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There's a wealth of historical information that is in the public domain (out of copyright) that you can mine, and that even Disney et al don't have time to capitalize on. Books, images, maps, correspondence, (govt) statistics, "systems". All FREE for commercial use.
You find "best of issue" on EBay for $750 that are public domain in the Library of Congress. It goes on.
"Before entering on an understanding, I have meditated for a long time, and have foreseen what might happen. It is not genius which reveals to me suddenly, secretly, what I have to say or to do in a circumstance unexpected by other people; it is reflection, it is meditation." - Napoleon I
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Gerry Schmitz wrote: There's a wealth of historical information that is in the public domain (out of copyright) that you can mine, and that even Disney et al don't have time to capitalize on. Books, images, maps, correspondence, (govt) statistics, "systems". All FREE for commercial use.
However there is also a great deal of stuff that cannot be touched also.
This is because it is small market. And making sure it is legal to use requires tracking down the people (often more than one) that now own the copyright and then negotiating with each of them to allow use of the original. For small markets it is not even close to being economical to do that.
And there is a worse problem. The original material might and probably does only exist in a few remaining printed documents. And when those documents are lost or destroyed the original content is forever lost.
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Patents expire after 20 years in most/all of the Western world. If you make less money on exploiting the patent yourself than the fee you pay to uphold it, why would you hold onto it? If those companies who want to profit from it are unwilling to pay you license fees covering your patent fees, then they do not consider it that essential for their activities. Demand a higher license, and if they are not willing to pay, then your (father's) invention is not that much worth. If you still think it is, no matter what others say: Keep paying the patent fees, even if you can't recover it from licenses.
Copyright: Even a poor author retains the right to his works. He may, for a pay, allow a publisher to take the cost of producing and marketing copies of his works - and he should certainly be aware of the details of the contract. Any author is free to ignore established publishing houses and do the work himself: Contact companies doing the typesetting, graphical artists doing the cover and illustrations, marketing companies and book stores. Or paying for an established publishing house doing it. It often pays to hire in someone professional to take care of your rights when making a contract with a large publisher. In most cases, it pays back.
In technology, 20 years of patent validity usually (there are exceptions!) means that the technology is rather aged when the patent expires. If the patent owner has made real profit on it for that long, it is about time to let others in on it. In lots of cases, new sub-technologies have been added. Look at MP3: The format and decoding was protected for 20 years, but over those years, a whole crop of improved encoding techniques were developed, under their own patents. Today, you may use the original MP3 patents freely. Unless you pay the license fees for the highly improved encoding patents, those MP3 files you encode will have inferior quality compared to state of the art. (Nowadays, we see the same development with AAC files: If you pay for access to the best encoders, you will hear better sound quality at lower bit rates.)
Copyright usually relates to artistic works, not technological progress. You can rarely argue that giving the author the exclusive right to profit on his novel will constrain literary creativity. In major parts of the Western world there is an understanding that not even when the author dies are his novels (and poems and songs and whatever) free for the vultures to take; they are part of the heritage, owned by the heirs, for 70 years.
Honestly, I am not getting what you are driving at. It seems like you both complain about your father's patents expiring after 20 years, and complain about Disney retaining their intellectual rights for 20 years. And you appear unclear about the distinction between technical innovation (patents) and artistic creations (copyright). Well ... Such confusion is common!
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trønderen wrote: Honestly, I am not getting what you are driving at. It seems like you both complain about your father's patents expiring after 20 years, and...
Yes, you really aren't, because that isn't what I was complaining about.
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David O'Neil wrote: ience of King David's Court | Object Oriented Programming with C++
OK, now we know what you are really complaining about. Thanks for explaining.
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I suppose I should have also given another example of being 'for the rich' that really pisses me off. The patent for insulin is expired (and it was free), but if you try to make insulin off that patent you will get shut down by the FDA because you have to have tons of money to make a 'pure' lab... So the poor people are screwed because the 'rich' don't give a crap about making the world better for them. That is abundantly clear from the prices insulin now goes for in America.
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David O'Neil wrote: you will get shut down by the FDA because you have to have tons of money to make a 'pure' lab..
Err...rather certain that one can make a very good case that insuring that medicines are safely made is in fact reasonable.
And other than that any law, rule and/or regulation can be exploited either by finding ways around it or finding ways to restrict fair use due to those in the first place. It is not possible and never will be to both be safe and fair.
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jschell wrote: It is not possible and never will be to both be safe and fair.
And that, right there, is the problem. We've allowed our 'bullies' to take control of the market, and they have no regard for the average person. To them, we are just a means of making a profit. As evidenced by insulin prices.
I don't have a problem with insuring the drugs are produced purely. I do have a problem when the entire system is stacked against the regular Joe, who can't access the capital for such costly endeavors like building a lab to make insulin more affordable.
On the bright side, I did hear of a project to change the situation, although I haven't heard word of success yet. Maybe we will slowly eliminate the 'stacked against the average Joe' problem.
