"Lawyers are not the bad guys in legal battles any more than soldiers are the bad guys in military battles, unless they are on the side against you or lose your case. "
Your analogy illustrates the distinction between actors (soldiers) and the system (the war) that simply doesn't exist with lawyers. Lawyers (for the most part) make the laws, make the regulations, become judges, and represent clients. Lawyers are thus far more responsible for the system in which they practice than any soldier might be.
Besides, just like we might "win" in Iraq and come home bankrupt and having utterly failed to make the world more secure, lawyers often deliver a "win" for their clients that means bankruptcy and business failure. In most cases, win or lose, the lawyer "wins" in a conventional sense (i.e. makes off with the cash) while the client/business/consumer pays.
Lastly, how did patents in this case do anything you claimed they did, when both sides of this fight went and bought their patents from some other organization? And I would also point out that working around patents does not uniformly progress "the useful arts" when such efforts could have been far more productively spent making their business as effective as possible.
Suppose someone publishes a patent, and I as an engineer/business person read that patent and decide it has nothing to do with my product.
Now if this "someone" sues me and wins, then they get TRIPLE damages if it can be shown I knew about the patent (i.e. willful infringement).
So to limit my liability, I very carefully AVOID reading patents as an engineer or business person, and leave the patent research to my lawyer who just gives his "yeah" or "nay", even though he hasn't a clue about the technical details of my product.
How does this "bring people together"? Sounds to me like it isolates engineers and business people. Seems to me that we don't get together until our court date.
Why doesn't someone sing "Happy Birthday" to the Hill Sisters...
... and have the music played constantly in the background of a discussion of why this song is most certainly in the Public Domain.
One might assume that someone like the EFF or even the ACLU (since this is most certainly theft from the public commons) help fight the resulting copyright suit.
Absolutely. And do not neglect the fact that getting a patent voided amounts to a removal of part of the barrier to entry into that market by a competitor.
In fact, as noted, settling is taken to imply the patent is valid, raising the barrier to entry for a competitor.
Consider: Today, NOBODY has secured all the patent rights required to build a smart phone. Not Microsoft, Not Apple, not Google, not Palm, not RIM, not HTC, not Nokia, not Motorola, etc. Everyone of these groups (and plenty of others) hold patents that could certainly be used (and are being used) in lawsuits against products in the market today.
If you believe in patents, and you believe nobody should sell a product that infringes on a patent, you are a hypocrite if you use a smart phone of any kind. I'd go further and say you shouldn't drive a car, fly in a plane, or order anything over the web.
Actually, it would be interesting to figure out if it is even possible to avoid patent infringing products short of becoming a hermit.
"...wouldn't the best approach ... be to fight any and all bogus patents?"
The answer.... No.
1) If you fight the bogus patent, you spend money that your competition does not have to spend because you get the patent thrown out.
2) Settling doesn't cost very much. You are a big company, so you can afford both to beat down the cost of settling, and paying what ever amount you negotiate.
3) Bad Patents become a much bigger barrier to entry for new comers to a market, and to start ups. Even a big company has a hard time standing by a commitment to a market that is new to them. Start ups don't have leverage to negotiate settlements, and have less money to pay.
Last, an observation. Corporate America arguably has the most powerful tool for influencing legislation: Money. So given this obvious advantage, why don't they pressure congress to change the law if patent lawsuits are bad for big business?
The answer is the generalization of the 3 observations above. No matter how much the occasional patent might annoy big business, the system favors big companies and allows them to avoid competition from startups, reduces innovation, limits disruption in their market, and thus extends the profit gained through their current business practices.
We don't get patent reform, and we don't see big business fighting stupid patents for the same reason: The status quo benefits the status quo.
As a software developer myself that developed a bit of very interesting code for a project, my story is kinda interesting. That code was very, very useful, and really deserved to be developed further, but after a year the company I was working for decided it was "good enough". The code got tied up with the client, and mostly unavailable to me going forward.
