Let's look at the claims, the part of the patent that defines the legal rights. The first claim is...
1. A purified preparation of pluripotent human embryonic stem cells which (i) will proliferate in an in vitro culture for over one year, (ii) maintains a karyotype in which the chromosomes are euploid and not altered through prolonged culture, (iii) maintains the potential to differentiate to derivatives of endoderm, mesoderm, and ectoderm tissues throughout the culture, and (iv) is inhibited from differentiation when cultured on a fibroblast feeder layer.
You can read the patent to find out what the terms mean. If a stem cell line does not have all of the features above, it doesn't infringe. A short-lived stem cell line might have been a practical way around this patent before President Bush restricted federal funding for research involved with making more stem cell lines.
I am very sorry I drafted the previous posting poorly. Absolutely no personal attack was intended.
My intention was to insinuate that certain law professors were smoking something. My point is that there are SOME people who want the doors to courthouses to be more open to some people than others. I think that the law professors who think that it is even *possible* to have them be more open to poor people than rich people are not connected to reality regardless of the purity of their motives.
My point in offering the point about law professors was to admit that your views are clearly within the NON-JUDICIAL spectrum of thought. Quite frankly, the United States is the most plaintiff-friendly legal system in the world that I know of. Part and parcel of that is a very low level of contact required for anyone to sue anyone. The jurisdictional part of that development well precedes the litigation explosions of the 80s and 90s.
Nevertheless, although close to the line (and I can't really say how the Supreme Court would rule on this one) the court's opinion is not unreasonable in light of existing Supreme Court precedent.
The Nolo page is quite correct that "minimum contacts" is the standard. Throwing a rock at someone standing in a state would clearly be a "minimum contact" with the state. When a guy named Toeppen put a picture of Pana, Illinois on a web page at the domain panavision.com he got himself locked into personal jurisdiction in California under the "minimum contacts" standard. (Personally, I hate that case.) Although not the Supreme Court, the 9th Circuit is pretty much the same thing for California purposes.
There is a 9th Circuit copyright case that very strongly protects the right to reverse engineer under the copyright act. The merits of the defense can be very strong. If jurisdiction (in a vacuum) exists in both California and Indiana (and the defendant has never said that the ONLY problem is that the case is not being heard in Indiana) then resolving the tension is covered by the doctrine of forum non conveniens, not personal jurisdiction.
This is really run-of-the mill law. People in tons of non-Internet industries have been facing it for decades. If the defendant wins the personal jurisdiction issue, then he gets dead-meat sued in Indiana, for what now would be trivial savings. (Live in Texas. Defending in Indiana is cheaper than defending in California?) When is the best time to confront the merits rather than run away based on legal technicalities that cannot be avoided indefinitely?
The "American Rule" of legal costs is that each party bears his own costs. It makes it easy for a plaintiff to bring a suit fearlessly. Sometimes the little guy benefits, and sometimes he is oppressed. But this is not a debate about the "loser pays" European rule.
The principle of jurisdiction (in this country) is to be sure to afford legal recourse to wronged people.
BIGCORP builds a catapault in Indiana, aims it at Joe and Jane in California, and smashes poor Joe and Jane to jelly. Joe's and Jane's poor orphan child Joey can sue BIGCORP in California, but can't get to Indiana. In your world, suit over, BIGCORP gets to cackle at Joey and how powerless California's courts are over BIGCORP.
We don't have different laws for different people, do we?
Let's not confuse the jurisdiction issue with whether Indiana is a better location than California for the suit. The question that was litigated is whether California is a possible location, irrespective of the rest of the universe.
There are law professors that want to do some sliding-scale facts-and-circumstances case-by-case jurisdictional stuff. All of this requires the principle that the courthouse doors are opened or closed depending on who you are. Anyone who thinks that such rules favor LITTLE PEOPLE in the long run are smoking something with quite a bit of kick.
