>this is 100% accurate. but those words support my assertions not yours. before recorded media, >musicians did fine. they were rich and were famous and were well respected.
I suspect that there were far, far, far fewer rich, famous, respected musicians before recorded media than there are at any given point in history after that advent.
>what the age of recorded media did to music was make them superrich and superfamous. >and yes, indeed, that era is now dying. like i said, do you need fifty cent or jay z money to >make music?
Salaries are not determined by NEED. They are supposed to be determined by MARKET VALUE. Artists can no longer sell recordings of their own work, because copying has destroyed its market value. You might think this is great, but what if I told you that the means that YOU use to make a living was suddenly worthless, but you were still expected to provide it so that the world could enjoy it for free?
>live concerts, endorsements are now your revenue stream as a musician. and what is wrong with that?
Nothing is wrong with that. What is wrong is that an artist can no longer sell recordings of their work. Why shouldn't an artist be able to sell recordings of their work?
>do you honestly believe your own words that all musicians will be hoppyists?!
Not all, but most. There will be far, far, far less paid musicians than there are today. If you ain't getting paid, you're a hobbyist.
>like any creative field, music is full of starving artists.
Of course. In the industry, this is called "paying your dues". Do you know why they pay those dues? Out of hope for a payoff - out of hope for "making it big". The world is full of starving artists hoping to get PAID.
>this was true in the year 1700, in the year 1950, and will be true in the year 2100. do you honestly >believe that starving musicians didn't exist in the era of recorded media, 1890-1999? but, just like in 1700, >in the year 2100, when music conglomerates are long dead, there will still be very rich, very successful >musicians... and starving musicians. nothing has changed
What will have changed is the financial incentive of selling recordings of one's work will be gone.
>you can't use your argument that by returning to how things worked in the 1700s that music will be destroyed. >because you yourself have outlined how in the 1700s music worked!
I didn't say it would be destroyed. But you may be exactly correct that music will return to how it was in the 1700s. There will be very few artists, even fewer who are rich and famous, and very little new recorded work produced, because there is no incentive to produce it. Your only option for hearing music may well be to patronize live performances. Shit I haven't been to a concert in 15 years, and don't care to go to one.
>and finally, i will assert to you that any musician who would complain about the death of music >conglomerates that music will drop in quality and quantity is not a real musician. a real musician >makes music TO MAKE MUSIC, not to make money.
All I know is it takes money to bring music to market. That money is invested with the expectation of getting a profit return. With that gone, there is going to be a lot less incentive to bring music to market. Maybe the quality will be better, maybe not. My guess is there will be a lot less. Time will tell
>the only future for us as consumers and artists is the chinese model: >piracy is rampant and unstoppable, and accepted. artists simply make money >off of endorsements and live shows. that means they won't make jay z or fifty >cent money, but music will be made nonetheless, and artists will still be >financially quite comfortable, because artists make music for the sake of >music first, not for the sake of making money.
>it's not like someone suddenly announced that wall street traders will >make a tenth of what they used to make, and so no one wants to be a wall >street trader anymore. people make music because they love music. period. >that's been true ever since we were just banging on drums around a campfire, >and will always be true, no matter what the economic future of the music >world holds. and besides, it's a way for teenage guys to get chicks. do >you honestly need anymore incentive than that?
I must take exception to the idea that artists will still be artists even if they don't get paid. Sure they will. They will be called "hobbyists". Music will be something they will do in their limited spare time, because the rest of their time will be spent like yours and mine is - putting food on the table. I think the number of options and quality of music will decline, because not only will there be fewer people who can afford to have the time to devote to just making music, but there will be fewer people who can afford to donate their time to running sound studios and songwriting and all the other people behind the scenes for music production.
I don't think you can glibbly say that people will continue to do what they love regardless of getting paid or not. If that were true at least 50% of Americans would stay home and masturbate all day long instead of going out for a paycheck.
The fact is, musicians have always been compensated throughout history. Whether a quartet commissioned by a duke, a troubadour paid by a bartender, a busker on the street, or a drummer getting tossed some tablescraps from the guy who owns the campfire, musicians have been in demand and have been commissioned for hire. The difference was, in the time before recordings, live music was your only option, and generally only the wealthy could afford to pay for music on demand. Recorded music brought music on demand affordably to everyone, and moreover, allowed the musician to effectively get paid for many more "performances" than he could physically do in person. Now, because of "piracy" (or whatever you want to call it) that revenue stream is, as you correctly state, gone.
I'm not sure it's right.
I mostly agree with the sentiment of your post. I'm getting damn tired of this DRM crap myself. Frankly, I think if I have bought it and it is in my hands (i.e. a CD or DVD), or if I have paid for the pipeline coming into my house (i.e. cable TV programs), then I should be able to copy them for my own use.
In the case of the Ipod thingie, if I have paid for the music that is on that Ipod, and it exists only on that Ipod, then I should be able to sell it with the Ipod for profit.
Maybe "live" performances/ARE/ the future for making money as a musician. But maybe not. Maybe we'll all just wait to download the bootleg recording of the live performance.
>I know I'm going to kind of play devil's advocate here, but have you searched for >chicken on Google before you suggested it? I actually found the results to be a >lot better than you imply in your post here.
I knew someone would actually go Google for "chicken". No, I didn't actually Google for chicken myself because it was merely an example.
For the things I have been routinely searching for, I find myself digging deeper and deeper down the list of returned results before I find what I'm actually after.
For example, yesterday I Googled on "how to engrave metal". I ended up digging up a lot of pages before I finally came across the obvious: http://www.engravingschool.com/ . Most of the results returned are about people/selling/ engraving services or equipment, not web sites about how to engrave metal.
No argument - Google is the best thing going in internet searching - I wasn't trying to argue anything different. I'm just saying - you want to knock Google off the top of the hill, one possible way is to make your results more relevent.
Make the top 10 search results actually relevent again.
Google is rapidly becoming a disappointment for me. Or rather, I'm quickly learning after doing a Google search to immediately click to page 2 of the results to see the "real" results.
Page 1 of the results seem to largely be irrelevent to what I'm/really/ searching for - it is far more relevent to people who have paid to have their URL returned when my keyword is typed in.
I can't tell you how many times I've typed in "chicken" (or whatever) and been presented with a top-10 list of "results" for web sites that have absolutely nothing to do with chicken - they've just paid someone to make sure their web site/appeared/ to be associated with chicken.
You want to beat Google? Find a way to make a search engine that doesn't pad the results with irrelevent paid advertising.
Interestingly, I'm finding the "legitimate" paid results - those down the right side of the screen, to often be more relevent to my searches than the top 10 URLs presented in the actual search body.
Steve
Actually, I'm dropping CELL in favor of VOIP!
on
Supermarket VOIP
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· Score: 1
>Actually, how is VoIP doing since people are dropping landlines for cell service?
I dropped landline in favor of Cell a while back. I just didn't like the principle of paying twice for the same service. Especially getting taxed twice for it (two 911 fees, etc.)
