Patents are supposed to be non-obvious to experts in the field. There is nothing novel or non-obvious about this one. Anybody who seriously studies encryption would have known about this technique years ago. Surely there are academic papers out there describing this, which pre-date this 1999 patent. This is very similar to storing encrypted information using a customer's password as part of the key, so the entire key does not have to be stored on the server.
Yes, that would be sensible but we're talking about the law here.
There is a much higher burden of proof involved to invalidate a patent than there is to show non-infringement. No matter how obvious or stupid a patent is, it is assumed that it had a valid basis for being granted, and it requires very compelling evidence to overturn it.
"I happen to hold a software patent for an idea that I'm currently marketing. If it werent for the patent I would have _NO CHANCE_ at making any money on my idea. As a result, I would have had no reason to spend the thousands of hours researching it. **THE IDEA WOULD NEVER HAVE SEEN THE LIGHT OF DAY**"
Maybe YOU would not have brought the idea to see the light of day, but there is a high probability that somebody else would have done it if you didn't, and it is very likely somebody else already has done it before you but didn't patent it. Tell us what your patent number is, and we'll almost certainly be able to find somebody who already has a fully functioning product that implements what your patent does, and they did it without owning or having knowledge of the patent.
Over 99% of patented software would have been created anyway by the patent holder or somebody else if software patents didn't exist. Also, over 99% of software accidentally implements somebody else's patent. Even the techniques that are advanced and original enough to possibly deserve the patent they received, like RSA encryption and MP3 compression, have had equivalent alternative unpatented implementations created by others.
Plain and simple, there is almost no software out there that would not have been created by somebody if software patents didn't exist, but there is a lot that has been aborted or delayed because of the minefield of software patents that exists.
If they can lock out other software like this, they will surely use this technique, probably via Palladium, to lock out other operating systems from the PC market. A future version of MS Windows will only run on specially protected hardware, and that hardware will only run software that is digitally signed by Microsoft. You will need a modchip to run Linux on your PC, and MS will use the DMCA to have the modchips declared illegal.
Software patents should be eliminated because they are just plain unnnecessary for promoting innovation. There isn't any software out there that would not have been developed if software patents didn't exist. Most software produced in the world today isn't protected by patents (although they may unknowingly infringe on somebody else's patent). Of those that are patented, either the original developers would have created it anyway, or somebody else would have independently created an equivalent. The vast majority of software patents already have been accidentally implemented by others, who created their equivalent implementations without the incentive of owning a patent or the knowledge of somebody else's existing one.
The same thing applies to patenting business processes - just plain unnecessary. A business won't decide to abstain from an innovative business model because of the lack of an ability to use patents to prevent competitors from using it. Quite the opposite - once having conceived the idea, they will be in a haste to implement it precisely because they fear their competitors may also do it and they don't want to get left behind. A business model or process that would be unprofitable without patent protection isn't a truly innovative one. Only bad ones and obvious ones have a need for patent protection to make them profitable, and the truly innovative ones would be implemented anyway.
The purpose of patents is to encourage or accelerate the innovation that would not have occurred if patents didn't exist. Software and business patents don't fit that mold because whatever the patents implement would have been done anyway, either by the original creator or soon afterwards by someone else.
If they were sensible, they would insist that patents be worded in as simple terms as is reasonably possible before granting the patent. But the way most patents are written, apparently they grant the patent if they don't understand it, that's why we see all these twenty-page descriptions for doing something as simple as 1+1.
It's the designers, not so much the coders (unless the designers are also coding) who have to be well aware of the big picture - since they are the ones who direct how all the little black boxes work with each other.
No, this is not a joke. The solution to the problem of the loss of bone and muscle mass may be something low-tech that already exists. If you've seen how astronauts exercise in space, it is generally some type of stationary bicycle work or other types of exercise that do not work the muscles and bones intensely enough.
