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The BlackBerry Infringing on Other Technologies?
windwaker writes "The maker of the popular BlackBerry waits to see if he's infringing on eight other patents. If this is true, future BlackBerrys will have to be licensed differently, to compensate for the infringement."
1. patent some random technology that in the patent app is so vauge it could be anything devolped with in the nex 5 years...
2. do nothing with the tech that was just patented cause your company is so broke from getting the patent...
3. wait 5 years for some company to do something truly inovative and useful with somthing that could be considered your patent only because the original application to the patent office was so vauge, AND THEN SUE THEM!!!
4. ???
5. $$$$$$$$
You don't have to attempt to patent a technology in order to be liable for infringing on a patent on the same technology.
That data you cite regarding political contributions is wildly inaccurate. It is a list of top contributors to specific members of Congress for 2004. Not surprisingly then, is that John Kerry's supporters hold all of those positions. So what you've got is presidential campaign money mixed in with statistics for Congress.
A better index to use would be the top donors since 1989.
The top contributors, which isn't surprising given the number of people they employ, are the American Federation of State, County & Municipal Employees (think of all those police officers and firefighters); the National Association of Realtors (perhaps surprising to be this high on the list), the National Education Association (teachers), and coming in fourth is the Association of Trial Lawyers of America.
Big businesses are absent from this list, which might surprise some people, until they realize that almost every top individual donor sits in a pretty high position in their company.
What?
Woah now, I think you're mixing RIM up with some other company...they did not at ALL start off with a vague idea...the company started out of a product. The guys that started the company were waterloo eng students, and the blackberry came out of a final year project they were working on for school. In fact, they had a product before the company was even an idea.
...no two people are not on fire.
I'm not hostile, I justam really frustrated that people think that software patents = stupidity patents. They're not the same. Stupidity patents occur in hardware too, see that recent ipod bay in a recent /. article.
I am still unconvinced that copyright is enough to protect software. Copyright just prevents the copying of a work. It does not protect the nature of the work. Take JPEG compression for instance. It's a novel, nontrivial method to achieve lossy compression on images. Copyright would protect the inventor from someone character-for-character copying the source. It would not prevent a reverse eningeered copy nor a rewrite using similar but not exact methods.
Just as trademark laws protect exact copies of hardware (well logos, I pre-emptively agree this isn't a perfect comparison), copyright protects exact copies of software. Neither protect the methods used to create the work, which is what patent is all about.