The patent was applied for in 1983, and issued in 1987. The patent will expire in 2004. (Seventeen years from date of issue resulting in the longer term than 20 years from first filing.)
Courts don't evaluate whether a patent stifles development. They evaluate whether it is new, useful, and non-obvious. Lemelson's patents did not stop bar code technology from becoming pervasive. It is a question of distributing the money from the commercialization, not whether the commercialization goes forward.
And it is very likely that the patent would expire before a lawsuit including appeals could conclude. That means that ONLY money is on the line, not ordering someone to stop what they are doing. Heck, given that these guys have sat on the patent all these years, they might have problems with demanding money because of laches.
Perhaps the common law has not grown in Commonwealth countries. That could be true. It grows, and grows, and grows in the U.S.
So negligence law (ancient) gives rise to the doctrine of "res ipsa loquitor" (it speaks for itself). Classis RIL, a barrel rolls out of the upper story of a warehouse and crushes a passerby on the street -- was there negligence? Hard to say -- nobody saw how the barrel got loose. However, RIL (it speaks for itself) is brought in by evolution of the common law.
So, then a Coke bottle explodes in a waitress' hand in California. RIL? No -- strict product liability. In a situation like that, if your product hurts someone, you play, no showing of fault required.
Negligent infliction of emotional distress. The old common law only recognized intentional infliction of emotional distress (and narrowly circumscribed it). Some jurisdictions allow emotional distress causes of action based on negligence.
Tortious intereference with prospective economic advantage -- the older common law formulation only allowed recovery with interference with contracts that had already been entered into.
The advances, changes, twists and additions continue. In 50 states and the federal system. (Admiralty law is a federal common law.)
In the area of criminal law, you are absolutely correct. There is no common criminal law in the U.S., even as a holdover. They may have written common law offenses into the code, but the common law currently carries no force for criminal prosecutions. A strictly what's-in-ink area.
Lessig's article is a response to a talk by a well-known federal judge. (Actually, there are a number of articles written in response to this particular talk...) An edited transcript of the talk can be found at:
on the web.
Actually, law journals are pretty much irrelevant. Lawyers and judges pay attention to what higher courts say, and that's about it. Law journals are what are used to get law professors tenure.
"IANAL, but if I undestand correctly, the great deal of Western law is based on 'common law', the practice of allowing previous court decisions to affect future decisions."
(Some vast oversimplifications follow)
Common law is strongest in English-derived legal systems. Most other Western countries are founded on civil law. Common law is where the rules of law are largely made by judges in resolving particular cases. Civil law focuses more on writing the law down ahead of time.
Common law tends to be more organic - it grows. Civil law is more designed. Both do try to achieve consistency and fairness. If two people lose fingers in work accidents, both systems try to award similar numbers to the two individuals. Common law is more likely to look at previous cases, civil law is more likely to have a table of damages created before the case crops up.
Each has strengths. Common law does not require thinking of everything ahead of time. Civil law puts everyone on better notice. The unpredicatability of common law, versus the "oops, missed a spot" aspect of civil law is one of tradeoffs.
Whether "cyberspace" if you think it exists would be better governed by civil or common law, is an entirely separate question from the one that started the thread. It may not be best served by the analogical reasoning of the common law, but on the other hand, a civil law approach requires more foresight than anyone has for the environment.
The above are "technical" problems of law that, for the moment, ignore political and social dimensions of "cyberspace" as a community, or "cyberspace" as a fragment of larger pre-existing communities. For example, if "cyberspace" says that it is not responsible for cyber-stalkers of 12-year-old girls in the same way that Arafat says he is not responsible for Hamas, what is the result? The response of "too bad, so sad" isn't going to cut it.
Just to stir the pot a little. While one class of problem is "I made ABC system work for XYZ Corp. before", the other side can be interesting too.
For example, you worked for XYZ Corp., and tried to solve the problem with VENDOR 1's product. For a number of not-terribly forseeable technical reasons, it was an expensive nightmare that had to be scrapped. Now, working for PDQ Corp., a competitor of XYZ, a VP thinks that the solution to a same/similar problem is using VENDOR 1's product. Can you pipe up and say "Forget it and save yourself a million bucks, I've been there." Even if you don't offer the eventual XYZ Corp. solution, you have added value.
Having read the article, I thought - finally, they came up with a justification that can be sold to consumers for DRM - privacy protection.
