Q: How do you know the theorem prover is correct? Have you verified it? A: We have not formally verified the theorem prover (you could, but note the potential for an infinite conversation if we said yes here). It is a so-called LCF-system that constrains any correctness-critical problems to a very small part of the prover. We have strong confidence in this small core.
IMO, they've got nothing until they've verified the prover. I don't really think their confidence makes the correctness of the prover axiomatic.
Step 2: Take pictures they don't like Step 2a: Publish them
Step 3: When they complain, bring up 17 USC 204a: "transfer of copyright ownership, other than by operation of law, is not valid unless an instrument of conveyance, or a note or memorandum of the transfer, is in writing and signed by the owner of the rights conveyed or such owner's duly authorized agent. "
We shouldn't try to address the problem by creative judicial decisions. We need to work to get clear, easy to interpret laws passed that allow these things.
And by what method do you expect to defeat the juggernaut which has managed to get clear, easy to interpret laws passed that forbid these things? The Senate vote was unanimous and the House vote was by acclimation. We have no allies with legislative power.
They can call the police, and have me arrested for breaking the DMCA. I'll laugh at the cops. I'll laugh at the judge. I'll laugh at the jury, assuming they convict me. I'll laugh at my cellmate, and I'm sure he'll laugh with me when I tell him why I'm in jail.
Yeah, he'll say, "Ha, ha, yeah, well I'm in for forcible sodomy". (the judge will have sent you to a supermax facility because you laughed at him).
And when I get out, you'll can be damn sure I'll go right back to ripping my DVDs, assuming I don't decide to emigrate somewhere else, first.
Without knowing a whole lot about dvd encryption: why couldn't you do a bit-for-bit copy of a DVD? That way you don't have to break CSS.
Practically, because you can't write to the area with the key.
Legally? This is a good one.
There's a bit on the disc which tells the DVD player to turn on Macrovision. Macrovision is patented. Courts have ruled that making a copy of a DVD with that bit flipped off amounts to a DMCA violation. However, the courts have also ruled that making a copy with that bit left ON is manufacture of a patented device without the authorization of the patent holder. This despite the fact that the actual implementation of Macrovision is in the DVD player, not the disc. It's ridiculous, a single-bit patent violation, but the courts will bend over backwards to rule for the MPAA.
Of course they can, it's not going to show up as a bunch of 0's decrypted, and when you move it to another volume it will be relatively simple to compare data size differences. There are a dozen other techniques, I'm sure, of recognizing encrypted data.
The unallocated areas will not show up as a bunch of 0's once decrypted _whether or not_ there is an extra layer of encryption; the TrueCrypt developers aren't idiots. There are many techniques for attempting to recognize encrypted data, but there are also encryption methods resistant to those techniques, and many papers written on finding and eliminating such "distinguishers".
The priority date on this patent makes it almost contemporaneous with CSS, but it is not CSS anyway; it's much simpler. CSS assigns meaning to tags according to the content or context of those tags. This assigns styling to text according to the position of that text.
That is, it describes a way to convert a file with inline tags to a file with content along with another file with out-of-band tags.
So, "FOOBARBAZ" might be converted to one file with "FOOBARBAZ" and one file with "3 6". Where "file" is understood to not be limited to a disk file; the most common case is a structure in memory.
Congress has the last say as to what constitutes statutory subject matter. Remember your basic governent/civics class in high school -- Congress make the laws and the courts interpret the laws. The Supreme Court can declare what is patentable or not, but within the confines of what Congress has written in the laws.
Here in the real world, the Supreme Court has plenty of wiggle room, which is one reason most Supreme Court decisions are not unanimous.
In passing 35 USC 273, Congress acceded to that prior decision which stated that business methods were patentable.
The Supreme Court could follow that line of reasoning. Or it could follow a line of reasoning which says that because 35 USC 273 does not contain any language explicitly adding business methods to patentable subject matter, that Congress did not intend to modify the meaning of 35 USC 101, so the original meaning of 35 USC 101 stands. Or it could follow a line of reasoning that while the machine-or-transformation test does rule out many business method patents, that some might stand the test, and that therefore 35 USC 273 is not rendered meaningless by the test.
