As for me making more money on inventions than my clients, this is how it works. If you come to me with a real, legitimate innovation, a good business plan, a plan for raising capital, the motivation and energy to weather the storms that will inevitably occur, and maybe even a decent exit strategy, then your patent will be an investment in your business, and your profit just might dwarf whatever fees you pay me. But I will tell you up front that there is always risk. If it were safe and easy, we'd all be millionaires.
On the other hand, if you come to me with a "clever" little gadget idea and your only business plan is "I want to file a quick, cheap provisional patent application, and then sell it to Big Box Retailer(R) and sit back in my easy chair and collect royalty checks," then you maybe have a 1 in 20 chance of ever making any money at all, and what you do make will probably not be a lot. In fact, if anybody buys your patent it will probably be one of these patent trolls, and they will buy it at a fire-sale discount, flat fee, no royalties, after you've invested all the money to get it issued. You'll be lucky to break even.
If you're still willing to pay my fees after I give you that little lecture, I'll be happy to represent you, and I'll do my very best for you. But I will not promise you results. Clever little ideas are a dime a dozen. Good entrepreneurs aren't.
I live and breathe patents every day, and I really don't think the system is as broken as its reputation. That's not to say there are no bad patents. I have personally defended several clients against patents that were almost certainly invalid, and that the clients almost certainly didn't infringe even if they were valid. I have been involved in some classic "patent troll" cases, and I think it's terrible that it's happened.
But I've also seen clients work hard on new ideas and then have others just copy what they did. So I've got a sort of double perspective: on the one hand, defending against patents, where the motivation is to limit them, on the other hand, writing patents, where the motivation is to want broad protection.
If we get too aggressive with the anti-troll backlash, we will throw the baby out with the bathwater. I think the only real answer is better examination in the first place, which means not only rejecting invalid claims, but rejecting them for the right reasons, and also allowing good claims (because both of those have been a problem). People on here complain about patents being rubber-stamped, but the reverse is actually true. There is HUGE incentive for examiners to reject, reject, reject. The problem is not that they're rubber stamping patents. It that they're issuing sloppy rejections on almost everything because that was the only way to keep their count up. And sloppy rejections means that you're usually arguing about the wrong stuff, which means bad patents. And it's not necessarily the examiners' fault. The whole system was broken.
I didn't vote for Barack Obama, and I disagree with him a lot, but I have to give him credit for appointing David Kappos to replace Jon Dudas, who was one of Bush's political cronies and was not even statutorily qualified for the position. That by itself was a major step forward.
Then you would strip all universities and research institutions of the ability to survive by inventing new technologies and licensing them legitimately. Or do you believe that manufacturing is the only legitimate business model?
I never noticed this flaw in US legal system before: one of these litigants has to win. If only *both* could lose...
That's really not true. I've seen plenty of cases where everybody loses, including the lawyers. (If you think that's not possible, it's because you've never had to try to collect legitimate fees from a broke client. I only wish I could get paid for 100% of my time.)
You have to be careful thought. Two-year-olds also have powerful destructive potential, especially when coupled with auxiliary particles like the PB&J particle, the Red Kool-Aid Particle, the Chocolate Candy Bar particle, or (worst of all) the Soiled Diaper Particle. The only safe way to interact with a two-year-old is to buffer all of your observations through a Mommy Interface, especially when the diaper appears to be in danger of going super-critical. On the other hand, the Mommy Interface also has a major drawback. Without fail, all of your data points come back as "adorable."
Well, you just have to be more creative. For the misanthropic psychopath looking to maximize human suffering with this much-reduced fleet, I recommend 450 well-placed high-altitude EMP bursts. You won't get much (if anything) out of the blast effect, but I imagine that would be enough to knock out all or most of the electronics in the world (I haven't done any actual calculations). Not as sexy as vaporizing people, but now anything that is computer controlled doesn't work anymore. Power, sanitation, communications, manufacturing mass transit, commerce---they all run on computers. Your car won't even run anymore unless you're lucky enough to have a '65 mustang or something. With all the commerce, infrastructure, and communication gone, enjoy watching human civilization devolve into small factions warring over scarce resources. Plus, you've put plenty of particle radiation into the upper atmosphere, which will now slowly spread over the earth, making lots and lots of people sick without necessarily killing them (at least not instantly and mercifully). So if you're a depraved psychopath, this may be the preferred method anyway.
we only have enough nuclear weapons to annihiliate the earth 20 times over.
