(Perhaps that's why 1800s US literacy was 99% - lots of free, cheap books available for reading.)
Also, TV was a lot less popular then.
Re:They also left out a good deal of context
on
How Did Wikileaks Do It?
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
As the sibling post notes, the Fox News article mentions that the truck that pulled up was unmarked. No red cross/crescent, no "ambulance", no nothing. If they're assuming that the people they just killed were enemy combatants because they had AKs and RPGs, then the next logical assumption is that the unmarked van that pulls up is affiliated with those people and is therefore also a target.
So, no, Fox didn't fail to mention that small detail.
Re:They also left out a good deal of context
on
How Did Wikileaks Do It?
·
· Score: 2, Informative
In that case, you might be interested in this article in which a Fox News reporter talks to one of the Wikileaks editors associated with the release of this video. That editor states that it appears that one of the people killed in the video was carrying an AK-47 while another was carrying an RPG, even though Wikileaks neglected to include this in their commentary on the video.
I know, I know, this is Slashdot, and dishing on Fox News is the most effective form of karma-whoring. Have at it, folks. Nevertheless, the substance of the article calls into question the veracity of (and the motives behind) the video and commentary.
To be more precise, it has to meet either one of the following criteria: 1) the method is tied to a particular machine or apparatus; or 2) the method performs a transformation of a particular article into a different state or thing. Furthermore, the machine tie or the transformative step can't merely be related to insignificant extra-solution activity, so if you're talking a computer-implemented method of some sort, the machine tie can't simply be in an input or output step that doesn't have much to do with the invention.
Also, a lot of these terms are not very well defined by the case law. For example, what is a "particular" machine? What does "tied" mean? What qualifies as a "transformation"? A "particular article"?
In re Bilski is built on case law that went before, such as Benson, Flook, Abele.... But none of these cases does a very good job laying out the bounds of what qualifies as statutory subject matter. Unfortunately, it's unlikely that much clarity will come from Bilski. Most likely, the Supreme Court will throw out the machine-or-transformation test, or at least indicate that it's not the sole test for determining whether subject matter is statutory or not (similar to KSR v. Teleflex indicating that the teaching-suggestion-motivation test is not the only way to arrive at a finding of obviousness). What they put in its place is likely to be nebulous, raising as many questions as it answers.
In IBM's case here, though, they'll probably just do what everyone else does when their computer-implemented method claim gets rejected under 101: amend the claim to say that a processor performs the steps.
Third parties can pay the USPTO a fee (currently $180) to put references into the file of a pending application and have those references considered by the examiner. However, you have to do this within two months of the date of publication (or two months after a notice of allowance in the application, whichever is earlier), and you cannot make any commentary whatsoever concerning the references you cite. You also have to serve the applicant with notice that you filed the references with the USPTO.
Bilski is not going to make all methods unpatentable. 35 USC 101 states that processes (i.e., methods) are a permitted statutory class of invention for the purposes of obtaining a patent. The key is whether certain types of methods fall under the previously delineated judicial exceptions (abstract ideas, natural phenomena, or laws of nature) to the four statutory classes of invention that 35 USC 101 describes (processes, machines, articles of manufacture, and compositions of matter). Specifically, the USPTO and the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit say that Bilski's claimed invention is nothing more than an abstract idea with tenuous, if any, ties to a particular application of the idea.
If you're expecting an earth-shattering kaboom when SCOTUS releases their opinion in Bilski, prepare to be disappointed. It's unlikely to have a huge impact on patents for computer-based methods, although few people actually think that Bilski is going to come away from this with a patent in hand.
Actually, patent terms are 20 years from the effective filing date of the application (plus patent term adjustments due to USPTO delays). They changed over from 17 years from date of issue back in 1995 to help reduce the effects of submarine patents. There might still be a few applications in the pipeline that claim benefit of an effective filing date before the 1995 date when the law changed, and those applications are grandfathered in under the old law.
The US is the only country in the world that has a first-to-invent system. Resolution of this (when two applicants each believe they separately invented the same invention) is called an "interference" between the two conflicting parties, in which each inventor attempts to prove that they were the true first inventor of the claimed invention.
For publications, the one year "grace period" is only guaranteed for one's own publications of an invention. If you publish an invention on 1 September 2007, you have one year, until the first business day on or after 1 September 2008, to file your application for that invention. But if the prior art is a publication authored by someone else, the grace period does not apply unless you can prove either (a) reduction to practice of the invention before the prior art date, or (b) complete conception of the invention before the prior art date coupled with due diligence until reduction to practice or the filing date.
Any publication more than one year before the filing date always counts as prior art, even if you can prove you had reduced your invention to practice before that publication - and even if the publication was your own work. Public use or sale in the US more than a year before the filing date also counts for this.
