And yet, his own software, that he sells as $40 shareware for the Mac (...why?!), is designed specifically to display copyrighted and/or trademarked cover art of other people's software/music/etc, in its entirety, without the permission of the copyright/trademark holders. Did he ask them? I doubt it. Is it Fair Use? Pretty clear "no" on that, it doesn't check any of the boxes.
He gets the artwork from Amazon, with permission. In fact, Amazon provides an API for this.
It sure sounds like a joke, doesn't it? I mean, come on, he's all bent out of shape over a woodgrain texture? It's not like they took his logo or something distinctive about his application. It sounds pretty petty to me.
How is it not distinctive? Anyone who has used Delicious Library would look at those screenshots and instantly assume they are looking at a mobile version of DL.
The 40 games listed on the above link have an average rating of 2.6, and range from a rating of 1 star to 4 stars, which is not bad, but not particularly good either
Actually, it is pretty good. For some reason, there are a lot of idiots rating iPhone apps, and apps that perform exactly as the developer claimed, flawlessly, get a lot of low ratings. I've seen a lot of reviews that go like this: "This app does what it is advertised to do, perfectly. It's very useful. But I wish it also did (function that makes no sense for this app)" and they rate it 1 star.
Unless this thing compiles to native code, a runtime interpreter isn't allowed by Apple's SDK.
That's not really quite correct. Apple has approved apps that use a runtime interpreter. They key is that the app cannot allow any means of downloading "outside" code to run on the interpreter. If you want to implement your app as an interpreter for language Foo, which is only used to interpret the Foo code you include as part of the app, that should be OK.
When OO 3 came out, it severely broke spreadsheets in Symphony. It wasn't until Symphony 1.3 came out, something like 9 months later, that Symphony gained the ability to handle spreadsheets from OO 3.
Yet if you Google for information on the problem, you'll find pretty much nothing. That one thing in the Lotus forum is the only mention I've found of it.
I conclude from the fact that such a major incompatibility could go virtually unnoticed by most of the OO and Symphony user communities for so long that either almost no one uses Symphony, or Symphony users are closed groups that don't need to exchange documents with outsiders who use OO.
But seriously, shouldn't the court be trying to determine infringement, rather than letting the plaintiff view every piece of code Facebook has written?
The plaintiff doesn't get to look at any of the code. It is only looked at by the plaintiff's lawyers and their outside experts. The lawyers in such cases are careful, almost to the point of fanaticism, about making sure that the plaintiff doesn't see anything they are not supposed to see.
What does there settling a patent lawsuit with Microsoft have to do with any of this? Alternatively, if patent litigation involving TomTom is somehow relevant, why did the submitter not mention any of TomTom's suits against other GPS companies?
The reason you keep getting modded as a troll is that you keep making trollish claims, such as the chip cannot be reverse engineered due to DMCA, even after you are shown links that explain why you are wrong.
The chip is a controller chip. There is nothing in the DMCA that prohibits reverse engineering controller chips.
It's not just China we have to worry about, though. There are about a dozen or so elements that are important to US technology that we rely on imports for. Some, like the ones we get from China, we have supplies of ourselves--we just don't mine them because it was cheaper to import, so we can switch to domestic sources, albeit it a higher cost. However, there are some for which the US only has a small supply, such as platinum.
Collectively, these are called strategic minerals, and a distressingly large fraction of the world's supply of many of them are concentrated in small countries that are very politically unstable.
The point of a defensive patent is to protect against other people's patents.
OIN licenses its patents for free, as long as you don't use any of your patents to sue over Linux or various other open projects (PostgreSQL, KDE, Firefox, Mono, and many others).
There are around 11000 births in the US each day, so yes, on average, there is less than 1 birth per zip code per day per gender. The 87 percent figure is quite believable.
Another way to look at it: it takes about 15 bits to encode a zip code, and about 16 bits to encode a birthdate, and 1 bit to encode gender. We are distributing 300 million people into 4 billion bins. The distribution is not uniform, but it is certainly plausible that a lot of people will have their bin all to themselves.
All this talk of "defensive patents" that supposedly "protect the community" is just a fraud. To protect the community, take all the documentation of the patent, and put it in the public domain. Then, anyone who wants can implement the tech, without restriction, forever. Keeping it patented retains the power of the patent holder to deny implementation to someone, sometime.
You have completely misunderstood the point of a defensive patent. The idea is that if someone sues over one of the technologies that the OIN is protecting, OIN can look in its portfolio for a patent that the suer is infringing, and that can be used against the suer.
Production of creative works in the context of a free market system.
