Grames

Plays and music that are in copyright are protected. Since chess is a game it has the sportsmanship issues described above for basketball. Chess games reported upon as sporting events are copyrightable only in the same way a football or baseball game can be, which is broadcast rights. The events of a sporting game can be reported as news by anyone.

Current public "education" systems are in fact obstacles to teaching children how to think.

A novel chess opening shares in common with other property the fact that it was caused to exist. Thus it is simple justice to acknowledge the originator of the line. However, the special nature of a chess game renders a novel opening unprotected and unprotectable by any of the existing intellectual property regimes. It can't be patented, as described above. It can't be held as a trade secret because it would be exposed the first time it was used. It can't be copyrighted because every new game is a new performance not a copy. Particular games such as championship matches can be copyrighted, but the rights would be jointly held by the particpants or the match sponsor not some other party. The joint authorship of each game creates a difficulty when one player deploys a novel protected line. If the opposing player defends he is creating a derivative work violating the copyright. This is absurd. One can write a copyrighted book about a new chess opening, but it is the particular expression of the book which is protected not the idea within.

I am ex-navy and consider myself qualified to answer this. First of all get straight in your head that you are obligated to honor the contract. If you are given an unlawful order you can disobey it, but that will never negate your contract. Even if there should be massive congressional clusterfuck over the budget that shuts the government down and you don't even get paid for months, you are obligated to honor the contract. Furthermore, realize that your contract can be extended indefinitely without your consent. You can be lawfully ordered to put your life and health at great risk. This is not a normal contract. Second, don't rationalize. It is perfectly reasonable to be unhappy with your choice of a military career for any number of reasons. There is no need to trump up some bullshit "the entire Navy is unethical" line in your mind to make yourself feel better about the fact that you don't fit in and don't want to. Third, "the entire Navy is unethical" is bullshit because organizations are not unethical, individuals are. You are unjustly damning the whole organization for the acts of a few. Collective guilt is not right. Fourth, I disagree that your having a blindingly brilliant strategic vision of how to fight the grand war against Islamic Totalitarian Ideology enables you to be taken seriously when you pronounce other people with different strategies immoral. Fifth, when you finally someday become a civilian again you will still find yourself thrown into situations requiring interaction with stupid or immoral people. You will find that changing careers or moving to a new city every time this happens is not an effective coping strategy. Looking forward to your response.

Finder's keepers.

This does not fit the theory or practice of patents. Novelty is not the only requirement of patentable subject matter, at least in U.S. law. Chess openings are not patentable on grounds of the 'useful' requirement, the same reason that abstract algorithms and music are not patentable. An invention or even a process should be about something tangible or potentially tangible. A chess match is an entirely abstract affair, even if there were a prize attached to a victory.

Running is the athletic activity with the least possible amount of actual skill involved. Great example you've got there.

Posting to confirm that this is potentially patentable subject matter. However, actually resorting to patent protection during a game would be unsportsmanlike. To gain an advantage on the court by legal prohibiting your opponents from doing the best they can is poor form. Hopefully whatever administrative organization runs the sport would prohibit a patented technique. Different sports have different standards of sportsmanship, there could be a context which would permit patents to influence the outcome. (yacht or auto racing most likely) The Fosbury Flop is an example of a novel technique applied to the sport of high jumping. If he had attempted to procure and enforce patent protections the most likely result would be very few people using his technique, thus little direct compensation. Letting the technique be freely available increases his own utility as an authority and opportunities for indirect compensation. Actually this is a good parallel example to software patents, where one could apply patents but that might not be the most rational action depending on the context of the inventor and the invention.

Yes because it needs to be created. Created as in found, mined, purified, cast, or worked.

Unsourced assertion of a surprising fact is best ignored. I have two entire books (at least) to the contrary I could cite.

Only because you post here, and if you updated your sig with a link to your new blog then there would be mutual links between the 2 sites. This would be good for google visibility and traffic building. But you have a good point about potential confusion, which counts as a negative. Your call of course, and I can see either choice being valid depending on your goals.

Bookmarked. But I think it would right to have a link back to OO.net on your site also.

Quatum theories are not all wrong, the fluff surrounding them is. When Galileo and Newton explained motion, the fad in philosophical thought was machines and determinism. When quantum mechanics came along, the fad became indeterminism and uncertainty. Trends in physics set the trends in philosophy because the physicists know what they are doing and the philosophers do not. Certainty is a compelling ideological force. There is no certainty in music theory, so it drifts along mainly motivated by a quest for novelty and influenced by the popular philosophy of the time.

No, because the way you posed the question about a specific individual (your mother) the strangeness cannot be negated. No one here knows your mother. She is not a philosophical or psychological issue, she is a specific individual, a proper noun, a concrete. It is up to you to decide which conclusion about philosophical or psychological issues may apply to your mother. I agree with softwareNerd's post.

The economic understanding is the relevant one. The other understanding you point out here is the metaphysical nature of man. It is also true that a lion doesn't have meat appear before him magically, he has to go out and contribute to the hunt. All living things have to achieve their lives by a certain values and means to those values. Yes, values require action but labelling this situation as scarcity adds no insight. My claim that property was more fundamental than scarcity is not a claim that property is axiomatic because I did not have in mind the use of the word scarcity to describe the axiomatic fact that living things must act to achieve their values in order to live.

