Why is China allowed to sue anyone for patent infringement anywhere except in China?
"China" isn't suing anyone. Chinese companies like Huawei can sue for patent infringement outside China because they don't just have Chinese patents. It's exceptionally common for larger companies to file for a given patent in a number of different countries (the heavy hitters including the U.S., Canada, Europe, China, Japan, and South Korea), generally based on expected sales/manufacturing footprint.
The articles about that death covered the fact that AirBnB sweeps in with cash in exchange for confidentiality in the event of mishap, effectively hiding most deaths' associations with AirBnB.
Yes yes, I know -- just like the 300mpg carburetor that everyone could have had decades ago had the evil auto industry not suppressed it. (Here, the claim actually consumes itself: if there really were all these incidents and they really were cloaked with a confidentiality blanket such that there's no way to verify who and how many there are, then the journalists that claim to know this are either relying on inherently unreliable sources or outright lying.)
But bigger picture: People sue big companies all the time these days over much less than this, and sometimes it's not about the money as much as it is simply to be vindicated -- to tell your story to the world and have a jury of your peers agree that you were wronged. Conspiracy theories aside, it would be unlikely (to say the least) if at least some of the survivors wouldn't choose to take that route.
Putting aside your embarrassingly wrong pop psychology evaluation, ponder this: In your haste to smugness, you're actually taking the side of someone who believes Airbnb is more dangerous than hotels despite zero evidence to that effect.
Seriously, think that through. Prior to regulations high rise fires killed LOADS of people.
Prior to [the past several decades], individual house fires killed LOADS of people too -- hopefully we can at least agree on that. And United States fire deaths have decreased dramatically over the past several decades. So in an intellectually honest universe, there are a number of confounding factors you would have to work through before simply declaring that hotel "regulations" (whatever those might be) are responsible for an allegedly significant decrease (that you have yet to quantify) in hotel deaths. Say, the significant decrease in smoking rates. Or significant improvements in fire-retardant materials. But at this point I'm guessing intellectual honesty is not the order of the day here.
And I didn't bother looking for airbnb specific fires. Because there is no reason to. Given airbnb doesn't require any additional regulation then best case scenario is that it will have a fire rate the same as the wider building population.
So instead of looking at the actual data to determine whether your hypothesis just might be incorrect, you're declaring the actual data doesn't matter (and even better, that you know what it would be if you did look) because you're taking your hypothesis as a given. Wow. Just wow.
Impossible to compare AirBNB stats as the information is completely unavailable.
So you have no idea. And come on -- given how much publicity there was over the dude who was killed by the falling tree branch/tire swing, how many deaths from fire at an Airbnb property do you really think could sneak under the radar? That's why I challenged you to simply find one. I take it you haven't.
However there were 1.24 million building fires in the US in 2013. Which claimed the lives of 3240 people. Of those fires 7700 were in high rise buildings. Those high rise fires contributed 27 deaths. That gives you a fatality chance per fire of.35% in a high rise and.26% in all fires.
And in the link I posted, fatality chance per fire in your "much higher standard for fire safety" hotels works out to about.38%. If you're ultimately less likely to survive a hotel fire than one in a freestanding house, then the regulation you think you want is worse than useless.
It is materially less safe than the existing hotel market. A simple example is hotels are held to a much higher standard for fire safety.
I call bullshit -- that is, if you care about actual outcomes as opposed to bureaucratic box checking. Show me one Airbnb death from fire. One. If you can find one, then we can go on to discuss whether Airbnb's effective per-room-night death rate is higher or lower than the hotel industry's, which in the U.S. alone has thousands of fires and double-digit deaths each year.
What in the world are you talking about? From the front page of the complaint: "This is a patent case regarding Huawei’s obligation to offer a license to certain U.S. patents . .."