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Cap it.
Make whatever money you want/need from it and then release it from restriction.
It's a non-problem.
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I mean we kind of have caps, but then you have outfits like Disney that basically abuse them to keep creations out of the public domain in a way that the little folks can't do. I guess it helps if you can lobby the lawmakers.  A separate problem at least, for us here in the US, but an enduring one.
I guess my point is the caps don't seem all that effective.
Maybe some reform is all that's advisable, or maybe there's just a better mousetrap out there and we haven't found it yet.
There are some people I won't quote here because their very names are politicized all to heck, who had some interesting alternative takes on IP. I don't think I agree with all of them, but it doesn't mean there's no insight to be found there.
Real programmers use butterflies
modified 24-Dec-21 19:51pm.
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I thought the question regarded what you intended to do.
The large picture is indeed quite complex and solutions are unclear.
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Oh no, as far as I'm concerned, I do what I can live with given the lay of the land. Or I guess that is, I dance with the one who brung me.
I was being expansive, looking at human activity as a whole. Sometimes I wax big picture without warning. 
Real programmers use butterflies
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"On the other hand, I need to eat."
There you go. There is nothing wrong with profiting from your ideas and labor. Many people have done so and fed many more families.
Charlie Gilley
“They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” BF, 1759
Has never been more appropriate.
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Don't misunderstand me. I don't see any problem in profiting from my labor.
I do take issue with the fact that we stifle human innovation as a consequence, at least to degrees.
I just wish there was a better way to have our cake and eat it too.
Real programmers use butterflies
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Note that a patent requires a publication of your work. You tell the world of your great idea. They may learn from it, make prototypes based on it, and develop it further. It doesn't stiffle development at all - quite to the contrary.
Everyone may play around with your ideas, learn from them, develop them. The only limitation of a patent is that if they want to exploit it commercially, they have to ask you for permission. You have the freedom to refuse, or to say "OK, as long as you pay me a 10 cents license fee for each unit you make". You can control the use of your great idea for at most 20 years (then it becomes free to use for everyone), provided you pay the yearly fee to uphold your patent. If you do not, the patent may be freed at an earlier time.
OK, sometimes we may see a delay. In my student days, we read research articles (and newspaper 'science' stories) about this new magnetic disk technology, vertical magnetizing, that might increase disk capacities by a large factor. We saw nothing of that over the following years. But then, quite suddenly, lots of disks came out with capacities measured in gigabytes rather than megabytes. I counted backwards ... Those papers and news stories of vertical magnetizing had appeared something like 19 years ago. The patents were probably in place at that time. So for twenty years, disk manufacturers had been polishing and perfecting that vertical technology, and filled their stores with large-capacity disks, ready to be shipped on the very day that the patents expired.
I don't know who held the patents, but I suspect it was IBM, much because their high capacity DeskStar disk series of the time soon earned the name 'Death Star': The technology was not yet mature. I may be wrong. When other manufacturers released their disks, they turned out to be mature and reliable.
Another thing that is often not understood: Patents is a national matter. No "international" patent exists. Even if you pay your yearly fee to uphold your US patent, anyone may do business on your ideas as long as they do it outside the US. If you do not pay patent fees to China, any Chinese manufacturer who reads your patent may exploit it, as long as they do not market their products on the US market. That is not copyright infringement! If you want Chinese manufacturers to stay off your invention, you must pay Chinese fees! They may market their products in the huge Asian market, and even the European market, if you didn't bother to apply for patent protection in Europe.
Assuming that you do have a patent - you have a sole right to commercially exploit this great idea of yours. If you have no opportunity to realize this exploitation, you haven't got the funds to set up a factory to make the products, or to do the marketing: What is wrong with you going to some company that is capable of manufacturing / marketing it, telling them: "If you pay me so and so much, I will give you the sole right to profit off my great idea!"? You could of course sell them non-exclusive licenses to manufacture and create products, but if you tell them: I sell the patent to you, giving up all my rights!, then you have explicitly put yourself together will all those others who read the patent text: They/you know how to do it, but have no legal right to exploit it commercially.
Your choice! What really would be stiffeling to innovation is if you either decided not to reveal to anyone what you have created, not applying for a patent but keeping it secret. Or, you apply for (and are granted) a patent so that everyone can see what you have created, but even though you have no opportunity yourself to exploit the idea as a commercial / industrial product, you absolutely refuse to sell any sort of license to anyone who might have realized it.
The Open Source community has worked hard to establish the understanding that "If we can't get hold of it absolutely for free, and use it in absolutely any way we like, then we consider it not at all available, and as an undisputable example of IP rights curbing innovation".
Like, in the link provided in the initial post of the "display port vs. HDMI interface" thread, one of the reader comments say
Dont forget that Display Port is an open standard. Eveytime you buy hdmi you are paying extra for licensing fees. There’s no real reason to use HDMI. It’s being forced on consumers and it costs extra.
