Maybe there should be an award for "Most Under-Credited Person of the Century".
That's pretty funny. If you give them the award, they are no longer uncredited, so you have to give the award to somebody else. And of course if you have even heard of them they are probably not the most uncredited. A tough award to figure out!
One of the things about this discussion that I think is missing is credit to scientists outside physics. The famous ones like Fleming, of course, and the less famous like Robert Woodward (total synthesis of natural compounds) and H. Wallace Carruthers (inventor of polyester and polyamines) have had huge impacts on the way we live our daily lives; a lot more than Einstein.
The fact that no-one else was doing this doesn't mean that no-one else thought of it or that it isn't obvious.
Why the hell not? It seems to me the fact there no one else was doing it is a pretty good clue that it wasn't obvious. How long have search engines been around? There are many search engines out on the net, using all kinds of weird methods, most of which are ineffective.
One of the more famous cases of a patent granted on this basis was the use of a ramp to slow down a bowling ball when it was returned to the bowler. Prior to this invention people had problems with the balls getting damaaged, people getting broken fingers, etc. when the balls arrived back at the front of the lane.
An inventor came up with the idea of a ramp, and tried to patent it. At first it was rejected because it looked so obvious. HOWEVER, on appeal the patent was allowed because of the fact that the problems it solved had been around for a long time, and nobody previously had come up with this as a solution - proving the idea was in fact not obvious.
"If any smart person can sit down for 2 weeks and invent something that has been patented from scratch, then it should not be patented."
The law states "an invention must not be obvious to one with ordinary skill in the art".
"only things that have taken more than 12 months of R&D, not something thought of over a few hours which any one can duplicate."
I don't think that time is a good indicator of the originality of an invention. Many really good inventions occur while you are taking a shower in a flash of insight, or as the result of an accident. For example, Teflon resulted from a chemist noticing a small amount of solid material in an experiment involving frozen refrigerants. Obvious? Hell No. Less than a year? More like 3-4 days to analyze the solid material. Did he deserve a patent for having the insight to realize this was something worth investigating? You bet.
I mean if one person doesnt make something, some one else will, so why is it patentable.
Are you sure someone else will? How long have we had search engines? Are you sure somebody else would have come up with this ranking method?
If its, "i invented this first 12 minutes before you did, so I should have the patent" then what a blow job of a system it is.
The reason for this is to prevent people from sitting on inventions. Patents were invented to encourage people to publish their results, not keep them squirreled away in some lab until they might need it.
I generally agree that algorithms shouldn't be patentable, but this seems like an exception. Maybe it isn't
Algorithms are NOT patentable. You cannot patent an algorithm. There is a specific rule in patent law against patenting discoveries, laws of nature and so on. Algorithms fall into this basket.
A patent covers an IMPLEMENTATION, that is using an algorithm in conjuction with a stored program computing device to compress data to reduce the data size IS patentable. This is what the LZW patent covers. You are still free to use an abacus or pencil and paper or anything else that doesn't store programs to use the LZW algorithm to compress data.
I agree with the Amazon case. It is a bad patent. It is obvious. It might not have prior art - Amazon was Very Early into ecommerce.
Patenting business models - interestingly this was not due to a change in the law. Business models are not patentable under current law - the problem is that a District Court ruled that certain types of process patents are valid; these types of process patents can be made to cover business processes. This is a recent loophole that should be fixed ASAP.
The only thing a patent grants the owner is a limited ability to prevent others from using an invention. Google comes up with a new search engine and patents it. Anyone can still think all they want about the methods used, and in fact do R&D on it without infringing. In fact, without patent protection the chance is you WOULDN'T be thinking about the Google algorithms because they would be kept as a trade secret.
Governments take away your rights every time they make a law. The laws against murder take away your rights to shoot somebody just because you have a headache.
The point of laws is that the OVERALL gain is supposed to outweigh the loss of freedom associated with having a law. Back in the 17th century governmants worked out the principle that granting patents in exchange for requiring the inventor to publish his technology was a benefit to society as a whole. If it weren't for patents, the Google inventors WOULD NOT be publishing their algorithms and you would have no idea how their search engine worked unless you tried to re-engineer it yourself, a needless duplication of effort.
until we can persuade the (US) government that software patents in their present form don't work
I won't argue with that - any system can be improved.
would argue that their innovation, in spite of the "support" of Bell Labs, was not inevitable
I think this account is rather at odds with the accepted history.
Bell Labs 1946 in fact had a department doing development work on the solid state physics of semi-conductors because of the known deficiencies with existing switches - especially switching speeds. The expected need for improvements to support the anticipated growth in the field of telecommunications was a powerful incentive. One of the official targets of this group was in fact the solid state amplifier - the equivalent to Lee DeForest's vacuum triode.
