Yeah, and computer programmers are the reason computer programs cannot be used without going to professional training courses on how to use the program.:)
Complication has mostly arisen from the fact that somewhere a bias arose that the system attempt to genuinely reach the "right" result a very high percentage of the time, say 99%. Simpler rules would probably result in being right 90% of the time. As a people, so far, we haven't been willing to swallow that 9% difference.
Odds are even the really complicated system that aspires to 99%, is far less good than that, but the tweaks continue and continue. Take a look at the length of the US tax code as a function of time, and ask yourself -- is the tax code now 100 times better than a century ago? Is Microsoft Word 2000 that much better than Wordperfect 5.2? Is THE PHANTOM MENACE that much better a movie than CITIZEN KANE? I don't think any of the above, but the futile search for perfection through complexity continues.
So yeah, the law is bloatware. But what isn't these days?
The Colorado Supreme Court restricted the ability of Colorado police to execute a search warrant.
First, there is a doctrine that says if there is an independent state ground for the ruling, then there is not a basis for Supreme Court review. This doctrine has less applicability when a Constitutional right is being allegedly violated. However, nobody says that the Colorado police have a Constitutional right to the search -- if anything the ruling tends to support Constitutional rights.
Second, Federalism doctrine, which the current U.S. Supreme Court favors, would tend to lead to the conclusion that the U.S. Supreme Court should let the Colorado Supreme Court rein in the Colorado police if it wants to.
There will be other cases in the future, and the Supreme Court may well hear one. Just not this one.
While copyright law and patent law are about incentives to create, trademark law is different and should not be lumped in with the other two.
Trademark law is what makes sure consumers can know where the products and services they buy come from. The red and white swirl, the odd shaped bottle, and the words "Coca-Cola" all help consumers identify a soft drink sold under the strongest (or by now perhaps second strongest) brand in the world. There are countries in the world where you can't be sure what is in a bottle labeled that way. I don't really like the idea of buying things in such places.
But most of this "never been done before" is more of an argument for an award after the third movie is screened, to prove the consistency of the work before awarding for that.
There is no way LoRT deserves best screenplay adaptation.
I am not quibbling about various inaccuracies that are required by the extrememly compressed format. For example, turning Arwen into Xena-warrior-princess was gutwrenching. This is all the more because there *is* a Xena-warrior-princess later in the person of Eowyn. (Marry a woman like Eowyn, and you better not cheat on her. Would take Lorena Bobbitt to a new level.)
People who had not read the books do not and cannot reasonably take in the time scale of events to understand the scope of the epic. This transforms the book in two ways that are bad.
First, it drops the implication of intermediate time that is so important to understand why these little hobbits are so heroic. One loses a sense of how far Bree is for them, much less Rivendell, much less Lorien. One needs not only space, but time to explain how far they hobbits are going.
Second, it lends the impression that the action scenes that take perhaps 50 pages of the book are adjacent events. While it makes for a much better action story, it does not tell Tolkien's story, which is much more of a travel log. The places I saw, the people I met etc.
Elisions like Tom Bombadil are nits to pick, but the overall character of the work changing, and for the worse, takes LoTR out of consideration for best adapted screenplay.
The defendant never said he never got the documents. In fact, his lawyer obviously did get the documents somehow.
He was 1) actually notified, 2) actually represented, and 3) trying to hide behind some hypertechnical fig leaf. He was trying to tell the courts that because he hadn't been physically whacked with rolled up piece of ink-on-dead-tree, that the courts were powerless.
Would he have been happier losing the domain name because the complaint was published in the Miami Herald or the like? Good grief. He was a loser messing with everyone who got whacked. Looks good to me.
John D. Ashcroft, Attorney General, et al., v. The Free Speech Coalition, et al. will decide whether virtual child pornography can be treated as the real thing. It was argued in the Supreme Court last October, and they still have not issued an opinion.
