binarybits

I did email him. He told me I needed to go through Microsoft PR, and after I explained the topic of my story Microsoft PR declined to let me talk to him.

I'm pretty sure I didn't say "the iPhone was just a copy."

I link to that page in my story. I tried to interview Buxton but Microsoft's PR people turned me down.

Obviously, the best situation would be for majorities in both parties to be against this stuff. But a world where Republicans are against it and Dems are for it is much better than the world we've had for the last few years, in which both parties were on Hollywood's side.

It's important to remember the DMCA has two major provisions. The anti-circumvention provision is pure evil. The notice-and-takedown safe harbor was a pretty good compromise.

Which ones are those?

Stocks are valuable because they're a claim on a stream of future dividends. Bitcoins, in contrast produce no dividends and aren't intrinsically useful. So the question is why are they valuable at all?

Also, the name-calling isn't necessary.

So everything is patentable and it's judicial activism for the Supreme Court to rule that something is unpatentable? Why do you assume it works that way and not the other way around?

"It doesn't seem like this is a case where they could expand it—that would involve overturning precedent."

Which precedent would that be?

"True change in this area really is something where the Court can only do so much. The definitions of patents in general are determined by Congress and its laws."

Sorry, but this is just completely wrong. The law regarding patentable subject matter is almost entirely judge-made. There are broad categories of inventions in software, medicine, business methods, and elsewhere that clearly were not eligible for patent protection in 1980 and are eligible for patent protection under recent court decisions. This didn't change because Congress passed new legislation. It changed because the courts (primarily the Federal Circuit) changed its mind. Given that fact, it makes sense to criticize the courts for continuing to expand the bounds of patentable subject matter, no?

His representation in the case provided by Public Citizen, a public interest organization that I would expect takes clients pro bono.

Don't the same issues apply to the cruise ship industry?

B-2 is for tourists. You're probably thinking of the B-1, but as I understand it that precludes "productive work" and only allows meetings.

The idea is to provide a platform for companies that aren't yet large enough to take advantage of visas that are available to larger firms. So startups that got traction would eventually transfer over to being normal SV companies.

But clean-room engineering is almost always slower than writing the software from scratch. Which, AFAICT, is what most companies actually do except in the rare case where they need to achieve interoperability with an existing product (like the early PC clones where bug-compatibility with the IBM PC was essential). Right?

Thanks for reading my article, and for sharing your perspective on it. However, I don't think you understand how copyright law applies to computer software. Translating a computer program line-for-line to another programming language doesn't avoid liability for copyright infringement. If it's "blindlingly obvious" that a copy was made, a court is going to say infringement has occurred.

I recommend reading about clean room reverse engineering. That's what you have to do to copy software without infringing its copyright. It's doable, but in most cases it'll be more, not less, work than writing your own software from scratch.

If you read my article, you'll see that's not what the study finds. They estimate that less than 10 percent of the wealth lost by defendants goes to patent trolls. The rest is destroyed.

Having access to a large patent pool provides zero protection against NPEs ("patent trolls").

Those are all worthwhile sentiments, but they're not the same as "we're opposed to patents on software."

No, they opposed "low-quality software patents," which is a goal, not a reform proposal.

This ignores how the patent statute is written. Congress sets extremely broad principles for what is patentable and leaves it to the courts to work out the details. That process of interpretation inevitably involves making policy judgments.

This isn't unusual. Constitutional concepts like "reasonable search," "cruel and unusual punishment" similarly invite courts to make policy judgments.

No, a computer does that. You can patent a computer, you just can't patent the software it runs. Just as you can patent a CD player but you can't patent the music it plays.

The Supreme Court's rule against software patents was a matter of statutory interpretation, not constitutional law. And software patents were created by a lower court (the Federal Circuit) in the first place, so it would be perfectly appropriate for a higher court to reverse their error.

I'd love to see Congress fix the problem, but there'd be nothing improper about the courts doing it.

The rules of the web are changing constantly. All you have to do to change the web is convince Google, Apple, Microsoft, and Mozilla to go along with it.

Except that that post addresses a different problem than the one I raise.

There's also a countervailing bias that I suspect is far more important: most wrongly-convicted defendants have no way to prove their innocence, and so we never learn that they were wrongly convicted. Many criminal defendants are not sophisticated about the law, and their cases are handled by overworked public defenders. The courts in many states are extremely stingy about giving defendants access to evidence or legal appeals post-conviction. So even if potentially-exculpatory evidence emerges, the convict often can't do anything with it.

This is one of those statistics that will never be known with any precision, but even if the number of known exonerations is small (which I don't know to be the case) that doesn't prove that the number of innocents in jail is small.

You're way off-base about this. Lots of good schools are in college towns that have "not a whole lot there." This has absolutely nothing to do with what causes a handful of people to commit suicide. And Bill's suicide note gives no indication that he was upset about anything Princeton-specific. I'm sorry you had a bad experience living in the town of Princeton, but that's completely orthogonal to what happened here.

Because the people you want most aren't going to waste a ton of time jumping through hoops? The nice thing about puzzles is that they're self-contained and can be understood and solved in a few hours. When I was applying for a Facebook internship, I wound up spending ~6 hours over a couple of days finishing two of the puzzles. This already seemed like a significant time investment. A problem that involved "a real world use case, with a code base to work off of" would necessarily take a lot longer to understand and implement. I was pretty busy that month, and if the puzzle questions had been more time-consuming I might have skipped Facebook and applied to other companies instead. (As it happened I wound up at Google)

Puzzle-based interview questions are meant to be a rough cut to weed out the people who are clearly unqualified for the position. They're not meant as a substitute for more in-depth discussion of skills, work experience, etc. If the filter is too time-consuming, it's going to weed out some of the best people who are confident they'll get offers from other companies. And a large company like Facebook doesn't necessarily want to test specific skills because they may not have yet decided which position you'd be hired for, and in any event you're likely to work on multiple projects during your time with the company. For entry-level positions (which is presumably what these questions are designed for), it's better to hire the smartest guy you can find and train him on specific technologies than to hire a guy who already has a specific skillset and then discover he's a one-trick pony.

Why improve the bill when it's not obvious there's a problem here that requires Congressional action to solve?

Um, the Commerce Clause didn't unilaterally impose ObamaCare on the country. It simply (arguably) authorized Congress to pass legislation regulating health care. What we're arguing about is whether Congress should exercise its power under the Commerce Clause to give the executive branch more power over the Internet. The language of the statute determines how much, and what kinds, of power the executive branch would get.

Um, you realize that newspapers generated billions of dollars in profits over more than a century by "tricking people" into using coupons, right? Coupons are about helping businesses attract customers they wouldn't have gotten otherwise. The specifics are a little different in the Internet age, but there's no reason to think Groupon is any more a flash in the pan than the advertising supplements in newspapers were.