If Jason had bothered to read Kemp's spreadsheet, he could easily see that SMB is one of the protocols identified in the apreadsheet as covered by several MS patents.
I don't see the point of his questioning the decision of the SMB folks.
In a sense, the Federal appellate court officially began to allow "business method" patents because it was having such a hard time trying to distinguish those methods which were worthy of patenting (such as new methods of making a chemical, new methods of making an electrical circuit...) and those methods that probably should not be patented (new methods which are merely mathematical algorithms).
As more and more cases tried to distinguish why certain methods are as a "technical" matter worty of patenting, the courts found more and more of these distinctions too adhoc and artificial.
> As I recall, you are also free to use patented
stuff in your own home without paying for it -
only commercial use would actually infringe.
Whoa, wait a second here. This is just plainly incorrect. There is *NO* "commercial use" exception to patents. Heck, even if you are a university researcher doing wonderful non-commercial work, you are *not* allowed to practice a patented process. Period. Not without a license from the patent holder (or without resorting to some very complicated exceptions in section 271 of the patent code that deal with drug research).
IAAL and I can say that this is one of many fundamental problems with the patent system...
I'm afraid that there have been many economists for many years now who have called for a complete overhaul of the patent system. Many famous economists have been quick to point out the very tenous relationship between a patent incentive system and innovation.
The difficulty is getting *non-economists*, i.e. lawyers and the public, interested enough to consider the implications if the patent system is broken.
Hmm, and I am a little worried about some of the statements in this article. These particular economists seem to be a little misinformed as to what is going on in patent law these days (or maybe the quotes are out of context). The emergence of the Federal Circuit has actually been a positive effect on patent law in the United States, and most of the legal developments in patent law over the last decade have pushed more and more of the decision-making away from juries and towards judges (not the other way around).
Agreed, "enforceable" is misleading. What I meant to suggest is that such European software patents are granted by the European patent office and are routinely licensed commercially. They can be as big a headache for many companies in Europe since it's a pain in the neck to have to invalidate someone's patent (though Europe has much better opposition mechanisms than the US for invalidating patents).
Check out
European patent EP0,129,439.
This is the European version of the infamous "gif" LZW patent that was enforceable in Germany, France, Britain, and Italy until June of this year.
Although "technically" the European patent offices are *not* supposed to allow patents to software, they routinely allow patents on what is actually a software invention (and have been doing so for decades). The problem is that the line between a software invention and a non-software invention is a really fuzzy one. Unfortunately, to suggest that software patents are not currently a problem in Europe (as has often been suggested on/.) is just plain wrong. They are already a problem and have been for many years...
Yes, the patent 5,978,791
has the title "Data processing system using substantially unique identifiers to identify data items, whereby identical data items have the same identifiers." It was "invented" by some fellow by the name of Ron Lachman who is apparently the Chief Scientist at Atnet.
The basic idea of the patent seems to be to use hashes or some other form of "identifier" which is determined by "only the data in the data item" (and not on stuff external to the data such as a filename, directory, date, etc.) to identify duplicates of data. Smells a bit like a variety of things in the prior art to me...
"inducement" as a legal term with a specific meaning in intellectual property law. It typically means that someone is doing something which would *not* strictly speaking be considered an infringement of a copyright or a patent. But what they are doing is "inducing" infringement, i.e. causing, encouraging, soliciting others to infringe.
It's a concept that carries over from criminal law. It's sort of like, hey, she didn't commit the crime, but she did solicit others to do it for her, or something like that.
ATI has been steadily releasing newer versions of their linux drivers over the past year (and I commend them for doing that). What has been frustrating is that the general experience has been that performance has degraded with many of the recent 3.xx releases, at least in comparison to the old 2.8 release which was already pretty fast and stable for my ATI card. I think part of the problem has been the push to support the most recent chipsets which has definitely complicated the driver releases.
WRONG. The term "housing having an illuminable portion" is not in the claim and is, thus, irrelevant. The proposed claim in the patent application reads as follows:
1. A computing device, comprising: a housing for enclosing various internal components associated with the operation of the computing device; and an indicator assembly for indicating events associated with the computing device, the indicator assembly being configured to produce an indicator image at an outer surface of the housing when activated, and to eliminate the indicator image from the outer surface of the housing when deactivated.
The terms used are pretty damn broad. A bad lawyer could argue that a glowing power button is an "indicator image" (or maybe not). There is no limitation to an "illumnable portion".
And by the way. The button IS prior art. The issue is not whether it is or is not prior art, the issue is whether the prior art causes this Apple patent application to be invalid as a matter of patent law.
I don't get the need for SLI support in the low-end card series. It's not like the old days when these cards were thin PCI-based and had, at most, a heat sink bolted to it...
Slashdot Mirror
If Jason had bothered to read Kemp's spreadsheet, he could easily see that SMB is one of the protocols identified in the apreadsheet as covered by several MS patents. I don't see the point of his questioning the decision of the SMB folks.
