There's two parts to this. The first is that the USPTO, having now decided to pay bonus's for the inspectors granting the most patents rather than the most valid patents has ended up with a lock of dreck out there and it's the dreck the patent trolls end up using, for the most part. Then again the patent inspectors often have no expertise, much less familiarity, with a lot of the technology they're granting patents on as they hurry through it blissfully (??) unaware of things like prior art and obviousness hence one click patent.
Then there's the existence of trolls all by itself. Companies that have no intention, and never did, of bringing the invention to market. Merely to create an income flow from lawsuits. Whether or not that is shared with the inventor is unknown but I'd wager Microsoft's annual income that it isn't.
I don't know if Mike agrees with the incentive idea behind patents but I don't. Any more than I believe the incentive idea behind copyright. That it might provide an incentive is tangential to one of the major reasons it came about in the first place which was to reduce trade secrets and reveal what was in new inventions while providing exclusivity for a limited period of time. The growth of trade secrets was impeding the growth and spread of the Industrial Revolution in England in the early days and that, as much as anything, gave rise to patent laws. It was to end trade secrets and to share the information and details of the invention.
As for incentive, for the most part I don't think inventors need incentive when they begin work on what results in their invention they're trying to solve a problem or remove a roadblock that's in their way. Human's are a creative species so we'll create anyway, incentive or not. The ability to make money with what an inventor creates often comes much later once the invention is done.
I was curious about how long that line of argument would take to appear.
While there are independents out there I have to say that the logic of an inventor developing and patenting something without at least trying to build and sell the result of all that work. It strikes me that an inventor is trying to solve or fix a problem and doing nothing with the solution doesn't make a world of sense to me.
Put another way, I don't buy your doomsday argument for non-practicing entities (patent trolls) existing for that purpose or that they do exist for that purpose.
Certainly in the realm of software patents the patents we see these days are written mostly to mean just about anything the holder wants them to mean.
The reaction isn't towards the number of times I can listen to the song i bought or that it's how DRM works now it's that they want it to become, however tangentially, part of US copyright law.
Which, of course, the US will want to export as part of ACTA (revised) and TPP as part of the American attempt to have everyone adopt the exact same "IP" rules as the US has. (See Sec. 1, Subsec 3b, Para, 18, Line 7a except on days where there is a full moon in which case Para 18m Line 32fm.)
When the Green's got going they were considered marginal and a lot of the same things were said about them. While I don't expect the Pirate Party to ever serve in a coalition with cabinet ministers and everything, I didn't expect that to happen with the Greens either. Even in opposition the Green's have affected policy and public attitudes in Europe and around the world.
The problem for vendors like OpenStreetMap and MapQuest is that, like it or not, Google Maps has become normative which is different than being a monopoly. For example it doesn't come preinstalled on a PC like Windows does which has made it harder (next to impossible) for a competing OS to compete.
On trying OpenStreetMap I found an immediate problem where the Map moved my house a half mile from where it actually is. Kinda reminds me of MS's mapping software!
I found MapQuest hard to use in that once I turned a feature on I couldn't turn it off. That's probably unfamiliarity with MapQuest more than a bug/feature. At least it got my house in the right location!
Yes, I can see Google wanting to charge heavy users of the system a fee-for-access. While I don't see it as being wrong from what I'm reading they could have found a couple of hundred ways of communicating it better to customers like Wikipedia who may have been one of the largest generators of traffic to Google Maps and may have had to pay under the existing structure.
Google Maps has been monetized for years, even if it's hard to see. Each of those little pointers to businesses, churches and other locations such as museums are paid for. In their way they're ads, often invaluable, to the businesses they point to.
It's ironic that one project that's charging for access now, Google Maps, is being dropped by another that Google sponsors, Android, because of the additional costs.
My, admittedly, quick experiences with OpenStreetMap and MapQuest do illustrate one thing clearly and that's what I said at the top of this post. Google Maps are normative. People are used to it and how it works and, worse for OpenStreetMap and MapQuest, the information it contains which is nothing short of enormous.
It's not that people will reject either in the long run. The Phone directory publisher in Canada has used MapQuest for years, for example.
This leaves me to wonder if Google won't reverse itself or revise the pricing structure in order to being some of the fleeing customers/users back.
It's getting very crowded under that old patent troll bridge, isn't it? Between the cobwebs and moss, not to mention the rapidly filling outhouses the smell must be wonderful, too. Of course, trolls actually are nourished by bad smells so that doesn't bother them one little bit.
