The purpose of patents is to give inventors a limited monopoly on their specific invention, method or process in exchange for disclosure. It is not to reserve ideas or functionality. Just saying "create an information model" is nothing like enough. You can't own the idea of "create an information model," although you might be able to own a particular "information model" if it is novel and nonobvious, etc.
What is this "nothing like enough" and where do you find it in the statutes? If you're referring to the fact that "create an information model" has been done before, then sure. But if we're talking about something that hasn't been done before, such as FTL communication, then as long as you disclose enough detail to enable one of ordinary skill in the art to make and use the invention, why shouldn't you be able to claim a method for FTL communication, without going in depth on the specifics of quantum entanglement?
To use your example, if I were to invent and patent an ansible which employs quantum entanglement, your ansible employing latent human telepathy is non-infringing. You can't patent "the ansible," only a specific method for realizing one.
If my ansible includes every part that's in your claimed ansible, then I do infringe. So, the question is how narrowly you have to claim your ansible to be patentable over the prior art.
I think the complaint here is that there is nothing in those flow charts that reveal how they plan to accomplish this. They have provided many very broad and generic requirements, but they don't reveal any nuts and bolts. The devil's in the details with a system this complex. The result is that no one skilled in programming could take this patent and learn anything about how to make this "invention."
Oh, I don't know about that. With a good flow chart, I think a decent programmer can come up with an implementation of the algorithm.
Conversely, many people could run afoul of this patent by making a myriad of different implementations that follow a basic framework.
For example, from figure 4, "Generate a model information associated with the text", in figure 5 "Analyze the text for a contextual cue", or from figure 6 "Analyze the second image for auxilary information." All of these are very general and provide no real details to indicate the actual "how" to make this work.
Well, yeah, but there's also the specification discussing those steps. Additionally, if I give you, a carpenter, an instruction to fasten two boards together, that's very general and provides no real details... But you can probably come up with a dozen different ways to do so, including nails, screws, glue, dovetail joints, etc. If my overall furniture design for a combination couch/toilet is novel and nonobvious, why shouldn't I be able to claim any trivial variation of the design? Or conversely, why should you get to claim you don't infringe because you used Phillips screws rather than flathead screws?
Given these figures, Microsoft is claiming an incredibly broad patent that covers nearly every implementation of this idea, so long as it follows a very broad framework (that is likely to be used by anyone trying to acheive this idea).
And if their idea is novel and nonobvious, then they should get a claim to cover nearly every implementation. Mind you, this doesn't mean the idea is novel or nonobvious, and a lot of time, those claims get significantly narrowed before the patent is ever issued. But, if, for example, you come up with a working method for faster than light communication, why shouldn't you get a claim that covers such a method, whether it's done in hardware or software, runs Windows or Linux, written in C or COBOL, etc.?
Odd pairing, considering that Myhrvold is no longer with Microsoft, but, of course, runs Intellectual Ventures. Interestingly, this application isn't a continuation, and was filed in 2012.
Ah, that makes a lot of sense. Basically, patents only need to be an improvement over a process.
Yep. In general, almost everything is an improvement on something else. An airplane? That's really just a flying car, which itself is just a horseless carriage, which is really a landboat. Doesn't mean that a raft anticipates the space shuttle, though.
As for their demand letter... they say that 802.11 is a violation of the patent, being a bidirectional communication path, and information is sent to the modem. This is incorrect - 802.11 wireless is actually omnidirectional, due to the ease of listening in to the conversaion (e.g. FireSheep, Aircrack-ng). Further, their patent is more specific to physical connections rather than wireless.
Without looking in depth at the patent, I believe you're using a different definition for "directional"... They're talking about bidirectional communications over a single path via half-duplex timing, not whether those communications follow a specific geometric vector. Theoretically, 802.11 timeslicing would read on it, since it's half-duplex communications on the same frequency.
In other words, yes, 802.11 goes in every direction... but it's still a bidirectional communication path in which the recipient and sender both communicate over the same path.
London, the city with more closed circuit cameras than anywhere else on Earth, wants to ban spying on pedestrians? Or is it only a concern when someone other than the government has control over the information?
A quick check on that site, and the patent with the most letters (https://trollingeffects.org/patent/6587473) is a patent on dial-up internet. Proven by looking into the patent and seeing all those PPP references, and seeing all physical modem components being stuffed in the patent.
So, ISPs (from all over) unknowingly violate a patent for behaving normally.
Looking at this patent (https://www.google.com/patents/US8337359?dq=hybrid+gas+electric+car+toyota&hl=en&sa=X&ei=p_0IUvnzDILp2QXVuYGgAw&ved=0CEoQ6AEwAw), it's a patent on a car. Proven by looking into the patent and seeing all of those mentions of vehicles and seeing discussions of internal combustion engines being stuffed in the patent. So every car out there unknowingly violates a patent for behaving normally.
