throwawaykf05

6 ms·

1.
by throwawaykf05 8y ago
This story is oft-repeated here but this paper provides convincing historical industrial evidence that it's a myth: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2355673
2.
by throwawaykf05 10y ago
Let's. Microsoft is the biggest spender on R&D amongst software companies and they sponsor a lot of research without clear immediate benefits. This is in stark contrast to all the other big companies who largely only sponsor projec
3.
by throwawaykf05 10y ago
Or, asserting their legal right to protect their investment in R&D that latecomers like Linux and Android simply ripped off. Just a matter of perspective, really. Is just that given open source is the dominant religion around these part
4.
by throwawaykf05 10y ago
Of course it does. The claims define what a patent covers. Noting that the vast majority (95%+?) of patents go unused, it's reasonable to assume that they have some correlation with market usage. What other hypothesis would you posit f
5.
by throwawaykf05 10y ago
In fact, the MP3 patents are directly responsible for spurring the development of Ogg Vorbis, which is arguably superior in some ways (see other comments). From Wikipedia: > Vorbis is a continuation of audio compression development star
6.
by throwawaykf05 10y ago
> In what way is it "doing harm" to the patent system? Well here's a study showing that the user of the term "troll" had become widely used by media without any evidence to support their negative views. This ha
7.
by throwawaykf05 10y ago
> ... grant a more even balance between the financial interests of the rightsholders and the cultural interests of the public at large... You mean the public that still exchanges terabytes [1] of pirated content every month in the US a
8.
by throwawaykf05 10y ago
The main reasons Netflix, Spotify and their ilk exist are a) piracy is still not user-friendly enough for everyone, and b) people vastly overestimate the risk of getting caught for piracy. Both of these are largely due to the incessant effo
9.
by throwawaykf05 10y ago
> TV and Movie owners already have copyright laws and DMCA laws giving them legal control on who gets their content and how it is used. And you have property laws giving you legal control over who gets your physical property and how it
10.
by throwawaykf05 10y ago
IIRC, it was some bytes of object code they copied to be interoperable, so that string could just as well have been an array of random numbers as far as being the key to interoperability was concerned.
11.
by throwawaykf05 10y ago
> Most corporations are still focused on just moving over to IaaS with compliance and security first Yes but my point is AWS has more mindshare and MS has more leverageable pre-existing business inroads with a huge number of these cor
12.
by throwawaykf05 10y ago
"We can only send you the data as fast as we can get it from Netflix. Please try speedtest.net, speedof.me or testmy.net to check your actual speed."
13.
by throwawaykf05 10y ago
Is not wanting to peer with somebody for free a violation of net neutrality?
14.
by throwawaykf05 10y ago
Microsoft put billions into Windows Phone and many (including me) think it's superior to iOS and Android, but what's its market share now? What I mean is, even if it is technically better, will Google Cloud get customers? AWS has
15.
by throwawaykf05 10y ago
Says the guy paid by Google. Tell me, when Alsup issued his "name your shills" order, was yours amongst those Google released? I certainly see you (or at least your handle) commenting on various Google-related threads here and on
16.
by throwawaykf05 10y ago
Yes, and those semantics are purely functional, lacking any form of expression, which copyright expressly excludes from protection. The only reason binaries are copyright-protected is because they are "derivative works" from the o
17.
by throwawaykf05 10y ago
Another key point (in my view) is that these APIs are textual whereas BIOS / protocols / binary interfaces are purely functional. Copyright is meant to cover "forms of expression". Text can have "expressive" c
18.
by throwawaykf05 10y ago
You said: > Sure. But music sharing didn't kill the industry then; there's little reason to believe it'll be the reason for its death now. To me that translated to: "Sharing some songs between a handful of friends
19.
by throwawaykf05 10y ago
They put in most of the up-front money to make an artist big (or bigger). Is that not risk?
20.
by throwawaykf05 10y ago
>But music sharing didn't kill the industry then; there's little reason to believe it'll be the reason for its death now. Not a valid extrapolation. The Internet is billions of times faster and more densely connected tha
21.
by throwawaykf05 10y ago
Maybe they can afford to because they've figured out other ways to screw the public? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2G_spectrum_scam
22.
by throwawaykf05 10y ago
Are you saying the government does not do "vigorous enforcement of drug laws, long punishments for criminals"? These are topics that are the source of perennial complaints on HN. I think rayiner's point is that outside the HN
23.
by throwawaykf05 10y ago
Actually the problem these days is that standard-essential patents are considered less valuable because they tend to require FRAND licensing. This is the problem companies like Motorola and Samsung ran into during the smartphone patent wa
24.
by throwawaykf05 10y ago
Not really, it's just compliance with the license that a piece of software is offered with. Things are no less silly in the world of open source. You are bound to honor the license of the open source software that you use. For instance
25.
by throwawaykf05 10y ago
No, only abstract mathematical algorithms cannot be patented. Compression is a concrete application of mathematical algorithms.
26.
by throwawaykf05 10y ago
As a consumer of APIs I agree that having drop-in replacements for APIs is the ideal state. However, as a producer of APIs, I also appreciate the efforts required to design a good API. There's some value in that. This translates to any
27.
by throwawaykf05 10y ago
Yes, in my view people should not get to free ride on the labors of others. The ease of copying information belies the efforts required to produce quality information that is valuable, and so people think they have a right to freely copy wh
28.
by throwawaykf05 10y ago
The ABI, being essentially an ordering of bytes at specific offsets, has no expressive capability. Tons of creativity, sure, but of the functional kind, the stuff copyright explicitly exempts. Note that if only ABI compatibility was require
29.
by throwawaykf05 10y ago
That is what Chicken Little would like you to believe, but you always have the option of devising your own API, call it prefixWithChars. If your implementation really is that much better, people will go through the effort of migrating their
30.
by throwawaykf05 10y ago
IANAL, but my take: Are you re-implementing anybody else's API without their permission? If not, this has absolutely no bearing on you. Hopefully a real lawyer can shed more light.

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