Having the same systems implementing the filtering of spam (unapproved senders), restricting forwarding (unapproved redistribution), and also cover DRM (again, unapproved redistribution) allows the whole scheme to be marketed as an anti-spam system.
The marketing on "fair use" really is about certain fair uses such as backups. No software is going to be able to figure out whether a transformative use of digital content will be fair or not -- what is the difference between creating a digital commentary on a video (fair) and a remarketing of it? (say in the Spanish language). Nothing that can be discerned by a computer program, I assure you.
Still, it is encouraging to see MS taking security seriously, even if for the reasons of extending the reach of corporate profiteering. Actually, I can't think of any other reason that would motivate MS to do it, but so it goes.
The header indicates that a substantial sum was paid. How much was that? I have my doubts that it really was substantial. In this kind of dispute, 100k is chump change, although quite a real sum to me personally.
How many people who own only tape players buy content instead of renting it? I suppose parents who let their kids watch the same movie 100 times a week do -- but aren't they REALLY better off with a DVD player? Or buying the overstock when Blockbuster Video or Hollywood Video sells the movies after 6 weeks or so?
Just about everything about DVD discs are superior to VHS tapes except the installed base of players. They last longer, are easier to distribute, provide language and subtitle selection, and take less space to store.
Corporate decision makers are afraid enough of change as it is -- this decision was more likely overdue by a year rather than happening a year too soon.
Fifty years ago if you showed a first-year physics graduate student an equation for an asymmetrical top, he'd probably be 90%+ to recognize it. Today, he'd be 95%+ to not recognize it. Among the students that went to college in the U.S., that would likely be 99%+.
This loss of ability in mathematical methods is universal in the U.S., and not limited to physicists. They are likely the last bulwark against total ignorance. In the article above, the "squashed circle" (an ellipse) can't be drawn by the student, who apparently can't get two pins, a piece of string, and a pencil. (You have to know that an ellipse has two foci to draw one. Egg shapes require a more convoluted effort, because for a Cartesian oval, you use distance to one focus and twice distance to other focus as the conserved quantity.) I would gather that given a protractor this same student could not manage a circle or, with the aid of a ruler, an oval. An electronic device is not the solution to the student's problem.
I guess I am of two minds on this. Certainly, there are legitimate uses for graphing tools. When you have a mathematically complicated function, graphing it to see the shape can be instructive, such as a Maxwell-Boltzmann distribution. (Yes, easy shape, but not intuitive to most high school students.)
However, in most cases, electronic aids foster weak learning. First, it discourages analytical solutions in favor of numerical solutions. Second, it impairs the formation of approximate quantitative judgment. (In this regard, slide rules are likely superior educational tools -- you have to know the differences among logarithmic, exponential, and linear responses.) Third, it inhibits the important skill of hand-drawing graphs. (Ok, on a PDA with a graph paper template, you have an expensive etch-a-sketch, but still...)
The biggest problem is that you cannot easily regulate what a device can do, therefore, students rely on a machine too soon after beginning to master a skill. Fifty years ago, or even thirty, science students were MUCH better mathematicians than they are now. On the balance, I think that reliance on calculators has atrophied the minds of two generations now, and it is time to stop the intellectual carnage.
1) Make patent term dependent upon how pioneering the invention is. If you are the first with the laser, long term. If you are the first with using a laser as a pointing device during presentations, short term. The PTO assigns a term as part of prosecution.
2) Require the PTO to accept and process comments about patents, and consider reexamination when a certain number of non-anonymous comments have accumulated. Thus, a reexaminatino of the Amazon patent could have been triggered by citizens. Have provisions to make sure companies don't have their employees swamp competitors patents. Congress needs to fund this function directly.
3) Access control isn't the problem, it is control over access control. Anyone who reverse engineers access control and or produces unlicensed access control can do so to the extent it is consistent with the law and the rights of the copyright holder. Thus, if open-source stuff is written to protect the copyright holder's legitimate rights, while better allowing access to expired copyrights for example, that is ok even if not approved by the copyright holder or the access system designer. (Please note: DeCSS still probably loses under this standard.)
Well, that's what I have off the top of my head...
All copyrights must be held by a private individual. No corporate entity may hold a copyright. Copyrights cannot be assigned to another entity. Patents must be held by individuals, not corporate entities.
Why does a creative person have to devote his life to being a collection agent on his work? The only point to this rule is to require each artist to hunt down the people ripping him off. This is anger talking, not thinking.
