211–220 of 240 posts
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Too be fair, the EU also never managed to build a large scale software industry. I’m not saying this is only because of patents, but it’s not a great example to uphold.
Someone should tell Spotify, SAP, Sage, Nokia, and ARM they're not large scale.
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Agree with this. In administrative law (the principles of which apply here) certain words have technical interpretations that are very different from the colloquial meaning. "Shall" is one of those words - and I too would interpret this as an obligation.
But it doesn't say that "Congress shall promote the progress..." it says "Congress shall have the power to promote the progress..." If the framers wanted to require that Congress do this stuff, why insert "have the power to" unnecessarily? There's no need for that phrase. As another point against this being an obligation, if you look at the list of enumerated powers[0], you'll see some that are clearly not obligation…
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As long as it suits them. I think the bigger reason is that in many civil cases (not just IP) it ultimately comes down to who is willing to pay more for lawyers and legal fees.
As a litigator I do not think that is true. Facts, more than anything, dictate outcomes, generally. Though I will say that patent cases are prohibitively expensive. Though, contrary to what I would think many here assume, leaves the inventor with the short end of the stick as opposed to large IP-owning organizations like Google (that simultaneously advocate for lesser patent-rights).
The problem is that patent cases are intrinsically prohibitively expensive. It's the nature of them, not a result of some recent regulatory change advocated by Google. Especially when there are companies that hold many thousands of patents, any of which can be claimed in combination and cause the defense to incur significant costs even if the claims or their applicability ultimately turn out to be bunk. And you're bankrupt before you can prove it.
The result is that large companies can destroy small practicing inventors with legal fees at will, which is naturally what they do if the small practicing inventor attempts to assert their patent.
To avoid this is to not practice your own invention so you can't yourself be sued for infringement. Which implies that the patent system is only useful to trolls and large incumbents and is actively harmful to small practicing inventors, who can't usefully assert their own patents against the incumbents but can have the large incumbents assert their patents against the small inventor.
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There are startups in this space, but there are also people who value the friction (and not all for selfish reasons).
> (and not all for selfish reasons) Can you elaborate?
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Not OP but, it is my understanding Amazon Web Services is their biggest money maker, that's where I think that claim comes from.
'Market cap' is not the best choice of metrics here, it's really a measure of investor surpluses, ignore the rest of the equation. Wallmart, Exxon, Amazon retail revenues completely dwarf the 'tech sector' - it's just that their margins are more narrow, in most cases, surpluses to consumers are vast. Honestly 'profit to investors' should be one of the last metrics most of us care about. Most individuals should be far…
And Samsung, Foxconn, and Alphabet. So 10% of the list.
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'Market cap' is not the best choice of metrics here, it's really a measure of investor surpluses, ignore the rest of the equation. Wallmart, Exxon, Amazon retail revenues completely dwarf the 'tech sector' - it's just that their margins are more narrow, in most cases, surpluses to consumers are vast. Honestly 'profit to investors' should be one of the last metrics most of us care about. Most individuals should be far…
I'm curious why you think revenue matters more than profits. Take two hypothetical companies, say ebay` and amazon`. They both provide a marketplace, but slightly differently. ebay` allows manufacturers to list directly on their market for a fee. Amazon` buys from manufacturers and sells on their market for a markup equivalent to ebay's fee. Are these two companies substantially different? I don't think so but the re…
From an economic standpoint, what matters more will be revenue, it's a better indication of how meaningful what is done impacts the world.
As for Ebay vs. Amazon - for 3rd party listings, it doesn't matter that much, it's all accounting, but when Amazon actually does buy and sell stuff, it's very material because of a) cash flows: they send off cash (or get huge credit) to buy stuff b) they have inventory, warehouses, workers c) they are the merchant of record and take on chargeback risk, returns etc.. At the scale that is meaningful.
But I don't think that this comparison really highlights the difference between 'high margin' and 'high revenue' so much as for example AirBnB vs. Toyota. Even though Toyota is not worth that much more than AirBnB, it's considerably important to the economy whereas AirBnB is almost irrelevant.
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Laws pushed by large companies so that others can't compete against them and they are able to price gouge the customer. There is a large supply of housing that is available to customers that want to purchase it. The idea that two people can't make a consensual exchange of value is antithetical to a free society.
No one's saying that two people can't make a "consensual exchange of value" of legal actions . I can't make a "consensual exchange of value" by paying a mob hitman to kill someone that I don't like. This is a good thing, and this is not antithetical to a free society.
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Laws pushed by large companies so that others can't compete against them and they are able to price gouge the customer. There is a large supply of housing that is available to customers that want to purchase it. The idea that two people can't make a consensual exchange of value is antithetical to a free society.
Laws are laws, your insinuation of general corruption isn't really fair, the onus would be on you to prove that. Both Uber and AirBnB knowingly break the law as part of their business model. Zoning doesn't allow the kind of business that AirBnB has, they just don't care. One could very well argue that maybe the laws need reform (as I do) but that's another story; the inherent ethos of YC et. al. is to err on the side…
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As a former employee, I don't agree with that. I know it's the prevailing sentiment on HN, but it's not the truth.
I think the opinion is that they exploit lack of laws in this area. Their business model is built to let people run essentially unlicensed hotels and rentals without those pesky restriction. They could easily prevent this but they have no interest in that. It is growth at all costs; who cares if "regular" people can't find apartments because people are buying them up as AirBNB properties. The regulations will eventua…
This is BS. Those "regular" people just want rental market to collapse so they can live in center of the city for pennies.
It's nobody's business if someone rents apartment. If you can't afford it - you can't afford it.