I took a contract on a similar project. I re-wrote the same bit of code with many added features and tools for yet another project. Then that one was done. And again the code gets tied up with the client.
In the end, I had nothing. So I wrote the code yet again but this time put it into an Open Source project. At my current job, I have the unique opportunity to use my code, but if I leave yet again, I will have my code to take with me.
What software developers understand is that software gets developed regardless of copyright. That is because almost everything we do ends up as work for hire. And yet the code gets written anyway.
Now with software, there is a huge amount of potential if you write a sufficiently complex and sufficiently useful piece of software even if you open source it. That is because you get to continue to work with that software, and sell your services to different companies as long as what you are working on is open source. If it is closed source, you run into all sorts of other problems even if you do complete re-writes of what you know how to do. I was lucky due to the nature of the contracts my work supported.
All of this to say, there are ways software is very different from say movies and music. There are ways we can use free distribution to leverage our work that don't make sense with media. None the less, there are many ways to leverage media using free distribution that don't make sense with software.
In the end, you sir are "dreaming" as you say. The idea that Sun's failure == Open source failure simply demonstrates how uninformed you are about Open source. There are many reasons that the CREATORS of software are protected by open source, and it is these reasons that are going to continue to drive the development of open source regardless of how many corporate stooges "dream" of the demise of Open Source.
Nobody cares about identity theft unless something IS taken away from the victim, i.e. Money or Privacy or Liability.
You steal my credit card, they you are stealing money from me (or the credit card company). You dig through my medical history, or personal life by hacking one of my accounts (My doctor's records or Facebook or my email), then I lose my privacy to the extent that you gain access to protected information. You use my name/badge to gain access to my company's work site, I am potentially liable for what you do.
The people that want to claim that this crime is "Identity Theft" are the same people that want to deny that something WAS stolen. A Bank wants to claim I lost the money taken from my account because my "Identity" was stolen rather than admit that their bank was robbed because their security sucks.
"Identity Theft" isn't a crime sans SOMETHING being taken that isn't just a copy of some of my information.
The USER pays to access the Internet, pays for the bandwidth to download said movie, pays for the media on which said movie gets stored. All for the right to pay the same $15 for the same product less the cost of the disk and packaging, less the cost of physical distribution, less the retailer's cut to provide physical store space.
I wonder why so many people DON'T think this is a good deal for the consumer?
If you installed a pencil sharpener in your office, you wouldn't expect even the possibility that it would break on the pens on your desk.
On the other hand, if you install a game on your PC, you always have a non-zero chance of breaking something else on your system (though increasingly unlikely with better operating systems...).
In this case, what you have is a "feature" where a vendor (Amazon) can punish the customer for bad behavior, but the "feature" has a bug that punishes a customer because they purchased a badly configured product.
The customer must beware that many of the digital products we buy require a network connection to call home in order to enable this "feature" of allowing a vendor to police their behavior. I have moved my household to open source to the maximum extent possible because of this and other policies becoming common in commercial software. It isn't really about the money. I can afford to buy software.
I am increasingly avoiding commercial software (like Windows, Office, OS-X, iTunes, Kindle, etc.) because open source software delivers the same functions WITHOUT the loss of privacy/freedom and WITHOUT the higher risk of error and and WITHOUT having to pay out money and over fist for the same products over and over.
I am still buying paperback books because there isn't any reasonable product that gives me the same freedom and security of a bound set of pages.
...If the media companies decided to make content available via an affordable, comprehensive, easy to use, and consumer friendly service.
Right now I pay ~3000 per year for Internet, cable services, Internet subscriptions, books, and CDs and DVDs -- Not including theater or concerts or hardware to view digital content! This is just for recorded and/or published media. And my estimate could be low.
Certainly, I have a wife that accounts for a chuck of this expense. But regardless, I am paying out this kind of money and the content industry wants even more. I say that because I watch only very rarely a Hollywood film at home, because I only have AT&T U-verse video on demand, and their offerings suck, and are hugely over priced. I don't want to bother with renting DVDs, or buying DVDs (or any other format).
