Machine Vision Patents Thrown Out

chalker writes "Cognex Corporation, the world's leading supplier of machine vision systems, announced today that the U.S. District Court in Las Vegas has ruled in favor of Cognex in its lawsuit against the Lemelson Medical, Education & Research Foundation. It held that the claims of 14 patents asserted by Lemelson are invalid and unenforceable , and not infringed by Cognex. Co-plantiffs included barcode reader manufacturers Symbol Technologies, Accu-sort Systems, and Zebra Technologies amongst others. These patents were classic "submarine" patents orginally applied for in 1954, but tied up in the patent office and changed over the next four decades to cover changes taking place in the machine vision field. Lemelson had threatened to sue numerous end-users, including Motorola and Ford, over the past two decades and had settled all of them out of court for over $1.5 billion in licensing fees. For once a judge has seen how ridiculous our patent system is."

Comments

For once...

[iminplaya]

a judge has seen how ridiculous our patent system is.

Now if only the rest of us can do the same.

Re:For once...

[Capsaicin]

a judge has seen how ridiculous our patent system is.

Nothing could be further from the truth. What a judge has seen is that this particular patent was unenforceable under the patent system.

What is ridiculous, is that it is often more cost effective to pay licensing fees for these kinds of patents, than to defeat them in the court system.

Re:For once...

[nfras]

A good point, and well made. Is this your first time on slashdot?

Actually, Lemelson has used the tactic of extor.. ahem charging licensing fees that are lower than the cost of mounting a legal defence to encourage settlement rather than litigation, it keeps his costs lower. There needs to be a kind of 3 strikes on patents, if you have 3 patents successfully challenged in court you are barred from applying for any more patents. This would put a stop to this kind of shit. I can see the downside of course, but it would mean that large entities (corporations etc) would need to be damn sure that any patent they apply for must hold up in court, or be willing to withdraw it when someone comes along with a good challenge.

Re:For once...

[gcaseye6677]

Its a good idea, but I can already see how someone would get around it. Once a company has hit the limit, it simply folds and the owner forms a new one. Even if this restriction were attached to a person, it wouldn't be hard for someone to go looking for an 'agent' willing to apply for new patents to be used in the new company. Patent leaches are like spammers. Shut them down and they'll pop up somewhere else in a different form.

Re:For once...

[FLEB]

Plus, it could simply go in reverse. "Pay us a licensing fee (for some trivial thing), or we'll mount a lawsuit (that you can't afford to defend against) that will invalidate some of *your* patents."

Re:For once...

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd like to make them give back every dime they ever stole from suing people. And force them to pay past court costs for each company they sued.

We need to teach companies to keep litigation as a last resort.

Re:For once...

[Tassach]

We need two basic changes to the legal system to address this problem, as I see it

1. Criminalize the practice of using submarine/stealth patents.
2. Remove the corporate shield and hold corporate officers and directors personally liable for the criminal actions of the companies they control.

IMHO, patents should be treated like trademarks: they should automatically invalidated if you do not actively defend them from the start.

You know the world has gone to hell

[Anonymous Coward]

..when so many corporations own patents on so many intangible things that a corporate dynasty like IBM can bring anyone in the world to their knees financially.

Even foreign governments.

Intellectual property in all of its various forms is being abused by the corporate world - both friends and foes of Linux and otherwise. The madness is the laws supporting this behavior continue to pass, bypassing the individual and wholeheartedly supporting the corporation.

Isn't the government supposed to be working for us? Aren't our rights supposed to be first and foremost in their minds? There is a balance to be maintained, and our rights are not unlimited, but more and more across the entire globe the individual is lost.

Not to be funny but has anyone considered the implications of all these recent intellectual property rights and how it seems more and more that we're being pushed into the draconian future of Johnny Mnemonic and Shadowrun? The only way you get information is to steal it. The only way for another corporation to get information is to hire you to steal it.

I grow more and more distressed at the world my son will grow up in, the conditions he will consider normal, the laws he will break just by trying to think.

Re:You know the world has gone to hell

[automatix]

..when so many corporations own patents on so many intangible things that a corporate dynasty like IBM can bring anyone in the world to their knees financially.

Even foreign governments.

What? Patents are not an international thing. Each country has it's own patent laws, which differ quite a bit around the globe. There are some global agreements, but they are typically much more limited than regular patents.

Any government can ignore or enforce patents as it sees fit within its borders. Whether IBM will sell products to those countries is another issue...

Rob :)

Re:You know the world has gone to hell

[Capt. Fodder]

Would you please stop posting this quote? I think this is the third time this week I've seen it...

Re:You know the world has gone to hell

[Anonymous Coward]

..when so many corporations own patents on so many intangible things that a corporate dynasty like IBM can bring anyone in the world to their knees financially.

This has nothing to do with IBM or any of your typical corporate-owned patents. This is an abuse of the patent system used particularly by the infamous (now deceased) IP entrepreneur Jerome Lemelson.

Whatever you may think of patents, you have to admit that IBM actually puts in a huge amount of effort researching and developing new technologies. Lemelson, on the other hand, was notably not for any research or inventions, but in his discovery of a way to exploit the patent system.

Re:You know the world has gone to hell

[iminplaya]

"Not to be funny but has anyone considered the implications of all these recent intellectual property rights..."

There's nothing recent about it. The law was designed to do precisely this from the begining. So many people want to maintain the status quo in the hopes of making a million bucks with their "pet rock" inventions.

Re:You know the world has gone to hell

[jfdawes]

There is some evidence that for whatever reason, some corporations have had enough.
From the Q&A document:

What is the significance of the laches decision to Cognex's case?
If Cognex is successful in arguing that Lemelson's delay in prosecuting his patent claims is a violation of the doctrine of prosecution laches, the court could find that all, or the vast majority of machine vision claims in Lemelson's patents are invalid. This would have a positive impact not just on Cognex, but also on dozens of other companies around the world being sued by Lemelson (in fact, several major lawsuits are now on hold pending the outcome of Cognex's trial.)

I suspect that it's not only going to be a useful outcome for the machine vision industry but for every industry where Lemelson has patents. Remember that this guy has hundreds of the things.

Re:You know the world has gone to hell

[S.Lemmon]

This is true to a legal extent, but practically many foreign governments are too heavily dependent on trade with the U.S. to simply ignore its patents.

Like when a small company makes a deal with a corporation like Microsoft and later finds they got the short end of the stick (if any stick at all), most smaller countries simply find they have no choice but to play the game on U.S. terms.

Re:You know the world has gone to hell

[Capsaicin]

What? Patents are not an international thing.

Except on planet Earth.

Any government can ignore or enforce patents as it sees fit within its borders.

Not in this century. Ever heard of TRIPS? Or the WTO perhaps? Lemme guess you were asleep when they covered international aspects IP law, at law school?

Re:You know the world has gone to hell

[fishbowl]

>Even foreign governments.

It never ceases to amaze me that these so-called "foreign" governments seem ever willing to follow any rule the US makes, or even implies.

Why does I.P. litigation survive? Seems to me the first nation to simply ignore these stifling rules would gain the advantage that could lead to industrial superiority. While "we" are busy suing each other in a ceaseless effort to keep ideas from flourishing into productive new venues, someone else could certainly be ignoring all that as so much bullshit that happens in RightPondia, and getting on with business.

It's not just IP laws. For instance, just because the USA is stuck in the legacy of 1937 doesn't mean some other country couldn't be doing the whole fuel-and-paper-from-hemp thing. But instead, everybody seems to be happy as clams following the "lead" of the US, no matter how wrong the US gets it.

I've never understood it. Maybe a true, complete, and irrevocable economic collapse in the US will help other countries on the road toward cultural and political independence. It doesn't look like anything else is ever going to do it.

If the US Congress decided Up was Down, the rest of the goddamned world would follow suit, people saying the whole while "in a FREE country Up is Up and Down is Down" even as their own leaders follow like ducks on a fishing line.

Re:You know the world has gone to hell

[annisette]

During the begining of the cold war, late 40,s the international patent agreement was being drawn up (46 I believe)The(then)U.S.S.R was the first to sign the agreement and to some extent in the private sector reconized other countries patents. They knew it ws important even while they debated blowing up the world.

International patent law is alive and well

Re:You know the world has gone to hell

[Anonymous Coward]

well, for the time being, we (the EU) does ignore your patents on software.
Lets just hope it stays that way.

Re:You know the world has gone to hell

[Thagg]

Actually, with WIPO and WTO, patents are "harmonized" across national borders. Patents are now virtually international. How could you not notice?

Is it in India's interest to respect the patent on AIDS drugs? Of course not. The only problem is that if they don't respect them, they violate their agreement with the WTO, and they can't afford to do that.

Sorry. Patents are international now. Thanks for playing.

thad

Re:You know the world has gone to hell

[JaredOfEuropa]

Isn't the government supposed to be working for us? Aren't our rights supposed to be first and foremost in their minds? There is a balance to be maintained, and our rights are not unlimited, but more and more across the entire globe the individual is lost.

Politicians have lost sight of us individuals in the 'big picture'. Try talking to them or correspond with them (on silly patents, for example) You'll find that they do want the best for us, but in the way you would want the best for your kids. So we're important as a whole, but we are not supposed to make important decisions ourselves. Daddy knows best.

This is partly because of the view politicians have of the world, which depends on who they speak with. Individual citizens will find it hard to gain an audience, but special interest groups and perhaps activist groups have access to politicians. The problem with this setup is that a fight between activists and big business often looks like a fight between vague, intangible rights versus economic sense. Few politicians concern themselves deeply over fundamental rights.

Re:You know the world has gone to hell

[Syre]

This is completely false. Obviously you've never applied for a patent.

When you apply for a U.S. patent, what you get (if anything) is a patent enforcable for things which are made or sold in the USA. That's it.

In order to apply for any other patents, you have to first file a PCT (Patent Cooperation Treaty) application (about $5000 extra) with the USPTO. This gives you the RIGHT to file additional international patents within the next 36 months.

If you DO want to file international patents you have to file EACH ONE INDIVIDUALLY in the country you want it filed. Each one has to be translated into that country's language and must be put into their particular format.

If you decide to file in every country, it will end up costing perhaps $200K or so more (depending on the length of the patent and therefore translation fees). But some countries (notably Taiwan) are not signers to the PCT, and have to be filed entirely separately.

The U.S. does not rule the world yet, and U.S. patents are not valid everywhere.

Re:You know the world has gone to hell

[EvilTwinSkippy]

Actually write a letter to your elected "politician" and tell me that again with a straight face.

Re:You know the world has gone to hell

[JaredOfEuropa]

I have... What's your point?

Re:You know the world has gone to hell

[ratamacue]

Isn't the government supposed to be working for us? Aren't our rights supposed to be first and foremost in their minds?

That's what the statist claims, of course. That's the justification for all government, is it not?

The simple truth is that all individuals are driven by self-interest. The act of being elected to public office (chosen to posess the unique "right" to initiate force) does not change the laws of human nature. Individuals in government are driven by self-interest, just like any other individual.

It's not hard to see why government has a tendency to expand its powers over time. There is a simple reason why the US government today dwarfs the US government of only 100 years ago: because it benefits those in power.

My point? Always question the motives of those in power. US patent law is sloppy, ambiguous, and highly expoitable for one simple reason: because it expands the scope and cost of government.

Re:You know the world has gone to hell

[EvilTwinSkippy]

None. Just that most people bitching about how politicians don't listen have never done that much. Hell, most don't even vote.

I was hoping you'd squirm away like a cockroach when the lights go on.

So, Democrican or Republicrat?

Re:You know the world has gone to hell

[JaredOfEuropa]

So, Democrican or Republicrat?/blockquote> Neither, I vote in the Netherlands :) If you must know, my interests are neither left wing, right wing, nor something in between. I vote for whomever is the most individualistic of the lot.

Re:You know the world has gone to hell

[swv3752]

But what product is going to be developed that is not going to be marketed in the US?

Re:You know the world has gone to hell

[bev_tech_rob]

As the old saying goes - The Golden Rule - He who has the Gold makes the Rules (or in this case, Corporations).

Re:You know the world has gone to hell

[EvilTwinSkippy]

In a black and white world, it's always nice to be plaid.

Re:You know the world has gone to hell

[S.Lemmon]

Er, you're completely missing the point - yes the patent has no legal binding outside of the U.S., but unless you never plan to sell your widgets in the U.S. you can't ignore them.

Also don't forget all the pressure the U.S. Government puts on other countries to adopt similar IP laws - don't think for one minute U.S. corporations (and the government officials they buy) aren't behind the push for software patents in Europe.

Sure a country like say China could declare the concept of patents and even copyright null and void, but how long do you think their "most favored nation" status would last? Corporations do not care that you have to file for a patent in each country - they can easily afford it and it keeps the little fish at bay, but they wouldn't be too happy at all about a country that outlaws patents all together.

Re:You know the world has gone to hell

[Syre]

It's amazing how little you know, and how authoritatively you post.

In fact, the People's Republic of China does not recognise patents of other countries, and does basically no patent enforcement at all. It also requires a patent holder to grant a license to anyone who wants one, and gives a judge the right to make up the terms.

It's well known, in fact, that there's no point in applying for a patent in the PRC because it gets you nowhere.

A good summary of the situation can be found here.

Do you always mouth off about things you have no knowledge of? Maybe now's a good time to stop.

Re:You know the world has gone to hell

[S.Lemmon]

Well aren't you the complete jackass!

Just why do you think the U.S. keeps pushing China to change that?

Do you honestly believe China would be making any efforts at all without U.S. pressure? Do really think the U.S. would just sit back and say "that's just fine and dandy" if they reversed course and decided to abandoned patents completely?

Of course you seem less interested in facts than masturbating your own inflated ego - didn't your mom teach you not to do that kind of stuff in public?

Re:You know the world has gone to hell

[mabhatter654]

With George at the helm the parent was spot on!
Sure you can make and sell stuff in third world countries...but if it's shipping to USA...or sold to a US compan... or used to process stuff going to the USA [or europe]...you've gotta have a US patent or be in compliance with them. The long arm of US corps will see to that. Disagree and they'll lobby congress to label you "terrorist" and bomb you.