You've succinctly captured one of the truly amazing things about socialists -- no matter how many devastating failures have come before, hope springs eternal that if you just tweak a thing or two, all will be puppies and rainbows. The problem y'all just can't come to grips with is fundamental to any flavor of socialism: it strips the individual of any motivation to excel. And that motivation to excel is the reason we're not still drawing pictures with burnt sticks on the walls of caves. To pretend that humanity in the aggregate is going to go the extra mile solely for the benefit of others is to recklessly ignore fundamentals of human nature that won't be changing any time soon. Capitalism plus reasonable taxation harnesses that human nature for a true win-win -- society overall benefits far more than it ever has or ever could under a socialistic regime.
My hopes of a rational discussion were dashed by your admission that you're advocating for full-blown socialism -- as the saying goes, insanity is doing the same thing again and again and expecting a different result. But a few points:
Because we're letting a sizable portion of humanity starve for no reason. We're already making enough food in raw calories to feed everyone, but we still have mass starvation. Think about why.
My question was why you know Monsanto et al are making more profit than they would need to in order to continue to develop the products they do. Your answer was completely orthogonal to my question. Care to try again?
They don't. 90% of the _hard_ R&D is paid for by your tax dollars and mine.
A laughable proposition that might not even be true even under whatever twisted definition of "_hard_" you have in mind. Feel free to send any actual data you have on the subject.
Fun Fact: The US Housing market currently has a housing shortage. Is it because of evil gummint bureaucrats? Nope, it's because they ran out land developed by the American Taxpayer.
Again, feel free to send any support you might have for this. It seems clear enough that cities that have not opted to artificially restrict new development are experiencing a great deal of it in response both to the need and to the increase in prices -- free markets have a pesky tendency of working that way, whether or not that agrees with your worldview. See, for example, here.
Just regulate it already so there's enough profit motive to keep people interested as opposed to living like god-kings.
1. How much is "enough profit motive to keep people interested"? 2. How do you know "companies like Monsanto" are currently making more than that? (Bonus question: If they are, how much cheaper do you think their products would be at the "enough profit motive" level?) 3. How would these companies continue to have "enough profit motive" to engage in R&D in a world where farmers need only buy seeds from them once, then replant saved seed every year thereafter?
It's amazing how much misunderstanding of the U.S. patent system (and its history) you've packed into a single sentence.
Drop them back to the original term of 14 years
Sounds enticing on the surface, but keep in mind that was 14 years from issue. The U.S. didn't start measuring term from filing until 1995. Before that, people like Jerome Lemelson could manipulate the system by keeping applications tied up in the Patent Office literally for decades, all the while massaging the claims to cover wherever the market happened to be going in the meantime, and still get 17 years of fresh term when each patent finally was issued. I doubt you really want to go back to that kind of a system. And given that it can often take 3+ years for the Patent Office to examine a patent, the current term of 20 years from the filing date isn't effectively that much longer than the scheme you're proposing going back to.
close the "change one minor thing and re-patent" loophole
No such "loophole" exists. Right now today, advances over the prior art are only patentable if they would not have been obvious to a person of ordinary skill in the art at the time of the invention. 35 U.S.C. 103. If your real quibble is that the Patent Office issues too many patents with claims that actually would have been obvious, I won't disagree, but the solution is to more consistently enforce the rules that currently exist, not change them. The new procedures put in place by the America Invents Act (such as inter partes review) are helping with this a great deal.
and make damn sure they STAY at 14 years and don't let them ever become renewable or extended and grow out of control like copyright has.
Nobody is suggesting doing any of these things, so there's nothing to "reform."
It isn't. The Internet Archive has a well-established process and payment schedule for requesting an affidavit on the authenticity of a given archived page.
Most fast food workers don't work even close to 40 hours a week, 30 hours now being the cutoff for being considered "full time" and thus eligible for health insurance. The average is more like 24. So even at $15/hr (ridiculous, I agree), that's only about $18k/yr.
Hint: I didn't say anything about there being a "legal definition," and whether there is or isn't really has no bearing on what I did say.
