I have seen mixed things about this, which I attribute to reporters glossing some things over. Some talk about it integrating with the advance army radio system, which Motorola Solutions would obviously do. I also see things about using local cell phone coverage, which would be the Motorola Mobility strength. I find it hard to believe that the U.S. Military would make itself dependent on easily destroyed, easily snooped cellular networks. But hey, it would be cheap, right?
Let's be clear here. In Quill Corp. v. North Dakota, 504 U.S. 298 (1992), the Supreme Court required a state to have nexus with someone to tax them. In that case, it included Quill paper's business through catalog sales into North Dakota. North Dakota could not exercise taxing authority over Quill because of the dormant commerce clause. But the Court said: "This aspect of our decision is made easier by the fact that the underlying issue is not only one that Congress may be better qualified to resolve, [n.10] but also one that Congress has the ultimate power to resolve." So there. If Congress does something, it is fixed. If not, it is not. Pretty simple, no?
I think that it is pretty clear that your average consumer wants the lighting in his house to make things look nice. Right now, they know if they take an incandescent of a certain wattage and put it into socket A, they are going to get the result they want.
That is not the consumer experience of CFLs. Absent the ability to predict how the light will perform in the home, they are not going to want to switch. They will be fine with saving money if they can get the quality they want without becoming a lighting professional.
Since Congress' legislation basically does nothing to address consumers' genuine needs, it is stupid. They also need to outlaw sucky lighting options so that everything on the shelf is as good as, or better than, incandescent unless it has big letters saying "this lighting sucks."
Well, if you did something that is open source, it is released into the wild, right? That makes it prior art. So your defense is that their patent is invalid if it happens more than a year later.
But under the current house bill (H.R. 1549) which is now in the Senate for approval, users who were making commercial use of the invention more than a year prior to the filing date of the patent, even in secret, are protected. Also, the status of prior public use or publication is stronger under the first-to-file system than the first-to-invent system. Even one day before the patent application's filing date (with the exception of disclosures prior to your publication by the patent applicant) defeats the patent.
So things are looking up if you want freedom.
Now, if you want to smite greedy companies for using your idea, that is a whole different kettle of fish.
You do know that the investment made in companies uses money, right? And the people who gave the money, actually value the money?
I mean, sure, it must be fun to burn other people's money. But don't act surprised when they object.
A new small molecule drug costs about $500 million to $600 million to develop these days. You get 5 years to recover that money without a patent. Trade secrets won't work, small molecule drug pills are very easily reverse engineered.
A patent should be viewed as insurance on a business cash stream. If you don't have a specific plan for a cash stream, you are buying a lottery ticket where the payoffs are infrequent and low. If you can even get the lottery commission to pay attention to you when you try to claim your winnings. Getting a patent to get a patent is pretty much a vanity thing. It happens often.
The real question is whether this is a solution to the "patent troll" problem. IBM generates a billion a year off of licensing its patents. Is IBM a troll? What about universities that develop technology with no intention of starting a business? There are small inventors who find these patent-acquiring entities useful because it is a way of monetizing the invention and getting it to those who will attempt to get someone to use the technology in a meaningful way.
Other problems: venture capitalists don't fund patent applications. At this stage, either your friends and family agree with you, or not.
And the facts of life of a patent: it is only worth what you can enforce. If you don't have seven figures lying around to spend on patent litigation, your patent is probably worth very little. Unless you get into a game of chicken with another small player. Then maybe mutual assured destruction works to get the other guy to stop.
This basically turns the government into a kind of troll where you have to pay break-the-bank money to participate in the patent system. Tell me, who wins -- the little guy or IBM?
No, there will still be "derivation" proceedings for when the invention originated from another. So "first inventor to file" means that the first person to independently develop the invention who files for it wins.