It can be shown mathematically that under certain assumptions a free market results in the optimal use of resources. Unfortunately, those assumptions do not work for things like recorded music, where the marginal cost of production is essentially zero. Hence, a free market CANNOT be used to efficiently to determine allocation of resources for music production. If you tried a pure free market, you'd end up with massive underproduction.
There are two known ways to solve this. The first way is to completely remove things like music from the free market. Have wealthy patrons, or the government, pay for music production. The results are freely copyable. The advantage of this is that the public can consume all the music it wants. The disadvantage of this is that the public doesn't really have a say in what is produced--they get what the patrons or the government wants.
The second way, which is what we currently use, is to artificially, by force of law, give music those attributes that make it so it does work with a free market system. That means we have to treat copies essentially like loaves of bread--you can't copy them for free. You can only obtain copies produced by the manufacturer (but once you have a copy, you can give it away or resell it).
The big advantage of this approach is that market forces decide what gets produced. The disadvantage is that it makes music cost too much (remember--the economically correct price for digital copies of music should be zero), so you end up with underconsumption. Consumers use less than they want to.
It registers a user? I wonder if this why my Wordpress blog, which generally is not of interest to anyone, suddenly has had several requests for new user registrations.
An important legal principle is that you can't sell something that isn't yours to sell. For example, if I steal a car, "sell" it to a used car dealer, who "sells" it to you, the original owner will be able to recover the car from you, because it remains his car.
Now, imagine you go to a used car dealer, and he sells you a car, and takes your money. As you get ready to drive the car off the lot, he comes up, tells you that they have just found out the car is stolen, hands you your money back, and says "sorry". No one would have a problem with that.
On the other hand, if you drove the car home, used it for a month, maybe customized it, and then the car dealer found it was stolen, so mailed you a check, and sent a repo man out to take the car, that would be a problem. The dealer should have just told the police who they sold the car to, and let the police deal with recovering it.
But what if the customer takes the car home, and then brings it back six months later for an oil change, and the dealer then, while the car is in the shop, finds out it was stolen, and refunds the purchase money then and returns the car to the real owner? OK or not?
Amazon was in a novel situation. They had "sold" an ebook that they could not sell, so the "buyer" had not actually successfully bought the item. Unlike with cars, there is no clear change of possession--you do not drive an ebook off the lot. You get a copy for your device, but your device remains in contact with Amazon (kind of like a car in the shop for an oil change).
I was actually surprised at first that annotations were caught up in the Orwell fiasco, considering that they're stored in files independent from the book itself. I can only assume that the original copyright holder put the squeeze on Amazon, claiming that the notes were "derivative works" or some such thing, and that since the users didn't have the right to the books, they didn't have the rights to the notes. Or else the copyright holder didn't want the user to retain clippings of the book.
A more likely explanation is that Amazon simply did not anticipate ever needing to delete a book while retaining the annotations, so the deleteBook function deletes everything.
If this was Google defending their patent portfolio (like the idiotic patent they just took out on their homepage) I bet we'd have all the corporate flavour of the week groupies heralding their courageousness in fighting patent trolls. But because it's Microsoft, we have idiots like parent poster saying they should abandon the lawsuit and instead seek to reform the patent system.
Google's "patent" is just a design patent, which is massively different from what most people think of as a patent. It is only the fact that Slashdot editors are incompetent that it got here.
Second, the i4i suit does not involve any patent trolls.
If they had concentrated on reforming the patent system, instead of just bolstering their patent portfolio, they could have prevented this. But instead, they prize their own ability to do this to the little guy too highly.
Over its lifetime, Microsoft has filed something like two patent lawsuits involving software patents, not against little guys. I don't recall the details of one, but the other was in a case where the other side was threatening Microsoft over patents, negotiations failed, and both sides filed suit.
During that same time, they've been on the receiving end of patent lawsuits, often from the little guys, numerous times.
The fact is that they have pushed for patent reform to make it harder to get software patents. You make it sound like Microsoft is so powerful that they could cause reform single-handedly, if they just asked for it. Other companies, such as patent giant IBM, have some influence too.
According to Wikipedia, they were looking for something more memorable than Jomax Technologies. Someone suggested Big Daddy, but that was taken, and then someone just came up with Go Daddy.
Slashdot Mirror
and I thought all works of government were to be public domain (except classified info)
Works of Federal government.
And yet, his own software, that he sells as $40 shareware for the Mac (...why?!), is designed specifically to display copyrighted and/or trademarked cover art of other people's software/music/etc, in its entirety, without the permission of the copyright/trademark holders. Did he ask them? I doubt it. Is it Fair Use? Pretty clear "no" on that, it doesn't check any of the boxes.
