The USPTO already has an increasing fee scale for requests for reexamination of patents, and it has a lower "small entity" rate. Of course, this only applies to the one patent. If you carry the penalty over for any new patents filed by the same entity, you could have the desired effect by penalizing a suspect patenting agency.
On the other hand, many patents are sent back because the application was missing a drawing, or something was poorly labled. If you carry over penalties, then you'd horribly penalize newbies who are trying to learn the patent application process, essentially making it a requirement to hire an expensive patent attorney...
How large is large for the deposit amount? We already charge different rates based on whether the application comes from a "small entity":
(a) Basic fee for filing each application for an original patent, except provisional, design, or plant applications:
By a small entity (Sec. 1.27(a)) ----$385.00
By other than a small entity --------$770.00
This is straight off the USPTO website, and is for the initial filing fee only. There are a host of other charges (such as requests for re-examination which run into the thousands), which I haven't listed because Slashdot's lame-ass junk filter keeps me from doing so.
Of course, if you mean we need to increase the penalty, consider that a lot of the submarine patents that have been wielded by evil companies like PanIP are generated by people who would qualify as "small entities". Discouraging frivolous applications is a good way of cutting down on the work load of USPTO examiners, but what we need is to eliminate bad granting of patents - giving them more time isn't necessarily going do the job if the patent examiner isn't well versed in the field that the patent is being granted in.
I'm thinking mandatory public/peer review is the key (think public probationary period)... If it isn't deemed original by a board of voluntary examiners drawn from the field, then it doesn't pass go. If someone objects with evidence of prior art during the 1 year public review period, the patent automatically goes back for reexamination. The other thing that needs to happen is the re-enacting the requirement that a working model of the invention MUST be demonstrated as part of the patent application. No more pie-in-the-sky speculative patents without any actual work to back them up.
It's a very, very, very short list. You could print it on a t-shirt, or on a postcard. It's nice to know that we have SOME rights, but even then these exemptions are set to expire in 3 years. Here it is:
(1) Compilations consisting of lists of Internet locations blocked by commercially marketed filtering software applications that are intended to prevent access to domains, websites or portions of websites, but not including lists of Internet locations blocked by software applications that operate exclusively to protect against damage to a computer or computer network or lists of Internet locations blocked by software applications that operate exclusively to prevent receipt of email.
(2) Computer programs protected by dongles that prevent access due to malfunction or damage and which are obsolete.
(3) Computer programs and video games distributed in formats that have become obsolete and which require the original media or hardware as a condition of access. A format shall be considered obsolete if the machine or system necessary to render perceptible a work stored in that format is no longer manufactured or is no longer reasonably available in the commercial marketplace.
(4) Literary works distributed in ebook format when all existing ebook editions of the work (including digital text editions made available by authorized entities) contain access controls that prevent the enabling of the ebook's read-aloud function and that prevent the enabling of screen readers to render the text into a specialized format.
Definitions. (1) "Internet locations" are defined to include domains, uniform resource locators (URLs), numeric IP addresses or any combination thereof.
(3) "Obsolete" shall mean "no longer manufactured or reasonably available in the commercial marketplace."
(3) "Specialized format," "digital text" and "authorized entities" shall have the same meaning as in 17 U.S.C. 121.
These exemptions will remain in effect through October 27, 2006.
You wouldn't believe the kind of morons who take advantage of the traffic change caused by flashing lights and a siren to run red lights, make left/right turns, etc. There's a reason ambulances and other emergency vehicles slow down when approaching ANY intersection - the absence of traffic may prompt some idiot to make a left right into the path of the ambulance, or some opportunistic (or perhaps just deaf) pedestrian may decide to cross the road just at that moment...
I work at a hospital (UCLA Medical), and we see ambulances come through the WORST traffic to get to us (Wilshire/Santa Monica & Westwood.) Often times I see ambulances having to drive on the wrong side of the street because of traffic (and people who just stop in the middle of the street)... and that's why folks, you pull over, ALL the way over.