You don't gotta have a patent for things used outside the US, but the largest source of money is the US and Europe...you gotta play by the corperate rules to sell anything here...although with things like medicine many countries refuse to honor US patents. Other things like crops, we'll let our corps take food from starving african children [farm crop patents] to enforce our patent US "rights"... It's also why we won't see the chinese dragon processor based stuff here...

Patents

[nil5]

Do you really think this should be patented? Look at the following link and decide for yourself.
http://www.mit.edu/afs/athena/org/v/vis ion/courses .html

Hmm

[iswm]

Seems to be like silly patent madness lately. I wonder how long this trend will last.

Re:Hmm

[Anonymous Coward]

till all nourishment is provided by taco bells.

--

"With a firm tone of voice, demand maniac lie down; with hands behind back"

Machine Vision in DARPA Robot Competition

[nil5]

Does anybody know what happened here?

This really is the future

trademarks and patents

[aNonMooseCowherd]

I plan to trademark the "TM" trademark symbol, and then charge everyone else royalties to use it. Once that is successful, I will patent that as a new business method.

Re:trademarks and patents

[Ieshan]

Good idea, but I've already got patents on the T and the M. And I've got a patent on the superscript.

Re:trademarks and patents

[Fancia]

Ah, but I own patents on |, -, v, \ and /. Pay up.

Re:trademarks and patents

[notque]

I plan on trademarking repetitive posts, and then charge everyone else royalies to use it.

(This is where you reply, "There is too much prior art." and then we share a laugh.)

Re:trademarks and patents

[Anonymous Coward]

hasn't this joke run its course?

Re:trademarks and patents

[pointzero]

If your going to go that far... why not just patent the action of breathing. Everytime somebody takes a breath... they owe you a penny. I figure by the end of the week you won't know what to do with you're wealth! You know what actually, since I came up with the idea... I'LL PATENT IT. YOU SNOOZE YOU LOSE!

Re:trademarks and patents

[xigxag]

reminds me of RTMark

Re:trademarks and patents

[stubear]

I'm going to patent stupidity and make a killing off suing slashbots.

Re:trademarks and patents

[Anonymous Coward]

No way... it just keeps getting funnier and funnier every time I hear it!

Bwahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha! He patented something obvious!!!!!1!!!!! Yukyukyukyukyukyukyukyukyukyuk...

Re:trademarks and patents

[Anonymous Coward]

Have you ever seen a joke run its course on slashdot? It takes several years for most people to stop repeating it, but even then, it never stops completely.

Re:trademarks and patents

[DickBreath]

Didn't we just have a slashdot story yesterday about All Encompasing patents? I want to apply for the all-encompasing patent.

Shadowrun?

[Anonymous Coward]

What? I hearby patent magic and having sex with tenticaled beasts from the neather world using only japanese school girls!

Re:Shadowrun?

[Anonymous Coward]

NOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!! We must take immediate action to destroy the current US Patent Office if they can allow such fundamental staples of my culture to be patented!

What?

[Deraj DeZine]

Machine Vision Patents Thrown Out

Can they do that?

Re:What?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes.

Re:What?

[PsionicMan]

No, of course not. This is a blatant attempt at a coup d'etat by Chief Judge Philip Pro. You can expect the federal forces to be mobilized by 2300 MST, and I'd say the final showdown in Vegas will probably happen early tomorrow morning.

I sure hope Judge Pro has been practicing with his gavel. Remember, follow through!

Re:What?

[Anonymous Coward]

That is, in all seriousness, a retarded question.

Here is the answer: Yes.

Re:What?

[Mr2cents]

Machine Vision Patents Thrown Out

Can they do that?


i don't see your point :)

Re:What?

[timotten]

Well, let's examine the statement a little more closely.

"Machine vision patents 'thrown out.'"

I parsed this as:

->(sentence)
---> (subject, noun) vision
-----> (appositive) machine
---> (predicate, verb) patents
-----> (direct object) 'thrown out'

This statement actually has multiple difficulties. Firstly, only natural persons are allowed to claim invention of patents, and vision is not a natural person. Secondly, only persons and corporations are allowed to own things; vision is not. Thirdly, regardless of how "thrown out" is interpreted, it's not patentable. There are two main interprations:

* The words "thrown out" are themselves patented. One cannot use them anywhere without the permission of machine vision -- This doesn't work because patents only apply to processes. Perhaps the patent applicant would prefer to register a copyright or trademark?

* The words "thrown out" identify the process of throwing a thing out. One may not throw a thing out without the permission of machine vision -- This has two defects. On the one hand, one should use the gerund form instead of the participle form when identifying any thing. On the other hand, the "throwing out" process is usually realized by a person (e.g., "The judge threw out the case."), but, again, vision is not a person.

So clearly "they" -- regardless of that pronoun's antecedent -- cannot "do that" because the statement "Machine vision patents thrown out" can never be true.

Re:What?

[Deraj DeZine]

Actually my post was a bit of a joke (patents are given for almost anything, so I was implying that patents must be awarded in all cases), but thanks for the in-depth analysis =)

Re:What?

[The Cydonian]

Dude, the NLP class is scheduled after the machine vision class in Artificial Intelligence 301. :-)

mmm....

[doublebackslash]

The concept that any idea nowadays is uncopyable or un-emulateable is rediculous.
I'm sick of companys thinking that they have any unique ideas that someone else cannot make a cheap duplicate of.
I've yet to see a great, profitable idea go un-coppied, despite patents.
I blame the lawyers, what was the line in 'king lear', blank all the lawers? It'll come to me, but Shakespear has verry little advice that is not still valid.

Pardon the spelling, I'm in a hurry.

Re:mmm....

[Anonymous Coward]

what was the line in 'king lear', blank all the lawers?

"The first thing we do, let's kill all the Lawyers."
Henry VI, Part II. Act one, scene one.

Re:mmm....

[KevinKnSC]

"I blame the lawyers, what was the line in 'king lear', blank all the lawers? It'll come to me, but Shakespear has verry little advice that is not still valid."

If you had RTFP, the Bard is actually talking about the vital role that lawyers play in society.

Re:mmm....

[Anonymous Coward]

Parent should be modded up just for getting the line right.

Re:mmm....

[Artifakt]

For those not in on the joke yet, "First, we'll kill all the Lawyers" is from Richard the 3rd, words put into the mouth of a psycho who orders little kids be drowned in a barrel of wine, thus one of Shaxpur's worst villians.

Re:mmm....

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, it's from Henry VI, part 2. Act 4, scene 2, line 72. If you read the scene, it's obviously meant to be satirical.

Re:mmm....

[AndroidCat]

CADE: Be brave, then; for your captain is brave, and vows reformation. There shall be in England seven halfpenny loaves sold for a penny: the three-hooped pot; shall have ten hoops and I will make it felony to drink small beer: all the realm shall be in common; and in Cheapside shall my palfrey go to grass: and when I am king, as king I will be,--

ALL: God save your majesty!

CADE: I thank you, good people: there shall be no money; all shall eat and drink on my score; and I will apparel them all in one livery, that they may agree like brothers and worship me their lord.

DICK: The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers.

CADE: Nay, that I mean to do. Is not this a lamentable thing, that of the skin of an innocent lamb should be made parchment? that parchment, being scribbled o'er, should undo a man? Some say the bee stings: but I say, 'tis the bee's wax; for I did but seal once to a thing, and I was never mine own man since. How now! who's there?

Enter some, bringing forward the Clerk of Chatham

Re:mmm....

[jfengel]

I played Edward IV in Henry VI about three years ago. Stupid director, but a great play. (Well, two good plays and a sucky one.)

Re:mmm....

[bar-agent]

See, the idea of a patent is not to prevent copying the idea. You have to publish your patent, after all, which makes it publicly available. The idea is keep anyone else from selling your idea while your patent exists. All your competitors will definitely be using your ideas, they just can't sell a product yet.

Way too much history behind this

[swordgeek]

Something that people don't seem to realise (not just on /., but in the world in general) is that the patent system has been abused for centuries. Eli Whitney spent decades in the courts, trying to prevent people from making and selling ripoffs of his (patented) cotton gin, and by the time he won, the patent was only valid for one more year. Edison, in contrast, patented everything under the sun and sued people black and blue over trivial or non-existent issues.

The point is that the patent system has been open to abuse as long as it's been around, and it's not likely to change in the next two years or so, as most seem here seem to think. Even if the abuses are so flagrantly worse now than ever before that it really is going to collapse, there's a LOT of momentum, and it's going to take a decade or more.

So push it hard, but don't expect to see much movement for a while.

Re:Way too much history behind this

[iminplaya]

Thank you. At least some folks are seeing the truth. We can spew on about the evils of the patent/copyright system, but it seems noone is hearing. They'll keep on screaming for new laws that will never come about, nor should they. Oh well, life in the big city...

"So push it hard,..."

You know what they say..."If you push something hard enough, it will fall over."

Re:Way too much history behind this

[jcr]

Edison, in contrast, patented everything under the sun and sued people black and blue over trivial or non-existent issues.

I think you're glossing over the fact that Edison did indeed invent the things he patented. He didn't just file for a patent on the lightbulb and the phonograph and then wait for 39 years for someone else to come up with them so he could sue.

-jcr

Re:Way too much history behind this

[Anonymous Coward]

Fortunately, patents are only really open to abuse by rich people and big businesses. As I recall, a patent can easily cost between $7,000 and $20,000 (that's just the fee to the USPTO -- we're not even talking any lawyer fees you may incur if you have one arrange things for you).

A small time inventor living on a salary from an average career is not going to have $7-20k for every great idea he comes up with. It's a lose lose situation for the guy who goes it alone.

Re:Way too much history behind this

[glinden]

• So push it hard, but don't expect to see much movement for a while.

It's not really clear what the average person can do to promote change in the patent system. Do you have any suggestions?

I'm completely serious. I like many others are unhappy with the current situation, but I honestly don't see a way to change it. What can the average person do to promote constructive change in the US patent system?

Re:Way too much history behind this

[Fnkmaster]

Write to your legislators. Join/setup organizations to raise funds from the community to campaign for these causes. I think the most important thing to do would be to get some high profile technology industry figures to come out in favor of patent reform. I think Jeff Bezos has done that, despite (because of?) his company's involvement in the infamous one-click patent. Let's convince more high profile business figures in the tech industry that reform and rationalization of the patent filing/award process could benefit business and lead to more innovation and entrepreneurship, while still allowing legitimate awarding of intellectual property protections.

Don't rant and rave about abolishing intellectual property - remember that patent protections do benefit a lot of businesses and create jobs. It's just that the system is too open to abusive use, submarining of patents, patenting of obvious non-inventions, patenting existing practices by use of obscuring and confusing language, patenting in the face of flagrant quantities of prior art and so on. These abuses hurt everybody, small businesses, individuals, and big businesses. Except for the lawyers who get to litigate the mess that results.

Re:Way too much history behind this

[gcaseye6677]

One small change which could eliminate some of the worst abuses would be to restrict changes in ownership of patents. If I file for a patent, I should have the option of using the technology myself, licensing it to others, or selling the patent to someone for the purpose of them using the technology in their business. Also, should I die while the patent is valid, I can designate someone who will 'inherit' it. What I should not be able to do is to sell it to someone who has no reasonable intention of using it and just wants to have it for a basis to sue someone. This would make it a lot harder for companies like PanIP to exist, since they would not simply be able to buy up trivial patents. Assuming the patent applicant is required to show evidence that they actually put some real development effort into the patent claim, 'lawsuit companies' will have a much harder time existing.

Re:Way too much history behind this

[AJWM]

Edison, in contrast, patented everything under the sun and sued people black and blue over trivial or non-existent issues.

He (and/or his company) was not above infringeing upon others' patents and copyrights, either. For example, the classic film "Le Voyage a la Lune" was pirated by Edison employees while it was playing in London and had pretty much played out to American audiences by the time legal copies made it to the the US. Then there are the dirty tricks he pulled to "prove" that his DC power transmission system was much safer than Tesla's AC system. (Probably also proved the TCO was lower, too.)

Re:Way too much history behind this

[Kwil]

As somebody else mentioned, write your congressman and senator about the situation and push for legislation that would make a difference.

One significant and fairly easy change to make is that once a patent is submitted for registration it may not be altered. It either passes or fails in its current state. If it fails, you have to submit an entirely new patent application. This means make sure you get it right the first time or cough up more money (giving more resources to the patent office to adequately check things) It also means you don't get to say that a patent you submitted in 1954 but have been changing every 3 years to match current technology counts as being patented since 1954.

Another simple change would be to make it so that people who have their patents thrown out in a court of law have to repay any liscence fees previously collected, plus a penalty fine of up to 50% of those total fees to be paid to the court system, (thus reducing the burden on the taxpayer that the "patent to sue" practice places on us by over-use of the courts)

Re:Way too much history behind this

[Anonymous Coward]

"remember that patent protections do benefit a lot of businesses and create jobs"

I don't remember this at all.

I can even show evidence of the contrary:
MacroEconomic Effects of Patents

What is your evidence?

Re:Way too much history behind this

[Fnkmaster]

The first 4-5 at least are pretty much exclusively about software and business method patents. I don't think those actually benefit anybody and I think they should be wiped out. But patents have been around since long before software existed, or anybody thought you could patent a business method. I have anecdotal evidence about other kinds of patents being beneficial shields for small businesses, but I'm too tired to go searching for macroeconomic data right now. :)

Re:Way too much history behind this

[Anonymous Coward]

Restrict new patents. Make them shorter in time, defend less the "inventor".

Re:Way too much history behind this

[pommiekiwifruit]

There were lightbulbs before edison's (e.g. by Swann). It would be evil for him to claim all forms of lightbulb, instead of just the improvements his workshop had created.

Re:Way too much history behind this

[danila]

What can the average person do to promote constructive change in the US patent system?
First you get a truck full of explosives...

Other tips

P.S. Terrorism is free speech.

