"Remember that the point of the patent system is to get an inventor to fully disclose the best mode of their invention in order to advance the art."
No, the constitutionally defined point is to "advance the progress" of the "useful arts and sciences." If an "invention" is not novel, useful, or progressive, nobody gives a darn how much anyone discloses any mode of said invention. Describe your method of growing rice all you want -- it's been done for over a millennium before your birth, so nobody cares anymore. If the best mode of an invention is better expressed as an actual product on a market, rather than an attempt at a government granted monopoly for an *idea* about a *possible* product, then to "advance the art" that item should just be brought to market. This can and has been done without disrupting competition via patents.
Tests like prior art and obviousness are necessary, to support these constitutional claims on the validity of the monopoly grant. Monopolies are universally harmful to open market progress, so the standards to grant them should be set extremely high, if granted at all. For being so clearly against Microsoft and other Oligopoly interests, you seem rather fond of handing out monopolies via IP, without concern to market harm.
"Teaching the invention is very costly..."
Not in all cases. The patent process can make it more expensive than necessary. Teaching is as free as writing this comment was.
"There would be no incentive to teach otherwise."
What about basic humanism? What incentive is there to keep knowledge a secret when it can benefit your community? Even self-interest dictates that if you and the people you care about can benefit from an invention, you benefit from bringing it into reality by any cost-effective means. Why is a long 25-year monopoly the only incentive you can fathom? I know plenty of Teachers who work at horrible wages, because they love the kids they teach.
Come back when you get your priorities straight. Personally, I'm pro-consumer and pro-public first on any tough market decision. If patents harm either the consumer directly (i.e. unnecessary price controls), or the public generally (i.e. methods of free operation must be licensed, even when no profit is gained), I say that makes the patents worthless. So far, your comments have been equally worthless. You're a weasel, a monopoly interest shill, and I don't understand why Mike doesn't just ban your space wasting grimace.
"The East Texas court has every right and it delivers justice far faster than other courts."
And with that, Mr. Riley has lost all credibility.
Spending just a little time on Slashdot or Google News feeds with keywords or tags like "East Texas" and "Patent" will show you how wrong this statement is. Just to show you I'm better at providing information sources than Mr. Riley, who tends to only include links to the organizations he shills for in his enormous signature, here's a couple of examples to get you started:
I don't think Mr. Riley is being honest here with his categorization of industry players, as being for or against patents. I agree there is plenty of corruption to go around, but from what I can see the corruption goes in favor of government granted monopolies such as IP, and higher fees and more complex laws around IP to increase the barriers to competition. Corruption is supportive of easy-to-get and hard-to-invalidate patents, not against them, because they have the resources to spam the USPTO with weak patents comprehensively in their field. They also tend to fight patent reform, unless "reform" means making it even worse. Just look at the list of companies filing briefs in support of or against Bilsky to see who is on each side. If the Supreme Court overturns the current ruling, and ideas and abstract "methods" are allowed to be patented instead of physical things, we are all doomed.
Uh, did you just argue for patenting a program that just says "Hello World" and does nothing else? Wow.
OK, so one point about "obvious" is that "prior art" is actually an obviousness test. It means the "invention" was not only completed by someone else before the patent was filed, but it was fully documented in some manner portable enough to reach the patent examiner. If the prior art wasn't from an old expired patent, that also means the previous "inventor" thought it so obvious as not worth patenting. There's a non-subjective obviousness test right there.
My point about reverse-engineering costs as constituting an obviousness test is that truly new leaps in knowledge are actually pretty hard to convert into tacit knowledge, even when made explicit via physical form. Think about someone trying to reverse-engineer a modern microprocessor, without access to modern nanoscale microscopy equipment. In that case, you couldn't even see the thing you're meant to copy at any meaningful scale, because the important features are small beyond a scale you can sense. Without first having the nanoscale sensing equipment, and the tacit knowledge required to both use it and interpret its output, the modern processor is indistinguishable from magic. Even with the right sensing equipment, if you can't determine why one type of transistor spacing was used over another, you're doomed to repeat the same mistakes as the original implementer, driving the cost of reverse-engineering to the same as (or more than) original R&D. It would have been more cost effective to "license" a look at the original documentation by the original implementer. You could try to work around that by creating an absolute copy, but then you get into questions of plagiarism instead of just "innovation" value to society.
All innovation is obvious to at least one person: the implementer. If more than one person is able to implement the same thing, that makes it objectively obvious, as more than one person can perceive the same thing independently. If knowledge becomes obvious in such an objective fashion, without the help of spreading that knowledge via the patent system, then what exactly is the point of granting a patent on that knowledge?
