Cited documents in the patent include:EP1551032; E. CAMPARI, S. FOCARDI, V. GABBANI, V. MONTALBANO, F. PIANTELLI, S. VERONESI: "Overview of H_Ni systems: old experiments and new setup" 5TH ASTI WORKSHOP ON ANOMALIES IN HYDROGEN-DEUTERIUM LOADED METALS, ASTI, ITALY, 2004; S. FOCARDI, V. GABBANI, V. MONTALBANO, F. PIANTELLI, S. VERONESI: "Evidence of Electromagnetic radiation from Ni-H Systems" 11TH INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON CONDENSED MATTER NUCLEAR SCIENCE 2004, MARSEILLE, FRANCE, 2004; CERRON-ZEBALLOS E ET AL: "INVESTIGATION OF ANOMALOUS HEAT PRODUCTION IN NI-H SYSTEMS" SOCIETA ITALIANA DI FISICA, NUOVO CIMENTO A, EDITRICE COMPOSITORI, BOLOGNA, IT, vol. 109A, no. 12, 1 December 1996 (1996-12-01), pages 1645-1654; G. MENGOLI, M. BERNARDINI, C. MANDUCHI, G. ZANNONI: "Anomalous heat effects correlated with electrochemical hydriding of nickel" IL NUOVO CIMENTO, vol. 20D, no. 3, 1998, pages 331-352; EP 2259998A1; and WO9520816; LEWAN MATS: 'Cold fusion may provide one megawatt in Athens' INTERNET CITATION, [Online] 02 February 2011.
So yes, there's a patent application there. Looks like it will be granted, too, based on the latest Examination Report.
The one sentence summary of what they have had acknowledged as their invention is not the title of the patent. It is normally "Claim 1". And, of course, any other independent claims. The claim reads: "A hybrid vehicle, comprising: at least two pairs of wheels, each pair of wheels operable to receive power to propel said hybrid vehicle; a first alternating current (AC) electric motor, operable to provide power to a first pair of said at least two pairs of wheels to propel said hybrid vehicle; a second alternating current (AC) electric motor, operable to provide power to a second pair of said at least two pairs of wheels to propel said hybrid vehicle a third AC electric motor; an engine coupled to said third electric motor, operable to provide power to said at least two wheels to propel the hybrid vehicle, and/or to said third electric motor to drive the third electric motor to generate electric power; a first alternating current-direct current (AC-DC) converter having an AC side coupled to said first electric motor, operable to accept AC or DC current and convert the current to DC or AC current respectively; a second AC-DC converter having an AC side coupled to said second electric motor, operable to accept AC or DC current and convert the current to DC or AC current respectively; a third AC-DC converter coupled to said third electric motor, at least operable to accept AC current and convert the current to DC; an electrical storage device coupled to a DC side of said AC-DC converters, wherein the electrical storage device is operable to store DC energy received from said AC-DC converters and provide DC energy to at least said first and second AC-DC converters for providing power to at least said first and second electric motors; and a controller, operable to start and stop the engine to minimize fuel consumption."
Because often, aspiring artists are not being courted by many labels simultaneously. Remember, most in the music business are looking, and perpetually waiting, for their "big break" - a major label offering them a contract. No-one will turn down a label because they think they'll do better with another. Labels are not a service industry for musicians. Musicians are raw material for the labels' products.
"The case concerned a flu remedy. The manufacturer advertised that buyers who found it did not work would be rewarded £100, a considerable amount of money at the time. The company was found to have been bound by its advertisement, because a contract was formed. The Court of Appeal held the essential elements of a contract were all present, including an offer, acceptance, consideration and an intention to create legal relations."
I believe that it has some precedential value in the US.
I really hate to have to point this out, but almost everything on the internet is copyrighted, in some aspect or another, at least. In fact, nearly everything has some copyrighted component.
I refer you to the US copyright office, with similar provisions applying in almost every other Berne-convention country (including my very own UK).