... except it doesn't work like that. That patent linked above is a patent on an improvement for cars, namely a specific implementation of a gas-electric hybrid engine control system. The fact that it mentions that it happens to be in cars doesn't mean they're trying to claim they invented the Model A. Hell, it's in the statutes, 35 USC 101 - whoever invents a new and useful process, machine, manufacture, composition of matter, or any new and useful improvement thereof, may obtain a patent therefor. So, the question isn't "does that Lodsys patent include PPP references or discuss physical modem components", but "is it claiming an improvement on existing PPP modem technology?" Considering that they're specifically distinguishing their claimed invention from PSTN modems and cable modems in the background, then yes, it's claiming an improvement.
Now, mind you, I haven't looked in depth at the claims or done any prior art search, and so this isn't a statement that the patent is valid or anything. However, to say "zomg they patented dial-up internet, because the specification mentions modems" is just flat-out wrong.
Name any other situation besides student athletes where corps can make tens of millions but get away with no giving the one doing the work a penny because i can't think of one.
Students who do research, undergrad or graduate level, on inventions that end up being patented and licensed by the university.;)
Xio Software lost because their argument was that every part of the game was an "essential" game element and wasn't subject to copyright, even though they conceded that there were a limitless number of aesthetic options they could have used.
I just don't see why so many are the EFF on this one when it means supporting EA a company notorious for screwing EVERYBODY from the employees on up.
Because it's not just about EA, but establishing precedent that could adversely affect companies we like.
Personally I'm all for this rule because i'm hoping it will open debates i think are long due, which is why are college athletes not allowed to get paid for what they do but everyone can make money off of them just like in TFA? Most of these kids will NEVER make it to the majors and if they blow out a knee on their last year their life usually ends up shit, meanwhile everybody else, the school, the groups in charge of licensing like the NCAA, even game companies like EA THEY can all make money but the kid can't? I'm sorry but that is severely fucked up.
But should they be paid by the video game manufacturer directly, or should they receive a cut of the licensing/tickets/television rights/swag income from the college? Consider that, with the former, at best you get "NCAA 2014 with star quarterback [famous name] and 10 anonymous shmucks!"
I agree that it's not fair that people make millions off of these kids, but I think you have to target it at its source, the NCAA and the colleges, and not the individual game/swag manufacturers.
I have been using The Old Reader since before Google Reader went offline.
I stuck with them through month long wanting queues, ubiquitous downtime and slow servers, and extended offline time. Thinking these guys were not amateur hobbyists doing something neat for as long as it suited them.
Then one day I am told that I did not sign up early enough, and that they are closing down because it is too much work.
According to TFA, the limit for signing up "early enough" is March 13, 2013. So, if you signed up after that, you've only been using it for a mere four and a half months... so is it really reasonable to act as if you've been a long-time supporter, sticking with through "month long" queues and downtime?
I've provided a reference that clearly states that highly competitive industries can survive just fine without patents, [even if as you point out, related industries use patents].
Although true, that "industry" does not analogize to the rest of the world. From your article, F1 doesn't use patents because, if they get a patent on a technology, all of the other competitors will vote to have that technology disallowed. That simply doesn't exist in other industries, and without that sort of punitive over-arching regulation of an industry, there's no reason to suspect that the F1 experience should apply elsewhere.
And there are plenty of references here on/. that corroborate my statement that people do not look through the patent applications due to the risk of triple damages.
Yes, but that's mostly out of date. The law on willful infringement is changing, quite reasonably too. At this point, merely reading a patent application will not be enough to support a finding of willful infringement.
Not quite. If we start reading patents, it opens up liability for treble damages should we be found in violation of a patent. For example, we're investigating patents, there's that doesn't have prior art, a few months/years later we're found to be in violation of that patent. At that point their lawyers say "hey, you guys were looking at patents and should have known about this one. Triple the damages!"
And at that point, your lawyers say, "yeah, we knew about this one, but we investigated and reasonably believed we did not infringe because of (a) and (b). We also thought the patent was invalid because of (c) and (d). Therefore, we did not willingly infringe your patent, both because we did not think it applied and because we thought it was shiat."
Willful infringement has gotten very, very hard to prove lately. Merely reading the patent is not going to be enough.
Even LZW compression is fairly obvious to a skilled programmer. I remember there were several similar compression algorithms around at the time it was patented. It's not an especially good algorithm, it's just more famous (mostly thanks to the patent wars that surrounded it).