Copyright terms may vary up to a period of 17 years (depending on content type -- To Be Specified), with a single renewal for the same period of time
Having the term depend on content type can make sense. It is probably harder to make money from a book than a movie. For some things, the value comes in preventing copying, e.g. original oil paintings where the intent, and a fair bit of value, comes from it being the only of its kind.
Copyright expires upon the death of the copyright holder.
Writer dies in car crash before book gets published. Too bad for his wife and kids! Sucks to be them.
Only physical objects and processes may be patented.
The exclusion of compositions of matter was probably unintentional, unless you really don't like new chemicals of any sort.
A working implementation of the patented process must be provided (upon request of USPTO)
A supertanker, a dam, an interstellar rocket. Ooh. That's good, what about things that can only be assembled in outer space?
The USPTO must conduct a good faith search for any prior art.
The sad part is that they do. Search is a function of budget, and Congress impounds fees from the PTO, and does not support it at all.
Larry Kaufman was an IM level chess player in the US who tried to get the game shogi to catch on in this country back in the early 1980s. Although I was pathetic at both, it was easier to get him interested in my learning shogi than learning chess.
Although this has a stronger French connection than American connection, it could be the start of a process that could finally get shogi an appropriate level of recogniztion here. Shogi is much more of an action game than chess. Pieces dropping in from the sky, possibly promoting the move after they drop in. Yikes! Shogi has a much more traditional handicapping system for matching stronger and weaker players.
The handicapping system is combined with traditional educational/learning pattern of how to win at certain handicaps. Once you have mastered a certain level of advantage, you can move to the next one against anyone, thereby seeing progress.
Try the game if you have the patience to learn it. Maybe someone can post an on-line shogi-playing site?
Depends how much of the material comes from the 1984 patent application. The applicants kept adding material, combining applications, etc, but appears to have gotten most of their raw material by 1993. The USPTO fought these people off for a long time -- 12 years.
Accidents at intersections happen for a variety of reasons. I know a local intersection that has a lot of morning accidents because you are staring right into the sun at 8am. A red-light camera wouldn't affect that.
Part of the point of the cameras is to change a person's driving habits, not the habits at particular intersectinos. Accordingly, choosing the busy ones that many people drive through is the best way to do that.
In the city, I wish they would use the cameras to nail people who enter an intersection they do not have a prayer of exiting, and then block the cross-street for a full light.
First, the right to not testify against yourself is for criminal cases. Thus, OJ could sit out his criminal trial for murder, but not the civil lawsuit against him for wrongful death.
Second, as pointed out by another poster, evidence is not testimony. For example, DNA samples can be taken to ascertain whether you were the rapist. That is far, far more intrusive than looking at your TV watching diary.
You are correct for the burden being on the plaintiff. However, the plaintiff is entitled to "every man's evidence" in pursuing his claim. So he can subpeona documents, witnesses, etc. (There are quite a number of limits on this, too tiresome to enumerate, but the idea is to get to the right answer by making as much evidence as is reasonably possible available.)
Your reasons are good ones, and your first reason has additional support. You always fight the easier case first, and use that as a jumping-off point for harder cases.
This seems to be the Shetland Times case all over again, which was settled rather than fought to the bitter end.
The line between fair use and ripoff may be hard to define, but is worth doing if we want reporters and editors to do the work we value.
It is important to fight against the passage of UCITA. Even under the old UCC, shrink-wrap licenses have been held by some courts to be fine. Presumably, the analysis would be much the same for click wrap.
See ProCD v. Zeidenburg. A decision that is not without controversy, but still a warning to ignoring your EULA. In general, it is bad to be dragged into court when you look like a thief, as the case shows.
All of these companies have lots of money to trumpet their products. They roll out new ones every few months, and spend a lot of money to keep them rolling.
I remember when I used to buy computers from DEC in the mid-80s. You would get a genuinely impressive series of well-indexed and comprehensive manuals. When you couldn't find the answer there, you could call technical support and talk to a technically capable person. If that person could not help you, they would put you through to an engineer.
I also remember the first day that I got put through to a clueless, script reading, customer support representative at some anonymous call center when I called DEC. After that, I bought PC clones from Gateway or PCs Unlimited (eventually Dell). The only point of ponying up the big bucks was for the extensive documentation and support.
DEC tried to become a different company via changed marketing and survive. It died. You cannot abandon your customers and survive.
