Since I also said they hurt innovation, giving more example of things they've hurt is sort of supportive of half my point and irrelevant to the other half. But yes, I do agree with the suggestion that sometimes things aren't helped. Software patents specifically seem a real minefield for no apparent purpose.

The idea that "artists do what they do" is rather self serving. If you decide not to pay people for their labor, it's nice to pretend they don't care about the money. But I know artists who've quit spending time at it because they had a family to support and it became clear they weren't going to make it work as a profession. (Doesn't matter if you think that proves they weren't committed--they were producing art, and stopped, because of money.) I'm thinking mostly of people I know, but the brilliant cult SF writer John Sladek seems to have stopped his fiction output and gotten a day job near the end of his life. And some reasonably talented recording artists just don't like performing--the indie band XTC in the '80s, stopped touring because of Andy Partridge's stage fright but released a couple more good albums, and Gene Clark quit the Birds when his fear of flying got too much. Heck, the Beatles best stuff was after they stopped doing live shows. So a "no recording profits" rule would certainly cut some people out--ie, stop their innovation, even if it shifted it to others.

But really, I don't have much knowledge of the artistic 'industries' and don't have a strong opinion about how the world would change if we got fewer blockbusters and more garage bands, I don't like either much.

Some things are easy to copy and hard to invent; in others the invention is less important than the skill to produce it. This is my whole point; there's a whole range out there in the world. In general, protections are going to be most useful when research and development costs are large or risky Picking industries where this isn't the case--like you did with consumer electronics above--don't prove any general rule, they just illustrate that there are situations where those factors don't apply and the benefits are less clear. People on Slashdot only know the one area--they often work in software, download non-mainstream music and buy smart phones--but if you actually care about the issue ignoring everything else is the intellectual equivalent of sticking your fingers in your ears.

The US government actually did an experiment to see if extra IP protection would spur development of new products in pharmaceuticals. That wasn't the point of it, but the Orphan Drug Law promised extra years of protection for diseases with small patient populations. It has been a great success, at least in terms of spurring research and getting companies to develop cures. (Predictably, sales cost while the products remain under a state-protected monopoly are quite high, so not everyone is enthusiastic overall. But that's not the point of this discussion.)

It's a bit sad, considering the amount of energy spent on Slashdot discussing IP and innovation, that a sweeping and incorrect generalization like "No IP protection in the Baroque" that is still considered "Insightful." You would have hoped that people would have spent a fraction of the time writing and ranting instead reading.

There were of course considerable legal efforts used to keep smart people in place and harvest their output. This was an era when monopoly rights were routinely granted to restrict competition and the wealthy were obsessively worried about secret knowledge.

If you were, say, a glassblower in Venice, it would be impossible to take that knowledge and use it elsewhere within Venice; risky to use it outside Venetian control; and downright fatal if you did use it outside Venice and then returned home. By comparison, a patent lawsuit where most of the time you split the profits is downright encouraging.

In the arts, Handel basically had to defect from Hannover to compose in England.

This is not to over-dramaticize; states were weaker and their understanding of what could be considered a "valuable innovation" much more limited. I don't know how you could reasonably compare "IP" restrictions and say one era was better or worse; they were just very different. It would depend what you were trying to do.

I'm afraid my own opinion is fairly bland--clearly IP laws hurt innovation and clearly IP laws help innovation. (I could give personal examples of both--projects killed because an invention was patented but not developed by a competitor; projects not considered because you couldn't establish exclusivity and thus saw no path for ROI.) They have different effects in different industries. The proper balance between freedom, basic fairness and innovation is tricky.

This is a case where the fine article is worth the time. I'm hardly a regular, but by far the most interesting one I've clicked on in quite a while. It addresses all your hypotheses:

From TFA: "To be honest, I make more as a consultant, and I find consulting to be a lot more interesting than scratch lottery tickets." Not surprising for a talented, experienced person with technical degrees from MIT and Stanford--either in the degree of compensation or the matter of where his interest lies. He could probably shoot for 5 times that in the financial industry (pre-crash, anyway) if money was his main goal. Instead he chose "geological statistics."

From TFA: "Instead of secretly plundering the game, he decided to go to the Ontario Lottery and Gaming Corporation. Srivastava thought its top officials might want to know about his discovery. Who knows, maybe they'd even hire him to give them statistical advice." So yeah, less work for a potentially bigger paycheck, bypassing legal issues and the necessity of hiding the secret of his success . . . he does OK in the "think bigger" category. :)

The article goes on to discuss statistical anomalies in winning ticket distributions. It is possible people are doing this, although there is "no direct evidence."

