I think anyone's who's had their gall bladder removed will tell you they wish they had a functioning one. It helps make your stool a lot more pleasant!
Where can I sign up for one or two extra ones? I'd like my stool to smell like roses, and I'd like it to play classic jazz whenever I fart.
Take the gun off and put, say, gripper arms, and you have a robot that can maneuver around a house and help older people who have trouble getting around.
Now the search goes out for any student who has a paper which is being held by TurnItIn that they did not upload themselves.
Er, no. It was pure supposition on the part of the blog author that the lawyers might be interested in hearing from more students.
On a side note, the students lost. Twice. They were also facing accusations of unauthorized access to the TurnItIn site, and opted to settle rather than face the prospect of actually having to pay for poking the hornets' nest (the district court had ruled against the company, but the Court of Appeals reversed and remanded that decision). Meanwhile, the TurnItIn people had already gotten a favorable judgment on the copyright issue, which serves to dissuade other people from trying to push the issue - no reason to risk that at the Supreme Court if you don't have to.
If I were the lawyers on this case, I wouldn't want to touch it again with a ten-meter cattleprod.
In this case, the important feature is the channel depth stuff recited in the independent claim. Are any of the podcasting experts out there familiar with this limitation and how it relates to the prior art?
Okay, so AT&T tells Apple to ban an iPhone app that provides a competing service.... would any antitrust lawyers out there mind explaining to me exactly what part of this isn't illegal under antitrust law?
I thought a "Marketing Douche" was what one used after lying to one's customers for the umpteenth time, to get rid of that "not-so-fresh" feeling.
Re:Tron 2.0 Videogame - No Longer Cannon?
on
Tron Legacy Exposed
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· Score: 1
Upon viewing the stills for the new movie, I thought, "Hey, I'm pretty sure I've played this movie before." A lot of the design seems more inspired by Tron 2.0 than the original Tron movie.
1. The BPAI affirms rejections more often than not. See this study on the topic.
2. In the long run, continuing to reject a case, and getting counts for RCEs, will provide slightly more advantage to an examiner than an allowance. Allowances are also, generally speaking, harder to come by for junior examiners, since a primary examiner or supervisory examiner has to sign their cases, and a rejection is "trusted" more than an allowance since rejections can always be fixed in the next action.
3. KSR and Bilski have both had a tremendous impact in decreasing the rate of allowance, combined with recent quality policies in the USPTO which put allowances under more scrutiny and the training of many new examiners in a training academy where allowances are very uncommon.
On a side note, I would point out that the presumption of validity of issued patents is mandated by statute. In the courts, this has the effect of requiring a defendant to prove invalidity at the threshold of "clear and convincing evidence" (compare this to rejections in the USPTO on patent applications, which require only "prima facie evidence").
However, most clauses that have been tested in courts have been found to be not enforceable
This actually isn't true. Most of the enforceability issues have come from how the EULA is presented to the user and whether the user is made fully apprised of the terms before they are out the cash. (Whether offering a refund for those who decline the EULA is good enough to avoid these problems is unknown, since, afaik, this has never been tested in court.)
Even still, in the absence of an EULA, the defaults provided by copyright law would still cause problems for someone who wanted to export Spore creatures to another game, and even more problems for someone who wanted to sell their exported Spore creatures.
1. You file your application. You have to pay a filing fee, an examination fee, and a search fee. If you file more than 3 independent and/or 20 total claims, you pay an additional fee. 2. At 18 months after filing, the application is published in accordance with our international treaty obligations (unless you request that it not be published and you file a statement indicating that you won't file the same application overseas). At this point, you have to pay a publication fee. 3. The PTO eventually examines the application and sends you an Office action. Usually, this will be a rejection, and the first rejection is always non-final. 4. You respond to the Office action, either presenting arguments as to why the examiner is wrong, or amending the claims. You have a three-month time limit to file a response, but you can buy up to three more months if you need to. 5. The PTO considers your response and examines any amended claims. If the examiner maintains the original rejections, or if all new rejections were necessitated by the amendment to the claims, then the next Office action is final. If the examiner went too far with the rejection or if the amended claims are allowable, the next action will probably either be another non-final rejection (go back to step 4 at that point) or a notice of allowance. 6. You can file another response after a final action, but unless your response places the application in condition for allowance, you will receive an advisory action indicating that the clock is still ticking for you. Alternatively, you can file a notice of appeal (with a fee), followed by an appeal brief (with a fee), and have your appeal heard by the Board of Patent Appeals and Interferences (an internal group at the USPTO which handles the first level of appeals of examiner decisions). 7. If you choose not to appeal, and you want to keep your application in the running, you would then need to file a Request for Continued Examination (with a fee). An RCE is generally filed with amended claims (and at this point, you would go back to step 3 to have the amended claims examined).
At some point, either you abandon your application, usually by not responding within the time limit, or you get a Notice of Allowance. Upon allowance, you must pay an issue fee in order to actually get a patent.
There are very few cases where any fees are refundable. Certainly, the filing fee is nonrefundable, and the search fee is nonrefundable once an examiner has conducted a search. There are a few cases where a fee that was paid improperly can be applied to future expenses in the same application.
