Saying: "Let's see you do better!" isn't the answer.
You're right - the patent system is flawed, and Congress should get off their collective ass and do something about it.
But when the previous poster is bitching about the work that examiners do without a fair basis for their complaints (except, perhaps, for a very few unfortunate and well-publicized cases out of the hundreds of thousands of patents issued annually), it's fairly appropriate to suggest that they put up or shut up.
Thanks for the explanation - I'm not terribly familiar with Jack Benny, so I didn't get the joke (it's an old one and I've heard it many times before, but didn't know it was a Jack Benny favorite).
At the time, you had to explicitly renew your copyright at 28 years. For example, a fair number of old Warner Brothers cartoons from the 1930s and 1940s are in the public domain because the owner at the time, Associated Artists Productions, failed to renew the copyright.
In that case, what does CBS mean by, "there are so many issues with those shows, that even if we took the time to figure it out, we still almost certainly wouldn't do the deal"?
We're called examiners, rather than clerks, and the issue with the vast majority of patents reported on Slashdot isn't that the examiners are clueless concerning the prior art, but that Slashdotters are ignorant of how patent law and patent examining actually works.
For example, in this case, the claims are extremely long - so long, in fact, that the patent is probably worthless for its offensive capacity. The more limitations that a claim has, the narrower the invention has.
In order to anticipate the claim - and thereby reject it under 35 USC 102 - a single prior art reference has to disclose every single limitation of the claim. The longer the claim is, the more likely it is that there's something in there that the prior art doesn't disclose.
In order to render the claim obvious under 35 USC 103, a combination of prior art references has to teach every single limitation of the claim. No single reference has to teach any particular limitation; instead, it can arise through a combination of the references. But it has to be there. What's more, there has to be a proper rationale for combining the references. That is, a "person having ordinary skill in the art" has to have some reason why they would modify what one reference teaches by incorporating the teachings of a second reference. This can be anything from one of the references providing a motivating reason why the teachings of the second reference would be advantageous to include, to a simple finding that one could perform a simple substitution of the secondary reference for a part of the primary reference with predictable results. (See the Supreme Court's KSR Int'l v. Teleflex for a fuller discussion of obviousness.)
Finally, a determination that a patent should be issued is not a 100% guarantee that there is no prior art anywhere that could render a claim anticipated or obvious. Examiners only have a certain amount of time to get the job done, and eventually they have to make a judgment call that a claim properly represents the scope to which the applicant is entitled. The point is to help reduce the number of unnecessary lawsuits resulting from patents whose claims are too broad.
It's not perfect, but we do what we can. And if you don't think that's good enough and you're a US citizen, then eventually, when we start hiring again, you might consider joining the ranks and improving things yourself, within the bounds of the law, one application at a time.
Near the very top, just above the author name ("Dean et al.") it says "United States Patent". A published application would instead say "Patent Application Publication".
Another way to tell is that it has an issued patent number. Currently, patents are being issued with numbers in the mid-seven-millions. They (more or less) started at one and continue to increase from there. Published applications have numbers in a different format: YYYY/NNNNNNN, the YYYY being the year of publication and the NNNNNNN being a serial number for publications occurring in that year.
Finally, you can tell from the suffix on the number in cases where the suffix is printed (the linked-to USPTO database entry doesn't provide this, but it shows up on the face of the printed patent such as you might see on Google Patents). Issued patents in the US have a suffix B1, B2, etc. (The number depends on whether the patent has been published previously, such as when a Certificate of Correction is issued for the patent.) A published application will have a suffix A1 (or rarely A2).
Keep in mind that decisions on whether to take action against other nations' failures to uphold their treaty obligations is primarily a function of the Executive Branch (in this case, by the Department of Commerce). So, if you don't like it, you can complain to President Obama or his Secretary of Commerce, Gary Locke.
Step 1: fill 2-qt saucepan with water Step 2: add 1 egg, 2 cellphones Step 3: cover, turn on heat, and bring to a boil Step 4: when water boils, turn off heat and let stand for 10 mins Step 5: rinse egg and cellphones with cold water, remove shells, and eat
Unfortunately, the time I would have spent posting to this thread was instead spent looking at TIME CUBE. By no definition of the phrase could I possibly be said to have "saved time".