Bonus hint: Courts can (and often do) interpret contract language that doesn't have a "legal definition," based on the expectations the language would have created in the mind of a reasonable person under the circumstances. I'd love to hear your reasoning as to why a reasonable consumer would/should understand the language "free lifetime service subscription" to mean "we'll keep the server up as long as we feel like it."
Basically what I’m trying to say is read the fine print and check your entitlement. You chose to pay money for a product that was dependent on someone else’s charity to keep working.
Reasonable people thus might well view the ongoing service as something more along the lines of a contractual obligation rather than an "entitlement" or "charity."
The thing is, the opportunities to step to are drying up quickly. More and more people are finding that they are stuck on minimum wage.
The actual statistics don't support that at all, to the extent you trust the Bureau of Labor Statistics as a data source. From the summary on the front page:
The percentage of hourly paid workers earning the prevailing federal minimum wage or less declined from 4.3 percent in 2013 to 3.9 percent in 2014.
That's about a 10% decrease in one year. The table on page 13 of the PDF shows historical rates back to 1979. In recent years, there has been a consistent decrease each year from 2010 through 2014 (the most recent year BLS has reported), with a cumulative decrease of 35% over the period. And save a period during the Bush years when the percentage hit the 2-3% range, the decline has been fairly constant since 1980. Back then, the percentage making minimum wage or less was a whopping 15.1%. Now it's about a quarter of that.
But, here's the funny part - even if you win, you lose. You will still ultimately pay your lawyers more to defend your company than you would pay me in fulfillment of your contract. Your call.
Otherwise known as a cost of litigation settlement demand -- exactly the same technique patent trolls use to try to skim from businesses large and small. But, like many of them, eventually you're likely to run into a Newegg that understands that if it just forks over money every time it's threatened like that, it'll experience death by a thousand cuts. Companies make judgment calls all the time that it's better in the long run to pay the lawyers more for a particular case to set an example that they're not an ATM to everyone who comes along with their hand out.
Excellent post -- arbitration is a far more useful tool (for all involved) than many people believe. Just wanted to clarify one minor point:
You can't sue them in small claims court or state court because of jurisdiction. The first thing the company will do is petition for removal for diversity of jurisdiction - that means moving it from small claims or state court to Federal court.
Even if there's complete diversity of the parties, the amount in dispute has to be above a threshold (currently $75,000) for a federal court to have jurisdiction.* 28 U.S.C. 1332. It's unlikely that would be true in most disputes like this, and if it were you wouldn't be filing in small claims court anyway.
* This assumes your cause of action isn't under federal law, which it generally shouldn't be in this kind of situation.
The article title is incomplete. The article itself says it's about both the source code and the signing key:
The department wrote in a footnote to its filing: “The FBI cannot itself modify the software on Farook’s iPhone without access to the source code and Apple’s private electronic signature.
“The government did not seek to compel Apple to turn those over because it believed such a request would be less palatable to Apple. If Apple would prefer that course, however, that may provide an alternative that requires less labour by Apple programmers.”
Even if they could ever figure out how to build it, by that point it's unlikely there would be enough people still running that generation of hardware for it to matter much.
So there is nothing dangerous about it what so ever.
You sound pretty confident in that position. Confident enough that you stand ready to assume the liability for any bad outcomes that come from people taking your advice? I'd best not hold my breath for that one.
Sounds like you're just another arrogant tosser who thinks it's their right, nay, their duty to bombard everyone with your banal, vapid phone conversations.
Ah, so if I'm not in favor of illegal jamming, that means I must be in favor of obnoxious cell phone conversations--particularly my own. Got it. Seriously, friend, it's never too late to take another shot at remedial reading comprehension.
-- Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
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Why is China allowed to sue anyone for patent infringement anywhere except in China?
"China" isn't suing anyone. Chinese companies like Huawei can sue for patent infringement outside China because they don't just have Chinese patents. It's exceptionally common for larger companies to file for a given patent in a number of different countries (the heavy hitters including the U.S., Canada, Europe, China, Japan, and South Korea), generally based on expected sales/manufacturing footprint.