In a sense, the Federal appellate court officially began to allow "business method" patents because it was having such a hard time trying to distinguish those methods which were worthy of patenting (such as new methods of making a chemical, new methods of making an electrical circuit...) and those methods that probably should not be patented (new methods which are merely mathematical algorithms).
It may help to read the actual cases. They are readable and have only a modest amount of legal mumbo-jumbo. The cases were State Street http://www.ll.georgetown.edu/federal/judicial/fed/ opinions/97opinions/97-1327.html/
and AT&T v. Excel
http://www.ll.georgetown.edu/federal/judicial/fed/ opinions/98opinions/98-1338.html/
.
As more and more cases tried to distinguish why certain methods are as a "technical" matter worty of patenting, the courts found more and more of these distinctions too adhoc and artificial.
> As I recall, you are also free to use patented stuff in your own home without paying for it - only commercial use would actually infringe.
Whoa, wait a second here. This is just plainly incorrect. There is *NO* "commercial use" exception to patents. Heck, even if you are a university researcher doing wonderful non-commercial work, you are *not* allowed to practice a patented process. Period. Not without a license from the patent holder (or without resorting to some very complicated exceptions in section 271 of the patent code that deal with drug research).
IAAL and I can say that this is one of many fundamental problems with the patent system...
I'm afraid that there have been many economists for many years now who have called for a complete overhaul of the patent system. Many famous economists have been quick to point out the very tenous relationship between a patent incentive system and innovation.
The difficulty is getting *non-economists*, i.e. lawyers and the public, interested enough to consider the implications if the patent system is broken.
Hmm, and I am a little worried about some of the statements in this article. These particular economists seem to be a little misinformed as to what is going on in patent law these days (or maybe the quotes are out of context). The emergence of the Federal Circuit has actually been a positive effect on patent law in the United States, and most of the legal developments in patent law over the last decade have pushed more and more of the decision-making away from juries and towards judges (not the other way around).
Agreed, "enforceable" is misleading. What I meant to suggest is that such European software patents are granted by the European patent office and are routinely licensed commercially. They can be as big a headache for many companies in Europe since it's a pain in the neck to have to invalidate someone's patent (though Europe has much better opposition mechanisms than the US for invalidating patents).
No, actually they are.
Check out European patent EP0,129,439. This is the European version of the infamous "gif" LZW patent that was enforceable in Germany, France, Britain, and Italy until June of this year.
Although "technically" the European patent offices are *not* supposed to allow patents to software, they routinely allow patents on what is actually a software invention (and have been doing so for decades). The problem is that the line between a software invention and a non-software invention is a really fuzzy one. Unfortunately, to suggest that software patents are not currently a problem in Europe (as has often been suggested on /.) is just plain wrong. They are already a problem and have been for many years...
Yes, the patent 5,978,791 has the title "Data processing system using substantially unique identifiers to identify data items, whereby identical data items have the same identifiers." It was "invented" by some fellow by the name of Ron Lachman who is apparently the Chief Scientist at Atnet.
The basic idea of the patent seems to be to use hashes or some other form of "identifier" which is determined by "only the data in the data item" (and not on stuff external to the data such as a filename, directory, date, etc.) to identify duplicates of data. Smells a bit like a variety of things in the prior art to me...
"inducement" as a legal term with a specific meaning in intellectual property law. It typically means that someone is doing something which would *not* strictly speaking be considered an infringement of a copyright or a patent. But what they are doing is "inducing" infringement, i.e. causing, encouraging, soliciting others to infringe.
It's a concept that carries over from criminal law. It's sort of like, hey, she didn't commit the crime, but she did solicit others to do it for her, or something like that.
ATI has been steadily releasing newer versions of their linux drivers over the past year (and I commend them for doing that). What has been frustrating is that the general experience has been that performance has degraded with many of the recent 3.xx releases, at least in comparison to the old 2.8 release which was already pretty fast and stable for my ATI card. I think part of the problem has been the push to support the most recent chipsets which has definitely complicated the driver releases.
btw, this http://www.rage3d.com/content/articles/atilinuxhow to/how-to hosted by Rage3D has been a god-send to those of us linux users suffering with ATI cards....
WRONG. The term "housing having an illuminable portion" is not in the claim and is, thus, irrelevant. The proposed claim in the patent application reads as follows:
1. A computing device, comprising: a housing for enclosing various internal components associated with the operation of the computing device; and an indicator assembly for indicating events associated with the computing device, the indicator assembly being configured to produce an indicator image at an outer surface of the housing when activated, and to eliminate the indicator image from the outer surface of the housing when deactivated.
The terms used are pretty damn broad. A bad lawyer could argue that a glowing power button is an "indicator image" (or maybe not). There is no limitation to an "illumnable portion".
And by the way. The button IS prior art. The issue is not whether it is or is not prior art, the issue is whether the prior art causes this Apple patent application to be invalid as a matter of patent law.
I don't get the need for SLI support in the low-end card series. It's not like the old days when these cards were thin PCI-based and had, at most, a heat sink bolted to it...