AED's are not a common device like a cell phone and should only be used by people trained and with a ticket to use them not Joe-blow member of the public.
Common enough that they are in virtually every mall, casino, and airport in the US. But that's ultimately beside the point: that Apple's life-saving invention can be used by just about anyone actually argues in favor of its non-obviousness because it's harder to develop effective technologies that everyone can use. For example, despite years of development and lots of potential value, no one has yet developed an AED that can be safely used by someone who has no training.
Regarding the screen dimming: the patent does not claim all uses of voltage lowering to dim the LCD. It claims only the use of this power-saving feature when an emergency call is placed.
Many posters have already suggested that this should not be patentable because it's a potentially life-saving feature. Critical reflection shows why that argument does not hold much water.
A new treatment or cure for a fatal disease is also life-saving, but few would argue that drugs should not be patentable.
Alternatively, consider the invention of the automatic external defibrillator. This is also a life-saving device, and much of its utility stems from software and an effective user interface (e.g., spoken commands to the user), but there are no calls to force AED technology into the public domain.
Careful reading of the patent application shows that its essential features could be replicated on any smart phone and a subset could even be implemented on a non-smart phone. The fact that phone manufacturers have not implemented these features in the decade or so that it would have been possible to do so suggests two possibilities: One, that the features are actually not that useful or important; Two, that the features and their implementation here are actually far from obvious.
If the former is the case, then we shouldn't care about the application because it pertains to something of such limited value that the dozens of phone manufacturers and telecom companies never saw fit to implement it. If the latter is the case, then Apple is rightly to be rewarded for developing a useful feature and, presumably, bringing it to market. Without patent protection, Apple is much less likely to invest time and effort developing new features for its products, including potentially life-saving features like this one.
Finally, I think we should withhold our ultimate judgment until the patent is granted or denied. The examination process may turn up prior art that blocks the application entirely or it may cause the claims to be substantially narrowed. Faced with a less than optimal patent, Apple may abandon the application. This story is a bit like judging a piece of software based on an alpha version.
If you're talking about Tibetan Buddhism, then no, this doesn't really 'negate the values a Buddhist would stand for.' To wit: "His Holiness the Dalai Lama has said that having the mantra on your computer works the same as a traditional prayer wheel. Since a computer's hard disk spins hundreds of thousands of times per hour, and can contain many copies of the mantra, anyone who wants to can turn their computer into a prayer wheel."
A Zen Buddhist might look at it differently, though.
Here are the University of Delaware-owned patents: 6,323,846 and 6,888,536. Two other early Westerman patents (6,570,557 and 6,677,932) were assigned to FingerWorks, which was bought by Apple a few years ago.
Anyway, all of the Westerman patents are for the capacitive touchscreen itself and the accompanying software, not the multi-touch gestures covered by the recently granted Apple patent. It could very well be that the company that designed the screens (Balda) or the company that manufactured them (TPK Solutions) has licensed the U of Delaware patents. Even if the screens are unlicensed, it could be that they do not infringe or that the Delaware patents are invalid. Given the amount of money that Balda, TPK, and Apple have riding on the iPhone, it is very likely that lots of due diligence was done on these issues, especially with Westerman working for Apple now.
Even if the Delaware patents are valid and infringed, it is quite likely that Apple's contract with Balda/TPK Solutions includes an indemnity clause that puts Balda/TPK on the hook rather than Apple. In the post-eBay v Mercexchange world, it is likely that the University of Delaware would be unable to enjoin Balda, TPK, or Apple, leaving it only able to collect damages and future royalties. Even if an injunction were to issue, I'm sure the University would be happy to negotiate a licensing agreement since it does not practice the patent itself. Finally, even if the University were to stonewall Apple, there are lots of other companies that make capacitive touchscreens that could fit the bill for the iPhone.
Now, let's turn to the issue of the prior art references omitted from Apple's patent application. Contrary to a popular misconception, there is no affirmative duty to submit every last possible prior art reference to the PTO, only those that are known to the applicant and material to patentability (that is, that could have made a difference in the PTO's decision). It could be that the submitted references covered everything that the Pierre Wellner reference disclosed, in which case the Wellner reference would be immaterial. Or it could be that the Apple patent only claims subject matter that is patentably distinct from the Wellner reference, in which case, again, it would be immaterial.
Yes, these are all potential issues, but determining the outcome will depend on a lot of information that is not publicly known (such as any Balda/TPK Solutions/Apple licensing deals with the University of Delaware) or that ultimately has to be determined by the PTO or a court (e.g., whether the University of Delaware patents are valid or whether Apple's patent is unenforceable for inequitable conduct). As a result, both of the linked articles are rife with speculation and conjecture. For now, this is pretty much a non-story. Come back if some of these patents are found invalid during reexamination or if Apple gets sued.
Would Rowling still have written her books if the work only got her half her current earnings? Probably. A quarter or a tenth? Still probable. Would she have written the books if copyright only lasted 15 years, instead of decades? Probably. Society is undoubtedly overpaying for this creativity.
Luckily, we invented a way to redistribute some of that excess wealth back to society: taxation. Of course, the tax regime isn't perfect, but it's overall a much more efficient way to correct overpayment than trying to determine, ex ante or even ex post, how much money a given author deserves for a given creative work. I'll give you that the copyright term is too long, but we shouldn't try to cap how much money an author can make from a work. Instead, we should just set appropriate, progressive income taxes.
I'm gonna paraphrase your points to keep the post length down. I will try to be fair in my paraphrasing.
Programmers are virtually all anti-software patent
The US patent system is a pragmatic one: if protection encourages innovation, then it is good; if not, it is bad. We should not look to the opinion of scientists or programmers but rather to the hard data. Empirical economic analysis either shows a mixed picture or a benefit. It does not show anything like a clear case for eliminating software patents. Maybe we need to collect more data, but there is not an establish empirical case for barring software patents.
No matter how much I *think* about "1 part Chromium to 2 parts Iron", I never *actually make any alloy*....You are patenting the purely mathematical process of evaluating a particular chunk of math.
