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On August 13 2009 06:15 tec27 wrote:Show nested quote +On August 13 2009 03:50 -fj. wrote:
Patent law -_-
Esp. When it is applied to computers, it mostly just prevents people from doing the best work they can... Its like a limit on what you can make, for example people have to use worse / less efficient methods of rendering shadows in 3D games because the best ways are patented.
Capitalism does this all the time.. Makes things shitty for everyone just so 1 person can make money. Planned obsolescence, anyone? You made sense until that last point. Patents are not a creation of capitalism, they are a creation of governments. They do allow people to make more money than they otherwise would, but only through a grant of monopoly by governments, not through market power. Anyway, this is just another example of why software patents, and patents in general, do not fulfill their goal of increasing innovation and idea creation. This is a pretty good read on the subject of patents/copyright, I think: http://www.dklevine.com/general/intellectual/againstnew.htm
I think his last point is legitimate. Even if they weren't created by capitalism, it is because of capitalism that patents have turned into what they are today. They have transformed from being a method of protecting ideas to a method of imprisoning them.
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First, patents are a stimulator of innovation. For every case like this where they seem 'silly' there's a million others that contribute perfectly to our explosive technological growth.
Second, Microsoft is, internally, a horribly run company. The company's uber-strength is a pressure-cooker atmosphere filled with thousands of genius-types. Its uber-weakness is a terrible internal organization, lack of communication between teams, and very poor management skills (programmers managing programmers...). It is this dichotomy that allows them to produce a new operating system every four years or less (which is fast) while having to recreate most of the old OS 'from scratch' and ending up with something that is almost worse than the OS before it (lack of team communication, lack of good management, techies getting way into their code competitively without a clear focus for the main project as a whole...).
My years at Microsoft were the best and worst of my work life. The unfortunate truth is that Microsoft's unique industry gifts it with billions in cash that it literally doesn't know what to do with, which gives the company no incentive to fix its ridiculous internal problems. I guarantee you that Windows Vista is worse than Windows XP because of the company's internal problems, and that Windows 7 will be worse than Windows Vista for the same reason. They're a bunch of geniuses under extreme pressure to produce, without any real guidance. Sadly we're all going to snap their shit up anyway, purely due to network externalities, and hardware producers will have to up their efforts to create cheap super-computers that will almost be able to run the terribly inefficient Windows 2020 at the speeds we're already at today...
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i've always had microsoft office 2000 so i just used openoffice to open docx files haha. good thing open office came out or else i wouldn't have been able to open some documents for school and such..
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Does this mean that we can now pirate Word 2007 openly and legally? Sweet!
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On August 13 2009 06:27 Slithe wrote:Show nested quote +On August 13 2009 06:15 tec27 wrote:On August 13 2009 03:50 -fj. wrote:
Patent law -_-
Esp. When it is applied to computers, it mostly just prevents people from doing the best work they can... Its like a limit on what you can make, for example people have to use worse / less efficient methods of rendering shadows in 3D games because the best ways are patented.
Capitalism does this all the time.. Makes things shitty for everyone just so 1 person can make money. Planned obsolescence, anyone? You made sense until that last point. Patents are not a creation of capitalism, they are a creation of governments. They do allow people to make more money than they otherwise would, but only through a grant of monopoly by governments, not through market power. Anyway, this is just another example of why software patents, and patents in general, do not fulfill their goal of increasing innovation and idea creation. This is a pretty good read on the subject of patents/copyright, I think: http://www.dklevine.com/general/intellectual/againstnew.htm I think his last point is legitimate. Even if they weren't created by capitalism, it is because of capitalism that patents have turned into what they are today. They have transformed from being a method of protecting ideas to a method of imprisoning them.
This is a rather moot point. Patents were created to provide exclusive monopoly to certain entities (generally, people that create new devices/methods/ideas), and that is what they are still being used to do. The fact that a large number of rent-seekers have sprung up due to such intervention is not due to capitalism. Such behavior is at the heart of economic law (and therefore applicable regardless of economic system). We could argue that patents are good in some idealistic world where no one develops rent-seeking behavior and they are only granted to people who actually contribute something of merit, but such a world does not and will never exist.
