The parent said, "If you want a full description, feel free to get yourself a lawyer."
To which you said, "Uh, done? I don't keep old casebooks on my shelf for the hell of it, you know."
On Slashdot, you are my favorite kind of lawyer. In real life, my least favorite. You are smug, lording it over other people, and 100% wrong.
If you think that the trademark law is enabled by the copyright and patent clause of the US Constitution, you might want to read the 1879 Trademark Cases. They are Supreme Court cases, so they should be in the old casebooks on your shelf. To wit, the federal trademark laws stem from the commerce clause, not the patent and copyright clause, precisely because the patent and copyright clause says nothing about trademark. This is the opposite of what you said.
Thus, your argument that the word "IP" has some kind of constitutional meaning is void.
I sure hope you don't fancy yourself an "IP lawyer."
The US allows dual citizenship up to age 18. Upon turning 18 and legally reaching maturity, you are expected to choose one country or the other. If you can demonstrate you spend a fair amount of time in both yearly you can keep the dual citizenship, but it's not easy.
I'll admit that I don't fly regularly, but that's never happened to me, and furthermore it seems to defeat the purpose and definition of "carry-on" luggage.
It means the TSA monkeys never get to paw through your luggage without you being there to watch them, and it means that your luggage won't miss the flight or be sent to Timbuktu.
I wonder if these linguists could summon up the same outrage for other PC-speak. For example, "undocumented immigrants" for illegal aliens.
Boy, you win the irony award today. The term "illegal alien" is the loaded, non-technical word ("PC speak," as you say, is another loaded, non-technical word). The correct term is "EWI" or entered without inspection.
Now the term "undocumented immigrant" does not mean quite the same thing, because an immigrant is someone who intends to remain in the U.S, and EWI does not imply that the person intends to remain in the U.S. Additionally, there are people who enter under visas (or visa waivers), and then simply fail to leave when their time is up. These are not EWI, because they were inspected when they entered.
However, as a matter of practice, people who are here as tourists and for business trips do it the proper way, being inspected at the border. Thus "EWI" tends to imply "immigrant." And there are relatively few working-class people who take the trouble to get a visa, then overstay. Much simpler just to cross the border. Thus, it is accurate in practice to refer to EWI persons as "undocumented immigrants" and vice-versa.
Now, as for the "illegal alien" word, I would like you to conduct a simple exercise, since you seem to have picked up so much erudition from Rush Limbaugh or Sean Hannity or whomever. I would like you to find me the statute in the U.S. Code which says that it is a crime for someone to enter EWI, or to overstay a visa. Go ahead, I can wait. Are you back yet?
The answer is, there is no such statute. Someone can be deported for not having authorization to be here (or the more modern term, "undergo removal proceedings"), however deportation proceedings are civil in nature, not criminal. They're not even a misdemeanor. (It is a crime, a felony in fact, to return to the US after being deported, but that's altogether different.)
So how's your driving? Do you ever exceed the speed limit? Do you coast through stop signs when you think nobody's around? Do you ever smoke weed? When you were a freshman in college, did you drink beer? I'm sure you do and did, because condescension and hypocrisy go hand in hand. My real question then, is whether you feel shame for being an "illegal driver" or an "illegal student" for having committed misdemeanors. I am equally sure you do not.
Dennis Clarke, general manager of Robotics, said the city has no right to an operating manual.
"If you own the copyright, you have a right to use it,"
This is wrong is so many ways. First, the right to "use" is one of the patent rights, not one of the rights in copyrighted works. The exclusive rights in copyrighted works at set out in 17 USC 106, aptly titled "Exclusive rights in copyrighted works." They are: to make copies, to make derivative works, to distribute copies, to perform or display publicly (for artistic works), and to make digital audio transmissions (for recordings).
It is patent rights which say that the patent holder has the exclusive right to "makes, uses, offers to sell, or sells [his] patented invention," as set out in 35 USC 271. They are totally different laws. The general manager of Robotics is wrong, wrong, wrong. (This is putting aside any limitations on the rights which may come about through the first sale doctrine, etc.)