The regulatory processes grind exceedingly slowly. If EPA rushes something, it opens itself to having its justifications found to lack substantial evidence. Also, if it proposes rules that are too strict, it could goose Congress into taking the matter off of EPA's plate. Also, if you are Obama, this is something for your second term. Doing something fast that turns out to be unpopular could be his undoing. So I expect the Notice to be released mid-November, 2012.
Well, ethanol is hard on engines from a corrosion standpoint, and petroleum-based fuels are made of basically the same kind of stuff as the engine lubricants. Also, ethanol does not have the same power density as petroleum. This is important for applications such as flight.
The trick we want is to turn CO2 in the atmosphere into petroleum again. Then, we can put what we want in the ground in the ground, and recycle the amount we want to use. Plants do this with sugar and are powered by sunlight. Oh, but the technological gap is so big from sugar to hydrocarbons.
Regarding Germany, I think that the economic plan is to make export goods that benefit from more skilled labor and more intense engineering. My sense is that Germans themselves strike the balance between workmanship (quality) and price more in favor of workmanship than the U.S.
The facts is that in the U.S. price is the driving force for almost all goods and many services. U.S. airlines are competent but not on par with many national airlines of other countries. And I am not talking about big countries. Singapore and New Zealand do a better job of it. Sure, there is a luxury market in the U.S., but look at how much of that is foreign sourced.
So until the ordinary American consumer is willing to make do with fewer, but better, things and taking pride in a high quality of workmanship, well, reality shows it is.
I would like to point out that the government doesn't need to guarantee loans for something that is guaranteed to win on a cost basis. So I am betting that the risk is too high for venture capital to do this without government intervention. I expect that those numbers people are waving around are best-case scenarios. Or even fantasy-case scenarios.
Regarding "window cleaning," I am not as worried about the solar collection as I am turning the latent heat into power. I am supposing it would be a steam turbine, but don't actually know.
Please remember that the European Patent Office restricts patentability of methods of medical treatment. So this is fairly nearby to a decision they already made. These public interest approach is far more common in the rest of the world than the United States.
I have a friend who does mostly capital murder. He says a pretty significant portion of time, the only issue to argue is the death penalty or not. So guilty or not may not even be the issue.
I agree that you cannot read a lawyer's private views into the law. Scalia is clearly against flag burning, but ruled that it was constitutionally protected. Maureen Mahoney, despite being a top-drawer Republican, defended the University of Michigan's affirmative action program. We have no idea what her personal views are. If she had been appointed Solicitor General (not unrealistic) she probably would have argued differently. Remember, he is an appellate advocate. While he is representing the client, the client may well be tied to a different attorney at the firm, and he is just pitching in. Oh, and nobody passes up a chance to argue in the Supreme Court. The thrill is too big.
But, as Larry Lessig has pointed out, the law is not that friendly on the issue of copyright. And it is the Solicitor General's job to uphold the laws of the United States in court. So anyone who takes that job is unlikely to be of assistance to music listeners.
Transparency is the rule in well-done science. But having done university research, it is not like a research group has a compliance department to make sure everything is stored in just-and-so a form and archived in storage media good for at least 20 years.
But when science is being done for the purposes of enlightenment of scientists the degree of searching inquiry is fairly low. Now, when someone takes their science and invites worldwide scrutiny by insisting that the world economy has to turn on his results, those ordinary processes fail. If this science is going to be steering trillons of dollars it has to be subject to vetting sufficient to show that decisions of that magnitude should rest on those results. Probably a level to make what FDA does to review potential drugs and inspect manufacturing facilities look like child's play.
But let's face it. These guys were doing a lot of work when their mothers didn't care. Much less the world. And, yes, people are going to be disappointed when the research gets audited. Gosh knows my research would have looked bad with that level of scrutiny.
Whatever happened was within the ordinary range of scientific research. And I am sure certain of the involved players look back in retrospect and see that they could have done better. But that is 20/20 hindsight, not prior misbehavior.
All that doesn't answer the question of whether all of this is good enough to make multi-trillion dollar decisions. But it explains why the things that are happening are happening.
