Well, the "P" in IP stands for "property". If you are provided with a beta version of software, and your contribution is to point out a bug, well fine, you own the property rights to the bug, congratulations. Wait a minute, the bug was already there, you only noted it. Therefore, you don't own the bug either.
If, in addition to pointing out the bug, you provide a solution, then yeah, you own the rights to implementation of the solution. Assuminng of course that you didn't first sign a beta-reviewer contract in which you agreed to assign all IP rights.
You don't own IP because you pointed out a problem; you have to suggest a solution.
Re:No offense, Michael, but you suck
on
AvantGo Gets a Patent
·
· Score: 1, Insightful
I think that if Slashdot takes a stance on software patents as being good or bad in every case, there's no point in ever having a discussion of them. Is/. supposed to take an official stand on everything, and everyone must fall in line with that stand? There would be lots of complaints if everyone who posts an opinion that is contrary to the status quo got modded down just for that reason. This type of article fosters discussion, which is good. I don't mind discussing an issue with someone who doesn't agree with me, but I don't want the forum telling me what to think or say.
Claim 1 has a little more to it than that. The content is updated according to a user profile stored at the server, so it's not really a transfer of content, it's a customized update of content. Still pretty damned broad.
Yeah, lots of references were cited, but the application also pended for less than 2 years. It's not uncommon for a software application to wait longer than that just to get a first action from the PTO. It looks like Sterne, Kessler really buried them in prior art right off the bat and pushed this one through; I'll bet the legal fees for this one were huge. As broad as the claims are, I wouldn't be surprised if there's a related submarime application still pending.
Claim 1 basically recites a method for updating content for a client at the request of a user, with the update coming from the content provider based on a user profile stored at the server. This is my take on a quick read of the claim without looking at the detailed description, but it seems rather broad.
Applications are made public after pending for 18 months. The PTO publishes them in the PTO Gazette, and they are printed and placed in the searchable stacks at the PTO, as well as on the PTO Web site. Anyone in industry or academia can monitor published applications and submit comment directly to the examiner handling the application.
Giving a patent application to people who have received patents in related fields leads to a couple of problems. First, in industry, those reviewers are likely to either be co-workers of the applicant, or competitors of the applicant. In either case, the review is likely to be biased. Second, in the latter case, the PTO would be putting the content of the application - which is confidential until publication - into the hands of the applicant's competition. For those who actually file applications for valid patents, this would be disasterous.
The PTO actually has a sort of peer review in place, as of November, 2000. After 18 months of pendancy, most applications are published, and public comment is invited. This means that review is not limited to just competitors, but to anyone who has an interest, so the review is actually farther-reaching. The applicants are protected in case of infringement based on publication of the application, by being awarded a reasonable royalty for infringing activity dating back to the time of publication, if the issued patent has claims that are substantially similar to those of the published application.
Yeah, great idea. And how do you objectively measure innovation? Obviously, you've filed a submarine patent on an innovatomometer, and you are now trying to artificially create a need for it in the marketplace so that you can collect royalties. Nice try.
You're both wrong. It was a different ACC, that is, Anonymous C. Coward. He couldn't get the patent for it, because there was too much prior art in the form of prior public use by the applicant.
Maybe it's not bureaucratic bungling. In order for an invention to be patentable, it must be described in a way that is "enabling". That is, given the description of the invention, a person of ordinary skill in the art must be able to construct a working model of the invention.
An example of a non-enabled invention would be a teleporter. If you apply for a patent for your teleportation apparatus, and your description only says that it provides near-instantaneous transmission of a human being over vast geographical distances without saying how it works, well, you aren't gonna get a patent, because you haven't enabled your idea; it's not really an invention. If someone actually ever gets such a device to work, that person gets the patent, and you've got no valid gripe just because you had an unworkable idea for the invention first.
The sort of response that ACC got in the story you relate seems to indicate that he didn't provide an enabling description, only a high-level description that can be said to be a great idea, but not a fully developed invention. Later, satellites became a reality because someone else provided that enabling description (and presumably was awarded the patent).
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Prior art doesn't apply to copyrights, only to patents. The standard for getting a copyright is originality, not novelty. That is, you only have to prove that you didn't copy something to get a copyright on it. You don't have to prove that you were the first to have authored it. If you give an infinite number of monkeys an infinite number of typewriters, the one that inevitably churns out "War and Peace" gets a copyright on it, even though he wasn't the first to write it, merely because he didn't copy it.
My decription of finding that a claim is obvious before the Patent Office *is* the letter of the law. Before spouting off uninformed, inane bullshit, look it up: 35 U.S.C. section 103. Gut feelings of a giant hairy spider don't count. Also, your comment that you know that the claim is obvious and you're not even a video engineer actually make you *less* qualified to attest that the invention is obvious. The standard is based on the knowledge of a person of ordinary skill in the art, not one of casual acquaintance with the subject matter.