Solid state diodes and rectifiers had been use for a long time at this point, so the utility of semiconductors was well known when this effort started. In particular p-n junctions had been used in radio detectors for many years. Russell Ohl, working at Bell Labs had over the previous years worked out much of the solid state theory of p-n junctions.
The war effort to perfect RADAR had a major impact in developing knowledge of the performance of solid state materials in electronics applications. In fact some workers in the field felt that studies of the performance of crystal detectors, particularly purity effects, used in RADAR made the step to the transitor quite straitforward. There is a history of this point here.
The theory of the transistor effect had been worked out as early as 1925 by J.E. Lillenfield - although several attempts to build the device he predicted had failed.
The main contribution of Shockley Bardeen and Brattain was in fact to work out what materials were needed to make Lillenfield's theory work. Certainly not trivial, but I think quite inevetable.
There is another, less frequently cited theory that Shockley, Bardeen and Brattain were using materials recovered from an 'incident' at Roswell New Mexico, but I think I will leave this to the cold fusion and hydion crowd to discuss.
In a lot of ways Einstein is a good choice because of the symbolism. A man of peace and intellect forced to flee the tyranny, wars, racism and genocides that are Europe's main contribution to history in the 20th century.
A man who gave the world great intellectual accomplishments only to be remembered as the enabler of nuclear terror - he becomes the harbringer of the duality of technology as a force for both good and evil.
A quiet, retiring person who has fame shoved on him, at the end of the century he becomes one of the first of a wave of celebrities created by the media for their own purposes.
To me one of the things that recommends people like Gandhi is the lack of inevitability. Einstein is constrained by the physical reality he works with. His vision must fit the facts of Michelson-Morley and Lorentz-Fitzgerald, as well as the orbital measurements of Mercury. If Einstein doesn't develop Relativity, surely others will do so. Otto Hahn was splitting the atom long before Einstein signed his letter to FDR.
Gandhi's way is NOT inevetable. Quite a few former outposts of the British Empire have fallen into despotism and anarchy. Gandhi fought hard and not entirely succesfully against religous war and persecution. His work led to the establishment of the world's large democracy where there was previously no such institution. By shear force of his great spirit he led millions to non-violence, some thing rare indeed in the war filled 20th century.
Watson and crick stole their data from a female collegue, who was then completely forgotten
If there was a villan in the story it is Wilkens, who showed Rosalind Franklin's data to Watson and Crick without telling Ms. Franklin. Wilkens was a dirtbag who treated Ms. Franklin quite poorly when she was in his lab. Rosalind Franklin was actually quite pleased that Watson and Crick used her data to determine the structure of DNA.
It is too bad that Franklin died before Watson Crick and Wilkens won the Nobel for the determination of DNA structure. She surely would have shared in the award, however Nobel Prizes are not given posthumously.
Similarly, Martin Luther King's Ghandi-inspired non-violent protests set the stage for the extension of full civil rights
King was important for building popular support for civil rights in the US. Before King was marching there was another revolutionary that was making a huge impact as well, using the courts and the constitution. To my way of thinking he had at least as big an impact.
Different industries move at different speeds, a computer hardware idea from conception to market, and one market cycle (8 months or o) is around five years.
Yes, but how does this justify shortening the life of a patent? Even within a given industry different technologies have different lifetimes. You can't say on granting a patent, well, this invention looks like it will have a useful life of 8 years. There is no way to predict anything of the sort.
A computer design may have a life of 5 years, but there are technologies in it that have lots longer lifetimes. Look at how long people have been using the basic photoresist process. The only real change has been to go to shorter UV wavelengths. If you have a technology in a rapidly moving field that is still useful after 20 years, you must have come up with a sound invention, and you deserve the benefits.
Patents that have a short useful life already have an expiration mechanism - the patent office requires maintenance fees to keep the patent in force. If you don't pay the fee, it expires. If you look closely at the IBM Patent site, you will see the fee status of the patents as part of the patent listing. If your patent is replaced by some other technology, you are not going to waste your money on the fees.
If you are in a fast moving field, and the technology has a short real lifetime, it is going to self-limit.
There is no need to decend into a morass of trying to have different lifetimes for different industries or technologies.
The example of the metallic glass alloys isn't valid. If they didn't have the technology finished, they shouldn't have been able to patent it.
It most certainly is valid. When you develop something as novel there are many steps in the process to bring it to market; the development of the first lab technology, the first small scale processes to manufacture, and so on. Each step usually involves patentable inventions, and the patent law insists that you patent in a diligent fashion - sitting on a several year old invention until the final result is ready gets you barred from getting the patents. There is some variablity in what is considered diligent - in some cases taking a week off is enought to cause you to lose rights to an invention.
And as far as having it ready, but not being able to convince people to use it - in many of the applications (such as cores for large transformers - metallic glasses have unique magnetic properties) you are looking at a market where the equipment has a 50 year life cycle - not only is a lot of testing to validate you have the same life cycle, a whole lot of engineering is needed, and THEN you are looking at waiting in some cases up to 50 years to get your product sold.