I don't want to pay extra for HD content. I don't want to pay extra for 3D. I don't want to pay "convenience fees" to buy tickets online.
The only significant industry in the world that expects to raise prices and hike up profits as they add features to their product and lower their production costs is the media industry!
Where would computers be if we paid premiums, and continued to pay premiums for every improvement made to computer systems?
At some point progress in digital technology MUST make access to content cheaper to the consumer. Every year that goes by making it more expensive to access content and information will force people to find ways to access that content and information in a way they can afford.
Either the next generation will be wealthier by a huge margin than all that have gone before, to the point they don't care if Media is ever more expensive, annoying, and difficult to access, or the media industry is absolutely delusional.
Microsoft's employment agreement requires all patents to be assigned to Microsoft, regardless of when you do the work or whose resources (your own or Microsoft's) are used to develop the patent. That said, I don't know about copyrights, but I do believe that Richard Brodie wrote "Memes A Virus of the Mind" while at Microsoft, and Microsoft hasn't laid claim to the book. I don't remember anything about copyright while at Microsoft, but it's been 10 years...
I don't doubt the law is what the law is. I don't even doubt that warnings are plastered on all the machines, which kinda like a EULA supposedly lock in the customer to terms that don't make sense from the customer's perspective.
It remains that this is unfair. It also remains that glitches in a bank's system cannot be compared to a slot machine.
When you transfer funds between accounts or to another user, the transfer of those funds is the functionality the bank is selling to the customer. If a glitch failed to transfer the funds, or transfered too much money, then this behavior isn't consistent with the product the bank is selling to the customer, i.e. the ability to accurately transfer funds.
In this case, the business is selling bets. The casino chooses to purchase machines from other businesses. One assumes that the machine claims that the customer *could* win 11 million dollars (at least I haven't heard otherwise).
Then the machine indicates a payoff of 11 million. This is consistent with what a user certainly hoped for when they put money into the machine. Then AFTER the fact, the business does not pay due to a fault either in configuring the machine, or in the machine itself.
Now, I have a number of problems with this. 1) How is it the customer's responsibility to insure that a machine that claims to have a possible payout of 11 million actually does? 2) If such a machine paid out 11 million because of some fault, how can one prove that it wouldn't have given the pay out of 11 million without that fault? 3) If someone needs to cover the obligation due to an error in the programming, how is it that the business that sold the machine to the casino escapes any liability?
I could go on. I don't gamble via casinos, lotteries, etc. I gamble by buying insurance. It is the same game, placing a bet, and hoping the house will pay if they lose. My In-laws lost that bet and went bankrupt when my mother-in-law got cancer. All perfectly "legal" and consistent with the law of the land, and the fine print in the contracts.
Forgive me if I find the fact that the process in this case is "legal". It once was legal to simply shoot an American Indian if you wanted to. Doesn't make it right or moral.
The fundamental fallacy at play here is the FACT that a market system doesn't work where the business is making a bet.
If a business is making a bet, there is every incentive to market the bet as being a good one for the customer, while at the same time making the bet as bad of one for the customer as possible.
The point is that Government/regulation becomes necessary to make betting fair. Somebody has to step in and say, "Sorry bud, but you made the bet, you took the money, you lost, you pay up."
It is totally unreasonable to make the customer liable for the failures of Casinos/Health Insurance companies to do due diligence on their bets. But without regulation and government, the customer due a big payout is almost never going to get a fair shake.
There just are not any market forces that force fairness in betting where the big payouts are so few and far between.
This is why regulation and reform is needed.... If the Casino loses big, it obviously has every incentive to avoid paying out big. A bad run of luck could absolutely kill a Casino, and the investors would lose their money.
For exactly the same reasons, your health insurance company has no incentive to come through and pay for a catastrophic sort of illness, but has (for the identical reasons) every incentive to avoid paying out big. A bad run of expensive to treat illness in their insured population could absolutely kill an Insurance company, and the investors would lose their money.
