As of last year, pretty much anything that is not "obvious" to the PTO and which has economic value can be patented.
In State Street Bank, the Federal Circuit (the US appeals court which hears almost all patent cases) said that a math algorithm alone is patentable if it has an "economic value", i.e. utility, and that such a patent is cannot be stopped for being a mere "business method."
Then, in Excel, the same court said that a patent for a binary switch (one or zero) over a telecommunications network which tells you whether two end parties are using the same carrier is not obvious. That firm literally got a patent on "1"s and "0"s, making the Onion's recent article more on point than many/. postings.
So, as of now, adding 1 + 1 is patentable, for a commercial purpose not directly shown in prior art. Bell Atlantic later bought Excel for some ungodly amount of money...
Last year, an RIAA official publicly stated their intention to eventually "phase out" MP3s by putting an "off switch" on all SDMI compliant software. After the SDMI standard becomes widespread, the consortium would "flip the switch", and make MP3s completely unplayable on all computers with SDMI installed.
This is made particularly incideous because the Digital Millenium Copyright Act makes a copy control system legal, and makes it a criminal offense to remove such a system (regardless of your intent!) However, the RIAA has gone beyond a copy control system.
By considering (and possibly implementing) such an "off switch", and other attributes of the SDMI standard, the music industry is group boycotting the MP3 standard. They can't do that, at least not the way they are planning to do it now. The DMCA doesn't allow it, and it may be an antitrust violation.
When they do, a number of us will be here, waiting. And for the RIAA/MPAA/DVD-CCA lawyers reading this (We know you're there), recognize that some of us see the potential antitrust violations you've wired or may wire into your software codes. If you keep your efforts limited to honestly restricting piracy, and don't prevent competition with your proposed proprietary formats, and if you stop using your monopoly on movies and/or music to control the downstream market for players, then your industry associations have nothing to worry about. But we're watching, like thousands of hawks.
The moral of the story: we should stick to open MP3 players not made with SDMI, for now.
Instead of paying $10K, we should set up a pool of "provisional" patent applications. For under $100, a provisional patent provides no offensive power, but clearly puts each idea out in the PTO database of "prior art". After a year, the provisional applications expire, but their existence should work as a block to unscrupulous patentees.
Similarly, there is a statutory invention index that are "defensive" patents which go through the PTO obviousness review, but cannot be used to sue. Either of these ideas is practical. It would be simple to set up a web based group to handle this. Any takers?
(1) Its becomming pretty clear we are entering a recession. Better pay off your credit cards and put some money in the cookie jar.
(2) The unstability caused by the election fiasco, caused by both candidates, surely didn't help the economic state of affairs. That said, energy prices, land prices, and stock prices are all headed in a pretty bad direction at the same time. Add that to the credit saturation of the consumer market, you've got a bad predicament.
(3) Bush isn't responsible, but neither is the Justice Department. Clinton's responsibility is anyone's guess--and history and the GNP over the next few years will tell.
Maybe we can forget about venture capitalists, copyright and lawsuits for a bit...
Unfortunately, a downward slump usually means tech companies turn to lawsuits for profits instead of products.
I find it funny that so many people blame the Microsoft suit for the current slump, while saying MS doesn't have a monopoly. The explosion of other lawsuits would have nothing to do with destroying innovation on the internet?
We'll get out of the slump in four years, when quasipresident Bush gets kicked out.
Right now there is a race between public & private entities to map the genome, and the private entities are winning.
More disturbing, though, the private entity is using the public database to double check it's work, giving it a double head start. The private group has filed thousands upon thousands of patent applications. This leads to the essential question: If our DNA is patented, is human reproduction patent infringement?
The problem is that rights generally apply against the government, not the private sector. Similarly, you can redress your grievences to government, but a company can just kick you out the door--not to mention the government will listen to it's grievence well before yours.
The solution is a simple change in contract laws. Now, when companies contract with each other, they always include a non-dislosure clause. Similarly, a consumer's interaction with a company should not be disclosable to a third party without the consumer's express seperate consent.
A rule like this over contracts would stop corporations from "arbitraging" personal information for profit. In fact, the same companies that are saying we have no right to our personal information are now lobbying the US congress to provide copyright-style protection for their resulting databases of our information! Not just the form of the databases, but the information itself. (In effect, a company would have exclusive rights to whatever information it gathered on you!)
