Taking attendance is one thing, its quite another to know each and every step someone takes.
Look - we're talking about schools. They're supposed to know where the kids are at all times. If they didn't, and something bad happened, the parents would sue the school.
Do you really feel this is the best way to teach kids about freedom? They are free yet are tracked every second of every day?
The kids have no freedom while they're in school. Their comings and goings are completely dictated by their class schedules. And that's the extent of the "tracking" - it's not "every second of every day," as you assert, but merely while they're on campus. Nothing requires them to carry RFID tags when they're not in school. (And if the school tried to mandate anything like that, I'd be just as infuriated as you are about this.)
if you know where everyone is or was, you can run some juicy analysis on it and gain more knowledge, like god has.
Warning: The following comment will probably terrify you.
The school already knows where they are, through a diabolical tool known as... brace yourself... class schedules. That's right - they already know exactly where the kids are... because they command them to go to certain classrooms through the day. And they even punish the kids for not following orders! It's like Stalinist Russia! O, the humanity!
Seriously. Knee-jerk responses like this don't help the privacy movement. They make the privacy movement look paranoid and foolish, which allows people to disregard it in the future.
It is about INSTILLING the idea that tracking people is ok in young minds. People will grow up thinking hey government, put a GPS receiver on my back, I have nothing to hide! Due to this our future governments will have absolute power over the people because as children they were taught it was ok.
First, it's not "the government" - it's a school. A better logical extension is tracking by your future employer. And that's already close to reality, given the "always-available" nature of the professional world (cellphones, pagers, Blackberries.) If you want to fight that battle, you'll need a tricked-out Delorean set to 1985.
Second, the tracking is strictly limited to while the kids are on school grounds. They're free to chuck the ID cards when they leave campus. This isn't pervasive, nefarious surveillance - which, I agree, is offensive - and I doubt the kids will get inured to permanent surveillance by this limited function.
Third, your response has a knee-jerk "oh-no-Orwellian-future!" quality to it that diminishes the privacy movement. If you do this chicken-little routine every time someone suggests tracking anything, then people are going to write off privacy advocates as idealistic hippies. Many kinds of tracking are bad. A few kinds of tracking are actually useful to you. You'll do better if you accept this now and pick your battles.
Finally - I can't believe someone modded my initial response -1 overrated. It had been rated a 2. (rolls eyes) I guess that's what happens when anyone challenges the Slashdot majority vote...
Worse yet, in an elementary school it should be pretty obvious when a student isn't there, since the student only has one teacher.
During four out of my eight grade-school years, I had three teachers. One taught math and science; one taught social studies, history, and geography; one taught English. These weren't massive schools in some overcrowded metropolitan area, but a suburb of Cleveland that approximates typical middle America.
In this hectic environment, any kids who wanted to skip class probably could. That was in the 1980's - it's probably more chaotic today.
I think that model is on the upswing - and it's a good thing, since it dispels the myth that teachers are good at all subjects. But it does create a problem keeping track of students, which is why I can't complain about this.
And look at it this way: Taking attendance takes time. 10 minutes a day * 200 school days = an extra 33 hours of class time per year.
Nothing like a good controversy to make an entrepreneur an about-face...
It's just too bad that the "controversy" detracts attention from the actual issue.
I'm a pretty strong privacy advocate, but I simply can't understand the parents' uproar over this. Teachers take attendance, and hall monitors watch hallways between periods. RFIDs take attendance and watch hallway movements. What's the difference?
I can certainly understand the objection to posting RFID sensors outside bathrooms - that serves no legitimate purpose - we don't care if little Johnny stayed on the can for 45 minutes 'cause he's constipated. And it just... seems... sketchy. So the school removed those. Problem solved.
I can also understand that there's an abuse potential, e.g., people getting hold of some kind of tracker and tracking your kid when he's out of school. So Johnny picks up his ID before he gets on the school bus, and he leaves it at the door when he gets home. For the most part, problem solved.
And, I can understand that it's hardly foolproof: Johnny can just carry Mark's ID around all day as evidence of attendance while Mark skips school. No system is perfect, especially not on the first iteration. People have to try them in the field in order to work out the kinks.
In summary - sure, there are concerns. They can be circumvented or simply ignored. In the absence of a solid complaint, I have to chalk this up to parents protesting primarily for attention-whore purposes... people will rah-rah for any cause if they think they'll get on TV because of it.:shakes head:
Hospitals, universities and so called 'non profit' institutions are all still corporations.
Now you're quibbling. Sure, hospitals and universities incorporate - primarily so that they can take advantage of some techncical benefits of the tax code. If you're going to be this picky, then technically, our law sees every "corporation" as a "person," so your point is moot.
If you want to switch to practical terms, well, your point is still moot. You're railing against government sponsorship of "corporations" via the Bayh-Dole Act, and now you're including hospitals and universities in your definition of "corporations." I doubt many would agree that the government should stop funding academic research (solely on the basis that universities are "corporations," and therefore somehow evil.)
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A corporation need not be "for profit" to actually serve the private interests of its shareholders.
Actually, that's the primary legal difference between nonprofit and for-profit institutions: nonprofits cannot use their funds to benefit any private individual (including - no, especially - shareholders.)
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If you are taking the position that handing over patents on government funded research is not intended to actually be a form of wellfare subsidies for large corporations (rather than "people"), then why do you rationalize that subsidy by showing that the government also subsidizes small businesses?
You've misconstrued my purpose. Small businesses are "people," in the finest-grain sense of the word that is practical for this purpose. The government asks a few people to get together and make an employment-class commitment to work on the funded research. I don't think that's asking to much.
The alternative is to write personal checks (of large value!) to specific individuals to carry out research. That has a hideous taint to it, and the potentials for corruption are tremendous. Moreover, no one in their right mind would take on such personal liability. If a company works on government-funded research that doesn't pan out, the company can basically fold. (Most startups do, within five years, because prospective research is risky.) But an individual may be saddled with paying back some of that money... who'd undertake such a personal risk?
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Proving non-use would require someone to be able to prove a negative. Exceedingly difficult to do.
In the abstract - e.g., "there is no god" - yes, it's exceedingly possible. In a specific instance, with limited objects to examine, it's pretty easy. Look: { 1 4 12 13 19 26 32 } - I can prove that this set does not contain the number 16.
I'm not being smarmy here; I'm showing how "proving the negative" is done. It's pretty easy: company X patents a fantastic technique for drive compression, let's say, but they abandon work on the technology and solely assert it defensively. If it's abandoned long enough, any company that actually wants to use it can sue for patent abuse, and simply must show that the company hasn't offered the technology in any product. Hardly an impossible task.
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However, the government ought not help to cover the cost of research and then give the private partnet a 100% ownership stake in the fruits of that labour.
(sigh) You're disregarding the fact that no business is going to pick up only part of it. Seriously, it doesn't get much easier than this. There are plenty of fish in the sea of commerce - why waste time pursuing one that another fisherman has also hooked? They would have to pull against each other as much as against their prey, and if they're lucky, each of them gets half of a torn-apart fish.