The judge does not know, and cannot know whether it was throwing a rock illegally or handing a rock legally until the law suit is DECIDED.
It is illogical to say that the law suit cannot be FILED because the plaintiff is wrong. If the plaintiff is wrong, PROVE the plaintiff is wrong. You prove things in courts. The judge hears a lawsuit to figure out who is right and who is wrong without assuming the final conclusion.
Jurisdiction is not about who is right or wrong. It is about whether the judge has the power to EVEN LISTEN to the parties. The defendant was saying that the judge in California was not allowed to read one word the plaintiffs wrote or hear one word they spoke about this matter. The defendnat's statement was not "what I did was legal" it was "what I did was beyond your reach no matter how bad it was or how badly people were hurt or how badly I intended it or how illegal it was because you cannot reach ME."
Of course, the position in this discussion is that open source programmers get to tell judges that they are beyond the reach of a judge because they are open source programmers and that when they say they are beyond the reach of a court or are right the judge has to rule in his favor. Hah.
Looking at quotes of the defendant's testimony, he admitted to an awful lot.
If you are standing in Nevada, and throw a rock and hit someone standing in California, why can't a California court hear it? It seems sense to me. If you could throw the rock from Indiana, that doesn't make any logical difference to me.
Our hero admitted that he knew what he was doing would hurt people in California. He threw the (figurative) rock anyway. Maybe he thought it was legal to throw the rock. It looks like he testified that he even knew (or suspected) it was illegal to throw the rock. Maybe he was right, maybe he was wrong -- he isn't a lawyer after all.
A guy who says he got hit with a rock does not have to prove his whole case to get into the courtroom door. He has to allege that he got hit by a rock, and then prove it at trial, not at the beginning of the case.
I think that the real indignation being voice in this thread is with the ALLEGATIONS. That is, I have not seen one post that said the ONLY complaint the poster had was that the case wasn't decided in Indiana. The decision was the California was a POSSIBLE place to hear the dispute.
Since the defendant lives in Texas now, I really don't see why Indiana would be such a better place apart from the fact that the movie industry is probably strong in California and weak in Indiana. On the other hand, would you rather have this case in front of a Palo Alto jury or a Bloomington jury?
If the whole point is that the defendant didn't do anything wrong, which is the thrust of 90% of the posts -- fine -- prove it up and get the case dismissed.
I'm not sure that this is any worse than Panavision v. Toeppen. I thought that the jurisdictional issue in the Toeppen case was decided wrong, but I can't fault the state court for getting to the result it got to in view of that.
(There are real problems with American personal jurisdiction law, entirely the fault of the Supreme Court in cases that have absolutely nothing to do with Open Source. Volkswagens, The National Enquirer, Burger King restaurants, divorce cases, tag-you-are-it games and etc., etc. The rest of America lives with those problems too.)
This judge was following a federal district judge in California, more or less. Winning this case in front of any other trial judge is going to be a steep uphill battle. No court is required to follow them, but on the other hand, getting a different result requires convincing a federal judge that TWO other federal judges on opposite sides of the country were wrong. Good luck!
Actually, there is a story at the University of Chicago about Enrico Fermi that more or less is along those lines.
During test blasts during the Manhattan Project the engineers would set up all sorts of equipment to measure the shock waves in the ground to estimate the energy in the blast of the atomic bomb.
During one blast, Fermi tore a piece of paper into small squares and dropped them on the floor of his bunker. During the blast, he looked at how far/fast the pieces of paper traveled. Then, knowing the distance of the bunker from the blast, and God knows what else was in his head, he used his 6" slide rule and calculated a result that was within 10% of what the monitoring equipment and involved calculations revealed some time later.
The lesson of this was supposedly, the bigger the mind, the smaller the slide rule.
USENET did have a solution, it had moderated newsgroups! Though, by and large, such were not necessary. The signal to noise ratio was relatively high. Kill files are good when idiots are rare, but not so effective when they predominate.