If you can treat the virtual like the real, then it becomes much easier for the AG of Pennsylvania to do something. He doesn't have to care about the difference. Otherwise, sorting out whether it is virtual or real could pose difficulties.
Interesting that CANDYMAN happened while the Supreme Court was noodling over the issue. I wonder if they know.
Those are short-term graphs when thinking in geological time. I think the National Academy of Sciences report to President Bush pretty much admitted that 1) people think something is going on, and 2) nobody knows if it is dangerous.
For example, suppose the warming averts another ice age. Do we WANT an ice age? At what point will the warming be dangerous? Hard to say given that the middle ages were warmer than we are now. (The recent trend prior to the middle of this century was a long-term gradual cooling trend.)
While we don't want to bet the world, it is far from clear that a 1 degree C increase in average temperature IS betting the world. It isn't even clear that the world is a worse place 1 degree C warmer than what we have now.
(Please note, re Antarctica -- polar ice is still melting from the last ice age. Unless we get much closer to ice age temperatures, it will keep melting, only the speed of melting is in question.)
The point to emphasize in the above, is that the judge reviews, and forces the government to explain again/reoffer. The judge does not write a new settlement.
The Tunney Act does the same thing that the Administrative Procedures Act generally does for judicial review of agency action -- it makes the government offer a coherent explaination or try again. That is, whether the action is arbitrary, capricious, or not in accordance with law. It does not substitute judicial judgment for executive judgement.
Mockeries of the judicial power are not based in policy disagreement. It is to protect the judicial power from being abused in the sense that on Monday the government takes the position that the sun rises in the east, and on Tuesday that the sun rises in the west. (Judicial estoppel).
You go on and on about "collustion" as it if contradicts my point. What is "ganging up" if not "collusion?" In cases like the present one, it matters far more who is running the DoJ than is sitting on the bench, and that is the way it should be -- regardless of which case it is, who the defendant is, or who appointed the judge. The system is too important to swing between the judge being imperial and the DoJ being unlimited in power depending on whether you like or dislike the advocates or the judge or the parties.
>Blowing this minute and dubious distinction >about remedy and sufficient remedy up into a >separation of powers type argument
No blowing up going on. It is. Practically the only reason to not enter a settlement is that the nominally hostile parties are really ganging up on somebody that isn't represented. The comment period gives those outside somebodies a chance to howl. Like it or not, the court has to accept that the DoJ represents the people of the United States.
>The consent decree was handed then to Thomas >Penfield Jackson for his immediate signature, >(who must have also wondered why a rubber stamp >at DOJ wasn't used instead, since according the >Appeals Court his signature was non-optional.)
Um, judgments aren't entered by Courts of Appeal. Really. They aren't entered by executive agencies either. They are entered by courts of original jurisdiction. Courts of appeal return cases with instructions all the time. For example, to dimiss the case.
Congress passes the laws. The Executive Branch is the enforcer. The judge only makes sure that the enforcement matches the law passed by Congress and the Constitution. This ain't France where the judge has a much bigger role. The powers are separated here to enforce a broader concurrance as to what the law is. Taking the DoJ out of the remedy phase turns the game from a three player game to a two player game. You can't have that and have our system of checks and balances.
What about software that controls the dose of radiation for cancer treatment? If you get 10,000 times the intended dose, someone can die. Do we treat that the same as a PDA phone number application that can't find people whose last names begin with 'q' because the "quit" command was munged? (bad example, but you get the idea...)
After all, you can always replace the PDA, and you can't forsee death as a result. Bad control of radiation can quite easily result in injury or death. With the case of the radiation machine, do we CARE how obscure the bug was, or how hard the maker/programmer tried and tested? Or do we just stick him with the liability because it's better than telling the dead person: "tough luck?"
Even apart from the donations buy votes theory, just remember -- If Jack Valenti can get a fee from you, Congress can tax that transaction at the same time. $$$.