Just make consumer interactions presumptavely private, with a seperate agreement required to disclose to third parties. That would at least be a start.
Fed up with bad patents, I think we should set up a open site to collect prior art against crazy patents and publicly post it all.
This can be done still avoiding legal problems; I've been thinking about this and working on it for some time. If anyone is interested in helping, on the legal or technical end, contact me at the address above.
If Al Gore becomes involved in a settlement of the MS case during his presidential campaign, it's good for him as free PR, but is good for everyone else?
First, how much do we want politicians interfering with the judicial process?
Second, MS told Gore, a few years ago, that if the antitrust trial was too severe, they would "pack their bags and move to India". Isn't Gore making himself vulnerable now--he has to find a "good" solution, or he won't become prez?
Last, let's just remember how Gore championed the Telecom Act of 1996 as a great source of competition; then we saw the largest stream of anticompetitive telecom mergers in the history of the US. Is this the person we want settling the MS case?
Apologies: my connection cut off while the last version was being posted. Here is the correctly formatted version.
(1) It seems that the DOJ missed the worst injury MS has caused. Namely, they caused an informational injury in the industry like those recently recognized by the Supreme Court in Kodak v. ITS (1992).
This comes from one thing they did that every user noticed a few years ago: the intentional incompatibility of their API's for external newtork software with MS's internal software, or, in english, tweaking the winsock.dll and friends so Netscape and AOL would crash.
The fact that such suspicious incompatibilities have absolutely no consumer benefit, can only harm competition, and only serve to preserve MS's monopoly OS position and create MS's IE market power seemed very strong evidence. Such conduct was the most flagrant (and traditional) antitrust act MS committed, yet I'm curious why it was never put forward. Was the difficulty proving MS's intent? But isn't MS's behavior suspicious given their hesitancy to give DOJ access to any of their code?
(2) Reading through the Findings of Fact, Judge Jackson makes a number of conclusions about MS's use of monopoly power to leverage other players and other horizontal (other OS's) and vertical (Apps and Hardware manufacturers) markets. Specifically, the potential agreement to split the browser market w/ Netscape on OS lines appears to be a prima facie illegal market division. Is this the strongest theory for an actual finding of an antitrust violation?
(3) MS's refusal to deal problems with Apple and other Hardware manufacturers over exclusive licensing agreements are bad; but, isn't this seems to be a weaker antitrust argument? Namely, it's not at all clear from the legal perspective (although it's pretty clear from a common sense perspective) that MS's market power was proven to extend to hardware dealers. For instance, are the favorable terms to exclusive licensees of Microsoft, while locking out, say OS/2 in the early 90's, enough to constitute an antitrust act on MS's part?
(4)In light of Judge Jacksons Findings of Fact about the merging of IE and Win98, is this sufficient to overcome the DC Circuit's novel test it set down a year and a half ago on browser integration? While Judge Jackson's conclusion that there was no consumer benefit from the integration is strong enough that the DC Circuit can't likely overturn it on a clearly erroneous standard, can they say his findings applied the wrong legal standard?
In other words, the DC Circuit said explicitly MS had shown a minimum showing of technological benefit from integration that, at least, it did not violate the consent decree and probably didn't violate the antitrust laws, if I'm reading it correctly. Judge Jackson then concluded there was no consumer benefit and the integration was solely for anticompetitive purposes. Does Judge Jackson's Finding of Fact thus legally conflict with the DC Circuit's prior conclusions?
(5) Lastly, the Supreme Court has been all but consistent on antitrust in the last few years. It doesn't seem like the DC Circuit test is in line with recent SC decisions, do you think the test will die on appeal?
I think the DC Circuit seemed to misinterpret Kodak v. ITS and other cases. In the end, do you think this case will come down to the legal issue of how consumer harm is to be defined in tech cases, and how antitrust injury is defined in tech competitors?
I mean these as seeds for discussion, answer what you feel is most interesting, or none at all. People don't seem to realize the conservative interpretation antitrust laws are given nowadays, so I'm asking these to find out which theories MS is most likely liable under.
