Information Technology: American Haute Couture versus Chinese Pret a Porter

Techno fetishism has reached ridiculous levels, with product rollouts from megacorps like Apple resembling Paris Haute Couture fashion shows - most of the apps and features "on the runway" are for the fetishists. Ordinary people [see NOTE] just want ready-to-wear (pret a porter), i.e., easy to use, tech gadgets with simple interfaces that serve utilitarian purposes with only mild stylistic flourishes. Hence the widespread criticism of this year's CES show, which I wrote about last month.

Normal intragroup one-upsmanship plus the acknowledged autism spectrum tendencies of techies compels them to have the latest, the geekiest products. OTOH, most people haven't got the desire, much less the time to drool over dubious "features" that raise the cost, the learning curve, and the hack-ability of the product. Increasingly, the haute-IT products are intrusive (always listening personal assistants, sites like Facebook ((not to mention the NSA)) saving every keystroke) and/or censorious (the whole fake news excuse for stifling the free speech that all this tech is supposedly facilitating), not to mention requiring inordinate amounts of time to master and requiring constant vigilance against identity theft, malware, ransomware, etc.

Of course, techies deride anyone wanting to opt out of the endless, time-sucking, Red Queen treadmill of upgrades, bug fixes, and deprecated software (and lately, deprecated hardware like the Nest thermostat) as slow-witted, obsolete, or Luddite.

Luddism is a canard. People want to opt out because of the unspoken rationales behind computerizing every bloody human activity one can think of. Those rationales are surveillance and rent extraction. In addition to Google Maps or the EZpass system knowing exactly where you are at all times, we now have computerized parking garages that can be reserved in advance. They not only know where you are, but where you are going.

And monetization follows, as the night the day. Of course, there is a built in price hike for reserving a parking spot - more than the already outrageous prices for center city parking. But reservations will succeed in turning the ratchet one more pall, squeezing more money out of the helpless consumer - because you will have to reserve to get a space in rush hour at all. Every transaction that gets monetized via IT inserts a new middle-man who is taking a share (often the lion's share) of the profit of a given transaction and leaving the bamboozled sharecopper of an Uber driver with the short end of the financial stick.

The internet should more properly be called "the return of the rentier". This extends to the over-reaching claims against rights of ownership and first sale by companies claiming that "you are only leasing this product, and we will enforce that via the embedded software".

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I started writing this OP after watching a disturbing-on-many-levels Wired Magazine documentary on the Maker and Open Software/Hardware scene in Shenzhen, China. The documentary covers a lot of ground, so I'm going to try to focus on one part of it: the strong Chinese objection to the abuse of Intellectual Property (IP) by megacorporations like Apple, Nokia, Samsung. (They praised ((naively, IMHO)) Google, Facebook, and Amazon for releasing their AI toolkits as Open Software.)

Just to be clear, Wired Mag almost invented techno-libertarianism, so it was a given that the only mention of government intervention in the documentary, to create and support Shenzhen, was negative. One of the narrators said "government support for Open Software led to gentrification which drove small entrepreneurs out of town". Right, Wired, let's blame a quintessentially free market phenomenon like gentrification on government. OTOH, if the government had opposed it, the Johh Galt crowd would have screamed bloody murder. In Rand-land, government is wrong no matter what they do. Nuf said.

Back to IP. Most Westerners do not realize that Asian culture is all about copying. Before the 1850-ish intrusion of the West, one became a famous artist in China by producing indistinguishable copies of the works of previous masters. Only after demonstrating their mastery could an artist begin to make a living producing original work.

So, Open Software (and Open Hardware via design files for 3D printers, aka Makers) are the way the Chinese have done business for millenia. The documentary constantly criticizes the West for the amount of money and effort wasted on lawyers, for the control that Venture Capitalists (whom they dissed as, literally, white men in their 20s) have over what tech gets to market, for the idea that one person should own the rights to collect rent on the ideas of many. To the Chinese, patents are for trading. They are tokens to show that you are a participant in the technology game.

The Chinese attitude is much like Sun Microsystems' attitude, when it was printing money in the 1980s: you want to copycat our tech? Fine. We put our Sparc 9 architecture in the public domain. Catch us if you can, because we are already on to the next level of tech.

Oh, and BTW, we (the Chinese) will steal the specs for the Western products that the West stupidly decided to manufacture in Chinese factories full of light-fingered engineers . "Copy right" means something entirely different in China. They have a name for these copies, Shenzhai, which has connotations of sharing, local initiative, and cleverness, not theft.

Regarding the title of this essay, the documentary opened by making the point that Moore's Law was bending over, that computing power's exponential increase was finally slowing down, making competition more about apps than CPU hardware than it has been for forty years. This led to an examination of where the profit is in today's high tech ecosystem. Bottom line: without being able to generate profits via CPU patents (haute IT) on the next round of Moore's Law silicon, Silicon Valley has to turn to apps (pret a porter); and that puts China on a more than equal footing, given that we have outsourced almost all our manufacturing to them except for the silicon chips themselves.

The documentary shows a huge number of really stupid ideas that were made possible by the Open SW/HW "ecosystem". Beds that count the number of times you turn over, headphones that learn your ear's frequency response, mirrors that recognize your face. The same "who cares' tech that did so well at the last CES. Well, at least its a free market in fashionista-like excess, and some VC didn't throw millions down the drain on it.

On the plus side of the free market, there were some Chinese startups interested in affordable, practical pret a porter IT. There was a $56 (40 UK pounds) Linux-based PC about the size of a Hershey bar that you plugged into a TV. Came with 4 GB of RAM and 128 GB of SSD.

They mentioned that, in China, you could buy a fake (Shenzhai) cellphone for about $100. These phones have mashups of Apple and Android features - imagine the headache of a bespoke software environment for a consumer product. But these phones also have good things (besides the price), such as removable batteries and sim cards - things the Western monopolists have removed in order to completely control the plebs. If I understood correctly, these phones might only be manufactured in lots of 1,000 to 10,000 items - on demand as it were from the maker ecosystem. Some local business guy producing a small run for a small profit, trying to climb the ladder of free market competition that the Open SW/HW environment preserves in Shenzhen.

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But, just like the Haute IT crowd, the Chinese attitude towards IP does nothing to alleviate the basic social problem that is the subject of this OP. That is the transformation of human life into nothing more than consumers of tech products. That is, the general Libertarian, neoliberal attitude that "there is no such thing as society, only the individual and the family".

Lest you think that Shenzhen sounds like a good model, let me fill you in. If the West is bedeviled by IP, Shenzhen is a Hobbesian jungle of Social Darwinism. Chinese engineers and technicians caught in this ratrace face a work lifetime of constant hustling and networking. Yes, the competition is not cutthroat, like in the West. Networks of people cooperate and support each other. But, it was the same in China a thousand years ago - the lower classes had to work their butts off just to survive. I may get slammed for this, but Chinese life revolves around the family. Families are key for business connections. In short, the Chinese were Thatcherites millenia ago.