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Contrasted with mundain commercial enterprises, your example of pharmaceutical companies is a special case of a product which costs a fortune to test, is very dangerous, and is relatively inexpensive to produce. It is not the general case of commercialization of inventions or business
I have thought about this, but the task is basically too large. The things that are being patented are too obvious, too common - invisible like a tree in the forest. Until someone takes a patent out on them of course, and pretends it is a unique invention instead of a fact of life.
So here's a second suggestion, if you're truly motivated: Sign up as a software patent examiner for the USPTO. Surely they need competent IT people to trundle forth rejections of obvious, everyday software. It's kind of like the army - the pay isn't great, but you're doing your country a great service - and it's highly unlikely you'll get shot.
It doesn't matter if it's obviously bogus on a casual review, the fact remains that they have the most money to burn, and can drag almost anyone through the "justice" system until they are quivering whimpering paupers. It wouldn't take too many public and loud examples of this nature to throw quite the chill into independent development of the overt and above board kind.
Do you have any examples of such conduct? Has Microsoft ever strangled any competitor through the use of a bad patent? Microsoft has done a lot of egregious things over the years - but this isn't one of them.
Indeed, the only way Microsoft has violated the goals of the patent system is by willfully infringing others' patents. The software patent held by Stac Electronics was the only reason Microsoft could not freely abscond with their technology. Similarly Eolas Technologies, Inc., which developed a web browser plug-in technology way back in 1994 - a year before Microsoft released Internet Explorer 1.0.
I can also cite the continued development of USPTO reexamination proceedings - an obvious and useful solution to the problem of $xMM patent litigation. Interested third parties can now request (and partake in) reexamination of issued patents in light of unconsidered prior art. This proceeding hasn't been perfected yet, but in a few years, your complaint may no longer be a business reality.
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This is a company that successfully fought off the US government and pretty much got away with it. Their technical legal "loss" wasn't a loss,not to them anyway, when they are allowed to print up their own "money" to use to pay the fines, and that "money" went to brainwash the next generation into still using their products.
That is, indeed, a shame. Sadly, our government has lost all focus of the purposes of antitrust law. The FTC has simply surrendered its obligation to prevent excessive consolidation. I don't know when or why the antitrust system lost its head, but the consequences will be - are already - catastrophic.
In Microsoft's case: It had an incentive to bust out the big (expensive) guns in that case, since the government had hinted at trying to break up the company. That would have been an excellent, appropriate, and deeply interesting result. Sadly, this didn't happen. The unconfirmed rumor is that the government accepted a plea bargain in exchange for backdoor access to Microsoft's security technologies... which, scarily, is fully in keeping with this administration's tactics. (Notice that the prosecuting attorney was none other than John Ashcroft, yet another paranoid Bush-backing crackpot.)
However, this sidebar is irrelevant in a discussion about software patents.
Responding to your general point that MS does what it wants: At least it's learned its lesson about respecting software patents. When Connectix developed a truly exceptional Intel hardware emulator, and patented some of the emulation techniques, Microsoft didn't ignore them and recreate the wheel. It bought the company and released the software as its own. This is a good result.
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Then there's the question and observation that a construct such as "linux" isn't really owned by anyone, except the copyright Linus owns of course for the kernel.
I've responded to this in detail in another response. To recap briefly: Microsoft wouldn't dare try, given that IBM is the owner of the world's largest arsenal of software patents, and also a friendly giant when it comes to Linux. Tellingly, Linus Torvalds is not concerned about this prospect.
The bottom-line professed concept of IP is that no one will innovate without the chance to make monopoly levels of profit.
No one has ever asserted that "no one" will invent. Patents, nor any other form of IP protection, have never been asserted as the sine qua non of invention. They are merely an "incentive." Some who would choose not to invent may be persuaded to do so. Others who would choose to invent may be encouraged to work harder on finishing and commercializing their invention.
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Therefore the proper means of competing in a free market is to get to market quickly with a superior product, price it to sell fast, make your money fast, and get on with the next product.
Oh, great! Just what we need - a bunch of half-baked, bug-ridden products that people whipped together fastfastfast and dumped on the consumer to make a quick buck. Screw customer support; we created that product last year - we've done eight others in the meantime!
Yikes. The net is awash in incomplete concept software - we don't need more of it. Have you never visited Winfiles.com?
(Yes, that's a joke. But I assert that if you're looking for an application to do something simple and stupid - e.g., scheduled file transfer - you're likely to go through a dozen shareware packages before you find something remotely decent. The rest is junk, if it works at all.)
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ALL IP law is detrimental to the advancement of the species. Period.
(Sigh) This abstract, unsupported assertion gets tiresome by the sixth time one encounters it.
Copyright law arose about 20 minutes after the invention of the printing press. Trade secret law has been a mainstay of our business system for eons. The need for patent law is expressed in Article 1 of the U.S. Constitution, and patent-like systems date back to early Greece and Rome. If the issue were as simple and obvious as you assert, then a whole lot of people have made a whole lot of unwise choices.
But for company X to establish that legal right, they would have to spend some significant money to have the patent invalidated. In the meantime, Microsoft has the presumption.
No, they don't. I keep making this point, but it keeps getting missed. Company X need not take the affirmative, expensive step of invalidating Microsoft's patent. (Maybe this is impossible, because the patent is valid.) It need not do anything. It can go ahead and keep using it.
Company X has no incentive to act - it should just keep doing what it's doing. Even if it finds out that Company X is using the ISNOT operator, Microsoft has no reason to stop them from doing so, and doing so would be an awful PR move. Both parties do nothing, and this is a win/win result.
There's nothing "illegal" about this, by the way. Microsoft has the legal right to stop them, but no legal obligation. Unless Microsoft asserts the patent, the university has done nothing wrong.
What do you make of open source software, and its viability in the face of such an extensive body of software patents? It seems that software patents have the potential to simply terminate open source software development and distribution.
I have several responses.
First, if it had the power to do so, Microsoft would have done so already. They've viewed Linux as a gathering threat for at least five years, and as you may have noticed, they're not keen on the concept of competition.
Second, Microsoft would have an affirmative duty to show which patents Linux violated, and how. Linux could respond by taking those technologies out of the kernel. Certainly the inventive power of the Linux army can invent around anything Microsoft can throw their way.
Third, if Microsoft tried to do so, it would face a commercial behemoth with an equally foreboding arsenal: IBM, which, in fact, is the world's largest software patentee. And IBM is Linux's big brother. Microsoft stands to lose much more than Linux in a patent gunfight.
Fourth, Linux has its own pony in this show - not software patents, but defensive publication. Arguably, open-sourcing the Linux kernel blocks anyone else from patenting anything it contains (unless they can prove they invented it first, and that's an uphill battle.)
Finally, it's noteworthy that Linus Torvalds doesn't seem concerned. (Link goes to Google archive of a thread originally on kerneltrap.org, which sadly is no longer available.) To wit: Dan Phillips: I suggest all vm hackers have a closer look at this [software patent]. It's stupid, but we can't just ignore it. Linus Torvalds: Actually, we can, and I will.... The fact is, technical people are better off not looking at patents. If you don't know what they cover and where they are, you won't be knowingly infringing on them. If somebody sues you, you change the algorithm or you just hire a hit-man to whack the stupid git.
