you must consult with Imagination before you change it.

Yes. And what happens then?

I haven't in general met many professors (or EEs) who understand much about intellectual property.

OK. Can we see your agreements, please? Because that did sound very much like trolling for additional intellectual property to add to your portfolio.

People who read this article have pointed out three open CPU designs in addition to the one that I remembered.

While your product might be "production ready", please keep in mind that open projects are very often written to a higher standard than commercial ones, and the researchers involved are no less professional than your own developers. And their projects come with fewer intellectual property issues than yours.

It's only "free" for academia.

Not even them. This is a lure for universities to create tech that they are not allowed to produce in hardware, but the company that provided the original tech can monetize.

The patent terms are whatever they want them to be. In general "reasonable" and "patent" don't happen together much. And "tiny", well I really doubt it.

Having a company provide funds for a research grant and then reap the patent royalties isn't in general a good thing for society. The student researchers get paid like slave labor (if they get paid at all) and put what may be the best idea of their lives in some company's pockets.

It's very common these days for companies to allow universities to use their technology at the cost of tying the company into the university's patent revenue. And of course this is often publicly-funded research, so not only is the taxpayer paying for the development of patents used to sue that same taxpayer, the patents go directly to a company from academia.

The net effect is to feed intellectual property centered companies at the expense of the technology sector in general and small technology companies in particular.

I'm ok with them watching porn, as long as they don't have to see that rampart violence that litters TV.

Let's teach our kids that if someone fucks with them, it's ok to fuck them back.

It is not a necessity. Not any more than a computer, an internet connection or a dishwasher. It's a matter of convenience and enjoyment. People want to watch their shows. And to watch them, they need to be able to do just that. They don't care that they get channels they don't want to get. What difference does it make for them?

Hmm... couldn't we simply do away with them instead of me? I mean, it does accomplish the same purpose.

The problem is that the only real option you have is abstaining. You don't want this behaviour? No cable TV for you. Because there's no such thing as a "channel mix" that you want. Have you ever taken a look at the average "basic mix" of channels? Nobody, absolutely nobody, on this planet would choose these channels. No matter what his interests.

If you're not happy with this, your choice is to do without. Not only without the channels you don't want, but also the ones that you would want. Don't want Sports and Bible TV? Ok, no SciFi for you either.

And most people would rather grin and bear it than abstain. Essentially what it means to them is that they don't get the 100+ channels promised but actually just about 10, with 90+ more that could as well not exist.

Cable? It's the only reason for having a TV anymore.

Why make your kids cry? www.thepiratebay...

Where is it, and how does one get there?

The main problem is here the ease of duplication. You have here a commodity where nearly all the cost of its creation is fixed. Per unit costs are negligible, and duplication of a unit is trivial. If you are allowed to duplicate and distribute the unit you paid for, depending on the total market there is actually the danger that the maker cannot sell many units, resulting in you having to pay for the total production cost, or market forces dictate that this commodity cannot be produced anymore due to higher cost than benefit.

In a nutshell, if you can copy as you please, people whose income depends on producing content will stop doing so.

We could now start a debate whether that would actually be a good thing when people start creating content (or, if you please, art) out of love instead of base desires like money. One thing would still remain, anything where production takes many years and costs lots of money will not be produced anymore. There would be no blockbuster movies and no AAA games. And yes, again, it's debatable whether that would actually be a bad thing.

What I can agree with is that copyright has gone out of hand. That's true. We're now at the insanity of the lifetime of the author plus 70 years. In other words, it's unlikely that the works of the Beatles, which were created half a century ago, will go into PD before I die. That's essentially copyright for over a century. Copyright originally was meant to give a creator an incentive to create, so he could recover his expenses and reap the rewards for his art. But where is the incentive if I can milk a single hit forever?

Original copyright was 7 years. And back then, that was pretty tight. 7 years was not a lot of time for an aspiring artist to get his book printed and sold. Some managed to get into a second issue and still earn royalties for that, but usually, especially for young artists, those 7 years went by VERY quickly. Back then it took a lot of time to get a book edited, printed and distributed. Advertising was WAY slower (and less efficient) than today, and by the time most people actually learned of the book and wanted to buy it, copyright was expired, other editors printed copies and the original author got jack.

And that's when copyright went bananas. Today, we have INSANELY long copyrights while at the same time the time from conception to distribution can be measured in days. Hours sometimes, even. That simply makes no sense anymore.

So I do not agree that I should be allowed to do "whatever I want" with the work. I should be allowed nearly everything, in this we can agree. I should be allowed to use it however I please, view and listen to it in whatever fashion I please and if I do not want to use it anymore I should be allowed and able to sell it. I should not be allowed to duplicate and distribute it, though, at least for a sensible period. The original 7 years sounded very sensible and I think reducing copyright to this 7 years would allow copyright to become again what it was meant to be: A tool to balance the interests of creators and consumers of content.