Judge Patel, in an August 2009 memorandum and order in the Universal. vs RealNetworks cases, states that fair use _is_ a defense to certain provisions of the DMCA, albeit not to the part that prohibits trafficking in anti-circumvention devices:
115. The Studios contend that fair use is never a defense to DMCA liability. This is the truth, but not the whole truth. Fair use is not a defense to trafficking in products used to circumvent effective technological measures that prevent unauthorized access to, or unauthorized copying of, a copyrighted work under sections 1201(a) or (b), respectively. But, fair use enters into the picture in the context of the act of circumvention itself. Fair use is prohibited in the access-control provision of section (a) but not in the copy-control provision of section (b).... So while it may well be fair use for an individual consumer to store a backup copy of a personally-owned DVD on that individual's computer, a federal law has nonetheless made it illegal to manufacture or traffic in a device or tool that permits a consumer to make such copies.
There is a general rule of statutory construction that says a statute must be interpreted so as not to make it meaningless. In this case, if circumventing access to a protected work for the purpose of making a copy doesn't count as "copyright infringment", Section 1201(c) would appear to be meaningless.
If Congress wanted to say that fair use is _not_ a defense to circumvention for the purpose of making a copy, that is presumably what they would have said. Instead they said something that appears to be the exact opposite, namely that it _is_ a defense.
It is not exactly news that section 107 provides defenses to section 106 violations, so why in the world would they repeat that in section 1201, unless there was some actual ambiguity that needed to be clarified.
If all he did was make a copy of a DVD, I beg to differ. DMCA Section 1201:
(a) Violations Regarding Circumvention of Technological Measures. -- (1)(A) No person shall circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title.... (c) Other Rights, Etc., Not Affected. -- (1) Nothing in this section shall affect rights, remedies, limitations, or defenses to copyright infringement, including fair use, under this title.
I have given an excellent illustration of the technology used to implement any number of comparable systems of much greater sophistication. The only thing that remains is to establish the obviousness of any of the differences.
And if you don't think that once given the prior art of a contemporary, sophisticated publish and subscribe system the remaining steps here are not perfectly obvious to any person having ordinary skill in the art, I should well conclude that you have something to sell.
And _even_ if the inventive steps here managed to survive a real court challenge (at the cost of tens of millions of dollars) the fact remains that the the entire world, as a whole, will be impoverished thereby, based on the excess of one of the most pusillanimous enterprises the world has ever seen. The software patent industry - as presently constituted - belongs in the same category with horse tracks, dog racing, and casinos. We would be immensely better off as a society if software patents in any shape or form were prohibited tommorrow.
By the way, you might start with telling us how anything in the Facebook patent is a non-trivial advance in the state of the art over Patent 6,298,455 "Publish and subscribe data processing with failover using cascaded sequence numbers" granted to IBM on October 2, 2001.
If anything Facebook's patent describes a regression in the state of the art, back to the kindergarten level. Of course that is the way they want it, all the better to intimidate the widest possible range of competitors over the widest possible domain.
The only visible difference between Facebook and tens of thousands of real world deployments of products such as IBM MQSeries (now Websphere MQ) is the idea that lo and behold we can use such a system to publish and subscribe events in such a toy application as social networking. Real world systems have much more sophisticated implementations in stock trading, financial transactions, manufacturing, error notification and so on.
Service oriented architectures based on such systems have been standard practice for nearly twenty years. The Java Messaging System (JMS) strike a bell by any chance? Seventeen years ago DEC was in our office trying to sell us such a system that ran on _VAX/VMS_. Such functionality (Advanced Queuing) has been a standard (no added cost) part of the Oracle database for nearly a decade, etc etc.
Assuming you know anything about the history of publish and subscribe systems, or access control lists, or broadcast notification filtering, why don't you tell me _anything_ that is a non-obvious advance in the state of the art in the Facebook patent.
