The subject matter sought to be patented must be sufficiently different from what has been used or described before that it may be said to be nonobvious to a person having ordinary skill in the area of technology related to the invention. For example, the substitution of one color for another, or changes in size, are ordinarily not patentable.
I suppose what I take issue with, then, is the "having ordinary skill" bit. That might make sense for the (relatively) simple mechanical devices for which patents were first used. It's not so great in today's environment, where fields of expertise are much more specialized (I mean, how many people of "ordinary skill in microprocessor design" can reasonably provide input on whether a change is trivial or not?")
Bush was right to call OBL a coward, he sent men to die while he hid in caves.
By that metric, though, any leader of a decent-sized organization is cowardly. Bush himself is certainly not fighting on the ground in Iraq, nor would I expect him to do so.
As a matter of fact, since the little Scandanavian "kings" that controlled little chunks of land and fought alongside their small bands of men, I don't remember rulers really going out and fighting.
I read Rodger Young's story -- sad, that, and the promotion refusal frusterating.
I don't like the idea of getting some sudden enormous financial setback, just because some obscure prior art is found. I do like the idea of having the re-examination sent to the patent holder for a short time before the patent office deals with it, and in giving them a chance to back out of the patent. I also think there should be some type of penalty for submitting a patent that later gets canceled, but some fine that forces you onto the path to bankruptcy is not the answer. This would only discourage smaller businesses from applying.
Hmm. I agree with you that the patent holder being always notified and provided with an opportunity to freely drop the patent would be a good idea. Perhaps the USPTO could be asked to just eat such costs?
The problem is...who then pays the fee for re-examination in the event of an invalidation?
I see three reasonable possibilities:
* The person requesting the reexamination. This is the current case, and has the drawback of severely discouraging anyone from submitting examples of prior art. As folks have pointed out before, Slashdotters have submitted numerous examples of prior art to Slashdot, but do not request reexaminations by the USPTO, because of the expense. I do not believe that this system is feasible.
* The general public. This would be the case if taxes are budgeted. This could get quite expensive quickly, and I'm not sure why everyone should have to pay for something that doesn't involve them.
* The patent holder. This is the person who did not properly check for prior art, as he was required to do.
It has been said that driving is a privilege, not a right. Regardless of this statement's validity, the same vein holds true for patents. If someone has a patent yanked out from under them, it should become harder for them to hold other patents. One suggestion would be to increase/double future filing fees per-patent yanked. If filing is normally $1000, and a company has 2 prior violations, their fee jumps up to $4000. This would give companies an incentive to not file frivolous patents, and if they do, to step down quickly when a re-examination comes in. It would also mean more to big companies that hold many patents. I would have the "violation" "stay on record" for either 17 years (the life span of a patent) or at least until the patent was due to expire.
I've considered such penalties before. Their main problem is that this sort of thing is very hard to harden against legal loopholes. For example, companies could have employees own patents, but be required to give the company an exclusive license to the patent and give the company the legal right to require said owning employee to transfer rights to the patent at any time.
Here's another possibility for dealing with obviousness.
The federal government establishes scholarships for people who which to obtain a graduate degree in a particular field.
Once these people recieve their degree, however, they are required to review a small number of patent applications in their field for obviousness each year (perhaps for a certain number of years).
There are obviously a lot of rough edges and unresolved details -- what if people change fields? How do we deal with the larger number of patents than potential reviewers? Will reviewers do a poor job? What if, out of sheer chance, a reviewer is chosen to review a particular patent that knows one of the people that produced the patent?
The jury system works reasonably well, and this is effectively a "jury trial on a patent".
It'd have to be at least a bit more complicated than that.
There would need to be some incentive to discourage people from submitting poorly-documented prior art, or incorrect prior art examples.
Furthermore (and my own ideas fall prey to the same issue) while this may help invalidate patents based on prior art, it doesn't really do anything for the obviousness property -- where patents must be nonobvious to people in the field.
This is interesting, and I will agree that it sounds as if internal USPTO improvements could definitely be made.
I do think that the external improvements I'm suggesting would still be worthwhile, though.
I'm curious as to what the effect of giving each examiner a 'point' upon rejecting a patent would be. I'm not sure whether an examiner is expected to identify all the issues with a patent when it is submitted -- if so, this obviously wouldn't be great, since it would mean that there is incentive to identify smaller chunks of issues to get more resubmissions per patents.
This would result in more anal examiners, which I would imagine is a good thing.
