Summations Only

Well, right, but the only way that limited-time exclusivity does promote the arts and sciences is by allowing you to capitalize on the investment of your time and money and effort to create your innovations by exercising monopoly power. So it's implicit. Except some patents are so broad they encompass any solution to the problem. I'm aware that's a misuse of patents under the law, but the Patent Office is so deluged by applications that their process is to approve all patents and simply allow patent courts to adjudicate which ones are invalid. And that simply results in a system of extortion by patent trolling. We need free access to our own culture more than we need shitty movies like Lethal Weapon 18. And the truth is that it's not even clear that Hollywood has suffered at all at the hands of pirates. I can still get a copy of any movie I want, DVD-released or still in theaters, and with the advantage that I can play it on anything, not just the devices that the MPAA was aware of at the time of release and has bothered to license the DRM to. (As XKCD says, when you pirate music, you own it for life.) But there's no indication that Hollywood has lost any money to pirates (as opposed to the downturned economy and competition from other leisure activities.) Sure, but if Louie steals a bottle of Zyrtek from Wal-Mart, Wal-Mart has one less bottle of Zyrtek to sell. They've suffered the monetary loss of a bottle of Zyrtek. But if Louie downloads music, the only "loss" that the RIAA suffers is the possible loss of one sale to Louie. They still have as many copies of the song as they did before, i.e. an infinite number. But if Louie was not actually ever going to buy the music in the first place, then they've lost nothing. And if he was going to buy it, if the album was actually worth the ten dollar price, he would have paid them ten dollars.The doctrine of "potential sales" really is a novel argument for damages, the description of this activity as "stealing" or "piracy" are provocative attempts to exaggerate the actual damages - much as Jack Valenti's description in the 80's of home taping as being as bad as raping and murdering women was an attempt to exaggerate - not accurate descriptions of the crime. Stealing is when I deprive you of some of your property, but simply making an unauthorized-by-you copy of one of your works deprives you of nothing. You have just as many copies as you did, before.We don't subject libraries to the criticism that they deprive authors of sales, despite the fact that that's exactly what they do according to the logic of the RIAA and the MPAA. And the reason that we don't is that we recognize that access to our own culture is more important than money for content rights holders. We recognize that, to the extent that libraries provide access to culture and knowledge to those who don't have the money to afford it, they're not actually "stealing" anybody's potential sales because there was never a sale there to make. Authors know that the library presents them with the benefits of notoriety and exposure, which itself drives book sales, and that people who are really fans of their work feel like they have an obligation to patronize the authors and artists that they enjoy.Certainly authors and artists deserve to be paid. But the idea that they deserve payment from each and every person who accesses their work is an absurdity. The construction of intellectual property is nothing but a legal fiction meant to turn the terms of the debate from what the public gives to artists and authors, and to what artists and authors should be allowed to extract from the public.

In the United States, my understanding is that you can patent a business plan, idea, or model; and it is under this rubric that Amazon patented "One-Click Buying", for instance. But, you're the lawyer, you tell me.

I think you're missing the point a bit.There's absolutely nothing stopping anyone who wants to from releasing their art into the world for free and without copyright, particularly now that we have a fabulous way of distributing a lot of it for free too.Those who want to do it simply for the love of it can - but many more want to do it for a business or just to eat. Those that want or need to sell their work, have to have their work protected, otherwise they won't do it, or if they do, you won't get to hear or see it.Without a way of protecting their work by copyright, the majority of entertainment couldn't be produced. There would be no film, TV radio; few books, very little software and without patent laws the industrialised world and modern society as we know it just wouldn't exist.Having said that, there's some great examples of no copyright (or very limited copyright) stuff around, Linux and the world wide web being great examples.

In a world without SOPA or the DMCA they're free to do so. They don't even need DRM to do it - Louis CK recently made about four million dollars releasing a comedy video on his website - no DRM, no nothing. If you wanted to copy it for free he made no effort to stop you. As it turned out, he didn't need to - enough people were fans of Louis CK that they didn't need to be legally forced with the government's gun to their heads to open their wallets and patronize him. That's clearly not the case, since an enormous number of content producers are producing popular content and getting paid for it, without resorting to draconian technical and legal efforts to restrict other people's access to their ideas, even in the face of effectively-unfettered "piracy" on the Internet and in China.There's no "problem" of piracy. Copying is and always has been a boon to content providers. We're in the amazing situation of having our rights - as Americans, in my case, and as Englishpersons, in yours - stripped away as the solution to a problem that doesn't exist.

