On first glance, I thought you and your math grad buddies were sending each other notes 120 characters at a time via SMS. And I knew we were all doomed.
d00d, eulerz 1337!1! i haz ur c0mplx nmbrz1!! lol tr1pl ntgr8 fail !
Somehow back in the day the airplane was invented common sense prevailed.
Two points. (1) Airspace rights have nothing to do with intellectual property, copyright or otherwise. So bad analogy. Air space is tied to real property, which is hardly a new concept. (2) IP was an issue with the invention of the airplane. The Wright brothers received a patent on their "flying machine" and went after infringers aggressively, spawning a patent war. Many people even argued that the Wrights' patent inhibited the growth of the aircraft industry rather than encouraging innovation. So you see, things aren't that different now. The Wrights got a patent. We got an airline industry. Whether the Wrights would have worked so hard on their machine without the benefit of a patent system, and whether somebody else would have picked up the slack, is left as an exercise for the reader.
Um it's not semantic (or "symantic"). I know several openly "gay" (i.e., attracted to the same sex) people who are in happy, monogamous, heterosexual marriages. It's not just a hypothetical construct.
Facebook is not unique in providing unreasonable "what if..." scenarios on why the offender "might be" innocent. "What if it was actually a burglar who broke into my house and called her house and hung up?" "What if it was actually my long-lost twin, separated at birth, who knocked on her door?" "What if that hand written letter was actually somebody forging my handwriting to frame me?" The law can never deal in absolute certainties
You can poke at least some people with public profiles, even if they're not your friends. I just found a random guy with a common name who is not my friend, and his "poke" feature is sitting there.
"Un-friending" them wouldn't be a problem because FB doesn't notify people that you have "unfriended" them. And it's irrelevant, because FB lets you "poke" people who aren't your friends.
I don't think it's heavy-handed. You generally have to do some persistent and crazy stuff to get a restraining order, so nerves are already pretty raw. Think of it like walking up to somebody and giving them the finger right in their face. It's stupid and obnoxious in any case (and yes, I think the Facebook "Poke" feature is always stupid and obnoxious), but what might be a mildly annoying jab when directed at a good friend could be a much bigger deal when done by a crazy stalker, crazy ex-, or whatever. In other words, you made yourself a persistent nuisance. A judge ordered you to stop on threat of fine or imprisonment. Flouting that court order, you got on Facebook and "poke" your victim, essentially saying, "You're still on my radar." I don't think it's terribly heavy-handed to punish the offender according to the terms of the restraining order.
Two things. One, this is not a patent. It's an application. You can put literally anything you want in a publication, and it will get published after 18 months, even though nobody's looked at it. I could file an application, and my first claim could be, "I claim a data storage device comprising a magnetic platter containing a plurality of magnetic bits, each bit configured to have two states, wherein each state represents alternately a 0 or a 1." That application would publish after 18 months with that claim, and everybody on/. would be hoppin' mad that I'd gotten a patent on the hard drive. And they would be completely wrong. Just because you ask for a particular, broad claim, doesn't mean you're going to get it.
Second, I doubt that you've done anything close to the analysis to even know if the filed claims are "absurd." What do the claims say? Do you know? What disclosure supports them? Does the disclosure have any limiting definitions or statements? Is there any file wrapper estoppel? Are the claims statutory subject matter under Bilski? I'm betting you don't know, which means you don't know if these claims are absurd or not.
Quite right. Brain checks out sometimes at the end of the work day. Read the first sentence and glossed over the rest of the post.
mi said that patent holders just wanted to get paid for their patents. If that's what Paice wanted, seems like they would've just asked for that. The court obviously has the power to order Toyota to pay up, seeing that that's exactly what it did...
I haven't read the court's order, so anybody can correct me if I'm wrong. But generally you'll get damages for past infringement and an injunction against future infringement (but the Supreme Court did find in eBay that an injunction is not an automatic remedy---it's just what normally happens). Once you get the injunction, the defendant has two options if they want to keep selling their product. They can design around your claims, possibly giving up valuable features, or they can negotiate a license with you. Since the injunction would give Paice the right to prevent Toyota from importing infringing Priuses, they get to say, "Pay us BIG $$$, or design out the (very important) infringing features if you want to keep selling Priuses." So it's (probably) not that Paice wants to keep Toyota from importing Priuses. It's that they want the right to keep Toyota from importing Priuses without writing them a big check first.