The small payouts are no problem. Of course, people could self fund and make those payments for the most part and do better than they would taking out insurance. So we are sold with the idea that we need health insurance to cover us should disaster strike. But since that doesn't happen so often, it is pretty easy for Insurance companies to make the sell FOR that reason, while in reality NOT coming through should someone really get sick in an expensive way.
Yeah, it's a bummer that customers are the ones liable for the supposed mistakes of game programmers rather than the Casinos. Identically, the customers are the ones liable for any discrepancies in forms and filings for Health Insurance. In either case, nobody is going to care as long as "the house" is winning over all, but should they lose big it is the customer who stands to lose.
Who is going to seriously contend we are going to get more media and more content by granting to some "patent pool" the right to prevent even professional cameras from being used to record video?
How does this help the content creators, if their video has to pay a royalty to a patent pool even if they buy an expensive, professional camera?
All this does is put up an artificial barrier to entry by anyone starting out in video.
Patents give companies the right to prevent products from being developed and sold to customers. No patent ever gives you the right to produce a product. Any significantly complex technical product could have a thousand patents filed and granted, and still run afoul of some dinky patent held by some patent pool or patent troll.
We need to cut the number of patents by a factor of 100 or more, raise the bar on filing a patent, and pass laws that prevent any non practicing entity (patent troll) from taxing people that develop and ship products.
So many Posts, and no time to address them all....
Over and over on this thread, we have a fellow attempting to assert that copyright should by all ethics be treated as property, as a benefit to artists, painters, musicians, writers, etc.
The problem is that *copyright* has nothing to do with providing income to the writers/painters/musicians/artists. It is the right to *produce* *a* *copy*.
Copyright has historically and in the present world designed to support *publishers* not content producers. A royalty is paid to content producers as a small and mostly insignificant expense in securing the right to *copy* works for as many as 150 years under current law.
Copyright is about the rights of publishers to have monopoly rights in publishing works. Given modern technology and practice, publishers are becoming increasingly unnecessary to the whole process of developing content, copying content, and distributing content.
To the extent that publishers are unnecessary either to content producers or consumers (for which technology allows them to produce and distribute their own content), the need to pass laws to protect publishers is increasingly counter productive.
This isn't about allowing people to download anything willy-nilly. The question that should be asked is why are we passing laws that require various corporations to be paid for any use of content when they are increasingly unnecessary? Why are we blocking the preservation of content just because we cannot find the copyright owners, but at the same time allow corporations to collect royalties which they keep because *they* claim they cannot find the copyright owners?
If we really cared about content producers, we would be passing laws that require auditing of any group that claims to collect royalties for artists. We should pass laws that limit how much such corporations can keep of money collected. We should require copyrights be registered with up to date contact information for acquiring permissions from content producers and to pay content producers directly.
But you are not going to hear about such ideas from Publishers. Because they want to make the argument about *artists* when it is really about the control of content by fat middle men in the process, and for the income of fat middle men in the process.
... and it doesn't seem to me to be as even handed as Mike claims here.
Yes, the report points out existing studies are junk.
BUT balancing that, it quotes "expert" after "expert" that claim that strong IP laws promote innovation.
Not a peep about the costs to legitimate businesses due to patent lawsuits by patent trolls. Not a peep about the loss of competition due to patent thickets by established businesses.
Likewise, copyright as currently in law goes way beyond promoting the production of goods to establishing nearly perpetual content monopolies. This effect can quite clearly be demonstrated as a harm to the economy; why do so many stars just go away to live on their royalties? This increases the costs to the consumers, takes money from the artists who are trying to work, and gives it to groups (like the labels themselves) whose "product" is nothing other than to collect money from the system!
This isn't that hard to figure out. And the GAO report mostly ignores these observations.
On the post: Do We Really Need A Patent Battle Over Group Buying?
Re: On patents and lawyers
Your analogy illustrates the distinction between actors (soldiers) and the system (the war) that simply doesn't exist with lawyers. Lawyers (for the most part) make the laws, make the regulations, become judges, and represent clients. Lawyers are thus far more responsible for the system in which they practice than any soldier might be.
