A fundamental misunderstanding of patent claims? Hardly. An acute understanding (and not through my desire, unfortunately), but my post was not as clear as it should have been.
Very few patents have as many as a hundred claims, and most have twenty or less.
Sorry, should have stated IANAL, but... the patent with which I was referring to was one I was the responsible party for, at a company I was working for which is no longer afloat. I assume the patent still stands. It consisted of 246 claim paragraphs, and was half the size of the other technology patents I read at the time to learn the generally accepted practices within patents.
Once, from Hitachi, was 700 pages long, and keyed in at about two thousand claims. Of these, I recall somewhere over 20 independent claims.
And yes, the legal fees were outrageous, this was five months of my time, dedicated solely to this. IIRC the company I worked for stiffed the attorneys, as well. (They still owe me about 5 months of unpaid salary).
The zip code is not patented when that happens, any more than the idea of an arcuate member in the example above.
Sorry then that my OP was not more clearly stated. My point was based on my specific experiences, where we were forced to rewrite considerable chunks of the patent claims to "genericize" things, to avoid opening the doors wide for future litigation. Again, IANAL, but this is what our chief representative counsel stressed, and he had spent seven years as a patent clerk, prior to becoming a patent attorney. Figured he knew what he was on about.
In any case, the point you make here is valid, and not contradictory, I think perhaps I should have phrased my original post more definitively to avoid your misunderstanding, as to my meaning and point.
My meaning and point: If an independent claim (the definition of a "chair" in your example) is ruled (by a member of the judiciary) as indefensible or incorrect, any dependent claims reliant on this become indefensible, as well.
In my example (quoting from experience on this one), if ZIP codes were changed to no longer represent geographical divisions, then the claim would be indefensible, and any dependant claim following would be likewise indefensible. Hence, my house of cards comment.
In any case, I think the point still stands... our patent system is not designed to protect the rights of the small individual, it's instead been tuned to allow TWTAM (those with time and money) to carve out large swaths of IP rights, as long as the Patent office approves said declarations.
I also, still, believe that in order to pursue litigation for patent infringement one having to place their patent which they allege was infringed upon in the light of day for patent office or judicial review and possibly removal if it was found lacking, would lessen these sorts of lawsuits.
Then again, TWTAM seem to like playing expensive lawyer games.
Having worked with intellectual property matters in the technology arena (both patent and trademark), the staggering antiquity of our concepts in protecting the fruits of one's intellectual labors is, well, staggering.
Patents are broken down into small "claims", and a patent can easily have hundreds of these, if not thousands. Even the most ridiculously simple idea gets divided into minute, easily digestible sections. One such section I remember was included to explain the concept of a ZIP code, and how the company filing the patent was NOT the arbiter or owner of that concept, but was using it as a reference within their work, and that this was not a determining factor in their technology (they could have easily used another large-scale locational identifier, such as area code). Hence, their patent could be defensible when someone claimed in court that it was based on technology they had no claaim to ownership of.
But worse, the point of the average patent is not to delineate what it is, but what it's not. If your patent includes as part of its concepts anything which you did not personally conceive of, and which you have not attributed to their original creators, That claim becomes indefensible. Toss out one claim, and the whole patent is invalid. It's a house of cards, and that's how patent attorneys litigate patent cases.
When push comes to shove, Amazon knew exactly what they were doing (certainly, their lawyers did) when they patented "one click", and they did it because a patent is precisely designed to allow the applicant to carve out as massive of a piece of intellectual pie as the patent office deems acceptable. Eolas is doing the same, in a different light, it would appear.
If you can state a case, without prior art being an issue, for patenting Earth, feel free. The rest of us will either have to move, or beat you up you and steal your planet.:)
In cases like this, where someone else comes up with a basic idea, manages to patent it, then extends their idea to encompass the known universe, perhaps the whole issue of reexamining the validity of the original patent should be considered. It would certainly cut back on the "I invented soil, it's mentioned in my patent" suits.
Ah yes, reminds me of some coworkers at a past job who couldn't figure out why the dual processor uber-dekstop they built was frying itself, even with high-speed fans going.
Until I pointed out that all of the case fans were blowing out (exhaust).
