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Trolls Are Real

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Re: Trolls Are Real

#101

Post by shkkmo »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #40
dalbasal wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(1) Informal norms among the fishermen as to how much fishing you should do. This system is not resilient to immigrants, who don't know the local norms (and may, not unreasonably, feel that the local norms already allot all of the fish to established fishermen), so fishing communities are often fiercely resistant to newcomers. "Informal" cultural norms operate as laws on a small scale, maybe a pre-industrial communit…

The ocean is all connected, but fish don't magically equalize their distribution by the law of fish gravity. If you double the number of ocean fishermen working out of Galveston, the supply of fish near Galveston will suffer. Cultural norms generally operate on a small group of people . In the modern day, it doesn't take very many people to catch a ridiculous number of fish. So depleting ocean fish is better handled…

> If you double the number of ocean fishermen working out of Galveston, the supply of fish near Galveston will suffer.

That greatly depends on the type of fish and is not generally true. Many species of fish spend different parts of their lives at different locations. Tuna, salmon and many other pelagic fish travel pretty big distances.

Re: Trolls Are Real

#102

Post by mrmyers »

twtw wrote: post #76
jMyles wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A world where you can release a chip or a drug or a jet engine and have a Chinese company immediately copy it and sell a competitor at a fraction of the price with no consequences is one that’s not good for Silicon Valley in the long run. I have no problem living in a world where the government is unable to exact violence against people for copying data. This seems to me to be an entirely artificial crime whose exi…

I genuinely do not understand your position. Let's say a U.S. company spends a billion dollars creating a chip design. You think that it should not be illegal for other companies to steal said chip design and manufacture it because it is just "copying data?" So the company that invested to design has to compete with a company that stole it, and therefore can price it lower because they don't have to recoup that inves…

Let's say I spend $300 and countless hours growing an amazing garden of especially fragrant plants. Do you honestly think it should not be illegal for some random guy on the street to walk by and steal my lovely-smelling air by literally 'taking' a sniff? He put absolutely no effort into making that air as fragrant as it is, but gets to reap all the benefit, while I'm stuck paying the fertilizer and gardening bills.

I can understand (though I disagree with) the pragmatic arguments you could make for copyright and patents for incentivizing creation. I cannot understand your insistence on pretending that copying information is actually stealing. You can't even plead technical legal truth, as they are absolutely not conflated legally. But when push comes to shove, this argument seems to reach for some 'moral' truth that one 'deserves' to be compensated for one's labor proportionately to one's investment, which is ultimately applied no where else in our society, since it's just the labor theory of value in a funny wig.

Let's say a mother spends tens of thousands and countless hours raising a child who never calls or supports her in her old age. Is this illegal? Our society depends much more crucially on the free labor of mothers and fathers than on the R&D of any chip company, even in purely economic terms. Pragmatically, one could say that people just don't seem to need as many guarantees/incentives to have kids as they do to innovate, so it's more important to have state incentives for the latter, and a temporary monopoly on usage is a sufficiently time-tested incentive. I can sort-of understand that argument. What I can't do, is somehow pretend that anyone should care more about the efforts of innovation going unrewarded than of any of the other crucial efforts essential to our society, for which no one is ever guaranteed a dime.

Re: Trolls Are Real

#103

Post by everybodyknows »

> ... patent number 10 million and celebrated that milestone with a signing ceremony at the White House with President Trump ...

Aha! Now we know why it was extra-important to pluck #10,000,000 out of normal order.

https://patentlyo.com/patent/2018/06/patent-no-10000000.html

https://patentlyo.com/patent/2018/06/patent-no-10000000.html...

Re: Trolls Are Real

#104

Post by mrmyers »

rayiner wrote: post #91
mlinksva wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

EFF advocates for civil liberties, not for Silicon Valley or the US. But for Silicon Valley and US, it's debatable whether trying to maintain continued dominance through stronger IP is a good bet. China and elsewhere are switching to producing more IP faster, even if starting far behind. It's not a simple or binary choice, but consider whether over the next decades it will be more advantageous to make it easier for U…

> EFF advocates for civil liberties, not for Silicon Valley or the US. Patents are business regulation. There is a civil liberties element to business regulation, but it’s well accepted that civil liberties concerns are attenuated when you’re talking about business conduct. There are lots of regulations that hurt small businesses and have a civil liberties angle, such as overly burdensome occupational licensing. But…

I don't think copying is bad. Copying is what's beautiful about Capitalism, it reduces everything to competition around the margins in cut-throat markets, with tons of choice.

