proc joke {} { set jokes [join { It's Dick Cheney! Now Darl McBride will send more accusation letters! M$ in search of new markets! Bin Laden finally has a safe place to hide! } \n]
"To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries..."
There have been many people in groups interested in limiting what
types of "discoveries" for which inventors can obtain the exclusive
right via the constitutional provision of a patent. Many who are concerned about the high
cost of medicine would like to see limitations on the availability of
patents for pharmaceuticals and methods of performing surgery. And of
course, many of those who care about the future of free software (and
I certainly do, basing my practice IT setup on Gentoo Linux), would
like to see the availability of patents to software limited or
eliminated.
What all of these people and interest groups fail to recognize is that
the patent system was not set up or even envisioned to cover only a
specific type of discovery. The founders could never have conceived of
software, yet they in their wisdom left the constitutional
authorization wide open to discoveries of all types. The very nature
of a patent -- a legally sanctioned granting of exclusivity to one
party -- naturally creates groups of people who opposed the existence
of particular patents because that existence means that they might
have to pay a lot of money or stop doing what they're doing.
A point that is widely missed in the hysterics about software patents
is that, pursuant to 35 U.S.C. 102, an inventor, say at Microsoft, can't patent something unless
it is novel. The inventor is blocked from apply for a patent if (among other things):
the invention was known or used by others in this country,
or patented or described in a printed publication in this or a foreign
country, before the invention thereof by the applicant for patent, or
the invention was patented or described in a printed publication in
this or a foreign country or in public use or on sale in this country,
more than one year prior to the date of the application for patent in
the United States,
Open-source software, as the name implies, has its workings exposed
and publicly accessible to all. There is a lot of prior art
in widely publicized and searchable CVS repositories, IMHO, that can be used as "printed publications" against patents that are ever asserted against OSS projects. (The key is availability by interested members of the public with reasonably diligent research, not "printing" on some physical media.) And the more detailed and more "suggestive" your comments in that publicly accessible code, the better a weapon the code becomes against patents others might try to obtain for the concepts it employs!
Ed Suominen * Registered Patent Agent
Web Site: http://www.eepatents.com
+ Nothing above to be construed as legal advice
+ or the opinion of my firm or any client.
I'm a registered patent agent, so this bill is obviously important to me. (Before I get modded into oblivion for having that occupation, please note that I am also an open-source software author. You can see something I wrote about that topic on one of my project pages. I watched the bill being enacted on C-SPAN. It stands alone, and is not any sort of a rider.
It is also a Good Thing (sorry, Martha) because the USPTO is desparately in need of funding to keep up with the flood of applications. The only thing I don't like about it (other than the fee increases it includes) is that it opens the door to outsourcing (not offshoring) searches to private contractors, something I think really is the patent examiner's job.
Last month I went for a hike along the 4-mile length of a pristine lake completely surrounded by national forest land. The first half of the hike was great, but my mood soured as my ears were bombarded by the gradually strengthening ugly sawtooth waves from a pair of jetskis, who decided to take that their enjoyment was important enough to ruin the very different kind of enjoyment a hundred or so people were looking for.
As we descended closer to shore, the air began to stink and I was completely pissed, just wanting to get the hike over and done with.
Patent clerks in the US are paid a sum per patent reviewed and after that for patent accepted . If they reject an application they lose the second bit.
That is simply not true.
Patent examiners receive one "point" for picking up an application and another point for disposing of an application. A disposition can be an allowance, sure. But it can also be (and often is) an abandonment of the application, e.g., due to the applicant's failure to overcome a final rejection.
Ed Suominen
Registered Patent Agent
Open-Source Software Author (yes, both)
Redhat up2date? Are you kidding?
I have come to genuinely regret signing up for the $60/yr RHN subscription because of the annoyance of up2date. I get the red icon staring me in the face because postfix 1.11-13b has been upgraded to 1.11-13c but I wait in vain for a real update of something I actually use, like Mozilla 1.4, KDE 3.1, etc.
8 percent!
That means that 92% of us will still be around.
Well...a bunch of the 92% will be spending their time talking with marketing types about what they want and translating that into specs for the offshore programmers to meet. Another bunch will be spending their time documenting what the offshore programmers wrote up. And still another bunch will be integrating and managing everything.
Brilliant coding alone isn't going to cut it anymore, I'm afraid...
