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Amiga Demonstration Helps Win Against Patent Troll
Amigan writes "Over on Groklaw, PJ is reporting that an actual demonstration of the Amiga OS (circa 1988) on an Amiga A1000 may have been the turning point in the lawsuit of IP Innovation v. Red Hat/Novell."
There's nothing that Amiga demos cannot accomplish. They are the stuff that drives our society forward.
... and then they built the supercollider.
Commodore has sushi and sold it as fish, sadly. The Amiga demos always kicked ass even if you weren't doing X.
Circa 1985 people! Come one. ;-)
Enjoyed the ""Your honor, we shouldn't be required to look for prior art that precedes our invention, because shurely such prior art would be outdated and irrelevant"" comment.
Wont someone legislate to close this prior art loophole.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Seriously, is that some kind of Mexican Facebook?
I judt got a nre Kinesis keybiartf so please excusr ant egregiou typos.
I always loved the way the Amiga offered functions other computers of the same era never came close to matching..
I love the quote from the owner who produced the working model.. "My Amiga Killed a Troll!"
http://www.hawknest.com/
I have five working Amigas sitting next to me. FIVE. All with Commodore branding, and including an A1000. University dumpsters were a gold mine for these things a few (by which I mean five) years ago. Groklaw speaks as if someone restored a System/360 or something!
The success is all very nice and all, but what was the disputed issue?
More prior art plskthx.
But that's the problem in itself right there. Yes, chances are that there is little "new" being done in software for the most part, and that someone has done [patent idea] before, but just imagine trying to find just the right bit of software, or just the right platform to show it's been done before.
The patent office couldn't instigate a "Prove no-one has done it before" process as that would be just ludicrous, but at the same time, having the right people on hand to show "just exactly where it HAS been done before" may not be 1) cheap, 2) practical and 3) possible.
There simply isn't an easy solution to this. If you abolish software patents, it makes it very difficult for companies to realistically spend millions on development of new concepts and ideas when someone can then just take the ground breaking UI or process etc. If you don't abolish patents, you still end up with the farcical joke that we have now.
Here, it really is a lose - lose scenario. Except if you are a patent lawyer.
Moved to http://soylentnews.org/. You are invited to join us too!
Let us not forget that OS-9 was doing it before Amiga.... and that was also submitted by someone as prior art from 1983:
http://www.post-issue.org/prior_art/83/detail
OS-9 was my first "real" OS, before eventually switching to Unix, then Linux. Back in the day, it was extremely impressive.
Those millions are spent on implementations, not on 'concepts and ideas'.
Error 001
Security Scan and Virus Detection do not work with your operating system.
Best scenario that I can think of is make the USPTO website really a lot easier to use. I think they do a good job considering the volume of crap they have to deal with, but it could be easier.
Second, allow anyone to submit comments regarding any prior art relevant to the claims of any patent application. So if someone posts an application with claims X, Y and Z and it's a rehash of an old idea, someone can just post a comment "Yo examiner, this was done in FVWM in 1995. Reject this shit."
And voila, it is rejected. That would be a perfect world(excluding all other worlds that would be better but are political suicide).
You can't legislate goodness. Let each to his own destiny, by will of his freely made choices.
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."
He put his boots up on the table and made a face. "The sig," he smirked. "You can waste your life in search of the sig."
So if someone posts an application with claims X, Y and Z and it's a rehash of an old idea, someone can just post a comment "Yo examiner, this was done in FVWM in 1995. Reject this shit."
But do you sit there sifting through applications? I don't. I have better things to do with my free time. I think just about everyone else would too. Perhaps a different twist on this is that a patent can be quickly and easily invalidated if someone shows prior art after it has been granted. However, in that case, would it actually then be transferred to the people that whose work was used to throw it out?
Moved to http://soylentnews.org/. You are invited to join us too!
There simply isn't an easy solution to this. If you abolish software patents, it makes it very difficult for companies to realistically spend millions on development of new concepts and ideas when someone can then just take the ground breaking UI or process etc.