Going back to post #25, I asserted property was more fundamental than scarcity. I provided a layman definition of scarcity, and you counter with the technical economic definition of terms using words like "utility" and "price", abstractions unnecessary to reduce the concept property to concretes. You win the battle, lose the war. I sharpen a stick and tie a feather to it to make it unique. When my work is done I have spear in my hand, I have possession of it. If someone takes my new spear from me with no offered trade, I understand I have been robbed with no great philosophical reflection. I needed the spear as a tool for hunting, but now I cannot hunt. The power to use and dispose of what I possess is a property right, even if I am a primitive with no concept of what right is. The concept of a property right is implicit in the situation described, all of the elements are present. I claim I have reduced the concept of property to concretes, and it is a far shorter path than any possible reduction of scarcity. edit: As all economic goods are in someone's possession when they are created, they are someone's property. Thus economic goods are an abstraction of property specifically relating to their value with respect to other articles of property and their trade value. The reduction of property is both shorter and fundamental to economics.

Monsanto's genetically engineered and patent protected "RoundUp Ready"™ canola plants sometimes pollinate the fields of farmers who are not Monsanto customers. Monsanto sues them for patent infringement, and wins.

Wait a minute. A: the meaning of scarcity is "material values are limited whereas human wants are not. " B: Therefore supply is always less than demand. C: Equivalently, demand is always greater than supply. D: Scarcity exists when the demand for a good is greater than the supply. Please spell out for this layman how D contradicts A. The only difference at all between my formulation and yours is that I do not concede that scarcity always exists everywhere for all goods. There are cases of worthless goods for which there is no demand (garbage), and finite demand for goods in plentiful supply (soft drinks).

Ideas revealed in works of fiction count as prior art. Either the Sony patent is specific enough to distinguish it from the prior art or it is invalid. The Patent Office stopped requiring models or prototypes long ago when the number of patents and patent applications made warehousing the hardware impractical. re: the "any future technology" terminology: The idea of an electronically reconfigurable key cap label is specific enough that applying future display technologies for this purpose would have been obvious anyway, so I see no loss here. When it comes time to actually build self-sustaining asteroid colonies, there will be no lawsuits filed based on patents of the very idea because these "silly" patents will be expired by then and are citable as prior art. This is actually a good thing.

Scarcity is not the same as "not in my hand" or even "out of reach". Scarcity exists when the demand for a good is greater than the supply. Hence the concept scarcity is derivative upon goods, supply, and demand, and their relationship. Supply and demand are broad abstractions in economics. The idea that property is caused by the effort of creating a good is far closer to the concrete goods and necessities of life being discussed.

Disclosure: I am a former employee of the U.S.P.T.O in the capacity of patent examiner in the period 1999-2001. I examined patents in the field of digital and pulse communications (i.e. cell phones, terrestrial HDTV, WiFi, ADSL, and all kinds of data link layer networking technologies.) The obvious is not patentable. I quote from the relevant section of U.S. patent law: Note that the standard used is "obvious to a person having ordinary skill in the art" not "obvious to the leaders in the field". One can prove what is obvious to one of ordinary skill in the art because documentation exists in the prior art. In the legal sense, if the prior art doesn't exist then it is non-obvious and the claimed invention passes the standard of 35 U.S.C. 103. "Relatively obvious" is a non-functional standard, either there is prior art or there is not. Translated into the terminology being used here, if there is prior art then that is proof that the claimed invention is not the product of the claiming inventor's effort. It comes down to proof, and objectivity. Awarding a patent to the first to invent is an objective way to resolve multiple claims to an invention. Another objective way to address this issue is to award a patent on the basis of first to file. First to invent is the US standard, most of the rest of the world uses first to file. I think the US way is better. Either method encourages speedy public dissemination of the state of the art. I cannot understand any of this "scarcity" talk. Scarcity has nothing to do with anything in this field, except the prices of things after the fact.

The following is the introductory portion of Ayn Rand's essay "Our Cultural Value-Deprivation". It appeared in The Objectivist in April 1966 and the Voice of Reason. I wonder if part of the source of teenage angst is that teenagers gain all of the adult capacities to work and value, but aren't expected or permitted to do anything personally important such as working for their living or maintaining their own household. All of the natural drama of life has been removed on their behalf to create an extended childhood.

Ethics is the branch of philosophy concerned with action; it answers the question "what should one do?" Politics is ethics applied to actions concerning other people. Economics is politics applied to property. To use the economic concept of scarcity to justify the ethical and political principle of rights violates the hierarchy of knowledge. Rights do serve a purpose. They define the boundaries of a man's action with respect to other people. Acts which are both rational and within the bounds of rights will create some good for the actor. Acts which trangress the bounds of rights are necessarily both irrational and evil. Property rights establish one's right to act upon material goods. Fundamentally all property rights are justified and derived in the same way: causation as described by Thomas M. Miovas just above.

In this arrangement, all lyrics have been deleted and she repeats "Ave Marie" over and over until the final Amen. With no lyrics to be concerned about, I can be appreciate the beauty and quality of the voice and accompaniment. I also like this because I can actually hear the lyrics.

This idea that scarcity justifies property rights implicitly contains within it a utilitarian standard of the good. It is not consistent with Objectivism. No such assumption is made or necessary. It is possible to live by hunting and gathering in the absence of all property rights. It is objectively better to live in a society that does define and defend property rights, including intellectual property.