What they really need is something that provides a variety of resistance exercises without relying on weights, such as Bowflex or spring-based machines, and they need to train heavy like a bodybuilder when using them in space. They should probably even train harder and more often than bodybuilders would, since they have the rest of the time when their muscles can get near-complete relaxation in the weightlessness of space.
It's not just about seven lives, but the enormous investment made in those lives and the value of the work they do. Each mission cost $300 million, the craft cost $10 billion, and each of those individuals spent decades of their lives preparing for it, with millions spent on them in the process.
That has now literally gone up in smoke, in addition to the loss of what would have been gained from future missions. The contributions of the space program to science - including a wide variety of medical techniques such as mammograms and treatments for chronic dizziness - have been hit with a big setback, and it makes people both angry and sad to think of what those billion$ could have done for starving people in America and elsewhere, instead of tossing it into a program that blows up every 15 years.
If they can be enlightened enough to raise the bar for genetic patents, hopefully they will lean in the same direction with software. The cause of their toughened stance seems to have the same roots as the problem with software patents: they were getting too many trivial applications for which they don't have enough time and money to examine.
Movie viewers were sued by the MPAA for turning up 5 minutes late at the theater. Their tardiness caused them to miss the first 5 minutes of the movie, which wreaked irrepairable and irreversible damage to the directors in Hollywood, because unless every viewer sees 100% of every film, their artistic reputation will be destroyed.
At the same theater, other viewers were sued for going to the bathroom in the middle of the film or leaving early. The amount of compensation sought in the lawsuits was based on the length of time the viewers had missed from the film, so eventually they decided it was not worth it to sue a young lady who covered up her eyes for 2.3 seconds during the beheading scene.
The only sure way of censoring a DVD would for an editor to go into the DVD and say "1:15:30 to 1:15:42 are to be removed", "Insert alternative dialogue in Robert DeNiro's dialogue from 0:1:15 to 2:11:10".
Based on what I've read so far about it, that is exactly how it is done. Somebody watches the DVD and notes the times where the so-called offensive scenes and words are located, and those times are fed to the special DVD player which skips video and mutes the sound according to the supplied data.
If ClearPlay isn't creating or distributing any copies, how are they violating any copyrights?
If I publish a newsletter for filtering books that consists of instructions like "tear out pages 123, 345, and 456, and cut out the second paragraph on page 789", how am I violating anybody's copyright and why should I pay royalties?
"Hollywood is offended by this for artistic reasons. When someone creates a Schindler's List or Saving Private Ryan, the horrors of war need to be seen. No one should be "kiddie-izing" such films.
What if I were to decide that Snow White needs sex scenes? Should I be able to hire animators to add a dwarves-gang-banging-Snow-White scene and sell (or rent) a DVD with that? Should I be able to create a PVR-style box to automatically add those scenes when someone watches the DVD?"
One word: YES.
If you aren't making copies of the edited version, you can mix and match the scenes however you want. If somebody wants to buy the sexed-up DVD player you made, they should be able to do so, as long as they are informed that the player isn't playing the original content 100%.
If somebody personally doesn't want to see the horrors of war in Schindler's List, they should be free to do so, as long as they're not preventing anybody else from seeing the full thing. I suppose you'd rather have people's eyes held open with duct tape and their bodies chained down to their seat for the duration of the film, so they are forced to either see all or nothing?
Sure, that is how you would WANT it. Just like copyright holders want to collect royalties from secondary sales, but don't have the right to do so.
Skipping certain scenes or muting certain words of a movie is just like ripping pages out of a book or blackening over selected words with a magic marker. No copies are being made or distributed, so copyright law does not prevent the purchasers of the books or movies from deleting any content as they desire. Doesn't matter what you want. Copyright law does not grant infinite control.
Actually, open source software has been pretty good at creating jobs. For example, there are many web programmers and web hosting companies that wouldn't be in business if they couldn't use Linux and Apache and instead had to pay big bucks for proprietary server software.
