Regarding point 2, judges are people too. If you don't help them to the right decision, they may not find it on their own. Also, there is a certain amount of "panel lottery" in whether a reversal happens. Many reversed trial judges could be affirmed by a different 3 judge panel.
Regarding point 1: not true. Sharon Prost has neither any technical background nor any patent experience. In ten years, who knows, but today a babe in the woods. What is the likelihood that she is up to speed with Pauline Newman? (Ph.D. in chemistry from Yale, research scientist for American Cyanamid, and then patent counsel to FMC Corp., and a patent appeals judge since 1984.)
I think that the court would be struggling less with the doctrine of equivalents (sometimes 1=2, e.g. in the second bit, but never 0=1) if there were more technically confident members of the court. It has turned into a court where English majors play with pushing words around the page.
I agree with ajakk on all but two points. First, I think district court judges get it wrong because attorneys generally present patent cases badly. Second, I think that these days most of the judges on the Federal Circuit are not former patent attorneys or examiners. The Federal Circuit was formed by combining a couple of other appeals courts, the ones that reviewed the Patent Office and the Court of Claims, and giving it appeals over federal employment and veterans cases also. While patent cases are about 1/3 of their cases, patent cases probably consume 2/3 of the time of the judges.
Patent attorneys (4 full, 0 senior): Newman (last transferred member from the Circuit Court of Patent Appeals), Lourie, Gajarsa, Linn.
First, research related to guns has taken on an almost totally political tenor. As a recent example, a book that alleged to offer facts relating to low gun-ownership in the time of the founding fathers has been shown to be at best unreliable, at worst a calculated fraud. (Michale Bellesiles resigned from Emory University over the flap.) The widespread acceptance and adulation at the book at its first appearance did reveal the polticial and uncritical nature of the book review community with respect to this issue.
This would indicate that absent visiting original records, you would have a hard time determining what the basic records reflect. This creates almost insuperable problems in the highly politicized environment. [Consider: the Maryland/Virginia sniper shootings laid out a case to increase gun control over small-caliber (.22 cal./5.56mm), single-shot (only one shot per episode despite the semi-automatic capability of the actual weapon), long (not easily hidden) guns. The result: agitation for more control over the "safest" class of weapons results.]
If the Supreme Court did find an individual rights to self-protection/hunting weapons, wherein gun owners knew that some level of gun ownership was protected by more than the politics of the moment, rabid resistance to any gun control as necessarily leading to a total gun ban might disappear. We won't get that any time soon. Anyway, that would just politicize Supreme Court nominations even more.
In short, unless you want to become a historian in this area, and spend your time examining original records, there probably is not much that you can implicitly trust. Anyone publishing data has an agenda, and it has been pretty much proven that the data can and will be warped to political ends. It is quite sad when that happens -- science is no longer possible, just politics, and the worst kind of politics at that, pure, blind, unbridled ignorance vs. pure, blind, unbridled ignorance.
There is an incentive to relocate million-mouse research programs to Canada, however. A technically advanced country where you can get good workers and not have to pay the developer.
1) It is a huge, huge dam. Supposed to supply something like 10% of China's electricity.
2) Unfortunately, the Three Gorges were an artistic inspiration for centuries of Chinese artists. They will be flooded, and their beauty lost. You can still see them pretty well now, but that won't be true for long.
A fairer allegation would be some form of trade secret misappropriation (information, not generally available, used for busines advantage, that is protected from unreasonable or unfair acquistions attempts) or a specie of unfair competition (vis-a-vis International News Service v. Associated Press, forbidding the republishing of 'hot news' to reap where one has not sown even though the facts of the news are not copyrighted). Not that it would be sustained in this particular case, but at least they aren't laughable theories.
Alright you are a biotech company. You are thinking of a big layout for an inheritable form of breast cancer...
CLIENT: What can I patent if I spend $200 million dollars?
ATTY: You can only patent your exact test. Anybody who departs from that test one iota gets to use all the fruits of your research for free.
CLIENT: Ok, shitcan that project. Let's think of another.
Oh, yeah, and nobody gets the test at ANY price. I wish at least 1 in 100 postings would think of the pathological scenario of the work never being done, or being done 30 years from now when the darn patent would have been expired for at least 10.