This page lists various fees involved in patent prosecution at the USPTO.
There are dozens of districts in the federal court system. Just by random chance, it's fairly likely that at least one of them will be off to the side of the bell curve, and once patent plaintiffs noticed which one(s), they started trying to take advantage of it.
This doesn't really have anything to do with local legislators. Patent disputes are usually handled in US District Court, meaning that the reason why the Eastern District of Texas has been so friendly to patent trolls is because an unusual number of federal judges in that district are unusually biased in favor of plaintiffs in patent disputes.
Step one: Patent your invention. It is an invention, right? Not just some half-baked idea, but instead, something you can write a paper about, providing implementation details sufficient to "allow one of ordinary skill in the art to make and use the invention without undue experimentation"?
Patenting your invention is not a vetting process. In fact, some inventions get patents because they do something in a more stupid way than the prior art teaches. The idea that a patent somehow confers credence is a marketing ploy hundreds of years old, but there's no truth to be found in it.
But you do get two benefits from patenting your invention: One, you find out some information about whether your invention is actually new, what parts of it are old (and possibly protected by their own patents), and you'll find out something about the techniques your competitors might be using (this information can be helpful, but it's not necessarily complete). And two, you get exclusive domain over your patent for 20 years from the filing date (possibly longer), so if you share your idea with a venture capitalist, only to find that the next year, they've taken your idea and cut you out of the loop, you can file a lawsuit to claim damages from their infringement.
If you choose to go the patent route, by the way, I strongly recommend that you hire a patent attorney. Very few pro se applicants know how to file a proper application, and even fewer can follow up by responding to the USPTO's actions with proper responses. For that matter, I've seen quite a few patent attorneys screw it up in small ways, but it's easy to tell how much of a hand an applicant had in drafting an application.
Slashdot Mirror
Understaffed? The guys approving these patents must not be spending more than 5 minutes on them. I'd say they are understaffed.
When we start hiring again, feel free to apply (if you're a US citizen).
Very good point. The true indicator of Microsoft considering itself to have real competition is when it starts pricing its products competitively.
If a search were truly "going out", there would be some evidence of this besides some blog post with no apparent connection to the lawyers.
I think anyone's who's had their gall bladder removed will tell you they wish they had a functioning one. It helps make your stool a lot more pleasant!
Where can I sign up for one or two extra ones? I'd like my stool to smell like roses, and I'd like it to play classic jazz whenever I fart.
No other dictionary source provides a definition for that form, at least according to Google (define:injuncted or define:injunct).
Take the gun off and put, say, gripper arms, and you have a robot that can maneuver around a house and help older people who have trouble getting around.
Now the search goes out for any student who has a paper which is being held by TurnItIn that they did not upload themselves.
Er, no. It was pure supposition on the part of the blog author that the lawyers might be interested in hearing from more students.
On a side note, the students lost. Twice. They were also facing accusations of unauthorized access to the TurnItIn site, and opted to settle rather than face the prospect of actually having to pay for poking the hornets' nest (the district court had ruled against the company, but the Court of Appeals reversed and remanded that decision). Meanwhile, the TurnItIn people had already gotten a favorable judgment on the copyright issue, which serves to dissuade other people from trying to push the issue - no reason to risk that at the Supreme Court if you don't have to.
If I were the lawyers on this case, I wouldn't want to touch it again with a ten-meter cattleprod.
You forget that technologies developed initially for military applications very frequently have civilian applications as well.
Radar? Military, at first. Now it's a cornerstone of meteorology and modern aviation.
Electronic computing? Also military, at first, though it really took off when it found civilian application.
The Intertubes? Also also military, at first (ARPAnet). Today, though, it brings us Slashdot.
Who cares? In a few years' time, this will be obsoleted by its successor, icantbelieveitsnotbtrfs.
Almost makes me want to head to the store right now and pick up some Torgo's Executive Powder.
AvP's tagline, "Whoever wins, we lose," was the most apropos tagline since Highlander's "In the end, there can be only one."
In this case, the important feature is the channel depth stuff recited in the independent claim. Are any of the podcasting experts out there familiar with this limitation and how it relates to the prior art?
Okay, so AT&T tells Apple to ban an iPhone app that provides a competing service.... would any antitrust lawyers out there mind explaining to me exactly what part of this isn't illegal under antitrust law?
True, putting the lab underground should prevent any problems.
I'm sure you mean underground with rat-zapping lasers.
I thought a "Marketing Douche" was what one used after lying to one's customers for the umpteenth time, to get rid of that "not-so-fresh" feeling.
Upon viewing the stills for the new movie, I thought, "Hey, I'm pretty sure I've played this movie before." A lot of the design seems more inspired by Tron 2.0 than the original Tron movie.
Dead people are easier to govern, though there is a loss of productivity.
They're also worth a lot of votes!
1. The BPAI affirms rejections more often than not. See this study on the topic.
2. In the long run, continuing to reject a case, and getting counts for RCEs, will provide slightly more advantage to an examiner than an allowance. Allowances are also, generally speaking, harder to come by for junior examiners, since a primary examiner or supervisory examiner has to sign their cases, and a rejection is "trusted" more than an allowance since rejections can always be fixed in the next action.