Leaving aside the argument of whether LZW is obvious or not, that's not what the article is talking about. Basically, in an incredibly simplified nutshell, there are 4 separate and independent requirements you have to pass to get a patent, and failing any one of them will result in a rejection or invalid patent. They come from four different statutes:
35 USC 101: the invention must be a useful method, machine, article of manufacture, or composition of matter;
35 USC 102: the invention must be new - i.e. never done before;
35 USC 103: the invention must be non-obvious;
35 USC 112: the invention must be sufficiently described in the patent application to enable someone to make and use it.
You're saying that LZW fails the 103 requirement in that it was obvious... that's a different argument. What this argument is about is whether all software should be excluded from the definition of "method" under 35 USC 101: whether the most novel, most non-obvious, most freakin' revolutionary bit of software in the entire universe should still be ineligible for a patent, because it's software.
The GP post says that yes, maybe that revolutionary software alone should be unpatentable under 101, but if it's part of firmware for an EPROM, then maybe it should be allowed.
I think this is actually a bad example, because to infringe on a patent, you actually have to infringe on all the claims.
That's absolutely incorrect. You have to infringe each and every element in a claim, but only have to infringe a single claim to infringe the patent.
But I think that was just a misstatement, because you have it right here:
This is actually a less broad patent, because it would only cover cars, with wheels, that used the engine that ran on water. So if you then took the engine that ran on water, and used it to make a generator (which isn't a method of transportation), you would no longer be in violation of the patent. Similarly, if you used it to make a boat motor, you wouldn't be in violation of the patent, because your boat most likely doesn't have wheels.
To paraphrase, if the claims are:
1. A.
2. The method of claim 1, further comprising B.
3. The method of claim 2, further comprising C.
... then to infringe claim 1, you need only do A. To infringe claim 2, you need to do A+B. To infringe claim 3, you need to do A+B+C. If claim 1 is invalid and too broad, then you can still infringe claim 2 by doing A+B (if it's not invalidated over other prior art). You don't need to do C to infringe claim 2 or infringe the patent.
The instructions (or CAD drawing) are copyrightable. If the finished object is considered a work of art, it is also copywritable (but separately from the CAD or instruction file). If the final object is an object of utility, it might get a utility or design patent.
Your clarification is wrong: the design patent cannot cover any functional aspects of the object, merely the aesthetic ornamentation... which is a "work of art" and is covered under copyright.
Additionally, in your "clarification," you use the term "copywrightable". There is no such term. "Copyright" comes from a right to copy. Not copy that has been written. Copywriters are entirely different things.
But those are all separate things. I have seen here on Slashdot a lot of people confusing them.
Have you ever seen a patent application that appears ridiculously broad? (“Good lord, they’re trying to patent CARS!”). Here’s why. The applicant is deliberately overreaching, that is, striving to get the broadest possible patent knowing that the worst thing that can happen is that the patent examiner whittles their claims down to what they were entitled to patent anyway...
An example might help. Imagine a simple application with these three claims:
1. A method of transportation
2. The method of transportation in claim 1, wherein there is an engine connected to wheels
3. The method of transportation in claim 2, wherein the engine runs on water
... Now, suppose you invented the water-powered car. When you submit your patent, you might submit it this way even knowing that there’s prior art for “methods of transportation” and you can’t really claim all of them as your invention. The theory is that (a) hey, you might get lucky! and (b) even if you don’t get lucky and the first claim is rejected, the narrower claims will still stand.
What he's done is equivalent to finding "a method of transportation," knocking out the ridiculously over-broad claim, which Joel describes as "a long shot lottery ticket". The narrower, dependent claims may still be patentable.
Additionally, this was the first office action in this patent application (not an issued patent, contrary to the/. summary). Would the Examiner have found this piece of prior art or another piece of prior art that knocks out that over-broad claim? Almost certainly, again according to Joel's logic. In fact, the Examiner went on to using 5 other pieces of prior art to address the dependent claims. Any of those could well anticipate the independent claim too.
Is it a good thing to crowdsource prior art searches? Absolutely. But people doing the search can't stop at just a single piece of prior art to knock out the one over-broad long shot lottery ticket claim. In Joel's example claims, finding prior art describing a method of transportation may allow you to run a victory lap and get a Slashdot story, but it does nothing for invalidating the claim to an engine that runs on water, which is really what the patent is about.