How about the fact that one company will be first to market and develop continously improving iterations staying ahead of the competition? To take for example graphics card as an example, the designs are often started 3-4 years in advance. Let's say they start now with a released card and probably spend the first year reverse engineering it, whatever they learn might be out in 2015. And then they'll be five years behind copying the 2015 models. You have to weigh that against the impact of granting a monopoly for 20 years - why should they continue to invent when they have an essential patent and can basically price gouge the market any way they want? It's really important to understand that software patents will stifle innovation too, and they're only worth it if the good outweigh the bad.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
The patent troll had a patent called "user interface with multiple workspaces for sharing display system objects". Presumably, the prior art is the Amiga Workbench 2.0 and above feature referred to in the developer documentation as "Shanghaiing". This allows one application to open a screen and another application to place a window on the screen and assume responsibility for the screen's allocation after the original application quits. Prior to this, only the four color Workbench screen was public to all applications.
It is possible to have the right people looking for prior art. Ask the individuals/companies that request software patents to pay a hefty research tax. They'll either stop requesting stupid patents and they'll pay only for the real deal. Prior art problem solved. Now we need to solve the problem of the concept of software patents.
Yes, it's sarcasm. Deal with it!
If you abolish software patents, it makes it very difficult for companies to realistically spend millions on development of new concepts and ideas when someone can then just take the ground breaking UI or process etc.
Sorry... which new concepts and ideas companies have spent millions on would you be referring to? Name one useful software patent that is not obvious... Please.....
http://mail.ale.org/pipermail/ale/2010-May/119052.html From the Atlanta Linux Enthusiasts mailing list. Way to go Aaron!!
Exactly.
No company spends millions of dollars researching the idea of using multiple fingers on a touchpad. They spend millions implementing the interface to be touch friendly.
I could throw reverse engineer an ipad, throw together a few chips and make one. But you wont get that slick look and feel that Apple has spent so long perfecting.
Not only that but even if my device looked nearly identicle to the ipad i wouldnt be violating a patent. But as soon as i implement, in software the ability to recognise "Gestures" it becomes an infringement. Its stupid. Its stifling innovation. I think their should be an abolishment of software patents. Just get rid of them. Keep copyright.
I've a newsflash for you: these aren't inventions and so they don't need patent protection. I don't believe this nonsense about companies spending millions on new concepts and ideas (for UI's or processes). I just don't.
Designing a new UI may be expensive, but it is simply sunk costs. If I develop a groundbreaking process for picking cotton, but I don't actually translate that process into a physical device, then it is simply an idea and nothing more.
I have lots and lots of "ideas". Sometimes, I see those ideas manifested physically by someone who has the wherewithal to make it happen. They get the benefit. Not me. I don't care if I had the idea first.
This notion that we need to protect intellectual property is ridiculous and is doing wonders for stifling innovation. I plan to go right on thinking whatever I want to think and dreaming about new ideas. I don't care if that means I'm infringing on some companies "intellectual property" and I'll be damned if any amount of legislation will ever change my mind.
I'd happily pay you Tuesday for a biopsy today!
focus less on "who gets the patent". focus more on creating.
I'd happily pay you Tuesday for a biopsy today!
What keeps the plaintiff from claiming it's a fake? They have little to lose anyhow such that being caught lying is not a big risk to them.
Table-ized A.I.
(Ecclesiastes 1:9-14 NIV) What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun. {10} Is there anything of which one can say, "Look! This is something new"? It was here already, long ago; it was here before our time. {11} There is no remembrance of men of old, and even those who are yet to come will not be remembered by those who follow.
citation
/I'm not prone to cite bible verse, but there you go. All your software patents are invalid. It sez so in the Good Book. The verse itself is an uncited theft of the work of Sophocles c. 429 BCE - himself a synthesist who didn't cite the vast realms of prior art from which he distilled his digests of the written and performed arts into their purest forms. Sophocles was a hack, but we don't have records of the prior art he stole, or today he'd be a pirate. His synthesis though? Timeless art in and of itself. It's good thing for us ancient Greece didn't have DMCA, DRM, and eternal copyright or he'd be Sophowho? To most he already is.