3. KSR and Bilski have both had a tremendous impact in decreasing the rate of allowance, combined with recent quality policies in the USPTO which put allowances under more scrutiny and the training of many new examiners in a training academy where allowances are very uncommon.
On a side note, I would point out that the presumption of validity of issued patents is mandated by statute. In the courts, this has the effect of requiring a defendant to prove invalidity at the threshold of "clear and convincing evidence" (compare this to rejections in the USPTO on patent applications, which require only "prima facie evidence").
However, most clauses that have been tested in courts have been found to be not enforceable
This actually isn't true. Most of the enforceability issues have come from how the EULA is presented to the user and whether the user is made fully apprised of the terms before they are out the cash. (Whether offering a refund for those who decline the EULA is good enough to avoid these problems is unknown, since, afaik, this has never been tested in court.)
Even still, in the absence of an EULA, the defaults provided by copyright law would still cause problems for someone who wanted to export Spore creatures to another game, and even more problems for someone who wanted to sell their exported Spore creatures.
Okay, here's what happens (generally speaking):
1. You file your application. You have to pay a filing fee, an examination fee, and a search fee. If you file more than 3 independent and/or 20 total claims, you pay an additional fee.
2. At 18 months after filing, the application is published in accordance with our international treaty obligations (unless you request that it not be published and you file a statement indicating that you won't file the same application overseas). At this point, you have to pay a publication fee.
3. The PTO eventually examines the application and sends you an Office action. Usually, this will be a rejection, and the first rejection is always non-final.
4. You respond to the Office action, either presenting arguments as to why the examiner is wrong, or amending the claims. You have a three-month time limit to file a response, but you can buy up to three more months if you need to.
5. The PTO considers your response and examines any amended claims. If the examiner maintains the original rejections, or if all new rejections were necessitated by the amendment to the claims, then the next Office action is final. If the examiner went too far with the rejection or if the amended claims are allowable, the next action will probably either be another non-final rejection (go back to step 4 at that point) or a notice of allowance.
6. You can file another response after a final action, but unless your response places the application in condition for allowance, you will receive an advisory action indicating that the clock is still ticking for you. Alternatively, you can file a notice of appeal (with a fee), followed by an appeal brief (with a fee), and have your appeal heard by the Board of Patent Appeals and Interferences (an internal group at the USPTO which handles the first level of appeals of examiner decisions).
7. If you choose not to appeal, and you want to keep your application in the running, you would then need to file a Request for Continued Examination (with a fee). An RCE is generally filed with amended claims (and at this point, you would go back to step 3 to have the amended claims examined).
At some point, either you abandon your application, usually by not responding within the time limit, or you get a Notice of Allowance. Upon allowance, you must pay an issue fee in order to actually get a patent.
There are very few cases where any fees are refundable. Certainly, the filing fee is nonrefundable, and the search fee is nonrefundable once an examiner has conducted a search. There are a few cases where a fee that was paid improperly can be applied to future expenses in the same application.
This page lists various fees involved in patent prosecution at the USPTO.
There are dozens of districts in the federal court system. Just by random chance, it's fairly likely that at least one of them will be off to the side of the bell curve, and once patent plaintiffs noticed which one(s), they started trying to take advantage of it.
The USPTO has already stated that they won't be doing real prior art checks themselves.
Care to cite a reference?
This doesn't really have anything to do with local legislators. Patent disputes are usually handled in US District Court, meaning that the reason why the Eastern District of Texas has been so friendly to patent trolls is because an unusual number of federal judges in that district are unusually biased in favor of plaintiffs in patent disputes.
Step one: Patent your invention. It is an invention, right? Not just some half-baked idea, but instead, something you can write a paper about, providing implementation details sufficient to "allow one of ordinary skill in the art to make and use the invention without undue experimentation"?
Patenting your invention is not a vetting process. In fact, some inventions get patents because they do something in a more stupid way than the prior art teaches. The idea that a patent somehow confers credence is a marketing ploy hundreds of years old, but there's no truth to be found in it.
But you do get two benefits from patenting your invention: One, you find out some information about whether your invention is actually new, what parts of it are old (and possibly protected by their own patents), and you'll find out something about the techniques your competitors might be using (this information can be helpful, but it's not necessarily complete). And two, you get exclusive domain over your patent for 20 years from the filing date (possibly longer), so if you share your idea with a venture capitalist, only to find that the next year, they've taken your idea and cut you out of the loop, you can file a lawsuit to claim damages from their infringement.
If you choose to go the patent route, by the way, I strongly recommend that you hire a patent attorney. Very few pro se applicants know how to file a proper application, and even fewer can follow up by responding to the USPTO's actions with proper responses. For that matter, I've seen quite a few patent attorneys screw it up in small ways, but it's easy to tell how much of a hand an applicant had in drafting an application.
Even without guns, though, the F-4 was the coolest looking aircraft of all time. (The A-10 is a close second.)