This is for the official registration papers with the copyright office, NOT a proof of ownership. For example, this comment that I am righting right here and now is an original expression of my ideas fixed in a tangible medium... meaning this comment is copyrighted to me. No need to register anything. However, if I want to sue and collect damages for somebody infringing on my comment, I would have to go to the copyright office and officially register this comment (IIRC some paperwork, a filing fee, and I think I'd have to provide two "best copies" of the work as proof of its existence).
Assignment of copyright technically does not require that the copyright office be informed of the transfer (although it is possible to do this and may be recommended). All you need to have to show a valid assignment is a signed writing for the assignment (because the assignment is almost always for more than 1 year and the Statute of Frauds applies), just like any other contract. Under Title 17 201 (d)
Transfer of Ownership. --
(1) The ownership of a copyright may be transferred in whole or in part by any means of conveyance or by operation of law, and may be bequeathed by will or pass as personal property by the applicable laws of intestate succession.
(2) Any of the exclusive rights comprised in a copyright, including any subdivision of any of the rights specified by section 106, may be transferred as provided by clause (1) and owned separately. The owner of any particular exclusive right is entitled, to the extent of that right, to all of the protection and remedies accorded to the copyright owner by this title.
As I said previously: I highly doubt that there are actually material defects with either the registration with the copyright office, or with the assignment of rights from the original artists to the plaintiffs. The defense lawyers are probably trying to do what lawyers do, which is to argue every possible point hoping to get lucky, even though they know many of the points they argue are lost causes.
The copyright registration documents are merely the paperwork that indicates that the copyright owners registered their works... which is a necessary precondition to suing for damages. The documents themselves also establish a prima facie presumption that the plaintiffs actually own the copyrights to the works that are allegedly infringed. In other words: Even if this motion to suppress objections fails, the defense is going to have to prove that the plaintiffs do not have rights to the copyrights in question... good luck trying to prove that. Frankly, the motion is not as evil as people here will make it out to be, since the issue of ownership of the copyrights isn't really in dispute anyway, and it will save both sides time & money to get to the important parts of the case.
Another thing to note is that this appears to be a new trial, which is not the same thing as an appeal. Despite what many people think, an appeal is not like a do-over of the original case. Once the original trial has been carried out, an appeal can only be made of issues that were properly disputed and objected to at trial. So, if a fact is established at trial, and there is no clear objection that is preserved for appeal, you can't argue it, even if you think that would be a great way to win the case during appeal. An appeal is almost always about questions of law instead of fact as well, and appellate courts usually give a great deal of deference to what the factfinders (usually the jury) determined during the trial, and will only overturn or (more commonly) vacate a lower court's factfinding if the jury reached a clearly erroneous conclusion. In fact, there is actually no constitutional right of appeal. By standard judicial custom most cases do get one appeal as long as they weren't dismissed with prejudice (for something like a patently frivolous claim, or for a case that clearly lacked standing like suing God).
Since this case is a brand new trial, there is likely little that cannot be brought back into play, for what little that's worth.
You are likely taking that clause out of context, since if you read it that way it would mean all vmware installations with windows would violate the license... and we would have heard about that by now I assure you.
Uh... Microsoft still does not DICTATE what CPU's you can run windows on. It is perfectly allowable to run x86 Windows on another architecture using emulation (although why the hell you would want to do so is beyond me). That is much different than Apple which will contractually prevent you from running OS X on any piece of hardware it did not sell you.
Despite the whiny sense of entitlement that pervades Slashdot, you don't have a right to get everything you want from Microsoft for free. They are not doing anything via contract law to LIMIT you from installing legitimately purchased versions of Windows on any hardware you want, but they are not REQUIRED to spend huge amounts of money to rebuild Windows and every single Windows program to run on whatever obscure hardware architecture you decide is sacred now.
Please reference one case where Microsoft was plaintiff in the Eastern District of Texas (where Marshall resides) and won some huge award... I'm not holding my breath. P.S. --> A plaintiff is the party that brings a case, Microsoft was the defendant in this case. Under Federal rules of civil procedure, plaintiff has a choice of forum (assuming there is personal jurisdiction and venue, but MS conducts business in all 50 states, and venue is often pretty easy to manufacture as well).
Bear in mind that the defenders in this case are in military academies, meaning they are the equivalent of college undergrads. It looks like they did a very competent job, but even Bruce Schneier could have trouble dealing with NSA level attackers if they pulled out all the stops.
