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> and likened the Java API’s to Charles Dickens and other literary works Never, could have I ever predicted to one day see that as an actual excerpt from an ar

> and likened the Java API’s to Charles Dickens and other literary works Never, could have I ever predicted to one day see that as an actual excerpt from an article. By the way, this is a wonderful exercise of effort on our part as a society. Really very important we sort these these nuances out. People may be dying, the poor may be getting poorer, but this is what is important. /s

colechristensen 11y ago
>By the way, this is a wonderful exercise of effort on our part as a society. Really very important we sort these these nuances out. People may be dying, the poor may be getting poorer, but this is what is important. /s It's sarcastic, I get it, but it is also profoundly stupid. Sorting out intellectual property and ownership is _the_ 21st century problem as we continually move away from the importance of physical objects and towards the importance of pure information.
- michaelvkpdx 11y ago
  Try eating "pure information". Or building shelter out of it. I hope this drags on forever. It's fun watching pigs in mud, aka lawyers in the Valley.
- iSnow 11y ago
  >Sorting out intellectual property and ownership is _the_ 21st century problem Uhm, no. Only for the HN crowd and maybe open source. There are a lot more and more pressing problems that have to do with things like the environment, food production, reproduction, migration and democracy vs. corporatism vs. ideology.
  - mattlutze 11y ago
    As we move away from jobs-as-sustenance and toward a new social model where sustenance and income come from a broader range of sources that do not so directly correlate to your time spent working... the respect for and ownership of intellectual property may very well be a central tenant to life in modern society. It's not just about lawyers and multinationals dukeing it out.
  - colechristensen 11y ago
    Which of those problems do you think doesn't already have a solution? If not, which of those do you think isn't a perpetual problem which has been around in some form or another since the dawn of human civilization? Reorganizing the world's economy away from physical works to intellectual ones is an entirely new problem and will be on the scale of the industrial revolution.
  - rayiner 11y ago
    It's profoundly important to the U.S. as a whole. Creation of IP is the last thing that's going to be automated by robots. It's already been tremendously resistant to production being exported to China and India. We're already at the point where the primary product of the U.S. is IP in various forms (Apple designs the computers but they're manufactured in China).
    - bediger4000 11y ago
      What do you mean by "IP"? If it's "intellectual property" that strikes me (a non-lawyer) as a particularly vague and ill-defined concept. I personally find the idea of owning an idea to be risible: historically, important things have been invented or discovered multiple times, sometimes clearly independently. So, why should I as a citizen finance some monopolies that will be economically detrimental to me and to society as a whole? Seriously. I'm not pulling chains here. Economists are almost 100% against monopolies (although they often differ on what constitutes a monopoly), and "IP" is a state-supported monopoly. Why should we subject ourselves to it?
      - jacobr1 11y ago
        > Why should we subject ourselves to it? The traditional reason is to grant incentive for its creation in the first place. One primary example has been medical advances. With the benefit of a (temporary) monopoly on the sales of a new drug, the company has an incentive to create it in the first place. Perhaps we wouldn't have as many life saving advances without IP protection. A secondary reason is that it requires public disclosure. One alternative to patent protection is to keep a production method a trade secret. So companies, if they are sufficiently secretive, could have effective if not legally enforced monopolies due to such secrets. So is it worth the tradeoff of having IP protection? COST: a time-limited monopoly; limited incremental innovation on derivatives of the protected work during the lifetime of the protection. BENEFIT: potentially more innovative goods and services are created to begin with; the means and methods behind these innovations are publicly documented for future replication or derivative work . I'm think it is worth the tradeoff both for copyright protection and patents in general. But the specific laws are certainly not optimal as currently written and enforced by the courts. Durations for both patents and copyright are too long. Plenty of things that are patentable should not be, due to them being too obvious, trivial, or just not appropriate for protection. Also the remedy for infringement has multiple options. You could allow general infringement, at statutory royalty rates. I think Canada has experimented with this for copyright, and the US as standard (but private) arrangements for the licensing of music. You could require a fraction of any profits. These provide the monopoly rents, but not a monopolization of production and derivatives. We are still learning what the optimal tradeoffs are for society. I hope we have more experimentation on regulatory regimes to identify the best compromises.
  - jaredklewis 11y ago
    Yea, but I would guess software will be pretty helpful when solving those problems.
- meesterdude 11y ago
  calling what I said "profoundly stupid" adds little to the discussion, and only stands to subvert my expression of frustration, which is where the sarcasm comes from. You may disagree, but you don't need to knock down what I said to do so. Likewise, take a step back. Maybe take two. What our our priorities as a society, as a species? These two companies with loads of money and resources, battling it out over if API's are copyrightable. I'm not saying that's not a significant legal matter, I'm saying in context of everything else, it's squabble. It's part of a big circle jerk that companies play with each other in attempt to screw one another so they can make more money. I guess the future really will be nothing but lawyers.
  - tw04 11y ago
    It's not squabble if you're an independent developer or a startup trying to create a new product. There will be a lot more of those poor people you were talking about if APIs are allowed to be copyrighted. It will stifle innovation in the US, and drive talented programmers to either seek a different profession, or move to a country that isn't draconian.
    - shit_parade2 11y ago
      That or it will be widely flaunted like jay walking or the tena of thousands other laws and regulations that are on the books and hardly ever enforced.
nathan_long 11y ago
False dichotomy. Society can work on solving more than one problem at once. Also, what happens to software impacts every other realm. Software moves your money, irrigates your crops, drives your car, and runs your pacemaker. It matters.