Besides, just like we might "win" in Iraq and come home bankrupt and having utterly failed to make the world more secure, lawyers often deliver a "win" for their clients that means bankruptcy and business failure. In most cases, win or lose, the lawyer "wins" in a conventional sense (i.e. makes off with the cash) while the client/business/consumer pays.
Lastly, how did patents in this case do anything you claimed they did, when both sides of this fight went and bought their patents from some other organization? And I would also point out that working around patents does not uniformly progress "the useful arts" when such efforts could have been far more productively spent making their business as effective as possible.
On the post: Chief Patent Judge Feigns Ignorance Of How Often Patents Are Used To Hinder Innovation
Patents "bring people together"
Suppose someone publishes a patent, and I as an engineer/business person read that patent and decide it has nothing to do with my product.
Now if this "someone" sues me and wins, then they get TRIPLE damages if it can be shown I knew about the patent (i.e. willful infringement).
So to limit my liability, I very carefully AVOID reading patents as an engineer or business person, and leave the patent research to my lawyer who just gives his "yeah" or "nay", even though he hasn't a clue about the technical details of my product.
How does this "bring people together"? Sounds to me like it isolates engineers and business people. Seems to me that we don't get together until our court date.
On the post: Reminder: Despite What You May Have Heard, Happy Birthday Should Be In The Public Domain
Why doesn't someone sing "Happy Birthday" to the Hill Sisters...
One might assume that someone like the EFF or even the ACLU (since this is most certainly theft from the public commons) help fight the resulting copyright suit.
On the post: Why Have So Many Companies Settled Over Ridiculous Patent For 'Online Music Distribution'?
Re: Re: Re: Long term
In fact, as noted, settling is taken to imply the patent is valid, raising the barrier to entry for a competitor.
Consider: Today, NOBODY has secured all the patent rights required to build a smart phone. Not Microsoft, Not Apple, not Google, not Palm, not RIM, not HTC, not Nokia, not Motorola, etc. Everyone of these groups (and plenty of others) hold patents that could certainly be used (and are being used) in lawsuits against products in the market today.
If you believe in patents, and you believe nobody should sell a product that infringes on a patent, you are a hypocrite if you use a smart phone of any kind. I'd go further and say you shouldn't drive a car, fly in a plane, or order anything over the web.
Actually, it would be interesting to figure out if it is even possible to avoid patent infringing products short of becoming a hermit.
On the post: Why Have So Many Companies Settled Over Ridiculous Patent For 'Online Music Distribution'?
Re: Long term
The answer.... No.
1) If you fight the bogus patent, you spend money that your competition does not have to spend because you get the patent thrown out.
2) Settling doesn't cost very much. You are a big company, so you can afford both to beat down the cost of settling, and paying what ever amount you negotiate.
3) Bad Patents become a much bigger barrier to entry for new comers to a market, and to start ups. Even a big company has a hard time standing by a commitment to a market that is new to them. Start ups don't have leverage to negotiate settlements, and have less money to pay.
Last, an observation. Corporate America arguably has the most powerful tool for influencing legislation: Money. So given this obvious advantage, why don't they pressure congress to change the law if patent lawsuits are bad for big business?
The answer is the generalization of the 3 observations above. No matter how much the occasional patent might annoy big business, the system favors big companies and allows them to avoid competition from startups, reduces innovation, limits disruption in their market, and thus extends the profit gained through their current business practices.
We don't get patent reform, and we don't see big business fighting stupid patents for the same reason: The status quo benefits the status quo.
On the post: Filmmaker Insists That Only People Whose Livelihood Depends On Copyright Really Understand It
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
On the post: Filmmaker Insists That Only People Whose Livelihood Depends On Copyright Really Understand It
Re: Re: Re: Infinite goods?
I took a contract on a similar project. I re-wrote the same bit of code with many added features and tools for yet another project. Then that one was done. And again the code gets tied up with the client.