I am telling you that the the claims are entirely derivative, superficial, and obvious and have cited an entire field of commercial software systems that do the same thing and ten times more, on a much more sophisticated and flexible basis. Do you deny that publish and subscribe messaging systems with access control and filtering actually exist? Such systems earn companies like IBM hundreds of millions of dollars a year. By comparison, the Facebook system - as actually implemented - is little more than a toy.
So tell me, what do you think is innovative about the Facebook patent? Anything? Do you know any actual software engineers who would conclude that the claims of the Facebook patent are beyond the ken of a person with ordinary skill in the art? Any actual software engineers who would rather fight a software patent arms race complete with the uncertainty that any non-trivial software product probably unknowingly violates tens if not hundreds of software patents. Go ahead, make my day.
The primary argument against whether software patents should be statutory is economic, not legal in nature. i.e. all things considered they cause more harm than good. There is an enormous amount of evidence to that effect - tens of billions of dollars in expenses every year with no evidence that there is actually a net benefit to anyone except the patent bar.
There is no incentive to try to be clever and look at prior art narrowly. It just weakens your patent.
That is hilarious. Patent attorneys have _every_ possible incentive to construe prior art in the narrowest possible terms, such that a patent has the broadest scope possible. And in fact, software patent attorneys seem to rarely if ever search or cite anything other than previously issued patents and (on occasion) published journal articles. Standard industry practice for related innovations considered too trivial to patent decades prior doesn't even register. To say nothing of all the things that couldn't have obtained software patents in the first place, because under then existing precedent, such patents were _prohibited_.
The common law definition of prior art in the field of software patents (established in the few years they have been allowed) is so narrow that relatively trivial changes in target application count as a new "invention", changes so trivial that most software engineers don't think they indicate a material advance in the state of the art _at all_. No software developer in his right mind thinks that the _claims_ of the Facebook patent represent such an advance, for example. Hence the outrage, even among those fully educated with regard to what the _claims_ actually entail.
There are _reams_ of much more sophisticated prior art in publish and subscribe systems. The only thing new here is the application of a rudimentary such system to the field of social networking. Any patent examiner who had even a superficial understanding of the history of the state of the art in software systems would know that. One might well conclude that either they are ignorant, or they are operating under a legal regime where prior art has an artificially narrow definition, in spades.
[By the way, you shouldn't go around making claims that require you to have mind reading capability to be remotely justified. That is juvenile, to put it mildly, and you ought to know better than that. You shouldn't act as if one must be a member of the patent high priesthood to have an educated opinion about the merits of the current patent system, either. An attorney may no doubt have a better conception of what the law _is_, but that hardly gives them some sort of monopoly over the question of what the law _should be_.
Due to enormous conflicts of interests, many attorneys are uniquely _unqualified_ to answer the latter question. Why don't we have federal malpractice reform? Because the trial attorneys don't like it. Why do we spend tens of billions a year on a socially and economically counterproductive software patent arms race? Ditto. There is no actual evidence that software and business method patents are a net benefit to anyone except the patent industry.
If it were not for the economic interests of the trial attorneys we would have medical malpractice reform tommorrow. If it were not for the economic interests of the patent bar, we would have radical _statutory_ limitations on the free for all that currently characterizes software and business method patents within months as well. Aside from the legal profession, the constituency for the proposition that the present software and business method patent regime makes the world a better place is small to non-existent. No doubt that is why the Supreme Court is reviewing the question.]
Angular momentum is a conserved vector quantity in the absence of an external torque. That is what keeps the earth spinning on its axis, and the axis pointing in the same direction. Needless to say, an internal earthquake cannot apply an external torque, and the effect on the lunisolar tidal forces that account for the only significant external torque (the one that causes prececession of the equinoxes every 23,600 years) would appear to be minimal at best.
Or in other words an earthquake not caused by an impact from outer space or associated with an ejection of matter to outer space cannot have an immediate or direct impact on the earth's axis. The only effect (if there is one) would be a minimal change in the rate of axial precession, a rate which isn't exactly overwhelming in the first place.
GPS satellites are in low earth orbit, and travel much faster than that, more like 300 km/s. Not that that makes much of a difference here. To first order, each satellite is going to continue on its merry way (i.e. be unaffected by the events on the surface), and the motion of a point on the earth's surface is going to move off of its expected track, in this case sped up by a factor of ~14 parts per trillion.
