1. Individual Inventor hereby gives EvilMegaCorp exclusive permission to produce, distribute, market, and sell Invention X. 2. Individual Inventor agrees not to give rights to Invention X to anyone else.
Perhaps such exclusive contracts should not be allowed. The inventor would be required to license to anyone who asked, except that he'd name his price.
If so, what happens when EvilMegaCorp simply ignores Individual Inventor's patent? Is Individual Inventor going to undertake the patent infringement suit against EvilMegaCorp all by himself?
There would be lawyers who would be willing to take the case for the percentage of the winnings (like civil suits today). At least this would eliminate stupid patent suits, since lawyers would not want to take cases that could not be won.
In current patent systems the lawyers have incentive to litigate - since they are paid either way by corporation they work for.
I have a simple fix. Only allow individuals to hold patents, not corporations. That would preserve the intent of the patent system, to encourage inventors to disclose their inventions, but it would prevent the current system of patent horse-trading and cross-licensing that corporations do today.
Sadly, you are right. Few weeks ago I wanted to buy a book. I went to B&N, they had it at list price with 2 to 3 week delivery. OK, next I tried FatBrain. List price again, 2 to 3 week delivery.
At Amazon the book was 20% less than list, next day shipping.
Where do you think I ordered? Now it wasn't some esoteric book, just the new Kent Beck XP book.
Still, I find it rather distasteful that Amazon would come up with such an obvious patent.
My son is 12 and my daughter 7. They love to play with Legos and have had some fun with the Mindstorms set. The problem is that we own several large containers of Legos and right now one of our touch sensors is lost in one of these containers!
My son has been coding since he was 10, so he has no problems writing Mindstorms programs. I would let him play with the set more, if he didn't spread all the parts from one end of the house to the other...;-)
- Patent portfolios are an important part of big business. If you don't patent something remotely related to what you are doing, you risk having someone else grab it.
This doesn't really make sense. If you are afraid that someone else will pattent a fairly obvious idea, why not simply publish it. There are many computer Journals that could print your paper.
Then you have established prior art, and there is no need to pay lawyers to file patents.....
Katz went to Disneyland to look for a philosophy of technology?! Come on. He lives in New Jersey, probably within thirty minute drive from Bell Labs. Why not visit Bell Labs instead?
There was probably more interesting technology used in getting him to Orlando (i.e. jets, air traffic control, etc) than he'll find in the silly rides at Disney.
I'm pretty sure he just wanted to spend time in Florida during the cold months.
Is the Florman article available on the web somewhere? I've read several of Florman's books and found them well written and interesting. Florman is an engineer who can also write well.
Check out "The Existential Pleasures of Engineering", "The Civilized Engineer" or any of his other books.
[..in Netscape composer...] Even on the latest 4.61, if you do something as elementry as insert a link, it'll bus error, for god's sake! This is just entirely too lame. And it doesn't even have Mozilla's excuses.
I've read the story about this book and Jim Clarke in the Sunday NY Times magazine. Healtheon is the idea of creating a centralized database of patient's medical records that can be accessed via the Internet by subscribing doctors and insurance companies. This way you can really streamline processing of medical claims (no paperwork).
It's funny that people are falling over each other running to give Jim Clarke money to do this. I'm sure most Sloshdotters who had to deal with medical insurance "invented" the same thing. Somehow no one wants to give us piles of money.
Of course the NYT article did not even consider the implications of having a centralized medical database accessible to doctors and insurance companies. Some of the consequences are not pretty.
Our network in Paris uses names of islands (madagscar, cuba, java, etc..), in London we use names of french wines (pauillac, pomerol, etc), and in NYC we use Native American tribes (dakota, cherokee, chippewa, sioux, etc).
The trick is to come up with names that hard to pronounce for people working in other offices.
I kind of respect people who try to do physics as a hobby, although it's hard to imagine that anyone could have enough spare time or resources to make a significant contribution.
Hmmm.... Wasn't there a patent clerk around 1905 who published some physics papers, that he did sort of as a hobby, while he wasn't busy reading patents.
Why can't this be a client app? Keep all the data on your own computer, then have a nice D-n-D interface that will drop the info from your machine into Amazon's form (or whomever's).
No central database, you have total control over your own data.
Perhaps this app could keep track of what you buy and if you want you could sell this info to mass marketers...
So if you're looking to throw a few million into research and development, in order to turn your Cool New Idea for the Next Killer App into a reality, do you really want to have to be asking yourself "So... how long until a few bearded hippies come up with a free (speech/beer)knock-off?"
If not a "bearded hippie", then Microsoft will (eg. web browser). So if you really have a good idea and want to implement, you might as well GPL it, to keep M$ hands of it.
You'll just have to figure out another way to make money from your work.
Solaris surely represents a couple of billion dollars worth of intellectual property. Sun's preparedness to give this away at the click of a mouse makes you ask "what is the value of a technology company"?
To me this says that intellectual property is a bogus concept.