In the end, I had nothing. So I wrote the code yet again but this time put it into an Open Source project. At my current job, I have the unique opportunity to use my code, but if I leave yet again, I will have my code to take with me.
What software developers understand is that software gets developed regardless of copyright. That is because almost everything we do ends up as work for hire. And yet the code gets written anyway.
Now with software, there is a huge amount of potential if you write a sufficiently complex and sufficiently useful piece of software even if you open source it. That is because you get to continue to work with that software, and sell your services to different companies as long as what you are working on is open source. If it is closed source, you run into all sorts of other problems even if you do complete re-writes of what you know how to do. I was lucky due to the nature of the contracts my work supported.
All of this to say, there are ways software is very different from say movies and music. There are ways we can use free distribution to leverage our work that don't make sense with media. None the less, there are many ways to leverage media using free distribution that don't make sense with software.
In the end, you sir are "dreaming" as you say. The idea that Sun's failure == Open source failure simply demonstrates how uninformed you are about Open source. There are many reasons that the CREATORS of software are protected by open source, and it is these reasons that are going to continue to drive the development of open source regardless of how many corporate stooges "dream" of the demise of Open Source.
On the post: Filmmaker Insists That Only People Whose Livelihood Depends On Copyright Really Understand It
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
You steal my credit card, they you are stealing money from me (or the credit card company). You dig through my medical history, or personal life by hacking one of my accounts (My doctor's records or Facebook or my email), then I lose my privacy to the extent that you gain access to protected information. You use my name/badge to gain access to my company's work site, I am potentially liable for what you do.
The people that want to claim that this crime is "Identity Theft" are the same people that want to deny that something WAS stolen. A Bank wants to claim I lost the money taken from my account because my "Identity" was stolen rather than admit that their bank was robbed because their security sucks.
"Identity Theft" isn't a crime sans SOMETHING being taken that isn't just a copy of some of my information.
On the post: Filmmaker Insists That Only People Whose Livelihood Depends On Copyright Really Understand It
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
On the post: Filmmaker Insists That Only People Whose Livelihood Depends On Copyright Really Understand It
Re: Re:
The USER pays to access the Internet, pays for the bandwidth to download said movie, pays for the media on which said movie gets stored. All for the right to pay the same $15 for the same product less the cost of the disk and packaging, less the cost of physical distribution, less the retailer's cut to provide physical store space.
I wonder why so many people DON'T think this is a good deal for the consumer?
On the post: Reminder: You Don't Own Your Ebooks; Amazon Locks Customer Out And Doesn't Respond To Help Requests
Unique to Software
On the other hand, if you install a game on your PC, you always have a non-zero chance of breaking something else on your system (though increasingly unlikely with better operating systems...).
In this case, what you have is a "feature" where a vendor (Amazon) can punish the customer for bad behavior, but the "feature" has a bug that punishes a customer because they purchased a badly configured product.
The customer must beware that many of the digital products we buy require a network connection to call home in order to enable this "feature" of allowing a vendor to police their behavior. I have moved my household to open source to the maximum extent possible because of this and other policies becoming common in commercial software. It isn't really about the money. I can afford to buy software.
I am increasingly avoiding commercial software (like Windows, Office, OS-X, iTunes, Kindle, etc.) because open source software delivers the same functions WITHOUT the loss of privacy/freedom and WITHOUT the higher risk of error and and WITHOUT having to pay out money and over fist for the same products over and over.
I am still buying paperback books because there isn't any reasonable product that gives me the same freedom and security of a bound set of pages.
On the post: Wishful Thinking: Hollywood Believes Next Generation Of Kids Will Pay For Content
Things COULD Change...
Right now I pay ~3000 per year for Internet, cable services, Internet subscriptions, books, and CDs and DVDs -- Not including theater or concerts or hardware to view digital content! This is just for recorded and/or published media. And my estimate could be low.
Certainly, I have a wife that accounts for a chuck of this expense. But regardless, I am paying out this kind of money and the content industry wants even more. I say that because I watch only very rarely a Hollywood film at home, because I only have AT&T U-verse video on demand, and their offerings suck, and are hugely over priced. I don't want to bother with renting DVDs, or buying DVDs (or any other format).
