Re:you can't claim proprietary rights to a verb.
on
Verbing Weirds Google
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Well, given that Google is an invented word, Google can are quite within their rights to claim common-law trademark rights to it - just like Coke, Kodak etc. (in fact looking at their homepage they seem to have filed for a trade mark for the word).
The reason why they don't want it genericised is that once that happens, they lose any proprietary rights in the word "Google" and any other party can use it at will. So, it's not really surprising at all that they are trying to prevent someone adopting it in a lexicon.
The same thing happened with Rollerblades, Thermos, Hoover etc etc.
The perils of a too popular Trade Mark! It may be free marketing, but they lose any rights to the name if/once it is 'adopted' into the language.
The cost difference between a position sensing clipboard (ie digitizing tablet) and a piece of paper are pretty big - particularly when you look at the 'total cost of ownership' issues, training, accuracy in respect of tablet devices.
The main issue is making the position encoded paper cheap enough for businesses. That doesn't seem too hard to me - the take-up bottleneck, imho will be anotos control over the decoding servers. In any case, there seem to be a lot of business models that might work.
Also, a lot of people have missed the point that there are virtually no other technologies that allow *absolute* position detection in a pen/paper form factor without a tablet or similar triangulation or sensing systems.
Sure there are the lots of relative position devices (Cross pen, optical mice etc etc), but none of them work in the same way or give you this sort of functionality.
This Anoto patent describes exactly the system works: WO 0126032 A1 (you can look at this document on the European Patent Office Website at http://l2.espacenet.com/espacenet/viewer?PN=WO0126 032&CY=ep&LG=en&DB=EPD
The main advantage is that it's an *absolute* position detection system as opposed to a relative system like optical mice, tablets etc.
The large paper space is a side effect of the encoding algorithm which allows an enormous logical area for paper encoding.
I've use one... very cool. No problems with handwriting capture. A nice piece of kit.
The Anoto system does use absolute coordinates. The position information is encoded into the "grid" background. The camera in the pen images the field of view and decodes the absolute position. When you strobe this as you move across the page (so long as the pen application pressure is being detected) you measure the position on the page (or the location on the unique logical page space - which is pretty huge).
The only real downside is the need for the pre-printed paper - but I imagine that will not be too big an obstacle for some of the more obvious business applications.
Yes, you're right. A US patent can have a real economic effect if a manufacturer wants to sell in the States. This is particularly so as the US is very good value in terms of patenting costs - this metric takes into account population, GDP, government costs, deterrence, enforcement costs etc. This makes it a good export target country where IP rights are effective.
I guess I was really talking about legal effect as it is pretty common to see US patents discussed as if they were International.
Having said that, in most of my work, the US has been one of many export targets and I'm not sure the presence of a competing patent or the inability to file for patent protection meant the end of any company I know of. It could happen though.
The US is not always the biggest single market for some types of technology. But it can have a knock on effect because of its IP law. The best example of this was when the US (and Canada) had "first to invent" rather than first to file. This gave legal priority to US applicants who were the first to invent something, whereas nearly every other country works on a first to file system.
By contrast, the US does have the concept of Small Entity giving cheaper govt fees for small organisations. The World Industrial Property Organisation has this too for PCT applications made by patent applicants from developing nations.
I'm not sure the US has a statutory compulsory license regime for patents. Given the policy of generally stronger inventor rights in the US, perhaps it doesn't. But the US DOJ and the courts can force a patent owner to license their patents. An example of this is the compulsory license enforced on 3D Systems Corp and DTM Corp. Interestingly this was to "preserve competition and promote innovation by allowing a firm presently competing abroad to enter the U.S. market." So it seems it's not all bad news for foreign companies. Usually it reduces to a policy call. After all, patents are inherently monopolistic - the hard thing is getting the balance right.
Read it again. Slowly if you have to. A recommendation for people to inform themselves doesn't imply a lack of intelligence. A proper response to your followup would.
The standard of patent reform discussions here should be improved. Yes it was critical of some of the posts here. Tough. As this thread shows, it's justified.