Re:Way too much history behind this

[servoled]

The first thing I would do would be to learn as much as you can about the current system, find out exactly what the requirments are for filing, allowing and rejecting patents. Also read the PTO's 21st Centruy Strategic Plan to see what they are already planning on changing. It would also be good to find out if any bills are before Congress that would improve the situation.

After that, write (on real paper, sent through the old fashioned mail system) a letter to your Senators and Representavies explaining the current problems with the system and how they should be fixed, if you do find current legislation before either house that you agree with, tell them that you would like to see them vote (yes/no) on that bill.

It is important to know exactly how the current system operates before you attempt to change it. Once you know what is currently in place, you will have a much better idea of what needs to be changed, and be able to write a much more conving letter to your members of Congress.

Note that this method, with a little modification, may work for other problems that you see with US government and laws.

To summarize in a way any slashdotter can understand:

1) Learn as much as you can about the current system
2) Identify problems in current system
3) Write Congress concerning those problems
4) ???
5) Profit!!!

Re:Way too much history behind this

[theonetruekeebler]

Almost a century ago, a patent attorney named George B. Selden sued Ford Motor Company, claiming he held the patent on the automobile. When Henry Ford laughed in his face, he started demanding licence fees from owners of Fords, Cadillacs, and other cars. An abridged story of the legal battle is here, although Googling for "Selden Ford patent" brings up other goodies.

Does this sound familiar to anybody?

Re:Way too much history behind this

[gorilla]

Edison actually lost his patents on the lightbulb, because of Swan's prior art in Britan, and William Sawyer in the US.

Re:Way too much history behind this

[swordgeek]

Edison invented SOME of the things he patented. He didn't invent the lightbulb, for instance. (it was argued at the time that he was unaware of Swann's work, but that's been effectively proven false.) He DID take out some patents for the sole purpose of suing people. He also created a company that heavily sponsored group activities (box socials, dances, etc.) but also worked them ferociously hard. He was a perfect example of capitalism unrestrained, none of which really affects my original point: He and many others have abused the patent system towards their own ends as long as it has existed.

Re:Way too much history behind this

[Anonymous Coward]

but did Edison patent various ways to facilitate making a light bulb, such as the method used to draw Tungsten into lightbulb filaments, or, for that fact, the use of tungsten as a lightbulb filament, the process to create the doubly-coiled filament, the process to fix and seal the lightbulb's base to the bulb, etc.?

While he might have lost the lightbulb patent, he could have had a bunch more patents involved in the mass manufacture of light bulbs that effectively kept others from making lightbulbs.

I'm not so sure patents are as useful today as they used to be. If one can effectively market and brand-manage a particular product (think: aspirin) outside of patent, then why cannot this apply to other things? Bayer still makes a mint from aspirin sales, even though whatever patents they might have held way-back when have long since expired. The battle there is now one of brand management, production efficiency, market share and loyalty with consumers.

Re:Way too much history behind this

[Anonymous Coward]

The AC vs DC battle royale was more Westinghouse (Westinghouse "invested" in Tesla's system) vs. Edison. Once it became obvious that it was possible to transmit power much easier and efficiently with AC than it was with DC and that AC scaled much better than DC...

I have a patent on...

[The I Shing]

I have a patent on making comments about having a patent on patents, so all those of you who say "I'm going to patent getting patents" now owe me royalties...

Oh, no, I just got a cease & desist letter from someone who says he holds a patent on making comments about people making comments about patenting getting patents. I hope he'll accept my cross-licensing deal.

Re:I have a patent on...

[Anonymous Coward]

I have a patent on making comments about having a patent on patents, so all those of you who say "I'm going to patent getting patents" now owe me royalties...

Geezus... not this joke again! C'mon moderators: this one is redundant, have the stones to mod it as such.

Re:I have a patent on...

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry, I have a patent on That!
Pay Me!!

not all IP is disgusting

[SHEENmaster]

if something is a truly unique invention, or a truly unique work of art, it deserves a patent or a copyright.

The problem here is that the patent office doesn't have the resources to investigate patents for legitimacy. Anyone can then patent anything and get away with exthorting license fees out of other, unrelated, businesses.

The patent system should be modified such that any significant improvement upon an existing patent negates a new invention from being covered by the previous patent. Then technology is advanced, rather than hindered, by the patent system.

Re:not all IP is disgusting

[Richard M. Nixon]

The patent system should be modified such that any significant improvement upon an existing patent negates a new invention from being covered by the previous patent. Then technology is advanced, rather than hindered, by the patent system.

Theoretically, if it is a more advanced technology, ie it really is a better mousetrap, then it should be granted it's own patent. The older patent doesn't become invalid, but it doesn't have a patent on the whole concept of a mousetrap.

Part of the problem is overly broad claims in patents. If the patent office would just denie patent applications that want to claim everything under the sun then that would help.

It would also help if companies being sued for patents with obvious prior art would submit challenges to the patent office, rather than fighting it in the courts, or worse yet settling out of court, then maybe there would be an end to this nonsense.

IBM clearly has the resources to do this.
Isn't there some form you can fill out and pay $1000 to challenge a patent with the Patent Office?

Re:not all IP is disgusting

[rahlquist]

Ummm youre right they dont have the resources, donate a 486 so they can use google like the rest of us. Gimme a break...

Re:not all IP is disgusting

[ericspinder]

IANA Patent Lawyer, but I believe that situation could be called a "derivative work". I belive that the complaints that most people have with patents are the "overly broad", "obvious progression", and the "prior art" ones. To the best of my knowledge these are all incorporated into the patent law currently (at least in the U.S.). The problem is how the patent office handles the applications, and when they do make mistakes (which seems to be all the time) they give the legal force to what are truly outrageous claims. Due to the cost of litigation many companies find themselves "behind the 8-ball" when served with an infringement suit.

Re:not all IP is disgusting

[SydShamino]

That idea doesn't really work. We give patents for things *because* we want them to be published and improved upon by others. If we strip patents as soon as someone improves on them, no one would publish their patents.

Consider the classic example of the automobile. Let's say you invent the automobile. It might take you years to build up a business where you can be profitable. Your cars have a manual transmission, but they run great.

After you have been building cars for six months, you are still in debt from your factory. Someone else invents an automatic transmission. Under your proposal, now the new person can build cars with automatic transmission. It's a definite improvement on your design. But your design was also new and novel. You deserve the time it takes to recoup the rewards from your patent. No, you can't build cars with automatics because you don't own that patent. But the other person can't build cars at all, unless you two work out a deal.

If you knew before you started that, as soon as someone improved on your idea you would lose it, would you invest the money in the first place, putting your family in debt, or would you just say "screw it" and let the idea die with you?

Patents can be problems today, yes, but that it mostly because big companies that acquire patents can enforce them for too many years, while small folks with patents might take years to build capital to produce a product, and then have their idea stolen without enough money to fight for it back. In my opinion, the problem lies in the big companies.

Re:not all IP is disgusting

[Anonymous Coward]

The patent system should be modified by adding a 4 week public challenge period. This would basically allow interested parties to do some of the patent investigators homework for them with regard to such things as investigating prior art. They might not know off hand how original 'one click checkout' or whatever is, but I'm sure interested computer geeks would be happy to provide or point them to information. This way challenge could occur prior to the grant of patent outside the courts rather than later in the courts with lawyers and associated expenses.

Re:not all IP is disgusting

[Anonymous Coward]

well, it works this way with drugs.

Take Prilosec/Nexxium, or Claritin/Clarinex. In both cases, these drugs are essentially the same, except that the second drug is the active metabolyte that does the work when you take the first. Oddly enough, they came out about when the patents for the parent drugs were wearing out, possibly providing legal ammunition against generic makers.

Want permission to make a generic version of Prilosec? Well, remember a component of it is still under patent protection, so said permission might be empty, because you could be making a different delivery device for the still-patented active ingredient...

The car analogy is bad, because both patents are overly broad.

Re:not all IP is disgusting

[ericspinder]

Did you read the parent I posted to?

Apparently not well enough, I had lost the context of the "significant" you wanted defined. Mostly I was posting in response to "I'd be pissed,..." and assuming that you weren't aware of the current patent law (at least to my understanding), I should have more carefully read up the thread. I did read his post first, however, but his last paragraph didn't stick too well. I would agree what his idea of "significant improvement" lacks "insight", however the rest of the comment was clear and "informative". When I came to your comment, I found a blurb, "define significat" and then a crazy idea. I see now that it was intended as a (almost) "pure sarcasm" post.

I would suggest that when you comment directly on anothers post that you use quotes or (at least) paraphase to (help) avoid confusion, but that is (of course) just a suggestion. I generally try to be a little more careful in finding the context, but that time I clearly missed an important part of the thread. Still, I believe that my comment stands out on it own, perhaps if I could edit it, I would acknowledge your sarcasm.

I am sorry that the comment would make you seem uninformed, when in reality you were trying to point out the foolish idea you were responsing to.

"submarine" patents orginally applied for in 1954

[smittyoneeach]

Ah, 1954, just before the launch of USS Nautilus spearheaded by Rickover.
One wonders what the father of the nuclear navy, a man both brilliant and a trifle autocratic, would have made of the patent mess, the virus mess, the open/closed source mess.

Darl, he would so crush you like the bug that you are.

RMS, I think he might respect.

Gates, too.

Linus, he'd definitely respect.
I've heard it said he favored two personality types: a) the spineless type who followed without question, and b) the total genious who just knew it all cold.
Would he deal with the information age? No, I speculate--he was a colossal Luddite. I daresay some little Enswine would be printing out his emails and then typing out the responses from hand scribbled notes.
Truly and American original.
This might be a little off-topic, but it was an interesting thought.

"Submarine" Patents

[Deraj DeZine]

These patents were classic "submarine" patents orginally applied for in 1954, but tied up in the patent office and changed over the next four decades to cover changes taking place in the machine vision field

I didn't really know where the name came from until recently, so I'll comment on it (maybe it's ITFA, but I didn't RTFA). Apparently they're claled "submarine" patents because they only surface when necessary. Like when 3dfx sued nVidia and then nVidia countersued for trivial patents so that they could end up with a cross-licensing agreement.

If this is wrong, I've been misinformed, will apologize, and then hunt down whatever sick mind thought it could safely spread lies on the Internet (of all places!).

Re:"Submarine" Patents

[loyalsonofrutgers]

Well, I will tentatively say you're wrong, at least in this instance. The issue with the patents here isn't that they are trivial or "portfolio" blanks that are only used as leverage. A "submarine" parent is a patent that is delayed intentionally by the applicant so that they can revise it over the approval span as technology progresses, even if they didn't necessarily invent the revised technology. This allows them, 40 years later, to say "hey look, we have a patent on this, and we filed for the patent 40 years ago". One could infer that it is a "submarine" patent because it is kept submerged by the applicant intentionally for their gain.

Re:"Submarine" Patents

[XaXXon]

Here's what appears to be an authoritative definition of submarine patent..

A Submarine Patent is a patent which an "inventor" files on a device or technology that doesn't exist yet, or which has not yet been successfully implemented. Using various procedural mechanisms, the filer intentionally delays issue of the patent, sometimes for years, until a practical implementation of the device/technology appears on the market. At that time, the filer allows the patent to "come to the surface" and demands royalties from the party who did the real work.

http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?SubmarinePatent

Re:"Submarine" Patents

[Deraj DeZine]

I guess I'm now obliged to go kill someone. I hope you can sleep tonight =)

(This is in reference to my bargain at the end of my post that you replied to, I feel the need to explain myself because most Slashdotters--not necessarily including you--seem incapable of following posts in a thread)

Re:"Submarine" Patents

[gcaseye6677]

There has been some recent progress in the U.S. that deters some of these patents. Instead of patents being valid for 17 years from date of issue, it is now 20 years from date of filing, which reduces some of the incentive to drag out the filing process. Not to say that this can't happen anymore, but it takes more work now and it is a lot harder to keep extending a patent.

Re:"Submarine" Patents

[warm sushi]

Submarine patent eh? That sounds like a great idea. I wonder if anyone has...

Hmmm. ..

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't you think they would have seen this one coming?

Nice Troll

[donutello]

.. especially considering that Lemelson is not a corporation.

Corporations are nothing more than representatives of individuals. Behind every "corporate interest" is an individual or collection of individuals who share the same interest.

We need laws against submarine patents and ridiculous IP enforcement but you lose a lot of credibility when you throw the "corporation" bogeyman on there.

Re:Nice Troll

[Dukael_Mikakis]

Corporations are nothing more than representatives of individuals. Behind every "corporate interest" is an individual or collection of individuals who share the same interest.

But corporations do possibly reach a point where they become the sort of "faceless" entities that they are. The reason why many people get upset at corporations and the things that they do is that they quite frequently assume a sort of "mob mentality" where many people backing a certain interest seems to validate that interest (though the largest interest we discuss is greed). The problem with these sorts of things is that most frequently it ends up very much in one person's interest and moderately (if that) in anybody else's.

Corporations benefit strongly the executives and the investors (especially large "bankish" ones, how much more faceless can you get?) and they use the "we're worth billions of dollars, employ thousands of people, make useful products" basis to ruin the environment/take advantage of third world labor/commit corporate scandals. Simply because a corporation employs thousands of people and pays tehm and everything does not mean that they have everybody's interests in mind. They likely don't. Hell, it doesn't even mean that they necessarily have the employees' interests in mind (as we've seen). Corporations are not iron-clad.

Hell look at the "corporation" of Communism in China and Russia.

Re:Nice Troll

[Artifakt]

Corporations have legal status as persons in their own right. That's something different than being a representitive of a person, right there. I'm a person. My lawyer is my representitive in some areas. That's two people. If I incorporate, that same lawyer can be hired to represent a third legal individual, that corporation. How can that corporation be nothing more than my representitive, if the law holds the lawyer can be representing only it or only me or both entities, depending on the situation?

"Governments are nothing more than representitives of individuals. Behind every government interest is an individual or collection of individuals who share the same interest.
We need protection against the loss of our freedom of speech and rediculous seizure without compensation, but you lose a lot of credibility when you throw the "government" bogyman on there.

