Keep in mind, a system of rules is just a system of rules. It takes someone to come along and knowingly look for "ah ha, gotcha" loopholes in a system to exploit for their own advantage.
It's completely possible to look at a system, realize there's a flaw, and not take advantage of it--perhaps even try to fix the flaw you discovered.
In the US, we're increasingly normalizing the culture of "well, it's legal" as to whether we should or shouldn't do something--the baseline of morales is becoming law.
Part of this is driven by competitive forces that put us at critical disadvantages if we don't follow suit. Taking the "high road" often costs more and hinders us to points we can't survive, so even if you don't want to play exploitative games on systems and people, in some cases, your very livelihood may actually depend on it.
"Don't hate the player, hate the game" comes to mind as players unwilling to come to a consensus that the game is flawed and adjust the rules so they can follow the intent of the game and not the flaws in the rules of the game.
> In the US, we're increasingly normalizing the culture of "well, it's legal"
Yes, this makes me sick. I know a disturbing number of people who, to varying degrees, seem to think gaming things without regard to positive-sum outcomes is just... right and normal.
People want to talk about a morality crisis, there's your crisis. Way too many people seem to want to live in Soviet-class corruption.
> Yes, this makes me sick. I know a disturbing number of people who, to varying degrees, seem to think gaming things without regard to positive-sum outcomes is just... right and normal.
It's right and normal because the US[1] has a very rule-based social system. Break the rules with the best of intentions, and you're not going to have a good time. Follow the rules with the worst of intentions, and you are.
Indeed, reasserting true American values and ideals over the corrupt Soviet ones would help ease some of this moral failing.
One thing that a society under communism has to deal with is reckoning with the fact that, actually, its all a game and there is little difference between what you can get away with, and what is right. In fact the Soviets celebrated and rewarded those people who, as individuals, could play the game best.
while in America we have always valued human enterprise in itself. It's not about the money, it's about collectively coming together to maximize prosperity and well being. People know whats right and good because, as a nation, its manifest that greedy individuals should not be celebrated; goes against the whole idea of the United States that's been there from the start.
It's really sad, I feel like I'm living in the USSR more and more everyday
have you ever lived in the soviet union before? or You just read about it from the media? Not to defend the system here. Just a gentle reminder of a bit critical thinking. >its all a game and there is little difference between what you can get away with, and what is right<...Here what about the Jeffery Epstein?
What about Epstein? His misdeeds were only acknowledged when he could no longer get away with them.
Edit: to be clear, I'm pretty sure they intended "right" to be sarcastic in that statement, not that they're actually endorsing something as depraved as cultural relativism.
> It takes someone to come along and knowingly look for "ah ha, gotcha" loopholes in a system to exploit for their own advantage.
Obviously it's not a positive thing in this case, but there seems to be a lot in common with a hacker sort of mindset here. Figuring out loopholes in laws seems awfully similar on some level to figuring out how a piece of tech works and making it do goofy things the designers never thought of or intended.
Obviously, ethics enter into the equation, and there's a collection of things that are legal but unethical whether you're talking about legal loopholes or traditional hacking. Though given this discussion I'm able to think of more in the legal realm that's unethical.
Maybe we need an analog to red-teamers in the legal world. I guess that's a lawyer? A certain kind of lawyer anyway.
> In some countries courts have the option to honor the spirit of the law instead of the letter when deciding in favor of the defendant.
In the US as well, though the system is geared toward hiding that fact.
Jury nullification is a thing, though if you admit to have heard about it you'll be booted off the jury.
Judges may not have as much leeway in sentencing as they used to, but they do for verdicts, though no judge likes to be reversed on appeal, the threat of which tends to constrain verdicts and opinions (which sometimes seems to lead to more creativity in findings of fact).
> How is putting advertisement on ANYTHING patentable
Because our patent system is broken beyond repair and should be entirely dismantled never to be rebuilt.
Remember cases like this the next time you hear anyone try to justify existence of something like a software patent. A monopoly on ideas is an absurdity laid bare to most people only by glaring examples like this.