I really only know about the land-based ICBMs, so with the caveat that this doesn't include our SLBMs (Trident) and strategic bombers...
Back in the height of the Cold War, we were doing stuff like fielding a fleet of 60+ monster Titan IIs, each with a monster 9MT warhead sitting on the tip, plus a fleet of 800 Minuteman-Is, each with a 1.2MT warhead. Those two fleets combined gave us a total yield of about 1.5 GT. We figure, "Drop a couple somewhere in the general vicinity of Moscow, and they've pretty well done their job." But as we refined our delivery technologies, we started to focus more on (relative) precision. Circa 1970, we built the Minuteman III, which could carry three much smaller Mk12A Reentry Vehicles (with the W-78 warhead at about 300-kT), buch was much more acccurate. So we could go for targeted kills on hardened silos without having to level entire cities. We fielded around 500 MMIIIs, giving us about 1,500 W-78 warheads, meaning at 300-kT each they pack a combined yield of around 450 MT. That's certainly a lot, but consider that the Russians actually detonated the "Tsar Bomba" with a yield of about 50 MT by itself, and it certainly didn't come close to destroying 1/9th of the earth. By the 80s, we also had a fleet of 50 Peacekeepers, each with 10 Mk21 RVs carrying the 300-kT W-87 warhead. The Mk21 was the most accurate RV we'd ever built (basically, you could pretty reliably hit a football field). So that's another 500 warheads, for another 150 MT. But note that even with 10 warheads, the PK still only had about a third of the total yield (about 3 MT) of a Titan II with a single warhead (about 9 MT). The PKs and MMIIIs together took us to about 600 MT total yield, and by this time, we were shutting down the Titans IIs. So that's less than half the yield we had at the peak. It's definitely a lot of fire power, but still not enough to scorch the earth 20 times over (or even once over, really). Then with the START I and II treaties, we started ramping way down. We agreed to decommission the MIRVs (Multiple Independently-Targetable Reentry Vehicles) (shame really---it was pretty neat technology), so we started decommissioning the Peacekeepers and dropping the MMIIIs to just a single warhead. Now, we just happened to have about 500 Mk21 RVs from the 50 PKs, and we just happened to have about 500 MMIII delivery vehicles, so we decided to put the best RV on our remaining launcher, and started the SERV program ca. 2005 to retrofit the Mk21 onto the MMIII launch vehicle.
Now that PK decom is complete, the only silo-launched ICBMs in our fleet are about 450 remaining MMIIIs, each with a single Mk21 RV carrying a single W-87 warhead with about a 300 kT yield. That means our current ICBM fleet has a combined yield of about 135 MT. This is not even 3x the yield of Tsar Bomba, and not even 10 times the yield of the U.S.'s biggest single detonation, the Castle Bravo shot with a yield of about 15 MT. It was big, yes, but again, not even close to destroying 1/10th of the earth.
So long story short, we used to have crazy big nuclear arsenals back in the really tense days of the Cold War. Today, we still have a scary big nuclear arsenal, but it has only about 1/10th the destructive power of our previous arsenal. That arsenal is still capable of making life on earth pretty miserable, but it's not going to level the globe.
Of course, back in the day, the Peacekeepers had 10 Mk21s each and the Minuteman IIIs had 3 Mk12As each (now with SERV, we only get 1 Mk21 per Minuteman III). So actually, you would need to send 9 missiles for the equivalent of 3 MMIIIs or 30 missiles for the equivalent of 3 Peacekeepers.