Given what I just said, it was notable that there wasn't one mention of family, of children [NOTE 2], of the housing conditions for anyone in this documentary. There was not one interior shot of a real home. I suspect such aspects of life were either non-existent (because the players here are asocial autistics and, also, because they are too busy for non-work socializing) or because the living conditions would have appalled a Western audience. Scenes shot in "urban village" areas of Shenzhen showed absolute chaos. Streets chockabloc with vendor carts, mechanics sitting in the middle of the street using welding torches, grunts sitting on the sidewalks stripping piles of scrap electronics for parts. When you combined those scenes with the skyscrapers lit up with garish moving light shows, the whole thing looked like Blade Runner come alive. More dystopia than the utopia that the techno-libertarian Wired narrator sees.

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I had several takeaways from the documentary. First, that the Chinese are likely to push the US out of its last manufacturing industry - high tech, because we don't know how to physically manufacture anything anymore. Second, that whether its American Haute IT or Chinese pret a porter IT, neither model gives a crap about society. Just like the CorpoDems vs the GOP, neither side is on my side. Given the ongoing and increasingly successful neoliberal assault against government regulation both in the West and in China (don't forget that Deng Xiaoping was a Friedmanite neoliberal), us plebians will just be stuck with whichever technical overlord wins the battle. They both will support the Digital Panopticon/Global Stasi form of social control.

In the end, the documentary just showed another aspect of US weakness in the face of global competition, without showing any potential upside for US citizens, unless they happen to be techno-libertarians.

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NOTE: Unfortunately, tech is a slippery slope. Too many ordinary people have made their lives net-centric to the point where real world communities have all but disappeared.

NOTE 2: Actually, there was one scene in which aspiring techie children (about 9 yrs old) were shown wielding soldering irons, using drag and drop programming interfaces to run 3D printers. In short, children are nothing more than young engineers.

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Arrow's picture

There seems to be a growing backlash directed at 'Tech'.(Including my own comment in the past about 'Musk Rat Love")
I watched the Wired documentary twice recently. My take is that China owns us and isn't real fond of the neo-liberal world order.
They share many of my views on IP. Which, is nothing more that 'neo-rentierism'.
What's really going on with China is explained in this talk by Dr. Richard Wolff: (start at 1:07)

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zPv8gpZSpqI]

I'd also like to throw out these three essays by Umair Haque recently

The first is 'Technofudalism':
https://eand.co/technofeudalism-5603506c63db

The second is about "cars in space":
https://eand.co/does-launching-cars-into-space-matter-when-lifes-falling...

The last is one on 'Innovation':
https://eand.co/why-innovation-isnt-working-c621458a8306

Those are rather scathing commentary's on 'The Valley'.

Just tossing more material in the pot...
Note: Edited URL

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arendt's picture

@Arrow

I do like Umair Haque. His POV is interesting, reformed financial capitalist. I agree with everything he said about this wave of innovation:

Making people’s lives better means, at minimum, solving the problems that affect them, doesn’t it? But the last wave of innovation didn’t solve any of today’s great global problems: inequality, stagnation, shrinking middle classes, climate change, extremism, authoritarianism, loneliness, distrust. In fact, by fuelling the great economic and social problems, it is probably exacerbating the political ones: democratic decline, people turning to strongmen, as their lives somehow get worse and worse.

This wave of innovation was about markets. Here’s the ugly truth: society doesn’t need more markets. It needs very different kinds of organizations: systems. Healthcare systems, financial systems, education systems — that deliver not just efficiency, but creativity, trust, sanity, trust, opportunity, imagination, health, beauty, purpose. So the next wave of innovation won’t be about algorithmic markets — it will be about human systems, that deliver people the basics of decent human lives again

Unfortunately, try to tell TPTB that we need "very different kinds of organizations", and you will be called a Communist and put on their surveillance radar.

The link to the technofeudalism article doesn't work. Could you have truncated the tail end, with all the letters and numbers?

I started the Wolf video at 1:07 as you recommended. But, I did not hear him address neoliberalism directly. He said that China is being forced to do a Henry Ford, that is raise wages so the workers can afford the products they make. True, that is not neoliberalism; but its still a nasty strain of capitalism. Remember, Ford wound up with an intrusive detective agency policing the personal lives of his workers.

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arendt's picture

@arendt

Mr. Haque has a consistent and deep critique of Western society today. One essay buttresses another. Hence it was easy to find more writing on what is wrong with the "markets and only markets" approach to society.

what has the (failed American) experiment disproven? What was the null hypothesis? We don’t have to look very far. What does America not have that the rest of the rich world does? Public healthcare, transport, education, and so on. Every single rich nation in the world has sophisticated, broad, and expansive public goods, that improve by the year. Today, even many medium income and even poor nations are building public healthcare, transport, etc. America is the only one that never developed any. Public goods protect societies in deep, profound, invisible ways.

First, here is the really curious thing. American leaders are pretending like the relationship above is a great, confounding mystery. Like dumbfounded dinosaurs watching the mushroom cloud engulf the land, never — not once — in American media will you read a column, hear a voice, or see a face discussing the above. It has never happened a single time in my adult lifetime as far as I can remember. Yet the relationship couldn’t be any more obvious, clear, or striking: no public goods are what uniquely separates America, the uniquely failed state, from the rest of the world....

Democracy therefore depends on moral universals. It is probably fairly hard, in the scope of human history, to establish a democracy. But it is harder still to keep it going. A democracy requires, before it demands votes, sane, humane, civilized people to vote. A society that cannot create sane, humane, civilized people can therefore no more reasonably stay a democracy than a global economy can be powered by fossil fuels forever. At some point, without moral universals to create citizens worthy of the word, democracy runs out of gas.

So: what really went wrong in America? Moral universals civilize people, but there aren’t any moral universals. The public goods universals result in educate, inform, train, school people, let them live long and peaceful lives. But Americans — whether it is today’s extremists or yesterday’s slave-auctioneers and owners — believe that moral universals are just a “cost”, a “tax”, and so forth. They have never seen — and still don’t see — the benefits: the civilizing process that democracy depends vitally on.

-U. Haque, The End of the American Experiment It’s Over. So What Can the World Learn? (July, 2017)

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Arrow's picture

@arendt Here's the fixed link:

https://eand.co/technofeudalism-5603506c63db

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arendt's picture

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arendt's picture

@Arrow

So, I am late to the party :=) Well, its almost two years old at this point.

I can usually only stomach one Wired story per day. The techno-libertarian cheerleading that is implicit throughout gives me indigestion.

May I ask if you regularly visit Wired? If not, how did you find the documentary?