The world has changed in a couple of decades. We have gone from removing occassional trash to gleaning trash for useful material. It is a sad transformation.
Well, the writers had allowed publication within a particular context, that is a particular newspaper. The database owners destroyed that context, and therefore it was not a publication as permitted by the author.
However, this is exactly the kind of context change that happens when you make "deep links" rather than linking to the main home page. Was the Supreme Court thinking of the deep linking issue? (remember the Ticketmaster v. Microsoft case)
Probably not a genuine worry, but only the paranoid survive, right?
1) The government generally gets a royalty-free license to the any patent deriving from government-funded research. Lots of patents begin with a "the government may have certain rights in this invention" with a citation to the grant number.
2) The government makes its money by taxing the corporate profits and other economic activity arising from the invention/patent. The point of the current proposed legislation is to get a bigger "cut" of that activity. I think that's misdirected -- the government should be investing in basic science, which generally would not necessarily have any detectable income stream. Once the government starts worrying about its "traceable" cut, it will only fund applied research. Ick.
3) Having been a science graduate student at a major research university, my reaction to the various forms of whining about "freedom", "strings", "deadlines", etc. Grow up -- you are living off someone else's money. You are a serf to your research advisor anyway. I don't see the point of whining about responding to corporate demands rather than getting the research published in time for the next (public) funding cycle. When you finally get your Ph.D., finish a post-doc or two, you can choose whether you jump for public-funding reviewers and senior faculty, or your corporate manager. Until then, why sweat the difference?
A transfer of copyright ownership, other than by operation of law, is not valid unless an instrument of conveyance, or a note or memorandum of the transfer, is in writing and signed by the owner of the rights conveyed, or such owner's duly authorized agent.
Please don't confuse "useful" with "made it." You can get a patent on something that has never been made if you can explain how to make and use it such that ordinary people in the field have the benefit of the invention.
The idea of usefulness in patent law is darn minimal. For a chemical, it can't be "if you make a brick of it, it can be a doorstop", but if you know your chemical discovery could 1) be a great research opportunity, and 2) used as kitty litter, you can patent it as the second and not the first, even if it did cost $10,000 an ounce to make. (Note: you can patent the chemical qua chemical for all applications as long as you provide ONE utility.)
The answer to that is relatively old, at least with respect to chemicals. Just because something would be interesting to study, does not make it patentable. I would expect the patent office to adhere to that answer until forcibly dislodged.
Something needs to be actually useful, not just potentially useful.
MBA programs offer a lot of different opportunities. For example, the courses cover accounting, organizational politics, marketing, negotiation, etc.
If you obtain a position where you need to be able to read a balance sheet, motivate employees, build credibility with higher management, negotiate, yada, yada, you can learn valuable things in the MBA program and apply them to your job. (If you think such things are irrelevant to techies, consider that if techies were better armed to deal with organization politics, the space shuttle Challenger might never have exploded.)
Apart from MBA-defined career tracks, such as investment banking, most of the opinions I have heard prefer a weekend/evening MBA program where you improve skills called upon for either the job you have or the promotion you want.
Therefore, you are probably better off asking yourself where you want to go, and then seeing if an MBA program supplies the missing elements. You can do the cost-benefit analysis as to whether the improvement in career track is worth the time and expense you would have to invest.
Pot odors would be enough to get a warrant for sure. Loud music, if a distubance of the peace, could justify him going up and knocking on the door and getting a better whiff. Heck, might justify an arrest w/o a warrant, but I don't think so.
The justification for scanning Kyllo is that he lived NEXT DOOR to somebody the cops suspected of growing pot. No noise, no smell, no bother, no justification, just random nosiness.
The government was watching the light bulbs inside the house. It was not watching smoke emerging from the chimney, or feeling heat on the walls of the house. (As I recall, in this case, the lamps were in the attic, and the heat coming from the roof.)
