One of the elements of a "fair use" analysis is "the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work." 17 USC 107(4). The device at issue in the Universal Pictures Studios/Sony case (betamax) could not complete a compendium of the X-files as easily. If you think that the Universal Pictures Studios case was well reasoned, then the difference probably doesn't have much weight. However, the decision (to the extent it relied upon fair use) has been roundly criticized over time. (Not as much as Roe v. Wade, but what is?) A revisiting of the issue by a Supreme Court that is more likely to protect business and property rights than the Burger Court could come out differently.
I have had one movie disappear in about two years, and when i cancelled they did not charge me. I subscribe for about half the year -- when the reruns kick in, I watch DVDs. I was worried about that, and there is no clear statement of policy as to who they go after and who they don't.
Novelty requires that the exact, precise thing being patented not have been done before. This is construed very narrowly in most legal systems including the U.S. Once you get into the details of what is being claimed, the "expressed" sequences being patented are not occurring as they do in nature.
For example, I want to patent "brilliant" cut diamonds. Diamonds exist in nature. Those diamonds even have weaknesses of cleavage in the locations of the eventual facets of the diamond. However, the brilliant cut diamond itself is not in nature even though it is waiting to be chiseled out of the diamond.
"inventive step" is the phraseology used in the Patent Cooperation Treaty context, and is the better translation for what many countries use. (For instance, Germany, even though Germans don't use English terminology.)
This reaction was part of Congress' overruling a judge-made "flash of genius" test for patentability. If you work really, really hard, but aren't a genius, you can patent the results of your work, in this country. (It got rid of the distinction of "non-obvious because of intellectual barriers versus non-obvious because nobody wanted to do the 1 billion iterations of a testing and experiment scheme to get the right answer.
Arguably, inventive step would do a better job of excluding most gene patents than our present concepts of non-obviousness.
Courts have a hard enough time figuring out 1) what happened, and 2) what is happening now. Asking them to be crystal ball jockeys is not fair. They deal with the past, the present, and (at best) the near future. If they can put it off until it is clearer (the doctrine of "ripeness") they generally will.
Bork had a tough decision to make, and probably about an hour to make it, tops. I think he made the wrong call, but I also know that I've thought about the issue for more than an hour too.
It couldn't have been that compelling an assault on Bork's character. Otherwise, Patrick Leahy (that's right, the man who is holding up all of the current president's nominees!) decided to attack Bork for earning money and not doing pro bono work while he was desperately trying to pay the bills to (unsuccessfully) save his wife from her cancer.
His character had to be pretty good for Leahy to have to slink that low to even to try to get a shot in.
The courts do it differently. The park service operates under Administrative Law rather than Antitrust Law. Owing to the Administrative Procedures Act (and court cases interpreting it) the agency has to consider and address all of the concerns raised in the comments.
If the same concern is raised by 100 people, then, it only has to write one reply. The agency probably has to consider how many people made the comment also, but it does not have to rewrite the same thing 100 times like a school-detention exercise.
In any case, the decision maker is given a lot of latitude in making a decision. Accordingly, it is important to be cogent, thoughtful, persuasive, polite and respectful.
The X-files went downhill when the writers really, really ran out of stuff to do with Mulder and Scully. They could have seen it coming. Somewhere around season *5* they should have begun transitioning Mulder out. There was still enough of the Scully character to develop for a season or two.
Now, with Doggett, I liked the show again. The Scully + Doggett thing was working for me, and after firmly estabishing Doggett, getting rid of Scully and completing the transition to a new team would have made a lot of sense.
However, they waited too long. They show went flat, and now they are in a position of trying to both transition and rescue the show. I think it is a darn shame. I think with one more season, they could have gotten the show fixed. Maybe the writers were so out of stories, even new characters couldn't keep the writers going. (Actually, I like Doggett *better* than Mulder. It is probably because Patrick can act rings around Duchovny.)
Actually, I have thought about the statement some more, am not sure I am right. HDTV standards haven't been politicized in the same way, and they are certainly screwed up enough.
Having worked in a research lab, I can tell you that who paid for what is often very, very unclear.
Consider a researcher has a research program that has been going for 20 years. He may have been funced at various times by: a) the university (often academic researchers start work on the university's dime), b) government grants, c) private foundation grants, d) his own money. His graduate students may have been supported by any of those various sources or independent scholarship sources. Perhaps a tuition-paying undergraduate contributed some code at some time also.
