When I'm President Of The World

3 thoughts
last posted Aug. 3, 2014, 6:08 a.m.
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No more “Terms And Conditions”. Contracts of adhesion are bullshit. You want to obligate some people to a gigantic pile of fine print that you just pulled out of your ass? Fine, you have two options:

  1. get elected to legislative office and pass a law
  2. get them to sign a binding agreement in accordance with all the rest of regular contract law
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No more vague patents on software. A vague description of an application of a concept to programming is not a "design", it's a daydream. If you want patent protection, you submit a fully working program, including a functioning build system. Then the patent office makes that available, and you only get to bring litigation against people who have actually downloaded that program and either used it or read it. If they had a parallel invention, no deal. If they wrote a program that did something similar but without using your exact source code as a reference, no deal.

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No more arbitrary licensing on copyright. Given that it's a state-granted monopoly, you can live with state-granted pricing.

Here's how damages work: if you make a copyrighted work, and someone else sells media (where "media" could be paper, could be a service where you can download things, could be CDs; anything where you transfer information via some mechanism for a fee), you are then entitled to a percentage of their gross revenue. Not their net profit: they can't just pay themselves all the gains as "costs" like salary and then pretend that the information is worthless. But you get a fixed percentage of that net.

And if the marginal cost of reproduction is zero, and nobody is running a business to copy your content, people are just doing it for free as gifts to each other, then TOUGH. Get another job.