Aside: Something that has occurred to me of late (while watching discussion about the Zimmerman trial, actually), is that I think humans have a tendency to fit real-world events into neat, narrative structures that have the same three-act form as good stories. I'm wondering if any news story that achieves really broad penetration of a large population's collective psyche doesn't end up getting "adjusted" until it fits a smooth, memorable narrative arc. This became apparent to me in the case of the Zimmerman trial when I realized that those who argued for guilty and not-guilty verdicts were discussing two rather different versions of the narrative, each of which followed a traditional storytelling arc, and neither of which was overly concerned about including facts that didn't fit the arc. The whole sequence of events, especially when the focus is on the actual evidence, makes a rather lumpy, disjointed tale with false starts and inconvenient edges, but the pro- and anti-Zimmerman stories are both much smoother.
Not "humans", but "Westerners", primarily because we're so used to that three-act structure in Western media. Asian movies frequently show a four-act structure - see Kishotenketsu.
I think the patent office shouldn't get the money for patent applications. They should have a budget independent of the number of applications they process with a minimum goal for each year to get through that's reasonable.
Sure we'll have a backlog, but when you can't get everything through and the patent office doesn't have a financial incentive to rubber stamp patents anymore it might cause change.
Another idea, give patent reviewers an incentive (bonus) when they find prior art for a patent.
The patent office makes money off of rejections, and therefore has a financial incentive to reject applications and have people re-file new ones. This explains why, for example, they initially rubber-stamp 85% of patent applications "REJECTED". This is as opposed to your implication that they allow everything.
Also, patent examiners are graded on a point system, and they receive points for rejecting applications. It seems like your suggestions are all already implemented, and therefore may not actually address the problem.
Patenting software is not a fundamental problem. Patent trolls are not a fundamental problem. Instead, these are the results and effects of the true fundamental problem, which is that the patent system itself is patenting anything that comes along that has no obvious conflicts, if even that. It considers its duty to be simply to record the patent... and take all the money.
If true, you would expect to see 99% of patent applications immediately allowed. Instead, 85% are initially rejected. Apparently, the system considers its duty to reject patent applications until they're properly narrowed.
If something is truly innovative, then without the inventor having done it, it is likely to not have been done at all for many years (when based to genius thought), or for a substantial investment into the work needed to come up with it (when based on a huge amount of work).
I disagree with that definition. "Truly innovative" things may be due to a spark of insight, and then not require significant work. For example, I bet most any engineer now could draw a schematic for a working internal combustion engine on a napkin. Does that mean it wasn't truly innovative when it first appeared?
This "truly innovative" definition of yours has no support in the patent statutes, nor in case law. As a purely subjective definition, it also creates a tyranny of intellectualism, in which inventions may be judged unworthy simply because we dislike their field. Maybe we see a new cancer drug as "truly innovative", but not a new children's toy, regardless of the actual invention.
The vast majority of patents are not true innovation. Most of them are just broad brushes of things they see as inevitable and coming, anyway.
In hindsight, everything looks obvious. The difficulty is in proving that something is inevitable before it's already here.
In the second case one of three things can happen. He can file and be awarded an overly broad patent which is clearly just a rewrite of prior art at which point he sells it to a patent troll or he can file and be awarded a small patent on something unique but unfortunately can't do anything with it because a patent troll already laid claim to the industry standard stuff he built it on top of.
The third thing that could happen is that the guy realizes he's screwed and his idea will never make it past the startup phase - so he gives up and goes back to work to a corporate gig.
The fourth thing that can happen is he gets a patent on his invention of a "unique quality" and then sell that to a patent troll or a large corporation manufacturing the relevant device. Your second point seems to ignore this possibility.
A baseball bat in the hands of a mad man is most certainly a deadly weapon and without adequate resistance can easily kill a goodly number of people in a relatively short period of time. Longer than a gun perhaps but that really depends on the targets and environment.
The distinction is in what constitutes "adequate resistance". For someone with a gun, that may require killing them. For someone with a baseball bat, it may require simply immobilizing them or even getting into such close range that they can't swing the bat.
Specifically, in the grandparent post, the poster hypothesized about a kid walking into a teacher's lounge. The "adequate resistance" required to stop a kid with a baseball bat is very different from the "adequate resistance" required to stop a kid with a gun.
As an aside:
While you're mentioning the evil uses of the canceling properties it seems highly disingenuous not to mention the practically infinitely more common instances:
The 90 pound woman defending herself against a rapist.
Though unrelated, this trope needs to be addressed since it's raised so frequently. The majority of rapes are not caused by strangers leaping out of bushes, but acquaintances, family friends, ex-boyfriends, predatory guy at a party, etc. Having a gun in those situations is useless, because there are very few people would shoot someone they know, particularly when that someone has not previously shown any violent tendencies. Suggesting that women should carry guns to protect themselves from rape is usually irrelevant, and leads to the false implication that if a woman was raped and didn't carry a gun, then she failed to take steps to protect herself and is therefore somewhat culpable.
