer the patent in order to get his invention manufactured. That isn't true if he can just grant the manufacturer a license.
A patent is nothing more than the right to exclude others from practicing your invention.
Indeed. And there comes a point in time when others should no longer be excluded from practicing that invention - say, after the original inventor is dead, when the patent has long since served its purpose of providing him an incentive to invent things. The ultimate goal of a patent system is to encourage people to invent things and disclose how they work, not to keep ourselves from using new technologies; the latter is only acceptable as a stepping stone to the former.
Any response to this moronity would be condescending - I'll leave it at that.
I'll take this as conceding the point.;)
You stand at a fork - either attempt to comprehend what is meant by the term "obviousness" under 35 USC 103, or accept that I have clearly called you out on your equivocation and refuse to fall for such a moronic tactic of debate.
Look, I understand that you'd rather stick to legal definitions, but I'm not playing that game. I'm not interpreting the law, I'm commenting on the unfortunate real-world consequences of that law. Here's a simple statement: No one deserves a patent for "inventing" something obvious. All the words in that sentence are simple English words.
I'm not saying no one can *get* a patent for inventing something obvious - clearly that's already happened. The reason it was allowed is that the legal definition of "obvious" differs from the conversational definition. That is a problem, and the legal definition should be changed so that things everyday people would consider obvious (like combining wireless technology + email to get wireless email) are also considered legally obvious and ineligible for patents.
I'm sorry, you only wrote "bourgeois" 6 times in this message. To qualify for the Marxist Vocabulary Award, you must use the word at least 10 times in a single post (including the subject line). You are encouraged, however, to submit another entry at any time before the final cutoff date of February 1, 2006.
I, and most other cellular customers in the US, have an email address where email messages are automatically translated into text messages. Send me a message at (my phone number)@vtext.com, and I get a wireless notification that a message has arrived, without my phone needing to maintain a constant connection. Seems like exactly what the Blackberry does, right?
I mean, honestly, if you produce a super spiffy free open source tool and a million people download it and love it, you feel pretty darn good and might choose to do so again if you can. [...] Back to child porn; if those that are actually producing it feel that there are millions of people just begging for their product, they will be more likely to try to produce more, no? Thus it seems that the "as long as you don't pay them for it" argument is flawed?
Thing is, open source software has a vibrant community. When you go to a site where you can download free software, there's typically a message board or email link where you can communicate with the authors, send them a donation, submit patches, etc.
I doubt there is such a thing with child porn - at least not in public. As I said earlier, the people who make it available online have a strong incentive to remain as anonymous as possible, which has the side effect of making it hard for them to get any feedback. If their primary method of distribution is P2P, Usenet, or Freenet, they'll have trouble even finding out how many people have downloaded what they uploaded.
If free software discussion forums were routinely investigated and infiltrated by the FBI (or the local equivalent), who used all the information they could get to track down the authors of free software and arrest them, don't you think it'd suddenly get a lot harder for random folks to communicate with the authors, as they all went into hiding overnight? And wouldn't it simultaneously become a lot harder for those authors to know who was using their software, how much they enjoyed it, and whether they wanted to see more?
Increased demand for child porn means a stronger incentive to make the stuff. Note that this is true even if no buying or selling is involved (ie trading). Open and free distribution might undercut the market to some extent -- but given that music companies continue to thrive despite widespread file-sharing, I doubt that market saturation will make child porn unprofitable.
Er, no. The reason music companies continue to thrive is people keep buying music, and the availability of free P2P downloads doesn't seem to interfere with that. If it were, say, illegal to buy music, the music companies would shrivel up and die overnight. No one would go buy CDs on a shady street corner when they could use Kazaa for free in their own homes.
Similarly, making child porn can only be financially profitable if people are paying for it. It's very simple: if no one pays, there's no money. In a barter situation, there might be a form of profit--"you send me a clip I haven't seen, and I'll send you a clip you haven't seen"--but not in a sharing situation.
if he does not own the capital and manufacturing facilities to see his invention to market - without those, he'd have to transfer his patent rights to (*gasp*) some totally unrelated third party that had nothing to do with conceiving of the invention!
Or (*gasp*) he could grant that third party a license to use his patent.
Further, your argument hinges on equivocation - "obviousness" in conversational English is an entirely different concept from "obviousness" under 35 USC 103, which is what we are discussing.
No, I'm afraid it isn't. Maybe you'd prefer to discuss that, but I'm using the word "obvious" as it's used in everyday English.
Wireless email is obvious in a world where wireless communications and email are already in use. If the law's definition of "obvious" fails to recognize that, then the law needs to be updated, because there's no sense in granting such an obvious patent.
Would you legislate that this wife and kids are required to "be nice"? They are no more under that obligation than you are to be truthful to your mother or than I am to buy my wife a Valentine's Day card. (First you would sacrifice the rights of the few for the good of the many, and now you seem to suggest mandating morality - in a philosophy class, this would be trolling.)
Thanks for that perfect example of a strawman argument; you should submit it to Wikipedia. I said nothing about "be[ing] nice". Those are your words describing an idea that, as far as I can tell, you made up on the spot. Let's revisit what I actually wrote:
A dead man can't do any more inventing. Do you think his wife and kids are going to be inspired to invent something new [...] now that they inherited this patent? Or could it be that they're just going to sit back, collect royalties, and shut down existing services? In other words, does giving them this ability provide any benefit to anyone but them?
To summarize: the patent has served its purpose.
Continuing to enforce it serves the financial interest of a few people who had nothing to do with the creation of this so-called invention, but only at everyone else's expense. Time to let it go. The "right" to stop other people from using an idea, just because your husband came up with it first, is not something we should feel bad about revoking for the good of everyone else.
