I mean, how useful would it be to you to have a list of all the social security numbers of everyone in a baseball stadium if you didn't have any of the names?
If RFID cards become pervasive, a gray market in matching serial numbers to real IDs will pop up just like there's currently a market among spammers for e-mail addresses. Any unscrupulous merchant with an RFID reader could harvest positive IDs from their customers at the checkout counter.
The key difference with SSNs is that you can't read them remotely from everyone who walks by.
Back to TiVo, they were the first. They deserve the patent because they did invent something, and before it was invented it did not exist in that form.
Not really. The concept of simultaneously reading and writing a computer file that happens to be video data was patented back in 1993 by somebody else. It's a very broad patent, and is not easily worked around like most of the patents that TiVo actually filed.
Now TiVo owns the rights to that patent, but it's because they bought it out a couple of years ago. (And they were probably infringing that patent prior to that point. IOW, TiVo probably built its empire by violating others' intellectual property.) Basically, TiVo got their most valuable and dangerous IP the same way that any other patent troll company does: not with innovation, but with a cash payout.
Where in the claim does it say that it has to not exit if you skip to past the end of the file? Variable delay works just fine in the example if you don't do that.
If you want to solve the problem, do it your own way... but don't do it the way Tivo did.
TiVo also owns exclusive rights to patent #5,241,428. Claim 1 of that patent is incredibly broad, and my example clearly violates it. There is no legal way to "not do it the way TiVo did".
They got their monopoly based on work they did, not work other people did.
They got their monopoly due to fundamental flaws with the way the patent system is implemented, including a total breakdown of the concept of "obviousness" that has occurred over the past 25 years.
Like I said, the USPTO should have granted them a patent on any clever tricks they used to get their system to work on crummy hardware. The patent office should *not* have given them a wide-ranging monopoly on the idea of reading and writing a file at the same time. No, I can't blame TiVo for grabbing the handouts the government is offering them, but that doesn't make the situation right or fair.
Additionally, there's a good chance hard drive wouldn't have developed the way they did if it weren't for Tivo.
That's just silly. A hard drive basically has 2 attributes: speed and capacity. Both of these have been increasing exponentially for almost half a century, and will continue to do so. It didn't take TiVo to come along and tell them to keep up the good work.
So because the complexity was abstracted away for you by millions of lines of code and millions of dollars of hard drive R&D, the problem isn't complex?
Those millions of lines of code and R&D efforts were made by parties who aren't TiVo. Why should TiVo get a 20-year monopoly based on the fruits of other peoples' work?
I'll reiterate since in your posts you fundamentally fail to grasp it: TiVo didn't do any of the work to make this possible. They didn't create any hard drives. They didn't design any MPEG chips. They don't deserve a monopoly on the results, but due to the way our patent system is implemented, they have that monopoly just because they were the first to run down to the patent office and file their land grab.
You've pointed out that back when TiVo got started, it was "really hard" to get it to work. So what TiVo deserves is a patent on the now irrelevant problem of how to get recording to work on hardware that barely supports it. But that's *not* a patent on the whole concept of simultaneous record/playback.
Climate change was occurring long before our species arrived here, has been occurring ever since, and will continue to occur long after we're gone.
I'm sick of seeing this stock response. Did you flunk algebra? There's also an important concept called rate of change. That's the problem here: the rate of change is now high enough to affect us within our lifetimes. Your fatalistic outlook of "we're all doomed anyway" wouldn't necessarily need to transpire for countless generations into the future. Since we're actively working to make it happen within the next few decades, we can also take actions to alter that course.
Let's spend less time fighting with each other and more time figuring out how we can get our species off of this lovely little rock and onto the next one because that's our only hope for survival in the end.
That doesn't solve much of anything. The day after the comet hit that wiped out the dinosaurs, where do you think that the most habitable place in the solar system was? That's right: it was still right here on earth. All of the other planets suck. There's no point worrying about them when we have more pressing problems to solve right here.
