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Canadian Company Claims RDF Patent
quinticent writes: "Looks like they are at it again. Companies seem to like to let a standard become, well, standard before pulling out the lawyers to claim they own a patent on it. Now some Canadian company is claiming they own a US patent on RDF (doesn't Slashdot use RDF?). When will the US government realize that allowing patents on common ideas is just wrong? The CNet article is here."
When will the US government realize that allowing patents on common ideas is just wrong?
That's the problem. Say company A creates something and company B is jealous. Well, company B could simply say "Oh yeah, we came up with that too, and so did company C and D and E. It's common!". Thus, there would be no patents.
Note if you don't think patents should exist, please don't argue about it on this thread, I'm just pointing something out.
blame the USPTO (and hence the Americans), they are the ones who actually awarded the patent.
What kind of a remark is this? What determins a "common idea"? Would you say that polaroid's patent on self-developing film is a "common idea", just because everyone knows how it works? Protecting ideas is the whole point of patents. Just because an idea is common NOW doesn't mean it has always been so.
Not that I support this RDF patent (it's just an application of XML, and XML isn't patented. What, are we going to start patenting every DTD out there now?), but this statement is absurd.
Great Idea (tm):
Why doesn't the guy trying to patent the HyperLink sue the fellow patenting RDF?
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
The Patent was awarded November 1997, but was filed in Dec 1994.
Scanning through the patent, the patent seems to be filed on a mathematical system. of course I may have this wrong, but the language of the patent is filled with it.
It is like trying to patent arithmetic, but making it so complex that it is not obvious to most people looking at it.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
So has anybody actually read their patent and care to speculate about prior art that may exist?
Reading through the claims of the patent in question, I think that SNMP may be an instance of prior art. SNMP contains all that atomic, compound, "endo-dynamic" and static information contained in an hierarchical identification node schema. Take the data returned from an SNMP tree walk and put it in XML and you have something nearly identical to what they've patented.
Anybody seen this?
Education is a better safeguard of liberty than a standing army.
Edward Everett (1794 - 1865)
Clearly, if you can patent a bunch of "slightly different bottle caps" then the patent is not common, but specific. The problem with many patents, especially software patents, is that they are specific things interpreted very broadly. For instance, I think that extended there concept of a "bonding identifier" to include (I presume) the nesting that defines parent-child relationships in XML to be very sketchy. You're supposed to be able to patent methods, not goals.
No, because they didn't patent the idea - they patented a method (probably multiple methods) of producing self-developing film.
The patent gave them a temporary monopoly on producing self-developing film using those methods. If someone came up with another way to produce self-developing film, then hey! - they could patent that method and tell Polaroid to go take a flying leap, because the patent was for how something was done, not the idea of doing it.
With software patents, the exact opposite happens - ideas are patented, methods are not. The actual method by which an idea is implemented is essentially irrelevant in a software patent. If you allowed these types of patents in other fields, you'd see things like Merck patenting "a method of utilising chemical compounds to increase serotonin levels in brain tissue" and filing a patent infringement lawsuit against every other pharmaceutical company that makes antidepressants.
"Great men are not always wise: neither do the aged understand judgement." Job 32:9
The patent offices are supposed to hire experts to go over patent claims and reject bogus claims; this makes it fair for everyone. Other patent offices do this; why can't the USPTO?
Because Congress siphons off the USPTO's filing fee revenues and uses them to balance the budget instead of letting the USPTO use them to hire more competent examiners.
Will I retire or break 10K?