Hello, I would like to order one of your _cheap_ PCs, specifically the one with 128 GPU:s which I will turn into a supercomputer with this great software.
Not 128 GPUs. A GPU with 128 pipelines, which is standard for a top-of-the-range card these days.
And who said they have to be businesses in competition? (IV) says "...intentionally attempted to attract, for commercial gain...".
Clause (iii) ("you have registered the domain name primarily for the purpose of disrupting the business of a competitor") said this. And that was the clause the sentence you quoted from me was rebutting.
Clause (iv), which you're quoting from there, is rebutted in an entirely separate statement.
Please address your comments to what I actually said, not a strawman version of them.
Ideal situation for reverse auction. What happens is you get all the passengers standing round in a circle, and you start counting up from zero. When a passenger shouts, they pay that much money and their bags are loaded onto the plane. Bags come off in reverse order. Anyone who fails to bid gets their bags on the next plane.
Also, TPB doesn't gain commercially from any visitors it attracts to the site. It's (likely to be) a political campaigning site. There are free speech arguments to be made here.
However, IANAL, and but they can probably convince some judge of part (iii) and (iv) below. [...] (iii) you have registered the domain name primarily for the purpose of disrupting the business of a competitor; or
The IFPI is not a business. Pirate Bay is not its competitor. This clearly doesn't apply.
(iv) by using the domain name, you have intentionally attempted to attract, for commercial gain, Internet users to your web site or other on-line location, by creating a likelihood of confusion with the complainant's mark as to the source, sponsorship, affiliation, or endorsement of your web site or location or of a product or service on your web site or location.
This is harder. However, the IFPI.com site has a prominent link to IFPI.org along with a disclaimer pointing out that they are not affiliated. Such disclaimers and links have, I believe, been successful in the past at protecting against claims under this term.
I think TPB have a fairly good case to keep the domain.
A patent troll wouldn't violate claim 15, for example, but they could still be in violation of earlier claims as well as claims that don't reference claim 15. Claim 1 is (of course) particularly broad.
A patent troll wouldn't violate _any_ of the claims, though, because what this patent is about, in every single claim, is operating a pool of assets (patents being a specific example thereof) and licensing them to people when some event occurs. This is not, in reality, what patent trolls do.
Except it isn't a patent troll patent. Read it, not the summary or the conclusions other people have jumped to. The patent is about patent-pooling for mutual defence from patent claims.
1. A method for extracting value from a portfolio of assets, comprising:granting a privilege to a second party by a first party at time t1 to permit the second party to exercise the privilege upon the occurrence of a predetermined event occurring at time t2 where t2>t1, and wherein the exercise comprises obtaining an interest in one or more assets residing in a dynamic pool of assets comprised of assets from the portfolio of assets at time t2, wherein zero or more assets are in the dynamic pool at time t1 and said zero or more assets are not in the dynamic pool at time t2.
So a company has a pool of assets. It gives somebody else a right to in the future, after some event has occurred, gain one or more of those assets. Some of the assets may have left the pool by the time they do this. Basically, we're talking about the standard financial instrument known as an "option", but over any of a pool of assets rather over a specific asset.
2. The method of claim 1, wherein the privilege is defined in a floating privilege agreement between the first and second parties, the floating privilege agreement having a term and specifying the predetermined event and the type of interest to be conveyed to the second party upon execution of the privilege.
The right can be time limited, and constrained to a certain kind of selection of assets.
3. The method of claim 2, wherein a number of assets in which the second party receives an interest is limited based on the floating privilege agreement.
The selection can be the number of assets acquired.
4. The method of claim 2, wherein the assets are intellectual property assets. 5. The method of claim 4, wherein the intellectual property assets are patents. 6. The method of claim 4, wherein the intellectual property assets are copyrights. 7. The method of claim 4, wherein the intellectual property assets are trade secrets.
Obvious.
8. The method of claim 2, wherein the assets include intellectual property assets selected from the group consisting of patents, copyrights and trade secrets.
But it doesn't have to be only IP. There can be other stuff as well.
9. The method of claim 4, wherein the privilege is exercised by the first party transferring rights in one or more of the assets in the dynamic pool of assets to the second party.
Pretty obvious, really.
10. The method of claim 9, wherein the transfer is by assignment. 11. The method of claim 9, wherein the transfer is by license. 12. The method of claim 11, wherein the license is an exclusive license.
OK, so there are multiple ways of transferring the rights.
13. The method of claim 4, wherein an occurrence of the predetermined event is a trigger event defined in the floating privilege agreement.