Would the PTO (or the CFFC) accept a patent on the same business method, except that users send requests on postcards, the audio will be burned to CDs and mailed by post, and the subscription lists will be maintained in paper folders?
If it was novel and nonobvious then yes, they would. You seem to be confusing subject matter with obviousness. You say that business methods should not be patentable, but then complain about the obviousness of a patent on a software method. Business method patents != software patents. Business method patents are looking like they are going to hammered by the Supreme Court, but I don't expect them to kill software patents. And patentable subject matter != obviousness. The question of patentable subject matter is "Should we refuse the applicant a patent even if this is the most brilliant, innovative, beneficial idea ever in the history of mankind." Let's say you come up with a business method that will end all hunger and poverty in the world. Bilski says you can't get a patent on it unless you tie it to a particular machine or transform matter, regardless of how innovative or nonobvious it is. The method you described, on the other hand, does transform matter (for example, you burn CDs, seal envelopes, etc.). So there's no question that it's patentable subject matter. The question is, is it obvious? They'd probably cite those obnoxious CD clubs against you, but you maybe could squeeze something out in the details.
and the reason they were nto maintianed is becasue Bush stole the money to pay for tax breaks for his rich friends.
And because he hates black people and clubs baby seals. (While we're making broad, unsupportable, subjectives judgments of Bush and his intentions). (Which doesn't mean I'm saying Bush was a great president or anyting). (But if you're going to hate him, at least hate him for a reason).
This is one of those issues I'd love to hear a real patent attorney weigh in on: If someone files a patent on something you can prove you demonstrated publicly at an earlier date, what are your options? Can you file an opposition to the patent? How does it work?
With the preface that this is not legal advice, I don't represent you, and you should not rely on this as a legal opinion for any reason whatsoever, this post is for entertainment purposes only, and anybody who relies on a random post on Slashdot as legal advice deserves whatever they get, you have several options actually. (Also, note that this isn't the case here. Microsoft is claiming an improvement on sparklines. It may or may not be an allowable patent, but it is not Tufte's invention they are claiming).
The easiest and cheapest thing to do is to send a copy of your prior art to the patent attorney prosecuting the application. That attorney is now aware of the prior art and is obligated to share it with the examiner. Make sure that you get a return receipt on your mail, so that you can prove you sent it. If the attorney fails to submit the art, and it's later determined to be material, the patent is invalid. 9+ out of 10 attorneys will just send it in, since there is rarely a reason not to (there was one time when we had already gotten a notice of allowance and the relevance of the art was extremely questionable where we considered not sending it in, but in the end we did anyway). In the case of this Microsoft application, I would imagine that the attorneys have already submitted articles, patents, or other materials that identify sparklines as prior art. If you're REALLY interested, you could even go look at it in PAIR and check the electronic file wrapper. Look for "Information Disclosure Statements." Then you'll know what Microsoft has shared with the Patent Office.
Next cheapest option is to file a Protest if you're within the protest period. Chapter 1900 of the MPEP has all the procedures. Feel free to go look it up.
You could wait for the patent to issue, and then if it still has claims that read on your art, you could file a request ex parte or inter partes reexamination.
If there's no bar date, you could file an application, naming yourself as inventor, to provoke an interference. In your hypothetical, there probably is a bar date, so no dice.
Then there are all the options that involve hiring a lawyer and giving him a big pile of money. This is the option I recommend. That lawyer will then tell you what options are available in your specific case.
Except it's not. You can file any old thing you want, and it will get published after 18 months, regardless of whether it has a snowball's chance in Hell of actually getting allowed. At the 18 month mark, few applications have even been taken up for examination.
No, it isn't. The patent expressly treats generic sparklines as prior art. From the "Background" section of the patent, where you put things that you admit are prior art:
[0001]Sparklines are small graphics embedded in a document, such as a text document or a spreadsheet, among the words, numbers, images or other content of the document. Sparklines can be used to graphically represent the content of one or more neighboring cells to provide a visual representation of the data. There are at least two advantages to using sparklines. First, as a "picture paints a thousand words," at a glance, a graph can quickly clearly show values, trends, and similar information. Second, by presenting such a graph in context within the document as opposed to presenting the graph on a separate page or screen, a viewer can more readily appreciate the information represented and/or compare the represented information with that represented by other sparklines.
