DCA is not in any medical formulary that I have seen. The prospects of it being accepted as safe and efficacious for anything look rather thin, in view of the neurotoxicity seen in a recently reported clinical trial for a different possible medical indication ----
"Objective: To evaluate the efficacy of dichloroacetate (DCA) in the treatment of mitochondrial myopathy, encephalopathy, lactic acidosis and stroke-like episodes (MELAS)."
[...snip...]
"Conclusion: DCA at 25 mg/kg/day is associated with peripheral nerve toxicity resulting in a high rate of medication discontinuation and early study termination. Under these experimental conditions, the authors were unable to detect any beneficial effect. The findings show that DCA-associated neuropathy overshadows the assessment of any potential benefit in MELAS."
It seems that the researchers at Alberta have not put DCA into any patients yet, and so we can't know how the effective human dose (if there even is one) for discouraging the growth of cancer cells relates to the toxic doses (which unfortunately do exist) seen in the reported clinical trial for another potential medical indication.
but the yahoos who accompanied him got a good ass whoopin'
I take it you don't live in the UK then. More likely they got counselling and a nice holiday somewhere warm!
Yes, there are times when it looks as if schoolkids in the UK have been given a status nearly like medieval child princes, who had whipping-boys who got 'whooped' in their places when the princes did something bad. The teachers' unions now seem to take for granted this world where bystanders and victims sometimes are made to pay for what delinquent children and youths do -- so when a union representative "called for more rigorous legislative control of internet sites" I have to wonder if this isn't the union selecting the internet service provider as next in line for the status of whipping-boy.
What country do you live in that doesn't have private schools?
In the UK, private schools are notably expensive -- enough so that most parents can't afford them, and there aren't that many in comparison to the state schools anyway. One result of this is that many parents try to suss out which are the best state schools in their region, and then try to relocate into the local 'catchment area' for a chosen one of them, so that their kids will be eligible to go to it. The effect is big enough in many places to have quite a positive influence on local house prices. So, for many people in the UK, the result is yes, they do live in a country that effectively for them doesn't have private schools.
I encourage you to read the primary literature of the study: [...] Then your opinion may or may not change, or may or may not have any credibility left. As a trained scientist, I think this is a very remarkable study, far more promising then the stop-gap measures we currently have for diabetes treatment. Let's not make opinions based on headlines.
I agree. The paper in 'Cell' is a full scientific report, complete with experimental background, offering the opportunity to others to attempt to replicate the results, which is the usual best standard of disclosure and description for any scientific publication. There is no prematurity about the scientific report. The results are remarkable too, they seem to reveal a rather new neurodependent factor in the causation of Type-1 diabetes, and this seems to add substantially to the (AFAIK) previous understanding of cause which has been in terms of the cellular and humoral branches of the immune system. The natural expectation and hope is that this newly-demonstrated causative factor will eventually prove to be exploitable in a therapeutic way.
But where comment about the paper does seem to go off into hype, is in the apparently speculative suggestion that some actual therapeutic intervention inspired by this new finding is only a handful of years off.
This has unfortunately become the usual way in which significant scientific findings with some long-term promise are nowadays often headlined in general media reports. An exaggerated suggestion of downstream applications 'real soon now' looks like an essential admission ticket without which an item like this doesn't get included in general news reportage at all.
The only scores definitely in the public domain are Mozart's original autographs. Engraved editions of his music, provided they were produced after 1923, are under copyright.
By the way, that "1923" is a local US thing. The equivalent date in the UK, for example, would be "1980" (1981 from next month...): it's 25 years from the end of the year of first publication, for the copyright in an original typography of a per-se out-of-copyright work. (And editions made by photoreproduction of a previously published typography don't qualify for a fresh copyright of this kind.) It's also worth noting that this period for 'publisher's' copyrights is set by s.15 of the 1988 copyright act in the UK and was left unchanged when the duration of the _author's_ copyrights was extended from 50 years to 70 years from the end of the year of the author's death (1995 regulations).
Aside from that, plenty of useful Mozart scores (e.g. many from Breitkopf and Haertel) were published in the 19th century, and are copyright-free even in the US, where Dover Publications for a long time provided a very useful service by republishing quite some numbers of them at reasonable prices.
Creating a definitive text from various scribbled manuscripts is painstaking work, it's no surprise that copyright law covers this process as well as that of purely original works.
The copyright in the NMA (Baerenreiter) scores appears to depend on two factors, (a) fresh typography and (b) the extent of significant editorial revisions. The first factor applies to all of the new-set scores, (and where the 25-year rule applies, some of these copyrights are already approaching or have even reached their end). The second factor may possibly not apply to all works, because to produce them it was certainly not usually a matter of "creating a definitive text from various scribbled manuscripts", some of the new editions differ from the old out-of-copyright ones by nothing more than a few corrected articulation-marks here or there -- like a few commas or periods of musical punctuation. But where the second factor does apply, it will presumably be an author's copyright timed by the lifetime + 70 years of the significant editor if any.
Like one of the earlier posters, I also don't 'get it' that a scan of an out-of-copyright score can attract a fresh copyright -- and yet, it was a private assertion of this kind (not tested in any court as far as I know) that effectively drove a set of scans of old and out-of-copyright Mozart scores off the internet within the past few years.
The complexity of copyright provisions, and their general unknown-ness, is clearly in itself a factor that takes away people's freedoms even to part of the extent that laws supposedly assure those freedoms. It is not often enough mentioned that, in this way, legal complications in themselves limit freedom.
Thanks for your reaction. I agree with you, it's conceivable the Supreme Court could now come up with a decision that raises the bar for patentability when claims merely combine two known things. Maybe they will require some showing from the applicant or patent owner, that the alleged invention in a case like that is more in its function than two separately known parts doing their known things.
But while that may help some few of those who are unjustly pestered by undeserving patent claims, I doubt if it would solve, by itself, all current abuse problems stemming from overbreadth of patents.
In regard to the contrast between patents for manifestations rather than patents for ideas, it's a curious thing, that after looking at very many patent claims, one notices that flexibility of verbal language allows an almost continuous series of ways of expressing a claim for an invention.
Claims can range in particularity or generality, by degrees, from something so specific that it probably only covers one or a few very closely-related embodiments, to something else that is so broad, that it is hard to distinguish it from a mere expression of an idea. There is almost a continuum of degrees of generality, and many of the points on the near-continuum arise from the verbal skills (or maybe the wiles?) of patent attorneys and other draftspersons.
It can be a very hard problem to identify and express an appropriate degree of generality/particularity for each invention. (The applicants/attorneys want and need to push the envelope as wide as they can, because the system usually only allows claims to be narrowed by amendment when found inadmissible after their first submission, and there is seldom a chance to widen them in any direction.)