Slashdot Mirror
The purpose of patents is to give inventors a limited monopoly on their specific invention, method or process in exchange for disclosure. It is not to reserve ideas or functionality. Just saying "create an information model" is nothing like enough. You can't own the idea of "create an information model," although you might be able to own a particular "information model" if it is novel and nonobvious, etc.
What is this "nothing like enough" and where do you find it in the statutes? If you're referring to the fact that "create an information model" has been done before, then sure. But if we're talking about something that hasn't been done before, such as FTL communication, then as long as you disclose enough detail to enable one of ordinary skill in the art to make and use the invention, why shouldn't you be able to claim a method for FTL communication, without going in depth on the specifics of quantum entanglement?
To use your example, if I were to invent and patent an ansible which employs quantum entanglement, your ansible employing latent human telepathy is non-infringing. You can't patent "the ansible," only a specific method for realizing one.
If my ansible includes every part that's in your claimed ansible, then I do infringe. So, the question is how narrowly you have to claim your ansible to be patentable over the prior art.
I think the complaint here is that there is nothing in those flow charts that reveal how they plan to accomplish this. They have provided many very broad and generic requirements, but they don't reveal any nuts and bolts. The devil's in the details with a system this complex. The result is that no one skilled in programming could take this patent and learn anything about how to make this "invention."
Oh, I don't know about that. With a good flow chart, I think a decent programmer can come up with an implementation of the algorithm.
Conversely, many people could run afoul of this patent by making a myriad of different implementations that follow a basic framework.
For example, from figure 4, "Generate a model information associated with the text", in figure 5 "Analyze the text for a contextual cue", or from figure 6 "Analyze the second image for auxilary information." All of these are very general and provide no real details to indicate the actual "how" to make this work.
Well, yeah, but there's also the specification discussing those steps. Additionally, if I give you, a carpenter, an instruction to fasten two boards together, that's very general and provides no real details... But you can probably come up with a dozen different ways to do so, including nails, screws, glue, dovetail joints, etc. If my overall furniture design for a combination couch/toilet is novel and nonobvious, why shouldn't I be able to claim any trivial variation of the design? Or conversely, why should you get to claim you don't infringe because you used Phillips screws rather than flathead screws?
Given these figures, Microsoft is claiming an incredibly broad patent that covers nearly every implementation of this idea, so long as it follows a very broad framework (that is likely to be used by anyone trying to acheive this idea).
And if their idea is novel and nonobvious, then they should get a claim to cover nearly every implementation. Mind you, this doesn't mean the idea is novel or nonobvious, and a lot of time, those claims get significantly narrowed before the patent is ever issued. But, if, for example, you come up with a working method for faster than light communication, why shouldn't you get a claim that covers such a method, whether it's done in hardware or software, runs Windows or Linux, written in C or COBOL, etc.?
Odd pairing, considering that Myhrvold is no longer with Microsoft, but, of course, runs Intellectual Ventures. Interestingly, this application isn't a continuation, and was filed in 2012.
This patent is just a wish list of features with no disclosure of any technique for realizing any of those features.
Not so. See figures 4-8 and the accompanying description.
Also, why isn't this modded redundant, since you posted the exact same thing earlier?
I'm not sure what "it" is since the patent itself doesn't describe an algorithm. It's just a wish list of potential features.
Yes, it does - see figures 4-8 and the accompanying description.
Ah, that makes a lot of sense. Basically, patents only need to be an improvement over a process.
Yep. In general, almost everything is an improvement on something else. An airplane? That's really just a flying car, which itself is just a horseless carriage, which is really a landboat. Doesn't mean that a raft anticipates the space shuttle, though.
As for their demand letter... they say that 802.11 is a violation of the patent, being a bidirectional communication path, and information is sent to the modem. This is incorrect - 802.11 wireless is actually omnidirectional, due to the ease of listening in to the conversaion (e.g. FireSheep, Aircrack-ng). Further, their patent is more specific to physical connections rather than wireless.
Without looking in depth at the patent, I believe you're using a different definition for "directional"... They're talking about bidirectional communications over a single path via half-duplex timing, not whether those communications follow a specific geometric vector. Theoretically, 802.11 timeslicing would read on it, since it's half-duplex communications on the same frequency.
In other words, yes, 802.11 goes in every direction... but it's still a bidirectional communication path in which the recipient and sender both communicate over the same path.
London, the city with more closed circuit cameras than anywhere else on Earth, wants to ban spying on pedestrians? Or is it only a concern when someone other than the government has control over the information?
A quick check on that site, and the patent with the most letters (https://trollingeffects.org/patent/6587473) is a patent on dial-up internet. Proven by looking into the patent and seeing all those PPP references, and seeing all physical modem components being stuffed in the patent.