The articles about that death covered the fact that AirBnB sweeps in with cash in exchange for confidentiality in the event of mishap, effectively hiding most deaths' associations with AirBnB.
Yes yes, I know -- just like the 300mpg carburetor that everyone could have had decades ago had the evil auto industry not suppressed it. (Here, the claim actually consumes itself: if there really were all these incidents and they really were cloaked with a confidentiality blanket such that there's no way to verify who and how many there are, then the journalists that claim to know this are either relying on inherently unreliable sources or outright lying.)
But bigger picture: People sue big companies all the time these days over much less than this, and sometimes it's not about the money as much as it is simply to be vindicated -- to tell your story to the world and have a jury of your peers agree that you were wronged. Conspiracy theories aside, it would be unlikely (to say the least) if at least some of the survivors wouldn't choose to take that route.
Putting aside your embarrassingly wrong pop psychology evaluation, ponder this: In your haste to smugness, you're actually taking the side of someone who believes Airbnb is more dangerous than hotels despite zero evidence to that effect.
Seriously, think that through. Prior to regulations high rise fires killed LOADS of people.
Prior to [the past several decades], individual house fires killed LOADS of people too -- hopefully we can at least agree on that. And United States fire deaths have decreased dramatically over the past several decades. So in an intellectually honest universe, there are a number of confounding factors you would have to work through before simply declaring that hotel "regulations" (whatever those might be) are responsible for an allegedly significant decrease (that you have yet to quantify) in hotel deaths. Say, the significant decrease in smoking rates. Or significant improvements in fire-retardant materials. But at this point I'm guessing intellectual honesty is not the order of the day here.
And I didn't bother looking for airbnb specific fires. Because there is no reason to. Given airbnb doesn't require any additional regulation then best case scenario is that it will have a fire rate the same as the wider building population.
So instead of looking at the actual data to determine whether your hypothesis just might be incorrect, you're declaring the actual data doesn't matter (and even better, that you know what it would be if you did look) because you're taking your hypothesis as a given. Wow. Just wow.
Impossible to compare AirBNB stats as the information is completely unavailable.
So you have no idea. And come on -- given how much publicity there was over the dude who was killed by the falling tree branch/tire swing, how many deaths from fire at an Airbnb property do you really think could sneak under the radar? That's why I challenged you to simply find one. I take it you haven't.
However there were 1.24 million building fires in the US in 2013. Which claimed the lives of 3240 people. Of those fires 7700 were in high rise buildings. Those high rise fires contributed 27 deaths. That gives you a fatality chance per fire of .35% in a high rise and .26% in all fires.
And in the link I posted, fatality chance per fire in your "much higher standard for fire safety" hotels works out to about .38%. If you're ultimately less likely to survive a hotel fire than one in a freestanding house, then the regulation you think you want is worse than useless.
It is materially less safe than the existing hotel market. A simple example is hotels are held to a much higher standard for fire safety.
I call bullshit -- that is, if you care about actual outcomes as opposed to bureaucratic box checking. Show me one Airbnb death from fire. One. If you can find one, then we can go on to discuss whether Airbnb's effective per-room-night death rate is higher or lower than the hotel industry's, which in the U.S. alone has thousands of fires and double-digit deaths each year.
What in the world are you talking about? From the front page of the complaint: "This is a patent case regarding Huawei’s obligation to offer a license to certain U.S. patents . . ."
You've succinctly captured one of the truly amazing things about socialists -- no matter how many devastating failures have come before, hope springs eternal that if you just tweak a thing or two, all will be puppies and rainbows. The problem y'all just can't come to grips with is fundamental to any flavor of socialism: it strips the individual of any motivation to excel. And that motivation to excel is the reason we're not still drawing pictures with burnt sticks on the walls of caves. To pretend that humanity in the aggregate is going to go the extra mile solely for the benefit of others is to recklessly ignore fundamentals of human nature that won't be changing any time soon. Capitalism plus reasonable taxation harnesses that human nature for a true win-win -- society overall benefits far more than it ever has or ever could under a socialistic regime.