But confronting everyone who thoughtlessly uses a word that you find offensive isn't the answer. The people who didn't mean anything by it will feel like shitheads, and people generally don't like feeling like shitheads, which beeeds resentment.
I find it hard to believe they didn't mean anything by it.
It's been a few years since I was in high school, so I don't hear "what a fag" or "that's gay" tossed around much anymore, but back then they knew exactly what they were saying. If someone complained, they'd switch to "this is so homosexual", "he likes men", etc. - avoiding the word but keeping the sentiment. The meaning behind the comment is clear: "I don't like gays, gay is bad, this is bad, so this is gay." People around here use "Jew" the same way; if you call someone a Jew as an insult, that's anti-semitic whether he's really Jewish or not.
Using any race, ethnicity, religion, or sexual orientation as an insult or pejorative is offensive, and if you know what it refers to (and who doesn't know what "gay" means?) but you continue doing it, you're a jerk. End of story.
By people downloading Child porn, does it give those that hurt the children more means to make child porn? I'm not trying to make a point with this question, I'm actually asking that question.
If you're seriously looking for an answer, then here it is:
No.
I'm willing to bet that the vast majority of all child porn on the internet is made available for free. It is, after all, highly illegal, and pursued a lot more vigorously than warez and other illegal data sharing. If the people who distribute it wanted to collect money for it, that would mean setting up a payment scheme, which would make it a lot easier to track them down and arrest them.
Therefore, the people who are only interested in distributing child porn for money will do it offline, where they can know exactly who they're dealing with to minimize their risk of being arrested. The people who are interested in sharing child porn with other pedophiles online will do it as anonymously as possible, which makes it difficult or impossible to charge for it.
I'll also answer a question you didn't ask, but which is implied as part of that one: Not all child pornography hurts children. Remember, the legal age limit for appearing in porn is 18 (AFAIK), even though in most states and countries, teenagers can legally consent to sex at age 16 or earlier. A video recording of teenagers having consensual sex would be considered child porn, even though the participants aren't children and haven't been forced into anything. The court decision explains that at least some of the illegal pictures in question were of teenagers (but who knows how willing they were to be photographed).
["Many of today's sex-related laws are based on some twisted idea of morality, and nothing more."]
I disagree with the 'nothing more' part; Also the 'twisted' part. It's far to say that the majority of people find the act of murder repugnant, so there's a law against it
If that were the only reason to outlaw murder, it wouldn't be a valid one. Luckily, there are perfectly good reasons to outlaw murder that don't boil down to "we think it's icky", such as respect for the victim's right to life or his right not to be attacked.
If you polled a group of random Americans, depending on which part of the country you pulled them from, you might find that a majority of them found homosexuality or Islam repugnant, but again, that wouldn't be a valid reason to outlaw homosexuality or Islam. In a civilized society, you have to be tolerant of your fellow man, even if what they're doing makes you uneasy - unless they're actually harming someone.
Forcing children to perform sex acts is harmful. But recording teenagers having consensual sex (with their permission) is not harmful, and neither is downloading a file or burning it to a CD-R.
This is merely recitation of the principles of utilitarianism. Oh my, how can I possibly respond to a knockout argument like that?
Not quite. I didn't say they don't deserve to shut it down *because* it's useful. They don't deserve to shut it down whether or not it's useful, because they didn't invent anything themselves - if anyone deserves to (which is questionable in itself), it's the actual inventor.
The CAFC has repeatedly ruled that obviousness under 35 USC 103 is a matter of law, yet you're so quick to point out that you're not giving legal advice. Yet you're clearly commenting on the obviousness of a patent, which is a matter of law. This is simply a contradiction that you seem unwilling to acknowledge for whatever reason.
Obviousness is a matter of fact, not just a matter of law. The fact is that combining wireless technology + email to get wireless email is obvious to anyone who has ever used either technology. Whether the law's definition of "obvious" reflects that is a different issue. If the law fails to recognize that wireless email is obvious, then the law is broken.
I see no evidence whatsoever that if a man contributes to the public domain by publishing his invention, though given incentive to do so through a patent, that when he dies his survivors do not deserve to inherit the profits of that patent.
"Profits"? First off, shutting down a popular wireless email service and pissing off thousands of customers is not profiting under any sensible definition.
Second, the point of patents is to provide an incentive to inventors. A dead man can't do any more inventing. Do you think his wife and kids are going to be inspired to invent something new (wireless phone calls, wireless weather forecasts, wireless stock ticker.. hey, they're not obvious at all!) now that they inherited this patent? Or could it be that they're just going to sit back, collect royalties, and shut down existing services? In other words, does giving them this ability provide any benefit to anyone but them?
Aside from making moral judgements about the patent system, do you complement attractive women on their functional efficiency or comparison shop computer processors based on prettiness?
Gosh, you're right; I see it now. No one should ever complain about a law on any grounds except its own constitutionality, or complain about the enforcement of a law on any grounds except its own legality, because laws exist independent of human society and decency.
There's no point in discussing what the law should be, or whether the various laws that exist today are good or bad. Laws just are, and all we can do is sit back and watch them mysteriously change every few years, for reasons we can only guess, and with consequences we shouldn't even worry about. After all, nothing bad ever came from passing and enforcing laws!
I think the facts of the two situations are enough to distinguish them. Wireless routers are consumer devices and most lay people just don't know how to configure a wireless router properly -- they just don't expect that others will be able to use their networks and (even if they did), they're probably not familiar with the risks involved.
So if you're running a web server on your PC without setting up robots.txt, because it's part of your OS or some app you use and you never took the time to investigate it, would you be able to successfully sue Google for caching it? The only difference between that scenario and the actual case here would be the site admin's ignorance.