7. Independant discovery either nullifies the patent completely, or grants identical rights to the other developers.
Well, you must mean BEFORE filing the patent. As soon as you file, you are likely to start selling the product, or you may publish the results in a journal. Or somebody in the patent office could talk, or you might have an application going in one of the countries that publishes applications (most countries do). This disclosure ot the technology automatically makes independent discovery impossible to prove.
The matter of multiple independent inventions prior to patent filing has been controversial. Alexandar Graham Bell got his invention only by filing an hour before a competitor. This issue has been talked about quite a bit, yet the law has always given the patent to the first inventor. While there may be some inequity there, I don't see how society is harmed by it. And it does spur the inventor to be diligent, which is a benefit to society.
One of the arguments that the patent office uses against this is that granting coinventor status would be a POWERFUL incentive for people to falsify records, generating huge numbers of fradulent claims and lawsuits.
I don't see how independent invention could be used as a proof of unobviousness. Your Calculus example is a perfect example. Innovative? Yes. Important? Big-time. Obvious because there were two independent inventors? No Way.
8. Protect it or lose it, like trademarks. If you are aware of, or should be with due vigilance, a company using your patented method, and you don't immediately notify them of your patent, you lose all rights regarding that patent.
Not needed. It's already part of the law. In fact this is why Xerox lost when it sued Apple for copying the GUI from PARC. It waited until the Mac had been on the market for 5 years. The Judge threw it out for lack of diligence.
Business analysts know that etailing is all about fulfillment. Catalog companies already have this in place, so you are generally safe if you order from LL Bean etc. New etailers, especially if the company is already dubious in terms of organization are not trustworthy. Toys R Us has been having trouble with it's brick and mortar stores for years; they would be the last people I would place an order with. Wal Mart on the other hand has superb inventory control and organization on the brick and mortar side and is therefore likely to be equally great on the web side.
Specific experiences I have had over the last year:
AMAZON - good to great customer service. Relatively high prices. I ordered twice; my wife once. They were slow shipping this season, but got everything here on time. I complained about their slow shipping and they refunded all of my shipping costs plus sent a $10 coupon.
Buy.com - crappy service but excellent prices on computer items. Other prices are not so great. Don't order anything time sensitive from these guys. They also have a 15% restocking fee.
DVD Wave - low prices, and surprised my with valiant attempt to get late ordered (non present items) DVD's to me by Christmas. I placed one order for three items, and they made three shipments to me. I will use these folks again.
Bookpool - Low prices on technical books and very nice customer service. Second only to Amazon in service.
J&R Audio - Only electronics place I have used on the web. Prices ok, service has been very good. Bought my DVD player from them, was shipped same day.
another problem might include the fact that an owner of a patent monopoly can choose to deny anyone else access to the invention, or set unfair terms..
I would think under normal circumstances the patent holder would set terms that would maximize his gain. It does a patent holder no good to set prohibitive terms on widget licenses - he wants to gain a LOT of income from the sale of his patented widget. His license fees would be thusly constrained to be slightly less than the economic gain of the improved widget.
There is also the issue of a company doing its own manufacturing of a patented item. Again the company is going to set the price so as to maximize it's economic gain. Too high and they lose out.
It is tough for me to see the need for compulsory licensing in such cases.
The problem comes when the patent has value because it is preventing canibillization; that is the patent holder (A) has a vested interest in something that he wants to continue, and the patent is blocking a competitor (B) from manufacturing a better, competing product. It seems like economic efficiency would be served to force licensing here. The problem is that by forced licensing you have the state abrogating property rights. This is unconstitutional in most cases; you have a very high standard to meet if you do this, and you owe compensation besides.. you owe the patent holder the value of his economic loss under eminent domain provisions of the US Constitution. I don't think we want to encourage the mess that would result from this.
There is also a big danger with compulsory licensing. Companies that don't want to license will simply not patent and keep thier invention secret. This is exactly opposite the primary purpose of the patent; to encourage publishing.
Personally I don't really think that there is much likelihood that a good innovation will sit idle. The hunger for innovative products is so great as to be almost unimaginable.
The usual industrial outcome in a case like this is very complicated. Sometimes there is an exchange of assests - B will buy out both the patent and old prodduct from A because the value of both are worth more to him than to A, or A will buy out B for similar reasons. Or a joint venture will result. There is a lot of interesting stuff like this joining on in the chemical industry over mettalocene catalysts - there is a minor industrial revolution going on, and companies are restructuring to allow the best development of the new technologies.