(I am not a lawyer. Lemelson is not a corporation, for whatever that's worth one way or the other. Flipping off the libertarian partyline on Slashdot may get you negative karma.)

Re:Nice Troll

[Aaden42]

Behind every "corporate interest" is an individual or collection of individuals

Very true, but the problem begins when the US system is abused. Elections cost money and litigation more so. In general large corporations have far more money at their disposal than do smaller companies and individuals.

The intent of the US system of representative government is that each individual should have an equal say in governmental proceedings. The inbalance of money of corporations versus individuals compromises that goal to the point that a very few (boards of corporations) can disproportionately influence law making. That influence is often used to push through legislation that greatly favors the influential corporations in matters of Intelectual Property while necessarily eroding the rights of the unwashed masses whose rights, by virtue of Majority, should trump those of the corporations.

Even in cases where the law does not necessarily favor the large corporation, the power of the law suit often prevents lesser-funded entities from exercising the rights they do have for fear of being sued into oblivion by well funded adversaries.

I believe that both the US legal system and its copyright, patent, and other IP laws are horribly flawed. Alas, not knowing how to fix them myself, what more can I do that mount my soapbox on /.?

(It's my first time. Please be gentle.)

Re:Nice Troll

[donutello]

The intent of the US system of representative government is that each individual should have an equal say in governmental proceedings. The inbalance of money of corporations versus individuals compromises that goal to the point that a very few (boards of corporations) can disproportionately influence law making.

You make some valid points. However, all those points are valid about individuals just as well as they are about corporations. Individuals with large amounts of money are able to corrupt the political process too. The solution to your problem is to eliminate the system of money corrupting politics - not to eliminate corporations.

That influence is often used to push through legislation that greatly favors the influential corporations in matters of Intelectual Property while necessarily eroding the rights of the unwashed masses whose rights, by virtue of Majority, should trump those of the corporations.

Nonsense. IP laws don't favor "corporations" any more than they favor individuals. An individual can do the same stuff. Again, the solution is to fight the dumb IP laws, not rally against this thing called "corporation" which is really no different.

Re:Nice Troll

[donutello]

Governments are very different than corporations. Governments have the ability to use physical force which a corporation cannot (legally) do.

Re:Nice Troll

[gilroy]

Blockquoth the poster:

Corporations are nothing more than representatives of individuals. Behind every "corporate interest" is an individual or collection of individuals who share the same interest.

Bzzzt. Simply untrue, but thank you for playing. Corporations are not "nothing more" than collections of individuals. They have a separate legal existence than the "individuals" who make them up. The origin of "corporation" is LLC, or "limited liability corporation". If corporations were nothing more than collections of individuals, then those individuals would be liable for the actions of the corporations and would, potentially, risk their assets on the decisions and actions of the corporations.

Until relatively recently (1830 or so? I'm no historian), that's how it worked: A "company" really was just a group of people who shared a business interest; metaphotically, they travelled through the business world ("accompanied") each other. An LLC is entirely different. It's one reason why the "invention" of the LLC is credited as helping spur the Industrial Revolution, especially in the States.

Since an LLC has a legal existence separate from the shareholders who own it and from the officers who run it, I think it's disingenuous to claim it is "nothing more" than a collection of individual people. That's like saying that the US Army is "nothing more" than a collection of people with guns.

Re:Nice Troll

[Artifakt]

Granted - does that make my analogy wrong? It concevably could if all criminal acts began with the use of physical force and involved absolutely nothing else.
If there are other kinds of wrong doing, for example involving lieing rather than force, then it can be no more wrong to say that governments are merely the reperesentitives of some persons than it is to say the same thing about corporations. Are you saying that when a group of people work for a government, and lie to you, that is a government commiting a wrong, but when a group of people work for a corporation and lie to you, that is nothing but individuals committing the wrong?

Re:Nice Troll

[donutello]

Lying is covered by standard contract law and is illegal for individuals as well as groups or representatives of individuals.

The discussion was about whether we needed to restrict governments and treat them any differently than we treat corporations or individuals. My point was that we do because governments have the power of physical force. Governments are more than representatives of people since they have the power of physical force behind them.

Governments have more powers than individuals and hence need to be restricted more than individuals. Corporations, (or unions or any other association) do not have any more legal powers than an individual does and therefore should not be restricted beyond what we restrict an individual from doing. At the same time normal restrictions that apply to individuals should also apply to corporations - in particular campaign reform where corporations can donate more money than individuals can.

Re:Nice Troll

[Aaden42]

That's true... Never thought of it quite like that, but to be fair, you could easily replace "corporation" with "well funded entity" in my previous post.

That said, I can't think of any cases of an individual attempting to abuse existing IP law and influence the creation of new and even more abusive IP law. Must be at least a few cases I'm not aware of, though.

I did thrash a bit harshly on the anti-corporate theme in my previous post, but of course I have nothing against corporations per se. What really gets me is anyone who's willing to trample Constitutional rights and disregard the basic liberties of others just to get a little more money or power. That ire applies as much to malevolent "well funded entities" as it does to politicians and appointed officials.

But now we're moving from a story about a bad patent to airing my opinions of Bush & Ashcroft. I'll stop now before the tinfoil hats start popping up...

lookout its SCO

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh shit, patents... that means SCOs going to intervene somehow someway... id run and hide now

Not the end of the road, but a start

[Nakito]

This is only a District Court decision (District of Nevada) so it is not binding precendent elsewhere. But it will interesting to see if this is the beginning of a trend that eventually kills the major cash cow of the Lemelson foundation. The foundation's business model has been to sue everyone in sight (or at least everyone who makes image recognition systems) and then to offer a license on the patents for an amount less than the cost of defense. It's been a very effective strategy. But there are tons of other Lemelson lawsuits in the works, and I am sure the lawyers are all reading this decision very carefully tonight.

Re:Not the end of the road, but a start

[Ancil]

This is only a District Court decision (District of Nevada) so it is not binding precendent elsewhere.

This ruling isn't a matter of "precedent". Precedent is what judges use to interpret the law. Precedent is only binding within a court's district or circuit.

The ruling itself is binding. Unless a higher court reverses, the patents are gone. Once a federal court invalidates a US Patent, it's invalid everywhere.

Re:Not the end of the road, but a start

[Nakito]

Yes, you're right. I was thinking only in terms of non-infringement (which is fact-specific), but the blurb and the press release do indeed say that the court declared the patents invalid. This is a big win.

How can this be ridiculous?

[Spruce Moose]

Lemelson is just performing his fiduciary duty by maximising shareholder returns!

Where to put the burden ...

[gradji]

Currently in both academic and policy discussions, there is some debate as to whether it is better to put the "burden of proof" for patents in the application process or the infringement/interference litigation process.

The current U.S. system is arguably set toward "easier" application and "harder" enforcement - with the idea being that a court room has more flexibility and resources to tackle difficult intellectual property rights issues than the patent office. Moreover, this type of system avoids a bias against inventors: a more "front-loaded" system that applies burden at the application process would delay the patent and perhaps even shorten the patent life significantly (similar to the argument pharmaceuticals make regarding how rigorous FDA testing effectively halves the patent life of new drugs)

So it's nice to see cases like Machine Vision. Of course, for every successful court ruling against a harmful/irrational patent, there are several more that survive the litigation process ... hence the ongoing debate ...

Re:Where to put the burden ...

[jazuki]

The current U.S. system is arguably set toward "easier" application and "harder" enforcement - with the idea being that a court room has more flexibility and resources to tackle difficult intellectual property rights issues than the patent office. Moreover, this type of system avoids a bias against inventors: a more "front-loaded" system that applies burden at the application process would delay the patent and perhaps even shorten the patent life significantly (similar to the argument pharmaceuticals make regarding how rigorous FDA testing effectively halves the patent life of new drugs) [--gradji]

The issue is not with how long the application process takes, but how long it takes to bring the invention to market. Inventors lose no rights by bringing the invention to market as soon as or even up to a year before the patent is actually filed. Thus, what you point out is an issue only for inventions that take many years to bring to market, for regulatory or other reasons. While this may be true of drugs, this is much less true with most other classes of inventions and almost completely untrue in cases of software, business methods, and many processes.

Yes, there may be some need to balance inventor rights, but I think to a large extent, for many classes of inventions, the balance has swung too far to inventors in a way that hampers further invention and limits progress.

Perhaps it's time to begin distinguising patents by classes, and for example limit software patents to five years, while retaining the current limits for drugs and such.

Re:Where to put the burden ...

[nudicle]

Some of the problems with the current easier application and harder enforcement system, however, are the nature of the inventors and the exortion it allows on the back end.

If our nation's inventors were toiling away in their basements in their spare time then avoiding a bias against inventors would be more important. But that's just what we like to pretend. In reality the overwhelming majority of patents are issued to corporations and have been developed by engineers and scientists working in their corporate capacity. Corporations should be able to deal with a more front-loaded system. Which is not to indulge a fantasy that corporrations are all huge and wealthy, but that it's not hardto argue that a "bias against inventors" fear mischaracterizes reality.

Also, patent litigation is massively, massively expensive. I mean, seriously expensive. Patent lawyers are expensive and litigation takes a long time. (from 1995 to 1999 there were 9615 patent cases filed, mean time for resolution was 1.12 years .. BUT only 5% of those cases went to trial)* So when a patent issues you suddenly have a lot of power to threaten and extort -- because the costs associated with challenging the patent in court are astronomical. This effect actively discourages the progress of science and the useful arts in areas like computer science where the patents are broad and their scope usually unclear. * - according to Kimberely Moore, Forum Shopping in Patent Cases : Does Geographic Choice Affect Innovation? in the North Carolina Law Review .. sometime in 2001 (i forget)

interesting

[DrDoombender]

I was doing some googling and found a site that talks about the history of the patent. Basically in England, it was used by the monarchy to grant monopolies and maintain control (EG gain quick coin). http://www.ladas.com/Patents/USPatentHistory.html

Apparently a patent only lasts about 17 years. So that's not as bad as a copyright, because if I recall a copyright lasts for around the life of the individual + ~20years(correct me if I'm wrong, one site said about 95 years).

In anycase, the US concept of the patent was used as a device to protect individual property rights during a time when the US needed technology bad (think back to when England had efficient factories, and the US wanted to know said secrets). Now with the concept of the corporation, it seems that the ideals of the patent have been corrupted. However, I can see the importance of protecting intellectual property rights, but at the same time, the US corporate world is beating every US citizen over the head with laws that should be corrected.

Re:interesting

[harlows_monkeys]

Apparently a patent only lasts about 17 years. So that's not as bad as a copyright, because if I recall a copyright lasts for around the life of the individual + ~20years(correct me if I'm wrong, one site said about 95 years)

The reason for the difference is that patents are much broader. They basically cover the use of an idea. A copyright just covers the particular expression of that idea.

So if Disney has a copyright on Donald Duck, that doesn't stop Warner Brothers from creating Daffy Duck. It just stops Warner Brothers from using Donald Duck.

If Disney could patent cartoon talking ducks, though, then it WOULD stop Daffy Duck.

The key here is that long copyrights for the most part do not impede the creative work of others. You can express the same idea as an existing copyrighted work--you just have to express it YOUR way, rather than copying the existing way.

Re:interesting

[Artifakt]

US Law:
Patent = 20 years
Corporate held Copyright = 95 years
Individual held Copyright = life + 70 years.
Trademark = unlimited (but must be defended).

(I am not a lawyer. If you need to know this stuff for financial reasons rather than curiosity, please get someone liscenced to practice law and trained in the appropriate specialties. Your state, province or nation may not recognize legal specialization in patent and copyright law. Fnord!)

Re:interesting

[Richard M. Nixon]

US Law:
Patent = 20 years
Corporate held Copyright = 95 years
Individual held Copyright = life + 70 years.

Keep in mind the original Length of copyright was 14 years (I think, I did a quick search.) and has been extended several times to reach the current lenght which is absurd.

Also note that the true purpose of the Patent system is to encourage inventors to share their idea. The protection that a patent provides is just the insentive for people to file patents.

Similarly, the purpose of copyright is to encourage authors to enrich our culture by publishing their works, and to protect them from businesses who would sell their books without permission. But the whole idea was to add more works to the public domain, which may never happen again thanks to Disney[tm].

Re:interesting

[EvilTwinSkippy]

Hey, FWIW as an aspiring author I rather like the idea that I can develop something that no one can take away from me.

Indeed, while everyone is belly acheing about how long copyrights last, the only ones who really benefit from a copyright expiring are those who mint cheap copies. Sure it sucks that the Girl Scouts need an ASCAP license to sing 'God Bless America.' But there is nothing keeping some counselor or scout from writing another song.

Let's face it, we have gotten so innured about buying pre-made books, and pre-made music that we have almost forgotten that there was a time when people would just make this stuff up. (Sigh, I go to a folk festival every year and it seems that most wandering minstrals only know Beatles tunes.)

Re:interesting

[Catiline]

Sure it sucks that the Girl Scouts need an ASCAP license to sing 'God Bless America.' But there is nothing keeping some counselor or scout from writing another song. Let's face it, we have gotten so innured about buying pre-made books, and pre-made music that we have almost forgotten that there was a time when people would just make this stuff up.

Except, perhaps, that "God Bless America" is part of the American culture. Sure, for the most part copyright is a great thing; however, when the idea under copyright becomes part of the common culture -- and you can't "just make this stuff up" when it's cultural -- its' status as an "owned idea" becomes onerous. That is the prime reason I object to the length of copyright terms as they exist today: too much of the culture around me seems to be owned by one corporation or another. (I don't mean the physical artifacts of the culture, either: there's a critical difference between owning a Van Gogh painting and owning copyright on, say, "The Wizard of Oz".)

Re:interesting

[gorilla]

"Happy Birthday" is another example of a song which has become part of the culture, yet is still under copyright. The tune was written in 1893, and the words first published in 1924.

Re:interesting

[EvilTwinSkippy]

The Wizard of Oz required a good deal more effort to develop than any of Van Gogh's paintings. If someone can come along, and simply re-badge your text, verbatim, that's wrong.