Apple hasn't received a patent on this yet. TFA refers to U.S. Patent Application Publication 2010/0081505, which was published Thursday and isn't a patent. It's just an application for a patent. In fact, the application hasn't been examined yet, as viewable in Public PAIR.
In other news, after hearing that the name "Google" is now unused, Steve Ballmer announced that Microsoft would be changing his name to Google.
"We think this is a really good way to grow our brand," Ballmer said. "People just weren't latching on to the Bing name, but now that it's Google Bing, people will be sure to show up."
In the US, software isn't patentable directly, either. If you claim "a program which causes a processor to perform the steps of...", then you get yourself a rejection under 35 USC 101, because a program isn't a process, machine, article of manufacture, or composition of matter.
One way that lawyers get around this is by claiming "a computer-readable storage medium storing a program which, when executed, causes a processor to perform the steps of...." A computer-readable storage medium (e.g., a hard drive) is generally considered to be an article of manufacture. This almost got tested in court several years ago, in In re Beauregard, but the USPTO decided to withdraw its rejection and issue the patent before the court got a chance to weigh in on it, and nobody has brought up the topic in litigation since then.
The problem is that what the Patent Office treats as an "invention" is almost completely unrelated to what constitutes an "invention" in the real world of commerce. A patent-office invention is just an idea. It doesn't have to be manufacturable, it doesn't have to be a viable product, it even doesn't have to work.
Incorrect. It doesn't have to be manufactured, as the filing of a patent application is construed as a "reduction to practice" (akin to the old requirement of providing a working model to the USPTO) but it does have to be manufacturable (in the case of machines, articles of manufacture, and compositions of matter) and it does have to work to fulfill some use - at least as well as the examiner can tell from the specification provided by the applicant in view of the relevant prior art.
See the 35 USC 101 utility requirement. "Specific, substantial and credible utility" is required, meaning it has to have a specific use mentioned in the specification, the use has to be substantial (e.g., you can't say "it makes great landfill!" and satisfy the requirement), and it has to be a credible use (e.g., no perpetual motion machines or other "incredible" utility).
See also the 35 USC 112, first paragraph, enablement requirement. The specification has to provide sufficient instruction to the ordinary artisan to be able to make and use the invention without undue experimentation. A half-baked invention that is still at the "conception" stage will usually fail this requirement.
An application which describes an invention that doesn't work or can't be manufactured will fail to meet both the enablement requirement and the utility requirement.
Clearly, that's over the top, but you'd be surprised at the sorts of super-resolution techniques that are out there already. Most (but not all) techniques require multiple frames of the same image with enough jitter from one frame to the next so that what you lose in spatial sampling you make up in temporal sampling.
And how is that supposed to happen? The US is by far the biggest exporter of money in the world. The reason this legislation would work is because the US can withhold that money to coerce other countries to comply. It doesn't work the other way around, because the other countries don't have leverage against the US.
One could argue that China (and Japan, actually) has leverage in the form of all the US debt they hold. But if China leveraging that debt against the US was a good thing for them, they'd have done it already. Truth is, China would hurt themselves as much as the US in the process.
As far as the moderation bit goes, that's why we have "-1 Overrated", and it's perfectly legitimate.
From the FAQ: "Concentrate more on promoting than on demoting. The real goal here is to find the juicy good stuff and let others read it. Do not promote personal agendas. Do not let your opinions factor in. Try to be impartial about this. Simply disagreeing with a comment is not a valid reason to mark it down. Likewise, agreeing with a comment is not a valid reason to mark it up. The goal here is to share ideas. To sift through the haystack and find needles. And to keep the children who like to spam Slashdot in check."
As for the DMCA, you can easily lose that nifty safe harbor protection if it can be proven that you knew about (or even encouraged) specific cases of infringement and did nothing about it. It does not grant ISPs blanket immunity, as you seem to believe.
It grants immunity when you comply with DMCA takedown requests, which Google/YouTube does and always (afaik) has.
As for fair use, have you actually read the article?
Mentioning fair use wasn't meant to address the article directly - it was simply another counterexample to your post, where licensing terms fail to explain the whole story about what people are allowed to do with other people's copyrighted works. Nevertheless, there have been numerous examples of clear fair use falling victim to overzealous copyright holders filing takedown requests on YouTube.
Slashdot Mirror
(Perhaps that's why 1800s US literacy was 99% - lots of free, cheap books available for reading.)
Also, TV was a lot less popular then.
As the sibling post notes, the Fox News article mentions that the truck that pulled up was unmarked. No red cross/crescent, no "ambulance", no nothing. If they're assuming that the people they just killed were enemy combatants because they had AKs and RPGs, then the next logical assumption is that the unmarked van that pulls up is affiliated with those people and is therefore also a target.
So, no, Fox didn't fail to mention that small detail.