Attempting to kill off the "vagueness" of the Web or it's essential randomness through legislation, litigation, patent trolls etc would kill off the Web itself, IMHO, by taking away the core reason(s) why it works so well. It's the same dynamic that was at work in the SOPA/PIPA debate where ignorance and desperate (?) monopolists sought to censor the internet by messing with DNS.
It's the "vagueness" and openess of both the Web and the Internet that it rides on that's essential to why it works as well as it does.
And continues to provide surprises and excitement. :-)
It's a habit legislators and governments have gotten into to slide something ridiculous or that they know will be highly unpopular into a huge "omnibus" bill that is presented as something that's supposed to clean up things in existing legislation.
Canadian federal governments to this all the time, particularly with the Criminal Code. It's such a good way to sneak in something silly like this into otherwise needed legislation which, the government will say, absolutely and positively must pass or the sky will fall and civilization will end.
A lot of the cruft is still there, though. If anything troubleshooting networking has gotten worse with 7 than it was with Vista. Not all that much but worse.
Sadly they can't get rid of all the cruft, which goes back to Windows 3.1, without a full rewrite of the kernel.
Because he failed to install VLC Player? Which is always a default install when you install a new distro?
Anyway, for most things in Linux now, other than the kernel the language of choice is C++ though there's a lot of Perl, Ruby and Python floating around so there's no need to know machine code at all. :-)
Oh yeah, and he's a troll so he can't RTFM under that dark bridge of his!
You must troll at lot at places like CNET because I've seen that bit of tripe so often there that I don't even see it anymore there.
I am surprised to see it on Techdirt though.
You did know that the most popular video player for Windows other than the built in one, VLC Player, was originally developed for Linux and THEN ported to Windows. Right?
The instance of bug fixes resurrecting old ones has declined but it's still on hell of a good idea to back up your data frequently enough to be able to recover it if a bug fix not only brings the dead back to life but introduces new problems.
Windows is NOT cheap to set up in a large corporate environment, in fact it's very expensive and getting worse. Well, getting worse if you're using the out of the box "wizards" to do the set up. Use them and pray that you never have to troubleshoot anything. It's still easy to see that networking was "plugged into" Windows because no matter how pretty it looks it's still a nightmare to set up or troubleshoot unless you're comfortable on the command line. You know, the DOS that isn't there anymore according to MS and their apologists.
In most Linux distros, for example, network set up doesn't need a visit to the command line anymore to work and those times where, when you're troubleshooting the tools at the command line give you a ton more useful information than any Windows box does. Mandriva's control centre is a dream come true for that kind of work. Something MS could learn from. Unlike the Windows equivalent that hops and jumps all over the place and when you do find what you want it doesn't seem to do much of anything. More to do with horrible menu/link design than any inherent superiority of Linux tools though in the majority of cases I'd argue that Linux has far better tools for that.
In a little case study we did at my employer we configured 100 machines across a TCP/IP network and discovered much to our horror that configuring the 50 Windows machines took three times longer to configure properly than the Linux boxes did, on average, and up to 10 times longer on some tasks. So relatively cheap isn't what Windows is.
People are, however, end users in particular, resistant to change. Show them a Linux desktop running GNOME and they freak out. KDE does better because it resembles Windows in many ways but it LOOKS different. Not that in, most ways, GNOME and KDE operate exactly the same as Windows does on the desktop. So there's the resistance point. It looks different. That's about it.
Still, the DRM argument still holds true. It's silly and restricts the market for ebooks rather than expands it which is absolutely daft for publishers to do.
While you do have a point about old and abandoned file formats like old Word documents there's a host of open source software that will read it and import it into OpenOffice, LibreOffice and, yes, even MS Office.
One of the biggest reasons I don't buy ebooks is the specific device requirements of the ones sold by Amazon and Apple. It's too much of a pain to get around both that and the DRM to make it worthwhile for me. The last thing I need is another device/gadget!
Reinstatement as a result of a DCMA take down notice is supposed to occur when the site removes the link to the allegedly offending file. No high powered relatives required.
That and Soundscope was probably bombarded by messages from Jamie's fans that basically asked WTF and demanded the site back on line. No doubt they played a major role too.
It's curious that you don't acknowledge the disconnect and dissonance between creation and ownership. Jamie merely did what musicians and arrangers have done for centuries which is remix something old into something new and, perhaps, providing exposure and sales for the new.
