How did Rambus get patents on technologies required for all forms of memory produced today? Did they actually shell out the R&D to develop them? If so, it seems reasonable that they be rewarded with a return on their investment. Conversely, if not, their patent ought to be reviewed.
Does Rambus really plan to use the licensing fees to kill a better technology (SDRAM)? If so, why? Wouldn't it make more business sense to just go with the better technology and milk it for marginal license fees? That means high volume and lots of cuts.
Er, Rambus is allowed to charge for this technology because of government intervention in the market. That's right, patents are a limited monopoly declared by the government. Messing with them would tune the existing government intervention, not create new intervention where there is none today.
Antitrust action against Rambus based on its use of patents, however, would in fact add intervention to intervention.
Screaming, sensationalistic headlines aside - "Article attacks Open Source!!!" - I'm with Taschek on this one. I think Slashdot is succumbing to yellow journalism in this case; the article isn't what it's represented to be.
Taschek doesn't address free software like Apache at all - he argues that Open Source software, as a commercial venture, has caught on but has yet to produce many results.
Free and Open Source commercial software are different things. To illustrate the distinction:
Free software is free for everyone's use.
Open Source software is not free. You must still pay to use it. It differs from closed software in that the paying customers get to inspect and comment on the source code.
Now, free software's work powers half the Internet today; but commercial open-source software, though it's gotten many corporate commitments, is still in the process of getting a stable position from which to actually produce stuff.
That's what Taschek says, and he's right about it. Bob Young's "incisive" reply dodges blatantly and doesn't even address Taschek's criticisms.
There's a huge gap between what Taschek says and "open source is bad". Any new thing first needs to get resources, then apply them and become established; open source has the resources, and is in the process of applying them. Business customers know that having source and compiling it themselves, even if they're not allowed to make or redistribute changes, is important insurance against bugs, back-doors, and security flaws, so it's a better deal for them; and suppliers are rushing to offer it, because their customers know it's a better deal. Even savvy mass-market customers might catch on to the advantages of having their e-mail programs reviewable by people "in the know" outside the company - especially if agencies like Consumer Reports take up the cause.
So the commercial viability Taschek seeks is the next happening thing. People like Taschek will even help it happen, by pointing out the need for it.
I expect to see a day where most proprietary, commerically sold software is open source, and Taschek's article isn't incompatible with this future at all.
The attitude displayed by Bob Young, on the other hand, could harm or delay this future by discarding results in favor of hype. I hope other, larger companies (like IBM, SAP, and Microsoft) take a more pragmatic view of what open source is and has to offer them.
DMCA is the US implementation of an international treaty it's signatory to. It sure ain't the only signatory. If your country signed, you can expect similar laws.
I know it's tempting to blame the US for everything, but the rest of the world is not powerless. There are money and technology in Europe, and powerful people with interests to protect.
I'd chalk this one up to an alliance of intellectual property interests from many nations, succeeding for the moment in bamboozling these nations' people and governments.
Good eye! Yes - the notifier must swear, under penalty of perjury, that he or she is authorized to speak on behalf of the complainant and that the complainant has alleged - claimed - that there is a violation. Nothing in this law says the complainant's statement has to be true, or applies penalties of perjury to it. In other words, the lawyer must be honest in reporting the complaint, but the complaint itself can be a barefaced lie - the material must still be taken down.
I see a time when they will be used to distribute material that should not be allowed to propagate due to its dangerous nature - instructions on how to buy/make drugs, race hate manifestos, terrorist propaganda and anti-Christian diatribes.
Let them be so used. The way to fight lies is with the truth, not with a muzzle. Why? Because the truth is a surgical weapon. A muzzle can be used indiscriminately against truth and lies, with the sole effect of destroying debate entirely. But truth can be used against only lies.
Ms. Ullman devotes a tremendous amount of space in her article to criticizing others' points of view (as well as surveying irrelevancies like people's clothing and haircuts) but never really articulates her own. She tears down the ideas of others without proposing any to take their place. I'm willing to listen; but Ms. Ullman should speak her mind directly. You reading this, ma'am? Tell me: how should the social problems and issues introduced with the mainstreaming of the Internet be solved?