Erlang's great until the share-nothing approach leads to so much overhead in pushing bytes back and forth between processes that you are spending more time copying bytes than actually doing work. Not saying that normal thread models are always better, but there is no "perfect" multiprocessing model and Erlang has its own pitfalls. As for Firefox, you are basically running a series of stovepipes where it makes sense for each tab to have a separate process... why it has taken so freakin' long for this I don't know, but it's not a new idea (hell I posted it right here on Slashdot back when FF3 was just coming out... lemme check.... here.
The crime's in Bethlehem and it probably won't be making any other papers either. And the construction is usually on 22 (and has been since about 1950) but that tends to back up 309... another story entirely.
One problem with trying to penalize people who spread viruses (at least on a tort theory) is the problem of causation, since you have to be both the cause-in-fact and the proximate cause to be liable for a tort. Here's an example of what that means and why it could be difficult to blame any single person for the spreading a virus, except maybe for the person who unleashed it in the first place:
Say there's a worm like Conficker that is very prolific and is being spread by many different means over the open Internet and where there are many exposed hosts. Say that for whatever reason I get infected, but that I happen to have detailed logs of the network traffic I received that shows that one A. Dumas who lives in Blackacre owned the IP address that I got my infection from. Say that further, this isn't some fluffy case where Dumas can claim it wasn't his computer or that he wasn't using it, instead Dumas was indeed sloppy and got himself infected with Conficker negligently. The problem is that while Dumas is the direct cause of me getting Conficker, he is likely going to be able to claim that he was not necessarily a but-for cause, meaning if he didn't infect me, somebody else would have. To make matters worse, with a worm like Conficker it would be likely that the "somebody else" would infect me in a very short period of time, possibly only minutes or seconds, after Dumas did it.
So the end result could go two ways depending upon how a court would look at causation. Some courts might let Dumas off from liability since you really couldn't prove he was the but-for cause, but instead only one random cause amongst millions of possibilities. Other courts would say that yes, Dumas is the cause, but that the damages would be whatever the cost to me is of having Conficker... for 5 minutes or however long I would reasonably had an uninfected computer but for Dumas's infecting me. That would likely lower the damage amounts greatly, and make suing somebody else pretty unattractive.
Of course, Tort law isn't the only way to handle this. The government could always come out an slap fines on people and the only thing they need to prove is that you were spreading the virus. I'm pretty pro-security, but I frankly think that would be a very bad idea that would lead to losses in freedoms much greater than anything people on Slashdot would imagine. If you are paranoid that some international phone calls were being intercepted before, imagine what it would be like when it is necessary to monitor everybody's network traffic to prove who had a virus and when they had it. Further, imagine all the insane regulations that would follow. For those of you naively thinking that this would somehow lead to Windows being banned from the Internet, think again. Given how the government works it would likely lead to any OS except for Windows and OS X being banned from use entirely. The reason would be that only Apple & Microsoft could effectively afford to pay the massive "licensing fees" and hire armies of lawyers to cut through the red-tape needed to get government approval to connect to the Internet.... not a pretty scenario at all.
The problem with being a Linux user is that you tend to find other people who use it and remember them more because it is unusual, then your own estimates of people who use Linux will run higher because you overvalue the data points you know about, and you lump all the other users out there into 1 data point, even if there are far more of them.
I can say that in my law school class of a little less than 200 people we are above the 1% mark... because there are 2 of us that use Linux as our regular OS. If anything the Mac userbase at school is probably quite a bit higher than it is in the general population, but there are still plenty of genero-crap Dells that I have to help revive from time to time.
You know who pays taxes? People... who work for multinational companies. If the people are in the US they pay taxes here, if they are in another country they can't "contribute" to Obama's socialist utopia.
If you use Linux you are entrusting your security to the NSA since code that the NSA wrote is already in the Linux kernel (see SELinux). As mentioned above, plenty of people can see the Windows source code to check for malware.
Of course, be it Linux or Windows, even having security audits doesn't mean there are no security holes... why bother writing your own backdoor that will likely be easier to trace when you could just use the same exploits that the malware writers use?
I second that! I just got the student version of Office 2007 and it runs great under Crossover, in fact Office 2007 under Wine is using slightly less memory than native Open Office... just goes to show where the real bloat is. Anyway, having SP2 support would be awesome and would go a long way towards letting me use Open Office when I want to, and MS Office when I have to, with fewer headaches.
