If you did like the study authors said and put wind turbines everywhere, you can pretty much ensure that there will be enough wind somewhere in the world at any given time to accommodate demand. That's assuming that you create a world electrical grid (or a set of grids that each cover a large enough area) to allow everyone to benefit from the averaging out of wind around the world.
No and no. Both of those situations involve someone gaining access to computer systems, where the owners of those systems don't want that someone to have access.
With the Iran situation, there are people trying to gain access to computer systems, where a third party doesn't want them to have access. To the contrary, the owners of Twitter, YouTube, and other services have been extremely supportive of the efforts of Iranians to spread the word of how the government has imported plainclothes thugs from other countries to come in and brutalize innocent people in the streets.
I don't think the manipulations at hand here are subtleties like "shifting votes". Seems more like "pulling numbers out of their collective ass" is what happened.
A lot of what we think of as the really bad stuff, was undertaken by the patent office on its own with neither authorization from Congress nor truly applicable court ruling, but at the direction of an ambitiously expansive director.
Hey, who woulda thunk that Triantyfyllos Tafas was a Slashdotter?
Somebody ought to call up IBM and Microsoft and warn them their lawyers are screwing up, since software algorithms ARE quite patentable here in the US.
The algorithms themselves are not patentable per se according to current US law. A variety of cases have established that mathematical algorithms are nonstatutory subject matter (though the explanation of why has differed from case to case). But from a practical standpoint, attorneys have a few ways to get patents on what is essentially software.
What has changed recently is the test applied to make a determination of whether a claim to a method is nonstatutory. Previously, case law commonly referred to as State Street indicated that if the claims were directed to an algorithm which produced "a useful, concrete and tangible result", then it was not merely a mathematical algorithm and was an actual patentable invention.
Current case law includes the fairly recent Bilski decision, which instead applies a test put forth by the USPTO in accordance with other case law: method claims are nonstatutory unless the method either is tied to a particular machine or performs an eligible transformation. The USPTO has gone through a few versions of the guidelines for applying these rejections to applications, but most computer-based method claims end up okay as long as the attorneys remembered to include in the specification that the method was performed with or by a computer.
Computer-based claims are frequently written in two other ways. One is by claiming a system of various units that perform functions. Generally, the units are software modules of some sort. In this case, if the claims don't also mention a computer, then the system is really just software per se. A case called In re Warmerdam discusses the direct claiming of computer programs (e.g., where the claim starts off, "1. A computer program which causes a computer to perform steps comprising..."), and even if they use the subterfuge of claiming a system, but the system is really all software, they get nailed on that.
They can also claim a computer program by embodying it on a tangible computer-readable medium (such as a CD-ROM, memory, etc.). What applicants usually run into problems with here is that they say that a signal (e.g., a carrier wave, a transmission line, etc.) could be a computer-readable medium, but there is case law against that as well (In re Nuijten). Interestingly, over in the 9th Circuit (Northern District of California, I think?), there's been a recent case that invalidated computer-readable medium claims as being directed to the computer-readable medium itself, which is anticipated by any computer-readable medium in the prior art.
Anyway, the take-home message is that you can't get a patent on software... unless you jump through all the hoops.
The pay is fairly competitive (as government jobs go, at least) with industry jobs. Starting salaries are close to average, ranging from $50k to $70k, depending on your incoming level of experience/education, although you do have to live in the DC-VA-MD area, which can be fairly expensive (though not as bad as Manhattan or Silicon Valley, for instance). If you stay long enough, you can hit the federal salary cap (about $150k). It's also tough to beat government bennies. The question is whether you like the work and can deal with the production environment.
Examiners are responsible to get a certain number of "counts" per pay period. You get a count by sending out a first Office action for an application (on the merits - there are certain Office actions which don't count for this). You also get a count when an application is disposed of (abandoned, allowed, upon writing an Examiner's Answer when the applicant is appealing your decision, or upon the applicant filing a Request for Continued Examination).
The problem is that there are Office actions that don't earn you counts, but that still require a decent amount of work. Your second Office action on a case doesn't earn you a count, and if you screwed up the first one, you may not be able to make the second one "final" (after final, if you did your Office action correctly, the applicant is only able to appeal or file an RCE, so you usually get a count after a final action within 3 to 6 months).
What this amounts to is a fairly grueling workplace starting at about six months (once your "basic" training is mostly complete) to about 1.5 to 2 years, because in the interim, you're doing a lot of Office actions that don't earn you any counts yet. Once your pipeline gets full, i.e., all those extra actions you sent out are finally netting you some disposal counts, the workload tapers off, and if you're good at the job, you'll pretty much sail through and get your promotions and bonuses easily at that point. But in the meantime, you'll probably be working a lot of unpaid overtime to make production.