The more I think about the problems with the term "obvious", the more I think the patent system actually just needs to be re-engineered. I think there's a couple of key points about the benefits of patents that are lost completely in the current system:
1. Progressing the arts and sciences by giving an incentive to spread specialized knowledge as it is discovered, with Patents especially about creating a new and useful thing for market.
2. Adding to the works and knowledge available to the public to build upon freely, to create new and better products.
Lawyers tend to ignore 2 and concentrate on 1 completely. 2 is assumed to be attained after Patent expiry, but too little attention is paid to how the expiry date affects generational progress. I think goal 2 is actually a bit more important than goal 1 to the "progress of the useful arts and sciences."
The argument for temporary monopolies over "inventions" is usually either that the invention will be kept a trade secret indefinitely, instead of shared, so that reverse engineering (which may contain flawed and inefficient analysis) will be required to get it into the public domain, and only after it is brought to market. In areas where reverse engineering is too easy, they argue that they need a monopoly to get a return on R&D past the initial release, or the R&D will never be funded.
The study of explicit knowledge versus tacit knowledge above explains the flaws with the R&D cost argument -- if the invention is that special and useful as to deserve a temporary monopoly, the steps to actually reproduce it will actually be quite costly, even with reverse-engineering capability. If the invention is really that new, the steps to reverse engineer it might not actually be clear to anyone "skilled in the arts." The cost of reverse-engineering could possibly qualify as the only real "obviousness" test. There is also the great advantage of being first-to-market in terms of incremental improvements and branding, that the R&D cost argument ignores.
Just going on the premise that a cost of reverse-engineering test qualifies as an obviousness test, which in turn determines the proper period a temporary monopoly should be allowed after an invention is sold to the open market, then all we need to argue about is getting the invention's original design into the public domain somehow. For that, I propose the Patent system becomes instead a Registered Trade Secret (RTS) system. The incentive for Trade Secret registration is help from the government keeping the secret from competitors, selling initial looks at the Trade Secret, and low-cost arbitration on royalty agreements after that. If anyone who bought a look at an RTS then builds a similar product, but refuses to pay royalties, that triggers an infringement case. The more complex legal wrangling only needs to take place in these infringement cases by RTS buyers. Everyone else is dependent on their own R&D and reverse-engineering capabilities. The incentive to invest in R&D then becomes the fact that you can sell Trade Secret looks and royalty agreements without expending your own resources on developing related products in-house. You also share documentation with the government, that they agree to keep secret, and that you can use in industrial espionage cases which might be difficult to prosecute otherwise. You know who to watch out for with royalty agreement violations, when they don't pay up on agreed royalty rates, yet sell a product utilizing the Trade Secret anyway.
Other companies who are able to develop similar products independently are more free to invent under RTS, from the trolls we have now under Patents. Real innovators don't have to keep on the lookout for tacitly similar patents in the current endless stream, or ignore Patents out of fear over increased damages, as they do now. Legal expenses go down all around. The RTS gets released to the public records after expiry, so the net public benefit is the same (greater, really) as if it was a Patent.
I don't want to talk about my current employment in any detail, but I have worked for over a decade in what would be considered "creative" industries. Let's just say I'm not in Hollywood, but I'm uncomfortably near it. The thing I find really weird about my particular part of the industry is that it seems to be based on the old factory-widgets model, with things like punching the clock and in-person staff meetings, which actually don't make any sense in any creative industry at all -- especially now when our outputs are all digital, we all have constant Internet access, and often have better computers at home than at the office. We should all just be salaried, but some State laws require that many of us work on an hourly basis. I think it should be on a price-per-output basis, but State law would require that we work as contractors for that, and lose all employee benefits (like group-rate health care).
Everybody likes a little face time now and then, but nothing about our jobs requires it to be 5 days a week, every week. When we love our work, even 'holidays' and 'weekends' are strange abstract notions. Most of the positions here are considered "artists", or at least "technical specialists" of various types. Anyone who has ever tried to create something "inspired" knows that art doesn't happen on a clock, even in what are considered the more technical aspects. The projects tend to actually get structured correctly, in that they are based on key assets being created by reasonable deadlines, and not on a widget-per-day type model. Key dependencies can be figured out ahead of time well enough, and evolve with the projects' progression appropriately. Time is also allocated for review and polish.