[0002]In the case of creating sparkline graphs, conventionally, sparklines are created manually, often by simulating the generation of bars with a set of segment fonts that represent parts of bars, lines, or other graph features. Alternatively, a user could manually could select data and manually generate a chart, then try to scale the chart to fit the desired space.
Sparklines are also used as elements of the claims. You can't use them as elements if you're claiming sparklines. This application may or may not have allowable claims, but it is clearly not trying to claim sparklines themselves. It's claiming an improvement on sparklines, which is a perfectly legitimate thing to do, including without the permission of the inventor of the underlying technology. In fact, since (as everybody has vociferously pointed out) generic sparklines are clearly in the prior art, Tufte cannot be named as an inventor on this application.
Hey, we're being attacked by... mormons... try not to die
Um, I know it's all hip to hate on religion and religions here on Slashdot, but seriously, when was the last time a mob of armed Mormons attacked your city? Were they armed with green Jell-O? Did somebody tell you that the guys with the white shirts and bicycles are some kind of Mormon special forces? Did you hear somebody abbreviate "Book of Mormon" as "BoM" and think they're ordnance technicians? Apparently I didn't get the memo that we're supposed to be engaging in some kind of armed, bloody Holy War.
When I first read the headline, I literally thought, "Cool, the Brits are going to build a super-secret navy to hunt down pirates and send those bad boys to Davy Jones' locker!" Then I was disappointed when I read the summary and realized these would just be lame copyright police. I WANT A SECRET NAVY!
The system automatically identifies threats such as... abnormal vehicle or pedestrian movement.
Hmmm. I seem to remember a scene in Fahrenheit 451 where the cameras "tagged" a pedestrian for displaying unusual behavior. And I remember things not going well for him. Glad to know that we're modeling our governments after dystopian fiction.
I believe it. My wife used to have an Odyssey. It was probably the best care we ever owned, by several metrics. Everything about it was tight and responsive. We ended up selling it (long story), and now she has a Dodge Caravan, which is garbage. I think in the next year or so, we'll have to get an Odyssey again.
I'm even a lawyer, and I've never heard anybody say "a brace of contracts." I've heard "a brace of pistols," and I think Samwise caught a "brace of conies" in The Two Towers, but I would just say "two contracts." Still, at least the guy posting the story used "penultimate" right.
So would we be better off with a society where individuals are not free to protest, burn books, and boycott stores as they see fit? Or would you say that individuals may do those things, but proscribe them from peaceably assembling as groups to do them? Should retailers be forced to sell items that carry viewpoints they don't like, or that they think their customers won't like, in the interest of "fairness"? Should Christian bookstores be forced to carry Nietzsche and atheist bookstores be forced to carry the Bible? I'd rather see a person burn a copy of a book that is very dear to me than live in a society where the government forces me to keep books I don't want. I would rather have the society where that guy is free to burn my book to express his opinion, and I am free to boycott his business to express mine. I'd rather live in a society where people are free to passionately disagree with each other than one where the Government hands down a well-regulated, "balanced" philosophy and requires the citizens to subscribe to it in perfect agreement. In short, I don't see any difference between a government that burns the books and a government that forces you to keep the books you'd rather burn.
When people burned Harry Potter books, did it revoke your access to them? Did it deprive Rowling or the publisher of money? How do you propose a free society be built without giving people the right to burn Harry Potter books when they feel like it?
Slashdot Mirror
As for me making more money on inventions than my clients, this is how it works. If you come to me with a real, legitimate innovation, a good business plan, a plan for raising capital, the motivation and energy to weather the storms that will inevitably occur, and maybe even a decent exit strategy, then your patent will be an investment in your business, and your profit just might dwarf whatever fees you pay me. But I will tell you up front that there is always risk. If it were safe and easy, we'd all be millionaires.