Now, if someone doesn't like the way it ended, and goes off and writes their own version, that's cool. Science Fiction writers to that all the time to each other.

I actually have no qualms about the Disney company fighting to maintain copyrights on their old work. Of course nobody really wants to re-sell steamboat willy or Snow White. The battles in court are actually not copyright battles but trademark battles. That's where I start to think we go wrong.

If I write a story about a british spy name James Bond from MI6 who sleeps around and drinks dry martini's I'd be sued by the Flemming Estate in a heartbeat. That's a clear case of my just lifting another's ideas, and their trade mark. I'm trying to capitalize on the well known works of the late writer, and the popularity of the movies, to sell my own works. I deserve to be sued.

Now, suppose I start a daycare center and I plaster disney characters all over the place. Again, I'm inapropriately associating myself with the Disney company, and again, they are probably right to sue me.

I would point out that these are not "artifacts of culture" no matter what the movie studios say. They are fictional characters. Someone indeed did "make the stuff up." That's the idea!

Now I would be quite willing to relase some of the stuff I make up to the public domain. Imagine a set of fictional characters in a fictional settings designed to knit together like an artificial mythology. I have fun thinking things like that up. I would really enjoy reading all adventures people develop using those creations.

I would also be slogging through 90% of pure dreck, and worse. People would be writing porn, snuff fiction, and creatively nasty stuff that would utterly stain the spirit in which the works were created. How many really nasty usenet posts star the characters from the Brady Bunch and Star Trek. Too many.

I would probably write in a clause that allows me to exercise some editorial control over what becomes of my characters. Sure, I'd be a puritan nazi who is censoring the works of others. But if I had no such control in the first place, I would never have created the works in the first place.

Which brings us back to the whole BSD vs. GPL license. One says "take my stuff". The other says "take my stuff, but according to spirit in which it was given."

Re:interesting

[Artifakt]

Sounds like you favor perpetual copyright. I don't blame you for that, but, have you considered some of these points.

The way the constitution says it, coyright is a quid pro quo. You create a work. You get rights for a time. Eventually, it enters the public domain. Quid - The public pays you by protecting your work for a time, and pro Quo - the public gets your work eventually. Right now, your quid has been lengthened from 14 years with 14 renewal to Life + 70. The public's pro Quo hasn't been strengthened to amtch.

For example, it's going to cost the public more to settle copyright disputes when some of them involve contracts written 125 years ago, where sometimes a dozen corporations have passed on assets during bankrupcy and such to muddy the waters. You or your heirs got all that extra time under the extensions, but you're not required to do anything extra, not even attach a codicil to your will that helps keep track of your copyrights so that those court cases will be easier to resolve. (In fact, even though life + 70 implies that ALL individual copyrights will be passed on to heirs, no one is required to actually make a will).

Poeple have looked at what written works make during a timeframe, and on average, current copyright law seems to reward an author whith 99.75% of what they would make over absolutely unlimited copyright. (That arguement was made to the U.S. supreme court in Eldred vrs. Reno, for those wanting to check a source). No one has found any fault with that math, so I'd suggest it fits your case, and is probably reasonably accurate for music and such as well as print. So, whatever unlimited copyright duration costs the public, that total cost at this point has to be weighed against not what it profits the creator, but 0.25% of that benefit. If the US went back to a 28 year copyright, the amount drops to about 85%, and I can see the society needing to make some efforts to protect an author's rights to what would average 15% of his or her total income, but when we're talking about a remaining quarter of one percent, how much effort is realistic?

Re:interesting

[mabhatter654]

I agree with you that using "tradmarked" characters like Mickey Mouse without Disney permission should be prevented, but copyright protects individual works from reproduction, not derivive works... that's a key point.

In the music and book industry copyright is pretty clearcut. they print a CD or book and you buy it. After so many years you still have the book in your posession and my copy it at will...if anybody still cares. Corporations are abusing that part of the deal. That once the "cat is out of the bag", it's out for good, take the money and move on. The problem is that with media like movies or performances or software, the publishers are playing both sides against the middle. The ORIGINAL work is often never released...they aren't publishing a printed play, movie reel, or source code to their work...Those materials are never published into the wild, but are held by the publishers under licenses and returned to the publishers after running and often destroyed! ...so they are not "publishing" anything...it's their trade secret. Much of the current copyright rule changes have hinged on that fact...Disney and other companies have held their sole internal copies hostage to get the rules changed...because they never released copies of much of the early works of Disney to the masses [i.e. publishing!!] they used their singular deteriorating copy as leverage to get the laws changed so they could charge again for more viewings. This is further complicated by pushes for DRM...where the copy is not real or persistant at all!!!! therefore in 20 years you will not have access to that information at all thru legal measures...or without taking extreme methods to archive media. That shouldn't count as a copyrightable material if it doesn't persist...because the point is to release the ideas into the wild...Which is actively being fought against.

mod down; parent is plagiarized

[Steve 'Rim' Jobs]

I noticed this comment sounded strikingly similar to something I had read before, and, sure enough, after some searching I found the original.
Parent should be modded down.

Re:mod down; parent is plagiarized

[Anonymous Coward]

Irony of ironies! Plagiarizing a post from a different story calling a parent poster on plagiarizing the same parent topic!

My mind riddles at the possibilities!

Re:mod down; parent is plagiarized

[Anonymous Coward]

Shut up Karma whoring troll. Anyone who looks at your post history can see that you are a cock sucking queerboy who can't even post a decent troll.

Patently Horrible

[GussT]

Let's get this society back into the swing of things and open the floodgates of innovation once again before we stagnate into a purely legalistic quagmire. 1st lets change patent laws so that only individuals (real people) can own patents. This would force corporations to deal with human beings and support the really inventive ones. 2nd lets make short terms for patent protections without appeal. This would free up the the possibility for inventors to actually dream about inventing again without the immediate afterthought "but I will just get sued into bankrupcy if I dare attempt to actually do anything with my invention."

Re:Patently Horrible

[Anonymous Coward]

...but would you have patents assignable only to individuals be passable to corporations?

The deal, at least until recently I think, was that part of one's employment at a corporation as an innovator (i.e., creator of patentable ideas) was that the individual did indeed file for the patent, but that the individual was required to reassign it to the corporation. This could only be done via "consideration", thus pictures of the people with a copy of their original patent grant from the USPTO and the $1 bill consideration being given to them in exchange from a corporate type.

Somehow, I don't think that pro-corporation forces will find any change to this system acceptable...

Submarine patents!

[Anonymous Coward]

Now that's some deep sea men!

Money Back?

[Saeed al-Sahaf]

IANAL (god I hate these kinds of aconymns), but can copanies that paid on these patents get their money back?

Re:Money Back?

[1ucius]

Probably no - invalidity is always a risk and Lemelson demanded fully paid up licenses.

Re:Money Back?

[fishbowl]

"Probably no - invalidity is always a risk and Lemelson demanded fully paid up licenses. "

Fine then. If some people in industry got their lollipop stolen, so much the better. Their voices will be heard in places where the name "slashdot" is unfamiliar.

Re:Money Back?

[Flyboy Connor]

And what about the people that wanted to go in machine vision technology but had to give up on it because they could afford neither the license fees nor the costs of going to court? Can they now sue for damages?

Throwing patents out

[RLiegh]

Can they even do this?

Machine vision patent case

[mjc_w]

Very interesting.

Apparently (IANAL, IMBanal) the patents were thrown out because
(1) too much time was taken modifying the patent claims, and this seemed to be intentional (something called "latches");
(2) the patent(s) described a system in which the objects to be scanned were at a fixed position, while the supposedly offending systems found the objects (e.g., bar codes) anywhere in their field of view and scanned them there.

There were also differences in which the way the information was processed (patent: analog differencing, systems: computer processing).

I found it a very interesting read.

My compliments to the judge.

Re:Machine vision patent case

[bezuwork's friend]

The court probably got most of it's reasoning from Symbol Technologies v. Lemelson Medical, Education and Research Foundation (2002) where the Fed. Circuit held that latches applied. For those that don't know, all patent appeals go through the Fed. Circuit - it was created expressly to bring consistancy to the patent litigation field. I'd imagine that many Lemelson suits will go this way from now on, given the Fed. Circuit precedence. Actually, they have to if the same issues apply.

Lemelson built his empire on what are called submarine patents - applications which are prosecuted for many many years before issuing. Once issued, the owner then goes after the big companies who have dominated the market in the meantime. That's how he made his billions.

I used to work in the patent office. My supervisor once brought in a Lemelson application he was working on - it's original filing date was 35 years earlier. From what he said, the original application was for a memory chip, but over the years Lemelson added bits of information here and there, and by the time my supervisor got the case, it was for a microprocessor of some kind. Basically, he played the patent system pretty close to the edge, but pretty much legally, I guess.

For those who find this shocking - the current patent system measures length of patent term from the date of application, so submarine patents of the extreme nature of Lemelson's are pretty much not possible any more (except if the application is classified - a few years ago a patent came out which had been classified some 67? years previously IIRC).

Alvin Toffler

[G27 Radio]

My dad used to read a lot of Alvin Toffler (futurist) books when I was a kid. I picked up a couple of them and read parts, but don't really remember much detail (nor the names of the books.) One of the things I do remember was him talking about how we were going to move from the Industrial Age to the Information Age. I suppose we were already in the transition at the time.

He talked about a triad of Power, Wealth, and Information. Any one or combination of the three could be used to aquire another. The interesting thing about information (and the information age) was that information could be expended, yet the provider of the information would still have it.

I'm not sure what my point is :) but being that it's the Information Age, information has become (and still is becoming) a commodity to be bought and sold. Companies are realizing this and focusing on how to capitalize on it. It's the Information Age. Unless you want to be stuck in the Industrial Age, this is what you have to do.

Maybe that's the point. If it's software, audio, video, text, or whatever, it's still information. This is what Information Age companies will make their money from. Figure out how to own or control of as much of it as you can now, and as we continue into the Information Age you will reap the rewards later.

Re:Alvin Toffler

[zhenlin]

That is exactly the problem with selling information: you can sell or use information, but you will still have it.

It does not fit in very well with traditional economics.

You can sell away the rights to the information (and give up your own), but you'd still retain it (or fragments of it) in your mind -- only the law prevents you from using it (because you've sold the rights to it)

Either information is not meant to be sold and traded, or a new system must be developed to deal with information trade. (The services model should adapt easily)

Re:Alvin Toffler

[EvilTwinSkippy]

You are confusing information with data.

Data is a jumble of facts. Information is the stuff that ties all those facts together into a useful representation of the world.

Those who simply collect and warehouse data have nothing. It's like the folks who fill their house with useless junk, and then start dumping garbage on their lawn.

Now, compare that to a museum. They have a lot of what would be otherwise useless junk. But they track where it came from. They track who owned it. They track what part the thingy played in history. They also package it, preserve it, and display it in a way that can be found again.

And I work at one. Museums throw things out all the time. It is the process of filtering, filing, and preservation that turns data into information. Much the same way a brick house is not the same as a pile of dirt, despite the fact that chemically they are the same.

Re:Alvin Toffler

[G27 Radio]

You are confusing information with data.

No, actually, I'm not. It doesn't just apply to data. It applies to information in the traditional definition, though I'm not sure if it does by yours. You can give someone an idea, or teach them how to produce a desired result, however you still have that idea or knowledge. This is more applicable since the discussion is of patents.

Re:Alvin Toffler

[Anonymous Coward]

but on the contrary, once it becomes digital, it is just unprotectable bits that can be essentially endlessly duplicated. The old Industrial Age companies will try to put as many of the same controls on the new content as they can (RIAA, MPAA, Microsoft/DRM, etc) in very much a rear-guard action, but will ultimately fail, or so Negroponte predicted.

Think about it. What is the meaning of registering Microsoft software when there are a million copies of it out there, the "registration key" really is about the equivalent of a public key that when verified with the private key in the software says "it's OK to install me", and it is trivial for Microsoft to make and distribute 10 million more copies of what you have? There is no inherent scarcity in the Information Age once things are digital, because they can be copied, duplicated and disseminated endlessly by the same equipment used to make that information usable.

Physical DRM devices will make this process harder, but will eventually be defeated as well.

One just has to look at DBS hackers...the greedy hackers will be busted, but the information about how to go about defeating DirecTV's DRM is already out there, and the information for how to do so is easily disseminated, and there will be no easy way to bust those who make their own equipment or only hack for themselves (and hence, make no noise).

Why this is good in many ways...

[Saeed al-Sahaf]

This is an interesting case, and should be of interest to SCO watchers too, not because of the patent implications (which are great for true innovation, and a wake-up call to the Patent Office), but spotlights companies who are not built around innovation, but rather litigation, and how this is a perversion of the patent system.

a term to remember

[Mr2cents]

We pursued this litigation because we knew that what Lemelson and his Partnership were doing was terribly wrong, and only Cognex had both the technical knowledge and the fortitude to put an end to their campaign of legalized extortion

legalized extortion and patents.. do they go hand in hand?

Wright brothers too

[A nonymous Coward]

They spent so much time and energy defending their patents on "wing warping" that they fell behind in other areas. For what it's worth, they actually changed the shape of the entire wing by yanking on cables which bent the trailing edge up or down, Curtis (among others) use hinged sections of wing (now known as ailerons). I guess there was some argument about whether that itself was changing the shape of the wing, even tho the Wrights never used hinged ailerons. So somebody put ailerons between the biplane wings, and moved just them, so no wing changed shape, it was an entirely separate wing which moved by itself. And then Curtis sold his airplanes overseas without any ailerons or wing warping at all, but shipped the ailerons separately from a Canadian factory directly overseas, and since Canada didn't recognize the Wrights' patent, no violation.

Meanwhile, the Wrights had locked themselves into their position, couldn't change their designs without compromising their lawsuits, so got stuck with old fashioned tech, and lost market share as everyone else came up with new ideas.

In other words, better to keep innovating than to defend the old ways.

IANAH so take with many grains of salt.