Being on the Internet, however, is different -- 99.99% of all websites that exist now have been created since search engines came into existance and since the robots.txt de facto standard was created.
Well, 100% of all wireless networks that exist now have been created since wireless encryption came into existence.:P
VLC and MPlayer are the primary media players that have the wizardly bits to make use of windows binary codecs, and perhaps we'll see some of that same wizardry applied to MacOS X on Intel sometime soon, but there are no true cross-platform solutions to playing windows media files.
Well, there's WMP 9 for OS X. It is a Microsoft product, though.
Sir, the law disagrees. If you take issue with the letter of the law [...] I have no faith whatsoever in your ability to judge what is or is not legally obvious under 35 USC 103. [...] I'm merely skeptical that your expertise supercedes the legal expertise that can be bought for millions of dollars.
You seem to have gotten the impression that I was talking about what is or isn't legal. In fact, I was talking about what is or isn't deserved - a moral judgment. Unfortunately, your entire response is based on that misunderstanding, and is therefore irrelevant.
You're welcome to try replying again, but if you do, I hope you'll do so with the understanding that I'm not offering legal advice. Questions of legality are orthogonal to questions of morality, fairness, justice, or whatever you want to call it. This is hardly the first time that someone has been harmed by the law without deserving it, and it's hardly the first time that a legal standard of obviousness has failed to catch something that is, in fact, obvious to any person working in the field.
A similar argument was thrown around a lot back when we had those stories about people being arrested for using unsecured WiFi networks without permission.
The argument works just as well there: You operate a wireless network. Wireless networks were created specifically with the idea that clients would try to connect to nearby networks (automatically, in some cases), and there are multiple standard well-known ways to prevent strangers from connecting to your network or accessing the internet through it. Running a wireless network without using these techniques means that you give strangers permission to connect to it.
It didn't seem to fly back then, though. Does this mean courts will now take the "implied license" argument more seriously when applied to other technologies besides HTTP?
I don't know about you, but if I invented a better mousetrap (or hey - intermittant windshield wipers, the canonical patent infringement example) and died, I'd like my wife and kids to get paid for my work.
As long as we're just talking about what we'd like, then hey, I'd like not to die in the first place.
But if you're talking about what they deserve, then no. Your wife and kids don't deserve the ability to shut down a useful tool used by thousands of businesses just because you filed a patent several years earlier - especially a patent on something as obvious as wireless email.
Is that the best you can come up with, a ridiculous argument about air and water?
It's all I needed to come up with to demolish your little argument about "taking something that doesn't belong to you". I could list more examples, but the point is clear already - everyone takes things that don't belong to them every day, without paying, and no one thinks there's anything wrong with it. It's only wrong when you actually deprive someone else.
If I go and copy company records, that is theft and is prosecuted as such.
Is that so? Show me a cite.
Now you back to class and pay attention.
Aww, you're trying to be patronizing! That's cute.
It may not be defined in the law as such, but it is still theft (as traditionally defined). It is taking something that does not belong to you.
When you breathe in oxygen, you're taking something that doesn't belong to you. Is that stealing?
How about when you use the drinking fountain at a mall? That water doesn't belong to you. Are you stealing?
Stealing is more than just taking something that doesn't belong to you. In fact, stealing is wrong only because it deprives someone else of whatever you stole. If you could "steal" a copy of your neighbor's car while leaving the original in his driveway, there'd be nothing at all wrong with that.
You are still claiming one group of beliefs to be inferior to another.
No. I didn't in the first place, and I'm still not. You are mistaking "these beliefs shouldn't be taught with public education money" for "these beliefs are inferior", but those statements are worlds apart. Let the difference sink in before trying to summarize my position again.
I disagree. A religious education is holistic, or at least many people believe it to be. A proper religious education, in many peoples' eyes, includes science, math, history, and language from a religious perspective. Your "religion on Sundays, secular during the weekdays" model does not fit with these beliefs.
Well, to get along in the real world, you need to know science, math, history, and language from a factual perspective.;)
Publically funded education is there to give everyone a basic level of knowledge and skill in a few key areas, not just to enforce parents' wishes while they're away at work. If you have a special request, whether it's teaching math from a religious perspective (whatever that means) or training your kid to be an airline pilot to the exclusion of all other subjects, don't expect taxpayers to pay for it.
I can best summarize your beliefs as "I can force people to spend money on teaching some of my beliefs, but not all. In the meanwhile, they cannot do the same to me, because I don't agree with their beliefs".
Nope. I'll remind you once more: whether or not I agree with those beliefs is entirely irrelevant. Please let that sink in before attempting to summarize my position again.
Why are you so afraid of someone learning about Jesus or the Buddha or the Earth Goddess?
Are you not paying attention? I've said at least twice that if you want to teach a comparative religion class with my education taxes--"this is what some people believe about Jesus, this is what other people believe about Krishna, etc."--then you have my support.
I've also affirmed that you're free to teach your religion in church, and you're free to learn about any religion at any church you want.
I'm not sure whether you're misrepresenting my position on purpose, or whether you really just don't get it - but either way, you're only doing yourself a disservice.
If one type [of speech] is subsidized, and another is not, there is no longer a free choice. Likewise, we do not have a free choice between secular and religious educations.
I suppose you could look at it that way. But by that logic, we don't have a free choice between government cheese and our favorite meals either - we can get food stamps for free, but we have to actually get a job and spend money if we want to have a wide selection of foods to eat. We don't have a free choice between sleeping in a homeless shelter (free) and sleeping in our own apartments or houses (not free).