If only ancient Greece, or modern Phoenix, had a sort of distributed Library of Alexandria where one works could not be forgotten - where the wisdom of our fathers and their fathers (and their foolishness too) might be preserved and so remain available to our children and their children. Something like a Google for books. Alas, copyright prevents it and copyright is now eternal in every practical sense. So it is that each new generation, constrained by previously patented and copyrighted art has diminishing realms of imagination to work with - until the lawyers finally abolish imagination altogether and we reach the asymptote where creation ends. So then we lay upon our children the duty to rethink the thoughts we've had, to re-invent our inventions, and to do so in peril of the trolls who lay claim to a third degree ownership of any potential perceived reference to characters or invented places in a brief manuscript published in 100 copies only, 200 years before - and upon their children we lay a logarithmically greater burden.
As patents are the death of invention, copyrights are the death of art. A pity our children must climb these mountains we've built for them without the benefit of a culture, but culture itself is deprecated in this regime in preference to whatever mindless new drivel can escape lawsuits long enough to become popular - and then is itself extinguished in a flurry of lawyers and cocaine.
We might have stood on the shoulders of giants, but now we huddle in fear of lawyers.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
If you abolish software patents, it makes it very difficult for companies to realistically spend millions on development of new concepts and ideas when someone can then just take the ground breaking UI or process etc
And yet almost all of the software on your PC was written by people who didn't either rely on patent protection for their ideas, or pay others for the use of theirs.
There were two big things that worked to kill Amiga, other than simply not being DOS (which was the standard even back then):
1) Cost. Amigas cost a whole lot more than other computers. Also let's not forget that in general computers were expensive. So when you were already talking something that was a major purchase and then talking something that was more expensive on top of it, well that gets real hard for people to justify. Sure the higher cost bought you something better, but the money isn't always there. Sometimes "good enough" has to be good enough. I'll bet that is true today of nearly every piece of electronics you own. There probalby is a higher end, better product out there that you decided was too expensive to justify. Nothing wrong with that, but appreciate that is how it works, and that others might disagree.
2) Failure to keep pace. The Amiga just didn't keep up with developments in the rest of the computer industry well. In particular this is because a lot of what made them cool and capable of doing neat things also made them inflexible with regards to being changed. A good example is in graphics. HAM-6 was neat because it got colour detail nothing else could, but the limitations on it were a real pain. So when competing systems started to get higher colour counts with standard indexed or true colour modes, it wasn't nearly so nice. However Commodore was slow respond to those new graphics advances, and got left behind.
Really marketing didn't play in to it. It was too expensive compared to other computers to every become the system most people owned, and it fell behind when it came to pros. I mean it could have enjoyed a solid pro following, as it initially had, but for that it would need to stay on the cutting edge and it didn't do that. Pros migrated off because other systems started doing a better job for less money.
Is that you Reverend Bradbury?
I'd happily pay you Tuesday for a biopsy today!
But do you sit there sifting through applications? I don't.
And that must mean that no-one does. Companies do look at patent applications of their competitors and should be given the opportunity to say "hey, I've already done that" before the patent is approved, not being forced to fight it during an expensive lawsuit later on.
mostly right, except there are design patents which cover the "looked nearly identical"
If only amiga was able to make their OS more wide-spread and accepted... Sigh.
Yeap, the Amiga marketing was shitty. When Gateway bought the Amiga from Escom I was hoping they'd revive the Amiga but it looks like all they did was waste money. There is AROS but I don't know how that's going.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
I'm not sure about that. The company I used to work for spent about as much money on customer research and contextual design as it did on development.
I still cannot find the droids I am looking for...
However, they are about the only thing I think deserves patents in the field of computing. Everything else is just a rehash of ideas first implemented in the 1960s.
And compression algorithms are different from pure mathematics, how...?
"This whole Linux thing won't work because I have better things to do with my free time than program a computer." **
**quote taken from slashdot comment in 1994***
***actually a hypothetical quote taken in 1994 if slashdot had existed in 1994
Since it's written in the constitution that our government should promote useful art, can we please make doing the exact opposite a federal crime and send some people to a federal pound-you-ass prison??
The only possible interpretation of any research whatever in the 'social sciences' is: some do, some don't
I don't understand the surprise that someone has a working 1986 computer.
Maybe it's because of how cheap computers were made later, but I have quite a few working 8bit systems.