But the fact is, a cell phone for my wife and I on the Verizon Family Plan costs us right at $80/month. With the price of gasoline what it is now, plus we just had a baby, I'm looking to cut corners everywhere I can.
So now I'm ditching our cell phones for Vonage, which we have had for a couple of months now. Quality is not quite as good as POTS yet (but is easily as good as my cells have every been), but it's good enough. And it's only $27/month for unlimited calls anywhere in the US. I couldn't get a local phone number, but all of our friends are in Atlanta anyway, so I got a 404 number which was a bonus as now they can call us for free.
I've gotten really used to the convenience of having a phone always available, and maybe I'll miss it, but for two things:
First, it really hasn't been all that long that I've had a cell phone. Only 5 or 6 years. I didn't suffer terribly for the lack of one before that.
Secondly, I have recently found out that in the US, all cell phones must be able to dial 911 whether you have cell service or not. I checked this with a couple of "dead" Cingular phones we have laying around, and it works fine. I have also recently found out that you can get your phone reprogrammed (wish I could figure out how to do it myself) so that it will automatically dial into the American Roaming Network and allow you to place credit card calls, even if you do not have cell service. Sure, it costs $3/minute, but I will only use it in emergencies.
So I'm dropping cellular in favor of a landlocked VOIP phone.
>Man, people who deliberately use "submarine patents" to try and make
>money off a popular technology really bug me. As do "technology companies"
>whose sole business model is to own patents. They wait and see, and if the
>tech becomes successful, they pounce. If it flops they stay away and let
>the infringer take the loss.
Why is it this a sleazy thing to do? What if you have a great idea for an invention but you can't afford to do anything with it, or get backers for your idea? Why let someone else with deep pockets come along and "invent" the same thing and reap all the benefits for an idea you had first?
Further, what is wrong with buying up patents? It's nothing more than futures trading. It's an investment with a risk and a hope of future payoff, just like any other investment.
Steve
If the various virus scanner companies can resist getting into bed with the guys foisting this DRM stuff on us, and make their virus scanning utilities detect this crap _like_any_other_virus_or_malware_, then it wouldn't be much of an issue.
I know, I know - if the DRM wasn't there to begin with it wouldn't be an issue. But like virii and malware, it is probably here to stay. Just give me reliable tools to crush this stuff.
OK, I admit, I'm a little behind the times on this whole Tivo thing. (Yeah, I have a B.S. in Computer Science and my VCR still flashes 12:00, too:) )
So someone fill me in. Isn't this just a digital VCR that you have to pay a subscription fee to use, with the axe of immenent DRM hanging over your necks?
I'm missing the appeal. Why do I have to pay a subscription to use a recording device and deal with "broadcast flags"?
>The question is which system fosters greater advancement, >And without some decent case studies I really don't see >how you can honestly be so certain that one is superior >to the other.
I can be certain because I understand what drives people to invent things. Natural curiosity, and the expectation of a payback on the investment of effort.
I can also be certain because I have first hand experience of inventing a product and, because I could not afford to patent it, now half of India makes my product and sells it to other, bigger fish, who can buy in bigger volume than I can, and I can no longer compete selling my own invention. If I had patent protection, I'd own the market. Now I have nothing.
In a nutshell, most folks in this thread arguing against patents are doing so because they claim that patents hinder advancement.
You're right, from the perspective that it prohibits others from using the idea for a while.
Sure, if there was no value in a particular invention, because anyone could make it, you're right - people would be speedily moving on to the next thing hoping to make a buck before others caught on.
I think that stinks.
If I invent something great I should be able to profit off of that - not have to hope I get lucky and invent something else (and something else, and then something else).
Further, one could argue that patents/encourage/ advancement. I have had to design around patent issues before. Sometimes it causes innovation and new approaches to solve a problem.
While it is cool to be listed on a patent, mostly I was happy to be/paid/ for it. Which is what patents really all boil down to - getting paid for what you invent. Every person listed on that patent got a $1000 bonus for filing that patent - not/getting/ it -/filing/ it.
>Caterers on movie credits, patents for rubber plugs. Just serving the food and making >sure your cable isn't clogged with dust before reaching the customer isn't good enough anymore?
Nope. Because now Lucent can prevent anyone else from making a similar rubber plug in the markets where it was granted the patent, assuming the patent is upheld if challenged. That's valuable to Lucent, because that gives them an exclusive product. Others will (and have already) come up with other ways to achieve the same result, but they can't do it the way we did it.
>Basically, patents are a 18th and 19th century thing. They prevent others from selling >products embodying your patented ideas or using your patented processes >***in the country where the patent was granted to you***.
This is correct.
>So, as far as process patents are concerned, elbonia just doesnt care, it does not issue >process patents, and even if it did, good luck enforcing them.
Oh, they sure do care, because if the patent holder holds the patent in every country where there are people who want to buy the product, then Elbonia has no place to sell their product.
When you get a patent, you patent your invention in the countries/of your target market/, not necessarily of the countries where it will be manufactured. By doing this, you can prevent others from selling in your markets, regardless of where they might try and manufacture a copy. These sorts of laws are enforced every day in civilized countries.
>If you are always causing these patent troubles, why should elbonia care to manufacture the goods you developed ?
That's the point! Unless, of course, you are paying them to manufacture them FOR YOU. In which case they care to do it in order to get paid making a product for you.
>So basically, you could argue that patents issued to qualcomm in the US and other markets have hindered the adoption the CDMA standard abroad.
No doubt it did. But the guys holding the GSM patents are loving life, aren't they? Let's hope they got patents in China.
>In the 80s, Microsoft DOS, and later Windows, swept all competing OSes off PCs for the >superior value perceived by customers compared to other offerings. > >It may not have been the technologically most advanced, but it did the job and let >the customer choose between a wide range of hardware and software. > >There was not a single patent involved in an innovation that laid the > base for the arguably most valuable company in the world.
Even if true, I'm sure there was a great deal of copyright protection instead.
>Every dollar Microsoft spends on IP-Lawyers in the US is lost for localizing windows >and the accounting package to cantonese and make the Dong-Feng-Garment-Works *want* to use and pay for windows.
True enough - resources spent on IP protection are resources that cannot be spent on product development. The fact that corporations choose to do this anyway clearly indicates that they feel that without doing so their current products would be stolen and produced by someone else, eating into their profits for the products that they/have/ developed. It's hard to go after new markets tomorrow if you have nothing to sell today.
>It is the new ideas, not the patents, that are valuable. The patents are an effort to attach additional artificial value to the ideas.
No, patents are an effort to do two things:
Firstly, they get innovative ideas into the public domain, thus furthering the collective knowlege of all. In order to be granted a patent, you basically have to give away the secret of how your idea works. These patents are a matter of public record and easily searchable. Secondly, in exchange for giving away your idea for your invention to the world, most countries grant you exclusivity for some number of years. This allows the entity who came up with the idea some time to profit off of it.
>Not having a patent on an idea does not make it worthless, and research into new things is still going to be valuable, >even in a world without patents.
