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Support PUBPAT. In regards to Monsanto...here are details of a case filed by PUBPAT....Organic Seed Growers & Trade Association et al. v. Monsanto

This could be a very large case for US law. Oral arguments were on January 10, 2013. You can download recording from US Court of Appeals (Federal).

Folks at Pubat claim the patent was rejected.

The lead lawyer on the case, Dan Ravicher, self identifies as a radical conservative who believes that when government isn't incompetent it's corrupt. There are some fundamental issues that people at every end of the political spectrum can agree on.

how do patents work in america?

Easy. You write something that you think it too long and complicated for a patent examiner to fully undertand in the 17 hours he/she will be allocated. Then it gets granted and for twenty years you can threaten anyone that developers or distributes software that does anything resembling your patent. (You, the writer of a patent, are a protected innovator. Those guys writing software are nasty pirates - watch out!)

When someone receives your threat letter, they become formally aware of your patent and they now risk triple damages plus paying your lawyers' fees! Win! To avoid this, they could ask their own lawyer for a certificate of non-violation, which costs $40,000. So, if the original letter (which cost 39c to send) asks for $35,000, there's a good chance you'll simply get your money. (As explained by patent attorney Dan Ravicher in this presentation)

Or, you could contest the patent and kill your company by spending 5 years paying legal fees and having a cloud of uncertainty around your business making you untouchable for investors. (As is the case with the 1-click patent)

But, don't worry, patent law does contain a consideration for the public: the nightmare ends after 20 years, so that's why we're all really excited now about Photoshop 1.0 finally becoming patent-free. I hear there's a great operating system that will be patent-free in 2015!

Google. And a "public domain" registry into which orgs like these publish inventions, well indexed. PubPat is a nonprofit law org that works to get patents revoked, especially using prior art - I expect they have quite a good library and index. And I expect that there is a way to submit inventions to the PTO without patenting them, which gives the PTO the prior art that prevents future patents of that invention.

But I also expect that the PTO could use a much better index, and a better system to populate and search it. Because it seems to grant patents despite prior art all the time.

According to Pubpat, the '517 patent was rejected in 2004. IANAL so I have no idea what that means for the lawsuit.

Maybe they should ask these guys? May I suggest this as an obvious avatar for Pat?

Maybe they should ask these guys? May I suggest this as an obvious avatar for Pat?

It's hard to take anything you say seriously when your sig screams "partisan shill".

MS is trying to push through patents in the EU so it can start scaremongering over there like it's doing here already. Or haven't you heard about the "246 infringing patents in linux" bit from Balmer yet. No legal challenges (because they would lose) but enough to scare the companies to keep taking their MS medicine. Hey, have you heard...MS had its FAT file system patent challenged by PubPat. MS is no better than patent trolls, my friend. You need to take a look around before you make this rash call.

Or, if you're astroturfing, at least you're getting paid for this.

It turns out they won http://www.pubpat.org/monsantorejections.htm/

"Everything else I ate in the 72 hours before I got so sick, I've eaten again with no problem," she said. "Frankly, I don't trust the tests."

http://www.mindfully.org/GE/GE2/StarLink-Cleared-AllergiesCDC.htm

Anyone remember this? Some people don't have the necessary enzyme to properly metabolize the Cry9c protein in genetically engineered corn.

Also, "In September 2006, PUBPAT filed formal requests with the United States Patent and Trademark Office to revoke four patents owned by Monsanto Company that the agricultural giant is using to harass, intimidate, sue - and in many cases bankrupt - American farmers."

http://www.pubpat.org/monsantovfarmers.htm

I couldn't tell from the article, but which intellectual property is MS saying open source solutions are infringing on?

Like SCO MS has never, and will never, say what IP Linux and Open Office violates. The figures Ballmer and MS uses, that Open Source violates 238 MS patents comes from a study conducted by people at PUBPAT, Public Patent Foundation, that concluded 238 patents "Might" be violated. They said "Might" not does, and they didn't say which ones. PUBPAT did the study for Open Source Risk Management, an insurance startup that insures FOOS users against patent or copyright infringement lawsuits.

When the day comes that some of these patents are real (assuming any are) are you going to dig into your checkbook and pay the hundreds of millions in damages?

First, they're not real. Don't you think Microsoft would've been happy to name them, if they are?

Microsoft can't name the patents Linux and OO violates because MS didn't conduct or higher someone else to conduct the study. The study Ballmer and the rest of MS says Linux and OO violates MS patents was done by Public Patent Foundation for Open Source Risk Management an insurance company that sales insurance to businesses that use Open Source Software. And the study concluded Linux and OO "MAY" violate MS patents, not that they do.