NSA backdoors? If there were going to be any backdoors in Russian software, they would be put there by other Russians... either the Czar (Putin) or the gangsters (Russian Business Network) or maybe even both.
On a somewhat offtopic note: I continually find it amusing that people on Slashdot simultaneously believe the NSA has a magic backdoor into every Windows box on earth that nobody has ever actually been able to proves exists (because there isn't one), but at the same time they have no problem with gobs of NSA written code being put into the Linux kernel directly.
Oh and before you start screaming about how Linux is open source so that protects against all back doors:
1. A subtle error (or intentional bug) can exist for a long time even in open source software (see the Debian SSL fubar situation)
2. Despite the fact that Windows is not hosted on Sourceforge, the code is really not a huge secret, there are lots of people outside of Microsoft in universities and private companies who can and do audit the code. Of course, this won't prevent the conspiracy theorists from saying that the NSA shows up in black helicopters to kidnap anybody who finds out about their magic back door, but then again, most of those morons still run Windows anyway.
Greetings, you fail 4th grade reading comprehension. Let's take a look at that quote again:
Since non-writable media such as CD-ROMs generally aren't avenues for malicious software propagation
The generally bit is the important part, and the quote is 100% accurate, particularly in the age of Bittorrent when burned CDs are used far less frequently for transporting questionable software. If you disagree with that, then I'm sure you will be the first person to stand up and scream at the top of your lungs when somebody says it is generally more difficult to root a Linux server compared to a Windows server, when there are plenty of cases where Linux servers have been rooted... I'm totally sure you would be that objective.... completely....
Okular rocks, and it apparently can run on Windows as well. My only feature upgrade request would be to have the underlying PDF engine allow for saving of annotations back to the PDF files... I want a digital highlighter pen.
Don't use Ubuntu if you want to configure things yourself... Try LFS (Linux From Scratch) Holy shit I hope your not a doctor:
"That cut is too deep for a band-aid, the only other option is to amputate the limb" Dude, there are a bunch of other distros out there that allow for far more configuration than Ubuntu while also having nice amenities like an actual package management system. I personally have been using Arch Linux for about a month and I have been able to do a lot of customization that Ubuntu makes difficult without having to search the web for every single library dependency in existence. It's a little irresponsible to dump LFS directly on somebody who is just getting proficient with Ubuntu... in fact, LFS is cute if you want to get the basis for beginning your own distro, but frankly it's a waste of time for most end users since you really don't learn anything more about Linux by fighting incompatible package versions, despite what the ricers say.
I just recently switched from Kubuntu to Arch and while Arch could use a little polish (while still being lean & mean) I'm liking it a lot right now. Bear in mind that while I was using Kubuntu, I used to do kernel development on Gentoo so I had enough of a skillset to handle Arch. So far I like that Arch has a fast package management system that works, allows me to compile my own packages without forcing me to do so (unlike Gentoo) and generally does not force me to install & run crap I don't want (Ubuntu: making me run wpa_supplicant... on a desktop that has no wireless card!!??!?!) Arch does have some problems, like missing packages for wine in 64 bit (fortunately it is not too hard to build via AUR), the default vim installation would not recognize my.vimrc files so I had to blow-away the system defaults which made vim unusable for me, and it took more hacking to get ssh-agent working than it did with Ubuntu which set it up automatically. So: Arch wins on the core, loses on some of the polish, but I think it strikes a better balance for me than Kubuntu was doing... plus Arch's KDE 4.2 packages seem somewhat better behaved.
Uhh... IBM & Sun are also competitors, don't let the fact that one of them isn't Microsoft fool you into thinking they aren't. In some ways, this merger would be MORE restrictive than if Sun merged with Microsoft (which would never happen BTW, MS has no interest). Think about it: MS isn't really a hardware company in any of the same places that Sun is (no the XBox doesn't count), while IBM with Power is directly competing with SPARC. An IBM merger would likely lead to SUN's software assets being distributed around IBM, while SPARC would be left to die.
As mentioned above, putting the invention in the Statutory Invention Registry is a low-cost way to publish the invention such that it will be covered in a standard USPTO search. While a patent applicant is required to divulge references to prior art that he knows about, there is no reason to expect every patent applicant to know the entire scope of the prior art... that's why every patent application includes a search fee where the USPTO conducts its own searches too!