But really, do you feel pressured to live off of food stamps or sleep on a cot downtown? I sure don't, and I doubt you do either. I value my privacy and possessions enough that I'm not tempted at all to quit my job and live in a homeless shelter; the choice is easy. Likewise, if I cared enough about giving my kids a religious education, the choice to spend a few bucks sending them to a private school would be easy too.
One more flaw to point out: a religious education is not mutually exclusive with a secular education. (In fact, any good private school will teach essentially the same things as public school, in addition to whatever religious doctrine it also teaches.) Sending your kids to public school during the week doesn't prevent you from sending them to Sunday school, or just teaching them religion on your own.
The government should be indifferent to religion and not even define whether something is "religion" or not in the first place.
Remember this? "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion..."
How could anyone interpret the First Amendment without defining an establishment of religion?
You want the government to be openly hostile to certain religions, treating their beliefs as inferior to your own.
Keep repeating that as much as you want, it doesn't make it true. Perhaps you're forgetting that this is a public forum, and anyone can read my posts and realize immediately that I said no such thing.
Taxing is "interfering" by any stretch of the imagination. If you think otherwise, imagine a $50/sentence tax on the expression of your political beliefs. Would that "interfere" with your right to free speech? Or can I claim "Hey, you still have a choice"?
That's the weakest analogy I've seen today. Tax money is not used to suppress religion, and AFAIK, churches don't even pay tax. No one is stopping you from opening a free school where anyone can come learn about your favorite religion. If you have a problem with the fact that other religious schools charge tuition, you should take it up with those schools, or start your own.
But you want a tax that buys YOU a gun but not them, because they do not want the same gun as you.
Only a kook could look at my empty holster and say "That's a gun! No-gun is a kind of gun!"
Using tax money to teach something that has no religious component is fine. If you want to teach religion, find your funding elsewhere.
There is something that you consider a lie but think the schools should teach? Or are you merely claiming you are only willing to force others to learn some of your beliefs, but not all?
What a cute little troll you are.
I'm not willing to force anyone to learn anything, actually. I don't think school should be mandatory - but that's another topic. My point was, and is, that public education dollars should only be spent on teaching factual material, not matters of opinion or faith-based beliefs. (If you're about to interject with "But even obvious facts like 'James K. Polk was the 11th President' and 'Olympia is the capital of Washington' are based on assumptions that must be taken on faith!", you can cram it, because we both know exactly what I mean.)
However, I am not so arrogant as to place my beliefs ahead of those of other people by force of law, as you are clearly are willing to do.
Take it up with the drafters of the Constitution; they made that decision long before I was born. The government has no place supporting religion.
Again you use the word "useful". This word is opinion, not fact.
I'm not going to waste my time on your semantic games.
However, [science] is based on unfalsifiable assumptions just like any other philosophy, and is unable to address many of the most important questions, which are based on what we "ought" to do.
Indeed. If someone wants to learn some of the ways those "ought" questions can be answered, they're free to do so on their own time and at their own expense.
I don't want my public schools telling anyone what they ought to do. Partially that's because I believe on principle that everyone should make up their own minds, but mainly it's because there can be no consensus. We can all agree that math, science, history, etc. are essentially "right" as presented (subject to some assumptions blah blah blah that everyone who isn't trolling just happens to share). You'll find no agreement, however, on any but the simplest of "ought" statements.
If you think public schools should offer (or mandate) a course in factual comparisons between various sets of "ought"-beliefs, rather than teaching one as Right and the rest as Wrong, then go ahead, you've got my vote.
If people want to learn either, then they should have every right to do so without interference from you.
I agree. As I'm sure you know, I've never said anyone doesn't have the right to learn whatever they want, nor have I interfered with their right to do so.
Their right to learn about whatever religion they like, however, does not obligate me, or any other taxpayer, to pay for it - just as their right to bear arms doesn't mean I have to buy them a gun.
I just see you saying "It is alright to use tax dollars to teach my beliefs, but not those that I disagree with".
Maybe you should get your reading comprehension checked, then, because that sure isn't what I wrote. Whether I agree with the beliefs in question is irrelevant; there are plenty of beliefs I hold that shouldn't be taught as The Truth in school either.
The place to teach science is in science class. The place to teach religion is in church. No one is being prevented from going to church, they're only prevented from making schools into churches.
I suppose it depends on how you interpret the question, then. I took it to mean that they support the whole system of taxing people to pay for medical care. Not just that they wanted to get the service they'd already paid for.
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Wow. Could you at least try to stay on topic? I was talking about how a small inventor could get his invention produced without having to transfer the patent, not laziness or investing. I'm not mandating that he do anything; he can license his patent to whomever he wants.
you can make this statement all day long and people will get patents for thing that you believe, using a common English definition, are completely obvious. To me, this is like pointing out that "power" and "mower" are spelled almost exactly the same but spelled differently - Wow how funny is that? It's an old, played out gag that obnoxiously confuses the real debate and doesn't prove a damn thing.
Hey, you're the one who brought up the legal definition of "obvious". I was perfectly happy using the common English definition, and if you don't mind, I'd like to go back to it. It's an unfortunate coincidence that the two words are spelled the same way, but it was your choice to read the wrong meaning into my words. Let's go back again to what I wrote in my original post:
Clearly not the words of a patent attorney. Why would you think I was using the legal definition there, when we both know wireless email isn't "obvious" under the legal definition?
Why is the common English definition better than the patent system's?
Because it wouldn't allow patents on something that anyone with moderate knowledge in the field could easily think up on their own. No one needs to be encouraged with a government-enforced monopoly just to put two common concepts together, and since granting a patent to one person imposes a restriction on everyone else, it shouldn't be done when it's plainly unnecessary.