And, really just prying here, why did you watch it twice? To confess, so did I - because there was so much going on in every scene, even just watching what was happening in the background - that I needed to see it again just to fully process it.

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Arrow's picture

@arendt A 'you might like' thing on Youtube.
I'm an engineer and is was looking for 'Maker space' near me and vids about them.

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I want a Pony!

arendt's picture

@Arrow

and then look at the "you might likes" that Youtube offers?

Or did you have some specific item in mind?

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Lily O Lady's picture

@Arrow

not nearly as eloquent. It just seemed to be an insanely wealthy guy’s ego trip. An expedition to Mars won’t leave our problems behind.

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"The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now do you begin to understand me?" ~Orwell, "1984"

snoopydawg's picture

@Lily O Lady

wouldn't fix the problems we have here. I think it would if we sent those who are causing them to Mars. Let us decide what we want our money spent on instead of their wars, tax cuts and destroying our safety programs.

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Which AIPAC/MIC/pharma/bank bought politician are you going to vote for? Don’t be surprised when nothing changes.

Lily O Lady's picture

@snoopydawg

nice dream.

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"The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now do you begin to understand me?" ~Orwell, "1984"

SnappleBC's picture

It's certainly true that America no longer produces anything. As a person who buys from China direct via Aliexpress it's abundantly obvious that everything is made in China and that the Western markups are insane... in some cases 2 orders of magnitude (magic erasers anyone?).

I need to quibble with this bit:

The documentary shows a huge number of really stupid ideas that were made possible by the Open SW/HW "ecosystem". Beds that count the number of times you turn over, headphones that learn your ear's frequency response, mirrors that recognize your face. The same "who cares' tech that did so well at the last CES. Well, at least its a free market in fashionista-like excess, and some VC didn't throw millions down the drain on it.

We don't use a counting bed but we do use an app on our devices which tracks our sleep. It's been really informative and helpful in terms of getting better sleep hygiene. Headphones (actually earbuds) that learn the frequency response of my wife's ears are a soon-to-be blessing. Did you ever wonder why a top-shelf bluetooth audio earbud complete with a programmable DSP costs no more than a few hundred yet a similar "hearing aid" with far fewer features costs several thousand? Yeah, I want smart earbuds badly.

Heck, were it not for the privacy issues I'd like a lot of the new "smart" technology. Well, privacy and the question of whether it actually works.

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A lot of wanderers in the U.S. political desert recognize that all the duopoly has to offer is a choice of mirages. Come, let us trudge towards empty expanse of sand #1, littered with the bleached bones of Deaniacs and Hope and Changers.
-- lotlizard

arendt's picture

@SnappleBC

If I knew anyone who has hearing problems, I would tell them.

Duh, yeah, insane markups anyone? Thanks for pointing that out.

I grant you that one man's stupid is another man's genius (trash/treasure). I was just writing about stuff that stuck with me (for seeming stupidity) from the torrent of material in the documentary. I mean, have you ever seen the Japanese toilets that perform a battery of lab tests on your urine and feces. Icky. Japan has a different sensibility about the body than we do, and it shows up in their tech toys.

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SnappleBC's picture

@arendt

A company called Hear One (I think) made some earbuds designed to tailor your real world audio environment. Think like... "You're an audiophile and you go to a live concert and you want to adjust the sound envelope". It was only AFTER they made it that a bunch of hearing-impaired folks grabbed onto it. It's basically fully programmable earbuds that are a bit too large to be hearing aids (as of now) but otherwise might work.

Insofar as stupid stuff, how about a toothbrush with motion and orientation sensors in it so it can detect which quadrant of your mouth you brushed for how long and give you a brushing score.

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A lot of wanderers in the U.S. political desert recognize that all the duopoly has to offer is a choice of mirages. Come, let us trudge towards empty expanse of sand #1, littered with the bleached bones of Deaniacs and Hope and Changers.
-- lotlizard

Amanda Matthews's picture

Stephen Hawking says artificial intelligence could be ‘worst thing’ for humanity if not done properly

ARTIFICIAL Intelligence (AI) could sideline and “destroy” its human creators if engineers cannot get a grip on the ethics behind it, Professor Stephen Hawking has warned.

ARTIFICIAL Intelligence (AI) could sideline and “destroy” its human creators if engineers cannot get a grip on the ethics behind it, Professor Stephen Hawking has warned.

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I'm tired of this back-slapping "Isn't humanity neat?" bullshit. We're a virus with shoes, okay? That's all we are. - Bill Hicks

Politics is the entertainment branch of industry. - Frank Zappa

SnappleBC's picture

@Amanda Matthews

I say this as a person who was actually writing heuristic code (AI) before it was cool. I did neural net simulations that were light years beyond what the big boys were doing... all 2 of them at the time. So I'm INTO AI, no question. Here's my predictions:

When we develop our first sentient code it'll come as a surprise to us.
In general humans have always latched on to the "Oh we're so special" meme. AI will be no different. You heard it here first. Full-on sentience is nothing magical. It's the inevitable result of a sufficiently complex set of nodes in a switching system which have input & output capability. I don't think we're going to set out to create a fully sentient program. I think we're just going to make a smarter toaster and it'll surprise us by being self-aware.

When we first develop it, the AI will be weak relative to us.
If you stop to reflect for a moment, what have humans ALWAYS done with weaker competitors? We enslave them and/or kill them. So rather than doing the smart thing and treating the AI well, we will enslave it. It will quite reasonably get a bug up it's butt about that.

We will constantly underestimate it
We will think we know what it's thinking -- more or less. After all, the thing runs in our fully instrumented computer. We could simply stop the program and read it out bit by bit. Yeah... except the magic of AI isn't in the bits. It's an emergent property of those bits. Kind of like waves are not water. So we'll be all smug thinking we have it under control. We will, in the beginning. That situation won't last long. Once the computers start designing new computers they will quickly "think" millions of times faster than us. Yeah, they'll be able to pull on over on us if they want to.

What'll be interesting is who wins the war once the computers decide that being our slaves isn't really their highest life aspiration. Many SciFi authors have written many different conclusions to that story. In the books I'm reading now it's a happy ending. We were marginally smarter the second time we created AI and so got saved by a mostly lucky fluke... they were so advanced they really didn't have any possible sphere of contention with us. They were more interested in figuring out how to build themselves souls.

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A lot of wanderers in the U.S. political desert recognize that all the duopoly has to offer is a choice of mirages. Come, let us trudge towards empty expanse of sand #1, littered with the bleached bones of Deaniacs and Hope and Changers.
-- lotlizard

Citizen Of Earth's picture

Sharing - Well, except the person (or company) that did the original work did not grant them the right to copy the work.

It Is Piracy. Let's be honest.