Your retort doesn't apply to patents concerning business models, because the method employed is transparent to everyone
Well, if you look at current patent law, it actually has a stipulation against patenting business processes. The problem is that the courts have mangled the interpritation of process patents in general so that with a little careful wording conventional process patent law can be streached to cover business processes. This is really a screwed up situation that needs to be fixed; patents were never intended to cover business processes.
And the USPTO isn't about to stop giving out trivial patents, because every patent issued by the USPTO to an American company/citizen is one fewer international patent that can be handed out to a foreign company/citizen. Nevermind that Americans suffer from this practice just as much as the rest of the world.
Your point is completely spurious because USPTO patents can and are in fact routinely given to to foreign companies and citizens; in fact on the order of 1/2 of US Patents over the past decade were assigned to foreign citizens and companies. There is no restriction on non-US citizens being granted US Patents.
If Sony wants to gain patent covereage on something they sell in the US they have to get a US Patent. If I want to get coverage on something I sell in Japan, I need a Japanese Patent. A US Patent has no standing outside the US except perhaps as prior art. In fact if I file a US Patent on MY INVENTION I have to file a European Patent about the same time to prevent my own US Patent being used against me as prior art.
This would create severe problems in some areas. For example, in the phramaceutical industry the time to commercialize a drug is so long that any real reduction in patent life would would essentially eliminate patent protection for drugs.
Even outside the drug industry, the 20 year from filing term is none too long. Most industrial products take 7 years to go from original invention to comemrcialization, and then it takes a few years for the product to reach market. Many products take longer, especially if it a really fundamental breakthrough. I saw one project (the invention of metallic glass alloys) have its basic patents expire before it started making an industrial impact.
It seems to me like its just another attempt to crush innovation.
Since when is copying work done by other people equal to innovation! All Streambox does is let you make copies of media developed by other people using a protocol orginally developed by another company.
This seems very reminiscent of the Netscape/AOL/DOJ vs. Microsoft case.
Loud sound of vomiting. The DOJ/Microsoft case was brought because Microsoft was abusing it's monopoly power to crush competitors like Netscape, who from what I remember had a browser on the market well before Microsoft did.
Microsoft is a corrupt monopolistic corporate vulture that has STIFLED innovation in the software industry for the last decade. They are famous for their 'embrace and extend' which is their way of saying ripoff and make incompatable with open standards.
1. Publish applications 12 months after filing to get more transparency into the process. 2. Tighten requirements for unobviosness. 3. Allow formal objections after publication of application. 4. Tighten law to close business model loophole. This was actually a provision in the law that was worked around via the process patent. 5. Specify in the new law that software is an expression not an implementation, thus not patentable.
Crimminy. Henry Ford DID NOT invent the assembly line. He copied the idea from a Chicago meat packing plant.
Sharing knowledge multiplies its power and benefits everyone, including those who create it. Hoarding knowledge impoverishes us all
I agree. That is the purpose of a patent in the first place. A Patent is a contract between the government and an inventor; the inventor gets an exclusive right to practice his invention for a limited period of time in exchange FOR PUBLISHING THE TECHNOLOGY. If it weren't for patents people would keep as much technology secret as possible.
It is the same thing as copyrights. The reason we have the GPL is because it is protected by Copyright law.
The only problem we have with patents today is that the USPTO is giving them out too easily, trivializing the real value of the patent process.
Like this is new. Trademarks based on names have been around since the beginning of trademarks. Ford Motor. McDonald's. Bell Telephone. Hoover vacuum cleaners.
On the internet we have ONE namespace, and result is conflict. Until the regulatory bodies fix the internet namespace problem, there will be name conflicts. It isn't the fault of trademark law - it is simply due to the intersection of new technologies never intended for commercial activity intersecting with the business world.
Actually, right out of the box Linux is definitely not the most secure OS in the world.
I am sure that the most secure OS in the world is NOT a UNIX or UNIX clone. Any OS with network services is less secure than one with network services.
It also seems that people are making a lot of comments about how secure xyz is compared to Linux that are off-base.
The problem is that Linux is not a monolithic system. There is a Linux distribution that is going through source review much like OpenBSD. This distro is in fact getting to be pretty damn tight. There are modified RedHat distros that are run a few months behind in the dev cycle that are far more secure than RedHat itself because of the simple expedience of code lefe cycle management.
I am sure that some of these are better than most of the OS's that were listed above; it would not surprise me if the day came when some Linux distros are right up there with OpenBSD as far as security.
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Maybe there should be an award for "Most Under-Credited Person of the Century".
That's pretty funny. If you give them the award, they are no longer uncredited, so you have to give the award to somebody else. And of course if you have even heard of them they are probably not the most uncredited. A tough award to figure out!
One of the things about this discussion that I think is missing is credit to scientists outside physics. The famous ones like Fleming, of course, and the less famous like Robert Woodward (total synthesis of natural compounds) and H. Wallace Carruthers (inventor of polyester and polyamines) have had huge impacts on the way we live our daily lives; a lot more than Einstein.