Handel did it, Beethoven did it, Led Zeppelin never stopped doing it to the point of note for note copies on which they then claimed authorship of the songs. Jamie did it and landed in a boiling pot of soup for doing it.
Of course, IP extremists didn't exit for Handel, Beethoven, or Zep nor did they exist for those who "stole" whole songs sans lyrics and stuffed them into Hymnals, a lot of which became some of our culture's favourite hymns which were, and continue to be, remixed into folk, country, rock, blues, jazz, show tunes, electropop, hip hop, and many other forms.
Yes, in one sense (not the copyright sense) there's a direct link between ownership between the creator of music and ownership. One that should always be acknowledged and supported. Sadly, in the copyright sense these days, in the vast majority of cases the creator of music, through assignment, has signed that copyright ownership over to a label, who then bring billing agencies like BMI/ASCAP and others into the picture all of whom take a cut of sales long before the creator sees one red cent from their creation. IF they ever do.
NOW, that's disrespect to the creator if there ever has been. And that's the biggest problem with the current copyright regime and how it plays out in practice. Labels create zilch. Unless you count confusion and chaos as creation.
Yet the labels, and you, demand we respect them and follow THEIR rules as chaotic and confused as they are. Talk about demanding artificial respect!
If current trends result in a complete rethink of copyright and how it works in the real world (as opposed to the *AA's world) I'll cheer it on. If that means the death of a concept born in a world of dead tree books and publishers constantly undercutting each other by printing the same title at the same moment then I'll be there to cheer it on. Megaphone in hand. If it means the appearance of a new form of "copyright" more appropriate for the digital age that ensures creators, not corporations, get paid first for their work I'll turn my megaphone up to 10 and really get to cheering.
Label's create nothing. Let's get that clear from the start.
Alienating fans has far more to do with non-creative entities howling about how creative they are than living in "the hood" or the yard of a high school where two over hormoned teenagers square off.
I used "a few seconds" more to illustrate the absurdity of it all.
Everything else you say I'd agree with and I'd agree that's what's going on.
It does speak volumes when you say the left and right hands of RIAA members don't know what each of them are doing. And it's not a surprise. :(
It happens when one part of the label's "brain" is obsessed and fixated by piracy while the other lobe is trying to promote the label's artists by releasing acapellas to prominent DJs for exposure and promotion.
Obession and fixation always win over good sense and actually conducting a successful business.
On the post: It's Time To Re-Establish That If A Patent Blocks Progress, It's Unconstitutional
Re:
Then there's the existence of trolls all by itself. Companies that have no intention, and never did, of bringing the invention to market. Merely to create an income flow from lawsuits. Whether or not that is shared with the inventor is unknown but I'd wager Microsoft's annual income that it isn't.
I don't know if Mike agrees with the incentive idea behind patents but I don't. Any more than I believe the incentive idea behind copyright. That it might provide an incentive is tangential to one of the major reasons it came about in the first place which was to reduce trade secrets and reveal what was in new inventions while providing exclusivity for a limited period of time. The growth of trade secrets was impeding the growth and spread of the Industrial Revolution in England in the early days and that, as much as anything, gave rise to patent laws. It was to end trade secrets and to share the information and details of the invention.
As for incentive, for the most part I don't think inventors need incentive when they begin work on what results in their invention they're trying to solve a problem or remove a roadblock that's in their way. Human's are a creative species so we'll create anyway, incentive or not. The ability to make money with what an inventor creates often comes much later once the invention is done.
On the post: It's Time To Re-Establish That If A Patent Blocks Progress, It's Unconstitutional
Re: making or selling a product
While there are independents out there I have to say that the logic of an inventor developing and patenting something without at least trying to build and sell the result of all that work. It strikes me that an inventor is trying to solve or fix a problem and doing nothing with the solution doesn't make a world of sense to me.
Put another way, I don't buy your doomsday argument for non-practicing entities (patent trolls) existing for that purpose or that they do exist for that purpose.
Certainly in the realm of software patents the patents we see these days are written mostly to mean just about anything the holder wants them to mean.
On the post: Are New Streaming Royalty Rates A Way To Backdoor DRM Into Copyright Law?