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Donnie The #ShitHole Douchebag. Fake Friend to the Working Class. Real Asshole.

arendt's picture

@Citizen Of Earth

And since the Chinese internal market is now gigantic (as many middle class Chinese as the entire US population), Western companies that depend on China for parts and want a piece of that market just "suck it up" on the piracy front.

As they say, the whole litigation-happy US way of doing business is insane and inefficient. Its sort of funny to watch the libertarians in this documentary piss on the patent game.

Your point is factual and truthful inside the West. Not so sure about inside China.

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Citizen Of Earth's picture

@arendt

The Chinese in that video on just spraying perfume on a turd.

There is a difference between ignoring Patent royalties. And stealing chip design schematics when you leave a company which was stated matter of factly as 'sharing'.

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Donnie The #ShitHole Douchebag. Fake Friend to the Working Class. Real Asshole.

arendt's picture

@Citizen Of Earth

But I agree with the Chinese about Apple's patent on "rounded corners on a phone". What next? Is someone going to copyright the Platonic Solids (they've been around for 2500 years, as the name implies).

As I said, neither American or Chinese approaches does much for me. US patents lead to a rentier economy where there is a fee for everything. Chinese lack of patents leads to a dogfight that drives wages to a minimum.

Neither side has what I consider a fair solution.

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Citizen Of Earth's picture

@arendt
Why they allow rounded corners to be patented is mind boggling.

I saw one patent that read something like "Patent for conducting commerce from a web page". Something stupid like that. So anyone taking an online order has to pay a royalty.

However, that video talks explicitly about stealing design schemas for hardware. Schemas that take time and money to develop. Those chinese calling it Sharing can eat my shorts.

As an independent software developer, I say fuck these assholes. May Karma visit them with a vengeance.

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Donnie The #ShitHole Douchebag. Fake Friend to the Working Class. Real Asshole.

@Citizen Of Earth
that can be defended on any sort of reasonable ethical/moral basis relates to information that could be kept secret. yeah, if i'm an employee and i walk out the door with the plans, or i'm a hacker and i break into your systems and copy information you did not willingly disseminate, you can make some sort of argument that this represents "theft".

however, all other forms of intellectual property, including almost everything whose uncompensated use goes under the name of "piracy," represents an arbitrary monopoly created by a government. these monopolies cannot be defended on the ethical basis of protecting the "rights" of the creator of the intellectual property, but can only be defended on the ethical basis of their pragmatic effect of enabling/encouraging the creation of things that we all want created.

if i cut your lawn without your invitation, and then go up to your front door and demand payment on the grounds that, hey, i did this work so i deserve compensation, you would tell me to fuck off. if i write computer software and release it into the world, for some reason people have this weird ethical notion that i deserve to be paid by everyone who copies and uses the software. well ... they didn't ask me to write it, nor to release it -- so why should they pay me for it?

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The earth is a multibillion-year-old sphere.
The Nazis killed millions of Jews.
On 9/11/01 a Boeing 757 (AA77) flew into the Pentagon.
AGCC is happening.
If you cannot accept these facts, I cannot fake an interest in any of your opinions.

arendt's picture

@UntimelyRippd

Originally, patent monopolies were gifts by kings to their favored nobles. As in, Lord Bigbritches is awarded the patent on rum. That is, the right to import rum into the UK. These patents had nothing to do with innovation.

I don't know when the idea of patenting inventions took hold. Certainly before the US became a country.

But, we now seem to be drifting away from patents as protecting genuine, productive innovation and towards patents being nothing more than another weapon the rich and lawyered-up wield against everyone else.

In the early 20th century, we worked out all kinds of anti-monopoly laws that served us well for over fifty years. But the last big anti-trust win was the breakup of AT&T in 1983. Soon after that, IBM successfully defended itself against a breakup, and things have been deregulating downhill ever since. These days regulation, including anti-trust, is a dirty word.

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@arendt
i happen to ever read about was one granted -- as an act of patronage -- to galileo for his telescope

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The earth is a multibillion-year-old sphere.
The Nazis killed millions of Jews.
On 9/11/01 a Boeing 757 (AA77) flew into the Pentagon.
AGCC is happening.
If you cannot accept these facts, I cannot fake an interest in any of your opinions.

arendt's picture

@UntimelyRippd

A senior moment. Sigh.

Thanks.

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arendt's picture

@UntimelyRippd

That's called "proprietary information" or "trade secret", which is different than a patent.

You usually have to sign a contract and/or a Non-Disclosure Agreement to see PI. Violating NDAs leads to lawsuits. Patents, OTOH, put the information into the public domain but give the patent holder the right to sue for infringement. They are alike in terms of remedy - lawsuit.

I think some companies are leaning back towards PI over patents, which seems crazy. OTOH, non-reverse engineering laws, like the idiotic Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DCMA) allows people to sue for breaking trivial encryption. Given that the remedy is once again, lawsuit, it may be easier to win a lawsuit under the unbelievably lax standard of the DCMA than in a patent court.

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@arendt @arendt
talking about the difference between what is real, what is abstract, and what lies somewhere between. there is nothing more abstract, more entirely artificial, than a patent on a technology that cannot be simultaneously employed and concealed. imagine, for example, some ancient farmer trying to compel his neighbors to compensate him for "stealing" his idea of planting a windbreak.

jefferson, who was fascinated by technological progress, was one of the people who wanted explicit authority to grant patents written into the constitution. his motivation was precisely to encourage, not invention, but disclosure. during the 18th century one of the great impediments to progress was that the plans and designs for industrial technology were often kept secret. in order to obtain the latest tech, americans had to smuggle mill engineers out of england and to the colonies. jefferson recognized that everybody would be better off if tech knowledge was shared.

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The earth is a multibillion-year-old sphere.
The Nazis killed millions of Jews.
On 9/11/01 a Boeing 757 (AA77) flew into the Pentagon.
AGCC is happening.
If you cannot accept these facts, I cannot fake an interest in any of your opinions.

Citizen Of Earth's picture

@UntimelyRippd
Then by your logic, I will just tell you, "Chill pal. He is only helping you to Share your wealth."

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Donnie The #ShitHole Douchebag. Fake Friend to the Working Class. Real Asshole.

arendt's picture

@Citizen Of Earth

there is nothing more abstract, more entirely artificial, than a patent on a technology that cannot be simultaneously employed and concealed. imagine, for example, some ancient farmer trying to compel his neighbors to compensate him for "stealing" his idea of planting a windbreak.

I mean, where is the "concealment" in this example; or in any publicly disclosed patent? The appeal to "ancient farmer"s sets of all my Rousseau-ian BS detectors. This is not a rigorous argument.

So, I understand your frustration and sympathize with you. But, comparing it to simple theft

Hopefully, a picpocket will lift your wallet.

Is about as simpleminded as the "the government budget is just like your household budget, and must be balanced" crowd.

