It is my understanding the Reuters itself or the shareholders who make up Reuters also own a large stake in AP.
Funny how everyone differentiates between the two.
It is kind of like picking between the now defunct Firebird or a Camaro which were both owned by the same company. It is the kind of choice I imagine that exists in the "news" industry nowadays.
Microsoft has pushed their way into the gaming industry in ways that have truly disgusted me. From trying to control PC gaming to their attempt to enter the console industry Microsoft has done little but imitate competition and bully their way into the gaming world.
They have NO business in the gaming world IMHO. Small independent game developers have consistently delivered better products before they first dipped their toes into gaming. This scares Microsoft so much that they will invariable use intellectual property to ensure their foothold.
When a system is abused this badly there really is only one choice, elimination. It is the only logic way to proceed at this juncture. We did it for welfare, so I think we can do it for wealthfare...lol
Reform is just an excuse to keep abusing an already broken system.
It is clear that once again corporate lobbying has done what it is supposed to. Eliminate diversity and push everyone into their ever growing pocket book.
How is it fair to put the interests of a single organization so far above the interests of the masses?
I would like to feel outrage, but after watching this same old corporate story my whole life I am getting pretty numb. One thing I have decided is that the corporatization and consolidation of American Business was pushed through on a highway of lies.
I remember the rhetoric when I was a kid and there were still a huge amount of family businesses around. Corporations billed themselves as providing better quality, superior services, and great employment. Twenty years I see now that is was just a lip-service so they could grab as much cash as possible and destroy forever choice as we knew it.
Tell me how we are better off nowadays with a McDonald's and Walmart on every corner? We have less choice than ever before, crap-ass pay, and products that can only be described as inferior. The money no longer stays in our communities and is instead shipped to banks in other states.
American Business is now a sad precession of people's time and energy into the abyss of big business backed by government regulation and corporate law. IP law is just another tool in the box of corporate tricks to force the little guy to roll over. The describes clearly what is now the Web Casters fate.
"PS: Guess how the book companies competed with xeroxing! By releasing low cost locally written textbooks :)"
Innovation, it is what happens when governments don't protect business models.
The title of you posts strikes me though. We have very ethnocentric thinking in the US of A. I would cation this assumption that India of China eventually has to join us with our bizarre obsession with IP.
They will likely relent somewhat when it comes to adopting IP laws, but I doubt they will ever embrace it the way we have.
"But those companies want to be compensated for all the research and testing."
From the peer-reviewed studies I have read 99% of these companies have recouped these costs in the first 1-3 years.
Mike has suggested that companies get exclusive rights to sell a product for a period of time as opposed to using IP law. I find that solution workable.
As far as crowd-sourcing it would likely be a pot that private and public entities invested in. The money could be paid out per solution to individuals/entities much like is already happening in the open source programming world. In this way the lightweight and quick innovators would get the rewards and they could be shared openly with anyone.
No idea if this would work, but it is interesting to consider.
"While I think the argument over whether or not IP law fosters or inhibits innovation is a worthy one, I don't think it matters in the long run."
Yes, things have a funny way of working out like this and I agree with your reasoning. I just hate to see companies with business models in their death-throws attacking and clawing at everyone as they go down.
"Boy those Toyota patents sure stifled innovation. Wait...what???"
No, it just makes so only the largest mega-corporation could ever produce such a good without getting the crap sued out of them. In your patent friendly world only people with a team of lawyers could ever hope to innovate and produce successfully.
In this way Patents lock in business models of those who can protect/fight for their concepts in extended legal battles. What does this have to do with innovation again?
Keep in mind the most innovative car business started in people's back yards. I guess that it just plain off limits in the new patented world.
Have you examined Ford Patents on Hybrid versus Toyota? Are they really that different and innovative compared to each other or did they just take an idea that has been running on every diesel train in the nation and applied it to a car?
"The proper use is to allow some exclusivity on a product or design for a certain period of time"
This would be an excellent solution to solve the patent conundrum.
On the other hand if the government just got out of the business of protecting business models who knows what would happen. Maybe cooperative development with competitors so R&D costs are reduced, better ideas are produced, and no-one can rip-off because they are all invested in the research as well.
This is what I see the future becoming. Not giant corporations spending billions of dollars on research that another giant corporation is already conducting.
The amount of waste that IP law produces in my mind is staggering and that doesn't even consider the court costs.
Technology can either free us or enslave us. It can give us more time to spend with friends and family or it can make it possible to spend even more time at work.