The idea that the BSA can routinely enter your premises and take them over is something the BSA would like everyone to believe. They have succeeded in getting access in the past, but a company with a reasonable compliance program ought to be able to convince a judge that emergency measures are not needed.
A judge's perception of the defendant will influence what will be allowed. For example, if the BSA went to court asking to seize all of the CIA's hard disks to search for illegal software the reaction might well be laughter. Even if there was a former CIA employee who testified that he saw a lot of condoned software piracy, the judge would trust the U.S. government not to destroy evidence.
The BSA often operates off tips from disgruntled former employees. A sufficiently credible employee, with a bad enough story, might be able to convince the feds to issue a warrant, but that is not likely. More likely is the threat to file a lawsuit.
No system will be perfect. If you implement systems to *try* to operate with properly licensed software, disgruntled former employee stories are less likely to stick, and once they see that a system is in place, the BSA will be able to see that litigation is not likely to be profitable on the occasional bad copy.
You'd rather be the angelic university that tried hard than the greedy pirating corporation that stole everything in sight.
When the Communications Decency Act of 1996 was struck down, Justice O'Connor wrote a concurrance that suggested that if the law had been approached as a zoning ordinance, it could have been written to pass muster. In writing the opinion, she relied, in part, on a 1996 article by Larry Lessig.
The idea of using a PRN domain was probably motivated by that concurrance. Whether it would survive Supreme Court review is another matter. Justice O'Connor was only joined by Chief Justice Rehnquist.
First, there is a statute that says that if a patent issues, it is presumed valid absent clear and convincing evidence.
Second, even non-patent federal employees mess up. No federal judge is going to let one egg inspector's mess up be used to challenge the whole egg inspection regime. That patent office's mistakes are going to be treated as just one more type of mistake something as big as the U.S. government makes.
Third, the USPTO at least isn't biased. Juries are confronted by two parties, each of which has an intense financial interest in the outcome, who hire high-priced experts to put forth their positions. What the perhaps imperfect, but not economically interested, patent examiner did does carry weight with them.
Slashdot Mirror
The patent was applied for in 1983, and issued in 1987. The patent will expire in 2004. (Seventeen years from date of issue resulting in the longer term than 20 years from first filing.)
Courts don't evaluate whether a patent stifles development. They evaluate whether it is new, useful, and non-obvious. Lemelson's patents did not stop bar code technology from becoming pervasive. It is a question of distributing the money from the commercialization, not whether the commercialization goes forward.
And it is very likely that the patent would expire before a lawsuit including appeals could conclude. That means that ONLY money is on the line, not ordering someone to stop what they are doing. Heck, given that these guys have sat on the patent all these years, they might have problems with demanding money because of laches.
Perhaps the common law has not grown in Commonwealth countries. That could be true. It grows, and grows, and grows in the U.S.
So negligence law (ancient) gives rise to the doctrine of "res ipsa loquitor" (it speaks for itself). Classis RIL, a barrel rolls out of the upper story of a warehouse and crushes a passerby on the street -- was there negligence? Hard to say -- nobody saw how the barrel got loose. However, RIL (it speaks for itself) is brought in by evolution of the common law.
So, then a Coke bottle explodes in a waitress' hand in California. RIL? No -- strict product liability. In a situation like that, if your product hurts someone, you play, no showing of fault required.
Negligent infliction of emotional distress. The old common law only recognized intentional infliction of emotional distress (and narrowly circumscribed it). Some jurisdictions allow emotional distress causes of action based on negligence.
Tortious intereference with prospective economic advantage -- the older common law formulation only allowed recovery with interference with contracts that had already been entered into.
The advances, changes, twists and additions continue. In 50 states and the federal system. (Admiralty law is a federal common law.)
In the area of criminal law, you are absolutely correct. There is no common criminal law in the U.S., even as a holdover. They may have written common law offenses into the code, but the common law currently carries no force for criminal prosecutions. A strictly what's-in-ink area.
Lessig's article is a response to a talk by a well-known federal judge. (Actually, there are a number of articles written in response to this particular talk...) An edited transcript of the talk can be found at: on the web.
Actually, law journals are pretty much irrelevant. Lawyers and judges pay attention to what higher courts say, and that's about it. Law journals are what are used to get law professors tenure.
"IANAL, but if I undestand correctly, the great deal of Western law is based on 'common law', the practice of allowing previous court decisions to affect future decisions."
