Do you REALLY think that shop lady and the customers singing a rolling stones song inside the shop should pay the rolling stones (cartel association they belong to) a "performance" fee? This isn't changing the subject, it is THE subject at hand in the article. I need no more than a yes or no. This is as short and on topic as I can make it then. It has nothing to do with your code or my landscaping arrangements, nor anything else, today, an exact happening, in the article, the shop lady/shop/customers singing a song inside the shop, and some fee that they allegedly owe because they violated some law and the law allegedly says they owe it. So, yes, or no?
I would rather see people educated instead of regulated.
Right. That's what this is. The changes are requiring the ads to *educate* the consumers regarding the strings attached to "endorsements". It's a really good thing, that will make it a little bit harder to lie or mislead people. Seriously, nobody is trying to take away your free speech or say that you can't endorse things all that you want. This is just about increasing the amount of truth in advertising.
This is of course, only possible if the writers of P2P software actually give two hoots about the bill.....
Bingo!
As we all know, the authors of P2P software are generally very conscientious about following the law. Not to mention the fact that they all fall under US jurisdiction.
Furthermore, I would suggest that the faster an area of technology moves, the less it matters how long the patent term is. A patent in such an area will quickly become obsolete. It's actually stagnant technology where a long patent term on a rare innovation is most valuable.
A patent is a wall in front of progress. The faster the progress, the more the wall arrests. The whole point of patents is to encourage people to invent things so valuable that others would rather pay to be let through that wall than have to go around it.
Software patents are like being surrounded by walls, as if in maze with no guaranteed exit, and all the walls have blurry edges, and some of them will solidify to a razor's edge for sole purpose of cutting you as travel along a path that has been clear for decades.
Old programmers never die, they just hit account block limit.