When someone develops a technology, their choices are generally to patent it themselves, publish it to give it to the public, or keep the development a secret. If a company indeed developed the technology independently, and there was no making the knowledge public, then the secret-keeper can have a problem. The patent system encourages developments to be made public, but with benefits for doing so. One of the detriments is that if you keep a secret, you may find someone else decides to patent it. Then you are can be an infringer.
This is a rarer instance. Most often in the not-for-profit world, people choose to publish. In fact, early publication is the biggest threat to universities getting patents on professors' developments.
For those with less money, and in Chicago, the Adler Planetarium has a raft of events for the 40th anniversary of Apollo 13.
http://www.adlerplanetarium.org/special/index.shtml#apollo
And for those with a fair bit of money there is an expensive dinner with a bunch of astronauts, including the two still-living Apollo 13 astronauts.
www.adlerplanetarium.org/special/doc/Apollo13invite
(Yes, I know, seriously off-topic, but please don't punish!)
Let's see. There is employment of about 3.2 million in Information Services. http://www.bls.gov/emp/ep_table_201.htm
There are about 20,000 active patent attorneys in all fields, and about 6,000 patent examiners in all fields. Even if they all worked in IT, nothing would change. Even if you double those numbers to include support staff.
It is arguable that Slashdot wastes more IT productivity in a day than the patent system could ever hope to. And examiners are much more useful in the chemical arts because the investment behind a patent is much greater than in high-tech. Especially in pharmaceuticals (say $300 million a drug).
Air bags go back a long way. The initial patents begin with the number "3" from the 60s or early 70s. There are many air bags that are not patented. For example, the floating horn design of Mercedes-Benz (air bag system has horn actuator underneath so that pressing the center of the steering column operates the horn) is off patent. The Mercedes-Benz patent was largely the reason why for years horns were activated by buttons on the steering column spokes or the like. Flexible air bag covers with film switches embedded that encased the air bag and its deployment explosive that had the horn closer to the surface were produced in thermoset plastics by Morton and later into thermoplastics by Morton and Venture Industries. GM preferred designs that had harder thermoplastic inner layers covered by softer thermoset outer layers initially. Then the Mercedez-Benz patent expired and the floating horn design regained some popularity. The reason people worked around Mercedez-Benz was because Mercedez-Benz wanted royalties. By no means did someone have a meaningful monopoly over air bags for any length of time when they were in wide use.
So the message is: come up with your own safety solution. If someone else did it, you can too.
This is first-year constitutional law in law school. Wickard v. Filburn. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wickard_v._Filburn
This is during the Roosevelt administration. Roosevelt is trying to keep supplies of food low so the price stays high enough for farmers to stay in business as opposed to prices dropping until they are all out of business.
Filburn grew wheat for his own use to feed his own chickens. The idea was that since Filburn was not buying from the limited supply of wheat allowed, he was depressing prices in interstate commerce. The Supreme Court accepted this argument.
This has been the basis of interstate commerce ever since with just a few notable exceptions. (United States v. Lopez for example. Ok, you say, this wheat and chickens things is silly. But what about a meal at a lunch counter? Guess what. Civil Rights laws depend on this expansive notion of Interstate Commerce.
This is not a small or trivial issue. The doctor will not win it.
I practice before the USPTO. This kind of thing is fairly common for the agency. Actually, I am pretty blase about this one.
But that tells you what kind of organization it is, I guess. I lost may capacity for outrage years ago.
I cannot imagine a use for this gun, except to require its use as a way of effectively taking away any right to a useful weapon. Step one, make the gun available. Step two, outlaw all other guns.
Slashdot Mirror
I have seen mixed things about this, which I attribute to reporters glossing some things over. Some talk about it integrating with the advance army radio system, which Motorola Solutions would obviously do. I also see things about using local cell phone coverage, which would be the Motorola Mobility strength. I find it hard to believe that the U.S. Military would make itself dependent on easily destroyed, easily snooped cellular networks. But hey, it would be cheap, right?