And moreover if people have a right to eat, the government should feed them; if there's really a problem where content creators are being driven into poverty, then we should be ameliorating poverty, not rolling back our access to our own culture.A society where content creators don't have to make money or die as a result of malnutrition or disease is a society that has more content creators, not fewer. Why do you think so many Metal bands come from Sweden and Norway? For one thing, they have to do something with all those umlauts, but it's also because quitting your job to start a band is something that isn't an incredibly risky thing to do in a country where your health care is guaranteed by the government.Edited by crashfrog, : "Fewer", not "less." Sorry, Strunk and White!

Your understanding is popular, but wrong. In the US there are such things as business method patents, but such patents must have a technological effect. Amazon's one-click patent actually covered a technological implementation that allowed purchasing with one click.

That's either false or so broad as to be meaningless. One of the first US business patents was "running a lottery." If there's a "technological effect" in selling entries into a random drawing to win a portion of the fees, with a big piece kept for the business, than nearly anything can come in under that heading.Here's the abstract for Amazon's "One-Click" patent:

quote:

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A method and system for placing an order to purchase an item via the Internet. The order is placed by a purchaser at a client system and received by a server system. The server system receives purchaser information including identification of the purchaser, payment information, and shipment information from the client system. The server system then assigns a client identifier to the client system and associates the assigned client identifier with the received purchaser information. The server system sends to the client system the assigned client identifier and an HTML document identifying the item and including an order button. The client system receives and stores the assigned client identifier and receives and displays the HTML document. In response to the selection of the order button, the client system sends to the server system a request to purchase the identified item. The server system receives the request and combines the purchaser information associated with the client identifier of the client system to generate an order to purchase the item in accordance with the billing and shipment information whereby the purchaser effects the ordering of the product by selection of the order button.

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I don't see the "technological effect." But you're the lawyer, maybe you can explain it to me. The parts about "the client system receives an HTML document" is surely ridiculous, given that any web-based system would have to operate this way. According to Amazon's patent there's no possible way to have a "One-click purchase" button on an e-commerce site that doesn't infringe.

Hi NoNukes, And I am an intellectual property creator (I am a designer, some of my designs are distributed world wide).I think the issue is muddied a bit by the variety of things that come under the broad umbrella of intellectual property. To me a copyrighted name and a trademark are like a legal name, and infringement on the trademark is like identity theft (or do we get into considering a person's identity their intellectual property? a bit of a stretch imho - do we want to get into issues of naming babies violating another person's identity?)My memory from 20+ years ago was (iirc) that Auto Mart was taken to court by Wal-Mart as an infringement on their name, Auto Mart lost and had to change their name to Auto Zone. This is ridiculous imho, as it would take a moron to confuse the two. What's next - suing all the grocery marts?Just because a company in one part of the US chooses the same name as a company in a different area does not mean that they intend to infringe on the second company.Identity is important for identifying the appropriate person or company, and nothing further. And like the names people have, we should expect some duplications to occur. Those of us with common names are very familiar with this: when I lived in Toronto there were 2-1/2 pages in the phone book that could have been me. Where we are talking about an invention (a better mousetrap) or a creation (art, poetry, songs), I think we need a new paradigm for how the inventor\creator is properly compensated and how companies can profit from them.If we were talking an hypothetical free market scenario, the inventor\creator would be rewarded every time the property was used, rather than be limited to royalties (if they are lucky) from one company, and the natural dispersal of the property would indicate how valuable the property was: the more it was used by anyone the more value it has to society.What I see with SOPA/PIPA is protection for the company profits and not for the inventor\creator.Enjoy.

