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Yahoo Crosses The Line

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Re: Yahoo Crosses The Line

#231

Post by monochromatic »

moldbug wrote: post #225
monochromatic wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Your enormous shiftiness around this issue demonstrates clear mens rea. In short, you know you're a bad boy. Simply not true. The work I do helps independent inventors protect themselves, and it helps startups get funding... believe me, I have no qualms about what I do. It is a net positive for the economy and for people who create things. > Mass murder is evil. Graft is evil. Your industry doesn't involve mass mur…

> You know WIPO isn't a U.S. organization, right? It's part of the U.N. It's in Geneva. Yeah, and who created the UN? Denmark? Indonesia? The UN is about as Swiss as the Warsaw Pact is Polish. > U.S. patents have no force outside the U.S. You mean in theory, or in practice? > First of all, people who don't like the patent system are not my enemies. They simply hold different beliefs than I do. No, they are your enemi…

> Parker v. Flook was a clear decision prohibiting software patents

Supreme Court jurisprudence about software patents has never been very clear. In any case, Diamond v. Diehr came out just a few years after Flook and made such a cut-and-dried reading untenable. And then there was the whole Bilski mess of an opinion...

This is what I mean when I say it'd have to come from Congress, and it'd have to be clear. If you want to prohibit software patents, you don't want 80 pages of Supreme Court justices all writing their own opinions concurring in part and dissenting in part. You want a statute no more than, say, a third of a page long, clearly defining what's meant by "software" (and maybe also "business method") and prohibiting patents on it. That would be damn hard to argue about. Supreme Court decisions are notoriously easy to argue about.

> No, you misread. Intentionally, I imagine. I said: how often do you refuse to pursue a patent you're confident will issue, just because you don't believe it is morally worthy? I got my answer, between the lines.

Ah, I did misread. It was not intentional. But the answer you read between the lines was correct--I have never done that. Maybe when I'm the head of a law firm I can make decisions about turning away money because of a moral objection... but for now, that's a little above my pay grade.

Re: Yahoo Crosses The Line

#232

Post by tomkarlo »

Natsu wrote: post #202
kd5bjo wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In a copyright-free world, that merchandise could be made by anyone; there's no guarantee that any merchandising money will make it back to the movie's creators. Crowdfunding can be a viable option, but paying large sums of money before any work is done makes it tempting to abscond with most of the money and produce either an inferior or nonexistent product. How would you prevent this from happening on a regular basi…

> In a copyright-free world, that merchandise could be made by anyone Not if you keep trademarks and have trademarks on the relevant characters, objects, etc.

The ability of trademarks to protect against commercial re-use of intellectual property isn't a good measure of how much they can replace copyright protection. If I write a fantastic book, trademark protection isn't going to help protect me from someone just duplicating it wholesale and changing the name.

Bad things are done in the name of copyrights (and patent protection). That doesn't invalidate the whole concept, it just means reform may be needed.

Re: Yahoo Crosses The Line

#233

Post by Natsu »

tomkarlo wrote: post #232
Natsu wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In a copyright-free world, that merchandise could be made by anyone Not if you keep trademarks and have trademarks on the relevant characters, objects, etc.

The ability of trademarks to protect against commercial re-use of intellectual property isn't a good measure of how much they can replace copyright protection. If I write a fantastic book, trademark protection isn't going to help protect me from someone just duplicating it wholesale and changing the name. Bad things are done in the name of copyrights (and patent protection). That doesn't invalidate the whole concept,…

You don't need it to. Kids don't want crappy knock-offs.

Re: Yahoo Crosses The Line

#234

Post by tomkarlo »

Natsu wrote: post #233
tomkarlo wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The ability of trademarks to protect against commercial re-use of intellectual property isn't a good measure of how much they can replace copyright protection. If I write a fantastic book, trademark protection isn't going to help protect me from someone just duplicating it wholesale and changing the name. Bad things are done in the name of copyrights (and patent protection). That doesn't invalidate the whole concept,…

You don't need it to. Kids don't want crappy knock-offs.

Have you looked at the list of top 10 movies from last year?

Besides, it's only a knock-off if you were exposed to the original.

Re: Yahoo Crosses The Line

#235

Post by CPlatypus »

fredwilson wrote: post #99
CPlatypus wrote: post #11

The OP wouldn't seem quite so hypocritical if VCs didn't put immense pressure on startups to generate patents. Don't tell me those patents are supposed to be purely defensive, either. They were supposed to stake out a bit of technical turf, just like Yahoo's doing. I'm not saying it's right, but I don't think much of demanding patent generation on one hand and then complaining about their use on the other. If you wan…

we don't do that at USV and never have. i agree that the VC industry is guilty of that practice, but we are not.

"I encourage all of our portoflio companies to file for as many as they need"

http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2006/04/patently_absurd.html

If you're letting them spend your money on filing patents without any kind of binding commitment to use them only in defense, and there's plenty of evidence at USPTO that your portfolio companies are still doing just that, then you're not clearly any different than any other VC in that regard.

This madness will not stop until there's more retaliatory capability than first-strike, and that won't happen as long as there's money pouring into the acquisition of first-strike weapons. Those who fund the stockpiling are culpable, no matter what they say as they're doing it.

Re: Yahoo Crosses The Line

#236

Post by nilsbunger »

Jach wrote: post #214
nilsbunger wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It costs ~$1B to bring a pharmaceutical to market because of the amount of testing and clinical trials required to make sure you're doing more good than harm. Of course some are copycat drugs, but that's going to be inevitable. There are real advances too, and those wouldn't happen without some ability to generate a return on the $1B or more you spent on the drug (let alone the hundreds of millions on drugs that didn…

So did you read the linked PDF?

Their solution seems to be that the government should fund the expensive part of drug development.

That sounds like a terrible idea though: now you'll have the govt "picking winners" that can go to market. As with anything in the government, that will be subject to tons of lobbying, earmarking, waste, and endless debate.

But if you think about it, Pharma drugs are actually similar to SW or movies or music. In each of those, a large investment produces a good which is cheap to replicate (knowledge of efficacy/safety of a compound, or in SW / movies / music, bits arranged a certain way).

Each of these need protection on the investment to create it, so that there can be a return.

In SW, music, and movies/etc, that protection is essentially copyright law.

The only difference with Pharma is that copyright law doesn't buy them anything. So they need some other mechanism of protection.

Maybe it doesn't have to be a patent: how about an exclusive government license to sell a pharmaceutical tied to the FDA approval. Kind of like a pharmaceutical-specific patent.

The key is that financing still happens via private means, and there isn't a fixed quota of budget or # of drugs... Let the market decide the right amount for our society to spend on drugs.

The government should step in when there is a market failure (e.g. unpriced externalities, or tragedy-of-the-commons, etc). But just the fact that there's a large investment that needs protection for an ROI isn't a market failure.

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