Posted on 02/13/2015 4:40:46 PM PST by lbryce
“Ah, so who exactly is in charge to determine which evil corporation gets banned, comrade?”
If I could make the rules, any corporation that does more than 25% of their production and has over 25% of their employees outside of the USA would be banned from lobbying our Congress for USA benefits.
It seems that the globalists with their WTO and UN have resulted in the USA cutting its own throat and failing to protect our security and interests and borders. For decades we’ve done nothing when Asia etc has been stealing our intellectual property. that USA taxpayers have subsidized, and then take our jobs and economy and sovereignty. Now these fraudsters in our crony govt. want to focus on and lower the hammer on USA citizens?
BTW when I hear a term like “Comrade” mentioned I can’t help but think of McCarthy, Hollywood and MSM.
Is there a government office established to lock up those suspected of breaking into your home?
Even the local governments don’t do it.
Even when they have evidence of who did the break in.
File the paperwork and wait and wait and oh yeah, hope your insurance is willing to give you a payout to recoup your expenses.
Copyright enforcement for Big Media should not be a role of Homeland Security. Let Hollywood foot the bill for their own detectives to bring the cases to court.
And how much should ABC-Disney (or NBC or whoever) pay to a private videomaker when he or she posts a home movie ‘news’ clip to youtube? Right now, they just take it without compensation.
And plenty of big companies have been caught (witout fair recompense or punative damages) stealing private photos from facebook, flickr, twitter, etc. and selling them to licensed photo syndicates.
It’s a two way street this copyright violation. The billion dollar crooks should be paying far deeper fines. Their legal team knows better and they have greater broadcast than any fileshare system.
Software patents have done demonstrable harm to the industry; why? Because the processes
that they represent are actually mathematical-in-nature.
For example the software patent that eHarmony holds (for calculating compatibility
) is simply matrix operations; from Patent Absurdity (transcription portion from this wiki):
[3:02 - 5:07] Ben Klemens (?): So for our first derivation, let's start with just a simple matrix, a matrix of values. We find the mean of each column: Mu 1, Mu 2, Mu 3. And we're gonna define Y to be X minus X - I'm sorry: X minus Mu for each column. Now, if we have some other factor X, we can take X dot S and find the projection of X onto this space. This is called the singular value decomposition. Now, here is the trick, here is the great part. Now let's say inst... let's say this first row, X1 equals sexuality. Let's say X2 equals: Do you own cats? And X3 equals, I don't know, affectionateness. Ok, so now, we'll also say that, let's take a vector J1 equals Jane, Jane's responses on this survey. Let's say J2 equals Joe's responses. Now let's do the same projection as we did before. We're going to take X dot S - we're going to take J1 dot S. We're going to take -- substract that from J2 dot S. We're going to find the distance between these two points, and we're going to call that "compatibility". And in that simple step, we have we have derived patent number 6,735,568. The trick, the trick of our derivation was that before -- with the singular value decomposition -- we had abstract numbers. What the guys at eHarmony did to get this patent was to assign names to our variables. So instead of an abstract X1, we have "sexuality". Instead of an abstract X2, we have "a preference for cats". And by making those assignments, by setting variable names in this manner, they were able to take an abstract concept and turn it into a patentable device.
What we want to do, according to the heads of our patent institutions, is take mathematics and slice it up into as many slices as possible and hand those slices out and say, well if you do a principal component analysis, if you multiply matrices for, uh, for dating sites, well ok, we give that to eHarmony. If it's for equities we'll give that to State Street. And so on and so forth. And uh, what we're giving out is basically exclusive rights to use mathematics, to use a law of nature, in whatever context. And what we're getting in return is basically nothing.
“Theft is theft. You should be able to kill someone to protect your property, so jailing them should be the least of the thief’s worries.
It would be a welcome change when/if the gubmint stands to protect property rights instead of infringing in the property owners’ rights.”
This is why I’m very happy I never had to face a foreign corporation (like Keystone XL) or a connected developer (like in Kelo v New London CT) coming to take my property via eminent domain for their personal profits. I put private property rights above the right of corporations.
That's not what I'm arguing — my argument is that lifetime of the author plus 70 years
is not what the founders had in mind when they gave the federal government the power To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries; — I think they would be horrified at how the copyright (and worse, patents) are used to prevent the progress of science and useful arts under threat of the law. (One incident was the RIAA trying to sue a man [professor, IIRC] who was sharing a file containing his own work that had a similar name
to something that was copyrighted.)
“which originally was only intended to be a short term incentive by Congress”
Not quite. Congress is applying the specifically enumerated powers delegated by the Constitution. The intent to protect intellectual property rights came from the founders.
Essentially the purpose of these laws and treaties are to provide incentive to use our creative abilities to further the progress of science and technology in ways that benefit everyone. Without these laws, inventions and other creative works could only be protected by keeping them secret. Exploiting (in the good sense) inventions can also be helped by being first to market. IP laws are supposed to add to these advantages.
Unfortunately the laws and the application of them by courts often just prop up the monopolistic powers of big companies like Microsoft and stifle innovation rather than foster it.
When government implements impossible standards without the consent of the governed, people often resort to what is legally considered theft by copying software, movies, and other IP.
Who pays their salary? Do they really want to mess with citizens?
“what’s needed there is to reject software patents”
No, software can be very innovative. What should happen is allow companies to either use trade secret protection (think software as a service) or patent protection for five years. After five years, the source code should be released and become public domain.
A conservative policy like this would foster innovation, productivity, and wealth creation. And big companies could not just continue to monopolize markets without innovating.
You do realize that software patents aren't about software per se, but mathematics, right?
(See Post 23.)
True, but this kind of legislation is to protect the distribution channel, jackass.
Or, at least, it shouldn't.
“The “public” didn’t create it, so why should out ever be in their domain?”
Who then in your view should own the rights to “Hamlet?” Joe Shakespeare, the great-great-great-great-great-great-great etc. grandchild of William? Joe didn’t create it, either.
And the FCC, under Obama’s direction and control, is taking over the internet??? Coincidence?
brave new world comrades. Finally, the age of thinking is over. Commissioners will do that for you.
The Constitutional intent was that the patent and copyright processes should further the progress of the useful arts. Right now they are often used just to sit on those arts. Patent and copyright ought to be use it or lose it, at the least.
Guilty as charged. It’s actually in the Constitution. Try reading it sometime.
You want to take other people’s stuff without paying for it. What does that make you?
So how long should it be?
Forever?
Or just extend it every time Mickey Mouse is about to go into the public domain?
Go back to the Constitution. Or did you just point to it as a sleazy sleight-of-hand?
please tell me why as a taxpayer I should have to pay to protect your interests for 70 years after your death. There is nothing reasonable about that.
“The “public” didn’t create it, so why should out ever be in their domain?”
Why should the public pay to protect it for them?
“Who then in your view should own the rights to “Hamlet?” Joe Shakespeare, the great-great-great-great-great-great-great etc. grandchild of William? Joe didn’t create it, either.”
You use the same analogy as Obama uses with the crusades.
Nobody is asking to copyright ancient Egyptian mummies. However, I am saying that there has to be property rights for at least a couple of generations. So, no, it is NOT your(public’s) property what a guy created 90 years ago. That guy’s descendants should have their RIGHTFUL ownership if they have not sold it or licensed it away.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.