In other words, Lessig was wrong, the DMCA does not prohibit fair use.
No, but it does prohibit it by default for all works, then puts the decisions of whether to re-allow it for specific, limited classes of works in the sole hands of the unelected Librarian of Congress.
This puts the burden of establishing citizens' rights on the citizens, granting rights only as special exceptions to a policy of restriction of dissemination of information. This is backward; as governments are known as usually too prone to meddle in such matters, the default should be free speech and dissemination of information, and the burden at each step should be on the government to prove a specific and limited restriction meets a compelling public need.
This reply started out as a sarcastic flame, but I cooled off and want to argue it logically.
Looks to me like sorehands is arguing for the repeal or nonpassage of bad laws, not just direct disobedience of them. Thing with law in a democracy is, the people make it, and if they don't like it they're supposed to change it. These laws aren't dropped down unalterably from God or something.
You appear to conflate law and justice in your mind. In the real world, these things can often diverge, although vigilance and effort might help to keep them similar.
The issue of whether an unjust law should be obeyed if it can't be repealed is a tougher one. It weighs the potential damage to the mechanisms of society done by disobedience against the private harm caused by compliance with an unjust law. Whatever the correct choice, it comes through careful consideration of the results, not through blind obedience (or blind disobedience, for that matter) to authority.
So legislate "special case" humanitarian uses of the drugs. The drug companies don't lose, because they're not getting any business there anyway. The sick win, because they get the drugs. And the coercive nature of government gives the companies an excuse to give those lower or free prices without being criticized for the difference by higher-paying customers from the industrialized world.
I'd say the effect of business method patents will be to separate the innovation from the people who use it; some orgs will design and license business software, while other orgs will pay for it and put it to use.
This is in contrast to today's E-business world, where the company that needs a site hires software developers to write it.
It'll be less frantic and chaotic ("We need the new add-ons finished now! We need to top 50,000 customers by Friday to get that infusion of capital!"). Software may get better and more "polished" (those working on it won't have to worry about other, unrelated duties), but this could also cool down the wave of easy enterpreneurship; you can't just get some people together and make a site, you must buy the software from its registered providers, with clearly defined and unavoidable costs.
This will bring down the "lawless" and insurgent Internet and make it much more like other industries.
Patents bring market forces to bear on inventions by treating them as property. Except in cases of market failure, most of which trigger government intervention today, market forces ensure that people are compensated in proportion to what they create or provide - if they try to charge more, no-one will buy (it won't be worth it to them), and why would they want to charge less than they could fairly get? As the value of one person's work is usually far more similar to the value of another's than today's compensation system (with its fickle grants of meteoric success and failure) reflects, the distribution of wealth will even out and the middle class will reappear.
Because employers will no longer have an incentive to provoke genius from their employees (reinventing the wheel better won't help you if you can't legally use it), stock options and 72-hour workathons will die out. In their place will come 9-to-5 jobs, incremental raises, and pensions - have to motivate employees to quality somehow - and it'll join the other mature industries of society.
Everyone takes a collective sigh and returns to "normal" life. Nostalgic movies are made about the "fast and free-wheeling" early days of the Internet. Curtain.
... most would mutiny and/or effect their own plan.
Which would give a commander reasons to protect the lives of his or her troops and develop conservative but effective plans, unlike in naked slaughter games like Starcraft and Age of Empires.
Maybe that's because it never got off the ground. Microsoft products and APIs are often pretty good in first incarnation. They just get increasingly hideous with each successive version, as the customers start screaming and rattling the bars.
Their process must be terrible if it lets chaos creep in like this.
Ok, how about a software-patents mailing list run by the Patent Office? Prominent and knowledgeable people (like those guys with such an inclination for writing open letters lately) could join. The reviewers could stay informed.
Maybe the Open Source community, with its highly experienced, capable, and authoritative body of professionals, could be a valuable resource to the Patent Office in its admitted difficulties of finding prior art and learning how the profession judges "obvious" vs. "non-obvious" (brilliant hack) ideas.