The "limited time" argument in terms of saying whether it should be 10, 30, 50, 70 or 100 years is not the kind of question that the Supreme Court can well put itself in the position of answering. The "rational basis" test is really a very deferential one that takes little to satisfy. True, the current Court has taken to rapping Congress on the knuckles for overreaching a lot in the past 20 years, but not with the tool of the rational basis test.
The extension of pre-existing copyrights is the best attack based on rational basis review. It is a big transfer from my ability to read and disseminate to the ability of authors to maintain their works in a grip-of-death.
We could well end up with a decision that "you can do that, but you can't do it retroactively." As for the "IP is bad" crowd, only Justices Breyer and Stevens are particularly sympathetic, and even they limit their depredations to narrowly construing copyright. (See Tasini case.) They are not Justices that are disposed to limiting Congressional power under the Constitution.
Microsoft is being ordered to turn it over to the States' attorneys so that it can be evaluated. Such discovery is always covered by a protective order. Company secrets are specifically mentioned as protectable subject matter, and are as an initial matter disclosed in confidence. What would happen at hearings or trial later is at the discretion of the judge. For example, the judge could order that only representative portions, or redacted portions be shown, or the sensitive portions of the record sealed and shown only to trial lawyers and the jury. Or the judge could just tell MS to take its lumps.
FEDERAL RULE OF CIVIL PROCEDURE - RULE 26(c)
(c) Protective Orders.
Upon motion by a party or by the person from whom discovery is sought, accompanied by a certification that the movant has in good faith conferred or attempted to confer with other affected parties in an effort to resolve the dispute without court action, and for good cause shown, the court in which the action is pending or alternatively, on matters relating to a deposition, the court in the district where the deposition is to be taken may make any order which justice requires to protect a party or person from annoyance, embarrassment, oppression, or undue burden or expense, including one or more of the following:
(1) that the disclosure or discovery not be had;
(2) that the disclosure or discovery may be had only on specified terms and conditions, including a designation of the time or place;
(3) that the discovery may be had only by a method of discovery other than that selected by the party seeking discovery;
(4) that certain matters not be inquired into, or that the scope of the disclosure or discovery be limited to certain matters;
(5) that discovery be conducted with no one present except persons designated by the court;
(6) that a deposition, after being sealed, be opened only by order of the court;
(7) that a trade secret or other confidential research, development, or commercial information not be revealed or be revealed only in a designated way; and
(8) that the parties simultaneously file specified documents or information enclosed in sealed envelopes to be opened as directed by the court.
To the extent that the comments are persuasive because of their content they matter. Remember that Judge Jackson was motivated, despite the parties, to look into a three-way breakup.
Judges are trained to decide based on right/wrong arguments, not what is popular. The Judges are their precisely to make sure that the political branches, that operate off popularity, stay between the lines. They are supposed to be independent, and counting the comments as votes is not independence.
As Professor Froomkin has pointed out, the absence of a notice and comment period raises issues more fundamental and widespread than the individual conclusion reached in this case. The APA referred to is the Adminstrative Procedures Act. This is the act that makes so much of what happens at agencies like the EPA, FDA, FTC, FCC and other agencies take a long time to do anything. Very, very scary stuff if you desire nimble decisionmaking, but very, very essential stuff if you are going to have democratic accountability of government action.
Non-obvious has to be qualified: "A patent may not be obtained... if the differences between the the subject matter sought to be patented and the prior art are such that the subject matter as a whole would have been obvious at the time the invention was made to a person having ordinary skill in the art to which said subject matter pertains. Patentability shall not be negatived by the manner in which the invention was made."
1) The last sentence got rid of the "flash of genius" test. If you have to try bamboo, eyelashes, feathers, paper, iron, thread, silk, etc. before finding tungsten as the right filament for a light bulb, the fact that you worked really, really hard rather than had a lightning bolt of inspiration does not keep you from getting a patent.
