This patent seems to be closer to Access Control Lists in VMS.
Yes, claim one has as prior art just about every access control mechanism known to machine. VMS, Kerberos, probably even venerable MVS. There may or may not be prior art for each particular dependent claim, but they amount to "gathering the foam", as Justice Bradley once put it -- in this case, attempting to secure every combination of digital signatures and ordinary access control.
The other independent claim, Claim 42 would also appear to be anticipated by VMS, and again probably many others. Many of the dependent claims here are laughable; patenting fine grained privilege might be defensible (if it didn't already exist, which it did); patenting particular grains is ridiculous.
The Compartment Mode Workstation work (circa 1990) probably covers quite a few of the claims made here, including those not covered by other OSs.
What's the M Sex Change Team? People who still haven't gotten over Judi Dench playing M? Come on, folks, M is a title, not a person; it's not a sex change!
How about this? Some asshole doctor rubs someone the wrong way, but does nothing illegal or wrong in any way. The abused person in question then launches a sock puppet campaign such that any online reference to the doctor includs large numbers of carefully parsed negative comments that could in no way be construed as libel, slander or defamation, but do in fact cause him harm by driving away potential patients. There is intent to harm the doctor on the part of the poster. Protected? Consequence-free?
Both protected (since you've said it's not defamation of any sort) and with consequence. There's no "niceness rule" exempting critical speech from free speech.
Stop trying to pretend that free speech means the right to say anything about anybody anytime and anywhere.
Yep, exactly the sort of statement that comes up in any case where an attempt is being made at suppressing free speech. The upshot of this statement is that free speech is simply a talking point, not something that applies in actual practical cases.
There's two sides to the story.
There's two sides to the original dispute. The libel claim is an attempt to suppress one of them, and penalize that side for even bringing it up.
In this case the doctor has already lost because of the bad publicity for his practice, regardless of the truth of the claims. Some free speech.
Did you think "free speech" meant one could only speak when it was free of consequences?
For any free speech issue on the Internet, there's someone to claim that it isn't one for some lame excuse or another.
free speech does not mean you can call someone a criminal unless you can prove it.
So if someone commits a wrong against me, and I can't muster up enough objective evidence to prove it, I must remain silent about it upon penalty of law? Some free speech.
Here are the statements that are claimed to be libelous:
a) "A friend told be to stop going, cause of Dr. Biegel billed his insurance company funny awhile before."
One should be prevented by law from posting such a vague assertion online?
b) "So I saw the guy for 2 visits, expected a bill for about 125 bucks... So ends up, Biegel billed me for over $500. I called to pay, and he couldn't give me a straight answer as to why the jump in price, we got into an argument..."
Assuming Dr. Biegel did in fact bill the defendant over $500, there's no false statement of fact here. Nor anything that would be defamatory per se even if it were false. "He couldn't give me a straight answer" is a matter of perception.
c) "He called me back to cover his ass, and had reasons as to why he could bill for the extra amount, then tells me he would still write it off because he wanted to keep his word from the previous conversation. One reason he gave me, was that he runs a business and would stick it to insurance companies (even though that drives my premiums up, and makes me wonder who else he sticks it to).
This is an example of an unprovable statement -- an unrecorded phone conversation. Should the defendant be forbidden by law from repeating Dr. Biegel's (alleged) words because he can't prove that Dr. Biegel said them?
d) "The next day I received a voicemail from the receptionist, she told me that she talked to my insurance company and found out that my case settled, and even though it was for an amount less than expected, they felt I owed them $125
It's not clear why Dr. Biegel even thinks this statement is libelous.
e) [I was a bit put off by the fact that] "he wasn't keeping his word anymore".
A bit vague to be the basis of a libel claim.
f) [I don't think good business means charging people whatever you feel hoping they'll pay without a fuss.] "Especially considering that I found a much better, honest, chiropractor."
The first part isn't libelous at all, it's a matter of opinion and the practice it implies the plaintiff engages in isn't illegal. The second part implies the plaintiff _isn't_ honest, which is clearly the defendant's opinion based on the other things that happened.
If this review is held to be libelous, then just about any write-up about a similar dispute can be held to be libelous. Proof isn't always going to be available, and to require that the complaining part have such proof before even making a complaint is definitely a "chilling effect".
