Now TomTom Sues Microsoft for Patent Infringement (Groklaw) [LWN.net]

Now TomTom Sues Microsoft for Patent Infringement (Groklaw)

Posted Mar 20, 2009 15:46 UTC (Fri) by simlo (subscriber, #10866) [Link]

Well, the sooner we get the "patent nuclear war" started, the sooner it will be over: Either the companies go bankrupt, or the politicians will step up and fix the system. We can just hope as many companies as possible get drawn in, they loose a lot of money and fire people. Then the politician will wake up.

This is good timing: A lot of people have lost belief in the so called "free market". This gives politicians leverage to actually fix the patent system without having to fight the free market advocates.

Odd thing is that these free market advocates fight for a free market, but what they are advocating is in reallity doing the opposit: more patents,less regulation, which removes transperancy and therefore in reallity makes the market less efficient.

Now TomTom Sues Microsoft for Patent Infringement (Groklaw)

Posted Mar 20, 2009 16:49 UTC (Fri) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]

> This is good timing: A lot of people have lost belief in the so called "free market". This gives politicians leverage to actually fix the patent system without having to fight the free market advocates.

Wow. Way to get things hugely backwards.

Patents are the exact opposite of the 'free market'. It's the government coming down and pushing regulations and rules on the market making it anything but free. The fact that they are doing it for the sake of certain key industries makes even less free and less capitalistic and _more_ socialistic.

Now TomTom Sues Microsoft for Patent Infringement (Groklaw)

Posted Mar 20, 2009 17:16 UTC (Fri) by flewellyn (subscriber, #5047) [Link]

Patents may not actually be "free market", but the people who often loudly advocate for "free market" in the business world, also often loudly advocate for more patents and protections for their own businesses.

Now TomTom Sues Microsoft for Patent Infringement (Groklaw)

Posted Mar 20, 2009 20:46 UTC (Fri) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]

> Patents may not actually be "free market", but the people who often loudly advocate for "free market" in the business world, also often loudly advocate for more patents and protections for their own businesses.

Well yeah they do. Also they are full of shit. All they care about is maximizing profits and they don't mind using the government to help them do that at the expense of everybody else.

Now TomTom Sues Microsoft for Patent Infringement (Groklaw)

Posted Mar 20, 2009 20:48 UTC (Fri) by flewellyn (subscriber, #5047) [Link]

Right, it's a very conservative idea.

Now TomTom Sues Microsoft for Patent Infringement (Groklaw)

Posted Mar 20, 2009 21:27 UTC (Fri) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]

> Right, it's a very conservative idea.

That's a very polluted word in USA politics. Same thing with liberal.

Liberal, traditionally speaking, relates to Liberty. As in Individual Freedom. That is the ability to do what you want, when you want, and fuck-all to the rest of the world; if that is your personal choice and as long as it doesn't violate other people's personal liberty. Something that modern liberals are seem to be very much against.

Liberty has a very very strong economic element to it. If I work for a living and I make money or produce a good or service and I have liberty can do with that what I will. However if a person is successful and lives in a big house or whatever then a modern liberal seems to think that is excessive and would want to take that away from them and give it to somebody that did not earn it. That's very anti-liberty. Taxes are a huge violation of liberty.

Putting governments in charge of hospitals, banks, corporations, take money from rich people to redistribute the wealth, etc etc. That sort of thing is very anti-liberty too. But still its still a idea pushed heavily by people who call themselves, by and large, 'liberal'.

Labels like 'conservative' and 'liberal' have zero meaning nowadays. Our two party political system has made a mockery of any sort of real philosophical or moral stance related to those terms.

Now they are just dirty words that 'the other side' uses. You might as well be saying, "Right, it's a very poo-poo-eater idea", for all the meaning it has.

What you probably mean is "It's a very republican concept" and that I can mostly agree with. Of course if you actually pay attention you'll see that Democrats are almost exactly the same.

All of them mostly suck.

Now TomTom Sues Microsoft for Patent Infringement (Groklaw)

Posted Mar 21, 2009 2:06 UTC (Sat) by madscientist (subscriber, #16861) [Link]

I'm not going to respond to this rant, except to say this is not appropriate for LWN. If you have a comment relevant to the topic of TomTom, Microsoft, or patents and you can express it cogently, then we'd love to read it. Otherwise, please keep it on your blog or /. or the FoxNews fanboi forums and spare the rest of us.

Thanks!

Now TomTom Sues Microsoft for Patent Infringement (Groklaw)

Posted Mar 21, 2009 12:55 UTC (Sat) by niner (subscriber, #26151) [Link]

Being from another continent, I found drag's comment to be a pretty well expressed
explanation of why certain words lost or even changed their meaning for a lot of people
by being tied to certain political parties of one of the world's many countries.