"When is my work protected? Your work is under copyright protection the moment it is created and fixed in a tangible form that it is perceptible either directly or with the aid of a machine or device.
Do I have to register with your office to be protected? No. In general, registration is voluntary. Copyright exists from the moment the work is created."
Copyright is not acquired, it is merely asserted.
Google cannot possibly have a policy that it only indexes works in which no copyright subsists. I suspect the real policy is that Google removes items from the index if there is a reasonable case that they are infringing copies of a copyright work, or that accessing them is likely to constitute infringement of copyright.
I am a patent attorney [obligatory "you insensitive clod"] before the British and European Patent Offices. Please excuse the slightly off-topic comment, but I'm not sure we're all particularly evil. I see a lot of patent-attorney bashing here on Slashdot. Mostly what we actually do is provide the best possible advice to our clients based on the current state of the law, and argue their case for them in what has evolved to be a very complex legal system. At the same time, we have a fun job which involves dealing with five or so different technologies on our desks on a daily basis, getting up to speed with them quickly and then thinking up detailed and powerful legal and technical arguments to deploy as to why our client's technology might just be worth the grant of a 20-year monopoly, or conversely, why our client's competitor's technology isn't. Most of us have higher technical qualifications, as well as our legal training. In many ways, it's a geek's dream...
Now, the people to whinge about are a) the legislators, and b) the patent offices themselves, who don't always do the best job of examining the patent applications as rigorously as they could. At least the situation is a bit better here in the EU than in the States, though, where as soon as a patent examiner gets any good he goes and qualifies as an attorney...
Equivalently, in Europe and the UK, such compilations can be protected by both database right and copyright in compilations/databases.
For database right to subsist, the qualifying factor is the level of investment in obtaining, verifying or presenting the contents of the database - but not in the creation of the data themselves. In the notable Fixtures Marketing cases, lists of sport fixtures did not attract database right, because the effort involved in the determination of the fixtures at first instance was not qualifying investment.
For copyright in a table or compilation to exists, there must be skill, labour or judgement by the author of the table in its compilation. A slavish listing of facts cannot attract copyright. For copyright in a database to subsist, the selection or arrangement of the contents of the database must be the author's own intellectual creation.
There are more of us on here than you think (part-qualified British and European Patent Attorney)...
NewYorkCountryLawyer is among the most high-profile (and, to give him his due, cogent and clear in his writing) of the legal commentators on here.
Exactly. In many cases, patent offices only conduct prior art searches on previously filed and published applications.
Getting exactly what it is you do into prior-art-space is a useful defence against another person later alleging patent infringement on a subsequently-filed patent.
Interference in national policy by other countries has been historical reality since time immemorial. It's been called under the name of treaties, representations, concords and, ultimately, declarations of war.
EU, for all its faults, is still an excellent method of persuading countries which historically have been over-eager to take up arms against their neighbours to dissipate their tensions in very long, very dull negotiations over the European Standard Paperclip.
I'd rather have that than the regular European wars of the preceding centuries. The EU may be expensive and inconvenient to some degree; the alternative is far more so.
So what's to stop me buying several of these kittens and just making some more, and reselling them? Or is selective breeding now an IP related area? Makes me think - do we now need Open Source hypoallergenic cats?
Now is a really poor time to be entering the stock market in a large way, especially as a first-time investor. The ratio of personal to institutional investors is high, due to media coverage of large market gains last year. Economic indicators are looking decidedly shaky, consumer deby to earnings is dropping ad the population loses confidence in the economy. Recession is not unlikely. The recent corrections mean that prices have just started to normalise to a sensible price/earnings ratio. So there are two courses of action.
