All posts have three buttons allowing them to be flagged "insightful", "funny", or "report". Could we have another one labelled "stupid"? Nearly every post by the well-named "anonymous coward" would qualify.
OK, I'm an engineer at Twitter and I come up with a brilliant patentable idea, something that no-one has ever patented before, like word wrap. Twitter is bought by Big Green Monster, and BGM starts suing everyone who does word wrap. So I say, hey that's not fair, and I start offering word wrap licenses. Now, patent suits are worth billions of dollars, so someone is going to offer me a million or two to either license them or not license them. But I'm a good guy, I value freedom of intellectual property much more than I value a few million dollars. So I turn all offers down, and tell my wife we could have had a private yacht but virtue is its own reward. Next week's fairy tale is Sleeping Beauty.
A lot of open source software is written by professional programmers with spare time on their hands. So I would expect it to thrive in a recession, when professional programmers are made redundant and have spare time (funded by their redundancy money) before the next full-time job.
You're spot on. I built my business by playing leap-frog with my competitors; we all took each others' ideas and improved on them; we all benefited as a result, and the customers benefited most of all. I've tried to make this point in my response to the UK government's consultation on a proposal to offer tax incentives to companies that take out patents - the stupidest idea I have seen for a long time (though I was more polite in my response).
>I wonder what the benefits to the US economy and society are of the overwhelming majority of Microsoft software in China having been pirated?
Well, if the Chinese hadn't been able to pirate Microsoft's operating system they would have developed their own by now, which would then have flooded the Western market. On the other hand, more competition in the operating system market would benefit the economy, so perhaps that argument isn't entirely rigorous...
>no one be barred from using the content of others, with the requirement that profits due to those uses must then be shared with the originator
This allows anyone to scan my book and put a copy of it for free on the web. They make no profit, so the compensation I get from them is zero, so the income I can make from writing the book is so low that I think I won't bother writing it, thank you very much.
There's a lot wrong with copyright, but this seems a rather poorly thought out answer to the problem.
Every time Microsoft issue a security patch, they prevent you doing things with "your" machine that you were able to do before. Sometimes that's in your interests, sometimes it's not. There was a recent patch to prevent your machine running a pirated copy of Office. A couple of years ago there was a patch to remove the swastika symbol from one of the installed fonts (it's illegal in Germany, apparently.)
I expect we can't complain because we probably ticked the "I agree to all your terms and conditions" box.
I really hope that we'll see a lot more of this: companies with ridiculous patents suing big companies like Microsoft and Google. Why? Because it's the only way that the big boys will be persuaded that software patents are a Really Bad Idea, and will abandon their current support for the notion.
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Can we have a "stupid" button
All posts have three buttons allowing them to be flagged "insightful", "funny", or "report". Could we have another one labelled "stupid"? Nearly every post by the well-named "anonymous coward" would qualify.
Follow the money
OK, I'm an engineer at Twitter and I come up with a brilliant patentable idea, something that no-one has ever patented before, like word wrap. Twitter is bought by Big Green Monster, and BGM starts suing everyone who does word wrap. So I say, hey that's not fair, and I start offering word wrap licenses. Now, patent suits are worth billions of dollars, so someone is going to offer me a million or two to either license them or not license them. But I'm a good guy, I value freedom of intellectual property much more than I value a few million dollars. So I turn all offers down, and tell my wife we could have had a private yacht but virtue is its own reward. Next week's fairy tale is Sleeping Beauty.
Open Source and Recession
A lot of open source software is written by professional programmers with spare time on their hands. So I would expect it to thrive in a recession, when professional programmers are made redundant and have spare time (funded by their redundancy money) before the next full-time job.
Absolutely right
You're spot on. I built my business by playing leap-frog with my competitors; we all took each others' ideas and improved on them; we all benefited as a result, and the customers benefited most of all. I've tried to make this point in my response to the UK government's consultation on a proposal to offer tax incentives to companies that take out patents - the stupidest idea I have seen for a long time (though I was more polite in my response).
Benefits of piracy
>I wonder what the benefits to the US economy and society are of the overwhelming majority of Microsoft software in China having been pirated?
Well, if the Chinese hadn't been able to pirate Microsoft's operating system they would have developed their own by now, which would then have flooded the Western market. On the other hand, more competition in the operating system market would benefit the economy, so perhaps that argument isn't entirely rigorous...
50% of zero is zero
>no one be barred from using the content of others, with the requirement that profits due to those uses must then be shared with the originator
This allows anyone to scan my book and put a copy of it for free on the web. They make no profit, so the compensation I get from them is zero, so the income I can make from writing the book is so low that I think I won't bother writing it, thank you very much.
There's a lot wrong with copyright, but this seems a rather poorly thought out answer to the problem.
Microsoft have been doing this for years
Every time Microsoft issue a security patch, they prevent you doing things with "your" machine that you were able to do before. Sometimes that's in your interests, sometimes it's not. There was a recent patch to prevent your machine running a pirated copy of Office. A couple of years ago there was a patch to remove the swastika symbol from one of the installed fonts (it's illegal in Germany, apparently.)
I expect we can't complain because we probably ticked the "I agree to all your terms and conditions" box.
Please keep suing
I really hope that we'll see a lot more of this: companies with ridiculous patents suing big companies like Microsoft and Google. Why? Because it's the only way that the big boys will be persuaded that software patents are a Really Bad Idea, and will abandon their current support for the notion.