Slashdot Mirror
Chip Firm Hit By 45-Year-Old Patent
JPMH writes "The Register is reporting that a Taiwanese chip foundry is being sued over two chemistry patents, one over 45 years old. The patents at issue were filed in 1957 and 1964, but are still in force because they were not granted until 1987 and 1992 respectively. The first patent, 4,702,808, details an apparatus and method for initiating chemical reactions by focusing "radiant energy, such as a laser" onto streams of particles. The second patent, 5,131,941 also details an apparatus and method for initiating chemical reactions, but this time radiation is used to provide the energy kick needed to get the compounds to interact."
You are partially correct the laser was "officially" invented in 1958 - however the maser was invented in 1953 (microwaves instead of visible light) The laser was at the time a predictable outgrowth - and was theorized to be possible. The patent in question mentions radiation in general, as well as lasers radiation. So while it seems amazing that somone could have that much foresight, its not improbable.
Ever notice that most of those people who are in power are ex-lawyers?
Ever notice that contract language has grown increasingly more complicated over the years, as a means of ensuring lawyer income?
Ever notice the increase in responsibility-declaiming lawsuits over the years, as lawyers take any bullshit to court as a means of ensuring their income?
Ever notice that judges are allowing more and more of these cases, as a means to ensure their continued employment?
It's the slow death of a society, crushed by the weight of a useless population of lawyers who can only feed off the harm they cause to others.
We want to save ourselves, we gotta fire up those frickin laser beams already. Time for some BBQ!
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Don't like it? Respond with words, not karma.
yesterday waiting in line for onion ring sauce for my onion rings and this little kid came up behind me and asked for a simpsons watch and i was like "hey punk where are you goddamn manners" and his dad came up behind me and he thought he was a tough ass because he was driving a ford f150 with the calvin windows decal pissing on the dodge logo and i said "look motherfucker my pythons are registered weapons with the federal government" and he said "yeah sure" so i socked him in the gut then in the face and then stomped on him about 672 times while his kid and girlfriend watched and then i ran off with his boots
Patents are not the source of all evil.
Patents are the only reason large companies invest money in researchers instead of just building whatever widget everybody else is building.
This is a perfectly valid exercise of intellectual property rights. Yes, the point in this case is probably to get money from a competitor, but that's business. The patent was forced into a pending status to increase its lifetime, but who cares? That loophole was closed. Frankly, I'd be more concerned about this patent applying to laser printers than some taiwanese chip manufacturer, but maybe it doesn't apply. IANAL.
It seems to make sense, however when you say, "So why not have the US make the chips they themselves need and have other "third world nations" make things they need [infrastructure, food, etc.]" you run into a fundamental problem: Third world countries lack the means of organized production and funding for such production to manufacture the things they need. In the global economy, the only option that exists for them to approach industrialization is to export for x ammount of years until they've allocated enough capital to develop themselves as an industrial state. But when that happens, they rely on some other existing third world country for the raw materials suitable to their particular production.
Have any other suggestions?
I'll go further than the above poster.
If the patent mentioned lasers (albeint by description, rather than by name) in 1957 then by Jove, that's worth a patent.
The advantages of using collimated and coherent light over other light sources in a chamical reaction are great, and certinally non-obvious back then.
The only thing I don't like about this patent is the submarine laywering over it. The content is quite reasonable, if not somewhat out of date.
Lemelson never invented anything, his method was to figure out where technology was going and throw up a patent in that path. Legalized robbery, I'd say. He claimed to have invented machine vision and lots of other stuff too. He never demonstrated any of "his technology".
Ever notice that most of those people who are in power are ex-lawyers?
Ever wonder why marxists call capitalist democracy the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie?
This is an artifact of the old patent system. You had a patent from 17 years after the date of issue, therefore, keeping the thing barely alive on life support until the technology became worthwhile was a game. If either of these had issued, without continuations when applied for, they would have been worthless.
Now, patents are timed 20 years from the date of filing. That means it is never good for the applicant to delay as far as term extension. (There may be other reasons, such as figuring out what you really want, to take your time.)
You'd think people would at least check the Nobel prizes for prior art. This sort of stuff was the subject of work by Norrish and Porter around 1950, for which they received the Nobel prize in 1967 (together with Eigen). More info here.
Those patents were applied for many, many years ago. Therefore, patent pending protection has been in affect for decades. The net result is to effectively extend patents by decades. This is wrong. The patent clock should be retroactive to the day the patent was filed, because the protection effectively is. These are extreme examples of that...but I've got to wonder how many other unexploded 'time bombs' like these are still out there.
I have no idea what one (communism) has to do with the other (whether or not the economy is a zero-sum game).
But the global economy, at any rate, is a zero-sum game, with two exceptions:
After accounting for those two things, the global economy must be a zero-sum game because money is a direct representation of human production. Were this not the case, you wouldn't get inflation (an overall increase in the prices of goods) as a direct result of printing more money.
Now, the individual local economies are not zero-sum games, but that is only because they have external inputs and outputs, such as foreign trade and foreign investment.
Use 'slashdot stuff' in the subject line in any email you send me if you want to get past the spam filter.
If the patent mentioned lasers (albeint by description, rather than by name) in 1957 then by Jove, that's worth a patent.
The MASER was invented before then. The only difference between a MASAR and a LASER is the frequency of the EM radiation.
The advantages of using collimated and coherent light over other light sources in a chamical reaction are great, and certinally non-obvious back then.
It's long been known that "light" can affect chemical reactions. e.g. photography.
The idea that monochromatic light would be best for catalysing a specific reaction probably crossed someone's mind as soon as the "photon model" was accepted.
So many obvious ideas which require little though have been patented, and when someone puts an enormous amount of effort into actually *implementing* something they get sued.
But you cannot patent an idea without an implementation. Try actually reading beyond the title of the patent (which is always very general) to see the actual body (which is always very specific).
Imagine that, someone had patented a nuclear powered submarine propulsion system before anyone had even exploded an atom bomb.
You do know that nuclear weapons and nuclear power plants work differently, right? There were reactors running at Los Alamos well before there were weapons, and there is absolutely no technological reason that humanity couldn't have skipped making nuclear weapons altogether but still had all the benefits of nuclear power.
The point is so many of these patents are granted to people who haven't implemented anything when all the work is in the implementation.
Interesting you should say that because the implementation if the patent system is what's broken, not the principle.