Except people who choose the 'right' to not pay for health care insurance still show up to doctors offices and hospital emergency wards demanding to be fixed without the ability to actually pay.
But the health care bill doesn't actually solve that problem. Some people would still fly under the radar until something bad happens and then go crying to the ER doc for free treatment. I wouldn't be able to, because I'm a fully documented U.S. citizen taxpayer. The government knows where to send the bill for the "you didn't subsidize other people's health care" fine.
If the quo for our quid were that the uninsured get shown the door at the ER, then I would support a requirement for people to buy health insurance. After all, this health care plan is supposed to insure everyone, right? If that's not the deal, then I should have just as much right to opt out of health insurance as the people who intentionally avoid the government's notice.
Strangely, my understanding of the injunction was that it wasn't supposed to interfere with Microsoft's contractual obligations to its present customers, only that it was supposed to enjoin Microsoft from continuing to sell the unpatched product to new customers. Maybe they figure that new customers buying software already on the shelves would get an unpatched version in violation of the injunction, so they're patching everyone.
Well, willful patent infringement can result in treble damages being awarded, which is about punishment even though it's a civil suit.
In this particular case, though, damages weren't trebled, but the district court judge awarded i4i an additional $40 million as sanctions against Microsoft for courtroom shenanigans (which is also about punishment).
I'm tired of this fat jolly asshole violating our airspace every year. I mean, a domestic passenger jet goes off course for an hour and we get ready to scramble fighters, but Santa gets a free pass even though we apparently know exactly where he is at all times.
Even Hugo Chavez says he's going to shoot down those imaginary drones he thinks we're flying over Venezuela. I say if shooting down imaginary aircraft is good enough for Hugo, then it's damn well good enough for us, too.
For those wondering about summary judgment, what it means, and how this can happen without a case going to trial in front of a jury:
Summary judgment requires that the judge consider the evidence in a manner most favorable to the non-moving party (i.e., the party not moving for summary judgment, in this case isoHunt). If, after consideration of the evidence in that light, there is no possibility that the non-moving party could prevail at trial, then summary judgment can be entered instead.
Essentially, this stems from the concept that juries are intended to be finders of fact, not judges of law. If there are no factual issues that need to be considered, then the jury has no job left to do - no matter what factual conclusion they reach concerning the evidence, the outcome as a matter of law will be the same.
Essentially, the Supreme Court and the court under it (the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, aka "CAFC" or "Federal Circuit", and its predecessor, the Court of Customs and Patent Appeals, or "CCPA") have over the years reached the legal decision that there are exceptions to the law which says what things are patentable.
That particular law, 35 USC 101, says that new and useful processes, machines, articles of manufacture, and compositions of matter are patentable. So, a trash compactor, being a machine, is patentable. A song, which isn't within any of those four classes, is not. That's sometimes called "not falling within a statutory class" or simply "nonstatutory".
However, the courts have said that there are certain claims that may appear at a glance to be statutory (because they say "a method" or "a system" at the beginning, implying that a process or machine is being claimed), but are actually not statutory. Laws of nature, natural phenomena, and abstract ideas are called "judicial exceptions" because the statute itself doesn't explicitly say that these things are nonstatutory, but the courts have held that they are nonstatutory anyway. So, F = ma is nonstatutory because it's a law of nature; adding two numbers is nonstatutory because it's an abstract idea. But some way of using F = ma or addition might be statutory... depending. (On what? Well, that's the question, ain't it?)
In the current case, Ex parte Gutta, the BPAI (the appeals board, internal to the USPTO, that represents your first line of appeal after the examiner rejects your application) agreed with the examiner's rejection. They said that the method claimed by Gutta was nothing more than a mathematical technique. Essentially, it was (1) calculate the variances of a set of values around each value in the set, and (2) choose the value with the lowest variance as a new "mean" value. There was no mention in the claim of limiting it to a specific application of that technique. So, the claim runs afoul of the judicial exceptions (it's an abstract idea). Essentially, every possible use of the mathematical technique is covered by the claim, and the courts have said that that's not permitted. This is connected to the "machine or transformation" test you may have read about in other/. discussions of Bilski v. Kappos, in that the "machine or transformation" test is supposed to tell you whether the claim is directed to a judicial exception or not.