I don't want to pay extra for HD content. I don't want to pay extra for 3D. I don't want to pay "convenience fees" to buy tickets online.
The only significant industry in the world that expects to raise prices and hike up profits as they add features to their product and lower their production costs is the media industry!
Where would computers be if we paid premiums, and continued to pay premiums for every improvement made to computer systems?
At some point progress in digital technology MUST make access to content cheaper to the consumer. Every year that goes by making it more expensive to access content and information will force people to find ways to access that content and information in a way they can afford.
Either the next generation will be wealthier by a huge margin than all that have gone before, to the point they don't care if Media is ever more expensive, annoying, and difficult to access, or the media industry is absolutely delusional.
I go with delusional.
On the post: Author Claims Patents Made Industrial Revolution Possible; Then Shows Why He's Wrong
Re: You don't push the timeline back quite far enough.
The Middle ages saw a continuation of invention and progress, even if some science and culture took a hit from the fall of Rome.
The idea that the Middle ages were the "dark ages" has by most historians been put aside.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science_in_the_Middle_Ages
On the post: Judge Says Barbie Doesn't Get To Own The Bratz
Re: So what was he?
On the post: More Casinos Succeeding With The 'That Jackpot You Won Was Really A Computer Glitch' Claim
Banks don't "sell" bets
It remains that this is unfair. It also remains that glitches in a bank's system cannot be compared to a slot machine.
When you transfer funds between accounts or to another user, the transfer of those funds is the functionality the bank is selling to the customer. If a glitch failed to transfer the funds, or transfered too much money, then this behavior isn't consistent with the product the bank is selling to the customer, i.e. the ability to accurately transfer funds.
In this case, the business is selling bets. The casino chooses to purchase machines from other businesses. One assumes that the machine claims that the customer *could* win 11 million dollars (at least I haven't heard otherwise).
Then the machine indicates a payoff of 11 million. This is consistent with what a user certainly hoped for when they put money into the machine. Then AFTER the fact, the business does not pay due to a fault either in configuring the machine, or in the machine itself.
Now, I have a number of problems with this. 1) How is it the customer's responsibility to insure that a machine that claims to have a possible payout of 11 million actually does? 2) If such a machine paid out 11 million because of some fault, how can one prove that it wouldn't have given the pay out of 11 million without that fault? 3) If someone needs to cover the obligation due to an error in the programming, how is it that the business that sold the machine to the casino escapes any liability?
I could go on. I don't gamble via casinos, lotteries, etc. I gamble by buying insurance. It is the same game, placing a bet, and hoping the house will pay if they lose. My In-laws lost that bet and went bankrupt when my mother-in-law got cancer. All perfectly "legal" and consistent with the law of the land, and the fine print in the contracts.
Forgive me if I find the fact that the process in this case is "legal". It once was legal to simply shoot an American Indian if you wanted to. Doesn't make it right or moral.
On the post: More Casinos Succeeding With The 'That Jackpot You Won Was Really A Computer Glitch' Claim
Re: Re: Casinos and Health Insurance
If a business is making a bet, there is every incentive to market the bet as being a good one for the customer, while at the same time making the bet as bad of one for the customer as possible.
The point is that Government/regulation becomes necessary to make betting fair. Somebody has to step in and say, "Sorry bud, but you made the bet, you took the money, you lost, you pay up."
It is totally unreasonable to make the customer liable for the failures of Casinos/Health Insurance companies to do due diligence on their bets. But without regulation and government, the customer due a big payout is almost never going to get a fair shake.
There just are not any market forces that force fairness in betting where the big payouts are so few and far between.
On the post: More Casinos Succeeding With The 'That Jackpot You Won Was Really A Computer Glitch' Claim
Casinos and Health Insurance
For exactly the same reasons, your health insurance company has no incentive to come through and pay for a catastrophic sort of illness, but has (for the identical reasons) every incentive to avoid paying out big. A bad run of expensive to treat illness in their insured population could absolutely kill an Insurance company, and the investors would lose their money.