Perhaps Andover should diversify into a patent forum. Or maybe patent reviewers should just read Slashdot.
I'm going to have to finally ask for details about the bad and unfair things the U.S. does to other countries. I hear a lot of discontented noises from citizens of other countries, and until now I've given them the benefit of the doubt, but the bad blood seems to be solidifying a bit, and I'd like to know what my country stands accused of.
I want to emphasize that this isn't just a cute way of denigrating the complaints; I'm genuinely asking for clarification. Questions below are meant literally, not ironically.
If countries were people and we all went to school, America would be that stupid fat kid that nobody liked, who went around robing your homework and stealing your lunch money.
This seems to imply the U.S. is a thief and a bully. What has it stolen? What threats does it use?
Most of your brains come from people leaving their native countries to go and live in America.
I'm not sure I agree with the "most" part - many of the U.S.'s best and brightest are nth-generation. I won't, however, deny that we're a substantial "brain drain" on many other countries. How does this make the U.S. a bad place, though?
Why is it that so many 2nd, 3rd (and so on) generation americans are so inward looking and arrogant.
Life is good here in many ways (though not as good as you'd believe from movies). Unfortunately, I think this has created complacency among those who've never known anything else.
The U.S. has no monopoly on this effect, though; late 19th-century British and German nationalism, for example, appear to me to have had very similar causes and characteristics.
---------
To keep this post on topic (and I should probably address the spying anyway): seems to me there're three points in question. (1) US-UK spies on other countries' communications. (2) Uses the info for economic gain. (3) They oughtn't.
I don't think anyone would dispute (1). (2) seems likely today, though we don't have most of the details. It seems to me that (3), however, depends on whether other nations do the same. Do they? Can you substantiate your answer?
*snicker* be like the weather reports. "Tuesday we expect a spot of lowered speed limit, so keep that foot off the accelerator - but that should clear up by Wednesday's meeting of the 623d division People's Congress. We're still having jaywalking enforcement on alternate Fridays for the next month. Oh, and the legal drinking age is at an all-year low of 16-3/4, but expect that to rise at state and federal levels in the next couple of months."
Corner kiosks? You lack vision, my friend. Wearables!
Let me get this straight. The Free Software community is smart enough to write good software, but can't critically consider resources on the Internet?
If this guy posts legit information on his site, I'm glad to have it. If he posts trojans, he gets found out, the community spreads the word, and he gets sued for damages. In either case, the domain he uses doesn't change much (since search engines index mostly by content anyway).
If I was looking for information on OpenSSH, I don't anticipate that this guy could put anything on his site that would significantly interfere with my search. Such a search normally passes through search engines, many sites, and a chain of referrals, and all I'd need to see is one debunk along the way.
On the other side, note the import of allowing political disputes between open-software groups to color the reactions of the community. Does it really matter what domain names these orgs have? Heck, they could fork the project and move it to corn-dogs.org and spittle.net and I still get two interesting and potentially suitable programs instead of one, and neither difficult to find (the magic of the Internet!).
I'd much rather everyone be able to post whatever they want wherever they can, and let the community sort it out, than object to minutiae like this.
Problem with bundling is, it easily becomes product tying. Say this $15 Linksys card jumps to $20 or $25 on TurboLinux reimbursement: I've been buying Linksys because it's cheap and works, but suddenly it's not as cheap. If Linksys has a competitor that stays at $15, I'll just buy theirs, but what if the competitor bundles with Caldera in response? Bam! Suddenly it's impossible to buy a network card without buying an operating system too, even if you don't need one! And this is product tying, a customer-hurting form of market failure. (In this case it subsidizes an emerging market [Linux distributions] by gouging an existing one [network cards].) TANSTAAFL, folks, buy what you need and be suspicious if things are only sold in packs.
Slashdot Mirror
Mighty naive of that standards consortium not to take from its members contractual agreements not to patent technology developed there.
Gee, gotta fix all that awful prosperity.
Interesting - like trademark law, you would have to enforce your patent from day one or lose it.