Oh, yes. Whoever decided that the USPTO should be self-funded is nuts. There are two very small benefits to self-funding. First, it's easier to do accounting with self-funding, and work out what expensive spots in your organization as a whole are -- organizations that can't manage to fund themselves. Second, it encourages organizations not to just keep requesting more funding and try to improve efficiency -- not a *huge* deal for the USPTO, which doesn't need to be all that efficient.
The problem is that self-funding leads to all kinds of inefficiencies and poor goal-setting at lower levels.
With budgeted funding, individual government entities can act as somewhat trusted entities because they have goals that are not simply to make money. With self-funding, we might as well just have another business in place rather than a government institution, since the primary goal is now to make money.
Even if the the work is done pro bono, it quickly gets expensive to go after anything but the most injurious patents.
I rely on two points:
* First, that review fees are placed on the patent holder in the case of an invalidated patent.
* Second, that there will presumably be fewer bogus patents to deal with if there is no reason for folks not to invalidate patents that they know are invalid. Right now, huge numbers of bogus patents are issued because they aren't going to get shot down under the existing system.
However, even if it costs $30K to get a patent issued, it's a drop in the bucket for MIcrosoft, IBM, Motorola, et al.
Sure, but if the patent is going to be shot down (as opposed to being ignored, as it currently is), it suddenly becomes not in their favor.
I actually spoke to an engineer at Motorola about doing an internship during my undergrad. One of the interesting tidbits he told me is that part of his job description was to submit at least 3 patents a year, no matter what they were about.
Right. This is not uncommon for tech firms, especially research ones. I would consider these unrealistic patent generation goals (which will surely produce bogus patents) to be an artifact of the fact that there's little reason not to produce bogus patents. Even ridiculous patents are legally useful, so engineers/scientists are encouraged to produce them. If ridiculous patents become easily eliminated, there is little incentive to force workers to produce this many, and I suspect that such requirements will change.
Can you prove you actualy wrote it 5 years ago?
Maybe. In this era of electronic communication and logging, it's getting much, much easier than it was twenty years ago. I don't worry about documenting work for patent production, but I have a fairly detailed log of everything I'm doing -- CVS logs of my source, for instance, and discussion with other project members.
Also, most software programs aren't patented, the methods for handling things are. And since the patent holder can reword his patent claims, he can probably design around your prior art if he knows about while the patent is being examined.
Hmm. Good point. I'm not sure what the rules are about what is allowed to be included in an amendment. A potential fix: he must pay the ex parte or inter partes fee if he chooses to amend during a third-party initiated re-examination. Amendment still means that the problem is resolved, since he *could* have just filed a narrower patent in the first place. He will have to pay an effective fine, and (in the case you're worried about, where fees are a "drop in the bucket" for the likes of Motorola) his own legal fees and amending costs.
(Personally, I don't think that claim amendment should be allowed -- just the dropping of claims -- but I guess patent lawyers consider it to be a worthwhile procedure.)
1) Don't buy the game. Pirate it once a warez group comes up with a cracked copy with all the annoying copy protection removed.
2) Send a personal check to the development company for what the game would have cost you. In some cases, dev houses have copy protection forced on them by the developer. Most dev houses will have contact information listed on their website. Include, with your check, a letter saying that you are sending them this check because you are unwilling to buy the game with copy protection included. This is very important, to ensure that they get the message -- this is an unhappy customer who is honest enough to pay for their game -- the copy protection not only was unnecessary for you, but made you unhappy.
You shouldn't have any ethical problems, as you're paying the developers for their time and effort. As for legality -- technically, what you're doing is illegal, but prosecutions for pirating software for personal use are nonexistent, and the possiblity of such lawsuits is openly ignored en masse.
Currently, it is possible to request a patent re-examination of one of two types.
However, the person who must pay the fees is the person who wants the patent to be re-examined. Fees may start (for inter partes) at $8K, plus $12K for legal fees. Getting a patent accepted costs only about $1K. With legal fees and prior art searches (which I swear that a lot of these people don't do) that might get up to $8K or so.
This keeps the playing field quite tilted towards those that file patents -- there is little incentive not to file bogus patents.
I'd like to see this system modified to impose the fee (perhaps with some multiplier) on the *patent filer* if the reexamination finds that the patent is indeed invalid, rather than on the party requesting the reexamination.
If pro-bono legal work is available, or a simple walkthrough on how to do basic requests for review ("I wrote a program that already does this that was sold five years before the patent was applied for, and here it is"), the process could be made effectively zero-cost for organizations like the EFF that attempt to eliminate bogus patents.
I see few drawbacks. It does impose the difficulty of collecting fees on the USPTO, but besides being part of the federal government (and thus being in a good position to locate patent owners that refuse to pay), they can refuse to issue more patents to an individual until he pays his fees.