At one extreme, a few fundamental inventions may effectively create and open new fields and deserve highly-general claims to correspond with the contribution made by the inventor. At the other extreme, many run-of-the-mill innovations may contribute nothing beyond the examples that represent them, if as much. There are many gradations of merit between those two positions. Appropriate principles for measuring out patent claims for this whole range of situations are hard to identify and express.
On the other hand, current institutional processes of law reform don't look like even beginning to address the ways in which current systems miss the target of awarding patent claims for inventions in an appropriate scope for their merits, not too wide, not too narrow.
[Thanks to the poster who suggested that I put in a revision for the wikipedia article. I'll see what I can do! (But last time I tried something like that, the revision got taken off again within 24 hours!)]
Talking about the founding fathers wanted with patents is a bit misleading though. Modern patents were invented (sic) in Venice in 1474
The actual lessons of history are often forgotten.
Current concerns about patent abuse, especially abuse of overbroad patent claims, somewhat reflect concerns that lay behind the 1623 English statute of monopolies. That was an attempt to prevent future abuse, and it specifically said that, in future, patents should not be granted or valid where they would be "contrary to the law or mischievous to the state, by raising prices of commodities at home, or hurt of trade, or generally inconvenient."
Wikipedia is rather misleading about patent law history, I'm afraid. Agreed, it has now become a commonplace to cite the 1474 Venetian ordinance about inventions as the 'progenitor' and so on of modern patent law, and chronologically it was the first. But it is only anachronistic hindsight reconstruction to say that it was also influential on the later developments -- because the Venetian history was only (re)discovered by scholars interested in origins of modern patent law within about the last century and a half. Way back before then, at the time and place of the founding fathers in the 1780s, nobody had heard of the Venetian history. What the founding fathers knew much more about then was English law. Many of them were lawyers trained in English law. The question they asked themselves was effectively whether they wanted patents on an English model. And in effect they said yes. The early US patent lawyers and judges looked to English legal practice for details of patent law or practice left open by the US statute. Fessenden's early US patent law textbook of about 1811, as well as Justice Story's Notes on Patent Law, make that very clear. (Even now, when the two systems have thoroughly diverged, it still occasionally has happened that senior courts in US, including the Federal Circuit and the Supreme Court, have referred back to old English 18th-century and 19th-century patent law reports, as in the 'Markman v Westview' and 'Warner Jenkinson v Hilton Davis' cases.)
But in the US (as in England), the safeguards mentioned in the 1623 statute of monopolies became forgotten in law and in practice, and nowadays some patents do seem to operate as "mischievous to the state, by raising prices of commodities at home, or hurt of trade, or generally inconvenient".
After all, before IBM handed over some 500 patents to the open source community, it's pretty clear that Linux was infringing some of them.
That's a blogger writing there: and maybe not too surprisingly, he doesn't mention what he thinks made it 'pretty clear' that Linux infringes any patents. I frankly doubt whether anything like that was pretty clear at all.
Patent infringement shouldn't just be casually presumed to exist -- even though some bullish (and bullying) patent owners have been happy to call infringement, even without specific grounds to make any such claims.
Some while back, there was a whole lot of talk about Linux supposedly including infringements of hundreds of patents, but the people who launched this suppositious idea weren't prepared to identify what they thought were the patents concerned.
This is an area where practicality and prudence can sometimes suggest caution in circulating too much (suppositious) information. It's not prudent to make public admissions of patent infringement, and it's not a friendly act to suggest publicly that your friends' products infringe patents of possibly-hostile third parties.
I'd suggest that optimum public handling of perceived possible patent risks for FOSS software can somewhat resemble good methods for handling software security risks that could be exploited by malware. That is, strike a balance between the need to inform software developers and users of any real and serious threat, balancing that with the other need, to provide users with a fix (where possible) before a hostile party can swing an exploit into action. Also to be borne in mind in the patent situation is that information to developers and users can also alert a previously-unaware hostile patent owner, just as security information may alert a previously-unaware malware author.
So what can prudently be done about a specific patent that someone somewhere in the community may perceive as a possible infringement risk? I'd suggest it might include the following:- Start a discussion about the specific patent, identifying the patent and its critical dates (but not identifying current technology applications that might come to be accused as infringement). The initial purpose of discussion would then be to gather information about possible lack of novelty or inventiveness, or other defect, in the patent. This is about searching for prior art and looking for it in unexpected places as well as expected places. Real-world discussions, to make any clear sense, usually need to focus on concrete technology applications that might fall under a patent claim. The best/prudent concrete applications to focus on here, are technologies that certainly existed before the patent's earliest critical date. The focus of the discussion would then be, what (if any) real novelty is there in the patent, and how (if at all) is that real novelty present in any of the patent claims.
This kind of discussion can of course be either private or public, but making it public can be helpful by gathering in more people's knowledge of what went before the critical date(s) of the patent. The more eyes there are on the question, the more likely it is that the crucial prior art will be found.
Desirable outcomes can take several forms.
One is, to make sure to preserve a good and accessible public record of critical prior art evidence that might otherwise get forgotten -- when evidence gets forgotten, the loss of that evidence may allow a hostile patent owner to claim more than its entitlement.
Another is, to preserve a good and accessible public record of explanations and evidence showing how the real novelty of a patent focuses on some feature that is not needed for the function that is really wanted by the public. This is a not-uncommon situation: the patent owner would really like the patent to cover everything broadly that performs function X, and may even try to persuade the world (and a court) that this is what the patent really does cover. But the e
Get ready, mate: Give up your guns and now look at where you're at
Nobody, I think, has mentioned the deepest poison in overbroad laws like this -- laws written so badly and broadly that they nominally outlaw a whole lot of harmless activities, and can't be totally enforced anyway.
The poison is that they make it so that no-one can depend any more on the written law to tell them what will and what won't be allowed in practice.
The parts that will be enforced will come to depend on how the enforcers are feeling. Nobody can be sure what that is, and it can be changed from one moment to the next.
If the enforcers take an unrelated dislike to Joe Blow, they become able to nail him arbitrarily for some harmless thing that's been swept up into the overbroad law -- even though it's a thing that isn't usually enforced against most other people. So no-one in practice can be sure any more where they stand.
I can hardly think of anything that can be more corrosive and poisonous than this, to equality and freedom under the rule of law.
"Chosen Reject" posted: I'm interested in learning how good the health care in the UK actually is. The only first-hand experience I've heard was from a Belgian friend of mine who lived there for a few years, and he thought it was awful.
I've seen too much of it recently, and IT disasters (and medical ones too) are no longer a surprise. IMHO the NHS is largely (mis)managed in the hands of a faceless and unaccountable bureaucracy, for whom truth is a scarce commodity, and organisational politics their main activity. (Example: a local NHS trust issued a statement this year announcing tens of millions pounds worth of cuts in a range of its services, including complete closedown of domiciliary care provided from one of the main hospices in the area, and they still managed to claim in public that the cuts were not going to have any adverse effect on patient care.)