You are right. But not having exclusivity, especially for an easily reproduced item, certainly diminishes its value. It also is likely to make entities more likely to keep their technology as a trade secret (if possible, i.e. the forumla for Coca-Cola), which will benefit no one but the inventing entity forever, or as long as they can keep the secret.
>Let's take the cameras from earlier in the discussion as an example. Presume we are back in time in an alternate >patentless past with Kodak busy making instant film cameras - something into which, in practice, they will have >to put R&D. Sure, they can reverse engineer what Polaroid did to get the basics, but to actually manage to produce >good quality working instant film cameras of their own they'll have to put in some research and engineering effort of their own.
But not nearly as much research and engineering effort as Polaroid did. Basically, in your alternate past, Polaroid subsidised Kodak's camera development. Is that fair? I don't think so.
>As long as there are advancements to be made Polaroid, with their R&D team who are well acquainted with >all the fine details of instant film cameras, far more so than reverse engineering people at Kodak, >will always be the premiere instant film camera manufaturer, which is worth money.
And what if there/are/ no more advancements to be made? Let's say you patent something novel, yet very simple and easily reverse-engineered. Basically you get no reward for your effort to come up with such an invention. Or let's say you come up with something incredibly complex, but final, like, say, a cure for AIDS, or cancer. You invested 15 years of research and 5 billion dollars in the effort. But when you're done, anyone can make it. Is that fair? I don't think so.
>Moreover, this alternate world would provide at least as rapid advancement in instant >film technology as the real world with patents ever did.
I doubt it very much. In your alternate world you are basically assuming that companies would invest large amounts of money in reasearch and development in the hopes that no one else can copy their work very quickly. The more simple your invention, the less likely this dream is to come true.
>But wait, there's more. While Polaroid and Kodak are busy slugging it out over instant film cameras there is still >plenty of incentive for Asian camera makers to throw money into R&D on digital cameras because those >investments will pay off. Even in the real world it is not so much patents holding Kodak back in the field >of digital camera technology so much as the fact that Kodak just doesn't really "get" digital cameras. >The companies that put in the hard slog researching and engineering digital cameras are way ahead. >Kodak didn't believe digital photography would take off, and got into the game way to late.
So what? The purpose of patents is not to save companies from short-sighted business plans. It is, as above, the get novel inventions into the public domain, and reward inventors with exclusive right
>If all we can generate is government-enforced monopolies, we've already lost. Collecting patents isn't creating value; creating products creates value.
Collecting patents doesn't create value, but/creating/ patents sure does create value, because patents, and the investment that went into creating them, are valuable.
>And honestly -- if we get to the point where all we generate is patents, why in the world would China even pretend to honor them?
Simple: Other countries honor patents because if they don't there are repercussions for them. For one, we would stop honoring theirs. For two, we might well close our markets to them or otherwise penalize them.
>If you want to save domestic jobs in the long term, the >patent nonsense must be stopped immediately.
So if patents are abolished, what products will we in the US be able to sell on the world market? If the last of our marketable products - thought, are rendered worthless, what jobs will be left? We've all but lost the manufacturing jobs. If the development jobs go, too, what will we have? Answer: Nothing.
Why do you think IP is heating up so much lately? Because that is the last of the marketable table scraps that we have left. Corporations big and small are coming to the realization that the 3rd world is catching up rapidly in terms of the kinds of things they are able to manufacture and quality. So unless you want your products being made in Elbonia in and sold for a fraction of what it costs you to make them, you had better stop others from being able to make them. Patents are a way to do that.
>My thought is that if A wants to come up with the idea and then sit >and wait for some B to come up with it independently and do the hard >work of turning the idea into a product, A doesn't deserve a slice of >B's hard work just for being lazy. Now, if A's shopping it around to >people who can actually produce it, that's another matter, but these >patent holding companies don't put any effort of their own in, they >just wait for someone else to expend the effort and then demand a >slice of the profit. That's not the way to create an incentive >for anyone else to do anything new.
Why not? How do you think the patent holding companies got the patents they are holding? Answer: They paid someone for their ideas. There's the incentive. Or, they developed the ideas themselves, and they are hoping for a payoff at some point in the future - again an incentive.
Is it lame that someone buys the patent for an idea and then waits for someone to start infringing on the patents they own before demanding royalties for using their property? Maybe - some would call it shrewd. To me it's no different than the guy who buys cheap farmland and then years later sells it to developers for a fortune when the area has grown and turned urban.
Believe me, it sucks to get boxed in by patent constraints when you are developing a patent - I have had to change direction on my designs in the past when I have found out that I was possibly treading on someone else's patents. But that is the price we pay for having the protection for our ideas.
>And by the same token, you would be able to take Chinese products and >do the same. And the wheels of industry would turn that much faster. > >Or do you think that only the west has a creative mind?
Of course not. But if there is no protection of intellectual property, who is going to invest in developing a new product, just so someone else can benefit from all your R&D and go directly into production, often with a much lower cost of production? Answer: No one.
Besides, even if the bulk of the thought was NOT going INTO China as it presently is, what good would it do us to copy Chinese ideas if it costs us 10 times as much to produce the same good because of disparities in labor costs? We still couldn't compete.
No, the business of the future is to develop new, marketable ideas and then protect those ideas. This is why IP is heating up so much lately. It's the one weapon you can wield against globalization and cheap labor. You develop the idea and protect it, and it doesn't matter who makes it or where - you still get your piece of the pie.
>At the end of the day, your company needs to ask itself whether it >wants to be in its current business or not. It sounds to me like >the answer is "no", as the appearance of competition seems to be >enough to make it want to cease R&D spending if it is not given >the aid of protectionism.
LOL! What a statement. Of course my company wants to be in business, as all businesses do. What they don't want to do, however, is pay an engineering staff millions of dollars to develop a new widget and bring it to market, and then have someone else copy it after a week's worth of reverse engineering and start manufacturing and selling it themselves! That is not competition. That's riding on someone else's laurels. If you can't see that, friend you are just blind. And if you don't offer protection to those kinds of processes, NO ONE WILL BOTHER TO DO THEM.
Do you think drug companies would continue to invest in developing new drugs if, as soon as they do, anyone can copy them and, leveraging cheaper labor, produce them at 1/2 the cost to boot? Hell no! It's the same for any business.
Why don't you go spend a couple of million dollars developing a product or process and then watch while others copy it, sell it for less than you can make it, and drive you out of the business for the product you created. Then you can come back and tell us how enthusiastic you are about dumping more money into R&D for another product or process.
Steve
On the value of thoughts...
on
The Patent Epidemic
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· Score: 2, Informative
>You had nothing to start with. An idea is just an idea --- >we all have them. What you are describing is simply envy that >someone else has managed to make money out of an idea when you >yourself didn't.
You are completely incorrect. Sure, we all have thoughts, but some are valuable and some are not. Very genreally, if you have a thought, and can demonstrate that there was no prior art (no one else thought of it first), you can patent it, and capitalize on that thought. If it is a good enough thought, people will pay you to make use of it.