The production system is why the turnover at the USPTO is so high. Most examiners who leave cite it as the biggest factor in their decision to quit. Not coincidentally, most examiners leave within their first two years. If it were fun like programming games or something, then people would probably grin and bear it, but it's kind of not. You'll learn a lot about the technology (or "art") you're examining in, but most of this learning will come from searching the prior art rather than from reading the applications you're examining, because attorneys (most of whom have a basic science or engineering background) write most of these things (and frequently, they are mediocre translations from Japanese or Korean), and the legal aspects make the obfuscations practiced by the attorneys into an artform.
Still, some people like it, and they stay at the USPTO until they retire. I haven't figured out why yet.
Can someone please tell me what things like that damn suitability matrix have to do with suitability to work? Such as sexual orientation, traffic tickets, bad checks, eviction, incest, and bestiality have to do with ability to Science?
Well, when the Science is super-ultra-secret, all of those things indicate possible ways that a foreign power could exert influence over a scientist to cause them to fork over the super-ultra-secret scientific information (i.e., through blackmail or bribery).
It's fairly likely that new incoming employees still have to submit to the background checks. At this point, many many federal employees do, and the level of probulation depends on the level of access to information given (e.g., confidential, secret, or top secret).
(On a side note, it's interesting that they treat marijuana with kid gloves compared to other drugs.)
Yes, corporations pass part of their costs along to consumers. But they can't pass all of those costs along, because of competition from producers in foreign markets, such as China, where the producers either are run at the whim of the state or get tax breaks. Those producers can undercut US producers for two reasons: one, the lower cost of labor caused partly by the currently-industrializing status of those countries and partly because of wage inflation caused by labor unions throughout the 20th century; and two, corporate taxes.
Faced with additional costs that they can't pass along to consumers because their sales will plummet, domestic producers will offshore in droves.
This is the best reason to replace all federal taxes with a federal retail sales tax, because it moves the hidden additional costs on domestically-produced goods to the end of the production cycle, and it applies the same taxes to both domestic- and foreign-produced goods (and without creating a fiasco at the WTO, either).
Farnsworth: Let me show you around. That's my lab table, and this is my work stool, and over there is my intergalactic spaceship. And here is where I keep assorted lengths of wire. Fry: Whoa! A real live space ship! Farnsworth: I designed it myself. Let me show you some of the different lengths of wire I used.
As it turns out, nearly all of the claim language you wrote would be considered "intended use", which usually doesn't impose any actual limitations on the claim. In this case, prior art would include any "insulating ceramic material vessel" aside from those which are completely incapable of transporting liquids.
This would include anything from an actual ceramic coffee cup to, say, a ceramic capacitor with a surface on which you could put some amount of liquid and then be able to transport it. (The reference cited as prior art doesn't actually have to state that the disclosed item is usable for that purpose, as long as it could be used that way.)
But in terms of indefiniteness, which is, I think, what you're talking about, no, it's not indefinite. It may be complicated, but one can discern what it is you're claiming, with a bit of applied thought. I've seen a few patent apps where you can read the claims and still can't actually tell what the invention is, but that doesn't mean it's indefinite - it just means the claim is written really broadly. The specification will explain what the actual application is, and the claim is just a much more generalized description that is intended to be applicable to a lot of things rather than their specific application.
Indefiniteness instead means that you can't tell where the boundaries are of what's being claimed. Think of a patent claim as a property deed, except instead of indicating what land you own, it indicates what portion of the space of inventions you "own". A property deed (in the older states in the US, anyway) will indicate the property line by "metes and bounds", i.e., "starting at a marked birch tree on the bank of the Potomac River, thence 120 poles N 34 degrees E on a line with Adams['s adjacent property] to a boulder..." While a birch tree isn't the best indicator (especially now that we have GPS) of a corner on a property line, it's historically been considered permanent enough to be definite.
If it instead says, "Starting at Bob who is standing on the bank of the Potomac River..." that would be indefinite, because you don't know who Bob is or where he's standing, and it's unlikely that someone will go back there later and find Bob still standing in the same spot.