The question is where do we want technology to lead us? A Utopian future of unlimited resources proposed by Gene Roddenberry or something along the lines of 1984.
By ignoring the implications of technology and spending progressively more time on issues like Roe Vs Wade we are missing much more critical changes to our future. Privacy as we know it is quickly coming to an end thanks to many implementations of technology.
Cloning is real and genetically altering people is more than likely already happening. These uses of technology will have huge impacts on our society but no-one is considering them in open debate.
We need to think generations ahead into the future, this us what good planners do. The time for "here and now" politics has passed, we need real leadership not a lip-service. We owe it to future generations to start tackling the hard questions of our future now rather than passing the buck until it is too late.
IP is obviously butting heads with technology and has been doing so since its very inception. Intellectual property goes against the very notion of human cooperation and cultural development.
It is impossible to enforce and impractical for numerous reasons besides. As I have said before, IP is simply DOA for the 21st century.
Nothing could make me happier than seeing IP law becoming obsolete in the near future. The only problem with this is there are not enough influential organizations against the notion of IP.
It really is a human rights issue at the core which does not bring many people to the table due to IP being very abstract by nature.
A better way to frame the debate is to show the possibilities for diversity and advancement once IP law has been eliminated. A few case studies on the technology development in China, which openly ignores IP, would probably be the smoking gun to show how quickly things can progress without lawyers deciding how advancement should happen.
This is good for developing countries but will likely result in a dramatic deflation of the value of IP in the modern world over time, hence why we are trying to ram IP down the throat of the world at large.
I for one don't care because I don't spend time investing time or money in an imaginary system designed to restrict technology, meter development, and oppress human culture.
"United States is not really a collectivist society."
Go Home Doctor Strange opinions and get a clue, we would not exist without cooperation. Collectivist Society? Next thing you will be accusing me of communism lol
"As if corporations were some golem wholly independent of the people that constitute them."
Corporation have taken a life of their own on. It is NOT a matter of free association rather over a hundred years of corporate law that has brought them to this point. I don't think you have even considered this.
"I cannot parse this sentence."
No surprise there, you would have actually read the previous post I was responding to.
"Have you ever worked and interacted with academics?"
I graduated with high honors from UW. I have debated how academia controls information and how that can hinder development of concepts and theories. You have never even thought along these lines. Information control to you is a conspiracy, you have no background in communications or social policy.
I see by the end of your post you did call me a communist? Wow, you have fallen into one of the most inbred rhetoric of all, congrats. No surprise here :)
"I'm sorry if, by selling the products of my own independent work rather than giving them all away, I'm stealing your culture."
You are obviously an intelligent person but you do not understand the context of my debate around IP.
The problem with reform is the concept of IP is flawed to begin with. IP law and theory goes against the way we have been communicating and expressing ideas/works for our entire human history.
You say there is no such thing as cultural Nazism, but their are clearly many example of IP being used as a tool to suppress freedom of expression. Clearly many examples of Patent abuse. Obvious misuse of the copyright system to bully companies into consolidation or sell-out.
The most important part of this is that there are no studies to prove the effectiveness of IP law. There is no meat to the idea that IP does anything beneficial for society at large. What is really needed here is some serious research level studies on this topic.
You argument is very quaint, but it is on a micro level where IP theory and law has little impact unless you consider how information is controlled at a University level. The "Ivory Towers" of information control and how that hinders advancement is yet another debate about IP theory and law.
The concept that we need to protect people's ideas and works is really ridiculous in my mind. The idea that you need to protect your works is also ridiculous. You create, you get paid, end of story. Why do we need to extend special protections? Without solid reasoning there is none.
Your ascertain that you are stealing my culture is FALSE. Your pro-IP position in effect is enslaving our culture so that corporations can make a buck. This connects into corporations and the fact that they have legal personhood and how it effects the balance of power in our society.
In the end I fear you think you have created your books, papers, etc. all by yourself. In reality know that every part of your existence is because of countless people before you. Your thoughts are OWED to the human race just as your ancestors offered their thoughts up to you.
IP theory and its implementations seek to control these thoughts, to created walls between information, to thrust the individual above the context that has allowed him/her to exist. It is an extensive of selfishness and a new modern form of slavery.
"I can't, not because I'm "full of it," but because you have defined originality so narrowly as to make the set of original works zero. In doing so, you have advanced no helpful argument."