2) "as a whole" - you do not ask if each of the pieces, in isolation, was in the prior art or obvious. You have to look at the whole thing with all of its cooperation, function, relationship of the parts, etc. The question is not whether Edison invented tungsten -- he never claimed to have invented tungsten. You have to include the voltage, the vacuum, the glass enclosure, etc. and how those elements are related to each other.
3) "at the time the invention was made" has two consequences.
First, you cannot use hindsight to say "oh, that was easy." Sure, tungsten glows bright white when hot, tungsten has a high melting point, tungsten is strong. Was tungsten obvious? I don't think so, but it is easy to construct hindsight analysis that makes it appear so.
Second, the level of skill in the art is assessed as of the time of the making of the invention -- not the state of knowledge today.
3) Ordinary skill in the art. Gosh knows if I was a Swiss inventor and my examiner was Albert Einstein it would suck. The man thinks everything is obvious. Well DUH. Consider from the level of ORDINARY SKILL IN THE ART. And get Albert Einstein out of the dang patent office.
4) The art. Solving a problem might be obvious out-of-field. For example, There is a problem with a printing press. The solution might well be obvious to an engineer in an oil refinery. That doesn't make it obvious in the printing press art.
"any means of transferring information" makes the claim broad. That is good and bad for the patentee. Good because it covers a lot of infringers. Bad because it does not differentiate him from the prior art. Odds are claims shouldn't be written to cover only transfers mediated by 8 bit microprocessors. The invention does not reside in how many bits the microprocessor had.
You can only evaluate a patent claim as being either infringed or obvious by using the entire claim. The judge has to interpret bits and pieces because the Supreme Court gave him that job. Once you figure out what the words or phrases mean individually, you still have to apply them as a whole to the case.
For the Roadrunner situation, it can be a remedy. Mind you, in most small claims courts all you can get is cash (no order to take customer back). Probably a refund for the month that you got kicked out and your small claims filing fee.
Courts are for things more substantial than hurt feelings. Remember Bill Murray's advice to Puxatawny Phil in Groundhog Day... don't drive angry.
Well, suing in small claims court isn't a remedy. Who are you going to sue? UPS? They did what the customs service ordered them to do. Sue the customs service? The small claims court does not have jurisdiction over the U.S. government.
Give it up. It is just a cable. If you really need one, make one.
Scientists often have strong interests in the arts. Chandrasekhar, late in life, wrote a book called "Truth and Beauty: Aesthetics and Motivations in Science." Certainly, he would not have bothered to write the book if 1) he did not perceive the needs for greater appreciation in the scientific community, and 2) believe that an increase in appreciation was possible and desirable.
I found the book interesting and valuable, but it was not popular and is hard to find now.
The Supreme Court does not have much of a recent record on patents, trademarks, and copyrights. The decisions they have made have been fairly narrow, abstruse aspects of the law, and have not been the sort of thing where you could tell where it is going vis-a-vis how the Warren or Burger courts did.
The areas I was referring to as being indicative of the likely disposition of the Court in these areas are land development cases, zoning cases, land regulation cases, and the like.
All property rights are artificial. There is no labeling of the atoms in your cell phone that makes the cell phone know it is your cell phone. It is an artificial monopoly right that the law has given you over your cell phone. The atoms of your cell phone do not care whether you, or someone else has it or uses it. The same goes for your house, your car, and your watch. Actually, looking at the 13th Amendment to the Constitution, your ownership of you is by the grace of the law too. Be grateful.:)
Slashdot Mirror
The patent office did search and found two patents:
U.S. Patent Documents
242601 Jun., 1881 Clement 472/118.
5413298 May., 1995 Perreault 248/228.
So it was not a failure to even look that caused this. Not that I can explain it -- this is just breathtakingly amazing.