You're about 90% right, but you missed one thing. The ITC can't award any money to Paice; it can only award an import injunction. The value of the injunction is as leverage to get Toyota to pay up.
If that were true, why did Paice ask the court to block sales of the Toyota cars in question?
Because that's the only thing the ITC has power to do. It can't award monetary damages. The money comes in when Paice gets an injunction against Toyota, and Toyota decides to pony up for a license instead of lose the ability to import Priuses.
You have absolutely no clue what you are talking about. You'll note that each of the "obvious" claims you complained about started with "the hybrid vehicle of claim X..." Those are called dependent claims. That means you are taking everything in claim X and incorporating it into that claim by reference. To properly read claim 6, first go to claim 1 and copy and paste every word in claim 1 into the beginning of claim 6. Now you know the scope of claim 6. Seriously, congratulations for at least getting that you have to look at the claims. That puts you ahead of most of the crowd here. But it's still not as simple as all that. Go back and read claim 1 together with claim 6. Does it still look like "a patent on a turbo charger"? (Answer: No).
Even if Toyota thought of it independently, Paice wins if they invented it first and filed a patent application on it. That's the way patents have always worked. The first to invent and disclose gets the right to exclude, regardless of whether you "copied" him or thought of it yourself. And as somebody else pointed out below, there may be more than one innovation involved. Think of it like this. If you invented the pencil and patented it, I could not make a pencil without your permission. But I could still invent a pencil with an eraser attached and patent it. You can't make a pencil with an attached eraser without my permission. I also cannot make a pencil with an attached eraser, because it includes a pencil, which would violate your patent. So nobody has the right to make a pencil with an attached eraser. We have to get to together to do that. Now a Prius is a pencil with an eraser plus about 100,000 other gadgets and gizmos. It's a complex piece of machinery, so there is a lot of room for different people to have patents on different parts.
You missed about a thousand other options, including... (z) they have a valid patent that Toyota infringes, and they went to the ITC because the ITC is much faster than the U.S. District Courts, and they know that if they get an import injunction against Toyota, Toyota will pay for a license to start the Priuses flowing again. In other words, the ITC doesn't award damages, but with a foreign defendant you can still use the threat of an ITC injunction to get a monetary settlement out of your opponent. It's a perfectly valid and reasonable strategy for a patent infringement case.
Oh, crud. I'm a Winni-the-Pooh geek. Alright, it won't be pretty, but let's just get this over with. I'll do my best on the snarky, elitist fanboi tone, but I can't guarantee the results.
Sorry, n00b. Pooh Bear didn't get stuck in the hive when he was trying to get honey from the hive. First, the branch broke, then he used a balloon to disguise himself as a rain cloud. When none of that worked, and he concluded they were the wrong sorts of bees, went to Rabbit's house, invited himself to lunch, and gorged himself on honey. Then he got stuck in Rabbit's front entrance, and they had to wait for him to get thin again. When he finally budged, they all pulled on him until he popped out of the hole, launching him into the honey tree. That's when he plugged the bees' hole (and again gorged himself on their honey).
Especially not the claims. Reading the claims is tantamount to reading the article. The proper./ method for commenting on a patent is to read the title, pick a few words out of the abstract, cry about how it's obvious and how patents are killing innovation, and cite as prior art some software that was released three years after the filing date and is irrelevant.
Actually, his wife/manager got in contact with somebody from Warner Music, who were claiming to own the copyright. There's nothing in the article that says he's ever had any contact with MySpace at all. If he had tried, I suspect it would have been similar to your experience.
Slashdot Mirror
On first glance, I thought you and your math grad buddies were sending each other notes 120 characters at a time via SMS. And I knew we were all doomed.
d00d, eulerz 1337!1! i haz ur c0mplx nmbrz1!! lol tr1pl ntgr8 fail !
Nobody is going to say "I'd told you so!", if the Shuttle were to be zapped by aliens while on the pad.
I bet the "timecube" guy would.