If a major database seller like Oracle goes out of business because open source databases outperform them, the developers at Oracle would lose their jobs, but then the companies that have been sending their billions to Oracle would have that money available for other purposes like writing apps on top of the open source database that replaced Oracle.
I don't think the baby boom retirements will open up that many jobs in IT. Many of that generation has already been laid off and will never be rehired because of their age, and with IT being a relatively new field there aren't that many fiftysomethings around to begin with.
Was the shipping cost displayed before you bid on it? If it was, I don't see how he could have had it "weighed and metered" already. The weight can be determined prior to the auction, but it's generally going to cost less to ship if you live in the same zip code than if you're 5 states away.
If you only learned the shipping cost after you bid, then you do have reason to get steamed.
It is common for a seller to quote the maximum shipping price within the United States, then if yours happens to be less they pocket the difference. As long as they stated the shipping charge up front, that is legitimate. There is no rule saying that the sellers can't profit from markups on the shipping costs and the item costs.
Whenever you bid on something, think of the total cost including shipping, and don't bid on it if you think that total is too high. You knew what the total was before you bid on it.
It is true that some sellers do jack up the shipping costs way beyond the actual, because of the psychological impact. People tend to focus on the bid amount without thinking of the shipping cost. When you place a $30 bid on an item with a $20 shipping cost, you're really spending $50. But because people's minds tend to focus only on the $30 bid, they end up paying $50 for something they otherwise wouldn't have spent more than $40.
The functioning of a multi-celled organism such as a vertebrate has incredibly high fault tolerance and would be a better analogy.
For example, if you stick a pin or needle in your finger, all that happens is you have a moment of pain and lose a drop or few of blood. There is zero impact to your life, health or functional abilities (except in the 0.0001% of cases where a serious infection occurs). The equivalent damage to a software system might be something like changing one bit in a 100-megabyte program. Such a tiny amount of damage can easily bring the whole system crashing down or spitting out gargage information.
Unlike software systems, animals (and plants, for that matter) can have multiple major components of their body damaged by disease or injury, yet not only do they survive, but they can recover well enough that their functional abilities and lifespan aren't damaged. You can lose your spleen, a kidney, or a good chunk of your liver, and eventually enjoy the same quality and quantity of life as those who have undamaged organs.
For mere survival, the tolerance is far higher. People have lost multiple limbs, taken a bullet in the head or abdomen, had a lung collapse, or broken several bones and recovered to live to their eighties and beyond.
It is very difficult to inflict a tiny damage that kills a large organism; the damage would have to be precisely directed at one of its weakest and most vital spots. But it is very easy to essentially destroy a large program by making a small random change.
"I'll bet dollars to donuts that your DBA knows far more about databases than you do, even if you know many more trendy buzzwords than he does."
Yes, overall a DBA should know and probably does know more about databases than the developers. However, they can be very resistant to use new features simply because they don't understand them, not because they have knowledge of it and have weighed the pros and cons before deciding against it. Sometimes I do know more about some aspects of the database, because I've actually used the feature(s) successfully in prior projects at another client, while the current DBA hasn't used it or even read up about it.
If the upper-echelon schools like MIT and Harvard decided to move to a system where they accepted the top 10% of applicants who are willing to pay the most, instead of the top 10% in terms of academic qualifications, they would get a set of rich kids but their overall ability as a group would be lower. As a result, either a large percentage of the students would fail to graduate, or they would have to dumb down the course material so more of them would pass. If they did either of those things, they would become less desirable as schools, and before long very few people would be willing to pay big bucks to attend them.
They tried to say that they should not treat the Internet differently than other published media, but their decision singled out the Internet for special treatment.
If the libelous statements were made in a US-based newspaper, of which some copies were physically mailed to Australia, Australians would not have been able to sue the US publisher. But when the statements are on a US-based web site, which is "mailed" to Australia via the Internet, Australians can sue.
The problem is that they *are* trying to force you to use their service, by gradually removing features that previously would run on your standalone PC.