I don't think that this 'proves' anything. However I do find these case histories interesting.
The fact that no-one else was doing this doesn't mean that no-one else thought of it or that it isn't obvious.
Why the hell not? It seems to me the fact there no one else was doing it is a pretty good clue that it wasn't obvious. How long have search engines been around? There are many search engines out on the net, using all kinds of weird methods, most of which are ineffective.
One of the more famous cases of a patent granted on this basis was the use of a ramp to slow down a bowling ball when it was returned to the bowler. Prior to this invention people had problems with the balls getting damaaged, people getting broken fingers, etc. when the balls arrived back at the front of the lane.
An inventor came up with the idea of a ramp, and tried to patent it. At first it was rejected because it looked so obvious. HOWEVER, on appeal the patent was allowed because of the fact that the problems it solved had been around for a long time, and nobody previously had come up with this as a solution - proving the idea was in fact not obvious.
"If any smart person can sit down for 2 weeks and invent something that has been patented from scratch, then it should not be patented."
The law states "an invention must not be obvious to one with ordinary skill in the art".
"only things that have taken more than 12 months of R&D, not something thought of over a few hours which any one can duplicate."
I don't think that time is a good indicator of the originality of an invention. Many really good inventions occur while you are taking a shower in a flash of insight, or as the result of an accident. For example, Teflon resulted from a chemist noticing a small amount of solid material in an experiment involving frozen refrigerants. Obvious? Hell No. Less than a year? More like 3-4 days to analyze the solid material. Did he deserve a patent for having the insight to realize this was something worth investigating? You bet.
I mean if one person doesnt make something, some one else will, so why is it patentable.
Are you sure someone else will? How long have we had search engines? Are you sure somebody else would have come up with this ranking method?
If its, "i invented this first 12 minutes before you did, so I should have the patent" then what a blow job of a system it is.
The reason for this is to prevent people from sitting on inventions. Patents were invented to encourage people to publish their results, not keep them squirreled away in some lab until they might need it.
Remember with worldwide patents you may not make any disclosure and with American only six months are allowed.
The key point is when was the patent filed. It takes years for the patent to issue - after filing you can make any kind of public disclosure you want.
I generally agree that algorithms shouldn't be patentable, but this seems like an exception. Maybe it isn't
Algorithms are NOT patentable. You cannot patent an algorithm. There is a specific rule in patent law against patenting discoveries, laws of nature and so on. Algorithms fall into this basket.
A patent covers an IMPLEMENTATION, that is using an algorithm in conjuction with a stored program computing device to compress data to reduce the data size IS patentable. This is what the LZW patent covers. You are still free to use an abacus or pencil and paper or anything else that doesn't store programs to use the LZW algorithm to compress data.
I agree with the Amazon case. It is a bad patent. It is obvious. It might not have prior art - Amazon was Very Early into ecommerce.
Patenting business models - interestingly this was not due to a change in the law. Business models are not patentable under current law - the problem is that a District Court ruled that certain types of process patents are valid; these types of process patents can be made to cover business processes. This is a recent loophole that should be fixed ASAP.
it takes away the right to someone's thoughts
How the HELL do you reach this conclusion?
The only thing a patent grants the owner is a limited ability to prevent others from using an invention. Google comes up with a new search engine and patents it. Anyone can still think all they want about the methods used, and in fact do R&D on it without infringing. In fact, without patent protection the chance is you WOULDN'T be thinking about the Google algorithms because they would be kept as a trade secret.
Governments take away your rights every time they make a law. The laws against murder take away your rights to shoot somebody just because you have a headache.
The point of laws is that the OVERALL gain is supposed to outweigh the loss of freedom associated with having a law. Back in the 17th century governmants worked out the principle that granting patents in exchange for requiring the inventor to publish his technology was a benefit to society as a whole. If it weren't for patents, the Google inventors WOULD NOT be publishing their algorithms and you would have no idea how their search engine worked unless you tried to re-engineer it yourself, a needless duplication of effort.
until we can persuade the (US) government that software patents in their present form don't work
I won't argue with that - any system can be improved.
would argue that their innovation, in spite of the "support" of Bell Labs, was not inevitable
I think this account is rather at odds with the accepted history.
Bell Labs 1946 in fact had a department doing development work on the solid state physics of semi-conductors because of the known deficiencies with existing switches - especially switching speeds. The expected need for improvements to support the anticipated growth in the field of telecommunications was a powerful incentive. One of the official targets of this group was in fact the solid state amplifier - the equivalent to Lee DeForest's vacuum triode.
Solid state diodes and rectifiers had been use for a long time at this point, so the utility of semiconductors was well known when this effort started. In particular p-n junctions had been used in radio detectors for many years. Russell Ohl, working at Bell Labs had over the previous years worked out much of the solid state theory of p-n junctions.