The inertial velocity of the earth's surface at the equator is ~ 464 meters / second. So a fixed target on the equator is going to drift off its projected inertial track by ~ 6.5 nanometers per second. So if the issue went uncorrected for a month, a GPS guided missile might be off its normal (mean) track by 16 millimeters. Needless to say there are other factors that will affect the accuracy of GPS measurements by rather a lot more than that.
theoretically it's not completely impossible that underground nuclear testing has something to do with the specifics of any earthquakes since the 1950s or so.
No doubt. Theoretically, it is an absolute certainty that the migration of swallows to Capistrano has something to do with the specifics of every earthquake for centuries now.
This 2 ms per century drift in the length of a day is an average. The actual variation is far more erratic - so erratic that this sort of thing seems rather likely to be lost in the noise.
[By the way, clock drift here is the integral of the change in the length of the day per day. Hence the disparity.]
After a little more checking: The correct patent is patent 7,668,832 granted Feb 23, 2010 as listed here
Note to web log authors: You can't use just any old URL. Some URLs have content that changes over time. The PTO web site may return a different patent every day if you don't actually query (and thus generate a URL based on) patent number.
The link both in the original post and in the cited article (to say nothing of dozens of other articles) cites the wrong patent.
The correct one is patent application 20050050027, but the patent number seems to be harder to track down. In fact I am not sure it has been granted at all.
The incorrectly linked patent is about remote ad selection for broadcast radio stations, which is not particularly relevant here.
The earth is naturally slowing down at a rate that makes this sort of thing hardly worth mentioning. That is why we have leap seconds.
Several milliseconds (per year) total when every year we drift ~500 ms? A few thousand such earthquakes and we might be able to put off a leap second for another year.
This is a new form factor and interface connector for a couple of industry standard buses with a couple of twists thrown in. That is not to say it won't be a minor boon for the people who can make use of such devices, just that this sort of change is sort of thing to be expected out of most market segments every eighteen to thirty six months. Not "hopeless" (that was a joke) but certainly derivative.
You have not addressed my argument, which is that the patent bar has established a sufficiently narrow definition of prior art as to render the term virtually meaningless.
Any software engineer with a reasonable history in the field could cite more sophisticated implementations of the same sort of technology that Facebook just patented going back decades. Every modern publish and subscribe messaging platform on the planet is far more sophisticated, for example.
But lo and behold, add the term "social networking" to the application, and now none of that is relevant. It is no longer "prior art", due to a trivial change of target audience. Nothing new has actually been invented here (far from it), just a new application for what in software engineering terms is ancient technology. Granting patents for such things is perverse. Ultimately, it makes all of us worse off, and the software patent industry a wart on the body politic, the sooner excised the better. Ambulance chasers look positively respectable by comparison.
I said an important part of the argument against software patents, whose other pernicious features make that a cost particularly not worth bearing.
And frankly, if you don't understand what is wrong with software patents in particular, I wonder what planet you have been living on for the last decade. Virtually every software company in the country agrees that they cause more harm than good. For most of them, it is all just a (very expensive) game of mutually assured destruction. For most the rest, it is just a game of manipulating the legal system for private gain, patenting "inventions" that nearly every software engineer in the world thinks are rudimentary implementations of standard engineering practice, in some marginally different field of enterprise.
Government grants of twenty year monopolies for "methods" that any intelligent sixth grader could come up with sums up much of the software patent industry. Buying something with one click? Surely that ranks with Edison and Einstein.
Incidents like this are a good reason for search engine operators like Google to add malware detection to their systems, refuse to index such pages, and actively blacklist the hosts (by dropping them entirely from the index or from the search results) until the problem is fixed.
It is probably also a good idea to penalize pages with clearly dodgy (if not malicious) javascript in terms of page rank as well.
So no the idiots at the Army Corps of Engineers who signed the contract for this didn't in fact get ownership of anything other than the physical sculpture.