Old patents, many of which are quite bogus, will have to be grandfathered in. There's no other reasonable way to deal with them, but eventually they will expire, and this prevents future abuse of the system.
It also increases the potential cost of obtaining a patent (not good, if you want to protect the little guy). However, patent filers are *supposed* to do prior art searches ahead of time, and are *supposed* to only be submitting legitimate inventions. Thus, if a patent holder has performed his tasks as he should, there will be no additional cost added.
I don't think it's feasible (since the USPTO can't hire the best researchers in every field) to never let through an illegitimate patent. I do think that making the review process more oriented around discouraging people from filing bogus patents is possible. This also takes a lazy approach -- bad patents are only dealt with and the patent holder only imposed a penalty upon if an actual problem comes up -- otherwise, there's little reason for an organization to go after patents.
I would like to see review fees reduced if possible.
I would also like to see it be made possible for an inventor to freely invalidate a patent. This means that if a company (let's say Microsoft, or the FSF) discovers that someone is going after them with a patent, and they are able to produce prior art, it's easy for them to just send a letter to the patent holder noting that they have identified prior art, and unless the patent holder wants them to initiate a review, to mark his patent invalid within the next month.
That way, Microsoft or the FSF doesn't have to pay the legal fees associated with requesting a review (so it's in their interest to first send out a letter), review load on the USPTO is reduced, and the inventor is never hit with the fee associated with losing a review.
There are some details to be resolved -- how should invalidation of individual claims be resolved? Should a per-claim fee be increased, and fees for review on individual claims be lower?
I don't think any of them are showstopping issues, though.
I've brought this up once before on Slashdot and haven't gotten any idea-killing issues brought up -- I'd be interested in any feedback.
If you want people to vote Libertarian, we need more political fragmentation.
Right now, there is a fairly even break between Demms and Reps. Nobody wants to vote for a third party, because it *does* effectively throw away their vote. We have an extremely contentious election, with Kerry opposing Bush on a number of hot topics, including abortion, gay rights, and war stance.
The best time for third parties to get votes is when people are sufficiently fed up with both the Republican and the Democratic candidate, when the election is being done over relatively lackluster issues, and both are very similar.
Arguing that something is "public" is not really a justification.
It *does* mean that past legislators have found it reasonable for this data to be public.
However, most of our laws about what can be public and what cannot be public were made in a different day and age, where disclosure of data gave different abilities to determine things.
For example, at one point, reverse phone directories were considered unacceptable. However, now that we have computers, the "public" (well, close enough) data in phone directories is easily used in reverse.
People that get upset worry that perhaps some data that is currently public (and made public in a day when we were less able to do things with acquired data) should no longer be public.
Reading it, it looks like the only issue is that SCO didn't include some content in their actual complaint that they already provided in their oral arguments, right?
So, it looks like more of a technicality that should be easily remedied by SCO.
I agree that ungrounded posts are more likely to be positively modded if they fit with the prevailing mindset on Slashdot, and more likely to be negatively modded if they do not.
However, well-written, inoffensive and supported posts are not suppressed, regardless of the side they take. I have written justified posts on both sides of most issues that have been modded up, and offensive posts on both sides that have been modded down.
The only time I've ever felt suppressed by Slashdot was when criticizing jamie's (IMHO abusive) use of his uber-moderation priviliges to quash criticism of the Slashdot moderation system, and watched him knock an entire thread with something like a hundred posts down to -1. That has not been a recurring problem, and spawned a sizeable backlash.
I'll take the example of Pfc. Joe E. Mann. He was in World War II in the 101st Airborne, and one of two Medal of Honor recipients in that group during that time.
Rank and organization: Private First Class, U.S. Army, Company H, 502d Parachute Infantry, 101st Airborne Division. Place and date: Best, Holland, 18 September 1944. Entered service at: Seattle, Wash. Birth: Rearden, Wash. G.O. No.: 73, 30 August 1945. Citation: He distinguished himself by conspicuous gallantry above and beyond the call of duty. On 18 September 1944, in the vicinity of Best., Holland, his platoon, attempting to seize the bridge across the Wilhelmina Canal, was surrounded and isolated by an enemy force greatly superior in personnel and firepower. Acting as lead scout, Pfc. Mann boldly crept to within rocket-launcher range of an enemy artillery position and, in the face of heavy enemy fire, destroyed an 88mm. gun and an ammunition dump. Completely disregarding the great danger involved, he remained in his exposed position, and, with his M-1 rifle, killed the enemy one by one until he was wounded 4 times. Taken to a covered position, he insisted on returning to a forward position to stand guard during the night. On the following morning the enemy launched a concerted attack and advanced to within a few yards of the position, throwing hand grenades as they approached. One of these landed within a few feet of Pfc. Mann. Unable to raise his arms, which were bandaged to his body, he yelled "grenade" and threw his body over the grenade, and as it exploded, died. His outstanding gallantry above and beyond the call of duty and his magnificent conduct were an everlasting inspiration to his comrades for whom he gave his life.