>As an electronics engineer and software architect with many years >behind me, I have a stack of notebooks absolutely brimming with novel >ideas, the vast majority of which I will never use in any product. >Patenting them would be utterly diabolical, effectively denying >others the right to invent those concepts for themselves independently.
LOL! Patenting them would be diabolical? It happens every day, dude. People invent things themselves independently every day. And you know what? If they are first to the patent office, they get themselves a patent. If you don't care to participate, that's great, but not much of an argument for the case you appear to be making that thoughts aren't valuable, protectectable assets.
>Does it matter to me when someone else develops one of my ideas by >themselves, or stumbles across it fortuitiously? Of course not. >Ideas are two a penny, and "losing the potential to make money" >is losing nothing at all. If I wanted to make money out of them myself, >I would, and if I don't have the means to do so then this very clearly >illustrates how that "potential" was actually an illusion and entirely >worthless.
This is so flawed I'm not sure where to begin. Just becase you don't have the means to captalize on your ideas does not mean that the idea was worthless. I would hazzard to say that this is the quandry with most inventors - they have great ideas but lack the means to do anything with them. Hell, just getting a patent is very expensive! But this certainly does not mean that the idea is worthless. If I invented a machine that could produce gold out of horse shit but I didn't have the means to actually make the machine would my idea for this invention be worthless? Hell no - I'd be selling that thought for billions to someone who/did/ have the means to bring that machine to market.
It may not matter to you if your thoughts are independently discovered by others and then capitalized by them. But it would bother me. But that wasn't my point in my original posting - what my point was then is that patents protect your thoughts that other people DON'T get independently (they copy you) and they make a fortune off of.
>All true a decade ago. Today, though, you aren't going to be sued >by someone who makes something. You're going to be sued by a patent >holding firm whose only "product" is patent litigation. What good is >your patent portfolio when your opponent doesn't make anything that >could infringe on your patents? You can't horse-trade when you don't >have anything the other guy wants (except money).
I understand your sentiment. But just about any market gets gamed. Look at the folks who milk the virtual world for "credits" and sell them for real currency in the real world!
I don't really have a problem with firms who's sole function is the holding of patents. They are NOT in the business of "patent litigation". They are in the business of buying commodities - in this case thoughts. They hold onto those commodities until someone comes along with the resources to use them, and then they charge royalties for the privelege. Nothing wrong with that.
Thoughts are becoming very valuable assets. Of course you are going to find people who want to treat them like any other futures commodity.
If someone comes up with a patentable thought, and someone wants to buy that thought with an eye towards it being in demand later in the future, what's wrong with that? Nothing, in my book.
>As far as protecting intellectual property goes, again most of the >problem patents these days are of the "Balance your checkbook using >exactly the same procedure used by millions of housewives for decades, >but LETTING A COMPUTER PERFORM THE STEPS!" sort. That kind of >"intellectual property" doesn't need or deserve protection.
I hear you. But you would not believe how absurd some things that truly are patentable seem when you first look at them. You think, "How could this possibly be new and different?" The fact is, especially in the mechanical world, most of the mechanical ways of making structures have already been done. But when you put old ideas together in new ways to achieve something new, often as not, that can be patentable. Hell, I'm on a patent for a DUST COVER ( http://tinyurl.com/8eh7l ) - a simple rubber plug for fiber optic ports. It's all in the way you word your patent.
Are there absurd patents out there? Sure. But remember, patents aren't bullet proof, either. They can be rejected, even after being approved.
Steve
Everyone loves to hate patents, but...
on
The Patent Epidemic
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· Score: 4, Informative
I know lots of people here love to bash patents, but really, they are a good thing.
I am a mechanical designer. I am listed on several patents for designs that I have been created or been involved with.
Yes, a lot of patents seem absurd. Hell, a lot of them probably ARE absurd. There is a reason for this.
Corporations like to build webs of patents around their products. It is not sufficient or desireable to just have a single patent. The idea is to create a web of patents around your product so that when someone infringes on one of your patents, and you take them to court, and they manage to use their highly paid lawyers to wiggle out of the infringement, you then can slap them with infringements on a bunch of other patents.
Another thing a web of patents do for you is they allow you to horse trade. Let's say someone comes against you with a lawsuit that you are infringing on one of/their/ patents. Well then you whip out your portfolio of patents and thumb through them until you find some things that/they/ are infringing on of yours. Then you horse trade: "Hey...I'll let you off the hook for THESE infringements if you let us off the hook for THOSE infringements..."
Sounds corny, but consider this - when Kodak tried to get into the instant film business to compete against Polaroid, Polaroid took them to court for patent infringement. Kodak had nothing with which to horse trade, and Polaroid refused to negotiate - they drove them out of the market. This after Kodak had invested millions in new plants and employees. You never want to get caught with no bargaining chips at the patent negotation table.
But more importantly, patents protect intellectual property. I know, I know, everyone likes to poo-poo the idea of intellectual property. But without such protections, there would be little incentive for companies to pay people like me to invent new products, because as soon as we did, they would be copied by places like China, and sold back in our markets for pennies on the dollar for what we could be able to sell them for.
Let's face it, folks, thought (IP) is one of the last marketable things that our country (USA) produces. Just about everything else that can be mass produced is now made somewhere else. Without some mechanism to protect IP, it will become worthless, and then we are going to be in some deep shit.
No one likes patents, until someone takes/your/ idea and makes a fortune off of it leaving you with nothing.
>Just set up an SSL Proxy, a little bit of P2P and you've skipped around all controls.
You know, it's a shame that it has come to this, but I think the time has come for complete encryption of data streams. I used to only encrypt things that were "important", but now I think it's important to encrypt everything.
How exactly does one go about setting up an SSL Proxy and this P2P stuff you are talking about?
I pay for commercial web spaces separate from my ISP. Can I set that up as an SSL proxy?
As much as I hate the strong-arm tactics of the MPAA, RIAA, etc., I think they are probably right. Piracy does mostly affect the bottom line for developed countries.
Why? Because software and other similiar "intellectual" property is the last product developed nations have to sell. All of the "non-intellectual work" has been sent to other countries. If intellectual work has no value, because no one is willing to pay for it (it is easier to obtain it for free), they (we) are screwed.
I agree with others who say that the vast majority of "pirated" things would not have been purchased anyway if they could not have been obtained illegally. But there is some percentage that would have been. How many more jobs could have been created at Microsoft if 3% of all pirated copies of Office had been purchased legally?
Could you please clarify the difference between clicking on a link to an MP3 file and a Podcast? I'm serious, this piece of technology has slipped by me and I really don't know what a "podcast" is.
For example, SciFi has some Battelstar Galactica "podcasts" here:
But they are just MP3 files. They do have a nice link about "learn more about podcasts" that I just read, and I guess what it amounts to is to turn an MP3 file into a "podcast" you need a special piece of software that goes and checks for updated MP3 files from time to time? They mention an "RSS" feed? This is something else I've never used.
Could someone tell me more about Podcasts? Thanks.
Slashdot Mirror
>this is 100% accurate. but those words support my assertions not yours. before recorded media,
>musicians did fine. they were rich and were famous and were well respected.