You try taking a hard drive from 1997 and recording and playing back MPEG2 data in real time simutaniously on it. You already know they figured it out, and it would still be a challenge even if you were an expert (which it seems fairly clear you aren't since you con't grasp the complexity of the problem).
The difficulty of that in 1997 was a function of the crappy hard drives of the day. But what does that have to do with the current situation? TiVo's patent is still in force for hard drives that can easily handle a dozen streams. Today, on any linux box with a MPEG capture card I could type:
$ cat/dev/video > foo.mpg & $ mplayer foo.mpg
(now hit spacebar to pause and unpause video)
...and I'd be violating this patent. That wasn't hard at all. The problem isn't complex.
Pollution is terrible, but compare the average lifespan in the 1800s to the 1900s to today -- for some reason we're living longer even with all this terrible pollution.
There was more "terrible pollution" in the 1800s when there were no environmental regulations. For example, unsafe sewage discharge near drinking water sources killed countless thousands every year. One of the reasons we live longer today is the government interference you despise so much.
It's a good thing I run an old Athlon. This chip has a simple overheat handling procedure: just emit good old-fashioned smoke.
Not only do you receive a convenient olfactory signal to alert you to the situation, but you also avoid security breaches brought on by overly complex thermal management.
All of the claims are dependent on claim 1 or claim 8, and both of those mention using signaling over AC power. It seems to me that one way to sidestep the patent would be to use dedicated signaling wiring like Etherenet or RS-232, and another would be to use DC power.
However, IMO this application is another example of how absurdly low the "obviousness" bar has been set for patents. If you asked a group of 10 freshmen EE students how they would cheaply implement communication between a minibar in a hotel and a central server, I'd bet that more than half of them would suggest using X10-style signalling. This technology has been around for decades; there's nothing new or innovative about using it. It shouldn't be patent-worthy just nobody else has happened to bolt this off-the-shelf stuff into a minibar yet.
Well, that's a rather narrow patent covering the communications network and restocking of large groups of minibars, specifically using X10-like signals over the AC power supply lines. It doesn't cover the single-step purchase nature of minibars, which AFAIK have been around for more than 20 years, so any attempt to patent that would be just as silly as Amazon's patent.
A robo-bar in a hotel room is pretty much just that. You pull out a diet pepsi, and $8.00 + 15% gratutity + 23% county sports stadium tax automatically gets added to your bill.
Re:Patents are not what they are supposed to be.
on
Paul Graham on Patents
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
The founding fathers of the USA wanted to have a patent system to protect the little guy.
I don't think that they had "protecting" anybody in mind. What they really wanted to do was to entice people to publish their trade secrets so that their innovations wouldn't be lost to the public when the inventors died. Perhaps unfortunately, the chosen means to this end was by granting time-limited monopolies.
The problem is that the enticement part has become the all-consuming focus of the patent process, rather than the disclosure of useful trade secrets part. Now a lot of people think that patents are a form of property right a sacred as the rights to their favorite pillow, and the patents themselves most often have obfuscated claims that reveal little if anything that isn't obvious from a quick look at the protected products themselves. They extrapolate from the "protection" side effect of the way patents were implemented and mistakenly assume that that was the primary goal all along.
The inventor now gets far more than the original intended benefits (because he can now often shake down a large company for the profits to all of their business), without having to give up much of anything in return. Much like agricultural market subsidies, patents have become little more than a wasteful government entitlement program.
This truly heralds a new age of independent aeronautics.
Independent how? Scaled Composites has already done enough Pentagon projects to fully qualify as a member of the Military Industrial Complex.
Other than market share, are they really different from Boeing in any significant way? Both companies make civilian aircraft and rockets, and both do defense contracting.
They embed the bloody font, and then use Rights-Management to keep you from changing it!
That reminds me of the Analog Rights Management that I had to deal with many years ago. A big chip vendor we were working with would send out pre-release design specs printed in black ink on dark red paper stock. I guess the idea was to prevent photocopying, but the main effect of their scheme was to make my eyes bleed by the end of the day.