Now the Robotics people may have signed a contract with the city saying who has the right to a manual, etc. I sure as hell hope they do, because if they don't, that speaks volumes about the incompetence of both the lawyers of Robotics and the city's lawyers. But then the issue of whether they have a right to the manual comes down to New Jersey contract law, not copyright.
Wait. I don't develop Ruby. But you're not honestly telling me that it doesn't at least have support for UTF-8, are you? I would have thought that UTF-8, at least, would have been a given for such a project. Is the support only partial, or is it limited, or... something?
The (Japanese) creator of Ruby thinks that Unicode sucks, and therefore Ruby has only half-baked support for Unicode. There are patches to make Rails work with Unicode but they're a little flaky.
If you think iSuppli does a bad job of tear-down you'll need more than idle speculation about how they could be wrong to prove it. (Especially when your argument is, "How do we know it's Toshiba and not Intel that's taking a loss on the CPU?" Please...)
They actually do a pretty credible job (which is why they stay in business), as opposed to the Merrill Lynch "analyses" that come out every so often with numbers pulled totally out of their asses that don't even cover all the parts. I do recall that iSuppli accounts for monopsony power for things like the flash in the iPods, although I'm not going to claim to be any more than a casual reader of their public reports.
Diesel is substantially denser than gasoline and has more BTUs per unit of volume. It is meaningless to compare the mpg of a diesel car with the mpg of a car. I think diesel will have about 20% higher mpg just from the fuel density.
You seriously think that instead of outsourcing tech support to India we should outsource it to Japan? Have you been to Japan since General MacArthur ran the place? Labor is extremely, extremely expensive in Japan -- anything that can be automated is automated. Nobody would ever think of outsourcing low-wage phone jockey work from the US to Japan.
For that matter, the main reason that companies outsource to India is that Indians are native English speakers. On the other hand, Japanese people who can speak English well enough to do technical support are rare and expensive. They could just as easily get a job translating technical articles at $.25 a word, which would be equally boring yet not stressful and way more lucrative.
That's a ceramic, which is non-metallic. There are lots of transparent aluminum compounds out there. Sapphire and ruby for instance are aluminum oxide, doped for color. The "crystals" on fine watches are artificially grown transparent sapphire. You can buy ingots of transparent sapphire from Honeywell.
Because with only 2, there is *less* risk of engine failure.
You aren't serious, are you? ETOPS ("engines turn or passengers swim") standards are only met by certain of the newest twin-engine airplane designs. Historically four-engined airplanes were allowed to go much further away from diversion airports than two-engined airplanes.
The CAFC has led to more widespread patenting, both in terms of raw numbers of patents and in subject matter -- we went from Flook and Diehr to having all software be patentable, for example. And yet the reversal rate on appeal is still 50%.
Patent litigation has grown from a specialist niche, a side job of patent prosecution boutiques, into one of the very few areas of law where billing is practically unlimited. Good, cheap firms like Finnegan bill $4m for a case, good, expensive firms like Weil bill four times that much, and god only knows what the crappy firms are billing -- usually somewhere in the middle. Every law firm wants to chase these fees, for rather obvious reasons.
There's really no way for clients to know who they should hire. The big firms that do an adequate job with corporate work, which the GCs are familiar with, have zero experience with patent litigation. The clients can't even get a reliable estimate of cost, because they don't know if the prospective firm is lowballing because they're lying, lowballing because the prospective firm doesn't know what they're doing, or giving an accurate estimate. And if the client does end up losing, as half of them by definition must, the GC would rather tell the CEO and board of directors that they did the best they could, because they hired a big (in truth mediocre) firm with a recognized name than some hotshot litigation boutique in Palo Alto.
The number of patent cases has gone up -- just look at the size of the USPQ volumes over the last few decades. And of course the size of patent verdicts and settlements has gone up too.
While the law is in some sense more uniform, the decisions certainly aren't, and given the other changes I don't see how you can say this is an improvement.
What exactly do you mean "blundered badly"?
It is a textbook case in many MBA programs how _WELL_ Intel handled this.
They recalled EVERY CPU at their own expense of millions of dollars. Managing the recall, the disposal, the resupply, the competition, AND the PR nightmare was handled so well that this incident has become canon for MBA candidates.