The government should try to acquire the rights to the sculpture for a reasonable sum. Failing that they should remove the sculpture, sell it to a third party, and commission a new one that they actually own.
Why anyone in their right mind would acquire (let alone fund) an original work of art without the accompanying copyright boggles the mind.
There is absolutely no incentive for holding back known art.
If the quality of the software patents granted over the past decade is any indication, patent attorneys have such a narrow definition of "prior art" as to render the term meaningless.
the parties will spend months and tens (or hundreds) of thousands of dollars fighting over the definitions....
You have just made an important part of the argument for why software patents shouldn't be allowed in the first place, to say nothing of dubious patents in other fields. Such patents cause a net decrease in human health and welfare. The social costs are far greater than the benefits. We could do better by paying software patent attorneys to dig holes in the ground and cover them back up again.
"A method for displaying a news feed in a social network environment, the method comprising: monitoring a plurality of activities in a social network environment; storing the plurality of activities in a database; generating a plurality of news items regarding one or more of the activities, wherein one or more of the news items is for presentation to one or more viewing users and relates to an activity that was performed by another user; attaching a link associated with at least one of the activities of another user to at least one of the plurality of news items where the link enables a viewing user to participate in the same activity as the another user; limiting access to the plurality of news items to a set of viewing users; and displaying a news feed comprising two or more of the plurality of news items to at least one viewing user of the predetermined set of viewing users."
Let's see here - a news feed on topics of interest, with access control and filtering. Not exactly rocket science. The sort of thing that clipping services were doing on paper three hundred years ago. No doubt using the Internet makes all the difference.
Granting the proposition that such a trivial implementation of an age old idea is actually patentable, and the patent is valid, at the very least the laws and policies that allow such things are immensely counterproductive, by effectively granting a monopoly on an entire field of enterprise based on something that at a high level is arguably not an "invention" at all, but rather a slight re-cast of technology that has widely been implemented on computers for decades.
In short, legal or not, software patents are evil, crippling entire industries while preserving an ephemeral advantage for a tiny minority. Software patent attorneys make their living by poisoning the well. That has to be a discouraging reality to wake up to every day, for those not so deluded as to suppose what they do actually makes the world a better place.
Well, if Facebook patented a specific implementation that wasn't right out of software engineering 101, maybe the patent would be valid.
As tempted as I am to respond in kind, I must say that "DUH" is exactly the way to garner enemies and opponents of your position, of whatever dubious value it may have.
Slashdot Mirror
Judge Patel, in an August 2009 memorandum and order in the Universal. vs RealNetworks cases, states that fair use _is_ a defense to certain provisions of the DMCA, albeit not to the part that prohibits trafficking in anti-circumvention devices:
There is a general rule of statutory construction that says a statute must be interpreted so as not to make it meaningless. In this case, if circumventing access to a protected work for the purpose of making a copy doesn't count as "copyright infringment", Section 1201(c) would appear to be meaningless.
If Congress wanted to say that fair use is _not_ a defense to circumvention for the purpose of making a copy, that is presumably what they would have said. Instead they said something that appears to be the exact opposite, namely that it _is_ a defense.
It is not exactly news that section 107 provides defenses to section 106 violations, so why in the world would they repeat that in section 1201, unless there was some actual ambiguity that needed to be clarified.
If all he did was make a copy of a DVD, I beg to differ. DMCA Section 1201:
I have given an excellent illustration of the technology used to implement any number of comparable systems of much greater sophistication. The only thing that remains is to establish the obviousness of any of the differences.
And if you don't think that once given the prior art of a contemporary, sophisticated publish and subscribe system the remaining steps here are not perfectly obvious to any person having ordinary skill in the art, I should well conclude that you have something to sell.
And _even_ if the inventive steps here managed to survive a real court challenge (at the cost of tens of millions of dollars) the fact remains that the the entire world, as a whole, will be impoverished thereby, based on the excess of one of the most pusillanimous enterprises the world has ever seen. The software patent industry - as presently constituted - belongs in the same category with horse tracks, dog racing, and casinos. We would be immensely better off as a society if software patents in any shape or form were prohibited tommorrow.
