Just what I came here to say. This isn't a failure of the patent system, it's a success: first person to play by the overlords rules gets protected from those who just want to do business without bending over backwards to appease their betters.
One commonality between Snowden and Manning was they both had access to IT infrastructure where classified material was sent in the open. If the DoD were serious about secrets, they would develop their own Linux variant with strong, default end-to-end encryption using the already-existing PKI that covers almost every government employee. That would make it much harder for system admins to see documents they have no "need to know." It might also reduce their reliance on extraordinarily expensive encryption hardware, which of course might not be palatable to those defense contractors.
Instead of spending millions on in-house exploit hunting, why not follow Google's lead and offer bounties for discovering exploits which will then be put in a public database? Economically, if the value of the bounty is greater than the value of using or selling the exploit (monetarily or otherwise) then hackers will be happy to collect the bounty. And since multiple hackers can find the same exploit, there will be competition to be the first and/or the lowest bidder.
Take apart the second phrase of your quote: the goal is "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts", and the method is "by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right..."
It doesn't have to explicitly say "solely" for Mike to be justified that the "exclusive Rights" clause has the purpose of promoting science and art.
My other pet peeve is that "limited Times" as applied to copyright has been twisted in the last century. Sure, it's limited - long after the author is dead and gone. I'm not so sure that the Constitution's authors ever dreamed it would become "by securing for the rest of their Lives and the Lives of their Children ...", or more importantly, that such long terms actually serve any public interest.
But there is another way, simply don't allow vertical monopolies in the first place! By simply separating infrastructure and service providers, other companies that don't have such a singleminded vision would explore and develop those other avenues, while the infrastructure provider charges for access.
The real infrastructure bottleneck is physical right-of-way. If governments have done such a poor job managing that, the oldest and most basic type of infrastructure, I don't know why people imagine that they can effectively manage something like fiber-optic networks.
1) The Constitution may allow us to carry big automatic guns, but that doesn't mean our governments do.
2) The gun scares are a good example of a government-manufactured boogie man (since areas with lenient gun laws have lower crime rates), so I feel like your criticism is a non sequitur. I suppose it is inconsistent on the part of Americans, but guns have been around longer and are easier to understand than computer networks.
perhaps it's just one clueless group overreacting.
They're not overreacting, they're following the fundamental principle of lawsuits: the chance of a lawsuit being successful is inversely proportional to the merits of the case and directly proportional to the square of the net worth of the defendant.
If we are unable to be alone, we are far more likely to [feel] lonely.
You hear similar things quite often: If you don't leave time for introspection, you're a less rounded person. I think there's truth to that. You can't make your kids introspective, but you can structure "alone" time into their schedules. Of course, listening to music on you iPhone and reading a book on your Kindle is as much alone time as anything previous generations did.
Again with the tax rate comparisons? Maybe no one has explained to you that capital gains taxes are taken out of money that's already been taxed (at the corporate income level). And maybe you forget that about 50% of people don't pay net income taxes, and then complain that the politicians don't care about them.
The way to get the wealthy career politicians out of office is not to have those same career politicians set the ground rules, in violation of constitutional principle. Who needs a SuperPAC more, a multi-millionaire willing to spend his money on gaining power, or Average Joe?
I agree with your analysis, but not your solution, because it's inconsistent with what you said. You say that groups (unions, corporations, PACs) can speak politically however they want and advocate whatever and whoever they want, but then you turn around and say that broadcast corporations have to be ambivalent.
The better solution is Congressional term limits. It limits the reelection-financing incentive and has the bonus effect of impeding legislation-writing because you will have more new Congresspersons every term than we typically get now.
Considering they made off not just with physical product and license keys, but caused damage and will cost the municipality money for investigation, I'd say good old digital infringement is far cheaper than actual crime. If DRM got to a point where it were unbreakable, you'd get more cases like this, where people really get hurt - maybe even killed.
If...the burden for the innovation of the world wide web had been shared across the whole user community in a very fair and reasonable manner...
Wasn't it though? Berners-Lee developed the HTTP part, someone else worked on browsers, and its development has been spread out over voluntary working groups all over the world. If it had been proprietary, even though licensed, wouldn't the development have been closed off, such as happened with Flash?
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Re: 'It's for the little guys, honest'
Classification is outdated
(untitled comment)
Why not follow private sector's lead?
Re:
Population Growth
Re:
It doesn't have to explicitly say "solely" for Mike to be justified that the "exclusive Rights" clause has the purpose of promoting science and art.
My other pet peeve is that "limited Times" as applied to copyright has been twisted in the last century. Sure, it's limited - long after the author is dead and gone. I'm not so sure that the Constitution's authors ever dreamed it would become "by securing for the rest of their Lives and the Lives of their Children ...", or more importantly, that such long terms actually serve any public interest.
Re: The same old game
The real infrastructure bottleneck is physical right-of-way. If governments have done such a poor job managing that, the oldest and most basic type of infrastructure, I don't know why people imagine that they can effectively manage something like fiber-optic networks.
Re:
2) The gun scares are a good example of a government-manufactured boogie man (since areas with lenient gun laws have lower crime rates), so I feel like your criticism is a non sequitur. I suppose it is inconsistent on the part of Americans, but guns have been around longer and are easier to understand than computer networks.
(untitled comment)
They're not overreacting, they're following the fundamental principle of lawsuits: the chance of a lawsuit being successful is inversely proportional to the merits of the case and directly proportional to the square of the net worth of the defendant.
(untitled comment)
You hear similar things quite often: If you don't leave time for introspection, you're a less rounded person. I think there's truth to that. You can't make your kids introspective, but you can structure "alone" time into their schedules. Of course, listening to music on you iPhone and reading a book on your Kindle is as much alone time as anything previous generations did.
Re: Re: Gah
The way to get the wealthy career politicians out of office is not to have those same career politicians set the ground rules, in violation of constitutional principle. Who needs a SuperPAC more, a multi-millionaire willing to spend his money on gaining power, or Average Joe?
Re: Double Standard
The better solution is Congressional term limits. It limits the reelection-financing incentive and has the bonus effect of impeding legislation-writing because you will have more new Congresspersons every term than we typically get now.
Infringement is cheaper
(untitled comment)
Wasn't it though? Berners-Lee developed the HTTP part, someone else worked on browsers, and its development has been spread out over voluntary working groups all over the world. If it had been proprietary, even though licensed, wouldn't the development have been closed off, such as happened with Flash?
Techdirt has not posted any stories submitted by Kevin L.
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