NHS spending in many areas is big on big-sounding projects, but often cheap at the point of providing useful actual service. Here's an IT example that I saw:-- in spite of all the big-bucks IT projects, a main regional hospital at the end of last year lost all of its computerised patient data -- they were back to paper and pen. The IT providers and their hardware were housed remotely from the hospital on an industrial-estate site, right next door to a very large fuel depot (that should have made it cheap to rent): the depot went up in flames, taking the data centre with it. Hospital IT services were down for weeks, they clearly had no backup that they could deploy quickly. And that was for a big regional hospital's patient data! Cheapness at the point of service delivery also applies to many in-patient hospital services, with many wards staffed mainly by overworked healthcare workers who are recruited in numbers that are too low, and at levels of both pay and qualifications also too low for the work they are asked to do. The medical results I've seen are another story, OT here.
how can it be alien, it was taken out of the HUMAN GENOME, it's part of us
The thing that is part of us is only a number of _degraded copies_ of a virus DNA sequence. They also lack the effective 'switches' that would be needed to transcribe and translate this DNA into the stuff of an actual virus.
So our genome is in this respect a bit like a library containing some virtually unreadable gummed-up copies of a very old recipe book, all of them with different misprints and 'copying losses'.
The researchers have compared the copies, and used DNA manipulation techniques to 'clean up' the misprints, to try and get back to the functioning original -- which in itself does not exist in the human genome. They have also 'cooked' the recipe themselves, to create what seems now to be a viable virus that nobody has ever seen before.
While this is all scientifically very interesting, there are clearly potential dangers: Like many viruses, the components of this newly resurrected virus are likely to embody a number of tricks to outwit the human immune system. The virus is also likely to be capable of adaptive mutations and evolution into new strains if it gets loose.
It might possibly all be harmless even if it escapes.
Agreed. When I found Firefox I fell on it with enthusiasm. I still like the user interface. But it seemed to grab memory and cpu time and seize up the system. I questioned this on user forums, and the answers (if any) would tell me I don't have enough RAM. Now I use Opera, and don't have these problems. -wb-
Have you already tried to check out which thinking methods fit with you?
For example, do you already have the habit of trying to find rational patterns, and enjoy visualizing them? If not, you could try that out and see if it fits with you. Visualization may be a two-edged weapon when it comes to math. Some people (including me) do it a lot and find it helpful. (But others handle math topics that may defy visualization, and claim that the visual-modeling habit ends up a hindrance.) Maybe you could find it stimulating to visualize. To find out, you could try reading about classical geometry and working through the essentially visual proofs there, and then go on with coordinate geometry. Visual modeling based on geometry helped me through calculus.
Then, do you have very good numerical memory? Would it stimulate you to try extending it anyway? Can you do simple mental arithmetic really easily, like adding up your purchases without needing the machine? You might try it regularly and enjoy making it come more easily.
But most of all you probably need to spend a lot of time with a chosen subject, and try to think about it and analogize it in lots of different ways and see which ways stimulate you and work for you.
It's not uncommon for overbroad oppressive contract clauses to arise because the other side's lawyer is afraid of something and doesn't know exactly what it is.
Then the lawyer drafts staggeringly broad clauses to try and hit the spot, covering whatever it might be that he's trying to feel for in the dark. It ends up covering a lot of what might not be, as well. Maybe even then it still doesn't hit the spot for the client.
The kind of clause that's currently bugging the parent poster can possibly be inspired by a scenario like this -- the key is not so much prior art, more like prior rights:--
Consultant works for client #1. Client #1 requires assignment of IP rights for the work product. Consultant plays ball, and gives assignment to client #1. Client #1 may get a patent for it. The patent claims could be broader than the specifics of what consultant has done for client #1.
Same consultant then starts talking to client #2. Client #2 probably knows or expects that consultant works in related fields for other clients before, and expects other clients have taken assignments of work product.
Client #2 then worries: Am I free to make use of what consultant will do for me now? Did client #1 already take an assignment and get a patent covering it, or could client #1 be just about to get one? So where would that leave me client #2?
The problem for client #2 is partly that the patent could be broader than the specifics of what consultant did for client #1. That can leave it in doubt whether consultant's work product for client #2 will be covered by the rights arising from the assignment already given to client #1, potentially leaving client #2 in deep doodoo.
So, client #2's lawyer tries his best to think of something:-- Does he ask consultant to promise that there isn't a right arising from consultant's earlier work that will catch client #2? (That's not much good, because even if consultant does give that sort of promise, it still won't make the feared patent go away if there is one.) So does he ask consultant to tell him _everything_ that consultant did before? Maybe that's a bit better from client #2's pov, because client #2 now gets a chance to evaluate the situation of anything done for previous clients if it looks dangerously close, but it's still not a perfect solution, it still won't make the third-party patent go away if there is one.
In fact I don't think there is a perfect solution for client #2, he may be able to reduce his risk by getting and evaluating various disclosures from consultant, but that's all.
Meanwhile the consultant is feeling threatened by all of this stuff. So what does he do? Maybe it could help to ask the client 'what are you afraid of here' and try and work something out. On the other hand, if the client has been panicked by the lawyer and says 'I must have this clause', without really being aware of what it's trying to achieve, they could easily just get into a stalemate.
Not giving any assignments or exclusive licenses, to anybody at all, could be a good solution to this problem from the consultant's pov -- if only he can persuade the clients to play ball with that.
Otherwise, I don't know of any good solutions, except for the consultant and clients to know each other and their work really well, and get confidence in each other that way.
If fuel energy bills are a big factor, why not take a look at energy-efficient heat-pumping solutions as described here?
Granted, the installation costs are generally higher, to secure lower running costs, but you could find that the balance works out ok in timescales in which you are interested.
Let's recall that even previous slashdot coverage of this issue -- as well as coverage elswhere -- identified that the "fat" patents are written to claim, not the fat-fs as such, but rather, ways of handling long filenames in connection with an underlying fat-fs. (I don't have the links by me to hand right now, sorry.)
That would be much less than a patent on fat as such.
When I last looked at the claims, it did seem that the ways claimed in the patent for handling the long filenames could be subgeneric, i.e. less than exhaustive of all the possibilities. (Granted that a situation like that can still mean that claims are wide enough to be a nuisance.)
So it would probably be more useful to the FOSS community to look at what is actually left from the actual MS patent claims, and whether they leave unpatented, free outside the claims, any other ways of handling the long filenames.
This would be as well as taking account of the possibility that the confirmed patent claims would still be invalidated by prior art or any other reason if it came to a court fight with the opposing party taking a full part there to provide full counterarguments.
This case and its result underline -- again -- the inadequacy of the US patent re-examination procedure -- mainly because of the unequal treatment that it gives to the party wishing to oppose the patent.
A failed attempt to get the patent invalidated is unhelpful to the community, because the patent holder can always point to the result when the prior art arguments come up again, and can argue that they have already been officially considered and rejected, so no need to review them.