Judging from the posts on this story (almost all of which are debates about system performance), we can draw the scientific conclusion that less than 3% of slashdot commenters actually bother to RTFA.
I just wish Microsoft would stop with this behavior and actually work on their core products. It's been nearly 5 years since the last major revision of Windows--it's getting kind of ridiculous.
Why should they bother with improving their current products when they can just sit back and use their patents to fend off any would-be rivals for the next 20 years? I say they ought to take it easy for now; they don't really need to restart development work until 2020 or so.
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If RFID cards become pervasive, a gray market in matching serial numbers to real IDs will pop up just like there's currently a market among spammers for e-mail addresses. Any unscrupulous merchant with an RFID reader could harvest positive IDs from their customers at the checkout counter.
The key difference with SSNs is that you can't read them remotely from everyone who walks by.
Licensing agreement? We ain't got no agreement. We don't need no agreement. I don't have show you any stinkin' agreements!
If they have the right to sell it as they see fit, then after I've bought it, why don't *I* have the right to tinker with my property as I see fit?
Most likely because they've got enough lobbyists to ensure that the government's police agencies are put into service as their personal towel boys.
Not really. The concept of simultaneously reading and writing a computer file that happens to be video data was patented back in 1993 by somebody else. It's a very broad patent, and is not easily worked around like most of the patents that TiVo actually filed.
Now TiVo owns the rights to that patent, but it's because they bought it out a couple of years ago. (And they were probably infringing that patent prior to that point. IOW, TiVo probably built its empire by violating others' intellectual property.) Basically, TiVo got their most valuable and dangerous IP the same way that any other patent troll company does: not with innovation, but with a cash payout.
Where in the claim does it say that it has to not exit if you skip to past the end of the file? Variable delay works just fine in the example if you don't do that.
TiVo also owns exclusive rights to patent #5,241,428. Claim 1 of that patent is incredibly broad, and my example clearly violates it. There is no legal way to "not do it the way TiVo did".
They got their monopoly due to fundamental flaws with the way the patent system is implemented, including a total breakdown of the concept of "obviousness" that has occurred over the past 25 years.
Like I said, the USPTO should have granted them a patent on any clever tricks they used to get their system to work on crummy hardware. The patent office should *not* have given them a wide-ranging monopoly on the idea of reading and writing a file at the same time. No, I can't blame TiVo for grabbing the handouts the government is offering them, but that doesn't make the situation right or fair.
Additionally, there's a good chance hard drive wouldn't have developed the way they did if it weren't for Tivo.
That's just silly. A hard drive basically has 2 attributes: speed and capacity. Both of these have been increasing exponentially for almost half a century, and will continue to do so. It didn't take TiVo to come along and tell them to keep up the good work.
Those millions of lines of code and R&D efforts were made by parties who aren't TiVo. Why should TiVo get a 20-year monopoly based on the fruits of other peoples' work?
I'll reiterate since in your posts you fundamentally fail to grasp it: TiVo didn't do any of the work to make this possible. They didn't create any hard drives. They didn't design any MPEG chips. They don't deserve a monopoly on the results, but due to the way our patent system is implemented, they have that monopoly just because they were the first to run down to the patent office and file their land grab.
You've pointed out that back when TiVo got started, it was "really hard" to get it to work. So what TiVo deserves is a patent on the now irrelevant problem of how to get recording to work on hardware that barely supports it. But that's *not* a patent on the whole concept of simultaneous record/playback.
I'm sick of seeing this stock response. Did you flunk algebra? There's also an important concept called rate of change. That's the problem here: the rate of change is now high enough to affect us within our lifetimes. Your fatalistic outlook of "we're all doomed anyway" wouldn't necessarily need to transpire for countless generations into the future. Since we're actively working to make it happen within the next few decades, we can also take actions to alter that course.
