Wow, does this mean you are going to camp out in backyard because you don't believe in "monopolies" of private property? Intellectual property, copyrights and patents have long been at the roots of our free market economy. Without protections of intellectual property you can say goodbye to the entertainment industry and the entire software industry.
Why don't you try paying for things that belong to other people rather than helping yourself, jerk.
Threads like these bring all the socialists out of the closet.
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.
True, but this kind of legislation is to protect the distribution channel, jackass.
You realize that the Founders would not have considered either copyrights or patents to be “property”.
The reification of government granted monopolies as “intellectual property” which can be transferred or sold is actually contrary to the plain meaning of the Constitutional authority to grant them, which specifies “to authors and inventors”. Looking at the history of the British copyright and patent law that the Founders has in mind when they drafted the Constitution — we know they had it in mind because the First Congress under the Constitution copied it into American law — the specification was intended to be exclusive. “To authors and inventors” means not to publishers (the practice before the Law of Queen Anne, which the first American copyright law copied) and not to commercial interests other than the inventor (a common practice before the Statute on Monopolies limited letters patent to inventors, again copied into American law by the First Congress).