The government doesn't really encourage "people" to do this. It encourages corporations to do this.
Incorrect. The Bayh-Dole Act is aimed at nonprofit institutions - mostly universities, but also nonprofit hospitals. Corporations are only incidental beneficiaries - a means to an end. If the government retained the rights to the technology, guess what they'd do with it? They'd license it to corporations, because the government doesn't produce commercial products.
I strongly encourage you to read up on this act. As one sign of its incredible effectiveness, both businesspeople and academic researchers widely hail it as a great move. How often does that happen?
As for encouraging "people," the government has many programs to help "people" to create companies around new technologies. Read up on the Small Business Innovation Research program, where states sponsor technology initiatives for small businesses (and only small businesses can apply for them.)
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Private entities also retain ownership of vast and sundry technologies - which, as it happens, sit on shelves completely unused.
Read up on the doctrine of patent abuse. Patentees have an obligation to use the technology they patent; if they don't, they can be forced into a compulsory licensing scheme.
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Your principle ignores the realities of business. It is not essential to have a monopoly on an invention in order to commercialize it.
Okay, I'll add one more topic to your growing go-research-this list: Check out how the pharmaceutical industry works. Academia creates thousands of concepts for new drugs every year, but only a few actually get turned into drugs. How do pharmaceutical companies choose candidates for further development? Think about it: the company must push the drug through several years of research, and then FDA approval. That costs a ton of money. Why would Merck take that chance if the moment its drug is FDA-approved, Pfizer, Eli Lilly, and Millennium can start selling the same drug?
For this reason, pharmaceutical companies solely focus on drugs that can be patented. This is an undeniable business reality.
This also has a direct line to software. Any company intent on developing a new software concept will probably choose Windows - by far, the largest software market in America - and thus faces Microsoft as a potential competitor. If the idea is good enough, Microsoft is an inevitable competitor. Now, why would any company spend $$$$$$$$ to develop a market that Microsoft can preempt without a second thought? Do you think the answer might involve software patents?
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Your principle also ignores the realities of democracy. The important factor is that the people have access to the invention which the people funded.
Yes. And "access to the invention" is exactly what patents are designed to promote. In exchange for the modest price of a fixed-term monopoly, the public enjoys the benefit of a corporation doing a ton of research, creating an invention, and disclosing the results along with the best way of using them. That seems quite fair to me - and to the framers of the Constitution.
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Commercialization is not the purpose of government research.
Oh - so we should spend our tax dollars on research that has no tangible benefit for humanity? "Commercialization" is just a concise term for "technology that people will find useful enough to buy." Hardly seems like "greedy business guys" in that context, huh?
But what if some company developed an ISNOT style operator for some internal project in the last 30 years? Then Microsoft would be unjustly taking the use of such operators away from any distributed software for a period of twenty years, despite the lack of true novelty.
Again, if it's solely for an internal project, then the company can continue using it. Microsoft has no way to find out about it - and no incentive, either. Stopping company X from using the ISNOT operator has no income potential for Microsoft.
Also, note that it doesn't necessarily take a $2MM lawsuit to resolve issues about bad patents. Thanks to the American Inventors Protection Act of 1999, the USPTO offers a new inter partes reexamination proceeding: third parties can raise previously unconsidered prior art to have an issued patent invalidated by the USPTO. This inter partes system isn't perfect - as this report indicates - but it's clearly a step in the right direction. We may soon see the end of the "but it's too expensive to litigate it" argument.
The problem I have with software patents, David, is that such a very small percentage of software is written for sale. Most is written for use. The USPTO seems to have no reasonable way of knowing what techniques have and have not been used by some programmer somewhere in the country.
True, but that sword cuts both ways.
One of the practical limitations of patents is that enforcement implies discovery of an unauthorized use: the patentee must find defendants who are using it and must prosecute them. In the context of private use, this is completely impossible. If a company wants to develop their own BASIC compiler with an ISNOT operator, solely for internal use, then Microsoft can do nothing to stop them. This kind of infringmenet is not approved, but is widely acknowledged and tolerated (for lack of any workable alternative.)
True, this effect is not part of the explicit theory of patent law. But I assert that it's an implicit limitation to what should be patented. Certainly it's a guiding factor for any attorney or businessperson whilst deciding whether or not a patent is worth pursuing.
Ah, but "is-not is not not-is". (Keith Laumer, The Great Time Machine Hoax, 1964)
Heh. Having not read the story (yet), I presume this is valid in the context of fuzzy logic - that "100% true" isn't the same as "not 100% not true."
In the context of the Visual BASIC ISNOT operator, there is no such fuzziness. Either two pointers point to the same object, or they don't. "ISNOT" can be written as "p1 != p1"; "!(IS)" can be written as "!(p1 == p2)". Here, they're the same.
On the other hand...if I, entirely on my own and without knowledge or information of the patented entity, discover the exact same thing and am prevented from using it, well, that's pretty tyrannic, as well, no?
Unfortunatey, that's practically unenforceable. Every company on the planet would claim that they "independently" developed the exact same method in order to avoid licensing the technology (or for actually investing in independent invention of the technology.)
Patents constructively notify people as to what is and isn't patented. If "I didn't know I was speeding" were a defense to speeding, no one would ever get a speeding ticket.
I have this theory, that all these really silly patents won't be used in court, but used for the Microsoft "Get the facts" campaign...
What I mean is that this patent will probably never ever end up in court, but it will most certainly end up in a "Linux violates 953292493294 patents" statistic.
Oh, I'm sure that's one of the intended uses. Companies do this all the time. A fellow patent attorney who used to do work for Kodak tells me that they patented tons of minutiae about their photo developing chemistry - solely to create a boulder of an obstacle for competitive development.
My only response is that these companies are damaging their own case by patenting such trivialities:
Microsoft says, "We have 1,000,000 patents."
Opponent responds, "Yeah, like the 'ISNOT' patent, and the 'Condensed Lat/Long' patent, and the 'Tapping on a PDA' patent.'"
It raises the inference that these patents are a whole lot of expensive drapery - that the average value of each one is quite low, and that the number of meritorious patents is only a small portion of the cited mass.
You've posted an interesting and insightful response. I hope those with mod points reward you accordingly.
No, it wouldn't be a method of implementing, a method of implementing would be "typing on the keyboard while sat at a computer, then running the compiler". It would be something like:
You're right - "implementing" isn't the right word. How about "representing," as in, a method of modeling and applying a psychoacoustic model to raw sound data? Regardless of the specific language chosen, I have to agree with you. And I believe that what you've suggested should be patentable (and has been patented.)
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The implementation of a known psychoacoustic model is trivial. That's the point. Putting any known fact into software is trivial.
Again, I agree with you. Of course, hardware circuitry and software are, in most cases, functionally interchangeable. The concept is the important point, and it is also the target of the patent. It need not be implemented in software.
The focus on "software" patents is really just focusing on concepts that are more easily or familiarly expressed as software. If I came up with a valuable computing concept and patented it as a circuit, Slashdot wouldn't think twice about it - which says more about the Slashdot crowd than about the nature of software patents.