And no matter how much you think about differential equations in your head you will never actually make an animation of flowing water appear on a computer screen. My example claim explicitly includes both a specific purpose (to produce images of a fluid) and a tangible output (the images on a screen). It is emphatically not a purely mathematical process and cannot be performed by the human mind alone (i.e., it is not an abstract idea, law of nature, or mental process).
Diamond v. Diehr is an anti-software patent ruling.
As I said above, even if that were true, then the court should be legislatively overruled to allow software patents. I won't go into anymore analysis of the ruling as this isn't really the forum for detailed legal discussion.
Google does not rely on its patents but rather its other IP and its computing infrastructure.
Google would not have gotten a strong trademark without good search results. It would not have gotten the VC funding necessary to build infrastructure, tweak its algorithms, or build the source code that powers all of its other sites without good search results. The absolutely fundamental part of Google is the Page Rank algorithm. If a patent were not essential, then Google would have either kept it a trade secret or published it and gone ahead anyway. If they kept it a trade secret they would've lost the ability to deter anyone who discovered it separately and if they published it then it would've been snatched up by more established competitors like Microsoft, who already had a strong trademark, the money to build infrastructure, etc.
Bill Gates opposes or opposed software patents.
Funny how Bill Gates' opinion can be trusted here but not elsewhere. In fact, in other industries with patents we do not see this 'patent thicket' problem and we don't see it in software. People want to get deals done, and the market will ensure that licensing deals, mergers, co-branding, etc all work out. Empirical scholarship has failed to identify a patent thicket or anti-commons tragedy in any area of technology or research. Software is not special.
The software industry grew without patents, therefore it does not need them.
The one does not necessarily follow from the other. Were software patents allowed from the beginning, it is entirely possible (and I believe likely) that the industry would have seen even more rapid growth. I can support this by comparing software to biotech. Biotechnology is another industry about as old as software, patents are essential to it, and it has seen explosive growth as well. Biotech and software share many similarities: startup costs are low (a few millions will do in either case), discovery costs are high (software is expensive and so is new compound discovery), but replication costs are low (software and compounds are both easy to copy).
Other countries disallow algorithms or mental processes.
I agree with you that, as the law stands now, software and business method patents are in a precarious position. What I don't agree is that they are undeserving of protection as a policy matter. You've made a few commonly raised points, so I'll address them.
A 100 digit number may be novel and non-obvious and useful for some specific application. I *do* see reason why we should not "encourage the development of such inventions". A number is not an invention. Math is not an invention.
But I am not talking about patenting math or numbers per se. I am talking only about patenting the specific application of a number or of some mathematical principle. Consider an alloy defined as 1 part Chromium to 2 parts Iron. I am applying the mathematical principle of a ratio in order to define a useful, physical composition of matter. Yet no one would claim that I am claiming a patent on ratios, just an application thereof. Similarly, if I patent the use of a differential equation to render fluids in a computer game, I'm not claiming differential equations, just their use in rendering fluids.
The Supreme Court has stated that any algorithm "is treated as though it were a familiar part of the prior art" for patent purposes. Math is not a patentable "invention". An information algorithm is not a patentable "invention".
You misunderstand the Court. The court did not state that software was not patentable, merely that algorithms alone are unpatentable, a point on which we agree. What is patentable is an application of the algorithm to a new and useful process.
I'm going to skip down a bit because a lot of the rest of your points depend on the claim that I am advocating patenting math, which is not the case.
Any software can be (slowly) "run" entirely mentally. In fact is it a standard part of debugging and analysis for programmers to "run" software in their head, to follow and check exactly what it is doing by carrying it out yourself entirely mentally. It is ludicrous to suggest that some sequence of thoughts could be a patent violation.
No one is suggesting that. While it is true that one can execute software in ones head, I would be astonished to discover that your head contained a computer monitor, or an internet connection, or a sound card, or any of the many other physical output devices that are routinely claimed in software patents. Again, I am not talking about patenting the naked algorithm, only the application of the algorithm to produce a specific result in the real world. As a technical matter, ones brain likely does not fall within the legal meaning of "general purpose computer" claimed by nearly all software patents, so this alarmist point is moot.
And there is absolutely nothing non-obvious about using a old ordinary computer simply to speed up that information processing. A computer was once new and patentable, but using a computer for it's obvious and intended purpose of speeding up generic non-patentable math is not patentable.
And rightly so, but (good, non-obvious) software patents don't claim "A method for rapidly calculating a known equation by using a computer." They claim "A new and non-obvious use for known equations to accomplish a useful result by use of a computer." For example, Google's Page Rank patent is based on linear algebra and graph theory. All of the math was well known, but the particular application to the Internet was not. The problem is complex enough that no one would attempt it by hand on any useful scale, so the patent claims the use of a computer. Larry and Sergei did not patent linear algebra or graph theory. They patented a new, non-obvious use of that math to accomplish a specific result: the ranking of the relevance of web pages to a search query. I posit that that result, which has created billions of dollars in wealth and saved hundreds of millions of people countless person-centuries of wasted time, is very much deserving of protection in order to encourage innovations
I'm not proposing eliminating software patents, so I don't need to provide such a line. I don't actually have a problem with software patents, so long as they are actually new, useful, nonobvious, and accompanied by a written description that adequately discloses the invention. The problem is not software patents: the problem is bad patents, and I can make several recommendations for cutting down on those.
First, the presumption of patent validity should be eliminated, making it easier to overturn bad patents. The large numbers of patents that are invalidated shows that the presumption of validity no longer makes sense.
Second, the patent office should make it easier for those with computer science backgrounds to become patent agents and patent attorneys. By bringing in more people educated in the field, better patents will be written and bad patents will be more easily overturned.
Third, courts and examiners should (and have started to) make more of the fact that all claims (even, or perhaps especially, broad ones) must be backed up by disclosure in the specification. As an example, if I disclose only one compression algorithm in my specification, then I should not be able to claim something as broad as "compressing data by eliminating redundant information." Instead, I should only be able to claim the algorithm I disclosed. Too many overly broad patents are granted, and this is especially common among software patents because the examining corps doesn't have enough competent computer scientists to weed out the chaff.
The majority decision introduces a new, complex, and vague test for patentability of business methods and software that raises more new questions than it answers. The end result will likely be the discovery of several 'magic words' that patent applicants can insert into their applications to ensure patentability without materially affecting what the claims cover. Unfortunately, those magic words will likely only be discovered after millions of dollars are wasted on expensive legal battles.