This could reduce the recycle rate of technology based on unenforced patents - but it could also reduce the sucker rate of cases like this.
A few questions:
How did Rambus get patents on technologies required for all forms of memory produced today? Did they actually shell out the R&D to develop them? If so, it seems reasonable that they be rewarded with a return on their investment. Conversely, if not, their patent ought to be reviewed.
Does Rambus really plan to use the licensing fees to kill a better technology (SDRAM)? If so, why? Wouldn't it make more business sense to just go with the better technology and milk it for marginal license fees? That means high volume and lots of cuts.
Er, Rambus is allowed to charge for this technology because of government intervention in the market. That's right, patents are a limited monopoly declared by the government. Messing with them would tune the existing government intervention, not create new intervention where there is none today.
Antitrust action against Rambus based on its use of patents, however, would in fact add intervention to intervention.
Another good solution might be for Slashdot to open a branch in Europe.
Screaming, sensationalistic headlines aside - "Article attacks Open Source!!!" - I'm with Taschek on this one. I think Slashdot is succumbing to yellow journalism in this case; the article isn't what it's represented to be.
Taschek doesn't address free software like Apache at all - he argues that Open Source software, as a commercial venture, has caught on but has yet to produce many results.
Free and Open Source commercial software are different things. To illustrate the distinction:
Now, free software's work powers half the Internet today; but commercial open-source software, though it's gotten many corporate commitments, is still in the process of getting a stable position from which to actually produce stuff.
That's what Taschek says, and he's right about it. Bob Young's "incisive" reply dodges blatantly and doesn't even address Taschek's criticisms.
There's a huge gap between what Taschek says and "open source is bad". Any new thing first needs to get resources, then apply them and become established; open source has the resources, and is in the process of applying them. Business customers know that having source and compiling it themselves, even if they're not allowed to make or redistribute changes, is important insurance against bugs, back-doors, and security flaws, so it's a better deal for them; and suppliers are rushing to offer it, because their customers know it's a better deal. Even savvy mass-market customers might catch on to the advantages of having their e-mail programs reviewable by people "in the know" outside the company - especially if agencies like Consumer Reports take up the cause.
So the commercial viability Taschek seeks is the next happening thing. People like Taschek will even help it happen, by pointing out the need for it.
I expect to see a day where most proprietary, commerically sold software is open source, and Taschek's article isn't incompatible with this future at all.
The attitude displayed by Bob Young, on the other hand, could harm or delay this future by discarding results in favor of hype. I hope other, larger companies (like IBM, SAP, and Microsoft) take a more pragmatic view of what open source is and has to offer them.
DMCA is the US implementation of an international treaty it's signatory to. It sure ain't the only signatory. If your country signed, you can expect similar laws.
I know it's tempting to blame the US for everything, but the rest of the world is not powerless. There are money and technology in Europe, and powerful people with interests to protect.
I'd chalk this one up to an alliance of intellectual property interests from many nations, succeeding for the moment in bamboozling these nations' people and governments.
Good eye! Yes - the notifier must swear, under penalty of perjury, that he or she is authorized to speak on behalf of the complainant and that the complainant has alleged - claimed - that there is a violation. Nothing in this law says the complainant's statement has to be true, or applies penalties of perjury to it. In other words, the lawyer must be honest in reporting the complaint, but the complaint itself can be a barefaced lie - the material must still be taken down.
I see a time when they will be used to distribute material that should not be allowed to propagate due to its dangerous nature - instructions on how to buy/make drugs, race hate manifestos, terrorist propaganda and anti-Christian diatribes.
Let them be so used. The way to fight lies is with the truth, not with a muzzle. Why? Because the truth is a surgical weapon. A muzzle can be used indiscriminately against truth and lies, with the sole effect of destroying debate entirely. But truth can be used against only lies.
Well? So this indicates demand for upload bandwidth. Should not the provider respond to this demand?