There are no original works made by individuals in a vacuum is my point. This does go against the way you define "original" because it does not really exist in my mind.
Your a teacher eh? Well then you are on the front lines of this insanity that has become the equivalent of cultural Nazism. When we continue to push students to "create" everything originally it becomes very plain with technology that very few things that are written have not been written many thousands of times before.
With a population of 6 billion + people on this planet how long can we truly fool ourselves into believing we really came up with something that someone else hasn't thought of or created already?
It is obvious to me at least that we need to re-think the argument around IP. It is flawed, so very flawed....
Anon, I think you are very confused about the whole process of creation in general. Riding on the shirttails is why were are here today. The fact that you can't recognize this shows your buying into a rhetoric invented by IP right holders and that you are ignoring thousands of years of human culture.
There is nothing "orgininal" about Harry Potter anyways. Did JK invent a single concept that is contained in her books? No, everything existed in prior works.
Trying to protect her "content" is like saying that you need protection after you created a culinary masterpiece by adding Dijon mustard to your McDonald' hamburger.
Furthermore your argument about dilution is absurd and reeks of someone who doesn't believe that there is any freedom in the market place. By your judgment whenever anyone copies anything it takes away from the original. I guess no-one should be reading J.R. Tolkien then?
"Over philosophized pronouncements that ignore ambiguity and ignore the practical realities that most cultural members can intuit"
Most people 300 years ago could "intuit" that slavery was the best way to increase production.
Trying to push what Mike is saying into some philosophical existentialism is like trying to say that abolitionists were just high minded jerks who couldn't see the truth that slaves made money.
When you get ready to pull your head out of your ass and take a look around at "reality" we will be waiting to resume this conversation....
Amen!? I think you guys missed the whole point here.
There are NO ORIGINAL WORKS PERIOD. One only has to do a quick survey of writing, songs, and art to see the same patterns repeating again and again.
If someone can think of your same idea/concept/art/invention without seeing your work directly then that is a good bet there is nothing original about it. This is true for just about everything that is created nowadays and I challenge you to prove it otherwise.
Everything that is created is not made in a vacuum. Try seeing what a boy raised by wolves creates.... A masterpiece of art? A great song? A new invention?
It is our culture that creates and corporations that claim ownership of that creation. They are stealing what is not theirs and attempting to control the very fabric of our culture.
This may not necessarily be a bad thing if corporations didn't put the almighty dollar above everything, even the above the worth of the people that make it possible for them to exist.
There is only one way to describe an entity that puts more value on money than human being's health and happiness.
Sociopathic
The truth is that the money grubbers of this world are using IP law to their own benefit at the detrement of our whole society.
I challenge you to show me truly original works, works created in a vacuum without society to build upon... You can't cause your full of it!
Great examples of how creative works of our culture have always been based upon prior works.
If you look at the oral tradition, a tradition that kept our culture going for thousands of years, you see the very foundations of our social interactions and social awareness. Nobody owns the works of our culture.
Take even a modern high budget movie. So Sony says they "own" it, but without the context of our culture and all the people that worked together to make it happen and then all the people that watched it and appreciated it it would be meaningless.
I wish people would appreciate how creativity happens and embrace the reality that copyrights and IP law in general are about opression. It is not nor has it ever been about protecting the people that actually create.
I for one do not want to give up the creative freedom that made us who we are.
Do the third world countries a favor and eliminate IP law now before this stupidity continues.
IP law is not supported by any evidence period. There may be many correlations that support it, but they are just that.
The simple reason is that IP law does not help people create. It is not now, nor has it ever been desgned to help you create.
In fact, it is designed to do just the opposite. To tell you what you can not do, or to limit your ability to create.
There is a whole faulty logic built around the need for IP in the modern marketplace, but it doesn't change the simple fact that it is anti-creation and therefore anti-freedom.
I think your confusing correlation with causation. IP law has nothing to do with creation. Plus the huge advances in technology were well before modern courts, modern copyright law and (shudder) copyright attorneys. One only has to look at the number of increasing IP litigations yearly to see the real trend
Our fast paced advancement has also teetered off. We are no longer striving for great things. Instead companies, more concerned with profits, have used IP law as a way to stifle competition keeping a meter on advancement.
Why don't I have a portable device that can also RECORD!? Waaaiit I though IP law wasn't holding things back? A quick look into portable devices coming from Korea show amazing advancement like the old Cowon A2.
Devices like the Cowon A2 couldn't even be produced in the US even though there would be demand for the features due to IP related laws.