Wow, that's genius. Buy multiple drives and a firewire hub, use multiple firewire to ide converters, and then use the OS on a connected Mac to software RAID the things, and get 35Mb/sec max transfer to a single client.
This guy's a freaking rocket scientist.
Or, wait... do what I did... buy a 4U aluminum case and toss in a recycled motherboard/CPU to match, bolt a system drive to a PCI card blank and mount it inside along with a Gig-E network card, get an actual RAID controller like a 3ware 7500-8, toss in eight drives (120GB in my case, bought in the middle of last year) set up 7 drives on RAID 5 and the eighth as a hot spare, toss Linux and SAMBA (I'm agnostic, use whatever OS you like) on the thing, and voila, 800-something gigs of sustained transfer rates of around 140Mb/sec (60Mb/sec writes). Accessible to every machine in the house via SAMBA or web (tossed on Apache, too) and if I chose to open it up (which no, I don't), the net... without having to host them off my desktop machine.
If you don't think this is a big deal, do you have any idea how much RAM it takes for *any* OS to cache information about a terabyte of disk?
All in all, with all of the fireware converters and hokum, he spent less than I did, by a couple hundred bucks (figuring the hard drive cost and size differences in; I built mine in the summer of 2002, and drive prices were a bit higher). Figure in the existing sunk cost of the mobo and RAM and the system drive and the processor, and yup, I tossed about $400 more into my case. But...
Doctor Bob doesn't actually give specs on his real transfer rates either; he says 35Mb/sec... which is the theoretical max for Firewire.
Yeah, I want to live in Theory too.. everything works there. Realistically, figure in the software RAID over the firewire, I'd be surprised if that thing ever makes it past 20Mb/sec. That's about... one-fifth the speed of an ATA/133 IDE drive.
Welcome to 1994.
Man, this guy gets smarter every second I think about it. Not to knock him for building a big externally housed drive system. Projects are fun, and this sounds like he had fun which, if that was the whole point, is great. If he wanted to sink that much money into something reasonable and sane, well, he failed.
Doctor Bob is *not* a brain surgeon.
And is it just me, or does that thing look like an explosion at an LED factory? I find this type of case mod ugly as hell. Yeah yeah, I know people will disagree with me... it's just my opinion. The firewire logo on the top was a nice touch, but you might as well put a Yugo hood ornament on top of it too, while you're advertising.
Why some people think having eleven randomly-picked colors of blinky lights on a case is uber-k3wl is beyond me. I modded one case once, before it was the "in" thing, and while I took pains to not make it l337-flashy but instead just interesting, I still regretted it once it became as common as it did. It's sitting in a basement now, scavenged of parts.
There are also many more of us who are technologically aware, more experienced, who have (and do) use all of the major OSes, and who don't buy the Apple marketing mechanism wholesale.
iTunes is less functional than WinAMP.
iPhoto is less functional than the software which *came* with my digital camera.
And gee, I paid a third of what you did, for a *faster* machine that, wow, just works!
I can't believe you guys resisted using "So Long and Thanks for all the Fission" as your byline...:)
(And yes, I know, it's not fission, but the line is worth bending it IMHO, heh)
'scuse me? I sure as heck *can* tell the difference between my P2-400 and P3-600 machines... I do 3d mapping work from time to time, and what brings the P2 to its *knees* is smooth and flowing on the P3. Besides that, my compile times are about 1/2 of what they were on the P2. Just because Joe Average playing xbill won't notice the speed increase doesn't mean that none of us will. Regards, -mh. The "average user" is kind of a myth... as requirements keep skyrocketing while technology advances and software gets more and more capable (and complex), processor speed and capabilities are just as valid concerns as disk space and memory. How many people do you know who are still doing productive work on a 286?
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A fundamental misunderstanding of patent claims? Hardly. An acute understanding (and not through my desire, unfortunately), but my post was not as clear as it should have been.
Very few patents have as many as a hundred claims, and most have twenty or less.
Sorry, should have stated IANAL, but... the patent with which I was referring to was one I was the responsible party for, at a company I was working for which is no longer afloat. I assume the patent still stands. It consisted of 246 claim paragraphs, and was half the size of the other technology patents I read at the time to learn the generally accepted practices within patents.