He gets the artwork from Amazon, with permission. In fact, Amazon provides an API for this.
It sure sounds like a joke, doesn't it? I mean, come on, he's all bent out of shape over a woodgrain texture? It's not like they took his logo or something distinctive about his application. It sounds pretty petty to me.
How is it not distinctive? Anyone who has used Delicious Library would look at those screenshots and instantly assume they are looking at a mobile version of DL.
So did this guy contact EVERY company and artist about offering to sell the cover images online?
He gets the covers from Amazon. And yes, he contacted Amazon and got permission to use the covers the way he uses them.
The 40 games listed on the above link have an average rating of 2.6, and range from a rating of 1 star to 4 stars, which is not bad, but not particularly good either
Actually, it is pretty good. For some reason, there are a lot of idiots rating iPhone apps, and apps that perform exactly as the developer claimed, flawlessly, get a lot of low ratings. I've seen a lot of reviews that go like this: "This app does what it is advertised to do, perfectly. It's very useful. But I wish it also did (function that makes no sense for this app)" and they rate it 1 star.
Unless this thing compiles to native code, a runtime interpreter isn't allowed by Apple's SDK.
That's not really quite correct. Apple has approved apps that use a runtime interpreter. They key is that the app cannot allow any means of downloading "outside" code to run on the interpreter. If you want to implement your app as an interpreter for language Foo, which is only used to interpret the Foo code you include as part of the app, that should be OK.
When OO 3 came out, it severely broke spreadsheets in Symphony. It wasn't until Symphony 1.3 came out, something like 9 months later, that Symphony gained the ability to handle spreadsheets from OO 3.
Yet if you Google for information on the problem, you'll find pretty much nothing. That one thing in the Lotus forum is the only mention I've found of it.
I conclude from the fact that such a major incompatibility could go virtually unnoticed by most of the OO and Symphony user communities for so long that either almost no one uses Symphony, or Symphony users are closed groups that don't need to exchange documents with outsiders who use OO.
Even scarier would be Stallman, Ballmer, Gates, Jobs, and Torvalds all together in the same room planning to take over the world...
I'd rather see them in a room playing D&D. That would be interesting.
My bet is on a poorly written PHP (which stands for "Please Hack Promptly") app.
But seriously, shouldn't the court be trying to determine infringement, rather than letting the plaintiff view every piece of code Facebook has written?
The plaintiff doesn't get to look at any of the code. It is only looked at by the plaintiff's lawyers and their outside experts. The lawyers in such cases are careful, almost to the point of fanaticism, about making sure that the plaintiff doesn't see anything they are not supposed to see.
With authors, scholars, the DoJ and publishers ripping apart the Google book deal[...]
Add to that list privacy advocates.
What does there settling a patent lawsuit with Microsoft have to do with any of this? Alternatively, if patent litigation involving TomTom is somehow relevant, why did the submitter not mention any of TomTom's suits against other GPS companies?
The reason you keep getting modded as a troll is that you keep making trollish claims, such as the chip cannot be reverse engineered due to DMCA, even after you are shown links that explain why you are wrong.
The chip is a controller chip. There is nothing in the DMCA that prohibits reverse engineering controller chips.
It's not just China we have to worry about, though. There are about a dozen or so elements that are important to US technology that we rely on imports for. Some, like the ones we get from China, we have supplies of ourselves--we just don't mine them because it was cheaper to import, so we can switch to domestic sources, albeit it a higher cost. However, there are some for which the US only has a small supply, such as platinum.
Collectively, these are called strategic minerals, and a distressingly large fraction of the world's supply of many of them are concentrated in small countries that are very politically unstable.
The point of a defensive patent is to protect against other people's patents.
OIN licenses its patents for free, as long as you don't use any of your patents to sue over Linux or various other open projects (PostgreSQL, KDE, Firefox, Mono, and many others).
There are around 11000 births in the US each day, so yes, on average, there is less than 1 birth per zip code per day per gender. The 87 percent figure is quite believable.
Another way to look at it: it takes about 15 bits to encode a zip code, and about 16 bits to encode a birthdate, and 1 bit to encode gender. We are distributing 300 million people into 4 billion bins. The distribution is not uniform, but it is certainly plausible that a lot of people will have their bin all to themselves.
All this talk of "defensive patents" that supposedly "protect the community" is just a fraud. To protect the community, take all the documentation of the patent, and put it in the public domain. Then, anyone who wants can implement the tech, without restriction, forever. Keeping it patented retains the power of the patent holder to deny implementation to someone, sometime.