In Damon Knight's "A for Anything" an overnight revolution takes place when cheap matter duplicators are distrbuted to everyone in the mail. Of course, you got two of them, so you could make as many copies of the matter duplicator as you wanted. The first thing that happens is that the ruthless duplicate weapons, kill off competition, essentially destroy society as we know it.
If replicators were really around the corner, illegality would become moot. Could any government, totalitarian or otherwise, hope to defeat a population that could arm itself overnight with just one set of ammo and a working gun?
Too many lawyers. No, seriously, we have too many lawyers, and they all need work. Idle hands (or in this case, solicitors) make for the devil's work. Too bad we can't force lawyers into the poor house by forcing them to take out extravagant malpractice insurance policies. I'm sure the doctors here would love to see that happen.
If this gizmo is so damn cool, they should be using patents, not shrinkwrap licenses to protect it. Seriously, what kind of fool buys a car that requires you to use "Ford Brand Gasoline" in the agreement? Similarly, if they think they can use a piece of paper to keep someone from sharing THEIR OWN WORK, then they need to take the overpriced asshole of a lawyer who suggested the idea, and throw him out of a 20 story window.
I neglected to add that Disney could get around the limitation by selling a $5000 limited collector's copy in the interim. The idea is that you don't want the copyright holder to starve the market, and outlast any existing copies that might be circulating, in order to have monopoly control of the property even after the copyright period has expired, or to ensure that all existing copies are destroyed.
Some businesses that have rights to a property will often let the property deteriorate rather than let someone else make any money off of it. The 20 year offer it or be forced to license it allows people who have a copy of the property to make copies for other people without running afoul of the law IF there are no legal copies to be had.
Of course, at $5000, there will probably be a lot of "illegal" copying going on, so Disney has the choice of allowing their market be saturated by unlicensed copies (no money to Disney), using the meager profits from the very slow-selling $5000 copies to enforce legal action against copying, or making cheap copies that they can sell in order to fill demand. Obviously, this rule is designed to "encourage" Disney to take the 3rd course of action:)
They can restrict distribution as much as they want during the first 20 years of the copyright. After this point, I'd argue that it should be subject to a less monopolistic copyright that ensures that there will always be new copies available.
Seriously. If the intent of copyright is to spur the publication of new material, why are we making it so easy to make a living off of milking the same property for all time? Creative material is not a tangible, (assumably) permanent asset like land, and should not be treated as such.
Corporations should not be allowed to become more powerful by just buying up creative material, and leveraging that control to purchase even more creative material. Someone has to actually produce NEW material from time to time, and enforcing limits on exclusive control after 20 years is a good way to spur spending on content creation, rather than content acquisition and repackaging.
I think you should be guaranteed 20 yrs, and anything after that (up to life of creator, or 100 years for a corporation, whichever comes first) would be fine as long as:
1. The owner pays for continual upkeep and maintenance on a pristine "master copy." This mean recopying it, restoring it, digitizing it, or transcribing to new media/formats as necessary to guarantee that a usable copy is available at the end of the copyright term. This also includes storage costs for the Library of Congress (or equivalent body in country where copyright is being extended.)
2. For every year beyond the minimum, compulsory licensing must be made available if there are no publicly purchasable copies of the work. For example, if Vol 1, Issue 9 of Comic X is out of print, and the publisher wants to hold on to the copyright, they must make that material available for sale (ie, via a digital download, on-demand copy, graphic novel or other compendium) or else be subject to compulsory licensing of the work. This ensures that copies of the work are publicly available (even if they have to be extremely expensive.) None of that stop selling for X years to build up demand crap that Disney pulls.
Why these conditions? To make sure that the material is available to the public, and if the owner doesn't want to pay for the master copy (to ensure that the work is accessible after the copyright expires) then the copyright expires right there and then, and if people think it has value, they will copy/distribute it and preserve it that way.
For an example of where this is happening, some copy-protected programs/games from the 80's are no longer available from the original owners (no master copies exist.) The copyright has yet to expire, but even if it did, there are no master copies exist for people to copy and examine. However, there are collectors (ie, pirates) who might have broken the copy protection, archived those copies, and have kept copying them to new media (5 1/4 floppy -> 3.5 floppy -> hard drives -> CD-Roms -> DVD, etc.) This is moot without the hardware to run this stuff, so enter emulators to run the software.