It's not clear to me if SecurityPoint's patent is for putting advertisements on the trays. I thought SecurityPoint offered to let TSA use their technology without paying fees, if the TSA would include SecurityPoint ads?
I wonder why we don't implement a Georgist tax on 80%-100% of the value of a patent to discourage patent hoarding and incentivize building on top of patents held. The intellectual property market would become a lot more efficient and productive.
I like this. We should do the same for copyright: the owner of the thing (patent; trademark; copyright) declares a value, then they pay a tax on the value; anyone else can “pay the balance” to buy off the monopoly.
The issue here is that the value of things is not universal, nor is the means to pay such a tax.
For instance, I may discover a manufacturing machine that cuts the cost of building semiconductor chips in half. My options under this model, though, are to either price it low enough that I can actually afford to build up a business on top of it (in which case a bigger company can swoop in, buy the rights from me, and destroy my business) or price it high enough that the incumbents can't afford to buy me off (in which case, the proposed tax will be large enough that it'll stifle my business, and the incumbents can just wait until my business dies on its own.)
The current system is far from perfect, but it does favor upstarts and entrepreneurs' ability to build business rather than incumbents. The big thing I'd love to see is a shortening of the patent exclusivity period before becoming public domain.
> The current system is far from perfect, but it does favor upstarts and entrepreneurs' ability to build business rather than incumbents.
I think exactly the opposite is true. Patents are one of the primary ways that incumbents are able to rent seek on their inventions for decades. These large companies hoard patents, and are legally granted monopoly on a given technology, making direct competition on their invention illegal.
A world without patents would be more enabling to small entrepreneurs, because the amount of things they are allowed to attempt is so much higher than in our current world.
> Patents are one of the primary ways that incumbents are able to rent seek on their inventions for decades. These large companies hoard patents, and are legally granted monopoly on a given technology, making direct competition on their invention illegal.
Totally agreed, and the solution there is (in my opinion) to reduce the duration of such patents to the point where newcomers have a reasonable chance to bootstrap a business based on that patent, but not so long that patents bar competitors from coming to market down the line.
Value-based taxation will always favor those with deep pockets who can afford to pay top dollar to scrape the cream off of small businesses.
Let's suppose you had some novel idea that would greatly increase the value of a social network, idea X. In the current system, you can patent it, build a working version, and then either sell out to FB or another major tech company (ala Instagram) or go public (like Snapchat). Without patents at all, FB sees your app start to take off, looks at it's key feature, assigns N engineers to duplicate it and rolls it out to billions of users. Your app then is a sad knockoff of FB's shiny new feature, withers and dies.
Meanwhile, with a Georgist tax, either you have to raise hundreds of millions just to pay the tax when created, or FB buys your patent for peanuts.
I'm curious what you mean by phasing these in slowly. I've seen the issue crop up in every Georgist or valuation-based tax proposal I've seen, but I'd love to learn more if there are reasonable ways around these bad incentive structures.
I haven't thought about patents. But, for copyrights, I think there should be two "schedules":
1. A fixed original-author schedule which is 28 years, tax free; and,
2. A "work for hire" schedule which is 70+ years, where the Geoist tax is free for the first 7 years, then increases by 1% every 7 years.
Again, the rule is this: you self appraise, and pay your tax. Any other entity can pay the balance due (in my opinion, to the Treasury: the monopoly is granted by the people, not the copyright owner), and it places the copy into the public domain.
For patents... I'd probably say its "free" unless you enforce its monopoly. Then, if you value the patent at "100 million$" you owe the government N-years X percentage X 100 million. Obviously, the valuation isn't the infringing value — infringement is a fraction of its value. That means a patent only "has value" when it's used to enforce its monopoly.
Part of copyright is the right to exclude. Adding a compulsory buyout provision would make copyright so unrecognizable as to not be a copyright anymore.
Imagine the Hobson's Choice you just offered small-time artists. If you don't want to work with a large publisher, you either have to overvalue your copyright to the point of being buried by ruinsome, confiscatory taxes... or, if you don't want the taxes, then a large publisher can buy you out for pennies on the dollar. What that would mean is that you would lose the legal right to write your own work anymore.