Commodores, Apple II's, TRS-80 Mod 4p, Amiga 1000. Oh, wait, that Amiga is actually a 16bit system. Since I guess I can include those, I can original Macs in that mix also.
In fact, it's harder to find pre pentium system these days (of the x86 line) then I think any of the computers I mentioned.
And it's funny that they had to bring in an amiga 1000 to prove it, when a emulator would of done the job also. Of course, wheeling the Amiga 1000 in, and booting it up would have a better affect.
Be seeing you...
"But do you sit there sifting through applications? I don't. I have better things to do with my free time. I think just about everyone else would too."
Do you sit there correcting spelling and grammar errors in random wikipedia articles? I don't. I have better things to do with my free time. I think just about every else would too.
Of course I, and likely you, would be wrong. People do exactly this. All you need is some kind of recognition or reward system and people will do it. This carries extra kudos. If you are the highest scoring prior art finder companies can potentially save a lot of money by having you examine claims for prior art BEFORE they submit them.
"However, in that case, would it actually then be transferred to the people that whose work was used to throw it out?"
No unlike copyrights you don't get patent by default upon creation. You only get it in exchange for disclosing the exact details of how your invention works.
"Perhaps a different twist on this is that a patent can be quickly and easily invalidated if someone shows prior art after it has been granted."
I'm with you here. The USPTO should revoke patents. They should have user submitted prior art and a slashdot like moderation system so they can query highly rated prior art in addition to currently examined patents.
Without patents on physical goods, innovators stand to lose hundreds of millions of dollars, at least. This already accounts for at least 2 orders of magnitude difference between software and physical goods, and that's assuming your figures for software. Now consider the cost of reproduction for software vs physical goods, the former being near zero, and the latter being nowhere near zero given the requirement for raw materials.
I'm sorry, but software and physical goods are not even close to comparable, and thus should not be granted the same protections. First to market and copyright protection are the only advantages you need in the software marketplace.
Higher Logics: where programming meets science.
And on top of that the patent system (used to) allow technical different implementations to the same result.
E.g. fans: the result is blowing air. Still there will be many different ways to (mechanically) blow air, each of which are patentable and rightfully so.
It is not the idea of blowing air that is patentable, how interesting it may be in itself, it is the implementation on how to do it that is patentable.
"If you abolish software patents, it makes it very difficult for companies to realistically spend millions on development of new concepts and ideas when someone can then just take the ground breaking UI or process etc."
This is complete FUD. Software patents only keep the little guy out of the game as it is. The big guys all rip one anothers patents off because their competition is violating enough of their own patents that they don't want to face the fallout of a patent war.
Which is an illustration of the IP problem. A design is a textbook case of something which clearly belongs to copyright protection, not patent.
For a start there is such thing as "copyright" that covers software nicely.
Secondly there is something called a "design patent" which allows you to protect a specific design, e.g. of a machine, or of a UI. Some years ago here on /. (sorry too lazy to search) there was mentioned that Apple was granted a patent on the waste basket of OS-X. That was a design patent. Other vendors may still implement waste baskets, but they are not allowed to look just like Apple's.
No.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
> but i bet they are equally as happy that it takes 3 days to finish xD
Boss calling up on Monday morning: "Hey are you coming yet?".
Proving prior art by demonstration can indeed be hard and expensive, but it is often used as a powerful tool. I am working as patent engineer in Europe, and I am currently in the process of tracking down a certain model of oldtimer to show a technical feature which is clearly prior art in an ongoing patent case, but which has for some reason never been documented in any written piece I could get my hands on. Not exactly an easy task, indeed, but sometimes it is the best way. It is a purely mechanical feature, though, and I share your sentiment regarding software patents.
Usual disclaimer, IANAL and this is no legal advice.
Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.
The comment system is a nice idea, but you have to avoid spam that swamps the examiner completely. If you look at patent discussions on /., you'll find about 50 cries of "prior art! prior art!" in the comments, most of them from people who just read the abstract and not TF claims, and pointing to stuff that mostly is not even remotely prior art to the subject-matter at issue. If you submit that to the PTO, they would probably just lock up due to DDOS... :P
Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.
This is pretty cool.
