Apple sues Samsung over "copying" iPhone and iPad

Ahh! I found Doctorow sufficiently annoying to have no desire to read his fiction.

Heh, figures. I thought he was a good writer if one is able to ignore such wacky premises.

Madrugada: No, you should take it as in context. The context was that my opponents argument was not spesific enough, so I pulled out something extreme to demonstrate that "you are not right because you claim so".
I could likely have used more relevant examples, such as monopolies locking out all competition via force, or something similar too.
I may or may not have missed what my opponented intended to say, however.
But I am feeling smug, so I think I sort of hit the spot.
Of course, a lot of this silly semantics could be solved by asking around for "what is broken in the current system, and how do we fix it?" to everyone before we started slaughtering the extremists for their poorly worded ideals.

That post is fairly incoherent...eh. What is «the core principal of economics»?

The core principal of economy is to earn money.
Everything else is just consequenses of the core principal.
Example: "Social ecnomy" is hence when the economy is about earning as much money for each induvidual inside a community, or how much the general population earns compared to something else.

@del diablo: I would agree that the current system is broken in some serious ways and is drastically in need of reform. I just don't see extremists of any stripe in being useful in negotiating that reform; by their nature, extremists don't compromise.

Which is not to say that extremists are not useful, because they do play a useful role in showing possibilities. By examining what the nature of a no-IP society would be like, for instance, we can try and work out what IP law is actually giving us, positive and negative, and from then determining what's worth the cost and what's not.

I'm not sure how avoiding scarcity is supposed to inevitably lead to less profit, or what that has to do with intellectual property.

Tzetze: Depends on how its done. The advantage of scarcity is that when there is low supply but higher demand than supply, the price of that something is high.
And it depends on the viewpoint and marked. Some times competition leads to a marked expanding, meaning the ones competing will earn more money over time than if they just sat on their scarcity.
In other situations, it is the opposite, etc etc etc.
But Heathens main point are that patents are artifical scarcity, since the one making the patent gets a sort of monopoly from it, which may or may not hurt the marked depening on the marked.
Of course, property rights, laws and a lot of things is also artifical scarcity too, so just because it is so does not make it bad.
I hope I managed to make sense here.

Avoiding scarcity wouldn't, but recognizing it would certainly have to lead to less profit (for example, if internet bandwidth were sold at anything resembling its actual price, it would cause profits to plummet.) Playing scarcity and IP against each other is a shell game though, since even if a box of medicine or software were sold at manufacturing cost, that would simply be refusing to acknowledge the price of actually inventing it, which alternate solutions (like redistributive subsidies) would actually take into account while providing the same benefits.

I missed the discussion on scaling back patents to a very short period of time with heavy restrictions (I'm not even sure if patents are approved within two years), but I don't think the suggestions made would work.

For the concept of patents to be useful, the benefit they provide to the creator has to be enough for them to a) put in the resource investment to develop the idea in the first place; and b) fully disclose the idea to the world. A large part of the benefit to society from patents is that not only does it encourage the creation of new ideas, it requires them to be fully documented and placed on public record.

If patents were so horribly gimped as to become useless, then the alternative of keeping the idea a secret becomes far more attractive and we will lose the repository of disclosed ideas.