Nope. I should have been a bit clearer--if you were already doing something, and didn't recognize it as a "new invention" then that other inventor's new patent --shouldn't-- be patentable, but may very well be held valid in court. This is patent law, not common sense. Or if the language of the patent covers conduct that used to be in the public domain, that same conduct could be covered by the patent if some trivial condition is met, like doing X (public domain) versus doing X on the internet (covered by the patent.)
I believe it is a little worse than Mr. Young lets on.
(1) Especially in university or early open source development, you are still liable for infringement EVEN IF YOU DID IT FIRST. While you think you'd be protected as a "prior user," this isn't well established. Congress is passing legislation that will allow corporations to use this defense, but make it difficult for universities or individuals to apply it: if you sell your invention after the other entity has patented it, you are still liable. [This is the American Inventor Protection Act of 1999.]
(2) It isn't just patents coming out tomorrow that are an issue. There are thousands of patents in the PTO covering software and internet uses people think are in the public domain. This "land grab" covers business methods, algorithms, and a number of areas previously thought unpatentable.
(3) For technical reasons, a patent can conceivably cover something you've done for a long time. If you've done X for years, and a patent claiming only Y in it's "written description" comes out, you shouldn't be an infringer. But if the patent arguably includes X in the claims, you shouldn't be an infringer but may very well be adjudicated as one. Your previous practice would only be a defense under particular circumstances (i.e. it was published)
(3) I think we need a patents and general intellectual property HOW-TO group. Anyone out there interested in putting together a basic explanation of patents, trademarks, copyright, and software/internet for/. style reader, let me know.
You'd think ordinary ideas were'nt patentable. But right now they are. It doesn't matter that it's "obvious", it just matters that it hasn't been done before, isn't already out there, and is commercially useful. If you meet all these things, the courts will uphold your patent on obviousness grounds. Don't yell at me, I don't like it either. But them's the truth.
The RSA patent is referenced by 174 newer patents. That means that (at least) 174 other people have similar "inventions", some real, some questionable, which directly use the RSA algorithm. Here it is.
The problem is that its hard to tell what uses of RSA are actually covered by these newer patents. It doesn't matter whether the use is "obvious" to us, it's just impossible to tell what uses are covered without going through everything. Translation: RSA will be available soon, but it's use for almost anything commercial/useful will still be independently patentable.
The options of intrusive government regs or breaking up microsoft aren't appealing. Instead--let them lose the help of government regulation. Take away their intellectual property rights in their operating system software.
If you look at what happened to the baby bells--the breakup of AT&T actually made a fortune for (almost) everyone involved, especially shareholders. And now, almost 15 years later, the baby bells are merging again into a new local monopoly, and at the same time the long distance companies are mergings (a few years ago Sprint+MCI/Worldcom would have been laughable...). On the other hand, direct government regulation wouldn't work for an industry like software. Imagine a hundred people with buckets trying to control a river in case it floods. That would be government regulation of Microsoft.
Much of what Microsoft actually did wrong (contrasted to the actual charges DOJ are bringing in the suit) involves misuse of techonology. You could say it is "borging" small developers and new technologies, then privatizing industry standards to its own proprietary systems to ensure dominance and control. The best way to handle this type of misuse of innovation, misuse of technology, is to deny it patent, copyright, and trademark protection on the technology it misused.
The patents and IP microsoft has are government grants. When they are misused, they can and should be taken away. It's not exactly "open source" but its a start.
-Aug 13: Shamir announces Twinkle -Aug 26: Panel suggests getting rid of export restrictions. href="http://cryptome.org/LIB42.htm">here. -Sept. 14: Clinton announces restrictions will be changed.
as of now, they're still in place... I think the real point is technology is changing too quickly for "digital certificates" or any encryption-based 'official ID' system to be taken seriously. Meanwhile, most people are uninformed. They think "SSL" means secure, and see this as a complicated black box.
There are four sides to this: consumers & business, the government, clueful hackers & programmers, and bad guys. The first three groups have legitimate interests to protect, and need to be protected from the fourth group. The third group (slashdot types) have to tell the government what they want, and have to inform consumers what encryption means.
This deserves a much longer rant, but less boring...