In that case, you might be interested in this article in which a Fox News reporter talks to one of the Wikileaks editors associated with the release of this video. That editor states that it appears that one of the people killed in the video was carrying an AK-47 while another was carrying an RPG, even though Wikileaks neglected to include this in their commentary on the video.
I know, I know, this is Slashdot, and dishing on Fox News is the most effective form of karma-whoring. Have at it, folks. Nevertheless, the substance of the article calls into question the veracity of (and the motives behind) the video and commentary.
To be more precise, it has to meet either one of the following criteria: 1) the method is tied to a particular machine or apparatus; or 2) the method performs a transformation of a particular article into a different state or thing. Furthermore, the machine tie or the transformative step can't merely be related to insignificant extra-solution activity, so if you're talking a computer-implemented method of some sort, the machine tie can't simply be in an input or output step that doesn't have much to do with the invention.
Also, a lot of these terms are not very well defined by the case law. For example, what is a "particular" machine? What does "tied" mean? What qualifies as a "transformation"? A "particular article"?
In re Bilski is built on case law that went before, such as Benson, Flook, Abele.... But none of these cases does a very good job laying out the bounds of what qualifies as statutory subject matter. Unfortunately, it's unlikely that much clarity will come from Bilski. Most likely, the Supreme Court will throw out the machine-or-transformation test, or at least indicate that it's not the sole test for determining whether subject matter is statutory or not (similar to KSR v. Teleflex indicating that the teaching-suggestion-motivation test is not the only way to arrive at a finding of obviousness). What they put in its place is likely to be nebulous, raising as many questions as it answers.
In IBM's case here, though, they'll probably just do what everyone else does when their computer-implemented method claim gets rejected under 101: amend the claim to say that a processor performs the steps.
Third parties can pay the USPTO a fee (currently $180) to put references into the file of a pending application and have those references considered by the examiner. However, you have to do this within two months of the date of publication (or two months after a notice of allowance in the application, whichever is earlier), and you cannot make any commentary whatsoever concerning the references you cite. You also have to serve the applicant with notice that you filed the references with the USPTO.
See 37 CFR 1.99 and MPEP 1134.01 for more details.
Bilski is not going to make all methods unpatentable. 35 USC 101 states that processes (i.e., methods) are a permitted statutory class of invention for the purposes of obtaining a patent. The key is whether certain types of methods fall under the previously delineated judicial exceptions (abstract ideas, natural phenomena, or laws of nature) to the four statutory classes of invention that 35 USC 101 describes (processes, machines, articles of manufacture, and compositions of matter). Specifically, the USPTO and the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit say that Bilski's claimed invention is nothing more than an abstract idea with tenuous, if any, ties to a particular application of the idea.
If you're expecting an earth-shattering kaboom when SCOTUS releases their opinion in Bilski, prepare to be disappointed. It's unlikely to have a huge impact on patents for computer-based methods, although few people actually think that Bilski is going to come away from this with a patent in hand.
> I tried the same thing in a honda civic (not mine, lol) at about 50km/h and the deceleration was so great that my head banged into the steering.
Either the seat belts were not working/good, or you should have worn them.
Alternatively, they should have stopped by ramming into something to cause the air bag to deploy.
Typical DARPA. They'll put research funding into any idea that they've seen on Star Trek or read in a book somewhere.
Specifically, this idea was in Cowboy Bebop, although in that episode, they required a physical link (they fired grapples at each other).
Actually, patent terms are 20 years from the effective filing date of the application (plus patent term adjustments due to USPTO delays). They changed over from 17 years from date of issue back in 1995 to help reduce the effects of submarine patents. There might still be a few applications in the pipeline that claim benefit of an effective filing date before the 1995 date when the law changed, and those applications are grandfathered in under the old law.
Thanks for picking that up. I stand corrected!
The US is the only country in the world that has a first-to-invent system. Resolution of this (when two applicants each believe they separately invented the same invention) is called an "interference" between the two conflicting parties, in which each inventor attempts to prove that they were the true first inventor of the claimed invention.
For publications, the one year "grace period" is only guaranteed for one's own publications of an invention. If you publish an invention on 1 September 2007, you have one year, until the first business day on or after 1 September 2008, to file your application for that invention. But if the prior art is a publication authored by someone else, the grace period does not apply unless you can prove either (a) reduction to practice of the invention before the prior art date, or (b) complete conception of the invention before the prior art date coupled with due diligence until reduction to practice or the filing date.
Any publication more than one year before the filing date always counts as prior art, even if you can prove you had reduced your invention to practice before that publication - and even if the publication was your own work. Public use or sale in the US more than a year before the filing date also counts for this.