It really comes down to what is reasonably considered to be in "plain view." Once you put your trash out for collection, it is, but while it is on the back porch in the trash can, it isn't. If you can see it from a window by the front door it isn't, but if you can see it with a telesecope from the church steeple 5 blocks away, it isn't.
It all comes down to the word "reasonable", in the context of home privacy. They sat 9 grandmas and grandpas down, and came out with this result. Change the facts a little, and maybe the votes are different. In this area of the law it is possible to overcomplicate it.
In general, home cases are mostly about the privacy of the home, not the needs of police. If he'd been doing this growing in the empty room above his gas station, he'd have been nailed for sure.
The police do not have to be blind to what your neighbors can readily see and know. "General public use" surely means the police officer can wear ordinary corrective lenses or contacts when looking at your house. High-powered telescopes are out, as such behavior is generally illegal even for private people for looking into homes. (Peeping Tom laws) The whole question turns around what is "reasonable."
Hold on -- he is entitled to not be discriminated against because of the content of the speech. If you get to continue speaking because the university legal department likes your point of view, but get gagged if they don't that's content regulation.
If the government is going to support private speech, it cannot discriminate based on whether it agrees or not. (Distinguished from the situation where the government is the speaker -- then the government gets to send the message it wants.)
The present fundamental tenet of the anti-nuclear crowd is that there is no possibility of safe storage of nuclear materials long term. (Except as in the native ores that we make the materials from, perhaps.) Now this? Or does the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists consider the Union of Concerned Scientists completely misguided? I wouldn't think so.
The Federal Government is a government of limited, enumerated powers. The copyright clause does have a "limited time" requirement. However, Congress also has a power to regulate international commerce. It is not at all clear that congress could not use its commerce powers to accomplish the same goal. In fact, it is not at all clear that Congress could not create a domestic perpetual copyright using commerce clause powers. After all, that is precisely how the government has implemented (potentially) perpetual rights for trademarks.
Certainly, there are positive limits on federal government power, mostly in the Bill of Rights, reverse incorporation doctrine, yada, yada.
We already, pursuant to the Berne Convention, give foreign copyrights better treatment than domestic ones. For example, we don't require registration of foreign copyrights to initiate a copyright lawsuit.
Sure, the power of the purse does come into it. Witness our current non-payment of UN dues.
This is clearly a rough transcript prior to corrections by the attorneys. I would not be surprised if the court reporter transcribed "pixels" as "pickles."
(a) Except as otherwise provided in this title, whoever without authority makes, uses, offers to sell, or sells any patented invention, within the United States or imports into the United States any patented invention during the term of the patent therefor, infringes the patent.
Please note USES. In the case of the defendants in this case, SELLS and OFFERS TO SELL apply, and IMPORTS might also.
Companies don't go after consumers, it is just too big a pain in the ass. But they could. (Oh, they can't sue the company that sold to you and then sue you. When they get their damage award, the sold product gets an implied license -- no double dipping.)
Right, you can't prove a negative. The person who can prove the positive in this case has the burden.
1) The Plaintiff has said he can prove that the magnets in question infringe the claims of his patent.
2) Having bought a magnet from a LICENSED source is a DEFENSE to patent infringement. Once the Plaintiff has proved the magnets infringe, it is up to the defendant to prove his defense. All he has to do is prove he bought from a licensed source.
Each party is proving a positive. Requiring the patent holder to prove THE ABSENCE OF A LICENSE is forcing the proving of a negative. As you point out that is illogical. That is why the law does not do it that way.
Prior to the GATT amendments in the mid-90s, the term was 17 years after the patent issued. Patents that date from before then get the longer of 20 from the filing date or 17 from the issue date.
The 20 year from date of filing is the new rule, and can be adjusted for the provisional patent application above as well as delays that are not the fault of the applicant. Then you can get a patent term extension to make up for the government's slowness.
Slashdot Mirror
Let's look at the claims, the part of the patent that defines the legal rights. The first claim is...