Just like research equipment, code also accumulates. It may have been traded from other research groups. It is a real mess. Figuring out who owns what can be more or less impossible unless you have a dedicated ground-up code block that is identifiable to a project that has no contributions from anything other than public funding. (Oops, you have a Hertz fellow write 2,000 lines of the 100,000 lines of code... now what?)
Odds are that there are already too many rules regarding the code. Adding another one is just going to bollix up an already intractable mess.
Parallel distribution systems for natural gas and electricity make little sense. However, multiple sources of natural gas and electricity make a lot of sense. Where a monopoly is the only practical solution, you need to minimize the monopoly to solve the problem required.
In telecom, that should be "the last mile" so to speak. We aren't even close to there yet. There are a whole lot of problems which will not be solved until we let people make a lot of money from solving the problem.
I have some different perspectives based on what I am doing at the time...
1) The guts have to be easy to work with. I thing that single-sided boards are probably mandated by air flow for cooling.
2) There are too many cables inside the machine. You have cables going from cards to drives (such Sound Card to CD or DVD) or the motherboard to drives. There are a boatload of cables from the power supply to the drives. I should be able to just slide a drive in from the front and have it make data and power connections. You have one big fat cable dropping down from the drive support along the wall to the motherboard, and another for power daisy-chained along the sides of the drives. Now cooling is a lot easier, and you don't trace amorphous gray ribbon cable around inside or get the twist just so to make the far reach around the other cabling.
3) Too many outside cables. The printer, the keyboard, the mouse, the modem, the gamepad or joystick. Egads, let's make some of this wireless. The case should support lots of wireless devices. The standard case should be able to support a bunch of wireless devices within 5 or so feet (maybe even 10) of the computer.
I have always been astounded at picking 10,000 years as a number. This is longer than written human history. If you think about the technological changes between 8000 B.C. and now, and think of where technology is likely to be even as soon as 3000 A.D. (much less 12000 A.D.) even 1,000 years ought to be plenty.
Of course, you have lots and lots of people who would rather that the waste sit in the temporary storage facilities near major metropolitan areas for the next 10,000 years. That looks VERY good to them. That is the only alternative to Yucca Mountain that I can see, and it is not pretty.
Practically every posting here, every statement made by an interest group or a politician, make it perfectly clear that the very last thing that to be considered to decide where this waste ends up will be the most practical scientific solution currently available. Nobody is saying that there is a better solution than Yucca Mountain, just that Yucca Mountain isn't "good enough." I think the issue must be Yucca Mountain vs. the status quo. The naysayers will just keep lifting their bar otherwise. (100,000 or 1,000,000 or 1,000,000,000,000,000 years, whatever)
Squirrel Killer also has a point. This case set forth a process for evaluating what a major life activity was that did not exist before, and pretty clearly sent it back for further consideration. The Bush-Gore case, having decided that the clock had run out as an essential element of its decision, didn't leave anything to do below except carry out the formalities of signing off on Bush' victory.
Here the Supreme Court explicitly refused to hand the employer a victory. I expect the appellate court to remand for further proceedings, and for the case to settle prior at the trial court prior to a trial. (Civil cases settle 90% of the time or more -- nothing about this case would seem to give it any more legs than any other civil case at this point.)
Juries are mostly about figuring out who is telling the truth, or who is right about what happened in the real world (the facts). Judges are the final voice of what the law is, in fact, just before the jury goes into the jury room, the judge tells the jury what the law is.
The instant-win (called summary judgment) is used only in civil cases (not criminal) when the key facts are not disputed, and the law disposed of the case. It really does save a lot of time and money, because jury trials are not only expensive for the parties, but it would unfairly impose burdens on the jurors when only one outcome is possible under the law.
However, no matter how strong the proof is against you in a criminal case you have a right to a jury trial.
There is also the right to due process. The law must protect against totally unfounded and irrational results. (That is, results that could not be the result of law, but rather the result of racial prejudice, for example.) One person's right to a jury trial is confined by the other person's right to due process.
In its brief on the merits, petitioner asks us to reinstate the District Court's grant of summary judgment to petitioner on the manual task issue.
At the trial court, the employer was given a win without having to go to trial because of a ruling regarding the employees ability to do manual tasks. Assumed in the sentence is that the employer's win was taken away at the appellate court. The employer is asking the Supreme Court to give it its instant-win back.
In its petition for certiorari, however, petitioner did not seek summary judgment; it argued only that the Court of Appeals' reasons for granting partial summary judgment to respondent were unsound.