Now, I will admit that there are many people that might consider this guy irrational. Maybe even stupid. But I can't understand how you could call him "cowardly".
I would say that the September 11th hijackers were very brave people. They were willing to die and suffer for a cause that they believed to be just, against an overwhelming enemy that they believed to be evil.
Just because someone is opposed to you certainly does not mean that you cannot recognize them as being brave. There were brave German soldiers that would have been fighting against Mr. Mann in World War II.
President Bush categorized the September 11th hijackers and bin Laden as "cowardly". I would assume that this was an attempt to draw bin Laden out into the open where he could be more easily killed -- it was reasonable, well-thought-out, but should certainly not be taken by Americans as true or even aimed at them.
The current conflict was sparked by decades terrorist attacks (mostly state-sponsered) and a general refusal by the UN to do jack shit about it.
If you are correct, then why did we invade and take over Iraq, which had absolutely nothing to do with September 11th (and, in fact, under Saddam was a major enemy of al Quaeda due to being highly secular and progressive from a Western social standpoint), and has little al Quaeda activity, but did nothing but reaffirm our friendship with Saudi Arabia, where most of the September 11th hijackers came from?
Most soldiers I've met take their obligations and duties very seriously, and would never actually kill somebody just for speaking his mind....For you to suggest otherwise shows a disturbing lack of understanding of the world around you, and of respect for those who inhabit it.
Actually, if you read the grandparent post, you'll notice that he wasn't the person that initially suggested it. He was just continuing the conversation.
But a moslem calls for the death of Jews and the forces of the state rally to protect his "rights".
If a white man were to call for the murder of non-whites, he'd be branded a racist and hounded by the state for "hate crimes". This may just be due to national differences between the United States and the United Kingdom (which is where I assume that you are located).
However, an Islamic student was arrested, and the United States attempted to jail him because he volunteered time to help moderate a forum containing people that had advocated violence against Christians.
I think that it's not unreasonable to say that any governmental crackdown is, if anything, biased toward Christianity, when you consider the fact that quite similar discussions take place in the open, without federal officials feeling the need to become involved.
Dan, would you do me a favor, and take a look at the following thread? The Muslim student who moderated a forum that contained calls for violence against Christians was arrested, and the federal government attempted to jail him for such activities. Would you consider the moderator of this forum to be on equally illegal ground? I believe that the federal government has no complaint with his activities.
If you consider it reasonable for the federal government to classify this as legal and the Muslim student's actions as illegal, what criteria do you find important in making such a classification?
HOWEVER, recently I've witnessed the influx of HATE sites claiming to be "islamic" sites. The preech hate and praise desruction. I'm all for free speech, but the freedom of a group or indivduals aren't absolute, and it shouldn't infringe or in anyway threaten the freedoms of others. In these sites they are calling for attacks on western intrests everywhere. They cheer for teh killing of westerners and/or Chrstians and calling for more acts like teh ones we saw in Saudi. I think the freedom of speech those ppl. have should be revoked because they very grossly abused.
Would you be so kind as to review the following thread?
If you believe that the Islamic student in question should have been jailed for moderating his site, what about the moderator on this site?
You can (and many do) use it, of course, to mean 'raises the question,' or 'makes you wonder.' If you don't mind some of your audience thinking you are a poor speaker (or writer), or just plain stupid, then go right ahead.
You are incorrectly using single quotes to quote content from the grandparent post.
Here's an idea, Junior. Why don't you investigate what kind of freedoms the "webmaster" in question advocated. Suicide bombing. Genocide. Mass murder of "infidels" (i.e. gays, lesbians, Christians, Jews, Buddhists, Wiccans, dope smokers, beer drinkers, girls in bikinis, Pat Robertson, Larry Flynt,...).
Please read this, and ask yourself whether you believe that the forum moderator in question should be imprisoned, as the federal government attempted to do to the student in question. If not, what is different between the two moderators?
Slashdot Mirror
Ah, you're right. According to the USPTO:
The subject matter sought to be patented must be sufficiently different from what has been used or described before that it may be said to be nonobvious to a person having ordinary skill in the area of technology related to the invention. For example, the substitution of one color for another, or changes in size, are ordinarily not patentable.