Furthermore, patents have always been devices of imprisonment, not protection. All intellectual property follows suit in that: it effectively grants you a right to say what other people *cannot* do with their property. If I develop a new widget, and get a patent, I now have the power to say that no one else can form materials into the same widget without my approval. This is imprisonment, regardless of whether I actually contributed anything of merit to my field.
On August 13 2009 06:31 garmule2 wrote:
First, patents are a stimulator of innovation. For every case like this where they seem 'silly' there's a million others that contribute perfectly to our explosive technological growth.
You may want to read the link I pasted, or at least skim it. I can't think of any examples where patents have contributed to explosive technological growth. On top of that, it is nearly impossible to see what we have lost by having patents in place.
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how is this a good thing?  This relaly sucks
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On August 13 2009 06:31 garmule2 wrote:
First, patents are a stimulator of innovation. For every case like this where they seem 'silly' there's a million others that contribute perfectly to our explosive technological growth.
Second, Microsoft is, internally, a horribly run company. The company's uber-strength is a pressure-cooker atmosphere filled with thousands of genius-types. Its uber-weakness is a terrible internal organization, lack of communication between teams, and very poor management skills (programmers managing programmers...). It is this dichotomy that allows them to produce a new operating system every four years or less (which is fast) while having to recreate most of the old OS 'from scratch' and ending up with something that is almost worse than the OS before it (lack of team communication, lack of good management, techies getting way into their code competitively without a clear focus for the main project as a whole...).
My years at Microsoft were the best and worst of my work life. The unfortunate truth is that Microsoft's unique industry gifts it with billions in cash that it literally doesn't know what to do with, which gives the company no incentive to fix its ridiculous internal problems. I guarantee you that Windows Vista is worse than Windows XP because of the company's internal problems, and that Windows 7 will be worse than Windows Vista for the same reason. They're a bunch of geniuses under extreme pressure to produce, without any real guidance. Sadly we're all going to snap their shit up anyway, purely due to network externalities, and hardware producers will have to up their efforts to create cheap super-computers that will almost be able to run the terribly inefficient Windows 2020 at the speeds we're already at today...
I'm sure you meant for your nerdrant to be coherent except you missed the part where windows 7 is already being used and confirmed to be way, way better than xp or vista.
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That sucks, I used to take random apps and rename them as .docx and send them to my teachers, then when they couldn't open it I would have an extra day to do my assignments. Fucking awesome.
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On August 13 2009 06:45 tec27 wrote:
If I develop a new widget, and get a patent, I now have the power to say that no one else can form materials into the same widget without my approval. This is imprisonment, regardless of whether I actually contributed anything of merit to my field.
If someone actually wants to create your widget, then you did contribute something of merit to your field (assuming the widget is actually new and nonobvious). Logically, if you didn't contribute anything of merit, then no one will want to create your widget, and therefore any imprisonment is irrelevant.
Show nested quote +On August 13 2009 06:31 garmule2 wrote:
First, patents are a stimulator of innovation. For every case like this where they seem 'silly' there's a million others that contribute perfectly to our explosive technological growth. You may want to read the link I pasted, or at least skim it. I can't think of any examples where patents have contributed to explosive technological growth. On top of that, it is nearly impossible to see what we have lost by having patents in place.
The pharmaceutical industry is the typical example of why patents are necessary for innovation. Developing new drugs takes lots of highly educated scientists years of working with very expensive equipment. Manufacturing drugs takes a factory (that already exists) and pennies worth of materials. If research companies weren't given monopolies on new drugs, it wouldn't be financially viable to produce them.
As for the software industry? Well, that's harder to defend. I write software patents for a living, and I'm still on the fence as to whether they're a net gain or loss.
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ShadowDrgn, they're a net loss. The things that software patents cover are things that would get invented if they could not be patented, anyway. Patents are there for the extra incentive for inventions that would not be invented if the cost/failure-risk of inventing them would be too big to recover through commercial application, due to anyone taking off with said invention.
Now if you'd think that software patents cover inventions (or whatever they're called in this case) that would not be otherwise made if it wouldn't be for the patenting possibilities, aside from the application of selling the patent or 'striking gold' with one (which is not why patents were put into law), can you name one?