Slashdot Mirror
Patents are supposed to be non-obvious to experts in the field. There is nothing novel or non-obvious about this one. Anybody who seriously studies encryption would have known about this technique years ago. Surely there are academic papers out there describing this, which pre-date this 1999 patent. This is very similar to storing encrypted information using a customer's password as part of the key, so the entire key does not have to be stored on the server.
Yes, that would be sensible but we're talking about the law here.
There is a much higher burden of proof involved to invalidate a patent than there is to show non-infringement. No matter how obvious or stupid a patent is, it is assumed that it had a valid basis for being granted, and it requires very compelling evidence to overturn it.
"I happen to hold a software patent for an idea that I'm currently marketing. If it werent for the patent I would have _NO CHANCE_ at making any money on my idea. As a result, I would have had no reason to spend the thousands of hours researching it. **THE IDEA WOULD NEVER HAVE SEEN THE LIGHT OF DAY**"
Maybe YOU would not have brought the idea to see the light of day, but there is a high probability that somebody else would have done it if you didn't, and it is very likely somebody else already has done it before you but didn't patent it. Tell us what your patent number is, and we'll almost certainly be able to find somebody who already has a fully functioning product that implements what your patent does, and they did it without owning or having knowledge of the patent.
Over 99% of patented software would have been created anyway by the patent holder or somebody else if software patents didn't exist. Also, over 99% of software accidentally implements somebody else's patent. Even the techniques that are advanced and original enough to possibly deserve the patent they received, like RSA encryption and MP3 compression, have had equivalent alternative unpatented implementations created by others.
Plain and simple, there is almost no software out there that would not have been created by somebody if software patents didn't exist, but there is a lot that has been aborted or delayed because of the minefield of software patents that exists.
If they can lock out other software like this, they will surely use this technique, probably via Palladium, to lock out other operating systems from the PC market. A future version of MS Windows will only run on specially protected hardware, and that hardware will only run software that is digitally signed by Microsoft. You will need a modchip to run Linux on your PC, and MS will use the DMCA to have the modchips declared illegal.
Software patents should be eliminated because they are just plain unnnecessary for promoting innovation. There isn't any software out there that would not have been developed if software patents didn't exist. Most software produced in the world today isn't protected by patents (although they may unknowingly infringe on somebody else's patent). Of those that are patented, either the original developers would have created it anyway, or somebody else would have independently created an equivalent. The vast majority of software patents already have been accidentally implemented by others, who created their equivalent implementations without the incentive of owning a patent or the knowledge of somebody else's existing one.
The same thing applies to patenting business processes - just plain unnecessary. A business won't decide to abstain from an innovative business model because of the lack of an ability to use patents to prevent competitors from using it. Quite the opposite - once having conceived the idea, they will be in a haste to implement it precisely because they fear their competitors may also do it and they don't want to get left behind. A business model or process that would be unprofitable without patent protection isn't a truly innovative one. Only bad ones and obvious ones have a need for patent protection to make them profitable, and the truly innovative ones would be implemented anyway.
The purpose of patents is to encourage or accelerate the innovation that would not have occurred if patents didn't exist. Software and business patents don't fit that mold because whatever the patents implement would have been done anyway, either by the original creator or soon afterwards by someone else.
If they were sensible, they would insist that patents be worded in as simple terms as is reasonably possible before granting the patent. But the way most patents are written, apparently they grant the patent if they don't understand it, that's why we see all these twenty-page descriptions for doing something as simple as 1+1.
It's the designers, not so much the coders (unless the designers are also coding) who have to be well aware of the big picture - since they are the ones who direct how all the little black boxes work with each other.
No, this is not a joke. The solution to the problem of the loss of bone and muscle mass may be something low-tech that already exists. If you've seen how astronauts exercise in space, it is generally some type of stationary bicycle work or other types of exercise that do not work the muscles and bones intensely enough.
What they really need is something that provides a variety of resistance exercises without relying on weights, such as Bowflex or spring-based machines, and they need to train heavy like a bodybuilder when using them in space. They should probably even train harder and more often than bodybuilders would, since they have the rest of the time when their muscles can get near-complete relaxation in the weightlessness of space.