It would arguably be better not to use US re-examination in the first place, if there is an assessment that the patent holder could wriggle out of the allegations of prior art when the other party is not there to answer -- because stopped by the procedure from answering to nail the errors in the arguments of the patent-holder.
It might also be recommendable for the PPF, instead of rushing in to raise proceedings that fail when there is no current and urgent need actually to bring them at that point in time, instead to give wide publicity first to the evidence and arguments against a nuisance patent, and to encourage debate about it.
The resulting debate could bring facts to light, e.g. that strengthen the prior art arguments.
New facts and evaluations can also shed light on the defendable scope of the claims, and make it clearer what techniques actually lie free outside them -- maybe even indicating that invalidation proceedings are not necessary.
At least, wider discussion can make it a bit easier for PPF or anybody else to weigh up the prospects of success before weighing in with action.
My impression is that the depressant effect of traditional holidays can sometimes be a result of sudden removal of usual distractions. Going through a traditional holiday ritual process, or being without it, can either be welcome, or it can easily concentrate the mind and feelings on awkward ultimate questions. Without the normal distractions, the result can be an unexpected need to tolerate one's own company, maybe even in the middle of a crowd. How to live with self can then with some folks be itself the depressant problem, and when it is, the answer probably has to be so individual a learning process that no formula can cover it.
I am a law student and recently passed the US patent exam.
Well I certainly wish you the very best of fortune in your coming professional activities. You will certainly find out soon enough how questions related to money make it easier to give certain kinds of advice, and harder, under economic pressure, to give certain other kinds of advice -- even when legally appropriate. I hope you will notice how this effect is often not in the interests of justice and of the public (which includes all clients at least some of the time) and sometimes not even in the interests of the clients. May I also mention a hope for you that you do not lose the idealism that you start off with, and continue to aim for justice as well as results for your clients.
I disagree with your interpretation of the meaning of the provisions you are citing. However, I am not a lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
Well, you are pretty free with legal interpretations, and I even wish you were likely to be right, but I am afraid they are not sound interpretations. I don't want to overload this post. I have practised patent law for over 30 years. What is coming seems to me a rape of what remains of justice in the patent system, and I have a sense of relief, even though mixed with regret, that I am just about to retire.
Unfortunately the new provisions are not linked, as you suggest they are, to the question of enablement: they will be independent and new statutory words. They will not be 'about' enablement, or indeed about anything other than what they mean themselves. This is how they will create independent and new legal criteria. And what they mean is all in the direction of cutting down what will be admissible as prior art.
What will you think when a patent is granted for a technique that is publicly known, but buried away like a needle in a haystack, in some part of the GNU/Linux operating system? Today, the public prior example of the technique would be prior art against later invention, but when the reform bill is passed, it can be chopped away. Hard to find? Hard to decipher when found? The arguments will expand long and expensively. No sir, that arguably won't be prior art any more, and while one case may go one way, and another case may go another, the loser will be the public and any assurance of its continued freedom to use what was publicly disclosed and not patented.
I wish that your optimistic expectations were likely to be right. But maybe you never heard the expression 'The more words there are, the more words there are about which doubts may be entertained'. Where there are more doubts, there are certainly more opportunities for expensive legal arguments, and the party without the long purse will be still further disadvantaged.
The patent can be challenged by every schmoe accused of infringement as long as he hadn't sued or been sued before.
Well maybe in principle, but none of the schmoes will be able to deploy as effectively again the arguments based on the art cited in the failed re-exam proceeding.
There is always some tendency for a court to take the view that the questions handled in the re-exam were properly dealt with, and that the statutory presumption of validity of the patent has been strengthened.
That pushes future disputes about validity towards the direction of being an open-and-shut case.
In that way, the failure of the re-exam harms everybody interested in freedom to use this technology.
One poster (lheal) wrote Congress is too busy worrying about baseball players taking steroids to actually fix the [patent] system.
And another (pgpckt) riposted Are you serious???? Have you not heard of the Patent Reform Act of 2005, H.R. 2795 ? [links were given]
Hold on a moment! When you read through all the cruft, there is a _very_ big sting in this 'patent reform' bill. It comes from the "objective prior art rules requiring patent-defeating information to be publicly accessible" -- that's a quote from the introduction to the 'coalition print' of the bill (see IPO website linked by earlier poster pgpckt).
This will be, in reality, a salami-slicing operation on the rights of the public not to have old public knowledge turned into new private patent rights.
The bill goes even further than the introduction gives a hint, and it says:
--- that pre-existing subject matter will only count as prior art against a patent if it is "reasonably and effectively accessible", and also
--- that pre-existing subject-matter won't count as reasonably accessible nor as prior art unless skilled persons can 'gain access' to it 'without resort to undue efforts',
--- and it also won't count as 'effectively' accessible unless 'persons of ordinary skill' are able to 'comprehend the content of the subject matter without resort to undue efforts' (see page 4 of 'coalition print').
Effectively this change will cut down quite drastically on the amount and the quality of the prior knowledge (prior art as currently understood but not in future!) that can be cited against a patent. It redefines 'prior art' in a way that exactly fits the spirit of 'newspeak' in '1984', George Orwell's dystopia-novel written in 1948:
Something could be prior in date, and could be relevant technological art, but we won't be able to call it prior art, because the term 'prior art' will in future already be legally 'occupied' instead by a futile and impotent idea, something like 'simple prior art that doesn't need any appreciable search to find it and not much knowledge to understand it'.
This legal change will multiply the arguments available to patent owners to dismiss the significance of what we now call prior art. This alone will add to the already-bloated cost of patent proceedings. The level of 'ordinary skill in the art' will continue to be able to be assessed by a court or by the patent office, potentially as being quite low. So, not much of the really important prior art in technically complex cases is likely to be found both 'effectively accessible' and comprehensible 'without resort to undue efforts', and nearly every patent may be unobvious over what is left of the prior art after the salami-slicing.
IMHO, the very last thing that the world needs (or the US needs), is to have the prior art redefined and made narrower than at present, so that invalid patents will just be made valid by decree of Congress, even though they cover old knowledge and old technique. But it is on the way to happening now.
Maybe indeed this will 'fix' the patent system -- but not exactly in the sense that the earlier posters meant, I suspect.:(
Slashdot Mirror
DCA is not in any medical formulary that I have seen. The prospects of it being accepted as safe and efficacious for anything look rather thin, in view of the neurotoxicity seen in a recently reported clinical trial for a different possible medical indication ----
3 /324 ]
see "Dichloroacetate causes toxic neuropathy in MELAS, A randomized, controlled clinical trial "
P. Kaufmann, MD, MSc, et al, NEUROLOGY 2006;66:324-330
[see http://www.neurology.org/cgi/content/abstract/66/
[excerpts:-]
"Objective: To evaluate the efficacy of dichloroacetate (DCA) in the treatment of mitochondrial myopathy, encephalopathy, lactic acidosis and stroke-like episodes (MELAS)."