No. That's only one way science is promoted. Another way is to promote science is to encourage people to work around patents even if the resulting ideas are not a patentable idea.Further, my point was intended to counter the impression that the monopoly power could not be constitutionally justified beyond the point were investments were recouped. A person who had never applied to the patent office might well believe that the PTO behaves in such a way. I assure you that the idea of the PTO takes such an approach is malarkey.Further, patents so broad that they block all possible solutions to a problem are invalid under SC precedent.None of that is to say that the PTO doesn't issue too many patents, that patents don't sometimes stifle innovation, and that patents might even be counter to the public good in any number of situations. But I haven't seen a credible argument that such is often or usually the case. I didn't attempt to counter that argument.But it's also the case that my squatting in your backyard with my tent doesn't make you homeless. Yet we don't find it unjust to allow you to evict squatters.And what's so vital about your access to Lethal Weapon 18 at zero cost anyway? We don't but others do exactly that. Perhaps you've heard of recent attempts by the scientific publishing sector and members of Congress to overturn laws that make NIH's work publicly available when the Govenment pays for it. True, but that also isn't the law. I lend out books and movies to friends and family all the time. It isn't against the law for me to do so.In your view, who should pay, and who should be exempt?

Names are not protected by copyright. And trademark law cannot be employed to prevent you from naming your child. Your fears are groundless. I cannot address this question without knowing the details including the exact names at issue. There are lots of stores out there with "Mart" in their name, so the issues cannot be as clear cut as you describe here. This would be utterly unworkable in many situations. Do you want to pay everytime the advanced contrast circuit kicks on in your television set. There are dozens of arguments for the proposition that SOPA and PIPA are bad law even without taking the position that all IP is inherently evil. In my opinion SOPA and PIPA are largely about protecting legitimate interests with laws that intrude on the rights of the general public.

The way to understand a patent is to read the claims, which are the numbered sentences at the end of the patent. The title and abstract are simply guides for locating patents. But even the abstract described an information flow between a server and a system to generate a result.And unless every single action described in a claim is performed by a single actor as described then that claim is not infringed. It does no good to pick out one item such as HTML document.And what if the transaction used something other than an HTML document or if two clicks were used.Quote me the claims of the running a lottery patent,.

Come on. That's stupid. The notion that the Framers conceived of copyright as a way of setting up innovation-stimulating obstacles so that people would be challenged by having to find workarounds to legal impediments is risible. Is that what they're teaching in law school these days? Then sorry, but you don't have the expertise that you claim to: [quote]We might expect that anyone considering applying for a patent would be fairly certain of the merits of their case for one. And yet, of the patents granted by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (PTO) that are subsequently litigated, 40% are declared invalid in court... [S]eeking even dubious patents is a gamble worth taking. The PTO receives over 520,000 patent applications a year. That’s about 1,425 applications a day. The agency’s approximately 6,500 patent examiners are overburdened; on average each patent gets only about 16 hours of review. Virtually all experts agree that this is nowhere near enough time to properly assess a patent. More fundamentally, patent examiners are rewarded for processing applications — and the easiest way to clear a file is to approve a patent. The PTO’s examiners don’t get paid to say no. They’re incentivized to approve.Any patent the PTO grants enjoys a legal presumption of validity. To overturn this presumption, defendants in a patent infringement case must prove the patent’s invalidity by a high standard of clear and convincing evidence. It takes a lot of lawyer fees to do that. And the result is that defendants often pay rather than fight, even when they think they could ultimately have the patent invalidated. More than 97% of patent infringement suits are settled before trial.[/quote]http://www.freakonomics.com/...ent-trolling-taxes-innovationI'm sorry but this absolutely describes a system where the PTO, for the most part, rubber-stamps patents with the expectation that invalid patents will be discovered in the court system. The PTO collects a larger fee for an approved patent than for a disqualified one. The result of this is a PTO that - regardless of validity - grants patents like 5,443,036: Method of Exercising a Cat (with a laser pointer.) Because volume, space, are limited. Someone pitching a tent on my property deprives me of a portion of its use. Yet someone who copies my song deprives me of nothing that was actually mine in the first place; at best, the deprive me of something I wanted to have, but who cares? If wishes were horses we all would ride. If I want to see Lethal Weapon 18, but I don't have the money to afford the ticket - or believe that the film has merit, but not so much as to justify a 9 dollar ticket; or own a copy of the film for my DVD player, but wish to view it instead on my laptop or iPhone; or own a digital copy of the film downloaded from iTunes, but wish to view it on my TV via my Xbox instead of via Apple's AppleTV device; or believe the film is of major cultural importance and wish to illustrate that in my film class with representative samples of the work - then who is MGM or Miramax or 20th Century Fox to tell me that I can't do any of those things?If, indeed, the free market has determined that the appropriate price of admission for Lethal Weapon 18 is zero dollars then its not clear why MGM/Miramax/Fox should be able to use the government's guns to enforce artificial scarcity of copies of the film. Right, and the reason for opposing those laws is that the people's interest in those materials outweigh the interests of content holders to impose an artificial scarcity out of a desire for profit. The amazing and shameful thing is that many are eager to overturn the public's right to information all in order to protect entertainment. As a matter of fact, it's exactly illegal to lend out your movies. Like they say on the back:It's illegal to view it in hospitals, hotels and oil rigs; unauthorized copying and lending is specifically forbidden. Unless you wrote to and received written permission from the publishers of your DVD's to lend them to your friends, you violated the rights of the copyright holders and, in doing so, violated the DMCA. I take issue with the word "exempt." All should be exempt in the sense that you should not be required to pay the author of a work simply because you experienced it. And no one should pay save those who wish to patronize. If artists can't eat under such a system, the problem is with a government that does not feed its citizens. The solution shouldn't be to empower content creators to say "oops, your buddy acted out a scene from the movie he saw last night; now you owe me nine dollars."