1) Nobody will ever know. 2) Nope. 3) Fish in the ocean do not recognize political boundaries. (I assume you mean the imaginary lines people draw on land and water to divide it up, not the fact that a mountain chain can be a pain in the ass to swim across if you are a fish.) Similarly, fish can be thought of as having their own sovereignty. 4) Until the "internet" has armed forces to enforce its decisions, it will have to pay attention to the countries with armies. Just like sovereignty is an exclusive power, to have that power sovereignty must exclude other sovereigns. All the internet country has to do is push the others out. Until then, it will have a lot in common with the nation of fishes. Not able to do much about how the countries of the world regulate how they are harvested. Or don't.
What Rogan does not explain is why the fees for claims should increase exponentially with the number of fees. If your linear relationship is off, reset the slope dammit! It isn't right to punish an inventor because his invention is complicated.
Fees should probably be higher, the USPTO should be allowed to keep all its fee income and pay the examiners accordingly or supplement the research resources the examiners have. The fee probably should be higher for longer patent applications. (Yes, it is the same fee for 10 pages of description and 1000 pages of description now.)
Patents are granted unless the PTO can find a reason not to. ("A person shall be entitled to a patent unless --" 35 U.S.C. 102) Shorting the examiners of time and resources necessarily leads to bad patents getting out.
Part of the reason that patent application fees are low is that the U.S. Patent system is a "winners pay" system. After the patent is allowed you still have to pay a publication fee, an issue fee, and then maintenance fees at 3, 7, and 11 years. That way, small inventors can take their shot but not bear the full cost unless they get a patent.
What Rogan won't confront, is that the darn points system, which basically is a system where you require the hamsters to run a little faster each year, is not the right management tool (at least in a vacuum). The only thing that supplements it now are "customer satisfaction surveys". Mind you, having the USPTO be polite and responsive is ok, but please notice that QUALITY OF ISSUED PATENTS just does not enter the picture. Please, FIX THE METRICS. If it takes money, which is must, then raise fees. Don't just raise fees to hand money over to Congress though.
Certainly you would allow someone to mark up the book you sold them. Make annotations in the margins. Use highlighter to select passages. Oh wait, if they use BLACK highlighter you are upset, but yellow is ok.
The original unretouched movie is bought. The author got all of his economic benefit out of that copy. Can a marked-up version of a book be sold at a garage sale? Can it be lent to a friend?
The problem is that they are in the business of selling markups, and going beyond a personal use of the book. However, if they do not copy the book, what's wrong?
The Congress is supposed to interpret the Constitution before it passes a law, and adhere to the Constitution as Congress views it. Many senators and representatives ignore this role, and abdicate in favor of the Supreme Court. Perhaps because it is politically inconvenience (e.g. campaign finance reform).
The President is supposed to interpret the Constitution when he decides to sign a bill or enforce a law. Therefore, he can even stop unconstitional laws that have been passed before from working, and stop new ones from happening. No president (more accurately, Attorney General) attempted to enforce the law that attempted to overthrow the Miranda decision. That was an executive decision.
The Supreme Court (and other courts) interprets the Constitution in the cases before it. The fact that the other branches can be brought before the Supreme Court by others does not take away the Supreme Court's oath to protect the Constitution of the United States of America.
And the Supreme Court is right because they are last, not last because they are right. Lincoln wanted to keep the issues raised in the Dred Scott case alive, and keep presenting them to the Supreme Court to attempt to force a reversal. Supreme Court reversals of position are not common, but they do happen. Nobody should consider issues "over" because of one decision.
The article is at best an incomplete picture of Professor Lessig. While it is framed to show the roots of where he ended up, it could have been different.
Professor Lessig's primary interest, at least initially, was constitutional law. Actually, that makes the Eldred case a good case for him. If you read the briefs you will see that the parties are not especially approaching the case as a "cyberlaw" case.
I don't think the scope of his interest has been limited to being a great niche legal thinker. He wants to be broad, but is going to ride this particular wave for what it is worth. The article does do a good job of explaining why Lessig is important to a particular non-legal community now, and taken for that, it is nice.
His opinion goes into a fair amount of detail as to why he is convinced that Deep was playing games with copyright infringement. He is ordering them to try to respect the non-infringing users. He is not saying that if it is not possible, that the service isn't getting shut down.