[...snip...]
"Conclusion: DCA at 25 mg/kg/day is associated with peripheral nerve toxicity resulting in a high rate of medication discontinuation and early study termination. Under these experimental conditions, the authors were unable to detect any beneficial effect. The findings show that DCA-associated neuropathy overshadows the assessment of any potential benefit in MELAS."
It seems that the researchers at Alberta have not put DCA into any patients yet, and so we can't know how the effective human dose (if there even is one) for discouraging the growth of cancer cells relates to the toxic doses (which unfortunately do exist) seen in the reported clinical trial for another potential medical indication.
This begins to smell to me of hype.
-wb-
Or maybe I got that wrong and it was supposed to out last April 1
-wb-
He's published early for April 1
-wb-
but the yahoos who accompanied him got a good ass whoopin'
I take it you don't live in the UK then. More likely they got counselling and a nice holiday somewhere warm!
Yes, there are times when it looks as if schoolkids in the UK have been given a status nearly like medieval child princes, who had whipping-boys who got 'whooped' in their places when the princes did something bad.
The teachers' unions now seem to take for granted this world where bystanders and victims sometimes are made to pay for what delinquent children and youths do -- so when a union representative "called for more rigorous legislative control of internet sites" I have to wonder if this isn't the union selecting the internet service provider as next in line for the status of whipping-boy.
-wb-
What country do you live in that doesn't have private schools?
In the UK, private schools are notably expensive -- enough so that most parents can't afford them, and there aren't that many in comparison to the state schools anyway. One result of this is that many parents try to suss out which are the best state schools in their region, and then try to relocate into the local 'catchment area' for a chosen one of them, so that their kids will be eligible to go to it. The effect is big enough in many places to have quite a positive influence on local house prices. So, for many people in the UK, the result is yes, they do live in a country that effectively for them doesn't have private schools.
-wb-
I encourage you to read the primary literature of the study: [...] Then your opinion may or may not change, or may or may not have any credibility left. As a trained scientist, I think this is a very remarkable study, far more promising then the stop-gap measures we currently have for diabetes treatment. Let's not make opinions based on headlines.
I agree. The paper in 'Cell' is a full scientific report, complete with experimental background, offering the opportunity to others to attempt to replicate the results, which is the usual best standard of disclosure and description for any scientific publication. There is no prematurity about the scientific report. The results are remarkable too, they seem to reveal a rather new neurodependent factor in the causation of Type-1 diabetes, and this seems to add substantially to the (AFAIK) previous understanding of cause which has been in terms of the cellular and humoral branches of the immune system. The natural expectation and hope is that this newly-demonstrated causative factor will eventually prove to be exploitable in a therapeutic way.
But where comment about the paper does seem to go off into hype, is in the apparently speculative suggestion that some actual therapeutic intervention inspired by this new finding is only a handful of years off.
This has unfortunately become the usual way in which significant scientific findings with some long-term promise are nowadays often headlined in general media reports. An exaggerated suggestion of downstream applications 'real soon now' looks like an essential admission ticket without which an item like this doesn't get included in general news reportage at all.
-wb-
The only scores definitely in the public domain are Mozart's original autographs. Engraved editions of his music, provided they were produced after 1923, are under copyright.
By the way, that "1923" is a local US thing. The equivalent date in the UK, for example, would be "1980" (1981 from next month...): it's 25 years from the end of the year of first publication, for the copyright in an original typography of a per-se out-of-copyright work. (And editions made by photoreproduction of a previously published typography don't qualify for a fresh copyright of this kind.) It's also worth noting that this period for 'publisher's' copyrights is set by s.15 of the 1988 copyright act in the UK and was left unchanged when the duration of the _author's_ copyrights was extended from 50 years to 70 years from the end of the year of the author's death (1995 regulations).
Aside from that, plenty of useful Mozart scores (e.g. many from Breitkopf and Haertel) were published in the 19th century, and are copyright-free even in the US, where Dover Publications for a long time provided a very useful service by republishing quite some numbers of them at reasonable prices.
Creating a definitive text from various scribbled manuscripts is painstaking work, it's no surprise that copyright law covers this process as well as that of purely original works.
The copyright in the NMA (Baerenreiter) scores appears to depend on two factors, (a) fresh typography and (b) the extent of significant editorial revisions. The first factor applies to all of the new-set scores, (and where the 25-year rule applies, some of these copyrights are already approaching or have even reached their end). The second factor may possibly not apply to all works, because to produce them it was certainly not usually a matter of "creating a definitive text from various scribbled manuscripts", some of the new editions differ from the old out-of-copyright ones by nothing more than a few corrected articulation-marks here or there -- like a few commas or periods of musical punctuation. But where the second factor does apply, it will presumably be an author's copyright timed by the lifetime + 70 years of the significant editor if any.
Like one of the earlier posters, I also don't 'get it' that a scan of an out-of-copyright score can attract a fresh copyright -- and yet, it was a private assertion of this kind (not tested in any court as far as I know) that effectively drove a set of scans of old and out-of-copyright Mozart scores off the internet within the past few years.
The complexity of copyright provisions, and their general unknown-ness, is clearly in itself a factor that takes away people's freedoms even to part of the extent that laws supposedly assure those freedoms. It is not often enough mentioned that, in this way, legal complications in themselves limit freedom.
-wb-
Thanks for your reaction. I agree with you, it's conceivable the Supreme Court could now come up with a decision that raises the bar for patentability when claims merely combine two known things. Maybe they will require some showing from the applicant or patent owner, that the alleged invention in a case like that is more in its function than two separately known parts doing their known things.
But while that may help some few of those who are unjustly pestered by undeserving patent claims, I doubt if it would solve, by itself, all current abuse problems stemming from overbreadth of patents.
In regard to the contrast between patents for manifestations rather than patents for ideas, it's a curious thing, that after looking at very many patent claims, one notices that flexibility of verbal language allows an almost continuous series of ways of expressing a claim for an invention.
Claims can range in particularity or generality, by degrees, from something so specific that it probably only covers one or a few very closely-related embodiments, to something else that is so broad, that it is hard to distinguish it from a mere expression of an idea. There is almost a continuum of degrees of generality, and many of the points on the near-continuum arise from the verbal skills (or maybe the wiles?) of patent attorneys and other draftspersons.
It can be a very hard problem to identify and express an appropriate degree of generality/particularity for each invention. (The applicants/attorneys want and need to push the envelope as wide as they can, because the system usually only allows claims to be narrowed by amendment when found inadmissible after their first submission, and there is seldom a chance to widen them in any direction.)
At one extreme, a few fundamental inventions may effectively create and open new fields and deserve highly-general claims to correspond with the contribution made by the inventor. At the other extreme, many run-of-the-mill innovations may contribute nothing beyond the examples that represent them, if as much. There are many gradations of merit between those two positions. Appropriate principles for measuring out patent claims for this whole range of situations are hard to identify and express.