Apple hasn't received a patent on this yet. TFA refers to U.S. Patent Application Publication 2010/0081505, which was published Thursday and isn't a patent. It's just an application for a patent. In fact, the application hasn't been examined yet, as viewable in Public PAIR.
Konami code FTW.
Still doesn't protect you from that grue, though.
In other news, after hearing that the name "Google" is now unused, Steve Ballmer announced that Microsoft would be changing his name to Google.
"We think this is a really good way to grow our brand," Ballmer said. "People just weren't latching on to the Bing name, but now that it's Google Bing, people will be sure to show up."
it hints perhaps that the drive to try is far more important than natural ability.
Disagree with you Yoda does.
In the US, software isn't patentable directly, either. If you claim "a program which causes a processor to perform the steps of...", then you get yourself a rejection under 35 USC 101, because a program isn't a process, machine, article of manufacture, or composition of matter.
One way that lawyers get around this is by claiming "a computer-readable storage medium storing a program which, when executed, causes a processor to perform the steps of...." A computer-readable storage medium (e.g., a hard drive) is generally considered to be an article of manufacture. This almost got tested in court several years ago, in In re Beauregard, but the USPTO decided to withdraw its rejection and issue the patent before the court got a chance to weigh in on it, and nobody has brought up the topic in litigation since then.
Uh, something Hugo Chavez would say?
Idi Amin?
Pervez Musharraf?
The problem is that what the Patent Office treats as an "invention" is almost completely unrelated to what constitutes an "invention" in the real world of commerce. A patent-office invention is just an idea. It doesn't have to be manufacturable, it doesn't have to be a viable product, it even doesn't have to work.
Incorrect. It doesn't have to be manufactured, as the filing of a patent application is construed as a "reduction to practice" (akin to the old requirement of providing a working model to the USPTO) but it does have to be manufacturable (in the case of machines, articles of manufacture, and compositions of matter) and it does have to work to fulfill some use - at least as well as the examiner can tell from the specification provided by the applicant in view of the relevant prior art.
See the 35 USC 101 utility requirement. "Specific, substantial and credible utility" is required, meaning it has to have a specific use mentioned in the specification, the use has to be substantial (e.g., you can't say "it makes great landfill!" and satisfy the requirement), and it has to be a credible use (e.g., no perpetual motion machines or other "incredible" utility).
See also the 35 USC 112, first paragraph, enablement requirement. The specification has to provide sufficient instruction to the ordinary artisan to be able to make and use the invention without undue experimentation. A half-baked invention that is still at the "conception" stage will usually fail this requirement.
An application which describes an invention that doesn't work or can't be manufactured will fail to meet both the enablement requirement and the utility requirement.
Nanotechnology, huh?
And here I had all my money on the Murai vaccine.
Clearly, that's over the top, but you'd be surprised at the sorts of super-resolution techniques that are out there already. Most (but not all) techniques require multiple frames of the same image with enough jitter from one frame to the next so that what you lose in spatial sampling you make up in temporal sampling.
And how is that supposed to happen? The US is by far the biggest exporter of money in the world. The reason this legislation would work is because the US can withhold that money to coerce other countries to comply. It doesn't work the other way around, because the other countries don't have leverage against the US.
One could argue that China (and Japan, actually) has leverage in the form of all the US debt they hold. But if China leveraging that debt against the US was a good thing for them, they'd have done it already. Truth is, China would hurt themselves as much as the US in the process.
I'm glad Slashdot is here to tell us about these things, or else I might not have found this important security bulletin.
Jodie Foster!
Can we PLEASE start spending all this cash on things that don't blow up?
Seems awfully inefficient to me. After all, it's a lot easier to kill people with stuff that does blow up.
As far as the moderation bit goes, that's why we have "-1 Overrated", and it's perfectly legitimate.
From the FAQ: "Concentrate more on promoting than on demoting. The real goal here is to find the juicy good stuff and let others read it. Do not promote personal agendas. Do not let your opinions factor in. Try to be impartial about this. Simply disagreeing with a comment is not a valid reason to mark it down. Likewise, agreeing with a comment is not a valid reason to mark it up. The goal here is to share ideas. To sift through the haystack and find needles. And to keep the children who like to spam Slashdot in check."
As for the DMCA, you can easily lose that nifty safe harbor protection if it can be proven that you knew about (or even encouraged) specific cases of infringement and did nothing about it. It does not grant ISPs blanket immunity, as you seem to believe.
It grants immunity when you comply with DMCA takedown requests, which Google/YouTube does and always (afaik) has.
As for fair use, have you actually read the article?
Mentioning fair use wasn't meant to address the article directly - it was simply another counterexample to your post, where licensing terms fail to explain the whole story about what people are allowed to do with other people's copyrighted works. Nevertheless, there have been numerous examples of clear fair use falling victim to overzealous copyright holders filing takedown requests on YouTube.