He does have a clue as to how to be an effective judge, and he also knows that Judge Patel ended up having problems with the Ninth Circuit for not trying hard enough to sort out the infringing from the non-infringing. He is trying to avoid those problems. It is up to the parties to draft the thing, not the Judge, precisely because he knows he doesn't know the technology. Both parties will come back with drafts, and reasons supporting the drafts. Mind you, Aimster won't be able to argue that shutting down infringements without non-infringements is impossible. If Aimster does that, he shuts it all down.
Even if that is the final result, he needed to put the drafting step in so that the Court of Appeals could see that Aimster failed to provide a sound technical basis for shutting one down but not the other when ordered to. That is done to keep Aimster from gratuitously changing positions on appeal. (Before Aspen saying: "Impossible", and then at the Court of Appeals saying: "Very easy.")
Re:How would the world react. . .
on
Want Freedom?
·
· Score: 1
I think you ought to take a look at "Being Digital" by Nicholas Negroponte. Certainly, though he is a fan of fiber, he believes that the installed copper wire, if used intelligently, can handle what is needed.
Few people know how good copper twisted pair is. Asymmetrical Digital Subscriber Loop (ADSL-1) can provide 1.544 Mbits per second into, and 64 Kbits per second out of, 75 percent of American and 80 percent of Canadian homes. ADSL-2 runs above 3 Mbits per second and ADSL-3, above 6 Mbits per second. ADSL-1 is fine for VCR-quality video.
Which would you prefer: 500 channels from which you can choose one, or one channel that can be switched to any source on the network?
It is absolutely true that fiber delivers thousands, in fact, millions of times more bandwidth. Frankly, we don't really know the limits of fiber. In addition, fiber now costs less than copper - when lines are updated, fiber will be used, with or without a need for bandwidth. Therefore, fiber will come into being automatically through the forces of common sense and Mother Nature"
You can only be held liable if you had actual or constructive notice of a patent. Constructive means "you didn't know, but should have." Carelessness will not be a problem, but being willfully blind to patent rights. Thus, a refusal to look at patents you see in patent markings on products you are copying is not going to necessarily save you.
However, there is a general duty to not recklessly disregard the patent rights of others. Doing so is called "willful infringement" and can result in 1) treble damages; 2) paying the patentee's attorneys' fees for the patent infringement suit.
So it is possible that even though you did not make any money, and did not decrease the profits of the patentee, you could still get rung up for $1E6 if you fought the suit.
First of all, teachers can't serve as the sole source of motivation for students. Parents and communities have to do that too. The transition for fractions to algebra is one of the hardest on young people. As noted above, one problem is that students that did not have a good grasp of fractions just become more lost in algebra. A second problem is the motivation to learn this new, hard subject.
Students need to understand that "the future is now." This is part of a runup to calculus in college (if not sooner), and that what you can or cannot do in math can and will shape your future. If you do not know algebra II and trigonometry, you are going nowhere in Physics I. No Physics I, no engineering, no chemistry, likely no computer science, etc.
Second, we have to face the fact that many students in math want to get through the class with a decent grade, but have no ambitions to actual understanding. They WANT to be trained monkeys. Their parents often have uncritical aspirations too, and will be happy with trained monkeys.
Thus, they do not want to understand the associative and distributive properties. A trained monkey type of student can solve problems while not fully grasping the properties. A student who understands these properties will have an important intellectual tool available. The idea that certain types things can or can't be related in certain well-defined ways is an important idea.
To those who want to teach math only in the context of solving science problems I say: foo. Mathematical training needs to be broader than the known scientific problems to be solved or you encourage inside-the-box thinking. Where in a physic experiment does someone like Godel become relevant? What about Fermat's last theorem?
Gear the teaching to allow the best to be the best. The crank-churners who don't want to excel will find a way to get a B or C on the test. That's why they call average grades "mediocre." The system has to tolerate the mediocre accepting their lot, but it doesn't have to discourage virtuosity in doing so.
Consider also: only about 1-2% of patents get litigated. So as far as you can tell, 98-99% of the time the world doesn't care. Consider that if you reject, the patent applicant is very likely to appeal, unless he was a small inventor that ran out of money or something.