The new test states that a business method or software-implemented invention must be either "tied to a particular machine" or "transform a particular article." The court does not define what a 'particular machine' is. It is possible that a general purpose computer is sufficient, but it may not be. If it is not, it is unclear how specific the patent must be about what kind of computer it is tied to.
The court also failed to define what was a suitable level of transformation or what kinds of articles would suffice. Maybe the transformation must be significant, or maybe any change in state at all is enough. Maybe it will depend upon the nature of the invention. Maybe some articles are physical enough while others are not. All of these questions will require millions of dollars and years of litigation to answer. In the meanwhile, the value of thousands of patents will be called into question.
The court did point out that the article need not be physical, as in the example of a CT scanner which manipulates data representing a patient's body but not the body itself. So perhaps as long as there is some ultimate tie-in to a physical object, the invention is patentable. It is unclear why the manipulation of data representing a patient's body is adequately tied to a physical article but the manipulation of data representing commodities (which are ultimately very real barges full of coal, for example) is not. Figuring out exactly where that line is will be very difficult.
In my opinion (and in the opinion of Judge Rader, who wrote one of the three dissenting opinions) , the law already provided plenty of reasons to deny the application in the case as well as other overly broad or overly vague business method and software patents. Inventing complicated new tests will do more to provide employment for patent attorneys than it will to streamline business and encourage innovation.
Of course, I would also call into question the requirement for a physical tie-in of any kind. So long as the business method or software patent is limited to a specific, useful application (and is new, nonobvious, etc), I see no reason why we shouldn't encourage the development of such inventions. For example, better that a hedge fund patent a new kind of derivative and the world see what they are doing than they keep it an in-house trade secret. Assuming the Supreme Court or Congress does not overrule it, this decision will do much to drive such complex financial methods into the shadows.
One other very real concern. This decision could very well spell the end of Google's Page Rank and AdWords patents. If that happens, expect Microsoft and Yahoo to announce new, improved versions of their search engines and ad-delivery systems...and expect Google's stock to tank. Almost all of Google's value is tied up in its intellectual property. This decision weakens some of the fundamental parts of its business. Without software patents, it will be much harder for Google (or the next clever startup) to challenge more established companies.
I made a skype-out call from the G1 over my wifi network today. Try that with an iPhone.
Actually, there's a great free iPhone app called Fring that supports VOIP over WiFi using Skype, MSN Messenger, ICQ, Google Talk, and several SIP services.
A link to the defendant's attorneys, who notably do not list intellectual property among their specialties. It is arguable that the defendant made a poor choice of attorney for this case.
This case may not be as strong a precedent as it appears at first glance. Bruce Perens's article, while informative, failed to mention a few important legal details, which I will try to fill in here. Please note that I am not a lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
The Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, where this case was heard, has a more limited jurisdiction than the regional circuits (1st through 11th and DC). Generally speaking, the Federal Circuit hears cases arising under the patent laws, and it also has jurisdiction over a hodgepodge of federal administrative law issues (veterans claims, the Merit Service Protection Board, certain government contracts, etc). In this case, the appeal was heard by the Federal Circuit because of a tie-in to patent law, though that was not the subject of the appeal.
Why does it matter that the Federal Circuit heard the case? It's important because the Federal Circuit does not set precedents for copyright law. Instead, it relies on the precedents of the regional circuit that would have heard the case were it not for whatever side issue brought it under Federal Circuit jurisdiction. Here, the Federal Circuit used the copyright precedents of the Ninth Circuit because the case originated in the Northern District of California, which is in the Ninth Circuit.
So, this case is really only indicative of what two (of twelve) Federal Circuit judges and one district judge from New Jersey thought the Ninth Circuit would do if the appeal were heard there. It is not binding precedent on the Federal Circuit, nor the Ninth Circuit, nor any other regional circuit. Different circuits often have different interpretations of the law (called a circuit split), which can often only be resolved by a Supreme Court decision. It would not surprise me if other circuits take differing views on the validity or precise nature of open source licenses.
I would not even take this case as saying much about the Federal Circuit's own views. As pointed out earlier, one of the appellate judges in this case is a district court judge who does not normally take part in Federal Circuit cases. I would also point out that the Federal Circuit is known for having a very broad range of judicial philosophies represented on its bench, with judges often writing dissenting opinions in patent cases. There is no guarantee that even another case before the Federal Circuit would come out the same way, especially if it originated in a different circuit.
All is not doom and gloom, however. Courts are notoriously conservative and reluctant to make the first move in a new area of the law. Now that there is something to hook into, it is possible that district courts and other circuit courts will make use of the Federal Circuit opinion as persuasive authority in their own decision making. Just beware that there is no guarantee that will happen.
You'll notice the June 28, 2007 filing date. The earliest reference I can find to Intelliscreen is that it was in early beta in May of 2008. Indeed, Intelliborn didn't apply for a trademark on "Intelliscreen" until May 23, 2008 (TM App. Serial No. 77482276). Also note that the product requires a jailbroken iPhone. The iPhone wasn't even first jailbroken until July, 2007!
Thus, it seems almost certain that Apple came up with the idea long before Intelliborn had a product on the market and very likely long before Intelliborn came up with the idea at all.
People should understand that patent applications are (generally) not published the moment they are filed. Instead, they are usually published 18 months after the filing date. Just because we are now seeing the application does not mean that it was only now filed. In fact, it usually means just the opposite.
Presumably what Nike and Apple are worried about is capturing profits from shoe sales as well as sensor sales. But rather than have all of this DRM garbage, why not just raise the price of the sensor to cover the 'losses' from people who don't buy Nike shoes? The sensor is, after all, the critical part of the equation, and the vast majority of customers have one pair of shoes and one sensor.
Hell, what Nike should really do is raise the price of the sensor to compensate for any losses, and sell their own adapter. That would have the benefit of providing another revenue stream, more branding, and allow people who like Nike shoes but not necessarily ones with the built-in pocket to use the sensor.
I think Nike and Apple are seriously overthinking this.