The war effort to perfect RADAR had a major impact in developing knowledge of the performance of solid state materials in electronics applications. In fact some workers in the field felt that studies of the performance of crystal detectors, particularly purity effects, used in RADAR made the step to the transitor quite straitforward. There is a history of this point here.
The theory of the transistor effect had been worked out as early as 1925 by J.E. Lillenfield - although several attempts to build the device he predicted had failed.
The main contribution of Shockley Bardeen and Brattain was in fact to work out what materials were needed to make Lillenfield's theory work. Certainly not trivial, but I think quite inevetable.
There is another, less frequently cited theory that Shockley, Bardeen and Brattain were using materials recovered from an 'incident' at Roswell New Mexico, but I think I will leave this to the cold fusion and hydion crowd to discuss.
In a lot of ways Einstein is a good choice because of the symbolism. A man of peace and intellect forced to flee the tyranny, wars, racism and genocides that are Europe's main contribution to history in the 20th century.
A man who gave the world great intellectual accomplishments only to be remembered as the enabler of nuclear terror - he becomes the harbringer of the duality of technology as a force for both good and evil.
A quiet, retiring person who has fame shoved on him, at the end of the century he becomes one of the first of a wave of celebrities created by the media for their own purposes.
To me one of the things that recommends people like Gandhi is the lack of inevitability. Einstein is constrained by the physical reality he works with. His vision must fit the facts of Michelson-Morley and Lorentz-Fitzgerald, as well as the orbital measurements of Mercury. If Einstein doesn't develop Relativity, surely others will do so. Otto Hahn was splitting the atom long before Einstein signed his letter to FDR.
Gandhi's way is NOT inevetable. Quite a few former outposts of the British Empire have fallen into despotism and anarchy. Gandhi fought hard and not entirely succesfully against religous war and persecution. His work led to the establishment of the world's large democracy where there was previously no such institution. By shear force of his great spirit he led millions to non-violence, some thing rare indeed in the war filled 20th century.
We'll remember them only as long as you Americans dont try and credit the Wright Brothers with inventing powered flight.
And I'll remember Australia if they remember that the Wright brothers were famous for inventing CONTROLLED powered flight.
After his first visit to the US he noted, among other things, that Americans are somewhat shallow compared to Europeans.
Right there he blows away any chance of being man of anything. Intelligent people do not engage in stereotyping.
Watson and crick stole their data from a female collegue, who was then completely forgotten
If there was a villan in the story it is Wilkens, who showed Rosalind Franklin's data to Watson and Crick without telling Ms. Franklin. Wilkens was a dirtbag who treated Ms. Franklin quite poorly when she was in his lab. Rosalind Franklin was actually quite pleased that Watson and Crick used her data to determine the structure of DNA.
It is too bad that Franklin died before Watson Crick and Wilkens won the Nobel for the determination of DNA structure. She surely would have shared in the award, however Nobel Prizes are not given posthumously.
Similarly, Martin Luther King's Ghandi-inspired non-violent protests set the stage for the extension of full civil rights
King was important for building popular support for civil rights in the US. Before King was marching there was another revolutionary that was making a huge impact as well, using the courts and the constitution. To my way of thinking he had at least as big an impact.
Thurgood Marshall led an inspiring life.
The planet is Mercury. Relativistic physics is needed to correctly calculate it's orbit.
Different industries move at different speeds, a computer hardware idea from conception to market, and one market cycle (8 months or o) is around five years.
Yes, but how does this justify shortening the life of a patent? Even within a given industry different technologies have different lifetimes. You can't say on granting a patent, well, this invention looks like it will have a useful life of 8 years. There is no way to predict anything of the sort.
A computer design may have a life of 5 years, but there are technologies in it that have lots longer lifetimes. Look at how long people have been using the basic photoresist process. The only real change has been to go to shorter UV wavelengths. If you have a technology in a rapidly moving field that is still useful after 20 years, you must have come up with a sound invention, and you deserve the benefits.
Patents that have a short useful life already have an expiration mechanism - the patent office requires maintenance fees to keep the patent in force. If you don't pay the fee, it expires. If you look closely at the IBM Patent site, you will see the fee status of the patents as part of the patent listing. If your patent is replaced by some other technology, you are not going to waste your money on the fees.
If you are in a fast moving field, and the technology has a short real lifetime, it is going to self-limit.
There is no need to decend into a morass of trying to have different lifetimes for different industries or technologies.
The example of the metallic glass alloys isn't valid. If they didn't have the technology finished, they shouldn't have been able to patent it.
It most certainly is valid. When you develop something as novel there are many steps in the process to bring it to market; the development of the first lab technology, the first small scale processes to manufacture, and so on. Each step usually involves patentable inventions, and the patent law insists that you patent in a diligent fashion - sitting on a several year old invention until the final result is ready gets you barred from getting the patents. There is some variablity in what is considered diligent - in some cases taking a week off is enought to cause you to lose rights to an invention.