Ms. Ullman devotes a tremendous amount of space in her article to criticizing others' points of view (as well as surveying irrelevancies like people's clothing and haircuts) but never really articulates her own. She tears down the ideas of others without proposing any to take their place. I'm willing to listen; but Ms. Ullman should speak her mind directly. You reading this, ma'am? Tell me: how should the social problems and issues introduced with the mainstreaming of the Internet be solved?
In other words, Lessig was wrong, the DMCA does not prohibit fair use.
No, but it does prohibit it by default for all works, then puts the decisions of whether to re-allow it for specific, limited classes of works in the sole hands of the unelected Librarian of Congress.
This puts the burden of establishing citizens' rights on the citizens, granting rights only as special exceptions to a policy of restriction of dissemination of information. This is backward; as governments are known as usually too prone to meddle in such matters, the default should be free speech and dissemination of information, and the burden at each step should be on the government to prove a specific and limited restriction meets a compelling public need.
This reply started out as a sarcastic flame, but I cooled off and want to argue it logically.
Looks to me like sorehands is arguing for the repeal or nonpassage of bad laws, not just direct disobedience of them. Thing with law in a democracy is, the people make it, and if they don't like it they're supposed to change it. These laws aren't dropped down unalterably from God or something.
You appear to conflate law and justice in your mind. In the real world, these things can often diverge, although vigilance and effort might help to keep them similar.
The issue of whether an unjust law should be obeyed if it can't be repealed is a tougher one. It weighs the potential damage to the mechanisms of society done by disobedience against the private harm caused by compliance with an unjust law. Whatever the correct choice, it comes through careful consideration of the results, not through blind obedience (or blind disobedience, for that matter) to authority.
So legislate "special case" humanitarian uses of the drugs. The drug companies don't lose, because they're not getting any business there anyway. The sick win, because they get the drugs. And the coercive nature of government gives the companies an excuse to give those lower or free prices without being criticized for the difference by higher-paying customers from the industrialized world.
I'd say the effect of business method patents will be to separate the innovation from the people who use it; some orgs will design and license business software, while other orgs will pay for it and put it to use.
This is in contrast to today's E-business world, where the company that needs a site hires software developers to write it.
It'll be less frantic and chaotic ("We need the new add-ons finished now! We need to top 50,000 customers by Friday to get that infusion of capital!"). Software may get better and more "polished" (those working on it won't have to worry about other, unrelated duties), but this could also cool down the wave of easy enterpreneurship; you can't just get some people together and make a site, you must buy the software from its registered providers, with clearly defined and unavoidable costs.
This will bring down the "lawless" and insurgent Internet and make it much more like other industries.
Patents bring market forces to bear on inventions by treating them as property. Except in cases of market failure, most of which trigger government intervention today, market forces ensure that people are compensated in proportion to what they create or provide - if they try to charge more, no-one will buy (it won't be worth it to them), and why would they want to charge less than they could fairly get? As the value of one person's work is usually far more similar to the value of another's than today's compensation system (with its fickle grants of meteoric success and failure) reflects, the distribution of wealth will even out and the middle class will reappear.
Because employers will no longer have an incentive to provoke genius from their employees (reinventing the wheel better won't help you if you can't legally use it), stock options and 72-hour workathons will die out. In their place will come 9-to-5 jobs, incremental raises, and pensions - have to motivate employees to quality somehow - and it'll join the other mature industries of society.
Everyone takes a collective sigh and returns to "normal" life. Nostalgic movies are made about the "fast and free-wheeling" early days of the Internet. Curtain.
Which would give a commander reasons to protect the lives of his or her troops and develop conservative but effective plans, unlike in naked slaughter games like Starcraft and Age of Empires.
Maybe that's because it never got off the ground. Microsoft products and APIs are often pretty good in first incarnation. They just get increasingly hideous with each successive version, as the customers start screaming and rattling the bars.
Their process must be terrible if it lets chaos creep in like this.
Maybe lack of later suits against the patent?
(Though this one incentivizes to preferentially deny potentially valuable patents.)
Ok, how about a software-patents mailing list run by the Patent Office? Prominent and knowledgeable people (like those guys with such an inclination for writing open letters lately) could join. The reviewers could stay informed.