You forgot about the FAT file system patent (5991517 - the '517 patent) ... the one that they tried to shake down makers of portable devices and memory cards for, and it blew up in their faces with the patent being invalidated ...

Lexar paid to license FAT in 2003.

We would NOT be better off if it became unprofitable to develop new drugs in the first place.

The Public Patent Foundation ("PUBPAT") is a not-for-profit legal services organization that represents the public's interests against the harms caused by the patent system, particularly the harms caused by undeserved patents and unsound patent policy. PUBPAT provides the general public and specific persons or entities otherwise deprived of access to the system governing patents with representation, education and advocacy.

One of the most important difference of software compared other tangible products is, it doesn't cost to duplicate once a software product is developed. The other major difference is, it doesn't even cost to distribute even if to the whole world thanks to peer-to-peer (P2P) networks.

A minor, student or single person can easily infringe one or many software patents by writing a small computer program. That is, you don't have to be a company to violate Software Patents.

Software Patents are the single most danger faced today by the students, end users, software developers, scientists, companies especially small ones, etc.

Therefore, Software Patents strongly discourage if not completely stop innovation and advancement of science and technology.

Software Patents allow few big companies to earn money with following two dangers to the public:
1. Software Patents holder has no obligation to give a license to others.

2. Even if Software Patents holder agrees to give a license to others, there is no obligation for them to give at price affordable for others.

By using either or both above points they can simply cutoff others from implementing a technology or advancement of a technology. Please note, the technique used is cutoff, not compete.

Today I'm sitting on a product that I developed by advancing the technology using innovative ideas, but I cannot release it to the world either free or at fee unless I violate one single patent owned by a large company.

I wrote to that company asking how much royalty do I have to pay, there is no reply from them. They want us to violate the law and sue us later. They do not want to compete with us, they simply want to cutoff us from competition.

By being a victim of Software Patents, my suggestion is software should be managed by Copyright laws, not by Patent laws. If somebody does not want to given me a license for a software product, I can still sit and develop a functionally equivalent one as if I'm writing a new book without violating law.

This is how major industries such as music, movie, book publishing operates.

Sagara W

Following links may give you a better understanding of this Software Patents issue:
1. Public Patent Foundation ( http://www.pubpat.org/ )
2. http://www.nosoftwarepatents.com/
3. Software Patents vs Parliamentary Democracy ( http://swpat.ffii.org/index.en.html )
4. Petition for a Software Patent Free Europe ( http://petition.eurolinux.org/index_html )
5. Software Patents Gone Bad ( http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,1666755,00.as p )

• Adam B. Jaffe
• Suzanne Michel
• Mark B. Myers
• Daniel B. Ravicher

Isn't that similar to what these guys do? http://www.pubpat.org/

can any slashdoter tell me why this deal is really bad and should be avoided?

PUBPAT has a different spin on this story, touting how Forgent has dropped all claims on the patent as a result of a successful challenge brought a year ago by PUBPAT resulting in the patent office rejecting the broadest claims last May. However, the details of the patent show that it was issued in 1987, which would mean that it expires sometime in 2007. So Forgent just settled for a final $8 million to cap off the total $110 million in revenue they have grabbed during the 10 years since they bought the company that owned the patent.

PUBPAT has a different spin on this story, touting how Forgent has dropped all claims on the patent as a result of a successful challenge brought a year ago by PUBPAT resulting in the patent office rejecting the broadest claims last May. However, the details of the patent show that it was issued in 1987, which would mean that it expires sometime in 2007. So Forgent just settled for a final $8 million to cap off the total $110 million in revenue they have grabbed during the 10 years since they bought the company that owned the patent.

$8 million is plenty to sneeze at, considering it is a small fraction of what they were asking and had a 43% contingency deal with their lawyers.

You forgot the best part, which tells why we won't be hearing from them again anytime soon:

JPEG PATENT CLAIM SURRENDERED:
Forgent Networks Ends Assertion of Patent Challenged by PUBPAT

NEW YORK -- November 2, 2006 -- The Public Patent Foundation ("PUBPAT") announced today that Forgent Networks (Nasdaq: FORG) has stopped asserting its patent against the Joint Photographic Experts Group (JPEG) international standard for the electronic sharing of photo-quality images. PUBPAT successfully initiated a challenge to the patent last year and this week Forgent dropped all of its pending cases asserting the patent and stated that it would not file any other infringement claims based on the patent.