My guess is that nVidia will put a stop to this pretty quickly. PhysX is covered by at least a couple of patents. There may be others pending or that were assigned to nVidia.
I don't know if PhysX is covered by patent protection in Israel, but it's possible. In any event, don't count on official PhysX support from ATI any time soon.
Except, as noted above, that's not true at all. You learned it in high school because you had a bad science teacher, and shame on "livescience.com" for perpetuating such nonsense. Glass is an amorphous solid, not a 'slow liquid.' It shares one or two characteristics with supercooled liquids, but it is different in several important ways.
So this is a collection of mods for the original Doom, which was released 15 years ago. Except it's for the Dreamcast, which ended production 7 years ago and was never a big seller. On top of that, you need a modded Dreamcast. So basically this will appeal to almost no one.
First off, you can force something to run in the background, but you shouldn't. The limitation on background processes has nothing to do with control over developers and everything to do with battery life. A simple XML query once every 5 minutes is enough to drain the battery in just 4 hours.
In a mobile device, everything you do drains the battery. Remember also that most of the time the user is not looking at the screen and often has the device muted. Consequently, is there really a need for an application to pop up dialogs or sound alarms that will go unnoticed? Similarly, does it really have to do gather data constantly and not, say, during a sync or when the app is actually run by the user? Apple weighed those slim probabilities against the much larger probability that poorly written apps would needlessly waste battery power and put a sensible limitation on developers in order to protect users.
One last point: users don't know which app is draining all of their battery power. Once apps become available, users may well install several all at once. If their battery life suddenly went to hell, it would be a difficult process of trial and error to figure out which app(s) was/were the culprit(s).
At higher pressures, Tc decreases to 8.8 K at 165 GPa and is then likely to increase again to 11.3 K at 192 GPa (Fig. 2C). The behavior of Tc between 90 GPa and 120 GPa is suggestive that higher values of critical temperature of superconductivity may be possible. So not only is it still extremely cold (much colder than traditional liquid nitrogen semiconductors), but the pressures required are very near the highest pressures attainable in a lab. A diamond anvil cell can only reach up to about 360 GPa. This is interesting science, but it is pretty unlikely to lead to true room temperature superconductors.
It's been nearly ten years since the US courts decided that business methods were patentable and that most software could be patentable -- and we've all seen what's happened since then.
Since then we've seen the emergence of Google as a powerful challenger to Microsoft. This is one example among many of a company whose entire existence, much less its massive success, is dependent upon a patent (# 6285999, in Google's case). If Google had not been able to patent its major innovation, then Microsoft could easily have co-opted the idea, and it would have dominated search as well as operating systems and office suites. Recall that most of Microsoft's meteoric rise took place during a time when software was not patentable. The absence of software patents is precisely what makes "embrace, extend, extinguish" possible. Software patents give the original innovator the power to stop that strategy in its tracks.
I believe that what Slashdot readers truly dislike are bad patents, not software patents per se. Software just has more bad patents than it should because of the way the PTO treated them. Until the courts basically forced the PTO to accept software patents, the PTO did not hire computer scientists as patent examiners. Even now, the PTO has a massive backlog of software patent applications, and as a result computer related applications have by far the longest median time to issuance (roughly 44 months!). The PTO tends to err on the side of issuance, and so we end up with a flood of terrible software patents.
How to fix this? The simplest way is to eliminate the presumption that patents are valid, which requires a patent challenger to prove invalidity by clear and convincing evidence (a standard almost as high as beyond a reasonable doubt). Instead, we should recognize that many patents are not valid and end the presumption of validity. That way, bad patents can be more easily challenged, and patent trolls will think twice before bringing spurious suits.
It seems to me that both findings of the study (more tumors and even more tumors in people in rural areas) could be due to simply talking a lot. More talking means more salivation to keep the mouth from drying out, and it is possible that heavy use of the salivary glands could lead to cancer. In rural areas, one would expect the effect to be magnified because people there are more isolated, and so even less likely to talk a lot except when using a cell phone. It's possible that the study accounted for differences in time spent talking, but neither article makes that clear.
Some Back of The Envelope Calculations
on
Energy From Raindrops
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· Score: 4, Informative
A typical raindrop has a fall velocity of about 8 m/s. Assuming a pretty healthy rainfall of 10cm (4 inches) we get 100 liters of water per square meter of land. 100 liters of water weighs 100kg, of course, and plugging that into the equation for kinetic energy gives us 6400 joules. Spread out over 2 hours, that's a whopping.89 watts per square meter.
All of that assumes 100% conversion efficiency and no losses due to standing water absorbing the impact of the drops. If the overall efficiency is, say, 50%, then you'd need something like 30 square meters to light a single compact fluorescent bulb. To generate a megawatt would require over 2 million square meters (over 500 acres).
Given that in most places it rains less often than the sun shines, this seems like an astonishingly inefficient way to generate electricity. There just isn't that much energy in rainfall.
So, we already put weapons on robots, and now we're giving the robots to the monkeys. Logically, the next step will be monkey-controlled robots with weapons.
And I thought the holodeck would be the last thing we ever invented...
Trademark law is designed to prevent brand confusion in the marketplace among similar products. If you try to sell a car that looks like a Ford and has the Ford emblem on it, you are in violation of trademark. However, selling a calendar with pictures of cars in it (unless, perhaps, they are all Fords, or you are reproducing the Ford logo on the front of the calendar as if it were an official Ford product) is most likely permissible.
That would be true if Ford did not own any trademarks on calendars. As I noted above, however, they own roughly 30 such trademarks and actively license them to calendar producers. A search on Amazon for 'ford mustang calendar' produces lots of results.
In a world where everyone can own their own replicator, who will control what is replicated?
In that case, patent rights will still be necessary to encourage people to invent new durable goods in the first place, and trademarks will still be necessary to ensure that one is getting goods (or, if you prefer, digital plans for goods) from a known, high-quality source.
Actually, I was wondering, does Ford have a trademark on calendars?
Yes. Ford owns something like 30 live trademarks on calendars and related products, including the Mustang logo (Trademark Registration # 2034378), the Ford name (#1868251), the Ford logo (#1863708, and the Cobra name (#2246277). So this isn't a purely academic pursuit for them; they make money by licensing their trademarks to calendar producers. In fact, they even have a trademark on a "Ford Official Licensed Product" logo that is used on, among other things, calendars (#3310542, if you're curious).