By the way, you might start with telling us how anything in the Facebook patent is a non-trivial advance in the state of the art over Patent 6,298,455 "Publish and subscribe data processing with failover using cascaded sequence numbers" granted to IBM on October 2, 2001.
If anything Facebook's patent describes a regression in the state of the art, back to the kindergarten level. Of course that is the way they want it, all the better to intimidate the widest possible range of competitors over the widest possible domain.
The only visible difference between Facebook and tens of thousands of real world deployments of products such as IBM MQSeries (now Websphere MQ) is the idea that lo and behold we can use such a system to publish and subscribe events in such a toy application as social networking. Real world systems have much more sophisticated implementations in stock trading, financial transactions, manufacturing, error notification and so on.
Service oriented architectures based on such systems have been standard practice for nearly twenty years. The Java Messaging System (JMS) strike a bell by any chance? Seventeen years ago DEC was in our office trying to sell us such a system that ran on _VAX/VMS_. Such functionality (Advanced Queuing) has been a standard (no added cost) part of the Oracle database for nearly a decade, etc etc.
Assuming you know anything about the history of publish and subscribe systems, or access control lists, or broadcast notification filtering, why don't you tell me _anything_ that is a non-obvious advance in the state of the art in the Facebook patent.
I am telling you that the the claims are entirely derivative, superficial, and obvious and have cited an entire field of commercial software systems that do the same thing and ten times more, on a much more sophisticated and flexible basis. Do you deny that publish and subscribe messaging systems with access control and filtering actually exist? Such systems earn companies like IBM hundreds of millions of dollars a year. By comparison, the Facebook system - as actually implemented - is little more than a toy.
So tell me, what do you think is innovative about the Facebook patent? Anything? Do you know any actual software engineers who would conclude that the claims of the Facebook patent are beyond the ken of a person with ordinary skill in the art? Any actual software engineers who would rather fight a software patent arms race complete with the uncertainty that any non-trivial software product probably unknowingly violates tens if not hundreds of software patents. Go ahead, make my day.
The primary argument against whether software patents should be statutory is economic, not legal in nature. i.e. all things considered they cause more harm than good. There is an enormous amount of evidence to that effect - tens of billions of dollars in expenses every year with no evidence that there is actually a net benefit to anyone except the patent bar.
There is no incentive to try to be clever and look at prior art narrowly. It just weakens your patent.
That is hilarious. Patent attorneys have _every_ possible incentive to construe prior art in the narrowest possible terms, such that a patent has the broadest scope possible. And in fact, software patent attorneys seem to rarely if ever search or cite anything other than previously issued patents and (on occasion) published journal articles. Standard industry practice for related innovations considered too trivial to patent decades prior doesn't even register. To say nothing of all the things that couldn't have obtained software patents in the first place, because under then existing precedent, such patents were _prohibited_.
The common law definition of prior art in the field of software patents (established in the few years they have been allowed) is so narrow that relatively trivial changes in target application count as a new "invention", changes so trivial that most software engineers don't think they indicate a material advance in the state of the art _at all_. No software developer in his right mind thinks that the _claims_ of the Facebook patent represent such an advance, for example. Hence the outrage, even among those fully educated with regard to what the _claims_ actually entail.
There are _reams_ of much more sophisticated prior art in publish and subscribe systems. The only thing new here is the application of a rudimentary such system to the field of social networking. Any patent examiner who had even a superficial understanding of the history of the state of the art in software systems would know that. One might well conclude that either they are ignorant, or they are operating under a legal regime where prior art has an artificially narrow definition, in spades.
[By the way, you shouldn't go around making claims that require you to have mind reading capability to be remotely justified. That is juvenile, to put it mildly, and you ought to know better than that. You shouldn't act as if one must be a member of the patent high priesthood to have an educated opinion about the merits of the current patent system, either. An attorney may no doubt have a better conception of what the law _is_, but that hardly gives them some sort of monopoly over the question of what the law _should be_.