Thus, an item that had value was maintained by the copying of collectors even when the original owner lapsed in their duty to preserve that original. Ironically, this behavior, preservation of a public good (which it would have been, once the copyright lapsed), is illegal under the DMCA. What a way to erase cultural history and hundreds of man-hours of creative work in the name of profit and greed.
I imagine that they'll want to test fly the actual complete rocket under automated guidance repeatedly, before consigning a human being (or multiple beings) as cargo for the X-prize.
Besides, if believe that they should look at certain details, tell em! Carmack appreciates input from the outside world - if you have a better method, or suggestions for things that need to be monitored or tested, e-mail em.
About a year ago I was hitting 100 spam messages per day. That's when I started getting serious about using bayesian rules with SA (I already had SpamAssassin installed from when I was getting about 30-40 spams a day.) Today I get over 250-300 pieces of spam a day, with a leakage rate of anywhere from 5 to 20 messages that actually land in my mailbox, depending on what new tactic the spammers are trying to avoid SA rules.
Just wait long enough and you'll get more than your fair share too...
Apply game theory. He who stops replying first gets to keep the extra dollar (assuming that he did not initiate the exchange.) Thus, the only way to win, is never to e-mail anyone!
Since people everywhere have been conditioned to regard anything "nuclear" as bad, I propose that all new sources of power based on radioactive decay be called "atomic" power. It might just be semantics, but I like the idea of an "atomic battery".:)
Is Apple taking a bath on every download? I thought that encoding MP3s required a license... which means that Apple is paying for every user that downloads iTunes. Not that I'm complaining - I'll take a free MP3 encoder anyday!
Note that although it's being sold through the Apple iTMS, the seller is actually Audible (so Apple needs a cut, Audible needs a cut, the publisher needs a cut, and the author gets their percentage at the very end.) With that said though, I thought that having quickie downloads like language tapes for $8 a piece was great. Thinking about traveling to a foreign country and need to learn the language? Log on to iTunes, download the tape, and you're set for when you're stuck in parking-lot traffic on your daily commute (or on the bus, or waiting for your laundry at the laundromat, etc.) All they need to do is add more languages...
Given that the GIMP source is open, how long before someone forks a build that replicates Photoshop as closely as possible? (icons, menus, shortcuts, plugin support, etc.)
I've been running off of OpenNic root-originated DNS ever since Verisign tried this stunt the first time. It's only a matter of time before there's a major break in the control and administration of.com and.net.
Slashdot Mirror
Sadly, this will never happen as the patent system now stands because how do you prototype a "business process".
All the more reason to disallow these types of "patents".
The USPTO already has an increasing fee scale for requests for reexamination of patents, and it has a lower "small entity" rate. Of course, this only applies to the one patent. If you carry the penalty over for any new patents filed by the same entity, you could have the desired effect by penalizing a suspect patenting agency.
On the other hand, many patents are sent back because the application was missing a drawing, or something was poorly labled. If you carry over penalties, then you'd horribly penalize newbies who are trying to learn the patent application process, essentially making it a requirement to hire an expensive patent attorney...
This is straight off the USPTO website, and is for the initial filing fee only. There are a host of other charges (such as requests for re-examination which run into the thousands), which I haven't listed because Slashdot's lame-ass junk filter keeps me from doing so.
Of course, if you mean we need to increase the penalty, consider that a lot of the submarine patents that have been wielded by evil companies like PanIP are generated by people who would qualify as "small entities". Discouraging frivolous applications is a good way of cutting down on the work load of USPTO examiners, but what we need is to eliminate bad granting of patents - giving them more time isn't necessarily going do the job if the patent examiner isn't well versed in the field that the patent is being granted in.
I'm thinking mandatory public/peer review is the key (think public probationary period)... If it isn't deemed original by a board of voluntary examiners drawn from the field, then it doesn't pass go. If someone objects with evidence of prior art during the 1 year public review period, the patent automatically goes back for reexamination. The other thing that needs to happen is the re-enacting the requirement that a working model of the invention MUST be demonstrated as part of the patent application. No more pie-in-the-sky speculative patents without any actual work to back them up.