I suppose what I take issue with, then, is the "having ordinary skill" bit. That might make sense for the (relatively) simple mechanical devices for which patents were first used. It's not so great in today's environment, where fields of expertise are much more specialized (I mean, how many people of "ordinary skill in microprocessor design" can reasonably provide input on whether a change is trivial or not?")
Bush was right to call OBL a coward, he sent men to die while he hid in caves.
By that metric, though, any leader of a decent-sized organization is cowardly. Bush himself is certainly not fighting on the ground in Iraq, nor would I expect him to do so.
As a matter of fact, since the little Scandanavian "kings" that controlled little chunks of land and fought alongside their small bands of men, I don't remember rulers really going out and fighting.
I read Rodger Young's story -- sad, that, and the promotion refusal frusterating.
I don't like the idea of getting some sudden enormous financial setback, just because some obscure prior art is found. I do like the idea of having the re-examination sent to the patent holder for a short time before the patent office deals with it, and in giving them a chance to back out of the patent. I also think there should be some type of penalty for submitting a patent that later gets canceled, but some fine that forces you onto the path to bankruptcy is not the answer. This would only discourage smaller businesses from applying.
Hmm. I agree with you that the patent holder being always notified and provided with an opportunity to freely drop the patent would be a good idea. Perhaps the USPTO could be asked to just eat such costs?
The problem is...who then pays the fee for re-examination in the event of an invalidation?
I see three reasonable possibilities:
* The person requesting the reexamination. This is the current case, and has the drawback of severely discouraging anyone from submitting examples of prior art. As folks have pointed out before, Slashdotters have submitted numerous examples of prior art to Slashdot, but do not request reexaminations by the USPTO, because of the expense. I do not believe that this system is feasible.
* The general public. This would be the case if taxes are budgeted. This could get quite expensive quickly, and I'm not sure why everyone should have to pay for something that doesn't involve them.
* The patent holder. This is the person who did not properly check for prior art, as he was required to do.
It has been said that driving is a privilege, not a right. Regardless of this statement's validity, the same vein holds true for patents. If someone has a patent yanked out from under them, it should become harder for them to hold other patents. One suggestion would be to increase/double future filing fees per-patent yanked. If filing is normally $1000, and a company has 2 prior violations, their fee jumps up to $4000. This would give companies an incentive to not file frivolous patents, and if they do, to step down quickly when a re-examination comes in. It would also mean more to big companies that hold many patents. I would have the "violation" "stay on record" for either 17 years (the life span of a patent) or at least until the patent was due to expire.
I've considered such penalties before. Their main problem is that this sort of thing is very hard to harden against legal loopholes. For example, companies could have employees own patents, but be required to give the company an exclusive license to the patent and give the company the legal right to require said owning employee to transfer rights to the patent at any time.
*Ack*.
"covers", not "discovers".
The abstract is not significant in determining what the patent discovers.
Look only at the claims.
Here's another possibility for dealing with obviousness.
The federal government establishes scholarships for people who which to obtain a graduate degree in a particular field.
Once these people recieve their degree, however, they are required to review a small number of patent applications in their field for obviousness each year (perhaps for a certain number of years).
There are obviously a lot of rough edges and unresolved details -- what if people change fields? How do we deal with the larger number of patents than potential reviewers? Will reviewers do a poor job? What if, out of sheer chance, a reviewer is chosen to review a particular patent that knows one of the people that produced the patent?
The jury system works reasonably well, and this is effectively a "jury trial on a patent".
It'd have to be at least a bit more complicated than that.
There would need to be some incentive to discourage people from submitting poorly-documented prior art, or incorrect prior art examples.
Furthermore (and my own ideas fall prey to the same issue) while this may help invalidate patents based on prior art, it doesn't really do anything for the obviousness property -- where patents must be nonobvious to people in the field.
This:
In some cases, dev houses have copy protection forced on them by the developer.
Should read
In some cases, dev houses have copy protection forced on them by the publisher.
Doesn't make much sense otherwise.
This is interesting, and I will agree that it sounds as if internal USPTO improvements could definitely be made.
I do think that the external improvements I'm suggesting would still be worthwhile, though.
I'm curious as to what the effect of giving each examiner a 'point' upon rejecting a patent would be. I'm not sure whether an examiner is expected to identify all the issues with a patent when it is submitted -- if so, this obviously wouldn't be great, since it would mean that there is incentive to identify smaller chunks of issues to get more resubmissions per patents.
This would result in more anal examiners, which I would imagine is a good thing.