You're correct that I didn't post my contact information; I have in the past, I forgot this time. If you want to take me up on the offer, write to me at ranterX_98@yahoo.com. I'm putting a yahoo address rather than my primary office address, because I don't need trolls swamping my inbox. If you write to me with a legitimate missive, you'll get my primary address, name, PTO registration number, etc.
The power of complaint? Where, to Slashdot? Preaching to the choir will accomplish nothing. If you don't like the PTO's policy, complain to Congress, they wrote the laws on which the PTO's guidelines are based. If you think a patent is invalid, fight it.
You say that the PTO is incompetent, as if this means that all efforts are futile. In case you weren't paying attention, my original comment stated that I have been successful in invalidating claims before the PTO. The re-examination process does work, for the most part because it overcomes the patent examiner's greatest deficiency - finding relevant prior art. It also overcomes the examiner's second biggest deficiency - applying the prior art to the claim in a meaningful way. Why? Because the person filing the re-examination gets to make the first argument. Do you think a lazy examiner is going to read a ready-made argument for invalidity and spend a great deal of time and effort coming up with a counter-argument for validity if he can avoid it? No, in most cases my argument turns out to be the first rejection sent to the patent holder.
You called my offer insincere and ridiculous. I call your complaint insincere and ridiculous. Anyone can whine about how things should be different. Get off your ass and do something about it instead.
First of all, I *am* a patent attorney, so put a little credence in what I'm saying. Second, I was talking about a re-examination proceding in the Patent Office, which is not decided by "incompetent courts", unless the patent owner loses and appeals. Third, prior art has everything to do with obviousness. A patent claim doesn't pass a gut reaction "duh" test to overcome the obviousness challenge. A patent claim is ruled obvious if there is no single piece of prior art that invalidates the claim by anticipating it (proving that the invention is not novel), but if a combination of teachings from more than one piece of prior art could be used by one of ordinary skill in the art to derive the claimed invention. Finally, complaining without really doing anything accomplishes nothing, except maybe to make you look like a whiner and make the other side look sympathetic.
The offer still stands.
BTW, what's up with the moderation? I make a valid, generous offer directed to the topic of this article, and I sit at zero. Other comments in this thread spread misinformation, and get modded up as informative. I'll bet that this comment, straightening out their misconceptions, continues to sit at zero as well. Slashdot: News for the deluded, stuff that confuses.
I've made this offer before, and no one has taken me up on it, but I'm making it again. You say that this patent fails the obviousness test, and is invalid. I'm a patent attorney, and I've successfully invalidated patent claims through the Patent Office's re-examination process. If you provide me with the prior art necessary to prove that the patent is invalid, and pay the re-examination filing fee ($2520), I'll prepare, file, and prosecute the re-examination for free. It's one thing to complain that a patented invention is obvious because you have a gut feeling about it, and another to prove that it's invalid by backing up your contention with prior art and a good argument. If you don't like that these companies assert patents that you think are invalid, let's do something about it. Put your money where your mouth is.
Watch out, this could be one of those deals like when they published a list of criminals in the paper, saying that they'd won the lottery and to come pick up their money. When they showed up, with the cuffs.
He's your hero?! Are you the one who thinks up his obvious posts? Do you arrange his frilly shirts and wax his moustache? Or are you only allowed to lick his ass?
Illegally copying software is a run-of-the-mill copyright violation. However, Illegally asserting a copyright that isn't yours exposes the violator to liability against the alleged infringer, as well as sanctions by the court and the Copyright Office. A much more serious offense.
WIPO has no jurisdiction over a US patent. WIPO does oversee adherence to the Patent Cooperation Treaty among signatory countries (US and JApan included), and in that respect helps facilitate getting patent rights in other countries. But if a company only has patent rights in the US, WIPO can't enforce those rights across borders. In fact, they'd tell that company that they should have sought international protection prior to getting the patent in the US, wise up next time.
The situation you describe has nothing to do with US law. If MIT has only a US patent, selling TVs in Japan is not infringement, so US law is irrelevant, and nothing of Sony's will be seized. If there is no infringement, Sony is obeying the law, and the US better not be spanking anything. As you said, any multi-national corporation knows how this game is played and carefully toes the line in every country they do business in. How the game is played is getting patents issued in every country that you want protection. If you don't, you're exposed.
In this case, what's important is where the infringing acts take place. If MIT has only US patents, only actions that take place in the US would be considered in determining infringement. If no US acts occur, there is no infringement, and therefore no legitimate reason to seize anything belonging to Sony, whether it's Sony Japan or Sony US. In other words, if MIT doesn't have a Japanese patent for this technology, Sony can sell the product in Japan all the live long day, without punishment, because a US patent can't be infringed in a foreign country.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, the "P" in IP stands for "property". If you are provided with a beta version of software, and your contribution is to point out a bug, well fine, you own the property rights to the bug, congratulations. Wait a minute, the bug was already there, you only noted it. Therefore, you don't own the bug either.