So, ISPs (from all over) unknowingly violate a patent for behaving normally.
Looking at this patent (https://www.google.com/patents/US8337359?dq=hybrid+gas+electric+car+toyota&hl=en&sa=X&ei=p_0IUvnzDILp2QXVuYGgAw&ved=0CEoQ6AEwAw), it's a patent on a car. Proven by looking into the patent and seeing all of those mentions of vehicles and seeing discussions of internal combustion engines being stuffed in the patent. So every car out there unknowingly violates a patent for behaving normally.
Now, mind you, I haven't looked in depth at the claims or done any prior art search, and so this isn't a statement that the patent is valid or anything. However, to say "zomg they patented dial-up internet, because the specification mentions modems" is just flat-out wrong.
Name any other situation besides student athletes where corps can make tens of millions but get away with no giving the one doing the work a penny because i can't think of one.
Students who do research, undergrad or graduate level, on inventions that end up being patented and licensed by the university. ;)
the whole "can't copyright essential game elements, only expressive artwork" deal
Tell that to Xio Software, who got successfully sued by The Tetris Company for making a block-stacking game that uses pieces made of four square blocks.
No, they didn't lose because they had a block-stacking game that uses pieces made of four square blocks. You should read your link, which notes that "a puzzle game where a user manipulates blocks to form lines which disappear' would be noninfringing." Rather, it was the particular colors selected for the blocks, the way the game fills up the field at the end game, the appearance of garbage lines, the particular movement of the blocks, the patterns on the blocks themselves, etc.
Xio Software lost because their argument was that every part of the game was an "essential" game element and wasn't subject to copyright, even though they conceded that there were a limitless number of aesthetic options they could have used.
I just don't see why so many are the EFF on this one when it means supporting EA a company notorious for screwing EVERYBODY from the employees on up.
Because it's not just about EA, but establishing precedent that could adversely affect companies we like.
Personally I'm all for this rule because i'm hoping it will open debates i think are long due, which is why are college athletes not allowed to get paid for what they do but everyone can make money off of them just like in TFA? Most of these kids will NEVER make it to the majors and if they blow out a knee on their last year their life usually ends up shit, meanwhile everybody else, the school, the groups in charge of licensing like the NCAA, even game companies like EA THEY can all make money but the kid can't? I'm sorry but that is severely fucked up.
But should they be paid by the video game manufacturer directly, or should they receive a cut of the licensing/tickets/television rights/swag income from the college? Consider that, with the former, at best you get "NCAA 2014 with star quarterback [famous name] and 10 anonymous shmucks!"
I agree that it's not fair that people make millions off of these kids, but I think you have to target it at its source, the NCAA and the colleges, and not the individual game/swag manufacturers.
I have been using The Old Reader since before Google Reader went offline.
I stuck with them through month long wanting queues, ubiquitous downtime and slow servers, and extended offline time. Thinking these guys were not amateur hobbyists doing something neat for as long as it suited them.
Then one day I am told that I did not sign up early enough, and that they are closing down because it is too much work.
According to TFA, the limit for signing up "early enough" is March 13, 2013. So, if you signed up after that, you've only been using it for a mere four and a half months... so is it really reasonable to act as if you've been a long-time supporter, sticking with through "month long" queues and downtime?
And the speech wars are just heating up: Microsoft and Amazon both have speech engineering offices in the Boston area too.
"Siri, wheah's a wicked good place to pahk neah the Gahden?"
I've provided a reference that clearly states that highly competitive industries can survive just fine without patents, [even if as you point out, related industries use patents].
Although true, that "industry" does not analogize to the rest of the world. From your article, F1 doesn't use patents because, if they get a patent on a technology, all of the other competitors will vote to have that technology disallowed. That simply doesn't exist in other industries, and without that sort of punitive over-arching regulation of an industry, there's no reason to suspect that the F1 experience should apply elsewhere.
And there are plenty of references here on /. that corroborate my statement that people do not look through the patent applications due to the risk of triple damages.
Yes, but that's mostly out of date. The law on willful infringement is changing, quite reasonably too. At this point, merely reading a patent application will not be enough to support a finding of willful infringement.
Not quite. If we start reading patents, it opens up liability for treble damages should we be found in violation of a patent. For example, we're investigating patents, there's that doesn't have prior art, a few months/years later we're found to be in violation of that patent. At that point their lawyers say "hey, you guys were looking at patents and should have known about this one. Triple the damages!"
And at that point, your lawyers say, "yeah, we knew about this one, but we investigated and reasonably believed we did not infringe because of (a) and (b). We also thought the patent was invalid because of (c) and (d). Therefore, we did not willingly infringe your patent, both because we did not think it applied and because we thought it was shiat."