Oh, yes. Whoever decided that the USPTO should be self-funded is nuts. There are two very small benefits to self-funding. First, it's easier to do accounting with self-funding, and work out what expensive spots in your organization as a whole are -- organizations that can't manage to fund themselves. Second, it encourages organizations not to just keep requesting more funding and try to improve efficiency -- not a *huge* deal for the USPTO, which doesn't need to be all that efficient.
The problem is that self-funding leads to all kinds of inefficiencies and poor goal-setting at lower levels.
With budgeted funding, individual government entities can act as somewhat trusted entities because they have goals that are not simply to make money. With self-funding, we might as well just have another business in place rather than a government institution, since the primary goal is now to make money.
Even if the the work is done pro bono, it quickly gets expensive to go after anything but the most injurious patents.
I rely on two points:
* First, that review fees are placed on the patent holder in the case of an invalidated patent.
* Second, that there will presumably be fewer bogus patents to deal with if there is no reason for folks not to invalidate patents that they know are invalid. Right now, huge numbers of bogus patents are issued because they aren't going to get shot down under the existing system.
However, even if it costs $30K to get a patent issued, it's a drop in the bucket for MIcrosoft, IBM, Motorola, et al.
Sure, but if the patent is going to be shot down (as opposed to being ignored, as it currently is), it suddenly becomes not in their favor.
I actually spoke to an engineer at Motorola about doing an internship during my undergrad. One of the interesting tidbits he told me is that part of his job description was to submit at least 3 patents a year, no matter what they were about.
Right. This is not uncommon for tech firms, especially research ones. I would consider these unrealistic patent generation goals (which will surely produce bogus patents) to be an artifact of the fact that there's little reason not to produce bogus patents. Even ridiculous patents are legally useful, so engineers/scientists are encouraged to produce them. If ridiculous patents become easily eliminated, there is little incentive to force workers to produce this many, and I suspect that such requirements will change.
Can you prove you actualy wrote it 5 years ago?
Maybe. In this era of electronic communication and logging, it's getting much, much easier than it was twenty years ago. I don't worry about documenting work for patent production, but I have a fairly detailed log of everything I'm doing -- CVS logs of my source, for instance, and discussion with other project members.
Also, most software programs aren't patented, the methods for handling things are. And since the patent holder can reword his patent claims, he can probably design around your prior art if he knows about while the patent is being examined.
Hmm. Good point. I'm not sure what the rules are about what is allowed to be included in an amendment. A potential fix: he must pay the ex parte or inter partes fee if he chooses to amend during a third-party initiated re-examination. Amendment still means that the problem is resolved, since he *could* have just filed a narrower patent in the first place. He will have to pay an effective fine, and (in the case you're worried about, where fees are a "drop in the bucket" for the likes of Motorola) his own legal fees and amending costs.
(Personally, I don't think that claim amendment should be allowed -- just the dropping of claims -- but I guess patent lawyers consider it to be a worthwhile procedure.)
Happy Birthday!
1) Don't buy the game. Pirate it once a warez group comes up with a cracked copy with all the annoying copy protection removed.
2) Send a personal check to the development company for what the game would have cost you. In some cases, dev houses have copy protection forced on them by the developer. Most dev houses will have contact information listed on their website. Include, with your check, a letter saying that you are sending them this check because you are unwilling to buy the game with copy protection included. This is very important, to ensure that they get the message -- this is an unhappy customer who is honest enough to pay for their game -- the copy protection not only was unnecessary for you, but made you unhappy.
You shouldn't have any ethical problems, as you're paying the developers for their time and effort. As for legality -- technically, what you're doing is illegal, but prosecutions for pirating software for personal use are nonexistent, and the possiblity of such lawsuits is openly ignored en masse.
Currently, it is possible to request a patent re-examination of one of two types.
However, the person who must pay the fees is the person who wants the patent to be re-examined. Fees may start (for inter partes) at $8K, plus $12K for legal fees. Getting a patent accepted costs only about $1K. With legal fees and prior art searches (which I swear that a lot of these people don't do) that might get up to $8K or so.
This keeps the playing field quite tilted towards those that file patents -- there is little incentive not to file bogus patents.
I'd like to see this system modified to impose the fee (perhaps with some multiplier) on the *patent filer* if the reexamination finds that the patent is indeed invalid, rather than on the party requesting the reexamination.
If pro-bono legal work is available, or a simple walkthrough on how to do basic requests for review ("I wrote a program that already does this that was sold five years before the patent was applied for, and here it is"), the process could be made effectively zero-cost for organizations like the EFF that attempt to eliminate bogus patents.