Slashdot seems to love hyping up the Streisand effect but the more prominent and recognised it becomes, the more courts will take it into account awarding damages for these kinds of libel cases.
The courts are likely going to be leery of awarding damages to a defendant who inflicted those damages upon himself. It's not the defendant who causes the extra damage associated with the publicity attached to a libel case, so he's not responsible for it.
The problem is when a corporation starts taking such photos systematically, aggregating them all together and correlating them with other systematic data sets.
That's the issue with data mining in general, but I still don't see how Google Street View adds any particular risk.
A neighbor takes a photo of her naked, and posts it to 4chan. Thousands of folks copy the photo all over the web. The photo has GPS information in the EXIF tags. Creepy/b/tards start stalking your wife. You give a resume to a potential employer with your residential address in it; they look up the address in Google Maps, click on the link to show image search results taken nearby, and are treated to a naked picture of your wife.
And in this hypothetical case, the risk was caused by a photo with GPS coordinates and a map. Street view was totally unnecessary to compound the privacy violation.
(and suggesting somehow preventing the correlation of GPS coordinates with addresses doesn't seem very useful either)
The broadcast flag has failed, FOR NOW! If it can be used it will.
And also, doesn't most of the HW available now sold already have the BF capabilities? Isn't that what HDCP is all about?
No on both counts. There's already far too much hardware out there which can decode ATSC broadcasts and NOT respect the broadcast flag, even if they turned it on. And HDCP is separate; broadcast-flag enabled hardware might have to use it, but having HDCP does not imply respecting the broadcast flag.
Probably not. Twice in the last decade Mercedes has thought that using the janis joplin song Mercedes Benz in their commercials was a good idea, despite the fact that the entire song is a criticism of the exact kind of materialism that drives buyers to Mercedes's luxury lines in the first place.
In one campaign, they used it straight up, the original Janis Joplin recording. And the campaign was successful. That's an advertising company to be feared, if not respected.
(but I'd still rather have a Porsche... like Joplin)
In my last job I wrote software to control variable message signs on freeways. A lot of effort was put into selecting the messages which are displayed on the principle that any message is a distraction from driving and must be justified if it is presented at all.
Which was then over-ridden by higher-ups who make the signs say things like "Don't Drink and Drive", "Seat Belt Law Enforcement In Effect", or whatever other low-priority message they want to put up on them. (Yes, I'm talking to YOU, PennDOT)
It is because the digital signals can be controlled via DRM and broadcast flag. Then they will have complete control over the broadcasts & content. There is still not a consumer-level HDDVR on the market and I'm tired of renting cable/dish/tivo stuff, I want my own and to have choices of models & features.
The broadcast flag failed and the signals are broadcast over the air decrypted. MythTV is perfectly capable of doing HD and has been for some time now.
There is finally a commercial non-computer-based OTA HD DVR, the DTVPal DVR. $250, no subscription. I have no experience with it.
That's not typical on this side of the pond. What is typical is ever increasing fees and ways to entrap your customers into paying those fees. As a random example, most banks over here will pay the largest items first, i.e: if you have four transactions on the same day for $300, $100, $20 and $10 they'll pay them in that order. The net result of that is that if you only had $350 in your account you just generated three overdraft fees at $20-$35 a pop.
My bank (Wachovia) doesn't do that. Actually they're very cool about overdrafts. First of all, there's no fee for an overdraft pulled from savings (not that I keep much savings there). Second, they only charge one overdraft fee (for overdrafts to credit) per day. Third -- and I've watched online and seen this happen in my transaction list -- if you resolve the overdraft in the same day it occurs, they actually reverse both the automatic overdraft transaction and the fee. I don't count on this as it's not advertised behavior.
They do require a substantial minimum to get this. But the minimum includes savings, checking, money market... and credit lines. Having a Visa with them with a $10,000 limit counts the same for minimum balance purposes as having $10,000 in savings.
Things like claiming someone owes them more money even after they've fulfilled the letter of the contract, then when it gets to court, backpedalling and saying they made a mistake, but it's too late now because they've already sold the debt to a debt collector. At that point, under the law here, *someone* has to pay the debt collector
Err, no. If the debt that the debt collector bought is found to be invalid, the piece of paper the debt collector has is worth as much as a share of Washington Mutual. That's a risk a debt collector takes when purchasing debt.
and guess who has a pair of big guys come around and start accidentally breaking the stuff in your lounge room until you sign a repayment plan?