It smells like an antitrust violation. RIAA is an association representing an entire industry; if they collude to exclude a competitor from the market, it sounds like a group boycott to me.
If they go forward with this, or any evidence of this is available, there is every reason to organize a private suit against these guys, let them publicly announce first.
In 1991, the Supreme Court decided that the factual content of phone directories are NOT copyrightable. (see Feist Publications, 499 US 340)
There is little difference between a phone book entry and a whois entry; they may be able to copyright the FORM of the database, but the INFORMATION is useable by all.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, I know some patent examiners and patent lawyers and... em, you're right. :)
As of last year, pretty much anything that is not "obvious" to the PTO and which has economic value can be patented.
/. postings.
In State Street Bank, the Federal Circuit (the US appeals court which hears almost all patent cases) said that a math algorithm alone is patentable if it has an "economic value", i.e. utility, and that such a patent is cannot be stopped for being a mere "business method."
Then, in Excel, the same court said that a patent for a binary switch (one or zero) over a telecommunications network which tells you whether two end parties are using the same carrier is not obvious. That firm literally got a patent on "1"s and "0"s, making the Onion's recent article more on point than many
So, as of now, adding 1 + 1 is patentable, for a commercial purpose not directly shown in prior art. Bell Atlantic later bought Excel for some ungodly amount of money...
Last year, an RIAA official publicly stated their intention to eventually "phase out" MP3s by putting an "off switch" on all SDMI compliant software. After the SDMI standard becomes widespread, the consortium would "flip the switch", and make MP3s completely unplayable on all computers with SDMI installed.
This is made particularly incideous because the Digital Millenium Copyright Act makes a copy control system legal, and makes it a criminal offense to remove such a system (regardless of your intent!) However, the RIAA has gone beyond a copy control system.
By considering (and possibly implementing) such an "off switch", and other attributes of the SDMI standard, the music industry is group boycotting the MP3 standard. They can't do that, at least not the way they are planning to do it now. The DMCA doesn't allow it, and it may be an antitrust violation.
When they do, a number of us will be here, waiting. And for the RIAA/MPAA/DVD-CCA lawyers reading this (We know you're there), recognize that some of us see the potential antitrust violations you've wired or may wire into your software codes. If you keep your efforts limited to honestly restricting piracy, and don't prevent competition with your proposed proprietary formats, and if you stop using your monopoly on movies and/or music to control the downstream market for players, then your industry associations have nothing to worry about. But we're watching, like thousands of hawks.
The moral of the story: we should stick to open MP3 players not made with SDMI, for now.
Instead of paying $10K, we should set up a pool of "provisional" patent applications. For under $100, a provisional patent provides no offensive power, but clearly puts each idea out in the PTO database of "prior art". After a year, the provisional applications expire, but their existence should work as a block to unscrupulous patentees.
Similarly, there is a statutory invention index that are "defensive" patents which go through the PTO obviousness review, but cannot be used to sue. Either of these ideas is practical. It would be simple to set up a web based group to handle this. Any takers?
(1) Its becomming pretty clear we are entering a recession. Better pay off your credit cards and put some money in the cookie jar.
(2) The unstability caused by the election fiasco, caused by both candidates, surely didn't help the economic state of affairs. That said, energy prices, land prices, and stock prices are all headed in a pretty bad direction at the same time. Add that to the credit saturation of the consumer market, you've got a bad predicament.
(3) Bush isn't responsible, but neither is the Justice Department. Clinton's responsibility is anyone's guess--and history and the GNP over the next few years will tell.
(4) Anonymous coward? 'Nuf said.
Maybe we can forget about venture capitalists, copyright and lawsuits for a bit...
Unfortunately, a downward slump usually means tech companies turn to lawsuits for profits instead of products.
I find it funny that so many people blame the Microsoft suit for the current slump, while saying MS doesn't have a monopoly. The explosion of other lawsuits would have nothing to do with destroying innovation on the internet?
We'll get out of the slump in four years, when quasipresident Bush gets kicked out.
Right now there is a race between public & private entities to map the genome, and the private entities are winning.
More disturbing, though, the private entity is using the public database to double check it's work, giving it a double head start. The private group has filed thousands upon thousands of patent applications. This leads to the essential question: If our DNA is patented, is human reproduction patent infringement?