Re: Re:
Which, of course, the US will want to export as part of ACTA (revised) and TPP as part of the American attempt to have everyone adopt the exact same "IP" rules as the US has. (See Sec. 1, Subsec 3b, Para, 18, Line 7a except on days where there is a full moon in which case Para 18m Line 32fm.)
On the post: Pirate Parties Continue To Grow In Europe As People Get Sick Of Politics As Usual
Re:
Much the same could happen here, in the long run.
On the post: Pirate Parties Continue To Grow In Europe As People Get Sick Of Politics As Usual
Re: Re:
By the way, it's lion cub reading the book, not a tiger :-)
On the post: Google Maps Exodus Continues As Wikipedia Mobile Apps Switch To OpenStreetMap
On trying OpenStreetMap I found an immediate problem where the Map moved my house a half mile from where it actually is. Kinda reminds me of MS's mapping software!
I found MapQuest hard to use in that once I turned a feature on I couldn't turn it off. That's probably unfamiliarity with MapQuest more than a bug/feature. At least it got my house in the right location!
Yes, I can see Google wanting to charge heavy users of the system a fee-for-access. While I don't see it as being wrong from what I'm reading they could have found a couple of hundred ways of communicating it better to customers like Wikipedia who may have been one of the largest generators of traffic to Google Maps and may have had to pay under the existing structure.
Google Maps has been monetized for years, even if it's hard to see. Each of those little pointers to businesses, churches and other locations such as museums are paid for. In their way they're ads, often invaluable, to the businesses they point to.
It's ironic that one project that's charging for access now, Google Maps, is being dropped by another that Google sponsors, Android, because of the additional costs.
My, admittedly, quick experiences with OpenStreetMap and MapQuest do illustrate one thing clearly and that's what I said at the top of this post. Google Maps are normative. People are used to it and how it works and, worse for OpenStreetMap and MapQuest, the information it contains which is nothing short of enormous.
It's not that people will reject either in the long run. The Phone directory publisher in Canada has used MapQuest for years, for example.
This leaves me to wonder if Google won't reverse itself or revise the pricing structure in order to being some of the fleeing customers/users back.
On the post: Early Mobile Internet Company That Failed To Adapt Becomes Patent Troll
On the post: The First Analysis Of The Web: Vague, But Exciting
Re: The web is only beginning...
It's the "vagueness" and openess of both the Web and the Internet that it rides on that's essential to why it works as well as it does.
And continues to provide surprises and excitement. :-)
On the post: Italian 'Blog Killer' Law Rises From the Grave
Canadian federal governments to this all the time, particularly with the Criminal Code. It's such a good way to sneak in something silly like this into otherwise needed legislation which, the government will say, absolutely and positively must pass or the sky will fall and civilization will end.
On the post: Did The Publisher's Own Insistence On DRM Inevitably Lead To The Antitrust Lawsuit Against Them?
Re: Re: Re: Re: Humans!
Sadly they can't get rid of all the cruft, which goes back to Windows 3.1, without a full rewrite of the kernel.
On the post: Did The Publisher's Own Insistence On DRM Inevitably Lead To The Antitrust Lawsuit Against Them?
Re: Re: Re: Humans!
Anyway, for most things in Linux now, other than the kernel the language of choice is C++ though there's a lot of Perl, Ruby and Python floating around so there's no need to know machine code at all. :-)
Oh yeah, and he's a troll so he can't RTFM under that dark bridge of his!
On the post: Did The Publisher's Own Insistence On DRM Inevitably Lead To The Antitrust Lawsuit Against Them?
Re: Re: Humans!
I am surprised to see it on Techdirt though.
You did know that the most popular video player for Windows other than the built in one, VLC Player, was originally developed for Linux and THEN ported to Windows. Right?
On the post: Did The Publisher's Own Insistence On DRM Inevitably Lead To The Antitrust Lawsuit Against Them?
Re: Re: Re: Humans!
Windows is NOT cheap to set up in a large corporate environment, in fact it's very expensive and getting worse. Well, getting worse if you're using the out of the box "wizards" to do the set up. Use them and pray that you never have to troubleshoot anything. It's still easy to see that networking was "plugged into" Windows because no matter how pretty it looks it's still a nightmare to set up or troubleshoot unless you're comfortable on the command line. You know, the DOS that isn't there anymore according to MS and their apologists.