Large publishers would benefit handsomely, as they'd be able to buy into a new market of hilariously undervalued work. You would turn every independent creative endeavor into the highly exploitative contracts that the average record label M&A lawyer writes on a day-to-day basis. Meanwhile, because these companies are already rich and powerful, they can just afford to pay the tax to overvalue their copyrights. So the end result would be a transfer of wealth from artists to publishers.
Furthermore, what happens to any existing licensing agreements? What happens if Microsoft buys out Linus Torvalds or the FSF with the intent of making Linux or GNU proprietary software? Does the GPL still hold, or does the buyout override the licensing agreement? The latter is bad for obvious reasons. The former would allow the use of improper transfers and creative accounting to partially evade the taxation regime. Hold your copyright personally, exclusively license it to an LLC on very generous terms, and then undervalue the copyright on your taxes. If someone does buy you out, they can't terminate the license for at least 35 years - upon which most of the copyright's value will have already been exploited.
What you seem to be asking for is a way to attack large companies for being large. The answer to your question is not to break copyright and patent law (more than it already has); but to actually enforce antitrust law, and reduce the scope and scale of copyright back to something reasonable.
I replied elsewhere, but will reply here, as well. I think there should be two "schedules":
1. A private schedule, which is tax-free which terminates at 28 years or upon any (or all?) of the authors' death, whichever is first; and,
2. A work-for-hire schedule, which begins at 0% tax, and increases by 1% every 7 years after that.
A "private" copyright can be converted to a "work-for-hire" by paying past taxes. A work-for-hire may not be converted to private.
First, when a copyright is "bought out", the payment is made to the Treasury — the copyright is granted by the people via the US government, that is the beneficiary of the buyout. Second, the buyout places the work into the public domain; this is not a transfer sale! Third, the copyright owner can increase the value whenever they feel like, but the valuation can never decrease. For example: the owner could value the copyright at 50 gajillion dollars; at the end of 7 years, if they can't pay the tax on the 50 gajillion dollars, the copyright lapses.
For patents, I think a tax is owed when the patent is enforced in a court of law. I don't know the schedule for that.
That's less catastrophically flawed than I thought it would be. Having a tax-free provision for privately-owned or authorially-owned copyrights fixes my main concern with this.
What you're talking about with patents could be handled by just taxing licensing revenues. That would also work for creating a copyright value tax. However, I'm pretty sure we already have ways to tax the proceeds of copyright and patent licensing.
Also, while "buyout to uncopyright the work" is better than "buyout to own the work for yourself", I still think there's some problems with this. Public domain doesn't just mean "everyone owns it", it also means "everyone can reuse it", and when you do that you create a new copyright on that derivative work[0]. This is part and parcel of the reason why copylefts and share-alike licensing exists. It lets you lock things open. Would Microsoft be able to buy out Linus Torvalds in order to evade the GPL on Linux?
[0] This is also why nominally public domain characters like Sherlock Holmes are actually fiendishly difficult to reuse. The estate that owns the still copyrighted part of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's work can still sue if your reuse of the public domain character is too close to their copyrighted expression. Notably, this means your Sherlock can't be too human.
I'd argue that GPL-licensed works should remain "authorial", and that each commit generates a new derivative object and, thus, a new copyright. In that sense, the "old code" goes into the public domain in ~28 years, but the "tip of tree" remains firmly GPL'd.
Granted, the original idea was on real property. But practically speaking, is there much difference with the way IP law works in the US? Patent trolls are essentially rent seekers, with similar economic effects. Even worse, it's much harder to realize you're infringing a lot of the time. At least with land there are lines in the sand you can look up at a county clerks office.
> the patent system rewards the people who essentially “call dibs” on ideas like this
Patents are regularly invalidated due to prior art. As long as you document your inventions thoroughly, then even if you don't patent the idea yourself, you can invalidate the person who did. If the people who "call dibs" are being rewarded, it's only because the inventors either weren't patenting, or weren't documenting.
Calling dibs is still problematic, even with proper documentation... independent inventors often come up with same thing at a later date, because it's obvious, but they are still prevented from using their own invention because someone else had the same idea.