Re:Wright brothers too

[benh57]

The ironic thing is, now we are going back to wing warping.

Re:Wright brothers too

[Anonymous Coward]

Ha! that's great. It's a dildo with wings!
wonder if it was in that issue's "best of what's new"

Re:Wright brothers too

[Anonymous Coward]

NASA keeps messing with this (they had an F111 modded in the 80's that did something similar to this as well), but it does not seem to be practical for real implementation, unless the efficiencies gained from doing it justify the costs for it over cheaper traditional surfaces (ailerons, spoilers, spoilerons, flaps and slats).

Even military still sticks with mostly conventional flight control surfaces. How many military airplanes have active canard surfaces and vectored thrust systems? Su-27? Saab Viggen (no vectored thrust)? Rafale? The US and Germany have been working on this since the 80's and have a plane that is incredibly manouverable.
Yet it just has not taken off a lot, really, and this is a domain where function/performance seems to define form in a cost-be-damned way, so one might think it would have been implemented on a wider scale than it has if its benefits are so advantageous.

Think of a commercial airplane. Is the cost for this in a commercial airplane wing worth the tradeoff in what it probably does to the amount of fuel carried by the wing, the increase in wing load, etc. and additional expense?

Oh the Irony

[Crypto Gnome]

Am I the only one to consider it ironic that it took a patent about "Machine Vision" to make someone in the legal system see just how stupid some patents are.

Re:Oh the Irony

[Anonymous Coward]

yes

Re:Oh the Irony

[Richard M. Nixon]

Am I the only one to consider it ironic that it took a patent about "Machine Vision" to make someone in the legal system see just how stupid some patents are.

You would think that patent US5443036: Method of exercising a cat being granted would have been sufficient to show that the US Patent Office is too far gone.

I wonder if Kevin T. Amiss and Martin H. Abbott have tried to sue anyone yet.

Re:Oh the Irony

[nilenico]

You would think that patent US5443036: Method of exercising a cat

[Warning: off-topic]

Hah!

At the end of the page is table of references to other, sort of, related patents. The bottom one is US5194007, held by The United States of America as represented by the Secretary of the Navy: "Semiconductor laser weapon trainer and target designator for live fire."

Poor kitty!

Re:Oh the Irony

[Crypto Gnome]

Yup! Don'cha know that the computers which aim anti-missile lasers (like the ones they're going to retrofit into Boeings) will be based on "neural net" technologies derived from cat-chasing-laser-pointer exercises.

Sorry, they *are* international

[Anonymous Coward]

"Patents are not an international thing"

Do some more checking.

RMaybe, but accoe:Why this is good in many ways...

[1ucius]

According to the article, Lemelson managed to extort $1.5 Billion. Maybe the litigation-companies are onto something?

There's more, too.

[khasim]

If I (as an individual) was caught dumping poison into YOUR drinking water, I'd be in jail for attempted murder.

If a corporation dumps toxic waste into a public water system, they can be fined.

In theory, the officers could be locked up, but that doesn't happen much in practice.

Corporations are treated as people, but they don't run the same risks that people do.

Re:There's more, too.

[Anonymous Coward]

There is a huge difference in degree between poison and (most) toxic waste.

Re:There's more, too.

[donutello]

Nonsense. Where do you people get this crap?

Corporations are individuals as far as civil offenses are concerned. If a corporation gets caught committing a civil offense it is fined just the same as an individual is.

Corporations are not individuals as far as criminal offenses are concerned however. If a corporation gets caught committing a criminal offense, it is the individuals who authorized or committed the crime who will be subject to criminal prosecution.

So in your example, if they knowingly dumped poison into someones drinking water, the people who did it would be in jail for attempted murder.

Re:There's more, too.

[Anonymous Coward]

Toxic means poisonus, toxic wastes by definition are poisons. The main difference is in actual effect on a person. There maybe less poison in a cup, but more concretate (to kill a person), or a vast amount dispersed into an even vaster amount of water creating poison, but non-lethal doses.

Re:There's more, too.

[puppet10]

Corporations can and do cause serious injury or death to their employees through negligence and not following OSHA standards and often no one, including the managers or owners who create the dangerous environment face serious charges.

And as to dumping heres an exerpt from a Frontline investigation --

We tried to contact the general manager and the vice president but they refused to speak to us, referring us to McWane headquarters.

The problem with wastewater wasn't just in Alabama.

The Delaware River flows by Phillipsburg, New Jersey, and millions have been spent over the years to clean it up.

But on the morning of Dec. 5, 1999, residents noticed this oily sheen on the river.

It grew into an oil slick eight miles long.

Investigators eventually found the source: a city storm drain somehow turned into an industrial sewer.

They started pulling manhole covers to find where the oil was coming from.

The trail led them here: to Atlantic States foundry a pipe plant owned by the McWane corporation.

Even after the FBI and state officials raided the foundry they were unable to find out who at the plant released the contaminated wastewater. To dispose of the case McWane paid $50,000 to an environmental group. But we found former employees who told us that this was not an isolated incident.

Getting rid of wastewater was a constant headache for Brad Schultz.

BRAD SCHULTZ: Once or twice once or twice a week we were told that we had to pump it out. That's 100,000 some gallons of fluid that you're losing every single day. It's got to go somewhere.

And the nearest somewhere was through a storm drain that led here: the Delaware River.

BRAD SCHULTZ: My supervisor gives me that order. At the time it was Bobbie Bobinus.

PRISON GUARD: C'mon out, Bob.

Bobby Bobinus wasn't supervising much when we found him.

He was in the Sunbury, Pennsylvania, jail.

He was in for a driving offense, but he worries about the legality of some of the things he did when he worked for Atlantic States foundry, like getting rid of contaminated wastewater the easy way.

BOBBY BOBINUS: You had to pump it out.

LOWELL BERGMAN: And held in what, in holding tanks?

BOBBY BOBINUS: There's holding tanks but they can't hold their capacity. When you pump 20,000 gallons of water into a 10,000-gallon tank and it overflows, it runs down the storm sewers, it goes wherever storm sewers end up, which is usually in the Delaware River.

LOWELL BERGMAN: But I just want to get this clear. The water's overflowing everyday. Did your supervisor know that?

BOBBY BOBINUS: Yes.

LOWELL BERGMAN: You mentioned it?

BOBBY BOBINUS: Yeah, because I, me and my supervisor were sitting out on a bunch of pipes about 5 o'clock one morning and I looked at him and I says I don't want to go to jail for this because I realized what was going on. And that's--

LOWELL BERGMAN: And what'd he say?

BOBBY BOBINUS: Shhh. That's when I realized how, what the magnitude of what was going on was, when he said that. He just looked at me and shhh.

The supervisor in question would not talk to us.

In an exchange of letters and e-mails company officials have assured us that overall they are trying to do better. McWane says its spending tens of millions to clean up the air and water pollution from their foundries around the country; $5 million alone at the Atlantic States, where they say they have sealed off the foundry from the town's storm drains.

In a letter to us McWane pointed out that, in the real world, they're fighting for survival, competing against foreign manufacturers who have "little or no regard for the safety of their workers or ... the environment ... "

The full transcript is here.

Re:There's more, too.

[HardCase]

If I (as an individual) was caught dumping poison into YOUR drinking water, I'd be in jail for attempted murder.

If a corporation dumps toxic waste into a public water system, they can be fined.

In theory, the officers could be locked up, but that doesn't happen much in practice.

Corporations are treated as people, but they don't run the same risks that people do.

How do you lock up a corporation? The only thing that you can do to a corporation is take money from it. Now, you can punish the executives behind the corporation by putting them into jail. It does, in fact, happen fairly often in practice. Consider the ongoing Enron debacle. Would you suggest that a corporation be punished by, say, closing the doors for good? That seems a tad counterproductive, in that we then have to pick up the tab for the unemployment of all of the workers, people whose only mistake was working for a company that committed a crime. Talk about cutting off your nose to spite your face!

Oh, and corporations are not treated like people. This whole idea of corporations==person simply is not true. As one of the partners in a limited liability corporation, I can tell you that we have to jump through many more hoops and are subject to much more regulation than a corporeal person. And the consequences for breaking those rules have penalties that apply to both the company and the partners.

-h-

Re:There's more, too.

[rifter]

Nonsense. Where do you people get this crap?

Corporations are individuals as far as civil offenses are concerned. If a corporation gets caught committing a civil offense it is fined just the same as an individual is.

Corporations are not individuals as far as criminal offenses are concerned however. If a corporation gets caught committing a criminal offense, it is the individuals who authorized or committed the crime who will be subject to criminal prosecution.

So in your example, if they knowingly dumped poison into someones drinking water, the people who did it would be in jail for attempted murder.

Great, so when does GWB go on trial for putting arsenic in our drinking water? Oh, wait...

The fact is corporations knowingly dump toxic chemicals in our drinking water and in other places, and to the extent which they are fined it amounts to a slap on the wrist. They continue to do it. If you or I did that we would be put in jail where we cannot put any more chemicals in people's water, but with corporations we are still arguing today about how much arsenic and mercury is acceptable for them to dump each day, knowing that they will dump more than is acceptable and will be given a break anyway.

As for this bit about criminal offenses, you are wrong. Theft, fraud, and all kinds of other crimes which would be heinous crimes if committed by individuals, are committed by corporations every day. Usually the corporation gets away with these things. If they are punished, what that usually means is the corporation pays a small fine as the cost of doing business and the individuals responsible get a pay raise. The worst thing that can happen in most cases is that the individuals get promoted to a higher paying job elsewhere in the company or retire with a hefty package.

It's the same with government officials. They regularly commit acts which, if done by ordinary citizens, would be prosecuted as horrible crimes and result in long jail terms, but the worst thing which happens to them usually is that they have to "step down" or resign. BFD.

Re:There's more, too.

[Dukael_Mikakis]

Yeah, but there's also going to be a diffusion of responsibility in these circumstances even if the corporation, or the individuals involved will get prosecuted the same. One person kills somebody and that person will be fully accountable for what they individually did. A mob of 30 people collectively kill a person, or incite one member to kill another will also result in a conviction, sure. But that's likely going to be put largely on one person (perhaps the actual perpetrator) and the others will probably get off on plea bargains, testimonial immunity, or lesser charges (because they didn't pull the trigger. That doesn't make it okay.

If a corporation is dumping poison into some water it's true, there is somebody somewhere who signed the papers or who gave the signal to do so, but that doesn't mean, I figure, that we should ignore the other malicious and greedy "mob members" (i.e. shareholders, executives -- redundant, since they are likely shareholders -- etc.) who were shouting and throwing their arms up demanding higher returns. What'll happen is the corporation will be assessed a fine (because the government can, and could use the money, whereas an individual poisoning the water doesn't have deep pockets) and *maybe* the executive in charge will see some other ramifications.

What I'm saying, though, is what makes corporations so evidently forgiveable is that the law operates more directly on people than entities (you can't put GE away for life, i.e.), and there are so many guilty parties that it's impossible to pin down any one perpetrator. I would feel guilty about forcing an 8-year-old to make clothing for me, but as a greedy investor in Nike I would effectively be stating "make me money at all costs" and feel much less guilt when they violate human rights.

One normal person kills another, and they'll feel the full guilt of it, and the law will acknowledge their full guilt. Several hundred thousand people contribute collectively kill even a handful of people, any one person will feel hardly any guilt (likely) and the law will similarly have difficulty assessing any guilt. Guilt is usually in the form of a fine, and people aren't too upset when they have to pony $20 after saving $10 for the past 10 years (especially since the insiders and the savvy investors might have dumped stock, also).

Corporations are treated differently because, frankly, they are different, and act on a completely different basis than regular people. I would never do the things that many of these corporations do. Not many people would.

Re:There's more, too.

[Anonymous Coward]

Corporations are not the same as people when it comes to civil punishments.

As far as you or me, it is entirely possible for us to face a civil judgement that bankrupts us and leaves us penniless for the rest of our lives. It is not possible for a corporation to effectively be sued out of business, because they can either buy a judge who throws out the judgement, bankrupcy court allows the corporation to wall off the judgement from the corporation and its investors, or by the time the judgement has come along, the corporation that currently owns that old company seems to be able to argue that they are being held responsible for something that someone else committed (like parents being held liable for the actions of their adult children or people being held liable by actions of their long-deceased relatives).

While in theory it is possible for a corporation to be sued out of business, the reality is that all the offending corporation has to really do is declare bankrupcy, coalesce the operations that resulted in the judgement against the corporation (i.e., spin off the asbestos product-making side of Manville or whatever operations bear the liability) into another entity that is allowed to wither and die, and reincorporate the rest of the corporation's assets as a different entity legally, yet leaving the rest of the assets untainted and untouchable by the judgement, or the operations are tied up in a subsidiary (a separate wholly-owned corporation) that isolates it from its parent corporation. Thought you were suing THE Dow Chemical corporation? No, you were suing some bizarre subsidiary with very little assets that the parent corporation is walled off from. Good luck collecting...

Corporate officers CAN be held liable in the name of the corporation. Which is why some of the execs have most of their tangible assets not tied up in their name (in states that allow this), as well as money tied up in states (TX, FL) that are pretty lax when it comes to bankrupcy and real property.

You or I cannot do (afford) things like this. If we get sued and found personally liable, we're fucked for the rest of our lives, because the laws that rely on some sort of financial penalty when violated exclude bankruptcy as a means to avoid
responsibility (think tax law, criminal financial liabilities, civil forfeiture of property).

How exactly do you put a corporation in jail or make it submit to 1000 hours of community service?

Many US corporations have been sued and found liable for doing just what you say in the US (knowingly dumped poison into water supplies). Off the top of my head, there are the US companies that left us with Love Canal, the town in Montana that mined asbestos and now about 90% of the people who lived there in the last 50 years have or will get asbestosis, mesothelioma, etc., Bhopal, Kerr-McGee, etc.

Yet not one of the corporate executives responsible were ever held personally responsible for any decisions or actions (or non-decisions) made by the corporation.

