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| Authored by: Anonymous on Tuesday, February 26 2013 @ 08:56 AM EST |
That's only because the government generally has a monopoly on violence, so
there's not much anyone can do about it.[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Tuesday, February 26 2013 @ 12:46 PM EST |
>>The government may be able, under certain circumstances,
>>to tell you to move in order to build the highway, but
>>it has to *pay* you reasonable compensation.
As with many other transactions, 'reasonable' can vary widely, particularly the
buyer's perspective. Where many people consider 'fair and reasonable' as the
going market rate for an item, some simply do not. I have bought and sold some
items where I argued because I thought I was getting too good of a deal,
especially when negotiating with friends. Then again, some people, especially
local and state governments, expect landowners to sell for ridiculous prices.
If you watch the movie 'Talledega Nights,' there is a split second in a car
scene where you can see what used to be my grandfather's farm. The land was in
my family for about 150 years until the state decided that they needed to make a
bypass. My grandfather was given a choice of selling at somewhere between a
third and a fourth of market value or having the land condemned. The state had
it's assigned value, and it did not care what documentation my grandfather had
on market value.
As for the FRAND issues, I really worry about any lobbyist-susceptible group
being involved in setting the 'Fair and Reasonable' part of the pricing. In
this arena, though, the solution is fairly simple; get rid of software patents,
altogether. Patents should never, ever be granted without a fairly complete
search of the prior art, and searching for software prior art is not
practical... not in the very least. Too many millions (billions?) of lines of
commercialized code are written, and most of it is not searchable. If anything,
a safe assumption is that any freshly-coded idea is already embedded somewhere
in some companies binary blobs, but the USPTO, inventors, and patent attorneys
would never, ever be able to find it. Only gross negligence on the part of the
USPTO would allow a patent number to be assigned without a good verification of
novelty, and that happens every day especially in software.
We have copyright for language-derived creations, including math as a subset of
language. Then again, we need to so something about these gross extensions to
copyright duration, too.[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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| Authored by: albert on Tuesday, February 26 2013 @ 01:32 PM EST |
Unless you are a licensed real estate appraiser (I was), you probably have no
idea of the value of your property. Read the wiki on 'eminent domain'. It can
be very complicated to determine 'just compensation'.
That said, it's interesting to note that governments can, and do, seize property
other than real estate:
"...Governments can even condemn intangible property such as contract
rights, patents, trade secrets, and copyrights..." - wiki
If you apply for a patent on something of high military value, the gov't can,
under the Invention Secrecy Act of 1951, 'seize' the application, and prevent
any publication of the idea or device. Once declared secret, you are bound by
draconian policies not to disclose it. So the USPTO must deal with this sort of
thing on occasion. Who knows how many applications end up in the Secret Bin.[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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