Slashdot Mirror
AED's are not a common device like a cell phone and should only be used by people trained and with a ticket to use them not Joe-blow member of the public.
Common enough that they are in virtually every mall, casino, and airport in the US. But that's ultimately beside the point: that Apple's life-saving invention can be used by just about anyone actually argues in favor of its non-obviousness because it's harder to develop effective technologies that everyone can use. For example, despite years of development and lots of potential value, no one has yet developed an AED that can be safely used by someone who has no training.
Regarding the screen dimming: the patent does not claim all uses of voltage lowering to dim the LCD. It claims only the use of this power-saving feature when an emergency call is placed.
Many posters have already suggested that this should not be patentable because it's a potentially life-saving feature. Critical reflection shows why that argument does not hold much water.
A new treatment or cure for a fatal disease is also life-saving, but few would argue that drugs should not be patentable.
Alternatively, consider the invention of the automatic external defibrillator. This is also a life-saving device, and much of its utility stems from software and an effective user interface (e.g., spoken commands to the user), but there are no calls to force AED technology into the public domain.
Careful reading of the patent application shows that its essential features could be replicated on any smart phone and a subset could even be implemented on a non-smart phone. The fact that phone manufacturers have not implemented these features in the decade or so that it would have been possible to do so suggests two possibilities: One, that the features are actually not that useful or important; Two, that the features and their implementation here are actually far from obvious.
If the former is the case, then we shouldn't care about the application because it pertains to something of such limited value that the dozens of phone manufacturers and telecom companies never saw fit to implement it. If the latter is the case, then Apple is rightly to be rewarded for developing a useful feature and, presumably, bringing it to market. Without patent protection, Apple is much less likely to invest time and effort developing new features for its products, including potentially life-saving features like this one.
Finally, I think we should withhold our ultimate judgment until the patent is granted or denied. The examination process may turn up prior art that blocks the application entirely or it may cause the claims to be substantially narrowed. Faced with a less than optimal patent, Apple may abandon the application. This story is a bit like judging a piece of software based on an alpha version.
If you're talking about Tibetan Buddhism, then no, this doesn't really 'negate the values a Buddhist would stand for.' To wit: "His Holiness the Dalai Lama has said that having the mantra on your computer works the same as a traditional prayer wheel. Since a computer's hard disk spins hundreds of thousands of times per hour, and can contain many copies of the mantra, anyone who wants to can turn their computer into a prayer wheel."
A Zen Buddhist might look at it differently, though.
Here are the University of Delaware-owned patents: 6,323,846 and 6,888,536. Two other early Westerman patents (6,570,557 and 6,677,932) were assigned to FingerWorks, which was bought by Apple a few years ago.
Anyway, all of the Westerman patents are for the capacitive touchscreen itself and the accompanying software, not the multi-touch gestures covered by the recently granted Apple patent. It could very well be that the company that designed the screens (Balda) or the company that manufactured them (TPK Solutions) has licensed the U of Delaware patents. Even if the screens are unlicensed, it could be that they do not infringe or that the Delaware patents are invalid. Given the amount of money that Balda, TPK, and Apple have riding on the iPhone, it is very likely that lots of due diligence was done on these issues, especially with Westerman working for Apple now.
Even if the Delaware patents are valid and infringed, it is quite likely that Apple's contract with Balda/TPK Solutions includes an indemnity clause that puts Balda/TPK on the hook rather than Apple. In the post-eBay v Mercexchange world, it is likely that the University of Delaware would be unable to enjoin Balda, TPK, or Apple, leaving it only able to collect damages and future royalties. Even if an injunction were to issue, I'm sure the University would be happy to negotiate a licensing agreement since it does not practice the patent itself. Finally, even if the University were to stonewall Apple, there are lots of other companies that make capacitive touchscreens that could fit the bill for the iPhone.
Now, let's turn to the issue of the prior art references omitted from Apple's patent application. Contrary to a popular misconception, there is no affirmative duty to submit every last possible prior art reference to the PTO, only those that are known to the applicant and material to patentability (that is, that could have made a difference in the PTO's decision). It could be that the submitted references covered everything that the Pierre Wellner reference disclosed, in which case the Wellner reference would be immaterial. Or it could be that the Apple patent only claims subject matter that is patentably distinct from the Wellner reference, in which case, again, it would be immaterial.
Yes, these are all potential issues, but determining the outcome will depend on a lot of information that is not publicly known (such as any Balda/TPK Solutions/Apple licensing deals with the University of Delaware) or that ultimately has to be determined by the PTO or a court (e.g., whether the University of Delaware patents are valid or whether Apple's patent is unenforceable for inequitable conduct). As a result, both of the linked articles are rife with speculation and conjecture. For now, this is pretty much a non-story. Come back if some of these patents are found invalid during reexamination or if Apple gets sued.
Would Rowling still have written her books if the work only got her half her current earnings? Probably. A quarter or a tenth? Still probable. Would she have written the books if copyright only lasted 15 years, instead of decades? Probably. Society is undoubtedly overpaying for this creativity.
Luckily, we invented a way to redistribute some of that excess wealth back to society: taxation. Of course, the tax regime isn't perfect, but it's overall a much more efficient way to correct overpayment than trying to determine, ex ante or even ex post, how much money a given author deserves for a given creative work. I'll give you that the copyright term is too long, but we shouldn't try to cap how much money an author can make from a work. Instead, we should just set appropriate, progressive income taxes.
I'm gonna paraphrase your points to keep the post length down. I will try to be fair in my paraphrasing.
Programmers are virtually all anti-software patent
The US patent system is a pragmatic one: if protection encourages innovation, then it is good; if not, it is bad. We should not look to the opinion of scientists or programmers but rather to the hard data. Empirical economic analysis either shows a mixed picture or a benefit. It does not show anything like a clear case for eliminating software patents. Maybe we need to collect more data, but there is not an establish empirical case for barring software patents.
No matter how much I *think* about "1 part Chromium to 2 parts Iron", I never *actually make any alloy*....You are patenting the purely mathematical process of evaluating a particular chunk of math.