I read the article and I'm a bit stunned about the way she writes about a working Amiga like if it was something really special and really rare. You will get thousands of working Amigas over here in Europe from EBay. I still own one (Amiga 500) and a couple of my friends still own their Amigas, too - working of course.
Was the Amiga really that rare in the United States?
-Nahooda
Sigs suck!
As a matter of fact, Oprah has Rugbrød flown in straight from Denmark for her breakfast (google Oprah, Rugbrød, and check the Danish-press articles. I couldn't find a decent English one).
The point of such behavior: what we eat is the primary social differentiators. It's more indicative even than what we wear and what we drink. In non-industrialized cultures, wealth is tied to eating lots of meat. In many parts of the world today, a socially important person is also obese. Food is power.
In the West, we're rich enough that everyone can afford meat, and our poor can also be morbidly obese. But, in addition to quantity, quality has always been a determining factor. And one of the easiest ways to indicate quality is by eating really expensive food, hence the taste for the exotic. So, yes, I think sushi is quite tasty. But the ability to serve sushi, and to eat it, indicates belonging to a social group of wealthy, educated elites.
That's also why in the US, they make sickly sweet "blush" wines and overoaked chardonnays: Americans associated drinking wine with bourgeois status, but many don't like the taste.
Huh?
The level of innovation in software moves so fast precisely because it doesn't take millions to develop new concepts. Almost any software innovation, you can bang out a basic demo or proof of concept over the weekend and tweak it some for show and comment next week. We're talking investments in the single or double digit thousands to show off a sweet new software innovation. It might cost less than the CEO's desk cost to prove out and "invent" the innovation.
Idea: Hows about patents have an expiry date of a few years. That way the big guns can make their money from the patent for 5 or so years and then the rest can actually USE the tech to benefit society.
Seven Days with Ubuntu Unity
http://www.xkcd.com/598/
Your comment is an textbook case of the IP problem--ignorance of the issues that is popularly, and blindly, reinforced as a worthwhile statement.
A copyright cannot be used to protect a useful article. A patent cannot be used to protect nonfunctional aspects of an object. A trademark has limited application and cannot protect objects clearly marked as unrelated. Thus, a design patent (which is usually known as an "industrial design" in most countries and is not a patent in the ordinary sense, having different application procedures, a shorter term, and a narrower scope of protection) bridges any gap that might arise, providing protection for the nonfunctional, distinctive design of a useful object, as well as provides an alternative to seeking independent protection of individual aspects of a creation.
There is certainly some overlap with copyright, but industrial design is not copyrightable unless its form can be separated from its medium--you can't copyright a car. You can copyright photographs, drawings, paintings, sculptures, songs, and stories of the car, but the car itself needs an industrial design registration to protect. In the US, that's called a design patent.
An industrial design registration simultaneously protects creative enterprise, promotes distinctiveness of competing products, and rewards successful integration of art and science. There is little legitimate reason to be upset about having to come up with an original design, given that it is difficult to infringe accidentally.
(And FYI, it's 'something that clearly', not 'something which'.)
I don't know if this would actually be useful. Just reading the comments on Slashdot, for example, in just about any patent case makes you want to jam something sharp into all of the commenter's throats. Half of them don't even read beyond the abstract, which is the only damn part of a patent application that has no meaning whatsoever. Other think that anything that is vaguely similar even through 15 layers of abstraction ("well really all a computer does is manipulate bits and we've done that since computing existed!") is prior art, and have no problems whatsoever posting this opinion as gospel and then remaking on how stupid patent examiners are to have missed it.
If that sort of trend were to continue on the USPTO website--and I have no reason to believe it wouldn't--the examiners would quickly be overwhelmed with ultimately bogus leads that they had to track down. You'd occasionally get some that they actually did use to invalidate a patent, but it would be the vast minority of comments. More information can be good, but only as good as that information is.
All of that, by the way, ignores the possibility of information being simply bogus instead of accurate but not prior art. There will be all sorts of people with agendas -- competitors, the anti-patent crowd, etc.