But the board went beyond Bilski in this case, saying that the same principles apply to system claims or computer-readable medium claims. Essentially, saying that you have a "system with a processor and a memory, wherein the processor is configured to perform the steps of..." is just window dressing when the "steps of..." are something that would be nonstatutory on their own in a method claim. This is important, because in the vast majority of computer-related applications, the applicant will present three sets of claims: one claiming a method, one claiming a system which performs the method, and one claiming a computer-readable medium (CRM) in which is embodied a program which performs the method when executed by a computer. Without Ex parte Gutta, the policy of the USPTO has been to reject the method claim under 35 USC 101 if it fails the machine or transformation test, but not reject the system and CRM claims, because the processor and/or the CRM makes it statutory. Depending on the result of Bilski v. Kappos (expected in a couple of months from the Supreme Court), Gutta may become a useful tool to prevent window dressing from making an otherwise unpatentable method patentable as a computer programmed to do that method.
One caveat, however, is that Gutta was particularly egregious in terms of the abstractness of the claimed method. A lot of claims in other applications involve manipulations of data. For example, taking an x-ray image of a person, adjusting the contrast or other aspects of the x-ray image, and displaying the mo
Young man Got your acronym wrong I said, young man Got it wrong all night long I will teach you What the letters should be So don't spell it dys-lex-ic-ally
You're s'posed to call it the D-M-C-A You're s'posed to call it the D-M-C-A You can take my advice Use this mnemonic device And this chorus, you sing it twiiiiice
You're s'posed to call it the D-M-C-A OMFG it's the D-M-C-A You got those letters reversed Thank god there's no second verse My karma's going from bad to wooooorse
The earlier patent gets 17 years from the date of issue, which was in 1998 (so it expires in 2015 as long as they pay their maintenance fees), because it was filed before June 8, 1995 and gets the longer of 17 years from issue or 20 years from filing.
Ironically, the later-filed patent gets 20 years from the earliest date of filing, i.e., the date at which the earlier-filed application was filed (because the later-filed patent is a continuation of a continuation of the earlier-filed patent), which means it expires in 2014.
Of course, the later-filed patent has a patent term adjustment of about four years, so it actually expires in 2018.
If you have prior art which presents a "substantial new question of patentability" for an existing enforceable patent (i.e., it's during the patent term and the owner has been paying their maintenance fees), you can file for an ex parte reexamination. The fee is not exactly inexpensive ($2200 or more, considerably more than the fees for actually applying for a patent), and there are some fairly complicated hoops to jump through that might make hiring an attorney a good idea. Still, it's something to consider if there's a particular thing that you're pretty sure you could make money on if the patent weren't in the way. Look at it as an investment - if you can get a good return on that investment, it may be worth filing the reexam request, but it's expensive enough to make it not worth doing it based on principle.
Note that it's harder to get a patent invalidated than it is to reject a patent application, so the prior art that you provide in a reexam request has to be pretty spot-on. Also, the patent owner can amend their claims during reexam to overcome the prior art, so the applicant may still have a patent even after the reexam is concluded. In that case, you should be careful that you don't later infringe on the narrowed claims of the reexamined patent.
So, in essence, you're saying we should be treated like specialist surgeons - get paid $400k a year, but spend most of that on malpractice insurance.
Also, keep in mind that patent examination is an art, not a science. Some things are going to be missed, both in terms of false positives and false negatives. It's about finding what we can in the time allotted (between maybe 6 and 30 hours, depending on our field and our level of experience), applying it against the claims, and allowing the application if we can't find what we need. If someone litigates a patent, the defendant will (or should, if they plan on fighting it) fork over enough big bucks to find the prior art that we weren't able to.
By the way, eventually, we're going to start hiring again. If you really want to make things better, you might try working here for a while to see how the system actually works.
One issue with your suggestion is that by asking inventors of prior art about their inventions, we are likely to overestimate the skill of the ordinary artisan. Obviousness is meant to be considered from the perspective of a "person having ordinary skill in the art" - not an expert in the art, not Linus Torvalds, not Steve Wozniak. In some fields, ordinary skill may require a Ph.D., or it may be represented by Mom doing some gardening on the weekend.
We actually are allowed to contact applicants themselves (through, or at least with, their attorney if they have one) if we feel that a discussion of the application will forward prosecution in some way. The Office is actually trying to encourage this to some small degree.
