> How do you think the Japanese go so good at making cars; by > buying examples of the competition and driving, examining and > testing them to the very limits, and then deciding where to > do it better (and probably cheaper). > First reliability, then handling, then performance and > finally style - but lets face it, most cars either have a > twin or a triplet these days, you know exactly which > make/model is competing with which make/model. > > I think it really comes down to how you approach it, the > Japanese way (very generalized term here - don't mean to > offend anyone) to examine, study and then say OK, let's build > a better gearbox, better engine and better air conditioner. > Then there is the pirate option; OK lets copy this gearbox, > engine and air conditioner using cheap material and labour.
EULAs aside, I agree with Richard that there are legal forms of reverse engineering. Check out this entry on wikipedia and the "cloning" of the PC: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_PC The Japanese have internalized the notion of continuous improvement in the manufacturing process, which served them well not only in creating cars that are more efficient but also break down less. They took to TQM (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Total_Quality_Management) like fish-to-water. What is facinating and going on _right now_ is the outsourcing of manufacturing jobs to China. Id beware about tossing around terms like copyright, trademarks and patents as they are different types of intellectual property and treated entirely different by individual governments. Something Id like to point out though, something that IS going on right now in IP you might be interested in is what is happening with Orphaned Works: http://judiciary.house.gov/oversight.aspx?ID=427 In a nutshell, there are folks lobbying to allow free use of so called "orphaned works", if the original owner cannot be located. The suggested means of location has been to allow no protection for works that arent registered in privately run registrars. Think if you've created thousands of bits of IP. If you havent registered them, someone could claim they couldn't "find" you, and go ahead and use your work. Best regards, Lynn Fredricks President Paradigma Software http://www.paradigmasoft.com Valentina SQL Server: The Ultra-fast, Royalty Free Database Server _______________________________________________ use-revolution mailing list [email protected] Please visit this url to subscribe, unsubscribe and manage your subscription preferences: http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-revolution