It's like granting a patent on a ham & peanut butter sandwich - anyone who knows about ham, peanut butter, and sandwiches can figure that one out, and anyone who finds himself with nothing but ham, peanut butter, and bread in the fridge will eventually figure it out. Why does the first person to put ham and peanut butter together deserve the exclusive right to do so? Why should everyone else who finds himself in that situation have to pay royalties to the first guy, who didn't do anything special except find himself in their situation a few years earlier?
I must regretfully inform you that each posting is scored separately. That is, one message with 6 uses of the word "bourgeois" followed by another message with 1 use does not add up to a single message with 7 uses.
Furthermore, the necessary number of uses for qualification is 10, not 7.
I should also like to clarify at this time that entries are not judged solely on usage of the word "bourgeois"; additional phrases such as "corporate fatcats", "proletariat", and "means of production" will improve your post's chances of winning. The requirement that the word "bourgeois" be used ten times simply means that entries with fewer than ten uses will not be accepted.
You are welcome to submit another entry before our cutoff date of February 1, 2006.
Yes, like his wife and children.
;)
I meant, of course, that he could grant a third party the right to use his patented invention. Do you think the inventor's wife and kids would have a use for such a license? Or might such a license be more useful to, say, someone who can actually manufacture and market the product that he designed?
Please try to remember the context: you suggested he'd have to transfer the patent in order to get his invention manufactured. That isn't true if he can just grant the manufacturer a license.
A patent is nothing more than the right to exclude others from practicing your invention.
Indeed. And there comes a point in time when others should no longer be excluded from practicing that invention - say, after the original inventor is dead, when the patent has long since served its purpose of providing him an incentive to invent things. The ultimate goal of a patent system is to encourage people to invent things and disclose how they work, not to keep ourselves from using new technologies; the latter is only acceptable as a stepping stone to the former.
Any response to this moronity would be condescending - I'll leave it at that.
I'll take this as conceding the point.
You stand at a fork - either attempt to comprehend what is meant by the term "obviousness" under 35 USC 103, or accept that I have clearly called you out on your equivocation and refuse to fall for such a moronic tactic of debate.
Look, I understand that you'd rather stick to legal definitions, but I'm not playing that game. I'm not interpreting the law, I'm commenting on the unfortunate real-world consequences of that law. Here's a simple statement: No one deserves a patent for "inventing" something obvious. All the words in that sentence are simple English words.
I'm not saying no one can *get* a patent for inventing something obvious - clearly that's already happened. The reason it was allowed is that the legal definition of "obvious" differs from the conversational definition. That is a problem, and the legal definition should be changed so that things everyday people would consider obvious (like combining wireless technology + email to get wireless email) are also considered legally obvious and ineligible for patents.
I'm sorry, you only wrote "bourgeois" 6 times in this message. To qualify for the Marxist Vocabulary Award, you must use the word at least 10 times in a single post (including the subject line). You are encouraged, however, to submit another entry at any time before the final cutoff date of February 1, 2006.
How does this not apply to SMS?
I, and most other cellular customers in the US, have an email address where email messages are automatically translated into text messages. Send me a message at (my phone number)@vtext.com, and I get a wireless notification that a message has arrived, without my phone needing to maintain a constant connection. Seems like exactly what the Blackberry does, right?
I mean, honestly, if you produce a super spiffy free open source tool and a million people download it and love it, you feel pretty darn good and might choose to do so again if you can. [...] Back to child porn; if those that are actually producing it feel that there are millions of people just begging for their product, they will be more likely to try to produce more, no? Thus it seems that the "as long as you don't pay them for it" argument is flawed?
Thing is, open source software has a vibrant community. When you go to a site where you can download free software, there's typically a message board or email link where you can communicate with the authors, send them a donation, submit patches, etc.
I doubt there is such a thing with child porn - at least not in public. As I said earlier, the people who make it available online have a strong incentive to remain as anonymous as possible, which has the side effect of making it hard for them to get any feedback. If their primary method of distribution is P2P, Usenet, or Freenet, they'll have trouble even finding out how many people have downloaded what they uploaded.
If free software discussion forums were routinely investigated and infiltrated by the FBI (or the local equivalent), who used all the information they could get to track down the authors of free software and arrest them, don't you think it'd suddenly get a lot harder for random folks to communicate with the authors, as they all went into hiding overnight? And wouldn't it simultaneously become a lot harder for those authors to know who was using their software, how much they enjoyed it, and whether they wanted to see more?
Increased demand for child porn means a stronger incentive to make the stuff. Note that this is true even if no buying or selling is involved (ie trading). Open and free distribution might undercut the market to some extent -- but given that music companies continue to thrive despite widespread file-sharing, I doubt that market saturation will make child porn unprofitable.
Er, no. The reason music companies continue to thrive is people keep buying music, and the availability of free P2P downloads doesn't seem to interfere with that. If it were, say, illegal to buy music, the music companies would shrivel up and die overnight. No one would go buy CDs on a shady street corner when they could use Kazaa for free in their own homes.
Similarly, making child porn can only be financially profitable if people are paying for it. It's very simple: if no one pays, there's no money. In a barter situation, there might be a form of profit--"you send me a clip I haven't seen, and I'll send you a clip you haven't seen"--but not in a sharing situation.
Or (*gasp*) he could grant that third party a license to use his patent.
Further, your argument hinges on equivocation - "obviousness" in conversational English is an entirely different concept from "obviousness" under 35 USC 103, which is what we are discussing.
No, I'm afraid it isn't. Maybe you'd prefer to discuss that, but I'm using the word "obvious" as it's used in everyday English.
