It's not dirty at all. The Dutch minister misinformed the national parliament before the vote on the political agreement. This came to light, and now he has to bear the consequences. If anyone played dirty here, it's the minister.
Please use this link instead, it goes to a static version of the linked page. It would be nice if an editor could update the story itself as well, thanks.
If slashdotters haven't yet realized that patents are SPECIFIC IMPLEMENTATIONS
In case of software, copyright protects specific implementations and patents monopolise principles (which forbid everyone else's specific implementation). And the description that the AC quoted means squat, only the claims are relevant (and each and every claim can be used to sue you, you don't have to violate all claims to infringe).
I mean, come on, remember the outrage when some clever cat in Australia patented fire? "Oh look, patents don't work! This guy got fire!"
In case of software patents, afaik all economists agree they have more bad effects than positive ones. There's only one "economical" study in the whole world I know of which claims it's the other way round, but that one was carried out by a "professor in law" connected to a "school of law" using an interview method (so the results in that case obviously heavily depend on who you ask things to).
The description of the patent means absolutely nothing regarding what's been patented, only the claims do. The first claim does not mention anything about thresholds.
I hope you're not a programmer, or someone that depends on logic. Just because my name isn't on the patent is proof of nothing.
Read the discussion here (along with the comments below it until the next title) to understand somewhat of how "non-obviousness" is interpreted by patent offices. It's indeed not what a programmer (or pretty much anyone else) would consider "non obvious".
Unlike copyright, patent law is a purely economical law, so unless you have proof that more patents = better economy under all circumstances, denying patents in case of doubt does not necessarily go against the concept of the patent system."
Yes it does: you clearly didn't read my post nor think through the issue. If the benefit of the doubt doesn't go towards the inventor, then the patent office is going to throw away patents that it can't properly decide upon, but are actually valid. This would prevent things from being patentable.
Of course, but the reverse also has problems: always giving the benefit of the doubt to the applicant, will cause the patent office to grant (potentially a lot of) invalid patents.
As I stated, the real problem is the lack of opposition process: meaning that a "questionable" patent would be given the benefit of the doubt by the examiner, and then enter pre-publication and opposition phase, where it is open to the entire public, and this entire public which includes those at the top of their field, can then challenge the patent before it is granted (or, in a short period after grant).
Even if there is an affordable opposition process, this still requires a lot of time and money from society (at large, i.e. including companies etc). You really have to be able to show that all this time and money is (much) less than what we would lose by denying patents in case of doubt.
The problem with the USPTO is that there is no decent opposition system. Introduce a more effective and workable opposition system, and watch the public (whether eff, patpub or other companies) take it up and use it to put a stop to bad patents. In doing so, this will start to make the patent office look bad (i.e. high rates of opposition), and provide some real/effective backpressure into the office to do something about the quality of its examinations. At the moment, there is no good "feedback" into the USPTO other than all of our ranting and raving and the "occasional" re-examination.
While there certainly are quality problems with the USPTO (as well as with the EPO and probably with most other patent offices), the main problem of bad/trivial patents is with patent law itself imho. See this post why I think so.
"the deputy director" - there isn't just one, their are several. The top-dog is the comptroller. Then there are divisional directors, then deputy directors (one of whom heads the group that examine computer patents), then senior examiners and finally examiners (and associates below them).
Thanks, I didn't know that. It's Steve Probert I was talking about.
I think the argument is slightly different to how Halo1 frames it in that if an examiner argues that a "barrel-shift and multiply processor in a mobile phone"-patent (say, maybe for hashes or something, I'm just making this up!!) is obvious as "barrel-shift and multiply processors are known in general computing and mobile phones are just specialised computers"... then the response is, if it's obvious _in_such_a_well_worked_field why hasn't it been done already. It's a pretty good argument too. The best ideas, after all, always elicit that "why didn't we think of that before".
That's when the examiner has to say, benefit of doubt to applicant and use their big stamp!
Patents are not intended for ideas (not even for very good ideas), but for inventions (even only "technical inventions" in Europe). Nevertheless, this mentality of benefit of doubt to the applicant (client is king) is indeed another reason so many (trivial) patents are granted which normally shouldn't be.
Incidentally this all gets quite tricky when you mix-in the non-patentability of computer programs!!
We're talking about two separate problems here though. The problem of "giving the inventor the benefit of the doubt" is separate to the problem of "not effectively considering the patent against the state of the art".
...
Getting rid of the former would be like changing the system from presumption of innocence to presumption of guilt. The problem with the latter is analogous to cops running around and stuffing people into shackles and prison cells without due cause ("shoot first, ask questions later").