On the other hand, if you come to me with a "clever" little gadget idea and your only business plan is "I want to file a quick, cheap provisional patent application, and then sell it to Big Box Retailer(R) and sit back in my easy chair and collect royalty checks," then you maybe have a 1 in 20 chance of ever making any money at all, and what you do make will probably not be a lot. In fact, if anybody buys your patent it will probably be one of these patent trolls, and they will buy it at a fire-sale discount, flat fee, no royalties, after you've invested all the money to get it issued. You'll be lucky to break even.
If you're still willing to pay my fees after I give you that little lecture, I'll be happy to represent you, and I'll do my very best for you. But I will not promise you results. Clever little ideas are a dime a dozen. Good entrepreneurs aren't.
I live and breathe patents every day, and I really don't think the system is as broken as its reputation. That's not to say there are no bad patents. I have personally defended several clients against patents that were almost certainly invalid, and that the clients almost certainly didn't infringe even if they were valid. I have been involved in some classic "patent troll" cases, and I think it's terrible that it's happened.
But I've also seen clients work hard on new ideas and then have others just copy what they did. So I've got a sort of double perspective: on the one hand, defending against patents, where the motivation is to limit them, on the other hand, writing patents, where the motivation is to want broad protection.
If we get too aggressive with the anti-troll backlash, we will throw the baby out with the bathwater. I think the only real answer is better examination in the first place, which means not only rejecting invalid claims, but rejecting them for the right reasons, and also allowing good claims (because both of those have been a problem). People on here complain about patents being rubber-stamped, but the reverse is actually true. There is HUGE incentive for examiners to reject, reject, reject. The problem is not that they're rubber stamping patents. It that they're issuing sloppy rejections on almost everything because that was the only way to keep their count up. And sloppy rejections means that you're usually arguing about the wrong stuff, which means bad patents. And it's not necessarily the examiners' fault. The whole system was broken.
I didn't vote for Barack Obama, and I disagree with him a lot, but I have to give him credit for appointing David Kappos to replace Jon Dudas, who was one of Bush's political cronies and was not even statutorily qualified for the position. That by itself was a major step forward.
Preferably from one year before the application date. That way it's an absolute bar.
Then you would strip all universities and research institutions of the ability to survive by inventing new technologies and licensing them legitimately. Or do you believe that manufacturing is the only legitimate business model?
I never noticed this flaw in US legal system before: one of these litigants has to win. If only *both* could lose...
That's really not true. I've seen plenty of cases where everybody loses, including the lawyers. (If you think that's not possible, it's because you've never had to try to collect legitimate fees from a broke client. I only wish I could get paid for 100% of my time.)
That was okay, but "Blink" was scarier.
You have to be careful thought. Two-year-olds also have powerful destructive potential, especially when coupled with auxiliary particles like the PB&J particle, the Red Kool-Aid Particle, the Chocolate Candy Bar particle, or (worst of all) the Soiled Diaper Particle. The only safe way to interact with a two-year-old is to buffer all of your observations through a Mommy Interface, especially when the diaper appears to be in danger of going super-critical. On the other hand, the Mommy Interface also has a major drawback. Without fail, all of your data points come back as "adorable."
There's a great quote attributed to Mark Twain: "It's easy to quit smoking. I've done it hundreds of times."
(Not speaking from experience; I've never touched the things and second-hand smoke makes me nauseous).
