You can't know criminals' names in Korea? Kind of weird.
Yeah ditto on that weirdness vibe. Kind of makes one wonder how they handle something like America's Sex Offender registry.
You'll get websites saying you need to download this codec to watch this video, and people will do it. With a standard codec, if a site does that, users can be educated that they shouldn't download ANY codec.
Even if delvers better sound and video? Significantly improved compression?
Closed captioning, secfond channel audio or other benefits?
Tell me why the geek thinks the web should be permenently bound to whatever codec he - and perhaps he alone - thinks is "technologically superior" or "politically correct."
Why there should be no competition, no room for experiment.
If I were able to patent math, or a concept, which is too generic for a patent, what is to stop me from suing anyone for doing anything considered "Similar" to said concept? This is the issue. When you get down to patenting 2+2 that means you can stop people from patenting any form of math. See how this leads to a circular argument that only goes down the drain for inventors?
Unless the inventors work for a company with the legal and financial muscle to compete. I'm really jaded (especially in presentation), but the system really is set up so that innovation can be stifled so that large entities who could be destroyed (in whole or in part) by rapid market innovation don't have to worry. I know the system is set up in such a way that it's supposed to protect the very people it stifles from having their ideas stolen instead of bought, but the practice of overly-broad generic patents on basic concepts in many fields has created litigious loopholes which allows the giants to reverse the tables on the small innovator, forcing them to sell the idea or face a patent suit that will bankrupt them before discovery is finished. (Holy run-on sentence Batman!) I don't like that setup, I'd rather let market forces subject only to anti-collusion and anti-price-fixing regulations reach a similar end effect in the marketplace independent of the litigation.
We can found no scientific discipline, nor a healthy profession on the technical mistakes of the Department of Defense and IBM. -- Edsger Dijkstra