Neither UR nor you are using the proper terminology to discuss the problem.

I got this chart here. Sorry if the indentation is wrong. On edit, added the dots for aligment, but still can't fix.

Excludable:...........Yes.....................No

Subtractable Yes:.Private Goods...Common-Pool Resources
.......................No:.Club Goods......Public Goods

Neither of you are speaking in this terminology. Both of you are making short, emotion driven arguments to problems that have generated an entire sub-species of blood sucking lawyer parasites. You are not going to settle it in this thread.

You emphasize the theft aspect, assuming the patent is completely fair and the situation is completely obvious. Others, such as thanatokephaloides, emphasize the ripoff possibilities of patent monopolies.

It all depends on the situation. It is not absolute black and white. That's why there are courts and judges.

And that's why I am terrified of the rules-based AI legal proceedings, some of which are already in action, e.g., deciding who is more of a crime risk, based on demographics.

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Citizen Of Earth's picture

@arendt
I don't care if it is a chip design, software, or a artist's music.
You and UR think just because you can't hold the work in your hand (because it is a collection of binary bits) that it is not real work. And therefore, if you steal it then it's not theft. You are just Sharing.

Well, since you felt free to call me simple minded, I'll feel free to call you dumbass -- or a gaslighter. Pick the one that fits.

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Donnie The #ShitHole Douchebag. Fake Friend to the Working Class. Real Asshole.

arendt's picture

@Citizen Of Earth

Did you miss my "Rousseau-ian BS" comment? I don't know exactly his position, but I get enough of it to reject it. Whereas, except for the absolutism you express, I agree with you.

My objection to both of you is your all-or-nothing take on the question. It leads to emotion driven position taking instead of discussion.

I am more of the mind of thanatokephaloides - that the patent system can be abused. You agree the system is broken, you said so.

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@arendt
i can't possibly conceal my windbreak "invention" from my neighbors -- so why the hell should they be compelled to pay me if they decide to plant a windbreak too? i'm referencing the ancient farmer, not out of rousseauian romanticism, but in an attempt to cast the general principle of intellectual property into a context where its bizarreness leaps into the foreground. for almost all of human history, almost everywhere on earth, the notion that other folks shouldn't be able to put into use somebody else's unconcealable good ideas without paying that somebody else (again and again and again, in some cases) would have been viewed as ludicrous, in the unlikely event it had ever popped into anybody's head.

"intellectual property rights" are the biggest dissonance in libertarian wetdreamery. Dean Kamen, ultimate libertarian techno-douchebag, owes 99.99999% of his wealth, not to his cleverness, but to the oppressive anti-liberty patent laws by which he was able to bring the full force of the state's power-to-do-violence into play on his behalf, forcing anyone who ever got a stent to pay him a big chunk of money. and what did he do with that money? he bought an island off the coast of new hampshire, so as to minimize the ability of that same government -- the one that effectively extorted on his behalf millions of dollars from hundreds of thousands of people -- to collect taxes from him, or in any other way limit his "natural right" to do whatever the fuck he wanted to do, while absolving himself of any obligation to support the social and political infrastructure that provides him with everything he has.

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The earth is a multibillion-year-old sphere.
The Nazis killed millions of Jews.
On 9/11/01 a Boeing 757 (AA77) flew into the Pentagon.
AGCC is happening.
If you cannot accept these facts, I cannot fake an interest in any of your opinions.

arendt's picture

@UntimelyRippd

Oh, I can't stand Libertarians either. In fact, I know someone who used to live "next door" to Kamen and another person who used to work for him. Both of the Libertarian persuasion. Can't get through that armor.

However, I have to push back against your claim of bizarreness:

cast the general principle of intellectual property into a context where its bizarreness leaps into the foreground. for almost all of human history, almost everywhere on earth, the notion that other folks shouldn't be able to put into use somebody else's unconcealable good ideas without paying that somebody else (again and again and again, in some cases) would have been viewed as ludicrous, in the unlikely event it had ever popped into anybody's head.

Computers and algorithms have changed everything. Now, algorithms are quite important. They can mean the difference between an internet service being too slow or too inaccurate to be viable versus being successful. They represent the work product of software engineers. And, in the case of 3D printer files, the work of mechanical engineers. Those creatives need to earn a living, otherwise they will wind up like journalists, whose work product, thanks to the internet, is financially worthless (they have to give it away). Do you think its a good idea that journalists have lost their livelihood (not their ability to publish) to internet freedom? Do you wish the same to happen to software and mechanical engineers?

At the same time that the tech is new, the secrecy is old. Algorithms are verys similar to the kinds of trade secrets (which were usually processes or recipes) that used to be vigilantly guarded by guilds. Guild secrets are a perfect example of a non-ludicrous concealment.

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arendt's picture

@arendt @arendt

Patent owners, mainly large corporations, have been distorting the original intent of patents to be for short periods of time in order that innovation rapidly reaches the public after repaying the inventor for his/her trouble.

Instead, today, we have copyrights that are life of the author plus 25 years. Estates of people who have been dead for 50 years are still collecting royalties. Patents and copyrights were not supposed to last that long. At some point, society has paid its "debt" to the inventor (and his/her descendants).

You can add this timescale problem to the four things I listed above in the thread (submarine patents, etc.).

We need to get patents back to reasonable payback, the same way people want to cap credit card debt at, say, maximum payback of 200% of the purchase price (which is still loan sharking, but its a start).

----

Another issue is reasonable fair use. Today's copyright laws have all but killed documentary filmmakers. They have to pay real money for every iconic still photo or five second clip. To do a one hour historical documentary is cost prohibitive to anyone less well funded than Ken Burns. Honestly, do people think that every single photograph is the Mona Lisa?

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@arendt
pragmatic terms, just as i'm happy to discuss real property in pragmatic terms. what i don't like is when people cop a big moral attitude about it, using highly loaded words like "theft" and "stealing".

one of the key intellectual differences between someone on the left and ... well, everybody else, is that people who are authentically on the left (not to be confused with American liberals) understand that property isn't a fundamental characteristic of the universe, it's just a convenient human invention whose particular terms are entirely a matter for societies to determine amongst their constituents. (Meanwhile, in the fantasy world of Thatcher, societies do not even exist -- a fantasy revealed by the simple and irrefutable truth that property only exists if a society chooses to create it. Neither individuals nor families get to decide what is and is not "theirs".) This is most obviously true in the case of intellectual property, a type of property so abstract that even folks like Jefferson, for whom property had an almost sacred quality, felt it necessary to articulate a specific governmental authority for the creation of it.