The problem is that rights generally apply against the government, not the private sector. Similarly, you can redress your grievences to government, but a company can just kick you out the door--not to mention the government will listen to it's grievence well before yours.
The solution is a simple change in contract laws. Now, when companies contract with each other, they always include a non-dislosure clause. Similarly, a consumer's interaction with a company should not be disclosable to a third party without the consumer's express seperate consent.
A rule like this over contracts would stop corporations from "arbitraging" personal information for profit. In fact, the same companies that are saying we have no right to our personal information are now lobbying the US congress to provide copyright-style protection for their resulting databases of our information! Not just the form of the databases, but the information itself. (In effect, a company would have exclusive rights to whatever information it gathered on you!)
Just make consumer interactions presumptavely private, with a seperate agreement required to disclose to third parties. That would at least be a start.
Fed up with bad patents, I think we should set up a open site to collect prior art against crazy patents and publicly post it all.
This can be done still avoiding legal problems; I've been thinking about this and working on it for some time. If anyone is interested in helping, on the legal or technical end, contact me at the address above.
I think the best solution is to boycot oxygen. It only causes rust and forest fires anyway.
Unless there's a patent on boycotting products via the internet too. There probably is, at least an application, for that.
If Al Gore becomes involved in a settlement of the MS case during his presidential campaign, it's good for him as free PR, but is good for everyone else?
First, how much do we want politicians interfering with the judicial process?
Second, MS told Gore, a few years ago, that if the antitrust trial was too severe, they would "pack their bags and move to India". Isn't Gore making himself vulnerable now--he has to find a "good" solution, or he won't become prez?
Last, let's just remember how Gore championed the Telecom Act of 1996 as a great source of competition; then we saw the largest stream of anticompetitive telecom mergers in the history of the US. Is this the person we want settling the MS case?
Apologies: my connection cut off while the last version was being posted. Here is the correctly formatted version.
(1) It seems that the DOJ missed the worst injury MS has caused. Namely, they caused an informational injury in the industry like those recently recognized by the Supreme Court in Kodak v. ITS (1992).
This comes from one thing they did that every user noticed a few years ago: the intentional incompatibility of their API's for external newtork software with MS's internal software, or, in english, tweaking the winsock.dll and friends so Netscape and AOL would crash.
The fact that such suspicious incompatibilities have absolutely no consumer benefit, can only harm competition, and only serve to preserve MS's monopoly OS position and create MS's IE market power seemed very strong evidence. Such conduct was the most flagrant (and traditional) antitrust act MS committed, yet I'm curious why it was never put forward. Was the difficulty proving MS's intent? But isn't MS's behavior suspicious given their hesitancy to give DOJ access to any of their code?
(2) Reading through the Findings of Fact, Judge Jackson makes a number of conclusions about MS's use of monopoly power to leverage other players and other horizontal (other OS's) and vertical (Apps and Hardware manufacturers) markets. Specifically, the potential agreement to split the browser market w/ Netscape on OS lines appears to be a prima facie illegal market division. Is this the strongest theory for an actual finding of an antitrust violation?
(3) MS's refusal to deal problems with Apple and other Hardware manufacturers over exclusive licensing agreements are bad; but, isn't this seems to be a weaker antitrust argument? Namely, it's not at all clear from the legal perspective (although it's pretty clear from a common sense perspective) that MS's market power was proven to extend to hardware dealers. For instance, are the favorable terms to exclusive licensees of Microsoft, while locking out, say OS/2 in the early 90's, enough to constitute an antitrust act on MS's part?
(4)In light of Judge Jacksons Findings of Fact about the merging of IE and Win98, is this sufficient to overcome the DC Circuit's novel test it set down a year and a half ago on browser integration? While Judge Jackson's conclusion that there was no consumer benefit from the integration is strong enough that the DC Circuit can't likely overturn it on a clearly erroneous standard, can they say his findings applied the wrong legal standard?
In other words, the DC Circuit said explicitly MS had shown a minimum showing of technological benefit from integration that, at least, it did not violate the consent decree and probably didn't violate the antitrust laws, if I'm reading it correctly. Judge Jackson then concluded there was no consumer benefit and the integration was solely for anticompetitive purposes. Does Judge Jackson's Finding of Fact thus legally conflict with the DC Circuit's prior conclusions?
