Yesterday, we were treated to another preliminary injunction on a product due to patent trolling. Over the past few years, some companies have resorted to patent trolling instead of competing on merit, using frivolous and obvious software and design patents to block competitors - even though this obviously shouldn't be legal. The fact that this is, in fact, legal, is baffling, and up until a few months ago, a regular topic here on OSNews. At some point - I stopped reporting on the matter. The reason for this is simple: I realised that intellectual property law exists outside of regular democratic processes and is, in fact, wholly and utterly totalitarian. What's the point in reporting on something we can't change via legal means?
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Member since:2006-03-14
Thom, your last statement (question actually) in your "article" was "What's the point in reporting on something we can't change via legal means?".
Wel, you generally don't change laws via the legal process, but via the legislative process which is the domain of politicians. IP law exists because lawmakers made it so.
As far as I am aware, most countries' legislative bodies are sovereign, i.e. they can legislate whatever they want.
The fact of the matter is that the public is not clamouring for a change in IP laws, therefore what is happening is completely democratic. If the vast majority of people want IP laws to change, then they should vote in people who pledge to change them. However, we all know most people aren't bothered about IP law, therefore it is entirely democratic that the law, as it stands, is applied. By not voting for change the public is voting for the status quo.
Member since:2011-01-28
mkone,
"The fact of the matter is that the public is not clamouring for a change in IP laws, therefore what is happening is completely democratic."
That doesn't necessarily follow, and to be sure there are plenty of counter examples too where politicians do whatever they hell they want to without regards to their supposed constituency. In reality even local politics requires millions of dollars, which is typically funded by corporations. They've recently been allowed to pledge infinite funds to influence politicians and elections, not to mention think tanks and apostrophising. This is corrupts the notion of a government democracy which exists "for the people". I find the control corporations have over government to be the downfall of a functional democracy.
"If the vast majority of people want IP laws to change, then they should vote in people who pledge to change them. However, we all know most people aren't bothered about IP law, therefore it is entirely democratic that the law, as it stands, is applied. By not voting for change the public is voting for the status quo."
I think it's a fallacy to say people aren't voting for change...they're always voting for change. But the only issues we'll ever get an opportunity to debate and vote on are "hot button issues" like jobs, affordable healthcare, war, union rights, taxes, education, housing, abortion, even religion and marriage, etc. You don't know what people think about their IP rights from the polls because the polls haven't attempted to measure that - election data is too granular to draw those kinds of conclusions.
Member since:2005-10-20
Wel, you generally don't change laws via the legal process, but via the legislative process which is the domain of politicians. IP law exists because lawmakers made it so.
Perhaps in this instance, Thom means legal as opposed to illegal, rather than legal as in court?
Unless they voluntarily give up such sovereignty, through the signing of treaties.
As the US civil war (amongst others) demonstrated, the giving up of sovereignty can be done irrevocably.
And it appears that in this case it's only revocable through departure from the WTO, which is economic suicide.
Popular apathy in itself does not mean that the status quo is democratic. It just means the issue hasn't received enough publicity recently to test its democratic support.
Official Apple statement on PRISM and privacy: "Regardless of the circumstances, our Legal team conducts an evaluation of each request and, only if appropriate, we retrieve and deliver the narrowest possible set of information to the authorities. In fact, from time to time when we see inconsistencies or inaccuracies in a request, we will refuse to fulfill it." This is basically Apple re-publishing their earlier statement in a more official manner. You either believe it, or you don't.
The open source Contiki operating system and its commercial Thingsquare distribution are making strides towards the connected home. According to a Computerworld article, a new LED light bulb manufacturer is putting small computers into their light bulbs. Each computer runs the Contiki OS, which gives each bulb an IP address and allows them to be controlled with a smartphone application. To connect the bulbs to the application, the bulbs use both Wi-Fi and the much lower power IEEE 802.15.4 mesh technology.
"Google asked the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court on Tuesday to ease long-standing gag orders over data requests it makes, arguing that the company has a constitutional right to speak about information it's forced to give the government. The legal filing, which cites the First Amendment's guarantee of free speech, is the latest move by the California-based tech giant to protect its reputation in the aftermath of news reports about sweeping National Security Agency surveillance of Internet traffic." Draining the ditch after the cow has drowned in it."I can't find one person who has been using the Nexus 7 for an extended period of time, and hasn't seen a massive downgrade in performance. Just what kind of downgrade are we talking here? I cannot pick up my Nexus 7 without experiencing problems like a lag of ten seconds, or more, just to rotate the display; touches refusing to acknowledged; stuttering notification panel actions; and unresponsive apps." Fully and utterly agreed. My Nexus 7 was blazing-fast and awesome for a few months, and at some point, it just started sucking. Just like that. I've tried loads of ROMs, and nothing helps.A new release of the hobby operating system MenuetOS! The release notes are a bit non-descript, but you'll have to take what you can get: "updates and improvements (picview, httpc, ehci, ...)"."The Internet is one of the most transformative technologies of our lifetimes. But for 2 out of every 3 people on earth, a fast, affordable Internet connection is still out of reach. And this is far from being a solved problem. There are many terrestrial challenges to Internet connectivity - jungles, archipelagos, mountains. There are also major cost challenges. Right now, for example, in most of the countries in the southern hemisphere, the cost of an Internet connection is more than a month's income. Solving these problems isn't simply a question of time: it requires looking at the problem of access from new angles. So today we're unveiling our latest moonshot from Google[x]: balloon-powered Internet access." Insane.
"MineAssemble is a tiny bootable Minecraft clone written partly in x86 assembly. I made it first and foremost because a university assignment required me to implement a game in assembly for a computer systems course. Because I had never implemented anything more complex than a 'Hello World' bootloader before, I decided I wanted to learn about writing my own kernel code at the same time. Note that the goal of this project was not to write highly efficient hand-optimized assembly code, but rather to have fun and write code that balances readability and speed. This is primarily accomplished by proper commenting and consistent code structuring." Just cool.
Jon Rubinstein, former CEO of Palm: "Well, I'm not sure I would have sold the company to HP. That's for sure. Talk about a waste. Not that I had any choice because when you sell a company you don't get to decide that. Obviously, the board and shareholders decide that. If we had known they were just going to shut it down and never really give it a chance to flourish, what would have been the point of selling the company? I think the deal we had with Verizon really hurt us, but who knew that at the time? These things are all hindsight.""And so it is with Dell's Alienware X51 R2, a small form factor gaming PC in console digs. It's shaped similar to Microsoft's Xbox 360 Slim, and though it's slightly larger than either a 360 or PlayStation 3, the X51 R2 would be right at home in a living room setting nestled next to a large screen TV. Indeed, it's adept at running Steam's Big Picture mode, and if your primary objective is to play games in the living room, go ahead and consider the X51 R2 a hybrid game console." This is obviously not the only machine like this - still, these are very valid console alternatives even for those that don't like being hunched over with a cramped WASD-claw. Also, PC gamers among us: could you get away with the $699 model for gaming?
From Bloomberg: "Microsoft, the world's largest software company, provides intelligence agencies with information about bugs in its popular software before it publicly releases a fix, according to two people familiar with the process. That information can be used to protect government computers and to access the computers of terrorists or military foes." The lid has officially been blown off.
Member since:
2005-06-29
You can't just say that the processes are undemocratic because you don't like the outcomes.
I don't think you read the article.