I suspect that there were far, far, far fewer rich, famous, respected musicians before recorded media than there are at any given point in history after that advent.
>what the age of recorded media did to music was make them superrich and superfamous.
>and yes, indeed, that era is now dying. like i said, do you need fifty cent or jay z money to
>make music?
Salaries are not determined by NEED. They are supposed to be determined by MARKET VALUE. Artists can no longer sell recordings of their own work, because copying has destroyed its market value. You might think this is great, but what if I told you that the means that YOU use to make a living was suddenly worthless, but you were still expected to provide it so that the world could enjoy it for free?
>live concerts, endorsements are now your revenue stream as a musician. and what is wrong with that?
Nothing is wrong with that. What is wrong is that an artist can no longer sell recordings of their work. Why shouldn't an artist be able to sell recordings of their work?
>do you honestly believe your own words that all musicians will be hoppyists?!
Not all, but most. There will be far, far, far less paid musicians than there are today. If you ain't getting paid, you're a hobbyist.
>like any creative field, music is full of starving artists.
Of course. In the industry, this is called "paying your dues". Do you know why they pay those dues? Out of hope for a payoff - out of hope for "making it big". The world is full of starving artists hoping to get PAID.
>this was true in the year 1700, in the year 1950, and will be true in the year 2100. do you honestly
>believe that starving musicians didn't exist in the era of recorded media, 1890-1999? but, just like in 1700,
>in the year 2100, when music conglomerates are long dead, there will still be very rich, very successful
>musicians... and starving musicians. nothing has changed
What will have changed is the financial incentive of selling recordings of one's work will be gone.
>you can't use your argument that by returning to how things worked in the 1700s that music will be destroyed.
>because you yourself have outlined how in the 1700s music worked!
I didn't say it would be destroyed. But you may be exactly correct that music will return to how it was in the 1700s. There will be very few artists, even fewer who are rich and famous, and very little new recorded work produced, because there is no incentive to produce it. Your only option for hearing music may well be to patronize live performances. Shit I haven't been to a concert in 15 years, and don't care to go to one.
>and finally, i will assert to you that any musician who would complain about the death of music
>conglomerates that music will drop in quality and quantity is not a real musician. a real musician
>makes music TO MAKE MUSIC, not to make money.
All I know is it takes money to bring music to market. That money is invested with the expectation of getting a profit return. With that gone, there is going to be a lot less incentive to bring music to market. Maybe the quality will be better, maybe not. My guess is there will be a lot less. Time will tell
Steve
>the only future for us as consumers and artists is the chinese model:
/ARE/ the future for making money as a musician. But maybe not. Maybe we'll all just wait to download the bootleg recording of the live performance.
>piracy is rampant and unstoppable, and accepted. artists simply make money
>off of endorsements and live shows. that means they won't make jay z or fifty
>cent money, but music will be made nonetheless, and artists will still be
>financially quite comfortable, because artists make music for the sake of
>music first, not for the sake of making money.
>it's not like someone suddenly announced that wall street traders will
>make a tenth of what they used to make, and so no one wants to be a wall
>street trader anymore. people make music because they love music. period.
>that's been true ever since we were just banging on drums around a campfire,
>and will always be true, no matter what the economic future of the music
>world holds. and besides, it's a way for teenage guys to get chicks. do
>you honestly need anymore incentive than that?
I must take exception to the idea that artists will still be artists even if they don't get paid. Sure they will. They will be called "hobbyists". Music will be something they will do in their limited spare time, because the rest of their time will be spent like yours and mine is - putting food on the table. I think the number of options and quality of music will decline, because not only will there be fewer people who can afford to have the time to devote to just making music, but there will be fewer people who can afford to donate their time to running sound studios and songwriting and all the other people behind the scenes for music production.
I don't think you can glibbly say that people will continue to do what they love regardless of getting paid or not. If that were true at least 50% of Americans would stay home and masturbate all day long instead of going out for a paycheck.
The fact is, musicians have always been compensated throughout history. Whether a quartet commissioned by a duke, a troubadour paid by a bartender, a busker on the street, or a drummer getting tossed some tablescraps from the guy who owns the campfire, musicians have been in demand and have been commissioned for hire. The difference was, in the time before recordings, live music was your only option, and generally only the wealthy could afford to pay for music on demand. Recorded music brought music on demand affordably to everyone, and moreover, allowed the musician to effectively get paid for many more "performances" than he could physically do in person. Now, because of "piracy" (or whatever you want to call it) that revenue stream is, as you correctly state, gone.
I'm not sure it's right.
I mostly agree with the sentiment of your post. I'm getting damn tired of this DRM crap myself. Frankly, I think if I have bought it and it is in my hands (i.e. a CD or DVD), or if I have paid for the pipeline coming into my house (i.e. cable TV programs), then I should be able to copy them for my own use.
In the case of the Ipod thingie, if I have paid for the music that is on that Ipod, and it exists only on that Ipod, then I should be able to sell it with the Ipod for profit.
Maybe "live" performances
Steve
>I know I'm going to kind of play devil's advocate here, but have you searched for
/selling/ engraving services or equipment, not web sites about how to engrave metal.
>chicken on Google before you suggested it? I actually found the results to be a
>lot better than you imply in your post here.
I knew someone would actually go Google for "chicken". No, I didn't actually Google for chicken myself because it was merely an example.
For the things I have been routinely searching for, I find myself digging deeper and deeper down the list of returned results before I find what I'm actually after.
For example, yesterday I Googled on "how to engrave metal". I ended up digging up a lot of pages before I finally came across the obvious: http://www.engravingschool.com/ . Most of the results returned are about people
No argument - Google is the best thing going in internet searching - I wasn't trying to argue anything different. I'm just saying - you want to knock Google off the top of the hill, one possible way is to make your results more relevent.
Steve
Make the top 10 search results actually relevent again.
/really/ searching for - it is far more relevent to people who have paid to have their URL returned when my keyword is typed in.
/appeared/ to be associated with chicken.
Google is rapidly becoming a disappointment for me. Or rather, I'm quickly learning after doing a Google search to immediately click to page 2 of the results to see the "real" results.
Page 1 of the results seem to largely be irrelevent to what I'm
I can't tell you how many times I've typed in "chicken" (or whatever) and been presented with a top-10 list of "results" for web sites that have absolutely nothing to do with chicken - they've just paid someone to make sure their web site
You want to beat Google? Find a way to make a search engine that doesn't pad the results with irrelevent paid advertising.
Interestingly, I'm finding the "legitimate" paid results - those down the right side of the screen, to often be more relevent to my searches than the top 10 URLs presented in the actual search body.
Steve
>Actually, how is VoIP doing since people are dropping landlines for cell service?
I dropped landline in favor of Cell a while back. I just didn't like the principle of paying twice for the same service. Especially getting taxed twice for it (two 911 fees, etc.)
But the fact is, a cell phone for my wife and I on the Verizon Family Plan costs us right at $80/month. With the price of gasoline what it is now, plus we just had a baby, I'm looking to cut corners everywhere I can.