1) Use some of your lesiure time to really research the markets and financial planning. If you have good PPE or Economics friends, they can give you places to start. Slashdot wasn't a bad starting point, as I imagine most here have the analytic skills to make sound financial decisions. If you get a feel for the realitites of investing you can use this in your employed life, when most of your colleagues are blowing newfound salaries on fast cars and designer jeans. A good place for you to be thinking about, as you probably don't have enough capital yet to build a sufficiently diverse portfolio from individual shares, is a well-managed fund, one that's been carefully screened to perform well in the rough economic conditions ahead. This is not impossible, it just neeeds you to know what you're doing, and have some experience. This isn't somthing you can learn entirly from books. Buy a few thousand's worth of shares, too - or play 'fantasy share portfolio' games to learn about the markets.
2) Spend your life paying others to have done 1 and hence know enough to be intelligent about your money. This is not necessarly a bad option. Everyone chooses their skill and specialism, and it's a lot of work really understanding the trading. Others will pay you to know about your degree subject, you do the same for them about finance. But with a grounding in 1, you can tell whether the people you pay are a) doing what you need them to do, and b) not taking to large a cut. This option, at this moment in time, probably involves investing in a long-term, high-interest savings account, and let the bank shoulder the risk for a while.
Since when was 10-30% overall from worst to best performer regarded as tremendous? The impact of the disk subsystem is around 30% on daily tasks, and around 70-90% on disk-intensive tasks. So we're looking at a ' tremendous performance increase' of around 10% to 25% in the best case, only achievable by owning the worst performer, and thence upgrading to the best available technology.
"but some people are required to be reachable, whether they be building managers, doctors or anyone else who is on call but still wants to come watch the show and enjoy the music."
Since when? Not in my book, they're not. All our shows run tue-sun, there's plenty of opportunity for them to come on their nights off. If you're on call, you shouldn't be undertaking an activity that requires you to be undisturbed for 2hrs.
The big problems are: 1. radio mikes 2. outfits with their own kit/musicians 3. higher power cellphones developed in the last few years, also wifi devices
Aside from this, it's just not practical to recable a theatre last wired 10yrs ago to cope with 10-20 high-power microwave sources inside the auditorium.
I stage manage shows in Oxford, UK. We have had this problem ever since the networks moved over to GSM. My preferred solution is to make the following announcement at the start of every show, over the God Mike, and as the house-lights dim (so people are concentrating and not talking). For example,
"Ladies and Gentlemen, welcome to tonight's production of Antigone. As a courtesy to the performers, crew and to your fellow audience members, we ask you to check that pagers, mobile telephones and other electronic devices are completely switched off for the duration of the performance, as these devices will interfere with the theatre's sound systems even while in silent mode."
We repeat this after each interval. This usually does the trick.
Prior art for just about every story already exists - all that can be considered now is combinations. Whether the Patent Office regards elements of stories as atoms, and therefore allows the patenting of the discovery of certain stories (molecules) with particular combinations, and therefore properties, is certainly a contentious point, as in biochemistry and the pharma industries. As the philosopher says, there are no new stories under the sun.
Nonetheless, if they believe that there are new story-types, I would suggest they start with the AT index, a kind of mathematical expression of the elements and content of a folktale, and then look at its expansion to modern literature. And the AT index already contains some redundancy.
