Unfortunately, it is. The general thinking among some examiners is that the bigger companies mostly get patents defensively (i.e. to stop others from suing them with the threat of a big patent portfolio). They see it as harmless to let something like this out because a patent like this would likely be used against another company with enough money to shoot it down.
In my time at the USPTO, I noticed that HP took the phrase "anything under the sun made by man" to the extreme and tried to patent everything under the sun made by man in every patent app filed. Each case was an absolute battle to get them to claim what they really invented. If the examiner wasn't willing to fight it out on the case, he or she could have just easily said "Screw it! They won't try to enforce it anyway..." and just allowed the case.
By MS helping to implement parts of Mono, they have, at a minimum, given up their rights to sue over those portions with which it helped. IANAL, but I have worked in the world of IP for a few years and from what I understand, MS has surrendered its rights to sue over those portions of Mono because of promissory estoppel. That is, since Mono was being implemented with help from MS, thereby giving the project its blessing to continue, MS has essentially given the developers of Mono a promise that it is OK for them to continue on.
What remains to be seen is whether or not MS would be allowed to sue for those portions of Mono that were implemented without help from MS. As usual, software development makes established IP law far more interesting to apply...
One important fact to remember is that patent prosecution takes a considerable amount of time. Assuming one files a provisional application, waits the allotted year, then files the non-provisional application, you are looking at 3-4 years before a patent examiner even touches the case. With further legal wrangling, it could be many more years before the patent is issued.
So, this leaves the question: is the company going to keep tabs on people who leave the company who are also listed as inventors on an application to pay them? Is it going to be on the named-inventor to make sure he gets paid?
It hasn't been too long since I made it out of undergrad, and I distinctly remember there being a "School of Management" there with a Management major. I knew quite a few people in that school, and the short-sidedness you speak of appeared to be a cornerstone of their Management education.
I would have to disagree. If one has a reasonable apprehension of suit, one can file for declaratory judgment to invalidate the patent or in the hope that the court will declare the product non-infringing.The problem here is that what MS has done, so far, falls into the category of "oblique suggestion". That is probably part of the reason that MS has not and will not state which patents are believed to be infringed; doing so could be construed as a very specific threat.
Saying "that work may infringe my IP" without specifically stating what IP is oblique. Your guitar solo example above is more like saying "that particular portion of your work infringes this particular portion of my IP". Even without saying you may sue, it is specific enough to create a reasonable apprehension. Right now, MS's statements more closely matches the oblique example.
I am fairly certain that the percentage that comes from bribes is 0%.
Simply put, if the art isn't there, even if the examiner doesn't like it, the allowance has to be given to the applicant. It is an unfortunate state of affairs, but it is a legal requirement. Simply put, the examiner was doing his job.
Actually, the law was changed in 1995 so that the owner of a patent can enforce the patent for 20 years starting from the earliest claimed filing date of the application. The issue date is completely irrelevant.
What everyone has to realize is that there is a vast amount of data to dig through in order to find prior art that can be used to reject claims in a patent application. Simply put, a patent examiner is given a limited amount of time to research for prior art for each patent application. If a particular claim cannot be refuted, the patent examiner must accept it.
As someone previously mentioned, as the claims in the patent get challenged, more time can be spent looking for prior art that can be used to refute the claims in the patent application.
The system isn't perfect, but it is the best we have, considering how much technology has evolved in such a short period.
The issues about porting ZSNES are slowly being resolved. A lot of the work done for this release involved replacing a lot of assembly with C. Since computers are so fast now, there is no need to try to squeeze every last bit of performance out of the processor by using assembly for SNES emulation. It may take a while, but I think the ZSNES may reach a point where it is written entirely in C.
I work as a student tech at my university, and their solution to the whole problem was to let everyone get infected, then patch and fix every computer on campus. While doing that, we are supposed to try to convince students to set Windows Update to automatically install updates.
Personally, I think this this is the wrong approach to the whole problem. Simply educating the computer users out there to click a few spots on the screen seems more efficient than wasting resouces trying to have (overworked and underpaid) stuff to do it. Isn't the whole point of institutions of higher learning to prepare people for the life, rather than preparing them to live a life of dependance on others for the most basic things?
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Unfortunately, it is. The general thinking among some examiners is that the bigger companies mostly get patents defensively (i.e. to stop others from suing them with the threat of a big patent portfolio). They see it as harmless to let something like this out because a patent like this would likely be used against another company with enough money to shoot it down.