The problem with your analogy is that granting patents is the same as giving out heavy weaponry (one patent can destroy the entire business of someone else). You have to decide whether always granting a patent when in doubt in general has better consequences than when denying it.
I can't say I find denying someone who has a (legal) right to a patent worse than giving one to someone who doesn't have the right. In the former case, one person's business/investment is hurt (with a small chance that he won't be able to do other research thus hurting society/innovation as a whole, but how many "lone-inventor-turned-super-innovating-company-tha nks-to-patents" stories do you know?). In the latter case, all other businesses and society as a whole are hurt. Keep in mind that there is no moral right to a monopoly on an invention.
Unlike copyright, patent law is a purely economical law, so unless you have proof that more patents = better economy under all circumstances, denying patents in case of doubt does not necessarily go against the concept of the patent system.
Requiring experts to judge applications cannot prevent trivial patents from being granted. The problem is with patent law itself. It states that inventions must "not be obvious to a person versed in the arts". If one takes those words literally, then this is a very low threshold: after all, the "person versed in the arts" does not mean anything -of course the reference point is not a layman-, and "obvious" also does really mean obvious!
The following reasoning is also heard from time to time: if an invention is new (another requirement for patentability), this means it is consequently not "obvious", since otherwise it would have been invented already! Patent law is only a hair away from allowing one to say that it very clearly and literally allows trivial patents!
As the Deputy Director of the UK Patent Office once said:
I cannot speak for lawyers, but I can assure you that many Patent Examiners are programmers themselves. In my group, all the Patent Examiners who deal with software applications either write computer programs in their spare time or have been employed as programmers before they became patent examiners. They usually have a pretty good idea whether something would have been easy or time consuming for a programmer. However, they might express the communication problem the other way around -
it's very difficult to persuade programmers that just because an invention is "easy", does not make it any less patentable.
And the fact that until now few people complained about this in the field, and that those trivial patents cause a lot more problems in the software field than in other fields (and that there seem to be even more trivial patents in the software field than in other fields), once more shows that software indeed is different. Patent law is simply completely and utterly unfit to judge advances in pure logic with.
Yes, but not all libs have 100% 64bit variants. It seems only libSystem (= libc, libpthread, libm + some other stuff), VECLib and MathLib are 64bit. This means you can write 64bit command line applications, but things like a 64bit Final Cut Pro etc won't be possible yet (unless they start separating all GUI shells from the underlying processing logic, moving it to daemons or so).
Works fine on my G4/400. Of course, it's faster on my brand new dual G5/1.8GHz, but it's quite usable and the speed is decent imho. The only "missing functionality" on my G4 is that I don't get cube transitions when doing fast user switches. Exposé works quite well, genie scaling too etc. Yes, there's no Quartz Extreme (Rage128), but it was still faster than Jaguar, so I don't see the problem.
Ideas are free. There is no "IP" protection for ideas, nobody can own an idea (except sometimes through creative usage of software patents). And that's a good thing: it creates competition, since one idea can spawn a lot of different implementations. If you allow monopolies on ideas, the market becomes poorer, not richer.
FWIW, I don't complain when Microsoft "steals" ideas from Apple either. You simply can't steal an idea, because ideas are not someone's property.
I agree that hammer is really cool, but the quote at the end completely obliterates any positive vibes you may get from looking at that picture:
Takes technology to the next step to meet the demands of today's market
I guess it was even cut off and originally continued as
... in a synergy of modern aesthetics and traditional craftsmanship, culminating in improved productivity by addressing contemporary challenges and empowering businesses everywhere by enabling them to evolve new paradigms in creating powerful convergences for businesses and consumers alike.
This organisation thinks differently. And the granted European software patents on this page also indicate otherwise.
Each country within the EU has its own separate patent office, and its own separate patent laws.
Yes and no. They indeed all have national patent offices and patent laws, but those patent laws are all based on the European Patent Convention (EPC) from 1973 (which incidentally included the establishment the European Patent Office (EPO)).
Note however that the EPO is not an EU body, it lives completely outside the EU (there are countries who signed the EPC and which thus recognise the EPO, but which are not in the EU).
Some countries permit the patenting of software patents, some currently do not.
It's a bit more complex than that. First of all, when you go to the EPO and get a European patent, you can designate in which countries it should be valid. Since the EPO happily grants software patents, you can get software patents in all EU countries, regardless of the national patent office's practice.
However, when you want to enforce a patent, you have to do so before a national court in the country where you want to enforce it. When you look at this, only in the UK software patents have been successfully enforced in the general case. In The Netherlands for example, no-one has ever even tried to enforce a software patent. In Germany, software patents have been generally unenforceable until now.