On the other hand, current institutional processes of law reform don't look like even beginning to address the ways in which current systems miss the target of awarding patent claims for inventions in an appropriate scope for their merits, not too wide, not too narrow.
[Thanks to the poster who suggested that I put in a revision for the wikipedia article. I'll see what I can do! (But last time I tried something like that, the revision got taken off again within 24 hours!)]
-wb-
Talking about the founding fathers wanted with patents is a bit misleading though. Modern patents were invented (sic) in Venice in 1474
The actual lessons of history are often forgotten.
Current concerns about patent abuse, especially abuse of overbroad patent claims, somewhat reflect concerns that lay behind the 1623 English statute of monopolies. That was an attempt to prevent future abuse, and it specifically said that, in future, patents should not be granted or valid where they would be "contrary to the law or mischievous to the state, by raising prices of commodities at home, or hurt of trade, or generally inconvenient."
Wikipedia is rather misleading about patent law history, I'm afraid. Agreed, it has now become a commonplace to cite the 1474 Venetian ordinance about inventions as the 'progenitor' and so on of modern patent law, and chronologically it was the first. But it is only anachronistic hindsight reconstruction to say that it was also influential on the later developments -- because the Venetian history was only (re)discovered by scholars interested in origins of modern patent law within about the last century and a half. Way back before then, at the time and place of the founding fathers in the 1780s, nobody had heard of the Venetian history. What the founding fathers knew much more about then was English law. Many of them were lawyers trained in English law. The question they asked themselves was effectively whether they wanted patents on an English model. And in effect they said yes. The early US patent lawyers and judges looked to English legal practice for details of patent law or practice left open by the US statute. Fessenden's early US patent law textbook of about 1811, as well as Justice Story's Notes on Patent Law, make that very clear. (Even now, when the two systems have thoroughly diverged, it still occasionally has happened that senior courts in US, including the Federal Circuit and the Supreme Court, have referred back to old English 18th-century and 19th-century patent law reports, as in the 'Markman v Westview' and 'Warner Jenkinson v Hilton Davis' cases.)
But in the US (as in England), the safeguards mentioned in the 1623 statute of monopolies became forgotten in law and in practice, and nowadays some patents do seem to operate as "mischievous to the state, by raising prices of commodities at home, or hurt of trade, or generally inconvenient".
-wb-
After all, before IBM handed over some 500 patents to the open source community, it's pretty clear that Linux was infringing some of them.
That's a blogger writing there: and maybe not too surprisingly, he doesn't mention what he thinks made it 'pretty clear' that Linux infringes any patents. I frankly doubt whether anything like that was pretty clear at all.
Patent infringement shouldn't just be casually presumed to exist -- even though some bullish (and bullying) patent owners have been happy to call infringement, even without specific grounds to make any such claims.
Some while back, there was a whole lot of talk about Linux supposedly including infringements of hundreds of patents, but the people who launched this suppositious idea weren't prepared to identify what they thought were the patents concerned.
This is an area where practicality and prudence can sometimes suggest caution in circulating too much (suppositious) information. It's not prudent to make public admissions of patent infringement, and it's not a friendly act to suggest publicly that your friends' products infringe patents of possibly-hostile third parties.
I'd suggest that optimum public handling of perceived possible patent risks for FOSS software can somewhat resemble good methods for handling software security risks that could be exploited by malware. That is, strike a balance between the need to inform software developers and users of any real and serious threat, balancing that with the other need, to provide users with a fix (where possible) before a hostile party can swing an exploit into action. Also to be borne in mind in the patent situation is that information to developers and users can also alert a previously-unaware hostile patent owner, just as security information may alert a previously-unaware malware author.
So what can prudently be done about a specific patent that someone somewhere in the community may perceive as a possible infringement risk? I'd suggest it might include the following:- Start a discussion about the specific patent, identifying the patent and its critical dates (but not identifying current technology applications that might come to be accused as infringement). The initial purpose of discussion would then be to gather information about possible lack of novelty or inventiveness, or other defect, in the patent. This is about searching for prior art and looking for it in unexpected places as well as expected places. Real-world discussions, to make any clear sense, usually need to focus on concrete technology applications that might fall under a patent claim. The best/prudent concrete applications to focus on here, are technologies that certainly existed before the patent's earliest critical date. The focus of the discussion would then be, what (if any) real novelty is there in the patent, and how (if at all) is that real novelty present in any of the patent claims.
This kind of discussion can of course be either private or public, but making it public can be helpful by gathering in more people's knowledge of what went before the critical date(s) of the patent. The more eyes there are on the question, the more likely it is that the crucial prior art will be found.
Desirable outcomes can take several forms.
One is, to make sure to preserve a good and accessible public record of critical prior art evidence that might otherwise get forgotten -- when evidence gets forgotten, the loss of that evidence may allow a hostile patent owner to claim more than its entitlement.
Another is, to preserve a good and accessible public record of explanations and evidence showing how the real novelty of a patent focuses on some feature that is not needed for the function that is really wanted by the public. This is a not-uncommon situation: the patent owner would really like the patent to cover everything broadly that performs function X, and may even try to persuade the world (and a court) that this is what the patent really does cover. But the e
Get ready, mate:
Give up your guns and now look at where you're at
Nobody, I think, has mentioned the deepest poison in overbroad laws like this -- laws written so badly and broadly that they nominally outlaw a whole lot of harmless activities, and can't be totally enforced anyway.
The poison is that they make it so that no-one can depend any more on the written law to tell them what will and what won't be allowed in practice.
The parts that will be enforced will come to depend on how the enforcers are feeling. Nobody can be sure what that is, and it can be changed from one moment to the next.
If the enforcers take an unrelated dislike to Joe Blow, they become able to nail him arbitrarily for some harmless thing that's been swept up into the overbroad law -- even though it's a thing that isn't usually enforced against most other people. So no-one in practice can be sure any more where they stand.
I can hardly think of anything that can be more corrosive and poisonous than this, to equality and freedom under the rule of law.
-wb-
"Chosen Reject" posted:
I'm interested in learning how good the health care in the UK actually is. The only first-hand experience I've heard was from a Belgian friend of mine who lived there for a few years, and he thought it was awful.
I've seen too much of it recently, and IT disasters (and medical ones too) are no longer a surprise. IMHO the NHS is largely (mis)managed in the hands of a faceless and unaccountable bureaucracy, for whom truth is a scarce commodity, and organisational politics their main activity. (Example: a local NHS trust issued a statement this year announcing tens of millions pounds worth of cuts in a range of its services, including complete closedown of domiciliary care provided from one of the main hospices in the area, and they still managed to claim in public that the cuts were not going to have any adverse effect on patient care.)
