Phoenix went through an elaborate clean room process to create a non-infringing BIOS implementation that could be proven to be an original work and not a copy.
The effort they went through (and all of us benefit!) was probably more expensive than writing the original BIOS. It was worth it as it led to all the PC clones, but consider the effort involved to overcome just a software copyright.
If they had software patents back then, not only would the clones not have been available, but broad patents on all the ideas implemented in the BIOS would have tied up almost all subsequent BIOS type firmware, so that almost no personal computer could have been built at all! Including the Mac, Amiga, etc. Software is an implementation of an idea, and the ideas should not be patented. Software copyrights are about protecting the implementation, and that is plenty of protection.
Out of the books mentioned on QM, I'd recommend Baym's Lectures on Quantum Mechanics for this purpose; it's a more methodical treatment of QM. it should appeal more to the mathemetician looking for understanding QM.
The advanced viewpoint starts from examining polarized photons to develop the QM framework. The result is a more intuitive understanding of QM.
The fault of most QM books is the "cookbook" like approach, even the best books sometimes fall in this pedagogical trap. Do these manipulations and the right answer will pop out. Do these types of perturbations, etc. and you can do more complicated problems.
Landau & Lifshitz, I feel, gets too detailed in the grind of the treatment. For a mathemetician trying to get the "essence" of QM, I'd recommend Baym.
Actually there is a reason for this, at least in the US
The bank who accepts the check is left holding the bag for a fraudulent check if it doesn't turn out. So they tend to be very careful about who they allow to cash checks.
If there is a fraudulent check written from an account, then the bank accepting the check (not the original bank, usually) is the one who pays. The more they know about the person cashing the check, the better their chance of recovering.
Of course, you are correct that random forms of ID are not very good at true identification, and I know personally of a check fraud case where the crooks opened accounts with fake id's at several banks and got away with depositing checks from blank checkbooks and absconding with the funds shortly after the wait period. This works because the funds are actually in the victim's account, and the victim doesn't question it until their bank statement comes. Usually, neither the victim nor their bank is on hook, but the bank that accepted the fraudulent check is the one who pays, since they are the one who took the check, and presumably checked that it was ok.
Check fraud is not common, but it's good to always guard one's checkbook and account information.
Smokers actually are taxed more than they cost the public, so there is merit to the argument that some "sins" do not cost society as much as one might think.
There was a study a few years back by MIT on economic costs of smoking vs alcohol. It was very surprising:
Smokers don't cost much to society: smokers tend to get lung cancer and die *after* having a reasonably productive life. Lung cancer is a relatively quick death.
Alcohol costs a lot, mainly because alcohol related car accidents tend to happen at an early age, before a person gets to contribute to society. There are multiple (non-alcohol drinking) victims of all ages. The disability/deaths caused by alcohol related accidents are much more expensive to society in terms of lost production and health care than smoking.
The conclusion was that alcohol taxes are too little compared to what it costs society, and that smoking taxes are more than enough to cover the social costs of smoking.
Does anyone have a reference to the MIT study? It was relatively old, more than 5 years ago, but a similar study on obesity would be quite illuminating. My own guess is that obesity costs society quite a bit in health care costs, but not as much in lost productivity as alcohol.
Well, yes, it's true that larger fees to improve patent rejections do not help impoverished inventors. But it does help improve the quality of all patents in general, which is a good thing. Impoverished inventors face *a lot* more problems than application fees. They really can't use their patents without money to back them up or by becoming patent trolls with nothing to lose.
The patent system has not traditionally favored the individual poor inventor. Stories are rampant about how a company stole/violated/infringed on some poor guy who invented some miracle device. You really need money backing to give the patent any teeth in order to survive the onslaught of court cases and patent variations that come.