My hopes of a rational discussion were dashed by your admission that you're advocating for full-blown socialism -- as the saying goes, insanity is doing the same thing again and again and expecting a different result. But a few points:
Because we're letting a sizable portion of humanity starve for no reason. We're already making enough food in raw calories to feed everyone, but we still have mass starvation. Think about why.
My question was why you know Monsanto et al are making more profit than they would need to in order to continue to develop the products they do. Your answer was completely orthogonal to my question. Care to try again?
They don't. 90% of the _hard_ R&D is paid for by your tax dollars and mine.
A laughable proposition that might not even be true even under whatever twisted definition of "_hard_" you have in mind. Feel free to send any actual data you have on the subject.
Fun Fact: The US Housing market currently has a housing shortage. Is it because of evil gummint bureaucrats? Nope, it's because they ran out land developed by the American Taxpayer.
Again, feel free to send any support you might have for this. It seems clear enough that cities that have not opted to artificially restrict new development are experiencing a great deal of it in response both to the need and to the increase in prices -- free markets have a pesky tendency of working that way, whether or not that agrees with your worldview. See, for example, here.
Just regulate it already so there's enough profit motive to keep people interested as opposed to living like god-kings.
1. How much is "enough profit motive to keep people interested"?
2. How do you know "companies like Monsanto" are currently making more than that? (Bonus question: If they are, how much cheaper do you think their products would be at the "enough profit motive" level?)
3. How would these companies continue to have "enough profit motive" to engage in R&D in a world where farmers need only buy seeds from them once, then replant saved seed every year thereafter?
It's amazing how much misunderstanding of the U.S. patent system (and its history) you've packed into a single sentence.
Drop them back to the original term of 14 years
Sounds enticing on the surface, but keep in mind that was 14 years from issue. The U.S. didn't start measuring term from filing until 1995. Before that, people like Jerome Lemelson could manipulate the system by keeping applications tied up in the Patent Office literally for decades, all the while massaging the claims to cover wherever the market happened to be going in the meantime, and still get 17 years of fresh term when each patent finally was issued. I doubt you really want to go back to that kind of a system. And given that it can often take 3+ years for the Patent Office to examine a patent, the current term of 20 years from the filing date isn't effectively that much longer than the scheme you're proposing going back to.
close the "change one minor thing and re-patent" loophole
No such "loophole" exists. Right now today, advances over the prior art are only patentable if they would not have been obvious to a person of ordinary skill in the art at the time of the invention. 35 U.S.C. 103. If your real quibble is that the Patent Office issues too many patents with claims that actually would have been obvious, I won't disagree, but the solution is to more consistently enforce the rules that currently exist, not change them. The new procedures put in place by the America Invents Act (such as inter partes review) are helping with this a great deal.
and make damn sure they STAY at 14 years and don't let them ever become renewable or extended and grow out of control like copyright has.
Nobody is suggesting doing any of these things, so there's nothing to "reform."
That doesn't come for free, not by a long shot.
It isn't. The Internet Archive has a well-established process and payment schedule for requesting an affidavit on the authenticity of a given archived page.
Even McDonald's workers need $15/hr ($30k/year)
Most fast food workers don't work even close to 40 hours a week, 30 hours now being the cutoff for being considered "full time" and thus eligible for health insurance. The average is more like 24. So even at $15/hr (ridiculous, I agree), that's only about $18k/yr.
The meaning of lifetime is settled law. Without an explicit statement of what it means, it means nothing.
Citation badly needed. And preferably to the "settled law" you mentioned, as opposed to something like your rather strained interpretation of the summary of a Consumer Reports article.
You might want to reread my post.
Hint: I didn't say anything about there being a "legal definition," and whether there is or isn't really has no bearing on what I did say.
Bonus hint: Courts can (and often do) interpret contract language that doesn't have a "legal definition," based on the expectations the language would have created in the mind of a reasonable person under the circumstances. I'd love to hear your reasoning as to why a reasonable consumer would/should understand the language "free lifetime service subscription" to mean "we'll keep the server up as long as we feel like it."