"Lot of money"?? - Are you kidding? I know it's a useful stereotype to demonise anyone associated with the legal profession, but keep to the facts in my post.
"saved you 5 minutes of your life"? What?! I'm saying go and read some law.
Here are some good resources.
http://vkv.tripod.com/patent.htm http://www.eng lib.cornell.edu/instruction/patents. html http://www.piperpat.co.nz/resource/iplinks.h tml http://www.european-patent-office.org/online/
If you work in technology these might save you some time and hassle one day.
I'm sorry but I have to say any attempts of patent reform out of these forums are doomed to fail. Utterly.
(BTW, I'm not directing my followup at the previous post either... just at patent reform posts here in general).
The level of ignorance of intellectual property law displayed is most slashdot discussions is roughly that of a newbie wanting to sue someone because his or her linux installation was too hard for them.
Cruel but fair.
Apart from disagreements based on a political or economic stance (hey, anyone's entitled to an opinion), it is clear that many people posting patent reform proposals have utterly no clue about what a patent is, how to read one, what can be protected by a patent and what are the criteria for patenting.
The signal to noise ratio on this topic is vanishingly small which is no excuse given that there are many excellent web-based resources which might help people learn a bit about IP law.
As a really rough guide before commenting on *any* patent infringement case, here are a few rules...
1. READ THE PATENT. For US patents the full text and figures are available on www.uspto.gov. For European and many other countries check out http://ep.espacenet.com (which brings me to rule 2...)
2. Patents are jurisdictional. Yes, other countries have patent systems which may or may not be identical to the US system. In fact, the US has some quite strange wrinkles compared with other places. Also, a US patent has NO legal effect outside the US (other than as prior art - like any other document...).
2. READ THE CLAIMS. If I had a dollar for every time I'd read a spittle-flecked indignant post about someone 'patenting' something when it is clear the author of the post has only read the title or the abstract.... The legal coverage is in the claims - these are the numbered clauses at the end of the patent. This probably accounts for 80% of indignant anti-patent posts. Someone hears about a patent and posts something along the lines of "they patented X???!?!! hey what about if I patented Y!!!". It's a no brainer. Read them. For example, the RIM Blackberry patent sounds scary but the reality is the claims look too narrow, include weird limitations and seem to read on lots of prior art. But this didn't stop many hysterical posts demanding patent reform. Otoh, there is the xerox 'graffiti' patent which I'm sure Palm Inc have found very interesting.
4. Realise that the simple fact of a patent existing is NO judgement on the value of the technology. Anyone is free to try and patent the dumbest things they want to. Who is to judge their idea? Not me, not you and certainly not anyone in the US (or any other) government. Child swing patents big deal - perhaps it was a "baby examiner". There are lots of silly patents out there. They make amusing reading. All they prove is that someone spent money on them and managed to convince a patent examiner that it was new and inventive.
5. If something annoys you about the patent system, do some research to find out if there is in fact a problem. For example the previous poster is concerned about people sitting on patents and not working them. Well, many countries have what are called compulsory licenses which cover situations where a patent isn't worked. Structures vary, but a quick bit of research should have revealed this legal mechanism.
If you follow those rules, you should be able to at least contribute something useful in that hazy zone in where technology, law and economics overlap. Otherwise, you can look very foolish. No-one would expect to post on slashdot with inane comments on technology and not expect to be corrected.
There it is.
(By the way, yes, I am a patent attorney (not in the US). So of course I have a vested interested in the patent system. It's just impossible to discuss patent reform if the contributors known nothing about the system itself.)
Sorry to niggle, but do you know copyright protection actually covers? Yes, what you have proposed is absurd, but it isn't copyright law. Copyright is a quite specific form of right and does not include ideas, concepts, algorythms etc. The signal to noise ratio in these discussions is astonishingly low and to the point where there is really no useful output - which is a shame as the new laws are important, but IP law isn't well known or understood, as proved by many of these posts.
er... check some copyright law. The creator of the work (prima facie) owns the copyright work. It's up to the creater (artist, musician etc) what they do with their intellectual property rights.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, given that Google is an invented word, Google can are quite within their rights to claim common-law trademark rights to it - just like Coke, Kodak etc. (in fact looking at their homepage they seem to have filed for a trade mark for the word).