Slashdot Mirror
This is for the official registration papers with the copyright office, NOT a proof of ownership. For example, this comment that I am righting right here and now is an original expression of my ideas fixed in a tangible medium... meaning this comment is copyrighted to me. No need to register anything. However, if I want to sue and collect damages for somebody infringing on my comment, I would have to go to the copyright office and officially register this comment (IIRC some paperwork, a filing fee, and I think I'd have to provide two "best copies" of the work as proof of its existence).
Assignment of copyright technically does not require that the copyright office be informed of the transfer (although it is possible to do this and may be recommended). All you need to have to show a valid assignment is a signed writing for the assignment (because the assignment is almost always for more than 1 year and the Statute of Frauds applies), just like any other contract. Under Title 17 201 (d)
As I said previously: I highly doubt that there are actually material defects with either the registration with the copyright office, or with the assignment of rights from the original artists to the plaintiffs. The defense lawyers are probably trying to do what lawyers do, which is to argue every possible point hoping to get lucky, even though they know many of the points they argue are lost causes.
The record company still has the rights via the original artist's assignment even if it is not the owner via a work-for-hire.
The copyright registration documents are merely the paperwork that indicates that the copyright owners registered their works... which is a necessary precondition to suing for damages. The documents themselves also establish a prima facie presumption that the plaintiffs actually own the copyrights to the works that are allegedly infringed. In other words: Even if this motion to suppress objections fails, the defense is going to have to prove that the plaintiffs do not have rights to the copyrights in question... good luck trying to prove that. Frankly, the motion is not as evil as people here will make it out to be, since the issue of ownership of the copyrights isn't really in dispute anyway, and it will save both sides time & money to get to the important parts of the case.
Another thing to note is that this appears to be a new trial, which is not the same thing as an appeal. Despite what many people think, an appeal is not like a do-over of the original case. Once the original trial has been carried out, an appeal can only be made of issues that were properly disputed and objected to at trial. So, if a fact is established at trial, and there is no clear objection that is preserved for appeal, you can't argue it, even if you think that would be a great way to win the case during appeal. An appeal is almost always about questions of law instead of fact as well, and appellate courts usually give a great deal of deference to what the factfinders (usually the jury) determined during the trial, and will only overturn or (more commonly) vacate a lower court's factfinding if the jury reached a clearly erroneous conclusion. In fact, there is actually no constitutional right of appeal. By standard judicial custom most cases do get one appeal as long as they weren't dismissed with prejudice (for something like a patently frivolous claim, or for a case that clearly lacked standing like suing God).
Since this case is a brand new trial, there is likely little that cannot be brought back into play, for what little that's worth.
You are likely taking that clause out of context, since if you read it that way it would mean all vmware installations with windows would violate the license... and we would have heard about that by now I assure you.
Uh... Microsoft still does not DICTATE what CPU's you can run windows on. It is perfectly allowable to run x86 Windows on another architecture using emulation (although why the hell you would want to do so is beyond me). That is much different than Apple which will contractually prevent you from running OS X on any piece of hardware it did not sell you.
Despite the whiny sense of entitlement that pervades Slashdot, you don't have a right to get everything you want from Microsoft for free. They are not doing anything via contract law to LIMIT you from installing legitimately purchased versions of Windows on any hardware you want, but they are not REQUIRED to spend huge amounts of money to rebuild Windows and every single Windows program to run on whatever obscure hardware architecture you decide is sacred now.
Please reference one case where Microsoft was plaintiff in the Eastern District of Texas (where Marshall resides) and won some huge award... I'm not holding my breath.
P.S. --> A plaintiff is the party that brings a case, Microsoft was the defendant in this case. Under Federal rules of civil procedure, plaintiff has a choice of forum (assuming there is personal jurisdiction and venue, but MS conducts business in all 50 states, and venue is often pretty easy to manufacture as well).
Aside from you not liking cygwin, which one of those applications does not run on Windows?
Bear in mind that the defenders in this case are in military academies, meaning they are the equivalent of college undergrads. It looks like they did a very competent job, but even Bruce Schneier could have trouble dealing with NSA level attackers if they pulled out all the stops.
Yeah I've grown soft and Slashdot doesn't have syntax highlighting to point out my sloppy parenthesizing.