I see few drawbacks. It does impose the difficulty of collecting fees on the USPTO, but besides being part of the federal government (and thus being in a good position to locate patent owners that refuse to pay), they can refuse to issue more patents to an individual until he pays his fees.
Old patents, many of which are quite bogus, will have to be grandfathered in. There's no other reasonable way to deal with them, but eventually they will expire, and this prevents future abuse of the system.
It also increases the potential cost of obtaining a patent (not good, if you want to protect the little guy). However, patent filers are *supposed* to do prior art searches ahead of time, and are *supposed* to only be submitting legitimate inventions. Thus, if a patent holder has performed his tasks as he should, there will be no additional cost added.
I don't think it's feasible (since the USPTO can't hire the best researchers in every field) to never let through an illegitimate patent. I do think that making the review process more oriented around discouraging people from filing bogus patents is possible. This also takes a lazy approach -- bad patents are only dealt with and the patent holder only imposed a penalty upon if an actual problem comes up -- otherwise, there's little reason for an organization to go after patents.
I would like to see review fees reduced if possible.
I would also like to see it be made possible for an inventor to freely invalidate a patent. This means that if a company (let's say Microsoft, or the FSF) discovers that someone is going after them with a patent, and they are able to produce prior art, it's easy for them to just send a letter to the patent holder noting that they have identified prior art, and unless the patent holder wants them to initiate a review, to mark his patent invalid within the next month.
That way, Microsoft or the FSF doesn't have to pay the legal fees associated with requesting a review (so it's in their interest to first send out a letter), review load on the USPTO is reduced, and the inventor is never hit with the fee associated with losing a review.
There are some details to be resolved -- how should invalidation of individual claims be resolved? Should a per-claim fee be increased, and fees for review on individual claims be lower?
I don't think any of them are showstopping issues, though.
I've brought this up once before on Slashdot and haven't gotten any idea-killing issues brought up -- I'd be interested in any feedback.
If you want people to vote Libertarian, we need more political fragmentation.
Right now, there is a fairly even break between Demms and Reps. Nobody wants to vote for a third party, because it *does* effectively throw away their vote. We have an extremely contentious election, with Kerry opposing Bush on a number of hot topics, including abortion, gay rights, and war stance.
The best time for third parties to get votes is when people are sufficiently fed up with both the Republican and the Democratic candidate, when the election is being done over relatively lackluster issues, and both are very similar.
Arguing that something is "public" is not really a justification.
It *does* mean that past legislators have found it reasonable for this data to be public.
However, most of our laws about what can be public and what cannot be public were made in a different day and age, where disclosure of data gave different abilities to determine things.
For example, at one point, reverse phone directories were considered unacceptable. However, now that we have computers, the "public" (well, close enough) data in phone directories is easily used in reverse.
People that get upset worry that perhaps some data that is currently public (and made public in a day when we were less able to do things with acquired data) should no longer be public.
Reading it, it looks like the only issue is that SCO didn't include some content in their actual complaint that they already provided in their oral arguments, right?
So, it looks like more of a technicality that should be easily remedied by SCO.
IANAL.
I agree that ungrounded posts are more likely to be positively modded if they fit with the prevailing mindset on Slashdot, and more likely to be negatively modded if they do not.
However, well-written, inoffensive and supported posts are not suppressed, regardless of the side they take. I have written justified posts on both sides of most issues that have been modded up, and offensive posts on both sides that have been modded down.
The only time I've ever felt suppressed by Slashdot was when criticizing jamie's (IMHO abusive) use of his uber-moderation priviliges to quash criticism of the Slashdot moderation system, and watched him knock an entire thread with something like a hundred posts down to -1. That has not been a recurring problem, and spawned a sizeable backlash.
BZZT. Blowing yourself up is cowardice, not bravery.
I don't know if I can agree with you. It might be a bad idea, but cowardly?
Would you call this cowardly?
I'll take the example of Pfc. Joe E. Mann. He was in World War II in the 101st Airborne, and one of two Medal of Honor recipients in that group during that time.