Method and system for interactively responding to instant messaging requests
"This patent application is a continuation of U.S. patent application Ser. No. 09/643,262, filed Aug. 22, 2000, entitled "METHOD AND SYSTEM FOR INTERACTIVELY RESPONDING TO INSTANT MESSAGING REQUESTS," which is hereby incorporated by reference in its entirety"
Mind you, you don't get to argue the relevance of the reference. Because of this, most big-money players don't play the game that way. However, if you just want to give the Examiner a helping hand, you can.
Let's say government buys 999 houses at market rate. The 1000th guy says, I want 1000x market rate, because all your other property is useless without mine. That's greedy.
The government is in the business of solving collective action problems. Broadcasters won't broadcast it unless people will view it, and people won't buy the TV sets unless signals are being broadcast. To get the logjam busted, you need to get something moving. Right now, the government has two swaths of spectrum tied up for TV, and they want to get it down to one, and TV buyers really don't care about spectrum problems.
Collective action problems, such as the prisoner's dilemma, races to the bottom, free rider problems, etc. are a staple of government laws. All gas stations have to accept used motor oil because none of them would if it was optional -- disposing of the motor oil is an expense, and a station accepting it would be at a cost disadvantage. Similarly, one hold-out homeowner can't block a highway. Getting everyone on the same page to prevent individual greed from blocking everything is one of government's jobs.
I think it is fair to allow an artist to protect his work from mutiliation.
An interesting example of this was the Monty Python troupe's suit against a broadcast network for cutting unwanted material that an American audience might be offended by. The case can be found here In sum, Gilliam didn't like some bonehead at a broadcast netword redoing his comedy. Ya gotta admit -- he had a point.
It is my impression that the EPO allows members of the public to follow the prosecution of a patent application and submit information to the examiner to consider in examining the patent. Do you think that the relative openness of the European system affects most applications, and if so, to what degree?
Slashdot Mirror
Regarding point 2, judges are people too. If you don't help them to the right decision, they may not find it on their own. Also, there is a certain amount of "panel lottery" in whether a reversal happens. Many reversed trial judges could be affirmed by a different 3 judge panel.
Regarding point 1: not true. Sharon Prost has neither any technical background nor any patent experience. In ten years, who knows, but today a babe in the woods. What is the likelihood that she is up to speed with Pauline Newman? (Ph.D. in chemistry from Yale, research scientist for American Cyanamid, and then patent counsel to FMC Corp., and a patent appeals judge since 1984.)
I think that the court would be struggling less with the doctrine of equivalents (sometimes 1=2, e.g. in the second bit, but never 0=1) if there were more technically confident members of the court. It has turned into a court where English majors play with pushing words around the page.
I agree with ajakk on all but two points. First, I think district court judges get it wrong because attorneys generally present patent cases badly. Second, I think that these days most of the judges on the Federal Circuit are not former patent attorneys or examiners. The Federal Circuit was formed by combining a couple of other appeals courts, the ones that reviewed the Patent Office and the Court of Claims, and giving it appeals over federal employment and veterans cases also. While patent cases are about 1/3 of their cases, patent cases probably consume 2/3 of the time of the judges.
Patent attorneys (4 full, 0 senior): Newman (last transferred member from the Circuit Court of Patent Appeals), Lourie, Gajarsa, Linn.
Other (8 full, 5 senior): Full: Mayer, Michel, Clevenger, Rader, Schall, Bryson, Dyk, Prost. Senior: Cowen, Skelton, Friedman, Archer, Plager.
Senior judges are older judges who are working with reduced caseloads.
This is based on the bios at the Federal Circuit website.
First, research related to guns has taken on an almost totally political tenor. As a recent example, a book that alleged to offer facts relating to low gun-ownership in the time of the founding fathers has been shown to be at best unreliable, at worst a calculated fraud. (Michale Bellesiles
resigned from Emory University over the flap.) The widespread acceptance and adulation at the book at its first appearance did reveal the polticial and uncritical nature of the book review community with respect to this issue.
This would indicate that absent visiting original records, you would have a hard time determining what the basic records reflect. This creates almost insuperable problems in the highly politicized environment. [Consider: the Maryland/Virginia sniper shootings laid out a case to increase gun control over small-caliber (.22 cal./5.56mm), single-shot (only one shot per episode despite the semi-automatic capability of the actual weapon), long (not easily hidden) guns. The result: agitation for more control over the "safest" class of weapons results.]