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Patents protect the investment in the discovery of scientific and engineering knowledge where the incentive to discover the knowledge is that it can be used in business, and when it can be discovered by study of your products instead of putting in the effort to research as you did originally.
That's very close. My only quibble is that it's not limited to the discovery of such knowledge, but also encourages the application of it. A technology may be accidentally discovered - e.g., in academia - but unless it can be protected, companies aren't likely to apply it.
(In my field - biotechnology - this is a fact of life: interesting disease pathways and drug targets go unexplored by pharmaceutical companies, because the researcher published the findings and the idea can't be globally protected. As a result, thousands of disease-curing concepts are sitting on the shelves gathering dust, because no company will invest in its development.)
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In software: For shipped products, the structure and design could be discovered by study of a product, so patents would seem to apply. For non-shipped products (eg, Amazon backend), trade secrets would seem to apply. The development of the structure and design is, however, quite a mechanical task, so there is very little investment in that aspect and patents wouldn't apply after all.
With one exception (see below), your summary complies with the theory and practice of intellectual property. There's little point in patenting a process that is strictly reserved for in-house use. And as you state, the "effort" in setting up the back end does not imply patentability - the USPTO regularly rejects applications that are the "ordinary work of engineers." Without an inventive hook, a chosen network and software configuration isn't patentable.
The exception that I noted is this: Back-end software is still patentable, largely because what separates "back-end" from "commercial" is simply a business decision. Consider that Google now sells appliances that apply its "back-end" technology to any other website. Who's to say that Amazon won't choose to license its e-commerce software (for $$$$$$) to other e-commerce sites?
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In fact, drive compression is relatively easy.... Microsoft should be allowed to implement an easy idea, not prohibited because somebody made a business case for doing the obvious thing first.
From Stac v. Microsoft: "Although there are a number of software companies which offer data compression programs, Stac is the acknowle
Interesting that you followd this up with, "in the real world things aren't black and white" - I think that's an apropos response to this statement.
Must this be a choice of extremes? Patent no software, or throw open the floodgates and allow all of them? Is it impossible to find a middle ground where we allow patents for new and useful software, and not allow patents for the rest (including this one?)
As for the "endless supply" of bad patents: The "endless" stream that Slashdot posts, maybe 20 a year, is a tiny percentage of the number of software patents issued per year.
It demonstrates that the particular patent damaged the industry and the consumers. Yes, companies don't like paying for things, nobody does. Apparently the "alternative" to paying for this patent was *not* to use encryption.
Yes, the alternative was not to use the encryption, because otherwise it wouldn't have been invented for a commercial purpose. As noted by other posters, the only other group that invented it was a secret service agency that sat on it.
Again, the group behind RSA didn't pick up a known mathematical algorithm and apply it to a new purpose. They invented the algorithm while trying to solve this problem. Arguably, if the incentive of starting a business around the concept hadn't existed, they wouldn't have done it.
So the difference here between "software patents" and "no software patents" isn't "pay" vs. "free." It's the difference between "pay" vs. "the technology doesn't exist." I choose the former.
(As I have argued, the technology was likely to be reinvented - but not necessarily soon, and not necessarily in the "free" software context. If Microsoft had invented it, they'd have locked it down as a proprietary piece of code - and then you'd bitch about that.)
What a stupid patent! This is why patents should not be allowed to exist in software.
I agree with your first statement.
As for the second: By the same token, no one should be driving, owning a gun, or drinking alcohol. And half (give or take 0.5%) of America shouldn't be allowed to vote in presidential elections.
Keep in mind that here at Slashdot, you're only likely to hear about the bad patents. That's like formulating an opinion on the safety of driving by reading the police blotter.
You can read about the patent and its problems in this nice article in cyberlaw.
:shrug: What you characterize as problems, I see as results of a successful business venture. Notably, the authors of that article chalked up RSA's success to "luck, bluster, and the naiveté of potential competitors." I don't see "impropriety" or "outrageous patent system" in that list.
(By the way, I am hardly an advocate of big business. I find a lot of their actions obnoxious, hostile, and hugely detrimental to the (non-business) citizens of their host countries. But I also understand the context of business and why we need them to have any functional economy.)
In '95 computers were already fast enough to handle secure-only communications, but the existence of this particular patent was a big problem for most of the new and small web companies (and users). And make no mistake, RSA really enforced this patent, they didn't play Mr. nice guy, if that is what you thought. So the majority of web sites, did not serve encrypted pages, the majority of emails are not encrypted (even today), and most of electronic devices have no such support.
Your example doesn't demonstrate that software patents are evil. It demonstrates that companies don't like paying for things.
Asserting any intellectual property right involves telling people they can't do things. Now, if that's the end of the story, then that business is probably being obnoxious. The RIAA is a prime example of a company asserting IP rights poorly - leading to missed business opportunities, reduced business profits, pissed-off customers, and damage to one's business reputation.
But RSA went further, and did as most IP owners should: they offered licenses to the technology at fair market value. That's simply a function of ownership of a consumer good, which is the cornerstone of capitalism.
So the majority of web sites, did not serve encrypted pages, the majority of emails are not encrypted (even today), and most of electronic devices have no such support.
How can you blame RSA, Inc. for the absence of RSA encryption in today's devices? The patent expired in 2000.
Which is exactly why software patents are a state means of creating monopolies and are thus NOT beneficial to the advancement of the species.
Your logic is flawed. Yes, people will reinvent the technology. It doesn't imply that (a) they will do it nearly as soon as they would have, and (b) they will disclose it to the public.
If your schtick is promoting advancement of technology, then you should be railing against trade-secret law, not patents. Let's say there are two airplane manufacturers, each of which has spent $xx billion on R&D to produce airplanes, and each of which has kept its results as trade secrets under lock and key. Since none of this research is public, any new competitor will have to reinvent the wheel. Since no such company can get funding to do that, the industry remains gridlocked forever at two firms.
Thomas Jefferson correctly opined that patents are an embarrassment to the government. But he just as correctly stated that some inventions are worthy of such embarrassment. The patent system is a public contract: in exchange for the tyranny of a state-sponsored monopoly, the public gets free use of a disclosed technology. In theory, this only applies to inventions that meet the high standards of patentability. In practice, it's not quite so good - and everyone involved admits that the system needs improvement.
ALL IP law is detrimental to the advancement of the species.
That's an interesting assertion. The framers of the Constitution disagreed with you, of course - Article 1 explicitly acknowledges the need to reward inventors and authors. Also at odds with your statement are 200+ years of America's technological prominence, and the fact that virtually every nation on the planet has wholesale adopted America's IP policy. What evidence do you have supporting your position?
The patent examiners are presented with an essentially impossible job. They need to be experts on ALL advancing technologies.
Incorrect. The examining corps is divided into different sections, based on different technologies. Examiners must have a decent background in a particular area of science to get hired. They're not rocket scientists, but given federal government salaries, the government can't hire rocket scientists (well, you know, outside of NASA.)