Once, from Hitachi, was 700 pages long, and keyed in at about two thousand claims. Of these, I recall somewhere over 20 independent claims.
And yes, the legal fees were outrageous, this was five months of my time, dedicated solely to this. IIRC the company I worked for stiffed the attorneys, as well. (They still owe me about 5 months of unpaid salary).
The zip code is not patented when that happens, any more than the idea of an arcuate member in the example above.
Sorry then that my OP was not more clearly stated. My point was based on my specific experiences, where we were forced to rewrite considerable chunks of the patent claims to "genericize" things, to avoid opening the doors wide for future litigation. Again, IANAL, but this is what our chief representative counsel stressed, and he had spent seven years as a patent clerk, prior to becoming a patent attorney. Figured he knew what he was on about.
In any case, the point you make here is valid, and not contradictory, I think perhaps I should have phrased my original post more definitively to avoid your misunderstanding, as to my meaning and point.
My meaning and point: If an independent claim (the definition of a "chair" in your example) is ruled (by a member of the judiciary) as indefensible or incorrect, any dependent claims reliant on this become indefensible, as well.
In my example (quoting from experience on this one), if ZIP codes were changed to no longer represent geographical divisions, then the claim would be indefensible, and any dependant claim following would be likewise indefensible. Hence, my house of cards comment.
In any case, I think the point still stands... our patent system is not designed to protect the rights of the small individual, it's instead been tuned to allow TWTAM (those with time and money) to carve out large swaths of IP rights, as long as the Patent office approves said declarations.
I also, still, believe that in order to pursue litigation for patent infringement one having to place their patent which they allege was infringed upon in the light of day for patent office or judicial review and possibly removal if it was found lacking, would lessen these sorts of lawsuits.
Then again, TWTAM seem to like playing expensive lawyer games.
Zelda the Windwalker will beat out Solid Snake, by a margin of six.
Okay, okay, we're gay.
NOW will you go out with us?
Having worked with intellectual property matters in the technology arena (both patent and trademark), the staggering antiquity of our concepts in protecting the fruits of one's intellectual labors is, well, staggering.
:)
Patents are broken down into small "claims", and a patent can easily have hundreds of these, if not thousands. Even the most ridiculously simple idea gets divided into minute, easily digestible sections. One such section I remember was included to explain the concept of a ZIP code, and how the company filing the patent was NOT the arbiter or owner of that concept, but was using it as a reference within their work, and that this was not a determining factor in their technology (they could have easily used another large-scale locational identifier, such as area code). Hence, their patent could be defensible when someone claimed in court that it was based on technology they had no claaim to ownership of.
But worse, the point of the average patent is not to delineate what it is, but what it's not. If your patent includes as part of its concepts anything which you did not personally conceive of, and which you have not attributed to their original creators, That claim becomes indefensible. Toss out one claim, and the whole patent is invalid. It's a house of cards, and that's how patent attorneys litigate patent cases.
When push comes to shove, Amazon knew exactly what they were doing (certainly, their lawyers did) when they patented "one click", and they did it because a patent is precisely designed to allow the applicant to carve out as massive of a piece of intellectual pie as the patent office deems acceptable. Eolas is doing the same, in a different light, it would appear.
If you can state a case, without prior art being an issue, for patenting Earth, feel free. The rest of us will either have to move, or beat you up you and steal your planet.
In cases like this, where someone else comes up with a basic idea, manages to patent it, then extends their idea to encompass the known universe, perhaps the whole issue of reexamining the validity of the original patent should be considered. It would certainly cut back on the "I invented soil, it's mentioned in my patent" suits.
Just wait 'til they all get laid off during the first financial Crunchberry.
And I've got 250 gajillion ones and zeroes to prove it.
You're giving Mac Users a bad name.
"Cool! You just got a new server? What's it look like?"
Apparently the rover stumbled on the missing WMD's and had to be "silenced".
Ah yes, reminds me of some coworkers at a past job who couldn't figure out why the dual processor uber-dekstop they built was frying itself, even with high-speed fans going.