The Supreme Court does like to decide cases on technicalities (sometimes, anyway), but they have a wide choice in _which_ technicalities they choose.
The PTO, of course, limits itself to (easily accessible) printed publications, patents, and patent applications because those are all easy to use forms of prior art.
There's numerous instances of the PTO not even paying attention to previous patents.
Party B could also invalidate the patent through disclosure in a printed publication or a patent application but again it chose to keep it secret.
There's a large gap between "secret" and "published"; a business method could be widely used without ever being formally disclosed in a printed publication.
In fact, some patent defenders have claimed that a process embodied in publicly available software isn't "published", and thus doesn't count as prior art.
Speaking of software patents, didn't Microsoft just _get_ one for saving a word processing document as an XML file?
The patent office isn't competent to evaluate this kind of patent (which makes me wonder if they're competent about any others). There's at least two (now expired) patents on LZW compression, with Unisys's being the later of the two. There's a multiplicity of patents which cover RLE or null suppression. Change your terminology a little, and you can get a new patent on the same thing.
In this case, it appears the troll has used the term "metacode" to indicate a formatting code, whereas other patents use other terms. New term = new patent.
Furthermore, the patent isn't on saving a word processing document as an XML file. It's a number of claims around the idea of, instead of storing the "metacodes" inline with the document, storing the raw text of the document and a separate table (their "metacode map") indicating where the "metacodes" would be. Once you've got that idea (which is not at all new), the ways of manipulating it are pretty much standard stuff any decent CS student could figure out. The claims include (but aren't limited to) creating that "metacode map" from the original document with inline "metacodes", and applying the "metacode map" to the raw text to create the document with inline "metacodes".
So if Slashcode takes this message with inline formatting codes, and at any point converts it into pure text and stores the formatting codes separately as a set of pointers into the raw text, Slashdot has violated the patent. Ridiculous.
Though I'm less sure about the possible legality of their even trying - this may already be handled by legal precedent. I dunno, I've never *seen* a copyright license for a CPU's microcode...:)
Of course not; as an end user of the CPU, you don't get one, nor need one. But any code running on that CPU is linked to that CPUs microcode in a manner rather similar to that linking a program to a library or to the operating system itself. Why is my work derivative of Stallman's if I do a CALL to his library, but not derivative of Intel's if I do a REP MOVSB, thus invoking their microcode?
The PageRank algorithm on which the Google empire rests was invented by Larry Page and Sergei Brin. They published the algorithm, patented it, and went on to become incredibly successful 'crass entrepreneurs.' Google owns dozens of software patents on key technologies such as its Map-Reduce implementation and AdWords. Few would say that Google is not a driver of innovation in software.
Google's patented search algorithm is not a driver of innovation in software. They have carved out their own niche in searching, in which they stand alone; no one builds on their work.
And if they really have a patent on MapReduce, that's a bad one too. Distributed software has used the general idea since before Google existed. I haven't read their actual claims, however.
A general tool of almost any kind, used in a different way, is _not patentable_. It's using the tool for what it was designed for, it does not change the physical construction of the machine nor its number of parts nor its general capabilities.
Evidentally you missed the article on Microsoft getting a patent on using XML as a file format for a word processing document, including certain specific new tags. Yep, they extended the eXtensible Markup Language (and not even in a particularly original way) and got a patent on their particular extension.
If it can be proven (and I'm sure it can) that software patents do not promote the progress of science and arts, then this line allows them to basically re-work patent law. Business method patents, software patents and other non-tangible or non-applied patents really haven't done a single thing to promote the progress of science and useful arts.
Forget it; this argument is a loser. The courts will defer to Congress on that issue. Of course, Congress didn't explicitly authorize the business method patents (the courts themselves did), so they could strike them down on other grounds (but probably not; it makes too much sense). But not on that one.
And of course, no one is actually forced to do anything. A patent is only valid if it claims something new, useful, and non-obvious, which means it can't cover anything that others were already doing.
