Slashdot Mirror

trifakir writes "Scientific American talks about the imperfections of the current patent law, subject to the book of two authors from the Harvard Business School. It seems that even business people start seeing the insanity of the current patent system. This time it seems that they are not only criticizing, but suggesting some procedural amendments (e.g. patent conflicts resolved by a judge and not by a jury). Do you think that any of these has chances being heard by the big wigs?"

lazed-dazed asks: "I've recently come into possession of a large number (120 of 'em) of keychain laser pointers (minus the fancy diffraction adapters, though the specs are the same). So, Slashdot, I ask you: Can you give me any project ideas for these low-wattage bad boys? Holograms? Fancy cigarette lighters? Laser cannons? The crazier, the better! Oh, and don't bother suggesting cat toys."

adenied writes: "According to this Delphion is going to start charging for full access to their patent database starting June 1. The only thing that will be available will be U.S. bibliographic data. For those of you who don't remember, Delphion is the company that is running the old IBM patent server womplex.patent.ibm.com. This really sucks. Anyone know other free patent servers out there on the net?" Thanks to IBM, there has been amazing free access to these files for a while. But as a public office, it seems reasonable to me that the USPTO be required to make their patent files, well .. public, actually.

Eddie Edwards writes "This story over at Gamasutra details how Worlds.com have been awarded US patent 6,219,045 for - well, for more-or-less exactly the client-server architecture used in Quake. As the article says, "the company believes the patent may apply to currently in-use multi-user games" (!) and Worlds.com "will also review other 3D sites who may be using [their] technology to ensure [they] are fully compensated". " Of course, Worlds.com will prolly get squashed on the prior art issue - but wow. From what I can see, IANAL, it's not so much Quake-like games, but more like 3D chat-game-type environment.

SirFlakey writes: "Just browsing the Patents database at delphion I came across this patent from a couple of weeks back. Apparently Apple Computer has patented a method of theming the OS. I wonder how this affects theming on Linux ?" Perhaps unsurprizing, considering Apple's general unhappiness with Apple-like themes, and that they convinced themes.org to remove Aqua, AquaX and others. Apple obviously has a lot tied up in their look-and-feel, but the patent's actual claims strike me as pretty thin. Sounds like Apple wants to be the sole owner of complex desktop customization, which I think some people might object to.

SirFlakey writes: "Just browsing the Patents database at delphion I came across this patent from a couple of weeks back. Apparently Apple Computer has patented a method of theming the OS. I wonder how this affects theming on Linux ?" Perhaps unsurprizing, considering Apple's general unhappiness with Apple-like themes, and that they convinced themes.org to remove Aqua, AquaX and others. Apple obviously has a lot tied up in their look-and-feel, but the patent's actual claims strike me as pretty thin. Sounds like Apple wants to be the sole owner of complex desktop customization, which I think some people might object to.

SirFlakey writes: "Just browsing the Patents database at delphion I came across this patent from a couple of weeks back. Apparently Apple Computer has patented a method of theming the OS. I wonder how this affects theming on Linux ?" Perhaps unsurprizing, considering Apple's general unhappiness with Apple-like themes, and that they convinced themes.org to remove Aqua, AquaX and others. Apple obviously has a lot tied up in their look-and-feel, but the patent's actual claims strike me as pretty thin. Sounds like Apple wants to be the sole owner of complex desktop customization, which I think some people might object to.

rhysweatherley writes "GeoWorks are at it again. They have just received US patent 6,173,316 on "Wireless communication device with markup language based man-machine interface", even though others have been doing the same for quite some time. After claiming to own WAP last year, this just gets me mad. Prior art reviews in the patent office are obviously not working." Ya know, it seems to me that taking something that already exists (Markup Languages) and changing some detail of the transfer mechanism (Ether? Cable? TCP/IP? AppleTalk? Post-it notes) just isn't a valid patent. But hell, lets start filing patents on every common net application, and any conceivable combination of layers from the OSI 7-Layer model. We only need to win a lawsuit on one of them to retire in bermuda.

amazedByTheUSPTO asks: "There is a new patent by Freshwater that covers eBusiness Transaction Monitoring. In reading the patent, I was surprised that the U.S. Patent Office even issued this one. If memory serves me right, Big Brother has been doing this for way longer than what the patent states. Because of this patent, am I going to pay for my home grown scripts that test to see if my server is up and running?

An Anonymous Coward writes: "Today I received a very ominous package from GraceNote, owners of CDDB. Already infamous for turning a wonderful open project into a quagmire of heavy contracts, licensing fees, forced user registration and anti-competition clauses, the package from GraceNote contained one thing: copies of their patents, freshly awarded. "Don't even think about using FreeDB", the packaged seemed to silently imply, "because we own the patents, period." That patent? "Method and system for finding approximate matches in a database." Ouch. Thanks, USPTO." Scary: I use freedb constantly. I'd hate to lose it.