Slashdot Mirror
Patent applications on file include WO2009125444A1, with US and European phases published as US 2011005506 (A1) and EP 2259998 (A1). You can see the European prosecution here: https://register.epo.org/espacenet/application?number=EP08873805
Cited documents in the patent include:EP1551032; E. CAMPARI, S. FOCARDI, V. GABBANI, V. MONTALBANO, F. PIANTELLI, S. VERONESI: "Overview of H_Ni systems: old experiments and new setup" 5TH ASTI WORKSHOP ON ANOMALIES IN HYDROGEN-DEUTERIUM LOADED METALS, ASTI, ITALY, 2004; S. FOCARDI, V. GABBANI, V. MONTALBANO, F. PIANTELLI, S. VERONESI: "Evidence of Electromagnetic radiation from Ni-H Systems" 11TH INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON CONDENSED MATTER NUCLEAR SCIENCE 2004, MARSEILLE, FRANCE, 2004; CERRON-ZEBALLOS E ET AL: "INVESTIGATION OF ANOMALOUS HEAT PRODUCTION IN NI-H SYSTEMS" SOCIETA ITALIANA DI FISICA, NUOVO CIMENTO A, EDITRICE COMPOSITORI, BOLOGNA, IT, vol. 109A, no. 12, 1 December 1996 (1996-12-01), pages 1645-1654; G. MENGOLI, M. BERNARDINI, C. MANDUCHI, G. ZANNONI: "Anomalous heat effects correlated with electrochemical hydriding of nickel" IL NUOVO CIMENTO, vol. 20D, no. 3, 1998, pages 331-352; EP 2259998A1; and WO9520816; LEWAN MATS: 'Cold fusion may provide one megawatt in Athens' INTERNET CITATION, [Online] 02 February 2011.
So yes, there's a patent application there. Looks like it will be granted, too, based on the latest Examination Report.
The one sentence summary of what they have had acknowledged as their invention is not the title of the patent. It is normally "Claim 1". And, of course, any other independent claims. The claim reads: "A hybrid vehicle, comprising:
at least two pairs of wheels, each pair of wheels operable to receive power to propel said hybrid vehicle;
a first alternating current (AC) electric motor, operable to provide power to a first pair of said at least two pairs of wheels to propel said hybrid vehicle;
a second alternating current (AC) electric motor, operable to provide power to a second pair of said at least two pairs of wheels to propel said hybrid vehicle
a third AC electric motor;
an engine coupled to said third electric motor, operable to provide power to said at least two wheels to propel the hybrid vehicle, and/or to said third electric motor to drive the third electric motor to generate electric power;
a first alternating current-direct current (AC-DC) converter having an AC side coupled to said first electric motor, operable to accept AC or DC current and convert the current to DC or AC current respectively;
a second AC-DC converter having an AC side coupled to said second electric motor, operable to accept AC or DC current and convert the current to DC or AC current respectively;
a third AC-DC converter coupled to said third electric motor, at least operable to accept AC current and convert the current to DC;
an electrical storage device coupled to a DC side of said AC-DC converters, wherein the electrical storage device is operable to store DC energy received from said AC-DC converters and provide DC energy to at least said first and second AC-DC converters for providing power to at least said first and second electric motors; and
a controller, operable to start and stop the engine to minimize fuel consumption."
As another EPA, I wish there were a page we could point people to with some basic bits of patent law on it just to calm everyone down a bit...
Thank Dawkins! Finally, someone who gets substantive patent law on Slashdot!
Really, there should be a page we can point people to who misunderstand the concepts of novelty, inventive step, and scope of protection...
Because often, aspiring artists are not being courted by many labels simultaneously. Remember, most in the music business are looking, and perpetually waiting, for their "big break" - a major label offering them a contract. No-one will turn down a label because they think they'll do better with another. Labels are not a service industry for musicians. Musicians are raw material for the labels' products.
Carbolic Smoke Ball says otherwise...
"The case concerned a flu remedy. The manufacturer advertised that buyers who found it did not work would be rewarded £100, a considerable amount of money at the time. The company was found to have been bound by its advertisement, because a contract was formed. The Court of Appeal held the essential elements of a contract were all present, including an offer, acceptance, consideration and an intention to create legal relations."
I believe that it has some precedential value in the US.
I really hate to have to point this out, but almost everything on the internet is copyrighted, in some aspect or another, at least. In fact, nearly everything has some copyrighted component.
I refer you to the US copyright office, with similar provisions applying in almost every other Berne-convention country (including my very own UK).
http://www.copyright.gov/help/faq/faq-general.html#mywork
"When is my work protected?