I cannot see, why this shouldn't have a place on LWN as it's in my view just a good reply
to another poster's comment using one of these words in the twisted meaning a political
system imposed on it.

Now TomTom Sues Microsoft for Patent Infringement (Groklaw)

Posted Mar 21, 2009 15:09 UTC (Sat) by jordanb (guest, #45668) [Link]

Drag's comment was a classic "true conservative" rant of which there are approximately ten trillion on the internet -- a good four trillion of which have been written since President Obama's election.

Drag is right that the meanings of political labels evolve (and they can be quite different in America than in other areas of the world, ex: liberal in Europe ~ Libertarian in the US whereas Liberal in the US ~ Socialist or Social Democrat in Europe). That doesn't mean that they lack meaning or that they're all "just dirty words." If you're interested in an explanation of the American political landscape you're better off looking up the words on wikipedia than trying to glean information from a bitter partisan political rant.

Now TomTom Sues Microsoft for Patent Infringement (Groklaw)

Posted Mar 23, 2009 22:04 UTC (Mon) by foo-bar (guest, #22971) [Link]

The patent thing is pretty much political,
hence political comments are quite relevant
on this particular occasion. (IMHO).

And every boy and every girl that's born into the world alive...

Posted Mar 23, 2009 1:02 UTC (Mon) by xoddam (subscriber, #2322) [Link]

> Taxes are a huge violation of liberty.

Meh. Taxes are part of the social contract. There's plenty of room to argue about who should pay how much tax and who benefits from government expenditure, but without taxation of some kind, there can be no legitimate police force, no law courts, no other democratic institutions, not even a pretense of equal opportunity, and therefore no liberty in any practical sense.

This is the inherent contradiction of liberalism.

There is no wonder at all that the word takes on varying interpretations due to experience: if you take the philosophy to the extreme of wanting to abolish government, you never actually achieve government (usually someone else does, though), so no-one has any experience with that kind of liberalism. There is, however, an infinite and multi-dimensional spectrum of how not-quite-that-liberal a self-identifying liberal can be whilst actually seeking office.

Conservatism, supposedly the opposite of liberalism, is anything but: the conservative says "I like where we are at; so let's keep doing what we did to get here." Which also necessarily varies in meaning with experience.

'Liberal' and 'conservative' have well-defined meanings, but neither describes a specific political platform. They can only be understood as such through relevant (local) history.

Of course lwn.net isn't the *perfect* place for such a discussion, but its general civility combined with its wide range of experience and opinion makes it a pleasant forum, and it's the only place drag and I meet AFAIK.

I don't see what harm it can do.

Libertarian anarchy

Posted Mar 23, 2009 22:45 UTC (Mon) by man_ls (subscriber, #15091) [Link]

It is very interesting (at least to me) how the same set of beliefs can be arrived at from completely different points of view. Case in point: libertarians want to abolish government because it restricts individual freedom. From the other extreme, anarchists want to abolish government because power gives authority and thus makes people be evil to one another. But try to put them in the same bag and both groups will vehemently disagree.

This phenomenon can be seen in many places: the German nazi party and the Russian communist party wanted their respective governments to control everything and not leave anything to private enterprise. But they came from opposite ends of the political spectrum. At least these two groups both carried "socialist" in their official names, and they both wanted very different goals for their neoplasic governments. But anarchists and libertarians cannot diverge in this sense because... well, because non existent governments all have the same goals: none.

Meanwhile, as you well say, people bearing the exact same name in different places hold wildly different ideas. The liberal tradition in Spain has little in common with British or with US-style liberalism. Likewise, Spanish Republicans have (by historical accident) been traditionally leftists, if only because they opposed the conservative monarchy; while US Republicans are right wing conservatives. So when drag says "It is a very republican concept" it only makes sense in his particular context.

Actually few thing make sense in politics when viewed in the appropriate light. For example, why do conservatives and environmentalists usually oppose each other, when what the green parties want to do is preserve the environment? Theoretical politics relates mostly to tradition and History, not to logic, and it is only through facts that it is brought down to practical matters. And as we can see with software patents it may take a long while for the hard facts to permeate through the government.

The last sentence notwithstanding, this discussion is pretty off-topic; however I find it quite enlightening to hear from people with different ideas as long as they expose them civilly, as drag or xoddam have done here.

More Patents Means...

Posted Mar 20, 2009 15:49 UTC (Fri) by pboddie (subscriber, #50784) [Link]

Yes indeed, more patent claims, more patent litigation. No wonder the patent business is so interested in poisoning the field of software - it's more money for a bunch of lawyers, although strangely enough it's never actually sold to the public in that way.