In most Linux distros, for example, network set up doesn't need a visit to the command line anymore to work and those times where, when you're troubleshooting the tools at the command line give you a ton more useful information than any Windows box does. Mandriva's control centre is a dream come true for that kind of work. Something MS could learn from. Unlike the Windows equivalent that hops and jumps all over the place and when you do find what you want it doesn't seem to do much of anything. More to do with horrible menu/link design than any inherent superiority of Linux tools though in the majority of cases I'd argue that Linux has far better tools for that.
In a little case study we did at my employer we configured 100 machines across a TCP/IP network and discovered much to our horror that configuring the 50 Windows machines took three times longer to configure properly than the Linux boxes did, on average, and up to 10 times longer on some tasks. So relatively cheap isn't what Windows is.
People are, however, end users in particular, resistant to change. Show them a Linux desktop running GNOME and they freak out. KDE does better because it resembles Windows in many ways but it LOOKS different. Not that in, most ways, GNOME and KDE operate exactly the same as Windows does on the desktop. So there's the resistance point. It looks different. That's about it.
On the post: Microsoft: Open Standards Are Good... If They're The Open Standards We Get Paid For
Re: Re: Re: FRAND-lexic?
On the post: Did The Publisher's Own Insistence On DRM Inevitably Lead To The Antitrust Lawsuit Against Them?
Re: Two major players?
On the post: Did The Publisher's Own Insistence On DRM Inevitably Lead To The Antitrust Lawsuit Against Them?
Re:
One of the biggest reasons I don't buy ebooks is the specific device requirements of the ones sold by Amazon and Apple. It's too much of a pain to get around both that and the DRM to make it worthwhile for me. The last thing I need is another device/gadget!
On the post: When The Kids Of Major Label Execs Get Accused Of Infringement...
Re:
On the post: When The Kids Of Major Label Execs Get Accused Of Infringement...
Re:
That and Soundscope was probably bombarded by messages from Jamie's fans that basically asked WTF and demanded the site back on line. No doubt they played a major role too.
On the post: When The Kids Of Major Label Execs Get Accused Of Infringement...
Re: Re: Most striking
Handel did it, Beethoven did it, Led Zeppelin never stopped doing it to the point of note for note copies on which they then claimed authorship of the songs. Jamie did it and landed in a boiling pot of soup for doing it.
Of course, IP extremists didn't exit for Handel, Beethoven, or Zep nor did they exist for those who "stole" whole songs sans lyrics and stuffed them into Hymnals, a lot of which became some of our culture's favourite hymns which were, and continue to be, remixed into folk, country, rock, blues, jazz, show tunes, electropop, hip hop, and many other forms.
Yes, in one sense (not the copyright sense) there's a direct link between ownership between the creator of music and ownership. One that should always be acknowledged and supported. Sadly, in the copyright sense these days, in the vast majority of cases the creator of music, through assignment, has signed that copyright ownership over to a label, who then bring billing agencies like BMI/ASCAP and others into the picture all of whom take a cut of sales long before the creator sees one red cent from their creation. IF they ever do.
NOW, that's disrespect to the creator if there ever has been. And that's the biggest problem with the current copyright regime and how it plays out in practice. Labels create zilch. Unless you count confusion and chaos as creation.
Yet the labels, and you, demand we respect them and follow THEIR rules as chaotic and confused as they are. Talk about demanding artificial respect!
If current trends result in a complete rethink of copyright and how it works in the real world (as opposed to the *AA's world) I'll cheer it on. If that means the death of a concept born in a world of dead tree books and publishers constantly undercutting each other by printing the same title at the same moment then I'll be there to cheer it on. Megaphone in hand. If it means the appearance of a new form of "copyright" more appropriate for the digital age that ensures creators, not corporations, get paid first for their work I'll turn my megaphone up to 10 and really get to cheering.
Label's create nothing. Let's get that clear from the start.
Alienating fans has far more to do with non-creative entities howling about how creative they are than living in "the hood" or the yard of a high school where two over hormoned teenagers square off.
Give me the new model any day.
On the post: When The Kids Of Major Label Execs Get Accused Of Infringement...
Re: Re: Re:
Everything else you say I'd agree with and I'd agree that's what's going on.
It does speak volumes when you say the left and right hands of RIAA members don't know what each of them are doing. And it's not a surprise. :(
It happens when one part of the label's "brain" is obsessed and fixated by piracy while the other lobe is trying to promote the label's artists by releasing acapellas to prominent DJs for exposure and promotion.
Obession and fixation always win over good sense and actually conducting a successful business.
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