If the Supreme Court did find an individual rights to self-protection/hunting weapons, wherein gun owners knew that some level of gun ownership was protected by more than the politics of the moment, rabid resistance to any gun control as necessarily leading to a total gun ban might disappear. We won't get that any time soon. Anyway, that would just politicize Supreme Court nominations even more.
In short, unless you want to become a historian in this area, and spend your time examining original records, there probably is not much that you can implicitly trust. Anyone publishing data has an agenda, and it has been pretty much proven that the data can and will be warped to political ends. It is quite sad when that happens -- science is no longer possible, just politics, and the worst kind of politics at that, pure, blind, unbridled ignorance vs. pure, blind, unbridled ignorance.
There is an incentive to relocate million-mouse research programs to Canada, however. A technically advanced country where you can get good workers and not have to pay the developer.
1) It is a huge, huge dam. Supposed to supply something like 10% of China's electricity.
2) Unfortunately, the Three Gorges were an artistic inspiration for centuries of Chinese artists. They will be flooded, and their beauty lost. You can still see them pretty well now, but that won't be true for long.
So that trip is a twofer.
A fairer allegation would be some form of trade secret misappropriation (information, not generally available, used for busines advantage, that is protected from unreasonable or unfair acquistions attempts) or a specie of unfair competition (vis-a-vis International News Service v. Associated Press, forbidding the republishing of 'hot news' to reap where one has not sown even though the facts of the news are not copyrighted). Not that it would be sustained in this particular case, but at least they aren't laughable theories.
Alright you are a biotech company. You are thinking of a big layout for an inheritable form of breast cancer...
CLIENT: What can I patent if I spend $200 million dollars?
ATTY: You can only patent your exact test. Anybody who departs from that test one iota gets to use all the fruits of your research for free.
CLIENT: Ok, shitcan that project. Let's think of another.
Oh, yeah, and nobody gets the test at ANY price. I wish at least 1 in 100 postings would think of the pathological scenario of the work never being done, or being done 30 years from now when the darn patent would have been expired for at least 10.
1) Nobody will ever know.
2) Nope.
3) Fish in the ocean do not recognize political boundaries. (I assume you mean the imaginary lines people draw on land and water to divide it up, not the fact that a mountain chain can be a pain in the ass to swim across if you are a fish.) Similarly, fish can be thought of as having their own sovereignty.
4) Until the "internet" has armed forces to enforce its decisions, it will have to pay attention to the countries with armies. Just like sovereignty is an exclusive power, to have that power sovereignty must exclude other sovereigns. All the internet country has to do is push the others out. Until then, it will have a lot in common with the nation of fishes. Not able to do much about how the countries of the world regulate how they are harvested. Or don't.
What Rogan does not explain is why the fees for claims should increase exponentially with the number of fees. If your linear relationship is off, reset the slope dammit! It isn't right to punish an inventor because his invention is complicated.
Fees should probably be higher, the USPTO should be allowed to keep all its fee income and pay the examiners accordingly or supplement the research resources the examiners have. The fee probably should be higher for longer patent applications. (Yes, it is the same fee for 10 pages of description and 1000 pages of description now.)
Patents are granted unless the PTO can find a reason not to. ("A person shall be entitled to a patent unless --" 35 U.S.C. 102) Shorting the examiners of time and resources necessarily leads to bad patents getting out.
Part of the reason that patent application fees are low is that the U.S. Patent system is a "winners pay" system. After the patent is allowed you still have to pay a publication fee, an issue fee, and then maintenance fees at 3, 7, and 11 years. That way, small inventors can take their shot but not bear the full cost unless they get a patent.
What Rogan won't confront, is that the darn points system, which basically is a system where you require the hamsters to run a little faster each year, is not the right management tool (at least in a vacuum). The only thing that supplements it now are "customer satisfaction surveys". Mind you, having the USPTO be polite and responsive is ok, but please notice that QUALITY OF ISSUED PATENTS just does not enter the picture. Please, FIX THE METRICS. If it takes money, which is must, then raise fees. Don't just raise fees to hand money over to Congress though.
Certainly you would allow someone to mark up the book you sold them. Make annotations in the margins. Use highlighter to select passages. Oh wait, if they use BLACK highlighter you are upset, but yellow is ok.