NHS spending in many areas is big on big-sounding projects, but often cheap at the point of providing useful actual service. Here's an IT example that I saw:-- in spite of all the big-bucks IT projects, a main regional hospital at the end of last year lost all of its computerised patient data -- they were back to paper and pen. The IT providers and their hardware were housed remotely from the hospital on an industrial-estate site, right next door to a very large fuel depot (that should have made it cheap to rent): the depot went up in flames, taking the data centre with it. Hospital IT services were down for weeks, they clearly had no backup that they could deploy quickly. And that was for a big regional hospital's patient data! Cheapness at the point of service delivery also applies to many in-patient hospital services, with many wards staffed mainly by overworked healthcare workers who are recruited in numbers that are too low, and at levels of both pay and qualifications also too low for the work they are asked to do. The medical results I've seen are another story, OT here.
-wb-
how can it be alien, it was taken out of the HUMAN GENOME, it's part of us
The thing that is part of us is only a number of _degraded copies_ of a virus DNA sequence. They also lack the effective 'switches' that would be needed to transcribe and translate this DNA into the stuff of an actual virus.
So our genome is in this respect a bit like a library containing some virtually unreadable gummed-up copies of a very old recipe book, all of them with different misprints and 'copying losses'.
The researchers have compared the copies, and used DNA manipulation techniques to 'clean up' the misprints, to try and get back to the functioning original -- which in itself does not exist in the human genome. They have also 'cooked' the recipe themselves, to create what seems now to be a viable virus that nobody has ever seen before.
While this is all scientifically very interesting, there are clearly potential dangers: Like many viruses, the components of this newly resurrected virus are likely to embody a number of tricks to outwit the human immune system. The virus is also likely to be capable of adaptive mutations and evolution into new strains if it gets loose.
It might possibly all be harmless even if it escapes.
But then again it might not.
'Pandora's box' comes to mind.
-wb-
here's where Opera comes in.
Agreed. When I found Firefox I fell on it with enthusiasm. I still like the user interface. But it seemed to grab memory and cpu time and seize up the system. I questioned this on user forums, and the answers (if any) would tell me I don't have enough RAM. Now I use Opera, and don't have these problems.
-wb-
Have you already tried to check out which thinking methods fit with you?
For example, do you already have the habit of trying to find rational patterns, and enjoy visualizing them? If not, you could try that out and see if it fits with you. Visualization may be a two-edged weapon when it comes to math. Some people (including me) do it a lot and find it helpful. (But others handle math topics that may defy visualization, and claim that the visual-modeling habit ends up a hindrance.) Maybe you could find it stimulating to visualize. To find out, you could try reading about classical geometry and working through the essentially visual proofs there, and then go on with coordinate geometry. Visual modeling based on geometry helped me through calculus.
Then, do you have very good numerical memory? Would it stimulate you to try extending it anyway? Can you do simple mental arithmetic really easily, like adding up your purchases without needing the machine? You might try it regularly and enjoy making it come more easily.
But most of all you probably need to spend a lot of time with a chosen subject, and try to think about it and analogize it in lots of different ways and see which ways stimulate you and work for you.
Good luck.
It's not uncommon for overbroad oppressive contract clauses to arise because the other side's lawyer is afraid of something and doesn't know exactly what it is.
Then the lawyer drafts staggeringly broad clauses to try and hit the spot, covering whatever it might be that he's trying to feel for in the dark. It ends up covering a lot of what might not be, as well. Maybe even then it still doesn't hit the spot for the client.
The kind of clause that's currently bugging the parent poster can possibly be inspired by a scenario like this -- the key is not so much prior art, more like prior rights:--
Consultant works for client #1.
Client #1 requires assignment of IP rights for the work product.
Consultant plays ball, and gives assignment to client #1.
Client #1 may get a patent for it. The patent claims could be broader than the specifics of what consultant has done for client #1.
Same consultant then starts talking to client #2.
Client #2 probably knows or expects that consultant works in related fields for other clients before, and expects other clients have taken assignments of work product.
Client #2 then worries: Am I free to make use of what consultant will do for me now? Did client #1 already take an assignment and get a patent covering it, or could client #1 be just about to get one? So where would that leave me client #2?
The problem for client #2 is partly that the patent could be broader than the specifics of what consultant did for client #1. That can leave it in doubt whether consultant's work product for client #2 will be covered by the rights arising from the assignment already given to client #1, potentially leaving client #2 in deep doodoo.
So, client #2's lawyer tries his best to think of something:--
Does he ask consultant to promise that there isn't a right arising from consultant's earlier work that will catch client #2? (That's not much good, because even if consultant does give that sort of promise, it still won't make the feared patent go away if there is one.) So does he ask consultant to tell him _everything_ that consultant did before? Maybe that's a bit better from client #2's pov, because client #2 now gets a chance to evaluate the situation of anything done for previous clients if it looks dangerously close, but it's still not a perfect solution, it still won't make the third-party patent go away if there is one.
In fact I don't think there is a perfect solution for client #2, he may be able to reduce his risk by getting and evaluating various disclosures from consultant, but that's all.
Meanwhile the consultant is feeling threatened by all of this stuff. So what does he do? Maybe it could help to ask the client 'what are you afraid of here' and try and work something out. On the other hand, if the client has been panicked by the lawyer and says 'I must have this clause', without really being aware of what it's trying to achieve, they could easily just get into a stalemate.
Not giving any assignments or exclusive licenses, to anybody at all, could be a good solution to this problem from the consultant's pov -- if only he can persuade the clients to play ball with that.
Otherwise, I don't know of any good solutions, except for the consultant and clients to know each other and their work really well, and get confidence in each other that way.
Best of luck!
-wb-
What's the definition of mental adulthood?
Sigmund Freud wrote somewhere that psychological maturity was about the ability to love and to work.
You can take your pick, but that sounds like a start to me.
-wb-
'Mind control parasites':
...
...)
'Toxoplasma'? I thought they were called politicians
(if only it was _only_ half of all humans
-wb-
If fuel energy bills are a big factor, why not take a look at energy-efficient heat-pumping solutions as described here?
Granted, the installation costs are generally higher, to secure lower running costs, but you could find that the balance works out ok in timescales in which you are interested.
-wb-
Let's recall that even previous slashdot coverage of this issue -- as well as coverage elswhere -- identified that the "fat" patents are written to claim, not the fat-fs as such, but rather, ways of handling long filenames in connection with an underlying fat-fs. (I don't have the links by me to hand right now, sorry.)
That would be much less than a patent on fat as such.
When I last looked at the claims, it did seem that the ways claimed in the patent for handling the long filenames could be subgeneric, i.e. less than exhaustive of all the possibilities. (Granted that a situation like that can still mean that claims are wide enough to be a nuisance.)
So it would probably be more useful to the FOSS community to look at what is actually left from the actual MS patent claims, and whether they leave unpatented, free outside the claims, any other ways of handling the long filenames.