14. The method of claim 13, wherein the trigger event is a litigation-related event.
15. The method of claim 13 [sic, should clearly be 14], wherein the litigation-related event is a filing of a complaint against the second party.
16. The method of claim 15, wherein the complaint against the second party alleges that the second party infringes an intellectual property asset of a third party.
Now we get to the meat of the patent. This is not a patent on patent-trolling, it's a patent on a mechanism for defending against patent trolling. What they're patenting is a legal agreement that says "if you get sued for patent infringement, we'll grant you a patent license for one of our patents so you can smite the bastards".
17. The method of claim 13, wherein exercising the privilege comprises the second party selecting an asset from the dynamic pool of assets in response to occurrence of the trigger event.
18. The method of claim 17, wherein exercising the privilege further comprises the first party qualifying the selected asset for transfer to the second party to ensure the selected asset is appropriate for use by the second party f
What's sluggish? I read this claim over and over again. In my experience, the only thing vaguely resembling sluggish is the nominally slower load. Please, provide more details.
In my experience, document load & save times can be substantially longer than in MSOffice. With regular autosaves, this can become somewhat of an issue, particularly as the autosaves do not occur in a separate thread to the UI.
Hmm. Yes, the clause I was thinking of is restricted to computer programs:
USC17 Section 117 (a) Making of Additional Copy or Adaptation by Owner of Copy.-- Notwithstanding the provisions of section 106, it is not an infringement for the owner of a copy of a computer program to make or authorize the making of another copy or adaptation of that computer program provided: (1) that such a new copy or adaptation is created as an essential step in the utilization of the computer program in conjunction with a machine and that it is used in no other manner, or (2) [...]
For example, I think Calibiri and Candara are easier to read than Arial and Helvetica, respectively.
The primary difference seems to be that they have larger leading. Compare Arial 10pt with line-spacing:110% with Calibri 11pt, line-spacing: 100% and they look pretty similar, IMO.
What article? The only link is the PDF with the examples, which doesn't exactly answer my question: why is it "mandatory" to get Vista? Why can I not simply continue using the old, perfectly acceptable fonts?
These guys seem to have a shockingly stupid understanding of the Internet and copyright, even if you ignore the fact that they're claiming to be expert lawyers on Internet-related issues.
"We use cookies on the website only to facilitate internal navigation and provide a more user friendly website. This is the only reason Dozier Internet Law, P.C. uses cookies on our website."
So how come one of them has a 1 year expiration date and includes my original referer details. Do they need this for internal navigation, or perhaps do they use it for visitor tracking?
"The name "Dozier Internet Law, P.C.", and similar derivatives of it, constitute our trademark and servicemark, and should not be used in any manner without our permission."
Uh, right. Come sue me, Dozier Internet Law PC, if you think you're hard enough.
"Dozier Internet Law, P.C. obviously has the capability to immediately react to ["misappropriation" of their trademarks in advertising by competitors], oftentimes resulting in very significant financial exposure for the infringer. You are not authorized to use our name, or any derivative of it."
Right. I can find no trace of any litigation issued by this company, and such cases are usually controversial and are generally publicly discussed. Therefore I can only conclude that by "oftentimes" they mean "in zero cases out of a total of zero".
"We do not authorize you to access the Dozier Internet Law, P.C. website by conducting "click attacks", which is the practice of clicking on one of our online ads for the purpose of running up our advertising costs. All of our online advertising is intended solely and exclusively for bona fide prospective clients. By clicking on an online ad, you are immediately directed to our website. If you are conducting a "click attack" and are not a legitimate, bona fide prospective client, your access to any page of our website is unauthorized."
So you're not allowed to click their banners unless you intend to hire them. Wow.
It's worth noting that this isn't the first time this company has come to public attention. See here.
That is, if I post a sign outside my house, can I prohibit looking at the sign without wearing 3D glasses, for example? Someone with knowledge of how the normal law works want to educate me?
Erm. No. Don't be silly.
Which is, of course, what somebody should have told these idiots.
Not directly, but it is possible to put conditions on the making of copies of the pages, and all people browsing the net necessarily make copies in order to do so. The issue would be whether they had managed to accomplish this and that they were even trying.
Yes, but as I understand the matter, there is a _direct exception_ in US copyright law that allows making temporary copies for the purpose of viewing material.
If you need to exchange documents with someone that needs to edit them, PDF is not an option.