The small payouts are no problem. Of course, people could self fund and make those payments for the most part and do better than they would taking out insurance. So we are sold with the idea that we need health insurance to cover us should disaster strike. But since that doesn't happen so often, it is pretty easy for Insurance companies to make the sell FOR that reason, while in reality NOT coming through should someone really get sick in an expensive way.
Yeah, it's a bummer that customers are the ones liable for the supposed mistakes of game programmers rather than the Casinos. Identically, the customers are the ones liable for any discrepancies in forms and filings for Health Insurance. In either case, nobody is going to care as long as "the house" is winning over all, but should they lose big it is the customer who stands to lose.
On the post: Why Is MPEG-LA Getting Into The Patent Trolling Game?
Patents promote progress...
Who is going to seriously contend we are going to get more media and more content by granting to some "patent pool" the right to prevent even professional cameras from being used to record video?
How does this help the content creators, if their video has to pay a royalty to a patent pool even if they buy an expensive, professional camera?
All this does is put up an artificial barrier to entry by anyone starting out in video.
Patents give companies the right to prevent products from being developed and sold to customers. No patent ever gives you the right to produce a product. Any significantly complex technical product could have a thousand patents filed and granted, and still run afoul of some dinky patent held by some patent pool or patent troll.
We need to cut the number of patents by a factor of 100 or more, raise the bar on filing a patent, and pass laws that prevent any non practicing entity (patent troll) from taxing people that develop and ship products.
On the post: Washington Post Fails To Ask NBC's Rick Cotton Any Tough Questions
So many Posts, and no time to address them all....
The problem is that *copyright* has nothing to do with providing income to the writers/painters/musicians/artists. It is the right to *produce* *a* *copy*.
Copyright has historically and in the present world designed to support *publishers* not content producers. A royalty is paid to content producers as a small and mostly insignificant expense in securing the right to *copy* works for as many as 150 years under current law.
Copyright is about the rights of publishers to have monopoly rights in publishing works. Given modern technology and practice, publishers are becoming increasingly unnecessary to the whole process of developing content, copying content, and distributing content.
To the extent that publishers are unnecessary either to content producers or consumers (for which technology allows them to produce and distribute their own content), the need to pass laws to protect publishers is increasingly counter productive.
This isn't about allowing people to download anything willy-nilly. The question that should be asked is why are we passing laws that require various corporations to be paid for any use of content when they are increasingly unnecessary? Why are we blocking the preservation of content just because we cannot find the copyright owners, but at the same time allow corporations to collect royalties which they keep because *they* claim they cannot find the copyright owners?
If we really cared about content producers, we would be passing laws that require auditing of any group that claims to collect royalties for artists. We should pass laws that limit how much such corporations can keep of money collected. We should require copyrights be registered with up to date contact information for acquiring permissions from content producers and to pay content producers directly.
But you are not going to hear about such ideas from Publishers. Because they want to make the argument about *artists* when it is really about the control of content by fat middle men in the process, and for the income of fat middle men in the process.
On the post: GAO Concludes Piracy Stats Are Usually Junk, File Sharing Can Help Sales
I read through the report...
Yes, the report points out existing studies are junk.
BUT balancing that, it quotes "expert" after "expert" that claim that strong IP laws promote innovation.
Not a peep about the costs to legitimate businesses due to patent lawsuits by patent trolls. Not a peep about the loss of competition due to patent thickets by established businesses.
Likewise, copyright as currently in law goes way beyond promoting the production of goods to establishing nearly perpetual content monopolies. This effect can quite clearly be demonstrated as a harm to the economy; why do so many stars just go away to live on their royalties? This increases the costs to the consumers, takes money from the artists who are trying to work, and gives it to groups (like the labels themselves) whose "product" is nothing other than to collect money from the system!
This isn't that hard to figure out. And the GAO report mostly ignores these observations.
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