It's just the use of clocks and office space that hasn't caught up to the modern world yet. It's like a building full of Michelangelo's, daVinci's, Magritte's, Van Gogh's, Dali's, Duchamp's, Pollock's, and Ansel's all expected to be on-site, punctual, and cohesive. It never made any sense for any of these "creative types" to work inside a factory-widget model, and makes even less sense now.
No, I'm not kidding. I suppose you don't like having a military, veteran's hospitals, a post office, or Medicare? You're the one kidding yourself when you claim private for-profit industry will do any of that better or for less money. In any monopoly or trust, profits=rents=tax. The taxes I currently pay on things like health insurance and Internet access are much higher overall than what I pay on government services, and I consider that taxation without representation. Tea bagger idiots would claim not to have representation in government, but they don't understand how basic democracy works, nor the limits of shareholder rights in corporations.
The US Government has many successful projects, but they are almost never "public-private partnerships" that involve for-profit companies, with an incentive to lobby and cheat. That's why I think they should have let GM go bankrupt and sold off the pieces. "Too big to fail" needs to become "too big to not sell it off in smaller pieces." The recombined AT&T monolith needs to be pieced apart in the same way, and should cleanly separate the lines from the services that run over those lines -- just as auto makers aren't allowed to own roads anymore.
This broadband 'stimulus' is looking a lot like Universal Lifeline taxes all over again. At least the incumbent monopoly telcos aren't allowed to add a "service fee" to our bills for it, and keep on charging it long after the program intentions have been fulfilled. Now they just get all the tax money up front.
Giant Oligarchs like Disney find it more cost effective to keep lawyers and lobbyists on the payroll, rather than let them be contractors or freelancers that can work for anyone else. This creates an incentive to do stupid things, like get failed 70's one-hit-wonders to extend Copyright for you in Congress, or sue anyone who dares to draw a big circle and two smaller circles together, for Copyright and/or Trademark infringement. Anything less would be considered sunk cost.
About the animated Grimm tales... In both media and technology, the best experimentation in any one area often arises by utilizing a foundation or standards set within other areas, so that they are less distracting to the newer or more experimental form. In animation, well-known fairy tales are often used as the story, so that story can be set aside to let other artistic details have the full concentration. Disney did this well, and his earliest animated films would have risked being less popular in the market than required for breaking even with development costs, had he not avoided the development costs involved with Character and Plot development. These development and public recognition costs were provided in full by Grimms' tales. All the "original" character development done by Disney in his early years was in the form of animated shorts, because a longer cinematic format would have required too much financial risk on an unproven cast.
Disney the company doesn't want any other animation studios to benefit from these basic business lessons: borrowing from the Public Domain to fill in for your weaknesses, to better concentrate on your strengths. They want to eliminate the strong base of existing media and writing, so that future animators can't benefit in the full concentration on their craft, at least not in the same way. This has nothing to do with protecting their brand or works, as they already benefit from being first-to-market in too many regards. This is all about stifling competition in their market of choice: animation. It took a whole change in medium from 2D inks to 3D computers to break that cycle. Then they bought Pixar, and ended that competition as well.
If you read the words of the US founders and those that drafted the original Copyright laws, the Public Domain wasn't an inconvenient side issue -- it was the WHOLE POINT. "Promoting the progress" was almost measured solely in terms of contributions to the Public Domain, especially where fictional works were considered. Registration was required because that was the only way of insuring that a work remained accessible to the public, even after the "owner" or "publisher" failed to keep their own records. They realized that our best inventions never stand alone. Everyone stands on the shoulders of giants -- those that came before us and laid the foundation, everything that we now know, yet we didn't have to discover on our own. Everything builds from something else that came before it. The Public Domain is what came before us, and allows us to grow further in our chosen arts. We are actively denying our own basis for progress, so a theme park owner can keep its lawyers busy.
"Dell execs who said simply that AMD's chips didn't have the performance of Intel chips"
This is like taking a statement from an Xbox fanbois, that the "PS3 can't compare to the power of the Xbox360." Unless they are backing up that claim with some actual benchmarks and recorded testing numbers, I would ignore the Dell execs' statements as being too subjective to be admissible as evidence. Major anti-competitive rebates by one processor provider would definitely make the competition suddenly look "very poor." Even if this was true at the time the Dell execs were interviewed, it definitely wasn't true for the entire period in which Dell sold Intel chips exclusively. AMD's first line of 64-bit processors trounced any of Intel's 64-bit solutions for several years, especially in terms of Win32 performance. There are benchmarks and hard numbers to back that up, from reliable third parties (Tom's Hardware Guide is a good example), so what use is the subjective statement of an active member in the collusion being investigated? The investigator did the right thing by not listening to Dell blowhards.