How common is this, really? I don't recall any occasion when I've expected somebody from outside my company to edit a document that I started. And inside the company, we've standardized on OO.o, so it doesn't matter which format we use. Which means we use.odt, because (a) the files are smaller and (b) it's easier to automatically process them.
He should have said "make redistributable" instead of "distribute".
I'd say the number of people who care about that are substantially fewer. Most end users don't give a shit whether they can legally copy their OS. They'll either do it, or they won't. Many care about being able to get it free, although I suspect quite a lot would settle for "cheap, if it includes all the stuff I need" instead. And given the number of people willing to make copies whether it's legal to do so or not, I don't see it being a barrier to adoption of a superior Linux distribution that it isn't legally redistributable in entirity.
That disc is not a part of the distro -- it isn't on the distribution disc, and that disc cannot ship as part of a GPL package.
Why is a Linux distribution only permitted to have GPL packages? There's nothing in the GPL that requires this (in fact, it goes so far as to state that it _isn't_ a condition).
The GPP's point was that he had to go and install extra software to get MP3 support; getting a non-free disc from Novell counts as installing extra software. The system doesn't have MP3 support out-of-the-box, and it cannot, until the MP3 patents expire.
Why is it not "out of the box", if that disc comes in the box with the software in the first place? And the process is integrated into the installation? When I installed SuSE, by the time it rebooted and brought my system up I had MP3 and MPEG compatible software installed. There's no _legal_ need even to have a separate disc, although SuSE does so for convenience (i.e., so that you can easily make a copy of the distribution without the non-free stuff). A similar result in a single disc distribution could be achieved with a script that made a copy of the disc with the non-free content stripped out.
I think the point is that this is a flaw of the distribution, not a necessary flaw. MPEG patent licenses aren't expensive. You could get discs to retailers with all this stuff included on them and retail them for less than $20. And they would have a significantly better "out of the box experience" for the user who wasn't experienced with Linux.
A Linux distro can never distribute software that requires royalties, and so, technically, no Linux distro can legally distribute MP3 software in the US.
This is quite simply not true. There is no reason why a Linux distribution cannot contain a disc of non-free software to supplement the free stuff, as SuSE did the last time I bought a box.
Slashdot Mirror
Hello, I would like to order one of your _cheap_ PCs, specifically the one with 128 GPU:s which I will turn into a supercomputer with this great software.
Not 128 GPUs. A GPU with 128 pipelines, which is standard for a top-of-the-range card these days.
And who said they have to be businesses in competition? (IV) says "...intentionally attempted to attract, for commercial gain...".
Clause (iii) ("you have registered the domain name primarily for the purpose of disrupting the business of a competitor") said this. And that was the clause the sentence you quoted from me was rebutting.
Clause (iv), which you're quoting from there, is rebutted in an entirely separate statement.
Please address your comments to what I actually said, not a strawman version of them.
Ideal situation for reverse auction. What happens is you get all the passengers standing round in a circle, and you start counting up from zero. When a passenger shouts, they pay that much money and their bags are loaded onto the plane. Bags come off in reverse order. Anyone who fails to bid gets their bags on the next plane.
Also, TPB doesn't gain commercially from any visitors it attracts to the site. It's (likely to be) a political campaigning site. There are free speech arguments to be made here.
The IFPI is not a business. Pirate Bay is not its competitor. This clearly doesn't apply.
This is harder. However, the IFPI.com site has a prominent link to IFPI.org along with a disclaimer pointing out that they are not affiliated. Such disclaimers and links have, I believe, been successful in the past at protecting against claims under this term.
I think TPB have a fairly good case to keep the domain.
A patent troll wouldn't violate claim 15, for example, but they could still be in violation of earlier claims as well as claims that don't reference claim 15. Claim 1 is (of course) particularly broad.
A patent troll wouldn't violate _any_ of the claims, though, because what this patent is about, in every single claim, is operating a pool of assets (patents being a specific example thereof) and licensing them to people when some event occurs. This is not, in reality, what patent trolls do.
Except it isn't a patent troll patent. Read it, not the summary or the conclusions other people have jumped to. The patent is about patent-pooling for mutual defence from patent claims.
Nah, this is _far_ too subtle for Ballmer. See my analysis of the first few claims.
1. A method for extracting value from a portfolio of assets, comprising:granting a privilege to a second party by a first party at time t1 to permit the second party to exercise the privilege upon the occurrence of a predetermined event occurring at time t2 where t2>t1, and wherein the exercise comprises obtaining an interest in one or more assets residing in a dynamic pool of assets comprised of assets from the portfolio of assets at time t2, wherein zero or more assets are in the dynamic pool at time t1 and said zero or more assets are not in the dynamic pool at time t2.
