Linked by Thom Holwerda on Sat 30th Jun 2012 19:34 UTC
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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RE[4]: copying is anti innovation
by Savior on Mon 2nd Jul 2012 07:33
in reply to "RE[3]: copying is anti innovation"
Member since:2006-09-02
No, the problem is software patents.
While you are right with respect to the question you answered, in the big picture, the other two IP systems, copyright and trademark, are flawed too.
Copyright lasts way too long. After the author's death? Why? How come people who had nothing to do with the work in question are entitled to royalties? My great-grandchildren won't get a penny from my current employer, and that's how it should be. Imagine if all companies had an obligation to pay your salary to your grandchildren, 70 years after you are gone. Plus extensions. And also in that time, nobody would be allowed to fill your job (OK, this last one is not entirely accurate).
Trademark is no better. From the Wikipedia page http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snow_white : "The Walt Disney Company currently has a trademark application pending with the US Patent and Trademark Office, filed November 19, 2008, for the name "Snow White" that would cover all live and recorded movie, television, radio, stage, computer, Internet, news, and photographic entertainment uses, except literature works of fiction and nonfiction."
So it's OK to write a story about Snow White, -- maybe not on the Internet, though, -- but creating a TV series or drama act is not? How can a company have an exclusive trademark for a name that was invented by someone else probably centuries ago, (two times, no less,) when even the copyright for the Brothers Grimm's book has long since expired?
(And sadly, judging from how they treat software patents, I have not a second's doubt that the UPSTO will grant the trademark.)
Edited 2012-07-02 07:33 UTC
RE[5]: copying is anti innovation
by Thom_Holwerda on Mon 2nd Jul 2012 07:46
in reply to "RE[4]: copying is anti innovation"
Member since:2005-06-29
How can a company have an exclusive trademark for a name that was invented by someone else probably centuries ago, (two times, no less,) when even the copyright for the Brothers Grimm's book has long since expired?
Because Disney is one of the most evil companies this world has ever seen. Virtually their entire business is built upon stealing European public domain works and charging money for their adaptations. Walt Disney's earliest work were adaptations of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll, right after the 17-year copyright term on the original books had transpired.
Disney then proceeded to push through the insane copyright terms we have today. Disney is pure, concentrated evil. Stealing European public domain works because the company has virtually zero creativity of its own. It's despicable.
RE[5]: copying is anti innovation
by zima on Sat 7th Jul 2012 22:46
in reply to "RE[4]: copying is anti innovation"
Member since:2005-07-06
Copyright lasts way too long. After the author's death? Why? How come people who had nothing to do with the work in question are entitled to royalties? My great-grandchildren won't get a penny from my current employer, and that's how it should be. Imagine if all companies had an obligation to pay your salary to your grandchildren, 70 years after you are gone. Plus extensions. And also in that time, nobody would be allowed to fill your job (OK, this last one is not entirely accurate).
It's not so simple; this kind of argument can be easily struck down (or at least, it has a not bad counterargument).
Our descendants can (and usually do, yours most likely will) benefit from physical inherited property, or from virtual, really, financial assets (just some data entries in a database somewhere) - how come people who had nothing to do with the work (in broader sense) in question are entitled to benefits from its results?
So why not for continuing benefits of work which produced "intellectual property"?
News
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/20/13 22:43 UTC
The Verge pointed me to a blog post by Leap Motion - which reveals how their Kinect-like motion control works with Windows 8. "From the second you plug in your Leap Motion Controller, you'll be able to browse the web and interact with your computer just by moving your hands and fingers in the air. With Leap Motion technology and Windows, you can do everything that's possible with multi-touch inputs - without actually touching anything. This also means that existing applications in Windows 7 and 8 will respond to your natural hand and finger movements. Soon, we'll show you how Leap Motion will work with Mac OS X." Quite cool.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/20/13 21:50 UTC
PocketNow interviews Marc Dillon, and there's an interesting note about why Jolla is keeping the display properties under wraps: "We're leaving some of those details out because we do understand that there are a lot of really big players in the market and they tend to take certain components in the market and dominate them. We created the ability to actually be able to run Sailfish on multiple hardware displays and be able to swap components, so this is part of the demand and supply planning phase. We are committed to this industrial design which is a 4.5-inch display, an 8 megapixel camera on the back and a front-facing camera at the front, and the exact specs of the display we'll provide when we're close to delivery." Something you rarely hear anything about.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/19/13 23:15 UTC
"This is my NeXTstation Turbo Color booting the Mac System 7.1 Operating System using a hardware add-on called 'Daydream'. The Daydream has a Mac ROM and a few custom ICs in it and hooked up to the NeXTs DSP port. Turns your NeXT into a full fledged 68k powered Mac." So cool.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/19/13 23:11 UTC, submitted by Drumhellar
"The NetBSD Project is pleased to announce NetBSD 6.1, the first feature update of the NetBSD 6 release branch. It represents a selected subset of fixes deemed important for security or stability reasons, as well as new features and enhancements. Please note that all fixes in the prior security/bugfix updates (NetBSD 6.0.1 and 6.0.2) are also in 6.1."