Wireless email is obvious in a world where wireless communications and email are already in use. If the law's definition of "obvious" fails to recognize that, then the law needs to be updated, because there's no sense in granting such an obvious patent.
Would you legislate that this wife and kids are required to "be nice"? They are no more under that obligation than you are to be truthful to your mother or than I am to buy my wife a Valentine's Day card. (First you would sacrifice the rights of the few for the good of the many, and now you seem to suggest mandating morality - in a philosophy class, this would be trolling.)
Thanks for that perfect example of a strawman argument; you should submit it to Wikipedia. I said nothing about "be[ing] nice". Those are your words describing an idea that, as far as I can tell, you made up on the spot. Let's revisit what I actually wrote:
To summarize: the patent has served its purpose.
Continuing to enforce it serves the financial interest of a few people who had nothing to do with the creation of this so-called invention, but only at everyone else's expense. Time to let it go. The "right" to stop other people from using an idea, just because your husband came up with it first, is not something we should feel bad about revoking for the good of everyone else.
But confronting everyone who thoughtlessly uses a word that you find offensive isn't the answer. The people who didn't mean anything by it will feel like shitheads, and people generally don't like feeling like shitheads, which beeeds resentment.
I find it hard to believe they didn't mean anything by it.
It's been a few years since I was in high school, so I don't hear "what a fag" or "that's gay" tossed around much anymore, but back then they knew exactly what they were saying. If someone complained, they'd switch to "this is so homosexual", "he likes men", etc. - avoiding the word but keeping the sentiment. The meaning behind the comment is clear: "I don't like gays, gay is bad, this is bad, so this is gay." People around here use "Jew" the same way; if you call someone a Jew as an insult, that's anti-semitic whether he's really Jewish or not.
Using any race, ethnicity, religion, or sexual orientation as an insult or pejorative is offensive, and if you know what it refers to (and who doesn't know what "gay" means?) but you continue doing it, you're a jerk. End of story.
By people downloading Child porn, does it give those that hurt the children more means to make child porn? I'm not trying to make a point with this question, I'm actually asking that question.
If you're seriously looking for an answer, then here it is:
No.
I'm willing to bet that the vast majority of all child porn on the internet is made available for free. It is, after all, highly illegal, and pursued a lot more vigorously than warez and other illegal data sharing. If the people who distribute it wanted to collect money for it, that would mean setting up a payment scheme, which would make it a lot easier to track them down and arrest them.
Therefore, the people who are only interested in distributing child porn for money will do it offline, where they can know exactly who they're dealing with to minimize their risk of being arrested. The people who are interested in sharing child porn with other pedophiles online will do it as anonymously as possible, which makes it difficult or impossible to charge for it.
I'll also answer a question you didn't ask, but which is implied as part of that one: Not all child pornography hurts children. Remember, the legal age limit for appearing in porn is 18 (AFAIK), even though in most states and countries, teenagers can legally consent to sex at age 16 or earlier. A video recording of teenagers having consensual sex would be considered child porn, even though the participants aren't children and haven't been forced into anything. The court decision explains that at least some of the illegal pictures in question were of teenagers (but who knows how willing they were to be photographed).
["Many of today's sex-related laws are based on some twisted idea of morality, and nothing more."]
I disagree with the 'nothing more' part; Also the 'twisted' part. It's far to say that the majority of people find the act of murder repugnant, so there's a law against it
If that were the only reason to outlaw murder, it wouldn't be a valid one. Luckily, there are perfectly good reasons to outlaw murder that don't boil down to "we think it's icky", such as respect for the victim's right to life or his right not to be attacked.
If you polled a group of random Americans, depending on which part of the country you pulled them from, you might find that a majority of them found homosexuality or Islam repugnant, but again, that wouldn't be a valid reason to outlaw homosexuality or Islam. In a civilized society, you have to be tolerant of your fellow man, even if what they're doing makes you uneasy - unless they're actually harming someone.
Forcing children to perform sex acts is harmful. But recording teenagers having consensual sex (with their permission) is not harmful, and neither is downloading a file or burning it to a CD-R.
This is merely recitation of the principles of utilitarianism. Oh my, how can I possibly respond to a knockout argument like that?
Not quite. I didn't say they don't deserve to shut it down *because* it's useful. They don't deserve to shut it down whether or not it's useful, because they didn't invent anything themselves - if anyone deserves to (which is questionable in itself), it's the actual inventor.
The CAFC has repeatedly ruled that obviousness under 35 USC 103 is a matter of law, yet you're so quick to point out that you're not giving legal advice. Yet you're clearly commenting on the obviousness of a patent, which is a matter of law. This is simply a contradiction that you seem unwilling to acknowledge for whatever reason.
Obviousness is a matter of fact, not just a matter of law. The fact is that combining wireless technology + email to get wireless email is obvious to anyone who has ever used either technology. Whether the law's definition of "obvious" reflects that is a different issue. If the law fails to recognize that wireless email is obvious, then the law is broken.
I see no evidence whatsoever that if a man contributes to the public domain by publishing his invention, though given incentive to do so through a patent, that when he dies his survivors do not deserve to inherit the profits of that patent.
"Profits"? First off, shutting down a popular wireless email service and pissing off thousands of customers is not profiting under any sensible definition.
Second, the point of patents is to provide an incentive to inventors. A dead man can't do any more inventing. Do you think his wife and kids are going to be inspired to invent something new (wireless phone calls, wireless weather forecasts, wireless stock ticker.. hey, they're not obvious at all!) now that they inherited this patent? Or could it be that they're just going to sit back, collect royalties, and shut down existing services? In other words, does giving them this ability provide any benefit to anyone but them?