1. A computer implemented method for managing one or more real property regions, the method comprising:
providing a geographic view of a property within an online property management system;
identifying a region of interest in the geographic view including at least a portion of a real property region;
analyzing the geographic view to locate one or more promotional features within the geographic view positioned upon a real property region;
providing a user-selectable link associated with the region of interest in the geographic view;
receiving a request for the region of interest in the geographic view via the user-selectable link;
receiving data to alter at least one of the behavior or the appearance of the region of interest;
storing the data in association with the geographic view; and
updating the region of interest within the geographic view based upon the received data.
You can't go by what the abstract says, and you definitely can't go by what somebody's summary says on Slashdot. What's claimed is what counts, and if there's some claimed aspect that isn't taught by the prior art, then they'll get a patent for it.
That said, it's infrequent that the originally-filed claims are allowed. By the time Google actually gets a patent, the allowed claims will probably look a lot different from this.
For a computer scientist that specializes in this sort of thing: probably.
Keep in mind that the standard for obviousness is not whether an expert in the field would find it obvious, but rather, whether one of ordinary skill would find it obvious. (If you read up on US patent law, you'll occasionally see the acronym PHOSITA: person having ordinary skill in the art.)
You answered your own question
on
Hot Or Not — 3D TV
·
· Score: 2, Informative
it certainly didn't add anything to it, besides $5 for the ticket.
The way to find out is to read the claim(s) in the patent instead of going by the abstract (or, worse yet, someone else's interpretation of the abstract). If you do the same thing the entire claim says, then you're infringing.
(There are other ways to infringe, such as contributory infringement, which don't require doing what the entire claim says. For example, if you sell a device whose sole purpose is to help someone else infringe a claim, then you're an infringer also. Most of the time, this involves making a device that is the same as what only part of the claim says, where the device doesn't have any substantial uses aside from serving as a part in another system which directly infringes.)
1. A process for managing digital rights to a scalable media file comprising of truncatable media packets, wherein a different encryption/decryption key is used to encrypt each truncatable media packet having a base layer and an enhancement layer without requiring additional storage space to store the encryption/decryption key, comprising the process actions of:
using a first computing device for encryption;
receiving at the first computing device a scalable media file comprising a plurality of truncatable media packets;
for each truncatable media packet:
- deriving a packet key for the encryption/decryption of the truncatable media packet via a message authentication code (MAC) on the base layer of the truncatable media packet;
- encrypting the base layer and the enhancement layer of the media packet using the packet key;
- encrypting the packet key via a media encryption key authorized by an owner of the content of the media;
- replacing an equal portion of the content in the encrypted base layer of the truncatable media packet with the encrypted packet key;
- using the first computing device or a second computing device for decryption of each truncatable media packet;
- receiving at the first computing device or second computing device the truncatable media packets;
- decrypting the packet key from the replaced portion of the encrypted base layer using a media decryption key authorized by the owner of the content of the media;
- decrypting the portion of the base layer of the truncatable media packet not replaced by the encrypted packet key using the decrypted packet key;
- using the MAC on the base layer of the decrypted portion of the truncatable media packet to regenerate the content overwritten by the encrypted packet key to reconstruct the entire base layer of the media packet; and
- decrypting the content of the enhancement layer of the truncatable media packet using the decrypted packet key.
This DOES (essentially) reduce thermal energy in the atmosphere.
Possibly, but someone would have to run the numbers to make certain. Personally, I have my doubts, at least about the direct reduction in thermal energy. A lot of the solar energy that reaches the Earth is normally reflected away without being converted into heat, particularly in cloudless, bright-floored desert areas. This project would instead convert much of that energy into heat and then dissipate it into the atmosphere. They say right in the OP that it uses a greenhouse concept, and if you had a really large number of these, it would essentially cause a global greenhouse effect without involving any greenhouse gases.
On the other hand, a net reduction of thermal energy in the atmosphere could arise from a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions made possible by the use of these facilities, i.e., an indirect benefit.