Yeah, and computer programmers are the reason computer programs cannot be used without going to professional training courses on how to use the program. :)
Complication has mostly arisen from the fact that somewhere a bias arose that the system attempt to genuinely reach the "right" result a very high percentage of the time, say 99%. Simpler rules would probably result in being right 90% of the time. As a people, so far, we haven't been willing to swallow that 9% difference.
Odds are even the really complicated system that aspires to 99%, is far less good than that, but the tweaks continue and continue. Take a look at the length of the US tax code as a function of time, and ask yourself -- is the tax code now 100 times better than a century ago? Is Microsoft Word 2000 that much better than Wordperfect 5.2? Is THE PHANTOM MENACE that much better a movie than CITIZEN KANE? I don't think any of the above, but the futile search for perfection through complexity continues.
So yeah, the law is bloatware. But what isn't these days?
Thank you for making that clear, I wish I had expressed the Colorado Constitution part that clearly.
I doubt the U.S. Supreme Court will take it.
The Colorado Supreme Court restricted the ability of Colorado police to execute a search warrant.
First, there is a doctrine that says if there is an independent state ground for the ruling, then there is not a basis for Supreme Court review. This doctrine has less applicability when a Constitutional right is being allegedly violated. However, nobody says that the Colorado police have a Constitutional right to the search -- if anything the ruling tends to support Constitutional rights.
Second, Federalism doctrine, which the current U.S. Supreme Court favors, would tend to lead to the conclusion that the U.S. Supreme Court should let the Colorado Supreme Court rein in the Colorado police if it wants to.
There will be other cases in the future, and the Supreme Court may well hear one. Just not this one.
While copyright law and patent law are about incentives to create, trademark law is different and should not be lumped in with the other two.
Trademark law is what makes sure consumers can know where the products and services they buy come from. The red and white swirl, the odd shaped bottle, and the words "Coca-Cola" all help consumers identify a soft drink sold under the strongest (or by now perhaps second strongest) brand in the world. There are countries in the world where you can't be sure what is in a bottle labeled that way. I don't really like the idea of buying things in such places.
But most of this "never been done before" is more of an argument for an award after the third movie is screened, to prove the consistency of the work before awarding for that.
There is no way LoRT deserves best screenplay adaptation.
I am not quibbling about various inaccuracies that are required by the extrememly compressed format. For example, turning Arwen into Xena-warrior-princess was gutwrenching. This is all the more because there *is* a Xena-warrior-princess later in the person of Eowyn. (Marry a woman like Eowyn, and you better not cheat on her. Would take Lorena Bobbitt to a new level.)
People who had not read the books do not and cannot reasonably take in the time scale of events to understand the scope of the epic. This transforms the book in two ways that are bad.
First, it drops the implication of intermediate time that is so important to understand why these little hobbits are so heroic. One loses a sense of how far Bree is for them, much less Rivendell, much less Lorien. One needs not only space, but time to explain how far they hobbits are going.
Second, it lends the impression that the action scenes that take perhaps 50 pages of the book are adjacent events. While it makes for a much better action story, it does not tell Tolkien's story, which is much more of a travel log. The places I saw, the people I met etc.
Elisions like Tom Bombadil are nits to pick, but the overall character of the work changing, and for the worse, takes LoTR out of consideration for best adapted screenplay.
The defendant never said he never got the documents. In fact, his lawyer obviously did get the documents somehow.
He was 1) actually notified, 2) actually represented, and 3) trying to hide behind some hypertechnical fig leaf. He was trying to tell the courts that because he hadn't been physically whacked with rolled up piece of ink-on-dead-tree, that the courts were powerless.
Would he have been happier losing the domain name because the complaint was published in the Miami Herald or the like? Good grief. He was a loser messing with everyone who got whacked. Looks good to me.
There is no reason a complaint can't be ASCII.
John D. Ashcroft, Attorney General, et al., v. The Free Speech Coalition, et al. will decide whether virtual child pornography can be treated as the real thing. It was argued in the Supreme Court last October, and they still have not issued an opinion.