Aside from making moral judgements about the patent system, do you complement attractive women on their functional efficiency or comparison shop computer processors based on prettiness?
Gosh, you're right; I see it now. No one should ever complain about a law on any grounds except its own constitutionality, or complain about the enforcement of a law on any grounds except its own legality, because laws exist independent of human society and decency.
There's no point in discussing what the law should be, or whether the various laws that exist today are good or bad. Laws just are, and all we can do is sit back and watch them mysteriously change every few years, for reasons we can only guess, and with consequences we shouldn't even worry about. After all, nothing bad ever came from passing and enforcing laws!
I think the facts of the two situations are enough to distinguish them. Wireless routers are consumer devices and most lay people just don't know how to configure a wireless router properly -- they just don't expect that others will be able to use their networks and (even if they did), they're probably not familiar with the risks involved.
:P
So if you're running a web server on your PC without setting up robots.txt, because it's part of your OS or some app you use and you never took the time to investigate it, would you be able to successfully sue Google for caching it? The only difference between that scenario and the actual case here would be the site admin's ignorance.
Being on the Internet, however, is different -- 99.99% of all websites that exist now have been created since search engines came into existance and since the robots.txt de facto standard was created.
Well, 100% of all wireless networks that exist now have been created since wireless encryption came into existence.
VLC and MPlayer are the primary media players that have the wizardly bits to make use of windows binary codecs, and perhaps we'll see some of that same wizardry applied to MacOS X on Intel sometime soon, but there are no true cross-platform solutions to playing windows media files.
Well, there's WMP 9 for OS X. It is a Microsoft product, though.
Setting up WMA in MPlayer doesn't look difficult at all as long as you're running on x86.
Sir, the law disagrees. If you take issue with the letter of the law [...] I have no faith whatsoever in your ability to judge what is or is not legally obvious under 35 USC 103. [...] I'm merely skeptical that your expertise supercedes the legal expertise that can be bought for millions of dollars.
You seem to have gotten the impression that I was talking about what is or isn't legal. In fact, I was talking about what is or isn't deserved - a moral judgment. Unfortunately, your entire response is based on that misunderstanding, and is therefore irrelevant.
You're welcome to try replying again, but if you do, I hope you'll do so with the understanding that I'm not offering legal advice. Questions of legality are orthogonal to questions of morality, fairness, justice, or whatever you want to call it. This is hardly the first time that someone has been harmed by the law without deserving it, and it's hardly the first time that a legal standard of obviousness has failed to catch something that is, in fact, obvious to any person working in the field.
A similar argument was thrown around a lot back when we had those stories about people being arrested for using unsecured WiFi networks without permission.
The argument works just as well there: You operate a wireless network. Wireless networks were created specifically with the idea that clients would try to connect to nearby networks (automatically, in some cases), and there are multiple standard well-known ways to prevent strangers from connecting to your network or accessing the internet through it. Running a wireless network without using these techniques means that you give strangers permission to connect to it.
It didn't seem to fly back then, though. Does this mean courts will now take the "implied license" argument more seriously when applied to other technologies besides HTTP?
Between Apple's AAC and Microsoft's WMA, which is cross platform and which is Windows-only?
This is a trick question, right?
I don't know about you, but if I invented a better mousetrap (or hey - intermittant windshield wipers, the canonical patent infringement example) and died, I'd like my wife and kids to get paid for my work.
As long as we're just talking about what we'd like, then hey, I'd like not to die in the first place.
But if you're talking about what they deserve, then no. Your wife and kids don't deserve the ability to shut down a useful tool used by thousands of businesses just because you filed a patent several years earlier - especially a patent on something as obvious as wireless email.
Is that the best you can come up with, a ridiculous argument about air and water?
It's all I needed to come up with to demolish your little argument about "taking something that doesn't belong to you". I could list more examples, but the point is clear already - everyone takes things that don't belong to them every day, without paying, and no one thinks there's anything wrong with it. It's only wrong when you actually deprive someone else.
If I go and copy company records, that is theft and is prosecuted as such.
Is that so? Show me a cite.
Now you back to class and pay attention.
Aww, you're trying to be patronizing! That's cute.
It may not be defined in the law as such, but it is still theft (as traditionally defined). It is taking something that does not belong to you.
When you breathe in oxygen, you're taking something that doesn't belong to you. Is that stealing?
How about when you use the drinking fountain at a mall? That water doesn't belong to you. Are you stealing?
Stealing is more than just taking something that doesn't belong to you. In fact, stealing is wrong only because it deprives someone else of whatever you stole. If you could "steal" a copy of your neighbor's car while leaving the original in his driveway, there'd be nothing at all wrong with that.
You are still claiming one group of beliefs to be inferior to another.
;)
No. I didn't in the first place, and I'm still not. You are mistaking "these beliefs shouldn't be taught with public education money" for "these beliefs are inferior", but those statements are worlds apart. Let the difference sink in before trying to summarize my position again.
I disagree. A religious education is holistic, or at least many people believe it to be. A proper religious education, in many peoples' eyes, includes science, math, history, and language from a religious perspective. Your "religion on Sundays, secular during the weekdays" model does not fit with these beliefs.
Well, to get along in the real world, you need to know science, math, history, and language from a factual perspective.
Publically funded education is there to give everyone a basic level of knowledge and skill in a few key areas, not just to enforce parents' wishes while they're away at work. If you have a special request, whether it's teaching math from a religious perspective (whatever that means) or training your kid to be an airline pilot to the exclusion of all other subjects, don't expect taxpayers to pay for it.