Your work is under copyright protection the moment it is created and fixed in a tangible form that it is perceptible either directly or with the aid of a machine or device.
Do I have to register with your office to be protected?
No. In general, registration is voluntary. Copyright exists from the moment the work is created."
Copyright is not acquired, it is merely asserted.
Google cannot possibly have a policy that it only indexes works in which no copyright subsists. I suspect the real policy is that Google removes items from the index if there is a reasonable case that they are infringing copies of a copyright work, or that accessing them is likely to constitute infringement of copyright.
I am a patent attorney [obligatory "you insensitive clod"] before the British and European Patent Offices. Please excuse the slightly off-topic comment, but I'm not sure we're all particularly evil. I see a lot of patent-attorney bashing here on Slashdot. Mostly what we actually do is provide the best possible advice to our clients based on the current state of the law, and argue their case for them in what has evolved to be a very complex legal system. At the same time, we have a fun job which involves dealing with five or so different technologies on our desks on a daily basis, getting up to speed with them quickly and then thinking up detailed and powerful legal and technical arguments to deploy as to why our client's technology might just be worth the grant of a 20-year monopoly, or conversely, why our client's competitor's technology isn't. Most of us have higher technical qualifications, as well as our legal training. In many ways, it's a geek's dream...
Now, the people to whinge about are a) the legislators, and b) the patent offices themselves, who don't always do the best job of examining the patent applications as rigorously as they could. At least the situation is a bit better here in the EU than in the States, though, where as soon as a patent examiner gets any good he goes and qualifies as an attorney...
Interesting. So $2/hour is acceptable to pay for an hour's gameplay, whereas $3/hour is excessive...
Achievement please :-)
Thank you kindly, sir...
Really? Surely you know that many forms of two-way radiotelephone misuse can also lead to heavy punishment in many jurisdictions.
Equivalently, in Europe and the UK, such compilations can be protected by both database right and copyright in compilations/databases.
For database right to subsist, the qualifying factor is the level of investment in obtaining, verifying or presenting the contents of the database - but not in the creation of the data themselves. In the notable Fixtures Marketing cases, lists of sport fixtures did not attract database right, because the effort involved in the determination of the fixtures at first instance was not qualifying investment.
For copyright in a table or compilation to exists, there must be skill, labour or judgement by the author of the table in its compilation. A slavish listing of facts cannot attract copyright. For copyright in a database to subsist, the selection or arrangement of the contents of the database must be the author's own intellectual creation.
There are more of us on here than you think (part-qualified British and European Patent Attorney)... NewYorkCountryLawyer is among the most high-profile (and, to give him his due, cogent and clear in his writing) of the legal commentators on here.
IPKat has a very nice analysis, as usual, here:
http://ipkitten.blogspot.com/2009/01/breaking-news-wto-panel-report-on-us.html.
However, IPKat concludes that it's more of a score-draw than a loss by the US.
Exactly. In many cases, patent offices only conduct prior art searches on previously filed and published applications. Getting exactly what it is you do into prior-art-space is a useful defence against another person later alleging patent infringement on a subsequently-filed patent.
Interference in national policy by other countries has been historical reality since time immemorial. It's been called under the name of treaties, representations, concords and, ultimately, declarations of war. EU, for all its faults, is still an excellent method of persuading countries which historically have been over-eager to take up arms against their neighbours to dissipate their tensions in very long, very dull negotiations over the European Standard Paperclip. I'd rather have that than the regular European wars of the preceding centuries. The EU may be expensive and inconvenient to some degree; the alternative is far more so.
So what's to stop me buying several of these kittens and just making some more, and reselling them? Or is selective breeding now an IP related area? Makes me think - do we now need Open Source hypoallergenic cats?
Now is a really poor time to be entering the stock market in a large way, especially as a first-time investor. The ratio of personal to institutional investors is high, due to media coverage of large market gains last year. Economic indicators are looking decidedly shaky, consumer deby to earnings is dropping ad the population loses confidence in the economy. Recession is not unlikely. The recent corrections mean that prices have just started to normalise to a sensible price/earnings ratio. So there are two courses of action.