(Some vast oversimplifications follow)
Common law is strongest in English-derived legal systems. Most other Western countries are founded on civil law. Common law is where the rules of law are largely made by judges in resolving particular cases. Civil law focuses more on writing the law down ahead of time.
Common law tends to be more organic - it grows. Civil law is more designed. Both do try to achieve consistency and fairness. If two people lose fingers in work accidents, both systems try to award similar numbers to the two individuals. Common law is more likely to look at previous cases, civil law is more likely to have a table of damages created before the case crops up.
Each has strengths. Common law does not require thinking of everything ahead of time. Civil law puts everyone on better notice. The unpredicatability of common law, versus the "oops, missed a spot" aspect of civil law is one of tradeoffs.
Whether "cyberspace" if you think it exists would be better governed by civil or common law, is an entirely separate question from the one that started the thread. It may not be best served by the analogical reasoning of the common law, but on the other hand, a civil law approach requires more foresight than anyone has for the environment.
The above are "technical" problems of law that, for the moment, ignore political and social dimensions of "cyberspace" as a community, or "cyberspace" as a fragment of larger pre-existing communities. For example, if "cyberspace" says that it is not responsible for cyber-stalkers of 12-year-old girls in the same way that Arafat says he is not responsible for Hamas, what is the result? The response of "too bad, so sad" isn't going to cut it.
Just to stir the pot a little. While one class of problem is "I made ABC system work for XYZ Corp. before", the other side can be interesting too.
For example, you worked for XYZ Corp., and tried to solve the problem with VENDOR 1's product. For a number of not-terribly forseeable technical reasons, it was an expensive nightmare that had to be scrapped. Now, working for PDQ Corp., a competitor of XYZ, a VP thinks that the solution to a same/similar problem is using VENDOR 1's product. Can you pipe up and say "Forget it and save yourself a million bucks, I've been there." Even if you don't offer the eventual XYZ Corp. solution, you have added value.
Having read the article, I thought - finally, they came up with a justification that can be sold to consumers for DRM - privacy protection.
Having the same systems implementing the filtering of spam (unapproved senders), restricting forwarding (unapproved redistribution), and also cover DRM (again, unapproved redistribution) allows the whole scheme to be marketed as an anti-spam system.
The marketing on "fair use" really is about certain fair uses such as backups. No software is going to be able to figure out whether a transformative use of digital content will be fair or not -- what is the difference between creating a digital commentary on a video (fair) and a remarketing of it? (say in the Spanish language). Nothing that can be discerned by a computer program, I assure you.
Still, it is encouraging to see MS taking security seriously, even if for the reasons of extending the reach of corporate profiteering. Actually, I can't think of any other reason that would motivate MS to do it, but so it goes.
The header indicates that a substantial sum was paid. How much was that? I have my doubts that it really was substantial. In this kind of dispute, 100k is chump change, although quite a real sum to me personally.
Anyone know?
How many people who own only tape players buy content instead of renting it? I suppose parents who let their kids watch the same movie 100 times a week do -- but aren't they REALLY better off with a DVD player? Or buying the overstock when Blockbuster Video or Hollywood Video sells the movies after 6 weeks or so?
Just about everything about DVD discs are superior to VHS tapes except the installed base of players. They last longer, are easier to distribute, provide language and subtitle selection, and take less space to store.
Corporate decision makers are afraid enough of change as it is -- this decision was more likely overdue by a year rather than happening a year too soon.
Fifty years ago if you showed a first-year physics graduate student an equation for an asymmetrical top, he'd probably be 90%+ to recognize it. Today, he'd be 95%+ to not recognize it. Among the students that went to college in the U.S., that would likely be 99%+.
This loss of ability in mathematical methods is universal in the U.S., and not limited to physicists. They are likely the last bulwark against total ignorance. In the article above, the "squashed circle" (an ellipse) can't be drawn by the student, who apparently can't get two pins, a piece of string, and a pencil. (You have to know that an ellipse has two foci to draw one. Egg shapes require a more convoluted effort, because for a Cartesian oval, you use distance to one focus and twice distance to other focus as the conserved quantity.) I would gather that given a protractor this same student could not manage a circle or, with the aid of a ruler, an oval. An electronic device is not the solution to the student's problem.