Sounds like they hired the Mafia rather than an actual debt collecting agency. While the real debt collectors don't often follow the debt collection laws, it more often amounts to telephone threats and slander than actual thugs coming around.
Because if you are unemployed you shouldn't have the internet.
Yeah, because as a computer programmer, the first thing I'm going to do to cut back when I get laid off is sever my connection to the job boards and cut off my email access to everyone I know who might be in a position to hire me. F-ing genius.
Televisions making up 10% of total residential electricity use? A savings of "$18.48/yr"? These numbers are just asspulls. The 10% for televisions appears to be derived from a report based on a 50-home survey which showed that "plug loads" accounted for 15-19% of electricity use and "entertainment" (including TVs, but also set-top boxes, DVD players, etc) made up 60% of that.
But that's not the invention claimed... The invention involves having a counter, incremented by some pages and non-incremented by others, and delivering images only until the counter exceeds some threshold.
Yes, those would be the "ordinary techniques". Or, if you prefer, it's a case of "patenting the goal": "Let them see a quarter of the book, plus the sample chapters".
You also have to consider the loss of future opportunity. For example, a woman working her way through law school as a stripper is likely to have trouble finding employment with law firms who find out about her past (and they will, because the partners are likely to have frequented the strip joints).
It doesn't really matter whether the method disclosed in the patent is very good or not.
What does matter is whether or not the patent is valid. That is, of patentable subject matter, and novel, non-obvious, and useful. It's certainly useful (even if there are ways around it). It would appear to be of patentable subject matter. Some if it is certainly not novel, however -- several of the claims describe things web servers and browsers have been doing since the early '90s (and Compuserve and AOL and likely others prior to that!). Even giving the rest of the claims the benefit of the doubt and saying they were novel 2000(though it's quite possible they were not), they're not non-obvious. They describe doing an ordinary thing (previewing a book over the web) using ordinary techniques.
Thus, the sinking of the Lusitania was justified. The United States and Britain were terrorists
Yes, and no respectively. The Lusitania was a merchant ship of a belligerent power; that in itself made it fair game. That it was carrying military ordinance was only icing on the cake, and did not make the British into "terrorists".
So basically there are too many people trying to exploit a limited pool of suckers to make the endeavor profitable. So sad. However, I have a solution, check out my site at http://www.h0wtoph1sh.com.
My guess is the vast majority of songs will now be sold at the $1.29 price point, and only indie bands hoping to break through will be reduced in price.
If the established labels do that, it is a win for the indie bands.
(BTW, how much you want to bet that the established labels have the contracts written such that royalties paid to performers on the 69 cent songs drop, but royalties paid to performers on the $1.29 songs don't increase)
Your argument fails here. First, there are exemptions to free speech in the US. You do not have a right to say anything you want without fear of repercussions. Certain forms of speech are actually illegal and can land you in jail: perjury, libel, and anything covered under the National Secrets Act.
Perjury, yes. Libel is a tort but generally not a crime (there's probably exceptions, though). As for the National Secrets Act, I'm unaware of any law called that in the US (the UK has an Official Secrets Act). Perhaps it's a secret.
There's also concepts like "fighting words", and other cases of inciteful words. We have a concept in Canada called "hate speech", and while you don't call it the same thing in the US, it's also illegal: spreading hateful speech or literature with the intention of causing harm to a group within society.
Such "hate speech" is not illegal in the US. Laws have been passed against it but generally struck down in the courts. "Fighting words" can be illegal, but they have to meet the Brandenberg test of being likely to cause "imminent lawless action".
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, claim one has as prior art just about every access control mechanism known to machine. VMS, Kerberos, probably even venerable MVS. There may or may not be prior art for each particular dependent claim, but they amount to "gathering the foam", as Justice Bradley once put it -- in this case, attempting to secure every combination of digital signatures and ordinary access control.