Erlang's great until the share-nothing approach leads to so much overhead in pushing bytes back and forth between processes that you are spending more time copying bytes than actually doing work. Not saying that normal thread models are always better, but there is no "perfect" multiprocessing model and Erlang has its own pitfalls. As for Firefox, you are basically running a series of stovepipes where it makes sense for each tab to have a separate process... why it has taken so freakin' long for this I don't know, but it's not a new idea (hell I posted it right here on Slashdot back when FF3 was just coming out... lemme check.... here.
The crime's in Bethlehem and it probably won't be making any other papers either. And the construction is usually on 22 (and has been since about 1950) but that tends to back up 309... another story entirely.
One problem with trying to penalize people who spread viruses (at least on a tort theory) is the problem of causation, since you have to be both the cause-in-fact and the proximate cause to be liable for a tort. Here's an example of what that means and why it could be difficult to blame any single person for the spreading a virus, except maybe for the person who unleashed it in the first place:
Say there's a worm like Conficker that is very prolific and is being spread by many different means over the open Internet and where there are many exposed hosts. Say that for whatever reason I get infected, but that I happen to have detailed logs of the network traffic I received that shows that one A. Dumas who lives in Blackacre owned the IP address that I got my infection from. Say that further, this isn't some fluffy case where Dumas can claim it wasn't his computer or that he wasn't using it, instead Dumas was indeed sloppy and got himself infected with Conficker negligently. The problem is that while Dumas is the direct cause of me getting Conficker, he is likely going to be able to claim that he was not necessarily a but-for cause, meaning if he didn't infect me, somebody else would have. To make matters worse, with a worm like Conficker it would be likely that the "somebody else" would infect me in a very short period of time, possibly only minutes or seconds, after Dumas did it.
So the end result could go two ways depending upon how a court would look at causation. Some courts might let Dumas off from liability since you really couldn't prove he was the but-for cause, but instead only one random cause amongst millions of possibilities. Other courts would say that yes, Dumas is the cause, but that the damages would be whatever the cost to me is of having Conficker... for 5 minutes or however long I would reasonably had an uninfected computer but for Dumas's infecting me. That would likely lower the damage amounts greatly, and make suing somebody else pretty unattractive.
Of course, Tort law isn't the only way to handle this. The government could always come out an slap fines on people and the only thing they need to prove is that you were spreading the virus. I'm pretty pro-security, but I frankly think that would be a very bad idea that would lead to losses in freedoms much greater than anything people on Slashdot would imagine. If you are paranoid that some international phone calls were being intercepted before, imagine what it would be like when it is necessary to monitor everybody's network traffic to prove who had a virus and when they had it. Further, imagine all the insane regulations that would follow. For those of you naively thinking that this would somehow lead to Windows being banned from the Internet, think again. Given how the government works it would likely lead to any OS except for Windows and OS X being banned from use entirely. The reason would be that only Apple & Microsoft could effectively afford to pay the massive "licensing fees" and hire armies of lawyers to cut through the red-tape needed to get government approval to connect to the Internet.... not a pretty scenario at all.
The problem with being a Linux user is that you tend to find other people who use it and remember them more because it is unusual, then your own estimates of people who use Linux will run higher because you overvalue the data points you know about, and you lump all the other users out there into 1 data point, even if there are far more of them.
I can say that in my law school class of a little less than 200 people we are above the 1% mark... because there are 2 of us that use Linux as our regular OS. If anything the Mac userbase at school is probably quite a bit higher than it is in the general population, but there are still plenty of genero-crap Dells that I have to help revive from time to time.
You know who pays taxes? People... who work for multinational companies. If the people are in the US they pay taxes here, if they are in another country they can't "contribute" to Obama's socialist utopia.
If you use Linux you are entrusting your security to the NSA since code that the NSA wrote is already in the Linux kernel (see SELinux). As mentioned above, plenty of people can see the Windows source code to check for malware.
Of course, be it Linux or Windows, even having security audits doesn't mean there are no security holes... why bother writing your own backdoor that will likely be easier to trace when you could just use the same exploits that the malware writers use?
I second that! I just got the student version of Office 2007 and it runs great under Crossover, in fact Office 2007 under Wine is using slightly less memory than native Open Office... just goes to show where the real bloat is. Anyway, having SP2 support would be awesome and would go a long way towards letting me use Open Office when I want to, and MS Office when I have to, with fewer headaches.