My lord, this reinforces just about every stereotype of b-school students I developed while living in Schwab.
First Intel refused to replace the chips, except for certain classes of customers who really needed accurate results (in the sole opinion of Intel). Then there was a PR war with companies like IBM piling on against Intel to look good to their own customers. There were ridiculous press releases from all companies estimating how often the average user would come across the bug, and whether or not that meant the user had to worry about it. Everyday software programs started to include options to disable the FPU to avoid the bug, and those options are still present in the programs today. It became a total media circus because Intel fucked up its response. To kill the furor, Intel agreed to replace anyone's broken CPU. They took a big charge, and it went away (as you said). Aside from the lingering bad PR (people still remember the incident, unlike all the other errata that were in early CPUs), Intel took a much bigger charge (billions, I think) than it had to by letting its CPU bug get on the evening news. If Intel had rolled over in the very beginning, its obstinancy wouldn't have made the news, and only people who really cared would have learned about the bug and cared enough to replace their chip.
You might compare this to the Nintendo Famicom recall. If you don't remember that motherboard issue, it's probably because Nintendo handled it much better even though it was essentially the same general kind of issue.
The problem being once these important OSS coders see oracle source, they are tainted.
That's not true, any more than someone can be "tainted" by working at one company and then getting a job at another. There's something to being cautious but it's simply not possible, especially in california which disallows non-compete agreements in almost all cases, to take away someone's open source livelihood by "tainting" him. There's nothing special about open source software.
f all you want to do is make sure that you can still use your own idea then a patent is not the way to go. Instead, you just need to tell as many people about the idea as possible in contexts where it is clear that you are the one telling people about the idea (that is, don't do it anonymously). Ideally you would publish it in a major journal but even just putting up a website precisely describing the idea would be a good start.
That works in theory for blocking patents on your idea, but in practice it doesn't because the patent office won't find it when they're doing a prior art search for another patent. At least if you file for a patent (A) they're likely to find it because their prior art searches rely mainly on patents and patent applications, not Google (and there's too much garbage on Google for them to ever find your paper anyway) and (B) you can file for an interference if someone else does manage to get a patent that overlaps with your earlier patent.
Second, this question was about manufacturer misappropriation, in which case the problem isn't that they file for a patent and "rip you off" out of getting your own patent, it's that they will make money selling the product you told them about, and without you having your own patent there's not a damn thing you can do about it. Making your idea in the public domain will ensure you never see a dime of royalties. If you're going to a manufacturer, make sure you have a patent first and tell them about it. They won't be tempted to "rip you off," they won't be scared that you will bring an expensive and hard-to-decide-correctly state law case and everyone will be sleep easier at night.
Lastly, even if you do publish your prior art, you'll never find a contingency fee lawyer to defend you against a bogus patent, so it's one step away from being useless. Contingency fees only work on the plaintiff side, or where there is a fee recovery statute, and patent law almost never awards attorney fees to the winner.
This (talking to manufacturers and wanting to make sure they don't "rip off" your idea) is absolutely the best reason to file a patent. I can think of three cases off the top of my head (Colgate, Walmart, and Evans) where a would-be inventor talked to a manufacturer without having a patent. Later the inventor finds out that the company is producing the same product. He sues, and is totally out of luck. Because he didn't file the patent, the "ripped off idea" is now prior art against him.
And he can't really sue in state court, because trade secret misappropriation is really hard to prove as a practical matter. State law claims are messy for everyone. In fact manufacturers historically wouldn't even talk to inventors if they didn't have a patent, in order to prevent groundless state law litigation.
If you're at the point of talking to manufacturers, then $10k (which is what a patent costs from a reputable patent firm) is not going to be a large amount of money.
Also, some people claim that patents are infeasible to enforce, which isn't really true. There are patent contingency firms (mediocre but-good-enough-for-this-purpose lawyers) as well as patent contingency funds like Rembrandt who pay for top-quality lawyers. If the claim is good, it will be brought on contingency, and if the claim is good, the guy who's "ripping you off" will back down rather than waste a lot of money fighting a losing battle. The key here is that your patent is directed towards the product, so you can use narrow claims that describe the product exactly. This isn't a case of someone who has a pie-in-the-sky idea, somehow gets a broad claim through the patent office, and then sues Microsoft ten years later for a billion dollars.