I bet Disney specifically timed the registered creation date of Mickey Mouse just to ruin Jazz. He was such a racist. Unfortunately, I'm not being sarcastic this time. Disney was a racist, and used his business and politics against any media or culture he disliked. I feel his racist hands reaching out from the grave at me right now! OK that last part was a little sarcastic.
Anyone duped by claims of "exporting democracy" are idiots. Any war involvement by the U.S. since WWII has been about being able to claim the most allies in the Cold War, not caring whether any of them are ruthless dictators. Any war engaged in by the U.S. since Vietnam has been about keeping oil cheaper for us than either Europe or the Russians, including and especially the Iraq invasion. We have never cared about totalitarian governments (especially theological monarchies) -- otherwise why would we be so friendly with Saudi Arabia? Even the hackneyed term "exporting democracy" has nothing to do with exporting our particular form of democracy, which almost entirely depends upon the Bill of Rights and related Amendments to the Constitution (which end stupid mistakes like slavery). We're far too willing to let other countries make stupid mistakes in their own Constitutions.
We have never fully defended any form of foreign domestic freedom of speech -- we invade with our own CNN and Fox idiots instead. All we ever defend internationally is pollution, oil, and consumerism, in that order.
A California politician who is sane about Copyright?!
"Let's face it, copyright extension these days is 'limited' to the life of Mickey Mouse."
This might be the first sane quote about Copyright that I've heard from ANY California politician, EVER. The Congress people in my district have permanent brown noses from tongue-inspecting Disney's and all the other Hollywood Studio's crevices, in confusion about where all their campaign donations are produced from.
You're right Infamous Joe. You're not supposed to be able to patent ideas -- only implementations, and hardware implementations at that. Unfortunately, the corporate lawsuit-loving courts confused all that in the "State Street" decision. Court precedent matters a great deal in patent law, because the USPTO has basically given up their responsibilities, and rubber stamped just about every form that comes through their offices, and instituted things like quota systems to help them pass even more dumb patents faster. It's harder to get a bad patent invalidated than it is to get it passed, especially if the right set of patent lawyers have their name on it. Patents are no longer about inventions -- they're all about the potential for lucrative lawsuits. Now things are nearly being set back to "normal" via the "Bilsky" decision, but the Supreme Court still has the option to take another look at "Bilsky" and screw that up too.
Of course, if the patent examiners weren't also practically monster-corp lackeys, currently on the "inside" half of the revolving door system at the USPTO, maybe these patents wouldn't get granted in the first place. Most patents can be kept from being accepted on simple grounds like *prior art* and *obviousness*. As Mike and other comments have noted in this case, all three patents are ridiculously obvious, and have a long history of prior art, even if you discount the pagers that were so ubiquitous in the 1980's. Patent renewals max out at 25 years, so any pager patents should have expired by now. Any patents on things you could do with UNIX in the 70's should have expired in the last century.
Anonymous Idiot, you're just digging your hole deeper. If you actually bother to READ the article, they are saying something more like the NFL should give away those dumb "This year in football" type DVDs in download form, because they just amount to free advertising any time they're played on another venue anyway (like ESPN when they're short on actual content). They can thus distribute their advertising materials for free, and the cost of distribution drops to $0 with tools like Bittorrent. They can use that kind of "free" to market themselves, so that more people are willing to pay $100's for tickets to the *live* show, season tickets, and crappy food. How is that not making them money? Also, the "free" games of football in the park by non-professionals you keep on bringing up are a *free form of recruitment* for the NFL, so they're directly benefiting from that sort of activity without paying a dime. Most industries have to pay for all forms of recruitment activity. How could any sane business owner consider a service that directly benefits their industry, and is completely free to them, a bad thing?
I'm a bit biased on this because I think all EULAs are worthless BS. They are usually the result of some lawyer in CYA mode rather than any consistently enforced standard or policy. Y
Your fast-food examples aren't really applicable here, because they only apply to a type of consumable that is destroyed or diminished with use. Hardware and software don't qualify in the same schema at all. Hardware can experience some small level of wear and aging from extended use, but arguments about that deal in warranty issues and not EULAs so much. Digits don't age. I guess you can try to eat your iPhone or PSP Go to make a point, but I'm not sure what that point would be -- a study of the effects of gastric acid on electronics, and subsequent warranty service?