Choice is truly an illusion in our modern world. Choices that are decided for you are not really choices at all.
I do not agree with your money argument. People have many thousands times more money tied up in the drug trade than they have in Intellectual Property. Does this somehow legitimize selling crack? Just because it makes money and people are heavily invested in it doesn't mean it suddenly is validated in my eyes.
IP laws are inherently anti-freedom. Your speak of reform, but it looks like a new form of technological and cultural slavery to me. You want to reform slavery? Too late, the money lenders alerady did :)
Reuters and AP sitting in a tree
It is my understanding the Reuters itself or the shareholders who make up Reuters also own a large stake in AP.
Funny how everyone differentiates between the two.
It is kind of like picking between the now defunct Firebird or a Camaro which were both owned by the same company. It is the kind of choice I imagine that exists in the "news" industry nowadays.
Microsoft patents stupidity
They have NO business in the gaming world IMHO. Small independent game developers have consistently delivered better products before they first dipped their toes into gaming. This scares Microsoft so much that they will invariable use intellectual property to ensure their foothold.
When a system is abused this badly there really is only one choice, elimination. It is the only logic way to proceed at this juncture. We did it for welfare, so I think we can do it for wealthfare...lol
Reform is just an excuse to keep abusing an already broken system.
Say goodbye to the little guy
How is it fair to put the interests of a single organization so far above the interests of the masses?
I would like to feel outrage, but after watching this same old corporate story my whole life I am getting pretty numb. One thing I have decided is that the corporatization and consolidation of American Business was pushed through on a highway of lies.
I remember the rhetoric when I was a kid and there were still a huge amount of family businesses around. Corporations billed themselves as providing better quality, superior services, and great employment. Twenty years I see now that is was just a lip-service so they could grab as much cash as possible and destroy forever choice as we knew it.
Tell me how we are better off nowadays with a McDonald's and Walmart on every corner? We have less choice than ever before, crap-ass pay, and products that can only be described as inferior. The money no longer stays in our communities and is instead shipped to banks in other states.
American Business is now a sad precession of people's time and energy into the abyss of big business backed by government regulation and corporate law. IP law is just another tool in the box of corporate tricks to force the little guy to roll over. The describes clearly what is now the Web Casters fate.
Re: Cost of doing business with western world!
Innovation, it is what happens when governments don't protect business models.
The title of you posts strikes me though. We have very ethnocentric thinking in the US of A. I would cation this assumption that India of China eventually has to join us with our bizarre obsession with IP.
They will likely relent somewhat when it comes to adopting IP laws, but I doubt they will ever embrace it the way we have.
Re: What about pharmaceuticals and biomed?
From the peer-reviewed studies I have read 99% of these companies have recouped these costs in the first 1-3 years.
Mike has suggested that companies get exclusive rights to sell a product for a period of time as opposed to using IP law. I find that solution workable.
As far as crowd-sourcing it would likely be a pot that private and public entities invested in. The money could be paid out per solution to individuals/entities much like is already happening in the open source programming world. In this way the lightweight and quick innovators would get the rewards and they could be shared openly with anyone.
No idea if this would work, but it is interesting to consider.
Re: Re: Not surprising
Yes, things have a funny way of working out like this and I agree with your reasoning. I just hate to see companies with business models in their death-throws attacking and clawing at everyone as they go down.
Innovation vs. Litigation
No, it just makes so only the largest mega-corporation could ever produce such a good without getting the crap sued out of them. In your patent friendly world only people with a team of lawyers could ever hope to innovate and produce successfully.
In this way Patents lock in business models of those who can protect/fight for their concepts in extended legal battles. What does this have to do with innovation again?
Keep in mind the most innovative car business started in people's back yards. I guess that it just plain off limits in the new patented world.
Have you examined Ford Patents on Hybrid versus Toyota? Are they really that different and innovative compared to each other or did they just take an idea that has been running on every diesel train in the nation and applied it to a car?
Re: Re: Re: Agree with patents in this case
This would be an excellent solution to solve the patent conundrum.
On the other hand if the government just got out of the business of protecting business models who knows what would happen. Maybe cooperative development with competitors so R&D costs are reduced, better ideas are produced, and no-one can rip-off because they are all invested in the research as well.
This is what I see the future becoming. Not giant corporations spending billions of dollars on research that another giant corporation is already conducting.
The amount of waste that IP law produces in my mind is staggering and that doesn't even consider the court costs.