When the employer wrote the Supreme Court to ask it to hear the case, it did not ask for the instant-win back. It only asked that the employee's instant-win be taken away.
This Court's Rule 14(1)(a) provides: "Only the questions set out in the petition, or fairly included therein, will be considered by the Court." The question whether petitioner was entitled to summary judgment on the manual task issue is therefore not properly before us. See Irvine v. California, 347 U.S. 128, 129--130 (1954).
The Supreme Court has a rule regarding what questions it will address based on what you asked it to address. Therefore, the instant-win for the employer is not in front of the Supreme Court, and it is not going to look at it.
Accordingly, we reverse the Court of Appeals' judgment granting partial summary judgment to respondent and remand the case for further proceedings consistent with this opinion.
The Supreme Court is taking away the employee's instant-win in the appellate court, and sending the case back down for the appellate court, and maybe the trial court, to think about things more, get more proof, have a trial, whatever.
On the contrary, this is a very significant case. It lays out the general rules for determining whether a major life function is impaired. Since CT may or may not rise to that level of impairment in individual cases, they must be sorted out individually. This one is being sent back for that to happen.
This is not a final victory for either the employer or the employee. The employee had walked into the Supreme Court with a grant of summary judgment (victory without trial). The case is just being remanded for further proceedings in light of the Supreme Court's clarification.
In its brief on the merits, petitioner asks us to reinstate the District Court's grant of summary judgment to petitioner on the manual task issue. In its petition for certiorari, however, petitioner did not seek summary judgment; it argued only that the Court of Appeals' reasons for granting partial summary judgment to respondent were unsound. This Court's Rule 14(1)(a) provides: "Only the questions set out in the petition, or fairly included therein, will be considered by the Court." The question whether petitioner was entitled to summary judgment on the manual task issue is therefore not properly before us. See Irvine v. California, 347 U.S. 128, 129--130 (1954).
Accordingly, we reverse the Court of Appeals' judgment granting partial summary judgment to respondent and remand the case for further proceedings consistent with this opinion.
Sure, there will be false positives. You have to consider the value of a screening technique to the alternatives. Currently random spot checks are being done at the gate, and virtually all of those checks are "false positives" and will remain so.
If the spot checks are done on every tenth person, you have a 10% chance of checking a terrorist walking up. If you have a screening method that is 80% to pick out the terrorists, and will result in checking every tenth person then you have no increase in false positives, but a factor of eight increase in efficacy.
Public safety is not going to be founded on some amorphous public policy change. There is no conceivable change that would have appeased bin Laden. I don't see that the Unabomber or McVeigh would have been easily dissuaded by such things either. A free society is always going to piss someone off with the choices it makes. Rational, respectful, effective policing is essential to maintaining a free society, and as events of the past year demonstrated, essential to keeping a free society safe.
What's in my wallet is my business. If a storeowner, or anyone with the right equipment can read how much money I have in my pocket, that bugs me. Heck, for all I know a well-equipped hacker/mugger will be able to spot targets using them.
I see, so your view is that XEROX PARC is about strangling innovation. They are likely the most ripped-off institution on the planet. Why shouldn't they get a fair royalty? I just guess it burns you whenever a dollar goes into someone else's pocket.
There can be quite a stretch between when a technology is invented or marketed and when a patent issues. For the type of technology for TIVO, I would expect at 15-18 month period before the patent office even looked at the application. Then you get into 3-6 month cycles of the patent office acting and the inventor responding. It is not at all unusual for patents to take 2.5-3.5 years to issue after application.
In the US, you have 1 year after you make your invention public to get the application on file. (The US system emphasizes getting the product to the public over getting a quick patent filing -- most of the rest of the world has the opposite emphasis.) A credible timeline could look like:
1) First player offered for sale (day 1)
2) Patent application filed (year one)
3) Patent application read by patent office (year 2.5)
4) Patent issues (year 4.5)
That would be a credible timeline if the inventor didn't have to fight tooth and nail to get the patent. Things can be a year shorter in easy cases, or much longer in hard cases.
One of the patent applications was filed in April 1998, the other in August of 1997. So we are dealing with 3.5-4.25 years. It looks to me like they got their applications on file and got them allowed in a reasonably quick time.
