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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we shouldn't be required to look for prior art that precedes our invention, because shurely such prior art would be outdated and irrelevant"" comment.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."
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
(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.
mostly right, except there are design patents which cover the "looked nearly identical"
"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
If they know it's not a fake, then ultimately they will face the same situation.
They will be spending more of their own time and money, and possibly be liable for the additional court costs of the winning side.
That sounds like a potentially large risk to them.
Which is an illustration of the IP problem. A design is a textbook case of something which clearly belongs to copyright protection, not patent.
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).
But that doesn't mean she's trying to show how edgy and different she is. Maybe she just really likes it? There's a difference between being a foodie and eating food to make a statement.
The point of such behavior: what we eat is the primary social differentiators.
Why would Oprah need anything to differentiate herself? She has a fuckton of money more than the average person, and is one of the most influential people in America. She doesn't need to prove herself by trying to be different.
But the ability to serve sushi, and to eat it, indicates belonging to a social group of wealthy, educated elites.
Oh bullshit, even middle-class people in the US can afford fine sushi. Hell, I make it from scratch, and it can cost less than what people typically spend on a fast-food meal for the family.
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.
Again, they buy them because they prefer the taste. It has little to do with social status. Nobody seriously links drinking wine with sophistication anymore.
... and then they built the supercollider.
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'.)
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.