What's new in patent history is the recent prevalence of patent trolls who impede companies making real products. This only has happened because of recent splurge of "obvious" patents. I personally know an individual inventor who is a successful patent troll. Lack of money is not a problem if you want to be a patent troll, all you need is a patent on a fairly obvious technology widely used. You send legal notices to big companies to pay you for some obvious patent, and ask them to pay a minor fee, say, $300+ for a lifetime license. Then you go after the smaller companies for $1000+, citing that the bigger companies ponied up already. Note that the smaller companies pay more, because they have less resources to defend themselves. Companies pay because it is cheaper than legal fees. This is bad.
That is the problem better rejection rates would solve. Higher patent rejection fees will get more reasonable reviews of patents. That will improve the quality of patents, as well make the business model of patent trolls less viable.
I agree, and I have a simple change to make it happen. Just make it so the Patent Office is rewarded more for rejecting patents than accepting patents.
Patent applicants put up a larger fee that assumes that the patent will be rejected. If the patent is accepted, the applicant gets a refund.
If the patent is rejected, the applicant gets no refund, but they do get a review of how the patent is deficient or unclear and needs to be revised.
Two of my friends who are examiners in the PTO. They tell me it takes almost 4-5x the time to reject a patent as to pass one. Job ratings are based on the number of patents processed. What would *you* do in that situation? Based upon the work involved, a rejected patent applications should cost 5x more than an accepted application.
The PTO prizes itself for being the *only* agency in the government that makes money and runs in the black. The examiners are proud of that. You just have to make a small change in the incentive scheme for examiners so that the effort they spend on rejections are rewarded also; we'd get fewer, clearer, more relevant patents.
...and they are very proud of the work they do. The PTO is one of the few government agencies which actually operates in the black, generating more revenue than the PTO uses. According to an examiner... "the PTO must be doing something right!"... especially compared with other government agencies which bleed red ink.
The hidden costs of bad patents is not readily apparent to the PTO examiners. And the incentives (bonuses, efficiency) in the PTO are designed for quick turnover of the backlog. When you add in the fact that a denied patent takes an incredible amount of extra time (3-10x) to process, it's bad for the examiner, it generates little for the PTO... it's easy to see why the PTO emphasizes a quick approval and a less than cursory examination.
In light of this internal incentive scheme, all the strange "obvious" patents that we actually see coming out of the PTO these days make sense.
To fix this, yes, deny business method patents, yes that software should be copyrighted but not be patented, and update patent validity time limits.
But more importantly, I would change the the application fees to change the work incentives for an examiner. A denied patent costs a lot more work for the examiner than an approved one, so it should cost a lot more. Maybe 3-4x as much. These are the changes I'd ask for
Examination. Include a large deposit with each patent application, to be refunded if the patent application is approved. If approved, the examiner rates the approval as being "clear, insightful,easily read, ok, poorly written, etc.. This rating will go on the patent record, and if the patent is ever challenged, it would be court evidence that the PTO thinks it's a well-written patent (e.g. hopefully stronger and not as ambiguous). An approved patent would have an incentive to be well written, both to be get quicker approval and to be stronger in court.
To deny the patent, the examiner must outline how it is deficient (this is the extra examiner work) *and* the PTO keeps the deposit and the examiner gets a bonus. Since the examiner's reasoning has to be included as part of the patent denial, this would put at least some check on spurious patent denials.
Licensing. If the patent holder does not produce a product in a year, anyone may license the patent for a fixed fee/product without approval from the patent holder. This fixed fee might be high at first, but the fixed license fee would go down down the longer there is no product from the patent-holder. If the patent holder eventually produces a product, then all the prior product licenses are automatically grandfathered in.
The original idea of the patent system was to document ideas clearly for eventual release into the public domain. It would benefit everyone to search the patent archives for ideas that would be neat to use or to license. Unfortunately, this is not realized. There is little incentive to read the original patents for the ideas; patents are not intended to be well-written.
This will at least set up the incentives work towards clarity and innovation and better products.