Wrong, and you know better. It could be something a lot of people were already doing, but if they had not documented their process in a way the patent office understands as "prior art" (which, as we've learned, is pretty much nothing), the patent can STILL stand. 35 USC 273 states this EXPLICITLY: If I was using a process prior to the patent priority date, I can continue to use it -- but no one else, who was not using it, can do so. So something which is actually common practice can become monopolized by a business method patent (except for those users grandfathered in).
The whole case could turn on the 35 U.S.C. 273 issue. The Supreme Court can rely on some very technical rationale for deciding a case, and one of these is called "statutory construction." One such rule is that a statute will be interpreted so as to be internally consistent such that a particular section of the statute shall not be divorced from the rest of the act. 35 U.S.C. 273 refers to a defences to infringement with regard to business methods. It would appear to be internally inconsistent to have a "business method" be nonstatutory under 35 U.S.C. 101 while still provide a defense for someone infringing a business method. If one cannot patent a business method, then one cannot infringe a business method. If one cannot infringe a business method, there is no need for a defense against infringement.
They could do that. Or they could note that 35 U.S.C. 273 was passed as a response to an earlier, erroneous, court ruling that business methods were patentable, and thus that rule doesn't apply. All depends on what the justices want the final ruling to be.
The problem is the environmentalist full court press -- the idea being to build absolutely no major new power generation or transmission capacity, and stop using the stuff we have. With that sort of attitude in charge, switching to electricity for automobiles (which, if done on a large scale, demands building of more generation, transmission, and distribution infrastructure) is foolish.
The miserable state of battery technology (energy density around 1/100 that of liquid fuel, lifetimes (for lithium cells) around 2 years) doesn't help either. But at least that could possibly be improved. Environmentalist attitudes towards large scale power generation aren't going to get any better. And if you can't satisfy them, why change at all?
Answer: The app's binary has embedded in it an *explicit* list of the libs it needs, along with other information like the names of functions and shared data structures that are used by the app and lib to pass data between them.
That's _reference_, not _derivation_. That (IMO, IANAL) no more makes the application derivative of the library than a bibliography entry makes a work derivative of the work it is citing.
At that point the FSF could prove the "intent", in a hypothetical court case, of the app's developer to use their lib in violation of the lib's license. The end-user's role becomes irrelevant at this point.
The license does not restrict use of the library. GPL V3 is explicit about it: "You may make, run and propagate covered works that you do not convey, without conditions so long as your license otherwise remains in force."
That means that the developer's use of the library is irrelevant because it is permitted by the license. The end user's use of the library is irrelevant because it is permitted by the license. What's at issue is whether the developer can legally distribute his code without a GPL-compatible license. If his work is not derivative of the library (as I hold), then he can, because there's nothing in the law to say otherwise. If it is, then such distribution violates the GPL and copyright law.
Anyone who is using "an elaborate hack", to use the GP's phrase, just to "get around" the limitations of the GPL, *does* have bad intentions, since they're obviously trying to avoid having to honor the desire of the author(s) of the code in question. Actions do show intent.
So what? The desire of the author isn't controlling. Copyright is _limited_. If my work is not a duplicate or derivative of yours (regardless of what nasty hack I used to avoid making it so), you have no say over how I distribute it. That applies regardless of whether your work is under the GPL or under some proprietary license. Thus, despite the fact that Apple has a copyright to Mac OS X, they don't get to control distribution of programs written for it. Despite the fact that Intel has a copyright on the microcode in its processors, they don't get to control distribution of programs written for them.
Yeah, I was thinking more about things like adventure games, where the public performance right is clearly implicated. It's hard to invoke with an engine like Mathematica, which provides factual results only.
Well every NiMH battery has to be licensed from a company - Cobasys, wholly owned by Chevron. Manufacturing is limited to consumer electronics size batteries. This explains why Tesla Motors is using thousands of small consumer-grade batteries in its electric vehicle.
Informative my ass. Please explain how a patent on a particular nickel metal hydride battery has anything at all to do with the lithium ion batteries used in the Tesla.
Can I make a wrapper that lets anyone in the world use your application (I bought a legal copy from you) over the Internet for free?
You could write the wrapper without violating the author's rights, but you'd be violating the public performance right by letting anyone use it over the Internet. Separate issue.