And as far as having it ready, but not being able to convince people to use it - in many of the applications (such as cores for large transformers - metallic glasses have unique magnetic properties) you are looking at a market where the equipment has a 50 year life cycle - not only is a lot of testing to validate you have the same life cycle, a whole lot of engineering is needed, and THEN you are looking at waiting in some cases up to 50 years to get your product sold.
7. Independant discovery either nullifies the patent completely, or grants identical rights to the other developers.
Well, you must mean BEFORE filing the patent. As soon as you file, you are likely to start selling the product, or you may publish the results in a journal. Or somebody in the patent office could talk, or you might have an application going in one of the countries that publishes applications (most countries do). This disclosure ot the technology automatically makes independent discovery impossible to prove.
The matter of multiple independent inventions prior to patent filing has been controversial. Alexandar Graham Bell got his invention only by filing an hour before a competitor. This issue has been talked about quite a bit, yet the law has always given the patent to the first inventor. While there may be some inequity there, I don't see how society is harmed by it. And it does spur the inventor to be diligent, which is a benefit to society.
One of the arguments that the patent office uses against this is that granting coinventor status would be a POWERFUL incentive for people to falsify records, generating huge numbers of fradulent claims and lawsuits.
I don't see how independent invention could be used as a proof of unobviousness. Your Calculus example is a perfect example. Innovative? Yes. Important? Big-time. Obvious because there were two independent inventors? No Way.
8. Protect it or lose it, like trademarks. If you are aware of, or should be with due vigilance, a company using your patented method, and you don't immediately notify them of your patent, you lose all rights regarding that patent.
Not needed. It's already part of the law. In fact this is why Xerox lost when it sued Apple for copying the GUI from PARC. It waited until the Mac had been on the market for 5 years. The Judge threw it out for lack of diligence.
Business analysts know that etailing is all about fulfillment. Catalog companies already have this in place, so you are generally safe if you order from LL Bean etc. New etailers, especially if the company is already dubious in terms of organization are not trustworthy. Toys R Us has been having trouble with it's brick and mortar stores for years; they would be the last people I would place an order with. Wal Mart on the other hand has superb inventory control and organization on the brick and mortar side and is therefore likely to be equally great on the web side.
Specific experiences I have had over the last year:
AMAZON - good to great customer service. Relatively high prices. I ordered twice; my wife once. They were slow shipping this season, but got everything here on time. I complained about their slow shipping and they refunded all of my shipping costs plus sent a $10 coupon.
Buy.com - crappy service but excellent prices on computer items. Other prices are not so great. Don't order anything time sensitive from these guys. They also have a 15% restocking fee.
DVD Wave - low prices, and surprised my with valiant attempt to get late ordered (non present items) DVD's to me by Christmas. I placed one order for three items, and they made three shipments to me. I will use these folks again.
Bookpool - Low prices on technical books and very nice customer service. Second only to Amazon in service.
J&R Audio - Only electronics place I have used on the web. Prices ok, service has been very good. Bought my DVD player from them, was shipped same day.
another problem might include the fact that an owner of a patent monopoly can choose to deny anyone else access to the invention, or set unfair terms..
I would think under normal circumstances the patent holder would set terms that would maximize his gain. It does a patent holder no good to set prohibitive terms on widget licenses - he wants to gain a LOT of income from the sale of his patented widget. His license fees would be thusly constrained to be slightly less than the economic gain of the improved widget.
There is also the issue of a company doing its own manufacturing of a patented item. Again the company is going to set the price so as to maximize it's economic gain. Too high and they lose out.
It is tough for me to see the need for compulsory licensing in such cases.
The problem comes when the patent has value because it is preventing canibillization; that is the patent holder (A) has a vested interest in something that he wants to continue, and the patent is blocking a competitor (B) from manufacturing a better, competing product. It seems like economic efficiency would be served to force licensing here. The problem is that by forced licensing you have the state abrogating property rights. This is unconstitutional in most cases; you have a very high standard to meet if you do this, and you owe compensation besides.. you owe the patent holder the value of his economic loss under eminent domain provisions of the US Constitution. I don't think we want to encourage the mess that would result from this.
There is also a big danger with compulsory licensing. Companies that don't want to license will simply not patent and keep thier invention secret. This is exactly opposite the primary purpose of the patent; to encourage publishing.
Personally I don't really think that there is much likelihood that a good innovation will sit idle. The hunger for innovative products is so great as to be almost unimaginable.
The usual industrial outcome in a case like this is very complicated. Sometimes there is an exchange of assests - B will buy out both the patent and old prodduct from A because the value of both are worth more to him than to A, or A will buy out B for similar reasons. Or a joint venture will result. There is a lot of interesting stuff like this joining on in the chemical industry over mettalocene catalysts - there is a minor industrial revolution going on, and companies are restructuring to allow the best development of the new technologies.