Design patents are not the same as utility patents. You may not want design patents to be covered under copyright law, where they would last for a century or so. Design patents cover things that provide distinctive design but are not necessary to the utility of the device. Such designs might not be copyrightable but can still get design patents. They are shorter in duration, in the US lasting only 14 years compared to 20 years for utility patents, 90 years for corporate copyright, and life plus 70 years for personal copyrights.
The home-computers in general, as opposed to the PC/Mac, were on the whole a EU thing. Not sure why. Commodore is after all Canadian. Maybe PC/Mac was cheaper in the US. Maybe IBM and Apple found it difficult to sell in Europe. Maybe US business adopted the PC more so that the proffesional choice was more influential then in Europe.
The Amiga was a home computer, while it could of course be used to run a small office it never got the reputation of being for the office in great numbers, never heard of a case of a large office using them in the same way DOS and Apples and later Windows would be used. They were not for word-processing... well they were, but that was not how they were sold.
But such regional differences are hardly surprising. One of the fun things of travelling abroad is to go into a supermarket and just look at the differences. Go into a US store and you won't regonize half the foods, even if it is the same food because of the different ways they are branded.
Most of us buy stuff anyway because our friends recommend it, so the first product to get a foothold often becomes the leading product.
So yes, a european is far more likely to see a working Amiga then an American. So Amiga is a bit like your own toes.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
It could work with a higher "barrier" for "comments".
The "online petition" that can be made to the German Bundestag or the European Parliament might be an example. It takes maybe 15-20 minutes to draft a petition with all the required information. (When it gets accepted it is then only a matter of seconds to co-sign it, though).
Or the update process for the IMdB, to actually add a new movie. That is also possible, but nobody is really swamping them because there is a minimum of required information that has to be submitted with verifiable sources.
I'm pretty sure, once a process is in place to actually submit prior art there will be a lot of community portals sprinning up where people can discuss patents, submit information, verify information, etc... so that when all the required information is collected some admin/moderator/etc... can then submit it.
We have an online petition system in Germany? God, I am behind the times... Gotta check that out. Anyway, you are right, of course - if you put up well-designed minimum requirements, this could work indeed. Such a barrier is crucial, however.
Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.
Out of curiosity, what ground breaking unique UIs and such were invented there and where is 'here'?
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
"I read the article and I'm a bit stunned about the way she writes about a working Amiga like if it was something really special and really rare. "
I have an Amiga 1000, in a box with a bunch of floppies from the day.
I would be surprised if those 20 year old floppies were in good enough condition to boot the Kickstart (ROM emulation disks) and WB desktop.
Newtek guys (they are still around, Video Toaster in Pro Video/PC) actually accomplished 4096 colours in high res by abusing the system which that patent troll claimed. I remember they were (rightfully) bragging about it on full page magazine ads but I haven't used it in production or seen it used. ...and people ask why Amiga can't be forgotten :)
If you abolish software patents, it makes it very difficult for companies to realistically spend millions on development of new concepts and ideas when someone can then just take the ground breaking UI or process etc.
Even without software patents, you'd still have copyright. The company's actual work would still be protected while allowing someone else to be inspired by them to create something else that's new and innovative.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
To be fair, all ideas are obvious, once someone has created them.
If something is "obvious" it would have tons of prior art going back years. You can't simply look at something, and with the benefit of having seen it say "Well, that was obvious".
Let's take, as an example, the Office Ribbon. Whether or not you like it, or whether or not you agree with it, the fact is, it was not an "obvious" UI change, and it did in fact radically change the UI to the extent that many people feel it's agregiously difficult to retrain people.
Certainly there are "Ribbonish" kinds of interfaces that existed before, if you only look at the visual style, but what makes the Ribbon unique is not only it's visual style, but its functionality as well. I'm sure you will say it was obvious, but the reality is that your hindsight gives you the benefit of looking at it with what you know now, not what was known then.
If you need web hosting, you could do worse than here
The entire patent process needs to be tossed into a volcano. Imagine how products that could save lives or make life better are either not created or are overly expensive because so many tiny items within the product require paying royalties. Need an on switch for a computer? How many patents are involved in a good switch? Before it is over one might be paying hundreds of companies for tiny parts or tiny snips of code.