The original unretouched movie is bought. The author got all of his economic benefit out of that copy. Can a marked-up version of a book be sold at a garage sale? Can it be lent to a friend?
The problem is that they are in the business of selling markups, and going beyond a personal use of the book. However, if they do not copy the book, what's wrong?
There is another view. It goes like this:
The Congress is supposed to interpret the Constitution before it passes a law, and adhere to the Constitution as Congress views it. Many senators and representatives ignore this role, and abdicate in favor of the Supreme Court. Perhaps because it is politically inconvenience (e.g. campaign finance reform).
The President is supposed to interpret the Constitution when he decides to sign a bill or enforce a law. Therefore, he can even stop unconstitional laws that have been passed before from working, and stop new ones from happening. No president (more accurately, Attorney General) attempted to enforce the law that attempted to overthrow the Miranda decision. That was an executive decision.
The Supreme Court (and other courts) interprets the Constitution in the cases before it. The fact that the other branches can be brought before the Supreme Court by others does not take away the Supreme Court's oath to protect the Constitution of the United States of America.
And the Supreme Court is right because they are last, not last because they are right. Lincoln wanted to keep the issues raised in the Dred Scott case alive, and keep presenting them to the Supreme Court to attempt to force a reversal. Supreme Court reversals of position are not common, but they do happen. Nobody should consider issues "over" because of one decision.
The article is at best an incomplete picture of Professor Lessig. While it is framed to show the roots of where he ended up, it could have been different.
Professor Lessig's primary interest, at least initially, was constitutional law. Actually, that makes the Eldred case a good case for him. If you read the briefs you will see that the parties are not especially approaching the case as a "cyberlaw" case.
I don't think the scope of his interest has been limited to being a great niche legal thinker. He wants to be broad, but is going to ride this particular wave for what it is worth. The article does do a good job of explaining why Lessig is important to a particular non-legal community now, and taken for that, it is nice.
His opinion goes into a fair amount of detail as to why he is convinced that Deep was playing games with copyright infringement. He is ordering them to try to respect the non-infringing users. He is not saying that if it is not possible, that the service isn't getting shut down.
He does have a clue as to how to be an effective judge, and he also knows that Judge Patel ended up having problems with the Ninth Circuit for not trying hard enough to sort out the infringing from the non-infringing. He is trying to avoid those problems. It is up to the parties to draft the thing, not the Judge, precisely because he knows he doesn't know the technology. Both parties will come back with drafts, and reasons supporting the drafts. Mind you, Aimster won't be able to argue that shutting down infringements without non-infringements is impossible. If Aimster does that, he shuts it all down.
Even if that is the final result, he needed to put the drafting step in so that the Court of Appeals could see that Aimster failed to provide a sound technical basis for shutting one down but not the other when ordered to. That is done to keep Aimster from gratuitously changing positions on appeal. (Before Aspen saying: "Impossible", and then at the Court of Appeals saying: "Very easy.")
Yeah! What would Brian Boitano do?
I think you ought to take a look at "Being Digital" by Nicholas Negroponte. Certainly, though he is a fan of fiber, he believes that the installed copper wire, if used intelligently, can handle what is needed.
Debunking Bandwidth: From Shop Talk to Small Talk
"Nature's Role in Copper Versus Fiber
Few people know how good copper twisted pair is. Asymmetrical Digital Subscriber Loop (ADSL-1) can provide 1.544 Mbits per second into, and 64 Kbits per second out of, 75 percent of American and 80 percent of Canadian homes. ADSL-2 runs above 3 Mbits per second and ADSL-3, above 6 Mbits per second. ADSL-1 is fine for VCR-quality video.
Which would you prefer: 500 channels from which you can choose one, or one channel that can be switched to any source on the network?
It is absolutely true that fiber delivers thousands, in fact, millions of times more bandwidth. Frankly, we don't really know the limits of fiber. In addition, fiber now costs less than copper - when lines are updated, fiber will be used, with or without a need for bandwidth. Therefore, fiber will come into being automatically through the forces of common sense and Mother Nature"
You can only be held liable if you had actual or constructive notice of a patent. Constructive means "you didn't know, but should have." Carelessness will not be a problem, but being willfully blind to patent rights. Thus, a refusal to look at patents you see in patent markings on products you are copying is not going to necessarily save you.