It's not just about seven lives, but the enormous investment made in those lives and the value of the work they do. Each mission cost $300 million, the craft cost $10 billion, and each of those individuals spent decades of their lives preparing for it, with millions spent on them in the process.
That has now literally gone up in smoke, in addition to the loss of what would have been gained from future missions. The contributions of the space program to science - including a wide variety of medical techniques such as mammograms and treatments for chronic dizziness - have been hit with a big setback, and it makes people both angry and sad to think of what those billion$ could have done for starving people in America and elsewhere, instead of tossing it into a program that blows up every 15 years.
If they can be enlightened enough to raise the bar for genetic patents, hopefully they will lean in the same direction with software. The cause of their toughened stance seems to have the same roots as the problem with software patents: they were getting too many trivial applications for which they don't have enough time and money to examine.
Movie viewers were sued by the MPAA for turning up 5 minutes late at the theater. Their tardiness caused them to miss the first 5 minutes of the movie, which wreaked irrepairable and irreversible damage to the directors in Hollywood, because unless every viewer sees 100% of every film, their artistic reputation will be destroyed.
At the same theater, other viewers were sued for going to the bathroom in the middle of the film or leaving early. The amount of compensation sought in the lawsuits was based on the length of time the viewers had missed from the film, so eventually they decided it was not worth it to sue a young lady who covered up her eyes for 2.3 seconds during the beheading scene.
The only sure way of censoring a DVD would for an editor to go into the DVD and say "1:15:30 to 1:15:42 are to be removed", "Insert alternative dialogue in Robert DeNiro's dialogue from 0:1:15 to 2:11:10".
Based on what I've read so far about it, that is exactly how it is done. Somebody watches the DVD and notes the times where the so-called offensive scenes and words are located, and those times are fed to the special DVD player which skips video and mutes the sound according to the supplied data.
If ClearPlay isn't creating or distributing any copies, how are they violating any copyrights?
If I publish a newsletter for filtering books that consists of instructions like "tear out pages 123, 345, and 456, and cut out the second paragraph on page 789", how am I violating anybody's copyright and why should I pay royalties?
"Hollywood is offended by this for artistic reasons. When someone creates a Schindler's List or Saving Private Ryan, the horrors of war need to be seen. No one should be "kiddie-izing" such films.
What if I were to decide that Snow White needs sex scenes? Should I be able to hire animators to add a dwarves-gang-banging-Snow-White scene and sell (or rent) a DVD with that? Should I be able to create a PVR-style box to automatically add those scenes when someone watches the DVD?"
One word: YES.
If you aren't making copies of the edited version, you can mix and match the scenes however you want. If somebody wants to buy the sexed-up DVD player you made, they should be able to do so, as long as they are informed that the player isn't playing the original content 100%.
If somebody personally doesn't want to see the horrors of war in Schindler's List, they should be free to do so, as long as they're not preventing anybody else from seeing the full thing. I suppose you'd rather have people's eyes held open with duct tape and their bodies chained down to their seat for the duration of the film, so they are forced to either see all or nothing?
Sure, that is how you would WANT it. Just like copyright holders want to collect royalties from secondary sales, but don't have the right to do so.
Skipping certain scenes or muting certain words of a movie is just like ripping pages out of a book or blackening over selected words with a magic marker. No copies are being made or distributed, so copyright law does not prevent the purchasers of the books or movies from deleting any content as they desire. Doesn't matter what you want. Copyright law does not grant infinite control.
Actually, open source software has been pretty good at creating jobs. For example, there are many web programmers and web hosting companies that wouldn't be in business if they couldn't use Linux and Apache and instead had to pay big bucks for proprietary server software.
If a major database seller like Oracle goes out of business because open source databases outperform them, the developers at Oracle would lose their jobs, but then the companies that have been sending their billions to Oracle would have that money available for other purposes like writing apps on top of the open source database that replaced Oracle.