Even if (when) the EU patent directive is introduced there still will not be a "European" patent office, or even a Europe-wide agreement as to what is and is not patentable.
Given that all EU countries signed the EPC, there actually is already a European-wide agreement on what is patentable and what not: see article 52 of the EPC. An EU directive cannot change anything to the EPC or the EPO however, since that these fall outside the EU. It can change things to the laws of the member states however, which means they can influence the enforceability of patents (as these have to be contested in front of national courts).
As you may have seen, article 52 EPC excludes computer programs, mathematical methods and business methods from being an invention (and thus from patentability). The catch is article 52(3), which states that those exclusions only pertain to the subject matter "as such". What this used to mean, is that you could never get a patent on something where the only contribution lied in one of those things (maths etc), but that otoh an patentable invention which also contains a computer program, does not suddenly become unpatentable
Since the EPO wanted to start granting software patents (their advisory board consists of corporate lawyers from IBM, Nokia etc, and they make money per granted patent), they changed that interpretation: now they say that this exlclusion means that e.g. computer programs not as such are patentable. Now what is a computer program not as such? A computer program executed by a computer, and to make it absolutely clear those are patentable, they call those "computer-implemented inventions" nowadays.
It seems like Europe has a pretty good record of not approving silly patents.
Where does it seem that way? That a common myth, but it's not true anymore since quite a while. In fact, the US, European and Japanse patent offices have made an agreement (the so-called trilateral) in which they try to use common criteria. They just use different wordings to fit it in their traditional practice (e.g., in Europe they denoted virtually everything under the Sun which you could want to patent as "technical", because technicality has long been an informal requirement in Europe to be patentable).
That's also the European Parliament's opinion: if you mention the use of software in your patent claims, you have to provide a reference implementation of this software according to them. Of course, that's just another thing that the Council threw out again...
The only reason they are able to do that, is that the big companies like IBM, Sun etc pushed the patent system further and further into the state it is in now... They loved the fact to be able to get really broad and generic patents (often even with little or no investment), but forgot that this could also be used against them. Now they are whining about so-called patent trolls...
Actually, the G4 iBooks haven't been out long enough yet to know that for sure. Most G3 iBooks only started failing after about 1 year. I really do hope they got it fixed, though...
-- Someone who has a G3 iBook with a 4th replacement logic board (because he was unlucky enough to have experienced two different kinds of logic board failures, so it has been replaced once for 1 issue and 3 times for another and they only want to talk about giving a replacement if the same issue occurs for the 4th time).
Also, Opera is a very active supporter of the fight against software patents in Europe and Mozilla isn't (probably not because they are in favour of software patents, but more likely since it's a US foundation instead of a European company like Opera that stands to lose a lot of money from the legalisation of software patents in Europe).
Re:One of the best things Google/GMail could do
on
Gmail Spam Filter Testing
·
· Score: 5, Informative
Most of the time, these messages contain both a text/plain section with only random words, and then a text/html part with the real payload. If you use mutt or so, you most likely only see the text/plain stuff. Another trick is using just a text/html section with random text, but also with an image that contains the real payload.
They don't do anything specifically about spam that gets routed through Belgium, only to spam sent by Belgians (routed via anywhere). They go after spam sources/senders (that's what's illegal according to the law and where they have jurisdiction), they're not the Belgian public proxy-shutdown service.
Why on Earth do you think the Belgian economical inspection has any power (or time) to spend hunting e.g. US viagra peddlers? By increasing the spam they get, you only make sure they have less time to deal with spam they actually can do something about (and with other things).
But I guess I've been trolled once more in this discussion, I suppose it's time for me to really shut up now <g>
Slashdot Mirror
It's not dirty at all. The Dutch minister misinformed the national parliament before the vote on the political agreement. This came to light, and now he has to bear the consequences. If anyone played dirty here, it's the minister.
The correct term is "political agreement on a common position of the Council", which indeed still has to be formalised afterwards.
Please use this link instead, it goes to a static version of the linked page. It would be nice if an editor could update the story itself as well, thanks.
The description of the patent means absolutely nothing regarding what's been patented, only the claims do. The first claim does not mention anything about thresholds.
I can't say I find denying someone who has a (legal) right to a patent worse than giving one to someone who doesn't have the right. In the former case, one person's business/investment is hurt (with a small chance that he won't be able to do other research thus hurting society/innovation as a whole, but how many "lone-inventor-turned-super-innovating-company-tha nks-to-patents" stories do you know?). In the latter case, all other businesses and society as a whole are hurt. Keep in mind that there is no moral right to a monopoly on an invention.
Unlike copyright, patent law is a purely economical law, so unless you have proof that more patents = better economy under all circumstances, denying patents in case of doubt does not necessarily go against the concept of the patent system.