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Copyright should be plenty to protect software. The original IBM PC had a PC BIOS firmware that was the stopping block for creating PC clones.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenix_Technologies
Phoenix went through an elaborate clean room process to create a non-infringing BIOS implementation that could be proven to be an original work and not a copy. The effort they went through (and all of us benefit!) was probably more expensive than writing the original BIOS. It was worth it as it led to all the PC clones, but consider the effort involved to overcome just a software copyright.
If they had software patents back then, not only would the clones not have been available, but broad patents on all the ideas implemented in the BIOS would have tied up almost all subsequent BIOS type firmware, so that almost no personal computer could have been built at all! Including the Mac, Amiga, etc. Software is an implementation of an idea, and the ideas should not be patented. Software copyrights are about protecting the implementation, and that is plenty of protection.
Out of the books mentioned on QM, I'd recommend Baym's Lectures on Quantum Mechanics for this purpose; it's a more methodical treatment of QM. it should appeal more to the mathemetician looking for understanding QM. The advanced viewpoint starts from examining polarized photons to develop the QM framework. The result is a more intuitive understanding of QM.
The fault of most QM books is the "cookbook" like approach, even the best books sometimes fall in this pedagogical trap. Do these manipulations and the right answer will pop out. Do these types of perturbations, etc. and you can do more complicated problems.
Landau & Lifshitz, I feel, gets too detailed in the grind of the treatment. For a mathemetician trying to get the "essence" of QM, I'd recommend Baym.
Actually there is a reason for this, at least in the US The bank who accepts the check is left holding the bag for a fraudulent check if it doesn't turn out. So they tend to be very careful about who they allow to cash checks.
If there is a fraudulent check written from an account, then the bank accepting the check (not the original bank, usually) is the one who pays. The more they know about the person cashing the check, the better their chance of recovering.
Of course, you are correct that random forms of ID are not very good at true identification, and I know personally of a check fraud case where the crooks opened accounts with fake id's at several banks and got away with depositing checks from blank checkbooks and absconding with the funds shortly after the wait period. This works because the funds are actually in the victim's account, and the victim doesn't question it until their bank statement comes. Usually, neither the victim nor their bank is on hook, but the bank that accepted the fraudulent check is the one who pays, since they are the one who took the check, and presumably checked that it was ok.
Check fraud is not common, but it's good to always guard one's checkbook and account information.
Smokers actually are taxed more than they cost the public, so there is merit to the argument that some "sins" do not cost society as much as one might think. There was a study a few years back by MIT on economic costs of smoking vs alcohol. It was very surprising:
Smokers don't cost much to society: smokers tend to get lung cancer and die *after* having a reasonably productive life. Lung cancer is a relatively quick death.
Alcohol costs a lot, mainly because alcohol related car accidents tend to happen at an early age, before a person gets to contribute to society. There are multiple (non-alcohol drinking) victims of all ages. The disability/deaths caused by alcohol related accidents are much more expensive to society in terms of lost production and health care than smoking.
The conclusion was that alcohol taxes are too little compared to what it costs society, and that smoking taxes are more than enough to cover the social costs of smoking.
Does anyone have a reference to the MIT study? It was relatively old, more than 5 years ago, but a similar study on obesity would be quite illuminating. My own guess is that obesity costs society quite a bit in health care costs, but not as much in lost productivity as alcohol.
Well, yes, it's true that larger fees to improve patent rejections do not help impoverished inventors. But it does help improve the quality of all patents in general, which is a good thing. Impoverished inventors face *a lot* more problems than application fees. They really can't use their patents without money to back them up or by becoming patent trolls with nothing to lose.
The patent system has not traditionally favored the individual poor inventor. Stories are rampant about how a company stole/violated/infringed on some poor guy who invented some miracle device. You really need money backing to give the patent any teeth in order to survive the onslaught of court cases and patent variations that come.