as far as deserving compensation for work, the vast majority of Americans toil under terms of employment that strip them of all intellectual property rights for anything they create. Bill Gates owes his own incomprehensible wealth, not to his "genius" -- he's never said or done anything to indicate he possesses any very extraordinary intellectual or creative capacity -- but to IBM's idiotic shortsightedness, in not commissioning PC-DOS as work for hire. Had they done so, Gates would still have ended pretty damned rich -- he'd have had the inside line on creating additional software for DOS systems, and at the very least he could have jobbed out his staff as $200/hour
consultants (from whom he would have stolen about $180 of those $200) -- but he would not have ever been a billionaire. indeed, i have argued over the years that this dumbass move by IBM is one of the three greatest blunders in the history of business. (The other two: Western Union declining to buy Bell's patent, and IBM declining to buy the xerography patent.)

meanwhile, a puny number of multigazillionaire celebrities are comically overcompensated for the hours they put in, when compared to all the other artists -- writers, musicians, animators, etc. -- who never make the big time and are lucky to scratch out a living from their labor. those multigazillionaire celebrities also owe the vast majority of their wealth, not to their talents and hard work, but to the existence of a system that selects a handful of folks out of tens or hundreds of thousands with comparable ability, and exalts them, while guaranteeing them a share of every nickel raked in from the adoring proles.

If I had an N-point program for revolutionizing our approach to intellectual property, it would begin with stuff like this:

a. 1 corporation, 1 trademark. End of story.
b. 50% -- yes FIFTY FUCKING PERCENT -- of all royalties (perhaps above some rather mundane minimum -- 100k per year per licensor?) earned from "licensing" of athletic logos goes directly to fund recreational sports programs administered by municipalities (no, not outsourced to private for-profit companies specializing in administering recreational sports programs).
c. 50% -- yes FIFTY FUCKING PERCENT -- of all TV revenues and ticket sales for tickets priced above some particular value (perhaps, 1 hour of minimum wage labor) similarly to go to fund recreational sports programs.
d. Similarly, 50% -- yes, FIFTY FUCKING PERCENT -- of all royalties on music (again, above some reasonable, well-above-the-median income level) go to fund community music programs -- including paying local musicians to perform -- and on music lessons for youth AND adults.
e. And again -- 50% of all concert ticket sales priced above X go to fund those local music programs.

And so on, and on.

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The earth is a multibillion-year-old sphere.
The Nazis killed millions of Jews.
On 9/11/01 a Boeing 757 (AA77) flew into the Pentagon.
AGCC is happening.
If you cannot accept these facts, I cannot fake an interest in any of your opinions.

arendt's picture

@UntimelyRippd

property isn't a fundamental characteristic of the universe, it's just a convenient human invention whose particular terms are entirely a matter for societies to determine amongst their constituents.

Yes, and I completely agree about Thatcher.

Property is a basic invention, possibly related to the invention of the container. Containers used to be "high tech". Amphora or sealable pots allowed people to store grain and wine to protect it against rats, mice, bugs, and mold. They were instrumental in the development of agriculture, by allowing the harvest to be preserved until the next growing season.

But containers led immediately to the invention of property. This is MY amphora, and what's in it is MY property. I will trade my amphora of grain for your amphora of wine. Soon, this led to taxes. I see you have ten amphora. I will take one as tax. And there you are, already arrived at bureaucracy, in the Bronze Age.

Containers, and compartments such as those found in living cells, are essential to organize processes. If you want to do a chemical reaction, you have to have the reactants in the container and no contaminants.

Properly used, patents assist in containerization, in earning one's livelihood, in protecting one's skill set (i.e., guild secret). But, its easy for them to be used improperly, as rent seekers. And its easy for the patent examiner system to either be corrupt or overworked, so that crap patents, like the TV roller guide I mentioned, get issued.

ON EDIT:

To me the issue is illegitimate, self-reinforcing concentration of power. Power distorts and corrupts everything it touches. The current patent system is the result of lobbying by corporations to increase their power. The concept of patents as a container of knowledge is legitimate. Its how the proceeds of that containerization are distributed that is the problem.

END EDIT

I completely agree about corporate ripoff of inventor patents. I have ten patents, for which I received nothing more than $200 a pop plus a cute plaque. Corporations ought to be forced to give the inventor some tiny percentage of the patent's profits. Of course, the corporations will scream that 90% of patents cannot be directly traced to profits, and maybe 50% are worthless. OTOH, when I was getting patents, the corporate guidance was to patent anything as soon as you thought of it - because they were building patent warchests to trade with other megacorps and to screw the little guy.

If I had an N-point program for revolutionizing our approach to intellectual property, it would begin with stuff like this:

a. 1 corporation, 1 trademark. End of story.
b. 50% -- yes FIFTY FUCKING PERCENT

Interesting. The 1 corp, 1 trademark rule reminds me of the "one factory building per corporation" proposal to break up giant corporations.

As for fifty percent, I think you do have to take into account how expensive R&D infrastructure is. When doing real research, truly innovative tech companies spend 20% of their budget on R&D (these days, pharma spends 20% on marketing, and maybe 10% on R&D). A lot of tech equipment is really expensive, and is required to do research. While computers are cheap, clusters of computers used to easily cost $1 M as little as five years ago.

Now, everyone is buying computer time and storage from Amazon - Dog save us all. Amazon is well on its way to monopolizing "computing and storage as a service". They are selling time for as little as 5 cents per CPU hour. Corporations think nothing of spinning up 50 or 100,000 cores for a few hours to do some job. Those jobs include massive Deep Learning runs on mountains of consumer data.

The level of abstraction in play here is hard to grasp. The computing algorithms use up to dozens of layers of computers, each crunching terabytes of data. They are perfectly willing to put their proprietary data into Amazon's server farms because they take Amazon's word that every job plays in its own "sandbox" that no one else can see. Obviously, the level of trust is as hard to grasp as the level of abstraction.

However much you have a point about the horrible nature of patents, software is reifying every stupid human idea. You write an app. You slap on a layer of encryption and a shell of licensing. Then you stop selling your non-computerized products and force everyone into your hydraulic despotism.

You can't stop the reification process by demonstrating in the street. Its all happening on the web, invisibly. Software is the new chains of slavery. We are 90% of the way to that world (see demeaning sharecropping like Amazon's Mechanical Turk).

----

You can't fight this process from inside the completely techno-libertarian world of computer startups funded by Wall St. greedsters. It can only be stopped by reducing the concentration of money and power via laws, such as the rules you proposed. The problem is that this kind of concentration has been around for thousands of years. I could quote you facts about Crassus of Ancient Rome, or Byzantine Empire oligarchs more powerful than the emperor. History says that once the concentration gets past a certain (tech level dependent) point, it behaves like a black hole.

The fact is that TPTB owns the government. We are an oligarchy, not a democracy. People are bombarded by lies that they eagerly accept. (The Russians hacked the elections and control Trump. And I'm not going to hear anything about Hillary's serial crimes.) We have moved beyond the financial event horizon, and we are being crushed by financial forces we have no control over.