Well, I already pay more for some scientific journals online. So obviously the right content is worth more than that to me.

For general interest, I wouldn't currently pay because plenty of good quality content is free. And if I'm paying (such as for the Economist) I prefer the print version, where I find it easier to read multiple medium length articles.

The study has nothing to do with the point you are making. There is no real world situation where we encounter Polar Express level-of-competence simulacra and our life is threatened if we make an incorrect decision. Claiming "survival," let alone it being "key" to survival, is sloppy thinking by researchers who have apparently internalized some evolutionary pyschology memes.

This ability is presumably a side effect of other valuable mental skills, such as the ability to read facial expression and identify similar looking faces. Which is amazing and the subject of not much study, but no what this article is about and not what the experiment measured.

There is a bit of confusion here in concept. The place the "placebo effect" is well documented and reproducible is in things like pain relief, and in this case at least some of the biochemical pathways are actually known. We can actually administer drugs to *block* the placebo effect in these cases, from what I've read.

On something like cancer, I've never heard of a study that confirmed a placebo effect. There are anecdotes, but there are anecdotes of people doing nothing at getting cured. Designing a study would be tough, since even beyond ethical concerns you'd have to compare it to "no treatment" and there is no way to double blind; you wouldn't be sure you were getting "placebo effects" or simply doctor or patient changes in behavior. (Or a reduced stress level in the placebo group, which isn't traditionally considered the "placebo effect" although it could still lead to better outcomes.)

On angina, the studies compared real surgery to sham surgery and actually suggested to many doctors that state-of-the-art treatment wasn't helpful. Pain relief (which falls into the "known placebo effect" area) but no actual improvement in long-term health or the underlying diseasehttp://science.slashdot.org/story/10/12/23/1445207/Placebos-Work----Even-Without-Deception#.

Browsing the stories, it seemed like they had studies showing it was more effective. Or is that supposed to be a rhetorical question?

If it does turn out to be mistake (presumably what you're getting at, and while it hasn't happened yet it wouldn't be the first time) it will probably be in part because there was a measurable effect at high dose but that there were safety concerns. This probably led to somewhat reduced focus on the efficacy question at the lower dose study, since the drug was already shown to work. So a weak signal would be believed more easily in this context than others--you can get above the 95% confidence threshhold by chance.

A brand new drug/study/pathway typically meets with more scrutiny by the FDA. Doesn't mean those never get mistakes, either, of course, but you're more likely to see efficacy issues in something like this.

I've read this paragraph three times and can't see the logic. It seems to be a claim that some people will break a law, therefore there should be no attempt to enforce it?

It's not "worth" thousands of dollars. It's punitive. That's the point; it is meant to be sufficiently harsh to discourage people from violating the law. Part of the logic is that the crime is easy to commit and expensive to enforce. Damages on the order of a few hundred dollars would never be worth pursuing.

This is the same logic used against corporations in civil cases to encourage them to act responsibly--if they illegally screw over an employee, for example, they'll usually get away with it, since most people have better things to do than spend thousands of dollars suing over a few dozen hours of overtime pay or even six months unemployment. So if someone takes the time charge them, under certain circumstances you hammer them with far more than the actual damages they caused, so they have an incentive to obey the law in other cases as well. It becomes a risk/reward calculation.

Both approaches have similar problems--it'd be fairer if punishment were more certain and smaller--but no one has figured out how to do that effectively.

Person pirates a song by Jessica Simpson. Person gets sued for civil damages, and the case is in court. You compare the act to stealing bread to eat, the (not yet assessed) punishment to lifelong exile, and the reaction a crime against humanity (sorry, a CRIME AGAINST HUMANITY) in the same paragraph you're complaining about unreasonable and disproportionate responses? Mote, plank, eye, etc.

Please mod the parent up. Linux is copyrighted. Copying Linux is legal solely because it is explicitly granted by a license which is required to be present on every copy. If you didn't have the license--or violated it--you would indeed be a 'pirate'. The grandparent poster seems unaware of or indifferent to the legal framework; the fact that he found someone working retail at Microcenter who was just as unaware is a pretty much textbook strawman.

In this case in question, the songs are by people like Jessica Simpson, Avril Lavigne, and Jennifer Lopez. I have trouble imagining anyone asserting with a straight face that a reasonable person would believe the songs were off copyright attached.

IIUC, on the actual issue at appeal, it's whether a jury should be allowed to laugh at the ignorance claim and go to judgment, or a judge is allowed to say it's not even a plausible defense and disallow it from being raised. Either way, the result will not be a right to copy anything without a notice. It strikes me as a pretty narrow issue.