Well, you just have to be more creative. For the misanthropic psychopath looking to maximize human suffering with this much-reduced fleet, I recommend 450 well-placed high-altitude EMP bursts. You won't get much (if anything) out of the blast effect, but I imagine that would be enough to knock out all or most of the electronics in the world (I haven't done any actual calculations). Not as sexy as vaporizing people, but now anything that is computer controlled doesn't work anymore. Power, sanitation, communications, manufacturing mass transit, commerce---they all run on computers. Your car won't even run anymore unless you're lucky enough to have a '65 mustang or something. With all the commerce, infrastructure, and communication gone, enjoy watching human civilization devolve into small factions warring over scarce resources. Plus, you've put plenty of particle radiation into the upper atmosphere, which will now slowly spread over the earth, making lots and lots of people sick without necessarily killing them (at least not instantly and mercifully). So if you're a depraved psychopath, this may be the preferred method anyway.
we only have enough nuclear weapons to annihiliate the earth 20 times over.
I really only know about the land-based ICBMs, so with the caveat that this doesn't include our SLBMs (Trident) and strategic bombers ...
Back in the height of the Cold War, we were doing stuff like fielding a fleet of 60+ monster Titan IIs, each with a monster 9MT warhead sitting on the tip, plus a fleet of 800 Minuteman-Is, each with a 1.2MT warhead. Those two fleets combined gave us a total yield of about 1.5 GT. We figure, "Drop a couple somewhere in the general vicinity of Moscow, and they've pretty well done their job." But as we refined our delivery technologies, we started to focus more on (relative) precision. Circa 1970, we built the Minuteman III, which could carry three much smaller Mk12A Reentry Vehicles (with the W-78 warhead at about 300-kT), buch was much more acccurate. So we could go for targeted kills on hardened silos without having to level entire cities. We fielded around 500 MMIIIs, giving us about 1,500 W-78 warheads, meaning at 300-kT each they pack a combined yield of around 450 MT. That's certainly a lot, but consider that the Russians actually detonated the "Tsar Bomba" with a yield of about 50 MT by itself, and it certainly didn't come close to destroying 1/9th of the earth. By the 80s, we also had a fleet of 50 Peacekeepers, each with 10 Mk21 RVs carrying the 300-kT W-87 warhead. The Mk21 was the most accurate RV we'd ever built (basically, you could pretty reliably hit a football field). So that's another 500 warheads, for another 150 MT. But note that even with 10 warheads, the PK still only had about a third of the total yield (about 3 MT) of a Titan II with a single warhead (about 9 MT). The PKs and MMIIIs together took us to about 600 MT total yield, and by this time, we were shutting down the Titans IIs. So that's less than half the yield we had at the peak. It's definitely a lot of fire power, but still not enough to scorch the earth 20 times over (or even once over, really). Then with the START I and II treaties, we started ramping way down. We agreed to decommission the MIRVs (Multiple Independently-Targetable Reentry Vehicles) (shame really---it was pretty neat technology), so we started decommissioning the Peacekeepers and dropping the MMIIIs to just a single warhead. Now, we just happened to have about 500 Mk21 RVs from the 50 PKs, and we just happened to have about 500 MMIII delivery vehicles, so we decided to put the best RV on our remaining launcher, and started the SERV program ca. 2005 to retrofit the Mk21 onto the MMIII launch vehicle.
Now that PK decom is complete, the only silo-launched ICBMs in our fleet are about 450 remaining MMIIIs, each with a single Mk21 RV carrying a single W-87 warhead with about a 300 kT yield. That means our current ICBM fleet has a combined yield of about 135 MT. This is not even 3x the yield of Tsar Bomba, and not even 10 times the yield of the U.S.'s biggest single detonation, the Castle Bravo shot with a yield of about 15 MT. It was big, yes, but again, not even close to destroying 1/10th of the earth.
So long story short, we used to have crazy big nuclear arsenals back in the really tense days of the Cold War. Today, we still have a scary big nuclear arsenal, but it has only about 1/10th the destructive power of our previous arsenal. That arsenal is still capable of making life on earth pretty miserable, but it's not going to level the globe.
Of course, back in the day, the Peacekeepers had 10 Mk21s each and the Minuteman IIIs had 3 Mk12As each (now with SERV, we only get 1 Mk21 per Minuteman III). So actually, you would need to send 9 missiles for the equivalent of 3 MMIIIs or 30 missiles for the equivalent of 3 Peacekeepers.