Forgent Networks acquired the '672 Patent through the purchase of Compression Labs, Inc. in 1997 and began aggressively asserting it against the JPEG standard through lawsuits and the media in 2004. PUBPAT filed its challenge to the patent in November 2005 and the Patent Office rejected the patent's broadest claims in May of this year.

"By completely ending its assertion of the '672 patent, Forgent has now finally admitted that the patent has no valid claim over the JPEG standard," said Dan Ravicher, PUBPAT's Executive Director. "This utter capitulation by Forgent is long overdue, but a cause for public relief nonetheless."

More information about the Forgent Networks patent formerly asserted against the JPEG standard, including a copy of the Patent Office's Office Action rejecting its broadest claims, can be found at http://www.pubpat.org/forgentjpeg.htm.

This thoroughly details which claims of the patent have been rejected (page 5) and which claims were found patentable (page 26). http://www.pubpat.org/672OA060525.pdf

Well, according to NE asia's may edition, the USPTO is going reexamine forgent's patent (at the behest of The public patent foundation. But that's really kind of besides the point 'cause all of MS's products are going to come under patent attacks.

There's just too many software patents out there (and too many broad ones) for MS to work their way around all of them, forgent will just buy up some company with a patent on entropy encoding & turn around & sue MS.

If jpeg patents are MS's fear, a new image format is only going to buy them a little time, but if DRM is their goal, it makes perfect sense.

"The request details those portions of Tescher as being relevant to claims 1-11 with suggestion that claims 12-46 are either identical to, or obvious implementations of claims 1-11, the detailed claim chart for independant claim 1 is shown on pages 3-4 of the request"

Does anyone have a link to their archive of prior art, or any other listing of prior art for this patent?

Start from TFA to PUBPAT ACTIVITIES > Protecting the Public Domain to Forgent Networks JPEG patent to the request for reexamination. This request lists U.S. Patent 4,541,012 (now expired) as the key prior art in this case.

Does anyone have a link to their archive of prior art, or any other listing of prior art for this patent?

Start from TFA to PUBPAT ACTIVITIES > Protecting the Public Domain to Forgent Networks JPEG patent to the request for reexamination. This request lists U.S. Patent 4,541,012 (now expired) as the key prior art in this case.

Does anyone have a link to their archive of prior art, or any other listing of prior art for this patent?

Start from TFA to PUBPAT ACTIVITIES > Protecting the Public Domain to Forgent Networks JPEG patent to the request for reexamination. This request lists U.S. Patent 4,541,012 (now expired) as the key prior art in this case.

Does anyone have a link to their archive of prior art, or any other listing of prior art for this patent?

Start from TFA to PUBPAT ACTIVITIES > Protecting the Public Domain to Forgent Networks JPEG patent to the request for reexamination. This request lists U.S. Patent 4,541,012 (now expired) as the key prior art in this case.

I've both read the CDDL and legal analysis of it. Various laywers and other members of the legal community disagree with you.

The CDDL *requires* the originator and contributors to automatically give patent grants, for good, to that CDDL code and its deratives - non-revocable.

Have you looked at the differences between the Mozilla license and the CDDL? This comparison chart is a good place to compare them side-by-side. Note the total omission of the Mozilla license's 3.4 - which discusses exactly the kind of patents that Sun may have licensed from SCO or Microsoft or whomever and hidden in "open" Solaris.

To quote people more practiced at interpreting legalize than I:

Specifically, marbux spotted a way that it would be possible for developers co-developing Open Solaris to someday find themselves blocked from distributing code by a Microsoft patent infringement claim, while leaving Sun, because of their cross-licensing deal with Microsoft, free to continue to distribute the contributed code.

It is a (common) logical falsehood that software would be where it is now without software patents. It might, but the same could be said for any patents on anything.

Actually it would probably be farther ahead. The bulk of "inventions" are mostly refining an established idea. Patents as they exist today only serve to roadblock this process. In theory this would give the original inventor the ability to do the refining and reap the rewards but in practice this almost never happens. Patents only serve to limit the scope of development to a few, and in many cases they completely torpedo an idea. Bogus patents, IP holding companies (IMO nothing more than legalized fraud and extortion companies) and such only make things worse by completely killing ideas (the patent "holders" in this case will NEVER develop the idea - they simply wait for someone else to do it and then litigate).

The question is whether the protection of patents drive some people and/or companies to put effort (and money) into developing new things, whether they be medical devices or object recognition algorithms. Obviously it does drive some developments. The real question, which seems impossible to answer, is whether more developments + patents is better than just having the fewer developments.