Submarine patents aren't an issue any more, because the duration of a patent is determined by the filing date, not the issue date. (International harmony and lessons learned owing to the practices of Jerome Lemelson made for that change)
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One of the elements of a "fair use" analysis is "the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work." 17 USC 107(4). The device at issue in the Universal Pictures Studios/Sony case (betamax) could not complete a compendium of the X-files as easily. If you think that the Universal Pictures Studios case was well reasoned, then the difference probably doesn't have much weight. However, the decision (to the extent it relied upon fair use) has been roundly criticized over time. (Not as much as Roe v. Wade, but what is?) A revisiting of the issue by a Supreme Court that is more likely to protect business and property rights than the Burger Court could come out differently.
I have had one movie disappear in about two years, and when i cancelled they did not charge me. I subscribe for about half the year -- when the reruns kick in, I watch DVDs. I was worried about that, and there is no clear statement of policy as to who they go after and who they don't.
The ninth circuit has improved in recent years. Also, as one judge on the Ninth Circuit said: "they [the Supreme Court] can't reverse them all!"
Novelty requires that the exact, precise thing being patented not have been done before. This is construed very narrowly in most legal systems including the U.S. Once you get into the details of what is being claimed, the "expressed" sequences being patented are not occurring as they do in nature.
For example, I want to patent "brilliant" cut diamonds. Diamonds exist in nature. Those diamonds even have weaknesses of cleavage in the locations of the eventual facets of the diamond. However, the brilliant cut diamond itself is not in nature even though it is waiting to be chiseled out of the diamond.
"inventive step" is the phraseology used in the Patent Cooperation Treaty context, and is the better translation for what many countries use. (For instance, Germany, even though Germans don't use English terminology.)
This reaction was part of Congress' overruling a judge-made "flash of genius" test for patentability. If you work really, really hard, but aren't a genius, you can patent the results of your work, in this country. (It got rid of the distinction of "non-obvious because of intellectual barriers versus non-obvious because nobody wanted to do the 1 billion iterations of a testing and experiment scheme to get the right answer.
Arguably, inventive step would do a better job of excluding most gene patents than our present concepts of non-obviousness.
Hold on there.
Courts have a hard enough time figuring out 1) what happened, and 2) what is happening now. Asking them to be crystal ball jockeys is not fair. They deal with the past, the present, and (at best) the near future. If they can put it off until it is clearer (the doctrine of "ripeness") they generally will.
Bork had a tough decision to make, and probably about an hour to make it, tops. I think he made the wrong call, but I also know that I've thought about the issue for more than an hour too.
It couldn't have been that compelling an assault on Bork's character. Otherwise, Patrick Leahy (that's right, the man who is holding up all of the current president's nominees!) decided to attack Bork for earning money and not doing pro bono work while he was desperately trying to pay the bills to (unsuccessfully) save his wife from her cancer.
His character had to be pretty good for Leahy to have to slink that low to even to try to get a shot in.
The courts do it differently. The park service operates under Administrative Law rather than Antitrust Law. Owing to the Administrative Procedures Act (and court cases interpreting it) the agency has to consider and address all of the concerns raised in the comments.
If the same concern is raised by 100 people, then, it only has to write one reply. The agency probably has to consider how many people made the comment also, but it does not have to rewrite the same thing 100 times like a school-detention exercise.
In any case, the decision maker is given a lot of latitude in making a decision. Accordingly, it is important to be cogent, thoughtful, persuasive, polite and respectful.
The X-files went downhill when the writers really, really ran out of stuff to do with Mulder and Scully. They could have seen it coming. Somewhere around season *5* they should have begun transitioning Mulder out. There was still enough of the Scully character to develop for a season or two.
Now, with Doggett, I liked the show again. The Scully + Doggett thing was working for me, and after firmly estabishing Doggett, getting rid of Scully and completing the transition to a new team would have made a lot of sense.
However, they waited too long. They show went flat, and now they are in a position of trying to both transition and rescue the show. I think it is a darn shame. I think with one more season, they could have gotten the show fixed. Maybe the writers were so out of stories, even new characters couldn't keep the writers going. (Actually, I like Doggett *better* than Mulder. It is probably because Patrick can act rings around Duchovny.)
Actually, I have thought about the statement some more, am not sure I am right. HDTV standards haven't been politicized in the same way, and they are certainly screwed up enough.
Having worked in a research lab, I can tell you that who paid for what is often very, very unclear.
Consider a researcher has a research program that has been going for 20 years. He may have been funced at various times by: a) the university (often academic researchers start work on the university's dime), b) government grants, c) private foundation grants, d) his own money. His graduate students may have been supported by any of those various sources or independent scholarship sources. Perhaps a tuition-paying undergraduate contributed some code at some time also.