Your retort doesn't apply to patents concerning business models, because the method employed is transparent to everyone
Well, if you look at current patent law, it actually has a stipulation against patenting business processes. The problem is that the courts have mangled the interpritation of process patents in general so that with a little careful wording conventional process patent law can be streached to cover business processes. This is really a screwed up situation that needs to be fixed; patents were never intended to cover business processes.
And the USPTO isn't about to stop giving out trivial patents, because every patent issued by the USPTO to an American company/citizen is one fewer international patent that can be handed out to a foreign company/citizen. Nevermind that Americans suffer from this practice just as much as the rest of the world.
Your point is completely spurious because USPTO patents can and are in fact routinely given to to foreign companies and citizens; in fact on the order of 1/2 of US Patents over the past decade were assigned to foreign citizens and companies. There is no restriction on non-US citizens being granted US Patents.
If Sony wants to gain patent covereage on something they sell in the US they have to get a US Patent. If I want to get coverage on something I sell in Japan, I need a Japanese Patent. A US Patent has no standing outside the US except perhaps as prior art. In fact if I file a US Patent on MY INVENTION I have to file a European Patent about the same time to prevent my own US Patent being used against me as prior art.
Also, I would add:
6. Reduce the longevity of a patent.
This would create severe problems in some areas. For example, in the phramaceutical industry the time to commercialize a drug is so long that any real reduction in patent life would would essentially eliminate patent protection for drugs.
Even outside the drug industry, the 20 year from filing term is none too long. Most industrial products take 7 years to go from original invention to comemrcialization, and then it takes a few years for the product to reach market. Many products take longer, especially if it a really fundamental breakthrough. I saw one project (the invention of metallic glass alloys) have its basic patents expire before it started making an industrial impact.
This is something I would NOT be in favor of.
It seems to me like its just another attempt to crush innovation.
Since when is copying work done by other people equal to innovation! All Streambox does is let you make copies of media developed by other people using a protocol orginally developed by another company.
This seems very reminiscent of the Netscape/AOL/DOJ vs. Microsoft case.
Loud sound of vomiting. The DOJ/Microsoft case was brought because Microsoft was abusing it's monopoly power to crush competitors like Netscape, who from what I remember had a browser on the market well before Microsoft did.
Microsoft is a corrupt monopolistic corporate vulture that has STIFLED innovation in the software industry for the last decade. They are famous for their 'embrace and extend' which is their way of saying ripoff and make incompatable with open standards.
If you were congress, who would you fix it?
1. Publish applications 12 months after filing to get more transparency into the process.
2. Tighten requirements for unobviosness.
3. Allow formal objections after publication of application.
4. Tighten law to close business model loophole. This was actually a provision in the law that was worked around via the process patent.
5. Specify in the new law that software is an expression not an implementation, thus not patentable.
1 anad 3 are in progress right now.
Crimminy. Henry Ford DID NOT invent the assembly line. He copied the idea from a Chicago meat packing plant.
Sharing knowledge multiplies its power and benefits everyone, including those who create it. Hoarding knowledge impoverishes us all
I agree. That is the purpose of a patent in the first place. A Patent is a contract between the government and an inventor; the inventor gets an exclusive right to practice his invention for a limited period of time in exchange FOR PUBLISHING THE TECHNOLOGY. If it weren't for patents people would keep as much technology secret as possible.
It is the same thing as copyrights. The reason we have the GPL is because it is protected by Copyright law.
The only problem we have with patents today is that the USPTO is giving them out too easily, trivializing the real value of the patent process.
How can a company trademark a person's name?
Like this is new. Trademarks based on names have been around since the beginning of trademarks. Ford Motor. McDonald's. Bell Telephone. Hoover vacuum cleaners.
On the internet we have ONE namespace, and result is conflict. Until the regulatory bodies fix the internet namespace problem, there will be name conflicts. It isn't the fault of trademark law - it is simply due to the intersection of new technologies never intended for commercial activity intersecting with the business world.
Actually, right out of the box Linux is definitely not the most secure OS in the world.
I am sure that the most secure OS in the world is NOT a UNIX or UNIX clone. Any OS with network services is less secure than one with network services.
It also seems that people are making a lot of comments about how secure xyz is compared to Linux that are off-base.
The problem is that Linux is not a monolithic system. There is a Linux distribution that is going through source review much like OpenBSD. This distro is in fact getting to be pretty damn tight. There are modified RedHat distros that are run a few months behind in the dev cycle that are far more secure than RedHat itself because of the simple expedience of code lefe cycle management.
I am sure that some of these are better than most of the OS's that were listed above; it would not surprise me if the day came when some Linux distros are right up there with OpenBSD as far as security.