Willful infringement has gotten very, very hard to prove lately. Merely reading the patent is not going to be enough.
Even LZW compression is fairly obvious to a skilled programmer. I remember there were several similar compression algorithms around at the time it was patented. It's not an especially good algorithm, it's just more famous (mostly thanks to the patent wars that surrounded it).
Leaving aside the argument of whether LZW is obvious or not, that's not what the article is talking about. Basically, in an incredibly simplified nutshell, there are 4 separate and independent requirements you have to pass to get a patent, and failing any one of them will result in a rejection or invalid patent. They come from four different statutes:
35 USC 101: the invention must be a useful method, machine, article of manufacture, or composition of matter;
35 USC 102: the invention must be new - i.e. never done before;
35 USC 103: the invention must be non-obvious;
35 USC 112: the invention must be sufficiently described in the patent application to enable someone to make and use it.
You're saying that LZW fails the 103 requirement in that it was obvious... that's a different argument. What this argument is about is whether all software should be excluded from the definition of "method" under 35 USC 101: whether the most novel, most non-obvious, most freakin' revolutionary bit of software in the entire universe should still be ineligible for a patent, because it's software.
The GP post says that yes, maybe that revolutionary software alone should be unpatentable under 101, but if it's part of firmware for an EPROM, then maybe it should be allowed.
I think this is actually a bad example, because to infringe on a patent, you actually have to infringe on all the claims.
That's absolutely incorrect. You have to infringe each and every element in a claim, but only have to infringe a single claim to infringe the patent.
But I think that was just a misstatement, because you have it right here:
This is actually a less broad patent, because it would only cover cars, with wheels, that used the engine that ran on water. So if you then took the engine that ran on water, and used it to make a generator (which isn't a method of transportation), you would no longer be in violation of the patent. Similarly, if you used it to make a boat motor, you wouldn't be in violation of the patent, because your boat most likely doesn't have wheels.
To paraphrase, if the claims are:
1. A.
2. The method of claim 1, further comprising B.
3. The method of claim 2, further comprising C.
To clarify:
The instructions (or CAD drawing) are copyrightable. If the finished object is considered a work of art, it is also copywritable (but separately from the CAD or instruction file). If the final object is an object of utility, it might get a utility or design patent.
Your clarification is wrong: the design patent cannot cover any functional aspects of the object, merely the aesthetic ornamentation... which is a "work of art" and is covered under copyright.
Additionally, in your "clarification," you use the term "copywrightable". There is no such term. "Copyright" comes from a right to copy. Not copy that has been written. Copywriters are entirely different things.
But those are all separate things. I have seen here on Slashdot a lot of people confusing them.
Yes, but you're not helping with that.
Have you ever seen a patent application that appears ridiculously broad? (“Good lord, they’re trying to patent CARS!”). Here’s why. The applicant is deliberately overreaching, that is, striving to get the broadest possible patent knowing that the worst thing that can happen is that the patent examiner whittles their claims down to what they were entitled to patent anyway...
An example might help. Imagine a simple application with these three claims:
1. A method of transportation
2. The method of transportation in claim 1, wherein there is an engine connected to wheels
3. The method of transportation in claim 2, wherein the engine runs on water
What he's done is equivalent to finding "a method of transportation," knocking out the ridiculously over-broad claim, which Joel describes as "a long shot lottery ticket". The narrower, dependent claims may still be patentable.
Additionally, this was the first office action in this patent application (not an issued patent, contrary to the /. summary). Would the Examiner have found this piece of prior art or another piece of prior art that knocks out that over-broad claim? Almost certainly, again according to Joel's logic. In fact, the Examiner went on to using 5 other pieces of prior art to address the dependent claims. Any of those could well anticipate the independent claim too.
Is it a good thing to crowdsource prior art searches? Absolutely. But people doing the search can't stop at just a single piece of prior art to knock out the one over-broad long shot lottery ticket claim. In Joel's example claims, finding prior art describing a method of transportation may allow you to run a victory lap and get a Slashdot story, but it does nothing for invalidating the claim to an engine that runs on water, which is really what the patent is about.
Aside: Something that has occurred to me of late (while watching discussion about the Zimmerman trial, actually), is that I think humans have a tendency to fit real-world events into neat, narrative structures that have the same three-act form as good stories. I'm wondering if any news story that achieves really broad penetration of a large population's collective psyche doesn't end up getting "adjusted" until it fits a smooth, memorable narrative arc. This became apparent to me in the case of the Zimmerman trial when I realized that those who argued for guilty and not-guilty verdicts were discussing two rather different versions of the narrative, each of which followed a traditional storytelling arc, and neither of which was overly concerned about including facts that didn't fit the arc. The whole sequence of events, especially when the focus is on the actual evidence, makes a rather lumpy, disjointed tale with false starts and inconvenient edges, but the pro- and anti-Zimmerman stories are both much smoother.