Social Security 'problem' is a myth.
No joke. It's the biggest, most successful Ponzi scheme in the history of the world. How can you call that a problem?
Somehow back in the day the airplane was invented common sense prevailed.
Two points. (1) Airspace rights have nothing to do with intellectual property, copyright or otherwise. So bad analogy. Air space is tied to real property, which is hardly a new concept. (2) IP was an issue with the invention of the airplane. The Wright brothers received a patent on their "flying machine" and went after infringers aggressively, spawning a patent war. Many people even argued that the Wrights' patent inhibited the growth of the aircraft industry rather than encouraging innovation. So you see, things aren't that different now. The Wrights got a patent. We got an airline industry. Whether the Wrights would have worked so hard on their machine without the benefit of a patent system, and whether somebody else would have picked up the slack, is left as an exercise for the reader.
Our local probation department routinely violates people based on facebook photos
Seems like a harsh penalty for running afoul of probation limits.
Um it's not semantic (or "symantic"). I know several openly "gay" (i.e., attracted to the same sex) people who are in happy, monogamous, heterosexual marriages. It's not just a hypothetical construct.
Any patents the Amiga OS infringes have probably long since expired.
That's not true. We both have a secretary.
Facebook is not unique in providing unreasonable "what if..." scenarios on why the offender "might be" innocent. "What if it was actually a burglar who broke into my house and called her house and hung up?" "What if it was actually my long-lost twin, separated at birth, who knocked on her door?" "What if that hand written letter was actually somebody forging my handwriting to frame me?" The law can never deal in absolute certainties
You can poke at least some people with public profiles, even if they're not your friends. I just found a random guy with a common name who is not my friend, and his "poke" feature is sitting there.
I did a quick try and you can not poke people who haven't "friended" you.
You can if they share their profile publicly.
"Un-friending" them wouldn't be a problem because FB doesn't notify people that you have "unfriended" them. And it's irrelevant, because FB lets you "poke" people who aren't your friends.
I don't think it's heavy-handed. You generally have to do some persistent and crazy stuff to get a restraining order, so nerves are already pretty raw. Think of it like walking up to somebody and giving them the finger right in their face. It's stupid and obnoxious in any case (and yes, I think the Facebook "Poke" feature is always stupid and obnoxious), but what might be a mildly annoying jab when directed at a good friend could be a much bigger deal when done by a crazy stalker, crazy ex-, or whatever. In other words, you made yourself a persistent nuisance. A judge ordered you to stop on threat of fine or imprisonment. Flouting that court order, you got on Facebook and "poke" your victim, essentially saying, "You're still on my radar." I don't think it's terribly heavy-handed to punish the offender according to the terms of the restraining order.
This patent is absurd.
Two things. One, this is not a patent. It's an application. You can put literally anything you want in a publication, and it will get published after 18 months, even though nobody's looked at it. I could file an application, and my first claim could be, "I claim a data storage device comprising a magnetic platter containing a plurality of magnetic bits, each bit configured to have two states, wherein each state represents alternately a 0 or a 1." That application would publish after 18 months with that claim, and everybody on /. would be hoppin' mad that I'd gotten a patent on the hard drive. And they would be completely wrong. Just because you ask for a particular, broad claim, doesn't mean you're going to get it.
Second, I doubt that you've done anything close to the analysis to even know if the filed claims are "absurd." What do the claims say? Do you know? What disclosure supports them? Does the disclosure have any limiting definitions or statements? Is there any file wrapper estoppel? Are the claims statutory subject matter under Bilski? I'm betting you don't know, which means you don't know if these claims are absurd or not.
mi said that patent holders just wanted to get paid for their patents. If that's what Paice wanted, seems like they would've just asked for that. The court obviously has the power to order Toyota to pay up, seeing that that's exactly what it did...
I haven't read the court's order, so anybody can correct me if I'm wrong. But generally you'll get damages for past infringement and an injunction against future infringement (but the Supreme Court did find in eBay that an injunction is not an automatic remedy---it's just what normally happens). Once you get the injunction, the defendant has two options if they want to keep selling their product. They can design around your claims, possibly giving up valuable features, or they can negotiate a license with you. Since the injunction would give Paice the right to prevent Toyota from importing infringing Priuses, they get to say, "Pay us BIG $$$, or design out the (very important) infringing features if you want to keep selling Priuses." So it's (probably) not that Paice wants to keep Toyota from importing Priuses. It's that they want the right to keep Toyota from importing Priuses without writing them a big check first.