So now I'm ditching our cell phones for Vonage, which we have had for a couple of months now. Quality is not quite as good as POTS yet (but is easily as good as my cells have every been), but it's good enough. And it's only $27/month for unlimited calls anywhere in the US. I couldn't get a local phone number, but all of our friends are in Atlanta anyway, so I got a 404 number which was a bonus as now they can call us for free.
I've gotten really used to the convenience of having a phone always available, and maybe I'll miss it, but for two things:
First, it really hasn't been all that long that I've had a cell phone. Only 5 or 6 years. I didn't suffer terribly for the lack of one before that.
Secondly, I have recently found out that in the US, all cell phones must be able to dial 911 whether you have cell service or not. I checked this with a couple of "dead" Cingular phones we have laying around, and it works fine. I have also recently found out that you can get your phone reprogrammed (wish I could figure out how to do it myself) so that it will automatically dial into the American Roaming Network and allow you to place credit card calls, even if you do not have cell service. Sure, it costs $3/minute, but I will only use it in emergencies.
So I'm dropping cellular in favor of a landlocked VOIP phone.
Steve
Well, we had our boondoggle, now they can build one, too.
Steve
>Man, people who deliberately use "submarine patents" to try and make >money off a popular technology really bug me. As do "technology companies" >whose sole business model is to own patents. They wait and see, and if the >tech becomes successful, they pounce. If it flops they stay away and let >the infringer take the loss. Why is it this a sleazy thing to do? What if you have a great idea for an invention but you can't afford to do anything with it, or get backers for your idea? Why let someone else with deep pockets come along and "invent" the same thing and reap all the benefits for an idea you had first? Further, what is wrong with buying up patents? It's nothing more than futures trading. It's an investment with a risk and a hope of future payoff, just like any other investment. Steve
If the various virus scanner companies can resist getting into bed with the guys foisting this DRM stuff on us, and make their virus scanning utilities detect this crap _like_any_other_virus_or_malware_, then it wouldn't be much of an issue.
I know, I know - if the DRM wasn't there to begin with it wouldn't be an issue. But like virii and malware, it is probably here to stay. Just give me reliable tools to crush this stuff.
Steve
OK, I admit, I'm a little behind the times on this whole Tivo thing. (Yeah, I have a B.S. in Computer Science and my VCR still flashes 12:00, too :) )
So someone fill me in. Isn't this just a digital VCR that you have to pay a subscription fee to use, with the axe of immenent DRM hanging over your necks?
I'm missing the appeal. Why do I have to pay a subscription to use a recording device and deal with "broadcast flags"?
Steve
But what about Klingon?
>The question is which system fosters greater advancement,
/encourage/ advancement. I have had to design around patent issues before. Sometimes it causes innovation and new approaches to solve a problem.
>And without some decent case studies I really don't see
>how you can honestly be so certain that one is superior
>to the other.
I can be certain because I understand what drives people to invent things. Natural curiosity, and the expectation of a payback on the investment of effort.
I can also be certain because I have first hand experience of inventing a product and, because I could not afford to patent it, now half of India makes my product and sells it to other, bigger fish, who can buy in bigger volume than I can, and I can no longer compete selling my own invention. If I had patent protection, I'd own the market. Now I have nothing.
In a nutshell, most folks in this thread arguing against patents are doing so because they claim that patents hinder advancement.
You're right, from the perspective that it prohibits others from using the idea for a while.
Sure, if there was no value in a particular invention, because anyone could make it, you're right - people would be speedily moving on to the next thing hoping to make a buck before others caught on.
I think that stinks.
If I invent something great I should be able to profit off of that - not have to hope I get lucky and invent something else (and something else, and then something else).
Further, one could argue that patents
Steve
>You say that as if you're proud of it.
/paid/ for it. Which is what patents really all boil down to - getting paid for what you invent. Every person listed on that patent got a $1000 bonus for filing that patent - not /getting/ it - /filing/ it.
While it is cool to be listed on a patent, mostly I was happy to be
>Caterers on movie credits, patents for rubber plugs. Just serving the food and making
>sure your cable isn't clogged with dust before reaching the customer isn't good enough anymore?
Nope. Because now Lucent can prevent anyone else from making a similar rubber plug in the markets where it was granted the patent, assuming the patent is upheld if challenged. That's valuable to Lucent, because that gives them an exclusive product. Others will (and have already) come up with other ways to achieve the same result, but they can't do it the way we did it.
Steve
>Basically, patents are a 18th and 19th century thing. They prevent others from selling
/of your target market/, not necessarily of the countries where it will be manufactured. By doing this, you can prevent others from selling in your markets, regardless of where they might try and manufacture a copy. These sorts of laws are enforced every day in civilized countries.
/have/ developed. It's hard to go after new markets tomorrow if you have nothing to sell today.
>products embodying your patented ideas or using your patented processes
>***in the country where the patent was granted to you***.
This is correct.
>So, as far as process patents are concerned, elbonia just doesnt care, it does not issue
>process patents, and even if it did, good luck enforcing them.
Oh, they sure do care, because if the patent holder holds the patent in every country where there are people who want to buy the product, then Elbonia has no place to sell their product.
When you get a patent, you patent your invention in the countries
>If you are always causing these patent troubles, why should elbonia care to manufacture the goods you developed ?
That's the point! Unless, of course, you are paying them to manufacture them FOR YOU. In which case they care to do it in order to get paid making a product for you.
>So basically, you could argue that patents issued to qualcomm in the US and other markets have hindered the adoption the CDMA standard abroad.
No doubt it did. But the guys holding the GSM patents are loving life, aren't they? Let's hope they got patents in China.
>In the 80s, Microsoft DOS, and later Windows, swept all competing OSes off PCs for the
>superior value perceived by customers compared to other offerings.
>
>It may not have been the technologically most advanced, but it did the job and let
>the customer choose between a wide range of hardware and software.
>
>There was not a single patent involved in an innovation that laid the
> base for the arguably most valuable company in the world.
Even if true, I'm sure there was a great deal of copyright protection instead.
>Every dollar Microsoft spends on IP-Lawyers in the US is lost for localizing windows
>and the accounting package to cantonese and make the Dong-Feng-Garment-Works *want* to use and pay for windows.
True enough - resources spent on IP protection are resources that cannot be spent on product development. The fact that corporations choose to do this anyway clearly indicates that they feel that without doing so their current products would be stolen and produced by someone else, eating into their profits for the products that they
Steve
>It is the new ideas, not the patents, that are valuable. The patents are an effort to attach additional artificial value to the ideas.
/are/ no more advancements to be made? Let's say you patent something novel, yet very simple and easily reverse-engineered. Basically you get no reward for your effort to come up with such an invention. Or let's say you come up with something incredibly complex, but final, like, say, a cure for AIDS, or cancer. You invested 15 years of research and 5 billion dollars in the effort. But when you're done, anyone can make it. Is that fair? I don't think so.