In my time at the USPTO, I noticed that HP took the phrase "anything under the sun made by man" to the extreme and tried to patent everything under the sun made by man in every patent app filed. Each case was an absolute battle to get them to claim what they really invented. If the examiner wasn't willing to fight it out on the case, he or she could have just easily said "Screw it! They won't try to enforce it anyway..." and just allowed the case.
By MS helping to implement parts of Mono, they have, at a minimum, given up their rights to sue over those portions with which it helped. IANAL, but I have worked in the world of IP for a few years and from what I understand, MS has surrendered its rights to sue over those portions of Mono because of promissory estoppel. That is, since Mono was being implemented with help from MS, thereby giving the project its blessing to continue, MS has essentially given the developers of Mono a promise that it is OK for them to continue on.
What remains to be seen is whether or not MS would be allowed to sue for those portions of Mono that were implemented without help from MS. As usual, software development makes established IP law far more interesting to apply...
It has already been done.
http://www.thenewspaper.com/news/26/2632.asp
One important fact to remember is that patent prosecution takes a considerable amount of time. Assuming one files a provisional application, waits the allotted year, then files the non-provisional application, you are looking at 3-4 years before a patent examiner even touches the case. With further legal wrangling, it could be many more years before the patent is issued.
So, this leaves the question: is the company going to keep tabs on people who leave the company who are also listed as inventors on an application to pay them? Is it going to be on the named-inventor to make sure he gets paid?
You are correct. I meant "short-sightedness".
Note to self: no posting after more than 20 hours of being awake.
It hasn't been too long since I made it out of undergrad, and I distinctly remember there being a "School of Management" there with a Management major. I knew quite a few people in that school, and the short-sidedness you speak of appeared to be a cornerstone of their Management education.
It's too early for people to get a Robot Chicken reference. The RC crowd usually wakes up in the afternoon.
I would have to disagree. If one has a reasonable apprehension of suit, one can file for declaratory judgment to invalidate the patent or in the hope that the court will declare the product non-infringing.The problem here is that what MS has done, so far, falls into the category of "oblique suggestion". That is probably part of the reason that MS has not and will not state which patents are believed to be infringed; doing so could be construed as a very specific threat.
Saying "that work may infringe my IP" without specifically stating what IP is oblique. Your guitar solo example above is more like saying "that particular portion of your work infringes this particular portion of my IP". Even without saying you may sue, it is specific enough to create a reasonable apprehension. Right now, MS's statements more closely matches the oblique example.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Declaratory_judgment
I am fairly certain that the percentage that comes from bribes is 0%.
Simply put, if the art isn't there, even if the examiner doesn't like it, the allowance has to be given to the applicant. It is an unfortunate state of affairs, but it is a legal requirement. Simply put, the examiner was doing his job.
Actually, the law was changed in 1995 so that the owner of a patent can enforce the patent for 20 years starting from the earliest claimed filing date of the application. The issue date is completely irrelevant.
What everyone has to realize is that there is a vast amount of data to dig through in order to find prior art that can be used to reject claims in a patent application. Simply put, a patent examiner is given a limited amount of time to research for prior art for each patent application. If a particular claim cannot be refuted, the patent examiner must accept it.
As someone previously mentioned, as the claims in the patent get challenged, more time can be spent looking for prior art that can be used to refute the claims in the patent application.
The system isn't perfect, but it is the best we have, considering how much technology has evolved in such a short period.
The issues about porting ZSNES are slowly being resolved. A lot of the work done for this release involved replacing a lot of assembly with C.
Since computers are so fast now, there is no need to try to squeeze every last bit of performance out of the processor by using assembly for SNES emulation. It may take a while, but I think the ZSNES may reach a point where it is written entirely in C.
I work as a student tech at my university, and their solution to the whole problem was to let everyone get infected, then patch and fix every computer on campus. While doing that, we are supposed to try to convince students to set Windows Update to automatically install updates.
Personally, I think this this is the wrong approach to the whole problem. Simply educating the computer users out there to click a few spots on the screen seems more efficient than wasting resouces trying to have (overworked and underpaid) stuff to do it. Isn't the whole point of institutions of higher learning to prepare people for the life, rather than preparing them to live a life of dependance on others for the most basic things?