I guess I am of two minds on this. Certainly, there are legitimate uses for graphing tools. When you have a mathematically complicated function, graphing it to see the shape can be instructive, such as a Maxwell-Boltzmann distribution. (Yes, easy shape, but not intuitive to most high school students.)
However, in most cases, electronic aids foster weak learning. First, it discourages analytical solutions in favor of numerical solutions. Second, it impairs the formation of approximate quantitative judgment. (In this regard, slide rules are likely superior educational tools -- you have to know the differences among logarithmic, exponential, and linear responses.) Third, it inhibits the important skill of hand-drawing graphs. (Ok, on a PDA with a graph paper template, you have an expensive etch-a-sketch, but still...)
The biggest problem is that you cannot easily regulate what a device can do, therefore, students rely on a machine too soon after beginning to master a skill. Fifty years ago, or even thirty, science students were MUCH better mathematicians than they are now. On the balance, I think that reliance on calculators has atrophied the minds of two generations now, and it is time to stop the intellectual carnage.
1) Make patent term dependent upon how pioneering the invention is. If you are the first with the laser, long term. If you are the first with using a laser as a pointing device during presentations, short term. The PTO assigns a term as part of prosecution.
2) Require the PTO to accept and process comments about patents, and consider reexamination when a certain number of non-anonymous comments have accumulated. Thus, a reexaminatino of the Amazon patent could have been triggered by citizens. Have provisions to make sure companies don't have their employees swamp competitors patents. Congress needs to fund this function directly.
3) Access control isn't the problem, it is control over access control. Anyone who reverse engineers access control and or produces unlicensed access control can do so to the extent it is consistent with the law and the rights of the copyright holder. Thus, if open-source stuff is written to protect the copyright holder's legitimate rights, while better allowing access to expired copyrights for example, that is ok even if not approved by the copyright holder or the access system designer. (Please note: DeCSS still probably loses under this standard.)
Well, that's what I have off the top of my head...
All copyrights must be held by a private individual. No corporate entity may hold a copyright. Copyrights cannot be assigned to another entity. Patents must be held by individuals, not corporate entities.
Why does a creative person have to devote his life to being a collection agent on his work? The only point to this rule is to require each artist to hunt down the people ripping him off. This is anger talking, not thinking.
Copyright terms may vary up to a period of 17 years (depending on content type -- To Be Specified), with a single renewal for the same period of time
Having the term depend on content type can make sense. It is probably harder to make money from a book than a movie. For some things, the value comes in preventing copying, e.g. original oil paintings where the intent, and a fair bit of value, comes from it being the only of its kind.
Copyright expires upon the death of the copyright holder.
Writer dies in car crash before book gets published. Too bad for his wife and kids! Sucks to be them.
Only physical objects and processes may be patented.
The exclusion of compositions of matter was probably unintentional, unless you really don't like new chemicals of any sort.
A working implementation of the patented process must be provided (upon request of USPTO)
A supertanker, a dam, an interstellar rocket. Ooh. That's good, what about things that can only be assembled in outer space?
The USPTO must conduct a good faith search for any prior art.
The sad part is that they do. Search is a function of budget, and Congress impounds fees from the PTO, and does not support it at all.
Larry Kaufman was an IM level chess player in the US who tried to get the game shogi to catch on in this country back in the early 1980s. Although I was pathetic at both, it was easier to get him interested in my learning shogi than learning chess.
Although this has a stronger French connection than American connection, it could be the start of a process that could finally get shogi an appropriate level of recogniztion here. Shogi is much more of an action game than chess. Pieces dropping in from the sky, possibly promoting the move after they drop in. Yikes! Shogi has a much more traditional handicapping system for matching stronger and weaker players.
The handicapping system is combined with traditional educational/learning pattern of how to win at certain handicaps. Once you have mastered a certain level of advantage, you can move to the next one against anyone, thereby seeing progress.
Try the game if you have the patience to learn it. Maybe someone can post an on-line shogi-playing site?
Depends how much of the material comes from the 1984 patent application. The applicants kept adding material, combining applications, etc, but appears to have gotten most of their raw material by 1993. The USPTO fought these people off for a long time -- 12 years.
The patent is probably not as broad as you were thinking. The term "means" is a very dangerous one for a patentee. See Chiuminatta Concrete Concepts, Inc. v. Cardinal Indus., Inc.
Accidents at intersections happen for a variety of reasons. I know a local intersection that has a lot of morning accidents because you are staring right into the sun at 8am. A red-light camera wouldn't affect that.