The same thing applies with patent claims, except there are other ways that a claim can be indefinite. It can refer to some limitation as if it's one we already know about from earlier in the claim, but that hasn't actually been mentioned yet (that's called lacking antecedent basis); it can use some relative term in a way that doesn't actually tell you anything (e.g., "having a large number of widgets attached"); it can use "for example" or similar terms which make it unclear whether a particular limitation is required to meet the claim; it can just state "A device for transporting coffee" without providing any actual limitations on the structure of the device; and there are various other ways of making a claim indefinite. If the claim is just pure non-understandable gobbledygook, that's indefinite, too.
Indefinite claims get rejected under the second paragraph of 35 USC 112, but the statute has been "clarified" by prolific case law on what is and isn't indefinite. You can look in the Manual on Patent Examining Procedure (MPEP), section 2173, and the subsections following that for more details.
I have never seen the word when not used in patents (or referring to them), and I have never seen a patent without the word.
That's because it's a concise way to require that there be more than one of something. If you don't specifically say that you mean more than one, in a lot of cases, just making a noun plural can be construed as indicating at least one of the noun, rather than at least two.
The folks in the dorms way back in my undergrad days would play multiplayer Descent with a "flares only" house rule, because it was too easy to kill people otherwise.
They never really define "native", though, so one could say that as long as the code is written as "native" for the processor (i.e., it's compiled into directly machine-executable code and not running on a Java VM or something like that), then it's "native".
These are actually just published applications, not patents (you can tell because the number starts with the publication year, whereas patent numbers are just serial numbers in increasing order roughly by date of issuance).
What's interesting is that the first one linked is specifically limited to a game console, while the second one sounds as though a MythTV box with MythGame/MAME would read on most, if not all, of the claims (whether under anticipation or obviousness depends on whether you consider a MythTV box with MythGame to be a game console).
Trying to make culture somehow a requirement for consciousness (a) is a dubious premise and (b) misses the point of where we stand technologically w.r.t. neuroscience and brain modeling. There are certainly several metric assloads of unanswered questions left behind by the linked paper, and the state of the art is nowhere near being able to generate an artificial consciousness (hence the word "toward"). Certainly, the "software", i.e., the actual arrangement of neurons and synapses in a given brain, is an unsolved (and barely addressed problem), but we still have to have a fundamental understanding of the large-scale dynamics and the general small-scale structure of the brain before we can get into that.
To some degree, this is in hopes that someone can arrive at a fully functional brain simulation without having to simulate a lot of physical development (i.e., zygote to infant) as well. Time will tell whether that's possible or not. But worrying about language (and eventually "culture") in a simulated brain is a problem decades, if not centuries, down the road, and we'll likely have decided a lot about human consciousness by virtue of modeling the brain itself long before the language problem is solved.
As for your "pop philosophy" statement, actually, this is science, first and foremost. Many scientists like to, er, philosophize on the nature of their work, particularly in neuroscience, and it makes great fodder for friendly argument at conferences and such. But ultimately, these questions will be answered by science, not philosophy.
I'm not sure how your example applies. Proving that a patent holder didn't invent the claimed invention invalidates the patent. The doctrine of laches provides that a patent holder who fails to take action in a reasonable amount of time against an infringer can't recover damages for the period up until the lawsuit is filed. And none of this depends on the differences between a patent consortium and a single entity acting alone.
The problem there is that your remedy at law for someone violating the anti-circumvention provision is to sue them. Takedown notices don't apply, and an ISP complying with a takedown notice makes no difference in their culpability for hosting the circumvention tools.
While licensing consortia look at first glance to be Evil(tm), they actually do serve an important function. Many technologies are covered by several, perhaps dozens, of patents. Trying to negotiate individually with each company for licensing terms would be a legal and logistical nightmare - especially considering that if you miss one, you're screwed. Negotiating with a licensing consortium means that you only have to go through the licensing steps once, and you're covered for the duration of your license against all of the various patents covering the technology.
Yes, you still have to be careful inasmuch as some company may have decided not to get on board the consortium train, but the chances of this happening are reduced.
The true evil arises when licensing consortia impose "terms of use" on their licenses, such as by leveraging patents to enforce DRM restrictions on equipment manufacturers (DVD-CSS, AACS, HDMI, CableCARD, etc.).
Slashdot Mirror
If you did like the study authors said and put wind turbines everywhere, you can pretty much ensure that there will be enough wind somewhere in the world at any given time to accommodate demand. That's assuming that you create a world electrical grid (or a set of grids that each cover a large enough area) to allow everyone to benefit from the averaging out of wind around the world.
Here, let me set that straw man on fire for you:
No and no. Both of those situations involve someone gaining access to computer systems, where the owners of those systems don't want that someone to have access.