Then I wouldn't consider you to be an atheist - you're an agnostic. Or, at the very least, you're not a "capital A" Atheist. But this is delving more into semantics than a cogent argument on the merits, though, so let me explain what I mean.
There are tons of people - take Richard Dawkins, for example - who are firmly convinced that no gods exist of any sort. For them, it's not that the evidence tends away from the existence of any god, and it's not that they merely have a "default" belief that doesn't specifically include the existence of any god but also does not exclude the possibility. It's the dogmatic belief that no god could possibly exist, that people who disagree are categorically wrong, and that those people who disagree should be converted, ridiculed, and persecuted.
The differences between such a dogma and the dogmas of religion are trivial.
Atheism may not be a religion, but it has the dogma of a religion. And some people wield the dogma of atheism like a bludgeon, in just the same way that some religious people do.
Carl Sagan said, "An atheist has to know more than I know. An atheist is someone who knows there is no God." For him there was no dogma, just a tremendous appreciation for the wonders of our universe.
One of the applications essentially claims a classifier to learn the signals corresponding to various movements, and then classifies unknown inputs to indicate what movements they correspond to. That one is extremely well-known, and it'll hinge on whether Microsoft managed to think of some specific signal feature not mentioned in the prior art. Personally, I would bet that one's dead in the water, but you can never be sure without doing a proper search.
The other one essentially claims a wearable device with EMG sensors. That one is going to hinge on one of the various automatic features they've claimed that distinguishes it from all the different prosthetic devices that have EMG sensors mounted in them.
On the plus side, there were quite a few Warner Brothers cartoons from the 1930s and 1940s that have entered the public domain as a result of Associated Artists Productions (which held the copyright at one point) failing to renew the copyright registration.
Note also that Warner Brothers is still selling DVDs with these cartoons (among others), so it's not like public domain automatically equals no profits for anyone.
Slashdot Mirror
Paul Atreides: They tried and failed?
Reverend Mother Mohiam: They tried and died.
Saying: "Let's see you do better!" isn't the answer.
You're right - the patent system is flawed, and Congress should get off their collective ass and do something about it.
But when the previous poster is bitching about the work that examiners do without a fair basis for their complaints (except, perhaps, for a very few unfortunate and well-publicized cases out of the hundreds of thousands of patents issued annually), it's fairly appropriate to suggest that they put up or shut up.
Thanks for the explanation - I'm not terribly familiar with Jack Benny, so I didn't get the joke (it's an old one and I've heard it many times before, but didn't know it was a Jack Benny favorite).
At the time, you had to explicitly renew your copyright at 28 years. For example, a fair number of old Warner Brothers cartoons from the 1930s and 1940s are in the public domain because the owner at the time, Associated Artists Productions, failed to renew the copyright.
In that case, what does CBS mean by, "there are so many issues with those shows, that even if we took the time to figure it out, we still almost certainly wouldn't do the deal"?
(From TFA, of course.)
Perhaps the federal government could appropriate the masters via eminent domain and make them available through the Library of Congress.
We're called examiners, rather than clerks, and the issue with the vast majority of patents reported on Slashdot isn't that the examiners are clueless concerning the prior art, but that Slashdotters are ignorant of how patent law and patent examining actually works.
For example, in this case, the claims are extremely long - so long, in fact, that the patent is probably worthless for its offensive capacity. The more limitations that a claim has, the narrower the invention has.
In order to anticipate the claim - and thereby reject it under 35 USC 102 - a single prior art reference has to disclose every single limitation of the claim. The longer the claim is, the more likely it is that there's something in there that the prior art doesn't disclose.
In order to render the claim obvious under 35 USC 103, a combination of prior art references has to teach every single limitation of the claim. No single reference has to teach any particular limitation; instead, it can arise through a combination of the references. But it has to be there. What's more, there has to be a proper rationale for combining the references. That is, a "person having ordinary skill in the art" has to have some reason why they would modify what one reference teaches by incorporating the teachings of a second reference. This can be anything from one of the references providing a motivating reason why the teachings of the second reference would be advantageous to include, to a simple finding that one could perform a simple substitution of the secondary reference for a part of the primary reference with predictable results. (See the Supreme Court's KSR Int'l v. Teleflex for a fuller discussion of obviousness.)