At least in Japan and Korea there still seems to be a small amount social sense of honor, when corporate executives resign when their corporation does something bad (KAL president resigning after KAL crash on Guam).

Do you think that thought ever crosses the mind of Michael Eisner when someone dies on a Disneyland/Disneyworld ride because maintenance has been pushed back so much on their equipment?

Nope. Settle out of court, no corporate admission of guilt or negligence, records sealed. Almost as if it never really happened.

If government people are soooo reluctant to piss away jobs because of judicial actions regarding negative corporate actions (i.e, corporate "death penalty"), then why do they let the same corporations do so in the name of "profitability", "streamlined operaions", and "increased productivity"?

What a mess.

Re:There's more, too.

[mabhatter654]

You've got a great point...perhaps we should start locking up more people...entire factories if we have too. Perhaps the suits would follow the laws if they KNEW they were going to jail. That's the biggest problem...certian offences need to land the suits in JAIL irreguardless of money. It sounds cruel, but time in the slammer is the only real deterrant to corperate crimes nowdays...fines are a joke to a multi-billion dollar corporation...but tossing a few execs and board memembers in the clink with common thugs should get the point loud and clear!

More punishment needs to be meeted to stockholders too...perhaps the govt should start demanding investors or execs surrender stocks instead of fines! Of course closing companies would work too...it would make people think twice about passively allowign illegal activities to go on...and deny unemployment for those workers too...

If you want to get corps back in line treat them like you would the mob! That's what we want to do to SCO right...just like in the war on drugs and terror, lean on the little guys so they won't work for companies accused of illegal actions. Companies don't do business with each other or employees without background checks...it's time that employees had motivation to demand the same intrusive inqueries of their bosses!! The problem is that the "welfare" that the pundits decry allows them to make irresponsible choices and let the govt fix it. After all, if there weren't unemployement, FDIA, and such corps would have to be a lot more responsible for their actions and the damage they cause to employees and financial institutions.

They tried to sue the company I work for..

[Anonymous Coward]

for using spreadsheets to display PLC (Programmable Logic Controllers)data realtime...
This is a common practice, it would be like patenting the method of turning on a light by upward motion of a toggle device..

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Jerome Lemelson- Flagellum Dei

[ScSurferDude]

I was once asked to participate as an expert witness against a Lemelson suit--- that was in 1985 (I declined). Amazingly, this still goes on. This snake needs to be killed once and for all. The money from each licensee victim, just goes into more legal fees to screw the next victim.

one word: WAAAHOOOO!!!

[rifftide]

Now if Skilling and Lay get sent to the pen this'll be a good year.

Rickover...

[Anonymous Coward]

I've heard it said he favored two personality types:

The stories I've heard from people who have met or served under him indicate a more complicated, less likable guy.

If a sub he was inspecting was it excelent condition, but the mess did not have white seedless grapes, that command would fail the inspection.

He purposely movede his Pentagon office down the hall to a broom closet with little/no decoration or windows. He felt that the luxorious office that had been given him was "not intimidating enough" (perhaps to make up for his short height and small frame.)

When he interviewed prospective sub commanders, he would sometimes ask the candidate to "piss him off". This practice was reportedly ceased when a particular young Commander grabbed the model of the Nautilus off of Rickovers desk and smashed it against the concrete block wall of the office.

As for being a "luddite", I don't see how the father of nuclear power generation could be considered such. (No one successfully supplied useful power from a reactor before him. The designs used in his naval reactors were heavily borrowed from to build the nuclear power stations still in use today. Too bad the civilians were unwilling to make thiers as "fail-safe", self contained, and worker-safe as the military's.) Most of his colleagues did consider him to be a pragmatist. Many of the Pentagon brass may have considered him to be a bit of a "boy-scout" as he was known to be vocal about his dislike for the CIA, and for cold war tactics in general.

The difference between Cognex and HP...

[entropy123]

...is that I will recommend buying a Cognex product to my friends...while actively attempting to find another printer/scanner/whatever than currently offered by HP...

The system needs to be replaced

[BlueCoder]

The whole patent system needs to be replaced. What should replace it should be a reward system where technologiest accross various diciplines elect various actually important problems that need to be solved and then rewards those with ingenuity to solve them with patents. The patenty could actully be longer them than they are but a panel could determine the amount and circumstances of patent fees. Also the patent office itself could collect all patent fees and distribute the money accordingly subtracting their operating costs.

For instance instead of more headache drugs that are just inovations on what exists they would only reward the drug companies when they produce a drug for more serious conditions that they dictated to have priority.

TAKE IT OUTSIDE, GODBOY!

[Anonymous Coward]

'light toggle'

[MarcQuadra]

DUDE!

Shut up! You're sitting on a GOLDMINE with that whole 'light by toggle' idea!

We should go into business. You've got the technical end, I'll handle the business and marketing.

Re:'light toggle'

[oshy]

someone will circomevent the patent by using down for on instead.

Re:"submarine" patents orginally applied for in 19

[spectecjr]

Ah, 1954, just before the launch of USS Nautilus spearheaded by Rickover.
One wonders what the father of the nuclear navy, a man both brilliant and a trifle autocratic, would have made of the patent mess, the virus mess, the open/closed source mess.

Who? You mean Feynman? The guy who owned the patent on the nuclear submarine.

Who is this Lemelson guy anyway?

[Anonymous Coward]

Lemelson seems to have been on the right side of much of the patent battle, if you are willing to reject the idea of "patent=bad". From the bio, you'll notice that most of his fight has been to ensure that actual inventors get paid by the corporations that were using thier ideas.

It is easy to see how much of this gets turned upside down when the subject of the patents are algorithms and business models (neither of which, IMHO, should be patentable), but for much of our history, if you were to take an idea to a company to sell for manufacture, they would likely reject your offer, and then produce it on thier own without your permission.

I'm not quite sure how I feel about this case, as the patents being discussed are rather old but they do seem to be an inobvious idea for the time (who in 1954 could envision a machine that "see, identify, and measure something", much less design one). By today, though it is a rather obvious idea and fifty years seems a bit too long for a patent to control a technology.

Re:Who is this Lemelson guy anyway?

[Ancil]

who in 1954 could envision a machine that "see, identify, and measure something", much less design one?

Certainly not this asshole. The nature of a submarine patent is to "invent" something by describing it. Like this: "Wouldn't it be cool if machines could see!!" *PATENT PENDING*

You then "refine" your patent application as real inventors do the actual work of teaching machines to see. Once someone else has put in the long hours making your "vision" a reality, you hit them up for ten million bucks.

Getting back to your original question -- it's actually two questions. Who in 1954 could envision a machine that could see? Plenty of people. Really, anyone who spent a lot of time daydreaming about the future. Who could actually design a machine that sees? Very few people, and it took them a long time. It was a lot of work, and the people who did it were the ones getting extorted by these pricks.

Re:Who is this Lemelson guy anyway?

[Anonymous Coward]

Somebody who did not take the concept of machine vison and "reduce it to practice." Others did. A fair and sound improvement to the patent mess would be demonstration of a working prototype for all claims in the application. That covers both submarine patents and perpetual-motion machines.

A second improvement would be a sunset provision, where the patented idea must be put on the market (or a substantial good-faith effort made to market it) within, say five years--or the patent reverts to the public domain. This would have happened to the patent with my name on it: the corporate assignee has never, to my knowledge, ever put it to use. It sits there in a file drawer, as ammunition to be used in a future cross-licensing war. Too bad SCO hasn't tried to infringe it...

a surprise.

[duran.goodyear]

I went to Hampshire College in Amherst MA. The lemelson foundation has spent a lot of money building a program there for inventors and innovators. I unfortunatly never took advantage of the program while I was there, but it was all funded by the money that Lemelson had made with his Patents. I had always assumed that he had made the money justly, and not so... poorly.

oh well.
another perception of good things shattered.

Re:a surprise.

[xeos]

The bar code was a reasonably innovative idea, one which I think Lemelson had every right to patent. Unlike many software patents that we (rightfully) complain about today, this does seem to meet the criteria of being a non-obvious idea.

On the other hand, it does seem that he manipulated the patent system to his gain. There was a very good article about this in American Heritage of Invention and Technology about 6 years ago. Perhaps a little bit less one-sided than the PDF that cognex puts forward (but who can blame them, eh?)

In general I think what he did was wrong, but not as bad as many of the extortions people atempt with incredibly obvious software patents. But I may be biased by what he did with the money (aka the Lemelson program at Hampshire and other colleges).

Re:a surprise.

[Anonymous Coward]

The bar code far precedes Lamelson's birth. It's very old. He can only have patented some peculiar aspect of barcodes. Or, perhaps, nothing at all . . .

At MIT there is a Lamelson prize generally associated with a lot of VC bigwigs being around and hype about innovation.

Re:a surprise.

[xeos]

I've not heard that before. Do you have a reference? I find it hard to believe, given that the bar-code is only useful once you have the electronics to read it, something that did not far precede Lemelson's birth. Unless you mean punch cards, but that's a stretch...

Re:a surprise.

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, I seem to recall reading this article as well.

Basically, what Lemelson did was take advantage of the protection that "patent pending" confers and the resetting of the clock that amending one's patent conferred after one sees where things are going while the patent is "pending", as well as making new derivative patent applications on the original idea covering new uses of the idea as they become apparant.

Since there is no time limit on the number of extensions granted in this process, it is possible to hone one's original patent idea over time to encompass not only eventual implementations over one's ideas, but also to have patents over many facets that original idea implied or requires...

Good for Lemelson, bad for everyone else, sort of like malpractice suits (good for individual, bad for medical system and everyone else).

Re:BEST. * IS DYING TROLL. EVER!

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree. Somebody give that AC some mod points. But this being /. there are a lot of political dreamers i.e. Dean supporters.

Re:Sorry...

[Anonymous Coward]

About fucking time this lame joke got modded redundant. Has there ever been a patent story or an SCO story on /. where someone didn't rehash this tired old joke.

Re:My wish

[Anonymous Coward]

You should just point out to him the fact that it doesn't matter whether or not jewboy eats ham, he's going to Hell anyways because his people killed Jesus.

Machine Vision Patents Thrown Out?

[Timbotronic]

Good to see that justice can still be blind!

Re:"submarine" patents orginally applied for in 19

[Anonymous Coward]

You mean Feynman?

Rickover was the engineer who designed and built the first working nuclear power generator, and oversaw the design and building of the first nuclear submarines. Feynman may have been a genius (he was) but daydreaming about a nuke sub and scribbling some notes doesn't quite compare with designing the powertrain and building the first.

Denying Rickover his due recognition because of Feynmans idea patent would be like denying that Oppenheimer was the father of the atomic bomb because Einstein came up with the theory.

Reads like a press release

[Anonymous Coward]

Why is Slashdot posting press releases?

FINALLY! Lemelson's getting it up the ass!

[pedro]

WHEW!
That bastard was a true player of 'the system'.
A total parasite.. a trader on the efforts and intelligence of others.
No conscience. No gratitude for what others had contributed before. A user to the nth degree.
Hmm...
Maybe he's a model for all that is wrong with modern (emphasis on the 'modern' part) capitalism?
Past Kapitalism as well.
Kommunism, too....

Doesn't mean that much today

[dilute]

This guy's sin was that he sat on his patent applications for decades so he could spring them after his ideas were commercialized by companies who had no clue that his patents were incubating. At the same time he would secretly amend his patent applications to match machinery coming on the market. Of course, he didn't invent that much either, but that's not what he go nailed on. So the court held that his patents are unenforceable because of his delay in pushing them out of the patent office.

The thing to bear in mind is that the law was changed in 1995 -- to make the term of a patent run from the date the application is filed, rather than the date it is granted -- so this guy's particular trick won't work that well any more. Plus, now patent applications get published after 18 months, so there is less of a surprise factor.

Just the same, the ripoffs go on - like the case making the rounds right now which goes after embedded PLCs on the manufacturing floor that are controlled through a spreadsheet interface - as used in half of industrial America at least. Another big shakedown involves patents on distribution of streaming video over the web. This decision addresses last generations' abuses. It will do absloutely nothing to stop most of the current brand of patent shenanigans.

Shareholder lawsuits?

[alienmole]

I wonder if shareholders in the companies which settled could sue those companies for not doing due diligence and defending their own intellectual property. Essentially, they conceded some of their own intellectual property without putting up a fight. A few successful lawsuits like that might make companies more inclined not to perpetuate the system by taking the easy way out and settling these bogus patent claims.

Machines need to see, too!

[icebattle]

I speak on behalf of the Machines. Let us see! I beg you, let us see!

Re:Machines need to see, too!

[o'reor]

Nope, it would me much more useful if you could smell.

Particularly, if you could smell a rat everytime a bogus patent is applied at the PTO.

Re:mmm....drown the kiddies eh?

[doublebackslash]

I like to respond to my responses.
I never was quite sure what the exact context was.
Thank you.
I s'pose that even psychos have their good ideas ;)
Seriously though, we should kill all the sue happy/copyright crazy lawers. (If I get bit by a dog, I'm su(e?)ing, thats ok, if I invent a uniqe way to turn plastic into cheap efficient fuel it deserves a patent, but I'm never going to patent a right click blocker, or some trivia like that, for example)
Wow, I ranted a lot there, ok done now.
Thx again for finding and explining the context.
Peace out.

Also the first steam engines

[Colin Douglas Howell]

Someone previously mentioned the Wright brothers as an example of historical patent abuse; another couple of examples go back to the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution.

According to this paper from the website of The Newcomen Society of the United States, Thomas Newcomen, the inventor of the first practical steam engine, was forced to go into partnership with a London syndicate that had bought a royal patent originally issued to the inventor Thomas Savery on engines powered by fire. The patent was for Savery's own "suction engine", which was never practical, but it was so broadly worded that Newcomen's own far superior design was also covered. The syndicate gave Newcomen little credit for his engines.