Patents have never applied to personal use. This is explicit in UK and (as far as I know) US patent law. Regardless of the outcome of the case you can continue to use your XBox and Lucent can't do a damn thing about it.
There is no "personal use" exception in US patent law - the closest you get is the common law experimental use exception which was nearly squished out of existence in the case against Duke University.
No, we're talking about $82 million. That's a huge number both in absolute terms and as a patent infringement verdict. There are only a handful of verdicts that have been larger.
It's also not clear that the relevant percentage should be total playstation sales rather than controller sales. Under the Fonar and Bose standard, to use the entire market sales as the base for royalties, the infringer must show that the market was caused by the infringing device. There are lots of console controllers of recent vintage that didn't have rumble function -- the wavebird, the original N64 controller, the original PSX controller, the dreamcast controller, etc. Sony wouldn't have lost much sales not including the rumble.
Slashdot Mirror
To which you said, "Uh, done? I don't keep old casebooks on my shelf for the hell of it, you know."
On Slashdot, you are my favorite kind of lawyer. In real life, my least favorite. You are smug, lording it over other people, and 100% wrong.
If you think that the trademark law is enabled by the copyright and patent clause of the US Constitution, you might want to read the 1879 Trademark Cases. They are Supreme Court cases, so they should be in the old casebooks on your shelf. To wit, the federal trademark laws stem from the commerce clause, not the patent and copyright clause, precisely because the patent and copyright clause says nothing about trademark. This is the opposite of what you said.
Thus, your argument that the word "IP" has some kind of constitutional meaning is void.
I sure hope you don't fancy yourself an "IP lawyer."
Totally wrong.
It means the TSA monkeys never get to paw through your luggage without you being there to watch them, and it means that your luggage won't miss the flight or be sent to Timbuktu.
Boy, you win the irony award today. The term "illegal alien" is the loaded, non-technical word ("PC speak," as you say, is another loaded, non-technical word). The correct term is "EWI" or entered without inspection.
Now the term "undocumented immigrant" does not mean quite the same thing, because an immigrant is someone who intends to remain in the U.S, and EWI does not imply that the person intends to remain in the U.S. Additionally, there are people who enter under visas (or visa waivers), and then simply fail to leave when their time is up. These are not EWI, because they were inspected when they entered.
However, as a matter of practice, people who are here as tourists and for business trips do it the proper way, being inspected at the border. Thus "EWI" tends to imply "immigrant." And there are relatively few working-class people who take the trouble to get a visa, then overstay. Much simpler just to cross the border. Thus, it is accurate in practice to refer to EWI persons as "undocumented immigrants" and vice-versa.
Now, as for the "illegal alien" word, I would like you to conduct a simple exercise, since you seem to have picked up so much erudition from Rush Limbaugh or Sean Hannity or whomever. I would like you to find me the statute in the U.S. Code which says that it is a crime for someone to enter EWI, or to overstay a visa. Go ahead, I can wait. Are you back yet?
The answer is, there is no such statute. Someone can be deported for not having authorization to be here (or the more modern term, "undergo removal proceedings"), however deportation proceedings are civil in nature, not criminal. They're not even a misdemeanor. (It is a crime, a felony in fact, to return to the US after being deported, but that's altogether different.)
So how's your driving? Do you ever exceed the speed limit? Do you coast through stop signs when you think nobody's around? Do you ever smoke weed? When you were a freshman in college, did you drink beer? I'm sure you do and did, because condescension and hypocrisy go hand in hand. My real question then, is whether you feel shame for being an "illegal driver" or an "illegal student" for having committed misdemeanors. I am equally sure you do not.
Dennis Clarke, general manager of Robotics, said the city has no right to an operating manual. "If you own the copyright, you have a right to use it,"
This is wrong is so many ways. First, the right to "use" is one of the patent rights, not one of the rights in copyrighted works. The exclusive rights in copyrighted works at set out in 17 USC 106, aptly titled "Exclusive rights in copyrighted works." They are: to make copies, to make derivative works, to distribute copies, to perform or display publicly (for artistic works), and to make digital audio transmissions (for recordings).