"you can't copyright a car"
Yes. You can. Design is not functional, it is aesthetic and aesthetics belong to copyright. 3D art is copyrightable just like 2D art. A car is copyrightable in the same manner in which a sculpture is.
"You may not want design patents to be covered under copyright law, where they would last for a century or so. Design patents [uspto.gov] cover things that provide distinctive design but are not necessary to the utility of the device. Such designs might not be copyrightable but can still get design patents."
If they aren't distinctive enough to qualify for copyright then they aren't distinctive enough to qualify for protection.
There simply isn't an easy solution to this. If you abolish software patents, it makes it very difficult for companies to realistically spend millions on development of new concepts and ideas when someone can then just take the ground breaking UI or process etc. If you don't abolish patents, you still end up with the farcical joke that we have now.
Companies that spends millions in software development very often produce crap. Look at UNIX, one of the most successful operating systems. The original plan of AT&T was to develop an ambitious OS called MULTICS but they failed to produce anything and UNIX it was developed after its failure by Kernighan & Ritchie. So the company, with all its million of dollars, failed to produce anything where an handful of smart people succeeded. Real innovations and breakthrough software are almost always produced by smart/skilful people or by very small company. The reason is that in big companies a handful of incompetent managers that does not understand anything takes the decisions and this lead very often to crap products. Also they tend to hire mediocre programmers and never hires really smart people because these latter have often a non-conventional CV. Google is an exception in this world and the explanation is that the work was started and the company founded by two very smart guys that understands very well maths and programming. Big companies only produce craps and they need software patents to protect their very fragile advantages. Francesco
A car is copyrightable in the same manner in which a sculpture is.
It isn't. It is prohibited expressly in Section 101 of the Copyright Act. A car is a useful article, which is ineligible from copyright protection except to the extent the form can be separated from its medium. The body of a car has no value as an independent work of art except as a derivative one meant to invoke the car itself. This recursive nature bars copyright protection.
For starters, see:
http://www.bitlaw.com/copyright/unprotected.html#useful
http://www.copyright.gov/fls/fl103.html
Salient quotes:
"Copyright protection is generally not available to articles which have a utilitarian function. Examples of these types of "useful articles" would include lamps, bathroom sinks, clothing, and computer monitors. Under the Copyright Act, the only copyright protection available to these items is for "features that can be identified separately from, and are capable of existing independently of, the utilitarian aspects of the article.""
"Designs for useful articles such as vehicular bodies, wearing apparel, household appliances, and the like are not protected by copyright."
Design is not functional, it is aesthetic and aesthetics belong to copyright.
Design is often functional. The body panels of a car are industrial design--the integration of aesthetics and engineering. They are protected by industrial design registration and NOT by copyright.
If an artist would not create the work as an independent expression of creativity, but instead is applying his craft to a functional need of a useful article, then it is not a copyrightable work. Specific exceptions have been made by statute, but they are limited to isolated cases and are not generally applicable.
"A car is a useful article, which is ineligible from copyright protection except to the extent the form can be separated from its medium"
Your except is the only extent to which the aesthetic design of a car SHOULD be covered. If it is not aesthetically unique enough to be covered under copyright and isn't functional and inventive enough to qualify for a true patent then it shouldn't be protected at all.
The area between copyright and patent you are referring to doesn't need to be fixed with additional IP. That gap is a feature, not a bug. Closing that gap with a 'design patent' only serves to hinder progress.
It may make more sense to think of design patents as being closest to trademarks. If you have some visual aspect of your product that is immediately associated with your brand, you don't want competitors to manufacturer a product that looks identical to your product, but with a different brand name on the bottom, where it will never be seen.
If something is "obvious" it would have tons of prior art going back years.
Person A comes up with an idea. The idea is obvious. Persons B, C, and D came up with the idea earlier.
Person B came up with the idea before Person A. The idea was obvious. Persons C and D came up with the idea earlier.
Person C came up with the idea before Person B. The idea was obvious. Person D came up with the idea earlier.
Person D came up with the idea before Person C. The idea was obvious. ???
The fundamental principle of recursion dictates that your statement is logically invalid. No matter how many people have come up with an idea, one of them had to be first.
The fallacy of your argument is that you don't take into account known technology and other events that can lead to the obvious idea.