While that is true for U.S. patents, I would very surprised if Amazon didn't have an application pending already, before doing the press release. Many if not most countries other than the U.S. have an "absolute novelty" requirement that prohibits filing an application for something after it has been publicly disclosed unless the application can claim priority of another application, e.g., one filed in the U.S.
If Amazon has indeed filed a U.S. application with intent to file overseas as well, that application will be published 18 months after filing.
Ed Suominen
Registered Patent Agent * Open Source Developer (Yes, both...)
+ http://www.eepatents.com
+ Nothing above to be construed as legal advice or the opinion of my firm or any client.
"Crash"?
What do you mean when you say an operating system "crashes"? Oh wait...I've been using Linux for some months now, and almost forgot about that...
SCO is mentioning their "Linux solutions," even today in their announcement of the conference call.
What a bunch of idiots!
Founded in 1979, The SCO Group, Inc. (Nasdaq: SCOX), helps millions of customers in more than 82 countries around the world grow their businesses everyday through the company's UNIX, Linux and Windows business solutions.
I see a major problem with SCO's case that no is talking about. That is the equitable doctrine of laches, which prevents a party asserting a claim against another too long a time after he could have, i.e., long after the offended party knew about the damage it supposedly suffered.
The source of the Linux kernel has been open for public inspection from its very inception, and SCO has been free to look through it and discover instances of copyright violation. Even more damning against it, SCO's own people have worked with the source, distributing their "own" version of Linux. There's no way they can claim that they couldn't have known about the issue for all these years.
Here's a nice little quote from a N.Y. state court case that failed to find laches due to a short delay of two years:
"Laches is an equitable doctrine which bars recovery where a party's inaction has prejudiced another party, making it inequitable to permit recovery" (Vickery v. Village of Saugerties, 106 AD2d 721)
P.S. - I am a registered patent agent, not an attorney. This means that I don't practice copyright law, and nothing above is legal advice or the opinion of any client etc. I'm also an open-source software author, which I suppose is a bit like a butcher being a vegetarian...
Yep. Strong encryption is the key.
I got concerned enough about this issue that I spent several hundred hours writing an open source software package for secure, peer-to-peer networking with "vapor keys" that disappear after you're done with a session. For those of you folks in the U.K. living under the R.I.P. law, that's cool because you can't be forced to give up keys that you no longer have.
You can get it (I guess this is a shamelesss plug, but what the heck, it's free software)here
-Ed Suominen
Slashdot Mirror
There have been many people in groups interested in limiting what types of "discoveries" for which inventors can obtain the exclusive right via the constitutional provision of a patent. Many who are concerned about the high cost of medicine would like to see limitations on the availability of patents for pharmaceuticals and methods of performing surgery. And of course, many of those who care about the future of free software (and I certainly do, basing my practice IT setup on Gentoo Linux), would like to see the availability of patents to software limited or eliminated.
What all of these people and interest groups fail to recognize is that the patent system was not set up or even envisioned to cover only a specific type of discovery. The founders could never have conceived of software, yet they in their wisdom left the constitutional authorization wide open to discoveries of all types. The very nature of a patent -- a legally sanctioned granting of exclusivity to one party -- naturally creates groups of people who opposed the existence of particular patents because that existence means that they might have to pay a lot of money or stop doing what they're doing.
A point that is widely missed in the hysterics about software patents is that, pursuant to 35 U.S.C. 102, an inventor, say at Microsoft, can't patent something unless it is novel. The inventor is blocked from apply for a patent if (among other things):
Open-source software, as the name implies, has its workings exposed and publicly accessible to all. There is a lot of prior art in widely publicized and searchable CVS repositories, IMHO, that can be used as "printed publications" against patents that are ever asserted against OSS projects. (The key is availability by interested members of the public with reasonably diligent research, not "printing" on some physical media.) And the more detailed and more "suggestive" your comments in that publicly accessible code, the better a weapon the code becomes against patents others might try to obtain for the concepts it employs!
Ed Suominen * Registered Patent AgentWeb Site: http://www.eepatents.com
+ Nothing above to be construed as legal advice
+ or the opinion of my firm or any client.
The House bill is H.R. 1561.
I'm a registered patent agent, so this bill is obviously important to me. (Before I get modded into oblivion for having that occupation, please note that I am also an open-source software author. You can see something I wrote about that topic on one of my project pages. I watched the bill being enacted on C-SPAN. It stands alone, and is not any sort of a rider.