No, patents are an effort to do two things:
Firstly, they get innovative ideas into the public domain, thus furthering the collective knowlege of all. In order to be granted a patent, you basically have to give away the secret of how your idea works. These patents are a matter of public record and easily searchable. Secondly, in exchange for giving away your idea for your invention to the world, most countries grant you exclusivity for some number of years. This allows the entity who came up with the idea some time to profit off of it.
>Not having a patent on an idea does not make it worthless, and research into new things is still going to be valuable,
>even in a world without patents.
You are right. But not having exclusivity, especially for an easily reproduced item, certainly diminishes its value. It also is likely to make entities more likely to keep their technology as a trade secret (if possible, i.e. the forumla for Coca-Cola), which will benefit no one but the inventing entity forever, or as long as they can keep the secret.
>Let's take the cameras from earlier in the discussion as an example. Presume we are back in time in an alternate
>patentless past with Kodak busy making instant film cameras - something into which, in practice, they will have
>to put R&D. Sure, they can reverse engineer what Polaroid did to get the basics, but to actually manage to produce
>good quality working instant film cameras of their own they'll have to put in some research and engineering effort of their own.
But not nearly as much research and engineering effort as Polaroid did. Basically, in your alternate past, Polaroid subsidised Kodak's camera development. Is that fair? I don't think so.
>As long as there are advancements to be made Polaroid, with their R&D team who are well acquainted with
>all the fine details of instant film cameras, far more so than reverse engineering people at Kodak,
>will always be the premiere instant film camera manufaturer, which is worth money.
And what if there
>Moreover, this alternate world would provide at least as rapid advancement in instant
>film technology as the real world with patents ever did.
I doubt it very much. In your alternate world you are basically assuming that companies would invest large amounts of money in reasearch and development in the hopes that no one else can copy their work very quickly. The more simple your invention, the less likely this dream is to come true.
>But wait, there's more. While Polaroid and Kodak are busy slugging it out over instant film cameras there is still
>plenty of incentive for Asian camera makers to throw money into R&D on digital cameras because those
>investments will pay off. Even in the real world it is not so much patents holding Kodak back in the field
>of digital camera technology so much as the fact that Kodak just doesn't really "get" digital cameras.
>The companies that put in the hard slog researching and engineering digital cameras are way ahead.
>Kodak didn't believe digital photography would take off, and got into the game way to late.
So what? The purpose of patents is not to save companies from short-sighted business plans. It is, as above, the get novel inventions into the public domain, and reward inventors with exclusive right
>If all we can generate is government-enforced monopolies, we've already lost. Collecting patents isn't creating value; creating products creates value.
/creating/ patents sure does create value, because patents, and the investment that went into creating them, are valuable.
Collecting patents doesn't create value, but
>And honestly -- if we get to the point where all we generate is patents, why in the world would China even pretend to honor them?
Simple: Other countries honor patents because if they don't there are repercussions for them. For one, we would stop honoring theirs. For two, we might well close our markets to them or otherwise penalize them.
Steve
>If you want to save domestic jobs in the long term, the
>patent nonsense must be stopped immediately.
So if patents are abolished, what products will we in the US be able to sell on the world market? If the last of our marketable products - thought, are rendered worthless, what jobs will be left? We've all but lost the manufacturing jobs. If the development jobs go, too, what will we have? Answer: Nothing.
Why do you think IP is heating up so much lately? Because that is the last of the marketable table scraps that we have left. Corporations big and small are coming to the realization that the 3rd world is catching up rapidly in terms of the kinds of things they are able to manufacture and quality. So unless you want your products being made in Elbonia in and sold for a fraction of what it costs you to make them, you had better stop others from being able to make them. Patents are a way to do that.
Steve
>My thought is that if A wants to come up with the idea and then sit
>and wait for some B to come up with it independently and do the hard
>work of turning the idea into a product, A doesn't deserve a slice of
>B's hard work just for being lazy. Now, if A's shopping it around to
>people who can actually produce it, that's another matter, but these
>patent holding companies don't put any effort of their own in, they
>just wait for someone else to expend the effort and then demand a
>slice of the profit. That's not the way to create an incentive
>for anyone else to do anything new.
Why not? How do you think the patent holding companies got the patents they are holding? Answer: They paid someone for their ideas. There's the incentive. Or, they developed the ideas themselves, and they are hoping for a payoff at some point in the future - again an incentive.
Is it lame that someone buys the patent for an idea and then waits for someone to start infringing on the patents they own before demanding royalties for using their property? Maybe - some would call it shrewd. To me it's no different than the guy who buys cheap farmland and then years later sells it to developers for a fortune when the area has grown and turned urban.
Believe me, it sucks to get boxed in by patent constraints when you are developing a patent - I have had to change direction on my designs in the past when I have found out that I was possibly treading on someone else's patents. But that is the price we pay for having the protection for our ideas.
Steve
>And by the same token, you would be able to take Chinese products and
>do the same. And the wheels of industry would turn that much faster.
>
>Or do you think that only the west has a creative mind?
Of course not. But if there is no protection of intellectual property, who is going to invest in developing a new product, just so someone else can benefit from all your R&D and go directly into production, often with a much lower cost of production? Answer: No one.
Besides, even if the bulk of the thought was NOT going INTO China as it presently is, what good would it do us to copy Chinese ideas if it costs us 10 times as much to produce the same good because of disparities in labor costs? We still couldn't compete.
No, the business of the future is to develop new, marketable ideas and then protect those ideas. This is why IP is heating up so much lately. It's the one weapon you can wield against globalization and cheap labor. You develop the idea and protect it, and it doesn't matter who makes it or where - you still get your piece of the pie.
>At the end of the day, your company needs to ask itself whether it
>wants to be in its current business or not. It sounds to me like
>the answer is "no", as the appearance of competition seems to be
>enough to make it want to cease R&D spending if it is not given
>the aid of protectionism.
LOL! What a statement. Of course my company wants to be in business, as all businesses do. What they don't want to do, however, is pay an engineering staff millions of dollars to develop a new widget and bring it to market, and then have someone else copy it after a week's worth of reverse engineering and start manufacturing and selling it themselves! That is not competition. That's riding on someone else's laurels. If you can't see that, friend you are just blind. And if you don't offer protection to those kinds of processes, NO ONE WILL BOTHER TO DO THEM.
Do you think drug companies would continue to invest in developing new drugs if, as soon as they do, anyone can copy them and, leveraging cheaper labor, produce them at 1/2 the cost to boot? Hell no! It's the same for any business.
Why don't you go spend a couple of million dollars developing a product or process and then watch while others copy it, sell it for less than you can make it, and drive you out of the business for the product you created. Then you can come back and tell us how enthusiastic you are about dumping more money into R&D for another product or process.
Steve
>You had nothing to start with. An idea is just an idea ---
/did/ have the means to bring that machine to market.
>we all have them. What you are describing is simply envy that
>someone else has managed to make money out of an idea when you
>yourself didn't.
You are completely incorrect. Sure, we all have thoughts, but some are valuable and some are not. Very genreally, if you have a thought, and can demonstrate that there was no prior art (no one else thought of it first), you can patent it, and capitalize on that thought. If it is a good enough thought, people will pay you to make use of it.