In general, if any sense of "ownership" is entirely dependent on a "license", I don't think it really qualifies as ownership. They own it. You just lease, rent, or subscribe to it, which all amount to the same thing to me: non-ownership. It's even worse than those rent-to-own schemes, because they make even delayed-and-overpriced ownership impossible. It's just that simple. These DRM companies are the ones intentionally trying to obfuscate the reality of the transaction, and I think they should be held liable for their lack honesty.
This is part of why trends like App stores (especially walled gardens like Apple's) and the PSP Go trouble me. What you have now are hardware platforms that are trying to be engines for consumption, with a new form of consumption that can't be resold or shared, even though what is being "consumed" is both non-volatile and never diminished by use. Some of these products, like the MMO accounts mentioned, might even be considered enhanced with use and thus worth *more* at resell -- or at least they would be in a free and fair market.
I don't think these types of services should be allowed to tell you that you are "buying" anything, because if you don't have resell rights then you don't really "own" anything at the end of the transaction. What you have is a subscription with more complicated terms. At best you have a rental, not a purchase. Valve's Steam service treats their subscribers admirably given the current problems with the market field, but they still don't treat them with the basic respect other more traditional retailers do: they don't admit the truth that their customers are all subscribers, and never owners.
All purveyors of DRMed products that say you can "buy" anything from them should be held liable for false advertising at least. I think it would be more just and honest to call it fraud, and prosecute them all accordingly.
Doesn't first mover advantage really define ALL the market benefit of "on the ground" journalism? It's not like bloggers and aggregators aren't mentioning and directly linking to the sites where the "original" news broke. The only places I see that offer miniscule to zero links to original sources are the wire services like AP and Rueters, who only seem to name snippet authors and not the publication they usually call home. How can providing greater exposure and more links (which also create higher PageRank) to your ad-laden content ever be a bad thing??? I would agree if it were just all mass-plagiarism, but that's not what's happening at all. Quoting and commentary are defined as fair use precisely because they take steps to define the original source and avoid actual plagiarism. I guess this is just more proof that newsmen make terrible businessmen.
That reminds me, I need to finish this patent for "cultivated growth pattern where the female of the species can be made to produce a narcotic beneficial for stress and hunger issues" before it gets legalized...
More seriously, I would support a penalty for invalidated patents -- especially if additional penalties were applied directly to any lawyers and patent examiners involved as well. There would be an awesome and immediate "chilling effect" on lawyers taking up bad patent cases, and the examiners neglecting simple things like prior art and obviousness tests. In any case, shouldn't invalid patents cost more to all involved with the application, than patents which provide real/provable innovations? They certainly create greater costs to society!
On the post: Just Because Something's New Doesn't Mean It's Not Obvious
Re: TechDIRT Weasels / Re:
No, the constitutionally defined point is to "advance the progress" of the "useful arts and sciences." If an "invention" is not novel, useful, or progressive, nobody gives a darn how much anyone discloses any mode of said invention. Describe your method of growing rice all you want -- it's been done for over a millennium before your birth, so nobody cares anymore. If the best mode of an invention is better expressed as an actual product on a market, rather than an attempt at a government granted monopoly for an *idea* about a *possible* product, then to "advance the art" that item should just be brought to market. This can and has been done without disrupting competition via patents.
Tests like prior art and obviousness are necessary, to support these constitutional claims on the validity of the monopoly grant. Monopolies are universally harmful to open market progress, so the standards to grant them should be set extremely high, if granted at all. For being so clearly against Microsoft and other Oligopoly interests, you seem rather fond of handing out monopolies via IP, without concern to market harm.
"Teaching the invention is very costly..."
Not in all cases. The patent process can make it more expensive than necessary. Teaching is as free as writing this comment was.
"There would be no incentive to teach otherwise."
What about basic humanism? What incentive is there to keep knowledge a secret when it can benefit your community? Even self-interest dictates that if you and the people you care about can benefit from an invention, you benefit from bringing it into reality by any cost-effective means. Why is a long 25-year monopoly the only incentive you can fathom? I know plenty of Teachers who work at horrible wages, because they love the kids they teach.
Come back when you get your priorities straight. Personally, I'm pro-consumer and pro-public first on any tough market decision. If patents harm either the consumer directly (i.e. unnecessary price controls), or the public generally (i.e. methods of free operation must be licensed, even when no profit is gained), I say that makes the patents worthless. So far, your comments have been equally worthless. You're a weasel, a monopoly interest shill, and I don't understand why Mike doesn't just ban your space wasting grimace.
On the post: Just Because Something's New Doesn't Mean It's Not Obvious
Re: Re: Fix The Courts.
And with that, Mr. Riley has lost all credibility.