Each examiner typically examines only a part of a particular field of technology. That way, the office can route all similar technologies to the same small cluster of examiners. This is only commonsense efficiency: the examiners are already familiar with the specific technology, and don't have to spend 100 hours reading up on it before starting examination.
I suspect that patent examiners are generally basically lawyers. Perhaps they might be somewhat knowledgeable in some technical field. But the more they know about law, the more likely that their knowledge of the technical field is, at best, quite shallow.
Consider what examiners do all day: they read technical articles while trying to contest a patent application. They don't read law. The only law they know is what's in the compendious Manual of Patent Examining Procedure. So they're apt to be much better at science than law - which, arguably, is how it should be.
Finally, consider that the USPTO's salaries aren't conducive to paying back law school student loans.
Actually, it was invented by a British intelligence wallah (nothing to do with spying or snooping. At all. No no no, not even a little bit.) at GCHQ Cheletenham. It was decided that this might make their job harder if got into enemy hands, so they simply kept quiet about it.
In the language of intellectual property law, they opted to keep it as a trade secret. Fair enough. The downside to this is that suppressed inventions will usually be rediscovered, by someone who's not in the same position and who opts to take a different route. Patenting is one. Relegating it to the public domain is another.
Slashdot Mirror
Look - we're talking about schools. They're supposed to know where the kids are at all times. If they didn't, and something bad happened, the parents would sue the school.
Do you really feel this is the best way to teach kids about freedom? They are free yet are tracked every second of every day?
The kids have no freedom while they're in school. Their comings and goings are completely dictated by their class schedules. And that's the extent of the "tracking" - it's not "every second of every day," as you assert, but merely while they're on campus. Nothing requires them to carry RFID tags when they're not in school. (And if the school tried to mandate anything like that, I'd be just as infuriated as you are about this.)
- David Stein
Warning: The following comment will probably terrify you.
The school already knows where they are, through a diabolical tool known as... brace yourself... class schedules. That's right - they already know exactly where the kids are... because they command them to go to certain classrooms through the day. And they even punish the kids for not following orders! It's like Stalinist Russia! O, the humanity!
Seriously. Knee-jerk responses like this don't help the privacy movement. They make the privacy movement look paranoid and foolish, which allows people to disregard it in the future.
- David Stein
First, it's not "the government" - it's a school. A better logical extension is tracking by your future employer. And that's already close to reality, given the "always-available" nature of the professional world (cellphones, pagers, Blackberries.) If you want to fight that battle, you'll need a tricked-out Delorean set to 1985.
Second, the tracking is strictly limited to while the kids are on school grounds. They're free to chuck the ID cards when they leave campus. This isn't pervasive, nefarious surveillance - which, I agree, is offensive - and I doubt the kids will get inured to permanent surveillance by this limited function.
Third, your response has a knee-jerk "oh-no-Orwellian-future!" quality to it that diminishes the privacy movement. If you do this chicken-little routine every time someone suggests tracking anything, then people are going to write off privacy advocates as idealistic hippies. Many kinds of tracking are bad. A few kinds of tracking are actually useful to you. You'll do better if you accept this now and pick your battles.
Finally - I can't believe someone modded my initial response -1 overrated. It had been rated a 2. (rolls eyes) I guess that's what happens when anyone challenges the Slashdot majority vote...
- David Stein
During four out of my eight grade-school years, I had three teachers. One taught math and science; one taught social studies, history, and geography; one taught English. These weren't massive schools in some overcrowded metropolitan area, but a suburb of Cleveland that approximates typical middle America.
In this hectic environment, any kids who wanted to skip class probably could. That was in the 1980's - it's probably more chaotic today.
I think that model is on the upswing - and it's a good thing, since it dispels the myth that teachers are good at all subjects. But it does create a problem keeping track of students, which is why I can't complain about this.
And look at it this way: Taking attendance takes time. 10 minutes a day * 200 school days = an extra 33 hours of class time per year.
- David Stein
It's just too bad that the "controversy" detracts attention from the actual issue.
I'm a pretty strong privacy advocate, but I simply can't understand the parents' uproar over this. Teachers take attendance, and hall monitors watch hallways between periods. RFIDs take attendance and watch hallway movements. What's the difference?
I can certainly understand the objection to posting RFID sensors outside bathrooms - that serves no legitimate purpose - we don't care if little Johnny stayed on the can for 45 minutes 'cause he's constipated. And it just... seems... sketchy. So the school removed those. Problem solved.
I can also understand that there's an abuse potential, e.g., people getting hold of some kind of tracker and tracking your kid when he's out of school. So Johnny picks up his ID before he gets on the school bus, and he leaves it at the door when he gets home. For the most part, problem solved.
And, I can understand that it's hardly foolproof: Johnny can just carry Mark's ID around all day as evidence of attendance while Mark skips school. No system is perfect, especially not on the first iteration. People have to try them in the field in order to work out the kinks.
In summary - sure, there are concerns. They can be circumvented or simply ignored. In the absence of a solid complaint, I have to chalk this up to parents protesting primarily for attention-whore purposes... people will rah-rah for any cause if they think they'll get on TV because of it. :shakes head:
- David Stein
Sure - and a show about a gang of overclockers, called... nah, too easy. (Based on what I've heard, that would've been a much better premise, anyway.)
Anyway, to save 500 Slashdotters six seconds each:
---
nslookup 90.2.1.0
*** Can't find 90.2.1.0: Non-existent domain
tracert 90.2.1.0
Tracing route to 90.2.1.0 over a maximum of 30 hops
...
4 172.28.248.25
5 Request timed out.
6 Request timed out.
(etc.)
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- David Stein
Now you're quibbling. Sure, hospitals and universities incorporate - primarily so that they can take advantage of some techncical benefits of the tax code. If you're going to be this picky, then technically, our law sees every "corporation" as a "person," so your point is moot.
If you want to switch to practical terms, well, your point is still moot. You're railing against government sponsorship of "corporations" via the Bayh-Dole Act, and now you're including hospitals and universities in your definition of "corporations." I doubt many would agree that the government should stop funding academic research (solely on the basis that universities are "corporations," and therefore somehow evil.)
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A corporation need not be "for profit" to actually serve the private interests of its shareholders.
Actually, that's the primary legal difference between nonprofit and for-profit institutions: nonprofits cannot use their funds to benefit any private individual (including - no, especially - shareholders.)
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If you are taking the position that handing over patents on government funded research is not intended to actually be a form of wellfare subsidies for large corporations (rather than "people"), then why do you rationalize that subsidy by showing that the government also subsidizes small businesses?
You've misconstrued my purpose. Small businesses are "people," in the finest-grain sense of the word that is practical for this purpose. The government asks a few people to get together and make an employment-class commitment to work on the funded research. I don't think that's asking to much.
The alternative is to write personal checks (of large value!) to specific individuals to carry out research. That has a hideous taint to it, and the potentials for corruption are tremendous. Moreover, no one in their right mind would take on such personal liability. If a company works on government-funded research that doesn't pan out, the company can basically fold. (Most startups do, within five years, because prospective research is risky.) But an individual may be saddled with paying back some of that money... who'd undertake such a personal risk?