With the Iran situation, there are people trying to gain access to computer systems, where a third party doesn't want them to have access. To the contrary, the owners of Twitter, YouTube, and other services have been extremely supportive of the efforts of Iranians to spread the word of how the government has imported plainclothes thugs from other countries to come in and brutalize innocent people in the streets.
I don't think the manipulations at hand here are subtleties like "shifting votes". Seems more like "pulling numbers out of their collective ass" is what happened.
A lot of what we think of as the really bad stuff, was undertaken by the patent office on its own with neither authorization from Congress nor truly applicable court ruling, but at the direction of an ambitiously expansive director.
Hey, who woulda thunk that Triantyfyllos Tafas was a Slashdotter?
The patent was invalidated on the basis of obviousness over the prior art, not because of it being software.
Somebody ought to call up IBM and Microsoft and warn them their lawyers are screwing up, since software algorithms ARE quite patentable here in the US.
The algorithms themselves are not patentable per se according to current US law. A variety of cases have established that mathematical algorithms are nonstatutory subject matter (though the explanation of why has differed from case to case). But from a practical standpoint, attorneys have a few ways to get patents on what is essentially software.
What has changed recently is the test applied to make a determination of whether a claim to a method is nonstatutory. Previously, case law commonly referred to as State Street indicated that if the claims were directed to an algorithm which produced "a useful, concrete and tangible result", then it was not merely a mathematical algorithm and was an actual patentable invention.
Current case law includes the fairly recent Bilski decision, which instead applies a test put forth by the USPTO in accordance with other case law: method claims are nonstatutory unless the method either is tied to a particular machine or performs an eligible transformation. The USPTO has gone through a few versions of the guidelines for applying these rejections to applications, but most computer-based method claims end up okay as long as the attorneys remembered to include in the specification that the method was performed with or by a computer.
Computer-based claims are frequently written in two other ways. One is by claiming a system of various units that perform functions. Generally, the units are software modules of some sort. In this case, if the claims don't also mention a computer, then the system is really just software per se. A case called In re Warmerdam discusses the direct claiming of computer programs (e.g., where the claim starts off, "1. A computer program which causes a computer to perform steps comprising..."), and even if they use the subterfuge of claiming a system, but the system is really all software, they get nailed on that.
They can also claim a computer program by embodying it on a tangible computer-readable medium (such as a CD-ROM, memory, etc.). What applicants usually run into problems with here is that they say that a signal (e.g., a carrier wave, a transmission line, etc.) could be a computer-readable medium, but there is case law against that as well (In re Nuijten). Interestingly, over in the 9th Circuit (Northern District of California, I think?), there's been a recent case that invalidated computer-readable medium claims as being directed to the computer-readable medium itself, which is anticipated by any computer-readable medium in the prior art.
Anyway, the take-home message is that you can't get a patent on software... unless you jump through all the hoops.
Seriously. What's the attraction? Why post one-line updates constantly?
Because that's what fits in a cell phone text message.
But you're right. Twitter is lame, especially now that everyone uses it.
The pay is fairly competitive (as government jobs go, at least) with industry jobs. Starting salaries are close to average, ranging from $50k to $70k, depending on your incoming level of experience/education, although you do have to live in the DC-VA-MD area, which can be fairly expensive (though not as bad as Manhattan or Silicon Valley, for instance). If you stay long enough, you can hit the federal salary cap (about $150k). It's also tough to beat government bennies. The question is whether you like the work and can deal with the production environment.
Examiners are responsible to get a certain number of "counts" per pay period. You get a count by sending out a first Office action for an application (on the merits - there are certain Office actions which don't count for this). You also get a count when an application is disposed of (abandoned, allowed, upon writing an Examiner's Answer when the applicant is appealing your decision, or upon the applicant filing a Request for Continued Examination).
The problem is that there are Office actions that don't earn you counts, but that still require a decent amount of work. Your second Office action on a case doesn't earn you a count, and if you screwed up the first one, you may not be able to make the second one "final" (after final, if you did your Office action correctly, the applicant is only able to appeal or file an RCE, so you usually get a count after a final action within 3 to 6 months).
What this amounts to is a fairly grueling workplace starting at about six months (once your "basic" training is mostly complete) to about 1.5 to 2 years, because in the interim, you're doing a lot of Office actions that don't earn you any counts yet. Once your pipeline gets full, i.e., all those extra actions you sent out are finally netting you some disposal counts, the workload tapers off, and if you're good at the job, you'll pretty much sail through and get your promotions and bonuses easily at that point. But in the meantime, you'll probably be working a lot of unpaid overtime to make production.