colechristensen 11y ago

>By the way, this is a wonderful exercise of effort on our part as a society. Really very important we sort these these nuances out. People may be dying, the poor may be getting poorer, but this is what is important. /s It's sarcastic, I get it, but it is also profoundly stupid. Sorting out intellectual property and ownership is _the_ 21st century problem as we continually move away from the importance of physical objects and towards the importance of pure information.

michaelvkpdx 11y ago
Try eating "pure information". Or building shelter out of it. I hope this drags on forever. It's fun watching pigs in mud, aka lawyers in the Valley.
iSnow 11y ago
>Sorting out intellectual property and ownership is _the_ 21st century problem Uhm, no. Only for the HN crowd and maybe open source. There are a lot more and more pressing problems that have to do with things like the environment, food production, reproduction, migration and democracy vs. corporatism vs. ideology.
- mattlutze 11y ago
  As we move away from jobs-as-sustenance and toward a new social model where sustenance and income come from a broader range of sources that do not so directly correlate to your time spent working... the respect for and ownership of intellectual property may very well be a central tenant to life in modern society. It's not just about lawyers and multinationals dukeing it out.
- colechristensen 11y ago
  Which of those problems do you think doesn't already have a solution? If not, which of those do you think isn't a perpetual problem which has been around in some form or another since the dawn of human civilization? Reorganizing the world's economy away from physical works to intellectual ones is an entirely new problem and will be on the scale of the industrial revolution.
- rayiner 11y ago
  It's profoundly important to the U.S. as a whole. Creation of IP is the last thing that's going to be automated by robots. It's already been tremendously resistant to production being exported to China and India. We're already at the point where the primary product of the U.S. is IP in various forms (Apple designs the computers but they're manufactured in China).
  - bediger4000 11y ago
    What do you mean by "IP"? If it's "intellectual property" that strikes me (a non-lawyer) as a particularly vague and ill-defined concept. I personally find the idea of owning an idea to be risible: historically, important things have been invented or discovered multiple times, sometimes clearly independently. So, why should I as a citizen finance some monopolies that will be economically detrimental to me and to society as a whole? Seriously. I'm not pulling chains here. Economists are almost 100% against monopolies (although they often differ on what constitutes a monopoly), and "IP" is a state-supported monopoly. Why should we subject ourselves to it?
    - jacobr1 11y ago
      > Why should we subject ourselves to it? The traditional reason is to grant incentive for its creation in the first place. One primary example has been medical advances. With the benefit of a (temporary) monopoly on the sales of a new drug, the company has an incentive to create it in the first place. Perhaps we wouldn't have as many life saving advances without IP protection. A secondary reason is that it requires public disclosure. One alternative to patent protection is to keep a production method a trade secret. So companies, if they are sufficiently secretive, could have effective if not legally enforced monopolies due to such secrets. So is it worth the tradeoff of having IP protection? COST: a time-limited monopoly; limited incremental innovation on derivatives of the protected work during the lifetime of the protection. BENEFIT: potentially more innovative goods and services are created to begin with; the means and methods behind these innovations are publicly documented for future replication or derivative work . I'm think it is worth the tradeoff both for copyright protection and patents in general. But the specific laws are certainly not optimal as currently written and enforced by the courts. Durations for both patents and copyright are too long. Plenty of things that are patentable should not be, due to them being too obvious, trivial, or just not appropriate for protection. Also the remedy for infringement has multiple options. You could allow general infringement, at statutory royalty rates. I think Canada has experimented with this for copyright, and the US as standard (but private) arrangements for the licensing of music. You could require a fraction of any profits. These provide the monopoly rents, but not a monopolization of production and derivatives. We are still learning what the optimal tradeoffs are for society. I hope we have more experimentation on regulatory regimes to identify the best compromises.
- jaredklewis 11y ago
  Yea, but I would guess software will be pretty helpful when solving those problems.
meesterdude 11y ago
calling what I said "profoundly stupid" adds little to the discussion, and only stands to subvert my expression of frustration, which is where the sarcasm comes from. You may disagree, but you don't need to knock down what I said to do so. Likewise, take a step back. Maybe take two. What our our priorities as a society, as a species? These two companies with loads of money and resources, battling it out over if API's are copyrightable. I'm not saying that's not a significant legal matter, I'm saying in context of everything else, it's squabble. It's part of a big circle jerk that companies play with each other in attempt to screw one another so they can make more money. I guess the future really will be nothing but lawyers.
- tw04 11y ago
  It's not squabble if you're an independent developer or a startup trying to create a new product. There will be a lot more of those poor people you were talking about if APIs are allowed to be copyrighted. It will stifle innovation in the US, and drive talented programmers to either seek a different profession, or move to a country that isn't draconian.
  - shit_parade2 11y ago
    That or it will be widely flaunted like jay walking or the tena of thousands other laws and regulations that are on the books and hardly ever enforced.

nathan_long 11y ago

False dichotomy. Society can work on solving more than one problem at once. Also, what happens to software impacts every other realm. Software moves your money, irrigates your crops, drives your car, and runs your pacemaker. It matters.