Paice would probably love it if Toyota offered to buy them out. Then all the principals walk away rich. What's the downside?
And the first-generation Priuses may not have had the claimed technology. Just because it's there now, that doesn't mean it's always been there.
You're about 90% right, but you missed one thing. The ITC can't award any money to Paice; it can only award an import injunction. The value of the injunction is as leverage to get Toyota to pay up.
If that were true, why did Paice ask the court to block sales of the Toyota cars in question?
Because that's the only thing the ITC has power to do. It can't award monetary damages. The money comes in when Paice gets an injunction against Toyota, and Toyota decides to pony up for a license instead of lose the ability to import Priuses.
You have absolutely no clue what you are talking about. You'll note that each of the "obvious" claims you complained about started with "the hybrid vehicle of claim X..." Those are called dependent claims. That means you are taking everything in claim X and incorporating it into that claim by reference. To properly read claim 6, first go to claim 1 and copy and paste every word in claim 1 into the beginning of claim 6. Now you know the scope of claim 6. Seriously, congratulations for at least getting that you have to look at the claims. That puts you ahead of most of the crowd here. But it's still not as simple as all that. Go back and read claim 1 together with claim 6. Does it still look like "a patent on a turbo charger"? (Answer: No).
Even if Toyota thought of it independently, Paice wins if they invented it first and filed a patent application on it. That's the way patents have always worked. The first to invent and disclose gets the right to exclude, regardless of whether you "copied" him or thought of it yourself. And as somebody else pointed out below, there may be more than one innovation involved. Think of it like this. If you invented the pencil and patented it, I could not make a pencil without your permission. But I could still invent a pencil with an eraser attached and patent it. You can't make a pencil with an attached eraser without my permission. I also cannot make a pencil with an attached eraser, because it includes a pencil, which would violate your patent. So nobody has the right to make a pencil with an attached eraser. We have to get to together to do that. Now a Prius is a pencil with an eraser plus about 100,000 other gadgets and gizmos. It's a complex piece of machinery, so there is a lot of room for different people to have patents on different parts.
There are only two possible explanations:
You missed about a thousand other options, including ... (z) they have a valid patent that Toyota infringes, and they went to the ITC because the ITC is much faster than the U.S. District Courts, and they know that if they get an import injunction against Toyota, Toyota will pay for a license to start the Priuses flowing again. In other words, the ITC doesn't award damages, but with a foreign defendant you can still use the threat of an ITC injunction to get a monetary settlement out of your opponent. It's a perfectly valid and reasonable strategy for a patent infringement case.
Oh, crud. I'm a Winni-the-Pooh geek. Alright, it won't be pretty, but let's just get this over with. I'll do my best on the snarky, elitist fanboi tone, but I can't guarantee the results.
Sorry, n00b. Pooh Bear didn't get stuck in the hive when he was trying to get honey from the hive. First, the branch broke, then he used a balloon to disguise himself as a rain cloud. When none of that worked, and he concluded they were the wrong sorts of bees, went to Rabbit's house, invited himself to lunch, and gorged himself on honey. Then he got stuck in Rabbit's front entrance, and they had to wait for him to get thin again. When he finally budged, they all pulled on him until he popped out of the hole, launching him into the honey tree. That's when he plugged the bees' hole (and again gorged himself on their honey).
[HANGS HEAD IN SHAME].
Especially not the claims. Reading the claims is tantamount to reading the article. The proper ./ method for commenting on a patent is to read the title, pick a few words out of the abstract, cry about how it's obvious and how patents are killing innovation, and cite as prior art some software that was released three years after the filing date and is irrelevant.
Actually, his wife/manager got in contact with somebody from Warner Music, who were claiming to own the copyright. There's nothing in the article that says he's ever had any contact with MySpace at all. If he had tried, I suspect it would have been similar to your experience.