If you can treat the virtual like the real, then it becomes much easier for the AG of Pennsylvania to do something. He doesn't have to care about the difference. Otherwise, sorting out whether it is virtual or real could pose difficulties.
Interesting that CANDYMAN happened while the Supreme Court was noodling over the issue. I wonder if they know.
40 miles x53 miles = 2120 sq miles.
That's bigger than Delaware: 1954 sq. miles (land area)
That's more than twice Rhode Island: 1045 sq. miles. (land area)
But only a very small fraction of Alaska: 571951 sq. miles. (land area)
(The World Almanac and Book of Facts 2002)
Those are short-term graphs when thinking in geological time. I think the National Academy of Sciences report to President Bush pretty much admitted that 1) people think something is going on, and 2) nobody knows if it is dangerous.
For example, suppose the warming averts another ice age. Do we WANT an ice age? At what point will the warming be dangerous? Hard to say given that the middle ages were warmer than we are now. (The recent trend prior to the middle of this century was a long-term gradual cooling trend.)
While we don't want to bet the world, it is far from clear that a 1 degree C increase in average temperature IS betting the world. It isn't even clear that the world is a worse place 1 degree C warmer than what we have now.
(Please note, re Antarctica -- polar ice is still melting from the last ice age. Unless we get much closer to ice age temperatures, it will keep melting, only the speed of melting is in question.)
The point to emphasize in the above, is that the judge reviews, and forces the government to explain again/reoffer. The judge does not write a new settlement.
The Tunney Act does the same thing that the Administrative Procedures Act generally does for judicial review of agency action -- it makes the government offer a coherent explaination or try again. That is, whether the action is arbitrary, capricious, or not in accordance with law. It does not substitute judicial judgment for executive judgement.
Mockeries of the judicial power are not based in policy disagreement. It is to protect the judicial power from being abused in the sense that on Monday the government takes the position that the sun rises in the east, and on Tuesday that the sun rises in the west. (Judicial estoppel).
You go on and on about "collustion" as it if contradicts my point. What is "ganging up" if not "collusion?" In cases like the present one, it matters far more who is running the DoJ than is sitting on the bench, and that is the way it should be -- regardless of which case it is, who the defendant is, or who appointed the judge. The system is too important to swing between the judge being imperial and the DoJ being unlimited in power depending on whether you like or dislike the advocates or the judge or the parties.
>Blowing this minute and dubious distinction
>about remedy and sufficient remedy up into a
>separation of powers type argument
No blowing up going on. It is. Practically the only reason to not enter a settlement is that the nominally hostile parties are really ganging up on somebody that isn't represented. The comment period gives those outside somebodies a chance to howl. Like it or not, the court has to accept that the DoJ represents the people of the United States.
>The consent decree was handed then to Thomas >Penfield Jackson for his immediate signature,
>(who must have also wondered why a rubber stamp
>at DOJ wasn't used instead, since according the
>Appeals Court his signature was non-optional.)
Um, judgments aren't entered by Courts of Appeal. Really. They aren't entered by executive agencies either. They are entered by courts of original jurisdiction. Courts of appeal return cases with instructions all the time. For example, to dimiss the case.
Congress passes the laws. The Executive Branch is the enforcer. The judge only makes sure that the enforcement matches the law passed by Congress and the Constitution. This ain't France where the judge has a much bigger role. The powers are separated here to enforce a broader concurrance as to what the law is. Taking the DoJ out of the remedy phase turns the game from a three player game to a two player game. You can't have that and have our system of checks and balances.
Do we care what the software is?
What about software that controls the dose of radiation for cancer treatment? If you get 10,000 times the intended dose, someone can die. Do we treat that the same as a PDA phone number application that can't find people whose last names begin with 'q' because the "quit" command was munged? (bad example, but you get the idea...)