You have completely misunderstood the point of a defensive patent. The idea is that if someone sues over one of the technologies that the OIN is protecting, OIN can look in its portfolio for a patent that the suer is infringing, and that can be used against the suer.
what are they trying to achieve?
Production of creative works in the context of a free market system.
It can be shown mathematically that under certain assumptions a free market results in the optimal use of resources. Unfortunately, those assumptions do not work for things like recorded music, where the marginal cost of production is essentially zero. Hence, a free market CANNOT be used to efficiently to determine allocation of resources for music production. If you tried a pure free market, you'd end up with massive underproduction.
There are two known ways to solve this. The first way is to completely remove things like music from the free market. Have wealthy patrons, or the government, pay for music production. The results are freely copyable. The advantage of this is that the public can consume all the music it wants. The disadvantage of this is that the public doesn't really have a say in what is produced--they get what the patrons or the government wants.
The second way, which is what we currently use, is to artificially, by force of law, give music those attributes that make it so it does work with a free market system. That means we have to treat copies essentially like loaves of bread--you can't copy them for free. You can only obtain copies produced by the manufacturer (but once you have a copy, you can give it away or resell it).
The big advantage of this approach is that market forces decide what gets produced. The disadvantage is that it makes music cost too much (remember--the economically correct price for digital copies of music should be zero), so you end up with underconsumption. Consumers use less than they want to.
It registers a user? I wonder if this why my Wordpress blog, which generally is not of interest to anyone, suddenly has had several requests for new user registrations.
An important legal principle is that you can't sell something that isn't yours to sell. For example, if I steal a car, "sell" it to a used car dealer, who "sells" it to you, the original owner will be able to recover the car from you, because it remains his car.
Now, imagine you go to a used car dealer, and he sells you a car, and takes your money. As you get ready to drive the car off the lot, he comes up, tells you that they have just found out the car is stolen, hands you your money back, and says "sorry". No one would have a problem with that.
On the other hand, if you drove the car home, used it for a month, maybe customized it, and then the car dealer found it was stolen, so mailed you a check, and sent a repo man out to take the car, that would be a problem. The dealer should have just told the police who they sold the car to, and let the police deal with recovering it.
But what if the customer takes the car home, and then brings it back six months later for an oil change, and the dealer then, while the car is in the shop, finds out it was stolen, and refunds the purchase money then and returns the car to the real owner? OK or not?
Amazon was in a novel situation. They had "sold" an ebook that they could not sell, so the "buyer" had not actually successfully bought the item. Unlike with cars, there is no clear change of possession--you do not drive an ebook off the lot. You get a copy for your device, but your device remains in contact with Amazon (kind of like a car in the shop for an oil change).
I was actually surprised at first that annotations were caught up in the Orwell fiasco, considering that they're stored in files independent from the book itself. I can only assume that the original copyright holder put the squeeze on Amazon, claiming that the notes were "derivative works" or some such thing, and that since the users didn't have the right to the books, they didn't have the rights to the notes. Or else the copyright holder didn't want the user to retain clippings of the book.
A more likely explanation is that Amazon simply did not anticipate ever needing to delete a book while retaining the annotations, so the deleteBook function deletes everything.
If this was Google defending their patent portfolio (like the idiotic patent they just took out on their homepage) I bet we'd have all the corporate flavour of the week groupies heralding their courageousness in fighting patent trolls. But because it's Microsoft, we have idiots like parent poster saying they should abandon the lawsuit and instead seek to reform the patent system.
Google's "patent" is just a design patent, which is massively different from what most people think of as a patent. It is only the fact that Slashdot editors are incompetent that it got here.
Second, the i4i suit does not involve any patent trolls.
If they had concentrated on reforming the patent system, instead of just bolstering their patent portfolio, they could have prevented this. But instead, they prize their own ability to do this to the little guy too highly.
Over its lifetime, Microsoft has filed something like two patent lawsuits involving software patents, not against little guys. I don't recall the details of one, but the other was in a case where the other side was threatening Microsoft over patents, negotiations failed, and both sides filed suit.
During that same time, they've been on the receiving end of patent lawsuits, often from the little guys, numerous times.
The fact is that they have pushed for patent reform to make it harder to get software patents. You make it sound like Microsoft is so powerful that they could cause reform single-handedly, if they just asked for it. Other companies, such as patent giant IBM, have some influence too.
According to Wikipedia, they were looking for something more memorable than Jomax Technologies. Someone suggested Big Daddy, but that was taken, and then someone just came up with Go Daddy.
I'm having trouble finding page 38 of the 36 page brief.