This would be as well as taking account of the possibility that the confirmed patent claims would still be invalidated by prior art or any other reason if it came to a court fight with the opposing party taking a full part there to provide full counterarguments.
This case and its result underline -- again -- the inadequacy of the US patent re-examination procedure -- mainly because of the unequal treatment that it gives to the party wishing to oppose the patent.
A failed attempt to get the patent invalidated is unhelpful to the community, because the patent holder can always point to the result when the prior art arguments come up again, and can argue that they have already been officially considered and rejected, so no need to review them.
It would arguably be better not to use US re-examination in the first place, if there is an assessment that the patent holder could wriggle out of the allegations of prior art when the other party is not there to answer -- because stopped by the procedure from answering to nail the errors in the arguments of the patent-holder.
It might also be recommendable for the PPF, instead of rushing in to raise proceedings that fail when there is no current and urgent need actually to bring them at that point in time, instead to give wide publicity first to the evidence and arguments against a nuisance patent, and to encourage debate about it.
The resulting debate could bring facts to light, e.g. that strengthen the prior art arguments.
New facts and evaluations can also shed light on the defendable scope of the claims, and make it clearer what techniques actually lie free outside them -- maybe even indicating that invalidation proceedings are not necessary.
At least, wider discussion can make it a bit easier for PPF or anybody else to weigh up the prospects of success before weighing in with action.
-wb-
My impression is that the depressant effect of traditional holidays can sometimes be a result of sudden removal of usual distractions. Going through a traditional holiday ritual process, or being without it, can either be welcome, or it can easily concentrate the mind and feelings on awkward ultimate questions. Without the normal distractions, the result can be an unexpected need to tolerate one's own company, maybe even in the middle of a crowd. How to live with self can then with some folks be itself the depressant problem, and when it is, the answer probably has to be so individual a learning process that no formula can cover it.
Happy New Year!
-wb-
I am a law student and recently passed the US patent exam.
Well I certainly wish you the very best of fortune in your coming professional activities. You will certainly find out soon enough how questions related to money make it easier to give certain kinds of advice, and harder, under economic pressure, to give certain other kinds of advice -- even when legally appropriate. I hope you will notice how this effect is often not in the interests of justice and of the public (which includes all clients at least some of the time) and sometimes not even in the interests of the clients. May I also mention a hope for you that you do not lose the idealism that you start off with, and continue to aim for justice as well as results for your clients.
With best wishes
-wb-
I disagree with your interpretation of the meaning of the provisions you are citing. However, I am not a lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
Well, you are pretty free with legal interpretations, and I even wish you were likely to be right, but I am afraid they are not sound interpretations. I don't want to overload this post. I have practised patent law for over 30 years. What is coming seems to me a rape of what remains of justice in the patent system, and I have a sense of relief, even though mixed with regret, that I am just about to retire.
Unfortunately the new provisions are not linked, as you suggest they are, to the question of enablement: they will be independent and new statutory words. They will not be 'about' enablement, or indeed about anything other than what they mean themselves. This is how they will create independent and new legal criteria. And what they mean is all in the direction of cutting down what will be admissible as prior art.
What will you think when a patent is granted for a technique that is publicly known, but buried away like a needle in a haystack, in some part of the GNU/Linux operating system? Today, the public prior example of the technique would be prior art against later invention, but when the reform bill is passed, it can be chopped away. Hard to find? Hard to decipher when found? The arguments will expand long and expensively. No sir, that arguably won't be prior art any more, and while one case may go one way, and another case may go another, the loser will be the public and any assurance of its continued freedom to use what was publicly disclosed and not patented.
I wish that your optimistic expectations were likely to be right. But maybe you never heard the expression 'The more words there are, the more words there are about which doubts may be entertained'. Where there are more doubts, there are certainly more opportunities for expensive legal arguments, and the party without the long purse will be still further disadvantaged.
-wb-
The patent can be challenged by every schmoe accused of infringement as long as he hadn't sued or been sued before.
Well maybe in principle, but none of the schmoes will be able to deploy as effectively again the arguments based on the art cited in the failed re-exam proceeding.
There is always some tendency for a court to take the view that the questions handled in the re-exam were properly dealt with, and that the statutory presumption of validity of the patent has been strengthened.
That pushes future disputes about validity towards the direction of being an open-and-shut case.
In that way, the failure of the re-exam harms everybody interested in freedom to use this technology.
-wb-
One poster (lheal) wrote
:(
Congress is too busy worrying about baseball players taking steroids to actually fix the [patent] system.
And another (pgpckt) riposted
Are you serious???? Have you not heard of the Patent Reform Act of 2005, H.R. 2795 ? [links were given]
Hold on a moment! When you read through all the cruft, there is a _very_ big sting in this 'patent reform' bill. It comes from the "objective prior art rules requiring patent-defeating information to be publicly accessible" -- that's a quote from the introduction to the 'coalition print' of the bill (see IPO website linked by earlier poster pgpckt).
This will be, in reality, a salami-slicing operation on the rights of the public not to have old public knowledge turned into new private patent rights.
The bill goes even further than the introduction gives a hint, and it says:
--- that pre-existing subject matter will only count as prior art against a patent if it is "reasonably and effectively accessible", and also
--- that pre-existing subject-matter won't count as reasonably accessible nor as prior art unless skilled persons can 'gain access' to it 'without resort to undue efforts',
--- and it also won't count as 'effectively' accessible unless 'persons of ordinary skill' are able to 'comprehend the content of the subject matter without resort to undue efforts' (see page 4 of 'coalition print').
Effectively this change will cut down quite drastically on the amount and the quality of the prior knowledge (prior art as currently understood but not in future!) that can be cited against a patent. It redefines 'prior art' in a way that exactly fits the spirit of 'newspeak' in '1984', George Orwell's dystopia-novel written in 1948:
Something could be prior in date, and could be relevant technological art, but we won't be able to call it prior art, because the term 'prior art' will in future already be legally 'occupied' instead by a futile and impotent idea, something like 'simple prior art that doesn't need any appreciable search to find it and not much knowledge to understand it'.
This legal change will multiply the arguments available to patent owners to dismiss the significance of what we now call prior art. This alone will add to the already-bloated cost of patent proceedings. The level of 'ordinary skill in the art' will continue to be able to be assessed by a court or by the patent office, potentially as being quite low. So, not much of the really important prior art in technically complex cases is likely to be found both 'effectively accessible' and comprehensible 'without resort to undue efforts', and nearly every patent may be unobvious over what is left of the prior art after the salami-slicing.
IMHO, the very last thing that the world needs (or the US needs), is to have the prior art redefined and made narrower than at present, so that invalid patents will just be made valid by decree of Congress, even though they cover old knowledge and old technique. But it is on the way to happening now.
Maybe indeed this will 'fix' the patent system -- but not exactly in the sense that the earlier posters meant, I suspect.
-wb-