Slashdot Mirror
IMO, they've got nothing until they've verified the prover. I don't really think their confidence makes the correctness of the prover axiomatic.
Step 1: Buy tickets by phone
Step 2: Take pictures they don't like
Step 2a: Publish them
Step 3: When they complain, bring up 17 USC 204a: "transfer of copyright ownership, other than by operation of law, is not valid unless an instrument of conveyance, or a note or memorandum of the transfer, is in writing and signed by the owner of the rights conveyed or such owner's duly authorized agent. "
(once again, no profit)
And by what method do you expect to defeat the juggernaut which has managed to get clear, easy to interpret laws passed that forbid these things? The Senate vote was unanimous and the House vote was by acclimation. We have no allies with legislative power.
Yeah, he'll say, "Ha, ha, yeah, well I'm in for forcible sodomy". (the judge will have sent you to a supermax facility because you laughed at him).
Nobody wants a convicted felon.
Practically, because you can't write to the area with the key.
Legally?
This is a good one.
There's a bit on the disc which tells the DVD player to turn on Macrovision. Macrovision is patented. Courts have ruled that making a copy of a DVD with that bit flipped off amounts to a DMCA violation. However, the courts have also ruled that making a copy with that bit left ON is manufacture of a patented device without the authorization of the patent holder. This despite the fact that the actual implementation of Macrovision is in the DVD player, not the disc. It's ridiculous, a single-bit patent violation, but the courts will bend over backwards to rule for the MPAA.
He was also interviewed about the case afterwards, and all he said was "I'm going to Disneyworld!"
The unallocated areas will not show up as a bunch of 0's once decrypted _whether or not_ there is an extra layer of encryption; the TrueCrypt developers aren't idiots. There are many techniques for attempting to recognize encrypted data, but there are also encryption methods resistant to those techniques, and many papers written on finding and eliminating such "distinguishers".
The priority date on this patent makes it almost contemporaneous with CSS, but it is not CSS anyway; it's much simpler. CSS assigns meaning to tags according to the content or context of those tags. This assigns styling to text according to the position of that text.
That is, it describes a way to convert a file with inline tags to a file with content along with another file with out-of-band tags.
So, "FOOBARBAZ" might be converted to one file with "FOOBARBAZ" and one file with "3 6". Where "file" is understood to not be limited to a disk file; the most common case is a structure in memory.
Here in the real world, the Supreme Court has plenty of wiggle room, which is one reason most Supreme Court decisions are not unanimous.
The Supreme Court could follow that line of reasoning. Or it could follow a line of reasoning which says that because 35 USC 273 does not contain any language explicitly adding business methods to patentable subject matter, that Congress did not intend to modify the meaning of 35 USC 101, so the original meaning of 35 USC 101 stands. Or it could follow a line of reasoning that while the machine-or-transformation test does rule out many business method patents, that some might stand the test, and that therefore 35 USC 273 is not rendered meaningless by the test.
The Supreme Court does like to decide cases on technicalities (sometimes, anyway), but they have a wide choice in _which_ technicalities they choose.
There's numerous instances of the PTO not even paying attention to previous patents.
There's a large gap between "secret" and "published"; a business method could be widely used without ever being formally disclosed in a printed publication.
In fact, some patent defenders have claimed that a process embodied in publicly available software isn't "published", and thus doesn't count as prior art.
It means you have the wrong patent number. Try 5,787,449.
The patent office isn't competent to evaluate this kind of patent (which makes me wonder if they're competent about any others). There's at least two (now expired) patents on LZW compression, with Unisys's being the later of the two. There's a multiplicity of patents which cover RLE or null suppression. Change your terminology a little, and you can get a new patent on the same thing.
In this case, it appears the troll has used the term "metacode" to indicate a formatting code, whereas other patents use other terms. New term = new patent.
Furthermore, the patent isn't on saving a word processing document as an XML file. It's a number of claims around the idea of, instead of storing the "metacodes" inline with the document, storing the raw text of the document and a separate table (their "metacode map") indicating where the "metacodes" would be. Once you've got that idea (which is not at all new), the ways of manipulating it are pretty much standard stuff any decent CS student could figure out. The claims include (but aren't limited to) creating that "metacode map" from the original document with inline "metacodes", and applying the "metacode map" to the raw text to create the document with inline "metacodes".