Until I pointed out that all of the case fans were blowing out (exhaust).
I'm surprised the damn case didn't pucker in.
Wow, that's genius. Buy multiple drives and a firewire hub, use multiple firewire to ide converters, and then use the OS on a connected Mac to software RAID the things, and get 35Mb/sec max transfer to a single client.
This guy's a freaking rocket scientist.
Or, wait... do what I did... buy a 4U aluminum case and toss in a recycled motherboard/CPU to match, bolt a system drive to a PCI card blank and mount it inside along with a Gig-E network card, get an actual RAID controller like a 3ware 7500-8, toss in eight drives (120GB in my case, bought in the middle of last year) set up 7 drives on RAID 5 and the eighth as a hot spare, toss Linux and SAMBA (I'm agnostic, use whatever OS you like) on the thing, and voila, 800-something gigs of sustained transfer rates of around 140Mb/sec (60Mb/sec writes). Accessible to every machine in the house via SAMBA or web (tossed on Apache, too) and if I chose to open it up (which no, I don't), the net... without having to host them off my desktop machine.
If you don't think this is a big deal, do you have any idea how much RAM it takes for *any* OS to cache information about a terabyte of disk?
All in all, with all of the fireware converters and hokum, he spent less than I did, by a couple hundred bucks (figuring the hard drive cost and size differences in; I built mine in the summer of 2002, and drive prices were a bit higher). Figure in the existing sunk cost of the mobo and RAM and the system drive and the processor, and yup, I tossed about $400 more into my case. But...
Doctor Bob doesn't actually give specs on his real transfer rates either; he says 35Mb/sec... which is the theoretical max for Firewire.
Yeah, I want to live in Theory too.. everything works there. Realistically, figure in the software RAID over the firewire, I'd be surprised if that thing ever makes it past 20Mb/sec. That's about... one-fifth the speed of an ATA/133 IDE drive.
Welcome to 1994.
Man, this guy gets smarter every second I think about it. Not to knock him for building a big externally housed drive system. Projects are fun, and this sounds like he had fun which, if that was the whole point, is great. If he wanted to sink that much money into something reasonable and sane, well, he failed.
Doctor Bob is *not* a brain surgeon.
And is it just me, or does that thing look like an explosion at an LED factory? I find this type of case mod ugly as hell. Yeah yeah, I know people will disagree with me... it's just my opinion. The firewire logo on the top was a nice touch, but you might as well put a Yugo hood ornament on top of it too, while you're advertising.
Why some people think having eleven randomly-picked colors of blinky lights on a case is uber-k3wl is beyond me. I modded one case once, before it was the "in" thing, and while I took pains to not make it l337-flashy but instead just interesting, I still regretted it once it became as common as it did. It's sitting in a basement now, scavenged of parts.
C'mon, they've been cutting costs on security for years by providing less and less of it...
This is already a reality in many large cities. The technology is known as 'refrigerator boxes and duct tape'.
There are also many more of us who are technologically aware, more experienced, who have (and do) use all of the major OSes, and who don't buy the Apple marketing mechanism wholesale.
iTunes is less functional than WinAMP.
iPhoto is less functional than the software which *came* with my digital camera.
And gee, I paid a third of what you did, for a *faster* machine that, wow, just works!
So, who's the zealot, again?
Why I haven't switched.
> Give me an example when "vote with your money" has ever worked.
DiVX.
I can't believe you guys resisted using "So Long and Thanks for all the Fission" as your byline... :)
(And yes, I know, it's not fission, but the line is worth bending it IMHO, heh)
'scuse me? I sure as heck *can* tell the difference between my P2-400 and P3-600 machines... I do 3d mapping work from time to time, and what brings the P2 to its *knees* is smooth and flowing on the P3. Besides that, my compile times are about 1/2 of what they were on the P2. Just because Joe Average playing xbill won't notice the speed increase doesn't mean that none of us will. Regards, -mh. The "average user" is kind of a myth... as requirements keep skyrocketing while technology advances and software gets more and more capable (and complex), processor speed and capabilities are just as valid concerns as disk space and memory. How many people do you know who are still doing productive work on a 286?