1) Use some of your lesiure time to really research the markets and financial planning. If you have good PPE or Economics friends, they can give you places to start. Slashdot wasn't a bad starting point, as I imagine most here have the analytic skills to make sound financial decisions. If you get a feel for the realitites of investing you can use this in your employed life, when most of your colleagues are blowing newfound salaries on fast cars and designer jeans. A good place for you to be thinking about, as you probably don't have enough capital yet to build a sufficiently diverse portfolio from individual shares, is a well-managed fund, one that's been carefully screened to perform well in the rough economic conditions ahead. This is not impossible, it just neeeds you to know what you're doing, and have some experience. This isn't somthing you can learn entirly from books. Buy a few thousand's worth of shares, too - or play 'fantasy share portfolio' games to learn about the markets.
2) Spend your life paying others to have done 1 and hence know enough to be intelligent about your money. This is not necessarly a bad option. Everyone chooses their skill and specialism, and it's a lot of work really understanding the trading. Others will pay you to know about your degree subject, you do the same for them about finance. But with a grounding in 1, you can tell whether the people you pay are a) doing what you need them to do, and b) not taking to large a cut. This option, at this moment in time, probably involves investing in a long-term, high-interest savings account, and let the bank shoulder the risk for a while.
Lenovo have already done this for Thinkpads - see ThinkPad Advanced Dock
o ck
http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/ThinkPad_Advanced_D
discussion of how well it works at:
http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.php?t=22358
http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.php?t=25584
[Name of your company] == University of Conneticut by any chance? or is that too much of a coincidence?
Since when was 10-30% overall from worst to best performer regarded as tremendous? The impact of the disk subsystem is around 30% on daily tasks, and around 70-90% on disk-intensive tasks. So we're looking at a ' tremendous performance increase' of around 10% to 25% in the best case, only achievable by owning the worst performer, and thence upgrading to the best available technology.
"but some people are required to be reachable, whether they be building managers, doctors or anyone else who is on call but still wants to come watch the show and enjoy the music."
Since when? Not in my book, they're not. All our shows run tue-sun, there's plenty of opportunity for them to come on their nights off. If you're on call, you shouldn't be undertaking an activity that requires you to be undisturbed for 2hrs.
The big problems are:
1. radio mikes
2. outfits with their own kit/musicians
3. higher power cellphones developed in the last few years, also wifi devices
Aside from this, it's just not practical to recable a theatre last wired 10yrs ago to cope with 10-20 high-power microwave sources inside the auditorium.
I stage manage shows in Oxford, UK. We have had this problem ever since the networks moved over to GSM. My preferred solution is to make the following announcement at the start of every show, over the God Mike, and as the house-lights dim (so people are concentrating and not talking). For example,
"Ladies and Gentlemen, welcome to tonight's production of Antigone. As a courtesy to the performers, crew and to your fellow audience members, we ask you to check that pagers, mobile telephones and other electronic devices are completely switched off for the duration of the performance, as these devices will interfere with the theatre's sound systems even while in silent mode."
We repeat this after each interval. This usually does the trick.
http://www.kfc.com/buffalosnacker/Checkage.asp takes you direct to the coupon - no need to watch the advert.
Prior art for just about every story already exists - all that can be considered now is combinations. Whether the Patent Office regards elements of stories as atoms, and therefore allows the patenting of the discovery of certain stories (molecules) with particular combinations, and therefore properties, is certainly a contentious point, as in biochemistry and the pharma industries. As the philosopher says, there are no new stories under the sun.
Nonetheless, if they believe that there are new story-types, I would suggest they start with the AT index, a kind of mathematical expression of the elements and content of a folktale, and then look at its expansion to modern literature. And the AT index already contains some redundancy.