(5) Lastly, the Supreme Court has been all but consistent on antitrust in the last few years. It doesn't seem like the DC Circuit test is in line with recent SC decisions, do you think the test will die on appeal?
I think the DC Circuit seemed to misinterpret Kodak v. ITS and other cases. In the end, do you think this case will come down to the legal issue of how consumer harm is to be defined in tech cases, and how antitrust injury is defined in tech competitors?
I mean these as seeds for discussion, answer what you feel is most interesting, or none at all. People don't seem to realize the conservative interpretation antitrust laws are given nowadays, so I'm asking these to find out which theories MS is most likely liable under.
A few legal questions for our edification... (1) It seems that the DOJ missed the worst injury MS has caused. Namely, they caused an informational injury in the industry like those recently recognized by the Supreme Court in Kodak v. ITS (1992). This comes from one thing they did that every user noticed a few years ago: the intentional incompatibility of their API's for external newtork software with MS's internal software, or, in english, tweaking the winsock.dll and friends so Netscape and AOL would crash. The fact that such suspicious incompatibilities have absolutely no consumer benefit, can only harm competition, and only serve to preserve MS's monopoly OS position and create MS's IE market power seemed very strong evidence. Such conduct was the most flagrant (and traditional) antitrust act MS committed, yet I'm curious why it was never put forward. Was the difficulty proving MS's intent? But isn't MS's behavior suspicious given their hesitancy to give DOJ access to any of their code? (2) Reading through the Findings of Fact, Judge Jackson makes a number of conclusions about MS's use of monopoly power to leverage other players and other horizontal (other OS's) and vertical (Apps and Hardware manufacturers) markets. Specifically, the potential agreement to split the browser market w/ Netscape on OS lines appears to be a prima facie illegal market division. Is this the strongest theory for an actual finding of an antitrust violation? (3) MS's refusal to deal problems with Apple and other Hardware manufacturers over exclusive licensing agreements are bad; but, isn't this seems to be a weaker antitrust argument? Namely, it's not at all clear from the legal perspective (although it's pretty clear from a common sense perspective) that MS's market power was proven to extend to hardware dealers. For instance, are the favorable terms to exclusive licensees of Microsoft, while locking out, say OS/2 in the early 90's, enough to constitute an antitrust act on MS's part? (4)In light of Judge Jacksons Findings of Fact about the merging of IE and Win98, is this sufficient to overcome the DC Circuit's novel test it set down a year and a half ago on browser integration? While Judge Jackson's conclusion that there was no consumer benefit from the integration is strong enough that the DC Circuit can't likely overturn it on a clearly erroneous standard, can they say his findings applied the wrong legal standard? In other words, the DC Circuit said explicitly MS had shown a minimum showing of technological benefit from integration that, at least, it did not violate the consent decree and probably didn't violate the antitrust laws, if I'm reading it correctly. Judge Jackson then concluded there was no consumer benefit and the integration was solely for anticompetitive purposes. Does Judge Jackson's Finding of Fact thus legally conflict with the DC Circuit's prior conclusions? (5) Lastly, the Supreme Court has been all but consistent on antitrust in the last few years. It doesn't seem like the DC Circuit test is in line with recent SC decisions, do you think the test will die on appeal? I think the DC Circuit seemed to misinterpret Kodak v. ITS and other cases. In the end, do you think this case will come down to the legal issue of how consumer harm is to be defined in tech cases, and how antitrust injury is defined in tech competitors? I mean these as seeds for discussion, answer what you feel is most interesting, or none at all. People don't seem to realize the conservative interpretation antitrust laws are given nowadays, so I'm asking these to find out which theories MS is most likely liable under.
Nope. I should have been a bit clearer--if you were already doing something, and didn't recognize it as a "new invention" then that other inventor's new patent --shouldn't-- be patentable, but may very well be held valid in court. This is patent law, not common sense. Or if the language of the patent covers conduct that used to be in the public domain, that same conduct could be covered by the patent if some trivial condition is met, like doing X (public domain) versus doing X on the internet (covered by the patent.)
I believe it is a little worse than Mr. Young lets on.