Due to enormous conflicts of interests, many attorneys are uniquely _unqualified_ to answer the latter question. Why don't we have federal malpractice reform? Because the trial attorneys don't like it. Why do we spend tens of billions a year on a socially and economically counterproductive software patent arms race? Ditto. There is no actual evidence that software and business method patents are a net benefit to anyone except the patent industry.
If it were not for the economic interests of the trial attorneys we would have medical malpractice reform tommorrow. If it were not for the economic interests of the patent bar, we would have radical _statutory_ limitations on the free for all that currently characterizes software and business method patents within months as well. Aside from the legal profession, the constituency for the proposition that the present software and business method patent regime makes the world a better place is small to non-existent. No doubt that is why the Supreme Court is reviewing the question.]
Angular momentum is a conserved vector quantity in the absence of an external torque. That is what keeps the earth spinning on its axis, and the axis pointing in the same direction. Needless to say, an internal earthquake cannot apply an external torque, and the effect on the lunisolar tidal forces that account for the only significant external torque (the one that causes prececession of the equinoxes every 23,600 years) would appear to be minimal at best.
Or in other words an earthquake not caused by an impact from outer space or associated with an ejection of matter to outer space cannot have an immediate or direct impact on the earth's axis. The only effect (if there is one) would be a minimal change in the rate of axial precession, a rate which isn't exactly overwhelming in the first place.
Correction: LEO satellites have an orbital velocity of approximately 7800 meters / second, or about 17,500 miles per hour.
GPS satellites are in low earth orbit, and travel much faster than that, more like 300 km/s. Not that that makes much of a difference here. To first order, each satellite is going to continue on its merry way (i.e. be unaffected by the events on the surface), and the motion of a point on the earth's surface is going to move off of its expected track, in this case sped up by a factor of ~14 parts per trillion.
The inertial velocity of the earth's surface at the equator is ~ 464 meters / second. So a fixed target on the equator is going to drift off its projected inertial track by ~ 6.5 nanometers per second. So if the issue went uncorrected for a month, a GPS guided missile might be off its normal (mean) track by 16 millimeters. Needless to say there are other factors that will affect the accuracy of GPS measurements by rather a lot more than that.
theoretically it's not completely impossible that underground nuclear testing has something to do with the specifics of any earthquakes since the 1950s or so.
No doubt. Theoretically, it is an absolute certainty that the migration of swallows to Capistrano has something to do with the specifics of every earthquake for centuries now.
This 2 ms per century drift in the length of a day is an average. The actual variation is far more erratic - so erratic that this sort of thing seems rather likely to be lost in the noise.
[By the way, clock drift here is the integral of the change in the length of the day per day. Hence the disparity.]
After a little more checking: The correct patent is patent 7,668,832 granted Feb 23, 2010 as listed here
Note to web log authors: You can't use just any old URL. Some URLs have content that changes over time. The PTO web site may return a different patent every day if you don't actually query (and thus generate a URL based on) patent number.
The link both in the original post and in the cited article (to say nothing of dozens of other articles) cites the wrong patent.
The correct one is patent application 20050050027, but the patent number seems to be harder to track down. In fact I am not sure it has been granted at all.
The incorrectly linked patent is about remote ad selection for broadcast radio stations, which is not particularly relevant here.
The earth is naturally slowing down at a rate that makes this sort of thing hardly worth mentioning. That is why we have leap seconds.
Several milliseconds (per year) total when every year we drift ~500 ms? A few thousand such earthquakes and we might be able to put off a leap second for another year.
This is a new form factor and interface connector for a couple of industry standard buses with a couple of twists thrown in. That is not to say it won't be a minor boon for the people who can make use of such devices, just that this sort of change is sort of thing to be expected out of most market segments every eighteen to thirty six months. Not "hopeless" (that was a joke) but certainly derivative.
You have not addressed my argument, which is that the patent bar has established a sufficiently narrow definition of prior art as to render the term virtually meaningless.
Any software engineer with a reasonable history in the field could cite more sophisticated implementations of the same sort of technology that Facebook just patented going back decades. Every modern publish and subscribe messaging platform on the planet is far more sophisticated, for example.