Basically what I’m trying to say is read the fine print and check your entitlement. You chose to pay money for a product that was dependent on someone else’s charity to keep working.
The not-so-fine print at the time of purchase actually said "Free lifetime service subscription." That sure sounds like an a liability the parties would have had on their radar when valuing the acquisition. In fact, after the acquisition was complete, Nest reiterated the commitment: "For existing customers, the service will continue to be available and we will continue to offer customer support."
Reasonable people thus might well view the ongoing service as something more along the lines of a contractual obligation rather than an "entitlement" or "charity."
It's chip and PIN -- not as bad as the summary made it sound.
The thing is, the opportunities to step to are drying up quickly. More and more people are finding that they are stuck on minimum wage.
The actual statistics don't support that at all, to the extent you trust the Bureau of Labor Statistics as a data source. From the summary on the front page:
The percentage of hourly paid workers earning the prevailing federal minimum wage or less declined from 4.3 percent in 2013 to 3.9 percent in 2014.
That's about a 10% decrease in one year. The table on page 13 of the PDF shows historical rates back to 1979. In recent years, there has been a consistent decrease each year from 2010 through 2014 (the most recent year BLS has reported), with a cumulative decrease of 35% over the period. And save a period during the Bush years when the percentage hit the 2-3% range, the decline has been fairly constant since 1980. Back then, the percentage making minimum wage or less was a whopping 15.1%. Now it's about a quarter of that.
But, here's the funny part - even if you win, you lose. You will still ultimately pay your lawyers more to defend your company than you would pay me in fulfillment of your contract. Your call.
Otherwise known as a cost of litigation settlement demand -- exactly the same technique patent trolls use to try to skim from businesses large and small. But, like many of them, eventually you're likely to run into a Newegg that understands that if it just forks over money every time it's threatened like that, it'll experience death by a thousand cuts. Companies make judgment calls all the time that it's better in the long run to pay the lawyers more for a particular case to set an example that they're not an ATM to everyone who comes along with their hand out.
Excellent post -- arbitration is a far more useful tool (for all involved) than many people believe. Just wanted to clarify one minor point:
You can't sue them in small claims court or state court because of jurisdiction. The first thing the company will do is petition for removal for diversity of jurisdiction - that means moving it from small claims or state court to Federal court.
Even if there's complete diversity of the parties, the amount in dispute has to be above a threshold (currently $75,000) for a federal court to have jurisdiction.* 28 U.S.C. 1332. It's unlikely that would be true in most disputes like this, and if it were you wouldn't be filing in small claims court anyway.
* This assumes your cause of action isn't under federal law, which it generally shouldn't be in this kind of situation.
Yup, that's the "have the stones" part. For the risk-averse, there are plenty of other legal options.
As a student of the Constitution, the President should know....
If you think Obama gives two shits about the Constitution, you haven't been paying attention.
The article title is incomplete. The article itself says it's about both the source code and the signing key:
The department wrote in a footnote to its filing: “The FBI cannot itself modify the software on Farook’s iPhone without access to the source code and Apple’s private electronic signature.
“The government did not seek to compel Apple to turn those over because it believed such a request would be less palatable to Apple. If Apple would prefer that course, however, that may provide an alternative that requires less labour by Apple programmers.”
Even if they could ever figure out how to build it, by that point it's unlikely there would be enough people still running that generation of hardware for it to matter much.
So there is nothing dangerous about it what so ever.
You sound pretty confident in that position. Confident enough that you stand ready to assume the liability for any bad outcomes that come from people taking your advice? I'd best not hold my breath for that one.
Sounds like you're just another arrogant tosser who thinks it's their right, nay, their duty to bombard everyone with your banal, vapid phone conversations.
Ah, so if I'm not in favor of illegal jamming, that means I must be in favor of obnoxious cell phone conversations--particularly my own. Got it. Seriously, friend, it's never too late to take another shot at remedial reading comprehension.
--
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
Ironic.