3.995 million of them are currently collecting dust in the desk drawers of neckbeards.

Leaving 5,000 of them doing something interesting and useful - and probably something that couldn't be done affordably with a brain that cost $800 or more.

If the computer costs just chump change, who CARES if most of them end up gathering dust? The cost of that is trivial, which the benefit of those that DO get used is substantial.

It's like pencil sharpeners (back before cheap automatic pencils): They spend almost all of their time idle. But they're so cheap that it makes more financial sense to have one in every office than to have one for the company and a department scheduling its time-sharing.

(That analogy was acutally used, to get executives to rent a clue, during the transition from central timesharing systems to ubiquitus desktop machines. When a computer costs several million and needs a clean room and dedicated hierarchy, it makes sense to have one and spend a lot of effort rationing it out. When one costs a thousand bucks it's far cheaper to put them on every desk and leave most of them horribly under-utilized. Such a price drop creates a qualitative change to resource allocation strategies.)

I'm using BeagleBone Black. Not wedded to it - it was just handy. Any of several others would have worked, but this was available and had the right stuff available, too.

$55, half a gig of RAM, four gig of flash filesystem (plus a socket for adding more).

Runs Linux (and several other OSes with ARM support.). Comes stock with Agngstrom but I installed a port of Ubuntu 14.04 LTS and an upgrade to the corresponding kernel version. (The stock Ubuntu port to BBB uses an older kernel, but there's another project that ports later kernels as drop-in replacements.)

The kind of capabilities you are looking for are out there.

Holy crap, I can hardly believe this topic. Who in their right mind would want FM opinion on anything? This is really puzzling to me.

There's a saying that applies: Know your enemy.

I doubt anyone will be fooled into thinking his arguments are unbiased, or correct, and adopt the mindset he's pushing. (If nothing else, there will be PLENTY of warnings from posters in the discussions. B-) ) So this is a chance to do a little research: Find out what arguments are being brought into court and congressional cloakrooms by those opposed to innovation and competition from outside of established corporate monoliths, so we can get ready with counter arguments.

As an independent software developer, how can I avoid getting dragged into a patent lawsuit? How can I leverage my rights to ensure others aren't exploiting my patents?

You can't.

A patent is just a license to sue.

It licenses others to sue you if they think you might be infringing their stuff (or they can get you to pay them to go away even if you aren't). It licenses you to sue others who are infringing your patents. That's all it is.

If you want protection for your creations, you have to be ready to put on the armor and walk into the arena to defend them.

Well, I suppose that it's possible that you might unplug your hard drive, put it in a cardboard box, and mail it to me, in response to a download request, but that's surely too unusual to care about.

Because the law defines making copies as a form of infringement, defines copies as material objects, and because we lack the ability to send a material object through the net, you cannot transmit an original copy of a work to me online. All you can do is give me the information I need to create a new copy on my end.

It's irrelevant whether you delete the file once I've downloaded it. The Copyright Act doesn't treat a copy followed by a deletion as not being copying. It doesn't matter in the least how many copies actually exist in the end, only what the provenance of the copies is. There is an essay called 'What colour are your bits?' which you may find helpful.

It is not, in any legally meaningful way, transferred anywhere.

Please take a look at this page, which discusses the outcome of the ReDigi case, and includes a copy of the opinion. ReDigi tried to sell used music files, going through the sort of copy and delete rigamarole as you suggest. They got shut down hard because it's utter nonsense as far as the legal system is concerned.

Thanks for agreeing with me, then; it's not possible to argue fair use unless there already is prima facie infringement.

Heh.

Forgive me. I stopped reading the front page some time ago.

No.

Creating a new copy of a work can infringe per 17 USC 106(1). But playing a work over a speaker doesn't create a new, infringing copy. That's why we have 17 USC 106(4), which can cause the public performance of certain works to be infringing. With public performance, no new copy needs to be created. Of course, not all performances are public performances -- playing a CD at home, privately, is likely not public and thus not infringing to begin with. Playing it outside, in a public park, is public and very well could be infringing.

I really think you'd benefit a lot by actually looking at the law, or perhaps reading a good book about it, instead of just continuing with what you imagine the law to be.

Given that the word 'copy' in copyright law is defined as a material object, and given the physical impossibility of sending material objects through telecommunications systems, I'm afraid you're very, very wrong.

I can't hold a file in my hand. It's not a material object. But I can hold the storage medium it's written to in my hand; that is a material object. Fixing the work into a new material object from which it can be perceived for a period of more than transitory duration is basically the definition of copying in the law, and as an exclusive right, copying can be infringing.

Feel free to read the relevant portions, at 17 USC 101. You'll want the definition of copies and also of fixing a work. Copying as an exclusive right is at 17 USC 106(1), as already mentioned.

Not all viewers, but a hell of a lot of them.

Here's an excerpt from Intellectual Reserve v. Utah Lighthouse Ministry, 75 F. Supp. 2d 1290 (D. Utah 1999):

No. Just because it's commonplace doesn't mean that the Internet is intended to enable infringements. The Sony precedent and the DMCA safeharbor both work to protect the continued existence of the Internet, despite widescale infringement. Remember, the basic rule of Sony is this: "[T]he sale of copying equipment, like the sale of other articles of commerce, does not constitute contributory infringement if the product is widely used for legitimate, unobjectionable purposes. Indeed, it need merely be capable of substantial noninfringing uses."

But just because ISPs are not obligated to dismantle the Internet doesn't help individual infringers.

I'm pretty sure that Battlefield is a UDP not TCP protocol so does UDP have the 'intelligence' to discard duplicate packets?

No it doesn't. UDP is just minimalist port-number-multiplexed, checksummed, access to the underlying IP protocol. It delivers the packets as they arrive, with no sorting out at all. (The underlying IP layer handles fragmentation and reassembly, but that's about it.)

That is why the SERVER and CLIENT that USE UDP have to, themselves, handle the dropping, reordering, and duplication of packets.

If your analogy using the mail were accurate, it would be possible for me to download a blender from Amazon and have it emerge from the side of my computer. Not a 3d printed blender either; that's just a copy. I mean one that was built at a factory in China or something.

You have RAM, which is a material object. You have a hard drive, which is a material object. You have flash memory, which is a material object. A work written to those makes them copies, just as a work written to a paper book makes it a copy.

In that case, you not buying it because you don't like it equally negatively affects that celebrity, because whatever the reason you don't buy it, they don't get more money.

Now, since then there has been the Cablevision case, where the 2d Circuit said that a work that was momentarily buffered in RAM (in that case, by a network provider) was not a copy because it lasted for too short a duration. But this is not likely to have much effect for the end user.

Also, your example is wrong. Copyright infringement is a strict liability offense, so the mental state (e.g. intent, knowledge) of the infringer is irrelevant.

A better example would be statutory rape, another strict liability offense. If you have sex with someone who swears they're an adult, who can produce excellent documentary support of that claim, and where you literally could not have undertaken any further reasonable measures to ensure that that person wasn't a minor, but it turns out that they were a minor anyway, you've just committed the crime of statutory rape. It doesn't matter how careful you were, that you didn't intend to have sex with a minor, what you knew, etc. Copyright is the same sort of thing.