I can best summarize your beliefs as "I can force people to spend money on teaching some of my beliefs, but not all. In the meanwhile, they cannot do the same to me, because I don't agree with their beliefs".
Nope. I'll remind you once more: whether or not I agree with those beliefs is entirely irrelevant. Please let that sink in before attempting to summarize my position again.
Why are you so afraid of someone learning about Jesus or the Buddha or the Earth Goddess?
Are you not paying attention? I've said at least twice that if you want to teach a comparative religion class with my education taxes--"this is what some people believe about Jesus, this is what other people believe about Krishna, etc."--then you have my support.
I've also affirmed that you're free to teach your religion in church, and you're free to learn about any religion at any church you want.
I'm not sure whether you're misrepresenting my position on purpose, or whether you really just don't get it - but either way, you're only doing yourself a disservice.
If one type [of speech] is subsidized, and another is not, there is no longer a free choice. Likewise, we do not have a free choice between secular and religious educations.
I suppose you could look at it that way. But by that logic, we don't have a free choice between government cheese and our favorite meals either - we can get food stamps for free, but we have to actually get a job and spend money if we want to have a wide selection of foods to eat. We don't have a free choice between sleeping in a homeless shelter (free) and sleeping in our own apartments or houses (not free).
But really, do you feel pressured to live off of food stamps or sleep on a cot downtown? I sure don't, and I doubt you do either. I value my privacy and possessions enough that I'm not tempted at all to quit my job and live in a homeless shelter; the choice is easy. Likewise, if I cared enough about giving my kids a religious education, the choice to spend a few bucks sending them to a private school would be easy too.
One more flaw to point out: a religious education is not mutually exclusive with a secular education. (In fact, any good private school will teach essentially the same things as public school, in addition to whatever religious doctrine it also teaches.) Sending your kids to public school during the week doesn't prevent you from sending them to Sunday school, or just teaching them religion on your own.
The government should be indifferent to religion and not even define whether something is "religion" or not in the first place.
Remember this? "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion..."
How could anyone interpret the First Amendment without defining an establishment of religion?
You want the government to be openly hostile to certain religions, treating their beliefs as inferior to your own.
Keep repeating that as much as you want, it doesn't make it true. Perhaps you're forgetting that this is a public forum, and anyone can read my posts and realize immediately that I said no such thing.
Taxing is "interfering" by any stretch of the imagination. If you think otherwise, imagine a $50/sentence tax on the expression of your political beliefs. Would that "interfere" with your right to free speech? Or can I claim "Hey, you still have a choice"?
That's the weakest analogy I've seen today. Tax money is not used to suppress religion, and AFAIK, churches don't even pay tax. No one is stopping you from opening a free school where anyone can come learn about your favorite religion. If you have a problem with the fact that other religious schools charge tuition, you should take it up with those schools, or start your own.
But you want a tax that buys YOU a gun but not them, because they do not want the same gun as you.
Only a kook could look at my empty holster and say "That's a gun! No-gun is a kind of gun!"
Using tax money to teach something that has no religious component is fine. If you want to teach religion, find your funding elsewhere.
There is something that you consider a lie but think the schools should teach? Or are you merely claiming you are only willing to force others to learn some of your beliefs, but not all?
What a cute little troll you are.
I'm not willing to force anyone to learn anything, actually. I don't think school should be mandatory - but that's another topic. My point was, and is, that public education dollars should only be spent on teaching factual material, not matters of opinion or faith-based beliefs. (If you're about to interject with "But even obvious facts like 'James K. Polk was the 11th President' and 'Olympia is the capital of Washington' are based on assumptions that must be taken on faith!", you can cram it, because we both know exactly what I mean.)
However, I am not so arrogant as to place my beliefs ahead of those of other people by force of law, as you are clearly are willing to do.
Take it up with the drafters of the Constitution; they made that decision long before I was born. The government has no place supporting religion.
Again you use the word "useful". This word is opinion, not fact.
I'm not going to waste my time on your semantic games.
However, [science] is based on unfalsifiable assumptions just like any other philosophy, and is unable to address many of the most important questions, which are based on what we "ought" to do.
Indeed. If someone wants to learn some of the ways those "ought" questions can be answered, they're free to do so on their own time and at their own expense.
I don't want my public schools telling anyone what they ought to do. Partially that's because I believe on principle that everyone should make up their own minds, but mainly it's because there can be no consensus. We can all agree that math, science, history, etc. are essentially "right" as presented (subject to some assumptions blah blah blah that everyone who isn't trolling just happens to share). You'll find no agreement, however, on any but the simplest of "ought" statements.
If you think public schools should offer (or mandate) a course in factual comparisons between various sets of "ought"-beliefs, rather than teaching one as Right and the rest as Wrong, then go ahead, you've got my vote.
If people want to learn either, then they should have every right to do so without interference from you.
I agree. As I'm sure you know, I've never said anyone doesn't have the right to learn whatever they want, nor have I interfered with their right to do so.
Their right to learn about whatever religion they like, however, does not obligate me, or any other taxpayer, to pay for it - just as their right to bear arms doesn't mean I have to buy them a gun.
I just see you saying "It is alright to use tax dollars to teach my beliefs, but not those that I disagree with".
Maybe you should get your reading comprehension checked, then, because that sure isn't what I wrote. Whether I agree with the beliefs in question is irrelevant; there are plenty of beliefs I hold that shouldn't be taught as The Truth in school either.
The place to teach science is in science class. The place to teach religion is in church. No one is being prevented from going to church, they're only prevented from making schools into churches.
I suppose it depends on how you interpret the question, then. I took it to mean that they support the whole system of taxing people to pay for medical care. Not just that they wanted to get the service they'd already paid for.