After all, you can always replace the PDA, and you can't forsee death as a result. Bad control of radiation can quite easily result in injury or death. With the case of the radiation machine, do we CARE how obscure the bug was, or how hard the maker/programmer tried and tested? Or do we just stick him with the liability because it's better than telling the dead person: "tough luck?"
Even apart from the donations buy votes theory, just remember -- If Jack Valenti can get a fee from you, Congress can tax that transaction at the same time. $$$.
The "limited time" argument in terms of saying whether it should be 10, 30, 50, 70 or 100 years is not the kind of question that the Supreme Court can well put itself in the position of answering. The "rational basis" test is really a very deferential one that takes little to satisfy. True, the current Court has taken to rapping Congress on the knuckles for overreaching a lot in the past 20 years, but not with the tool of the rational basis test.
The extension of pre-existing copyrights is the best attack based on rational basis review. It is a big transfer from my ability to read and disseminate to the ability of authors to maintain their works in a grip-of-death.
We could well end up with a decision that "you can do that, but you can't do it retroactively." As for the "IP is bad" crowd, only Justices Breyer and Stevens are particularly sympathetic, and even they limit their depredations to narrowly construing copyright. (See Tasini case.) They are not Justices that are disposed to limiting Congressional power under the Constitution.
Microsoft is being ordered to turn it over to the States' attorneys so that it can be evaluated. Such discovery is always covered by a protective order. Company secrets are specifically mentioned as protectable subject matter, and are as an initial matter disclosed in confidence. What would happen at hearings or trial later is at the discretion of the judge. For example, the judge could order that only representative portions, or redacted portions be shown, or the sensitive portions of the record sealed and shown only to trial lawyers and the jury. Or the judge could just tell MS to take its lumps.
FEDERAL RULE OF CIVIL PROCEDURE - RULE 26(c)
(c) Protective Orders.
Upon motion by a party or by the person from whom discovery is sought, accompanied by a certification that the movant has in good faith conferred or attempted to confer with other affected parties in an effort to resolve the dispute without court action, and for good cause shown, the court in which the action is pending or alternatively, on matters relating to a deposition, the court in the district where the deposition is to be taken may make any order which justice requires to protect a party or person from annoyance, embarrassment, oppression, or undue burden or expense, including one or more of the following:
(1) that the disclosure or discovery not be had;
(2) that the disclosure or discovery may be had only on specified terms and conditions, including a designation of the time or place;
(3) that the discovery may be had only by a method of discovery other than that selected by the party seeking discovery;
(4) that certain matters not be inquired into, or that the scope of the disclosure or discovery be limited to certain matters;
(5) that discovery be conducted with no one present except persons designated by the court;
(6) that a deposition, after being sealed, be opened only by order of the court;
(7) that a trade secret or other confidential research, development, or commercial information not be revealed or be revealed only in a designated way; and
(8) that the parties simultaneously file specified documents or information enclosed in sealed envelopes to be opened as directed by the court.
To the extent that the comments are persuasive because of their content they matter. Remember that Judge Jackson was motivated, despite the parties, to look into a three-way breakup.
Judges are trained to decide based on right/wrong arguments, not what is popular. The Judges are their precisely to make sure that the political branches, that operate off popularity, stay between the lines. They are supposed to be independent, and counting the comments as votes is not independence.
As Professor Froomkin has pointed out, the absence of a notice and comment period raises issues more fundamental and widespread than the individual conclusion reached in this case. The APA referred to is the Adminstrative Procedures Act. This is the act that makes so much of what happens at agencies like the EPA, FDA, FTC, FCC and other agencies take a long time to do anything. Very, very scary stuff if you desire nimble decisionmaking, but very, very essential stuff if you are going to have democratic accountability of government action.
(Someone please mod the parent post to 5...)
Non-obvious has to be qualified: "A patent may not be obtained ... if the differences between the the subject matter sought to be patented and the prior art are such that the subject matter as a whole would have been obvious at the time the invention was made to a person having ordinary skill in the art to which said subject matter pertains. Patentability shall not be negatived by the manner in which the invention was made."
