Viewing profile — throwawaykf05

This story is oft-repeated here but this paper provides convincing historical industrial evidence that it's a myth: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2355673

Let's. Microsoft is the biggest spender on R&D amongst software companies and they sponsor a lot of research without clear immediate benefits. This is in stark contrast to all the …

Or, asserting their legal right to protect their investment in R&D that latecomers like Linux and Android simply ripped off. Just a matter of perspective, really. Is just that give…

Of course it does. The claims define what a patent covers. Noting that the vast majority (95%+?) of patents go unused, it's reasonable to assume that they have some correlation wit…

In fact, the MP3 patents are directly responsible for spurring the development of Ogg Vorbis, which is arguably superior in some ways (see other comments). From Wikipedia: > Vorbis…

> In what way is it "doing harm" to the patent system? Well here's a study showing that the user of the term "troll" had become widely used by media without any evidence to support…

> ... grant a more even balance between the financial interests of the rightsholders and the cultural interests of the public at large... You mean the public that still exchanges t…

The main reasons Netflix, Spotify and their ilk exist are a) piracy is still not user-friendly enough for everyone, and b) people vastly overestimate the risk of getting caught for…

> TV and Movie owners already have copyright laws and DMCA laws giving them legal control on who gets their content and how it is used. And you have property laws giving you legal …

IIRC, it was some bytes of object code they copied to be interoperable, so that string could just as well have been an array of random numbers as far as being the key to interopera…

> Most corporations are still focused on just moving over to IaaS with compliance and security first Yes but my point is AWS has more mindshare and MS has more leverageable pre-exi…

"We can only send you the data as fast as we can get it from Netflix. Please try speedtest.net, speedof.me or testmy.net to check your actual speed."

Is not wanting to peer with somebody for free a violation of net neutrality?

Microsoft put billions into Windows Phone and many (including me) think it's superior to iOS and Android, but what's its market share now? What I mean is, even if it is technically…

Says the guy paid by Google. Tell me, when Alsup issued his "name your shills" order, was yours amongst those Google released? I certainly see you (or at least your handle) comment…

Yes, and those semantics are purely functional, lacking any form of expression, which copyright expressly excludes from protection. The only reason binaries are copyright-protected…

Another key point (in my view) is that these APIs are textual whereas BIOS / protocols / binary interfaces are purely functional. Copyright is meant to cover "forms of expression".…

You said: > Sure. But music sharing didn't kill the industry then; there's little reason to believe it'll be the reason for its death now. To me that translated to: "Sharing some s…

They put in most of the up-front money to make an artist big (or bigger). Is that not risk?

>But music sharing didn't kill the industry then; there's little reason to believe it'll be the reason for its death now. Not a valid extrapolation. The Internet is billions of tim…

Maybe they can afford to because they've figured out other ways to screw the public? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2G_spectrum_scam

Are you saying the government does not do "vigorous enforcement of drug laws, long punishments for criminals"? These are topics that are the source of perennial complaints on HN. I…

Actually the problem these days is that standard-essential patents are considered less valuable because they tend to require FRAND licensing. This is the problem companies like Mot…

Not really, it's just compliance with the license that a piece of software is offered with. Things are no less silly in the world of open source. You are bound to honor the license…

No, only abstract mathematical algorithms cannot be patented. Compression is a concrete application of mathematical algorithms.