And no matter how much you think about differential equations in your head you will never actually make an animation of flowing water appear on a computer screen. My example claim explicitly includes both a specific purpose (to produce images of a fluid) and a tangible output (the images on a screen). It is emphatically not a purely mathematical process and cannot be performed by the human mind alone (i.e., it is not an abstract idea, law of nature, or mental process).
Diamond v. Diehr is an anti-software patent ruling.
As I said above, even if that were true, then the court should be legislatively overruled to allow software patents. I won't go into anymore analysis of the ruling as this isn't really the forum for detailed legal discussion.
Google does not rely on its patents but rather its other IP and its computing infrastructure.
Google would not have gotten a strong trademark without good search results. It would not have gotten the VC funding necessary to build infrastructure, tweak its algorithms, or build the source code that powers all of its other sites without good search results. The absolutely fundamental part of Google is the Page Rank algorithm. If a patent were not essential, then Google would have either kept it a trade secret or published it and gone ahead anyway. If they kept it a trade secret they would've lost the ability to deter anyone who discovered it separately and if they published it then it would've been snatched up by more established competitors like Microsoft, who already had a strong trademark, the money to build infrastructure, etc.
Bill Gates opposes or opposed software patents.
Funny how Bill Gates' opinion can be trusted here but not elsewhere. In fact, in other industries with patents we do not see this 'patent thicket' problem and we don't see it in software. People want to get deals done, and the market will ensure that licensing deals, mergers, co-branding, etc all work out. Empirical scholarship has failed to identify a patent thicket or anti-commons tragedy in any area of technology or research. Software is not special.
The software industry grew without patents, therefore it does not need them.
The one does not necessarily follow from the other. Were software patents allowed from the beginning, it is entirely possible (and I believe likely) that the industry would have seen even more rapid growth. I can support this by comparing software to biotech. Biotechnology is another industry about as old as software, patents are essential to it, and it has seen explosive growth as well. Biotech and software share many similarities: startup costs are low (a few millions will do in either case), discovery costs are high (software is expensive and so is new compound discovery), but replication costs are low (software and compounds are both easy to copy).
Other countries disallow algorithms or mental processes.
I agree with you that, as the law stands now, software and business method patents are in a precarious position. What I don't agree is that they are undeserving of protection as a policy matter. You've made a few commonly raised points, so I'll address them.
A 100 digit number may be novel and non-obvious and useful for some specific application. I *do* see reason why we should not "encourage the development of such inventions". A number is not an invention. Math is not an invention.
But I am not talking about patenting math or numbers per se. I am talking only about patenting the specific application of a number or of some mathematical principle. Consider an alloy defined as 1 part Chromium to 2 parts Iron. I am applying the mathematical principle of a ratio in order to define a useful, physical composition of matter. Yet no one would claim that I am claiming a patent on ratios, just an application thereof. Similarly, if I patent the use of a differential equation to render fluids in a computer game, I'm not claiming differential equations, just their use in rendering fluids.
The Supreme Court has stated that any algorithm "is treated as though it were a familiar part of the prior art" for patent purposes. Math is not a patentable "invention". An information algorithm is not a patentable "invention".
You misunderstand the Court. The court did not state that software was not patentable, merely that algorithms alone are unpatentable, a point on which we agree. What is patentable is an application of the algorithm to a new and useful process.
I'm going to skip down a bit because a lot of the rest of your points depend on the claim that I am advocating patenting math, which is not the case.
Any software can be (slowly) "run" entirely mentally. In fact is it a standard part of debugging and analysis for programmers to "run" software in their head, to follow and check exactly what it is doing by carrying it out yourself entirely mentally. It is ludicrous to suggest that some sequence of thoughts could be a patent violation.
No one is suggesting that. While it is true that one can execute software in ones head, I would be astonished to discover that your head contained a computer monitor, or an internet connection, or a sound card, or any of the many other physical output devices that are routinely claimed in software patents. Again, I am not talking about patenting the naked algorithm, only the application of the algorithm to produce a specific result in the real world. As a technical matter, ones brain likely does not fall within the legal meaning of "general purpose computer" claimed by nearly all software patents, so this alarmist point is moot.
And there is absolutely nothing non-obvious about using a old ordinary computer simply to speed up that information processing. A computer was once new and patentable, but using a computer for it's obvious and intended purpose of speeding up generic non-patentable math is not patentable.
And rightly so, but (good, non-obvious) software patents don't claim "A method for rapidly calculating a known equation by using a computer." They claim "A new and non-obvious use for known equations to accomplish a useful result by use of a computer." For example, Google's Page Rank patent is based on linear algebra and graph theory. All of the math was well known, but the particular application to the Internet was not. The problem is complex enough that no one would attempt it by hand on any useful scale, so the patent claims the use of a computer. Larry and Sergei did not patent linear algebra or graph theory. They patented a new, non-obvious use of that math to accomplish a specific result: the ranking of the relevance of web pages to a search query. I posit that that result, which has created billions of dollars in wealth and saved hundreds of millions of people countless person-centuries of wasted time, is very much deserving of protection in order to encourage innovations
I'm not proposing eliminating software patents, so I don't need to provide such a line. I don't actually have a problem with software patents, so long as they are actually new, useful, nonobvious, and accompanied by a written description that adequately discloses the invention. The problem is not software patents: the problem is bad patents, and I can make several recommendations for cutting down on those.
First, the presumption of patent validity should be eliminated, making it easier to overturn bad patents. The large numbers of patents that are invalidated shows that the presumption of validity no longer makes sense.
Second, the patent office should make it easier for those with computer science backgrounds to become patent agents and patent attorneys. By bringing in more people educated in the field, better patents will be written and bad patents will be more easily overturned.
Third, courts and examiners should (and have started to) make more of the fact that all claims (even, or perhaps especially, broad ones) must be backed up by disclosure in the specification. As an example, if I disclose only one compression algorithm in my specification, then I should not be able to claim something as broad as "compressing data by eliminating redundant information." Instead, I should only be able to claim the algorithm I disclosed. Too many overly broad patents are granted, and this is especially common among software patents because the examining corps doesn't have enough competent computer scientists to weed out the chaff.