On the other hand, there have been a few times where I've wanted to contact some third party individual to ask them a question about a reference I've found, but we don't do that because of confidentiality rules during the examination of applications.
Actually, both Limbaugh and Fox News succeed because so few other outlets in the media discuss news from a non-liberal viewpoint. Maybe they are targeting the 50th percentile, maybe not, but Daily Show/Colbert Report are probably targeting the same range (just more leftward/younger/funnier). This is why Dennis Miller can't keep a show on mainstream TV, because he targets the 90th percentile.
On the other hand, the Fox News website panders to the 25th percentile. I swear, half the stuff on there these days is NSFW, and while I like looking at bewbs, I don't like looking at bewbs accidentally from work.
I was up early and on a whim went to the local Walmart to check out this "Black Friday" phenomenon. It was a ridiculous mess of rude people and massive lines.
Thank you for explaining that. Saves me the trouble!
It never ceases to amaze me, with the number of times that Slashdot has incorrectly and/or misleadingly reported on patent issues, and people who know better have complained about it in the comments, that we still see Slashdot articles quoting the abstract and generally misreading a patent application to arrive at apparently righteous indignation with the process. In this case, the OP used a lot of fancy language to appear like they did their homework, but in the end, they didn't really read the claims. They provided easier links for various parts of the patent prosecution, including an Office action, but what about a link to the issued claims?
Ah, well, I guess it just wouldn't be Slashdot otherwise.
Slashdot Mirror
Except people who choose the 'right' to not pay for health care insurance still show up to doctors offices and hospital emergency wards demanding to be fixed without the ability to actually pay.
But the health care bill doesn't actually solve that problem. Some people would still fly under the radar until something bad happens and then go crying to the ER doc for free treatment. I wouldn't be able to, because I'm a fully documented U.S. citizen taxpayer. The government knows where to send the bill for the "you didn't subsidize other people's health care" fine.
If the quo for our quid were that the uninsured get shown the door at the ER, then I would support a requirement for people to buy health insurance. After all, this health care plan is supposed to insure everyone, right? If that's not the deal, then I should have just as much right to opt out of health insurance as the people who intentionally avoid the government's notice.
Strangely, my understanding of the injunction was that it wasn't supposed to interfere with Microsoft's contractual obligations to its present customers, only that it was supposed to enjoin Microsoft from continuing to sell the unpatched product to new customers. Maybe they figure that new customers buying software already on the shelves would get an unpatched version in violation of the injunction, so they're patching everyone.
Well, willful patent infringement can result in treble damages being awarded, which is about punishment even though it's a civil suit.
In this particular case, though, damages weren't trebled, but the district court judge awarded i4i an additional $40 million as sanctions against Microsoft for courtroom shenanigans (which is also about punishment).
If this pattern holds, GNU Emacs will be in Bazaar for at least thirty-two years.
I'm pretty sure Emacs has already been bizarre for at least 32 years.
I'm tired of this fat jolly asshole violating our airspace every year. I mean, a domestic passenger jet goes off course for an hour and we get ready to scramble fighters, but Santa gets a free pass even though we apparently know exactly where he is at all times.
Even Hugo Chavez says he's going to shoot down those imaginary drones he thinks we're flying over Venezuela. I say if shooting down imaginary aircraft is good enough for Hugo, then it's damn well good enough for us, too.
For those wondering about summary judgment, what it means, and how this can happen without a case going to trial in front of a jury:
Summary judgment requires that the judge consider the evidence in a manner most favorable to the non-moving party (i.e., the party not moving for summary judgment, in this case isoHunt). If, after consideration of the evidence in that light, there is no possibility that the non-moving party could prevail at trial, then summary judgment can be entered instead.
Essentially, this stems from the concept that juries are intended to be finders of fact, not judges of law. If there are no factual issues that need to be considered, then the jury has no job left to do - no matter what factual conclusion they reach concerning the evidence, the outcome as a matter of law will be the same.
Peter: Egon, this reminds me of the time you tried to drill a hole in your head. Remember that?
Egon: That would have worked if you hadn't stopped me.