1. A purified preparation of pluripotent human embryonic stem cells which (i) will proliferate in an in vitro culture for over one year, (ii) maintains a karyotype in which the chromosomes are euploid and not altered through prolonged culture, (iii) maintains the potential to differentiate to derivatives of endoderm, mesoderm, and ectoderm tissues throughout the culture, and (iv) is inhibited from differentiation when cultured on a fibroblast feeder layer.
You can read the patent to find out what the terms mean. If a stem cell line does not have all of the features above, it doesn't infringe. A short-lived stem cell line might have been a practical way around this patent before President Bush restricted federal funding for research involved with making more stem cell lines.
I am very sorry I drafted the previous posting poorly. Absolutely no personal attack was intended.
My intention was to insinuate that certain law professors were smoking something. My point is that there are SOME people who want the doors to courthouses to be more open to some people than others. I think that the law professors who think that it is even *possible* to have them be more open to poor people than rich people are not connected to reality regardless of the purity of their motives.
My point in offering the point about law professors was to admit that your views are clearly within the NON-JUDICIAL spectrum of thought. Quite frankly, the United States is the most plaintiff-friendly legal system in the world that I know of. Part and parcel of that is a very low level of contact required for anyone to sue anyone. The jurisdictional part of that development well precedes the litigation explosions of the 80s and 90s.
Nevertheless, although close to the line (and I can't really say how the Supreme Court would rule on this one) the court's opinion is not unreasonable in light of existing Supreme Court precedent.
The Nolo page is quite correct that "minimum contacts" is the standard. Throwing a rock at someone standing in a state would clearly be a "minimum contact" with the state. When a guy named Toeppen put a picture of Pana, Illinois on a web page at the domain panavision.com he got himself locked into personal jurisdiction in California under the "minimum contacts" standard. (Personally, I hate that case.) Although not the Supreme Court, the 9th Circuit is pretty much the same thing for California purposes.
There is a 9th Circuit copyright case that very strongly protects the right to reverse engineer under the copyright act. The merits of the defense can be very strong. If jurisdiction (in a vacuum) exists in both California and Indiana (and the defendant has never said that the ONLY problem is that the case is not being heard in Indiana) then resolving the tension is covered by the doctrine of forum non conveniens, not personal jurisdiction.
This is really run-of-the mill law. People in tons of non-Internet industries have been facing it for decades. If the defendant wins the personal jurisdiction issue, then he gets dead-meat sued in Indiana, for what now would be trivial savings. (Live in Texas. Defending in Indiana is cheaper than defending in California?) When is the best time to confront the merits rather than run away based on legal technicalities that cannot be avoided indefinitely?
The "American Rule" of legal costs is that each party bears his own costs. It makes it easy for a plaintiff to bring a suit fearlessly. Sometimes the little guy benefits, and sometimes he is oppressed. But this is not a debate about the "loser pays" European rule.
The principle of jurisdiction (in this country) is to be sure to afford legal recourse to wronged people. BIGCORP builds a catapault in Indiana, aims it at Joe and Jane in California, and smashes poor Joe and Jane to jelly. Joe's and Jane's poor orphan child Joey can sue BIGCORP in California, but can't get to Indiana. In your world, suit over, BIGCORP gets to cackle at Joey and how powerless California's courts are over BIGCORP. We don't have different laws for different people, do we? Let's not confuse the jurisdiction issue with whether Indiana is a better location than California for the suit. The question that was litigated is whether California is a possible location, irrespective of the rest of the universe. There are law professors that want to do some sliding-scale facts-and-circumstances case-by-case jurisdictional stuff. All of this requires the principle that the courthouse doors are opened or closed depending on who you are. Anyone who thinks that such rules favor LITTLE PEOPLE in the long run are smoking something with quite a bit of kick.
The judge does not know, and cannot know whether it was throwing a rock illegally or handing a rock legally until the law suit is DECIDED.