The following reasoning is also heard from time to time: if an invention is new (another requirement for patentability), this means it is consequently not "obvious", since otherwise it would have been invented already! Patent law is only a hair away from allowing one to say that it very clearly and literally allows trivial patents!
As the Deputy Director of the UK Patent Office once said:
And the fact that until now few people complained about this in the field, and that those trivial patents cause a lot more problems in the software field than in other fields (and that there seem to be even more trivial patents in the software field than in other fields), once more shows that software indeed is different. Patent law is simply completely and utterly unfit to judge advances in pure logic with.
Works fine on my G4/400. Of course, it's faster on my brand new dual G5/1.8GHz, but it's quite usable and the speed is decent imho. The only "missing functionality" on my G4 is that I don't get cube transitions when doing fast user switches. Exposé works quite well, genie scaling too etc. Yes, there's no Quartz Extreme (Rage128), but it was still faster than Jaguar, so I don't see the problem.
Ideas are free. There is no "IP" protection for ideas, nobody can own an idea (except sometimes through creative usage of software patents). And that's a good thing: it creates competition, since one idea can spawn a lot of different implementations. If you allow monopolies on ideas, the market becomes poorer, not richer. FWIW, I don't complain when Microsoft "steals" ideas from Apple either. You simply can't steal an idea, because ideas are not someone's property.
Note however that the EPO is not an EU body, it lives completely outside the EU (there are countries who signed the EPC and which thus recognise the EPO, but which are not in the EU).
It's a bit more complex than that. First of all, when you go to the EPO and get a European patent, you can designate in which countries it should be valid. Since the EPO happily grants software patents, you can get software patents in all EU countries, regardless of the national patent office's practice.However, when you want to enforce a patent, you have to do so before a national court in the country where you want to enforce it. When you look at this, only in the UK software patents have been successfully enforced in the general case. In The Netherlands for example, no-one has ever even tried to enforce a software patent. In Germany, software patents have been generally unenforceable until now.
Given that all EU countries signed the EPC, there actually is already a European-wide agreement on what is patentable and what not: see article 52 of the EPC. An EU directive cannot change anything to the EPC or the EPO however, since that these fall outside the EU. It can change things to the laws of the member states however, which means they can influence the enforceability of patents (as these have to be contested in front of national courts).As you may have seen, article 52 EPC excludes computer programs, mathematical methods and business methods from being an invention (and thus from patentability). The catch is article 52(3), which states that those exclusions only pertain to the subject matter "as such". What this used to mean, is that you could never get a patent on something where the only contribution lied in one of those things (maths etc), but that otoh an patentable invention which also contains a computer program, does not suddenly become unpatentable
Since the EPO wanted to start granting software patents (their advisory board consists of corporate lawyers from IBM, Nokia etc, and they make money per granted patent), they changed that interpretation: now they say that this exlclusion means that e.g. computer programs not as such are patentable. Now what is a computer program not as such? A computer program executed by a computer, and to make it absolutely clear those are patentable, they call those "computer-implemented inventions" nowadays.
That's also the European Parliament's opinion: if you mention the use of software in your patent claims, you have to provide a reference implementation of this software according to them. Of course, that's just another thing that the Council threw out again...
The only reason they are able to do that, is that the big companies like IBM, Sun etc pushed the patent system further and further into the state it is in now... They loved the fact to be able to get really broad and generic patents (often even with little or no investment), but forgot that this could also be used against them. Now they are whining about so-called patent trolls...
-- Someone who has a G3 iBook with a 4th replacement logic board (because he was unlucky enough to have experienced two different kinds of logic board failures, so it has been replaced once for 1 issue and 3 times for another and they only want to talk about giving a replacement if the same issue occurs for the 4th time).
Also, Opera is a very active supporter of the fight against software patents in Europe and Mozilla isn't (probably not because they are in favour of software patents, but more likely since it's a US foundation instead of a European company like Opera that stands to lose a lot of money from the legalisation of software patents in Europe).
Most of the time, these messages contain both a text/plain section with only random words, and then a text/html part with the real payload. If you use mutt or so, you most likely only see the text/plain stuff. Another trick is using just a text/html section with random text, but also with an image that contains the real payload.
1, 2, 3.
They don't do anything specifically about spam that gets routed through Belgium, only to spam sent by Belgians (routed via anywhere). They go after spam sources/senders (that's what's illegal according to the law and where they have jurisdiction), they're not the Belgian public proxy-shutdown service.
Thanks to you as well for helping in trying to make that email address useless.
But I guess I've been trolled once more in this discussion, I suppose it's time for me to really shut up now <g>