It is also a Good Thing (sorry, Martha) because the USPTO is desparately in need of funding to keep up with the flood of applications. The only thing I don't like about it (other than the fee increases it includes) is that it opens the door to outsourcing (not offshoring) searches to private contractors, something I think really is the patent examiner's job.
Last month I went for a hike along the 4-mile length of a pristine lake completely surrounded by national forest land. The first half of the hike was great, but my mood soured as my ears were bombarded by the gradually strengthening ugly sawtooth waves from a pair of jetskis, who decided to take that their enjoyment was important enough to ruin the very different kind of enjoyment a hundred or so people were looking for.
As we descended closer to shore, the air began to stink and I was completely pissed, just wanting to get the hike over and done with.
See this Wikipedia entry for more details...That is simply not true.
Patent examiners receive one "point" for picking up an application and another point for disposing of an application. A disposition can be an allowance, sure. But it can also be (and often is) an abandonment of the application, e.g., due to the applicant's failure to overcome a final rejection.
Ed Suominen
Registered Patent Agent
Open-Source Software Author (yes, both)
Redhat up2date? Are you kidding? I have come to genuinely regret signing up for the $60/yr RHN subscription because of the annoyance of up2date. I get the red icon staring me in the face because postfix 1.11-13b has been upgraded to 1.11-13c but I wait in vain for a real update of something I actually use, like Mozilla 1.4, KDE 3.1, etc.
Well...a bunch of the 92% will be spending their time talking with marketing types about what they want and translating that into specs for the offshore programmers to meet. Another bunch will be spending their time documenting what the offshore programmers wrote up. And still another bunch will be integrating and managing everything.
Brilliant coding alone isn't going to cut it anymore, I'm afraid...
While that is true for U.S. patents, I would very surprised if Amazon didn't have an application pending already, before doing the press release. Many if not most countries other than the U.S. have an "absolute novelty" requirement that prohibits filing an application for something after it has been publicly disclosed unless the application can claim priority of another application, e.g., one filed in the U.S.
If Amazon has indeed filed a U.S. application with intent to file overseas as well, that application will be published 18 months after filing.
Ed Suominen
Registered Patent Agent * Open Source Developer (Yes, both...)
+ http://www.eepatents.com
+ Nothing above to be construed as legal advice or the opinion of my firm or any client.
"Crash"? What do you mean when you say an operating system "crashes"? Oh wait...I've been using Linux for some months now, and almost forgot about that...
PING privaria.org (64.33.49.48) 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from privaria.org (64.33.49.48): icmp_seq=2 ttl=242 time=2 days, 7 hrs, 37 min
64 bytes from privaria.org (64.33.49.48): icmp_seq=1 ttl=242 time=2 days, 17 hrs, 14 min
64 bytes from privaria.org (64.33.49.48): icmp_seq=3 ttl=242 time=3 days, 2 hrs, 41 min
echo "$COMMENT" |sed 's/Microsoft/Apple'
I see a major problem with SCO's case that no is talking about. That is the equitable doctrine of laches, which prevents a party asserting a claim against another too long a time after he could have, i.e., long after the offended party knew about the damage it supposedly suffered.
The source of the Linux kernel has been open for public inspection from its very inception, and SCO has been free to look through it and discover instances of copyright violation. Even more damning against it, SCO's own people have worked with the source, distributing their "own" version of Linux. There's no way they can claim that they couldn't have known about the issue for all these years.
Here's a nice little quote from a N.Y. state court case that failed to find laches due to a short delay of two years:
Here are some other interesting cites:
-
Understanding Basic Copyright Law Has some examples of where laches might be used.
-
Kepner-Tregoe, Inc. v. Executive Dev., Inc. (Federal district court, laches defense successful).
- Ed SuominenP.S. - I am a registered patent agent, not an attorney. This means that I don't practice copyright law, and nothing above is legal advice or the opinion of any client etc. I'm also an open-source software author, which I suppose is a bit like a butcher being a vegetarian...
Yep. Strong encryption is the key. I got concerned enough about this issue that I spent several hundred hours writing an open source software package for secure, peer-to-peer networking with "vapor keys" that disappear after you're done with a session. For those of you folks in the U.K. living under the R.I.P. law, that's cool because you can't be forced to give up keys that you no longer have. You can get it (I guess this is a shamelesss plug, but what the heck, it's free software) here -Ed Suominen