Rank and organization: Private First Class, U.S. Army, Company H, 502d Parachute Infantry, 101st Airborne Division. Place and date: Best, Holland, 18 September 1944. Entered service at: Seattle, Wash. Birth: Rearden, Wash. G.O. No.: 73, 30 August 1945. Citation: He distinguished himself by conspicuous gallantry above and beyond the call of duty. On 18 September 1944, in the vicinity of Best., Holland, his platoon, attempting to seize the bridge across the Wilhelmina Canal, was surrounded and isolated by an enemy force greatly superior in personnel and firepower. Acting as lead scout, Pfc. Mann boldly crept to within rocket-launcher range of an enemy artillery position and, in the face of heavy enemy fire, destroyed an 88mm. gun and an ammunition dump. Completely disregarding the great danger involved, he remained in his exposed position, and, with his M-1 rifle, killed the enemy one by one until he was wounded 4 times. Taken to a covered position, he insisted on returning to a forward position to stand guard during the night. On the following morning the enemy launched a concerted attack and advanced to within a few yards of the position, throwing hand grenades as they approached. One of these landed within a few feet of Pfc. Mann. Unable to raise his arms, which were bandaged to his body, he yelled "grenade" and threw his body over the grenade, and as it exploded, died. His outstanding gallantry above and beyond the call of duty and his magnificent conduct were an everlasting inspiration to his comrades for whom he gave his life.
Now, I will admit that there are many people that might consider this guy irrational. Maybe even stupid. But I can't understand how you could call him "cowardly".
I would say that the September 11th hijackers were very brave people. They were willing to die and suffer for a cause that they believed to be just, against an overwhelming enemy that they believed to be evil.
Just because someone is opposed to you certainly does not mean that you cannot recognize them as being brave. There were brave German soldiers that would have been fighting against Mr. Mann in World War II.
President Bush categorized the September 11th hijackers and bin Laden as "cowardly". I would assume that this was an attempt to draw bin Laden out into the open where he could be more easily killed -- it was reasonable, well-thought-out, but should certainly not be taken by Americans as true or even aimed at them.
The current conflict was sparked by decades terrorist attacks (mostly state-sponsered) and a general refusal by the UN to do jack shit about it.
If you are correct, then why did we invade and take over Iraq, which had absolutely nothing to do with September 11th (and, in fact, under Saddam was a major enemy of al Quaeda due to being highly secular and progressive from a Western social standpoint), and has little al Quaeda activity, but did nothing but reaffirm our friendship with Saudi Arabia, where most of the September 11th hijackers came from?
Most soldiers I've met take their obligations and duties very seriously, and would never actually kill somebody just for speaking his mind....For you to suggest otherwise shows a disturbing lack of understanding of the world around you, and of respect for those who inhabit it.
Actually, if you read the grandparent post, you'll notice that he wasn't the person that initially suggested it. He was just continuing the conversation.
But a moslem calls for the death of Jews and the forces of the state rally to protect his "rights".
If a white man were to call for the murder of non-whites, he'd be branded a racist and hounded by the state for "hate crimes". This may just be due to national differences between the United States and the United Kingdom (which is where I assume that you are located).
However, an Islamic student was arrested, and the United States attempted to jail him because he volunteered time to help moderate a forum containing people that had advocated violence against Christians.
I think that it's not unreasonable to say that any governmental crackdown is, if anything, biased toward Christianity, when you consider the fact that quite similar discussions take place in the open, without federal officials feeling the need to become involved.
Dan, would you do me a favor, and take a look at the following thread? The Muslim student who moderated a forum that contained calls for violence against Christians was arrested, and the federal government attempted to jail him for such activities. Would you consider the moderator of this forum to be on equally illegal ground? I believe that the federal government has no complaint with his activities.
If you consider it reasonable for the federal government to classify this as legal and the Muslim student's actions as illegal, what criteria do you find important in making such a classification?
HOWEVER, recently I've witnessed the influx of HATE sites claiming to be "islamic" sites. The preech hate and praise desruction. I'm all for free speech, but the freedom of a group or indivduals aren't absolute, and it shouldn't infringe or in anyway threaten the freedoms of others. In these sites they are calling for attacks on western intrests everywhere. They cheer for teh killing of westerners and/or Chrstians and calling for more acts like teh ones we saw in Saudi. I think the freedom of speech those ppl. have should be revoked because they very grossly abused.
Would you be so kind as to review the following thread?
If you believe that the Islamic student in question should have been jailed for moderating his site, what about the moderator on this site?
You can (and many do) use it, of course, to mean 'raises the question,' or 'makes you wonder.' If you don't mind some of your audience thinking you are a poor speaker (or writer), or just plain stupid, then go right ahead.
You are incorrectly using single quotes to quote content from the grandparent post.
Here's an idea, Junior. Why don't you investigate what kind of freedoms the "webmaster" in question advocated. Suicide bombing. Genocide. Mass murder of "infidels" (i.e. gays, lesbians, Christians, Jews, Buddhists, Wiccans, dope smokers, beer drinkers, girls in bikinis, Pat Robertson, Larry Flynt, ...).
Please read this, and ask yourself whether you believe that the forum moderator in question should be imprisoned, as the federal government attempted to do to the student in question. If not, what is different between the two moderators?