1) The last sentence got rid of the "flash of genius" test. If you have to try bamboo, eyelashes, feathers, paper, iron, thread, silk, etc. before finding tungsten as the right filament for a light bulb, the fact that you worked really, really hard rather than had a lightning bolt of inspiration does not keep you from getting a patent.
2) "as a whole" - you do not ask if each of the pieces, in isolation, was in the prior art or obvious. You have to look at the whole thing with all of its cooperation, function, relationship of the parts, etc. The question is not whether Edison invented tungsten -- he never claimed to have invented tungsten. You have to include the voltage, the vacuum, the glass enclosure, etc. and how those elements are related to each other.
3) "at the time the invention was made" has two consequences.
First, you cannot use hindsight to say "oh, that was easy." Sure, tungsten glows bright white when hot, tungsten has a high melting point, tungsten is strong. Was tungsten obvious? I don't think so, but it is easy to construct hindsight analysis that makes it appear so.
Second, the level of skill in the art is assessed as of the time of the making of the invention -- not the state of knowledge today.
3) Ordinary skill in the art. Gosh knows if I was a Swiss inventor and my examiner was Albert Einstein it would suck. The man thinks everything is obvious. Well DUH. Consider from the level of ORDINARY SKILL IN THE ART. And get Albert Einstein out of the dang patent office.
4) The art. Solving a problem might be obvious out-of-field. For example, There is a problem with a printing press. The solution might well be obvious to an engineer in an oil refinery. That doesn't make it obvious in the printing press art.
"any means of transferring information" makes the claim broad. That is good and bad for the patentee. Good because it covers a lot of infringers. Bad because it does not differentiate him from the prior art. Odds are claims shouldn't be written to cover only transfers mediated by 8 bit microprocessors. The invention does not reside in how many bits the microprocessor had.
You can only evaluate a patent claim as being either infringed or obvious by using the entire claim. The judge has to interpret bits and pieces because the Supreme Court gave him that job. Once you figure out what the words or phrases mean individually, you still have to apply them as a whole to the case.
Mea Culpa.
... don't drive angry.
For the Roadrunner situation, it can be a remedy. Mind you, in most small claims courts all you can get is cash (no order to take customer back). Probably a refund for the month that you got kicked out and your small claims filing fee.
Courts are for things more substantial than hurt feelings. Remember Bill Murray's advice to Puxatawny Phil in Groundhog Day
Well, suing in small claims court isn't a remedy. Who are you going to sue? UPS? They did what the customs service ordered them to do. Sue the customs service? The small claims court does not have jurisdiction over the U.S. government.
Give it up. It is just a cable. If you really need one, make one.
Scientists often have strong interests in the arts. Chandrasekhar, late in life, wrote a book called "Truth and Beauty: Aesthetics and Motivations in Science." Certainly, he would not have bothered to write the book if 1) he did not perceive the needs for greater appreciation in the scientific community, and 2) believe that an increase in appreciation was possible and desirable.
I found the book interesting and valuable, but it was not popular and is hard to find now.
The Supreme Court does not have much of a recent record on patents, trademarks, and copyrights. The decisions they have made have been fairly narrow, abstruse aspects of the law, and have not been the sort of thing where you could tell where it is going vis-a-vis how the Warren or Burger courts did.
:)
The areas I was referring to as being indicative of the likely disposition of the Court in these areas are land development cases, zoning cases, land regulation cases, and the like.
All property rights are artificial. There is no labeling of the atoms in your cell phone that makes the cell phone know it is your cell phone. It is an artificial monopoly right that the law has given you over your cell phone. The atoms of your cell phone do not care whether you, or someone else has it or uses it. The same goes for your house, your car, and your watch. Actually, looking at the 13th Amendment to the Constitution, your ownership of you is by the grace of the law too. Be grateful.