The production system is why the turnover at the USPTO is so high. Most examiners who leave cite it as the biggest factor in their decision to quit. Not coincidentally, most examiners leave within their first two years. If it were fun like programming games or something, then people would probably grin and bear it, but it's kind of not. You'll learn a lot about the technology (or "art") you're examining in, but most of this learning will come from searching the prior art rather than from reading the applications you're examining, because attorneys (most of whom have a basic science or engineering background) write most of these things (and frequently, they are mediocre translations from Japanese or Korean), and the legal aspects make the obfuscations practiced by the attorneys into an artform.
Still, some people like it, and they stay at the USPTO until they retire. I haven't figured out why yet.
Can someone please tell me what things like that damn suitability matrix have to do with suitability to work? Such as sexual orientation, traffic tickets, bad checks, eviction, incest, and bestiality have to do with ability to Science?
Well, when the Science is super-ultra-secret, all of those things indicate possible ways that a foreign power could exert influence over a scientist to cause them to fork over the super-ultra-secret scientific information (i.e., through blackmail or bribery).
It's fairly likely that new incoming employees still have to submit to the background checks. At this point, many many federal employees do, and the level of probulation depends on the level of access to information given (e.g., confidential, secret, or top secret).
(On a side note, it's interesting that they treat marijuana with kid gloves compared to other drugs.)
I also hope they have a webcam, especially in that room with the giant tubes (lasers).
Obviously, you would want to have a workstation positioned directly in the path of the lasers, but does it really need a webcam?
Yes, corporations pass part of their costs along to consumers. But they can't pass all of those costs along, because of competition from producers in foreign markets, such as China, where the producers either are run at the whim of the state or get tax breaks. Those producers can undercut US producers for two reasons: one, the lower cost of labor caused partly by the currently-industrializing status of those countries and partly because of wage inflation caused by labor unions throughout the 20th century; and two, corporate taxes.
Faced with additional costs that they can't pass along to consumers because their sales will plummet, domestic producers will offshore in droves.
This is the best reason to replace all federal taxes with a federal retail sales tax, because it moves the hidden additional costs on domestically-produced goods to the end of the production cycle, and it applies the same taxes to both domestic- and foreign-produced goods (and without creating a fiasco at the WTO, either).
That better be some damn tasty rhubarb.
built his CPU with 1253 pieces of wire
Farnsworth: Let me show you around. That's my lab table, and this is my work stool, and over there is my intergalactic spaceship. And here is where I keep assorted lengths of wire.
Fry: Whoa! A real live space ship!
Farnsworth: I designed it myself. Let me show you some of the different lengths of wire I used.
Well, I don't care whether your post is unrelated or not, because I LOL'ed.
As it turns out, nearly all of the claim language you wrote would be considered "intended use", which usually doesn't impose any actual limitations on the claim. In this case, prior art would include any "insulating ceramic material vessel" aside from those which are completely incapable of transporting liquids.
This would include anything from an actual ceramic coffee cup to, say, a ceramic capacitor with a surface on which you could put some amount of liquid and then be able to transport it. (The reference cited as prior art doesn't actually have to state that the disclosed item is usable for that purpose, as long as it could be used that way.)
But in terms of indefiniteness, which is, I think, what you're talking about, no, it's not indefinite. It may be complicated, but one can discern what it is you're claiming, with a bit of applied thought. I've seen a few patent apps where you can read the claims and still can't actually tell what the invention is, but that doesn't mean it's indefinite - it just means the claim is written really broadly. The specification will explain what the actual application is, and the claim is just a much more generalized description that is intended to be applicable to a lot of things rather than their specific application.
Indefiniteness instead means that you can't tell where the boundaries are of what's being claimed. Think of a patent claim as a property deed, except instead of indicating what land you own, it indicates what portion of the space of inventions you "own". A property deed (in the older states in the US, anyway) will indicate the property line by "metes and bounds", i.e., "starting at a marked birch tree on the bank of the Potomac River, thence 120 poles N 34 degrees E on a line with Adams['s adjacent property] to a boulder..." While a birch tree isn't the best indicator (especially now that we have GPS) of a corner on a property line, it's historically been considered permanent enough to be definite.
If it instead says, "Starting at Bob who is standing on the bank of the Potomac River..." that would be indefinite, because you don't know who Bob is or where he's standing, and it's unlikely that someone will go back there later and find Bob still standing in the same spot.