It is illogical to say that the law suit cannot be FILED because the plaintiff is wrong. If the plaintiff is wrong, PROVE the plaintiff is wrong. You prove things in courts. The judge hears a lawsuit to figure out who is right and who is wrong without assuming the final conclusion.
Jurisdiction is not about who is right or wrong. It is about whether the judge has the power to EVEN LISTEN to the parties. The defendant was saying that the judge in California was not allowed to read one word the plaintiffs wrote or hear one word they spoke about this matter. The defendnat's statement was not "what I did was legal" it was "what I did was beyond your reach no matter how bad it was or how badly people were hurt or how badly I intended it or how illegal it was because you cannot reach ME."
Of course, the position in this discussion is that open source programmers get to tell judges that they are beyond the reach of a judge because they are open source programmers and that when they say they are beyond the reach of a court or are right the judge has to rule in his favor. Hah.
Looking at quotes of the defendant's testimony, he admitted to an awful lot.
If you are standing in Nevada, and throw a rock and hit someone standing in California, why can't a California court hear it? It seems sense to me. If you could throw the rock from Indiana, that doesn't make any logical difference to me.
Our hero admitted that he knew what he was doing would hurt people in California. He threw the (figurative) rock anyway. Maybe he thought it was legal to throw the rock. It looks like he testified that he even knew (or suspected) it was illegal to throw the rock. Maybe he was right, maybe he was wrong -- he isn't a lawyer after all.
A guy who says he got hit with a rock does not have to prove his whole case to get into the courtroom door. He has to allege that he got hit by a rock, and then prove it at trial, not at the beginning of the case.
I think that the real indignation being voice in this thread is with the ALLEGATIONS. That is, I have not seen one post that said the ONLY complaint the poster had was that the case wasn't decided in Indiana. The decision was the California was a POSSIBLE place to hear the dispute.
Since the defendant lives in Texas now, I really don't see why Indiana would be such a better place apart from the fact that the movie industry is probably strong in California and weak in Indiana. On the other hand, would you rather have this case in front of a Palo Alto jury or a Bloomington jury?
If the whole point is that the defendant didn't do anything wrong, which is the thrust of 90% of the posts -- fine -- prove it up and get the case dismissed.
I'm not sure that this is any worse than Panavision v. Toeppen. I thought that the jurisdictional issue in the Toeppen case was decided wrong, but I can't fault the state court for getting to the result it got to in view of that.
(There are real problems with American personal jurisdiction law, entirely the fault of the Supreme Court in cases that have absolutely nothing to do with Open Source. Volkswagens, The National Enquirer, Burger King restaurants, divorce cases, tag-you-are-it games and etc., etc. The rest of America lives with those problems too.)
This judge was following a federal district judge in California, more or less. Winning this case in front of any other trial judge is going to be a steep uphill battle. No court is required to follow them, but on the other hand, getting a different result requires convincing a federal judge that TWO other federal judges on opposite sides of the country were wrong. Good luck!
Actually, there is a story at the University of Chicago about Enrico Fermi that more or less is along those lines.
During test blasts during the Manhattan Project the engineers would set up all sorts of equipment to measure the shock waves in the ground to estimate the energy in the blast of the atomic bomb.
During one blast, Fermi tore a piece of paper into small squares and dropped them on the floor of his bunker. During the blast, he looked at how far/fast the pieces of paper traveled. Then, knowing the distance of the bunker from the blast, and God knows what else was in his head, he used his 6" slide rule and calculated a result that was within 10% of what the monitoring equipment and involved calculations revealed some time later.
The lesson of this was supposedly, the bigger the mind, the smaller the slide rule.
USENET did have a solution, it had moderated newsgroups! Though, by and large, such were not necessary. The signal to noise ratio was relatively high. Kill files are good when idiots are rare, but not so effective when they predominate.
The world has changed in a couple of decades. We have gone from removing occassional trash to gleaning trash for useful material. It is a sad transformation.