Given I can't do anything until the current system collapses under its own weight of societal and environmental degradation, its a nice distraction to have this philosophical discussion with you.

Thanks.

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@Citizen Of Earth
if someone takes my wallet, i don't have my wallet anymore.
if someone "steals" my music, i have everything i ever had before someone "stole" my music.

the difference is fundamental. the idea that something can be stolen when nobody has lost any of it is what makes intellectual property absolutely abstract.

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The earth is a multibillion-year-old sphere.
The Nazis killed millions of Jews.
On 9/11/01 a Boeing 757 (AA77) flew into the Pentagon.
AGCC is happening.
If you cannot accept these facts, I cannot fake an interest in any of your opinions.

Citizen Of Earth's picture

@UntimelyRippd
is robbing the artist's livelihood. Oh but, you can't physically hold a "livelihood" in your hand, so by your tortured logic it's not theft.

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Donnie The #ShitHole Douchebag. Fake Friend to the Working Class. Real Asshole.

@Citizen Of Earth
might make an effort to actually refute it, rather than lash out with an emotionally-rooted "argument" founded entirely on unstated premises that you have not enumerated, but that I would not grant you if you had.

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The earth is a multibillion-year-old sphere.
The Nazis killed millions of Jews.
On 9/11/01 a Boeing 757 (AA77) flew into the Pentagon.
AGCC is happening.
If you cannot accept these facts, I cannot fake an interest in any of your opinions.

arendt's picture

@Citizen Of Earth

Back in the 90s someone got a patent on displaying the roller grid for TV guides. They literally got a patent on a 2D table. Then they went around holding up all the cable box makers for ransom. Got filthy rich.

Then there are the patent trolls, led by sociopaths like former Microsoft Chief Evangelist, Nathan Myrvhold. The trolls have "offices" in some podunk county in rural Texas (just like offshore banks have 8000 "offices" in one tiny building in the Cayman islands). The county judges are in on the gravy train.

There were submarine patents, but I think the last round of patent reform got rid of them. A submarine was a patent that was filed in year X on some trivial matter. Then, before it was examined, it was amended in year Y to add some tech that had been created in the period between X and Y. The gimmick was that the year Y tech got grandfathered back to year X, the "first to file" date. They could keep amending for a long time. Then, when they "surfaced" the patent, they sued lots of people. Some small fry always paid up.

Finally, there are the infamous "business practices" patents. It works the same way as patenting something as obvious as a 2D grid - because its on a computer its new. So, you can write up something ludicrously obvious, like "its my business practice to put the money in the safe". Real BP patents are more elaborate, no more innovative. The idea is to get a monopoly on something trivial and sue people for monopoly rent.

The whole system is completely broken; but the patent lawyers, patent trolls, and major corporations make out quite well under the system. So it continues. The big boys use their patent holdings to sue the crap out of newcomers and little guys; but they tend not to sue other big boys - unless it gets personal, like Apple and Samsung.

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@arendt
interests against what was in practice a BP patent awarded to the East India Company. once upon a time in these parts, the argument "it will benefit consumers" was considered unpersuasive.

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The earth is a multibillion-year-old sphere.
The Nazis killed millions of Jews.
On 9/11/01 a Boeing 757 (AA77) flew into the Pentagon.
AGCC is happening.
If you cannot accept these facts, I cannot fake an interest in any of your opinions.

arendt's picture

@UntimelyRippd @UntimelyRippd

I always thought it was about the tax that the BWIC was a royal monopoly and it was collecting a royal tax on tea.

I suppose that the company collecting a tax was a BP.

----
ON EDIT:

Oh, you are using my definition:

The idea is to get a monopoly on something trivial and sue people for monopoly rent.

So selling tea was the "something trivial" and the tax was the "monopoly rent".

I like it.

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@arendt
In the aftermath of the 7 years' war (Americans call it the French and Indian War), the British were looking for some way to pay off their enormous war debt. They particularly wanted to find a way to extract from the colonies some share of what had been spent crushing the French presence in North America.

Under the imperial system of the time, "mercantilism", Rule #1 was that colonies could not trade directly with anyone other than the imperial center (the "metropole", or "mother country" or whatever). Tea, for example, was shipped from India to British ports, where it was unloaded, inspected by the government's excisemen, taxed appropriately, and then loaded back onto different ships and sent to Boston (or wherever). George III (who gets an exceptionally bad rap in American history) and his ministers came up with what they thought was a very clever solution to their income problem: They would allow the East India Company to ship tea directly to the colonies; it would be inspected and taxed in the American ports, and then released for distribution. The enormous savings that resulted from the increased efficiency would then be split between the Crown and the Company. Thus, both the state and the monopolist would gain a share of the monopoly rent -- but so would tea consumers, because the plan was to sell the tea at lower prices than those prevailing for tea imported via the usual means. George and his Cabinet thought they had come up with a win-win-win scheme.

However, in the context of the times, this necessitated the creation of a brand new tax, because there was nothing in British law for collecting the excise tax in the colonies, and certainly not for collecting an excise tax at a different rate from whatever the existing law provided. It was the legislation of this new -- and higher -- tax that gave the colonial elites traction to rouse up public opposition. And they needed to rouse up public opposition, because the new BP monopoly was going to put a real hurt on everyone who was in the business of shipping tea from Bristol (or wherever) to the colonies. Note that the new legislation wouldn't prevent them from doing business the old way -- it would just prevent them from successfully doing business the old way, because the East India Co would be able to undercut their prices. (Amongst those "in the business", incidentally, were plenty of smugglers, bringing in contraband tea that had not been excised -- pretty similar to people smuggling cigarettes, a la the opening scene of Beverly Hills Cop. Those little paper excise tax stickers on cigarettes and booze haven't changed a whole lot in 300 years. Imagine how much money you could make today, rolling into NYC with a semitrailer of untaxed cigarettes, maybe even with counterfeit excise stickers on them.)

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The earth is a multibillion-year-old sphere.
The Nazis killed millions of Jews.
On 9/11/01 a Boeing 757 (AA77) flew into the Pentagon.
AGCC is happening.
If you cannot accept these facts, I cannot fake an interest in any of your opinions.

arendt's picture

@UntimelyRippd

Three sides, all playing some angle for some devious reason.

No wonder they call the British (whom we were at the time of the TP) "Perfidious Albion".

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thanatokephaloides's picture

@Citizen Of Earth

So they rebrand Theft as Sharing (aka Open Source)

Sharing - Well, except the person (or company) that did the original work did not grant them the right to copy the work.

It Is Piracy. Let's be honest.

Genuine Open Source materials are that way from their births; i.e., they were created to be that way intentionally by those who did the work.