(1) Especially in university or early open source development, you are still liable for infringement EVEN IF YOU DID IT FIRST. While you think you'd be protected as a "prior user," this isn't well established. Congress is passing legislation that will allow corporations to use this defense, but make it difficult for universities or individuals to apply it: if you sell your invention after the other entity has patented it, you are still liable. [This is the American Inventor Protection Act of 1999.]
(2) It isn't just patents coming out tomorrow that are an issue. There are thousands of patents in the PTO covering software and internet uses people think are in the public domain. This "land grab" covers business methods, algorithms, and a number of areas previously thought unpatentable.
(3) For technical reasons, a patent can conceivably cover something you've done for a long time. If you've done X for years, and a patent claiming only Y in it's "written description" comes out, you shouldn't be an infringer. But if the patent arguably includes X in the claims, you shouldn't be an infringer but may very well be adjudicated as one. Your previous practice would only be a defense under particular circumstances (i.e. it was published)
(3) I think we need a patents and general intellectual property HOW-TO group. Anyone out there interested in putting together a basic explanation of patents, trademarks, copyright, and software/internet for /. style reader, let me know.
You'd think ordinary ideas were'nt patentable. But right now they are. It doesn't matter that it's "obvious", it just matters that it hasn't been done before, isn't already out there, and is commercially useful. If you meet all these things, the courts will uphold your patent on obviousness grounds. Don't yell at me, I don't like it either. But them's the truth.
The RSA patent is referenced by 174 newer patents. That means that (at least) 174 other people have similar "inventions", some real, some questionable, which directly use the RSA algorithm. Here it is.
The problem is that its hard to tell what uses of RSA are actually covered by these newer patents. It doesn't matter whether the use is "obvious" to us, it's just impossible to tell what uses are covered without going through everything. Translation: RSA will be available soon, but it's use for almost anything commercial/useful will still be independently patentable.
The options of intrusive government regs or breaking up microsoft aren't appealing. Instead--let them lose the help of government regulation. Take away their intellectual property rights in their operating system software.
If you look at what happened to the baby bells--the breakup of AT&T actually made a fortune for (almost) everyone involved, especially shareholders. And now, almost 15 years later, the baby bells are merging again into a new local monopoly, and at the same time the long distance companies are mergings (a few years ago Sprint+MCI/Worldcom would have been laughable...). On the other hand, direct government regulation wouldn't work for an industry like software. Imagine a hundred people with buckets trying to control a river in case it floods. That would be government regulation of Microsoft.
Much of what Microsoft actually did wrong (contrasted to the actual charges DOJ are bringing in the suit) involves misuse of techonology. You could say it is "borging" small developers and new technologies, then privatizing industry standards to its own proprietary systems to ensure dominance and control. The best way to handle this type of misuse of innovation, misuse of technology, is to deny it patent, copyright, and trademark protection on the technology it misused.
The patents and IP microsoft has are government grants. When they are misused, they can and should be taken away. It's not exactly "open source" but its a start.
-Aug 13: Shamir announces Twinkle
as of now, they're still in place... I think the real point is technology is changing too quickly for "digital certificates" or any encryption-based 'official ID' system to be taken seriously. Meanwhile, most people are uninformed. They think "SSL" means secure, and see this as a complicated black box.-Aug 26: Panel suggests getting rid of export restrictions. href="http://cryptome.org/LIB42.htm">here.
-Sept. 14: Clinton announces restrictions will be changed.
There are four sides to this: consumers & business, the government, clueful hackers & programmers, and bad guys. The first three groups have legitimate interests to protect, and need to be protected from the fourth group. The third group (slashdot types) have to tell the government what they want, and have to inform consumers what encryption means.
This deserves a much longer rant, but less boring...
It smells like an antitrust violation. RIAA is an association representing an entire industry; if they collude to exclude a competitor from the market, it sounds like a group boycott to me.
If they go forward with this, or any evidence of this is available, there is every reason to organize a private suit against these guys, let them publicly announce first.
In 1991, the Supreme Court decided that the factual content of phone directories are NOT copyrightable. (see Feist Publications, 499 US 340)
There is little difference between a phone book entry and a whois entry; they may be able to copyright the FORM of the database, but the INFORMATION is useable by all.