So a company has a pool of assets. It gives somebody else a right to in the future, after some event has occurred, gain one or more of those assets. Some of the assets may have left the pool by the time they do this. Basically, we're talking about the standard financial instrument known as an "option", but over any of a pool of assets rather over a specific asset.
2. The method of claim 1, wherein the privilege is defined in a floating privilege agreement between the first and second parties, the floating privilege agreement having a term and specifying the predetermined event and the type of interest to be conveyed to the second party upon execution of the privilege.
The right can be time limited, and constrained to a certain kind of selection of assets.
3. The method of claim 2, wherein a number of assets in which the second party receives an interest is limited based on the floating privilege agreement.
The selection can be the number of assets acquired.
4. The method of claim 2, wherein the assets are intellectual property assets.
5. The method of claim 4, wherein the intellectual property assets are patents.
6. The method of claim 4, wherein the intellectual property assets are copyrights.
7. The method of claim 4, wherein the intellectual property assets are trade secrets.
Obvious.
8. The method of claim 2, wherein the assets include intellectual property assets selected from the group consisting of patents, copyrights and trade secrets.
But it doesn't have to be only IP. There can be other stuff as well.
9. The method of claim 4, wherein the privilege is exercised by the first party transferring rights in one or more of the assets in the dynamic pool of assets to the second party.
Pretty obvious, really.
10. The method of claim 9, wherein the transfer is by assignment.
11. The method of claim 9, wherein the transfer is by license.
12. The method of claim 11, wherein the license is an exclusive license.
OK, so there are multiple ways of transferring the rights.
13. The method of claim 4, wherein an occurrence of the predetermined event is a trigger event defined in the floating privilege agreement.
14. The method of claim 13, wherein the trigger event is a litigation-related event.
15. The method of claim 13 [sic, should clearly be 14], wherein the litigation-related event is a filing of a complaint against the second party.
16. The method of claim 15, wherein the complaint against the second party alleges that the second party infringes an intellectual property asset of a third party.
Now we get to the meat of the patent. This is not a patent on patent-trolling, it's a patent on a mechanism for defending against patent trolling. What they're patenting is a legal agreement that says "if you get sued for patent infringement, we'll grant you a patent license for one of our patents so you can smite the bastards".
17. The method of claim 13, wherein exercising the privilege comprises the second party selecting an asset from the dynamic pool of assets in response to occurrence of the trigger event.
18. The method of claim 17, wherein exercising the privilege further comprises the first party qualifying the selected asset for transfer to the second party to ensure the selected asset is appropriate for use by the second party f
What's sluggish? I read this claim over and over again. In my experience, the only thing vaguely resembling sluggish is the nominally slower load. Please, provide more details.
In my experience, document load & save times can be substantially longer than in MSOffice. With regular autosaves, this can become somewhat of an issue, particularly as the autosaves do not occur in a separate thread to the UI.
Hmm. Yes, the clause I was thinking of is restricted to computer programs:
USC17 Section 117 (a) Making of Additional Copy or Adaptation by Owner of Copy.-- Notwithstanding the provisions of section 106, it is not an infringement for the owner of a copy of a computer program to make or authorize the making of another copy or adaptation of that computer program provided:
(1) that such a new copy or adaptation is created as an essential step in the utilization of the computer program in conjunction with a machine and that it is used in no other manner, or
(2) [...]
using these new fonts is a recipe for typographical disaster on something like 95% of computers.
For example, I think Calibiri and Candara are easier to read than Arial and Helvetica, respectively.
The primary difference seems to be that they have larger leading. Compare Arial 10pt with line-spacing:110% with Calibri 11pt, line-spacing: 100% and they look pretty similar, IMO.
"The article goes on to state ..."
What article? The only link is the PDF with the examples, which doesn't exactly answer my question: why is it "mandatory" to get Vista? Why can I not simply continue using the old, perfectly acceptable fonts?
These guys seem to have a shockingly stupid understanding of the Internet and copyright, even if you ignore the fact that they're claiming to be expert lawyers on Internet-related issues.
They appear to be experts in bullying bloggers into removing adverse comments from their sites and representing spyware authors. I don't think copyright's actually one of their core strengths...
More comments on their site:
"We use cookies on the website only to facilitate internal navigation and provide a more user friendly website. This is the only reason Dozier Internet Law, P.C. uses cookies on our website."