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Proving non-use would require someone to be able to prove a negative. Exceedingly difficult to do.
In the abstract - e.g., "there is no god" - yes, it's exceedingly possible. In a specific instance, with limited objects to examine, it's pretty easy. Look: { 1 4 12 13 19 26 32 } - I can prove that this set does not contain the number 16.
I'm not being smarmy here; I'm showing how "proving the negative" is done. It's pretty easy: company X patents a fantastic technique for drive compression, let's say, but they abandon work on the technology and solely assert it defensively. If it's abandoned long enough, any company that actually wants to use it can sue for patent abuse, and simply must show that the company hasn't offered the technology in any product. Hardly an impossible task.
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However, the government ought not help to cover the cost of research and then give the private partnet a 100% ownership stake in the fruits of that labour.
(sigh) You're disregarding the fact that no business is going to pick up only part of it. Seriously, it doesn't get much easier than this. There are plenty of fish in the sea of commerce - why waste time pursuing one that another fisherman has also hooked? They would have to pull against each other as much as against their prey, and if they're lucky, each of them gets half of a torn-apart fish.
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Contrasted with mundain commercial enterprises, your example of pharmaceutical companies is a special case of a product which costs a fortune to test, is very dangerous, and is relatively inexpensive to produce. It is not the general case of commercialization of inventions or business
So here's a second suggestion, if you're truly motivated: Sign up as a software patent examiner for the USPTO. Surely they need competent IT people to trundle forth rejections of obvious, everyday software. It's kind of like the army - the pay isn't great, but you're doing your country a great service - and it's highly unlikely you'll get shot.
- David Stein
Do you have any examples of such conduct? Has Microsoft ever strangled any competitor through the use of a bad patent? Microsoft has done a lot of egregious things over the years - but this isn't one of them.
Indeed, the only way Microsoft has violated the goals of the patent system is by willfully infringing others' patents. The software patent held by Stac Electronics was the only reason Microsoft could not freely abscond with their technology. Similarly Eolas Technologies, Inc., which developed a web browser plug-in technology way back in 1994 - a year before Microsoft released Internet Explorer 1.0.
I can also cite the continued development of USPTO reexamination proceedings - an obvious and useful solution to the problem of $xMM patent litigation. Interested third parties can now request (and partake in) reexamination of issued patents in light of unconsidered prior art. This proceeding hasn't been perfected yet, but in a few years, your complaint may no longer be a business reality.
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This is a company that successfully fought off the US government and pretty much got away with it. Their technical legal "loss" wasn't a loss,not to them anyway, when they are allowed to print up their own "money" to use to pay the fines, and that "money" went to brainwash the next generation into still using their products.
That is, indeed, a shame. Sadly, our government has lost all focus of the purposes of antitrust law. The FTC has simply surrendered its obligation to prevent excessive consolidation. I don't know when or why the antitrust system lost its head, but the consequences will be - are already - catastrophic.
In Microsoft's case: It had an incentive to bust out the big (expensive) guns in that case, since the government had hinted at trying to break up the company. That would have been an excellent, appropriate, and deeply interesting result. Sadly, this didn't happen. The unconfirmed rumor is that the government accepted a plea bargain in exchange for backdoor access to Microsoft's security technologies... which, scarily, is fully in keeping with this administration's tactics. (Notice that the prosecuting attorney was none other than John Ashcroft, yet another paranoid Bush-backing crackpot.)
However, this sidebar is irrelevant in a discussion about software patents.
Responding to your general point that MS does what it wants: At least it's learned its lesson about respecting software patents. When Connectix developed a truly exceptional Intel hardware emulator, and patented some of the emulation techniques, Microsoft didn't ignore them and recreate the wheel. It bought the company and released the software as its own. This is a good result.
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Then there's the question and observation that a construct such as "linux" isn't really owned by anyone, except the copyright Linus owns of course for the kernel.
I've responded to this in detail in another response. To recap briefly: Microsoft wouldn't dare try, given that IBM is the owner of the world's largest arsenal of software patents, and also a friendly giant when it comes to Linux. Tellingly, Linus Torvalds is not concerned about this prospect.
- David Stein
No one has ever asserted that "no one" will invent. Patents, nor any other form of IP protection, have never been asserted as the sine qua non of invention. They are merely an "incentive." Some who would choose not to invent may be persuaded to do so. Others who would choose to invent may be encouraged to work harder on finishing and commercializing their invention.
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Therefore the proper means of competing in a free market is to get to market quickly with a superior product, price it to sell fast, make your money fast, and get on with the next product.
Oh, great! Just what we need - a bunch of half-baked, bug-ridden products that people whipped together fastfastfast and dumped on the consumer to make a quick buck. Screw customer support; we created that product last year - we've done eight others in the meantime!
Yikes. The net is awash in incomplete concept software - we don't need more of it. Have you never visited Winfiles.com?
(Yes, that's a joke. But I assert that if you're looking for an application to do something simple and stupid - e.g., scheduled file transfer - you're likely to go through a dozen shareware packages before you find something remotely decent. The rest is junk, if it works at all.)
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ALL IP law is detrimental to the advancement of the species. Period.
(Sigh) This abstract, unsupported assertion gets tiresome by the sixth time one encounters it.
Copyright law arose about 20 minutes after the invention of the printing press. Trade secret law has been a mainstay of our business system for eons. The need for patent law is expressed in Article 1 of the U.S. Constitution, and patent-like systems date back to early Greece and Rome. If the issue were as simple and obvious as you assert, then a whole lot of people have made a whole lot of unwise choices.
- David Stein
No, they don't. I keep making this point, but it keeps getting missed. Company X need not take the affirmative, expensive step of invalidating Microsoft's patent. (Maybe this is impossible, because the patent is valid.) It need not do anything. It can go ahead and keep using it.
Company X has no incentive to act - it should just keep doing what it's doing. Even if it finds out that Company X is using the ISNOT operator, Microsoft has no reason to stop them from doing so, and doing so would be an awful PR move. Both parties do nothing, and this is a win/win result.
There's nothing "illegal" about this, by the way. Microsoft has the legal right to stop them, but no legal obligation. Unless Microsoft asserts the patent, the university has done nothing wrong.
What do you make of open source software, and its viability in the face of such an extensive body of software patents? It seems that software patents have the potential to simply terminate open source software development and distribution.
I have several responses.
First, if it had the power to do so, Microsoft would have done so already. They've viewed Linux as a gathering threat for at least five years, and as you may have noticed, they're not keen on the concept of competition.
Second, Microsoft would have an affirmative duty to show which patents Linux violated, and how. Linux could respond by taking those technologies out of the kernel. Certainly the inventive power of the Linux army can invent around anything Microsoft can throw their way.
Third, if Microsoft tried to do so, it would face a commercial behemoth with an equally foreboding arsenal: IBM, which, in fact, is the world's largest software patentee. And IBM is Linux's big brother. Microsoft stands to lose much more than Linux in a patent gunfight.
Fourth, Linux has its own pony in this show - not software patents, but defensive publication. Arguably, open-sourcing the Linux kernel blocks anyone else from patenting anything it contains (unless they can prove they invented it first, and that's an uphill battle.)
