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Parties Behind Eolas Patent Reexam Revealed
theodp continues "According to a 4-27 Interview Summary, the USPTO presented Eolas with a 10-14 letter signed by in-house counsel from Microsoft, AOL and Macromedia, a 10-15 letter from Adobe, and a 10-22 letter from the law firm of Sidley Austin (aka Microsoft's lawyers) in connection with its proposed rejection of Eolas' patent claims. All predated the 10-24 letter from the W3C's counsel as well as Berners-Lee's widely-publicized 10-28 letter, which seems unlikely to have prompted the USPTO's detailed 10-30 Reexam Order. The W3C has repeatedly had no comment when asked if the 'newly cited art' provided in its 10-24 filing had already been supplied earlier to the USPTO by others. UPDATE: In response, the W3C's Danny Weitzner points out that the preceding words are mine and should not be confused with those of a distinguished journalist."
What, you mean that there's more than one patent the USPTO has wrongly green-lighted?
-Ashton
If this kind of web-neighbor due diligence was carried out more often, we would not see all these spurious software patents being issued.
Why don't we create an industry funded board whose job is to make sure that silly software patents are no longer awarded? Oh wait... The industry only dislikes SOME software patents, while anyone who cares to look will see that all software patents threaten innovation and are largely anti-competitive because they rig the game in favor of big corporations.
Unfortunately, software patents have become the last hurdle that the proprietary world can throw at the free software movement.
Moglen and Lessig are both very persuasive (If you got a bit of free time, read "Free Culture" by the latter) I hope that upon hearing their arguments European Commission will be wise enough to reconsider its position on software patents.
Pragmatism as an ideology is not particularly pragmatic in the long term. Keep it in mind when you dismiss Free Software
let's face it; software patenting is a rich boys club; or another manifestation of the motto "the one with the most money wins". There are thousands of patents like this; scads of unoriginal montages of half-baked and recycled ideas, cleverly disguised and slopped up to the USPO, and approved, cha ching.
It takes this kind of outrage and political pressure to get one patent reviewed. What chance does the small software company have protecting itself against patents with a lineage of prior art? It's also a positive feedback system; patents breed patents, just look at the crazy exponential explosion of USPO patents over the last five years. And sitting in the middle of the web is the black widow, the USPO, raking in the fees while spending precious little fix the spiraling problem. Once practical answer: maybe register your software company in the Cayman Islands or Vanuatu, or some other such place and take your international profits offshore. Better defensive legal system; and better protection against the system fueled by common-revenue-oriented legislation and wayward lawyers.
consider coffee a lubricant that helps one penetrate the coding zone
I vaiguely remember that the Amiga OS 3 had an application called Multiview which allowed extensible embedded viewing of almost everything with the correct plugins (Called datatypes if I remember correctly). I dunno if this is the same thing though, but i think it predates the Web completely (Although only by a year or two). Hmm, have to dig out my old Amiga and check.
After grant of a patent, any person (in Europe, this does not include the patent proprietor) can challenge the granted patent with all prior art available. And this person is party to the proceedings; the European Patent Office coordinates the procedure and judges it.
Remark to be made here is that in first instance, the EPO is not very willing to revoke a patent (the examiner of the grant procedure is in the opposition division as well), but appeal may be a good remedy.
I heard that the US patent law may be amended to allow inter partes proceedings for invalidation/re-examination. Any news on that?
I can't be the only one that read it that way...
Humm, The BBC had a article related to this too, Here, and it scared me since the companies that are lobbying for changes to the Patent regieme are all the existing 'effective monopolies', MS, Cisco, Ebay, etc..
I don't think a patent system re-written by Big-Business is going to be good for anyone other than Big-Business.
The more I think about this, the more I fail to see any answer, only problems. How can a patent system protect the genuinely innovative little guys, whilst preventing the abuses the Big Business will practice in order to protect their market share?
"Oops, I always forget the purpose of competition is to divide people into winners and losers." - Hobbes
It doesn't take "outrage and political pressure" to get a patent reviewed. If you know of invalidating prior art it is fairly simple to request a re-examination. It is also fairly inexpensive if you choose to request reexamination inter partes since it involves only filing a single paper.