Um, Motorola Solutions is the government radio company, not Motorola Mobility.
Let's be clear here. In Quill Corp. v. North Dakota, 504 U.S. 298 (1992), the Supreme Court required a state to have nexus with someone to tax them. In that case, it included Quill paper's business through catalog sales into North Dakota. North Dakota could not exercise taxing authority over Quill because of the dormant commerce clause. But the Court said: "This aspect of our decision is made easier by the fact that the underlying issue is not only one that Congress may be better qualified to resolve, [n.10] but also one that Congress has the ultimate power to resolve." So there. If Congress does something, it is fixed. If not, it is not. Pretty simple, no?
I think that it is pretty clear that your average consumer wants the lighting in his house to make things look nice. Right now, they know if they take an incandescent of a certain wattage and put it into socket A, they are going to get the result they want. That is not the consumer experience of CFLs. Absent the ability to predict how the light will perform in the home, they are not going to want to switch. They will be fine with saving money if they can get the quality they want without becoming a lighting professional. Since Congress' legislation basically does nothing to address consumers' genuine needs, it is stupid. They also need to outlaw sucky lighting options so that everything on the shelf is as good as, or better than, incandescent unless it has big letters saying "this lighting sucks."
Well, if you did something that is open source, it is released into the wild, right? That makes it prior art. So your defense is that their patent is invalid if it happens more than a year later. But under the current house bill (H.R. 1549) which is now in the Senate for approval, users who were making commercial use of the invention more than a year prior to the filing date of the patent, even in secret, are protected. Also, the status of prior public use or publication is stronger under the first-to-file system than the first-to-invent system. Even one day before the patent application's filing date (with the exception of disclosures prior to your publication by the patent applicant) defeats the patent. So things are looking up if you want freedom. Now, if you want to smite greedy companies for using your idea, that is a whole different kettle of fish.
You do know that the investment made in companies uses money, right? And the people who gave the money, actually value the money? I mean, sure, it must be fun to burn other people's money. But don't act surprised when they object.
A new small molecule drug costs about $500 million to $600 million to develop these days. You get 5 years to recover that money without a patent. Trade secrets won't work, small molecule drug pills are very easily reverse engineered. A patent should be viewed as insurance on a business cash stream. If you don't have a specific plan for a cash stream, you are buying a lottery ticket where the payoffs are infrequent and low. If you can even get the lottery commission to pay attention to you when you try to claim your winnings. Getting a patent to get a patent is pretty much a vanity thing. It happens often.
The real question is whether this is a solution to the "patent troll" problem. IBM generates a billion a year off of licensing its patents. Is IBM a troll? What about universities that develop technology with no intention of starting a business? There are small inventors who find these patent-acquiring entities useful because it is a way of monetizing the invention and getting it to those who will attempt to get someone to use the technology in a meaningful way. Other problems: venture capitalists don't fund patent applications. At this stage, either your friends and family agree with you, or not. And the facts of life of a patent: it is only worth what you can enforce. If you don't have seven figures lying around to spend on patent litigation, your patent is probably worth very little. Unless you get into a game of chicken with another small player. Then maybe mutual assured destruction works to get the other guy to stop. This basically turns the government into a kind of troll where you have to pay break-the-bank money to participate in the patent system. Tell me, who wins -- the little guy or IBM?
No, there will still be "derivation" proceedings for when the invention originated from another. So "first inventor to file" means that the first person to independently develop the invention who files for it wins.
The regulatory processes grind exceedingly slowly. If EPA rushes something, it opens itself to having its justifications found to lack substantial evidence. Also, if it proposes rules that are too strict, it could goose Congress into taking the matter off of EPA's plate. Also, if you are Obama, this is something for your second term. Doing something fast that turns out to be unpopular could be his undoing. So I expect the Notice to be released mid-November, 2012.