The reason why they don't want it genericised is that once that happens, they lose any proprietary rights in the word "Google" and any other party can use it at will. So, it's not really surprising at all that they are trying to prevent someone adopting it in a lexicon.
The same thing happened with Rollerblades, Thermos, Hoover etc etc.
The perils of a too popular Trade Mark! It may be free marketing, but they lose any rights to the name if/once it is 'adopted' into the language.
The cost difference between a position sensing clipboard (ie digitizing tablet) and a piece of paper are pretty big - particularly when you look at the 'total cost of ownership' issues, training, accuracy in respect of tablet devices.
The main issue is making the position encoded paper cheap enough for businesses. That doesn't seem too hard to me - the take-up bottleneck, imho will be anotos control over the decoding servers. In any case, there seem to be a lot of business models that might work.
Also, a lot of people have missed the point that there are virtually no other technologies that allow *absolute* position detection in a pen/paper form factor without a tablet or similar triangulation or sensing systems.
Sure there are the lots of relative position devices (Cross pen, optical mice etc etc), but none of them work in the same way or give you this sort of functionality.
Anyway, it's an interesting technology for sure.
This Anoto patent describes exactly the system works: WO 0126032 A1 (you can look at this document on the European Patent Office Website at http://l2.espacenet.com/espacenet/viewer?PN=WO0126 032&CY=ep&LG=en&DB=EPD
The main advantage is that it's an *absolute* position detection system as opposed to a relative system like optical mice, tablets etc.
The large paper space is a side effect of the encoding algorithm which allows an enormous logical area for paper encoding.
I've use one... very cool. No problems with handwriting capture. A nice piece of kit.
The Anoto system does use absolute coordinates. The position information is encoded into the "grid" background. The camera in the pen images the field of view and decodes the absolute position. When you strobe this as you move across the page (so long as the pen application pressure is being detected) you measure the position on the page (or the location on the unique logical page space - which is pretty huge).
The only real downside is the need for the pre-printed paper - but I imagine that will not be too big an obstacle for some of the more obvious business applications.
Yes, you're right. A US patent can have a real economic effect if a manufacturer wants to sell in the States. This is particularly so as the US is very good value in terms of patenting costs - this metric takes into account population, GDP, government costs, deterrence, enforcement costs etc. This makes it a good export target country where IP rights are effective.
I guess I was really talking about legal effect as it is pretty common to see US patents discussed as if they were International.
Having said that, in most of my work, the US has been one of many export targets and I'm not sure the presence of a competing patent or the inability to file for patent protection meant the end of any company I know of. It could happen though.
The US is not always the biggest single market for some types of technology. But it can have a knock on effect because of its IP law. The best example of this was when the US (and Canada) had "first to invent" rather than first to file. This gave legal priority to US applicants who were the first to invent something, whereas
nearly every other country works on a first to file system.
By contrast, the US does have the concept of Small Entity giving cheaper govt fees for small organisations. The World Industrial Property Organisation has this too for PCT applications made by patent applicants from developing nations.
I'm not sure the US has a statutory compulsory license regime for patents. Given the policy of generally stronger inventor rights in the US, perhaps it doesn't. But the US DOJ and the courts can force a patent owner to license their patents. An example of this is the compulsory license enforced on 3D Systems Corp and DTM Corp. Interestingly this was to "preserve competition and promote innovation by allowing a firm presently competing abroad to enter the U.S. market." So it seems it's not all bad news for foreign companies. Usually it reduces to a policy call. After all, patents are inherently monopolistic - the hard thing is getting the balance right.
...sigh
g lib.cornell.edu/instruction/patents. htmlh tml/
Read it again. Slowly if you have to. A recommendation for people to inform themselves doesn't imply a lack of intelligence. A proper response to your followup would.
The standard of patent reform discussions here should be improved. Yes it was critical of some of the posts here. Tough. As this thread shows, it's justified.