Part of the point of the cameras is to change a person's driving habits, not the habits at particular intersectinos. Accordingly, choosing the busy ones that many people drive through is the best way to do that.
In the city, I wish they would use the cameras to nail people who enter an intersection they do not have a prayer of exiting, and then block the cross-street for a full light.
First, the right to not testify against yourself is for criminal cases. Thus, OJ could sit out his criminal trial for murder, but not the civil lawsuit against him for wrongful death.
Second, as pointed out by another poster, evidence is not testimony. For example, DNA samples can be taken to ascertain whether you were the rapist. That is far, far more intrusive than looking at your TV watching diary.
You are correct for the burden being on the plaintiff. However, the plaintiff is entitled to "every man's evidence" in pursuing his claim. So he can subpeona documents, witnesses, etc. (There are quite a number of limits on this, too tiresome to enumerate, but the idea is to get to the right answer by making as much evidence as is reasonably possible available.)
Your reasons are good ones, and your first reason has additional support. You always fight the easier case first, and use that as a jumping-off point for harder cases.
This seems to be the Shetland Times case all over again, which was settled rather than fought to the bitter end. The line between fair use and ripoff may be hard to define, but is worth doing if we want reporters and editors to do the work we value.
It is important to fight against the passage of UCITA. Even under the old UCC, shrink-wrap licenses have been held by some courts to be fine. Presumably, the analysis would be much the same for click wrap. See ProCD v. Zeidenburg. A decision that is not without controversy, but still a warning to ignoring your EULA. In general, it is bad to be dragged into court when you look like a thief, as the case shows.
All of these companies have lots of money to trumpet their products. They roll out new ones every few months, and spend a lot of money to keep them rolling.
I remember when I used to buy computers from DEC in the mid-80s. You would get a genuinely impressive series of well-indexed and comprehensive manuals. When you couldn't find the answer there, you could call technical support and talk to a technically capable person. If that person could not help you, they would put you through to an engineer.
I also remember the first day that I got put through to a clueless, script reading, customer support representative at some anonymous call center when I called DEC. After that, I bought PC clones from Gateway or PCs Unlimited (eventually Dell). The only point of ponying up the big bucks was for the extensive documentation and support.
DEC tried to become a different company via changed marketing and survive. It died. You cannot abandon your customers and survive.
The idea that the BSA can routinely enter your premises and take them over is something the BSA would like everyone to believe. They have succeeded in getting access in the past, but a company with a reasonable compliance program ought to be able to convince a judge that emergency measures are not needed.
A judge's perception of the defendant will influence what will be allowed. For example, if the BSA went to court asking to seize all of the CIA's hard disks to search for illegal software the reaction might well be laughter. Even if there was a former CIA employee who testified that he saw a lot of condoned software piracy, the judge would trust the U.S. government not to destroy evidence.
The BSA often operates off tips from disgruntled former employees. A sufficiently credible employee, with a bad enough story, might be able to convince the feds to issue a warrant, but that is not likely. More likely is the threat to file a lawsuit.
No system will be perfect. If you implement systems to *try* to operate with properly licensed software, disgruntled former employee stories are less likely to stick, and once they see that a system is in place, the BSA will be able to see that litigation is not likely to be profitable on the occasional bad copy.
You'd rather be the angelic university that tried hard than the greedy pirating corporation that stole everything in sight.
When the Communications Decency Act of 1996 was struck down, Justice O'Connor wrote a concurrance that suggested that if the law had been approached as a zoning ordinance, it could have been written to pass muster. In writing the opinion, she relied, in part, on a 1996 article by Larry Lessig.
The idea of using a PRN domain was probably motivated by that concurrance. Whether it would survive Supreme Court review is another matter. Justice O'Connor was only joined by Chief Justice Rehnquist.
No, it won't help the defense.
First, there is a statute that says that if a patent issues, it is presumed valid absent clear and convincing evidence.
Second, even non-patent federal employees mess up. No federal judge is going to let one egg inspector's mess up be used to challenge the whole egg inspection regime. That patent office's mistakes are going to be treated as just one more type of mistake something as big as the U.S. government makes.
Third, the USPTO at least isn't biased. Juries are confronted by two parties, each of which has an intense financial interest in the outcome, who hire high-priced experts to put forth their positions. What the perhaps imperfect, but not economically interested, patent examiner did does carry weight with them.