alt Hacker NewsCare to actually engage with the text instead of deciding to paint the entire profession with a crappy brush?
I guess i'll start with calling two well known law professors "$500 an hour nitpickers" when they don't earn 500 an hour and have been professors for 15+ years (20+ in Jessica's case), so aren't earning anything close to 500 an hour, is not a great start?
I don't know if they are nitpickers, i've never taken their classes :)
Also, this is an op-ed, not a science paper. Which you'd know if you had bothered to read it at all.
You say elsewhere you didn't bother to read anything other than the abstract, because "you didn't need to", so besides being a totally uninformed opinion, complaining about something else being speculation when you are literally speculating on the contents of the paper is pretty ironic.
I also find it amazingly humorous given that Jessica's previous papers on IP has been celebrated by HN, in part because she roughly believes copyright/patents as they currently exist are all glorified BS that doesn't help anything, and has written many papers as to why :)
I dismiss the paper for 3 reasons:
1. It is entirely based on speculation of what is going to happen in the future.
2. The authors have a clear financial (and status based) interest in the outcome.
3. I have a negative opinion of lawyers and universities due to personal experience. (This is, of course, the weakest point by far.)
Speculation on future outcomes is not by itself a bad thing, but when that speculation is formatted like a scientific paper describing an experimental result I immediately feel I am being manipulated by appeal to authority. And the conflict of interest of the authors is about as irrelevant as pointing out that a paper on why Oxycodone is not addictive is paid for by Perdue Pharma. Perhaps Jessica's papers on IP are respected because they do not suffer from these obvious flaws? I owe the author no deference for the quality of her previous writing nor for her status as a professor.