Technology - Freedom or Slavery?
The question is where do we want technology to lead us? A Utopian future of unlimited resources proposed by Gene Roddenberry or something along the lines of 1984.
By ignoring the implications of technology and spending progressively more time on issues like Roe Vs Wade we are missing much more critical changes to our future. Privacy as we know it is quickly coming to an end thanks to many implementations of technology.
Cloning is real and genetically altering people is more than likely already happening. These uses of technology will have huge impacts on our society but no-one is considering them in open debate.
We need to think generations ahead into the future, this us what good planners do. The time for "here and now" politics has passed, we need real leadership not a lip-service. We owe it to future generations to start tackling the hard questions of our future now rather than passing the buck until it is too late.
Not surprising
It is impossible to enforce and impractical for numerous reasons besides. As I have said before, IP is simply DOA for the 21st century.
Nothing could make me happier than seeing IP law becoming obsolete in the near future. The only problem with this is there are not enough influential organizations against the notion of IP.
It really is a human rights issue at the core which does not bring many people to the table due to IP being very abstract by nature.
A better way to frame the debate is to show the possibilities for diversity and advancement once IP law has been eliminated. A few case studies on the technology development in China, which openly ignores IP, would probably be the smoking gun to show how quickly things can progress without lawyers deciding how advancement should happen.
This is good for developing countries but will likely result in a dramatic deflation of the value of IP in the modern world over time, hence why we are trying to ram IP down the throat of the world at large.
I for one don't care because I don't spend time investing time or money in an imaginary system designed to restrict technology, meter development, and oppress human culture.
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Original my ...
Go Home Doctor Strange opinions and get a clue, we would not exist without cooperation. Collectivist Society? Next thing you will be accusing me of communism lol
"As if corporations were some golem wholly independent of the people that constitute them."
Corporation have taken a life of their own on. It is NOT a matter of free association rather over a hundred years of corporate law that has brought them to this point. I don't think you have even considered this.
"I cannot parse this sentence."
No surprise there, you would have actually read the previous post I was responding to.
"Have you ever worked and interacted with academics?"
I graduated with high honors from UW. I have debated how academia controls information and how that can hinder development of concepts and theories. You have never even thought along these lines. Information control to you is a conspiracy, you have no background in communications or social policy.
I see by the end of your post you did call me a communist? Wow, you have fallen into one of the most inbred rhetoric of all, congrats. No surprise here :)
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Original my ...
You are obviously an intelligent person but you do not understand the context of my debate around IP.
The problem with reform is the concept of IP is flawed to begin with. IP law and theory goes against the way we have been communicating and expressing ideas/works for our entire human history.
You say there is no such thing as cultural Nazism, but their are clearly many example of IP being used as a tool to suppress freedom of expression. Clearly many examples of Patent abuse. Obvious misuse of the copyright system to bully companies into consolidation or sell-out.
The most important part of this is that there are no studies to prove the effectiveness of IP law. There is no meat to the idea that IP does anything beneficial for society at large. What is really needed here is some serious research level studies on this topic.
You argument is very quaint, but it is on a micro level where IP theory and law has little impact unless you consider how information is controlled at a University level. The "Ivory Towers" of information control and how that hinders advancement is yet another debate about IP theory and law.
The concept that we need to protect people's ideas and works is really ridiculous in my mind. The idea that you need to protect your works is also ridiculous. You create, you get paid, end of story. Why do we need to extend special protections? Without solid reasoning there is none.
Your ascertain that you are stealing my culture is FALSE. Your pro-IP position in effect is enslaving our culture so that corporations can make a buck. This connects into corporations and the fact that they have legal personhood and how it effects the balance of power in our society.
In the end I fear you think you have created your books, papers, etc. all by yourself. In reality know that every part of your existence is because of countless people before you. Your thoughts are OWED to the human race just as your ancestors offered their thoughts up to you.
IP theory and its implementations seek to control these thoughts, to created walls between information, to thrust the individual above the context that has allowed him/her to exist. It is an extensive of selfishness and a new modern form of slavery.
Re: Re: Re: Re: Original my ...
There are no original works made by individuals in a vacuum is my point. This does go against the way you define "original" because it does not really exist in my mind.
Your a teacher eh? Well then you are on the front lines of this insanity that has become the equivalent of cultural Nazism. When we continue to push students to "create" everything originally it becomes very plain with technology that very few things that are written have not been written many thousands of times before.