The other independent claim, Claim 42 would also appear to be anticipated by VMS, and again probably many others. Many of the dependent claims here are laughable; patenting fine grained privilege might be defensible (if it didn't already exist, which it did); patenting particular grains is ridiculous.
The Compartment Mode Workstation work (circa 1990) probably covers quite a few of the claims made here, including those not covered by other OSs.
What's the M Sex Change Team? People who still haven't gotten over Judi Dench playing M? Come on, folks, M is a title, not a person; it's not a sex change!
Both protected (since you've said it's not defamation of any sort) and with consequence. There's no "niceness rule" exempting critical speech from free speech.
Yep, exactly the sort of statement that comes up in any case where an attempt is being made at suppressing free speech. The upshot of this statement is that free speech is simply a talking point, not something that applies in actual practical cases.
There's two sides to the original dispute. The libel claim is an attempt to suppress one of them, and penalize that side for even bringing it up.
Did you think "free speech" meant one could only speak when it was free of consequences?
For any free speech issue on the Internet, there's someone to claim that it isn't one for some lame excuse or another.
So if someone commits a wrong against me, and I can't muster up enough objective evidence to prove it, I must remain silent about it upon penalty of law? Some free speech.
Here are the statements that are claimed to be libelous:
a) "A friend told be to stop going, cause of Dr. Biegel billed his insurance company funny awhile before."
One should be prevented by law from posting such a vague assertion online?
b) "So I saw the guy for 2 visits, expected a bill for about 125 bucks... So ends up, Biegel billed me for over $500. I called to pay, and he couldn't give me a straight answer as to why the jump in price, we got into an argument..."
Assuming Dr. Biegel did in fact bill the defendant over $500, there's no false statement of fact here. Nor anything that would be defamatory per se even if it were false. "He couldn't give me a straight answer" is a matter of perception.
c) "He called me back to cover his ass, and had reasons as to why he could bill for the extra amount, then tells me he would still write it off because he wanted to keep his word from the previous conversation. One reason he gave me, was that he runs a business and would stick it to insurance companies (even though that drives my premiums up, and makes me wonder who else he sticks it to).
This is an example of an unprovable statement -- an unrecorded phone conversation. Should the defendant be forbidden by law from repeating Dr. Biegel's (alleged) words because he can't prove that Dr. Biegel said them?
d) "The next day I received a voicemail from the receptionist, she told me that she talked to my insurance company and found out that my case settled, and even though it was for an amount less than expected, they felt I owed them $125
It's not clear why Dr. Biegel even thinks this statement is libelous.
e) [I was a bit put off by the fact that] "he wasn't keeping his word anymore".
A bit vague to be the basis of a libel claim.
f) [I don't think good business means charging people whatever you feel hoping they'll pay without a fuss.] "Especially considering that I found a much better, honest, chiropractor."
The first part isn't libelous at all, it's a matter of opinion and the practice it implies the plaintiff engages in isn't illegal. The second part implies the plaintiff _isn't_ honest, which is clearly the defendant's opinion based on the other things that happened.
If this review is held to be libelous, then just about any write-up about a similar dispute can be held to be libelous. Proof isn't always going to be available, and to require that the complaining part have such proof before even making a complaint is definitely a "chilling effect".
The courts are likely going to be leery of awarding damages to a defendant who inflicted those damages upon himself. It's not the defendant who causes the extra damage associated with the publicity attached to a libel case, so he's not responsible for it.
That's the issue with data mining in general, but I still don't see how Google Street View adds any particular risk.
And in this hypothetical case, the risk was caused by a photo with GPS coordinates and a map. Street view was totally unnecessary to compound the privacy violation.
(and suggesting somehow preventing the correlation of GPS coordinates with addresses doesn't seem very useful either)
Actually, this is no longer true. It's drugs, gun violence, then murder, with prostitution rather far back in the pack.
(gun violence is higher than murder because, like drugs, it suggests to politicians new oppressive laws they can pass)
No on both counts. There's already far too much hardware out there which can decode ATSC broadcasts and NOT respect the broadcast flag, even if they turned it on. And HDCP is separate; broadcast-flag enabled hardware might have to use it, but having HDCP does not imply respecting the broadcast flag.
