Yahoo joining the patent-suing..
 

Heyyo,

OMFG.. I just read the LAMEST thing EVER: yahoo is suing the creators of XFire for "patent infringement" wth eh? what they gonna do next? sue msn for msn messenger? hah! I'd like to see that..

anywho, if ya want sign petition to stop yahoo

http://www.petitiononline.com/Xfire/petition.html

Re: Yahoo joining the patent-suing..
 

Yeah, I saw that... But I'm afraid to sign my name in anything on the internet... :P

Re: Yahoo joining the patent-suing..
 

I don't use X-Fire, nor do I really care about it, but patents suck so I signed it.

Re: Yahoo joining the patent-suing..
 

About the only thing that will stop software patents, and other retarded types of patents, is to boycott the companies that make use of and/or lobby governments for patent protection. In addition, governments which bow to lobby groups hve to be thrown out of power.

Patents are not necessarily bad, but the current implementaion sure is. Patent protection lasts far too long, what can be patented is way too broad and general in scope, and patents should not include things which are naturally occuring, such as genetic codes.

Re: Yahoo joining the patent-suing..
 

Most of the faults I think are trere as safeguards against 'sneaky' infringements: Like a company building something that's almost identical, but stating that it's not covered by the original patent because there's a fraction of a degree deference between two parts, or its a different colour.

Re: Yahoo joining the patent-suing..
 

Yeah, I think patent is designed to encourage inventors to disclose their inventions, and copyright is designed to encourage authors to contribute more. Both were supposed for common good, and they weren't supposed to be something obstructive.

They also weren't described as "intellectual property" which is a bit popular nowadays. Ideas simply cannot and should not be any kinds of "property".

Re: Yahoo joining the patent-suing..
 

why not?

In the era of information techonology, products are, like ideas, independent of the physical world around you. You can spread a product just as well as you can spread an idea. There is no harm done in copying it, and the copy will not just be a copy, it will be the exact same thing.

This is just how ideas work.

But how can I see the code behind my webpages as my property, while the idea behind the design is not?

Tell me: In a digital world, what differences between product and idea makes product property and idea not?

Re: Yahoo joining the patent-suing..
 

a CD is property
the software on the CD is information
stealing CD is stealing
copying software on CD is sharing

information can be copied and shared almost effortlessly, while material objects can't be.

That's what I believe.

here is a small essay about the popular way to describe patents and copyright as "intellectual property":
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/not-ipr.xhtml

On the other way, I think copyright in digital age has also been abused - a book is copyrighted, but you can share your book by lending it to your friend and let him/her copy parts of it with a ink and pen. No one is called as "thief" or "pirate" for this. For software you even must buy multiple copy if you have multiple computers.

Re: Yahoo joining the patent-suing..
 

Actually, you can't do that legally, unless you're at an institution with a special lisence - otherwise it's an infringment of copyright. You also can't record TV programs, or tape songs off the radio. But because so many people do it, it would cost more to crack down on it than is actually lost. CD and software copying/piracy, however, is a much bigger problem, and the loss is greater than the cost of fighting it. It was the same at one point with pirated videos, but they were mostly successful in preventing it.

Re: Yahoo joining the patent-suing..
 

I believe the idea behind all patents and copyrights, and behind all things patentable and copyrightable, is an acknowledgment of the work the author has put into it. What makes the worth of just about anything, is the amount of work it represents, i.e. how hard and how long one has employed oneself to create it out of nothing, which is not the same thing as how hard and how long one has to employ oneself to copy it. In this sense, software is copyrightable, books are too, and ideas as well.

DNA patents, on the other hand, are utter ineptia.

That said, I am not advocacing copyrights and patents, I just say that I understand them. Ideally, if every person on earth was generous enough to share everyone's knowledge and actually work for the common good instead of just for oneself, knowledge and ideas would spread much better and much more naturally, and our mankind would certainly be MUCH more advanced than it is now. This implies working for free. The pending is getting a living for free, too. Both work altogether. But I'm an idealist. I know.