So how come one of them has a 1 year expiration date and includes my original referer details. Do they need this for internal navigation, or perhaps do they use it for visitor tracking?
"The name "Dozier Internet Law, P.C.", and similar derivatives of it, constitute our trademark and servicemark, and should not be used in any manner without our permission."
Uh, right. Come sue me, Dozier Internet Law PC, if you think you're hard enough.
"Dozier Internet Law, P.C. obviously has the capability to immediately react to ["misappropriation" of their trademarks in advertising by competitors], oftentimes resulting in very significant financial exposure for the infringer. You are not authorized to use our name, or any derivative of it."
Right. I can find no trace of any litigation issued by this company, and such cases are usually controversial and are generally publicly discussed. Therefore I can only conclude that by "oftentimes" they mean "in zero cases out of a total of zero".
"We do not authorize you to access the Dozier Internet Law, P.C. website by conducting "click attacks", which is the practice of clicking on one of our online ads for the purpose of running up our advertising costs. All of our online advertising is intended solely and exclusively for bona fide prospective clients. By clicking on an online ad, you are immediately directed to our website. If you are conducting a "click attack" and are not a legitimate, bona fide prospective client, your access to any page of our website is unauthorized."
So you're not allowed to click their banners unless you intend to hire them. Wow.
It's worth noting that this isn't the first time this company has come to public attention. See here.
I have no skills in programming real languages, but I imagine [Eric S Raymond's] more substantive code is equally good.
Speaking as somebody who once modified some of his code for an unusual purpose, no, not really. He's a hacker in the true sense of the word.
That is, if I post a sign outside my house, can I prohibit looking at the sign without wearing 3D glasses, for example? Someone with knowledge of how the normal law works want to educate me?
Erm. No. Don't be silly.
Which is, of course, what somebody should have told these idiots.
Not directly, but it is possible to put conditions on the making of copies of the pages, and all people browsing the net necessarily make copies in order to do so. The issue would be whether they had managed to accomplish this and that they were even trying.
Yes, but as I understand the matter, there is a _direct exception_ in US copyright law that allows making temporary copies for the purpose of viewing material.
If you need to exchange documents with someone that needs to edit them, PDF is not an option.
.odt, because (a) the files are smaller and (b) it's easier to automatically process them.
How common is this, really? I don't recall any occasion when I've expected somebody from outside my company to edit a document that I started. And inside the company, we've standardized on OO.o, so it doesn't matter which format we use. Which means we use
He should have said "make redistributable" instead of "distribute".
I'd say the number of people who care about that are substantially fewer. Most end users don't give a shit whether they can legally copy their OS. They'll either do it, or they won't. Many care about being able to get it free, although I suspect quite a lot would settle for "cheap, if it includes all the stuff I need" instead. And given the number of people willing to make copies whether it's legal to do so or not, I don't see it being a barrier to adoption of a superior Linux distribution that it isn't legally redistributable in entirity.
That disc is not a part of the distro -- it isn't on the distribution disc, and that disc cannot ship as part of a GPL package.
Why is a Linux distribution only permitted to have GPL packages? There's nothing in the GPL that requires this (in fact, it goes so far as to state that it _isn't_ a condition).
The GPP's point was that he had to go and install extra software to get MP3 support; getting a non-free disc from Novell counts as installing extra software. The system doesn't have MP3 support out-of-the-box, and it cannot, until the MP3 patents expire.
Why is it not "out of the box", if that disc comes in the box with the software in the first place? And the process is integrated into the installation? When I installed SuSE, by the time it rebooted and brought my system up I had MP3 and MPEG compatible software installed. There's no _legal_ need even to have a separate disc, although SuSE does so for convenience (i.e., so that you can easily make a copy of the distribution without the non-free stuff). A similar result in a single disc distribution could be achieved with a script that made a copy of the disc with the non-free content stripped out.
I think the point is that this is a flaw of the distribution, not a necessary flaw. MPEG patent licenses aren't expensive. You could get discs to retailers with all this stuff included on them and retail them for less than $20. And they would have a significantly better "out of the box experience" for the user who wasn't experienced with Linux.
Huffy Hummingbird?
Hapless Hookworm?
A Linux distro can never distribute software that requires royalties, and so, technically, no Linux distro can legally distribute MP3 software in the US.
This is quite simply not true. There is no reason why a Linux distribution cannot contain a disc of non-free software to supplement the free stuff, as SuSE did the last time I bought a box.