But you do have to do some research. Something which most people here are unwilling to do for any purpose other than to rant about the USPTO's inadequacies.
Someone once said something along the lines that it was only because they had stood on the shoulders of giants that they had achieved so much.
Perhaps the only fair solution is to limit patients to a maximum life of 2 years, and why not do the same for copyright too?
Ok I see the point if you invent create something unique that people are prepared to pay for then you should be entitled to some reward and a patient/ copyright gives you exclusive rights for a time and the opportunity to make some money by granting you a monopoly on this but for how long should independent development be halted?
very rarely if at all does something come without development using somebody elses work and idea's.
This Post is unique and the words I choose and the order I place them is mine alone. However they start with the basis of an article on slashdot, using technology that was developed by somebody else. If I had to pay for everything i did that used somebody elses work in someway or had to check to see who's copyrights i might be infringing I wouldn't be able to do anything and niether could you!
If we want the computer industry to stagnate then lets continue the madness and copyright and patent everything and why stop there.
Short limited life patents and copyrights seem to be the only sensible solution.
Blarney Quality Restaurant, Plants
Comment removed based on user account deletion
http://www.jolt.unc.edu/vol3/Parker-V3I2.pdf
to ponder the considerable problems in the reexamination system, including the $10,000 fee for proposing it plus considerable legal fees, maybe $10k - $100k +fees for filing it and researching it properly. If you are being asked for $5,000 in licensing fees for violating some frivolous patent it' a tough call. In 2003 the Commissioner ordered only 17 reexaminations of stupid patents. 17. This was somewhat better than 2001 when they only ordered 2. Wake up Commissioner!
Slugging it out in court is not an option for most small software companies as the average patent litigation fee through trial is cited to be 1.2 million.
Happy programming everyone. Maybe, just don't code anything more complicated than a REM statement as it will probably violate a whole bunch of patents.
consider coffee a lubricant that helps one penetrate the coding zone
It wasn't just web browsers either. Datatypes supported both read/display, & write/save operations. Commercial paint programs for the Amiga were able to make an end-run around the Unisys GIF patent by leaving out GIF support in the main program, but having datatype support. To save as GIF you downloaded an open-source GIF datatype (Unisys didn't attempt to enforce against open source implementations), dropped the class description and the library code in the required directories, and the paint program handled GIF equivalently to the native formats.
Pretty slick, eh?
There are extensive problems with allowing companies and individuals to patent biotechnology and there is little evidence to suggest that all the patents were necessary.
The genetic information within natural organisms should be part of the common property shared among everyone. Allowing some individual to claim ownership of the genetic code of a natural organism is obviously absurd.
Corporations have been rapidly patenting genetic information from crops that have been developed over thousands of years by indigenous populations in third-world countries. The thousands of years of cultivation apparently entitles those people to nothing, while using an automated machine to decode the genetic code entitles the corporation to ownership of the genetic code of the plant? How is this reasonable or equitable? These patents are robbing people in third world countries.
The explosion of development in bio-technology has more to do with the available technology and automation than allowing patents on natural organisms. There is plenty of profit to be made in developing medicines from natural genetic codes without granting ownership of those codes to corporations. Rightfully, the ownership of the genetic information should be held in common trust. There is nothing to stop businesses from patenting and profiting from treatments and therapies developed from that knowledge.
It seems that the current trend in the U.S. is to rush to grant ownership of everything, including knowledge, to some single individual or corporation. This headlong rush is being done largely without regard to the consequences of eliminating the public commons and the benefits which it provides. All knowledge and progress builds on what came before. If there is a price tag on every bit of knowledge, it won't be long before progress in the sciences slows dramatically.
There is nothing wrong with the idea of patents for novel inventions. I think it is an appropriate way to reward and spur invention. We need to make sure, though, that it's invention that we are rewarding and not political lobbying skills.
-All that is gold does not glitter - Tolkien
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