Not "humans", but "Westerners", primarily because we're so used to that three-act structure in Western media. Asian movies frequently show a four-act structure - see Kishotenketsu.
I think the patent office shouldn't get the money for patent applications. They should have a budget independent of the number of applications they process with a minimum goal for each year to get through that's reasonable.
Sure we'll have a backlog, but when you can't get everything through and the patent office doesn't have a financial incentive to rubber stamp patents anymore it might cause change.
Another idea, give patent reviewers an incentive (bonus) when they find prior art for a patent.
The patent office makes money off of rejections, and therefore has a financial incentive to reject applications and have people re-file new ones. This explains why, for example, they initially rubber-stamp 85% of patent applications "REJECTED". This is as opposed to your implication that they allow everything.
Also, patent examiners are graded on a point system, and they receive points for rejecting applications. It seems like your suggestions are all already implemented, and therefore may not actually address the problem.
Patenting software is not a fundamental problem. Patent trolls are not a fundamental problem. Instead, these are the results and effects of the true fundamental problem, which is that the patent system itself is patenting anything that comes along that has no obvious conflicts, if even that. It considers its duty to be simply to record the patent ... and take all the money.
If true, you would expect to see 99% of patent applications immediately allowed. Instead, 85% are initially rejected. Apparently, the system considers its duty to reject patent applications until they're properly narrowed.
If something is truly innovative, then without the inventor having done it, it is likely to not have been done at all for many years (when based to genius thought), or for a substantial investment into the work needed to come up with it (when based on a huge amount of work).
I disagree with that definition. "Truly innovative" things may be due to a spark of insight, and then not require significant work. For example, I bet most any engineer now could draw a schematic for a working internal combustion engine on a napkin. Does that mean it wasn't truly innovative when it first appeared?
This "truly innovative" definition of yours has no support in the patent statutes, nor in case law. As a purely subjective definition, it also creates a tyranny of intellectualism, in which inventions may be judged unworthy simply because we dislike their field. Maybe we see a new cancer drug as "truly innovative", but not a new children's toy, regardless of the actual invention.
The vast majority of patents are not true innovation. Most of them are just broad brushes of things they see as inevitable and coming, anyway.
In hindsight, everything looks obvious. The difficulty is in proving that something is inevitable before it's already here.
software patents need to be cut down as well as well the patents on basic stuff.
They should be eliminated completely, since software is already protected by copyright.
Software isn't adequately protected by copyright. Just ask Zynga competitors like NimbleBit.
In the second case one of three things can happen. He can file and be awarded an overly broad patent which is clearly just a rewrite of prior art at which point he sells it to a patent troll or he can file and be awarded a small patent on something unique but unfortunately can't do anything with it because a patent troll already laid claim to the industry standard stuff he built it on top of.
The third thing that could happen is that the guy realizes he's screwed and his idea will never make it past the startup phase - so he gives up and goes back to work to a corporate gig.
The fourth thing that can happen is he gets a patent on his invention of a "unique quality" and then sell that to a patent troll or a large corporation manufacturing the relevant device. Your second point seems to ignore this possibility.
A baseball bat in the hands of a mad man is most certainly a deadly weapon and without adequate resistance can easily kill a goodly number of people in a relatively short period of time. Longer than a gun perhaps but that really depends on the targets and environment.
The distinction is in what constitutes "adequate resistance". For someone with a gun, that may require killing them. For someone with a baseball bat, it may require simply immobilizing them or even getting into such close range that they can't swing the bat.
Specifically, in the grandparent post, the poster hypothesized about a kid walking into a teacher's lounge. The "adequate resistance" required to stop a kid with a baseball bat is very different from the "adequate resistance" required to stop a kid with a gun.
As an aside:
While you're mentioning the evil uses of the canceling properties it seems highly disingenuous not to mention the practically infinitely more common instances:
The 90 pound woman defending herself against a rapist.
Though unrelated, this trope needs to be addressed since it's raised so frequently. The majority of rapes are not caused by strangers leaping out of bushes, but acquaintances, family friends, ex-boyfriends, predatory guy at a party, etc. Having a gun in those situations is useless, because there are very few people would shoot someone they know, particularly when that someone has not previously shown any violent tendencies. Suggesting that women should carry guns to protect themselves from rape is usually irrelevant, and leads to the false implication that if a woman was raped and didn't carry a gun, then she failed to take steps to protect herself and is therefore somewhat culpable.