Well, ethanol is hard on engines from a corrosion standpoint, and petroleum-based fuels are made of basically the same kind of stuff as the engine lubricants. Also, ethanol does not have the same power density as petroleum. This is important for applications such as flight. The trick we want is to turn CO2 in the atmosphere into petroleum again. Then, we can put what we want in the ground in the ground, and recycle the amount we want to use. Plants do this with sugar and are powered by sunlight. Oh, but the technological gap is so big from sugar to hydrocarbons.
Regarding Germany, I think that the economic plan is to make export goods that benefit from more skilled labor and more intense engineering. My sense is that Germans themselves strike the balance between workmanship (quality) and price more in favor of workmanship than the U.S. The facts is that in the U.S. price is the driving force for almost all goods and many services. U.S. airlines are competent but not on par with many national airlines of other countries. And I am not talking about big countries. Singapore and New Zealand do a better job of it. Sure, there is a luxury market in the U.S., but look at how much of that is foreign sourced. So until the ordinary American consumer is willing to make do with fewer, but better, things and taking pride in a high quality of workmanship, well, reality shows it is.
I would like to point out that the government doesn't need to guarantee loans for something that is guaranteed to win on a cost basis. So I am betting that the risk is too high for venture capital to do this without government intervention. I expect that those numbers people are waving around are best-case scenarios. Or even fantasy-case scenarios. Regarding "window cleaning," I am not as worried about the solar collection as I am turning the latent heat into power. I am supposing it would be a steam turbine, but don't actually know.
Please remember that the European Patent Office restricts patentability of methods of medical treatment. So this is fairly nearby to a decision they already made. These public interest approach is far more common in the rest of the world than the United States.
I have a friend who does mostly capital murder. He says a pretty significant portion of time, the only issue to argue is the death penalty or not. So guilty or not may not even be the issue.
I agree that you cannot read a lawyer's private views into the law. Scalia is clearly against flag burning, but ruled that it was constitutionally protected. Maureen Mahoney, despite being a top-drawer Republican, defended the University of Michigan's affirmative action program. We have no idea what her personal views are. If she had been appointed Solicitor General (not unrealistic) she probably would have argued differently. Remember, he is an appellate advocate. While he is representing the client, the client may well be tied to a different attorney at the firm, and he is just pitching in. Oh, and nobody passes up a chance to argue in the Supreme Court. The thrill is too big. But, as Larry Lessig has pointed out, the law is not that friendly on the issue of copyright. And it is the Solicitor General's job to uphold the laws of the United States in court. So anyone who takes that job is unlikely to be of assistance to music listeners.
Transparency is the rule in well-done science. But having done university research, it is not like a research group has a compliance department to make sure everything is stored in just-and-so a form and archived in storage media good for at least 20 years. But when science is being done for the purposes of enlightenment of scientists the degree of searching inquiry is fairly low. Now, when someone takes their science and invites worldwide scrutiny by insisting that the world economy has to turn on his results, those ordinary processes fail. If this science is going to be steering trillons of dollars it has to be subject to vetting sufficient to show that decisions of that magnitude should rest on those results. Probably a level to make what FDA does to review potential drugs and inspect manufacturing facilities look like child's play. But let's face it. These guys were doing a lot of work when their mothers didn't care. Much less the world. And, yes, people are going to be disappointed when the research gets audited. Gosh knows my research would have looked bad with that level of scrutiny. Whatever happened was within the ordinary range of scientific research. And I am sure certain of the involved players look back in retrospect and see that they could have done better. But that is 20/20 hindsight, not prior misbehavior. All that doesn't answer the question of whether all of this is good enough to make multi-trillion dollar decisions. But it explains why the things that are happening are happening.
