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PanIP May Be Standing On Shaky Ground
GoatEnigma writes "You may remember the name PanIP, the company trying to hold e-commerce hostage with their patents. Well, according to this update on the PanIP Defendants site, it might not be as easy as they thought. Apparently a little bit of successful legal opposition has slowed down their nefarious scheme. Tim claims to have found evidence to undermine their patents, although the article is very short on details as to what this evidence might be..."
What usually happens with reexamination is that the patent office works with the party who received the patent, to narrow the scope of the claims. This unfortunately usually doesn't let one off the hook, as the claims can be narrowed, but still be focused on the infringement in question.
The other problem with reexamination is what happens to all the documentation submitted to the PTO to cause the reexamination to happen. If the patent is allowed to stand but the scope of the claims is narrowed, the new documents are added to the list of 'known prior art' in the patent. These documents can no longer be used to try to invalidate the patent once the reexamination process is complete -- as the PTO has in effect 'blessed' those documents, asserting that the patent is valid in spite of them.
So, reexamination is a double edged sword. You may end up with stronger patent, and all of your best ammunition voided.
IANAL, but I have fought a couple of patents. Won one and lost one.
thad
I love Mondays. On a Monday, anything is possible.
Thanks for standing up to the playgound bullies. It's good to hear someone from my hometown puting up a fight. It is also slightly refreshing to hear that the system is actually starting to work the way it should.
If anyone here is looking for an excellent source for fine chocolate, check out Tim Beere's "patent infringing" website, Debrand Fine Chocolate.
If you want to hang your own shingle as a software programmer and make a decent living, you'd better support at least a short time-limited copyright if you want to create your own products. Sure, you can contract yourself out to other companies to produce their programs for them, but if you ever want to make your own software as a living there's got to be incentive there. Without copyright law, as soon as one person has it the cat's out of the bag - so either gorge your first customer for the $60k you needed to live while writing it, or starve.
If you want a steady easy paycheck, but want rights to the work you do outside of your employment, you should negotiate it when signing up to work for a company. In the U.S. at least, it's standard to have a list of exemptions in the employee contract - make use of it. If it isn't there, write one and require that they sign it before signing yours. Hire a lawyer to whip one up for you if you need.
If you want rights to what you do at work - try talking them into doing it as open source. If it's a piece of code that would be of benefit to others, but wouldn't harm their competitiveness with other companies, you can probably succeed if you can voice your reasoning well and defend it. Of course, if what you are working on is trade secret for the company and is the heart of their business - good luck. Remember, those paychecks have to come from somewhere - usually its customers buying something they couldn't get for free at an equally high quality elsewhere.
If you want the law on your side - get a visa and move to California. They have some of the most employee-friendly state laws regarding copyright, patents, and other IP that I've seen. In some cases they may override your employer's contract. Hire a lawyer.
Here's an interesting article on copyright law with some pointers. I don't know how similar Australia's laws are.
I write code.
The salt tax was not a way of selling salt - it was a tax on people who sold it themselves. It's been the cause of many revolutions, such as in ancient China and modern France and India.
Perhaps you're thinking of salary, where Roman soldiers were paid in salt (which was essentially legal tender). That's also the origin of the phrase "worth one's salt".
I'm not aware of any historical salt tax that worked the way you describe (pay up or get no salt). Sounds like simple commerce, really. The poor have never had a good time of it.
Well look at it this way, look at it from the perspective of a company that does produce lots of innovations through pure research labs like Monsanto, Phizer or Du Pont. Research is expensive and takes a long time. Drug research literally takes years and years then years more of testing and usually costs billions of dollars. Now, they have to make that back somehow. Well, if everyone can freely manufacture that new drug, this will be impossible. Why? Well because the other companies will have no upfront R&D cost, the only cost to them is the production cost. So they price it just slightly over the produciton cost, and still make a profit. However the inventor has the huge R&D cost to make back. If they are going to be competitive, they need to price the same as the other guys, but with that low a level of profit, they won't make back their inital investment. Well guess what? If it's not profitable, they won't do it. We ARE a capatilism, which is based on controlled economic greed.
But hey, I've got this great idea for a piece of mail software that ties everything in your addressbook to the time it arrives, and works out when you really should get around to emailing that person who you forgot to reply to.
Now... if this is an 'idea' 'based on the environment of ideas built from what came before', then please tell me where I can download my "idea" from, so I can make use of it?
Don't even bother. I've patented the ideas of "downloading mail". "storing addresses in an address book", and "recording times of arrivals". Even if you put these three things together to make some really cool software nobody thought of, it would still infringe on my patents.
And thats the parent's point. If I patent the basic idea of an email client, all developement in the email client world grinds to a halt, except for my say-so. And this is whats happening. A friend of mine made a start-up company about a year ago. He and some of his friends got together and thought "gee, lets do something cool" so they got together a list of 4 or 5 ideas for "cool new programs" that he had never seen and would have loved to have, and decided to get them checked out with a patent attourney. Over $10,000 in fees later, only one of those things on the list didn't have a patent covering it. Not that any of the other things exist, a year later, but hey, I'm sure someone's doing "a shitload of work" waiting for someone else to invent it so they can sue for their income. So these other 4 ideas? They'll sit there waiting as bait for the next stupid programmer to come along.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
His retort is actually suprisingly topical, since IP patents have allowed Monsato to sue farmers for growing corn. Oh, you didn't know that corn was patented?