Spending just a little time on Slashdot or Google News feeds with keywords or tags like "East Texas" and "Patent" will show you how wrong this statement is. Just to show you I'm better at providing information sources than Mr. Riley, who tends to only include links to the organizations he shills for in his enormous signature, here's a couple of examples to get you started:
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/24/business/24ward.html
http://thepriorart.typepad.com/t he_prior_art/2008/03/judge-wards-son.html
On the post: Just Because Something's New Doesn't Mean It's Not Obvious
Re: Re: Trade Secrets vs Patents
On the post: Just Because Something's New Doesn't Mean It's Not Obvious
Re: Obviousness is subjective
OK, so one point about "obvious" is that "prior art" is actually an obviousness test. It means the "invention" was not only completed by someone else before the patent was filed, but it was fully documented in some manner portable enough to reach the patent examiner. If the prior art wasn't from an old expired patent, that also means the previous "inventor" thought it so obvious as not worth patenting. There's a non-subjective obviousness test right there.
My point about reverse-engineering costs as constituting an obviousness test is that truly new leaps in knowledge are actually pretty hard to convert into tacit knowledge, even when made explicit via physical form. Think about someone trying to reverse-engineer a modern microprocessor, without access to modern nanoscale microscopy equipment. In that case, you couldn't even see the thing you're meant to copy at any meaningful scale, because the important features are small beyond a scale you can sense. Without first having the nanoscale sensing equipment, and the tacit knowledge required to both use it and interpret its output, the modern processor is indistinguishable from magic. Even with the right sensing equipment, if you can't determine why one type of transistor spacing was used over another, you're doomed to repeat the same mistakes as the original implementer, driving the cost of reverse-engineering to the same as (or more than) original R&D. It would have been more cost effective to "license" a look at the original documentation by the original implementer. You could try to work around that by creating an absolute copy, but then you get into questions of plagiarism instead of just "innovation" value to society.
All innovation is obvious to at least one person: the implementer. If more than one person is able to implement the same thing, that makes it objectively obvious, as more than one person can perceive the same thing independently. If knowledge becomes obvious in such an objective fashion, without the help of spreading that knowledge via the patent system, then what exactly is the point of granting a patent on that knowledge?
On the post: Just Because Something's New Doesn't Mean It's Not Obvious
Registered Trade Secret
1. Progressing the arts and sciences by giving an incentive to spread specialized knowledge as it is discovered, with Patents especially about creating a new and useful thing for market.
2. Adding to the works and knowledge available to the public to build upon freely, to create new and better products.
Lawyers tend to ignore 2 and concentrate on 1 completely. 2 is assumed to be attained after Patent expiry, but too little attention is paid to how the expiry date affects generational progress. I think goal 2 is actually a bit more important than goal 1 to the "progress of the useful arts and sciences."
The argument for temporary monopolies over "inventions" is usually either that the invention will be kept a trade secret indefinitely, instead of shared, so that reverse engineering (which may contain flawed and inefficient analysis) will be required to get it into the public domain, and only after it is brought to market. In areas where reverse engineering is too easy, they argue that they need a monopoly to get a return on R&D past the initial release, or the R&D will never be funded.
The study of explicit knowledge versus tacit knowledge above explains the flaws with the R&D cost argument -- if the invention is that special and useful as to deserve a temporary monopoly, the steps to actually reproduce it will actually be quite costly, even with reverse-engineering capability. If the invention is really that new, the steps to reverse engineer it might not actually be clear to anyone "skilled in the arts." The cost of reverse-engineering could possibly qualify as the only real "obviousness" test. There is also the great advantage of being first-to-market in terms of incremental improvements and branding, that the R&D cost argument ignores.
Just going on the premise that a cost of reverse-engineering test qualifies as an obviousness test, which in turn determines the proper period a temporary monopoly should be allowed after an invention is sold to the open market, then all we need to argue about is getting the invention's original design into the public domain somehow. For that, I propose the Patent system becomes instead a Registered Trade Secret (RTS) system. The incentive for Trade Secret registration is help from the government keeping the secret from competitors, selling initial looks at the Trade Secret, and low-cost arbitration on royalty agreements after that. If anyone who bought a look at an RTS then builds a similar product, but refuses to pay royalties, that triggers an infringement case. The more complex legal wrangling only needs to take place in these infringement cases by RTS buyers. Everyone else is dependent on their own R&D and reverse-engineering capabilities. The incentive to invest in R&D then becomes the fact that you can sell Trade Secret looks and royalty agreements without expending your own resources on developing related products in-house. You also share documentation with the government, that they agree to keep secret, and that you can use in industrial espionage cases which might be difficult to prosecute otherwise. You know who to watch out for with royalty agreement violations, when they don't pay up on agreed royalty rates, yet sell a product utilizing the Trade Secret anyway.