There is some more legally (as opposed to policy) oriented coverage of the decision at Patently-O.
The majority decision introduces a new, complex, and vague test for patentability of business methods and software that raises more new questions than it answers. The end result will likely be the discovery of several 'magic words' that patent applicants can insert into their applications to ensure patentability without materially affecting what the claims cover. Unfortunately, those magic words will likely only be discovered after millions of dollars are wasted on expensive legal battles.
The new test states that a business method or software-implemented invention must be either "tied to a particular machine" or "transform a particular article." The court does not define what a 'particular machine' is. It is possible that a general purpose computer is sufficient, but it may not be. If it is not, it is unclear how specific the patent must be about what kind of computer it is tied to.
The court also failed to define what was a suitable level of transformation or what kinds of articles would suffice. Maybe the transformation must be significant, or maybe any change in state at all is enough. Maybe it will depend upon the nature of the invention. Maybe some articles are physical enough while others are not. All of these questions will require millions of dollars and years of litigation to answer. In the meanwhile, the value of thousands of patents will be called into question.
The court did point out that the article need not be physical, as in the example of a CT scanner which manipulates data representing a patient's body but not the body itself. So perhaps as long as there is some ultimate tie-in to a physical object, the invention is patentable. It is unclear why the manipulation of data representing a patient's body is adequately tied to a physical article but the manipulation of data representing commodities (which are ultimately very real barges full of coal, for example) is not. Figuring out exactly where that line is will be very difficult.
In my opinion (and in the opinion of Judge Rader, who wrote one of the three dissenting opinions) , the law already provided plenty of reasons to deny the application in the case as well as other overly broad or overly vague business method and software patents. Inventing complicated new tests will do more to provide employment for patent attorneys than it will to streamline business and encourage innovation.
Of course, I would also call into question the requirement for a physical tie-in of any kind. So long as the business method or software patent is limited to a specific, useful application (and is new, nonobvious, etc), I see no reason why we shouldn't encourage the development of such inventions. For example, better that a hedge fund patent a new kind of derivative and the world see what they are doing than they keep it an in-house trade secret. Assuming the Supreme Court or Congress does not overrule it, this decision will do much to drive such complex financial methods into the shadows.
One other very real concern. This decision could very well spell the end of Google's Page Rank and AdWords patents. If that happens, expect Microsoft and Yahoo to announce new, improved versions of their search engines and ad-delivery systems...and expect Google's stock to tank. Almost all of Google's value is tied up in its intellectual property. This decision weakens some of the fundamental parts of its business. Without software patents, it will be much harder for Google (or the next clever startup) to challenge more established companies.
Actually, there's a great free iPhone app called Fring that supports VOIP over WiFi using Skype, MSN Messenger, ICQ, Google Talk, and several SIP services.
Here is a link to an mp3 of the oral argument in this case, for the interested.
And here's the website for the law practice of the attorney who represented Jacobsen.
A link to the defendant's attorneys, who notably do not list intellectual property among their specialties. It is arguable that the defendant made a poor choice of attorney for this case.
And finally the Stanford lecturer who was the primary author on the amicus brief in support of Jacobsen.
This case may not be as strong a precedent as it appears at first glance. Bruce Perens's article, while informative, failed to mention a few important legal details, which I will try to fill in here. Please note that I am not a lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
The Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, where this case was heard, has a more limited jurisdiction than the regional circuits (1st through 11th and DC). Generally speaking, the Federal Circuit hears cases arising under the patent laws, and it also has jurisdiction over a hodgepodge of federal administrative law issues (veterans claims, the Merit Service Protection Board, certain government contracts, etc). In this case, the appeal was heard by the Federal Circuit because of a tie-in to patent law, though that was not the subject of the appeal.
Why does it matter that the Federal Circuit heard the case? It's important because the Federal Circuit does not set precedents for copyright law. Instead, it relies on the precedents of the regional circuit that would have heard the case were it not for whatever side issue brought it under Federal Circuit jurisdiction. Here, the Federal Circuit used the copyright precedents of the Ninth Circuit because the case originated in the Northern District of California, which is in the Ninth Circuit.
So, this case is really only indicative of what two (of twelve) Federal Circuit judges and one district judge from New Jersey thought the Ninth Circuit would do if the appeal were heard there. It is not binding precedent on the Federal Circuit, nor the Ninth Circuit, nor any other regional circuit. Different circuits often have different interpretations of the law (called a circuit split), which can often only be resolved by a Supreme Court decision. It would not surprise me if other circuits take differing views on the validity or precise nature of open source licenses.
I would not even take this case as saying much about the Federal Circuit's own views. As pointed out earlier, one of the appellate judges in this case is a district court judge who does not normally take part in Federal Circuit cases. I would also point out that the Federal Circuit is known for having a very broad range of judicial philosophies represented on its bench, with judges often writing dissenting opinions in patent cases. There is no guarantee that even another case before the Federal Circuit would come out the same way, especially if it originated in a different circuit.
All is not doom and gloom, however. Courts are notoriously conservative and reluctant to make the first move in a new area of the law. Now that there is something to hook into, it is possible that district courts and other circuit courts will make use of the Federal Circuit opinion as persuasive authority in their own decision making. Just beware that there is no guarantee that will happen.
Here is the patent application in question.
You'll notice the June 28, 2007 filing date. The earliest reference I can find to Intelliscreen is that it was in early beta in May of 2008. Indeed, Intelliborn didn't apply for a trademark on "Intelliscreen" until May 23, 2008 (TM App. Serial No. 77482276). Also note that the product requires a jailbroken iPhone. The iPhone wasn't even first jailbroken until July, 2007!
Thus, it seems almost certain that Apple came up with the idea long before Intelliborn had a product on the market and very likely long before Intelliborn came up with the idea at all.
People should understand that patent applications are (generally) not published the moment they are filed. Instead, they are usually published 18 months after the filing date. Just because we are now seeing the application does not mean that it was only now filed. In fact, it usually means just the opposite.
Presumably what Nike and Apple are worried about is capturing profits from shoe sales as well as sensor sales. But rather than have all of this DRM garbage, why not just raise the price of the sensor to cover the 'losses' from people who don't buy Nike shoes? The sensor is, after all, the critical part of the equation, and the vast majority of customers have one pair of shoes and one sensor.