Finally, a determination that a patent should be issued is not a 100% guarantee that there is no prior art anywhere that could render a claim anticipated or obvious. Examiners only have a certain amount of time to get the job done, and eventually they have to make a judgment call that a claim properly represents the scope to which the applicant is entitled. The point is to help reduce the number of unnecessary lawsuits resulting from patents whose claims are too broad.
It's not perfect, but we do what we can. And if you don't think that's good enough and you're a US citizen, then eventually, when we start hiring again, you might consider joining the ranks and improving things yourself, within the bounds of the law, one application at a time.
Near the very top, just above the author name ("Dean et al.") it says "United States Patent". A published application would instead say "Patent Application Publication".
Another way to tell is that it has an issued patent number. Currently, patents are being issued with numbers in the mid-seven-millions. They (more or less) started at one and continue to increase from there. Published applications have numbers in a different format: YYYY/NNNNNNN, the YYYY being the year of publication and the NNNNNNN being a serial number for publications occurring in that year.
Finally, you can tell from the suffix on the number in cases where the suffix is printed (the linked-to USPTO database entry doesn't provide this, but it shows up on the face of the printed patent such as you might see on Google Patents). Issued patents in the US have a suffix B1, B2, etc. (The number depends on whether the patent has been published previously, such as when a Certificate of Correction is issued for the patent.) A published application will have a suffix A1 (or rarely A2).
Keep in mind that decisions on whether to take action against other nations' failures to uphold their treaty obligations is primarily a function of the Executive Branch (in this case, by the Department of Commerce). So, if you don't like it, you can complain to President Obama or his Secretary of Commerce, Gary Locke.
you can cook an egg with two cellphones
Step 1: fill 2-qt saucepan with water
Step 2: add 1 egg, 2 cellphones
Step 3: cover, turn on heat, and bring to a boil
Step 4: when water boils, turn off heat and let stand for 10 mins
Step 5: rinse egg and cellphones with cold water, remove shells, and eat
I look forward to the day when various documents can be transported through these tubes, also as in Futurama.
Hermes: It's supposed to be about the filing!
There. That should save everyone some time.
Unfortunately, the time I would have spent posting to this thread was instead spent looking at TIME CUBE. By no definition of the phrase could I possibly be said to have "saved time".
Did you read the claims? For example:
1. A computer implemented method for managing one or more real property regions, the method comprising:
providing a geographic view of a property within an online property management system;
identifying a region of interest in the geographic view including at least a portion of a real property region;
analyzing the geographic view to locate one or more promotional features within the geographic view positioned upon a real property region;
providing a user-selectable link associated with the region of interest in the geographic view;
receiving a request for the region of interest in the geographic view via the user-selectable link;
receiving data to alter at least one of the behavior or the appearance of the region of interest;
storing the data in association with the geographic view; and
updating the region of interest within the geographic view based upon the received data.
You can't go by what the abstract says, and you definitely can't go by what somebody's summary says on Slashdot. What's claimed is what counts, and if there's some claimed aspect that isn't taught by the prior art, then they'll get a patent for it.
That said, it's infrequent that the originally-filed claims are allowed. By the time Google actually gets a patent, the allowed claims will probably look a lot different from this.
It's not really script kiddies who are doing this anymore. It's all tied to the RMT "industry" - essentially, organized crime.
For a computer scientist that specializes in this sort of thing: probably.
Keep in mind that the standard for obviousness is not whether an expert in the field would find it obvious, but rather, whether one of ordinary skill would find it obvious. (If you read up on US patent law, you'll occasionally see the acronym PHOSITA: person having ordinary skill in the art.)
it certainly didn't add anything to it, besides $5 for the ticket.
The way to find out is to read the claim(s) in the patent instead of going by the abstract (or, worse yet, someone else's interpretation of the abstract). If you do the same thing the entire claim says, then you're infringing.
(There are other ways to infringe, such as contributory infringement, which don't require doing what the entire claim says. For example, if you sell a device whose sole purpose is to help someone else infringe a claim, then you're an infringer also. Most of the time, this involves making a device that is the same as what only part of the claim says, where the device doesn't have any substantial uses aside from serving as a part in another system which directly infringes.)