I don't think the baby boom retirements will open up that many jobs in IT. Many of that generation has already been laid off and will never be rehired because of their age, and with IT being a relatively new field there aren't that many fiftysomethings around to begin with.
Was the shipping cost displayed before you bid on it? If it was, I don't see how he could have had it "weighed and metered" already. The weight can be determined prior to the auction, but it's generally going to cost less to ship if you live in the same zip code than if you're 5 states away.
If you only learned the shipping cost after you bid, then you do have reason to get steamed.
"Why don't they just not allow lawyers on Ebay? Wouldn't it make things much smoother?"
Then they'll come together as a group and sue for having been disallowed on eBay.
It is common for a seller to quote the maximum shipping price within the United States, then if yours happens to be less they pocket the difference. As long as they stated the shipping charge up front, that is legitimate. There is no rule saying that the sellers can't profit from markups on the shipping costs and the item costs.
Whenever you bid on something, think of the total cost including shipping, and don't bid on it if you think that total is too high. You knew what the total was before you bid on it.
It is true that some sellers do jack up the shipping costs way beyond the actual, because of the psychological impact. People tend to focus on the bid amount without thinking of the shipping cost. When you place a $30 bid on an item with a $20 shipping cost, you're really spending $50. But because people's minds tend to focus only on the $30 bid, they end up paying $50 for something they otherwise wouldn't have spent more than $40.
The functioning of a multi-celled organism such as a vertebrate has incredibly high fault tolerance and would be a better analogy.
For example, if you stick a pin or needle in your finger, all that happens is you have a moment of pain and lose a drop or few of blood. There is zero impact to your life, health or functional abilities (except in the 0.0001% of cases where a serious infection occurs). The equivalent damage to a software system might be something like changing one bit in a 100-megabyte program. Such a tiny amount of damage can easily bring the whole system crashing down or spitting out gargage information.
Unlike software systems, animals (and plants, for that matter) can have multiple major components of their body damaged by disease or injury, yet not only do they survive, but they can recover well enough that their functional abilities and lifespan aren't damaged. You can lose your spleen, a kidney, or a good chunk of your liver, and eventually enjoy the same quality and quantity of life as those who have undamaged organs.
For mere survival, the tolerance is far higher. People have lost multiple limbs, taken a bullet in the head or abdomen, had a lung collapse, or broken several bones and recovered to live to their eighties and beyond.
It is very difficult to inflict a tiny damage that kills a large organism; the damage would have to be precisely directed at one of its weakest and most vital spots. But it is very easy to essentially destroy a large program by making a small random change.
"I'll bet dollars to donuts that your DBA knows far more about databases than you do, even if you know many more trendy buzzwords than he does."
Yes, overall a DBA should know and probably does know more about databases than the developers. However, they can be very resistant to use new features simply because they don't understand them, not because they have knowledge of it and have weighed the pros and cons before deciding against it. Sometimes I do know more about some aspects of the database, because I've actually used the feature(s) successfully in prior projects at another client, while the current DBA hasn't used it or even read up about it.
If the upper-echelon schools like MIT and Harvard decided to move to a system where they accepted the top 10% of applicants who are willing to pay the most, instead of the top 10% in terms of academic qualifications, they would get a set of rich kids but their overall ability as a group would be lower. As a result, either a large percentage of the students would fail to graduate, or they would have to dumb down the course material so more of them would pass. If they did either of those things, they would become less desirable as schools, and before long very few people would be willing to pay big bucks to attend them.
They tried to say that they should not treat the Internet differently than other published media, but their decision singled out the Internet for special treatment.
If the libelous statements were made in a US-based newspaper, of which some copies were physically mailed to Australia, Australians would not have been able to sue the US publisher. But when the statements are on a US-based web site, which is "mailed" to Australia via the Internet, Australians can sue.
The problem is that they *are* trying to force you to use their service, by gradually removing features that previously would run on your standalone PC.