Published on 11 Aug 2017
Patent trolls are on the run. Let’s finish them off.
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It’s been a bad year for patent trolls, from a Supreme Court decision squelching their ability to funnel lawsuits to East Texas, to this week’s ruling that Personal Audio LLC can’t claim it owns a patent on the entirety of podcasting. In the latest Mostly Weekly, Reason’s Andrew Heaton explores what patent trolls are, the damage they do, and the next step in driving them out of courtrooms and back into dank caves.Trolls camp out on piles of weak and frivolous patents, hoping to one day sue inventors and businesses. Many of the patents they register or buy are vague, representing novel ideas only insofar as trolls are innovative at finding things they didn’t invent to claim legal ownership of. It doesn’t matter that these patents wouldn’t hold up in court, because a business is more likely to pay off a troll than to hire an expensive attorney to fight them. Trolls suck more than twenty billion dollars out of the economy each year.
The parasitical nature of “non-practicing entities” (the PC term for trolls) has raised questions about whether the modern patent system helps or hinders innovation, and if the best solution is for comprehensive reform or just to burn the whole thing down.
Heaton has an idea to hinder patent trolls. It may not be a silver bullet, but it will definitely piss them off.
Mostly Weekly is hosted by Andrew Heaton with headwriter Sarah Rose Siskind.
Script by Andrew Heaton with writing assistant from Sarah Siskind
Edited by Austin Bragg and Sarah Rose Siskind.
Produced by Meredith and Austin Bragg.
Theme Song: Frozen by Surfer Blood.
August 12, 2017
Troll the Patent Trolls
In reaction to the movie Dunkirk, Hollywood reloads with daring new concepts!
Kurt Schlichter goes behind the scenes in Hollywood to let us know what movies we’ll be watching soon:
People say the movie industry has lost its way and alienated its audience, but I’m super-excited about the future of movies, especially in light of Tinseltown’s current trend towards goose-stepping leftist conformity! How can that go wrong?
[…]
Xe-Day: After the racist, sexist, and homophobic nightmare that was Dunkirk left audiences literally shaking, moviegoers are begging to see a war movie that doesn’t just focus on the people who were actually there or things that really happened. Well, your wish is Hollywood’s command! You thought you knew the whole story of the Normandy operation, but what you really knew was the phallo people of pallor version that minimized and invisibled the contributions of trans soldiers of heft! Xe-Day is the stirring story of the she-roes who didn’t let their birth genders or carbohydrate addictions get in the way of defeating the Nazis! With the cry of “Come on you she-males, you want to live forever!” these pudgy paratroopers aren’t about to allow the Third Reich to mansplain away their girl power! It’s no longer just Band of Brothers anymore! It’s band of brothers, sisters, and others! Opening this Winter Solstice!
1984 II: This exciting reboot turns expectations on their heads as courageous social justice warriors root out bad thinking thought criminals like Winston Smith! You’ll thrill as angry college students confront people with ideas they don’t like, and punish and kill them for daring to be different – all in the name of diversity! When this smash hit is over, you too will love Big Mother!
Dirty Harriet: Take that, cro-magnon Clint Eastwood clichés! This modern cop movie teaches us that every life matters, except blue ones! Female-identifying (but curious!) Detective Harriet Callahan gets all the dirty jobs, like running diversity classes for those knuckle dragging patrolman who refuse to abandon their wrong thinking. Pairing up with a differently-abled Muslim dwarf of color, she busts the real villains…the people trying to keep order on the streets! And she does it with hugs! Go ahead, make her day – by admitting your privilege!
Son of an Inconvenient Truth: It’s his third try, and this time it’s personal! Al Gore takes time away from his busy schedule of eating, dining, having dinner, and pestering innocent masseuses, to explain in detail why his previous predictions of total climate Armageddon that were supposed to come true a couple years ago haven’t. Spoiler Alert – it’s all Trump’s fault!
End supply management in one swell foop!
As always, Colby Cosh can express my thought far more eloquently than I can myself:
Why should eliminating supply management take forever? The dairymen opposed Bernier’s huge buyout: just do it overnight without one. https://t.co/k2U1kdZ3I9
— Colby Cosh (@colbycosh) August 11, 2017
Mad Max tried to sugar-coat it as much as possible. They rejected that option with great vigour. Now let’s just burn the whole thing down … before Trump forces us to.
Why The Government Shouldn’t Break WhatsApp
Published on 3 Jul 2017
Encryption backdoors – breaking WhatsApp and iMessage’s security to let the government stop Bad Things – sounds like a reasonable idea. Here’s why it isn’t.
A transcript of this video’s available here: https://www.facebook.com/notes/tom-scott/why-the-government-shouldnt-break-whatsapp/1378434365572557/
QotD: The decline and fall of art
It also turns out that when that sort of revolutionary who believes in tearing down for its own sake, gets power, all they can do is keep tearing down, until the product manages to be, objectively, both repulsive and boring to any sane person. […] In painting this is very obvious. The shock that doesn’t shock anyone does manage, nonetheless, to turn the normal, sane human being off the “art” being displayed. (Though even there most of it is just boring. Really, the Denver museum of art paid millions for a bunch of twisted together kitchen implements? Without the little card explaining what it is and how it relates to domestic dissatisfaction, that “art” evokes “my drawer got stuck again.”)
So this avant garde of the past aged without doing more than throwing continuous artistic tantrums at the world that refused to conform to their visions. Some of the early ones, when they still weren’t the establishment were magnificent and are probably art, just because, well, art includes tantrums too. BUT after they became the establishment all they could do was chase the thrill and shock that no longer existed ever further, off the plank of sanity and into the ocean of irrelevance.
When they realized this — when the museums emptied of the middle-brow and the print runs fell — they chased relevance by erecting ever more exacting rules saying “this you shall not do, that you shall not say, this thing you shall not even think.” This ranges from political correctness to the sort of stultifying mandates on style and manner that are the last gasp of any dying artistic movement. (I’m still sticking my middle finger up at the minimalists and the idiots who think first person is always bad. )
Which brings us to science fiction. Since science fiction in its heyday was not considered art or literature, it was just… what people wrote for fun. (Kind of like Shakespeare in his day.) There would be some reflexive classical references, which were the equivalent of Kit Marlowe putting his stage directions in Latin, just to prove his education wasn’t wasted. However, they weren’t exactly following any school.
Then came… the deluge. Or at least the “if we destroy all the rules and shock everyone, it will be literature and amazing.” And when they took over the establishment, the same thing followed as in the rest of the art.
Now… Now they — even those marginally younger than I — are the establishment. They are the authorities still vainly rebelling against an establishment that doesn’t exist, that probably never existed except in their heads. Which is probably why they attract so many people with issues with daddy or teacher or other authority figures who didn’t let them have their bugs and eat them too in childhood. (It also explains a certain fascination with the contents of their metaphorical diaper, now I think about it.) They must be FOREVER the first woman to write non-binary sex, even if it has been done for decades before they were born. They must be forever the most shocking thing Evah! even if what they’re doing was done better and more apropos by their grandparents’ generation. It’s all they have.
Sarah A. Hoyt, “Avant-Garde”, According to Hoyt, 2015-09-26.