Which is commented on by another reader:
The HDMI royalty is paltry - between $0.04 - $0.15 per unit (not per port) + a fixed amount per manufacturer per year (which spread across the total manufacturing output is going to end up close to $0 on a per unit basis). It’s not going to affect the price in any meaningful way.
License fees are not devastating to progress and innovation!
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I'm not speaking about what I intend to do. I'm waxing expansive and talking about human activity as a whole and the impact of the IP concept on it.
Real programmers use butterflies
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Even if you are talking about The Great Abstract Concept of The Human Activity of Creating Intellectual Property, it has to be brought down to earth, made concrete, exemplified, to illustrate the consequences of those abstracted ideas.
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I'd say at least to me it's pretty obvious in the aggregate that if humans could share information more freely, we would probably benefit in terms of collective understanding so long as we could do so without diminishing incentive.
I'm not about to write a thesis or defend a dissertation, however. This is the lounge after all, not uni.
And to compare the state of things now with how they *might be* is effectively post hoc ergo propter hoc, so I won't directly make that argument with specifics.
Real programmers use butterflies
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trønderen wrote: Your choice! What really would be stiffeling to innovation is if you either decided not to reveal to anyone what you have created, not applying for a patent but keeping it secret. Or, you apply for (and are granted) a patent so that everyone can see what you have created, but even though you have no opportunity yourself to exploit the idea as a commercial / industrial product, you absolutely refuse to sell any sort of license to anyone who might have realized it.
I believe you missed one.
The time period in the US does not start until the patent is issued. But the protection extends before that.
And a company can extend the application period for quite a long time, by making modifications to the original application.
So the process is as follows.
1. Submit the application in 2021.
2. The process takes at a minimum of 6 months and that would be really short. Close to two years is more likely.
3. Company modifies the application in 2022
4. Company modifies the application in 2023
5. Application patent is finally approved in 2024.
6. 2024 is the first time the patent is publicly visible.
7. Company starts suing anyone before that for any products that use that tech.
8. Patent expires in 2048.
Now those people can try to break the patent by showing that what was patented was actually known before the company originally submitted the proposal. But that takes time and money.
And it is possible to get patent extensions. Vigra has such an extension because they found that it could be used to treat a childhood disease (heart disease probably.)
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I guess that being a patent lawyer is a matter so complex that even if you are an American one and never look outside your national borders, you may have a hard time keeping up with changing details and changing interpretations of the laws.
Europeans watching movies ridiculing US courts often have a good laugh. Of course we understand that it can't be true. That's not the way it is in real life. Then when you look at certain specific cases that make you think "But the distance between fantasy and reality isn't that big" ...
The schedule you describe may be fully realistic - in the US. But patent laws are, I dare to repeat, a strictly national issue. As seem from Europe, US patent (and copyright) management has tended to be easily associable with the wild west.
If your invention/product is going to be marketed in the US, you will have to pay attention to the way patents are handled in the US. If you see the US as an insignificant market, or one where you do not expect any significant competitors, or anyone worth the effort to fight against, you may choose to ignore the US market. (Say you make a translation machine for translating between Korean and Thai: If you have patents in all Asian countries, the number of units you expect to sell in the US is so small that even if someone reads your European/Asian (but no US) patents and decide to 'steal' it to make products for the US market, you may loose a share of that market - but it was insignificant anyway.
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honey the codewitch wrote: I can't even imagine how much further along STEM would be if we didn't put up artificial barriers around innovation.
That is common suggestion from people that run into patents.
It is a very broad conceptual argument that has no evidence to support it.
It is somewhat akin to conspiracy theories that cars would be much more efficient except for automobile industry patents that keep people for using some mysterious 'new' technology. Such arguments completely ignore (as mentioned elsewhere) that patents only limit use within a single country. If one could get 1000 miles on a one gallon of gas then many other countries outside the US would already be doing that.
There might be some limited short term impact on one individual segment of industry but if it is important there will probably be large scale research efforts to find different ways to approach the problem. And those very efforts will provide innovation that likely would not exist if the limitation by the patent did not exist.
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Quote: Seat cushions, table cloth, and napkins under sofa in kitchen
And I remember now ... last year it took me hours to find where the heck I put them the previous Christmas so I set up a reminder to save me time this year.
Thanks, one-year-younger-OriginalGriff! You're a mate. I'd buy you a drink, except ... you're gone now. 
Do you do things like that, or is it just me, and weird?
"I have no idea what I did, but I'm taking full credit for it." - ThisOldTony
"Common sense is so rare these days, it should be classified as a super power" - Random T-shirt
AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
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My thing is I'll put it somewhere safe and forget where somewhere safe is
"Life should not be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in a pretty and well-preserved body, but rather to skid in broadside in a cloud of smoke, thoroughly used up, totally worn out, and loudly proclaiming “Wow! What a Ride!" - Hunter S Thompson - RIP
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No, it's just you and yes, you are weird. 
Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.
-- 6079 Smith W.
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