Actually, I thought "Bleach". You might want to remove "Beach" as a primer...
You wouldn't believe the kind of morons who take advantage of the traffic change caused by flashing lights and a siren to run red lights, make left/right turns, etc. There's a reason ambulances and other emergency vehicles slow down when approaching ANY intersection - the absence of traffic may prompt some idiot to make a left right into the path of the ambulance, or some opportunistic (or perhaps just deaf) pedestrian may decide to cross the road just at that moment...
I work at a hospital (UCLA Medical), and we see ambulances come through the WORST traffic to get to us (Wilshire/Santa Monica & Westwood.) Often times I see ambulances having to drive on the wrong side of the street because of traffic (and people who just stop in the middle of the street)... and that's why folks, you pull over, ALL the way over.
Wait until drive-by wire becomes standard on GM cars. Then remote control is merely a matter of software...
But the onboard computer doesn't drive the rig itself, ala Homer Simpson, right? :)
In Damon Knight's "A for Anything" an overnight revolution takes place when cheap matter duplicators are distrbuted to everyone in the mail. Of course, you got two of them, so you could make as many copies of the matter duplicator as you wanted. The first thing that happens is that the ruthless duplicate weapons, kill off competition, essentially destroy society as we know it.
If replicators were really around the corner, illegality would become moot. Could any government, totalitarian or otherwise, hope to defeat a population that could arm itself overnight with just one set of ammo and a working gun?
Too many lawyers. No, seriously, we have too many lawyers, and they all need work. Idle hands (or in this case, solicitors) make for the devil's work. Too bad we can't force lawyers into the poor house by forcing them to take out extravagant malpractice insurance policies. I'm sure the doctors here would love to see that happen.
If this gizmo is so damn cool, they should be using patents, not shrinkwrap licenses to protect it. Seriously, what kind of fool buys a car that requires you to use "Ford Brand Gasoline" in the agreement? Similarly, if they think they can use a piece of paper to keep someone from sharing THEIR OWN WORK, then they need to take the overpriced asshole of a lawyer who suggested the idea, and throw him out of a 20 story window.
First sale doctrine folks.
I neglected to add that Disney could get around the limitation by selling a $5000 limited collector's copy in the interim. The idea is that you don't want the copyright holder to starve the market, and outlast any existing copies that might be circulating, in order to have monopoly control of the property even after the copyright period has expired, or to ensure that all existing copies are destroyed.
:)
Some businesses that have rights to a property will often let the property deteriorate rather than let someone else make any money off of it. The 20 year offer it or be forced to license it allows people who have a copy of the property to make copies for other people without running afoul of the law IF there are no legal copies to be had.
Of course, at $5000, there will probably be a lot of "illegal" copying going on, so Disney has the choice of allowing their market be saturated by unlicensed copies (no money to Disney), using the meager profits from the very slow-selling $5000 copies to enforce legal action against copying, or making cheap copies that they can sell in order to fill demand. Obviously, this rule is designed to "encourage" Disney to take the 3rd course of action
They can restrict distribution as much as they want during the first 20 years of the copyright. After this point, I'd argue that it should be subject to a less monopolistic copyright that ensures that there will always be new copies available.
Seriously. If the intent of copyright is to spur the publication of new material, why are we making it so easy to make a living off of milking the same property for all time? Creative material is not a tangible, (assumably) permanent asset like land, and should not be treated as such.
Corporations should not be allowed to become more powerful by just buying up creative material, and leveraging that control to purchase even more creative material. Someone has to actually produce NEW material from time to time, and enforcing limits on exclusive control after 20 years is a good way to spur spending on content creation, rather than content acquisition and repackaging.
I think you should be guaranteed 20 yrs, and anything after that (up to life of creator, or 100 years for a corporation, whichever comes first) would be fine as long as:
1. The owner pays for continual upkeep and maintenance on a pristine "master copy." This mean recopying it, restoring it, digitizing it, or transcribing to new media/formats as necessary to guarantee that a usable copy is available at the end of the copyright term. This also includes storage costs for the Library of Congress (or equivalent body in country where copyright is being extended.)