However, there is a general duty to not recklessly disregard the patent rights of others. Doing so is called "willful infringement" and can result in 1) treble damages; 2) paying the patentee's attorneys' fees for the patent infringement suit.
So it is possible that even though you did not make any money, and did not decrease the profits of the patentee, you could still get rung up for $1E6 if you fought the suit.
First of all, teachers can't serve as the sole source of motivation for students. Parents and communities have to do that too. The transition for fractions to algebra is one of the hardest on young people. As noted above, one problem is that students that did not have a good grasp of fractions just become more lost in algebra. A second problem is the motivation to learn this new, hard subject.
Students need to understand that "the future is now." This is part of a runup to calculus in college (if not sooner), and that what you can or cannot do in math can and will shape your future. If you do not know algebra II and trigonometry, you are going nowhere in Physics I. No Physics I, no engineering, no chemistry, likely no computer science, etc.
Second, we have to face the fact that many students in math want to get through the class with a decent grade, but have no ambitions to actual understanding. They WANT to be trained monkeys. Their parents often have uncritical aspirations too, and will be happy with trained monkeys.
Thus, they do not want to understand the associative and distributive properties. A trained monkey type of student can solve problems while not fully grasping the properties. A student who understands these properties will have an important intellectual tool available. The idea that certain types things can or can't be related in certain well-defined ways is an important idea.
To those who want to teach math only in the context of solving science problems I say: foo. Mathematical training needs to be broader than the known scientific problems to be solved or you encourage inside-the-box thinking. Where in a physic experiment does someone like Godel become relevant? What about Fermat's last theorem?
Gear the teaching to allow the best to be the best. The crank-churners who don't want to excel will find a way to get a B or C on the test. That's why they call average grades "mediocre." The system has to tolerate the mediocre accepting their lot, but it doesn't have to discourage virtuosity in doing so.
Consider also: only about 1-2% of patents get litigated. So as far as you can tell, 98-99% of the time the world doesn't care. Consider that if you reject, the patent applicant is very likely to appeal, unless he was a small inventor that ran out of money or something.
Following up on my own post. These guys are not done yet. There is a continuing application...
United States Patent Application 20020103917
Kay, Timothy ; et al.
Method and system for interactively responding to instant messaging requests
"This patent application is a continuation of U.S. patent application Ser. No. 09/643,262, filed Aug. 22, 2000, entitled "METHOD AND SYSTEM FOR INTERACTIVELY RESPONDING TO INSTANT MESSAGING REQUESTS," which is hereby incorporated by reference in its entirety"
After they have been on file 18 months, the USPTO does publish most patent applications. The website also has information on third-party submissions related to a patent application.
Mind you, you don't get to argue the relevance of the reference. Because of this, most big-money players don't play the game that way. However, if you just want to give the Examiner a helping hand, you can.
Let's say government buys 999 houses at market rate. The 1000th guy says, I want 1000x market rate, because all your other property is useless without mine. That's greedy.
The government is in the business of solving collective action problems. Broadcasters won't broadcast it unless people will view it, and people won't buy the TV sets unless signals are being broadcast. To get the logjam busted, you need to get something moving. Right now, the government has two swaths of spectrum tied up for TV, and they want to get it down to one, and TV buyers really don't care about spectrum problems.
Collective action problems, such as the prisoner's dilemma, races to the bottom, free rider problems, etc. are a staple of government laws. All gas stations have to accept used motor oil because none of them would if it was optional -- disposing of the motor oil is an expense, and a station accepting it would be at a cost disadvantage. Similarly, one hold-out homeowner can't block a highway. Getting everyone on the same page to prevent individual greed from blocking everything is one of government's jobs.
I think it is fair to allow an artist to protect his work from mutiliation. An interesting example of this was the Monty Python troupe's suit against a broadcast network for cutting unwanted material that an American audience might be offended by. The case can be found here In sum, Gilliam didn't like some bonehead at a broadcast netword redoing his comedy. Ya gotta admit -- he had a point.
It is my impression that the EPO allows members of the public to follow the prosecution of a patent application and submit information to the examiner to consider in examining the patent. Do you think that the relative openness of the European system affects most applications, and if so, to what degree?