Maybe the Open Source community, with its highly experienced, capable, and authoritative body of professionals, could be a valuable resource to the Patent Office in its admitted difficulties of finding prior art and learning how the profession judges "obvious" vs. "non-obvious" (brilliant hack) ideas.
Perhaps Andover should diversify into a patent forum. Or maybe patent reviewers should just read Slashdot.
I'm going to have to finally ask for details about the bad and unfair things the U.S. does to other countries. I hear a lot of discontented noises from citizens of other countries, and until now I've given them the benefit of the doubt, but the bad blood seems to be solidifying a bit, and I'd like to know what my country stands accused of.
I want to emphasize that this isn't just a cute way of denigrating the complaints; I'm genuinely asking for clarification. Questions below are meant literally, not ironically.
If countries were people and we all went to school, America would be that stupid fat kid that nobody liked, who went around robing your homework and stealing your lunch money.
This seems to imply the U.S. is a thief and a bully. What has it stolen? What threats does it use?
Most of your brains come from people leaving their native countries to go and live in America.
I'm not sure I agree with the "most" part - many of the U.S.'s best and brightest are nth-generation. I won't, however, deny that we're a substantial "brain drain" on many other countries. How does this make the U.S. a bad place, though?
Why is it that so many 2nd, 3rd (and so on) generation americans are so inward looking and arrogant.
Life is good here in many ways (though not as good as you'd believe from movies). Unfortunately, I think this has created complacency among those who've never known anything else.
The U.S. has no monopoly on this effect, though; late 19th-century British and German nationalism, for example, appear to me to have had very similar causes and characteristics.
---------
To keep this post on topic (and I should probably address the spying anyway): seems to me there're three points in question. (1) US-UK spies on other countries' communications. (2) Uses the info for economic gain. (3) They oughtn't.
I don't think anyone would dispute (1). (2) seems likely today, though we don't have most of the details. It seems to me that (3), however, depends on whether other nations do the same. Do they? Can you substantiate your answer?
*snicker* be like the weather reports. "Tuesday we expect a spot of lowered speed limit, so keep that foot off the accelerator - but that should clear up by Wednesday's meeting of the 623d division People's Congress. We're still having jaywalking enforcement on alternate Fridays for the next month. Oh, and the legal drinking age is at an all-year low of 16-3/4, but expect that to rise at state and federal levels in the next couple of months."
Corner kiosks? You lack vision, my friend. Wearables!
Let me get this straight. The Free Software community is smart enough to write good software, but can't critically consider resources on the Internet?
If this guy posts legit information on his site, I'm glad to have it. If he posts trojans, he gets found out, the community spreads the word, and he gets sued for damages. In either case, the domain he uses doesn't change much (since search engines index mostly by content anyway).
If I was looking for information on OpenSSH, I don't anticipate that this guy could put anything on his site that would significantly interfere with my search. Such a search normally passes through search engines, many sites, and a chain of referrals, and all I'd need to see is one debunk along the way.
On the other side, note the import of allowing political disputes between open-software groups to color the reactions of the community. Does it really matter what domain names these orgs have? Heck, they could fork the project and move it to corn-dogs.org and spittle.net and I still get two interesting and potentially suitable programs instead of one, and neither difficult to find (the magic of the Internet!).
I'd much rather everyone be able to post whatever they want wherever they can, and let the community sort it out, than object to minutiae like this.
Problem with bundling is, it easily becomes product tying. Say this $15 Linksys card jumps to $20 or $25 on TurboLinux reimbursement: I've been buying Linksys because it's cheap and works, but suddenly it's not as cheap. If Linksys has a competitor that stays at $15, I'll just buy theirs, but what if the competitor bundles with Caldera in response? Bam! Suddenly it's impossible to buy a network card without buying an operating system too, even if you don't need one! And this is product tying, a customer-hurting form of market failure. (In this case it subsidizes an emerging market [Linux distributions] by gouging an existing one [network cards].) TANSTAAFL, folks, buy what you need and be suspicious if things are only sold in packs.