"Strong Copyright is *not* about protecting the public"

sheesh.... No matter how hard I try to proof read, I still screw up! We need to be able to edit our own posts Slashdot!

The fundamental problem Strong Copyright has with piracy is that technology is going to *continue* to advance. This will make copying even easier in the future than it is now. Encryption and Peer to Peer networks are going to increase in power, and will be easier to use.

The only way to maintain Strong Copyright is through government force. Increasingly it isn't about stopping people from doing "bad things" like "stealing" content. Instead it becomes a Government managed and controlled system for collecting income for a few favored parties.

Strong Copyright is about protecting the public. It is about protecting the few at the top that can rake in the dough.

And I'm a .... whale.....

Seriously, I have a Google Nexus One, I am one of the 165K that bought the thing.

It has been a joy. No Telecom crap. A few applications I can't uninstall (grrrrr) but the UI and functionality has been peachy. I am always showing off how easy it is to do multitasking, navigation, web searches, ... All the stuff I want to do.

My wife's Atrix? Not so much. Maybe now that Google is buying them, Google can scrape the sludge of a UI Motorola slathered on their phones.

I AM a Computer Scientist!

A dominate product has more influence. But the real question is if there are so many products that look like the iPad before the iPad, where is the uproar about Apple copying *those* designs? Why does Apple get to copy, but nobody else does?

Measurements on my Jobsmeter give this image a reality distortion field of no more than 10 miliJobs. Apple's own distortions register 1000 miliJobs. Given that these measurements come from my objective Jobsmeter and not my opinion, I think (baring calibration issues) I must be right.

What about writing in your journal?

How about making a phone call? After all, someone could hear what is going on in the background.

How about closed circuit T.V.? The U.K is famous for having cameras everywhere. Isn't that a privacy issue?

How much of our ability to record the events in our lives is illegal under this logic, and subject to confiscation?

What if we just remember what we had for lunch? That could be terrible. Can we tweet about what we see? Is it okay to post a description of who you see at the mall?

Seriously, what does it mean to route to a destination? On just about any device, you can route to a set of destinations. Obviously, you can route people by a destination that the user didn't specify. Obviously this could be a retailer or other business, if you had any reason to do so. Obviously if they pay you to do so, that would be a reason.

Where is the "invention" here? It uses all the existing APIs. It uses standard business practice (i.e. you do something if someone pays you to do it).

Seriously I am struggling here. Does this mean you can patent "route avoids streets that have restaurants that serve meat" to accommodate strict Hindus? "route avoids paths that would make the driver pass a church" to accommodate flaming atheists?

I can play this game all day. You can route trips for all sorts of random reasons other than quickest path, shortest path, avoids tolls, avoids highways, is acceptable for walking, is acceptable for bicycles. Heck, maybe if no patents exist for these, they can be patented "first" now.

All of this is obvious, but worse it is obviously not an invention. Just an idea and a bit of api work and common (sadly) business practice.

Much of what you said it true, but much is a bit kind to Jonathan Schwartz. Companies like Sun was need to push their consultants out to bring in the cash. They have great products, tons of open source, and it would stand to reason that they would be the best to provide support and maintenance. But did Sun do this? Here is one example:

"IBM and Sun have announced that IBM will distribute the Solaris Operating System and Solaris Subscriptions for select x86-based IBM System x and BladeCenter servers. The agreement extends IBM's existing support for the Solaris OS on select IBM BladeCenter servers , and IBM and Sun's support of interoperability through open standards.
http://www.it-director.com/business/change/content.php?cid=9790

It wasn't obvious, except to Sun's bottom line, but Sun under Schwartz no longer pushed their own hardware. They didn't push their consulting arm. They were not populating large Enterprise Projects based on Java with their consultants. I know, because my wife lived through this at Sun, and I worked numerous projects under a range of consulting companies for both state, county, and private projects. I worked with IBM consultants. I worked with Oracle consultants. Rational Consultants. And seriously hundreds of other consultants, but NEVER a Sun consultant.

Sun did this to themselves. Your other examples are really very much alike, even if not as friendly and well thought of as Sun.

There is no excuse for a company with Sun's resources and advantages to fail to make money.

Written by someone who obviously has never done any reverse engineering. It just isn't that easy.

Yeah, but even Microsoft is getting into the open source game. It may be that certain dynamics of software may favor companies of a certain profile who support selected open source efforts.

I think claiming that every company needs to support open source is like saying every company has to serve espresso. Obviously some will, and some won't.

Your argument is like "Apple succeeds because of their Excellent Hardware, not due to their excellent advertising."

Seriously, Oracle didn't save enough money by cutting projects, nor made enough money by diverting users from open source to proprietary extensions to make Sun profitable. The fact is that Larry is pretty good at walking up to a company/government/organization and saying, "Say, why don't you buy my hardware? Oh, and here is your service contract!"

I will tell you how dumb Sun was.... Sun actively diverted service contracts to SUN HARDWARE to IBM!! Now cutting THAT off on day one went along way for Oracle making Sun profitable. Making Sun profitable had little to do with cutting Sun's support for Open Source. (Of course I am not claiming it hurt either; however long term if Oracle fails to continue to support Java and MySQL and other significant projects, it could come back to haunt them!)

IBM and Google have to make money. Open source both price cuts competition, makes friendly with customers, and provides them with a better product that they can make money on (hardware, advertising, whatever).

There IS a significant place for open source in a company's business plan.

Sun's problem wasn't because they contributed to Open Source. The problem with Sun was that they couldn't be bothered with making money.

Oracle made their operations profitable within a year without any significant changes to their open source projects. Or in other words, had they chosen to support all the same open source efforts, the changes in marketing and management Oracle introduced still made sun profitable.

IBM contributes heavily to open source, and in fact might be the biggest contributor to open source, and they are quite profitable.

Google contributes heavily to open source, and they are quite profitable.

Companies that contribute to Open Source just cannot make that their *entire* business plan.

Man, what a dream that would be! A company that focuses on solving problems for customers, and doesn't try to own every little crappy angle to squeeze their customers!

Seriously, imagine if HP took *every* possible open source option in building a PC, and opened as much of the system as possible to allow crowd sourcing of solutions to the problems that always pop up in systems! Now with Windows, that would still be pretty limited. But hey! This would be a company I could buy from!

It is possible that Intel just wants to do the right thing, and that is because doing the right thing will help them. They know Universities and their research are not going to spawn Chip Fabs. Those efforts cost Billions. No, the small start ups are going to compete against other companies more than they will against Intel. It is about taking down many competitors more than it will take down Intel.

And fewer trolls will mean more start ups to buy. They couldn't care less about impoverishing post docs. Why should they? A few dollars proving your worth means nothing to Intel. On the other hand, Intel wants successful people/companies/start ups to buy.