What's new in patent history is the recent prevalence of patent trolls who impede companies making real products. This only has happened because of recent splurge of "obvious" patents. I personally know an individual inventor who is a successful patent troll. Lack of money is not a problem if you want to be a patent troll, all you need is a patent on a fairly obvious technology widely used. You send legal notices to big companies to pay you for some obvious patent, and ask them to pay a minor fee, say, $300+ for a lifetime license. Then you go after the smaller companies for $1000+, citing that the bigger companies ponied up already. Note that the smaller companies pay more, because they have less resources to defend themselves. Companies pay because it is cheaper than legal fees. This is bad.
That is the problem better rejection rates would solve. Higher patent rejection fees will get more reasonable reviews of patents. That will improve the quality of patents, as well make the business model of patent trolls less viable.
I agree, and I have a simple change to make it happen. Just make it so the Patent Office is rewarded more for rejecting patents than accepting patents.
Patent applicants put up a larger fee that assumes that the patent will be rejected. If the patent is accepted, the applicant gets a refund. If the patent is rejected, the applicant gets no refund, but they do get a review of how the patent is deficient or unclear and needs to be revised.
Two of my friends who are examiners in the PTO. They tell me it takes almost 4-5x the time to reject a patent as to pass one. Job ratings are based on the number of patents processed. What would *you* do in that situation? Based upon the work involved, a rejected patent applications should cost 5x more than an accepted application. The PTO prizes itself for being the *only* agency in the government that makes money and runs in the black. The examiners are proud of that. You just have to make a small change in the incentive scheme for examiners so that the effort they spend on rejections are rewarded also; we'd get fewer, clearer, more relevant patents.
...and they are very proud of the work they do. The PTO is one of the few government agencies which actually operates in the black, generating more revenue than the PTO uses. According to an examiner... "the PTO must be doing something right!" ... especially compared with other government agencies which bleed red ink.
The hidden costs of bad patents is not readily apparent to the PTO examiners. And the incentives (bonuses, efficiency) in the PTO are designed for quick turnover of the backlog. When you add in the fact that a denied patent takes an incredible amount of extra time (3-10x) to process, it's bad for the examiner, it generates little for the PTO... it's easy to see why the PTO emphasizes a quick approval and a less than cursory examination.
In light of this internal incentive scheme, all the strange "obvious" patents that we actually see coming out of the PTO these days make sense.
To fix this, yes, deny business method patents, yes that software should be copyrighted but not be patented, and update patent validity time limits. But more importantly, I would change the the application fees to change the work incentives for an examiner. A denied patent costs a lot more work for the examiner than an approved one, so it should cost a lot more. Maybe 3-4x as much. These are the changes I'd ask for
Examination. Include a large deposit with each patent application, to be refunded if the patent application is approved. If approved, the examiner rates the approval as being "clear, insightful,easily read, ok, poorly written, etc.. This rating will go on the patent record, and if the patent is ever challenged, it would be court evidence that the PTO thinks it's a well-written patent (e.g. hopefully stronger and not as ambiguous). An approved patent would have an incentive to be well written, both to be get quicker approval and to be stronger in court.
To deny the patent, the examiner must outline how it is deficient (this is the extra examiner work) *and* the PTO keeps the deposit and the examiner gets a bonus. Since the examiner's reasoning has to be included as part of the patent denial, this would put at least some check on spurious patent denials.
Licensing. If the patent holder does not produce a product in a year, anyone may license the patent for a fixed fee/product without approval from the patent holder. This fixed fee might be high at first, but the fixed license fee would go down down the longer there is no product from the patent-holder. If the patent holder eventually produces a product, then all the prior product licenses are automatically grandfathered in.
The original idea of the patent system was to document ideas clearly for eventual release into the public domain. It would benefit everyone to search the patent archives for ideas that would be neat to use or to license. Unfortunately, this is not realized. There is little incentive to read the original patents for the ideas; patents are not intended to be well-written.
This will at least set up the incentives work towards clarity and innovation and better products.