Well, the writers had allowed publication within a particular context, that is a particular newspaper. The database owners destroyed that context, and therefore it was not a publication as permitted by the author.
However, this is exactly the kind of context change that happens when you make "deep links" rather than linking to the main home page. Was the Supreme Court thinking of the deep linking issue? (remember the Ticketmaster v. Microsoft case)
Probably not a genuine worry, but only the paranoid survive, right?
1) The government generally gets a royalty-free license to the any patent deriving from government-funded research. Lots of patents begin with a "the government may have certain rights in this invention" with a citation to the grant number.
2) The government makes its money by taxing the corporate profits and other economic activity arising from the invention/patent. The point of the current proposed legislation is to get a bigger "cut" of that activity. I think that's misdirected -- the government should be investing in basic science, which generally would not necessarily have any detectable income stream. Once the government starts worrying about its "traceable" cut, it will only fund applied research. Ick.
3) Having been a science graduate student at a major research university, my reaction to the various forms of whining about "freedom", "strings", "deadlines", etc. Grow up -- you are living off someone else's money. You are a serf to your research advisor anyway. I don't see the point of whining about responding to corporate demands rather than getting the research published in time for the next (public) funding cycle. When you finally get your Ph.D., finish a post-doc or two, you can choose whether you jump for public-funding reviewers and senior faculty, or your corporate manager. Until then, why sweat the difference?
17 U.S.C. 204 (a)
A transfer of copyright ownership, other than by operation of law, is not valid unless an instrument of conveyance, or a note or memorandum of the transfer, is in writing and signed by the owner of the rights conveyed, or such owner's duly authorized agent.
I just ran across this story, which pretty much lays out the debate in the biotech area.
Please don't confuse "useful" with "made it." You can get a patent on something that has never been made if you can explain how to make and use it such that ordinary people in the field have the benefit of the invention.
The idea of usefulness in patent law is darn minimal. For a chemical, it can't be "if you make a brick of it, it can be a doorstop", but if you know your chemical discovery could 1) be a great research opportunity, and 2) used as kitty litter, you can patent it as the second and not the first, even if it did cost $10,000 an ounce to make. (Note: you can patent the chemical qua chemical for all applications as long as you provide ONE utility.)
The answer to that is relatively old, at least with respect to chemicals. Just because something would be interesting to study, does not make it patentable. I would expect the patent office to adhere to that answer until forcibly dislodged.
Something needs to be actually useful, not just potentially useful.
MBA programs offer a lot of different opportunities. For example, the courses cover accounting, organizational politics, marketing, negotiation, etc.
If you obtain a position where you need to be able to read a balance sheet, motivate employees, build credibility with higher management, negotiate, yada, yada, you can learn valuable things in the MBA program and apply them to your job. (If you think such things are irrelevant to techies, consider that if techies were better armed to deal with organization politics, the space shuttle Challenger might never have exploded.)
Apart from MBA-defined career tracks, such as investment banking, most of the opinions I have heard prefer a weekend/evening MBA program where you improve skills called upon for either the job you have or the promotion you want.
Therefore, you are probably better off asking yourself where you want to go, and then seeing if an MBA program supplies the missing elements. You can do the cost-benefit analysis as to whether the improvement in career track is worth the time and expense you would have to invest.
Pot odors would be enough to get a warrant for sure. Loud music, if a distubance of the peace, could justify him going up and knocking on the door and getting a better whiff. Heck, might justify an arrest w/o a warrant, but I don't think so.
The justification for scanning Kyllo is that he lived NEXT DOOR to somebody the cops suspected of growing pot. No noise, no smell, no bother, no justification, just random nosiness.
The government was watching the light bulbs inside the house. It was not watching smoke emerging from the chimney, or feeling heat on the walls of the house. (As I recall, in this case, the lamps were in the attic, and the heat coming from the roof.)