Let's spend less time fighting with each other and more time figuring out how we can get our species off of this lovely little rock and onto the next one because that's our only hope for survival in the end.
That doesn't solve much of anything. The day after the comet hit that wiped out the dinosaurs, where do you think that the most habitable place in the solar system was? That's right: it was still right here on earth. All of the other planets suck. There's no point worrying about them when we have more pressing problems to solve right here.
The difficulty of that in 1997 was a function of the crappy hard drives of the day. But what does that have to do with the current situation? TiVo's patent is still in force for hard drives that can easily handle a dozen streams. Today, on any linux box with a MPEG capture card I could type:
...and I'd be violating this patent. That wasn't hard at all. The problem isn't complex.There was more "terrible pollution" in the 1800s when there were no environmental regulations. For example, unsafe sewage discharge near drinking water sources killed countless thousands every year. One of the reasons we live longer today is the government interference you despise so much.
Not only do you receive a convenient olfactory signal to alert you to the situation, but you also avoid security breaches brought on by overly complex thermal management.
However, IMO this application is another example of how absurdly low the "obviousness" bar has been set for patents. If you asked a group of 10 freshmen EE students how they would cheaply implement communication between a minibar in a hotel and a central server, I'd bet that more than half of them would suggest using X10-style signalling. This technology has been around for decades; there's nothing new or innovative about using it. It shouldn't be patent-worthy just nobody else has happened to bolt this off-the-shelf stuff into a minibar yet.
Well, that's a rather narrow patent covering the communications network and restocking of large groups of minibars, specifically using X10-like signals over the AC power supply lines. It doesn't cover the single-step purchase nature of minibars, which AFAIK have been around for more than 20 years, so any attempt to patent that would be just as silly as Amazon's patent.
A robo-bar in a hotel room is pretty much just that. You pull out a diet pepsi, and $8.00 + 15% gratutity + 23% county sports stadium tax automatically gets added to your bill.
I don't think that they had "protecting" anybody in mind. What they really wanted to do was to entice people to publish their trade secrets so that their innovations wouldn't be lost to the public when the inventors died. Perhaps unfortunately, the chosen means to this end was by granting time-limited monopolies.
The problem is that the enticement part has become the all-consuming focus of the patent process, rather than the disclosure of useful trade secrets part. Now a lot of people think that patents are a form of property right a sacred as the rights to their favorite pillow, and the patents themselves most often have obfuscated claims that reveal little if anything that isn't obvious from a quick look at the protected products themselves. They extrapolate from the "protection" side effect of the way patents were implemented and mistakenly assume that that was the primary goal all along.
The inventor now gets far more than the original intended benefits (because he can now often shake down a large company for the profits to all of their business), without having to give up much of anything in return. Much like agricultural market subsidies, patents have become little more than a wasteful government entitlement program.
Your world. Delivered...
to the NSA.
Independent how? Scaled Composites has already done enough Pentagon projects to fully qualify as a member of the Military Industrial Complex.
Other than market share, are they really different from Boeing in any significant way? Both companies make civilian aircraft and rockets, and both do defense contracting.
Given that NTP doesn't have any valid patents, logic would dictate that your statement is true.
That reminds me of the Analog Rights Management that I had to deal with many years ago. A big chip vendor we were working with would send out pre-release design specs printed in black ink on dark red paper stock. I guess the idea was to prevent photocopying, but the main effect of their scheme was to make my eyes bleed by the end of the day.
The RTG generators used in these probes are neither clean nor efficient. That's not really an issue in deep space, though.
BTW, they still build 'em like that. The Pluto probe launched this year has one.
Oh yeah? Well I work for someone who formats paragraphs for a living...
Judging from the posts on this story (almost all of which are debates about system performance), we can draw the scientific conclusion that less than 3% of slashdot commenters actually bother to RTFA.
Why should they bother with improving their current products when they can just sit back and use their patents to fend off any would-be rivals for the next 20 years? I say they ought to take it easy for now; they don't really need to restart development work until 2020 or so.