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Eminent Domain Applied to IP Due To State Secrets
NormalVisual writes "Wired recently ran a story about a group of inventors that found themselves unable to sue Lucent Technologies for infringement of a patent they held on a novel design for a pipe/cable connector. They had been working with Lucent on an underwater application for this connector, but unfortunately for the inventors, Lucent's application was being developed for an as-yet-unnamed branch of the U.S. government. The government is now claiming a state-secret privilege, and is refusing to let the inventors sue Lucent for patent infringement, citing national security concerns. In the meantime, Lucent continues to directly profit from their invention without paying any royalties or other compensation. The patent in question can be found online. It's doubly a shame because, unlike so many other patents that we've seen here, this one is actually creative and non-obvious." We've touched on this topic before.
I first read that as "I"nternet "P"rotocol. I thought to myself, "Those fucks will never take 127.0.0.1 from me!"
We had the same problem with a cell phone tower in our property. Our solution was to take it down, put it on a trailer, and dump it in front of the local branch of the cell company. They got the hint after we did it twice.
So can someone tell me which criteria of fascism we haven't had happen yet.
the funny mustaches
Don't trust a bull's horn, a doberman's tooth, a runaway horse or me.
1. State secret.
2. Publicly posted patent.
I suspect this is not a legal/governmental snafu at all, but rather a behavioral experiment to see how stupid an excuse the government can manage to get away with foisting off on people while essentially conducting crimes that they'd never let the people get away with.
Maybe that's a little far fetched. OK, so it's really just people in government offices fucking with people and laughing about it. There, that makes more sense.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
Evil when they're owned by big companies. Good when they're owned by little people and infringed by big companies:)
One-sided posts are all my feeble mind can handle!
Judging from the results of the last election, you're in good company.
Can't someone please come up with simple absolute rules for everything so we don't have to think?
1 - Microsoft, SCO, MPAA, RIAA, & all corporations unless noted in rule 2 = Bad
2 - Linux, Google, Apple, AMD = Good
3 - DRM, outsourcing = Bad
4 - Open source, P2P = Good
5 - Patents, Copyright = Bad, unless being used against a big corp
6 - Goverment = Bad unless they are installing WiFi in your town
7 - NASA = Good, unless they say they will not keep Hubble in space
8 - USA = Arrogant
9 - Religion = only post flames, any intelligent conversation for or against religion will be ignored
10 - In Soviet Russia, Does it run Linux, Beowulf Cluster, I for one welcome, etc = overused, but still must be modded +5 funny
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