The flaw in this argument is that lack of patents necessarily means fewer inventions. This is simply not the case. I know as a hardware developer myself that being able to develop devices without the potential of being litigated out of the blue would make things MUCH easier. If the patents on the books today were 100% legit and patent law was perfectly enforced then technical development in this country would come to a grinding halt. It would be impossible to develop a device without paying many times the value of the device in royalties to companies which truly had absolutely nothing to do development of the device (effectively it kills the notion of two people thinking of the same thing at the same time, despite the fact that it happens all the time - first to patent takes all).

Which is better? I don't know, and I'm sure you don't either.

Another bad assumption. In fact I DO know that the patent system today is completely busted. Try reading some of the stuff on PUBPAT sometime. According to one of their briefs an empirical study showed that 46% of patents litigated to judgement on validity issues were held invalid. How many individuals and companies were litigated out of existance in the name of these bogus patents? Those same individuals and companies would have produced far more innovation than the respective holders of the bogus patents.

The system today is nothing more than a way of extorting a profit rather than actually earning one. I'm a strong believer that people should be rewarded for actually "doing" not just "thinking". If someone can't DO anything with their idea then they should hell out of the way of people that can.

I could rant for hours on this, but then I'm far from alone. I would suggest checking out the December issue of Spectrum from the IEEE which had a decent article on the failures of the patent system.

Invalidating any particular MS-patent would be a hellaciously expensive court fight.

Second, if a dangerous patent is not already in their arsenal, it soon will be because MS possesses what amounts (for all pratical purposes) to unlimited money, so they can buy-out any number of obscure patents.

Read http://www.pubpat.org/ and http://www.cs.ucdavis.edu/~devanbu/FSP.htm

There will be a time when these patents expire and the commons will be richer

Sounds like another one for Public Patents.

Did anyone notice that moments after the FAT patent was invalidated, we started to hear of a Microsoft-specific format for USB "disk" devices? I think they still would like to close out that path of interoperability for us.

Bruce

Time to ask the Public Patent Foundation to see if this patent can be overturned because of prior art and obviousness. Sounds like these patents are really good targets for both problems.

According to the Groklaw discussion, the jury trial came from a town where Kodak is one of the two main employers. One can only suspect that this may have swayed the jury.

This is definitely a case for PubPat to tackle. There has got to be significant prior art on these patents.

To anyone thinking of looking, prior art must fulfil the following requirements (IANAL):

1. It must precede the submission of the patent.
2. It must be published. Open source should do fine. So should any kind of academic textbook or paper. Closed source doesn't count unless the technique was specifically described in the documentation or some similar published work.
3. It must be specific. Saying "Unix had this in 1980" doesn't count. Saying "This was described in section 3.4 of Programming Objects in FOO by J Random Academic in 1980" does count.
4. It must cover the same ground as the claims. Suppose that the candidate prior art had been published today. Would it infringe the patent? If so, then its prior art that invalidates the patent. Otherwise its irrelevant.

   Paul.

The Public Patent Foundation (which recently got Microsoft's FAT filesystem patent rejected) has gotten the patent office to agree to re-examine the most recent, presumably illegitimate Axel patents.

Of course this work has almost nothing to do with the work for which he was awarded the Nobel prize...

exactly, and what better way to celebrate today's victory, than to donate to PubPat.
What joy it would be to see all these stupid Trivialities be rejected and get confirmed that all those mighty emperors do not have any clothes on ;-))

Even for this case alone, these guys deserve our support.

http://www.pubpat.org/Microsoft_517_Rejected.htm

Pubpat or the Electronic Frontier Foundation


"Do the Right Thing. It will gratify some people and astound the rest." - Mark Twain

What, like these guys?

Ravicher's online bio also claims that he "practiced law" at Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom, one of the country's most prestigious law firms. Actually, he spent eight weeks at Skadden as a summer intern while he was still attending law school."

who has the most patents and money to ram them down everyone else's throat instead of who has the best product. Our whole system of Intellectual Property needs a serious rethinking and revision. The paradigm is broken. Litigiousness is choking innovation instead of encouraging it. Let's get behind organizations like Pubpat and Electronic Frontier Foundation to move forward.

"Do the Right Thing. It will gratify some people and astound the rest." - Mark Twain

There's a person in the Board of Directors that should be familiar to some.

There's a person in the Board of Directors that should be familiar to some.

This looks like yet another patent to fight. The FAT file system patent is going to be reviewed by the patent thanks to PubPat. This is another one to add to the list.

could be they (pubpat, eff) planned the party together... http://www.pubpat.org/Partners_and_Providers.htm