Would the PTO (or the CFFC) accept a patent on the same business method, except that users send requests on postcards, the audio will be burned to CDs and mailed by post, and the subscription lists will be maintained in paper folders?
If it was novel and nonobvious then yes, they would. You seem to be confusing subject matter with obviousness. You say that business methods should not be patentable, but then complain about the obviousness of a patent on a software method. Business method patents != software patents. Business method patents are looking like they are going to hammered by the Supreme Court, but I don't expect them to kill software patents. And patentable subject matter != obviousness. The question of patentable subject matter is "Should we refuse the applicant a patent even if this is the most brilliant, innovative, beneficial idea ever in the history of mankind." Let's say you come up with a business method that will end all hunger and poverty in the world. Bilski says you can't get a patent on it unless you tie it to a particular machine or transform matter, regardless of how innovative or nonobvious it is. The method you described, on the other hand, does transform matter (for example, you burn CDs, seal envelopes, etc.). So there's no question that it's patentable subject matter. The question is, is it obvious? They'd probably cite those obnoxious CD clubs against you, but you maybe could squeeze something out in the details.
Claim 4 includes all the elements of both of claims 3 and 1. It doesn't stand alone.
and the reason they were nto maintianed is becasue Bush stole the money to pay for tax breaks for his rich friends.
And because he hates black people and clubs baby seals. (While we're making broad, unsupportable, subjectives judgments of Bush and his intentions). (Which doesn't mean I'm saying Bush was a great president or anyting). (But if you're going to hate him, at least hate him for a reason).
This is one of those issues I'd love to hear a real patent attorney weigh in on: If someone files a patent on something you can prove you demonstrated publicly at an earlier date, what are your options? Can you file an opposition to the patent? How does it work?
With the preface that this is not legal advice, I don't represent you, and you should not rely on this as a legal opinion for any reason whatsoever, this post is for entertainment purposes only, and anybody who relies on a random post on Slashdot as legal advice deserves whatever they get, you have several options actually. (Also, note that this isn't the case here. Microsoft is claiming an improvement on sparklines. It may or may not be an allowable patent, but it is not Tufte's invention they are claiming).
The easiest and cheapest thing to do is to send a copy of your prior art to the patent attorney prosecuting the application. That attorney is now aware of the prior art and is obligated to share it with the examiner. Make sure that you get a return receipt on your mail, so that you can prove you sent it. If the attorney fails to submit the art, and it's later determined to be material, the patent is invalid. 9+ out of 10 attorneys will just send it in, since there is rarely a reason not to (there was one time when we had already gotten a notice of allowance and the relevance of the art was extremely questionable where we considered not sending it in, but in the end we did anyway). In the case of this Microsoft application, I would imagine that the attorneys have already submitted articles, patents, or other materials that identify sparklines as prior art. If you're REALLY interested, you could even go look at it in PAIR and check the electronic file wrapper. Look for "Information Disclosure Statements." Then you'll know what Microsoft has shared with the Patent Office.
Next cheapest option is to file a Protest if you're within the protest period. Chapter 1900 of the MPEP has all the procedures. Feel free to go look it up.
You could wait for the patent to issue, and then if it still has claims that read on your art, you could file a request ex parte or inter partes reexamination.
If there's no bar date, you could file an application, naming yourself as inventor, to provoke an interference. In your hypothetical, there probably is a bar date, so no dice.
Then there are all the options that involve hiring a lawyer and giving him a big pile of money. This is the option I recommend. That lawyer will then tell you what options are available in your specific case.
It's a real shame that now that it's patented
Except it's not. You can file any old thing you want, and it will get published after 18 months, regardless of whether it has a snowball's chance in Hell of actually getting allowed. At the 18 month mark, few applications have even been taken up for examination.
