History Will Remember Obama as the Great Slayer of Patent Trolls
wired.com
wired.com
As we enter the new era of land grabs and might-makes-right, history shall record that what the American President did to stop it was order travel bans on a few minor flunkeys.
The US didn't stop invading, and neither did the USSR. But the one principle was that waging war for territorial gain is no longer acceptable.
After WWII, the major countries understood that while it's impossible to completely outlaw war - states will find real or imagined reasons to attack each other - if we agree to freeze borders, most of the motivation for waging war will go away.
And it worked. After 1945, no developed country started a war against a peaceful neighbour to perform a land grab. The very few exceptions where annexations did happen were in the context of pre-existing state of war, and even so were not recognized by the international community (e.g. the Golan Heights).
But actually invading a country which doesn't threaten you and annexing part of its territory? Didn't happen after 1945.
Until 2014. Welcome to the new era.
Why is this the only one principle that is relevant? Doesn't grabbing natural resources & other assets [1] constitute as a kind of territorial gain? Why is anything UN related relevant now when it wasn't relevant when the United States was invading Iraq?
>"But actually invading a country which doesn't threaten you and annexing part of its territory? Didn't happen after 1945."
At least the first part of this statement is factually incorrect. I can't think of how Iraq that is nowhere close to the United States was a threat to it. Doesn't destroying an independent country's government and installing your own chosen leaders count as some kind of territorial grab? Sure that isn't the definition of annexing, but if I'm ruling your country and calling it by its old name, what is the difference?
[1] O&G in Iraq :: most lucrative contracts to American O&G giants. Similar for some other industries in the country.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_Security_Council...
On September 16, 2004 Secretary-General of the United Nations Kofi Annan, speaking on the invasion, said, "I have indicated it was not in conformity with the UN Charter. From our point of view, from the charter point of view, it was illegal."[1]
Territorial wars, not just any invasion or a military op or a coup or installing a friendly regime. The very fact that you don't see much difference shows that the world has forgotten how terrible they used to be.
The fact is that al most no one got killed when the Russians went in. The same cannot be said about the wars we have ventured into.
It's true that the majority of Crimeans are Russian, but the majority of people in Sudetenland were Germans, too.
The whole point of territorial integrity is that state boundaries are frozen to prevent territorial wars, even if they don't happen to coincide exactly with ethnic boundaries (they never do).
If there's no threat of territorial land-grabs, there's no motivation for the sovereign power to do ethnic cleansing. In Crimea, for example, Russians were and remained the majority since Ukraine declared independence in 1991. Ukraine never tried to settle a huge mass of Ukrainians in Crimea, or induce Crimean Russians to move out. In the bright new world we've now arrived at, states will be very motivated to "smooth out" their populations by ethnicity, so that neighboring powers don't invade and annex lands with "their people".
The 19th and 20th centuries were rife with such ethnic cleansings and mass resettlements; ever since the fallout of WWII we had very few. Not anymore.
There's less motivation. If power is (or might be) democratically controlled, and issues are divided along ethnic lines, then there remains motivation.
Still an important point, though.
It wasn't tolerated and eventually corrected, but it still happened.
See anything like that happen with Russia's annexation of Crimea?
What you are describing as a first with Crimea in 2014 had, in fact, happened before in a similar way. It's just with Crimea so far there's been much less bloodshed.
There's a difference between saying such actions have not been tolerated since WW2 and such actions have not happened at all.
* Attack Russia?
* Try to force them to submit with sanctions (current line)?
* What else?
A real economic and financial isolation would weaken Putin's regime immensely, and probably topple it quickly. One thing which is very different from the Cold War is that almost everything Russians consume is manufactured outside its borders (and if China doesn't play along, that would only reduce the pressure so much).
There's real and very high economic cost to implementing such sanctions. Europe is only just now slowly recovering from its depression, and the US has plenty of problems with its "jobless recovery". Real sanctions might hurt a lot. But if you really, truly want to stop a new Reich in process of ramping up, and I do not use that word lightly, that might be the price you should be willing to pay.
The above is the most extreme version, but even much weaker sanctions would be way better than the pathetic travel bans on a dozen-odd individuals.
You drastically overestimate the importance of this event for an average American. It's just another popcorn moment on TV. Remember Egypt? No? Well, no one does now.
And that's why history judges Chamberlain the way it does, and that's why history will judge Obama.
(I'm not saying the outcome will be the same. Nothing repeats exactly. We might not get WW3. Maybe we'll get lots of local territorial wars slowly ramping up, as the international order that held firm through the worst years of the Cold War broke down in the time of stupid, lazy, weak US and European leadership. Circa 2014 is when it started, the books will say).
This is really the gist of it.
While I'm sure that every member of HackerNews would read the article first, clarification may help our visitors who decide to skim the comments =)
In the first sentence, he seems to be saying a patent troll might be suing someone who has never heard of the troll's technology and they haven't produced a commercial product. The "they" in that sentence seems to imply he is speaking of the one being sued. If they, meaning the party being sued, has not created a commercial product that infringes on the troll's technology, it begs the question of why are they being sued?