The value of the company comes from the people who work there.
maybe they will use genetic algorithms. there is no need to understand how things work.
Maybe. But keep in mind that evolution took 3 billion years to evolve human "intelligence". I don't see why the machines should be able to do it faster.
From the moment these intelligent machines exist, technological change becomes unimaginably fast- machines designing better machines.
How does this follow? Perhaps an "intelligent" machine will have so many layers over the basic computation units that it will be just as good as humans at, let's say arithmetic.
Your brain cell can perform some pretty amazing electro-chemical feats, but do YOU know anything about what they do?
People will be strangely irrelevant.
On cosmic scale people ARE irrelevant. However, what matters is how people relate to other people. I don't believe that machines can replace that.
Isn't it ironic that such a statement (which is true, btw) would show up on a Linux related site? Linux is the epitome of user-hostile design. Reading this book (and using a Mac for a month or two) would probably open some eyes aroung here.
Linux is not hostile to users. Linux/Unix was designed for programmers and programmers love it.
How many people do you know that go home at night to write code on their Windows or Macs for the fun of it?
BTW, I've read all of Donald Norman's books and I think they are great.
Slashdot Mirror
Perhaps such exclusive contracts should not be allowed. The inventor would be required to license to anyone who asked, except that he'd name his price.
If so, what happens when EvilMegaCorp simply ignores Individual Inventor's patent? Is Individual Inventor going to undertake the patent infringement suit against EvilMegaCorp all by himself?
There would be lawyers who would be willing to take the case for the percentage of the winnings (like civil suits today). At least this would eliminate stupid patent suits, since lawyers would not want to take cases that could not be won.
In current patent systems the lawyers have incentive to litigate - since they are paid either way by corporation they work for.
What do you think?
At Amazon the book was 20% less than list, next day shipping.
Where do you think I ordered? Now it wasn't some esoteric book, just the new Kent Beck XP book.
Still, I find it rather distasteful that Amazon would come up with such an obvious patent.
My son has been coding since he was 10, so he has no problems writing Mindstorms programs. I would let him play with the set more, if he didn't spread all the parts from one end of the house to the other... ;-)
There are other measures of success than the size of your income (it's not how big it is, it's what you do with it ;-) ).
Linus is quite successful. He can have any programming job he wants, making plenty of money to live very comfortably, doing what he wants.
If that's not success, then I don't know what is.
This doesn't really make sense. If you are afraid that someone else will pattent a fairly obvious idea, why not simply publish it. There are many computer Journals that could print your paper.
Then you have established prior art, and there is no need to pay lawyers to file patents.....
There was probably more interesting technology used in getting him to Orlando (i.e. jets, air traffic control, etc) than he'll find in the silly rides at Disney.
I'm pretty sure he just wanted to spend time in Florida during the cold months.
Check out "The Existential Pleasures of Engineering", "The Civilized Engineer" or any of his other books.
I was planning to buy a DVD player, but now I have changed my mind.
Oh come on. Use Xemacs for god's sake!
No so. I have seen ATMs that have braille keys and touch screens for everything else.
It's funny that people are falling over each other running to give Jim Clarke money to do this. I'm sure most Sloshdotters who had to deal with medical insurance "invented" the same thing. Somehow no one wants to give us piles of money.
Of course the NYT article did not even consider the implications of having a centralized medical database accessible to doctors and insurance companies. Some of the consequences are not pretty.
The trick is to come up with names that hard to pronounce for people working in other offices.
For serious debugging I put on my headphones and something loud to shut off the outside world.
Hmmm.... Wasn't there a patent clerk around 1905 who published some physics papers, that he did sort of as a hobby, while he wasn't busy reading patents.
I think his name was Albert something....
No central database, you have total control over your own data.
Perhaps this app could keep track of what you buy and if you want you could sell this info to mass marketers...
If not a "bearded hippie", then Microsoft will (eg. web browser). So if you really have a good idea and want to implement, you might as well GPL it, to keep M$ hands of it.
You'll just have to figure out another way to make money from your work.
Doesn't sound particularly revolutionary....
A new mode of "computation" will be invented, based on holographic elements ("holocomps" - to make up a term).
This will be just an extension the work being done today with holographic memories.
To me this says that intellectual property is a bogus concept.
The value of the company comes from the people who work there.
Maybe. But keep in mind that evolution took 3 billion years to evolve human "intelligence". I don't see why the machines should be able to do it faster.
How does this follow? Perhaps an "intelligent" machine will have so many layers over the basic computation units that it will be just as good as humans at, let's say arithmetic.
Your brain cell can perform some pretty amazing electro-chemical feats, but do YOU know anything about what they do?
People will be strangely irrelevant.
On cosmic scale people ARE irrelevant. However, what matters is how people relate to other people. I don't believe that machines can replace that.
Linux is not hostile to users. Linux/Unix was designed for programmers and programmers love it.
How many people do you know that go home at night to write code on their Windows or Macs for the fun of it?
BTW, I've read all of Donald Norman's books and I think they are great.