The problem is that the law isn't being enforced with any consistency.
You know what's required for a patent to be awarded? It has to be non-obvious. It has to be something that someone "the typical person in the field" wouldn't think to do, when given that problem to solve.
If the patent office (and later, the courts) would just apply the non-obviousness criteria reasonably we wouldn't have these problems.
And yes, that means they'd likely need to consult with people in various fields. It's not exactly free to get a patent; some of that money could go to pay those same consultants to judge the obviousness of each patent as it is reviewed.
> If the patent office (and later, the courts) would just apply the non-obviousness criteria reasonably we wouldn't have these problems.
Agreed, but given that inventors can endlessly refile with whatever minor tweaks they like, and examiners are incentivised according to the number of patents they grant, it isn't hard to wear them down, eventually.
Courts then presume a patent is valid and it takes a lot of effort to convince them otherwise, and typically it is only prior art that will do it.
>"examiners are incentivised according to the number of patents they grant"
This is completely wrong; their incentive is actually to reject an application. The optimal strategy for an examiner seems to be to reject an application at least twice, usually more. There is abundant literature on this topic, and I encourage you to explore it.
> (It boils my blood that the patent system rewards the people who essentially “call dibs” on ideas like this, instead of the people who build things.)
To me that's a really bad take, obsessing on builders, do you see how much additional wasted energy and mindshare that requires?
"woah hey there, I don't respect you because what I wanted you to do was build the security apparatus and tray system yourself and find the product market fit yourself, despite the TSA monopoly on all the checkpoints, don't worry about that part its about how much I respect you, not the higher capital requirements, time requirements and worthlessness of attempting any of this!"
You've got a valid general point about the scapegoating of NPEs. But it isn't applicable here, where the lack of building being referenced is the seeming impossibility of doing anything novel and non-obvious with plastic bins.
If you click through to the patent filing (linked elsewhere in this thread), the claims are quite easy to read. If someone notices something novel in the claims that I've missed, I'd love to be wrong and learn about some fantastic new invention for plastic bins. But all indications are that this is yet another utterly bullshit patent that should never have been granted.
Right, I actually disagree still, not because of the genericness of the patent itself but because it was a good finesse. And also because we are looking at it from 2021's eyes and not 2001's eyes.
We need to rewind to 2001 and 2002 here, where the priority date of this patent begins.
TSA was created as part of a series of kneejerk reactions to the September 11th 2001 terrorist attacks in November 2001. Congress was merely a tool here as there was almost zero original bills passed, just pet projects that enterprisers and war hawks had already written as bills, forwarded to their favorite committees when it was convenient.
Within 8 months this person has their provisional patent filed that predicts how these checkpoints will be structured and how they could further function. July 2002.
Here, I agree that it was patentable because this level of security really was not in use anywhere back then. There was no need for an efficient baggage binning system back then. Just a few government buildings had scanners for just a couple people at a time.
The TSA did not implement this until after this patent holder presented the proposal to them.
The TSA also had a choice of not doing these obvious things. The patent system allows for infinite permutations to be patented, as well as patents to cover many of those permutations. The TSA did a very specific one, this isn't really that ambiguous.
I agree with the patent examiner, I agree with the judge. Also thank you for validating my point about how non-practicing entities get scapegoated way too much, I appreciate that. Hope my perspective still offers more insight others can agree with.
I'd say the shape of our disagreement here follows a fundamental problem with the patent system.
It's impossible to directly refute the argument that it only seems obvious in retrospect, short of finding some people who became isolated/frozen/etc in Y2K and asking them to judge.
Which is why we look to prior art. But that forms a much weaker argument - while we've seen stackable bins and bin aggregation carts for decades, we hadn't seen them in use at high volume invasive security checkpoints, as such checkpoints didn't exist before. Does applying a longstanding technology to a newly needed purpose constitute invention?
The patent system asserts that this answer is undecidable, and thus defaults to issuing a patent. Whereas to everyone else looking at the constructive behavior of this system, it looks an awful lot like lawyers getting paid a bunch of money to generate paperwork that divvies up ownership of the intellectual commons.