It is patent rights which say that the patent holder has the exclusive right to "makes, uses, offers to sell, or sells [his] patented invention," as set out in 35 USC 271. They are totally different laws. The general manager of Robotics is wrong, wrong, wrong. (This is putting aside any limitations on the rights which may come about through the first sale doctrine, etc.)
Now the Robotics people may have signed a contract with the city saying who has the right to a manual, etc. I sure as hell hope they do, because if they don't, that speaks volumes about the incompetence of both the lawyers of Robotics and the city's lawyers. But then the issue of whether they have a right to the manual comes down to New Jersey contract law, not copyright.
You bought a Tandy?
The (Japanese) creator of Ruby thinks that Unicode sucks, and therefore Ruby has only half-baked support for Unicode. There are patches to make Rails work with Unicode but they're a little flaky.
They actually do a pretty credible job (which is why they stay in business), as opposed to the Merrill Lynch "analyses" that come out every so often with numbers pulled totally out of their asses that don't even cover all the parts. I do recall that iSuppli accounts for monopsony power for things like the flash in the iPods, although I'm not going to claim to be any more than a casual reader of their public reports.
Diesel is substantially denser than gasoline and has more BTUs per unit of volume. It is meaningless to compare the mpg of a diesel car with the mpg of a car. I think diesel will have about 20% higher mpg just from the fuel density.
For that matter, the main reason that companies outsource to India is that Indians are native English speakers. On the other hand, Japanese people who can speak English well enough to do technical support are rare and expensive. They could just as easily get a job translating technical articles at $.25 a word, which would be equally boring yet not stressful and way more lucrative.
That's a ceramic, which is non-metallic. There are lots of transparent aluminum compounds out there. Sapphire and ruby for instance are aluminum oxide, doped for color. The "crystals" on fine watches are artificially grown transparent sapphire. You can buy ingots of transparent sapphire from Honeywell.
You aren't serious, are you? ETOPS ("engines turn or passengers swim") standards are only met by certain of the newest twin-engine airplane designs. Historically four-engined airplanes were allowed to go much further away from diversion airports than two-engined airplanes.
The article was about why known bugs ("thousands of bugs") aren't fixed before ship, not why all bugs aren't found.
The CAFC has led to more widespread patenting, both in terms of raw numbers of patents and in subject matter -- we went from Flook and Diehr to having all software be patentable, for example. And yet the reversal rate on appeal is still 50%.
Patent litigation has grown from a specialist niche, a side job of patent prosecution boutiques, into one of the very few areas of law where billing is practically unlimited. Good, cheap firms like Finnegan bill $4m for a case, good, expensive firms like Weil bill four times that much, and god only knows what the crappy firms are billing -- usually somewhere in the middle. Every law firm wants to chase these fees, for rather obvious reasons.
There's really no way for clients to know who they should hire. The big firms that do an adequate job with corporate work, which the GCs are familiar with, have zero experience with patent litigation. The clients can't even get a reliable estimate of cost, because they don't know if the prospective firm is lowballing because they're lying, lowballing because the prospective firm doesn't know what they're doing, or giving an accurate estimate. And if the client does end up losing, as half of them by definition must, the GC would rather tell the CEO and board of directors that they did the best they could, because they hired a big (in truth mediocre) firm with a recognized name than some hotshot litigation boutique in Palo Alto.
The number of patent cases has gone up -- just look at the size of the USPQ volumes over the last few decades. And of course the size of patent verdicts and settlements has gone up too.
While the law is in some sense more uniform, the decisions certainly aren't, and given the other changes I don't see how you can say this is an improvement.
That was the most informative thing I've ever read on slashdot.
My lord, this reinforces just about every stereotype of b-school students I developed while living in Schwab.