Did you bother reading the claim?
1. A process for managing digital rights to a scalable media file comprising of truncatable media packets, wherein a different encryption/decryption key is used to encrypt each truncatable media packet having a base layer and an enhancement layer without requiring additional storage space to store the encryption/decryption key, comprising the process actions of:
using a first computing device for encryption;
receiving at the first computing device a scalable media file comprising a plurality of truncatable media packets;
for each truncatable media packet:
- deriving a packet key for the encryption/decryption of the truncatable media packet via a message authentication code (MAC) on the base layer of the truncatable media packet;
- encrypting the base layer and the enhancement layer of the media packet using the packet key;
- encrypting the packet key via a media encryption key authorized by an owner of the content of the media;
- replacing an equal portion of the content in the encrypted base layer of the truncatable media packet with the encrypted packet key;
- using the first computing device or a second computing device for decryption of each truncatable media packet;
- receiving at the first computing device or second computing device the truncatable media packets;
- decrypting the packet key from the replaced portion of the encrypted base layer using a media decryption key authorized by the owner of the content of the media;
- decrypting the portion of the base layer of the truncatable media packet not replaced by the encrypted packet key using the decrypted packet key;
- using the MAC on the base layer of the decrypted portion of the truncatable media packet to regenerate the content overwritten by the encrypted packet key to reconstruct the entire base layer of the media packet; and
- decrypting the content of the enhancement layer of the truncatable media packet using the decrypted packet key.
Still obvious?
This DOES (essentially) reduce thermal energy in the atmosphere.
Possibly, but someone would have to run the numbers to make certain. Personally, I have my doubts, at least about the direct reduction in thermal energy. A lot of the solar energy that reaches the Earth is normally reflected away without being converted into heat, particularly in cloudless, bright-floored desert areas. This project would instead convert much of that energy into heat and then dissipate it into the atmosphere. They say right in the OP that it uses a greenhouse concept, and if you had a really large number of these, it would essentially cause a global greenhouse effect without involving any greenhouse gases.
On the other hand, a net reduction of thermal energy in the atmosphere could arise from a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions made possible by the use of these facilities, i.e., an indirect benefit.
Those are the wrong trousers, Gromit!
Then I wouldn't consider you to be an atheist - you're an agnostic. Or, at the very least, you're not a "capital A" Atheist. But this is delving more into semantics than a cogent argument on the merits, though, so let me explain what I mean.
There are tons of people - take Richard Dawkins, for example - who are firmly convinced that no gods exist of any sort. For them, it's not that the evidence tends away from the existence of any god, and it's not that they merely have a "default" belief that doesn't specifically include the existence of any god but also does not exclude the possibility. It's the dogmatic belief that no god could possibly exist, that people who disagree are categorically wrong, and that those people who disagree should be converted, ridiculed, and persecuted.
The differences between such a dogma and the dogmas of religion are trivial.
Atheism may not be a religion, but it has the dogma of a religion. And some people wield the dogma of atheism like a bludgeon, in just the same way that some religious people do.
Carl Sagan said, "An atheist has to know more than I know. An atheist is someone who knows there is no God." For him there was no dogma, just a tremendous appreciation for the wonders of our universe.
One of the applications essentially claims a classifier to learn the signals corresponding to various movements, and then classifies unknown inputs to indicate what movements they correspond to. That one is extremely well-known, and it'll hinge on whether Microsoft managed to think of some specific signal feature not mentioned in the prior art. Personally, I would bet that one's dead in the water, but you can never be sure without doing a proper search.
The other one essentially claims a wearable device with EMG sensors. That one is going to hinge on one of the various automatic features they've claimed that distinguishes it from all the different prosthetic devices that have EMG sensors mounted in them.
Apparently, at least some implementations define time_t as a signed integer.
On the plus side, there were quite a few Warner Brothers cartoons from the 1930s and 1940s that have entered the public domain as a result of Associated Artists Productions (which held the copyright at one point) failing to renew the copyright registration.
Note also that Warner Brothers is still selling DVDs with these cartoons (among others), so it's not like public domain automatically equals no profits for anyone.