Finally, it's noteworthy that Linus Torvalds doesn't seem concerned. (Link goes to Google archive of a thread originally on kerneltrap.org, which sadly is no longer available.) To wit: ... The fact is, technical people are better off not looking at patents. If you don't know what they cover and where they are, you won't be knowingly infringing on them. If somebody sues you, you change the algorithm or you just hire a hit-man to whack the stupid git.
Dan Phillips: I suggest all vm hackers have a closer look at this [software patent]. It's stupid, but we can't just ignore it.
Linus Torvalds: Actually, we can, and I will.
- David Stein
Incorrect. The Bayh-Dole Act is aimed at nonprofit institutions - mostly universities, but also nonprofit hospitals. Corporations are only incidental beneficiaries - a means to an end. If the government retained the rights to the technology, guess what they'd do with it? They'd license it to corporations, because the government doesn't produce commercial products.
I strongly encourage you to read up on this act. As one sign of its incredible effectiveness, both businesspeople and academic researchers widely hail it as a great move. How often does that happen?
As for encouraging "people," the government has many programs to help "people" to create companies around new technologies. Read up on the Small Business Innovation Research program, where states sponsor technology initiatives for small businesses (and only small businesses can apply for them.)
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Private entities also retain ownership of vast and sundry technologies - which, as it happens, sit on shelves completely unused.
Read up on the doctrine of patent abuse. Patentees have an obligation to use the technology they patent; if they don't, they can be forced into a compulsory licensing scheme.
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Your principle ignores the realities of business. It is not essential to have a monopoly on an invention in order to commercialize it.
Okay, I'll add one more topic to your growing go-research-this list: Check out how the pharmaceutical industry works. Academia creates thousands of concepts for new drugs every year, but only a few actually get turned into drugs. How do pharmaceutical companies choose candidates for further development? Think about it: the company must push the drug through several years of research, and then FDA approval. That costs a ton of money. Why would Merck take that chance if the moment its drug is FDA-approved, Pfizer, Eli Lilly, and Millennium can start selling the same drug?
For this reason, pharmaceutical companies solely focus on drugs that can be patented. This is an undeniable business reality.
This also has a direct line to software. Any company intent on developing a new software concept will probably choose Windows - by far, the largest software market in America - and thus faces Microsoft as a potential competitor. If the idea is good enough, Microsoft is an inevitable competitor. Now, why would any company spend $$$$$$$$ to develop a market that Microsoft can preempt without a second thought? Do you think the answer might involve software patents?
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Your principle also ignores the realities of democracy. The important factor is that the people have access to the invention which the people funded.
Yes. And "access to the invention" is exactly what patents are designed to promote. In exchange for the modest price of a fixed-term monopoly, the public enjoys the benefit of a corporation doing a ton of research, creating an invention, and disclosing the results along with the best way of using them. That seems quite fair to me - and to the framers of the Constitution.
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Commercialization is not the purpose of government research.
Oh - so we should spend our tax dollars on research that has no tangible benefit for humanity? "Commercialization" is just a concise term for "technology that people will find useful enough to buy." Hardly seems like "greedy business guys" in that context, huh?
- David Stein
Again, if it's solely for an internal project, then the company can continue using it. Microsoft has no way to find out about it - and no incentive, either. Stopping company X from using the ISNOT operator has no income potential for Microsoft.
Also, note that it doesn't necessarily take a $2MM lawsuit to resolve issues about bad patents. Thanks to the American Inventors Protection Act of 1999, the USPTO offers a new inter partes reexamination proceeding: third parties can raise previously unconsidered prior art to have an issued patent invalidated by the USPTO. This inter partes system isn't perfect - as this report indicates - but it's clearly a step in the right direction. We may soon see the end of the "but it's too expensive to litigate it" argument.
- David Stein
True, but that sword cuts both ways.
One of the practical limitations of patents is that enforcement implies discovery of an unauthorized use: the patentee must find defendants who are using it and must prosecute them. In the context of private use, this is completely impossible. If a company wants to develop their own BASIC compiler with an ISNOT operator, solely for internal use, then Microsoft can do nothing to stop them. This kind of infringmenet is not approved, but is widely acknowledged and tolerated (for lack of any workable alternative.)
True, this effect is not part of the explicit theory of patent law. But I assert that it's an implicit limitation to what should be patented. Certainly it's a guiding factor for any attorney or businessperson whilst deciding whether or not a patent is worth pursuing.
- David Stein
Heh. Having not read the story (yet), I presume this is valid in the context of fuzzy logic - that "100% true" isn't the same as "not 100% not true."
In the context of the Visual BASIC ISNOT operator, there is no such fuzziness. Either two pointers point to the same object, or they don't. "ISNOT" can be written as "p1 != p1"; "!(IS)" can be written as "!(p1 == p2)". Here, they're the same.
But your humor is appreciated. -smile-
- David Stein
Unfortunatey, that's practically unenforceable. Every company on the planet would claim that they "independently" developed the exact same method in order to avoid licensing the technology (or for actually investing in independent invention of the technology.)
Patents constructively notify people as to what is and isn't patented. If "I didn't know I was speeding" were a defense to speeding, no one would ever get a speeding ticket.
- David Stein
Oh, I'm sure that's one of the intended uses. Companies do this all the time. A fellow patent attorney who used to do work for Kodak tells me that they patented tons of minutiae about their photo developing chemistry - solely to create a boulder of an obstacle for competitive development.
My only response is that these companies are damaging their own case by patenting such trivialities:
Microsoft says, "We have 1,000,000 patents."
Opponent responds, "Yeah, like the 'ISNOT' patent, and the 'Condensed Lat/Long' patent, and the 'Tapping on a PDA' patent.'"
It raises the inference that these patents are a whole lot of expensive drapery - that the average value of each one is quite low, and that the number of meritorious patents is only a small portion of the cited mass.
- David Stein
No, it wouldn't be a method of implementing, a method of implementing would be "typing on the keyboard while sat at a computer, then running the compiler". It would be something like:
You're right - "implementing" isn't the right word. How about "representing," as in, a method of modeling and applying a psychoacoustic model to raw sound data? Regardless of the specific language chosen, I have to agree with you. And I believe that what you've suggested should be patentable (and has been patented.)
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The implementation of a known psychoacoustic model is trivial. That's the point. Putting any known fact into software is trivial.
Again, I agree with you. Of course, hardware circuitry and software are, in most cases, functionally interchangeable. The concept is the important point, and it is also the target of the patent. It need not be implemented in software.
The focus on "software" patents is really just focusing on concepts that are more easily or familiarly expressed as software. If I came up with a valuable computing concept and patented it as a circuit, Slashdot wouldn't think twice about it - which says more about the Slashdot crowd than about the nature of software patents.
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Patents protect the investment in the discovery of scientific and engineering knowledge where the incentive to discover the knowledge is that it can be used in business, and when it can be discovered by study of your products instead of putting in the effort to research as you did originally.
That's very close. My only quibble is that it's not limited to the discovery of such knowledge, but also encourages the application of it. A technology may be accidentally discovered - e.g., in academia - but unless it can be protected, companies aren't likely to apply it.