When someone develops a technology, their choices are generally to patent it themselves, publish it to give it to the public, or keep the development a secret. If a company indeed developed the technology independently, and there was no making the knowledge public, then the secret-keeper can have a problem. The patent system encourages developments to be made public, but with benefits for doing so. One of the detriments is that if you keep a secret, you may find someone else decides to patent it. Then you are can be an infringer. This is a rarer instance. Most often in the not-for-profit world, people choose to publish. In fact, early publication is the biggest threat to universities getting patents on professors' developments.
For those with less money, and in Chicago, the Adler Planetarium has a raft of events for the 40th anniversary of Apollo 13. http://www.adlerplanetarium.org/special/index.shtml#apollo And for those with a fair bit of money there is an expensive dinner with a bunch of astronauts, including the two still-living Apollo 13 astronauts. www.adlerplanetarium.org/special/doc/Apollo13invite (Yes, I know, seriously off-topic, but please don't punish!)
Let's see. There is employment of about 3.2 million in Information Services. http://www.bls.gov/emp/ep_table_201.htm There are about 20,000 active patent attorneys in all fields, and about 6,000 patent examiners in all fields. Even if they all worked in IT, nothing would change. Even if you double those numbers to include support staff. It is arguable that Slashdot wastes more IT productivity in a day than the patent system could ever hope to. And examiners are much more useful in the chemical arts because the investment behind a patent is much greater than in high-tech. Especially in pharmaceuticals (say $300 million a drug).
Air bags go back a long way. The initial patents begin with the number "3" from the 60s or early 70s. There are many air bags that are not patented. For example, the floating horn design of Mercedes-Benz (air bag system has horn actuator underneath so that pressing the center of the steering column operates the horn) is off patent. The Mercedes-Benz patent was largely the reason why for years horns were activated by buttons on the steering column spokes or the like. Flexible air bag covers with film switches embedded that encased the air bag and its deployment explosive that had the horn closer to the surface were produced in thermoset plastics by Morton and later into thermoplastics by Morton and Venture Industries. GM preferred designs that had harder thermoplastic inner layers covered by softer thermoset outer layers initially. Then the Mercedez-Benz patent expired and the floating horn design regained some popularity. The reason people worked around Mercedez-Benz was because Mercedez-Benz wanted royalties. By no means did someone have a meaningful monopoly over air bags for any length of time when they were in wide use. So the message is: come up with your own safety solution. If someone else did it, you can too.
This is first-year constitutional law in law school. Wickard v. Filburn. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wickard_v._Filburn This is during the Roosevelt administration. Roosevelt is trying to keep supplies of food low so the price stays high enough for farmers to stay in business as opposed to prices dropping until they are all out of business. Filburn grew wheat for his own use to feed his own chickens. The idea was that since Filburn was not buying from the limited supply of wheat allowed, he was depressing prices in interstate commerce. The Supreme Court accepted this argument. This has been the basis of interstate commerce ever since with just a few notable exceptions. (United States v. Lopez for example. Ok, you say, this wheat and chickens things is silly. But what about a meal at a lunch counter? Guess what. Civil Rights laws depend on this expansive notion of Interstate Commerce. This is not a small or trivial issue. The doctor will not win it.
The FDA has known about this for quite a while... http://www.fda.gov/BiologicsBloodVaccines/GuidanceComplianceRegulatoryInformation/ComplianceActivities/Enforcement/UntitledLetters/ucm091991.htm And yes, there is a Mr. FDA Man. The Office of Criminal Investigations. http://www.fda.gov/ICECI/CriminalInvestigations/default.htm They tend to prioritize based on danger to the public, so at least they have not lumped him in with the adulterated-drug people. Yet.
I practice before the USPTO. This kind of thing is fairly common for the agency. Actually, I am pretty blase about this one. But that tells you what kind of organization it is, I guess. I lost may capacity for outrage years ago.
I cannot imagine a use for this gun, except to require its use as a way of effectively taking away any right to a useful weapon. Step one, make the gun available. Step two, outlaw all other guns.