I work in the drug industry. Competitor drug patents are aggressively read for clues on what to do and what to work on. In short, they often contain valuable, non-obvious knowledge that, once they are made public, spur further innovation in others. In short, at least at times they work exactly how they are supposed to. (Other times the benefit is less clear cut.)

In the software industry, my understanding is that no one reads patents because they aren't helpful and it's better to have no knowledge of a patent you may unintentionally infringe upon.

I do think people on Slashdot whose primary exposure to patents is reading about especially outrageous software patents, and the occasional gene sequence patent, are missing half the picture. It doesn't mean the half they focus on is good or 'worth it', but it's not even close to the whole picture.

I'm not loving your business plan. The problem with trade secrets is that prior art doesn't apply to non-public inventions. If someone else invents & patents it, I lose my right to do business selling my own invention, just because you came up with it second but decided to use the evil patent system while I remained pure.

Patenting everything gives you direct defense against someone else trying to trump you, plus the ability to counter-sue or threaten other companies who harass you, plus the ability to harass the competition. The last one is optional; the other two are essentially required for a large tech company.

If software patents weren't issued at all, then the trade secret approach would work fine. Hence the "blame it on the system" comment.

I thought I was at least partly joking, but I guess not.

"Only people I like can come to my party" is a rule. Think that's too trivial? Consider that you can't kill someone--unless you are in a situation where you have a reasonable fear for your life, whatever that means. Jurors will argue about their opinion of what a reasonable person should fear, and the only answer is that a 'reasonable' man is what the jurors thought it was. But the anti-killing thing is still a rule.

Most human rules are like that, and not like simple algorithms at all. Some cases clearly on one side, some on another, and for some there's lots of arguments until the 'opinion' of the judge, prosecutor and jurors will eventually decide things.

I actually mostly agree on the results of the judgment, simply without finding it as severe or unusual flaw as you seem to. Except, as I said, cutting fluff from an encyclopedia *adds* value for me, since I enjoy browsing a concisely edited one.

Actually your point was that they don't follow rules. You didn't mention "judgment" at all, not even indirectly; it was complaining about inconsistent application of rules.

If you now want to change your point to say that you question their judgment in applying rules, fine, but that's a different argument. I actually agree with the revised argument, at least the specifics, as I implied in my post (I'm the AC in the GP). I don't think an animated show deserves multiple entries, and I don't think an ideal encyclopedia should include implementations of algorithms in code just because a lot of editors are apparently undergrad comp sci majors.

But disagreeing with judgments being made doesn't mean they aren't being made, or even made consistently. "Wikipedia is an encyclopedia with many worthwhile articles but, among other flaws, over emphasizes science fiction and popular television" is IMHO an accurate description. The 1912 Britannica was a good encyclopedia with its own emphasis problems, plus some incredibly embarrassing mistakes about non-western history (such as not knowing when the Mughals came to power in India) because of the biases in *its* editorial pool.

The problems don't invalidate either project, let alone in concept (as you seem to be arguing) or the idea of a "notability" standard. They do affect the utility and the enjoyment of both.

Empirically, your are probably right that if Wikipedia tried to be more assertive it would do a bad job. But they could certainly change standards from the ridiculous 'cite needed' when making critical judgments (which discourages people who actually *know* crap from editing, and encourages Dunning-Kruger sufferers who read one book on the subject once and believed it) and be more encouraging about cutting marginal articles to the bone. In the theoretical space for 'collaborative projects', this could reach a stable equilibrium of sorts, with people cutting stuff out and fixing bad claims. But in practice? I doubt it's worth trying.

I assume their reason is to mimic a traditional encyclopedia. Personally my preference for less is based on two things: A 200-word article is more useful than a 2000 word article if you want a short introduction; and, length in a traditional encyclopedia does convey valuable information about the overall importance.

It is reasonable in principle, and a significant new burden that a lot of small businesses won't be able to handle and will mess with a lot of the ways the internet has empowered the small-time crowds..

It's one thing for anyone who's core business is on-line selling, let alone a corporation. But don't think like them. Suppose you run a local used bookstore that's willing to ship books to customers out of the area, or are a musician who is happy to supplement performance income by selling that self-recorded CD? You handle the orders with paypal, but have you really encrypted that customer list you used to keep in a notebook but is now in Excel? Have you even thought of it?

In addition, it applies to anyone who *sells* to a MA resident. If other states follow suit, but don't do things exactly the same, could you imagine trying to keep up? You'll have to do best practices (including written security policies) to have a fighting chance of avoiding fines.

To be fair, there usually are exemptions for small businesses; I didn't see one skimming the story, but my examples may be irrelevant. Hopefully they are.