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/18/13 21:06 UTC
"At the end of a week in which Electronic Arts confirmed it wasn't developing a thing for the Wii U, one of the software engineers in EA Sports' Canada studio, in a series of since-deleted tweets, disparaged the console as 'crap' and suggested Nintendo should give up on hardware altogether. 'The Wii U is crap. Less powerful than an Xbox 360. Poor online/store. Weird tablet', tweeted Bob Summerwill, listed as a senior software engineer at EA Canada, in a reply to a tweet posting a link about EA's no-Wii U news. 'Nintendo are walking dead at this point'." The Wii U is turning into the 21st century's Virtual Boy.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/18/13 7:37 UTC
"In NixOS, the entire operating system - the kernel, applications, system packages, configuration files, and so on - is built by the Nix package manager from a description in a purely functional build language. The fact that it's purely functional essentially means that building a new configuration cannot overwrite previous configurations. Most of the other features follow from this." Interesting approach. A Linux distribution, sure, but with some very refreshing ideas about system configuration.
Linked by fran on 05/18/13 1:38 UTC
Appfour added, among other features, C/C++ support to its new version of AIDE. From Android-IDE, "Now you can write parts of your app or your whole app in C/C++ on your device. AIDE supports the Standard Android NDK toolchain (GCC 4.6 + Bionic, STL, ...). No changes are necessary if you want to build an app developed on a PC with Eclipse. C/C++ development is fully integrated: Build errors appear in the error list and files can easily be navigated to with Go to file. The editor supports C/C++ syntax highlighting."
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/17/13 23:35 UTC, submitted by kragil
Ars nails it: "The answer is that Google did announce what amounts to a fairly substantial Android update yesterday. They simply did it without adding to the update fragmentation problems that continue to plague the platform. By focusing on these changes and not the apparently-waiting-in-the-wings update to the core software, Google is showing us one of the ways in which it's trying to fix the update problem."
Linked by MOS6510 on 05/17/13 22:22 UTC
"It is good for programmers to understand what goes on inside a processor. The CPU is at the heart of our career. What goes on inside the CPU? How long does it take for one instruction to run? What does it mean when a new CPU has a 12-stage pipeline, or 18-stage pipeline, or even a 'deep' 31-stage pipeline? Programs generally treat the CPU as a black box. Instructions go into the box in order, instructions come out of the box in order, and some processing magic happens inside. As a programmer, it is useful to learn what happens inside the box. This is especially true if you will be working on tasks like program optimization. If you don't know what is going on inside the CPU, how can you optimize for it? This article is about what goes on inside the x86 processor's deep pipeline."
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/17/13 22:15 UTC, submitted by Tom
"It was the only moment I heard regret slip into Otellini's voice during the several hours of conversations I had with him. 'The lesson I took away from that was, while we like to speak with data around here, so many times in my career I've ended up making decisions with my gut, and I should have followed my gut,' he said. 'My gut told me to say yes.'" The world would've been a much different place - Apple would have been less dependant on Samsung for its chips, which probably would've meant less money for Samsung to develop its Galaxy business.More News »
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Member since:
2007-02-17
A novel or a piece of music can be protected by copyright, but not by patents. There is no issue with software copyright ... if one wants to make a competing software product one should write one's own code rather than selling a literal copy of someone else's code, in exactly the same way that if one wants to be a best-selling novelist, one should write one's own novel and not copy the words of another writer.
No problem with that, copyright is fine as IP protection for software, just as it is for writing or music. Note that Android is not a copy of iOS, it is a work-alike. No, the problem is software patents.
Having software patents is akin to disallowing Harry Potter novels from ever being written because someone else had earlier written a novel about a young male wizard character named, say, Merlin growing up. No more lullabys ever to be allowed to be written except for the one by Brahms.
Insanity of the highest order, and totally inappropriate.
There are very reasonable dividing lines in European law:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patentable_subject_matter
(a) discoveries, scientific theories and mathematical methods;
(b) aesthetic creations;
(c) schemes, rules and methods for performing mental acts, playing games or doing business, and programs for computers;
(d) presentations of information.
You will note that software is excluded twice since software is "programs for computers" and it also is "mathematical methods".
Now you are getting very confused indeed, and totally silly. You are talking now about another totally different IP law called trademark. Android does not infringe on Apple's trademark ... no one can possibly confuse a little comic green robot icon for an apple.
Edited 2012-07-01 23:59 UTC