Hell, what Nike should really do is raise the price of the sensor to compensate for any losses, and sell their own adapter. That would have the benefit of providing another revenue stream, more branding, and allow people who like Nike shoes but not necessarily ones with the built-in pocket to use the sensor.
I think Nike and Apple are seriously overthinking this.
My guess is that nVidia will put a stop to this pretty quickly. PhysX is covered by at least a couple of patents. There may be others pending or that were assigned to nVidia.
I don't know if PhysX is covered by patent protection in Israel, but it's possible. In any event, don't count on official PhysX support from ATI any time soon.
Except, as noted above, that's not true at all. You learned it in high school because you had a bad science teacher, and shame on "livescience.com" for perpetuating such nonsense. Glass is an amorphous solid, not a 'slow liquid.' It shares one or two characteristics with supercooled liquids, but it is different in several important ways.
So this is a collection of mods for the original Doom, which was released 15 years ago. Except it's for the Dreamcast, which ended production 7 years ago and was never a big seller. On top of that, you need a modded Dreamcast. So basically this will appeal to almost no one.
First off, you can force something to run in the background, but you shouldn't. The limitation on background processes has nothing to do with control over developers and everything to do with battery life. A simple XML query once every 5 minutes is enough to drain the battery in just 4 hours.
In a mobile device, everything you do drains the battery. Remember also that most of the time the user is not looking at the screen and often has the device muted. Consequently, is there really a need for an application to pop up dialogs or sound alarms that will go unnoticed? Similarly, does it really have to do gather data constantly and not, say, during a sync or when the app is actually run by the user? Apple weighed those slim probabilities against the much larger probability that poorly written apps would needlessly waste battery power and put a sensible limitation on developers in order to protect users.
One last point: users don't know which app is draining all of their battery power. Once apps become available, users may well install several all at once. If their battery life suddenly went to hell, it would be a difficult process of trial and error to figure out which app(s) was/were the culprit(s).
It's been nearly ten years since the US courts decided that business methods were patentable and that most software could be patentable -- and we've all seen what's happened since then.
Since then we've seen the emergence of Google as a powerful challenger to Microsoft. This is one example among many of a company whose entire existence, much less its massive success, is dependent upon a patent (# 6285999, in Google's case). If Google had not been able to patent its major innovation, then Microsoft could easily have co-opted the idea, and it would have dominated search as well as operating systems and office suites. Recall that most of Microsoft's meteoric rise took place during a time when software was not patentable. The absence of software patents is precisely what makes "embrace, extend, extinguish" possible. Software patents give the original innovator the power to stop that strategy in its tracks.
I believe that what Slashdot readers truly dislike are bad patents, not software patents per se. Software just has more bad patents than it should because of the way the PTO treated them. Until the courts basically forced the PTO to accept software patents, the PTO did not hire computer scientists as patent examiners. Even now, the PTO has a massive backlog of software patent applications, and as a result computer related applications have by far the longest median time to issuance (roughly 44 months!). The PTO tends to err on the side of issuance, and so we end up with a flood of terrible software patents.
How to fix this? The simplest way is to eliminate the presumption that patents are valid, which requires a patent challenger to prove invalidity by clear and convincing evidence (a standard almost as high as beyond a reasonable doubt). Instead, we should recognize that many patents are not valid and end the presumption of validity. That way, bad patents can be more easily challenged, and patent trolls will think twice before bringing spurious suits.
It seems to me that both findings of the study (more tumors and even more tumors in people in rural areas) could be due to simply talking a lot. More talking means more salivation to keep the mouth from drying out, and it is possible that heavy use of the salivary glands could lead to cancer. In rural areas, one would expect the effect to be magnified because people there are more isolated, and so even less likely to talk a lot except when using a cell phone. It's possible that the study accounted for differences in time spent talking, but neither article makes that clear.
A typical raindrop has a fall velocity of about 8 m/s. Assuming a pretty healthy rainfall of 10cm (4 inches) we get 100 liters of water per square meter of land. 100 liters of water weighs 100kg, of course, and plugging that into the equation for kinetic energy gives us 6400 joules. Spread out over 2 hours, that's a whopping .89 watts per square meter.
All of that assumes 100% conversion efficiency and no losses due to standing water absorbing the impact of the drops. If the overall efficiency is, say, 50%, then you'd need something like 30 square meters to light a single compact fluorescent bulb. To generate a megawatt would require over 2 million square meters (over 500 acres).
Given that in most places it rains less often than the sun shines, this seems like an astonishingly inefficient way to generate electricity. There just isn't that much energy in rainfall.
So, we already put weapons on robots, and now we're giving the robots to the monkeys. Logically, the next step will be monkey-controlled robots with weapons.
And I thought the holodeck would be the last thing we ever invented...
Trademark law is designed to prevent brand confusion in the marketplace among similar products. If you try to sell a car that looks like a Ford and has the Ford emblem on it, you are in violation of trademark. However, selling a calendar with pictures of cars in it (unless, perhaps, they are all Fords, or you are reproducing the Ford logo on the front of the calendar as if it were an official Ford product) is most likely permissible.
That would be true if Ford did not own any trademarks on calendars. As I noted above, however, they own roughly 30 such trademarks and actively license them to calendar producers. A search on Amazon for 'ford mustang calendar' produces lots of results.
In a world where everyone can own their own replicator, who will control what is replicated?
In that case, patent rights will still be necessary to encourage people to invent new durable goods in the first place, and trademarks will still be necessary to ensure that one is getting goods (or, if you prefer, digital plans for goods) from a known, high-quality source.
Actually, I was wondering, does Ford have a trademark on calendars?
Yes. Ford owns something like 30 live trademarks on calendars and related products, including the Mustang logo (Trademark Registration # 2034378), the Ford name (#1868251), the Ford logo (#1863708, and the Cobra name (#2246277). So this isn't a purely academic pursuit for them; they make money by licensing their trademarks to calendar producers. In fact, they even have a trademark on a "Ford Official Licensed Product" logo that is used on, among other things, calendars (#3310542, if you're curious).