>As an electronics engineer and software architect with many years
>behind me, I have a stack of notebooks absolutely brimming with novel
>ideas, the vast majority of which I will never use in any product.
>Patenting them would be utterly diabolical, effectively denying
>others the right to invent those concepts for themselves independently.
LOL! Patenting them would be diabolical? It happens every day, dude. People invent things themselves independently every day. And you know what? If they are first to the patent office, they get themselves a patent. If you don't care to participate, that's great, but not much of an argument for the case you appear to be making that thoughts aren't valuable, protectectable assets.
>Does it matter to me when someone else develops one of my ideas by
>themselves, or stumbles across it fortuitiously? Of course not.
>Ideas are two a penny, and "losing the potential to make money"
>is losing nothing at all. If I wanted to make money out of them myself,
>I would, and if I don't have the means to do so then this very clearly
>illustrates how that "potential" was actually an illusion and entirely
>worthless.
This is so flawed I'm not sure where to begin. Just becase you don't have the means to captalize on your ideas does not mean that the idea was worthless. I would hazzard to say that this is the quandry with most inventors - they have great ideas but lack the means to do anything with them. Hell, just getting a patent is very expensive! But this certainly does not mean that the idea is worthless. If I invented a machine that could produce gold out of horse shit but I didn't have the means to actually make the machine would my idea for this invention be worthless? Hell no - I'd be selling that thought for billions to someone who
It may not matter to you if your thoughts are independently discovered by others and then capitalized by them. But it would bother me. But that wasn't my point in my original posting - what my point was then is that patents protect your thoughts that other people DON'T get independently (they copy you) and they make a fortune off of.
Steve
>All true a decade ago. Today, though, you aren't going to be sued
>by someone who makes something. You're going to be sued by a patent
>holding firm whose only "product" is patent litigation. What good is
>your patent portfolio when your opponent doesn't make anything that
>could infringe on your patents? You can't horse-trade when you don't
>have anything the other guy wants (except money).
I understand your sentiment. But just about any market gets gamed. Look at the folks who milk the virtual world for "credits" and sell them for real currency in the real world!
I don't really have a problem with firms who's sole function is the holding of patents. They are NOT in the business of "patent litigation". They are in the business of buying commodities - in this case thoughts. They hold onto those commodities until someone comes along with the resources to use them, and then they charge royalties for the privelege. Nothing wrong with that.
Thoughts are becoming very valuable assets. Of course you are going to find people who want to treat them like any other futures commodity.
If someone comes up with a patentable thought, and someone wants to buy that thought with an eye towards it being in demand later in the future, what's wrong with that? Nothing, in my book.
>As far as protecting intellectual property goes, again most of the
>problem patents these days are of the "Balance your checkbook using
>exactly the same procedure used by millions of housewives for decades,
>but LETTING A COMPUTER PERFORM THE STEPS!" sort. That kind of
>"intellectual property" doesn't need or deserve protection.
I hear you. But you would not believe how absurd some things that truly are patentable seem when you first look at them. You think, "How could this possibly be new and different?" The fact is, especially in the mechanical world, most of the mechanical ways of making structures have already been done. But when you put old ideas together in new ways to achieve something new, often as not, that can be patentable. Hell, I'm on a patent for a DUST COVER ( http://tinyurl.com/8eh7l ) - a simple rubber plug for fiber optic ports. It's all in the way you word your patent.
Are there absurd patents out there? Sure. But remember, patents aren't bullet proof, either. They can be rejected, even after being approved.
Steve
I know lots of people here love to bash patents, but really, they are a good thing.
/their/ patents. Well then you whip out your portfolio of patents and thumb through them until you find some things that /they/ are infringing on of yours. Then you horse trade: "Hey...I'll let you off the hook for THESE infringements if you let us off the hook for THOSE infringements..."
/your/ idea and makes a fortune off of it leaving you with nothing.
I am a mechanical designer. I am listed on several patents for designs that I have been created or been involved with.
Yes, a lot of patents seem absurd. Hell, a lot of them probably ARE absurd. There is a reason for this.
Corporations like to build webs of patents around their products. It is not sufficient or desireable to just have a single patent. The idea is to create a web of patents around your product so that when someone infringes on one of your patents, and you take them to court, and they manage to use their highly paid lawyers to wiggle out of the infringement, you then can slap them with infringements on a bunch of other patents.
Another thing a web of patents do for you is they allow you to horse trade. Let's say someone comes against you with a lawsuit that you are infringing on one of
Sounds corny, but consider this - when Kodak tried to get into the instant film business to compete against Polaroid, Polaroid took them to court for patent infringement. Kodak had nothing with which to horse trade, and Polaroid refused to negotiate - they drove them out of the market. This after Kodak had invested millions in new plants and employees. You never want to get caught with no bargaining chips at the patent negotation table.
But more importantly, patents protect intellectual property. I know, I know, everyone likes to poo-poo the idea of intellectual property. But without such protections, there would be little incentive for companies to pay people like me to invent new products, because as soon as we did, they would be copied by places like China, and sold back in our markets for pennies on the dollar for what we could be able to sell them for.
Let's face it, folks, thought (IP) is one of the last marketable things that our country (USA) produces. Just about everything else that can be mass produced is now made somewhere else. Without some mechanism to protect IP, it will become worthless, and then we are going to be in some deep shit.
No one likes patents, until someone takes
Steve
>Just set up an SSL Proxy, a little bit of P2P and you've skipped around all controls.
You know, it's a shame that it has come to this, but I think the time has come for complete encryption of data streams. I used to only encrypt things that were "important", but now I think it's important to encrypt everything.
How exactly does one go about setting up an SSL Proxy and this P2P stuff you are talking about?
I pay for commercial web spaces separate from my ISP. Can I set that up as an SSL proxy?
Steve
As much as I hate the strong-arm tactics of the MPAA, RIAA, etc., I think they are probably right. Piracy does mostly affect the bottom line for developed countries.
Why? Because software and other similiar "intellectual" property is the last product developed nations have to sell. All of the "non-intellectual work" has been sent to other countries. If intellectual work has no value, because no one is willing to pay for it (it is easier to obtain it for free), they (we) are screwed.
I agree with others who say that the vast majority of "pirated" things would not have been purchased anyway if they could not have been obtained illegally. But there is some percentage that would have been. How many more jobs could have been created at Microsoft if 3% of all pirated copies of Office had been purchased legally?
Steve
Steve
Could you please clarify the difference between clicking on a link to an MP3 file and a Podcast? I'm serious, this piece of technology has slipped by me and I really don't know what a "podcast" is.
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For example, SciFi has some Battelstar Galactica "podcasts" here:
http://www.scifi.com/battlestar/downloads/podcast
But they are just MP3 files. They do have a nice link about "learn more about podcasts" that I just read, and I guess what it amounts to is to turn an MP3 file into a "podcast" you need a special piece of software that goes and checks for updated MP3 files from time to time? They mention an "RSS" feed? This is something else I've never used.
Could someone tell me more about Podcasts? Thanks.
Steve