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A comment on U.S. Supreme Court Curbs Excessive Design Patent Damages. Parent comment

Re:U.S. Supreme Court Curbs Excessive Design Patent Damages by walterbell on Thursday December 08, 2016 @11:46AM (#13131623)
A possible lesson is that any anonymous ranking/suppression mechanism can be used for reasons unrelated to the original motivation for the mechanism.

E.g. the many shades of SEO in an attention economy, or downvoting for quality vs disagreement. Once a mechanism exists, it acquires multiple identities through use.

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Re:U.S. Supreme Court Curbs Excessive Design Patent Damages by danharaj on Thursday December 08, 2016 @12:03PM (#13131833)
Useful concept: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_wha...
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Re:U.S. Supreme Court Curbs Excessive Design Patent Damages by walterbell on Thursday December 08, 2016 @12:18PM (#13131990)
That's great, thanks. Have you seen contemporary academics who are applying elements of cybernetics and systems thinking to social media and IoT feedback loops?
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Re:U.S. Supreme Court Curbs Excessive Design Patent Damages by danharaj on Thursday December 08, 2016 @02:18PM (#13133213)
I haven't, but it sounds like it would be great research. I think systems thinking provides a powerful epistemology for scientific and mathematical inquiry.
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Re:U.S. Supreme Court Curbs Excessive Design Patent Damages by jessaustin on Thursday December 08, 2016 @06:06PM (#13135155)
A useful, if unpopular, corollary to that observation, in politics, is that there is no such thing as a "loophole"...
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Re:U.S. Supreme Court Curbs Excessive Design Patent Damages by danharaj on Thursday December 08, 2016 @11:19PM (#13136640)
It's more complicated than that. If a judge under common law thinks you're trying to abuse the letter of the law to violate its spirit, they could very well deem it a loophole and reject the reasoning. In civil law a judge is expected to uphold the law as close to how it's written as possible. In both cases we have the corollary which many don't acknowledge that the law is not what's written on paper, it is a system that includes human components.
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