In one campaign, they used it straight up, the original Janis Joplin recording. And the campaign was successful. That's an advertising company to be feared, if not respected. (but I'd still rather have a Porsche... like Joplin)
Which was then over-ridden by higher-ups who make the signs say things like "Don't Drink and Drive", "Seat Belt Law Enforcement In Effect", or whatever other low-priority message they want to put up on them. (Yes, I'm talking to YOU, PennDOT)
The broadcast flag failed and the signals are broadcast over the air decrypted. MythTV is perfectly capable of doing HD and has been for some time now.
There is finally a commercial non-computer-based OTA HD DVR, the DTVPal DVR. $250, no subscription. I have no experience with it.
My bank (Wachovia) doesn't do that. Actually they're very cool about overdrafts. First of all, there's no fee for an overdraft pulled from savings (not that I keep much savings there). Second, they only charge one overdraft fee (for overdrafts to credit) per day. Third -- and I've watched online and seen this happen in my transaction list -- if you resolve the overdraft in the same day it occurs, they actually reverse both the automatic overdraft transaction and the fee. I don't count on this as it's not advertised behavior.
They do require a substantial minimum to get this. But the minimum includes savings, checking, money market... and credit lines. Having a Visa with them with a $10,000 limit counts the same for minimum balance purposes as having $10,000 in savings.
Err, no. If the debt that the debt collector bought is found to be invalid, the piece of paper the debt collector has is worth as much as a share of Washington Mutual. That's a risk a debt collector takes when purchasing debt.
Sounds like they hired the Mafia rather than an actual debt collecting agency. While the real debt collectors don't often follow the debt collection laws, it more often amounts to telephone threats and slander than actual thugs coming around.
Yeah, because as a computer programmer, the first thing I'm going to do to cut back when I get laid off is sever my connection to the job boards and cut off my email access to everyone I know who might be in a position to hire me. F-ing genius.
Televisions making up 10% of total residential electricity use? A savings of "$18.48/yr"? These numbers are just asspulls. The 10% for televisions appears to be derived from a report based on a 50-home survey which showed that "plug loads" accounted for 15-19% of electricity use and "entertainment" (including TVs, but also set-top boxes, DVD players, etc) made up 60% of that.
Yes, those would be the "ordinary techniques". Or, if you prefer, it's a case of "patenting the goal": "Let them see a quarter of the book, plus the sample chapters".
It's held in Las Vegas. At the same time as the Adult Entertainment Expo. If the booth babes aren't sufficient, just head down the street.
You also have to consider the loss of future opportunity. For example, a woman working her way through law school as a stripper is likely to have trouble finding employment with law firms who find out about her past (and they will, because the partners are likely to have frequented the strip joints).
It doesn't really matter whether the method disclosed in the patent is very good or not.
What does matter is whether or not the patent is valid. That is, of patentable subject matter, and novel, non-obvious, and useful. It's certainly useful (even if there are ways around it). It would appear to be of patentable subject matter. Some if it is certainly not novel, however -- several of the claims describe things web servers and browsers have been doing since the early '90s (and Compuserve and AOL and likely others prior to that!). Even giving the rest of the claims the benefit of the doubt and saying they were novel 2000(though it's quite possible they were not), they're not non-obvious. They describe doing an ordinary thing (previewing a book over the web) using ordinary techniques.
Yes, and no respectively. The Lusitania was a merchant ship of a belligerent power; that in itself made it fair game. That it was carrying military ordinance was only icing on the cake, and did not make the British into "terrorists".
So basically there are too many people trying to exploit a limited pool of suckers to make the endeavor profitable. So sad. However, I have a solution, check out my site at http://www.h0wtoph1sh.com.
If the established labels do that, it is a win for the indie bands.
(BTW, how much you want to bet that the established labels have the contracts written such that royalties paid to performers on the 69 cent songs drop, but royalties paid to performers on the $1.29 songs don't increase)
That's so early-2008.
Perjury, yes. Libel is a tort but generally not a crime (there's probably exceptions, though). As for the National Secrets Act, I'm unaware of any law called that in the US (the UK has an Official Secrets Act). Perhaps it's a secret.
Such "hate speech" is not illegal in the US. Laws have been passed against it but generally struck down in the courts. "Fighting words" can be illegal, but they have to meet the Brandenberg test of being likely to cause "imminent lawless action".