With a population of 6 billion + people on this planet how long can we truly fool ourselves into believing we really came up with something that someone else hasn't thought of or created already?
It is obvious to me at least that we need to re-think the argument around IP. It is flawed, so very flawed....
Re: Re: JK Hamburgler
There is nothing "orgininal" about Harry Potter anyways. Did JK invent a single concept that is contained in her books? No, everything existed in prior works.
Trying to protect her "content" is like saying that you need protection after you created a culinary masterpiece by adding Dijon mustard to your McDonald' hamburger.
Furthermore your argument about dilution is absurd and reeks of someone who doesn't believe that there is any freedom in the market place. By your judgment whenever anyone copies anything it takes away from the original. I guess no-one should be reading J.R. Tolkien then?
Re: Re: Mommy wow, I am a big boy now!
Most people 300 years ago could "intuit" that slavery was the best way to increase production.
Trying to push what Mike is saying into some philosophical existentialism is like trying to say that abolitionists were just high minded jerks who couldn't see the truth that slaves made money.
When you get ready to pull your head out of your ass and take a look around at "reality" we will be waiting to resume this conversation....
Re: Re: Original my ...
There are NO ORIGINAL WORKS PERIOD. One only has to do a quick survey of writing, songs, and art to see the same patterns repeating again and again.
If someone can think of your same idea/concept/art/invention without seeing your work directly then that is a good bet there is nothing original about it. This is true for just about everything that is created nowadays and I challenge you to prove it otherwise.
Everything that is created is not made in a vacuum. Try seeing what a boy raised by wolves creates.... A masterpiece of art? A great song? A new invention?
It is our culture that creates and corporations that claim ownership of that creation. They are stealing what is not theirs and attempting to control the very fabric of our culture.
This may not necessarily be a bad thing if corporations didn't put the almighty dollar above everything, even the above the worth of the people that make it possible for them to exist.
There is only one way to describe an entity that puts more value on money than human being's health and happiness.
Sociopathic
The truth is that the money grubbers of this world are using IP law to their own benefit at the detrement of our whole society.
I challenge you to show me truly original works, works created in a vacuum without society to build upon... You can't cause your full of it!
Copyright is just plain copywrong
If you look at the oral tradition, a tradition that kept our culture going for thousands of years, you see the very foundations of our social interactions and social awareness. Nobody owns the works of our culture.
Take even a modern high budget movie. So Sony says they "own" it, but without the context of our culture and all the people that worked together to make it happen and then all the people that watched it and appreciated it it would be meaningless.
I wish people would appreciate how creativity happens and embrace the reality that copyrights and IP law in general are about opression. It is not nor has it ever been about protecting the people that actually create.
I for one do not want to give up the creative freedom that made us who we are.
Re: ...
Yeah, that is what we need. A settlement for a couple hundred million (or more) against a corporation. Then we could have a fair court fight.
I seriously doubt the RIAA would go after a major corporation though, as they would prefer to sit around and pick on people who can't fight back.
Only one way to solve this headache...
IP law is not supported by any evidence period. There may be many correlations that support it, but they are just that.
The simple reason is that IP law does not help people create. It is not now, nor has it ever been desgned to help you create.
In fact, it is designed to do just the opposite. To tell you what you can not do, or to limit your ability to create.
There is a whole faulty logic built around the need for IP in the modern marketplace, but it doesn't change the simple fact that it is anti-creation and therefore anti-freedom.
Re: Re: Re: Re: Copyright law (as Reedatschool)
Our fast paced advancement has also teetered off. We are no longer striving for great things. Instead companies, more concerned with profits, have used IP law as a way to stifle competition keeping a meter on advancement.
Why don't I have a portable device that can also RECORD!? Waaaiit I though IP law wasn't holding things back? A quick look into portable devices coming from Korea show amazing advancement like the old Cowon A2.
Devices like the Cowon A2 couldn't even be produced in the US even though there would be demand for the features due to IP related laws.
Choice is truly an illusion in our modern world. Choices that are decided for you are not really choices at all.
I do not agree with your money argument. People have many thousands times more money tied up in the drug trade than they have in Intellectual Property. Does this somehow legitimize selling crack? Just because it makes money and people are heavily invested in it doesn't mean it suddenly is validated in my eyes.
IP laws are inherently anti-freedom. Your speak of reform, but it looks like a new form of technological and cultural slavery to me. You want to reform slavery? Too late, the money lenders alerady did :)
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