(In my field - biotechnology - this is a fact of life: interesting disease pathways and drug targets go unexplored by pharmaceutical companies, because the researcher published the findings and the idea can't be globally protected. As a result, thousands of disease-curing concepts are sitting on the shelves gathering dust, because no company will invest in its development.)
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In software: For shipped products, the structure and design could be discovered by study of a product, so patents would seem to apply. For non-shipped products (eg, Amazon backend), trade secrets would seem to apply. The development of the structure and design is, however, quite a mechanical task, so there is very little investment in that aspect and patents wouldn't apply after all.
With one exception (see below), your summary complies with the theory and practice of intellectual property. There's little point in patenting a process that is strictly reserved for in-house use. And as you state, the "effort" in setting up the back end does not imply patentability - the USPTO regularly rejects applications that are the "ordinary work of engineers." Without an inventive hook, a chosen network and software configuration isn't patentable.
The exception that I noted is this: Back-end software is still patentable, largely because what separates "back-end" from "commercial" is simply a business decision. Consider that Google now sells appliances that apply its "back-end" technology to any other website. Who's to say that Amazon won't choose to license its e-commerce software (for $$$$$$) to other e-commerce sites?
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In fact, drive compression is relatively easy. ... Microsoft should be allowed to implement an easy idea, not prohibited because somebody made a business case for doing the obvious thing first.
From Stac v. Microsoft : "Although there are a number of software companies which offer data compression programs, Stac is the acknowle
Interesting that you followd this up with, "in the real world things aren't black and white" - I think that's an apropos response to this statement.
Must this be a choice of extremes? Patent no software, or throw open the floodgates and allow all of them? Is it impossible to find a middle ground where we allow patents for new and useful software, and not allow patents for the rest (including this one?)
As for the "endless supply" of bad patents: The "endless" stream that Slashdot posts, maybe 20 a year, is a tiny percentage of the number of software patents issued per year.
- David Stein
Yes, the alternative was not to use the encryption, because otherwise it wouldn't have been invented for a commercial purpose. As noted by other posters, the only other group that invented it was a secret service agency that sat on it.
Again, the group behind RSA didn't pick up a known mathematical algorithm and apply it to a new purpose. They invented the algorithm while trying to solve this problem. Arguably, if the incentive of starting a business around the concept hadn't existed, they wouldn't have done it.
So the difference here between "software patents" and "no software patents" isn't "pay" vs. "free." It's the difference between "pay" vs. "the technology doesn't exist." I choose the former.
(As I have argued, the technology was likely to be reinvented - but not necessarily soon, and not necessarily in the "free" software context. If Microsoft had invented it, they'd have locked it down as a proprietary piece of code - and then you'd bitch about that.)
- David Stein
I agree with your first statement.
As for the second: By the same token, no one should be driving, owning a gun, or drinking alcohol. And half (give or take 0.5%) of America shouldn't be allowed to vote in presidential elections.
Keep in mind that here at Slashdot, you're only likely to hear about the bad patents. That's like formulating an opinion on the safety of driving by reading the police blotter.
- David Stein
(By the way, I am hardly an advocate of big business. I find a lot of their actions obnoxious, hostile, and hugely detrimental to the (non-business) citizens of their host countries. But I also understand the context of business and why we need them to have any functional economy.)
In '95 computers were already fast enough to handle secure-only communications, but the existence of this particular patent was a big problem for most of the new and small web companies (and users). And make no mistake, RSA really enforced this patent, they didn't play Mr. nice guy, if that is what you thought. So the majority of web sites, did not serve encrypted pages, the majority of emails are not encrypted (even today), and most of electronic devices have no such support.
Your example doesn't demonstrate that software patents are evil. It demonstrates that companies don't like paying for things.
Asserting any intellectual property right involves telling people they can't do things. Now, if that's the end of the story, then that business is probably being obnoxious. The RIAA is a prime example of a company asserting IP rights poorly - leading to missed business opportunities, reduced business profits, pissed-off customers, and damage to one's business reputation.
But RSA went further, and did as most IP owners should: they offered licenses to the technology at fair market value. That's simply a function of ownership of a consumer good, which is the cornerstone of capitalism.
So the majority of web sites, did not serve encrypted pages, the majority of emails are not encrypted (even today), and most of electronic devices have no such support.
How can you blame RSA, Inc. for the absence of RSA encryption in today's devices? The patent expired in 2000.
- David Stein
Your logic is flawed. Yes, people will reinvent the technology. It doesn't imply that (a) they will do it nearly as soon as they would have, and (b) they will disclose it to the public.
If your schtick is promoting advancement of technology, then you should be railing against trade-secret law, not patents. Let's say there are two airplane manufacturers, each of which has spent $xx billion on R&D to produce airplanes, and each of which has kept its results as trade secrets under lock and key. Since none of this research is public, any new competitor will have to reinvent the wheel. Since no such company can get funding to do that, the industry remains gridlocked forever at two firms.
Thomas Jefferson correctly opined that patents are an embarrassment to the government. But he just as correctly stated that some inventions are worthy of such embarrassment. The patent system is a public contract: in exchange for the tyranny of a state-sponsored monopoly, the public gets free use of a disclosed technology. In theory, this only applies to inventions that meet the high standards of patentability. In practice, it's not quite so good - and everyone involved admits that the system needs improvement.
ALL IP law is detrimental to the advancement of the species.
That's an interesting assertion. The framers of the Constitution disagreed with you, of course - Article 1 explicitly acknowledges the need to reward inventors and authors. Also at odds with your statement are 200+ years of America's technological prominence, and the fact that virtually every nation on the planet has wholesale adopted America's IP policy. What evidence do you have supporting your position?
- David Stein
Incorrect. The examining corps is divided into different sections, based on different technologies. Examiners must have a decent background in a particular area of science to get hired. They're not rocket scientists, but given federal government salaries, the government can't hire rocket scientists (well, you know, outside of NASA.)
Each examiner typically examines only a part of a particular field of technology. That way, the office can route all similar technologies to the same small cluster of examiners. This is only commonsense efficiency: the examiners are already familiar with the specific technology, and don't have to spend 100 hours reading up on it before starting examination.
I suspect that patent examiners are generally basically lawyers. Perhaps they might be somewhat knowledgeable in some technical field. But the more they know about law, the more likely that their knowledge of the technical field is, at best, quite shallow.
Completely incorrect. Check out the requirements for getting hired as an examiner. Applicants must have a degree in a field of science. Law degree not required, or even "a plus."
Consider what examiners do all day: they read technical articles while trying to contest a patent application. They don't read law. The only law they know is what's in the compendious Manual of Patent Examining Procedure. So they're apt to be much better at science than law - which, arguably, is how it should be.
Finally, consider that the USPTO's salaries aren't conducive to paying back law school student loans.
- David Stein
In the language of intellectual property law, they opted to keep it as a trade secret. Fair enough. The downside to this is that suppressed inventions will usually be rediscovered, by someone who's not in the same position and who opts to take a different route. Patenting is one. Relegating it to the public domain is another.
- David Stein