Just like research equipment, code also accumulates. It may have been traded from other research groups. It is a real mess. Figuring out who owns what can be more or less impossible unless you have a dedicated ground-up code block that is identifiable to a project that has no contributions from anything other than public funding. (Oops, you have a Hertz fellow write 2,000 lines of the 100,000 lines of code... now what?)
Odds are that there are already too many rules regarding the code. Adding another one is just going to bollix up an already intractable mess.
Yes, but if the problem can be reduced to an engineering problem, we are home free.
Parallel distribution systems for natural gas and electricity make little sense. However, multiple sources of natural gas and electricity make a lot of sense. Where a monopoly is the only practical solution, you need to minimize the monopoly to solve the problem required.
In telecom, that should be "the last mile" so to speak. We aren't even close to there yet. There are a whole lot of problems which will not be solved until we let people make a lot of money from solving the problem.
I have some different perspectives based on what I am doing at the time...
1) The guts have to be easy to work with. I thing that single-sided boards are probably mandated by air flow for cooling.
2) There are too many cables inside the machine. You have cables going from cards to drives (such Sound Card to CD or DVD) or the motherboard to drives. There are a boatload of cables from the power supply to the drives. I should be able to just slide a drive in from the front and have it make data and power connections. You have one big fat cable dropping down from the drive support along the wall to the motherboard, and another for power daisy-chained along the sides of the drives. Now cooling is a lot easier, and you don't trace amorphous gray ribbon cable around inside or get the twist just so to make the far reach around the other cabling.
3) Too many outside cables. The printer, the keyboard, the mouse, the modem, the gamepad or joystick. Egads, let's make some of this wireless. The case should support lots of wireless devices. The standard case should be able to support a bunch of wireless devices within 5 or so feet (maybe even 10) of the computer.
I have always been astounded at picking 10,000 years as a number. This is longer than written human history. If you think about the technological changes between 8000 B.C. and now, and think of where technology is likely to be even as soon as 3000 A.D. (much less 12000 A.D.) even 1,000 years ought to be plenty.
Of course, you have lots and lots of people who would rather that the waste sit in the temporary storage facilities near major metropolitan areas for the next 10,000 years. That looks VERY good to them. That is the only alternative to Yucca Mountain that I can see, and it is not pretty.
Practically every posting here, every statement made by an interest group or a politician, make it perfectly clear that the very last thing that to be considered to decide where this waste ends up will be the most practical scientific solution currently available. Nobody is saying that there is a better solution than Yucca Mountain, just that Yucca Mountain isn't "good enough." I think the issue must be Yucca Mountain vs. the status quo. The naysayers will just keep lifting their bar otherwise. (100,000 or 1,000,000 or 1,000,000,000,000,000 years, whatever)
Squirrel Killer also has a point. This case set forth a process for evaluating what a major life activity was that did not exist before, and pretty clearly sent it back for further consideration. The Bush-Gore case, having decided that the clock had run out as an essential element of its decision, didn't leave anything to do below except carry out the formalities of signing off on Bush' victory.
Here the Supreme Court explicitly refused to hand the employer a victory. I expect the appellate court to remand for further proceedings, and for the case to settle prior at the trial court prior to a trial. (Civil cases settle 90% of the time or more -- nothing about this case would seem to give it any more legs than any other civil case at this point.)
Juries are mostly about figuring out who is telling the truth, or who is right about what happened in the real world (the facts). Judges are the final voice of what the law is, in fact, just before the jury goes into the jury room, the judge tells the jury what the law is.
The instant-win (called summary judgment) is used only in civil cases (not criminal) when the key facts are not disputed, and the law disposed of the case. It really does save a lot of time and money, because jury trials are not only expensive for the parties, but it would unfairly impose burdens on the jurors when only one outcome is possible under the law.
However, no matter how strong the proof is against you in a criminal case you have a right to a jury trial.
There is also the right to due process. The law must protect against totally unfounded and irrational results. (That is, results that could not be the result of law, but rather the result of racial prejudice, for example.) One person's right to a jury trial is confined by the other person's right to due process.
At the trial court, the employer was given a win without having to go to trial because of a ruling regarding the employees ability to do manual tasks. Assumed in the sentence is that the employer's win was taken away at the appellate court. The employer is asking the Supreme Court to give it its instant-win back.