Edit: Just sprang to my mind, a second benefit of patents in general is that inventions get publicized, rather than staying business secrets (which might leak out anyway hence the patenting process). This enables inventions to become widespread in a good open competing market, after the initial monopoly by the patent holder (and licensees).
Now for software, do you think software companies poor over software patent filings looking to find an invention that one could apply to ones own software product? Do you know any specific case, other than cases where a software company considers licensing only after being notified of patent infringement by a third party? (i.e. by their own initiative)
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don't really care about .docx but IE really needs to get with the program or get axed. it's funny that someone said microsoft office should be freely distributed, that's a terrible idea. that's what happened to IE and it went to hell (not that it was great in the first place), it's ridiculous that i have to hack the IE browser just to get a site to display how i want it to.
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On August 13 2009 07:17 Badjas wrote:
Edit: Just sprang to my mind, a second benefit of patents in general is that inventions get publicized, rather than staying business secrets (which might leak out anyway hence the patenting process). This enables inventions to become widespread in a good open competing market, after the initial monopoly by the patent holder (and licensees).
Now for software, do you think software companies poor over software patent filings looking to find an invention that one could apply to ones own software product? Do you know any specific case, other than cases where a software company considers licensing only after being notified of patent infringement by a third party? (i.e. by their own initiative)
No, certainly not. In fact, software developers wouldn't search through patents like that because of damages issues (i.e. willful infringement damages like we see in this case). The publication of software patents isn't even a good policy argument because it's hard to imagine what kind of methods and systems someone could keep secret and still be useful after 20 years in this area. Maybe innovation will slow down in the future (not likely), but right now, 20 years is forever for computers.
Drawing a box around software patents is hard though. Any "software" invention can be implemented in hardware so why should someone be able to patent a device that does X but not the underlying method of doing X? Should a router be patentable but not a general purpose computer configured to act exactly like the router? With the way technology is progressing, everything is becoming electronic, computerized, and software-driven, which makes it hard to separate what's a useful invention and what's "just an algorithm."
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That's bad. I actually like *.docx formats haha.
And *.odt format just kills...I never liked OpenOffice.
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I dont see how it can be overturned if they were using someone else patent. It is a bit silly since Microsoft is such a large and productive company but that being said, that same reason also makes it a great target.
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docx format is just an useless format microsoft forced upon it's consumers to force them to update and pay out cash
fuck microsoft
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On August 13 2009 07:46 GreEny K wrote:
I dont see how it can be overturned if they were using someone else patent.
The Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit could invalidate the patent.
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On August 13 2009 08:00 ShadowDrgn wrote:Show nested quote +On August 13 2009 07:46 GreEny K wrote:
I dont see how it can be overturned if they were using someone else patent. The Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit could invalidate the patent.
When was the last time we actually saw that? From what I have read they have a track record favoring the patent holders quite a bit.
Just a question, I haven't read anything too recent on the topic, so I don't know if the...what was it, 2006 revisions I think, has changed the matter much.
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On August 13 2009 07:02 fanatacist wrote:
That sucks, I used to take random apps and rename them as .docx and send them to my teachers, then when they couldn't open it I would have an extra day to do my assignments. Fucking awesome.
Ahaha I remember doing that a few times just to mess with people/profs. "What? it won't open?? wtf ill fix it in a bit"
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Sanya12364 Posts
Patents are a terrible way to "stimulate" innovation. They're absolutely terrible and it's only natural that the current rent seeking nature of business would turn patents into a major hindrance of innovation where companies have to seek legal protection before venturing to do business.
The best stimulation of innovation is open competition and open sharing of ideas. The best case scenario for patents is where they have a short lifespan with an use-it-or-lose-it stipulation at the very beginning. The length of effective patent lifespan varies from industry to industry so it doesn't even make sense to have an uniform rule for all industries.
Innovation is far faster after a patent expires than before. There is also no real advantage to innovation since people who invent (people who tinker) would invent regardless of whether or not there were legal protection for their work. In additional most innovations are derived from borrowed techniques of unrelated industries. Modern patent laws have effectively put an end to that.
Also the willful infringement is always going to be asserted by patent holding companies. It's their way to trigger the triple damages clause of patent law. Otherwise the legal battle wouldn't be worth fighting.
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EPT