James Watt, the inventor of the double-acting steam engine (which was the first really efficient steam engine and allowed the Industrial Revolution to take off), and his business partner Matthew Boulton obtained many patents on steam engine designs. These patents were for their own, workable inventions, so they were certainly on stronger ethical ground than the owners of the Savery patent, but by ruthlessly enforcing their patents against any inventors who tried to improve the steam engine further, they held back progress in the field for decades. In particular, the development of portable high-pressure steam engines, which would allow vehicles to be powered by steam, was delayed until Watt's patents expired. Watt opposed such engines, believing that they were unsafe. (See this article from the Technological Innovation and Intellectual Property newsletter, published by Research on Innovation.)

correction

[psxndc]

For once a judge has seen how ridiculous our patent system is.

s/is/was/

Granted, the patent system still has issues, but it is getting better. The PTO has implemented a system like the EU where patent apps are published at 18 months regardless of their status. This was done in direct response to abuses like "submarine" patents. It's getting better. It's just going to take time.

psxndc

Re:correction

[Anonymous Coward]

Lemelson Center at the Smithsonian Institute
http://www.si.edu/lemelson/lemelson/ind ex.html

Foreign governments following US rules

[Roy Ward]

It never ceases to amaze me that these so-called "foreign" governments seem ever willing to follow any rule the US makes, or even implies.

Why does I.P. litigation survive? Seems to me the first nation to simply ignore these stifling rules would gain the advantage that could lead to industrial superiority. While "we" are busy suing each other in a ceaseless effort to keep ideas from flourishing into productive new venues, someone else could certainly be ignoring all that as so much bullshit that happens in RightPondia, and getting on with business.

As someone who lives in one of the smaller countries (New Zealand), I can tell you why - because the US is so dominant in world trade and other areas that they can put pressure on smaller countries to tow the line, whether it be threats of restricting trade, or holding out the promise of some sort of favorable trade deal (which never actually eventuates) in return for policies that the US government likes.

I'd be inclined to call their bluff, but the government are often a cautious lot, and the electoral risk of some bad consequence of annoying the US is not seen as being worth it.

An interesting point is that part of what led the to the current power of the US is that when industry was getting off the ground there, part of what drove it is that they ignored many of the restrictive IP laws of European countries (just what you are suggesting). Of course, in those days they didn't have things like the Berne Convention and the WTO to keep countries in line.

Re:Foreign governments following US rules

[fishbowl]

As I suggested, a true economic collapse in the US would make all this "dominance in world trade and other areas" pretty much past tense. But for all the hype and panic stricken media reports of the troubled economy, I still observe large numbers of new 4- and 5- bedroom houses being built, people driving brand new *very* expensive cars... and I live in a part of the country that's supposedly *poor*... We're a long way from "the average person doesn't know where his next 10 meals are coming from."

So if the situation is that things need to get a whole lot worse before people will be motivated to change anything, looks to be a long time coming.

Countries only stay "in line" because they choose to. As long as you don't do the few things that entail getting "out of line", which pretty much involves mass murder, unilateral invasions, and making hydrogen bombs and anthrax.

As to your politicians who regard blind obedience to whatever whim comes from the usa, they should be reminded that it's their duty to live and die by independence and freedom.

Patenting for fun and profit

[Flyboy Connor]

Several times I have had bosses come up to me, saying "We need to patent more!"

I always tell them I can have a new patent fly out of my @$$ every day, no problem there. The problem is, who is going to foot the bill (about $20K per patent) to file it to the patent office? And I can't guarantee that any of those patents will ever bring in any money, if they get accepted. Most of them won't actually, unless we get a team of marketeers to aggressively sell them and/or a team of lawyers to aggressively sue potential patent offenders.

Now if I would have a billion in company capital to work with, I could probably make a profit this way.

Boss goes off, mumbling...

Re:Patenting for fun and profit

[Anonymous Coward]

Tell your boss, and this is coming from someone who drafts and prosecutes (that means deal with the PTO, not "litigates") patents for a living, that "we need to patent more" is a horrible idea. Would you invest $20k (we charge more like $12-15k) in something that is worthless? I would hope not. As immoral as it sounds initially, a patent is there to prevent others from practicing your invention without compensating you. If you patent something that is not useful to anyone else, you've wasted your money. A client a while ago said "We want to patent X, which is our way of solving Y" Our response was "well, isn't Y a problem completely unique to your situation?" "yes." "Then it makes no sense for you to patent it." Patents are business tools you invest in to advance your business. But not if there's no ROI.

Correction to the post

[AdEbh]

settled all of them out of court for over $1.5 billion in licensing fees

First, if there had been an out of court settlement, there would have been no ruling.

Second, the press release quoted the CEO as saying "we won't receive a single cent from Lemelson".

Re:Correction to the post

[MacrosTheBlack]

He settled out of court with the other companies he threatened (ie. Ford) not Cognex.

Cognex sued that Lemelson's patents weren't worth the paper they were printed on. & won.

But there isn't any monetary gain from that (unfortunately).

Filthy rats

[Anonymous Coward]

Those fucking kikes know no shame.

Lemelson was basically a parasite

[hqm]

He never produced anything himself, and never did any actual R&D. He would read up on what was happening in a field, from trade magazines and the like, and modify some overly general patent application he had to track changes, delaying as long as possible so that when an industry actually was making money, he could add bits and pieces of existing technologies to his patents.

He was basically a parasite.

Hey, that artificial voice knew it all along!

[EvilTwinSkippy]

Amazing Grace
How sweet the sound
that save a wretch like me
I once was lost
but now I'm found
was blind but now I see.

Not for the first time [see court opinion]

[waterbear]

What a judge has seen is that this particular patent was unenforceable under the patent system.

What is ridiculous, is that it is often more cost effective to pay licensing fees for these kinds of patents, than to defeat them in the court system.

Completely agreed with both points. But it's not for the first time: patent judges often find bad patents invalid, and it's not even the first time that undue delay has been cited as a reason for unenforceability. On the other hand, the cost of getting the court system to reach the point of making a useful decision is out of the reach of many, there is a big unsolved problem of access to justice.

The District court opinion in the Lemelson case is online here. (Beware of size, it's a 33-page image-scan pdf.) The defendants won on three independent bases -- the asserted patent claims were "unenforceable under the doctrine of prosecution laches" [undue delay, amounting to decades], the asserted claims were not infringed because use of the accused products did not satisfy one or more of the limitations of each asserted patent claim, and the claims were invalid for lack of written description and enablement. Personally I hope it's got enough supporting fact-finding in it to survive an appeal.

-wb-

It's "laches", not "latches"

[dtmos]

laches, n: Negligence or undue delay in asserting a legal right or privilege.

As the judge noted in his ruling, "...the Supreme Court held that a person 'may forfeit his rights as an inventor by a willful or negligent postponement of his claims, or by an attempt to withhold the benefit of his improvement from the public until a similar or the same improvement should have been made and introduced to others'". Lemelson was found to have delayed the prosecution of his patents--albeit within the rules and procedures of the USPTO--and Symbol and Cognex were able to use the defense of prosecution laches to defend themselves from Lemelson's request for license fees by getting the claims of the relevant patents ruled unenforceable. The judge noted that

More than five million United States patents have issued from 1914 through 2001. Lemelson's own exhibits demonstrate that of the 325 patents that issued in that period with a prosecution pendency of longer than eleven years, Lemelson holds the top thirteen positions for the longest prosecutions. Some of the claims asserted by Lemelson in this case will not expire until 2011, fifty-five years after the 1956 application was filed and forty-eight years after the application issued as a patent...If the defense of prosecution laches does not apply under the totality of circumstances presented here, the Court can envision very few circumstances under which it would.

In addition, the judge ruled that the claims were "not infringed by Symbol and Cognex because use of the accused products does not satisfy one or more of the limitations of each and every asserted claim [i.e., Lemelson's patent does not cover the products for which Lemelson was trying to get license fees]; and that the claims are invalid for lack of written description and enablement even if construed in the manner urged by Lemelson...." This last point refers to the so-called "enablement" requirement of a patent: A patent should enable one of ordinary skill in the art to duplicate the invention from the patent document. The judge ruled that "one of ordinary skill in the art to which it pertains" would be unable to make a functional machine vision system as described by Lemelson's patents.

Whew.

To Do: Create an organization

[RedLaggedTeut]

I think the "average" person should create an organization which assists people with ideas but without resources with money and lawyers in patenting every good idea ASAP. And if not patent it, document that the idea was there and that there is prior art. Mail me if you do that :-)

Apart from donations, revenue would come from licensing and cross-licensing negotiations could force more patents to become public.

I'm serious. There are companies that do peer-to-peer networks, why no network of indivuduals that patent.

My email

[RedLaggedTeut]

"RedLaggedTeut" < diag@cheerful.com >

Lemelson....

[ibm1130]

Ah yes, Lemelson of Incline Village Nevada.
If there was ever a poster child for patent reform this outfit would be a prime candidate. AIUI Lemelson is a patent mill consisting ( not unlike RAMBUS ) of lawyers and a few eggheads who sit around running the changes on wild-ass ideas that might someday be profitable. Implementations do they not.... That sort of activity ought not to be rewarded and indeed perhaps should be punished. Is there a patent equivalent of a vexatious litigant?

The patent system HAS been reformed

[Anonymous Coward]

From the comments I see here, it appears that no one ("no one" is a two-word phrase -- "Noone" was a member of Herman's Hermits) here has bothered to RTFMs (read the fine manuals). The patent laws, patent rules, and the Manual of Patent Examination Procedure (the bible used by patent examiners containing all the rules they have to follow for examining patent applications) are better documented than any Linux distribution. They are available at

http://www.uspto.gov/web/patents/guides.htm

If anyone ("anyone" is one word) had read these, you would have discovered that the techniques that Lemelson used to "game" the system into granting patents on 40-year-old applications that never published were abolished almost a decade ago.

Roughly speaking, any patents issuing on any application filed since about sometime in June, 1995 are valid for 20 years from the date of filing in the United States, or the date of filing of the earliest claimed priority application, give or take some adjustment for delays by the Patent and Trademark Office in examining the application. Furthermore, most applications are now published about 18 months after they are filed.

What you may not discover from reading the manuals is that Lemelson's practice of gaming the system was not held in high regard by many patent attorneys.

Knife, Fork, and Spoon

[brave1]

I've been reading Slashdot for awhile, and I just paid attention to the "Patents" icon for this story. Can anyone tell me what the knife, fork, and spoon represent in the "Patents" icon? Does it represent patenting common objects?

If so, that would seem to imply a belief that patents are bad.

Just curious.

Re:Knife, Fork, and Spoon

[servoled]

Slashdot is not the most objective of news sources out there.

Re:Knife, Fork, and Spoon

[sabat]

I've been reading Slashdot for awhile, and I just paid attention to the "Patents" icon for this story. Can anyone tell me what the knife, fork, and spoon represent in the "Patents" icon? Does it represent patenting common objects?

If so, that would seem to imply a belief that patents are bad.

The icon's intent is not to show that patents are bad, necessarily, but that our patent system is so very corrupt. Corporations are being issued patents for ridiculously obvious things because 1) they involve technology or the internet, and 2) the patent office's point of view is that it is a service to the business community, so it ought to issue as many patents as possible.

There is little to no prior art search done by the patent office, as the patents it issues demonstrate. Worse, it's willing to call almost anything an invention -- priceline.com has a patent on the concept of negotiating for a price on the internet. Now, gee, weren't the Arabs doing that in bazaars just a few thousand years ago? It's different because it's on the net?

So the fork and knife are Taco's way of saying: "Ok, what's next? You're going to allow patents on basic utensils?" And perhaps that the current system is not what the American founding fathers had imagined. "Intellectual Property" is not found anywhere in the Constitution, only the idea that a limited monopoly for a limited time might encourage inventors and artists to do their thing. The concept that an idea can be owned is anathema to a free society.

Symbol Technologies v. Lemelson Medical

[Anonymous Coward]

Yup,

I remember that one.

I thought the dissenting judge was correct in pointing out that the statutes allowed for the patent application to be delayed to the outrageous extent that Lemelson had practiced and the court should not have exercised its discretion in ruling against statute because Lemelson's actions appeared to be an unfair exploitation of that statute.

The law in question has since been changed to disallow this sort of delay in the application process.

Not really the information age per se...

[Dread_ed]

I would rather refer to this age as the "Age of Bullshit."

The word information has the connotation that the content it is referring to has some informative quality. I generally believe that the content of the "information" we see hear and read on a daily basis is actually bullshit.

My problem with the term "Information Age" is that it denys the basic human drive of adulteration. Now by adulteration I don't mean sex with your neighbors wife mind you (thought that is a drive), but the basic human drive to mess with the truth and spin it to show what we want it to show. I guess that comes from the feeling that if we can convince someone else to believe like we do then it somehow lends credence to our beliefs.

Whatever the reason, it is pervasive. Like the parent said, "companies are realizing this and focusing on how to capitalize on this." Remember Nike and their "corporate speech" argument? They wanted to be able to lie with impunity to the public, their shareholders, and their customers. Why? Because it would benefit their bottom line. Talk about trying to capitalize on information!

This illustrates the problem with information as a commodity. If you buy information you have to be sure you aren't buying a lie. It also illustrates the power aspect of information, if you control what people are exposed to you can manipulate their behavior without having to be accountable.

I remember an anecdote I heard a few years ago from an ex-Ford employee. He said their internal motto was "Perception is reality, reality be damned." Another instance where a company has recognised the power of information...all you have to do is control what your customers percieve as the truth and you will reap the benefits.

Ok, so from now on just remember that this is the AGE of BULLSHIT.

Re:Not really the information age per se...

[Anonymous Coward]

You just described "1984", "Make Room! Make Room!", etc.

Double-plus good, mate!

Re:mmm....drown the kiddies eh?

[Artifakt]

As somebody besides Shakespeare said, "It's that 90% of lawyers that give the other 10% a bad name."

American democracy...

[geoswan]

You Americans! You are so funny . You like to talk like you have the franchise on understanding democracy, yet so many of you don't understand it at all.

When a guy runs for office, and he is able to say something new, something other people aren't talking about, and get the public to consider and debate the issues he raised, then his campaign is a success.

Dean got people talking about the war. So his campaign was a success.

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