In its petition for certiorari, however, petitioner did not seek summary judgment; it argued only that the Court of Appeals' reasons for granting partial summary judgment to respondent were unsound.
When the employer wrote the Supreme Court to ask it to hear the case, it did not ask for the instant-win back. It only asked that the employee's instant-win be taken away.
This Court's Rule 14(1)(a) provides: "Only the questions set out in the petition, or fairly included therein, will be considered by the Court." The question whether petitioner was entitled to summary judgment on the manual task issue is therefore not properly before us. See Irvine v. California, 347 U.S. 128, 129--130 (1954).
The Supreme Court has a rule regarding what questions it will address based on what you asked it to address. Therefore, the instant-win for the employer is not in front of the Supreme Court, and it is not going to look at it.
Accordingly, we reverse the Court of Appeals' judgment granting partial summary judgment to respondent and remand the case for further proceedings consistent with this opinion.
The Supreme Court is taking away the employee's instant-win in the appellate court, and sending the case back down for the appellate court, and maybe the trial court, to think about things more, get more proof, have a trial, whatever.
On the contrary, this is a very significant case. It lays out the general rules for determining whether a major life function is impaired. Since CT may or may not rise to that level of impairment in individual cases, they must be sorted out individually. This one is being sent back for that to happen.
In its brief on the merits, petitioner asks us to reinstate the District Court's grant of summary judgment to petitioner on the manual task issue. In its petition for certiorari, however, petitioner did not seek summary judgment; it argued only that the Court of Appeals' reasons for granting partial summary judgment to respondent were unsound. This Court's Rule 14(1)(a) provides: "Only the questions set out in the petition, or fairly included therein, will be considered by the Court." The question whether petitioner was entitled to summary judgment on the manual task issue is therefore not properly before us. See Irvine v. California, 347 U.S. 128, 129--130 (1954).
Accordingly, we reverse the Court of Appeals' judgment granting partial summary judgment to respondent and remand the case for further proceedings consistent with this opinion.
Sure, there will be false positives. You have to consider the value of a screening technique to the alternatives. Currently random spot checks are being done at the gate, and virtually all of those checks are "false positives" and will remain so.
If the spot checks are done on every tenth person, you have a 10% chance of checking a terrorist walking up. If you have a screening method that is 80% to pick out the terrorists, and will result in checking every tenth person then you have no increase in false positives, but a factor of eight increase in efficacy.
Public safety is not going to be founded on some amorphous public policy change. There is no conceivable change that would have appeased bin Laden. I don't see that the Unabomber or McVeigh would have been easily dissuaded by such things either. A free society is always going to piss someone off with the choices it makes. Rational, respectful, effective policing is essential to maintaining a free society, and as events of the past year demonstrated, essential to keeping a free society safe.
What's in my wallet is my business. If a storeowner, or anyone with the right equipment can read how much money I have in my pocket, that bugs me. Heck, for all I know a well-equipped hacker/mugger will be able to spot targets using them.
I see, so your view is that XEROX PARC is about strangling innovation. They are likely the most ripped-off institution on the planet. Why shouldn't they get a fair royalty? I just guess it burns you whenever a dollar goes into someone else's pocket.
The application was a continuation of an application filed in October, 1993. That's likely a significantly harder date to beat than the 1995 date.
There can be quite a stretch between when a technology is invented or marketed and when a patent issues. For the type of technology for TIVO, I would expect at 15-18 month period before the patent office even looked at the application. Then you get into 3-6 month cycles of the patent office acting and the inventor responding. It is not at all unusual for patents to take 2.5-3.5 years to issue after application.
In the US, you have 1 year after you make your invention public to get the application on file. (The US system emphasizes getting the product to the public over getting a quick patent filing -- most of the rest of the world has the opposite emphasis.) A credible timeline could look like:
1) First player offered for sale (day 1)
2) Patent application filed (year one)
3) Patent application read by patent office (year 2.5)
4) Patent issues (year 4.5)
That would be a credible timeline if the inventor didn't have to fight tooth and nail to get the patent. Things can be a year shorter in easy cases, or much longer in hard cases.
One of the patent applications was filed in April 1998, the other in August of 1997. So we are dealing with 3.5-4.25 years. It looks to me like they got their applications on file and got them allowed in a reasonably quick time.
Submarine patents aren't an issue any more, because the duration of a patent is determined by the filing date, not the issue date. (International harmony and lessons learned owing to the practices of Jerome Lemelson made for that change)