2. For every year beyond the minimum, compulsory licensing must be made available if there are no publicly purchasable copies of the work. For example, if Vol 1, Issue 9 of Comic X is out of print, and the publisher wants to hold on to the copyright, they must make that material available for sale (ie, via a digital download, on-demand copy, graphic novel or other compendium) or else be subject to compulsory licensing of the work. This ensures that copies of the work are publicly available (even if they have to be extremely expensive.) None of that stop selling for X years to build up demand crap that Disney pulls.
Why these conditions? To make sure that the material is available to the public, and if the owner doesn't want to pay for the master copy (to ensure that the work is accessible after the copyright expires) then the copyright expires right there and then, and if people think it has value, they will copy/distribute it and preserve it that way.
For an example of where this is happening, some copy-protected programs/games from the 80's are no longer available from the original owners (no master copies exist.) The copyright has yet to expire, but even if it did, there are no master copies exist for people to copy and examine. However, there are collectors (ie, pirates) who might have broken the copy protection, archived those copies, and have kept copying them to new media (5 1/4 floppy -> 3.5 floppy -> hard drives -> CD-Roms -> DVD, etc.) This is moot without the hardware to run this stuff, so enter emulators to run the software.
Thus, an item that had value was maintained by the copying of collectors even when the original owner lapsed in their duty to preserve that original. Ironically, this behavior, preservation of a public good (which it would have been, once the copyright lapsed), is illegal under the DMCA. What a way to erase cultural history and hundreds of man-hours of creative work in the name of profit and greed.
I imagine that they'll want to test fly the actual complete rocket under automated guidance repeatedly, before consigning a human being (or multiple beings) as cargo for the X-prize.
Besides, if believe that they should look at certain details, tell em! Carmack appreciates input from the outside world - if you have a better method, or suggestions for things that need to be monitored or tested, e-mail em.
Don't think of it as dead weight. Think of it as added reaction mass.
About a year ago I was hitting 100 spam messages per day. That's when I started getting serious about using bayesian rules with SA (I already had SpamAssassin installed from when I was getting about 30-40 spams a day.) Today I get over 250-300 pieces of spam a day, with a leakage rate of anywhere from 5 to 20 messages that actually land in my mailbox, depending on what new tactic the spammers are trying to avoid SA rules.
Just wait long enough and you'll get more than your fair share too...
Apply game theory. He who stops replying first gets to keep the extra dollar (assuming that he did not initiate the exchange.) Thus, the only way to win, is never to e-mail anyone!
Since people everywhere have been conditioned to regard anything "nuclear" as bad, I propose that all new sources of power based on radioactive decay be called "atomic" power. It might just be semantics, but I like the idea of an "atomic battery". :)
Is Apple taking a bath on every download? I thought that encoding MP3s required a license... which means that Apple is paying for every user that downloads iTunes. Not that I'm complaining - I'll take a free MP3 encoder anyday!
Note that although it's being sold through the Apple iTMS, the seller is actually Audible (so Apple needs a cut, Audible needs a cut, the publisher needs a cut, and the author gets their percentage at the very end.) With that said though, I thought that having quickie downloads like language tapes for $8 a piece was great. Thinking about traveling to a foreign country and need to learn the language? Log on to iTunes, download the tape, and you're set for when you're stuck in parking-lot traffic on your daily commute (or on the bus, or waiting for your laundry at the laundromat, etc.) All they need to do is add more languages...
Given that the GIMP source is open, how long before someone forks a build that replicates Photoshop as closely as possible? (icons, menus, shortcuts, plugin support, etc.)
It's got a lot more horsepower than my first mac (SE/30) that's for sure. Just wait until it starts taking voice commands and dictation :)
I've been running off of OpenNic root-originated DNS ever since Verisign tried this stunt the first time. It's only a matter of time before there's a major break in the control and administration of .com and .net.
Holy SMOKES! Arrgh, anybody want to buy a nearly new Sony IC recorder? Wow, this is gonna put a dent into a lot of people's markets. :)