If, in addition to pointing out the bug, you provide a solution, then yeah, you own the rights to implementation of the solution. Assuminng of course that you didn't first sign a beta-reviewer contract in which you agreed to assign all IP rights.
You don't own IP because you pointed out a problem; you have to suggest a solution.
I think that if Slashdot takes a stance on software patents as being good or bad in every case, there's no point in ever having a discussion of them. Is /. supposed to take an official stand on everything, and everyone must fall in line with that stand? There would be lots of complaints if everyone who posts an opinion that is contrary to the status quo got modded down just for that reason. This type of article fosters discussion, which is good. I don't mind discussing an issue with someone who doesn't agree with me, but I don't want the forum telling me what to think or say.
Claim 1 has a little more to it than that. The content is updated according to a user profile stored at the server, so it's not really a transfer of content, it's a customized update of content. Still pretty damned broad.
Yeah, lots of references were cited, but the application also pended for less than 2 years. It's not uncommon for a software application to wait longer than that just to get a first action from the PTO. It looks like Sterne, Kessler really buried them in prior art right off the bat and pushed this one through; I'll bet the legal fees for this one were huge. As broad as the claims are, I wouldn't be surprised if there's a related submarime application still pending.
Claim 1 basically recites a method for updating content for a client at the request of a user, with the update coming from the content provider based on a user profile stored at the server. This is my take on a quick read of the claim without looking at the detailed description, but it seems rather broad.
Applications are made public after pending for 18 months. The PTO publishes them in the PTO Gazette, and they are printed and placed in the searchable stacks at the PTO, as well as on the PTO Web site. Anyone in industry or academia can monitor published applications and submit comment directly to the examiner handling the application.
Giving a patent application to people who have received patents in related fields leads to a couple of problems. First, in industry, those reviewers are likely to either be co-workers of the applicant, or competitors of the applicant. In either case, the review is likely to be biased. Second, in the latter case, the PTO would be putting the content of the application - which is confidential until publication - into the hands of the applicant's competition. For those who actually file applications for valid patents, this would be disasterous.
The PTO actually has a sort of peer review in place, as of November, 2000. After 18 months of pendancy, most applications are published, and public comment is invited. This means that review is not limited to just competitors, but to anyone who has an interest, so the review is actually farther-reaching. The applicants are protected in case of infringement based on publication of the application, by being awarded a reasonable royalty for infringing activity dating back to the time of publication, if the issued patent has claims that are substantially similar to those of the published application.
Yeah, great idea. And how do you objectively measure innovation? Obviously, you've filed a submarine patent on an innovatomometer, and you are now trying to artificially create a need for it in the marketplace so that you can collect royalties. Nice try.
You're both wrong. It was a different ACC, that is, Anonymous C. Coward. He couldn't get the patent for it, because there was too much prior art in the form of prior public use by the applicant.
Maybe it's not bureaucratic bungling. In order for an invention to be patentable, it must be described in a way that is "enabling". That is, given the description of the invention, a person of ordinary skill in the art must be able to construct a working model of the invention.
An example of a non-enabled invention would be a teleporter. If you apply for a patent for your teleportation apparatus, and your description only says that it provides near-instantaneous transmission of a human being over vast geographical distances without saying how it works, well, you aren't gonna get a patent, because you haven't enabled your idea; it's not really an invention. If someone actually ever gets such a device to work, that person gets the patent, and you've got no valid gripe just because you had an unworkable idea for the invention first.
The sort of response that ACC got in the story you relate seems to indicate that he didn't provide an enabling description, only a high-level description that can be said to be a great idea, but not a fully developed invention. Later, satellites became a reality because someone else provided that enabling description (and presumably was awarded the patent).
Where is everybody?
I thought they'd never come to their senses.
Filthy Critic...duh
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Prior art doesn't apply to copyrights, only to patents. The standard for getting a copyright is originality, not novelty. That is, you only have to prove that you didn't copy something to get a copyright on it. You don't have to prove that you were the first to have authored it. If you give an infinite number of monkeys an infinite number of typewriters, the one that inevitably churns out "War and Peace" gets a copyright on it, even though he wasn't the first to write it, merely because he didn't copy it.
My decription of finding that a claim is obvious before the Patent Office *is* the letter of the law. Before spouting off uninformed, inane bullshit, look it up: 35 U.S.C. section 103. Gut feelings of a giant hairy spider don't count. Also, your comment that you know that the claim is obvious and you're not even a video engineer actually make you *less* qualified to attest that the invention is obvious. The standard is based on the knowledge of a person of ordinary skill in the art, not one of casual acquaintance with the subject matter.