It really comes down to what is reasonably considered to be in "plain view." Once you put your trash out for collection, it is, but while it is on the back porch in the trash can, it isn't. If you can see it from a window by the front door it isn't, but if you can see it with a telesecope from the church steeple 5 blocks away, it isn't.
It all comes down to the word "reasonable", in the context of home privacy. They sat 9 grandmas and grandpas down, and came out with this result. Change the facts a little, and maybe the votes are different. In this area of the law it is possible to overcomplicate it.
In general, home cases are mostly about the privacy of the home, not the needs of police. If he'd been doing this growing in the empty room above his gas station, he'd have been nailed for sure.
The police do not have to be blind to what your neighbors can readily see and know. "General public use" surely means the police officer can wear ordinary corrective lenses or contacts when looking at your house. High-powered telescopes are out, as such behavior is generally illegal even for private people for looking into homes. (Peeping Tom laws) The whole question turns around what is "reasonable."
Hold on -- he is entitled to not be discriminated against because of the content of the speech. If you get to continue speaking because the university legal department likes your point of view, but get gagged if they don't that's content regulation.
If the government is going to support private speech, it cannot discriminate based on whether it agrees or not. (Distinguished from the situation where the government is the speaker -- then the government gets to send the message it wants.)
The present fundamental tenet of the anti-nuclear crowd is that there is no possibility of safe storage of nuclear materials long term. (Except as in the native ores that we make the materials from, perhaps.) Now this? Or does the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists consider the Union of Concerned Scientists completely misguided? I wouldn't think so.
Whoa, Nellie!
The Federal Government is a government of limited, enumerated powers. The copyright clause does have a "limited time" requirement. However, Congress also has a power to regulate international commerce. It is not at all clear that congress could not use its commerce powers to accomplish the same goal. In fact, it is not at all clear that Congress could not create a domestic perpetual copyright using commerce clause powers. After all, that is precisely how the government has implemented (potentially) perpetual rights for trademarks.
Certainly, there are positive limits on federal government power, mostly in the Bill of Rights, reverse incorporation doctrine, yada, yada.
We already, pursuant to the Berne Convention, give foreign copyrights better treatment than domestic ones. For example, we don't require registration of foreign copyrights to initiate a copyright lawsuit.
Sure, the power of the purse does come into it. Witness our current non-payment of UN dues.
This is clearly a rough transcript prior to corrections by the attorneys. I would not be surprised if the court reporter transcribed "pixels" as "pickles."
Well, er, technically, YES. 35 USCA 271.
271. Infringement of patent
(a) Except as otherwise provided in this title, whoever without authority makes, uses, offers to sell, or sells any patented invention, within the United States or imports into the United States any patented invention during the term of the patent therefor, infringes the patent.
Please note USES. In the case of the defendants in this case, SELLS and OFFERS TO SELL apply, and IMPORTS might also.
Companies don't go after consumers, it is just too big a pain in the ass. But they could. (Oh, they can't sue the company that sold to you and then sue you. When they get their damage award, the sold product gets an implied license -- no double dipping.)
Right, you can't prove a negative. The person who can prove the positive in this case has the burden.
1) The Plaintiff has said he can prove that the magnets in question infringe the claims of his patent.
2) Having bought a magnet from a LICENSED source is a DEFENSE to patent infringement. Once the Plaintiff has proved the magnets infringe, it is up to the defendant to prove his defense. All he has to do is prove he bought from a licensed source.
Each party is proving a positive. Requiring the patent holder to prove THE ABSENCE OF A LICENSE is forcing the proving of a negative. As you point out that is illogical. That is why the law does not do it that way.
Prior to the GATT amendments in the mid-90s, the term was 17 years after the patent issued. Patents that date from before then get the longer of 20 from the filing date or 17 from the issue date.
The 20 year from date of filing is the new rule, and can be adjusted for the provisional patent application above as well as delays that are not the fault of the applicant. Then you can get a patent term extension to make up for the government's slowness.