For example, one cannot have the idea of a flash on an iPad before there is an iPad. The genesis of the iPad makes the obvious idea possible.
Let's take another obvious idea. XOR'ing bits to create a cursor or pointer. There's prior art on this (and a patent) going back 30 years. Obviously, this obvious idea could not exist without CRT based graphics and the concept of cursors or pointers, so the idea cannot go back further than that.
If an idea is, in fact, obvious, then shortly after the idea is possible, there will be lots of people implementing it. If the idea was possible 20 years ago, but nobody did until last week, the idea isn't obvious.
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When I bought my Amiga 1000 part of the reason was that they advertised TurboPascal for the Amiga.
I bought a used Amiga 500 but I don't know if either Turbo Pascal and Turbo C was available for it. I did buy Borland C++ Powerbuilder for my PCs, one running Win 95 another with a DEC Alpha running NT4. The Win 95 PC is long dead and gone but the NT4 PC is under my desk. What I find ironic is that of all commercial software I bought the only one I was able to install on the Alpha was C++ Powerbuilder.
Do you have any idea how much software was written in Turbo Pascal and Turbo C?
And how much of it might have been ported to the Amiga?
A lot, that's it. I don't know how much commercial software was written with them. When I took Pascal and C/C++ those are what we used in my classes. Now I use, only to relearn and continue Java but I haven't done much lately because it hasn't been running right, is Eclipse. As for how much was written for Amiga OS/Workbench I don't know. I say about programming with the Mac, Macs can be used to write programs that run on Linux, Macs, and Windows. Well Amigas was able to do that and program for Amigas. From a purely development/programming perspective using an Amiga seemed best. Of course the user interface would have to do programmed separately, however that's where modularity and UML comes in.
Just to many misses.
I'm not sure what you mean here, but I'll answer as if you mean not many programs were written for Amigas. If more Amigas were sold more software would have been written for it. Demand stimulates production. When Microsoft started it had software written for a number of microcomputer systems from Altairs with Intel 8080 CPUs to systems with Motorola 6800 CPUs to Tandy (Radio Shack) TRS-80s with a Zilog Z80 CPU. Even today MS programs for Macs. MS never stopped programming for Apple, though Bill Gates threatened to stop.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
If it is not aesthetically unique enough to be covered under copyright
There you go again. At this point, your ignorance is obviously malicious. It is unique enough for copyright protection. It's not eligible for copyright protection for a completely different reason: because it's a useful article.
and isn't functional and inventive enough to qualify for a true patent then it shouldn't be protected at all.
A nonsensical statement. A design patent isn't a utility patent. It's not patentable for novel utility because it's not a novel function, but an existing function in a novel design. A particular object may simultaneously have patent, copyright, trademark, and industrial design protection, but the rights afforded cover different aspects and apply in different scenarios.
You are quibbling over a name, not its procedure, in a poorly disguised attempt to cover your plain display of ignorance. You can think of it as a copyright for useful articles if you prefer, but it's no more a copyright than a utility patent. Because industrial design has formalities and procedures requiring prosecution (like patents and trademarks and unlike copyrights), it was placed under the charge of the office with the resources and infrastructure to do so, the US Patent and Trademark Office. If you take issue with the name, you should consider that copyright started out as royal letters patent (same as with patents), and that lexical treatment could easily have developed where the modern copyright might be known as a copy patent.
The area between copyright and patent you are referring to doesn't need to be fixed with additional IP. That gap is a feature, not a bug.
Nonsense. Bold though you may be with your ignorance, sheer will won't make it into reasoning.
Industrial design has been protected internationally longer than trademarks have and predates the Berne Convention. In other words, it's been part of the equation from the beginning of the modern age. The constraints in each area are intentionally designed, but not to foreclose protection into your fictionalized binary state. Art is copyrightable to the exclusion of physical utility, machines are patentable to the exclusion of aesthetics. Industrial design protects functional art--a separate discipline altogether.
Closing that gap with a 'design patent' only serves to hinder progress.
All you're doing is bone-headedly arguing that design patents should be converted into copyrights, thus expanding their scope and duration.
You're internally inconsistent and contrarian. Further grasping at straws won't help your position.