Essentially, the Supreme Court and the court under it (the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, aka "CAFC" or "Federal Circuit", and its predecessor, the Court of Customs and Patent Appeals, or "CCPA") have over the years reached the legal decision that there are exceptions to the law which says what things are patentable.
That particular law, 35 USC 101, says that new and useful processes, machines, articles of manufacture, and compositions of matter are patentable. So, a trash compactor, being a machine, is patentable. A song, which isn't within any of those four classes, is not. That's sometimes called "not falling within a statutory class" or simply "nonstatutory".
However, the courts have said that there are certain claims that may appear at a glance to be statutory (because they say "a method" or "a system" at the beginning, implying that a process or machine is being claimed), but are actually not statutory. Laws of nature, natural phenomena, and abstract ideas are called "judicial exceptions" because the statute itself doesn't explicitly say that these things are nonstatutory, but the courts have held that they are nonstatutory anyway. So, F = ma is nonstatutory because it's a law of nature; adding two numbers is nonstatutory because it's an abstract idea. But some way of using F = ma or addition might be statutory... depending. (On what? Well, that's the question, ain't it?)
In the current case, Ex parte Gutta, the BPAI (the appeals board, internal to the USPTO, that represents your first line of appeal after the examiner rejects your application) agreed with the examiner's rejection. They said that the method claimed by Gutta was nothing more than a mathematical technique. Essentially, it was (1) calculate the variances of a set of values around each value in the set, and (2) choose the value with the lowest variance as a new "mean" value. There was no mention in the claim of limiting it to a specific application of that technique. So, the claim runs afoul of the judicial exceptions (it's an abstract idea). Essentially, every possible use of the mathematical technique is covered by the claim, and the courts have said that that's not permitted. This is connected to the "machine or transformation" test you may have read about in other /. discussions of Bilski v. Kappos, in that the "machine or transformation" test is supposed to tell you whether the claim is directed to a judicial exception or not.
But the board went beyond Bilski in this case, saying that the same principles apply to system claims or computer-readable medium claims. Essentially, saying that you have a "system with a processor and a memory, wherein the processor is configured to perform the steps of..." is just window dressing when the "steps of..." are something that would be nonstatutory on their own in a method claim. This is important, because in the vast majority of computer-related applications, the applicant will present three sets of claims: one claiming a method, one claiming a system which performs the method, and one claiming a computer-readable medium (CRM) in which is embodied a program which performs the method when executed by a computer. Without Ex parte Gutta, the policy of the USPTO has been to reject the method claim under 35 USC 101 if it fails the machine or transformation test, but not reject the system and CRM claims, because the processor and/or the CRM makes it statutory. Depending on the result of Bilski v. Kappos (expected in a couple of months from the Supreme Court), Gutta may become a useful tool to prevent window dressing from making an otherwise unpatentable method patentable as a computer programmed to do that method.
One caveat, however, is that Gutta was particularly egregious in terms of the abstractness of the claimed method. A lot of claims in other applications involve manipulations of data. For example, taking an x-ray image of a person, adjusting the contrast or other aspects of the x-ray image, and displaying the mo
The idea formed in a day. The lyrics grew later... at a substantially accelerated rate.
Can I cook, or can't I?
Okay, just kidding. A few minutes, I guess.
The FSM mythology
I find your attack on my religion insulting. May you be smote by His Noodly Appendage.
Young man
Got your acronym wrong
I said, young man
Got it wrong all night long
I will teach you
What the letters should be
So don't spell it dys-lex-ic-ally
You're s'posed to call it the D-M-C-A
You're s'posed to call it the D-M-C-A
You can take my advice
Use this mnemonic device
And this chorus, you sing it twiiiiice
You're s'posed to call it the D-M-C-A
OMFG it's the D-M-C-A
You got those letters reversed
Thank god there's no second verse
My karma's going from bad to wooooorse
The earlier patent gets 17 years from the date of issue, which was in 1998 (so it expires in 2015 as long as they pay their maintenance fees), because it was filed before June 8, 1995 and gets the longer of 17 years from issue or 20 years from filing.
Ironically, the later-filed patent gets 20 years from the earliest date of filing, i.e., the date at which the earlier-filed application was filed (because the later-filed patent is a continuation of a continuation of the earlier-filed patent), which means it expires in 2014.
Of course, the later-filed patent has a patent term adjustment of about four years, so it actually expires in 2018.