Sure if you're just describing the patent office's current policy. But based on the number of people who criticize patents for "X with computers" "X over a network" "X with advertising" etc, I'd say most people disagree that's how it should be. Granting monopolies on straightforward implementations of straightforward concepts for simply being the first to register does not drive innovation, it kills it.
I agree that TSA is ineffective against any sophisticated attack, but couldn't it potentially be a great filter for the many run of mill crazy person? Not suggesting its an efficient use of funds in either case.
The run of the mill crazy person could bomb the TSA lines and easily get dozens or hundreds of people. The reason there aren't more bombings is because there largely aren't people who want to do more bombings.
Or more! I hesitate to write what you did because I didn't wanna end up on one of those lists, but you're absolutely right.
I remember often standing in line at Dulles. Backed up to the escalators, you look down and see the security line completely folded on itself(like the game snake), people filling the entire space logjammed by security. There were easily more people there than on any flight I took out of Dulles.
Especially with how common we've seen violent outbursts on airplanes since post-pandemic flights have resumed. It's almost a daily occurrence. If those individuals had weapons during flight, the outcomes would be very different.
Leave the detection and prevention of sophisticated threats to agencies better equipped.
You're assuming that the people who are throwing tantrums on planes are premeditating enough to prepare by bringing weapons. Yet if they had those kind of planning faculties, they would realize that flipping out at flight attendants doesn't further their cause at all.
Alternative take: the people throwing tantrums have reached their breaking point from the stress of being in a totalitarian environment [0]. And all the security theater of airports is a major and needless contributor to that stress.
[0] Just to be clear here, I think masks are highly necessary and if I had to fly somewhere I would be wearing a full face P100. But the act of forcing people to wear them is still totalitarian, regardless of how justified it is.
That's the same way I feel about being forced to drive between the lines. I do it because I don't want to kill myself or other drivers, but forcing people to do it is clearly a sign of fascist dictatorship no matter how many lives it saves.
When I pass cyclists on single lane roads I'm generally more than halfway over the dividing line, conditions permitting. If someone gets a ticket for going over a line in a safe and reasonable manner, then yes it is quite appropriate to call that overbearing law enforcement.
Wearing something over your face is annoying. Loops around your ears are irritating. Confronting someone that they need to put something on their face creates an adversarial situation. These are facts that the (otherwise sensible) pro-mask political dogma has rallied around rejecting, rather than focusing on the more enlightened viewpoint that wearing a mask is indeed a burden but we all have the responsibility to do it.
Yeah I've thought this too. Measuring TSA effectiveness by number of knives, guns, and TNT caught in backpacks seems insufficient, because the very existence of the TSA likely dissuades loonies from considering commercial aircraft as a viable option in their plans. But you can't measure the number of events that never happened, so we can't get a full picture of exactly how many attacks the TSA prevents by existing.
Thank you for defending the purity of sanctity of the TSA. I don't know what we would all do if we couldn't look up to TSA as a shining beacon of morality and it turned into a "clown show".
Putting an ad on a tray would at least be somewhere in the top 500 most atrocious things the TSA regularly does.
It depends on whether it's advertising advertising, or just a sticker or maker's mark - you know, the ones these trays and other products in use at airports and security checkpoints already have.
I guess putting ads in the security check area works? If I were the buyer, I would be wondering if people would associate my brand with the negative experience which is airport security.
Climate Pledge, brought to you by SC Johnson, cleans and polishes your surfaces in more varied conditions for people who live in extreme climates. Makes sense they'd sponsor a hockey arena. /s
Except former Wukesong Arena in Bejing has been named "MasterCard Center", "LeSports Center" and is now "Cadillac Center". Then there's "Mercedes-Benz Arena" in Shanghai. Shaanxi Province Stadium was for a few years named "Coca-Cola Stadium".
Not via naming right. It’s garish, feels dystopian, and leads to misplaced incentives, where the building of projects of cultural benefit is affected by how useful their naming rights are for advertisers. Should we also try to auction off names for other large public projects? Dams? Power plants? Schools? Highways?
If we want the rich to finance large projects of cultural benefit, the appropriate mechanism for doing so is via taxation.