Personally, I feel like if we want to foster research and innovation, subsidizing them directly is easier than creating eminently abusable rights and monopolies.

Re: Trolls Are Real

#105

Post by twtw »

mrmyers wrote: post #102
twtw wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I genuinely do not understand your position. Let's say a U.S. company spends a billion dollars creating a chip design. You think that it should not be illegal for other companies to steal said chip design and manufacture it because it is just "copying data?" So the company that invested to design has to compete with a company that stole it, and therefore can price it lower because they don't have to recoup that inves…

Let's say I spend $300 and countless hours growing an amazing garden of especially fragrant plants. Do you honestly think it should not be illegal for some random guy on the street to walk by and steal my lovely-smelling air by literally 'taking' a sniff? He put absolutely no effort into making that air as fragrant as it is, but gets to reap all the benefit, while I'm stuck paying the fertilizer and gardening bills.…

Your garden analogy is poor for several reasons.

the primary reason is that it is not remotely comparable to the theft of trade secrets in my example. If the gardener put their garden in a greenhouse and put a padlock on the door, then the scenario would be more comparable, but then it wouldn't make a lot of sense to say it should "obviously" be legal for someone to break in and take a sniff, because it's just a sniff, right?

Your parent/child analogy is poor because you are just describing an investment that doesn't pay off for any number of reasons, not that somebody stole the value from you. Perhaps more comparable would be if a parent raised a child until adulthood, at which point someone stole the young adult, brainwashed them to think they were the parents, and the child visited the fake parents in their old age.

That sounds far fetched, but it is far more comparable to the scenario I introduced of someone stealing a company's intellectual property and profiting off of it.

Re: Trolls Are Real

#106

Post by mlinksva »

rayiner wrote: post #91
mlinksva wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

EFF advocates for civil liberties, not for Silicon Valley or the US. But for Silicon Valley and US, it's debatable whether trying to maintain continued dominance through stronger IP is a good bet. China and elsewhere are switching to producing more IP faster, even if starting far behind. It's not a simple or binary choice, but consider whether over the next decades it will be more advantageous to make it easier for U…

> EFF advocates for civil liberties, not for Silicon Valley or the US. Patents are business regulation. There is a civil liberties element to business regulation, but it’s well accepted that civil liberties concerns are attenuated when you’re talking about business conduct. There are lots of regulations that hurt small businesses and have a civil liberties angle, such as overly burdensome occupational licensing. But…

I'm curious what makes you think EFF spends time on patent far disproportionate to the civil liberties impact? Out of their https://www.eff.org/about/staff of 80+ it looks like they have 2 attorneys and one analyst that might be mostly working on patent. How much time would be proportionate? Assuming the current time spent is disproportionate, why do you think they've allocated time in that way?

I haven't followed closely, but on why ACLU might spend less time on business regulations that have a civil liberties angle than they might: they don't ignore completely, but they likely have mixed opinions on extent to which such regulation protects workers or consumers, and being relatively liberal, are skeptical of deregulation. So market libertarian civil liberties entities like IJ are the ones dedicating lots of their time to business regulation with a civil liberties angle...and as far as I know ignore IP altogether, perhaps because to them all property is sacrosanct.

On "copying is bad and destroys innovation", I'd really love to read your take on the ideal set of innovation policies stemming from this assertion!

Re: Trolls Are Real

#107

Post by dahart »

amelius wrote: post #90
pnw_hazor wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Post issuance maintenance fees are a good thing. They encourage patent owners to abandon patents earlier than their maximum term (20 years after filing) if they don't want them any more.

But that doesn't change the fact that the original incentives for the USPTO are wrong.

1- Why?

2- Isn’t having to pay troll deterrent?

3- How would you fix it?

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