So if Slashcode takes this message with inline formatting codes, and at any point converts it into pure text and stores the formatting codes separately as a set of pointers into the raw text, Slashdot has violated the patent. Ridiculous.
Of course not; as an end user of the CPU, you don't get one, nor need one. But any code running on that CPU is linked to that CPUs microcode in a manner rather similar to that linking a program to a library or to the operating system itself. Why is my work derivative of Stallman's if I do a CALL to his library, but not derivative of Intel's if I do a REP MOVSB, thus invoking their microcode?
Google's patented search algorithm is not a driver of innovation in software. They have carved out their own niche in searching, in which they stand alone; no one builds on their work.
And if they really have a patent on MapReduce, that's a bad one too. Distributed software has used the general idea since before Google existed. I haven't read their actual claims, however.
Evidentally you missed the article on Microsoft getting a patent on using XML as a file format for a word processing document, including certain specific new tags. Yep, they extended the eXtensible Markup Language (and not even in a particularly original way) and got a patent on their particular extension.
Forget it; this argument is a loser. The courts will defer to Congress on that issue. Of course, Congress didn't explicitly authorize the business method patents (the courts themselves did), so they could strike them down on other grounds (but probably not; it makes too much sense). But not on that one.
Wrong, and you know better. It could be something a lot of people were already doing, but if they had not documented their process in a way the patent office understands as "prior art" (which, as we've learned, is pretty much nothing), the patent can STILL stand. 35 USC 273 states this EXPLICITLY: If I was using a process prior to the patent priority date, I can continue to use it -- but no one else, who was not using it, can do so. So something which is actually common practice can become monopolized by a business method patent (except for those users grandfathered in).
They could do that. Or they could note that 35 U.S.C. 273 was passed as a response to an earlier, erroneous, court ruling that business methods were patentable, and thus that rule doesn't apply. All depends on what the justices want the final ruling to be.
The problem is the environmentalist full court press -- the idea being to build absolutely no major new power generation or transmission capacity, and stop using the stuff we have. With that sort of attitude in charge, switching to electricity for automobiles (which, if done on a large scale, demands building of more generation, transmission, and distribution infrastructure) is foolish.
The miserable state of battery technology (energy density around 1/100 that of liquid fuel, lifetimes (for lithium cells) around 2 years) doesn't help either. But at least that could possibly be improved. Environmentalist attitudes towards large scale power generation aren't going to get any better. And if you can't satisfy them, why change at all?
That's _reference_, not _derivation_. That (IMO, IANAL) no more makes the application derivative of the library than a bibliography entry makes a work derivative of the work it is citing.
The license does not restrict use of the library. GPL V3 is explicit about it: "You may make, run and propagate covered works that you do not convey, without conditions so long as your license otherwise remains in force."
That means that the developer's use of the library is irrelevant because it is permitted by the license. The end user's use of the library is irrelevant because it is permitted by the license. What's at issue is whether the developer can legally distribute his code without a GPL-compatible license. If his work is not derivative of the library (as I hold), then he can, because there's nothing in the law to say otherwise. If it is, then such distribution violates the GPL and copyright law.
So what? The desire of the author isn't controlling. Copyright is _limited_. If my work is not a duplicate or derivative of yours (regardless of what nasty hack I used to avoid making it so), you have no say over how I distribute it. That applies regardless of whether your work is under the GPL or under some proprietary license. Thus, despite the fact that Apple has a copyright to Mac OS X, they don't get to control distribution of programs written for it. Despite the fact that Intel has a copyright on the microcode in its processors, they don't get to control distribution of programs written for them.
Yeah, I was thinking more about things like adventure games, where the public performance right is clearly implicated. It's hard to invoke with an engine like Mathematica, which provides factual results only.
Informative my ass. Please explain how a patent on a particular nickel metal hydride battery has anything at all to do with the lithium ion batteries used in the Tesla.
Gray Davis did.
You could write the wrapper without violating the author's rights, but you'd be violating the public performance right by letting anyone use it over the Internet. Separate issue.