The same thing applies with patent claims, except there are other ways that a claim can be indefinite. It can refer to some limitation as if it's one we already know about from earlier in the claim, but that hasn't actually been mentioned yet (that's called lacking antecedent basis); it can use some relative term in a way that doesn't actually tell you anything (e.g., "having a large number of widgets attached"); it can use "for example" or similar terms which make it unclear whether a particular limitation is required to meet the claim; it can just state "A device for transporting coffee" without providing any actual limitations on the structure of the device; and there are various other ways of making a claim indefinite. If the claim is just pure non-understandable gobbledygook, that's indefinite, too.
Indefinite claims get rejected under the second paragraph of 35 USC 112, but the statute has been "clarified" by prolific case law on what is and isn't indefinite. You can look in the Manual on Patent Examining Procedure (MPEP), section 2173, and the subsections following that for more details.
Does not contain the word "plurality".
I have never seen the word when not used in patents (or referring to them), and I have never seen a patent without the word.
That's because it's a concise way to require that there be more than one of something. If you don't specifically say that you mean more than one, in a lot of cases, just making a noun plural can be construed as indicating at least one of the noun, rather than at least two.
The folks in the dorms way back in my undergrad days would play multiplayer Descent with a "flares only" house rule, because it was too easy to kill people otherwise.
They never really define "native", though, so one could say that as long as the code is written as "native" for the processor (i.e., it's compiled into directly machine-executable code and not running on a Java VM or something like that), then it's "native".
These are actually just published applications, not patents (you can tell because the number starts with the publication year, whereas patent numbers are just serial numbers in increasing order roughly by date of issuance).
What's interesting is that the first one linked is specifically limited to a game console, while the second one sounds as though a MythTV box with MythGame/MAME would read on most, if not all, of the claims (whether under anticipation or obviousness depends on whether you consider a MythTV box with MythGame to be a game console).
Are you saying that feral children lack consciousness?
Trying to make culture somehow a requirement for consciousness (a) is a dubious premise and (b) misses the point of where we stand technologically w.r.t. neuroscience and brain modeling. There are certainly several metric assloads of unanswered questions left behind by the linked paper, and the state of the art is nowhere near being able to generate an artificial consciousness (hence the word "toward"). Certainly, the "software", i.e., the actual arrangement of neurons and synapses in a given brain, is an unsolved (and barely addressed problem), but we still have to have a fundamental understanding of the large-scale dynamics and the general small-scale structure of the brain before we can get into that.
To some degree, this is in hopes that someone can arrive at a fully functional brain simulation without having to simulate a lot of physical development (i.e., zygote to infant) as well. Time will tell whether that's possible or not. But worrying about language (and eventually "culture") in a simulated brain is a problem decades, if not centuries, down the road, and we'll likely have decided a lot about human consciousness by virtue of modeling the brain itself long before the language problem is solved.
As for your "pop philosophy" statement, actually, this is science, first and foremost. Many scientists like to, er, philosophize on the nature of their work, particularly in neuroscience, and it makes great fodder for friendly argument at conferences and such. But ultimately, these questions will be answered by science, not philosophy.
I'm not sure how your example applies. Proving that a patent holder didn't invent the claimed invention invalidates the patent. The doctrine of laches provides that a patent holder who fails to take action in a reasonable amount of time against an infringer can't recover damages for the period up until the lawsuit is filed. And none of this depends on the differences between a patent consortium and a single entity acting alone.
The problem there is that your remedy at law for someone violating the anti-circumvention provision is to sue them. Takedown notices don't apply, and an ISP complying with a takedown notice makes no difference in their culpability for hosting the circumvention tools.
There's always Google's cached copy of them.
These search items are highlighted: keyhook door These terms only appear in links pointing to your house: keys
While licensing consortia look at first glance to be Evil(tm), they actually do serve an important function. Many technologies are covered by several, perhaps dozens, of patents. Trying to negotiate individually with each company for licensing terms would be a legal and logistical nightmare - especially considering that if you miss one, you're screwed. Negotiating with a licensing consortium means that you only have to go through the licensing steps once, and you're covered for the duration of your license against all of the various patents covering the technology.
Yes, you still have to be careful inasmuch as some company may have decided not to get on board the consortium train, but the chances of this happening are reduced.
The true evil arises when licensing consortia impose "terms of use" on their licenses, such as by leveraging patents to enforce DRM restrictions on equipment manufacturers (DVD-CSS, AACS, HDMI, CableCARD, etc.).
So, um.... Did you bother to read the claims?