NSA backdoors? If there were going to be any backdoors in Russian software, they would be put there by other Russians... either the Czar (Putin) or the gangsters (Russian Business Network) or maybe even both.
On a somewhat offtopic note: I continually find it amusing that people on Slashdot simultaneously believe the NSA has a magic backdoor into every Windows box on earth that nobody has ever actually been able to proves exists (because there isn't one), but at the same time they have no problem with gobs of NSA written code being put into the Linux kernel directly.
Oh and before you start screaming about how Linux is open source so that protects against all back doors:
1. A subtle error (or intentional bug) can exist for a long time even in open source software (see the Debian SSL fubar situation)
2. Despite the fact that Windows is not hosted on Sourceforge, the code is really not a huge secret, there are lots of people outside of Microsoft in universities and private companies who can and do audit the code. Of course, this won't prevent the conspiracy theorists from saying that the NSA shows up in black helicopters to kidnap anybody who finds out about their magic back door, but then again, most of those morons still run Windows anyway.
Greetings, you fail 4th grade reading comprehension. Let's take a look at that quote again:
The generally bit is the important part, and the quote is 100% accurate, particularly in the age of Bittorrent when burned CDs are used far less frequently for transporting questionable software. If you disagree with that, then I'm sure you will be the first person to stand up and scream at the top of your lungs when somebody says it is generally more difficult to root a Linux server compared to a Windows server, when there are plenty of cases where Linux servers have been rooted... I'm totally sure you would be that objective.... completely....
Okular allows for you to fill in forms, and even save the form data in the PDF itself, putting it one step ahead of the free Adobe reader.
Okular rocks, and it apparently can run on Windows as well.
My only feature upgrade request would be to have the underlying PDF engine allow for saving of annotations back to the PDF files... I want a digital highlighter pen.
Don't use Ubuntu if you want to configure things yourself... Try LFS (Linux From Scratch)
Holy shit I hope your not a doctor:
"That cut is too deep for a band-aid, the only other option is to amputate the limb"
Dude, there are a bunch of other distros out there that allow for far more configuration than Ubuntu while also having nice amenities like an actual package management system. I personally have been using Arch Linux for about a month and I have been able to do a lot of customization that Ubuntu makes difficult without having to search the web for every single library dependency in existence. It's a little irresponsible to dump LFS directly on somebody who is just getting proficient with Ubuntu... in fact, LFS is cute if you want to get the basis for beginning your own distro, but frankly it's a waste of time for most end users since you really don't learn anything more about Linux by fighting incompatible package versions, despite what the ricers say.
I just recently switched from Kubuntu to Arch and while Arch could use a little polish (while still being lean & mean) I'm liking it a lot right now. Bear in mind that while I was using Kubuntu, I used to do kernel development on Gentoo so I had enough of a skillset to handle Arch. So far I like that Arch has a fast package management system that works, allows me to compile my own packages without forcing me to do so (unlike Gentoo) and generally does not force me to install & run crap I don't want (Ubuntu: making me run wpa_supplicant... on a desktop that has no wireless card!!??!?!) .vimrc files so I had to blow-away the system defaults which made vim unusable for me, and it took more hacking to get ssh-agent working than it did with Ubuntu which set it up automatically. So: Arch wins on the core, loses on some of the polish, but I think it strikes a better balance for me than Kubuntu was doing... plus Arch's KDE 4.2 packages seem somewhat better behaved.
Arch does have some problems, like missing packages for wine in 64 bit (fortunately it is not too hard to build via AUR), the default vim installation would not recognize my
And lock the case so the cracker can't reset the CMOS by disconnecting the internal battery....
Uhh... IBM & Sun are also competitors, don't let the fact that one of them isn't Microsoft fool you into thinking they aren't. In some ways, this merger would be MORE restrictive than if Sun merged with Microsoft (which would never happen BTW, MS has no interest). Think about it: MS isn't really a hardware company in any of the same places that Sun is (no the XBox doesn't count), while IBM with Power is directly competing with SPARC. An IBM merger would likely lead to SUN's software assets being distributed around IBM, while SPARC would be left to die.
As mentioned above, putting the invention in the Statutory Invention Registry is a low-cost way to publish the invention such that it will be covered in a standard USPTO search. While a patent applicant is required to divulge references to prior art that he knows about, there is no reason to expect every patent applicant to know the entire scope of the prior art... that's why every patent application includes a search fee where the USPTO conducts its own searches too!