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Knowing the European Parliament, some minor symbolic thing will be changed, it will be hailed by bought off parliamentarians as a major victory, and it will be passed.
The European Parliament cannot change anything about ACTA. Either it passes it ("gives ascent"), or it rejects it.
For now I'll continue to assume that using an API without explicit premission from the owner is theft but will keep my ear to the ground for more news on this incredible oversight.
Theft, really?! What happens when a poor programmer cannot feed their children? They die. Of starvation.
Murder is the word you are looking for, cold-blooded premeditated murder .
If that dance or play has not been fixed in some medium, then copyright does not apply.
That is incorrect, see Article 2 of the Berne Convention. A simple example: if I come up with a poem and recite it, and you hear it and start using it in performances, you infringe on my copyright. Copyright protects the creative work itself, not a medium it has been fixed in.
But if I see you do a trick, work out how it happened and then do the trick myself, then this is no more copyright infringement [..]
That's probably true. The point in this case was however not just that the guy figured out how the trick worked, but he basically copied the entire act.
A theatre play also falls under copyright, regardless of whether it involves spoken words or not. Changing minor details does not change that, just like changing the names in the Harry Potter stories would not be sufficient.
There is no exact definition of when something stops being a derivative work and becomes a new/independent work. The reason is, as you sort of touched upon, that it is simply not really possible to write a strict definition for something like that. As a result, either both authors come to an agreement, or a judge decides after their and expert witness testimony.
Being from Belgium, I can confirm that you are right to a certain extent. But at the same time, there is in general quite little love for the US (or US army) left today. My generation (I'm 33) was brought up with all the wonderful stories about how the US protected us from the evil USSR and how they were the beacon of freedom in the world. That image has disappeared almost completely over the last 15-20 years or so and neither my parents' nor my generation is generally a big fan anymore of the US these days...
It doesn't mean that we're not thankful for what the US (and UK, and others) did in WWII, but those were decisions of the people in charge back than. I think that abstract or unconditional loyalty to a nation is silly or even dangerous, because while past actions and traditions obviously have some effect on current and future behaviour, I believe that the most important factor that determines behaviour is the people that are in charge.
Look at the die layout for Sandy Bridge, there's no Ivy Bridge layout yet but it's probably the same. You see that huge chunk called "graphics"? Me neither, it's somewhere in those small "misc io" bits. That's the only little thing of your CPU you aren't using with a dGPU.
I guess that's simply a chip without an integrated GPU. Here's a picture of a Sandy Bridge Core i7 with GPU.
Thank you both. Now I don't have to post. The letter was not threatening in any way and is complying with litigation, which is basically what one would want.
It must be great to be in the astroturf business with the Stratfor situations and now this! (btw: anyone else noticed that Stratfor is almost an anagram of astroturf?)
What are the alternatives?
2) The inventor builds an encryption product out of the invention. BigCorp Inc. reverses the code of the encryption program, and next version of their OS has encryption by modular exponentiation. The inventor gets a email saying "thanks for all the fish". Or a job offer, if lucky.
What happens now if you you publish an encryption product based on that algorithm:
if the product supports file system encryption, BigCorp 4, BigCorp 5, Big Corp 6 or Big Corp 7 sue you depending on how you implemented it
Now, those are results from just a quick google search, and obviously not all of those patents will be infringed by every implementation. However, how many small software have the resources to figure out which patents exist, whether or not they infringe on those patents (nobody likes being served with an injunction that prevents them from selling the software they designed and wrote all by themselves) and how to rewrite their software so that they won't on any currently filed patent, or patent that may be filed up to a year from now (grace period).
Indeed, good luck. I'll take my chances that someone else will reverse engineer what I did and try to duplicate my work, rather than that I have to watch out that nothing I did may have been patented within the last 17 years by at least one company.
What the GP meant is not that the distinction should be "is the abstract process carried out using electrons or chemical reactions". What he (presumably) meant, was "does the novelty lie in the abstract process, or does it lie in the physical process". Figuring out an energy-efficient way to split water into oxygen and hydrogen obviously can be represented via abstract formulas, the but the novelty does not lie in the maths but in the physical insight.
Conversely, an algorithm that performs a quicker FFT is an innovation in mathematics rather than in physics, even if when calculating that formula using a CPU uses less electricity. I.e., the fact that any kind of mathematics can be calculated using physical means (including our brains), should not suddenly render it patentable. The innovation is not a new understanding about how electrons work. And no, generally implementing that same innovation in hardware would/should/is not be patentable either (the innovation is not in how to build hardware). That why they came up with the integrated circuit layout design protection (although it's not very popular due to it being way narrower than a patent, and of course it's always more fun/interesting to have broad exclusion rights instead of narrow ones).
In general, this kind of philosophical discussion does not lead anywhere though. The easiest way to demonstrate why software patents don't work is to simply look at the negative effects of how they work in practice.
I see what you mean about not being able to patent or copyright the CONCEPT behind a game, though, if you mean concept as in "general class of gameplay." There are many first person shooters implementing the concept, but each has a copyright-protected style of gameplay specific to each game.
"Style of gameplay" is not a copyrightable entity, at least not in the sense that I understand that term (which may differ from your definition). The graphics of a game are copyrightable, the music is copyrightable, and the story can be copyrightable if it is sufficiently creative (only "creative works" are copyrightable, but there is no objective lower boundary for what constitutes a creative work because that simply cannot be objectively defined). Style of gameplay or rules for games are however not copyrightable. And that's a good thing overall.
I don't understand how your post is an answer to what I wrote. Whether Facebook is built on PHP or ASP.NET doesn't really matter in this context. The APIs this article is talking about are the APIs used by Facebook games such as Farmville that enable them to integrate with Facebook profiles, friends and whatnot. Or the APIs that people can (could) use to create mashups based on Google maps.
That's also why I mentioned that these open APIs (open in the sense that third parties can use them) are not guaranteed to stay available, and hence do nothing to address one of the main drivers behind open source development (fighting vendor lock-in and planned obsolecense).
"hindering open source development"?
Yeah, sure. Just like the fact that I, like most people, don't donate 10% of my income to the FSF or some other open-source project hinders it. So what?
If you want to judge others from a particular ideological position (concealing code is unethical), you should state that clearly rather than impugn others indirectly.
It's a bit silly to answer the above to an article that ends with
Open APIs are the new open source, except they require less geeky access to lines of code, and more programmatic interaction with software services. As an added bonus, open APIs don't come with the baggage of licensing fundamentalists.
And of course, the main issue the fact that these open api's are very much "here today, gone tomorrow", which is also one of the driving force behind open source development (to reduce a third party's ability to take away features or to make it impossible to keep using some program on newer systems by refusing to update it in case of incompatibilities).
No, I don't. Many if not most GM plants are rendered sterile so that you are forced to purchase new seeds from year to year, thus making further evolution impossible.
Afaik, these so-called terminator genes were never used in commercially available seeds.
In the off-chance that some GM plants manage to produce offspring, the farmer involved (intentionally or no) sued and the crops destroyed.
Indeed, lawyers are way more effective as terminators. And many GM seed producers do require you to buy new seeds every year and forbid you to keep part of the harvested seeds to plant them again the next year.
Consider well the proportions of things. It is better to be a young June-bug than an old bird of paradise. -- Mark Twain, "Pudd'nhead Wilson's Calendar"