[0001]Sparklines are small graphics embedded in a document, such as a text document or a spreadsheet, among the words, numbers, images or other content of the document. Sparklines can be used to graphically represent the content of one or more neighboring cells to provide a visual representation of the data. There are at least two advantages to using sparklines. First, as a "picture paints a thousand words," at a glance, a graph can quickly clearly show values, trends, and similar information. Second, by presenting such a graph in context within the document as opposed to presenting the graph on a separate page or screen, a viewer can more readily appreciate the information represented and/or compare the represented information with that represented by other sparklines.
[0002]In the case of creating sparkline graphs, conventionally, sparklines are created manually, often by simulating the generation of bars with a set of segment fonts that represent parts of bars, lines, or other graph features. Alternatively, a user could manually could select data and manually generate a chart, then try to scale the chart to fit the desired space.
Sparklines are also used as elements of the claims. You can't use them as elements if you're claiming sparklines. This application may or may not have allowable claims, but it is clearly not trying to claim sparklines themselves. It's claiming an improvement on sparklines, which is a perfectly legitimate thing to do, including without the permission of the inventor of the underlying technology. In fact, since (as everybody has vociferously pointed out) generic sparklines are clearly in the prior art, Tufte cannot be named as an inventor on this application.
No hard feelings. I just thought it was an odd thing to say. Maybe I need to update libpythonhumour to the latest version.
Hey, we're being attacked by ... mormons ... try not to die
Um, I know it's all hip to hate on religion and religions here on Slashdot, but seriously, when was the last time a mob of armed Mormons attacked your city? Were they armed with green Jell-O? Did somebody tell you that the guys with the white shirts and bicycles are some kind of Mormon special forces? Did you hear somebody abbreviate "Book of Mormon" as "BoM" and think they're ordnance technicians? Apparently I didn't get the memo that we're supposed to be engaging in some kind of armed, bloody Holy War.
When I first read the headline, I literally thought, "Cool, the Brits are going to build a super-secret navy to hunt down pirates and send those bad boys to Davy Jones' locker!" Then I was disappointed when I read the summary and realized these would just be lame copyright police. I WANT A SECRET NAVY!
The system automatically identifies threats such as ... abnormal vehicle or pedestrian movement.
Hmmm. I seem to remember a scene in Fahrenheit 451 where the cameras "tagged" a pedestrian for displaying unusual behavior. And I remember things not going well for him. Glad to know that we're modeling our governments after dystopian fiction.
I believe it. My wife used to have an Odyssey. It was probably the best care we ever owned, by several metrics. Everything about it was tight and responsive. We ended up selling it (long story), and now she has a Dodge Caravan, which is garbage. I think in the next year or so, we'll have to get an Odyssey again.
OT, but I love how a Ford Focus , for example, is considered a "luxury car" under the tax code.
I'm even a lawyer, and I've never heard anybody say "a brace of contracts." I've heard "a brace of pistols," and I think Samwise caught a "brace of conies" in The Two Towers, but I would just say "two contracts." Still, at least the guy posting the story used "penultimate" right.
So would we be better off with a society where individuals are not free to protest, burn books, and boycott stores as they see fit? Or would you say that individuals may do those things, but proscribe them from peaceably assembling as groups to do them? Should retailers be forced to sell items that carry viewpoints they don't like, or that they think their customers won't like, in the interest of "fairness"? Should Christian bookstores be forced to carry Nietzsche and atheist bookstores be forced to carry the Bible? I'd rather see a person burn a copy of a book that is very dear to me than live in a society where the government forces me to keep books I don't want. I would rather have the society where that guy is free to burn my book to express his opinion, and I am free to boycott his business to express mine. I'd rather live in a society where people are free to passionately disagree with each other than one where the Government hands down a well-regulated, "balanced" philosophy and requires the citizens to subscribe to it in perfect agreement. In short, I don't see any difference between a government that burns the books and a government that forces you to keep the books you'd rather burn.
When people burned Harry Potter books, did it revoke your access to them? Did it deprive Rowling or the publisher of money? How do you propose a free society be built without giving people the right to burn Harry Potter books when they feel like it?