"Lot of money"?? - Are you kidding? I know it's a useful stereotype to demonise anyone associated with the legal profession, but keep to the facts in my post.
"saved you 5 minutes of your life"? What?! I'm saying go and read some law.
Here are some good resources.
http://vkv.tripod.com/patent.htm
http://www.en
http://www.piperpat.co.nz/resource/iplinks.
http://www.european-patent-office.org/online
If you work in technology these might save you some time and hassle one day.
You're welcome.
I'm sorry but I have to say any attempts of patent reform out of these forums are doomed to fail. Utterly.
(BTW, I'm not directing my followup at the previous post either... just at patent reform posts here in general).
The level of ignorance of intellectual property law displayed is most slashdot discussions is roughly that of a newbie wanting to sue someone because his or her linux installation was too hard for them.
Cruel but fair.
Apart from disagreements based on a political or economic stance (hey, anyone's entitled to an opinion), it is clear that many people posting patent reform proposals have utterly no clue about what a patent is, how to read one, what can be protected by a patent and what are the criteria for patenting.
The signal to noise ratio on this topic is vanishingly small which is no excuse given that there are many excellent web-based resources which might help people learn a bit about IP law.
As a really rough guide before commenting on *any* patent infringement case, here are a few rules...
1. READ THE PATENT. For US patents the full text and figures are available on www.uspto.gov. For European and many other countries check out http://ep.espacenet.com (which brings me to rule 2...)
2. Patents are jurisdictional. Yes, other countries have patent systems which may or may not be identical to the US system. In fact, the US has some quite strange wrinkles compared with other places. Also, a US patent has NO legal effect outside the US (other than as prior art - like any other document...).
2. READ THE CLAIMS. If I had a dollar for every time I'd read a spittle-flecked indignant post about someone 'patenting' something when it is clear the author of the post has only read the title or the abstract.... The legal coverage is in the claims - these are the numbered clauses at the end of the patent. This probably accounts for 80% of indignant anti-patent posts. Someone hears about a patent and posts something along the lines of "they patented X???!?!! hey what about if I patented Y!!!". It's a no brainer. Read them. For example, the RIM Blackberry patent sounds scary but the reality is the claims look too narrow, include weird limitations and seem to read on lots of prior art. But this didn't stop many hysterical posts demanding patent reform. Otoh, there is the xerox 'graffiti' patent which I'm sure Palm Inc have found very interesting.
4. Realise that the simple fact of a patent existing is NO judgement on the value of the technology. Anyone is free to try and patent the dumbest things they want to. Who is to judge their idea? Not me, not you and certainly not anyone in the US (or any other) government. Child swing patents big deal - perhaps it was a "baby examiner". There are lots of silly patents out there. They make amusing reading. All they prove is that someone spent money on them and managed to convince a patent examiner that it was new and inventive.
5. If something annoys you about the patent system, do some research to find out if there is in fact a problem. For example the previous poster is concerned about people sitting on patents and not working them. Well, many countries have what are called compulsory licenses which cover situations where a patent isn't worked. Structures vary, but a quick bit of research should have revealed this legal mechanism.
If you follow those rules, you should be able to at least contribute something useful in that hazy zone in where technology, law and economics overlap. Otherwise, you can look very foolish. No-one would expect to post on slashdot with inane comments on technology and not expect to be corrected.
There it is.
(By the way, yes, I am a patent attorney (not in the US). So of course I have a vested interested in the patent system. It's just impossible to discuss patent reform if the contributors known nothing about the system itself.)
Sorry to niggle, but do you know copyright protection actually covers? Yes, what you have proposed is absurd, but it isn't copyright law. Copyright is a quite specific form of right and does not include ideas, concepts, algorythms etc. The signal to noise ratio in these discussions is astonishingly low and to the point where there is really no useful output - which is a shame as the new laws are important, but IP law isn't well known or understood, as proved by many of these posts.
er... check some copyright law. The creator of the work (prima facie) owns the copyright work. It's up to the creater (artist, musician etc) what they do with their intellectual property rights.