You're correct that I didn't post my contact information; I have in the past, I forgot this time. If you want to take me up on the offer, write to me at ranterX_98@yahoo.com. I'm putting a yahoo address rather than my primary office address, because I don't need trolls swamping my inbox. If you write to me with a legitimate missive, you'll get my primary address, name, PTO registration number, etc.
The power of complaint? Where, to Slashdot? Preaching to the choir will accomplish nothing. If you don't like the PTO's policy, complain to Congress, they wrote the laws on which the PTO's guidelines are based. If you think a patent is invalid, fight it.
You say that the PTO is incompetent, as if this means that all efforts are futile. In case you weren't paying attention, my original comment stated that I have been successful in invalidating claims before the PTO. The re-examination process does work, for the most part because it overcomes the patent examiner's greatest deficiency - finding relevant prior art. It also overcomes the examiner's second biggest deficiency - applying the prior art to the claim in a meaningful way. Why? Because the person filing the re-examination gets to make the first argument. Do you think a lazy examiner is going to read a ready-made argument for invalidity and spend a great deal of time and effort coming up with a counter-argument for validity if he can avoid it? No, in most cases my argument turns out to be the first rejection sent to the patent holder.
You called my offer insincere and ridiculous. I call your complaint insincere and ridiculous. Anyone can whine about how things should be different. Get off your ass and do something about it instead.
First of all, I *am* a patent attorney, so put a little credence in what I'm saying. Second, I was talking about a re-examination proceding in the Patent Office, which is not decided by "incompetent courts", unless the patent owner loses and appeals. Third, prior art has everything to do with obviousness. A patent claim doesn't pass a gut reaction "duh" test to overcome the obviousness challenge. A patent claim is ruled obvious if there is no single piece of prior art that invalidates the claim by anticipating it (proving that the invention is not novel), but if a combination of teachings from more than one piece of prior art could be used by one of ordinary skill in the art to derive the claimed invention. Finally, complaining without really doing anything accomplishes nothing, except maybe to make you look like a whiner and make the other side look sympathetic.
The offer still stands.
BTW, what's up with the moderation? I make a valid, generous offer directed to the topic of this article, and I sit at zero. Other comments in this thread spread misinformation, and get modded up as informative. I'll bet that this comment, straightening out their misconceptions, continues to sit at zero as well. Slashdot: News for the deluded, stuff that confuses.
I've made this offer before, and no one has taken me up on it, but I'm making it again. You say that this patent fails the obviousness test, and is invalid. I'm a patent attorney, and I've successfully invalidated patent claims through the Patent Office's re-examination process. If you provide me with the prior art necessary to prove that the patent is invalid, and pay the re-examination filing fee ($2520), I'll prepare, file, and prosecute the re-examination for free. It's one thing to complain that a patented invention is obvious because you have a gut feeling about it, and another to prove that it's invalid by backing up your contention with prior art and a good argument. If you don't like that these companies assert patents that you think are invalid, let's do something about it. Put your money where your mouth is.
Watch out, this could be one of those deals like when they published a list of criminals in the paper, saying that they'd won the lottery and to come pick up their money. When they showed up, with the cuffs.
He's your hero?! Are you the one who thinks up his obvious posts? Do you arrange his frilly shirts and wax his moustache? Or are you only allowed to lick his ass?
Your desperate attempts to get everyone's attention have reached a new low.
Illegally copying software is a run-of-the-mill copyright violation. However, Illegally asserting a copyright that isn't yours exposes the violator to liability against the alleged infringer, as well as sanctions by the court and the Copyright Office. A much more serious offense.
WIPO has no jurisdiction over a US patent. WIPO does oversee adherence to the Patent Cooperation Treaty among signatory countries (US and JApan included), and in that respect helps facilitate getting patent rights in other countries. But if a company only has patent rights in the US, WIPO can't enforce those rights across borders. In fact, they'd tell that company that they should have sought international protection prior to getting the patent in the US, wise up next time.
The situation you describe has nothing to do with US law. If MIT has only a US patent, selling TVs in Japan is not infringement, so US law is irrelevant, and nothing of Sony's will be seized. If there is no infringement, Sony is obeying the law, and the US better not be spanking anything. As you said, any multi-national corporation knows how this game is played and carefully toes the line in every country they do business in. How the game is played is getting patents issued in every country that you want protection. If you don't, you're exposed.
In this case, what's important is where the infringing acts take place. If MIT has only US patents, only actions that take place in the US would be considered in determining infringement. If no US acts occur, there is no infringement, and therefore no legitimate reason to seize anything belonging to Sony, whether it's Sony Japan or Sony US. In other words, if MIT doesn't have a Japanese patent for this technology, Sony can sell the product in Japan all the live long day, without punishment, because a US patent can't be infringed in a foreign country.