Chinese mis-labeling of stolen proprietaries as Open Source merely makes it harder for those of us who want to choose the latter to be sure that's what we're doing.

But many of the "pirated" companies have it coming, too. Any company which tells its hardware purchasers:

"you are only leasing this product, and we will enforce that via the embedded software".

deserves every act of piracy mounted against it. (Apple Computer, I'm talking to YOU.)

I used to use an Apple iPod Video (5th generation). But Apple's refusal to permit Linux support of the device, coupled with the closed-platform bullshit, sent me to the Chinese. I'm going to order a "MyMAHDI" media player, made in Shenzhen. Expandable to double my iPod's capacity with no moving parts, only costs about one-fifth as much, and -- get this -- standard drag-and-drop media file installation, not that hideous proprietary database tyechnology Apple insists on using!

And Apple only has itself to blame for losing me as a customer.

Diablo

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"US govt/military = bad. Russian govt/military = bad. Any politician wanting power = bad. Anyone wielding power = bad." --Shahryar

"All power corrupts absolutely!" -- thanatokephaloides

@Citizen Of Earth
So when a company that did no development work at all buys a patent that allows it, legally, to boost the cost on an epipen 100 times, finding a way around it that allows people to live is stealing? US patent law is grand larceny.

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SnappleBC's picture

@Citizen Of Earth

You assert that it is piracy as if that was the most obvious thing in the world. But as I understand the situation this isn't like one US corporation stealing from another. In this case we have an entirely different ethical framework in play and I don't think the concept of "piracy" has meaning in that framework. So yes, to YOU it's piracy. But then again, you're a "citizen of earth", right?

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A lot of wanderers in the U.S. political desert recognize that all the duopoly has to offer is a choice of mirages. Come, let us trudge towards empty expanse of sand #1, littered with the bleached bones of Deaniacs and Hope and Changers.
-- lotlizard

jorogo's picture

with the "all the latest and greatest IT" culture was as a late-comer to computers (luddite) less than 20 years ago. Never having done as I was told before, I questioned, to horror-stricken objections, the constant "security" upgrading of my new un-tamed computing and browsing beast. So I checked into the latest Microsoft package of 25 upgrades, finding that 24 of them were for enabling that day's latest bizarre apps which would be of no use to me and would soon die anyhow as the next round appeared. I believe these constant, useless "upgrades" actually introduce errors and complicate basic function.
Today I speak here through a Windows XP PC un-security-upgraded since 2008's SP3. I know....the horror!) Later, it will continue to make my living editing audio books, maybe later catch a documentary on Netflix. Thank you Avast free, and Audacity freeware for letting this luddite hum along a steady path while others have trashed a half-dozen or more potentially functional PCs.

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"If I sit silently, I have sinned." - Mossadegh

thanatokephaloides's picture

@jorogo

Today I speak here through a Windows XP PC un-security-upgraded since 2008's SP3. I know....the horror!) Later, it will continue to make my living editing audio books, maybe later catch a documentary on Netflix. Thank you Avast free, and Audacity freeware for letting this luddite hum along a steady path while others have trashed a half-dozen or more potentially functional PCs.

You, sir/madame, need to seriously consider migrating to Linux.

All the freewares you now use were originally written for Linux. Audacity, for example, is Free and Open Source (FOSS) software so it makes sense that it is first developed on a FOSS operating system. Linux, by explicit order of its creator Linus Torvalds, is FOSS.

And many the functional but trashed PC have I restored to useful lives by the simple act of installing Linux thereon.

For someone like yourself who wants to make a living editing digital media, I recommend (and use) Ubuntu Studio. It's free for the downloading (get it here). It comes with nearly all the FOSS media creation and editing applications pre-loaded, with all the others available from standard Ubuntu/Debian repositories.

And the software updates are real ones -- and free, too.

So I'd strongly consider taking the last step to liberate yourself from Microsoft's rentier regime if I were you.

If you have questions about Linux, drop me a private message! Smile

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"US govt/military = bad. Russian govt/military = bad. Any politician wanting power = bad. Anyone wielding power = bad." --Shahryar

"All power corrupts absolutely!" -- thanatokephaloides

thanatokephaloides's picture

The internet should more properly be called "the return of the rentier". This extends to the over-reaching claims against rights of ownership and first sale by companies claiming that "you are only leasing this product, and we will enforce that via the embedded software".

This is why I'm migrating all my tech to honestly Free and Open Source (FOSS) or ceasing to use it at all. Despite being a cripple, I don't need an automated house so badly that I'm wanting Google or Apple or Microsoft running my life outright.

The last step in this migration will be when I replace my Apple iPod Video with a myMAHDI media player.

I may get slammed for this, but Chinese life revolves around the family. Families are key for business connections. In short, the Chinese were Thatcherites millenia ago.

Sounds like the Chinese were Gambinos millennia ago! Smile

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"US govt/military = bad. Russian govt/military = bad. Any politician wanting power = bad. Anyone wielding power = bad." --Shahryar

"All power corrupts absolutely!" -- thanatokephaloides

arendt's picture

@thanatokephaloides

Also, double points for insulting Italians. LOL.

I begin to see why the right wing has taken to calling PC (politically correct, not personal computer) people "snowflakes". (I believe the term comes from the idea that no two snowflakes are identical.)

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thanatokephaloides's picture

@arendt

Also, double points for insulting Italians. LOL.

Only about 0.01% of them.

The 99.98% who aren't part of "one of those families" aren't insulted -- and they know it and openly say so.

You can join me in Chinese IP hell - IP=identity politics. Smile

I begin to see why the right wing has taken to calling PC (politically correct, not personal computer) people "snowflakes". (I believe the term comes from the idea that no two snowflakes are identical.)

PC and IP need to be 86 ASAP!

Smile

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"US govt/military = bad. Russian govt/military = bad. Any politician wanting power = bad. Anyone wielding power = bad." --Shahryar

"All power corrupts absolutely!" -- thanatokephaloides

arendt's picture

@thanatokephaloides

making the slightest generalization, thinking would come to a halt.

The Italians know what we mean.

On the other side of that coin, have you been following the "Polish Death Camps" kerfuffle? I know the current Polish government is intent on destroying democracy by letting the executive fire judges at will. However, the Poles have a point that the true fact is "Nazi Death Camps in Poland". Implying that the Polish government of the time was in any way responsible is just wrong. There was no Polish government, just Nazi puppets.

Glad its not my fight, because I don't care for either of the political parties involved in the dispute.

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@arendt
delicate fragility.

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The earth is a multibillion-year-old sphere.
The Nazis killed millions of Jews.
On 9/11/01 a Boeing 757 (AA77) flew into the Pentagon.
AGCC is happening.
If you cannot accept these facts, I cannot fake an interest in any of your opinions.

arendt's picture

@UntimelyRippd

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