So they have a new distribution and business model - that's great, if it works for everybody copyright laws will be unnecessary. So if you believe it, you have no problem.It can't work for everybody though can it? And it can't work at all for patents.

Right. Necessarily, any system of commerce via a web page is going to require "information flow between a server and a system to generate a result." If that system requires only a single mouse-click, it by definition infringes Amazon's patent. Then it doesn't infringe Amazon's patent. That's the workaround that Barnes and Noble had to use, ultimately - two clicks to buy something on B&N.com. On iTunes, which has its own internal web browser to display the iTunes Store, the One-Click patent was actually licensed so that users could click one button to purchase and download a song. There's no way to have a single "purchase" button in iTunes that doesn't infringe Amazon's patent, because the patent is so broad it encompasses every possible way to have one button on a web page where you click it and, in doing so, a purchase is made.Amazon didn't "invest" or "research" or do anything else to merit the "One-Click" patent; they just realized that they were the first to file for a patent on it. There's no redeeming public interest in Amazon's government-granted monopoly of "Buy Me Now" buttons on e-commerce webpages and there's no "workaround" because the patent encompasses any and all methods to achieve the same result. It's basically the Amazon tax on their competitors and its a symptom of an "intellectual property" culture run amok.

They are unnecessary. But what constituency exists to advocate for their repeal? On the other hand, what constituencies continue to lobby for the monopoly power granted to them by these laws? And how much money are they prepared to spend on politicians who favor their views?It's a classic example of how politics is shaped by the difference in preference intensity. Your life is not extremely affected by government-granted content monopolies. I mean, once a year maybe you'll be frustrated by the way your carious consumer electronics are legally barred from working with each other. (For me it's during Christmas, when I'd like to play some classical music from my iTunes library on something with decent speakers, like my television, via my Xbox. Impossible, unless the music was "stolen.") It's sometimes a bit of a hassle but nothing worth taking to the streets or even writing a letter about.But if you're one of JRR Tolkein's heirs, copyright and content monopolies suddenly matter a great deal because your sole significant source of income are royalties from licensed Lord of the Rings derivatives and suing people who invent fantasy worlds with short, hungry people in them. And if Congress does its Constitutional duty and allows Lord of the Rings to expire into the public domain, suddenly that stream of sweet, sweet monopoly money is going to dry right on up.Well, fuck those guys. Why should Bubba Tolkein Jr. get to live off his great-granddaddy's genius for his entire life? I mean, almost all of the big-ticket IP's are long since past the point where its their actual creators who are collecting the checks.