But lo and behold, add the term "social networking" to the application, and now none of that is relevant. It is no longer "prior art", due to a trivial change of target audience. Nothing new has actually been invented here (far from it), just a new application for what in software engineering terms is ancient technology. Granting patents for such things is perverse. Ultimately, it makes all of us worse off, and the software patent industry a wart on the body politic, the sooner excised the better. Ambulance chasers look positively respectable by comparison.
I said an important part of the argument against software patents, whose other pernicious features make that a cost particularly not worth bearing.
And frankly, if you don't understand what is wrong with software patents in particular, I wonder what planet you have been living on for the last decade. Virtually every software company in the country agrees that they cause more harm than good. For most of them, it is all just a (very expensive) game of mutually assured destruction. For most the rest, it is just a game of manipulating the legal system for private gain, patenting "inventions" that nearly every software engineer in the world thinks are rudimentary implementations of standard engineering practice, in some marginally different field of enterprise.
Government grants of twenty year monopolies for "methods" that any intelligent sixth grader could come up with sums up much of the software patent industry. Buying something with one click? Surely that ranks with Edison and Einstein.
Incidents like this are a good reason for search engine operators like Google to add malware detection to their systems, refuse to index such pages, and actively blacklist the hosts (by dropping them entirely from the index or from the search results) until the problem is fixed.
It is probably also a good idea to penalize pages with clearly dodgy (if not malicious) javascript in terms of page rank as well.
So no the idiots at the Army Corps of Engineers who signed the contract for this didn't in fact get ownership of anything other than the physical sculpture.
The government should try to acquire the rights to the sculpture for a reasonable sum. Failing that they should remove the sculpture, sell it to a third party, and commission a new one that they actually own.
Why anyone in their right mind would acquire (let alone fund) an original work of art without the accompanying copyright boggles the mind.
There is absolutely no incentive for holding back known art.
If the quality of the software patents granted over the past decade is any indication, patent attorneys have such a narrow definition of "prior art" as to render the term meaningless.
the parties will spend months and tens (or hundreds) of thousands of dollars fighting over the definitions....
You have just made an important part of the argument for why software patents shouldn't be allowed in the first place, to say nothing of dubious patents in other fields. Such patents cause a net decrease in human health and welfare. The social costs are far greater than the benefits. We could do better by paying software patent attorneys to dig holes in the ground and cover them back up again.
"A method for displaying a news feed in a social network environment, the method comprising: monitoring a plurality of activities in a social network environment; storing the plurality of activities in a database; generating a plurality of news items regarding one or more of the activities, wherein one or more of the news items is for presentation to one or more viewing users and relates to an activity that was performed by another user; attaching a link associated with at least one of the activities of another user to at least one of the plurality of news items where the link enables a viewing user to participate in the same activity as the another user; limiting access to the plurality of news items to a set of viewing users; and displaying a news feed comprising two or more of the plurality of news items to at least one viewing user of the predetermined set of viewing users."
Let's see here - a news feed on topics of interest, with access control and filtering. Not exactly rocket science. The sort of thing that clipping services were doing on paper three hundred years ago. No doubt using the Internet makes all the difference.
Granting the proposition that such a trivial implementation of an age old idea is actually patentable, and the patent is valid, at the very least the laws and policies that allow such things are immensely counterproductive, by effectively granting a monopoly on an entire field of enterprise based on something that at a high level is arguably not an "invention" at all, but rather a slight re-cast of technology that has widely been implemented on computers for decades.
In short, legal or not, software patents are evil, crippling entire industries while preserving an ephemeral advantage for a tiny minority. Software patent attorneys make their living by poisoning the well. That has to be a discouraging reality to wake up to every day, for those not so deluded as to suppose what they do actually makes the world a better place.
Well, if Facebook patented a specific implementation that wasn't right out of software engineering 101, maybe the patent would be valid.
As tempted as I am to respond in kind, I must say that "DUH" is exactly the way to garner enemies and opponents of your position, of whatever dubious value it may have.