I hope this clears things up for you. ;)
Yes, it's a business method, but no, it's not a patent. At least, not yet, anyway.
This one will undoubtedly get, ahem, "Bill-skied". Hopefully, we'll find out what SCOTUS has to say on the matter before it gets examined.
watching Nova Science Now religiously
Now that's irony!
Not to mention the International Buttered Toast Society.
If you have prior art which presents a "substantial new question of patentability" for an existing enforceable patent (i.e., it's during the patent term and the owner has been paying their maintenance fees), you can file for an ex parte reexamination. The fee is not exactly inexpensive ($2200 or more, considerably more than the fees for actually applying for a patent), and there are some fairly complicated hoops to jump through that might make hiring an attorney a good idea. Still, it's something to consider if there's a particular thing that you're pretty sure you could make money on if the patent weren't in the way. Look at it as an investment - if you can get a good return on that investment, it may be worth filing the reexam request, but it's expensive enough to make it not worth doing it based on principle.
Note that it's harder to get a patent invalidated than it is to reject a patent application, so the prior art that you provide in a reexam request has to be pretty spot-on. Also, the patent owner can amend their claims during reexam to overcome the prior art, so the applicant may still have a patent even after the reexam is concluded. In that case, you should be careful that you don't later infringe on the narrowed claims of the reexamined patent.
So, in essence, you're saying we should be treated like specialist surgeons - get paid $400k a year, but spend most of that on malpractice insurance.
Also, keep in mind that patent examination is an art, not a science. Some things are going to be missed, both in terms of false positives and false negatives. It's about finding what we can in the time allotted (between maybe 6 and 30 hours, depending on our field and our level of experience), applying it against the claims, and allowing the application if we can't find what we need. If someone litigates a patent, the defendant will (or should, if they plan on fighting it) fork over enough big bucks to find the prior art that we weren't able to.
By the way, eventually, we're going to start hiring again. If you really want to make things better, you might try working here for a while to see how the system actually works.
One issue with your suggestion is that by asking inventors of prior art about their inventions, we are likely to overestimate the skill of the ordinary artisan. Obviousness is meant to be considered from the perspective of a "person having ordinary skill in the art" - not an expert in the art, not Linus Torvalds, not Steve Wozniak. In some fields, ordinary skill may require a Ph.D., or it may be represented by Mom doing some gardening on the weekend.
We actually are allowed to contact applicants themselves (through, or at least with, their attorney if they have one) if we feel that a discussion of the application will forward prosecution in some way. The Office is actually trying to encourage this to some small degree.
On the other hand, there have been a few times where I've wanted to contact some third party individual to ask them a question about a reference I've found, but we don't do that because of confidentiality rules during the examination of applications.
Can I get free delivery right to my house?
I'm hoping it was heavy on the percussion.
Actually, both Limbaugh and Fox News succeed because so few other outlets in the media discuss news from a non-liberal viewpoint. Maybe they are targeting the 50th percentile, maybe not, but Daily Show/Colbert Report are probably targeting the same range (just more leftward/younger/funnier). This is why Dennis Miller can't keep a show on mainstream TV, because he targets the 90th percentile.
On the other hand, the Fox News website panders to the 25th percentile. I swear, half the stuff on there these days is NSFW, and while I like looking at bewbs, I don't like looking at bewbs accidentally from work.
I was up early and on a whim went to the local Walmart to check out this "Black Friday" phenomenon. It was a ridiculous mess of rude people and massive lines.
But it's like that at Walmart every day.
It's too big to be a space station.... so it's definitely pr0n.
Thank you for explaining that. Saves me the trouble!
It never ceases to amaze me, with the number of times that Slashdot has incorrectly and/or misleadingly reported on patent issues, and people who know better have complained about it in the comments, that we still see Slashdot articles quoting the abstract and generally misreading a patent application to arrive at apparently righteous indignation with the process. In this case, the OP used a lot of fancy language to appear like they did their homework, but in the end, they didn't really read the claims. They provided easier links for various parts of the patent prosecution, including an Office action, but what about a link to the issued claims?
Ah, well, I guess it just wouldn't be Slashdot otherwise.
Actually, WSJ is pretty good, but most of it is behind a paywall and isn't getting properly indexed anyway.