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Authored by: Anonymous on Tuesday, March 19 2013 @ 03:01 PM EDT |
It seems there are Judges that - for whatever reason - appear to like to play
the same word games as Lawyers. As a result they are willing to convince
themselves that Earth is the centre of the Solar System, it is flat, and we are
all Gods! Ok... I'm exagerating a lot.
The point is: I think there are
some Judges who are willing to allow arguments that argue against the Spirit of
the Law so they can change it while complying (sorta) with the Letter of the
Law.
Much like the Federal Circuit with regards Patents. As Gene Quinn
once said:
How long will it take the Federal Circuit to overrule this patent
ruling by the Supreme's?
It's because of cases like this that I have faith
the Supreme's will eventually see through all the word games the Lawyers are
presenting and make it clear software is not patentable subject matter. Whether
applied to a general purpose machine or a specific machine doesn't
matter.
What I would really love to see in one of these patent cases is
the Supreme's to ask the pro-software patent folk to point to the physical
embodiment of software. Specifically with one of them knowledgable enough that
they can respond to whatever example provided. A response to the Lawyer holding
up a software cd:
You pointed to the cd... that's plastic, with burn marks.
Where's the software?
And it'd be even sweeter if that question was
followed with the Judge holding up a sheet of paper saying:
I hold here in
my hand the exact same representation of software.... only on different media.
It's clearly a language and languages are clearly abstract. So where's the
physical software in connection with this paper?
How does the software
take on physical form when applied to a computer?
RAS[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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Authored by: tknarr on Tuesday, March 19 2013 @ 03:13 PM EDT |
It's because of an accepted form of legal argument that allows one to do the
equivalent of "proving" that the square root of 2 is 2 by taking successive
approximations and then arguing that after a sufficiently large number of
iterations the approximation is the actual value and that the actual
value must be ignored in favor of the just-demonstrated approximation. [ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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Authored by: newbury on Thursday, March 21 2013 @ 10:58 AM EDT |
This result may just become the thin edge of a wedge into the application of the
DMCA.
The decision makes it clear that 'first sale' cuts off the copyright owners
rights to control the use of the object *except for copying*. There is a fair
argument to be made (which parallels the arguments for allowing cell-phone
unlocking) that the DMCA extends the ambit of copyright impermissibly beyond the
Constitutional limits of copyright.
Unfortunately I will also predict that it will take a while and a lot of money
wasted in court, before the DMCA gets reduced to nothing.
Breyer makes it clear that he considers *ownership* to be ranked well above
*copyright restrictions*. If you cannot do what you bloody well please with your
own property (including making a backup copy) then you do not actually own your
property.
[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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