The most evil organization in the world

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The Business Software Alliance is a fascist organization devoted to stifling innovation and bullying small companies and nonprofit organizations in order to protect the intellectual property of big businesses and millionaire CEOs. They gain funding by inciting patent and copyright wars and suing those they feel are a threat to the corporate elite. Now they are using false information and coercion to try to destroy open standards. (By the way, HTML, SVG, RSS, and pretty much everything else that makes up the internet are open standards, so basically they are compromising the needs of everyone who uses the internet to help those who are already rich.) The BSA is dedicated to the protection of 33 software companies. Here are some of them:

- Adobe
- Microsoft
- Apple
- Intel
- Autodesk
- Symantic
- IBM

All gigantic monolithic corporations with billions of dollars in profits and a virtual monopoly in at least one market. The BSA defends the interests of these companies from the small businesses and nonprofit organizations that commit the heinous crime of creating their own technologies and trying to promote them in the software world.

I fu¢king hate the BSA. I hate the BSA and every other organization that puts the needs of the rich over the needs of everyone else.

from wut i can guess it sounds like they are the bsa.
ie, they make it up, in a form of league / federation
sort arrangement. but then i dont know. they sound
like some manner of pressure group. never heard of
them before. u make them sound like the darth-v
of the software world. *sniggers* like the empire in
empire strikes back. but wutever their goals i doubt
you have much to fear. companies come and go --
even big ones like IBM; same goes for technologies.
whatever advances they make in the courts will be
obsolete anyway in a few weeks, days, if not hours.

What about the just claims of innovators over the convenience of those who do not innovate?

Shouldn't the developers of software or any other technology have an exclusive right to profit from their labor for a limited period of time?

Are you against all patents or just software patents?

ruveyhn

I have addressed this question many times. You can watch the video in my signature for an explanation of why the system doesn't work.

You are rehashing Stallman's nonsense. If Stallman wants to give away his brain children for free that is his right. However, the law provides that authors and inventors shall enjoy an exclusive right to benefit from the product of their labor for a limited period of time. That law was wired right into the U.S. Constitution to provide a monetary incentive for people to invent stuff.

Now there may be people who will create and invent just for the joy of it, and that is fine. If they wish to share their goodies with the world, that is their right. But there are other who want to make a $$$$$ and they should be able to profit from the fruit of their labor too.

I favor patents because they reward creativity and invention. And it does not matter what is being created or invented. Be it animal, vegetable, mineral or abstract. He who creates and benefits others by doing so should be rewarded. In our society, money is the common or frequent reward for work well done. Each and every one of us should be able to profit from our labor.

ruveyn

I do not know all the details here, but I once read something about some of the first USA settlers nearly dying out altogether because so few of them put sufficient effort into communal living. In other words, most people will only make minimal effort unless they are able to actually *gain* from their own labor ... and mere wages are not actual gain.

It seems very plausible to me that a law saying that nobody can profit from improving existing designs or incorporating patented technology into a completely new product will actually discourage innovation (it certainly hampers innovation in some ways, the question is whether or not it adds more than it detracts).

They are also anti-consumer in that they grant a legal monopoly to a single producer. Furthermore, resources that could otherwise be spent on more research and development or passed on as savings to the consumer have to be spent on patent lawyers and lawsuits.

Sounds evil enough to me, I don't think I have a single adobe product on this computer and the only reason I have a Microshaft product is because it's one I've been using for 10 years and I know it inside and out and it is 100% stable for me and has great compatibility with existing software.

The BSA recently (7th October) wrote to the European Commission to oppose the adoption of open standards and system inter-operability (the European Interoperability Framework), a proposal to reduce cost and eliminate some of the disastrous unrecoverable mistakes in government procurement - http://www.fsfe.org/projects/os/bsa-let ... is.html.en - so they are, indeed, pretty evil.

The European Computer Driving Licence ( http://www.ecdl.org/ ) seems to exist only to promote commercial and proprietary software in all schools and training centres. There does not seem to be transparency on their funding or membership.

Jon Landau recently described how advertising the film Avatar to under-12s was an important part of the film's commercial success ( http://arstechnica.com/media/news/2010/ ... ildren.ars ), with McDonald's Happy Meals containing Avatar tie-ins. There are industry organisations for "sponsoring" schools in order to put advertising for crisps, processed cheese and soft drinks onto every child's copy-book, and vending machines in every corridor.

There are plenty of other organisations like this. Ireland has the positive-sounding Nutrition and Health Foundation ( http://www.nutritionandhealth.ie/ ) that describes itself as "The Nutrition & Health Foundation has a multi-stakeholder approach to addressing the health challenges of our nation, by bringing together industry, government, state agencies, internationally recognised scientists, health professionals and other relevant stakeholders." Those stakeholders are listed as Brennan's Bakery, Britvic Ireland, Cadbury Ireland, Coca Cola Bottlers Ireland, Danone Ireland Ltd., Dawn Farm Foods, Glanbia Consumer Foods, GlaxoSmithKline, Kellogg Company of Ireland Ltd, Kelkin, Kepak Group, Kerry Foods, Kraft Foods Ireland, Mars Ireland and PepsiCo International - a coalition of the fast food, drug and sweet industries. They actually formulate policy on school food, exercise, advertising and local planning.

But importing edible food stuffs for our cattle from Africa while robbing Africans of all natural resources, then watching them starve on huge screens behind rock performances is more evil.

Stallman is an idealist and then surrealist. But reading your comment seems quite surrealistic too. You are just giving of what would be a patent in an imaginary ideal world

Patents first ambition, that you underline well, can be easily turned into an anti-competitive tool, in order to enforce a dominant position biasing the rules of a free market making it de facto less efficient. And I suppose you are not a socialist because of your defensive posture on patents, so you should know that the efficiency of the market is what gives a market economy all its meaning.

Congress was given the power to make such laws in the constituiton, it was not required to make such laws.


Plenty of people make money off free software. This is not an either/or situation.


Theoretically they do. Realistically, patent law is pretty messed up right now, and software patents are far too easy to get on obvious ideas.

If you get a patent on a relatively obvious idea, it's still a patent, and you can legally threaten people with it. Given that a patent lawsuit can cost millions to defend even for an invalid patent, some people just settle, and sometimes courts reach the wrong decision (like in the RIM case).

Given the current way the system works, software patents are a net drag on innovation.

I don't know how Norton Symatec has a virtual monopoly. AVG is really popular, as well as McAfee.
Though, I agree with Apple, because I really hate Apple.

I hear their ads on the radio.

I just go

I just flat out (insert expletive here) hate Apple. Nuff said. Their prices are astronomical and their ads are propaganda brainwashing people to think Windows is a piece of trash. This isn't 1995 people. If it were, then I would be watching Power Rangers every Saturday at 7 AM and every weekday at 3:30 PM.

In all seriousness, though, Apple's a great company. They made smartphones what they are today, they were the first company to bring MP3 players to the masses, they've made tablets into something useful we actually want to buy, and they've made computers beautiful and reliable.

Yeah, the prices are higher, but you get what you pay for!

How is charging high prices for something worse than trying to make it illegal for someone to make a competing product?