Other companies who are able to develop similar products independently are more free to invent under RTS, from the trolls we have now under Patents. Real innovators don't have to keep on the lookout for tacitly similar patents in the current endless stream, or ignore Patents out of fear over increased damages, as they do now. Legal expenses go down all around. The RTS gets released to the public records after expiry, so the net public benefit is the same (greater, really) as if it was a Patent.
On the post: Do Hourly Employees Even Make Sense Any More?
Factory Model in the Creative Digital Industries
Everybody likes a little face time now and then, but nothing about our jobs requires it to be 5 days a week, every week. When we love our work, even 'holidays' and 'weekends' are strange abstract notions. Most of the positions here are considered "artists", or at least "technical specialists" of various types. Anyone who has ever tried to create something "inspired" knows that art doesn't happen on a clock, even in what are considered the more technical aspects. The projects tend to actually get structured correctly, in that they are based on key assets being created by reasonable deadlines, and not on a widget-per-day type model. Key dependencies can be figured out ahead of time well enough, and evolve with the projects' progression appropriately. Time is also allocated for review and polish.
It's just the use of clocks and office space that hasn't caught up to the modern world yet. It's like a building full of Michelangelo's, daVinci's, Magritte's, Van Gogh's, Dali's, Duchamp's, Pollock's, and Ansel's all expected to be on-site, punctual, and cohesive. It never made any sense for any of these "creative types" to work inside a factory-widget model, and makes even less sense now.
On the post: Broadband Stimulus Plan Keeps Looking Worse And Worse
Re: Re: Re: It's a government project
On the post: Broadband Stimulus Plan Keeps Looking Worse And Worse
Re: It's a government project
This broadband 'stimulus' is looking a lot like Universal Lifeline taxes all over again. At least the incumbent monopoly telcos aren't allowed to add a "service fee" to our bills for it, and keep on charging it long after the program intentions have been fulfilled. Now they just get all the tax money up front.
On the post: Copyright Length And The Life Of Mickey Mouse
Disney has lawyers and lobbyists to pay!
About the animated Grimm tales... In both media and technology, the best experimentation in any one area often arises by utilizing a foundation or standards set within other areas, so that they are less distracting to the newer or more experimental form. In animation, well-known fairy tales are often used as the story, so that story can be set aside to let other artistic details have the full concentration. Disney did this well, and his earliest animated films would have risked being less popular in the market than required for breaking even with development costs, had he not avoided the development costs involved with Character and Plot development. These development and public recognition costs were provided in full by Grimms' tales. All the "original" character development done by Disney in his early years was in the form of animated shorts, because a longer cinematic format would have required too much financial risk on an unproven cast.
Disney the company doesn't want any other animation studios to benefit from these basic business lessons: borrowing from the Public Domain to fill in for your weaknesses, to better concentrate on your strengths. They want to eliminate the strong base of existing media and writing, so that future animators can't benefit in the full concentration on their craft, at least not in the same way. This has nothing to do with protecting their brand or works, as they already benefit from being first-to-market in too many regards. This is all about stifling competition in their market of choice: animation. It took a whole change in medium from 2D inks to 3D computers to break that cycle. Then they bought Pixar, and ended that competition as well.
If you read the words of the US founders and those that drafted the original Copyright laws, the Public Domain wasn't an inconvenient side issue -- it was the WHOLE POINT. "Promoting the progress" was almost measured solely in terms of contributions to the Public Domain, especially where fictional works were considered. Registration was required because that was the only way of insuring that a work remained accessible to the public, even after the "owner" or "publisher" failed to keep their own records. They realized that our best inventions never stand alone. Everyone stands on the shoulders of giants -- those that came before us and laid the foundation, everything that we now know, yet we didn't have to discover on our own. Everything builds from something else that came before it. The Public Domain is what came before us, and allows us to grow further in our chosen arts. We are actively denying our own basis for progress, so a theme park owner can keep its lawyers busy.