Plus, a patent doesn't have to vague for it to be considered part of a patent troll. It can be a very clear and precise patent on something so glaringly obvious that no one else bothered to patent it because a normal thinking person wouldn't think it should be granted in the first place.
> It can be a very clear and precise patent on something so glaringly obvious that no one else bothered to patent it because a normal thinking person wouldn't think it should be granted in the first place.
In practice this is a lesser problem, because a very clear and precise patent on something really obvious will be quite easy to invalidate using prior art. It's not free to defend such suits, but cheap enough where a nuisance settlement isn't particularly attractive. It's the vague patents that aren't clearly applicable to your particular problem domain that are the greatest concern, because litigating the meaning of those patents can be very expensive.
Company A has a patent, Company B has a product that doesn't use said patent, Company A sues Company B anyway?
Or are you saying that Company B has a product that they think is original by having never seen the patent beforehand?
I'm just getting stuck on the idea of being in a patent lawsuit over a product, or no product I guess, that doesn't involve the company being sued for the patent in question.
As for the second point, a clear and precise patent on something obvious would be easy to use. You simply offer to settle and/or license cheaper than it would be to fight it in court, pushing the idea that invalidation is not easy and not common. It would pay off if you think of the long tail.
The vague patents are for going after the big targets.
While personally, I am of the mind that software patents should be eliminated entirely, the concept of patents appears in the constitution[1], which makes it very hard to make substantive changes, and there are a lot of people aligned to keep current laws in place. If you fundamentally believe that an idea on its own that has not been instantiated in a product has value (which is a basic concept of patents), then trolls are very hard to eliminate. What if an inventor sells his patent to a lawyer in order to monetize it (his protected right) because he lacks the resources to litigate himself? Then is that lawyer a troll, or just an enforcer of the inventor's right?
It's easy to say we are trying to eliminate trolls, but it's hard to draw a black and white distinction between trolls and legitimate plaintiffs if you fundamentally believe that an idea without a product has value, and that concept is in the constitution (or at least,the constitution has been interpreted that way to date).
[1] Article 1, Section 8, Clause 8
http://stks.freshpatents.com/AAPL-sym.php
No matter what happens with Obama it couldn't be worse than what Romney would have done.
Obama is going to go down as the worst President in history. Staggering debt, destruction of the Health Care industry, "Common Core", Benghazi, lies, corruption, etc.
I doubt Romney would have put the country in the mess it is now.
Hope & Change my ass...
"History will remember Obama for being the First African American President of the United States", will supersede any other statement in the long run (50-100+ years).
The future is really hard to predict, and the one thing we know is that the social attitudes of 100 years from now will not match today's. Even the most "enlightened" of people 100 years ago (... whichever ones you think they are, which may well not be what people 100 years from now think....) were not precise matches to anyone today, and no matter how much you think you've got it completely nailed now, you do not have any of the attitudes of people from 100 years from now. That's my real point here.
So we'll always have a president as this is a grand American tradition, even if the role is eventually reduced in power to that of a royal. But we'll fill that spot with an AI. Got it. ;)
Up to now, Margaret Thatcher is not primarily remembered for being female, a comparable and unmatched milestone. She is remembered more for what she achieved in office (for good or for bad).
The changes that allowed America to have its first black president did not happen on the day of the election in 2008, nor during Obama's time in office. To suggest that he will be remembered for this is to suggest that he has done nothing of historical note.
Sure, they all dealt with political issues but for most people in the long term presedents are generally forgettable. Long term, George Washington = First, Abraham Lincoln = civil war/emancipation, Franklin D. Roosevelt = new deal, and without a major issue or accomplishment Obama = first black president or just nothing.
I'm not sure that's necessarily true. I mean, when you think of Margaret Thatcher, your first thought is probably NOT that she was the first female prime minister of the UK.
Probably not, but then, the England (and later the UK) had reigning queens both while the monarch was head of government as well as chief of state and later when it was just the latter, so the fact that Thatcher was the first female head of government in the latter period is not really a good parallel to Obama's position as the first African American as chief of state and head of government in the US.
A: John Henry Eden
With that said, what value does the article's author add by creating content with such link-bait-y headlines?
Surely he must know that even Obamacare might be more relevant in remembering Obama vs. whatever he is doing to combat patent trolls. Infact s/he says so in the first line of the article. Given all that does the headline really add value? Will history remember Obama as the Slayer of Patent Trolls?
Likely applies to a number of large international corporations.
Long after the time in which anyone can easily recall who was US president in 2014, or what party was in power, or which wars of declining empire were fought, and then long after anyone even cares about that ancient history, and later, long after the whole downward slope of the history of the US is but a footnote of interest to scholars of the transition from second to third millennium, and later still, long after anyone can even find out with any great reliability who was US president in 2014 ... long after all these things are forgotten, the first half of the 21st century will still be clearly recalled as the dawn of the biotech and data era, the coming of age of medicine and computing.
Progress in science and technology is really the only thing that matters in the long term. Everything else is just fiddling cultural details. How much do you know or care about the legal disputes of Ur?