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The Supreme's.... a body of thought | 367 comments | Create New Account
Comments belong to whoever posts them. Please notify us of inappropriate comments.
The Supreme's.... a body of thought
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 | # ]

First Sale Doctrine Upheld by US Supreme Court ~pj
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 | # ]

First Sale Doctrine Upheld by US Supreme Court ~pj
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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