On the post: EU Antitrust Regulator Scolded For Simply Ignoring Evidence In Intel's Favor
Re: Re:
This is like taking a statement from an Xbox fanbois, that the "PS3 can't compare to the power of the Xbox360." Unless they are backing up that claim with some actual benchmarks and recorded testing numbers, I would ignore the Dell execs' statements as being too subjective to be admissible as evidence. Major anti-competitive rebates by one processor provider would definitely make the competition suddenly look "very poor." Even if this was true at the time the Dell execs were interviewed, it definitely wasn't true for the entire period in which Dell sold Intel chips exclusively. AMD's first line of 64-bit processors trounced any of Intel's 64-bit solutions for several years, especially in terms of Win32 performance. There are benchmarks and hard numbers to back that up, from reliable third parties (Tom's Hardware Guide is a good example), so what use is the subjective statement of an active member in the collusion being investigated? The investigator did the right thing by not listening to Dell blowhards.
On the post: If Robert Johnson Died In 1938... Why Is His Music Still Covered By Copyright?
It's a Conspiracy
On the post: Iraq The Latest To Push For Internet Censorship
War Hawks never gave a crap.
We have never fully defended any form of foreign domestic freedom of speech -- we invade with our own CNN and Fox idiots instead. All we ever defend internationally is pollution, oil, and consumerism, in that order.
On the post: Rep. Lofgren: A Real Antitrust Issue That Needs Scrutiny Is Copyright
A California politician who is sane about Copyright?!
This might be the first sane quote about Copyright that I've heard from ANY California politician, EVER. The Congress people in my district have permanent brown noses from tongue-inspecting Disney's and all the other Hollywood Studio's crevices, in confusion about where all their campaign donations are produced from.
On the post: And Of Course: Twitter Sued For Patent Infringement In Texas
Re: But seriously..
Of course, if the patent examiners weren't also practically monster-corp lackeys, currently on the "inside" half of the revolving door system at the USPTO, maybe these patents wouldn't get granted in the first place. Most patents can be kept from being accepted on simple grounds like *prior art* and *obviousness*. As Mike and other comments have noted in this case, all three patents are ridiculously obvious, and have a long history of prior art, even if you discount the pagers that were so ubiquitous in the 1980's. Patent renewals max out at 25 years, so any pager patents should have expired by now. Any patents on things you could do with UNIX in the 70's should have expired in the last century.
On the post: David Levine & Michele Boldrin On New Business Models Like CwF + RtB
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
On the post: Video Game Downloads Harming The Used Video Game Market?
Re: Re: App store cage
Your fast-food examples aren't really applicable here, because they only apply to a type of consumable that is destroyed or diminished with use. Hardware and software don't qualify in the same schema at all. Hardware can experience some small level of wear and aging from extended use, but arguments about that deal in warranty issues and not EULAs so much. Digits don't age. I guess you can try to eat your iPhone or PSP Go to make a point, but I'm not sure what that point would be -- a study of the effects of gastric acid on electronics, and subsequent warranty service?
In general, if any sense of "ownership" is entirely dependent on a "license", I don't think it really qualifies as ownership. They own it. You just lease, rent, or subscribe to it, which all amount to the same thing to me: non-ownership. It's even worse than those rent-to-own schemes, because they make even delayed-and-overpriced ownership impossible. It's just that simple. These DRM companies are the ones intentionally trying to obfuscate the reality of the transaction, and I think they should be held liable for their lack honesty.
On the post: What Would Happen If Social Networking Sites Charged
Re: Classmates
My rebuttal to Lyons:
Classmates.com
QED
On the post: Video Game Downloads Harming The Used Video Game Market?
App store cage
I don't think these types of services should be allowed to tell you that you are "buying" anything, because if you don't have resell rights then you don't really "own" anything at the end of the transaction. What you have is a subscription with more complicated terms. At best you have a rental, not a purchase. Valve's Steam service treats their subscribers admirably given the current problems with the market field, but they still don't treat them with the basic respect other more traditional retailers do: they don't admit the truth that their customers are all subscribers, and never owners.
All purveyors of DRMed products that say you can "buy" anything from them should be held liable for false advertising at least. I think it would be more just and honest to call it fraud, and prosecute them all accordingly.
On the post: Is There Really A 'Piracy' Problem For Newspapers?
Gotcha Journalism = First Mover Advantage
On the post: Patents On Common Beans Rejected 10 Years Too Late
Reminds me...
More seriously, I would support a penalty for invalidated patents -- especially if additional penalties were applied directly to any lawyers and patent examiners involved as well. There would be an awesome and immediate "chilling effect" on lawyers taking up bad patent cases, and the examiners neglecting simple things like prior art and obviousness tests. In any case, shouldn't invalid patents cost more to all involved with the application, than patents which provide real/provable innovations? They certainly create greater costs to society!
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