First Intel refused to replace the chips, except for certain classes of customers who really needed accurate results (in the sole opinion of Intel). Then there was a PR war with companies like IBM piling on against Intel to look good to their own customers. There were ridiculous press releases from all companies estimating how often the average user would come across the bug, and whether or not that meant the user had to worry about it. Everyday software programs started to include options to disable the FPU to avoid the bug, and those options are still present in the programs today. It became a total media circus because Intel fucked up its response. To kill the furor, Intel agreed to replace anyone's broken CPU. They took a big charge, and it went away (as you said). Aside from the lingering bad PR (people still remember the incident, unlike all the other errata that were in early CPUs), Intel took a much bigger charge (billions, I think) than it had to by letting its CPU bug get on the evening news. If Intel had rolled over in the very beginning, its obstinancy wouldn't have made the news, and only people who really cared would have learned about the bug and cared enough to replace their chip.
You might compare this to the Nintendo Famicom recall. If you don't remember that motherboard issue, it's probably because Nintendo handled it much better even though it was essentially the same general kind of issue.
You need 100GB of music to match your mood swings? You know they have medication for that.
That's not true, any more than someone can be "tainted" by working at one company and then getting a job at another. There's something to being cautious but it's simply not possible, especially in california which disallows non-compete agreements in almost all cases, to take away someone's open source livelihood by "tainting" him. There's nothing special about open source software.
That works in theory for blocking patents on your idea, but in practice it doesn't because the patent office won't find it when they're doing a prior art search for another patent. At least if you file for a patent (A) they're likely to find it because their prior art searches rely mainly on patents and patent applications, not Google (and there's too much garbage on Google for them to ever find your paper anyway) and (B) you can file for an interference if someone else does manage to get a patent that overlaps with your earlier patent.
Second, this question was about manufacturer misappropriation, in which case the problem isn't that they file for a patent and "rip you off" out of getting your own patent, it's that they will make money selling the product you told them about, and without you having your own patent there's not a damn thing you can do about it. Making your idea in the public domain will ensure you never see a dime of royalties. If you're going to a manufacturer, make sure you have a patent first and tell them about it. They won't be tempted to "rip you off," they won't be scared that you will bring an expensive and hard-to-decide-correctly state law case and everyone will be sleep easier at night.
Lastly, even if you do publish your prior art, you'll never find a contingency fee lawyer to defend you against a bogus patent, so it's one step away from being useless. Contingency fees only work on the plaintiff side, or where there is a fee recovery statute, and patent law almost never awards attorney fees to the winner.
And he can't really sue in state court, because trade secret misappropriation is really hard to prove as a practical matter. State law claims are messy for everyone. In fact manufacturers historically wouldn't even talk to inventors if they didn't have a patent, in order to prevent groundless state law litigation.
If you're at the point of talking to manufacturers, then $10k (which is what a patent costs from a reputable patent firm) is not going to be a large amount of money.
Also, some people claim that patents are infeasible to enforce, which isn't really true. There are patent contingency firms (mediocre but-good-enough-for-this-purpose lawyers) as well as patent contingency funds like Rembrandt who pay for top-quality lawyers. If the claim is good, it will be brought on contingency, and if the claim is good, the guy who's "ripping you off" will back down rather than waste a lot of money fighting a losing battle. The key here is that your patent is directed towards the product, so you can use narrow claims that describe the product exactly. This isn't a case of someone who has a pie-in-the-sky idea, somehow gets a broad claim through the patent office, and then sues Microsoft ten years later for a billion dollars.
There is no "personal use" exception in US patent law - the closest you get is the common law experimental use exception which was nearly squished out of existence in the case against Duke University.
Literally millions in Japan, my ass. If there is a million miles of railroad track in the whole world I'd be mildly surprised.
>That's not patentable either.
Eh? Have you read In re Lowry?
You're exactly wrong. I don't know if you're trying to be funny or if you make a point of talking about things you know nothing about.
No, we're talking about $82 million. That's a huge number both in absolute terms and as a patent infringement verdict. There are only a handful of verdicts that have been larger.
It's also not clear that the relevant percentage should be total playstation sales rather than controller sales. Under the Fonar and Bose standard, to use the entire market sales as the base for royalties, the infringer must show that the market was caused by the infringing device. There are lots of console controllers of recent vintage that didn't have rumble function -- the wavebird, the original N64 controller, the original PSX controller, the dreamcast controller, etc. Sony wouldn't have lost much sales not including the rumble.